Let's pray and ask the Lord's blessing on our time. You'll need your Bibles. Well, you can at least write down the text. Write down the text, okay? All right, let's pray and ask the Lord's blessing. We've got a lot to do. We'll try to be done by 10 minutes still. Okay, let's pray together. Our wonderful God, who really does save us from our sins, show us today the glory and the depth and the grandeur of what that means, we pray in the saving name of Jesus, amen. Okay, I'm calling this lesson, which is really on part two of the first chapter of Paul Tripp's book. We'll go faster, but I really want to lay the foundation here. Okay, Psalm 51 and verse 5, David said, in sin did my mother conceive me. David's mother was not an adulteress, that's what he means, but sin attached to David from the point of conception, which is when life begins, okay? Genesis chapter 6 and verse 5, Because we're dealing, today's topic is, Sin is the Problem, Jesus is the Solution. Genesis 6 and verse 5, and this was not solved by the flood. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. When we talk about total depravity in the so-called five points of Calvinism, TULIP, the first one is total depravity. That's what that is. And this is what it looks like. If you want an MRI, a spiritual MRI, so to speak, or a soulish MRI, Romans chapter three and verses nine through 20 You're wanting to show people the depth of what sin is, this text. What then, are we Jews any better off, that is, than Gentiles? No, not at all. For we've already charged, that's what's led up to this point in Romans, that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written, and this is a weaving together of Old Testament texts. None is righteous, no not one. No one understands, no one seeks for God. I'm never sure how you can have a seeker-sensitive worship service since no one seeks after God, although God seeks after us, but no one seeks for God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps, which are poisonous snakes, is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. In their paths are ruin and misery. and the way of peace they've not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes." Now we know that whatever the law says, and he's using law in a broad sense here, It speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law, no human being will be justified or declared righteous in his sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin. Now, remember the Francis Schaeffer model, evangelist in the 60s, 70s. You got one hour with somebody to present the gospel. According to Schaeffer, a good model, 50 minutes, 5-0. to open up the meaning of sin, what it does, the law, everything up. Fifty minutes to talk about basically the ravages created by sin. And then in your remaining ten minutes, you present the gospel. And I think that's a good dictum. This is quoting from Tripp, pages 10 and 11. If you're going to help someone, you need to know what's wrong and how it can be fixed. You go to your auto mechanic because he can determine why your car is malfunctioning and get it running. Any trustworthy perspective on personal change must do the same. It must correctly diagnose what is wrong with people and what is necessary for them to change. Now this is where our culture, Paul Tripp says, gets it completely wrong. In rejecting a biblical view of people, the world eliminates any hope of answering the what is wrong question accurately. And if it wrongly answers this question, well, how can it possibly provide a proper solution? Why do people do the things they do? Is my problem fundamentally an informational one? Will a well-researched, logical set of insights provide the solution? Or is my problem fundamentally experiential? Will dealing with my past solve my problem? Or, is my problem fundamentally biological? This is what our culture is saying today. Will helping me achieve chemical balance solve my problem? Or, is there something beneath all these things that is more deeply wrong with me? Scripture's answer to this last question is a clear, resounding yes. Scripture would agree that my problem is informational and that I don't know what I need to know. It also affirms the impact of our experiences, though it maintains that our core problem precedes our experience and goes deeper. The Bible also acknowledges the complex interaction between our physical and spiritual natures, but it never locates our core problem in our biology. In this way, the Bible is radical, gets to the root, compared to our culture. The Bible says that our core problem, the fundamental reason we do what we do, is sin. What is being said here? Scripture is defining sin as a condition that results in behavior. We all are sinners, and because of this, we do sinful things. This is why I said that our core problem precedes our experience. David captures it well. Psalm 51, surely I was sinful at birth, and actually I was conceived in sin is the word, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. So David is saying, I was born with a fundamental problem. I had it long before my first experience. Something is wrong with my inner self that fundamentally affects the way I operate as a human being, and this has thunderous implications. Because sin is my nature as a human being, it is inescapable. It marks everything I think, say, and do. It will guide my cravings, my response to authority, and my decision-making, think of what you heard in Esther today, right? It will alter my values, direct my hopes and dreams, and shape every interpretation I make. Now, if you're going to deal with your own difficulties or assist others who want to deal with theirs, you must correct wrong thinking. Yes, you must deal with the suffering of the past and the ways the body isn't properly functioning, but you must do more. You must help them conquer the sin that distorts all these experiences. So, let's, for the first part here, let's talk about being sinned against and personally sinning and counseling, okay? And let's use, Tripp uses an excellent illustration, which I could relate to, because I've dealt with so many different abuse cases. Let's talk about abuse for a bit. Someone is sinned against by abuse, by a parent, by a spouse. Some cases it's even by children, believe it or not, but there's abuse, okay? Now, in abuse, folks, And I want you to think, you'll know what I'm getting at, I want you to think of an inmate and his wife and his family. That person has sinned against another and is a sinner. And the effects of that affect everybody. And folks, we should weep with that. And we really should be angry, not with the sinner, but with sin. Okay, there's be angry and sin not. So whenever there's abuse, your person is sinned against, we should weep and be angry with sin. And I think frankly, I think that's one of the positive developments in biblical counseling in the last 20 years. It's not just that people do wrong, they're sinned against, and you have to enter into that. Okay, so but now let's talk about personal sinning. Let's take this person, who was abused, let's say abused as a child by a father, okay, and it continued over many years in that person's home. Now let's just imagine it's a she, because usually it is an abuse of a female. What is that like? Tripp describes this, and he's kind of boilerplate describing what happens when a woman has been abused in her youth. One, She is controlling because her life has been out of control and she's been controlled. She's going to try to control things. People who've been abused are very hard to work with. It's very hard to be their friends. They are usually, in my experience, people who have been abused are very smart. They've learned to be pretty much street smart, and they think things through, and they can be very argumentative. They need a lot of affirmation. They are obsessed with what people think of them. And as a result, people who've been abused can be critical and judgmental, and they won't give others the benefit of the doubt. I could put names to this, but I won't. But that's the boilerplate pattern of someone who's been sinned against. That's that person's personal sin in every case. And see, the way we can work, as we say, oh, you've been sinned against, let's deal with your suffering. And you should. But they also sin in particular ways. And in counseling, you have to deal with that. So what about your counselor? You're a counselor. You're listening to a sufferer. You are listening to someone who feels rejected and feels alone. Why do people find me so intimidating? I am so intense, I am bent that no one is going to go through the same experience that I did. So why do people find me intimidating? Hello? No one even believes or respects what I tell them. This can't be real. Your father was so nice and kind, and so they feel alone and rejected. Now, is that her past? Yes, she was abused. But how is she dealing with it? And where does her sin come in? So you have to do both, folks. You've gotta be like Jesus, sympathizing with, empathizing with people, entering into a lot of listening, and probably going home just feeling devastated by what you've heard, but then you also have to deal with that person's own sin, or as Trip puts it, sinners, tend to respond sinfully to being sinned against. Sinners tend to respond sinfully to being sinned against. So what's salvation? It's a rescue mission. It's not just information. You are rescuing people really from themselves. sinned against, but then they sin against themselves and they need a rescuer, they need a deliverer. Now again, quoting Trip on page 12, this is why we cannot simply offer people a system or give advice on how to deal with their past. For years there was a conference attended by multiplied thousands called Basic Youth Conflicts. And frankly, there was a lot of helpful stuff in there. But by the time you get done this six days of this conference, you say, oh, yeah, yeah, I've got a problem with lust. There's seven steps I need to follow. What if I miss the fifth? That kind of a thing. That's what he's getting at. Now, some of that can be helpful. But you can't simply offer people a system or give advice on how to deal with their past. We must point them to a powerful and present Redeemer. He is our only hope. He has conquered sin on our behalf. He willingly offers us his heart-transforming life-altering grace. And that's why the Apostle Paul writes so pointedly in Colossians 2.8, see to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world, unlike basic youth conflicts, and not on Christ. The world's philosophy is deceptive because it cannot deliver what it promises. It may be well-researched and logically presented, but it's not centered on Christ. That's the wisdom of the world. Because sin, the condition, is what is wrong, true hope and help can only be found in Christ. Any other answer will prove hollow. Now, heart surgery. Here we go. People say, okay, I've heard all that before. Let me sip the coffee that has been given. Oh, you don't like coffee? You don't know what you're missing. Wonderful, wonderful coffee. What sin does to us. A couple of titles of books about sin. The Plague of Plagues. The Evil of Evils. And brothers and sisters, I really appreciated, Mike Mattone last week said, could we, we won't do it till the fall, but go through Dr. Machen's book, Christianity and Liberalism. That was the book that blew everything wide open in the battle with unbelief in the Presbyterian Church USA. And I said, there really needs to be an update called Christianity and Evangelicalism. because what used to be a pretty rock-ribbed commitment to the scriptures isn't so much today. And the weakness, the weakness of modern evangelicalism is right here. It has a pathetically weak view of sin. And that's putting it mildly. Here are some quotations about sin of the pages we could get. Sin defiles man and defies God. Sin is not only an offense which needs forgiving, but a pollution which needs cleansing. Sin is God's would-be murderer. Sin is man's declaration of independence, or I would say would-be independence, from God. Sin is a refusal of divine lordship and disobedience to God's will. Every yielding to sin is a welcoming of Satan into our very bosoms. And the famous one from John Bunyan, who wrote Pilgrim's Progress, sin is the dare of God's justice. the rape of his mercy, the jeer at his patience, the slight of his power, and the contempt of his love. Wow. Never think, wrote one of the old writers, never think to find honey in the pot when God writes poison on its cover. Sin has scarred the ecology of the whole universe. And I want to use the word Selah several times here. Behold, stop and think about that. Now this, even to read this, I can hear people squirming in the evangelical world. But this isn't user-friendly. This isn't going to attract people. This is going to turn people off. Really? Sin turns God off, folks. All right? So those are just some of the things. Now let's get back to Paul Tripp, okay, and his development here. Page 12, what sin does to us. Sin is the ultimate disease. Again, plague of plagues. It is the grand psychosis. You cannot escape it. You cannot escape it or defeat it on your own. Look around and you will see its mark everywhere. Sin complicates what is already complicated. Life in a fallen world is more arduous than God ever intended. Yet our sin makes it worse. We deal with much more than suffering, disease, disappointment, and death. Our deepest problem is not experiential, biological, or relational. It is moral. and it alters everything. It distorts our identity, alters our perspective, derails our behavior, and kidnaps our hope. How could Francis Schaeffer spend 50 minutes talking about sin? It would take you the whole hour and more just to unpack that. But here's why that's important. against the world that in its wisdom gives you a phony view of reality. This is the real world and has to be lovingly bored into people's souls. So, what though does sin produce? And Trip, like so many others, brings it down to three. One, rebellion. And folks, rebellion isn't just breaking a few rules. Rebellion is a fundamental flaw in the human character, and you see it in Vashti, but it's a fundamental flaw in all of our characters. Rebellion, writes Tripp, is the inborn tendency to give in to the lies of autonomy, I am the captain of my soul, I am master of my fate. Self-sufficiency and self-focus, as Luther put it, sin makes us curve inward on ourselves. It results in a habitual violation of God-given boundaries. Autonomy says I have the right to do what I want when I want to do it. Self-sufficiency says, I have everything I need in myself, so I don't need to depend on or submit to anyone. Self-focus says, I am the center of my world. It is right to live for myself and to do only what brings me happiness. Sounds like a strange new world, right? These are the lies of the garden. The same lies Satan has whispered in generation after generation of willing ears. They deny our basic makeup as human beings. We were not created to be autonomous. We were designed to be in daily submission to God and deliver his glory. Living outside this design never works. The rebel spirit affects the way we approach difficulty and blessing. Independence, self-sufficiency, and self-absorption lead us to think of ourselves first and to climb over the fences between ourselves and our desires. We want control, and we hate being controlled. We want to make up the rules and change them whenever it suits us. Essentially, we want to be God, ruling our worlds according to our own will. No matter what else we are rebelling against, our rebellion is ultimately directed at God. we refuse to recognize his authority, we rob him of his glory, and we usurp his right to rule. Whoa, Selah, stop and think about that. That's what rebellion is. But it's not only rebellion, it's foolishness. Foolishness says this, there's no perspective There's no insight, there's no theory of truth that is more reliable than my own. I did it my way. That's why people quipped that April 1st, which happens to be John Bates' birthday, as well as the day of our concert. But apart from that, April Fool's Day. April Fool's Day, which people say should be our national holiday. No perspective, no insight or theory or truth that is more reliable than my own. That's foolishness. What does foolishness do? It distorts reality. It makes you live in a world of your own making. And as Paul Tripp says, and others have used the illustration, remember the old carnivals, the hall of mirrors, a world of mirrors? And you'd go in and there were mirrors, and you'd look, and you were very thin, very short, very fat. Now many of us don't even need the mirror for that. But everything was distorted, okay? That's what foolishness does. Again, quoting Tripp on page 15, foolishness convinces us that we're okay, and that our rebellious, irrational choices are right and best. Think Bahá'u'lláh. Foolishness is a rejection of our own basic nature as human beings. We were never created to be our own source of wisdom. We were designed to be revelation receivers, dependent on the truths that God would teach us. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, and applying those truths to our lives. Remember, God spoke to Adam and Eve in the garden. They lived out of revelation, or they were supposed to. We were created to base our interpretations, choices, and behavior on His wisdom. Living outside of this will never work. The fool has said in his heart, no God, and as you go through Proverbs, all the references to the fool, and you see it in our culture around us. And what was the first sin? We want to be as God, all right? And that's what foolishness says. And the third thing, inability. or what we call total depravity, total inability. Jesus says in John 5, literally, you are not able, you don't have the power to come to me that you might have life. Quoting Tripp, we are moral quadriplegics. Quadriplegics, no use of arms or legs in a wheelchair. We are fundamentally unable to do what is right. Selah, stop and think about that. Now that's, folks, that's skimming the surface of what sin does. You get in the, underneath the epidermis of the soul, and you find inoperable cancer throughout, and it's aggressive, and it destroys. Now, let's take a little break, okay? The gospel. Because of modern evangelicalism's pathetically weak views of sin, it has pathetically weak views of the gospel. What's the gospel? Put your hand in the hand of the man who walked the waters. Excuse me. The heart of the gospel is not Jesus walking on water, it's Jesus bearing a cross. Louis Armstrong looking to the Lord to deliver him from all of his troubles. No mention of sin. But because of modern evangelicalism's pathetically weak views of sin, it has pathetically weak views of the gospel. because sinners must be radically saved. They must be rescued. Quite frankly, they need to die in Christ so that they might be made alive. So what is the gospel? Well, number one, people, and it's something you can use in ministering to people. People have a bad record. That was the call to confession of sin today. marks from conception through my whole life every thought and word and deed that sin and God calls us to account. That's a bad record. Jesus has a perfect record. That's what his obedience is all about. The miracles confirm he's God, but it's his obedience that's critical. Because quite frankly, if you don't have an absolute perfection, you don't stand in the presence of God. I heard a sermon that David Murray gave once. It was the end of the school year. Brilliant sermon. He's a tremendous preacher. And David Murray, who's done so much helpful material on depression, David Murray's speaking to children in the church. And he says, well, at the end of the year, and you've gotten your report cards, and in that Dutch community, boy, you better do well on your report card. And he says, I'll bet. A lot of you didn't do well on your report cards. By then the children are thinking, oh, I got a C, a D, maybe my dad and mom still let me live in the house, or they wanted all As and I got Bs. And he drilled in how you don't have a perfect report card. And he says, children, you know what the gospel is? Jesus gives you his report card, and he has all A pluses. Isn't that a beautiful way to present the gospel? So that's part of what the gospel is. But not just a bad record, we have a bad heart. The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked above all things. No one is able to come to me that they might have life. And God obviously gives us a good heart. He gives us a new heart. Why? It's Christ's heart. That's why we say, I love this. You have to have a transplant. And Jesus gives you his heart. And he's able to give that to all those who come to him by grace through faith, okay? And we have bad lives. God gives us a new life. He gives us Christ's life by grace through faith. You're in union with him and his whole life is yours. And as you open up, don't just say it, bad record, bad heart, bad life, but spin it out 50 minutes, right? Five, zero. In those 10 minutes, there you explain what the gospel is. And that, folks, is the radical meaning of being born again or being born from above. Heaven comes down, and by the Spirit, glory fills your soul. So the gospel is nothing less than heaven rescuing people from hell. And you must say that. Don't you dare say to people, you know, okay, your life isn't really what you want it to be. Jesus will clean that up and make it better. How about right now, outside of Christ, you're under the wrath of God. That's the language Paul uses. The wrath of God abides on those outside of him. And unless with the legs of repentance and faith you run to Christ, you remain under his wrath. Now folks, that's something you've gotta say. You have to say it lovingly. You have to say it graciously. You have to say it self-reflectively. Say, I know what I'm talking about. I can look back. Now, if you don't remember the time you were converted, maybe you can't. Those of us who can look back, I can remember what it was like before I was converted. And you reflect on that so it doesn't seem like you're just pointing at them. Say, look, I know what I'm talking about. I was there too. So graciously, lovingly, self-reflectively, but boldly you say that to people. And this is the testimony, 1 Thessalonians 1, it is the model of what the description of conversion is. Sent to these Christians in northern Greece, speaking about all those in Greece are talking about you. They themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you. They know how you received our words and how you turned to God from idols. That's not adding Jesus to your life. That's getting the idols out of your life. How you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to wait for his son from heaven whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come. All right, and so Paul embeds that. Okay, so let's wrap it all up, okay? This is from Tripp, page 16. And I will let Paul Tripp have the closing words and then your questions. As human beings, we cannot walk through life on our own. We need rescue, healing, and forgiveness. In short, we need God. I love it, Nan, when you're talking about presenting the gospel to your friends, and you've said it so many times, they need God. They need God, and that's right. They need Christ. They need the Father, too. They need the Spirit, too, because God, that's God. In short, we need God. We need the good news. We need the good news of the king who has come, making lasting change possible. My kingdom is within, right? This alone is our personal hope and the basis of our ministry to others. The good news of the kingdom is not freedom from hardship, suffering, and loss. We should send this book to Joel Osteen. It is the news of a Redeemer who has come to rescue me from myself. His rescue produces change that fundamentally alters my response to these inescapable realities of hardship, suffering, and loss. The Redeemer turns rebels into disciples fools into humble listeners. He makes cripples walk again. In him we can face life and respond with faith, love, and hope. And as he changes us, he allows us to be part of what he's doing in the lives of others. As you respond to the Redeemer's work in your life, You then learn to be an instrument in his hands. Title of the book, Selah. Stop and think about that. Again, Christian counseling, not a guy sitting on a raised platform at his desk staring at others. Somebody's sitting looking at you right in your eye and saying, hey listen, I'm right there with you. Sinner saved by grace and I want you to be the same. Okay, all right, so let's go. Questions, comments, arguments, anything you want to add. Reactions.