Faith Kills Pride (Romans 3:27-31) | Louis Azuma

Speaker: All right, we're finishing Romans three, Romans 3 27 to 31.

Romans 3 27 to 31.

So, um, one of the things that I didn't like about math in high school was

that math, um, you think you're like done with a math class, but really

you're not done with that math class.

You know what I mean?

Because the next year you're gonna be using everything you learned from that

math class in the next math class, right?

You like, oh, geometry was the worst.

Then you're like, oh, wait, now I'm doing, you know, trigonometry or Algebra two or

Pre-Calc, and you're like, this is all the stuff from geometry, just harder.

Or then you do algebra two and you're like, I thought I was done with algebra.

I took Algebra one, I was algebra two.

And then you learn about all these different functions and all this stuff.

And then, and then you do more and you're like, oh wait,

this is actually preparing me.

And then if you're, if you're lucky, you get to calculus and you're like, oh man.

This is just everything I've ever learned in math, but on steroids and way harder,

and it all builds on itself, right?

And if you're thinking, oh, once I just passed this unit test, right, once I just

passed the the sign, co-sign, tangent test, or once I just passed the test

on Hyperbola, or once I just passed the test on on the Y axis, then I'll be

done with it and I can just put it away.

You unfortunately are sorely mistaken, right?

If you think you can just take your math knowledge, put it in a

box and forget about it for the rest of your school career, I'm

sorry, that's not the case, right?

You don't just get to pass the test and then forget about it.

You have to use it for the rest of your school career, right?

The rest of your math, and you probably didn't wanna hear a sermon

starting with a math illustration.

But the point is that you can't just put your math knowledge

into a box and forget about it.

And I think sometimes.

Christianity.

We think that's how faith works.

We think faith, well, I use it to become a Christian and I trust Jesus and I get

saved and then I put it in a box and I, and I move on, and I just go and, and then

I do the rest of my Christian life by, you know, reading the Bible and praying

and obeying God, and, and listening to sermons and doing these things.

And we, we kind of think we can just put, do our, pass our faith test to

get saved and then forget about it.

And that's actually not the case with the Christian life.

Faith isn't just something you do once.

To get saved.

Faith is the ongoing lifestyle of the Christian life, and so in our

passage tonight, we're gonna see that faith makes both salvation

and obedience about God, not us.

Faith is the ongoing posture of the Christian for the rest of the Christian

life, not just to get you justified.

Right?

We talked a lot about justification by faith.

Right, that we're made right with God by trusting Jesus' work on the

cross to take away our sin, to give us righteousness, and that he rose from the

dead to give us hope for life forever.

That's what we trust in to be justified, but also we keep on exercising that faith.

We keep on trusting God as a Christian for the rest of your Christian life.

So.

There's two things here, right?

You see, faith makes both salvation and obedience about God, not us.

So art sermon is, it's gonna be really simple.

The first thing is gonna be how does faith make salvation about God?

And then the second thing is, how does faith make obedience about God?

So super simple.

So our first, for our first point, how does S, how does

faith make salvation about God?

Well, simple, simply put, faith completely relies on Jesus to make us right with God.

And hopefully you got that last week right?

Faith completely relies on Jesus.

To make us right with God, not anything else We've talked about

throughout the book of Romans, right?

There's, there's nothing else that we can rely on to make us right with God.

We, when we saw in the, in the context, we talked about how the Jews would

rely on their Jewishness or their outward religious signs to make them

right with God, and we said that, that that's not gonna work, right?

Just like going to church or being baptized or doing the church things or

having Christian parents, that doesn't make us right with God in the same way.

We, that's not what we rely on.

So faith.

We have to rely on Jesus to do that.

So for our first point tonight, make salvation all about Jesus.

Make salvation all about Jesus.

And once you've got that down, look with me at verse 27.

We're gonna get into our passage and see how it makes salvation

all about Jesus and not about us.

Okay?

Alright.

Verse 27.

So we just talked about how God makes us righteous through Jesus.

God uses Jesus to make us righteous, not us.

So then verse 27, Paul asks the question, what becomes of our boasting?

Now that's weird.

Why is he talking about boasting?

Well, let's see.

He says it's excluded.

It's shut out.

That's that what that word means by what kind of law or what kind

of like, how does that work?

How does faith shut out?

Boasting.

Is it by the law of works?

No.

It's by the law of faith for we hold that someone is justified by

faith apart from works of the law.

So what Paul's saying here is, well then if, if we're justified by faith,

can we take credit for anything?

Right?

When you're boasting about something, you're, you're, what you're doing

is you're saying, look at me.

Do we have any right to draw attention to ourselves?

If we're justified by faith?

No, not at all.

It's shut out.

It's like we, we took all of the credit that you think you deserve

and we locked it outta the room.

When we talked about justification by faith, and it's

not because of works, right?

It's because of faith.

Faith is what excludes.

Boasting not works, right?

Because if, if you worked for just salvation, you could say,

yeah, I deserve credit for it.

Right?

If you contributed even 5% of your, your salvation, you

deserve 5% of the credit, right?

If you, right, if you're, let's say you have a friend who's, who's an LDS, right?

A Mormon and, and their salvation, how they think it works is

you do your part and then God makes up the difference, right?

You do your best and God takes care of the rest, so they get credit

for what they did, and then God makes up the difference, right?

If the, if they got 60% of the way there, then God makes

up the 40% and that's great.

That's not what the Bible teaches.

The Bible teaches that you did 0% of the work, so you get 0% of the credit.

That's because of faith, right?

If it was by works, you could boast.

You could say, well, look what I did.

Look what I contributed to this.

Maybe I didn't do all of it, but I did some of it.

So faith is what eliminates boasting.

Faith is the opposite of boasting.

That's what these verses are telling us because.

Faith is depending on someone else, right?

Faith is the admission of inadequacy.

To have faith in Jesus to depend on Jesus.

You can't say, well, I helped by trusting Jesus.

You're, you're admitting that I'm not good enough.

The act of trusting Jesus is admitting that you don't measure up.

And so.

When you think about even where faith has to come from, right?

It has to come from the fact that, oh, I don't deserve salvation and I

can't do anything about it, right?

It's the, it's the admission of helplessness.

Even think about the way that the Bible talks about Christians

before they became Christians.

What are some of the words, right?

You think, uh, we were dead in our sin, right?

That's a very helpless person, right?

Dead people can't do anything to make themselves alive, or you think about.

We're blind, right?

We're, we're unable to see there's inability there.

Or you think about being slaves to sin, right?

That's, we, you can't do anything about it, right?

A slave couldn't free themselves.

Or you think about the idea of having a, a heart of stone and needing it

to be changed to a heart of flesh.

That's something that the, the heart can't do to itself.

So all of these pictures of what it's like to to be.

Apart from Jesus.

Ha.

You, you start with the admission that I can't do anything about my sin.

I'm stuck.

And that's what has to happen for faith.

Faith is the admission that I, I can't do anything I'm unable.

And even what he talked about a couple weeks ago, unwilling, we said

that no one seeks after God, right?

It's not just that you couldn't, it's that even if you could, you wouldn't want to.

So that's where faith starts.

But then also, um, faith draws attention to Jesus, not to us.

Right?

The whole, the whole point of faith is once you say, okay, I can't do anything

about this, someone else can, and that's who I'm gonna rely on, right?

If you don't bring anything to the table, you don't get any credit for it, right?

It's kind of like.

How Right.

Imagine.

Right.

Revival Black team, we won.

Right?

We definitely did.

Did I play any of the games?

No.

Right.

I was not participating in any of the games.

Actually, Morgan was at Revival for like less than half the time I was, and he

participated more in the games that I did.

If I started bragging about how I won Revival.

Not a good look.

Right.

Not a, not a good look.

If I'm like, oh yeah, look what I did.

I did all this stuff, I did nothing.

Right.

I just maybe yelled at Pastor Evan to stop cheating.

Right.

That's pretty much all I contributed to my team.

All I have to say is.

I would have no right to draw any attention to my, like imagine if after we

played Steal the Bacon and after or after we played, um, that, what was that game

on the tarp with the big beach ball thing?

Kenneth's favorite game?

Kenneth.

Uh, imagine like after, you know how, like imagine after Naya like

totally dominated that round.

If I went out there and was like, look at me guys.

I did so good.

Right?

That would be terrible.

That would be awful.

There's, I had have no right to do that.

That's what it looks like if we try to take credit for God's work to save us.

Right?

If we try to, to, to draw attention to, oh, well look

at, look at me in my salvation.

Look at all the stuff that, that I do.

Imagine if, if we had baptisms right.

Not too long ago.

Imagine if, if you're hearing someone share their testimony

from the tank and they're just talking about how, oh, well, like.

I did all this stuff and I started going to church, and I started reading

the Bible, and I really am, I was really smart so I could understand

the gospel, and I was, I was just a really, you know, wise person.

So I made these really good choices and put myself in this great

position, and then I realized that I should stop sinning.

And so I tried really hard and I studied a lot, and I stopped sinning.

And then I, you would be like, what are you doing?

Like you, you're talking about yourself.

You should be talking about God.

This is, this is God's work in you, not your work.

So when you talk about if, if you're professing Christian and you're

talking about salvation, right?

You're sharing your testimony.

You, if someone asks you, Hey, how did you become a Christian?

I, I hope that the star of your testimony is Jesus.

I hope the star of your testimony is what God did to you.

All the things that God did to draw you in to show you your sin.

I hope your, your testimony is not well, I.

Fill in the blank.

Did this, right?

I started doing this.

Look at me.

Look at me.

Look at me.

I hope your testimony is, look at God.

Look what he did.

Look how patient he was with me.

Look how merciful he was to forgive all of my sin.

That's why when we become a Christian, that's why we don't shy away from

saying, yeah, I, I was a sinner.

Right?

We don't want to necessarily, if you think about, um, when we did,

when we studied Matthew, right?

Matthew always calls himself Matthew, the tax collective.

Why do you think he does that?

He does that.

'cause he wants you to know, Hey, guess what?

God saved a tax collector like me.

God saved a corrupt, selfish, unjust person like Matthew, and he wants

you to know that that's who I was.

'cause he wants you to see, look what God did.

Look what God did to me.

Right?

Paul talks about this all the time.

You see this in a lot of Paul's letters.

First Timothy, first Timothy chapter one.

He says, I was the worst sinner.

The reason that he wants to tell people that he was the worst sinner

is 'cause he wants you to see how patient God is and how good God is.

So I hope when you talk about your salvation, if you're a Christian,

that you're not talking about you and you're talking about God, right?

It's, it's, it's your testimony about God's work.

It's not your testimony about how awesome you are for having all this

cool stuff happen to you, right?

Faith is inherently other focused.

Faith is inherently Jesus focused.

That's who you're depending on.

That's who you're trusting in.

It's not you focused.

And then we also see that in the rest of these verses, if you keep reading

29 and 30, so Paul keeps going or is God the God of the Jews only?

Is he not the God of Gentiles?

Also.

Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one who will justify the circumcised by

faith and the uncircumcised by faith.

So what Paul is saying here is that every single person, right, because

the Jews he, he's been talking with, he's going back and forth with the

Jews, this whole letter so far, and he said how the Jews, they were, they

were relying on their outward signs to show that we have God's favor, right?

We're special to God.

We have an advantage with God because.

Of the the law or the things that we do or the signs of the covenant, right?

They're saying that we have an advantage with God.

We've got like extra credit before God.

We don't need as much of God's grace because we have all this stuff, or

we even are already accepted by God because of all this stuff that we have.

What Paul is saying is that's not true.

There's only one way that people get saved through faith.

There's one way of salvation and that eliminates boasting, right?

The whole point of this paragraph so far has been that faith

gets rid of boasting, right?

If, if you believe that God saves people by faith, you have zero reason

to boast because there's nothing about you that makes you more or

less eligible for God's grace.

There's nothing about you that makes a difference in

whether God saves you or not.

God doesn't save you because you have the right parents or because

you're from the right area or because you know the right things.

God saves you because he wants to.

God saves you because he's kind and because he's generous

and because he's merciful,

you aren't more or less likely to be saved because you didn't do.

X, Y, and Z when you were a kid, or because you learned, you know these Bible

verses growing up, that doesn't make you more or less deserving of God's grace.

'cause otherwise it wouldn't be grace, right?

If you deserved it, it's not grace, because grace inherently is unwinnable.

It has to be free.

'cause if you worked for it, then God owed it to you, right?

If you did something to deserve it, then you should get it, and that then

it wouldn't be grace anymore, then it would be something you earned.

So I think it's, it's easy sometimes even right as a Christian to look

back and, and think, oh yeah, and now it makes sense that God

saved me because well, look at me.

I started growing, I started serving, you know, all this stuff happened to me.

I now, I'm doing all these great things for God.

And it's easy to look back and be like, oh yeah, I could see why God saved me.

'cause look at all this stuff I brought to the table.

Or think about Paul.

Right?

Okay.

Yeah.

I think I know why God saved me.

'cause I, I wrote these books to the Bible and he's gonna do all these

great things through me and preach the gospel to all these places, right?

That, that didn't make Paul more deserving of salvation just because God

used him for bigger things down the road

even, right?

You don't wanna look down on other people who aren't saved and say, well,

there must have been something about me that makes me different than them.

I don't want you to look at the, the people at school who maybe don't,

you know, they, they don't listen to their parents the way you do, or they

don't know the Bible the way you do.

Or they say those things that you know you're not supposed to

say or they watch those things.

You're, you know, you're not supposed to watch or they talk about those things

you, you know, you're not supposed to talk about or they go to the places

you know you're not supposed to go.

I don't want you to look down on them.

'cause the only difference between you and them is God's grace.

I remember one time, um.

I went on a mission trip to Utah, um, and we met these Mormons and I realized

the only difference between me and these people who believe this false religion is

that God put me in a place where I would hear the gospel and respond to the gospel.

'cause I didn't pick where I was born and they didn't pick where they were born.

But God loved me and put me in the way of the gospel.

And that isn't because of me, isn't 'cause anything I did.

It isn't because of anything that I would go on to do.

It's, it's all of his grace.

It's not because I deserved it more.

So salvation is all about Jesus.

And that's what faith has to acknowledge.

Faith has to acknowledge that that salvation is 100%

God and 0%, 0% us, right?

Um, God does all the work in salvation.

You think about it, God.

Plan to save you before you even existed.

God put you in a place where you would hear the gospel

and be able to respond to it.

God gave you the desire to respond to the gospel.

You don't even want to be saved, right?

You probably have friends, maybe even in this room who don't want to be saved.

They don't want God.

They'd rather have everything else but God.

The only reason that you don't feel the way they do is because

God did something to your heart.

God does all this stuff in salvation, right?

Even your trust in God comes from God.

'cause you wouldn't be able to trust God if God didn't give

you the desire to trust him.

So God does everything in salvation.

That's why he gets all the credit.

So when you talk about salvation, if you're a Christian, when you

talk about salvation, I hope that, that you make it all about Jesus.

I hope that you don't try to add yourself in there.

Take any credit for it.

And if you're not a Christian, I hope that you realize that it

doesn't matter how much you know, it doesn't matter who your parents are.

It doesn't matter what you've done.

It doesn't matter what you've thought, how you felt God can save

you because it doesn't, your sin isn't too big for God to overcome, right?

Or your lack of interest in God isn't too big for God to overcome.

Or maybe there's that person, you know, you're like, oh, there's

no way they'd become a Christian.

The only difference between you and them is God's grace.

So God can definitely save them too.

But when you think about this, when you think about salvation being,

being completely God's work, it's easy for us to maybe ask that question.

Well, if the way I live doesn't really matter, then can't

I just do whatever I want?

Right?

If Jesus paid for my sin and you know, God's grace is, is enough to

save me and cover me, then I can just do whatever I want, right?

Well, I'm glad you asked because Paul asked the exact same question,

the last verse of our paragraph.

Do we then overthrow the law?

Do we just say, okay, well let's get rid of all of God's commands because we can

trust in Jesus to forgive us by no means.

That's the strongest way.

Paul can say no in his language.

That's like definitely not, not gonna happen.

On the contrary, right, the opposite.

We uphold the law, we support it, we, we affirm it.

We still care about God's commands.

What Paul is getting at here is if you think about the question of like, okay,

well if it doesn't matter if I'm a Jew or a Gentile, then what's the point of

all of all of the Old Testament, right?

What's the what?

What about the 600 commands that God gave the Jews?

Why do, what's the point of all that stuff?

What's the point of, of all the commands in the Bible if, if it

doesn't really matter how I live?

Well, here's what.

Paul is saying, and he doesn't really explain it as much

here, but he explains it later.

And so I'm just gonna kind of pull some stuff into this.

But, um, what Paul is getting at is that faith-filled obedience is

the only type of real obedience.

If your obedience to God doesn't have faith in it,

you're not really obeying God.

You're not really keeping the law.

Unless you're doing it from a heart that trusts God, a heart that doesn't

trust God isn't really obeying God.

Right?

The, the whole point of all of those commands, all the stuff in the Old

Testament was to show you here's what it looks like to live for God.

It was like building a car with no engine.

Faith is the engine.

Faith makes it all work, but we, we showed you the car, just so you know, okay,

this is what it looks like, the, the law.

You're like, okay, well I'm not that.

I can't do that.

I can't live up to that.

I can't do what God asked me to do.

I can't live up to God's standard.

And so for all of us, we don't have the ability to do that.

We can't keep up.

And so we see, okay, I'm not good enough.

I'm a sinner.

That's what the law does for people who aren't saved, but for people

who are saved, the law shows us, here's how I'm supposed to live now.

Here's what it looks like now for me to trust Jesus actively and obey him.

So how does faith make obedience about God?

Well, faith gives all the credit to God for empowering us to live for him.

Faith gives God all the credit for our obedience because he gets all the

credit for not just our salvation, but our continued life following Jesus.

So point to make obedience all about Jesus.

So we wanna make our salvation all about Jesus, and we wanna

make obedience all about Jesus.

So just like how faith in salvation takes all the attention away from

us and puts it on God, we do the same thing with our obedience,

because our obedience is just as.

Up to God.

God empowers our obedience 100%.

It's all dependent on him because it all has to do with faith.

Faith is not just the key for salvation.

It's the key for continued life.

As a Christian, all real obedience to God as a Christian

has to come from faith in God.

So to put it simply, this is what Paul says later in Romans, whatever

doesn't come from faith is sin.

It's pretty simple.

If you're not trusting God, if it's not an act of trust in God, you're sinning.

That's pretty crazy.

Right?

That's maybe a different definition of sin than, than you would've probably written

out if someone asked you What's sin?

Well, Paul would say it's doing something without trusting God.

That's really interesting.

What faith does is it transforms our obedience.

It doesn't make our obedience useless.

It changes our obedience into what it's always supposed to be.

It's all of our obedience is an expression of trust in Jesus.

All of our obedience is saying, God, you're smarter than I am.

You're better than I am.

You are more loving than I am you.

Matter more than I do.

That's faith, right?

Faith is is telling God you're better, and that's what obedience is.

All obedience is telling God, I trust you.

The reason you obey God is because you trust him.

You trust that his plan is better.

You trust that his way of living is better than anything you could come up with.

You trust that what he values is better than what you value.

That's where all obedience comes from and that's how you live as a

Christian The rest of your life is.

Powered by faith.

That's what Paul started off this letter with, right?

Remember he said that the righteous person, the person who's who's made

righteous by God, lives by faith.

They don't just get saved by faith.

They keep on living by faith.

Same thing here.

I realize I shouldn't have highlighted this in blue, but that's okay.

The life I now live, I live in, I left.

I now live in the flesh.

I live by faith, not by effort, not by knowing the Bible better.

Trusting God.

That's the key to living for God.

I think a good example, we see it in Hebrews, right by Faith.

Abraham obeyed when he was called to go.

So God appeared to Abraham and said, Hey Abraham, you're gonna have to move all

the way across the desert, um, because I'm making a promise to you that you're gonna

be the father of many nations and one day.

I'm gonna basically save the world through you, right?

I'm gonna give you all this land and all these descendants and whatever.

God made a promise to Abraham and Abraham's obedience was

the result of him trusting God.

The same thing is true for you.

Anytime you obey God, it comes down to do you trust God?

Think about when you decide not to, right?

To tell the truth instead of lying.

That's an act of trust in God.

Because if you don't trust God, you're gonna try to

figure out your way out of it.

And so you're gonna try to, maybe you'll try to lie, you'll

try to make up something, you'll try to avoid the situation.

You'll try to only tell part of the truth, right?

But if you trust God, you can say, you know what?

I know that telling the truth honors God, and that's better than maybe

something bad that might happen to me if I do tell the truth.

So I'd rather honor God and tell the truth, and maybe have some

consequences that go with that than try to escape the consequences and lie.

And you trust God and you say, God, I'm gonna honor you, even though

this might put me in a bad spot.

That's an act of faith that's trusting God.

Or when you choose to use your time in a way that honors God, right?

When you choose to wake up and read your Bible instead of snoozing eight

times, that's you trusting God.

You're saying God, your word is what it, you say it's you.

Say your word is sweeter than honey.

You say your word is more precious than gold, right?

We talked about your word is better than in and out, right?

We talked about that.

I believe that.

And so I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna read it.

Even if I don't understand all the words, even if it doesn't always make sense, even

if it's not my favorite book right now, I'm gonna trust you that your word is what

you say it is and I'm going to read it.

That's trust, that's faith in God.

And see, that's why obedience has to be with faith.

So we talk about the law a lot in Romans.

The law is a burden without faith, the law doesn't.

Help you without faith, it just weighs you down.

It's kind of like, have you ever tried to ride one of these without the power on?

They had light work because these, these, right, these e-bikes, they go really

fast when they're actually like electric.

But if you're just trying to ride it like a regular bike, especially

like uphill, it's heavier.

It's harder, there's more resistance, right?

If you have one of those pedal assist bikes, right?

It's actually harder to ride it, even though it's more powerful, right?

Because it's heavier.

It weighs you down, it tires you out.

That's like trying to obey God without faith, right?

Imagine, imagine like riding up a hill with one of these without

the electricity on, without the, without the power on, right?

It's.

It's gonna wear you down and it's gonna help you realize

like, oh, I'm not gonna make it.

I'm not gonna make it up this hill on my own strength.

That's what God's law does for you before you're, you're saved.

And some of you, that's what all these sermons and Romans have

hopefully been doing for you, showing you I'm not good enough.

I don't measure up to God snare, I'm guilty.

I stand before God condemned, guilty deserving of his wrath.

You're trying to get up the hill and you're not good enough,

you're, you can't make it.

But then you know, if by God's grace you become a Christian,

you say, I'm not good enough.

You admit, I can't make it.

I don't measure up to your standard God, I need Jesus righteousness.

I need him to take away my sin, and you trust Jesus to do that.

Then instead of the law, God's commands being a burden for you

and weighing you down instead.

You live by faith and, and faith empowers you to obey those commands.

And so then instead of weighing you down, you see that God's commands are good.

You see that God's commands help you truly live.

They help you find real joy, that God's commands are the path to life.

They're not annoying, they're not frustrating.

Instead, they're the best way to live.

So.

You're using it the way it's supposed to be used.

When you use it the way it's not supposed to be used, it weighs you down.

When you use it the way it's supposed to be used, it, it actually works the way

it's supposed to and it's way better.

And it's, that's, that's what God's commands are for therefore your joy.

But the problem is, is we don't like the right things.

We like things that make us sad, right?

We like things that hurt us, that kill us, we're addicted to to sin.

And we don't trust God that his way is better.

And so we choose the wrong things, and that's where God's, that's where faith has

to, is the key to empowering obedience.

So obedience is meant to be powered by trusting God.

Um, so obedience, right?

If you're obeying without faith.

It's usually about you, right?

Because you're, it's almost like you're trying to, you're

trying to get something from God.

You're trying to, to be good enough.

You're trying to feel good about yourself.

Whereas when you have faith, your obedience is not to get something

from God, but it's because you trust God, because you love him.

It's not about getting something from God or measuring up to something.

You're free.

You're, you're free from that.

You don't have to worry about that anymore.

You're already accepted.

So you don't have to do that anymore.

And it's also not just outward focused, right?

It's inward focused because obedience from faith is really, cares more

about what's happening in here, right?

It's, it's cares more about, okay, what am I thinking about God?

What am I saying about God with this action?

Not, well do I have to just do the right things and check

the boxes and, and measure up.

But it's more about, okay, do I, am I loving God?

What does God want from me?

How am I.

Worshiping God right now.

How am I loving God?

How am I serving him?

How am I?

How am I making him look good?

And that's the whole point of the law anyway, right?

The whole point of the law, as Jesus said, is to love the Lord your God

with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength

and love your neighbor as yourself.

The whole point of the law is for you to love the way God wants you to love.

It's about internal things, not external.

So justification by faith doesn't make God's commands pointless.

It actually.

Makes all of the things in God's law about Jesus.

We don't measure up to God's law.

We need him to do it for us.

And then when we do live for God, it shows us that the way

we live for God is by faith.

It's not by our own effort and it's not trying to work for God

and earn something from him.

It's us living for God because we trust him and because we love him.

So let's pray and we'll head to small groups.

God thank you for.

Your word.

Um, your word says that your commands are not burdensome.

And so I pray for all of us in this room.

Um, I know there's times where all of us, I just wanna confess that we

feel like your commands are a burden.

Your commands feel like they're weighing us down.

Your commands sometimes feel like that they're we're just

putting rocks in a backpack.

Um, but I pray that we would believe what you say and that we would trust

who you are, that you are a loving.

Father, a good shepherd, a gentle king, and that your

commands for us are for our good.

You're smarter than us.

You know more than us.

You love us, you care about us, um, and you want to help us obey you.

So I pray for the Christians in the room that we would obey you because

we love you and because we trust you.

So help us to trust you more.

Help us to see how good it is to trust you.

Help us to strengthen our trust in you.

I pray for the people in this room who aren't safe.

I pray God that you would help them.

See, they don't measure up.

They're not good enough.

Um, and the only way for them to be free of the burden of trying to measure up

is to trust you to do that for them.

Pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen