The following sermon was delivered on Tuesday afternoon, October 18, 2011, during the annual Pastors Conference at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, New Jersey. The preacher is Pastor Robert Martin from Emanuel Reformed Baptist Church in Seattle, Washington. And this is the fourth session of the conference. Now if you will please turn to Romans chapter 7. In the very last verse of this chapter, Paul says, so then, with the mind, I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh, the law of sin. You know that at chapter 3 and verse 21, Paul turns a corner and he begins to open up the gospel. And what he says should be very familiar to us. The manner of his speaking is sola scriptura. His message is sola fidei, sola gratia, solus Christus, solideo gloria. He speaks of a saving righteousness from God that is imputed to the believer. And he speaks of God's righteousness in doing this. That he is the just and justifier of those who have faith in Christ. That he has honored his law to the last jot and tittle in the way in which he has justified sinners. At the opening of chapter 6, he turns another corner, this time to speak of the implications of the gospel concerning the possibility of believers continuing in sin. And as he develops this question, he assumes a number of truths. including the continuing prescribing function of God's moral law as a rule of life for the believer. This assumption is woven into the fabric of the canvas on which he displays his case for the Christian life. By the time we get to the end of chapter 7, to the verse that has already been read, this point is explicit. There Paul says, so then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God. But brethren, we need to see something of how Paul gets from the opening question and issue of chapter 6 and verse 1, how he gets from there to this affirmation in chapter 7 and verse 25. We can't possibly follow every bit of Paul's thought, we can't turn every corner with him, but we need to see enough to understand how important that 25th verse is to our appreciating the place of the moral law in the Christian life. Having spoken of the role of the gospel in securing forgiveness of sins and a saving righteousness, In chapter 6, Paul begins to address the believer's relation to his indwelling sin, that is, to his remaining corruption. He speaks of the sin that dwells in me. And he especially begins to address the incongruity of the believers continuing to practice sin as a pattern of life. Now he builds, of course, on what he's already said about our union with Christ. He argues that the gift of his righteousness does not encourage a life of sin in those who embrace the gospel. But his manner of proceeding is to ask and to address two questions. First, in verse 1, he asks, shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? And in short compass, his answer is that union with Christ makes that kind of life absurd. And then at verse 15, he asks, shall we sin because we are not under law, but under grace? And his answer again in sum is that though we are not under law as a way of salvation, not under its condemning power, yet we remain under the law as a rule of duty. Now consider then the first question. What shall we say then? What conclusion shall we draw from the gospel? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Now Paul has just said that where sin abounded, grace abounded much more. Now some apparently took this to imply that continuing in sin, a life of sin, not only is acceptable, but leads to a greater display of God's grace and therefore to His greater glory in saving sinners. And this was a very attractive argument for those who wish to abuse the gospel of free grace in order to justify their continuing in a course of unrighteousness. But the question Paul raises is this, does God's grace in justification free us from any obligation whatever to God's law? And we need to be very careful as we approach Paul's language, as we approach this section. The issue is not occasional lapses or sins. All believers continue, to some degree, in sin. That's reality. But this is very different from the idea of a life of unchallenged sin, a life of submitting one's members to indwelling sin, that they might be its instruments of unrighteousness. Paul later will define what he means by the phrase continue in sin in terms of being slaves to sin. He will speak in terms of not letting sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey it in its lust. W.G.T. Shedd has said that the real issue Paul is not referring to a supine indulgence of inward lust. That is, he is not speaking of a simple laying down passively and allowing your indwelling to sin to do as it pleases. It refers not to a supine indulgence of inward lust, but Paul is speaking instead of a steady struggling with and conquest of our indwelling sin. Well, the idea that a believer in Jesus Christ, joined to him by faith, that that individual should continue in a life of service to his indwelling sin, for Paul, that idea is absurd. And he responds, as you know in many other places, in a very emphatic way. He says, may Genoita, the authorized version, renders that as God forbid, most literally it is, it must not be, or this can never be. Paul here uses this stern rebuke. It is reserved for the most egregious abuses of truth. And he uses it to say, in essence, that those who think this way, those who think that the gospel of free grace frees them from the law in every sense, that they may continue in service to their indwelling sin, he is saying that you who think this way are as far from the truth as it is possible to be. Now Paul next, of course, poses a question. A question that again shows how absurd this is. He says, we who died to sin, how shall we any longer live in it? He speaks here of a past event. An event that has tremendous present implications. Later on in this chapter, he will exhort us to reckon ourselves now to be dead to sin, but he begins with the fact of our objectively having died to sin at a definite point in the past. And as you follow Paul's line of argument, it becomes very evident that the when, that is, that point in the past, was at the cross, where our old man was crucified with Christ and the how is that God reckoned us as united to his son at the time of his death so that when he died to sin, we died to sin in him. Now elsewhere you know that Paul speaks of Christ's death in terms of his dying in our place. and for our sake and because of our sins. And we ordinarily take this language merely in legal terms. That is, that Christ bore our sin and died in our place so that the demand of God's law is satisfied in His suffering and in His death, and our sins are forgiven because they have been punished in Him. If our thinking goes no farther than that, we've missed something very important. All of that is correct. But it does not exhaust the meaning of Christ dying for our sins and dying in our place. In his death, Paul teaches us, Christ also broke the dominion of indwelling sin over us, so that even as sin reigned in death because of Adam's sin, a rule or a reign made stronger by our many offenses, that even as that is the case, so grace reigns, rules over us through righteousness, that is, Christ's righteousness unto eternal life. It is in terms of this experiential liberty from sin's dominion, the experimental liberty from sin's rule over us, that Paul here says we died to sin in the death of Christ. And so what Paul is teaching us is that, in fact, Not only are we freed from sins of penalty and freed from the laws of power to condemn us, but also that Christ's death freed us from slavery to our indwelling sin and its dominion over us. And this, as much as the forgiveness of our sins, is the fruit of his death for us. And it's this that then makes sense out of Paul's challenge in chapter 6 and verse 2. We who died to sin, when? At the cross. How? In Christ. We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live in it? Continuing in a life of sin, a life not marked by ongoing repentance, A life not marked by the mortification of sin, a life that is not marked by a pursuit of holiness, is in congress with union with Christ in His death for us and because of our sins. Now in verses 3 through 5, Paul makes his point from the symbolism of baptism. He tells us that baptism symbolizes our union with Christ in His death, in His burial, and in His resurrection. And what He is saying to His original readers, and what He is saying to us, is that when you were baptized, you were symbolically professing that your union with Christ is complete. so that you died to sin in his death to sin, that you were buried with him in his tomb, and that you were raised with him to walk in newness of life. And Paul's point is that if we meant this, if that indeed is what we were professing in our baptism, If that was the testimony that we were bearing before a watching world, then to continue in a life of sin is utterly absurd. Now, union with Christ and His death is foundational. By virtue of this union, your indwelling sin's mastery has been broken. Burial with him confirms the definiteness of your union with Christ in his death. Burial is a decisive event that unequivocally testifies that a man's life is no longer his own, but that it belongs to God. And burial with Christ is the seal set to the fact of our death with Christ and shows that our old life is over and that we no longer are under indwelling sin's dominion. That we have died to sin, that death was so definitive that we have been buried with Christ. And therefore Paul goes on to say you are to reckon yourselves indeed to be dead unto sin. This is to be your attitude. This is to be your perspective. This is the reality that you are to embrace as fact by faith. And this is meant to arm us, to say no to sin's desires and no to sin's devices. For our indwelling sin, which is yet remaining sin, it still has all of its aspirations to rule. It still has the same agenda. It still has the same desires. It, though it does not rule in us, does not reign in us, it does remain in us. And it still wants to do what it has done before, which is to rule over us. The reality that we have died with Christ and been buried with Him, is meant to arm us to say, no, I will not present my members as instruments of unrighteousness to you. And yet in claiming your life, that claim imaged in burial with his son, God calls you to much more than a negative morality, doesn't he? It is much more than simply a life in which you say no to sin. There is also a positive morality to be embraced. There is a new life to live in which you reckon yourself, Paul says, not only dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus, His Son. There is a life to be embraced in which though you do not present your members as instruments of righteousness to sin, you do present your members to God and to His service. Paul includes this likewise in his argument from baptism. Death and burial with Christ have a larger purpose than death to sin. Continuing with the imagery, Paul says, we were buried with him through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. The ultimate purpose of union with Christ is a new life. It is a new life marked by walking with God in obedience to His law. And this is the ultimate symbolism of baptism. Just as believers are reckoned with Christ in His death and burial, so also we are reckoned as in Him in His resurrection and joined to Him in His resurrection. We are to live our lives in light of that tremendous fact. For the death that he died, Paul says, he died to sin once for all. And if we followed his argument to that point in chapter 6, we would say, yes, he died to sin once for all, and we in him. But the life that he lives, he lives to God. Likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Now brethren, here is where the rubber meets the road. This being alive to God is seen in our walking in newness of life. The image of walking, wherever you find it in the scripture, refers to conducting one's life in a certain way or conducting one's life in a certain direction. In this case, it speaks of conducting one's life in fellowship with God and in service to Him and in obedience to His moral law. And thus the term newness, as Paul speaks of newness of life, refers not just to something new in our experience, and it is certainly that. But he's also speaking of a quality of life that is very unlike the lawless life to which we have died in Christ. in view is a present experience of what Paul later calls eternal life that is the gift of God in Christ. And this is the kind of life, yes indeed, that we will enjoy in fullness at the end of our earthly life, but it is also the kind of life that we now can experience in a substantial and in an increasing measure as part of a normal healthy earthly Christian life. Now in the rest of this sixth chapter, Paul expands on the moral implications of union with Christ. He directs us, as you know, to a life of faith in which we receive as true. A life of faith in which we believe. what he has said about union with Christ in his death and his burial and his resurrection. He's still opening that principle from Habakkuk 2.4, that the righteous shall live by faith. He hasn't forgotten that. He continues by way of opening up this idea of a life of faith. By faith we are to embrace not only Christ, but we are to embrace the truth of the end of our indwelling sin's lawful rule over us. And we are to embrace it as fact that we have been made alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord, so that we may walk in newness of life. Yogi Berra once said that 90% of baseball is half mental. We can say the same thing about the Christian life. At the mental level, we are to reckon ourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God. But brethren, that's just half the story. The imperatives that we find in these chapters, especially the imperatives in chapter 6, verses 12 and 13, and let's look at that just for a moment. Do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of unrighteousness to God, Those imperatives take us far beyond any idea of passivity. Often we hear these verses cited in such a way that we wonder, well, do I have any responsibility in this matter? Well, Paul is not saying, he's not speaking of a situation in which we are to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God, and at that point, God's Spirit is going to step in and we can step out of the battle with remaining sin. That's not Paul's doctrine at all. He speaks of a life of active resistance to our indwelling sin. He addresses us, he addresses us to resist. You have not been made dead to sin and alive to God, my brethren, so that you can do nothing. That's not the Bible's doctrine of the Christian life. And as with resisting the devil, so resisting your sin's efforts to reassert its mastery over you is active business in which we are to use means that God has given. That's the one half of the battle with sin that is not mental, but engages our members, our faculties. Paul here then exhorts us. to exercise the faculty of choice. That is, He exhorts us to exercise the faculty of a choice, of a will that has been freed from the dominion of sin. We are to exercise that faculty actively, one temptation at a time, day in and day out, hour by hour, and if need be, minute by minute. And we are to do this negatively and positively. Yes, we are to exercise that renewed will to say, no, I will not do what you, my remaining sin, wants me to do. But it is not just that negative morality, it is to turn to God and to look in the face of His law in that beautiful mirror and say, this is what pleases you, this is what I choose to do. Your members, of course, are the parts and faculties of your redeemed humanity. It's your new man, physical and mental. It's your hands, your feet, it's your eyes and your ears. It's your tongue. It's your sexual organs. It's the faculties of the inner man, your mind, your affections, your consciences. and faced with temptation, faced with the allurements and the enticements of remaining sin to reassert its rule and to regain its mastery, faced with those temptations, armed with the truth that these things are not under sin's mastery, that He does not have rule of your eyes, He does not have rule of your tongue, He does not have rule of your affections and of your conscience. You are to say to the flesh, these are not yours. You are not my master. I have a master. And they will be used to serve Him. That's to be our continual response, brethren. to sin's efforts to reassert its rule. And the promise that the Lord makes to all who pray and all who trust and all who energetically resist the flesh, the promise is this, for sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace. Now the last part of that 14th verse, of course, is one of the most abused statements in all Scripture. God's law has two powers. It has the power to prescribe right and wrong, and it has the power to condemn transgression of its precepts. This second function Paul describes in Galatians 3 as the curse of the law. Its power to condemn to judgment and to the wrath of God those who break its precepts. Evangelicals agree that Christ's death has ended the condemning power of the law in the case of all those for whom Christ died. But many also want to move on from that to argue for a view of the Christian life in which the believer is freed from the prescribing power of the law of God as well. And this view usually includes the idea that Christ has put self-denying love in the place of God's law. But when we ask the question, a legitimate question, how is that self-denying love to actually behave itself, we inevitably are brought back to the moral law of God, we're inevitably, as Paul does in Romans 13, brought back to the commandments of the Decalogue, and we are told that this is how we are to love God with all our hearts and all our minds and all our strength, and this is how we can love our neighbors as ourselves. It will not do to say that the Christian ethic is about love but not law. Paul has spoken, therefore, of our liberty from the rule of indwelling sin. He has called us to present ourselves to God as being alive from the dead and our members as instruments of unrighteousness to Him. And from these words, we must deduce that our liberty from sin's dominion is not meant to be used independently of any master at all. That's a grievous error. That we have been freed to be our own masters is no part of the gospel ethic. But we have been freed from sin's dominion that we might serve righteousness, that we might serve God, and that we might serve His law. The very terms that Paul uses make that deduction inescapable. He uses words like sin to speak to the Christian. And sin is not just a law in our members. Paul uses that term in these chapters to speak of actual transgressions of God's moral precepts. He speaks of righteousness and unrighteousness. Even the term holiness is indecipherable apart from the idea of God's law. It's no surprise then that by the time we get to chapter 7, Paul at last introduces in a very emphatic and in a very explicit way the relation of the Christian, not just to God his master, but to the law of God his master. You know that he begins that seventh chapter with an illustration taken from the law of marriage. And in applying that imagery, he says, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ that you may be married to another. Now earlier, chapter 6 and verse 14, he has said that we are not under law, but under grace. And at that place, what he meant was that we are, by God's grace, freed from the laws condemning power. And so also here when he says that we have become dead to the law, he means dead to its condemning power. If he also means dead to the law as a rule of righteousness, dead to the law in terms of its prescribing function or prescribing power, then we're going to be at a great loss to understand what he means by the purpose of our marriage to Christ being to bear fruit unto God. Even as sin that is disobedience to God's law, he says, bears fruit unto death, so the fruit unto God, which is the issue of our marriage to Christ, must be understood in terms of acts of obedience to God's law. And this is confirmed, of course. In the words of verse 6 of chapter 7, we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve. Now you ask the question, we'll serve whom? serve God, serve righteousness, serve God's law in its prescriptive role as a rule of life. And how, Paul, are we to do this? How are we to serve the law of God as he will ultimately come in chapter 7 and verse 25 to point out is the very pinnacle of the Christian's relationship to the law. How are we to do this? He says, in the newness of the spirit and not in the oldness of the letter. Now these words, as is true of so much in these chapters, has been subjected to a great variety of interpretation. There's a great deal of misunderstanding about what Paul means by this. But if I understand correctly, he's saying that the unbeliever's life is the old way of the letter. It is the way of the law as condemner. This life of service to the law leads to death, 2 Corinthians 3, 6, for the letter kills. But the believer's life is lived in the way of the Spirit, who performed a circumcision of the heart that the law could not perform. Again, 2 Corinthians 3, the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. And it is by the Spirit's power that we are to serve God's law as a rule of life. That then helps us to make perfect sense out of what Paul says in chapter 8 beginning in verse 5. Here we read, For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded, or the mind of the flesh, is death, But to be spiritually minded is life and peace, because the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So then, those who are in the flesh, that is, under the rule of indwelling sin, cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. The plain implication of these words, especially when he says that they that are after the Spirit mind the things of the Spirit, is that the renewed mind which is set on the things of the Spirit can and it will submit itself to the law of God as a rule of conduct. As Paul says, verse 25 of the chapter, with the mind I myself serve the law of God. Now you know that at verse 7 of this chapter, Paul adopts the first person. His words become very personal. There's nothing comparable to it until you go all the way back to the beginning of Romans. But he drops the third person, he drops the second person, he begins to speak in the first person. His own experience, he is telling us, illustrates the relation that the Christian has to God's law. He speaks first of his relation to God's law as an unbeliever, and then as a Christian, first as unconvicted and then under conviction, but then as a believer contending with his remaining depravity. And in the process of doing this, in the process of opening this theme, Paul indeed defends the character of God's law. He says that it is holy, and it is righteous, and it is good. He tells us that its function is to reveal sin, and because of this, it is a rule of life, since that which reveals the boundaries of sin also reveals the boundaries of righteousness. We must pass over verses 7 through 13 where he speaks of the role of the Tenth Commandment in his own conversion. That illustrates the point we made in the last hour that the law of God in Paul's conscience made way for Christ in his soul. But in verse 14, he begins to depict his experience as a Christian for whom the moral law is a rule of life. And I say to you, my brethren, if you do not approach the text this way, if you do not see in it Paul's description of his relation as a Christian man to the law of God, you will never make any sense out of the text in any way that has any relation to experimental Christianity. Paul describes his experience as a believer. Not at all times, but on those occasions when he yields to the efforts of his remaining sin to reassert its mastery over him. And as we read through this section, we understand indeed from how Paul describes it, as well as from our own experience of it, we understand that psychologically this is a very complex experience. But we must pass by all that to come to what Paul actually says about the law. Paul the Christian, in his description, of his battle between what he calls the law of my mind and the law of sin that is in my members, as he describes this battle between his renewed will and his remaining sin, he speaks very emphatically and very pointedly about the place that the law of God, the moral law of God, has in his esteem and in his judgment. And he says four things about it. He says first, verse 14, the law is spiritual. Now this may point to the divine origin of the law. It may have to do with the character of the moral law or the fact that the law addresses the activities of the inner man as well as the outer man. This is how Paul experienced the Tenth Commandment in his conversion. He's already told us that. But however else we tweak the nuances of our interpretation, Paul certainly uses the word spiritual here to describe the law's character in contrast with his carnal behavior. So that he is saying that the law of God accords with the pattern of a spiritual life, that is, a life that is lived walking with the Spirit, and walking in the Spirit. But however conceived, In this role, the moral law, he says, is still in force. The law is, present tense, spiritual. But then second, verse 16, he describes his attitude towards God's law even when he disobeys it. He says, I agree with the law that it is good. Paul tells us that when he sins against the prevailing commitment of his mind and heart to God's will, when he says, What I would not, that I do, he does not, however, in his conscience repudiate the law as the moral standard by which his actions are to be judged. Describing his experience of self-condemnation that inevitably follows, he says, I agree. My conscience bears witness that the law is good. Again, he maintains, doesn't he? the present validity of the moral law. It remains the standard by which sin is measured. It remains the standard by which his conscience is supposed to operate. He is to continue to look to the moral law of God as setting the benchmarks by which his behavior is to be judged. Even when he sins against the prevailing temper of his mind, He looks again into the mirror of the law. I agree that you are good. But then third, verse 22, and at this point let's read verses 22 and 23. He says, I delight in the law of God according to the inner man. But I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. He's continuing to describe the battle that he has with the flesh. He's continuing to describe the battle, the warfare that he has with his indwelling sin. And in this battle with the flesh, in resisting the efforts of his remaining sin to reassert its mastery over him, Paul recognizes the presence, he recognizes the vigor of what he calls a different law. The prevailing disposition of his inner man, however, is commitment to God's law, as he says, I delight in the law of God after the inner man. He's not unaware where his real affections lie. He's not unaware as to where his prevailing disposition is. He says, I delight in the law of God after the inward man, and in spite of the struggles, in spite of the frustration that he experiences in his battle with his remaining sin, he delights in the law of God, not in a surface way, not in an external way, but in the deepest recesses of his redeemed humanity. He regards God's law as spiritual. He regards it as good. He acknowledges that it is the rule by which he is to live as a Christian and by which his conscience is to judge him. He does not resent the moral law. It is the delight of his heart. I've often wondered whether Paul was remembering the words of the psalmist in 119, I love your commandments above gold, yea, above fine gold. Therefore, I esteem all your precepts concerning all things to be right, and I hate every false way. Your testimonies are wonderful. Therefore, my soul keeps them. The opening of your words gives light. It gives understanding to the simple I opened wide my mouth and panted, for I long for your commandments. The 174th verse, your law is my delight. Here is a man that's engaged with God's law, not just in some surfaced way. It's not just a code on tablets of stone. It's not just a code that's written on the tablets of his heart. It's a code that has his tentacles wrapped around his affections. And he loves it. Now does Paul delight in a law that's no longer in force? Does he have merely an antiquarian interest in a dead letter? I have a dear friend on the West Coast who is an Akkadian scholar. I do not understand him. He has given his life to reading clay tablets from Sumer. He loves it. He delights it. There's no other way to explain why he does what he does. Paul delights in God's law in terms of what it is to him now. Then verse 25, I of myself with the mind, indeed, serve the law of God. Here Paul sums up his warfare. He acknowledges the continuing presence of the flesh and he concedes that his indwelling sin serves the law of sin. He doesn't try to varnish that in any way. He doesn't try to deny it in any way. He doesn't take the idea that I have stepped out of the battle and that it is no longer I who am engaged. He says, no, with the flesh I serve the law of sin. That's the source of the cry in verse 24, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death? But he says also that with the mind, with the consent of who he most deeply and centrally is as a new man in Christ, he serves the law of God. The moral law to Paul was more than an object that he avows is spiritual and good. It is more than something in which simply his soul delights. It is much more than that. His positive view of God's law came to practical expression in his seeking to serve God's moral law in his walk as a Christian. And had that not been the case, had he not been able to make that fourth statement in verse 25, that I with the mind serve the law of God, if he had not been able to say that, if he had not been able to bring forth a life that substantially reflected that commitment, he would have had no reason to believe that he was a Christian. And though he struggles greatly with his remaining sin, God, not his remaining sin, is his master. And he serves God's law because it is his master's revealed will. In some, God's moral law, which once convinced Paul that he was a sinner, in need of a righteousness that he did not possess, that same law continues as the rule of his Christian life. He serves his Lord by walking in the light of it, all of it, for there is no hint in what he says that he regards any moral commandment any differently from the rest, but he serves the law of God. Now in closing, brethren, I just want to press one point. I want to ask a very simple question. Can you testify as Paul has testified in this seventh chapter? I have no doubt we can all acknowledge the reality of the ongoing battle with remaining sin. It is our greatest grief, isn't it? It's the greatest attraction of heaven. Perhaps it shouldn't be, but the greatest attraction of heaven for me, at this point of my simple understanding of these things, the greatest attraction is to be free of remaining sin. We acknowledge our remaining sin. But are we prepared to serve the law of God. Are we prepared to love the law of God? Are we prepared to set that standard up in our conscience as the standard by which we are going to make moral decisions day by day and hour by hour? My brethren, as you sit at your computers and you open your email, And the internet provider that you have flashes a picture of some bimbo that's been spotted on some beach in a skimpy bikini, trying to lure you to there. Do you at that moment, with determination, serve the seventh commandment? When you handle holy things, we have a great privilege, brethren. We're allowed to handle holy things week in and week out in our study, in the pulpit, in our dealings with God's people. Do we do this, especially when we stand behind the pulpit? Do we do this, brethren, with one eye fixed on the third commandment that we will do everything we can not to profane these holy things? And in a generation where it's hard to keep the fourth commandment, we've all heard the axiom that our people will not grow in holiness beyond where we are at. They will not ordinarily rise higher than where we ourselves will go. Thankfully, there are many exceptions to that. But brethren, if we are not in every moment, in every day, in every incident, on every occasion, by God's grace, by God's Spirit, by the help that only He can give and the power that only He can give, if we are not serving God's law, how in God's name can we lead our people? To say with Paul, I delight in the law of God, I serve the law of God. Christian ethics divorced from the law of God is not Christian ethics. A Christian life divorced from the law of God is not the Christian life. Next to seeing our people justified by faith in Christ, Surely brethren our goal our focus is to see them walking in nearness of life Across the broad spectrum of what that will mean With God's gospel, yes, but his law before their eyes Doing that which is well pleasing to him There is no other way, brethren, to know His blessing. Let us pray. Our Father, we come once more today, needy and very much dependent, Lord, upon Your grace. Lord, You know that these things are so far beyond what we are natively able to do. It is foolish of us even to think of serving Your law apart from Your Spirit. And yet, Lord, we would have the mind of Your servant Paul. We would delight in it. We would love Your law even as we love You. Lord, You know that we do love You. We do desire, Lord, to please you. We do desire, Lord, that your own soul should be refreshed in the sight of our obedience. Father, give us grace. Grant that we might maintain a vigorous warfare against our remaining sin, that we would not present our members as instruments of unrighteousness, to that old master, submit them to you, and teach our people to do the same. Grant your grace, we pray, in Jesus' name. Amen.