The Positive Of Knowing About Our Sin

 

Sermon by Rev. John Zuidema on Lord’s Day 2

BoW: 389; BoW: 187; BoW 330; BoW 398; BoW: 416;

Scripture Readings: Eph 2:11-20; Rom 7:7-25; LD 2: q&a3-5;

 

Beloved people of God.

Have you ever wondered why Scripture continually highlights the law of God? Why do the elders and minister and other leaders of worship, regularly, if not every Sunday, have a time when they read the law, either the Ten Commandments, or some other section that highlights how God would want us to live our lives?

Is it because they sense some sort of power over reminding us about our sin and failures and our inability to do the very thing that God wants us to do? Do they just want to make us feel bad? Do they just want to rub our noses in the muck and mire of our lives?

No! Unequivocally No!! We do so, for we want you to appreciate what God has done for you in Christ. Our desire is that Jesus Christ is exalted amongst us and that we really appreciate God’s love for us in Christ. A nd one of the best ways to do it is to read God’s law, for in doing so it makes us aware of our sin and short comings and how privileged we are to know God and his love to us in Christ.

Don Carson in his book, “The love of God” suggests that if we really want to know the extent of God’s love, we need to find a hundred different ways to make people understand their sin! Without that we can never appreciate our wonderful salvation. And God in his wisdom knew that and that is why Scripture constantly reminds us of God’s law and why the elders insist on having a law section in our morning services.

Now that doesn’t mean we leave the joy we have in the Lord behind, not at all! However, the more we understand the law of God, the more we become aware of our need for a Saviour and the more joy we have in our lives when we turn to him in true repentance.

Paul uses the same principle in Eph 2. First he tells the Ephesian Christians that they are dead in their sins (vv 1-3). Then he tells them about their great deliverance and how that came into effect (vv 4-9). Then he tells them about the privileged position in serving their King (v 10).

And just in case they have forgotten it, he reminds them again of their original position without Christ in verses 11-12 where he basically tells them they were “without hope and without God in the world.”

That is what the Ephesians were before and what we were before we came to know Christ. Our greatest problem is not war, or sex or money, or gambling or computers, our greatest misery is that without Christ we can never be right before a holy God and never enjoy forgiveness or eternal life!

Without Christ we will always be spiritually wretched, poor, and hungry. But thanks be to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because of His law, our sin does not have the last word. Jesus Christ has the last word for he has paid for our sin.

Therefore, “we are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Eph 2:19-20).

So if anyone were to ask you, “How do you know that God is not pleased with you and that you need a Saviour? This is the answer: “God’s law tells me.” When I read the Ten Commandments or hear them read, I am convicted that I fail to live according to God’s righteous law.

And surprise, surprise, it already began in Genesis 3 with Adam and Eve. God’s desire was that Adam and Eve would love him and so he gave them a law, “You can eat from 999 trees, just don’t eat of that one tree or you will die”. But they failed!

God through His law makes us aware of our sin that alienates us from a loving God. That’s our misery. And the passage we read from Romans 7:7-25, particularly gives us that answer. Romans 7:7; “I wouldn’t have known what coveting was unless the law had said, ‘do not covet.'”

We could add, “I don’t know what stealing is unless the law had said, “Do not steal” or “do not murder” etc. However, this doesn’t make the law bad or evil or irrelevant as some suggest today or cause us to be depressed.

On the contrary, the law is good and positive, because it makes us see who God is, the ultimate good. And it makes us see that because of our failure to live in full obedience to God’s law, we are in desperate need of a Saviour.

Now we could put our head in the sand and say we can live without God and without his laws. Thousands try to do so, but how foolish. Foolish because Scripture teaches that we live and move and have our being in God and it is to him we must all give account! Hebrews 10:27 reminds us that we are destined to die once and then face judgment.

One of the difficulties with some outreach programs today is that they place no emphasis on the law of God! Yet, without the law of God, we would not know that we need a Saviour and then we would be doomed forever.

That is what Paul is saying in our passage. Apart from law, sin is dead. If we remain unaware that God’s law says, “do not covet”, how would we know that this single sin is enough to send us to hell when we do covet?

God in his love did us a tremendous favour when He gave us the law. For God’s law, makes us sit up and realize that unless we live up to it perfectly, we are eternally doomed. That is why Paul says the commandments brought death to him. For the commandments made him realize that those who do not obey the God’s law perfectly are like those in Eph 2:1. Spiritually dead!

And that is humanities misery! Yet that is not the end of our misery, for even though we now know how to live holy before God, we can’t do it perfectly! Try as we may, we continually muck it up every time! Verse 15 “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”

Instead of living a life that is totally directed towards God and connected to our neighbours, we live lives that are everything but that! Ever since Adam and Eve fell into sin, we cannot love God and our neighbour as ourselves as God’s law says we should. And if we fail in either, we have failed all of it!

In other words, we can say that everything that is in agreement with the law of God is the norm; that’s the standard, that is, to love God and neighbour alike. Anything that causes us not to love God and our neighbour is not in agreement with God’s law and is therefore abnormal, and this is precisely what the law makes us aware of.

Unfortunately many people look at the law as a list of do’s and don’ts. That is unwise. That is what the rich young ruler did when he approached Jesus and thought he had obeyed the law. Rather, we need to look for the essence of the law, the thing behind every precept and law.

And the one thing behind every law is the command to love God and neighbour. For God is good. He is perfection. He is righteous, just, gracious, faithful, and he deserves to be loved and obeyed and worship.

Your whole life must be motivated by an intense desire to be in harmony with Him. Your mind with his mind, your will with his will, your desires with his desires, your word with his Word, your deeds with his deeds, to live in perfect fellowship with him.

To love God concerns the whole man, not just external obedience. It touches the heart of man and it expresses what man shall be spiritually. As the heart is, so are man’s inner desires. Of course we know that to love your neighbour is grounded in the first commandment. If you don’t love your neighbour who you have seen how can you love God who you have not seen?

A “Christian” cannot say he is unable to love his neighbour. We may not always appreciate what they do, but we do have this responsibility to love them. And that is especially true in Christian circles.

Oh if only we would live according to the rules of our Maker, than we would be completely happy. Then we could have perfect fellowship God as he intended for that has always been God’s desire.

However, sinful man on his own volition, stepped out of it. We allowed our own wisdom to rule us, rather than obedience to our loving God. As a direct result, we are now just like fish out of water who unless something miraculous happens, are destined to die for an eternity!

And that is the beauty of the law. God’s good and perfect law says, “Love me with everything you have and your neighbour too! That’s the norm. That’s what we need to do to have peace with God and experience his blessing.

Now if you distort the norm, then you distort everything. Take away the law, which in itself is a reflection of God’s love and grace, and everything is a askew, everything falls.

Then you will feel no need to love and obey God. You will soon feel that you don’t owe your neighbour anything. And before long, you won’t feel that you have to repent. You won’t think you need to be redeemed.

You won’t realize your sin. And you will certainly not understand grace. You won’t see the need for Christ, the cross, the resurrection, indeed, you will throw God out altogether!

Now we know that none of us can love God perfectly. We all fall short of the glory of God. Paul’s word ring in our ears, “when I want to do good, I find I do the very thing I didn’t want to do.”

There is this constant struggle. I want to please God, but I often please myself instead and hence are guilty of all sorts of sins including idolatry. I want to love my neighbour, but my jealousy restrains me. Hence, we miss the mark with our neighbour as well.

Do you see? Our misery is our inability to love God and to love our neighbours. We simply don’t have it in us. Our nature is to hate God and our neighbour. Romans 8:7; says, the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.

And to think that we were like that, wretched people that we were! “Who will save us from the wrath of God?” And we say with Paul “Thanks be to our faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.”

That is the plus of God’s law! That is grace working in our lives. It points us to Christ! That is positive! And we run to him, no longer depending on our works and wisdom, and we cry out, save us! And that is what we remember and celebrate when we read the law and when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. We see our failure but God’s immeasurable love by sending Jesus Christ!

Jesus comes along and does what we couldn’t do! He fulfils the law perfectly by loving his Father in heaven and his earthly sinful neighbour even unto dying on a cross for our sin. The love of God is as old as creation, but the sum, the total of it was revealed in Jesus Christ.

God, who requires love, has given love, and that love was flesh and blood in Jesus Christ. And now that Christ has defeated death through his resurrection, those who believe and look to him can also love, because he lives in us with his Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5).

Now some people say we are sadists when we remind each other of the law and our sin and misery! They are wrong. How will we ever know the love of God in Christ if we don’t know what we have been saved from?

There is tremendous joy and comfort in knowing God’s law and our sin and misery for it shows the immeasurable love of God in Christ. Without that we die forever. With it, we live forever.

What greater joy and comfort is there than that! There is tremendous comfort in knowing that our Creator God, saw our desperate need, graciously gave us his law so that we may know his love. Some people will say, “Give us grace and not law – we live in the age of grace.”

But the truth is that without the law, we would never know grace. Without the law we would never know Christ. And without the law we would never be saved.

Hallelujah, what a God, what a Saviour! No wonder the Psalmist could say that he delighted in God’s law. May we do the same.

Amen!