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Brothers and sisters in the Lord, what I ask you this morning to imagine with me for
just a few moments, what life would be like ordered not for the grace of God?
What would life be like if Jesus Christ had never come into the world?
If He had never died on the cross for our sins, if He had never been raised on the
third day for our justification, what would life be like if our sins could not be forgiven
if there were no second chance?
What would life be like without Jesus?
Obviously, we'd be in a big heap of trouble because if we cannot live under the realm
of grace, then all that remains is the realm of law.
And law you might recall from one of our previous studies, law is a very cruel taskmaster,
as the law tells us what it is that we are to do, but it gives us no help in doing it.
The law says there are wonderful promises to the individual who manages to keep every
jot and tittle of the law, but the law breathes judgment and condemnation for everybody
that breaks the law.
And as Paul goes on, as we hope to see later on in Romans chapter 7 to point out, all
the law can do is lay bare the sinfulness that is within our own hearts.
God never intended for the law to change our lives.
God gave us the law to show us that by birth and by virtue of our own choices we are sinners.
We cannot measure up to the things that God wants us to be and that God wants us to
have in our own strength and in our own right for that reason.
Everywhere where the law holds sway, where people live under the system of you get what
you deserve.
There are three consequences that become evident in the lives of people and I want to share
those with you briefly this morning.
Number one, when we live under the law, we always live with a constant sense of failure
and a constant sense of condemnation.
Paul says earlier in the book of Romans, through the law comes knowledge of sin.
Isn't that been our own experience?
Those times perhaps before we came to know Christ that we tried to be good in our own strength
or those times after we have come to know Christ, when we sort of forget how much we need
him and we think we can do it ourselves and we begin to try to be in our own strength
the kinds of things that God wants us to be.
What is the result?
Is that knowing science of not being complete, that knowing sense of condemnation, that sense
that says there is more that I ought to be doing and there is more that other people ought
to be doing and of only we could work at it a little bit harder, maybe everything would
go okay.
That's why there are so many people in the world who throw themselves into drink and
who throw themselves into their work and who just refuse to sit down and really contemplate
their true condition because it is too painful a thing to begin to experience because every
time they look at themselves they don't like what they see.
There is a cloud of condemnation and as I shared with you a number of weeks ago it surfaces
in how critical people become of other people because that's how we try to build up ourselves
wherever the law rings there is that ongoing sense of I'm not quite good enough.
I haven't quite got what it takes and we either become hypocrites or we throw in the
towel and we say what is the use I can't live that way anyway let me give it up.
The law produces a sense of failure.
Over to the law produces a system whereby I must pay for all of my failures remember now
the law says I will reward you for doing it right but only if you do it all right but
I will punish you for every infraction you won't get out until you have paid the very
last penny.
I was moved this past week because I read a story in the paper of a young woman lawyer
in Toronto by the name of Carla Gower it had quite a spread in the Toronto star you might
have seen it.
A young woman who was raised in small town Ontario in a United Church home always was she
said by her own admission a good little girl went to law school developed a law career
and really began to prosper so that by the age of 30 she missions for the Supreme Court
of Canada and she had before her in everybody's estimation a brilliant and a beautiful career.
But then it happened she fell in love and unfortunately the person that she happened
to fall in love with was an ex-boxer by the name of Robert Krueger who turned out to be
quite a character.
God her involved in a variety of different real estate deals then dumped her for another
girlfriend and still kept using her services and in the perplexities of that emotional
confusion whereby she was so totally conquered by his power nevertheless.
She began to mess up with her career and one of her clients who was suing somebody else
for an automobile accident and for whom she was supposed to be filing whatever it was
with the courts she didn't do it but rather than admitting her mistake or her error she
kept then covering it up with other errors and mistakes and lies until she was found
out and charged with I think three counts of professional misconduct and they've been
having hearings and they'll continue to have hearings they were going to give her the
option of resigning from her profession but now there is talk about disbarment and her
career is in shatters and there is no way that she is going to get her career back because
you see under any system of law you get what you deserve there is no mercy there are no
second chances you pay for what you do and that's how the whole world operates and we're
not for the grace of God that's how we would be living we would be living in a world
without any second chances you pay for what you do and if you begin to consider that
from God's perspective all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God that's
a pretty sobering thought because it means that all of us under the law would pay the
supreme penalty which is death and that's of course the third thing that I want for
us to notice under this theme this morning you not only live with a sense of failure
you not only have to pay for everything you've ever done or haven't done but under the
law when all has been said and done it all comes unglued the end of those things at Paul
in verse 21 of chapter 6 the end of those things is death you might recall we looked at
that two weeks ago we saw that death as a process it begins with disobedience disobedience
leads to slavery slavery to sin and to satan slavery leads to shame that ongoing sense
of I can't lift up my head I am not worthy I'm dirty I'm unclean shame eventually begins
to produce greater and greater iniquity and the bottom line is death the wages of sedances
Paul in the first part of verse 23 the wages of sin is death it begins in that separation
from God in our spirit it begins to spread into every part of my emotional and psychological
being it spreads into my body and it lasts forever and ever and ever that's the tragedy of living
under the law by the works of the law the Bible says no man will be justified and any man
any woman that tries to come to God on the basis of who they are on the basis of how
the rights will outweigh the wrongs on the basis of my own ability and my own pride and
my own life the Bible says the wages of sin is death all you get for all of your efforts
in the final analysis is that there is nothing left because if we try to earn it and God
gives us what we deserve what we deserve is judgment and condemnation the wages of
sin says Paul is death but thank God he doesn't stop there because he goes on to tell us
in the latter part of his verse but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus
our Lord he says the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord and the contrast
on the one hand of course is between the wages of sin being death and the free gift of God
being eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord and if a wage is something you earn it's coming
to you because what it is that you've done then a free gift is something that as the name
implies God gives to you without you're having any right to it or claim to it the free gift
of God in Christ Jesus he says is eternal life the wages of sin is death but the free gift
of God is eternal life and that's of course the story of the gospel story of the gospel
is that God never intended the law as I said a few moments ago to be the two that would
present us before God without spot or wrinkle or blemish or any such thing the purpose of
the law was simply to hold things in check and to show us how stubborn proud and rebellious
we really are in Adam the purpose of the law was to point us to the Lord Jesus Christ
and in the Lord Jesus Christ God has instituted a whole new system of dealing with mankind
it's a system the Bible calls grace a system that says the purposes and the laws of God
have not changed but it's a system that says instead of God demanding from us that we do
with which we cannot God not only tells us what it is that he wants us to do in the person
of Jesus Christ he has come to make it available so that by faith he can give me all of the
things that he wants me to have the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord
and that again has some very practical applications for your life and for my life because it means
now that when we've come to Jesus when we've come to that point whereby we have said the
labors of my hands no longer can fulfill the laws of God and even if I live to be hundred
thousand years old I will never be righteous in his sight and I will never be what it is
that he wants me to be and we by faith turn to Jesus and we embrace him then there are
three corresponding things that begin to happen in your life and in my life let me share
those with you this morning number one I am no longer a failure no matter who I am where
I come from what I may think of myself what my experience in life may have been and what
my neighbor or my family or my friends or anybody thinks of me from God's perspective
I'm no longer a failure why not because God no longer measures me on the basis of who
I am I want us to understand that when God institutes grace he begins to operate a whole
new realm of life remember now under the law you got to try to prove yourself you got
to try to improve yourself you got to try to measure up to everybody else's expectations
it always produces condemnation but under grace it no longer depends on me or on what
lives in my heart God knows that I can never measure up anyway and so God system he
quit trying to measure up could try to earn your place quit trying to fight your way into
my presence acknowledge that you can't make it anyway and then he says look to Jesus Jesus
the perfect son of God perfectly righteous before God the Father and when I come to faith
in Jesus Christ his holiness and his righteousness by faith becomes mine and God accepts me as I am
because Jesus is as already as complete as he is ever going to be with that all God's
people understood that with a revelation of God's Holy Spirit because it's the biblical
antidote to all these feelings of I'm not good enough nobody wants me nobody loves me
I can't do it if you're in Christ God looks at you through the righteousness of Jesus
and he says in Christ your is good as you're ever going to be and then as a bonus he pours
out his Holy Spirit who begins to live in your heart and and the Holy Spirit who writes
the law of God on your heart now begins as we've seen together before to change our
heart from glory to glory so that we can start measuring up to the purposes of God not
because we're trying so hard but because there is a new spirit that is now operating within
our life bearing fruit for God did you notice that in verse in chapter 7 where Paul says
in verse 5 while we were living in the flesh our sinful passions aroused by the law where
at work in our members to bear fruit for death but he says now we are discharged from the
law did to that which held us captive so that we serve not under the old written code but
in the new life with the spirit and earlier in verse 4 he says you have died to the law
through the body of Christ but you may belong to another to him who has been raised from
the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God there is therefore now no condemnation
since Paul and Romans 8 verse 1 for those who are in Christ Jesus for God has done with
the law weakened by the flesh could not do sending his own son in the likeness of sinful
flesh and for sin he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the just requirement of the
law may be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the spirit
there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus in grace if I am in Christ
I am no longer a failure God looks at me and God says I don't care who you are I don't
care what it is that you've done I love you as I love my eternal son the Lord Jesus
and I accept you in him as I accept you as I accepted him number 2 it means now that
I am eligible for blessings which I do not deserve Ephesians chapter 1 verse 3 Paul puts
it this way blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us
in Christ with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places remember under the law it
is tipped for tat you do right you will be rewarded but if you do wrong you will be judged
and by virtue of our sinful human nature even though that promises at first glance to
be a system in which I've got some chance if I work at it hard enough Paul points out
a Romans chapter 7 that it becomes my undoing because it points out to me what really
lives in my life but he says now that I am in Christ and God imparts to me the righteousness
of Jesus God no longer needs to judge me and punish me for my failures because my failures
have all been thrown into the sea of forgetfulness God who is my Father now is free to pour out
on me the blessings of his grace because in Jesus Christ I have become righteous like
it's very practical it means that when I have made mistakes I don't have to live any
longer with a punishment of those mistakes now there may be times when I cannot avoid
the consequences but even those God can turn around and use them for my good it means
that when I look at myself and I see in myself emotions and thoughts and feelings and drives
and desires that I just cannot curb that keep driving me into things that are not of God
God and his mercy will pour out upon me his grace and his power and I can trust him to
change me to the core of my being it means that when I've been really bad and I'm not
suggesting we ought to be really bad just half bad is bad enough it means that I've been
really bad and I have just rebelliously and stubbornly gone my own way ever notice
you have those times there are those times when you just you've had it up to here trying
to be good and you just you just want to do what you want to do and under the law God
ought to strike us dead ever notice how many times God in grace comes along and he puts
his arms around us and like a rebellious and stubborn child he rocks us to repentance
to renewed courage and to renewed faith and to renewed vision that's the grace of God
it is the free gift aren't you glad that God does not deal with us according to our
anyway but that God in his mercy removes or sin from us as far as east is from west it
means to that when when humanly speaking I have no potential and there is no way that
I can acquire the kind of inheritance the slice of life that I would like to have when
everybody else looks down on me and it looks like I can never retain that dream or that
vision and when there is nothing in me that makes it that makes me worthy of receiving
that kind of blessing God's there and he can give me out of the abundance of his grace
whatever it is that he wants me to have it means he is the God of second chances it means
that he is the God who does not hold me accountable any longer for my failures and for my sins
and who can reward me with the generosity of his grace far above and beyond anything that
we can begin to imagine and sometimes just to prove his point God reserves some of his
biggest blessings for some of the worst sinners you've noticed that have you not you've
noticed that certainly in the pages of scripture Abraham was an idolater prior to God's call
from early Paul deans nothing in Abraham that made Abraham worthy to become the father
of believers but God chose him out of his sovereign love and sovereign grace.
Most of this you will recall was a man of a bad temper who killed an Egyptian soldier
not a likely candidate to be one of the most noble figures in the history of redemption
the Old Testament King David a man after God's own heart but a murderer in an adulterer Peter
one of the leading of the apostles a man almost a jackal and hide in his character full
of devotion to the Lord in the one hand and yet impetuous and denied the Lord.
Apostle Paul a man who persecuted the church and killed believers and thought he was doing
God a favor a mockly assortment of bad people and yet God in his love reaches down into
their lives and he gives them prominence and he gives them gifts and he gives them ministries
that have blessed people throughout all of the generations and when Paul and one Timothy
chapter one reflects on that many years later here's what he says about it let me just
read you a couple of verses he says the saying is sure and worthy of acceptance that Christ
Jesus came into the world to receive sinners and I am the foremost of sinners but I received
mercy for this reason that in me is the foremost Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience
for an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life he said I am the chief
of sinners but I received mercy for this reason that in me as the chief of sinners Jesus
Christ might display his perfect patience for an example to those who were to believe
in him for eternal life doesn't it bother you sometimes when other people who haven't
worked as hard as being good as you have when other people who don't have the credentials
that you have get elevated above and beyond you and receive gifts from God that you have
not yet received that's all the measure of grace nobody has the right to anything and
God gives us in Christ what it is that he wants us to have for the praise of his glory
and what he wants us to do is to be satisfied with that which he gives us and to be faithful
to the end for the praise of his glory I'm no longer a failure God gives me things that
I do not deserve and that he doesn't have to give me and number three I'm guaranteed
of making it to glory notice again how Paul puts it the free gift of God is eternal life
in Christ Jesus our Lord and even that verse free gift stands in opposition to wages then
eternal life stands in opposition to death and if death is my doom reward because of
all the things that I have done because of my sin then eternal life is the free gift
that God gives me by faith in Jesus Christ you know what that means that means that
he who began a good work in me is going to bring it to completion in the day of Jesus Christ
it means that he who died for me while I was yet a sinner and who was raised for my
justification will give me everything that I need to come to faith and to walk in repentance
and to walk in obedience and to come to where God wants me to be people's fear all the
time when you preach a gospel of graces that somehow or another it will lead to a rebellious
and an unrepentant kind of people and Paul's whole argument in Romans chapter six you will
recall is that nobody who really understands who Jesus is and what Jesus has done can
never choose to live that kind of life because we have died to see him we have died to the
law we live in this whole new realm that the Bible calls grace where he who began a good
work in you will also bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ and when we need
to come to faith he will bring us to faith when we need a repent of sins he will work within
our lives and he will give us the grace to repent when we need to learn to walk before
him in obedience he will help us to walk before him in obedience no matter what is the pressure
and no matter what are the difficulties and no matter what it is that it's coming at us
from the very joys of hell Paul says in Romans chapter eight I am convinced there is nothing
that can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus my Lord does that mean I can
just become careless does that mean I can just do what I want to do as I've already said
you can't possibly do that if you really love the Lord Jesus but what it does do is it gives
us a measure of hope and comfort that on the battle ranges and I don't know if I can keep
on going when I wonder how I can remain faithful to the Lord when there are temptations around
me that want me to compromise my faith every moment of every day that's since it's a free
gift God who has begun a good work in me will bring it to completion in the day of Jesus Christ
for those who are in Christ that's an incredible and a tremendous amount of comfort because it
means I can just rest in his love and he will give me what I need so that one day I will stand
before his throne in glory and I will be without spot I will be without wrinkle I will be without
any brokenness in my life and I will have been completely conformed to the image of Jesus Christ
for the praise of God's eternal glory he who began a good work in you bring it to completion in the
day of Jesus Christ for the praise of his glory the wages of sin is dead but the free gift of God is
eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord let us pray Father God help us to understand what it is
that in Christ we have died to the law help us Lord to see with a clarity that is inspired by your
Holy Spirit that if we try to come to you on the basis of our own pride on the basis of our
own righteousness on the basis of our own merits that all we will ever get is rejection Lord I
believe there are some of us here this morning we feel rejected by you we feel rejected by your
people we don't feel that bond of unity that comes for those who are in Christ Jesus our Lord help
us Lord to examine our own hearts to see whether in subtle ways and in subtle fashions we're
trying to to prove something to you to prove something to one another help us to understand that
we have died to the law by the law can only come the knowledge of sin and Lord help us to
turn our eyes to Jesus help us to understand that he is all our righteousness but he is perfect and he is complete and that by faith in him we are perfect and we are complete we are the
children of God and you will grant us the power of your spirit to live as worthy children and to present us before your throne in glory without any spot or
wrinkle or any such thing Lord help us never to forget what salvation cost you and help us always to rest in the confidence that in Jesus Christ every spiritual blessing in
heavenly places has been given to your children and Lord help us to rejoice in the gifts that you freely give to ourselves and to one another in
a world full of insecurity and in a world of people who don't feel they belong Lord help us to hold our heads up high and to
declare that in Christ Jesus where the sons and the daughters of God most high and of God before us nobody ever can be against us
grant us your spirit Lord to bear witness with our spirit that we are the children of God and have children then heirs heirs of eternal glory thank you for hearing us in Jesus name
Amen.