"Progressive Sanctification" Romans 7:15-25 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Have you ever, since your conversion, found yourself committing a sin that you have done before and repented of before, and lo and behold, you find yourself doing it again.

Has that ever happened?

To any of you?

Once or twice.

Maybe it's even a sin that you have decided to take seriously.

Like you got an accountability partner in everything.

And you bought a book about this sin and you read about this sin and you asked your wife to keep you accountable and your friends to keep you accountable.

And maybe you took it so seriously, you even went and bought a Puritan paperback on this sin.

Like that's how amped up you are.

You're gonna get to the these and thous if it'll make you holy.

Like you're going to war against this sin.

And then you still do it again.

And so you deduce, maybe, you deduce, I must not be saved.

I must not be saved.

And why do you think you're not saved?

And you say, well, because I keep doing the sin.

I know that the Bible says whoever walks in the darkness and says he's in the light is a liar, and I keep doing the sin, therefore I'm in the darkness and I'm lying.

And I, as a pastor at that point, would throw a penalty flag.

It's my mixed metaphor flag.

I would throw the penalty flag for mixing metaphors.

Because walking in the light and in the darkness and you going to war against your sin are not the same thing.

What the scripture means when it describes somebody who's walking in darkness is somebody who is living a life of sin.

I mean, they're walking in it, they're strolling in it, they're living in sin.

On the other hand, you, if I'm to believe you when you're telling me this, are not comfortably out for a leisurely stroll in darkness.

You are fighting.

You're dressed up in camouflage and you're got your night vision goggles on and you got memory verses taped to your refrigerator and on the dashboard of your car, and you're that's what I mean by you're going to war.

You're fighting this sin.

That doesn't sound like walking in sin.

That sounds like fighting sin.

Who taught you to why are you fighting sin?

If you're not a Christian, why are you fighting sin, by the way?

Shouldn't you like your sin?

Just go enjoy it if you're not a Christian.

Eat, drink, and be merry.

How does that verse end?

Tomorrow you die.

Well, you know.

Well, it's night, walk in the night, Paul says.

The person who battles sin is giving a pretty sufficient demonstration of the fact that they have holy desires inside them.

I mean, that's the reason you battle sin.

Now, there are, of course, wrong reasons to battle sin.

Sometimes you battle sin in your life because you don't like the consequences of sin.

You uh, if you can't get a certain sin under control, it might get you in trouble at work or in trouble at home or grounded from your parents or angry with your spouse or you know, something like that.

And so there are very bad ways.

Maybe you want to battle sin in your life because you don't like the way you feel after you sin.

So, you know, after you sin, you're like you feel bad and sad, and so you want to get your sin under control because you don't like the way you feel.

I mean, that's those aren't that's fine, but those aren't salvific reasons to battle sin.

Those aren't evidences of saving faith.

But an evidence of saving faith is I love Jesus and therefore I hate sin, and so I want to fight the sin because I hate it, but I keep doing it.

And so it's so easy to say, therefore I must not love Jesus.

But that's not the conclusion Paul goes to in Romans 7 when he describes this.

Paul doesn't say, so therefore I must not love Jesus.

Paul says, so therefore I must really love Jesus if I get up to fight again the next day.

I was at a rodeo once, and I saw two horses.

There was one of those slalom events, and the horses are racing each other and coming back across the thing, in and out of the barrels.

You're laughing at the slalom.

I don't know the right word for it, in and out of the barrels.

And they go around the corner, and now the two horses are running full speed down the middle of the rodeo arena, same direction, and they collide together.

Boom! Cowboy hats everywhere, horses laying on the ground, writhing in pain.

I kid you not, some of you are at this rodeo with me.

The announcer gets on the intercom and says, Well, ladies and gentlemen, that's an end of our rodeo tonight.

See you next week.

I mean, it was so horrific.

The guy didn't even blink, he just ended the whole thing.

Wow.

So we went down there like doctors running onto the thing, and we go down and this girl who just got leveled.

She like broke her collarbone and all kinds of stuff.

You know what she does?

She goes and finds her scared horse and lures it back over to her and with the you know, the rodeo clowns and everything, and bring it outside the gates, and she gets back on that horse.

Man, not me.

If my horse stumbled, I would take up, I don't know, something ridiculous, like watching baseball as a hobby or something.

I definitely wouldn't go back to riding a horse.

And this girl, she she loved riding the horse so much, she gets right back up on it after this catastrophe.

I think that's how our battle against sin is often.

We fight against sin and then we fall into it.

And so now the question is, what next now that you've fallen into sin?

And the answer is that if you love Christ, you get back up, you dust yourself off, and you go back in your pursuit of holiness again.

If you love Jesus, you don't let getting thrown off dissuade you.

You get back out there, you get back at it.

And that's certainly what Paul describes here in Romans chapter 7.

Romans 7 · chapter mention

This section here is filled with wartime language.

Paul is going to war against an enemy.

And the problem is that the enemy is inside of him.

The enemy is inside of him.

As a non-Christian, Jesus was outside of him, and he was at war against God on the outside.

But now through salvation, he has been regenerate, and the Holy Spirit seals his heart.

And so now the Holy Spirit who dwells inside of him, holiness dwells inside of him, a love for Christ dwells inside of him, but also inside of him is sin.

And so the war is not even outside, the war is inside.

This is why Paul later in 1 Corinthians 9 says, I beat my own body fighting sin.

I mean, notice who he sees his enemy as himself.

That's where Paul is, fighting himself.

Because he's fighting sin.

And if you are fighting yourself, who's going to win?

It's hard to say, but I know who's going to lose.

And the battle goes back and forth.

Back and forth.

This is the description in Romans 7 of the typical Christian life.

I'll go even one step further.

This, the way he describes it in Romans 7, it's not, although it is the description of the typical Christian life, it's not a typical Christian that would use this kind of language to describe it.

He uses the language of a mature Christian to describe it.

Somebody who has a deep, indwelling, and battle-tested love for the Savior.

Going against an enemy that he has had a long time fighting, lots of experience fighting this enemy.

That's the description here.

I mean, a relatively new believer would, you know, shrug her shoulders and say, ah, I know that sin.

I should probably stop doing it.

Whoa, I did it again.

I should probably stop doing that.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

You know, we all fail and go on with this life.

That's a relatively immature believer.

A more mature believer would say, I want to avail the means of grace.

I want to use the church and the word and prayer and discipleship, and I want to take all the weapons that God has given me to go battle against this sin.

But that's Paul's even beyond that in Romans 7.

This is the writing of Romans 7 is the kind of voice that you would expect a very seasoned saint who's been following the Lord for decades.

And you might ask him, hey brother, you've been a Christian for 30 years.

What's it like to no longer give in to the sins of the flesh?

And he would laugh and say, I have no idea.

But I can tell you what it's like to fight them.

That's the picture in Romans 7.

That's what Paul is describing.

In verse 15, he says, I don't understand my own actions.

This is coming out of verses 7 through 14, where he has described the holiness of the law.

So the context here, I know we're just parachuting in the middle of Romans 7, but the context is that the law is good.

Summary of Romans 7 so far, law is good.

Summary of Romans 6 so far is that sin is bad.

And in the middle of Romans 6 and 7 is where a Christian is freed from the power of sin.

So Romans 6 basically describes that your members have to sin because they're owned by sin.

Sin is the chain, you're tied to it, where it leads, you follow.

You don't have a choice apart from Christ.

You are captive to sin.

Well, what happens in the middle of Romans 6 is that you die to sin and you become alive to Christ.

So the chain that's tying you to sin is broken, and in Romans 6, you no longer have to sin.

Now you still will, we find out in Romans 7, but you just don't have to.

So as a believer in Christ, you're no longer allowed to say, I sinned because I had to.

Nope.

Sin made me do it.

No.

You made you do it.

Now, how does that put you in relationship to God's law?

Because God's law before is what provoked sin in you.

Does that mean God's law is bad, that God's law provoked you to sin.

And I remember this as a soccer referee.

There were, you know, it's the old adage that the person who retaliates is the one who gets caught.

You know, maybe somebody says something to, you know, a player on one team says something wicked to a player on the other team.

Of course, nobody can hear that.

Only the player can hear it.

So the player punches him in the face, which everybody sees, and the guy gets sent off, and he says, yes, but he made me do it.

Well, not really.

He didn't make you do it.

I don't see a gun in his hand.

He didn't make you do it.

You did it.

This is the nature of the way Christians sin.

Before Christ, you could legitimately say sin made me do it.

After Christ, you can't say sin made me do it.

You can't say, oh, the guy said something mean, so I had to hit him.

No.

You did it because you did it.

That's the new nature.

Before the law used to say don't do it, which made you want to do it because you hated the law.

And so here Paul says, listen, let's be honest.

The law is holy.

The law is good.

The law is good.

It's good.

You know, a teacher might tell students, no jumping up and touching the exit sign in the hallway.

Stop doing that.

A student would have never thought of doing it before hearing the teacher say that, and now he can't help it.

He must jump up and thlap that exit sign.

And I'm thinking of the exit sign up in there at that corner, right up there.

Not in the atrium, but in the hallway up there.

You can't see it.

It's there.

And the high school kids are compelled to walk by it and jump up and thlap it.

It's in their blood, you know.

They can't say, well, the teacher made me do it by telling me not to do it.

The law is holy, and the law is good.

This leads to the question that Paul asks: if the law is so good and you love Christ, why do you still sin?

So he's no longer arguing about the goodness of the law.

That's the first half of Romans 7.

Romans 7 spends the first half establishing the law is in fact good.

Even though it made you sin, it is actually good.

So now the second half of Romans 70 is dealing with a question from a different perspective.

The law is good, so why don't you do what it says?

If you really believe the law is good, why don't you obey it?

And this is his answer.

His answer, verse 15, I don't understand my own actions.

You have to give him points for honesty, don't you?

You could almost feel Paul wrestling with this in his life.

Paul, if you love the law, why do you break it?

And he says, I don't know.

I don't know why I break.

I don't know why I sin.

Now it's not as simple as that, because he's going to go on for the next ten verses to explain why.

You're going to deep dive into Paul's soul here.

But at the start, I appreciate what he says.

I don't know.

It was Augustine in Confessions who said, the more that he read the Bible after his conversion, the more that he read the Bible, he said, the more of a puzzle I became to myself.

Isn't that a great line?

It's like Paul is quoting him, except Augustine came 250 years later.

The more you know about Jesus, the more of a puzzle you become to yourself.

You can't figure yourself out.

And he says it simply here, I do not do what I want.

So do you catch what he's saying?

I want to follow Jesus.

I want to obey the law.

I love Jesus.

I want to be pleasing to him.

But that's not what I do.

Instead, I do the very thing that I hate.

Now, he's not talking about walking in darkness like an unregenerate person.

First of all, an unregenerate person wouldn't say he wants to love Christ and obey the law.

But secondly, don't import John's idiom of walking here into Paul's description of this.

It's obvious through the context here.

Paul's saying that in his normal life, he's loving Christ, he's serving Christ, he wants to love Christ, he wants to follow Christ, he's doing it, but then he keeps sinning also.

And he hates it.

This is not the language of a non-believer.

And there are those that try to take Romans 7 and apply it to non-believers and say, Romans 7 is Paul describing his life before he was converted.

Nuh-uh.

Nuh-uh.

Not true.

In fact, I heard a story this week about a pastor who put a standing order with a Christian book distributor every time a new Romans 7 commentary came out to mail him one and charge it to his account.

And uh every time he got a Romans commentary, and every time he got it, he would look at Romans 7.

And if it said this was Paul before his conversion, he would send it back and said, I told you to only send me Romans commentaries.

I think that's kind of funny.

Now, what he's going to launch into here is describing the life of a believer who wants to love Christ and hates sin and yet strangely enough keeps doing it.

And rather than pulling out three or four points from these verses, I just want to give you everything at once.

And I want to see that just about every verse in this has the same contrast.

It's driving home this war.

And so I'm going to put it on the screen and we'll walk through it.

And I hope you can read that with the font there.

But it begins in verse 15 with this contrast between what Paul wants to do and what he hates doing.

And that contrast is going to follow through all the way through the whole passage.

You see it in verse 16.

What I do not want.

And all the red on the list, by the way, is red there to demonstrate sin and the black there to demonstrate the nature of Paul's saved life here.

And that's what he's describing.

So the red in this is bad, and the black is good, if that makes sense for you here.

And he's like, I want to serve Christ, but I see myself doing what I hate.

And now he's going to reason beyond this.

Verse 16, if I do what I do not want, I'm agreeing with the law that it's good.

You have to really think about that sentence to follow it.

If I do what I do not want, I'm actually agreeing the law is good.

Why would you say that?

Because it's evidence of the battle in his heart.

When he caves into sin after a fight, you see how that's the testimony of the fact the fight was actually worth it.

Verse 17, when that kind of thing happens, when that dynamic happens, he's fighting against temptation, temptation arises, he fights against it, he knows it's wrong, he does it, sins anyway.

He's actually affirming the goodness of the law against the wickedness of sin because it's the war that's happening.

The bad guys won.

Verse 17.

When the bad guys win, it's no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.

This is the nature of the regenerate person.

He's saying, when I do sin, I fight the temptation, and when I give in to it, it's not really me who's doing it.

This is entirely the opposite kind of excuse of the person who says, That guy made me do it as an excuse.

Here, Paul is recognizing that that guy who made me do it is inside of him.

He's not blame shifting here.

He's not saying this is somebody else's fault.

No, the sin that's making him do it is inside of him.

It is him.

Look what he says in verse 18.

It is his flesh.

In verse 17, sin in me.

Verse 22 and 23, it's the law of sin in his members.

So he is not saying this is other people's fault.

He's not saying the law made me do it or that person made me do it.

He's saying I made me do it.

But it is not the real me.

That's the key point.

It's not, verse 17, the real me.

Any longer.

It used to be the real him.

So for the non-Christian, the non-Christian doesn't have the war inside of him.

The non-Christian just sins.

But here Paul can say, no, now there's a war, and it is no longer I who do it.

Romans 6 presents this battle language of your members.

Your members are at war and Christ conquers them.

But here they're going AWOL and going back to serving sin.

And you can take an analogy this way.

If an American soldier gets captured in combat, does he lose his citizenship?

He gets put in some POW camp in Vietnam.

Does he lose his citizenship?

He's there for 10 years.

Do you say, oh, you know, at five years he's still a citizen, but at six years he loses his citizenship.

No.

He's always a citizen.

In fact, you might go fight, you might go try to rescue him.

You might go after him.

That's Paul's analogy here.

When sin wins, when parts of his members get captured, he says, oh man, they are not serving the real me anymore.

They belong to sin, but I'm gonna go get them.

I'm gonna go get them.

And he explains what he means in verse 18.

I know that nothing good dwells in me.

Nothing good dwells in me, he says.

Well, I thought he was saved, and the Holy Spirit is in him.

Well, keep going.

That is in my flesh.

He's saying, in his flesh there is no good thing.

This is the doctrine of total depravity that is still true in a believer's life.

And so total depravity means that every part of a person's life is tainted by sin, that all of your affections, all of your emotions, all of your actions are tainted by sin.

For the non-Christian, it means that they're not capable of being pleasing to God because they're dominated by sin.

But for the Christian, it means that every aspect of your life is still tainted by sin.

It was John Owen who said, There is enough sin to damn me to a thousand hells in my most righteous prayer.

That's what this is about.

That sin dwells in you, nothing good dwells in your flesh.

Even now, as a believer.

Because of sin.

But the flesh is not all that's you because you're a believer.

You have a new nature, you have a new desire, and that's the second part of verse 18.

I have the desire to do what's right.

The problem is you just don't have the ability to carry it out.

You don't have the ability.

You just need to come to terms with that.

Brothers and sisters, do you understand what this verse is telling you?

You are not able to lead the perfect Christian life.

You don't have the ability.

If perfection is your goal, you'll fail.

Now the Bible tells you, be holy as God is holy, but there are other verses even around that.

You realize you're supposed to be holy as God is holy.

You can't do it, that breaks you.

You flee to Christ who's holy in your place.

You've got to get the whole gospel arc in there.

If you just end with be holy as God is holy, then you'll throw up your hands and say, Why bother?

This is approaching that from another example, another perspective.

Here he's saying, not be holy as God is holy, and then fail and flee to Christ.

Here he's just saying is recognize you can't do that.

You cannot be holy as God is holy.

You cannot leave.

The perfect Christian life.

And even drop the notch down a bit from perfection.

He's saying just between you and me, you can't lead the good Christian life because all of your life is filled with sin.

This is not an excuse to give up because remember, you hate the sin.

This is an excuse to keep fighting.

Verse 19, I do not do the good I want.

Again, he's going back to his real intrinsic desire.

His desire is to be pleasing to Christ.

That is the real Him.

Are you catching this tension through this whole passage between the left and the right side of the screen?

Where the left side of the screen, it's not really him.

Yes, it is him.

He's not blaming somebody else, but it is not the real nature inside of him.

It's not Christ in him.

And that's the real him.

What do you mean by real?

Well, when he dies, the flesh dies.

And his spirit, which is redeemed, lives forever.

So what's the real him?

That which lives forever.

The real you lives forever.

And Paul knows that.

Verse 19.

I don't do the good I want.

I want it so bad.

But the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.

He's not schizophrenic here.

He's really trying to explain the tension in his life.

Who leads your Christian life?

Do you lead your Christian life?

Oh, come on.

Don't take the credit for all the good things you do.

Okay, so you say, God leads my Christian life.

Oh come on, don't blame him for all the bad things you do.

They're both there.

And you want to yield, you want to serve, you want to submit perfectly to the Holy Spirit in your life, but you can't do it.

That doesn't mean you give up.

The wrong takeaway from Paul's example here, from Paul's uh explanation here is, well, you know what?

Since I can't win sin, why bother fighting?

That is the wrong takeaway from this.

The reason you bother fighting is because sin kills you.

You hate it.

And so you don't want it in your life.

I mean, the two overarching emotions in this passage are love for God and hatred for sin.

Just because you keep sinning doesn't mean you're going to stop fighting sin.

No, because you keep sinning is why you have to keep going to war.

You have to keep putting it to death.

Knowing that you will never have victory in this life.

Now, if I do, verse 20, what I do not want, in other words, sin.

It is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.

See what he's saying here?

When I'm sinning, again, he's not blame shifting.

He keeps using the first person pronoun.

When I do what I don't want, it's not me who does it because I don't want to do it.

It's rather sin that dwells in me.

Inside of him.

So I find it, after careful study, verse 21, to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.

The two go together.

The law's ability to provoke sin doesn't go away.

Your flesh is still with you throughout your life.

You don't escape it.

Verse 22, I delight in the law of God in my inner being.

Now, this is the doctrine of progressive sanctification.

Listen to me carefully.

When you get saved, you are a very immature believer.

You're brand new.

You need milk.

You need the basic teachings of Scripture.

The longer you're in the Lord and growing in godliness, which means reading the word, praying, Christian fellowship, discipleship, those are the means of grace.

The longer you're doing that, the more mature you get.

You're like the baby who grows up.

You drink milk and you get stronger.

You don't keep drinking milk, you move on from the elementary doctrines of Christianity to the more mature doctrines of Christianity, to the deeper things.

So you're growing in godliness, you're trending in godliness.

And that will continue the rest of your life.

You will always keep growing in godliness forever and ever and ever.

Now, the truth is it's not a straight line, is it?

You keep growing and you keep falling and you keep growing and you keep falling and you keep growing.

And sometimes the line goes up and down, sometimes it goes really, you know, you're maturing and then you crash and burn, and then you're some people's lives are more stable, some people's lives are more zigzaggedy, and some people are more like the Alps.

Your mileage may vary on this.

But the idea is that over time you're trending in godliness.

Not that over time you get to a point where you no longer sin.

So what motivates you to keep trending in godliness?

What motivates you to keep growing in godliness?

You're fighting.

That's the point.

You're not going to naturally grow in godliness.

It's not a default setting on you.

And if you think if I just kick back and not do the Christian life, I'll grow in godliness.

No, you will not.

You'll sit on the shelf, you'll grow mold.

In fact, left to yourself, you'll fall.

That's why you fight.

The Holy Spirit in you convicts you of sin and you go to war against sin.

And sin does not go quietly into the night either.

It's not like sin recognizes the Holy Spirit is in your life and that you're reading the word and that you're praying, and so sin says, Well, I give up then.

Because keep in mind, you're never going to lead the perfect life, but sin is never going to win either.

Sin is going to lose this battle because you're in Christ.

Sin will win, and sin doesn't give up.

So as long as sin is hanging around fighting you, you've got to fight back.

The problem is that not only does sin not retreat, I mean, think of a battle.

In a war, if an enemy doesn't retreat, what does the enemy do?

Does the enemy just hang out there and set up camp in the battlefield?

Play solitaire all day long, backgammon by the campfire?

No, what's the enemy doing while they're hanging out on the battlefield?

They're digging in.

They're building entrenchments, they're setting their cannons in the right spot.

They're getting ready for war.

And that's what's happening in your life too.

You think sin is dormant because maybe you're going through a period of time where you're growing in spirituality and you're growing in maturity and you think all is well on the home front, so to speak.

But sin did not go home and roast marshmallows.

Sin is in your life digging in.

So that when you find it next time it'll be even more entrenched.

And that's the nature of your whole life.

And when you find it again, you go to war against it again.

That's what he describes in verse 23.

I see in the members another law waging war against the law of my mind.

The law of his mind is unholiness.

But the law in his members is taking him captive to the law of sin that dwells in his members.

I mean, so you catch us, the law of members are branching out into his mind and in his heart and kidnapping thoughts and kidnapping affections and bringing them into the custody of the lust of the flesh.

It is a flesh against spirit war here.

Lust of the flesh wants you to sin.

The power of the mind and of Christ in your hearts wants you to be holy.

And sometimes sin wins, and sometimes sin captures your thoughts and take kidnaps them and puts them in prison.

That's the members of your body going against itself.

And it will always be like that.

And as you grow in godliness, the battle doesn't go away.

In fact, you get provoked more easily.

Here's the thing: if you've been a believer 30 years, you have a sin in your life that you're battling right now that you probably had when you were a brand new believer.

You just didn't realize it.

I think back often to a guy named Jason that I got to lead the faith in Christ a while ago and got to disciple him and just got to watch him grow through the years, and it was just fascinating to watch.

Where, you know, after his conversion, he's like, oh, I need to stop, you know, do being sexually immoral because that's a sin.

I'm like, yeah.

A few months later, man, I need to stop swearing.

I'm swearing all the time, and that's probably a sin, right?

I'm like, yes.

A few months later, I need to stop rebelling against my mom.

That's wrong, isn't it?

Yes, it's wrong.

A few months later, and the order here is actually the order that's happened in real life.

Comes back to me.

He's like, man, I've just I've got a I've got a drug issue.

I'm doing drugs.

I'm like, that should have been dealt with a year ago.

What are you talking about rebelling against your mom?

Put this on the front burner, man.

Ah.

Deal with that.

He went off and played soccer in Grand Canyon University, and he I remember him calling me, like his senior year in college, saying that I'm having issues in my life.

There's a teammate of mine that just bothers me so much.

I have I'm so angry with him.

He just gets under my skin and provokes me.

I know that's not honoring the Lord, so pray for me as I'm trying to love him.

And you know, he's trying, he's doing battle with the sin.

In his mind, this is a big deal.

There's this guy on his team that's just driving him crazy.

And I'm remembering all these conversations.

I'm like, praise Jesus if that's your sin right now.

Pride and anger towards a teammate?

Hallelujah, man.

You are saved.

And to this day, he's dealing with sin in his life.

That is going here's the thing: the sin today is just as offensive to him as a sin at the beginning of his Christian walk, if not more so, because now he knows more about Christ, and so he knows how to be offended against sin even more.

Do you understand that?

The longer you're a Christian, the more offensive sin gets, even though the sins you're going to battle with from an outsider's perspective might be more minor.

They might be minor to the observer, but they're major to you because it's in your body.

You understand this?

Somebody tells you I've got cancer.

They never say it, follow it with, but it's just a minor cancer.

And you might ask, what kind is it?

What stage is it?

And you're trying to calculate in your own mind how major it is.

But to the person who's who just got that diagnosis, of course it's major.

Doesn't matter what kind it is, it's in their body.

And that's the way sin is with us.

It's in our body.

This is a big deal.

And you just see this war.

Paul's been fighting it for decades.

Look what he says in verse 24.

Wretched man that I am.

Who will deliver me from this body of death?

There's pockets of resistance everywhere in his life, and he's at the point of his life now where he says, I just don't know how to keep fighting it.

It's whack-a-mole.

Sin comes up here, honk, up here, honk, and do I just despair?

Then he says, No.

Somebody will deliver me.

And look at who will deliver him, verse 25.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Jesus will deliver him.

Jesus wins is the point.

Jesus wins.

Amen.

Jesus wins this fight.

You have to stay in the fight.

You have to go all the way to the finish line.

But Jesus will win.

In the meantime, though, while you're waiting for Jesus to win.

In the meantime, verses 15 to 25 could be boiled down.

You almost wish you just would have said this, but I like the autobiographical nature of it.

So then, in summary, I serve myself myself, I myself serve the law of God with my mind.

But with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

Now understand, Paul's not a Gnostic.

He's not saying that the spiritual is good and the earthly is bad, like the created world, like the matter is bad.

He's not saying that.

He's saying that they're both spiritual principles.

The spiritual principle of sin is at work in his flesh and his fallen body.

Flesh is a great uh idiom for it because your flesh will die and go into the grave, whereas your soul is ransomed and live forever.

That's why the Bible calls it flesh.

It's the lust of the flesh.

So much of sin is feeding your flesh, sexual and food and sleep, laziness, gluttony, sexual morality, even materialism.

It's all about feeding the flesh.

And so it's right to call these sins of the flesh, but he's not saying the physical world is bad, the spiritual world is good.

No.

He's also listen so carefully to this.

He is not saying Christians have two natures.

You do not have two natures.

Saying a Christian has two natures just is it makes a train wreck of theology because nature is a very specific biblical term.

Jesus has two natures and he's it.

Nobody else has two natures.

Jesus has the nature of God and the nature of mankind.

You do not have two natures.

You are one person, you're not two people either.

You're one person with one nature in one body, but you have two laws at war with each other.

You have two desires inside of you.

You're one man, one nature.

Your nature is fallen because of sin and redeemed because of Christ, but is imperfect in sanctification.

And I want to say that one more time, because that's the key part.

Your nature is fallen because of sin, redeemed because of Christ, and imperfect in sanctification.

In other words, sometimes the law of sin wins.

These two laws, the law of sin and the law of Christ, they're at war inside of you.

There are two conditions, your mind versus your flesh, two spheres, what is right versus what is evil.

And it can even seem like two natures.

I'm fine saying it seems like two natures because you want to do something and there's this war inside inside of you.

But the truth is you're one nature that's imperfect.

So sin attacks and digs in, and you fight back.

You fight back.

How do you fight back?

You avail yourself of what God gives you in the scripture.

You grow in your love for Jesus Christ, knowing that he redeems you from sin.

And he will not forsake you.

When an enemy captures someone, the country goes and looks for him, and that's where Christ is for you.

You get captured by sin, Christ will come get you and pull you back out.

Don't take confidence in your ability to fight, although you need to fight.

Take confidence in Christ's ability to save, because he can save.

And that's where Paul ends.

Thanks be to God, who through Jesus Christ, our Lord, he is the one who will reject us.

And chapter 8 just begins with because of that, there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

God will not condemn you because of the sin that you keep doing, because you're fighting it, and he sees that it's the nature of sin that is with you.

I have friends named Carlos who lost his thumb in a forklift accident, and they took skin off of him, his off of his chest, and put it on his thumb, sealed it back up.

So he's missing a thumb, but has skin from his chest on his hand right there, and that's the nature.

And it is really funny sometimes.

I remember watching him.

Well, once he put his hand on the thing and he grabs up here, he's burning his hand, and his other hand he grabs his chest.

He's totally confused.

It works both ways.

Sometimes he gets hurt in his hand and he feels it in his chest, sometimes his chest to his hand.

His brain, he's been like this since he was 16 years old, and his brain still has not sorted it out.

It's quite humorous.

Um, and he thinks it's funny too, for the record.

I'm not making fun of him, sort of, but he thinks it's funny.

He taught himself to write using his fingers like this, even though he will sometimes drop the pencil.

When he drops the pencil, is that the real him that drops the pencil?

Is that how he was designed?

Well, no.

He wishes he had a thumb, he wants it back.

He doesn't have a thumb, he's learning the best.

Is he gonna be able to do everything perfectly without a thumb ever again?

No, he won't.

Is he gonna try?

Yes, he will.

Is he gonna fail?

Yes, he also will.

Does it lead to some really humorous scenarios?

Also, yes.

This is us at a much grander scale.

We've been horribly injured by sin.

And we live our life trying to be pleasing to Christ, knowing that we'll fail, but knowing that Christ will win.

Lord, we're thankful that you deliver us from this body of sin and death.

That you are great and gracious to us.

We give you thanks for this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, I want to close with a song, but before we do sing, you guys can come up, but before we we do sing.

Does anybody have any questions about what I taught tonight?

Because sometimes with a doctrine like this, I know it can be confusing.

Anyone have any questions or about anything else we talked about tonight?

Um I can't answer everything, but I'd be happy to try.

Daniel.

Yeah, how did uh sanctification work within the Old Testament?

How does sanctification work in the Old Testament?

Well, imperfectly, uh, and I mentioned this last week, but is there is there a single elder qualified person in the Old Testament?

I mean, what a mess.

They didn't have the indwelling spirit.

They're in the Old Testament, is regenerated by the Spirit, but not indwelt by the Spirit.

And so there's not that same kind of progressive sanctification that we see in the New Testament.

This is one of the foundational differences of the church age versus the Old Testament age.

Sanctification is still real in the Old Testament.

You see this in Psalm 119.

Uh, even Psalm 19, we looked at last week.

Do you remember the last part of Psalm 19 where David's like, I want to grow, make me happy in Christ, make me godly, let the word be honey to me.

I want to grow up.

So that's sanctification language there.

Um, but there's not the indwelling spirit that's going to work.

Now, how that all works out anthropologically compared to a New Testament saint, I don't really know.

Um, but the Bible just makes it clear that the indwelling of the Spirit in the corporate nature of the church is a New Testament reality.

So differently, harder in the Old Testament.

So I'm pretty happy to be in the church.

Yeah.

This is not a fall.

Correct.

Yeah.

What about stuff and you know, keep applying to try and whether trying to become communion?

You know, that's the question I get a lot.

Thank you for asking that.

I think your second question answers the first question.

You know, this is a battle that happens in believers' lives.

It doesn't happen in non-believers' lives.

Paul wasn't wrestling with whether or not to say communion before he was a Christian, you know.

He wouldn't have described his pre-Christian life with this kind of battle language.

Um the battle that's described in Romans 7 is the battle that requires a new nature.

An unregenerate person cannot say any of the things in any of the verses.

An unregenerate person cannot say, it's no longer I who do it.

An unregenerate person can't say, uh, I have the desire to do what is right.

An unregenerate person can't say, the evil I don't want is what I keep doing.

Those are things an unregenerate person can't say.

So that's why.

Secondly, communion, you confess your sins to the Lord.

You know, you have Peter as your two extremes that I don't need to, I don't need to repent to take communion, to I need to get saved to take communion.

You remember Peter's conversation with Christ before the first communion service.

So avoid those two extremes.

You don't need to get resaved before you take communion.

But you also don't need to say, I don't need to confess my sins.

Rather, every time you take communion, just confess your sins with the Lord.

The one verse that says if you know leave your offer, your sacrifice there and go away is if you have a separation with another believer, I would refrain from taking communion until you've done all you can to be reconciled with them.

Because the point of communion is that you are one baptism, one body, one church, one fellowship, and all that.

If you are separated from another believer because of sin, then communion, you're making a mockery by taking communion.

So rather go to that believer and try to make peace.

Um, reconcile and then go take communion.

But if you have unconfessed sin in your life before communion, confess it.

Repent to the Lord and then take.

Michael.

How should I battle my life?

What should my attitude outweigh?

Yeah.

Yeah, all of it.

I mean, yes.

And you even see Paul in Romans 10 here, he I mean ends with verse 9, wretched man that I am, and verse 24, wretched man that I am, verse 25, he's back to singing the doxology.

And that's two verses away.

I was reading earlier this week, Psalm 130.

Um, I think did we sing it last Sunday or something?

I don't know.

It was in my mind for some reason, but I read it in my devotional this week.

And you see both, um, my memory is that you see both even in Psalm 130 as you think about this.

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Yahweh, Lord, hear my voice.

You know, you see him in low down there of you should mark iniquities who should stand.

And then at the end, he's like, with the Lord, there's steadfast love and there's joy at the end of the psalm.

And you see that even in a one psalm, the valleys and the ups.

So I would say both, man.

Be frustrated with your sin and be thankful that Jesus died for it.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now, a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.