But we're no longer enslaved to it.
And we have learned in chapter 7 that we are no longer under the domination of the law
of God, that we through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ have been freed from it so
that we might bear fruit for God.
In our study of the law, that is the moral standard summarized by the Ten Commandments,
it was Jesus then summarized in just two, love God with all of your being and your neighbor
as yourself.
What we've learned about the law is, number one, that it cannot justify the sinner.
And number two, it cannot sanctify the saint.
God did not give it for that purpose.
We have learned in our study of the book of Romans that it cannot save a person from his
sin.
It cannot save the sinner.
On the other hand, it cannot cause a Christian to be more Christ-like.
It cannot sanctify the saint.
And so the question comes up then, then what is the usefulness of the law?
Of what good is it if it can't do those things?
The Jews, of course, believed that the works of the law justified them and also that it
procured holiness for them.
And now Paul's teaching comes along regarding the law and they misinterpret what he's saying
as though he is turning them to lawlessness.
Is that what Paul is meaning when he says we're no longer under the law?
Well, beginning in chapter seven and verse seven, Paul gives us some very personal words.
You will notice that he now begins to use the word I because he is incorporating his
own experience.
He tells us in these verses what was going on inside of his heart on the Damascus road
at the time of his conversion.
What shall we say then?
Is the law sin?
May it never be.
On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the law, for I would
not have known about coveting if the law had not said you shall not covet.
But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, or the law, produced in me coveting of every
kind, for apart from the law sin is dead.
And I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin became alive and
I died.
And this commandment which was to result in life proved to result in death for me.
For sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.
So then the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.
Therefore, did that which is good become a cause of death for me?
May it never be.
Rather it was sin.
In order that it might be shown to be sin by effecting my death through that which is
good, that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.
Now these verses have puzzled many and indeed they are complicated as they are written here
for us, but let's seek this evening to find in this paragraph the four works which the
law is to accomplish.
We're going to try to understand now the good works of God's law.
There are four of them.
The works of the law are all in the life of the sinner, not in the life of the Christian.
The four works of the law are works in the life of the person who has not come to Jesus
Christ.
Work number one, it reveals sin in the sinner.
Paul tells us of his own experience.
He says, I would not have come to know sin except through the law.
Now Paul could give you a theological definition of sin, no question about that.
He was a trained rabbi.
He knew how to define sin in theological terms, but what he means is that he would not have
come to know personal conviction of his own sinfulness if it had not been for the law
working within him.
Intellectually he could tell you what sin was, but he said it was law that caused him
to feel guilt for his personal sinfulness.
That is the point here.
It is the law that put up the standard in his heart which exposed how short he came
of that perfect standard of righteousness.
So Paul says, I would not have had personal awareness of my own sinfulness if it had not
been for the work of the law revealing sin in me.
I was playing basketball back in high school.
There was a certain move that I had developed on my own, a move that I thought was pretty
good and I worked at it quite a bit.
The only problem was the coach did not think it was a good move.
When he held up the standard of what I should be doing against what I was doing, it showed
up that my maneuver, my plan, my play was not sufficient to make it in the game.
Having showed up my shortcoming, he then went on to show me, to make me aware of what I
should be doing so that I might play a better game.
Too bad it did not work.
But that was the idea anyway.
You see, that is what the law does.
It shows up our shortcoming.
We have our own sense of righteousness.
We have our own way of seeking to impress God as sinners.
But the law comes along as it were as a coach and it says, ah friend, here's the way it
ought to be.
Here's the perfect standard.
And as it holds up that standard of moral perfection, the sinner says, I am short of
that.
For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.
The problem of the unregenerate, unsaved person is that he does not understand the truth about
sin.
As I've said, he has his own moral code written within him.
He may even feel guilty when he breaks his own moral code, but he does not grasp the
sinfulness of sin.
When he begins to see sin for what it really is, he becomes troubled in his soul, not self-confident.
He doesn't feel positive about himself.
He feels terrible about himself.
He doesn't feel self-sufficient.
He feels empty within as the law begins to do its work of revealing sin.
Paul's personal experience was with the sin of coveting.
Up to this point, when the law began to expose his sin, Paul felt about himself blameless.
He says this in Philippians concerning righteousness in the law, blameless.
That is, his external righteousness was without fault.
He was a Pharisee of the Pharisees.
He kept all the rules.
Externally, everything was fine with Paul.
He felt very good about himself, very self-righteous.
Concerning the righteousness in the law, blameless, he says.
But then the law began to do a deeper work in the life of this man.
He says here, I would not have known about coveting if the law had not said, you shall
not covet.
So Paul begins to personally open up here and to say that it was, in fact, the 10th
commandment, which brought about to him a personal awareness of his own sinfulness.
Now, it's interesting.
It was the 10th commandment.
That of all the others, perhaps, is the most invisible one.
It's an attitude.
It produces action, but it's an attitude of the heart, first of all, isn't it?
And it's that one, that one that reveals inward attitudes that are wrong, that God
used in Paul's life.
This particular one, of course, is basic to all the others.
It leads to lying.
It leads to stealing.
It leads to murder.
It leads to adultery.
It's a very basic one.
And Paul says it was coveting.
And the law said, thou shall not covet.
And all of a sudden, the light was turned on, and he said, I was aware of the coveting
within my soul.
I want to say to you, my friend, that before a person can be saved, there has to be a work
within his soul of God the Holy Spirit using the law to show that person a need within.
He must experience something of the agony and the shame of exposure of the inner man
before the holiness of God.
And when that has been done, that person can be a candidate for salvation.
But that first work must be accomplished.
The law must reveal sin in the sinner in order for him to seek a Savior.
Then in verses 8 and 9, there's a second work.
It not only reveals sin in the sinner, it revives sin in the sinner.
The sin, he says, sin rather taking opportunity through the commandment produced in me coveting
of every kind.
Have you ever noticed how prohibitions tend to create a deeper desire to do the very thing
that is forbidden?
A person gets on the plane who's a smoker, and he is told you cannot smoke on this flight.
What does he want to do for the next two hours?
Well, if he already had a nicotine problem, the very commandment, you shall not smoke,
only causes within him a more intense desire to smoke.
That's just the way we are made as human beings.
I was touring a church building a few weeks ago in another city, and on the sign there
in the hallway it said, wet paint on the railing.
You know what the first thing was I did?
I put my hand on the railing to see if it was wet.
Fortunately, it was dry by that time.
But isn't that true of all of us?
When there's a prohibition, that very statement, you shall not do this, only creates within
us a deeper desire to do it.
It's that way with little children.
Don't touch that.
They reach out to touch it.
It's just that inbred desire, the law revives sin in the sinner.
Paul says in the last part of verse 8, apart from the law, sin is dead.
What does he mean by that?
Well, he's saying that, he's not saying that sin wasn't there, sin was present, but he's
saying that it was not apparent.
Sin with its power, its virulence, was not apparent within him apart from the law.
But sin took advantage of that law's presence within him to form a staging area.
That's what the word opportunity means in verse 8.
It's a military term.
It's a base of operations.
The law said within Paul, you shall not covet, and sin within Paul used that very statement
as a beachhead in Paul to attack him, to express itself.
So that sin which before was not even apparent suddenly became a raging, consuming monster
within Paul and produced coveting of every kind, he says.
So the law not only revealed sin in Paul, but it actually excited it, it exacerbated
it, it revived it so that sin was everywhere all of a sudden, coveting was everywhere.
Verse 9 elaborates upon this thought.
There are really four movements here in verse 9 to Paul's thought.
He talks first about being alive apart from the law at one time.
That's a strange statement, isn't it?
Alive apart from the law once.
He's talking about that time before his conversion, a time when he was unconscious of the rebellion
against God that was in him.
He was not aware of the alienation from God.
In fact, he thought himself to be a pretty okay guy.
Indeed, as he measured himself externally with others and against the external commands
of the law, he felt himself blameless or as it were alive.
We might put it this way and paraphrase, in the days of my ignorance when a stranger to
the law, Paul would say, I deemed myself all right in good standing before God.
In other words, Paul felt he had his act together.
He was alive apart from the law once.
Then he speaks about when the commandment came.
You shall not covet.
The Spirit of God slammed that into the heart of Paul.
It was more than just a part of his intellectual knowledge as a Pharisee, but it was slammed
deeply into his heart, and he became aware of his covetousness when the law came.
The third movement then was that sin revived, or it became alive, he says.
It sprang to life within him.
It became powerful.
That sin created all kinds of lusting, things that Paul didn't even know were there suddenly
came popping to the surface within him.
The fourth movement that he describes is, I died.
I died.
In other words, he was conscious now of his condemnation before God, of his spiritual
deadness.
His loss of self-righteousness was as though it were death to him.
He was devastated.
The religious goodness about him, which he clung to before self-righteously, he lost.
He says, I died, as it were.
I want to reiterate that I believe before a person can be saved, he must come to this
kind of a death, a death to his own self-righteousness, his own sense of well-being, his own feeling
of goodness because he's a religious or a moral person.
There must be a death to all of that.
As Paul states in Philippians 3, there must be a point when the sinner would count all
of that but dung, but manure for the righteousness, the true righteousness that is in Jesus Christ.
The law revives sin in the sinner.
It doesn't help control it.
It only excites it.
I want to say by way of application that the same is true, my friend, of the Christian
who tries to live under legalism, who tries to be spiritual or to please God by keeping
rules, man-made rules.
Legalism will not lead a Christian to true holiness.
Legalism will not cause an individual to be able to contain his sin.
In fact, legalism will only arouse the sin within a Christian and create a greater problem
for him in the end.
The Galatian believers were caught up in legalism.
Having been delivered from the law, they went back to it now as believers, seeking to please
God by keeping the law.
Paul writes that letter to them to warn them about it, to warn them.
In the case of the Galatians, that legalistic spirit that overcame them did not help them,
did not produce in them the control of sin and the flesh.
In fact, they were biting and devouring one another.
What had happened?
Well, that legalism, that sense of law keeping, that obligation to keep rules that they felt
as believers actually only had a reverse impact in their lives.
It produced in them all kinds of problems and expressions of the flesh.
Just as the law only excites sin in the sinner, so law keeping only excites sin in the Christian
too.
There's a third work of the law that we see in verses 10 and 11.
It results in death to the sinner.
The apostle says that the commandment or the law was to result in life.
In other words, it would produce a way of life pleasing to God.
God of course knows how a full and meaningful life can be experienced.
A happiness and holiness are twins.
Blessedness and prosperity come with keeping the law.
There's only one problem.
The law can't be kept in the power of the sinner's flesh.
So that which could result in life proved to result in death for me as a sinner, says
Paul.
It resulted in death because sin used the law, he says in verse 11, to do two things,
to deceive me and to kill me.
The word deceived is a very strong word.
Paul says I was utterly deceived.
Very strong.
He is saying that sin, which is so subtle, so tricky, so beguiling, actually used the
law to deceive Paul.
The law seemed to say do this and live.
God intended for that to translate to the sinner.
You can't do it, therefore trust.
But sin took that concept, do this and live, and deceived Paul into thinking that he could
do it and could live.
That's what he means here.
How subtle and tricky sin is.
The law says do and live and sin deceives the human heart into thinking that one can
do that.
Then Paul says the law also killed me.
He writes to the Corinthians and he calls the law the ministry unto condemnation.
What does that mean?
Well it means that the law delivers the sinner to judgment and that judgment is death.
It kills.
Sin does the killing, but it's the law that delivers one to death.
It's the ministry of condemnation.
The law results in death to the sinner.
I just want to say in passing with regard to Christians as well, that law keeping or
legalism results in spiritual death, not spiritual life in one's experience.
One has said few things are more dead than a church that is orthodox and legalistic trying
to live up to its high standard in the energy of the flesh.
What usually happens in a legalistic church or among legalistic Christians is that they
begin to judge one another because others are not keeping the same standards I'm keeping.
That judging of one another leads to fights and the fights lead to splits and the splits
lead to long lasting bitterness.
And that's tragic.
Legalism does not produce life, spiritual abundant life in the believer, in the Christian.
It only produces the opposite just as it produces death in the sinner.
And finally in verses 12 and 13 we see the fourth work of the law.
It reveals sin's sinfulness to the sinner.
Is the law sin?
Paul began in verse 7 by asking that question.
Now he says in verse 12 the law actually is holy, not sinful.
He says the commandment is holy and righteous and good.
Three terms used there of the law of God.
Holy.
It comes from a holy God and it searches out sin.
The law is the opposite of sin.
If a man is condemned by the law it's not the law's fault, it's the man's fault.
It's his sin.
That's the problem, not the law.
The law is holy because it comes from a holy God.
It's righteous.
It lays just requirements upon men.
It condemns what needs to be condemned.
Sin says about the law that it's unfair.
It's unjust, but that is not so.
The law warns in advance of its consequences.
If you think of Adam and Eve who knew in advance what God set down as the law, it was not a
surprise to them that they died because they knew in advance.
The law doesn't trick anyone.
It's just, it's completely fair.
It states in advance its consequences and when it's broken those consequences fall upon
the sinner.
It's just, perfectly just and righteous.
Then he says it's good.
That is, its aim, its purpose is life.
It has a good purpose.
Its purpose is to expose the sinner's guilt and to bring him to faith in Jesus Christ.
Sin is so evil though that it takes even that which is good and holy and righteous.
He takes that which God meant for man's good and brings him to death.
By that the real nature of sin is exposed to us.
Its perversity is there.
It twists what God gives for good.
The apostle says it was sin that caused death.
In order that it might be shown to be sin, he says through the commandments sin became
utterly sinful, exceedingly sinful.
So what does the law do?
It reveals the utter sinfulness of sin to the sinner.
I fear that there are a lot of people today who are part of evangelical churches like
ours who have never been genuinely converted.
They know the language.
They go through some of the motions, the ones that please them to go through, the ones that
are comfortable to do, the ones that don't require commitment and sacrifice.
They talk a good line but they don't walk a good walk.
I fear that we have many people in our church who have never come to understand the utter
sinfulness of their own sin and who in some superficial way have made a decision for Christ
that has never been genuine.
I believe that what we need more than ever before in our churches today is an understanding
of what the moral standard of God is, what the law says, the standard that it sets up,
so that we might be aware of the holiness of the God with whom we claim to have to do.
When we come to understand the exceeding sinfulness of sin by the work of the Spirit of God through
the law in our lives, it will bring us to genuine conversion.
It is the law, it is the commandment which prepares the sinner to receive the Savior.
But so often we try to do that through positive messages.
We try to approach people with four simple spiritual laws that tell them how they can
have a wonderful and abundant life without their ever facing up to the need for repentance
of their sin before a holy God.
And so they make quick decisions.
They believe superficially and think themselves to be saved because we go on to show them
now that they've prayed this prayer, they have assurance of eternal life.
And I wonder how many people we've given assurance to who actually have no true understanding
of salvation.
The law, the commandment prepares the sinner to receive the Savior by exposing the terrible
need within him.
I don't believe a person will, I don't believe a person can truly trust in Jesus Christ until
he is confronted by the law, until he understands the exceeding sinfulness of his sin.
I think it's important, beloved, for us to be careful of short circuiting the law's
ministry in a sinner.
Sometimes we go to people who are hurting and burdened by their sinfulness and we try
to soothe them.
We try to comfort them.
And what we need to do is allow the law to have its full work in them, to bring them
to genuine repentance and faith in Christ.
John MacArthur said, don't waltz a sinner into the kingdom through positive thinking.
I just wonder how often that happens.
I fear that there are times when we may abort the actual new birth process by causing a
sinner to pray a prayer too soon.
You say, how do you know then when to help them to pray that prayer?
I'm not sure I have all the answers on that.
But I do believe this, that we need to allow the Spirit of God to do that full work of
conviction in a person's life and not encourage a person to pray the prayer until he realizes,
I mean inwardly realizes, his sinful offense before a holy God.
Because it's then when he senses that desperate need within him and his condemnation and his
death before God, his exposure before God's holiness, that he is willing to repent and
receive the Son of God who died to forgive him of his sin.
The good works of God's law, it boils down to this.
The law is a tutor to bring us to Christ.
The word tutor isn't teacher there in Galatians 3, but it means the law is a custodian, an
attendant, we might say a babysitter.
It's the word that would be used for the one who would take the child to school where he
would sit at the feet of the teacher.
So what does the law do by the goodness, the grace, the plan of God?
It takes the sinner by the hand and leads him to the Savior and prepares his heart to
genuinely trust in the only one who can save from the condemnation of the law.
That's the work of God's law and it did its work in Paul and it's done its work, I trust,
in your heart and mine in bringing us to a genuine relationship to Jesus Christ.
Let's pray together and then we will have a song sung to us and be dismissed.
Father in heaven, I pray that you will give us an appreciation for the law that perhaps
we've not had before, that we might understand the good work it does in the sinner.
And as we deal with people who are under conviction, give us a spirit-led sensitivity.
Oh, that we might not short-circuit in their lives what you're doing, that we might not
abort the process only midway, that we might not try to pluck the fruit before it's ripened.
But give us a sensitivity to know when the heart has been genuinely prepared.
And then may we seek with all of the persuasion that the Spirit of God would give us to bring
that friend or that loved one to faith in Christ.
Thank you Father for exposing to us one day what you did to Paul.
Perhaps it was another aspect of the law.
It was some other area of conviction that was used other than coveting, that you brought
us to death to our own self-righteousness, that we might have the true righteousness
which is by faith in Christ.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
In Jesus' name.
Would you sing the chorus with me?
Our heads bowed.
Thank you Lord for saving my soul.
Thank you Lord for making me whole.
Thank you Lord for giving to me.
Thy great salvation so rich and free.