The New Covenant (1 Timothy 1:8-11)

We're in 1 Timothy chapter 1.

1 Timothy 1 · chapter mention

We're going to be reading verses 8 through 11 this morning.

It says, But we know that the law is good, provided one uses it legitimately.

We know that the law is not meant for a righteous person, but for the lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinful, for the unholy and irreverent, for those who kill their fathers and mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, and males who have sex with males, for slave traders, liars, perjers, and for whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which was entrusted to me.

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you so much for your word.

We thank you that we get to continue this journey the second week into 1 Timothy.

Lord, I pray just continually that this book would mold us and shape us from the inside out, and that this would just be a sweet time for our body to go through this.

And for us as individuals, Lord, that you would work on your hearts, that you would do the work that you desire in us.

And that we would be open to those things, that we would desire to become more like Jesus by learning these things and applying them to our life.

We pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

So, as Brian was saying, we have the kids in service with us this month, which I'm really looking forward to.

But what some of the things that we're going to be doing is trying to have a few things within the sermon that include the kids a little bit more, help them to understand it, maybe even get them to participate a little bit throughout this morning.

So I want to start off with a question for the kids, and the adults can participate too as well.

But, and you please participate back to me out loud.

Do you believe that stop signs are a good thing?

Some of you are like, they really slow me down when I'm in a hurry.

They're inconvenient at times, yes, but in general, I do believe that stop signs are a good thing.

You know, it helps bring order to busy intersections.

They protect me as a driver, and they protect you as a driver if I'm not really paying attention and I, you know, and I'm not looking at the intersection, I'm not seeing who's there, and I just blow through it without stopping.

I'm thankful for stop signs personally.

I think they're a good thing in general.

Now, would you need a stop sign if you had a GPS in your car that was perfect?

And would tell you you're approaching a stop sign in 300 feet.

You're about a hundred feet away from this intersection in which you're going to need to stop.

Start to coast, start to apply the brake, come to a complete stop now.

Okay?

If we had this perfect GPS system, and then it would say, okay, everybody else has had their turn, it's your turn.

Put your foot on the accelerator, you can go through this intersection now.

If we all had that built into every vehicle, and we all obeyed that voice perfectly, would we need stop signs anymore?

No.

And I'm not promoting self-driving cars.

That's not what this is about this morning.

But not everybody has a GPS system in their car, do they?

And even the ones that do sometimes don't still obey their GPS, do they?

You ever go through an intersection and it says, you turn in 100 feet, you know, or something.

Recomputing, like it kind of gives you a different path.

So we still have to have stop signs to know what the law is at every specific intersection.

Otherwise, we would have no clue if we're supposed to stop or not, or who has the right-of-way and who doesn't, all those different things.

But even with GPS and stop signs, anybody at any time, as we just talked about, can blow through an intersection, can't they?

Even with the stop signs and with a perfect GPS system.

Whether you do it on purpose and blow through a stop sign or you do it accidentally.

You didn't see it.

It was behind a tree, something like that, and you just blow through an intersection.

And in doing so, whether it's on purpose or it's not on purpose, we can endanger ourselves and we can endanger other people through these intersections by not obeying those laws.

But the stop signs, they at least let people know what they're supposed to do.

And if they do blow through the intersection, at least they know that they're breaking the law and that they deserve a ticket.

Especially if they get pulled over and say, no, see the stop sign.

It's right there.

That's why I'm giving you a ticket today.

Now, the law that was given through Moses in the Old Testament, it's like a stop sign, but it's for sin.

It let people know this is either harmful to you, or it's going to be something that's harmful to somebody else, or both harmful to you and to somebody else at the same time.

You see, the law wasn't given just because God wanted to have this arbitrary set of rules just to see if people would obey it or not.

It was to let them know, hey, this is sin, and this is not sin, in very black and white terms for this nation of Israel.

So God gave them things like civil law, you know, for the nation of Israel.

These are the laws I want you to hold up as a nation.

He gave them dietary laws to protect them from sickness and to protect them from disease and things like that.

He gave them moral laws to protect them and to protect the other people as well.

He gave them ceremonial laws going along with worship through the sacrifice and the priest and the temple and all those different things to keep this nation pure, to keep them set apart and to keep them out of idolatry.

All for their own good.

It was for their own good, not just arbitrary laws just to see if they would obey.

It was for the well-being of the nation of Israel.

And we need to remember this as we go through this section, because we're gonna be talking a lot about this today, about the law.

Why did God give the law?

It was to protect them and others and to show the need for forgiveness.

When we do break the law to show that need for forgiveness, it's all because God loved them too much to not put stop signs in their intersections, so to speak.

But that was the old covenant.

A covenant of law.

And we're now in this new covenant that's based, that's not based on the law, but it's based specifically on grace, the grace of God.

And I want to just ask you another question here this morning.

What's the Old Testament?

You can respond.

What's the Old Testament when I say that?

Oh boy, we got a lot of work to do.

No.

Say it out.

What's that?

Jewish, original Jewish Torah.

The Torah, yes, you said the Torah, yeah, absolutely.

It's the first chunk of the Bible, right?

That we go through.

It's we call it the Old Testament.

What's the New Testament?

That's the next part in the Bible, right?

It's the second part where Jesus comes and then everything after that.

But did you know that the word covenant and testament mean the same thing?

They're the same word in Greek.

So we may best understand Old Covenant versus New Covenant if we say the books of the Old Covenant instead of Old Testament, or the books of the New Covenant instead of New Testament.

You know, the Old Covenant and the Old Covenant books are about the law, aren't they?

The new covenant and the new covenant books, the New Testament, are about Jesus and this new covenant of grace that Jesus ushered in for us.

And I wanted to bring that up this morning and clarify that because we're talking a lot about the law today.

We're talking about the Old Testament.

We're talking about the Old Covenant.

So just remember that as we move into this, those distinctions.

Now, before we jump into verse 8 here, I want to catch up from last week a little bit because it's kind of one flow of thought that we stopped right in the middle of.

Now, if you missed it, we talked about, you can look at it in your own Bible, verse 5 of chapter 1.

We talked about verse 5 being the thesis statement, really, of this whole book to come.

In verse 5, it says, Now the goal of our instruction is to love, uh, is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.

And we talked about how these things come from being shaped by God's word and actually living out our faith outside of these walls, outside of Sunday mornings.

So not saying one thing on a Sunday and then doing something completely else the rest of the week.

And the last verse that we saw was Paul talking about these false teachers of the law, if you remember that from last week.

They didn't know what they were talking about.

That didn't know Paul's words here, didn't know what they were insisting on.

They wanted to be teachers, they wanted to be heard, they wanted to be influencers of their time, and they were insisting on things and they didn't even know what they were talking about.

We talked a little bit about how this is probably a mix of different things, probably Judaizers, probably Gnostics.

Um, you can go back and listen to that if you want to learn a little bit more of that.

But there were probably some, and we kind of get this idea uh today, there's probably some that just wanted to keep feeding their flesh because it was culturally acceptable to do these things, and now the law is saying that you can't do these things, and they're like, no, no, no, but let me let me explain to you what this word actually means, so that they could continue to feed their flesh.

It was things they didn't want to give up that were culturally acceptable.

They didn't want to die to self, they didn't want to be crucified with Christ, they didn't want to do things God's way.

These people, they were people that wanted salvation, but they didn't want to submit to God.

They didn't want to submit to his will, but they still wanted to be saved.

And that is something that we deal with a lot in our culture today as well as well.

You know, we want to be saved.

We want to have that insurance policy, basically.

But we want to make ways for our sin to seem okay.

We want to make ways for our cultural sins in our society to be okay with whatever it is, but it's still contrary to God's word.

But we want to fit in, we don't want to seem unloving in any way or something like that.

So we're like, oh, well, maybe it is okay to do this because culturally it's okay.

How could, you know, it usually comes out like this.

Well, how could a loving God, and then you fill in the blank.

It usually starts with that.

Like, how could a loving God tell two consenting adults that love each other deeply not to sleep with one another?

How could a loving God do that?

I mean, because they really love each other.

How could a loving God not accept homosexuality, which we're gonna be talking about today?

Love is love, right?

How could a loving God be against something like this?

People say, how can a loving God send somebody to hell?

That's a false premise, uh, question to ask in the beginning, uh, in the beginning.

You're gonna hear things like, well, how could a loving God allow a nice person to suffer?

Or allow his own son to suffer?

Or allow followers of Christ to experience suffering.

This is in our own nation, in our own culture, this is how we justify trying to make cultural norms that are sin.

Okay.

We try to justify these things so we can continue doing these things, even though they're against God.

They're against God's word.

You know, because deep down, some of us want to be like the world.

We want to continue to feed our flesh, we want to do what feels good in the moment and then justify it because we want to be like the world in those ways.

Or we want to fit in and not stand out in our society.

But we are called to be in the world, but not of the world.

As believers in today's society, we should stand out.

We should not be accepting of what God's word calls sin.

We need to call sin sin.

And we'll see.

Timothy is coming up against all of this in Ephesus.

2,000 years ago, almost.

He's coming up again like there's nothing new under the sun.

The same things they are dealing with then are the same things that we're dealing with now.

So let's get a little bit of a running start before we jump into verse 8.

Just for the sake of context and flow.

Let's start at verse 7.

You can look at it with me.

They want to be teachers of the law, although they don't understand what they are saying or what they're insisting on.

But we know that the law is good, provided one uses it legitimately.

I want to encourage you in your Bible to highlight or underline the word legitimately, because that word is key here.

Going back a little bit, why did God give Israel the law?

It was for their own good, right?

It was to protect them.

It was to show that they needed forgiveness in the first place.

It was because he loved them, if you remember, too much to not give them stop signs.

And I wanted you to highlight the word legitimately here, uses it legitimately, because we need to see the law as a tool.

Not a means to salvation, but the law is a tool that God has given us.

It's something, the law is something that we should wield, not something that should wield us.

It's more like a mirror.

This is the best analogy I've ever heard, but the law's like a mirror.

It's what helps us expose the sin, but it doesn't do the cleaning for us.

If your face has dirt on it and you know that there's some dirt, but you don't know exactly where it is, or somebody says, hey, you got this mark on your head, first thing you do is you go to the mirror, right?

Like, where exactly is it?

The law is to expose sin just like a mirror.

But the mirror doesn't wash us, does it?

You ever try just rubbing a mirror on your face or something?

Like, it's not gonna do anything, it's just gonna move it around a little bit more.

That's why verse 8 says, but we know that the law is good, provided one uses it legitimately, uses it correctly for the right purposes, not as a source of salvation, but as a tool to expose the sin in our life.

You know, we have to recognize that there's no power in the law.

The law doesn't change people, it doesn't have the power to change people.

You know, Abraham, going way back before the law was even given to Moses.

Abraham was declared righteous, not by his works, but by his faith.

Genesis 15, 6 says, Abraham believed the Lord, and he, God, credited to him as righteousness.

You know, it's been about belief and faith since the very beginning.

Whether in the old covenant or whether in the new covenant, they still both came down to faith.

And now the new covenant that Jesus ushered in, this covenant of grace that he ushered in for us, I want to show you a couple of verses that explain this a little bit better.

Ephesians chapter 2, verses 8 through 9 says, For you are saved by grace through faith, not by the law, through faith.

Ephesians 2:8–9

And this is not from yourselves, it is God's gift, not from works, following the law, so that no one can boast.

It's all through Jesus.

And then Colossians 2, 13 and 14 say, and when you were dead in trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, we uh that's a he made you alive with him and forgave us all our trespasses.

He erased the certificate of debt with its obligations that was against us and opposed to us, and has taken it away by nailing it to the cross.

That's how we can say it's through the blood of Jesus Christ that we enter into this new covenant.

We don't often think of blood as a cleansing agent, though, do we?

Usually blood is the stain we're trying to get out of clothes.

But that's not the case with the blood of Jesus Christ.

It's the blood of Jesus Christ that is the cleansing agent.

So we need to think of the law as a mirror and the blood of Jesus Christ being the cleansing agent that removes the sin that the mirror is exposing.

Does that make sense, that analogy?

Good.

All right, let's move on to verse 9 then.

We know that the law is not meant for a righteous person.

We need to think of this in terms of salvation, otherwise, it can get a little bit confusing.

Because Paul just said the law's good, right?

He's talking to a church in Ephesus, talking to Timothy, but now he just said it's not for the righteous person.

So, wait, how do how does this work?

We need to think of this in terms of salvation.

Because Paul just said, as we just read the law's good, we just talked about God's law being filled with love.

How it sets up boundaries for right from wrong, how it exposes right and wrong when used correctly, right?

But in terms of salvation, it's not meant for the righteous.

The righteous are righteous, right?

And we're righteous through Jesus Christ and through his cleansing blood.

It's not meant for the righteous.

Paul said in Philippians 3.9, not having a righteousness of my own, he's talking about himself, from the law, from obeying the law, but one that is through faith in Christ.

We're made righteous through Jesus.

But for the unrighteous, this is how it works.

The law is the measuring stick.

For the unrighteous, the law is the measuring stick that they're gonna be measured against.

Their salvation depends upon them holding up every law perfectly their whole life.

And that's how they're measured up against salvation.

It's there to expose their sin as well, to let them know that they need forgiveness, but it's the measuring stick for salvation for them.

So if somebody asks you, well, why should I place my faith in Jesus?

You can just ask them, Well, have you ever lied?

Have you ever disrespected your parents?

Have you ever had a murderous or even a lustful thought once?

And if they say yes to any of those, that means that they don't measure up to the law.

That means that they're headed for physical and spiritual death apart from the blood of Jesus Christ.

That's why Jesus came to die for those sins, for those very sins where we didn't measure up to the law to save us from that physical and spiritual death.

I mean, we will still die physically, but that spiritual death.

Because we couldn't uphold the law by ourselves.

Nobody other than Jesus in the history of mankind can say, I never broke a single law in the old covenant.

And that also means that in order for Jesus to be that perfect sacrifice that could be sacrificed in our place, that he had to fulfill the law.

He had to be measured against the law and say, Yeah, I lived it out perfectly.

Every single thing.

He had to accomplish every prophecy about himself and about his first coming.

There's still some to come with his second coming, but he had to establish every one of those prophecies.

He had to personally uphold every single commandment.

Think about that.

I mean, just a stray thought for us that goes down a murderous or a lustful or an anger or something like that.

Boom, we just we're done.

Jesus never had one of those.

And then, on top of that, he chose to give himself to pay our debts.

That we accrued through our failure.

Because we couldn't uphold the law.

That's why Jesus had to do what he did on the cross.

That's how his blood can cleanse us because he was that perfect sacrifice in our place.

He paid that debt that we accrued and we could not pay.

But for those that are not cleansed by his blood, we're about to jump into a list starting in verse 9 of those who the law is for.

And these are most likely the exact sins that this church in Ephesus is going through.

I think that's why Paul's naming these specifically, just like, hey, you guys, all of these, yeah.

And then he's just going to put a disclaimer at the bottom, and anything else, pretty much.

But this is probably the exact sins, the priority that Paul puts on them is because, hey, all these things you're debating about, all these things that these false teachers are teaching about, like, you need to make sure these things are not happening in the church, that they're not being taught by anybody in the church.

So the list starts here, the second half of verse 9.

So the law is meant for the lawless.

Those who purposely run through stop signs, basically, is what this means.

He goes on, and rebellious.

So these are those that refuse to be under submission to anything and are intentionally disobedient.

I'm so glad we don't struggle with that today, right?

Yeah.

No, and that could be God that they just refuse to submit to.

It could be a spiritual authority.

It could be their bosses.

It could be a political authority that God set over them.

It could be children to parents, you know, that they just refuse to submit to any authority.

Just a refusal to submit to anything is what rebellious means right here.

The next part says, for the ungodly.

So this means people that have no reverence for God.

Or they actually condemn God by definition.

The next says, and sinful.

This actually means that the person's devoted to sin.

We're all going to struggle with sin.

We're all going to sin, but this is somebody that's devoted.

They're living a life of sin and wanting to continue that.

It means like especially wicked or a heathen.

Then he goes on in verse 9 and says, for the unholy, so those that are wicked and sacrilegious, uh, particularly immoral, and the irreverent.

So this is somebody that's totally worldly.

They have no interest in God, in spiritual things, in transcendent matters by definition.

So they have everything that they want in what the world has to offer.

Next he says, for those who kill their fathers and mothers.

In the Greek, they have one word that covers all of that right there.

And it's for somebody that particularly kills their mother or father.

And I bet most of you didn't know because I just learned it last week.

We actually have words in English for this.

Patricide is when you, you know, patriarch, kill your father, and then uh matricide, which is when you kill your mother, matriarch.

And I was just looking at that and thinking, that's horrible that both the Greek and the English have to have particular words for this.

Isn't it?

It seems particularly wicked to me that these things even have to be addressed.

But it must be something Ephesus is dealing with.

I don't know the scenario or what that looked like or how, but man, that's just wicked.

And then the next part of nine, he says, for murderers.

And this is anybody that kills a man, woman, or child.

Now look at verse 10.

He goes on, for the sexually immoral.

This is sexual immorality of any sort.

So any type of sexual immorality that happens outside of a husband and wife.

Anything else that covers all of that.

It also is a word that's used for prostitution as well.

He goes on in verse 10.

And males who have sex with males.

So this is obviously talking about homosexuality.

You know, no matter what our culture says, this is just simply not what God intended to be.

He set marriage up to be between a man and a woman, and for sex to only happen within a marriage between a man and a woman.

And I just want to remind you, because this is a hot topic in our culture, why did God give the law?

It was to protect us, to protect others, and to show our need for forgiveness, remember?

So when people say, Well, I was born that way.

I was born with these desires.

Why should I suppress these desires?

Well, not to make light of this, but I was born with a desire for sexual sin too.

Why should I have to suppress those desires that are outside of God's will, that are outside of God's plan?

Because it protects me and it protects others.

You know, God set up these boundaries because he loved us too much to not give us these boundaries.

He set it all up, he set up marriage, he knows what's best, and he has the right to say, this is what's best.

Here are the boundaries.

Stay in these boundaries, and you're gonna be the healthiest and the happiest and the most joyful people that you can possibly be.

God's loved us too much to not set up those boundaries.

And I really want to stop here for a second because this is so prevalent in our society today, especially right now.

Because we will ask, well, what about those Christians that have same-sex attraction?

Is same-sex attraction a sin?

Well, let's put that in a different context.

Because sometimes we like to put homosexuality in its own little boxes, its own, you know, special sin over here.

If somebody says, I was born that way, you know, why should I suppress it?

Or I'm a Christian and I have same-sex attraction, what would you tell them if somebody came up to you and told you that?

You would probably say, Well, resist temptation and do everything that you can to not submit to that temptation.

If somebody comes up to you, you'll tell them the same thing.

If they said, I really struggle with a desire for pornography, what should I do?

What would you say?

You would say, you need to resist that temptation and do everything you can to not submit to that temptation.

And if they said, Yeah, but that desire for pornography has been in, I mean, you know, since a very, very young age, it's built in.

Why should I suppress it?

Same reasons.

That's not how God set things up.

That's sexual immorality.

And it's no different if we're talking about pornography or if we're talking about homosexuality.

We need to resist that temptation and do everything we can to not submit to that temptation.

Now, if you have same-sex attraction, it's not sin until you act on it.

And please hear me out here.

We all have desires from our flesh that are sin.

Whether it's for food, whether it's for anger, selfishness, whatever it might be, same-sex attraction, it's not sin until we entertain those thoughts and we act on those thoughts.

Whether it's selfishness or anger or whatever, we have these thoughts that rise up.

It's like, okay, I'm gonna submit these things to the Lord, I'm gonna pray for the Holy Spirit to help me to not act out on these selfish, um, fleshly desires, you know, that are popping up.

I know Christians that have same-sex attractions, but they choose to not act on those desires.

And being saved by Christ does not mean that our sinful desires go away, does it?

I still have sinful desires every single day, and I'm sure each one of you, if you're being honest, will say the same thing.

When we're saved, the desire for sin doesn't go away.

But when we're saved, it does mean that we're all called to not act on those sinful desires anymore.

This is not my personal opinion, this is just what scripture is saying, and I wanted to relay to you.

This is what scripture teaches in the old covenant and in the new covenant, old testament, new testament.

Sexual sin, homosexuality, it's just simply not God's design.

It's not what's best for you, it's not what's best for me.

Just like pornography is not what's best for any heterosexual, as well.

He goes on, verse 10.

And he says, the law is meant for slave traders.

Your translation, if you're holding a different translation, may say kidnappers.

And those two words are kind of interchangeable because there's a lot of different types of slavery.

You know, in the Roman Empire, that they estimate that over half of the whole human population in the Roman Empire at this time were slaves.

Think about that.

If we drew a line right here between half of our church is slaves and half of our church is not.

That's a big percentage of slaves in the Roman Empire, isn't it?

We're gonna talk a lot more about this once we get to chapter six.

But there's some slaves that entered into this relationship willfully, whether it was to pay a debt or because they just like the guy and wanted to work for him forever or whatever it might be.

But this is speaking specifically against those that are kidnapped into slavery, that were taken, that were sold, or were forced into labor by the person that kidnapped them altogether.

So speaking very clearly against that type of slavery.

But if it was indentured servants or an agreement between two people or to pay a debt, it's not speaking against that at the time.

This is about the forced labor, kidnapping, slavery type thing.

Then he goes on.

Verse 10, he says liars.

Pretty self-explanatory.

Next he says perjurers.

So someone that swears one thing or signs the document about one thing, and then they do the other thing.

And then Paul sums this up as I was talking about here at the end of verse 10.

He says, And for whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God which was entrusted to me.

Paul's basically saying, this is not an exhaustive list that I'm giving you.

Stay away from those things and you're good.

He's just basically saying, you need to specifically change away or change these things, you need to specifically teach against these things, specifically not do these things, but there's a lot more.

So pretty much anything that goes against God's word.

You have to remember, too, that Ephesus at this time, they're part of the Roman Empire, but they were heavily influenced by the Greek culture.

So think about what those two cultures combined, what kind of sins that can bring, what kind of cultural norms that can bring to a society like this.

You know, between the Roman and Greek culture, there was a ton of idolatry, a ton of fornication.

Pedophilia was even not looked down on.

It was okay, it was expected in that culture as well, for men to have young boys.

I'll leave it at that.

So Paul throws in at the end of this, and for whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the gospel, I think this is Paul's way of saying, Timothy, you know the law, use it to expose this sin in the church.

Not to save these people, but to expose these false teachers.

And then he says, at the end, which I really love, that conforms to the gospel.

I think he's saying, don't give them the law, show them the law, yes, but teach them that salvation is through the gospel, that is by grace and through faith.

Your teaching needs to conform to that gospel message.

I think he's saying the law is useful, Timothy, but give them teaching that conforms to the gospel.

Paul passed the same gospel message on to Timothy, and now throughout this whole book, we're just gonna see Paul continue to tell Timothy to pass it on to those in Ephesus as well.

And here's the thing: when we come to faith in Christ, it's like Jesus puts a mirror inside of us.

We talked about the mirror exposing sin.

It's like Jesus puts this mirror inside of us, and that's the Holy Spirit.

It's the third person of the Holy Trinity.

And we're given the Holy Spirit to live inside of us.

You know, when we're abiding in Christ and we're walking by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit lets us know when we're about to break the law, doesn't he?

Before we even do it, we got this little thing inside of us that's saying, mm-mm, like you're about to break the law, you shouldn't do this.

And if we do break the law, the Holy Spirit's there directing our conscience to either accuse us or excuse us, as it says in Romans 2.

The Holy Spirit's like, hey, that's not okay.

You just ran that stop sign.

You endangered yourself and other people.

You need to go make that right.

You need to confess, you need to repent, meaning turn the other direction and go the other way and not ever do that again.

Holy Spirit's like a built-in mirror that we're given when we put our faith in Jesus Christ.

And sorry if it's crude to continue with this analogy, but going back to that stop sign analogy, the Holy Spirit is like an internal and perfect GPS to followers of Christ.

We may be a couple hundred feet from an intersection, and the Holy Spirit says, Hey, slow down, take your foot off the gas.

You need to stop real soon.

You need to put your foot on the brakes, you need to stop right here.

So we we do those things, and then he's gonna say, just wait for a second.

Okay, now you can go.

For your own safety, for the safety of others, here's how you need to treat this intersection in your life.

If we all had that built in and we all listened, and we never dangerously blew through intersections, we wouldn't need stop signs anymore.

But not everybody has the Holy Spirit as their GPS system.

And not everybody obeys the Holy Spirit, even when they have the Holy Spirit inside of them.

We still choose to sin and choose to blow through stop signs when the Holy Spirit's saying, hold on, hold on.

You're gonna hurt yourself, you're gonna hurt somebody else.

We need stop signs, we need the Holy Spirit inside of us, telling us, being that internal GPS, if you will.

We need them there for those reasons and to examine ourselves like a mirror and to expose the sin in our life.

And that's why it's still good for Christians to have the law, to use as a tool, but to not think that that's gonna gain us salvation of any sort.

We need to remember that the law is like a tool, it's like a mirror.

It's the blood of Jesus Christ that is the cleansing agent for believers.

I think that's why Paul can say the law's good, provided one uses it legitimately.

It's to protect us, it's to show us the need for give for forgiveness that we constantly have as we constantly blow through stop signs.

As long as we don't think obeying the law is gonna make us more holy, more righteous, more saved, or better than the person that's sitting next to us, because that's just outright legalism when we use the law illegitimately.

Salvation is through Christ alone.

Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and nobody comes to the Father except through me.

You know, Romans chapter 3, verses 21 through 24 just sum this up beautifully.

Romans 3:21–24

So I just want to read it to you.

Says, but now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, attested by the law and the prophets.

The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, since there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

If you've not been redeemed and justified by the cleansing blood of Jesus, you simply need to believe.

It's by faith that you will be saved.

Faith in Jesus Christ.

You do that and you will be saved.

You can do that right now if you've never done that before.

You can do that right now in your seat and just say, I believe.

Jesus, will you cleanse me with your blood of every unrighteous thing that I've done, every law of yours that I've ever broken?

Will you cleanse me?

Will you make me righteous?

I want to follow you.

That's all you simply have to do.

It's through faith and by grace.

And Jesus is waiting there saying, Yes, yes, like come to me with open arms.

You know, we're about to celebrate the new covenant that we've been talking about.

That's what communion is.

It's a celebration meal of the new covenant.

The wine, the grape juice that we have, it's a symbol of the cleansing blood of Jesus that was spilled for us to be that cleansing agent.

You know, we see in Luke 22, 20, the last supper, Jesus, it says, in the same way, he also took the cup after supper and said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.

That's what he did on the cross for us.

That's why his blood had to be spilled to usher in this new covenant of grace.

So we get to celebrate it today.

Celebrate all that Jesus has done for us.

And this is how we remember that new covenant.

This is how we give thanksgiving within this covenant.

And I just want to remind you you know, sometimes we can get super somber during communion, and it's a time of just confession and sometimes even beating ourselves up.

Don't ever forget the celebration aspect of this.

This is a celebratory meal, and it's great to self-examine, to pull that mirror out and be like, God, just expose the things in my life that need to be cleansed, that cleaned up and wash me with the blood of Jesus Christ and to take that time to do that.

And that's great and that's wonderful, but don't forget to add the thanksgiving.

Thank you, Jesus, for this new covenant.

Thank you that you did that so that I didn't have to go through that spiritual and physical death that was meant for me.

He did it for us.