When you realize you're a sinner, you're powerless to keep the law. But yet, grace, what does grace say? Okay, Paul, you recognize you're not one of the apostles. You recognize you're the least of the saints. You recognize you're the chief of sinners.
But look at the grace. I'm still using you. And you know I love you. And you know that if I'm using you and I'm loving you, that I'm using others and I'm loving them too.
And then you know that there are others who don't yet know me, but they will, and I'll love them. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Book of Romans. Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching.
But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in the Book of Romans, Chapter 7, with this edition of Cross-Reference Radio. Adam and Eve were told at the beginning, don't touch that tree. And they did it anyway. Don't eat from that tree. And so it was forbidden because it was harmful.
And now we know. And the trespasser acts on that covetous attitude, finds themselves where they don't belong because of their fallen nature. And so Paul says, this produced in me all manner of evil desire. What strikes me here is not the word evil desire as much as the pronoun me.
Produced in me. You can't say, well, I just did it for Paul. Maybe covetousness is not a problem you suffer with. There's something else. And you know what it is, too. Paul was willing to give up, say, I do covet. What else do you do, Paul? Well, that's none of your business. Law exposes the hidden nature of sin and the sinner.
Here's an example. How about those cameras on traffic lights? Do they arouse in you a spirit of resentment? I hope they don't come to my neighborhood. Why? Abide by the law. You don't have to worry about them. Well, I might not. They're taking away our chance to break the law. That's how the heart is.
We see that. And if it's not with that, it's something else. I'm a little irritated by speed limits that are too small. What's the thing with the school zones?
Let the kids learn how not to cross the street when the cars are moving so fast. Experience is a good feature. These things expose me for who I am. Just little things like that. They expose me and the sinner's in there. The angels won't think like that.
What are you talking about? For apart from the law, sin was dead in the sense of the conscience. But God's commandment exposed Cain for who he was. He knew he was supposed to bring a blood sacrifice and he opted out. And he was self-impressed as a rebel and a brazen murderer. Abel's obedience enraged Cain. And so it is one thing to have a criminal in your house.
It's quite another one to hide him there. Well, verse 9, and of course the criminal is the sinful nature and the spiritual man will not look to hide the criminal. Wants them out in the presence of God, that is. Verse 9, I was alive once without the law. When the commandment came, sin revived and I died. Well, the words apart from the law indicate a state of no law.
Now here's where all the, a lot of commentators want to fuss about, well, he can't be talking about it. Or this is when he was a Pharisee. No Pharisee would admit to being without the law. They were the law.
The personification of it, they felt. And so when was Paul ever without law and unchallenged by sin at the same time at his conversion? And the processes of that conversion after Ananias had came and said, receive the Holy Spirit. Ananias didn't come and show up and say, hey, this is what the law says. He said it's time for you to get baptized to receive the Holy Spirit because you've been living with just the Bible without the Holy Spirit.
What a revelation that is. And when he met a person, not a code, everything changed for Paul. And so the scripture says that Ananias said to Paul, be filled with the Holy Spirit. And once that happened is that the sanctification for Paul also, he did not instantly know everything.
He didn't want to even be around people. He got alone by himself to be with the Lord. He had so much to correct in his life. The law kept a man from struggling with deep indwelling sin.
Not all, again, there were those righteous Jews who had just the Old Testament and men like, again, David and Daniel. But look at Isaiah, woe is me. I'm an unclean man. I have been dwelling in the midst of an unclean being. He had this epiphany in the presence of God. Well, it really wasn't an epiphany.
God revealed these things to him just by being there in front of him. So this was not the law's intention. It is what men did with the law except for a few exceptions. What was not the law's intention? That the man would be self-righteous. That was not the intention of the law.
But that is largely the outcome. Or else those who held the scriptures would not have been so against the Christ when he came. But conversion changes all that. Let's consider Paul the Pharisee. Why he could not say, I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived, I died. That happened at conversion.
Well, here's Paul before conversion. He had no struggle in his heart when he guarded the clothes of those who stoned Stephen to death. He witnessed it. He relished it.
This is what he was about. If he could have, if the law of the Pharisees did not prohibit it, he would have cast the first stone and the second and the third. There was no resistance in his heart when he arrested Christians and imprisoned them for saying Jesus is the Messiah. There was no second thought in his heart when he rode off to Damascus as a religious bounty hunter to arrest even more Christians who are outside of Jerusalem.
He went out of his way to hunt us down. Don't tell me he had the Spirit of God in his heart, because the Bible doesn't tell us that. It tells us the opposite. In fact, if you read Acts 26, verse 9, Galatians 1, 13, Philippians 3, 6, you'll read him tell you the same thing about himself. There was no heaviness of his heart for a sinful heart, no burden for the Gentiles, no burden for the Christians, no sense of grace.
He knew nothing of spiritual character. He knew self-righteousness. He knew greed. He knew power.
That was Saul of Tarsus. And so he, being one of them, he understood the misuse of the law. And now that grace was here, he was doing everything he could to set it straight, that the law is good, but there's grace now.
And here's where the law did not reach its goals. And he lays it all out for them. The Galatian letter is, again, one of the great documents against life with a Bible without the Holy Spirit. And Romans is largely that, too. But when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. Well, Christ brings an awakening when he comes. That's what happened with Isaiah, you know, when I saw the Lord sitting on the throne high and lifted up.
Woe is me! That was the outcome of him seeing God. He saw himself.
Daniel fell as though he couldn't move, as though he were dead. Same with John, the apostle. Well, before Christ, I decided again what was acceptable and what was not. And Christ changes it all. And this is part of the meaning when we read in Corinthians, if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. All things pass away, all things become new. In that one little verse is the work of the Holy Spirit and sanctification is the light of the world in operation.
Opposition to all sin as an offense to God comes only from having this relationship of grace with God. And again, there were those in the Old Testament that were full of the Spirit, but things changed a little bit more when Messiah finally came. That's why Jesus said, you shall receive power and you shall be what? Good people.
Well, that's part of the goal still. You shall be witnesses to me. The Holy Spirit's been available to other believers, but not in the sense of preaching Messiah, the Christ. That was something that was a development in the history of humanity.
Just like there were laws before Moses came along, Enoch knew them, but then there were more laws that were given. There are these processes, these dispensations. Jesus said when he said, I didn't come to destroy, but to fulfill, he's saying there is more. There is more happening in humanity than you know.
And God is on top of these things. And as I pointed out, I think last session, Judaism could not fit the world. It would be very difficult for an Eskimo to comply with the law of Moses. Where would he find ceremonially clean animals to eat? How would he get to Jerusalem three times a year?
How would his family survive up there without him? I mean, there's just too many complexities and God saw it all. As to all the little details, why did God wait and why does that?
Well, you know, those things are hidden, but what is not hidden is what we do know and is very clear. Our responsibility to preach the gospel is very clear. And so in verse 7, he says in the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death. The law for its diagnostic purposes was perfect, flawless in pointing out sin. Whether the sin, the sin of sod or not, that conviction, Paul, again, didn't see the covetness of his own heart. The Pharisees didn't.
That's why they loved the money. First Timothy, he writes, he says, but we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully. That's what he says.
How am I going to use the law lawfully? The Spirit of God has to be in me, but I have this flesh. Even before the coming of the Holy Spirit, even before the New Testament, the flesh was just as active as ever. Theoretically the law is perfect. Theoretically, Christianity is perfect. We could just get rid of this sin thing, this temptation thing, if there could just be no devil, if we could just have no flesh. I like everything in the scripture.
It is perfect, practically, to carry it all out all the time. We can't. Again, the legalists will object to that. Paul is saying, I know I'm a participant. I'm not a spectator. I started out recognizing that I wasn't as good as the other apostles. Then I realized, you know what, I'm not even as good as other Christians.
Then I had this sense that I'm the chief of sinners. And so some legalist is going to walk up and say that they're better than Paul. So yeah, on paper the scripture is wonderful, it's perfect. Why did it have to prohibit the very things that my flesh wants to do? Well, this is the law of responsibility and accountability. The law is powerless to save from the virus of sin. It points it out, but it can't really deal with it. The law does not reward us for keeping the law. It only punishes us for breaking it. Under sheer law, what was Paul, what was Saul of Tarsus?
Well, I just read some of the things. He was misguided, as was Jonah. He majored in condemnation. He didn't even bother to minor in grace.
There was none. When he writes to the Corinthians, this is what he says about the sheer weight of the Old Testament. For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, he's talking about the Old Testament. He's saying it's a beautiful law, but it's condemning.
And then he, in contrast, holds the New Testament to it. He says, the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory. It is more beautiful. It is more wonderful. It is more far-reaching.
It goes outside of Israel. It reaches to the Gentile. It sees the sinner for what the sinner is and still saves him nonetheless. It is not looking to condemn. It does not walk around with a magnifying glass.
It walks around with the heart of love. There are those, they want the Sermon on the Mount to apply to everybody else but them. They want 1 Corinthians to apply to everybody, 1 Corinthians 13, the chapter of love. They want everybody else to be loving while they're not. But they'll never say it.
They just do it. And my saying this is for all of us, to say to ourselves, is it I, Lord? Do I do that? Do I like receiving stuff? I just don't like giving any? Do I dislike meanness? But am I mean? Petitness, it irritates me.
Am I petty? Well, the ministry of grace just holds its hands out and say, come, let's work on this. I'm not looking to get rid of you. I'm not looking to banish you. Verse 11, for sin, taking occasion by commandment, deceived me and by it killed me. Well, he's following, he's saying you just got raw law, sheer law. It's just death. He's personifying sin in this 11th verse.
He's saying it ruins everything. And when you realize you're a sinner, you're powerless to keep the law. But yet grace, what does grace say? Okay, Paul, you recognize you're not one of the apostles. You recognize you're the least of the saints. You recognize you're the chief of sinners.
But look at the grace. I'm still using you. And you know I love you. And you know that if I'm using you and I'm loving you, that I'm using others and I'm loving them too. And then you know that there are others who don't yet know me, but they will.
And I'll love them. And so when the gospel, when we're told by Christ, what you bind on earth, I'll bind in heaven. He's saying when you give the gospel, I'll back it up.
It's not going to bounce. When you preach the gospel and you say to a sinner, if you confess with your heart and your mouth, confession is made with the mouth, in the heart one believes. If you tell a sinner, you confess your sins, you come to Christ, he will forgive you. Well, that's where the authority comes from when Christ says, when you give that formula that I've given you and it's genuine, it's going to be true. You don't have to say to yourself, well, I sure hope this guy gets saved. I don't really like him too much. I'm actually hoping.
That would be very bad. Well, anyway, sin always deceives, often destroys, but sin is not the law. And the law is not sin. It's just, it's a stone. It's what it is.
It's not going to change. Paul's Phariseedical world collapsed upon him. So I read this from last session. I know I keep referring to last session because it's all tied and I'll refer to this one the next time because it's all goes together, but it's just too much, I think, to deal with in one session, at least the way I feel led to deal with it.
Now, I was saying something and it was going to be pretty good. Pharisees. So the Phariseedical world, when Paul came to Christ, it all collapsed. It was done, but it didn't happen that way for all the Pharisees. And we read about them in Acts chapter 15 when they came along and they were still clutching to their Phariseedical thinking.
You have to be circumcised or you can't be saved. And Paul fought against that his entire life and made many victories. I don't know what would have happened to Christianity if God did not raise up a man like Paul because Peter and Barnabas almost blew it there at Antioch when they came and they pushed away the Gentiles and they gravitated to the Jews that had come up from Jerusalem that James sent to spy them out. Paul said that they came to spy out our liberty. Those boys don't get it.
They're Christians and they don't get it. Legalism thrived around James. That's not necessarily a bad shot against James because if you were to put yourself in his place, oh man, take a special man to be successful with the gospel amongst those hardcore Old Testament Jews. So you've got to factor that in before you just say, why can't James be like Paul?
Well, because there were Jews that still needed to hear things that they could only hear from someone like James in spite of the difficulties, in spite of the clashes between the two men. So everything is not just a, you know, an easy fit. There's a lot of grappling in this life, both theologically and practically. And if you don't have grace, you won't be so fruitful. And in time you're going to find out that your hard heart does not benefit anyone.
But by that time you have made a mess of quite a few things. I think many legalists never, they go through the entire life, they just ignore their own sins and they just judge everybody else and they pretend to be saved and all of that stuff. Some of them may even be. But then there are others that learn grace and they're not quick to point the finger at others. They believe that, you know, if I got this thing in my eye, I better watch out before, no pun intended, I better watch out before I go trying to take a little speck out of somebody else's eye. See, read the Sermon on the Mount and ask yourself, do I do this?
Do I get all of this right all the time? The Sermon on the Mount chops everybody down to size and yet we love it. We love the Sermon on the Mount.
Well, coming back to this, verse 12, therefore the law is holy and the commandment holy and just and good. Now, we're not going to get to the next wave of instruction that he's going to give them, but he's going to lay out how the carnal man is still very much active in the life of a believer. The natural man is the sinner that's lost. The carnal man is the believer that is behaving like they're lost. And then there is, of course, the spiritual man who's getting the upper hand over the carnal man.
And those two can bounce back and forth on certain matters to some degree. So we'll get that next session, but in this one where he says, therefore the law is holy and the commandment holy and just and good. He rejects any argument that blames the Old Testament as the cause of human sin.
He's already laid it out. It doesn't cause sin. It points to it. And don't be hitting me with, hey, Paul, what are you saying about the Old Testament? It's no good. The grace has replaced it.
Don't hit me with that. I've already told you, we're not replacing the Old Testament. The rituals and stuff, they're done in Christ. But the moral code, it stands.
And the revelations about Yahweh, who is in the Old Testament, who is Christ in the New Testament, it stands. And nothing wrong with the Ten Commandments. There's nothing wrong with honoring your parents, with worshiping the only true God, with not murdering, with not stealing, with not lying.
There's nothing wrong with those things. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. Psalm 19. Well, you say, well, but that's Old Testament. Well, let's go to the New Testament.
And we'll close with this. Second Timothy, chapter three. Before I do this, I want to say, it is really hard preparing for Romans six and seven. And then there's Romans nine coming. It's just, you should know, I say that, so if you say to yourself, you know, yeah, when I get to certain sections of Romans, I don't understand what he's saying. Well, because it's so much history involved, so much culture involved, so many different personalities, twists and turns involved.
But once you begin to see those, you can get a handle on it. So coming back to this, Paul in the Old Testament, this is what he has to say about the Old Testament. In his second letter to Timothy, he's close to the end of his life.
He probably has another two years to live. Seems that way. We're not entirely sure. He says to Timothy that from childhood, you have known the Holy Scriptures.
Stop there. There was no New Testament when Timothy was a child. And so he's talking about the Old Testament. And he says they're Holy Scriptures, that from childhood, you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. Well, if Daniel could understand enough to be righteous, well, so can you. However, now that Christ has come, baked into that statement, he's saying, you have the Old Testament, you were raised with it, you should now be able to see Messiah has come.
You have both the old and now the new. Timothy's probably in his 30s at this time at least. And he continues, talking about the Old Testament, talking about the New Testament, he says all Scripture is given by inspiration of God. Does God breathe? The same way God breathed into the lump of clay that was Adam, that became Adam, God breathed life into the Scriptures. But without the Holy Spirit, you just have clay. And that was the problem of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Sanhedrin, those who took Christ to the cross. All Scripture is given by inspirations.
God breathed and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. And the world does not believe it. The world goes out of its way to say, no missionaries allowed. Leave these people to do the sins that they're doing and we're going to cover up all the misery that's happening in the lives of these people. You know, they come along and say, oh, the American Indians were so, they had such a good life before, you know, the Europeans came. Nonsense.
Read about Lewis and Clark expedition, how many Indians couldn't, just wanted to get away from the life that they had been subject to and knew no other life. That's just one place. Well, like the word of God, it is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. And that's why we come and we sit under the word.
And that's why you endure such short sermons as this. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross-Reference Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.
We're currently going through the book of Romans. If you're in need of hearing this message again, or want to listen to others like it, head over to crossreferenceradio.com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast too, so you'll never miss another edition. Just go to your favorite podcast app to subscribe. On our website, you'll be able to learn a little more about the ministry of Cross-Reference Radio. So make a note of it, crossreferenceradio.com. That's all we have time for today, but thanks so much for listening. Pastor Rick will be back next time in the book of Romans here on Cross-Reference Radio.
