If you have your Bible this morning and you want to read with us, I encourage you to turn to the book of Romans chapter 7. The book of Romans chapter 7. And I was thankful this week to have an extra amount of time to go through these two chapters, Romans 6 and Romans chapter 7. It was a great encouragement to me and both the things I plan to say this morning and many that I don't and I'm thankful. I'm just thankful for the truth that is here and for the promises that we find in God's word. And it's been very rich to me this week and I'm just thankful. Romans chapter seven, we're gonna be in reading as this is one of the most dense Books in the Bible, every verse is replete with such richness that I don't pretend to be able to get through even our scripture reading today, nor the context that it fits in. But I'm gonna jump into a middle of a thought that Paul is expressing here in Romans chapter seven, beginning in verse seven. I'll read down to verse 12, and we'll try to take one of the thoughts that Paul is providing us here. It says this. What shall we say then, is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law. For I had not known lust, except the law had said, thou shall not covet. But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concussions. For without the law, sin was dead. For I was alive without the law once, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me. Wherefore, the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. I'll conclude our reading this morning, and the title of this message is gonna be really derived from verse 11, where it says this, for sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it, slew me. The title of my message today is Sin Promises Life, But Gives the Grave. Sin promises life, but gives the grave. There are some obvious things or an obvious thing about being lost and separated from God that I think is almost so self-evident that it causes real fear and it should. And that involves the final judgment to an unrepentant sinner. Hell. And if you're lost this morning, I don't doubt that you are a lot like I was when I was lost, that the thought of hell, the thought of eternal punishment was with me often. I rarely alluded to that thought being with me to others. But the uncertainty of death and the reality of being unprepared if death found me was something that was with me all the time. There is a place, despite our culture's insistence that we not think about unpleasantness, there is a time and a place where the realities of God's just judgment must be brought to the minds and hearts of sinners and saints alike. In other words, sometimes we need to think about something we don't want to think about. I find at times when the ones that I love or even complete strangers being separated from God for all of eternity, When God impresses that upon my heart more deeply than is normal, it affects me. It affects my desires. It affects the way I see people. It affects the way I interpret sin towards me. And I think it's very often shied away from for the fear that we will be accused of fear-mongering or that we're trying, and perhaps at times religion has been guilty of that. Perhaps the preacher has gotten behind the pulpit and tried to wail away at this topic in order to coerce human behavior using some psychological trick. And if that be done, God forbid it be done, again, we don't need to help The truth impact the human heart. We need to get out of the way and just speak the truth and let it resonate as God's spirit dictates. And yet today I want you to know that in your state of being lost, hell and judgment is not the only thing that is bad about being lost. And I think this scripture, as we're led up to this text that we read, the chapter before it emphasizes a significant pain, a significant consequence to remaining in a lost state. Chapter six, if it teaches us anything, shows us that when a person is lost, they are completely a slave to sin. And so in this scripture, we have this mode of rhetoric, or this mode of literature that Paul uses called personification, a metaphor. And often, just like Jesus did in his parables, the purpose of these things is to bring to life a reality that we experience. And so what Paul brings to life is that all of us are subject to a master. You serve, not as a servant as the King James translates it, but as a slave. That's the correct word that ought to be translated here. That all of us are slaves to someone. And it personifies the someone as being God or sin. We can see, I want you to look in chapter six very briefly. I'm gonna skip real quick to show you that this is Paul's emphasis and that Paul is using very often what we'll find in scriptures is that when something's repeated twice, we ought to pay attention to it. In one chapter when nine or 10 times something is said, we ought to stop dead in our tracks and recognize that the reader, or excuse me, that the writer or the Holy Spirit is trying for us as we're gonna continue reading to root ourself with what he just repeated nine times and then view what we're about to read from the place that we have been rooted. And so notice here in chapter six, Paul is saying, now that you're saved, you were in your lost state, a slave to sin, and he's trying to express in chapter six, just how enslaved that we were when we were lost. Now, we sang this morning in multiple songs a word of rejoicing that for those of us that have been saved, we have been freed from the bondage of sin. Aren't you thankful this morning if you have been saved by God's grace that you can sing, I am free. I'm free from the bondage of sin and the judgment that will come thereafter. I no longer must serve sin. That's something to rejoice about. But if you're lost this morning, you are still in bondage. Look at what Paul says in Romans chapter six, the end of verse six. He says this. He's speaking to the saved person here. He says that henceforth, we should not serve sin. Verse seven, for he that is dead is freed from sin. So you can see this picture of being a slave and then being freed. He says in verse nine, at the end of verse nine, death hath no more dominion or rule over him. Look at verse 11, likewise reckon you also yourselves to be dead, indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body. Look at verse 13, it says this, he's given this instruction to save people, it says, neither yield ye yourselves members as instruments of unrighteousness. Why? Because in verse 14, in the beginning, for sin shall not have dominion over you. Look at verse 17. But God bethanked that ye were, this is where it should be slaves, slaves of sin. It says servants of sin here. Verse 18. Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness. Look at the middle of verse 19. For ye have yielded your members, servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity. Look at verse 20. For when you were the servants or slaves of sin, and then verse 22 he says this, but now being made free from sin. So if you're lost here this morning, here's what I want you to know. One of the awful things about the state you are in is that you are enslaved to the ruler of your life, which is sin. Now I think there are two groups of people, broadly speaking, enslaved to sin of how they look at their taskmaster. Because as verse 11 in our scripture reading said, Sin deceived me. And so as we look out in the world today, particularly the non-religious world, we see a lot of people who seem to find a great deal of happiness serving their master, sin. And they go about recklessly enjoying all of the pleasures of sin, which the book of Hebrew tells us, they'll enjoy those pleasures of sin for a season. And the reason that Paul says they do that here is because sin in their mortal body has deceived them and caused them to serve him with delight and happiness, taking delight in the pleasures that sin offers. Because you see what sin does is the same thing that Satan did whenever he tried to tempt Jesus in the garden. You remember there, excuse me, out in the garden whenever he was up on the mount. You remember whenever Jesus was there on the mount and there Satan comes to him in this weakened condition, he's fasting. Now we can say that sin functions very similarly, doesn't it? That sin often attacks our hearts when we are least suspecting of it and when we are most vulnerable to attack. When our hearts have experienced judgment from somebody else, perhaps unrightly. Perhaps someone has spoken harsh words to us. Perhaps we have been the target of hardship of some sort. And right at that moment, when we are wounded very often, sin begins to rise up in us. We think it just to begin to think of self We think it just to begin to think bad thing towards others, or God forbid, towards God, that God permitted this to happen, and oh, the victim that I am because of these things. And self-pity is a loathsome sin that destroys the lives of many. Sin creeps in and it promises, as the Proverbs show in Proverbs chapter two, I believe it's chapter two, where that woman with honey in her lips comes to seduce the heart and promise great pleasure for a night. Proverbs, the book of wisdom, warns the young heart by saying, listen, her lips are sweet and her pleasures are many. And she'll go to great lengths to adorn herself and her bedroom in a way that would be enticing and seductive. But the arrows are deadly. So we learn that there's one group of people in the world, and perhaps many of us, that often fall to the pleasures that sin has to offer, and that our own fallen nature falls in line with those pleasures by having this amazing fallen capability to justify almost everything that we want to do. Are you ever amazed at how readily that your heart will give you justification for the sin you want to do? I'll spend all my life blaming others and blaming my situation and blaming and blaming, all so in the end, I can just enjoy sin. There's one group of people who are in bondage to sin who are welcoming of their bondage. They seek to plunge, I guess we could look at it the opposite way, to rise higher and higher up the hierarchy of the slave hierarchy in order to gain more power and more pleasure that sin can offer. Another group, I believe, recognizes the danger of sin likely because you've come to a place like this. Likely because you have parents who slowly scaffold in your heart and mind Hey, don't, don't do that kind of thing. Don't act out in bitterness. Don't have a loose tongue where curses and bitter water comes forth, as the book of James puts it. And so throughout your life, you have been trained by both the scriptures and by a church and by parents, if you're lost this morning, that sin does have consequences. and yet there is a sense of familiarity that is so gained by sin. There is such a comfort, and we can all speak, of being in places and situations both in our body where you know it's not the best, but we have grown so accustomed to how it feels, we lack the urgency to find freedom. We're not eager to get emancipated because though I don't wanna be a slave to this, the risk, the pain of seeking emancipation and freedom just seems too much. And so sin says to you this, yes, I still own you. Yes, one day freedom is good, but not today. Not today is not a day to seek the Lord and to find freedom. Because it's just, I think Do-Re-Mi's tonight. Or in my case, during the midst of a revival where I got saved all that week, the preacher promising in goodwill, he said, you know what? One of these days when we get out of service early, I'll take you down here to get a cheeseburger and some ice cream. Down at the local Wendy's. Well, so what does a lost person do? It takes a good promise, which we'll talk about here in a moment, and sin manipulates that, cause us to compound our sin. In other words, he meant well by that, right? But here's what my sinful heart did. Well, that means if you seek the Lord tonight, you're not gonna get out early, so you're not gonna get your ice cream cone. And so day after day after day passed during that revival, And I wouldn't seek the Lord because the promises of sin, even in such a trivial, immature way, were so promising to a 10-year-old kid that the promises of ice cream was sweet enough to risk the condition of my very soul and grow comfortable being a continual slave of sin. What is amazing to me is how how what these verses teach us, how sin can contaminate everything that is good. That's what, where does it say it here? Verses seven through 10 are all about. What it's talking about is the law. And to us as sinners, the law sounds like a bad thing. And that's the irony of it. What the scripture teaches us is the law is not bad. It's actually good and holy and just and for our welfare. He says, it was by the law that I came to the knowledge of sin and then came to know the need for a Savior. And so the law is good and holy and just because it notifies mankind, you have transgressed and broken this and a holy judgment for all of eternity will be your doom and your reward if you don't make things right with God. And the law is meant to bring attention to the fact that we sin and are in jeopardy. And yet, he begins to point something out in his example in here that to me is almost humorous because it's so true. He says, the law said this, don't covet. So I want you to think of the kid. Think of the little kid. I had a couple of these kids whenever they were young that had a particular propensity towards this type of behavior. If I said, don't touch that, you know what it did? It embellished their desire to do it. And so what Paul is saying here is that the law was given and it was good and holy and just and meant for our good. But when the commandment came to us, it created all of these voices within through sin that said, you ought to touch it. You know how pleasurable to be? Well, dad stepped out of the room. He'll never know. And so what Paul is saying, he's revealing here, is how deceptive sin is, and that sin is so deceptive that it could corrupt even the law that God gave for the benefit of sinners to find God. And yet, isn't that just the nature of what sin does with everything? It doesn't just corrupt the law. Sin corrupts everything that God gave us in order to enrich our life, whether we're lost or whether we're saved. How many people have thought often about, I remember one day I was in a Cracker Barrel and I was listening, it was Christmastime and there was this music going and there was a harmony that these people were singing and the song that they were singing was completely secular, but I was taken by how gifted and talented that those people were to sing. And the thought struck my heart, voices that beautiful were never given to honor and worship self and accumulate wealth through it. A voice like that was given to sing praise to a creator. And yet what has happened? Well, mankind, through the insistence of sin dwelling within us, says God has given you a great voice. You ought to use it. Now, we can talk about secular music, but can that not also creep into the heart of people who sing about Christian things? There is a dangerous culture that exists today within a Christian music industry that lets create such beautiful sound that the power that moves the human heart is found in the beauty of the harmony, is found in the beauty of the instruments, rather than in the power of the message. And Paul in Romans chapter one, and Paul in first Corinthians chapters one through three, warns us that eloquence, talent, power, ought never to be the draw to God, because in so doing so, we cloud, we white out the power of the cross. And so people begin to listen to the way that we say things and how eloquent we are instead of seeing Christ through our words and the Holy Spirit to take those realities and imprint them so deeply upon our hearts that we're called to serve God, not admire the vessel that he created to give us that stuff. Isn't it amazing that my heart can corrupt a mind and a mouth that should be used in the proclamation of the gospel for your good, and that God can so corrupt my heart that I would seek to come up with clever ways to impress you, that you might think well of me, and God forbid I fall to that. You see how deceptive and clever You see, very often I think people say, you know, Satan's clever, sin is clever, almost in this way of like, yeah, but I figured him out. I know he's clever in those ways, but those very thoughts that you would have are an evidence of how clever that he is. that we would think that we have overcome the powers of temptation or that any of us would be able to rise above the natural propensities of the human heart to lust and covet and have pride. Listen to me, until the day we breathe our last breath, we are subject to the temptations of sin. Paul, the Bible, you know, your talents, God can, hobbies, Here, he can deceive us in multiple ways, right? Both directions he can deceive us. Prosperity, he can deceive us. Right, because he can create a scenario where prosperity is sin. That's not true. Prosperity is morally neutral. But what the Bible says is this, most people who accumulate prosperity begin to quickly slide down the slope of sin. They begin to take those things and enlarge their own tent. They begin to take those things and admire all that they have done and all they've accumulated. They begin to take those things and selfishly hoard those things. And so all throughout the New Testament, Paul is warning those rich brothers and sisters, be careful of the temptation of riches, because he knows the capacity of the human heart to make all of our, listen, you weren't given money to spend on yourself. You were given it to glorify God with, period. And so building sealed houses, the book of Haggai says, and accumulating great wealth so we might find security, so we might have all manner of toys, listen to me, is sin and a corruption of the human heart. And if you can somehow justify otherwise, that's the subtle voice of sin convincing you otherwise. And so sin, prosperity, being morally neutral. Abraham was rich, Solomon was rich, Job was rich. And they, by the grace of God, were able to use those things in a way that edified God and were willing to abandon those things like so few will when God calls them to do so. Oh, but then poverty can be also a very steep, direction towards covetousness and jealousy. There is no, there is no righteousness, there is no, all there is is sanctimony and the impoverished person who looks resentfully at the rest of the world. Paul taught us, listen, there is no virtue, that's what I was looking for, there's no virtue in poverty or wealth. Both equally pose a danger to the human heart that we can pervert both of those things through the power of sin. Marriage. I hate this one. I hate that this is how the culture is twisted. A gift God gave to the human race. When your spouse is your problem, they're not your problem, your heart is your problem. and you have allowed sin within you to grow so selfish that rather than being a servant to your spouse and being driven by love and being able to use those opportunities when your spouse sins as a means by which God sanctifies you when we pervert the sins of our spouse and we allow that to corrupt our heart and they for periods of time become our enemies and we get in a tug of war where we're just pulling and they're pushing and there's this constant tug of war that may never manifest in our lives, but it can manifest in our heart. We can know that sin within us has corrupted the beautiful gift that God gave us in marriage. Marriage is hard. And I'm glad that it's hard because it is through that that God sanctifies man's heart more than almost anything else. He makes you more like Him by forcing you to become one with your spouse than almost anything that God does. Child rearing, isn't that another one? Woe to us because we have children. How hard that it is. Who's not done that? Oh me, a thousand times over, have you not? Yet the scriptures tell us this, what a gift. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of children. How even in talk we can say, man, five kids, six kids, seven kids, whoa, you all are crazy. I'm not saying it's not hard. I'm not saying there's not practical reasons that we ought to not use common sense in making decisions for ourselves. But to project the image that more children means more cursing is just evidence to how much that our culture and our hearts have corrupted the gifts God has given Nowhere in the Bible does it say that children are anything but a gift, that marriage is anything but a gift, that when God allows it to rain upon the just, that it is a gift. All of those things God gives as gifts, and yet sin dwelling in us corrupts us. and lost person in your state, here's what I want you to know, there is no place, there is no opportunity where in your lost condition you will not corrupt every single gift that God has given you. You will corrupt the friendships God gives. You will corrupt the freedom in our country that God has given. You will corrupt the talents that God has given to you. You will corrupt the relationships God has given to you. Why? Because sin dwelling in you will corrupt them. And it's an inevitable thing because you're in bondage to it. Instead of denying that, instead of avoiding that, Paul tells us what to do. Seek emancipation. Because contrary to the bondage of sin is a master who calls us. But he's much more than a master. I hate that for so many years of my Christian life, I lived with this idea that God was this being that had to be appeased. That he was still somehow lurking in the shadows, waiting for me to make a mistake. And as soon as I did, he would seize that as an opportunity to just chasten me with a furiousness. And I'm so glad this morning that I recognize that that thought is exactly what sin in me is and is nothing what God has shown to be. I love being saved. Don't you love being saved this morning? Don't you love that God can free you? even in short moments, find the purpose and why things were created. Here's what I mean by that. I love today's Callen's birthday. He's four. Doesn't surprise anybody that from up to this point, it's been a lot of work, right? Just common sense. But amidst all of that, there have been moments where God has allowed me to die daily, that day, that moment. I'm no longer subject to the power that sin has over me. And in those moments, God has given me a joy that is not natural to this world. I'm not talking about seeing His smiling face and it just making me feel so good when He blows out the candles. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something greater than that. Something where I rejoice in Calen with God. that this blessing God has given is not just a little person to whom I'm responsible, it's not just a cute, smiling face, but it is this divine, eternal blessing of a soul whereby God has given me that my spirit may have this oneness and affection with my son. And in that moment that I can rejoice about things greater than just the happiness He brings at the moment, I can rejoice as to Him being God's creation. Rejoice in the promise, all the promises that God has laid out for Him. all the salvation that he can know. As I often pray for my children, I pray, Lord, allow them to experience the richness of your goodness, and then allow us, me and my child, to somehow become unified in glorifying you and honoring you through that richness. In other words, this is what I mean. I don't know how to explain it. A child does not have the capacity to fully appreciate everything that their parents do for them, right? So if dad works long hours and mom labors hard, makes great sacrifices, under great pressure and duress, a child may come up and say, well, thanks, mom. Can you give me a Pop-Tart? They don't have any conception that listen, this isn't just something you move on from. There was a great sacrifice made, the profundity of which requires significant recognition and praise, gratitude of a whole nother level. So here's how I feel with my children right now. As I study God's word, and as the Holy Spirit ministers to my heart, and brings me in deeper union with God, and I find more of the richness of his goodness, as I discover how good that he is and has been to me, and as that exceeding abundant revelation is made, that in Christ, God has given me more than I have previously ever understood, and he begins to show me the windows into all of God's blessings and goodness and glory. You know what I wanna do whenever God shows me that? Think of yourself, if God's ever showed you in a moment just how good that he was, just how good that even in the trials it was his blessing, in the mountain it was his blessing, and you begin to rejoice in that with God, How could you magnify that joy? How could it even get greater? I'll tell you one way that it gets greater is when you begin to rejoice with somebody else over the same thing. In other words, this, when God has revealed the same thing to them that he's revealed to you, and both are unutterable revelations of the heart. In other words, I can't describe it and you can't describe it, but you know what I'm talking about. And then both people, rather than try and explain it to one another, fall humbly upon their knees and begin to praise the God who gave it. There is a richness in that fellowship that transcends any human connection. I want that with my children so badly. I want that with my wife. I want that with my church, with each of you, for words to grow insufficient in the praising of God our Savior. But sin, sin. Paul later in Romans 7 says, when I seek to do good, sin is present with me. I want that so badly right at this moment. But you give me about 10 minutes. Give me about two minutes. And the desires of sin in me will overshadow that good and righteous desire. And so Paul comes to the end of chapter seven. He says, who will deliver me? Lost friend. That's the place you have to get to because everything you touch the rest of your life will be tainted in your heart by sin. And you will not be able to experience the joy of God's design in giving you that thing because sin will taint it. And so there's a place that Paul comes to that mirrors where the children of Israel came to in Exodus chapter two. You remember? There was a pharaoh that, you remember how the book of Exodus begins? There's a pharaoh that rose up that knew not Joseph and slowly put the Hebrews in sin, or excuse me, put them in bondage. All that story is recorded, not just for history, but to indicate the picture we're preaching on this morning precisely. That all those people had been in bondage for all of that time. And finally they got so desperate. I wanna read you what they said. And it came to pass in the process of time that the king of Egypt died and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage. And they cried. Don't just read over that. Think about it. They were slaves. Their parents were slaves. Their greatest enjoyment that they cried out for in the wilderness was, give us more cucumbers. That was the height of their joy while being slaves in Egypt. They cried, and their cry came up to God. This morning, listen to verse 24, it keeps on going. And their cry came up to God by reason of the bondage. So here's what God saw. They were in bondage, he felt sympathy. But that bondage, I believe, was meant to work in them this desire for deliverance and for a new master. And so the Bible says this, he didn't just look down and see they're crying and answer them. He looked down and he saw their groaning and their bondage. And in their state, he said, I'm going to send a deliverer. Oh, their deliverer was imperfect. Their deliverer came and set them free from the bondage of Egypt. But our deliverer was not imperfect. And he did not just come, though he did come to save the body, he didn't just come to save the body, but the soul, not from bondage to a person, but bondage to sin for all of eternity. And so, lost friend of that, you must get to the state where your groaning and bondage requires you, compels you rather, to cry out in groaning and say, who will deliver me from the bondage of this sin? And I'll note this for just a moment. To those of us that are saved, we want to readily help that process in them. Why don't we cry out from deliverance of ourselves in this body ourselves? That's what Paul was doing. He had been set free spiritually, but he was crying for the freedom of the body. He wanted to be free and not sin to reign and to control him like it so often did. This morning, I want to, I want to both declare as a truth. Listen, lost friend, you will never be free from sin infecting everything in your life, including every thought of the mind and heart until you are set free. You will never be able to enjoy what God desires until you can do it with freedom. But listen, there is freedom found in the person of Jesus Christ. I love to be free, and I'll close with this. I love that my inward man is free. And I love those moments where God fellowships with me in that freedom and reminds me that I'm not just a slave, but I'm an adopted son that will co-inherit everything reserved for His Son. That's a truth too great to even consider, and yet it's promised to me. But I wanna say this, the more I get to know God, I wanna say this to you older people especially. There is a freedom coming at death that should not be feared or ran from. You know, the moment you got saved, Romans 6 and 7 teaches this, your inward man died with Christ. Death brought about eternal life from Jesus Christ. That was in the spirit. It also is going to happen one day in your death as you inch closer and closer to death. There is going to be a death to this body that occurs. And you know what's going to die with that body? Sin. Once and forever, you will be free in every way from sin. That's why Paul said this. I'm in a straight betwixt. to be here is just good for you. But notice he didn't say it's good for him. And listen, saved people today, being here is not for us. As much as I love my children and enjoy the fellowship I have with them, the fellowship that awaits me in heaven, both with the saints and with God and with my children when they get there, far exceeds any of the greatest joys I experience with them down here. And so Paul said, I'm in a straight betwixt. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. It's to be freed from the body of sin. I think it's a good thing when saved people look forward to dying. It's not morbid, it's a just conflict within. I love you, and I'm okay to be here, to be here for you and for Him. Oh, but I much prefer to be with Him. That's the message of Scripture, because there's a freedom from sin. This morning, I wanna have a song with a Danny, if you will. I wish today, if you were lost, I wish today that you would seek freedom. A freedom that is found in Jesus Christ alone. A freedom that the people of God ought to rejoice in. Imagine that day as they were exiting Egypt. They and their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents had known nothing but slavery. And there they walked out with their taskmaster's riches. God makes a promise to us, friends. I pray if you're lost this morning, you would be set free from the bondage of sin.