And open your Bibles with me to the Book of Genesis, Chapter 3. The Book of Genesis, Chapter 3, verses 8 to 13. As we approach the end of the third chapter of Genesis, our pace is going to increase. The stage has been set now within these first three chapters, and the drama must play out throughout the long grind of the centuries of humanity. But the glorious news is that all of history is under the sovereign providence of the good and loving God, who works all things according to the counsel of his own will. And so as we turn now to the thrilling conclusion, we might say, as we keep moving forward here through the book of Genesis chapter three, give your attention to the reading of God's word. Genesis chapter three, verses eight to 13. Hear now the reading of the word of the Lord. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? The man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate. And the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. Thus far the reading of God's holy word. May he write its truth on our hearts. Let us go to him in prayer. Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for your word. Father, we give you thanks that your word is living and active, that it is sharper than any double-edged sword, piercing through the division of bone and of marrow and of soul and of spirit, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Father, we ask that you, Father, would use your word to pierce deep into our hearts, to show us the beloved one, to show us the Lord Jesus, that all that we need is in him. It's in his name we pray. Amen. Sin is sort of like a decaying corpse. It only gets worse. Perhaps to be a little less grotesque for you, sin is sort of like eating ice cream directly out of the tub. As you eat, there's less and less in the tub. It only gets worse. Such is the plot of many a movie. Such is the plot of many a movie trouble begins and it only gets worse. Such is the plot of movies like Fargo and of many horror movies. Such is the plot of Titanic and most disaster movies. Such is the plot of planes, trains, and automobiles. What about Bob, Jurassic Park, and even the Money Pit? Yes, all of these movies follow the same basic plot. It goes from bad to worse. And that is what happens with sin. Whether it be corpses or emptying ice cream tubs, or whether it be movies, sin only goes from bad to worse. And yet, and yet God can work good out of evil. God can work good out of evil. Christians should always have a mound of optimistic hope and a sober pessimism of man's failure. And that's what we should see here in our passage today. Today, we're going to see two more effects of sin. As you know, we've been looking at the effects of sin on this side of the fall. We've seen that there is shame, which comes because of sin, and we've seen that there is fear, which comes because of sin. And today, we're going to see two more. We're going to see that sin brings guilt, and we're going to see that it brings alienation. Alienation. Well, let's turn back to our passage now. Let's look again at starting in verse nine. Adam has hid himself and we read, but the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat? I want you to note something here as we read this passage. Notice how God phrases what he says to Adam. He says, have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you? not to eat. Back in Genesis 2, we have that the Lord had said to Adam, the Lord took the man, and it says, the Lord God commanded the man, saying in verse 16. And as one commentator points out, when we look at this, what is so interesting is when Satan comes to Eve and tempts her, he says, did God say? See, Satan downplays exactly what God did when he gave the command at the trees. He doesn't say commanded, he says said, and here God reiterates exactly what comes early in Genesis 2. Did I, which I commanded you, God gives a command, and Adam has disobeyed it, and now he is feeling guilt. He's dealing with great guilt. You see, sin makes a false promise. It promises pleasure. It promises pleasure in the moment. And when we engage in sin, we feel that tingling of pleasure and we say, I love this feeling. And then it dissipates so quickly into the feeling of death. To carry on with my food analogies, it's like eating a lollipop. And then you get to the gum on the inside and it's rotten. This is sin, and when our consciences aren't seared, you see we have a tenderness to our sin and to the guilt we feel, and we recognize that we have done something which we shouldn't. Some people, when they feel guilty, they are almost too sensitive, and they can feel guilty for something which they actually don't need to. They haven't done anything wrong, and they feel guilty for it. But it is the normal course of way for us that we do something wrong and we feel guilty for having done it wrong. But sin has so seared some people's consciences that they don't feel any guilt for their sin at all. It's a regular statement you might hear among Christians that, you know, eventually they'll feel their wrongdoing, eventually they'll repent, eventually they'll confess. But such is false thinking. For there are many people who sin, and they sin day in and day out regularly, and they don't feel any guilt for their sin whatsoever. Many people happily go about their days committing sin and feeling no guilt. Titus 3, where Paul is describing exactly what we were like before God showed us mercy, says that we all were passing our days in malice and envy. It's a description of what we are like all the time apart from God. We pass our days in malice and envy, hating one another and hated by one another, as he goes on to say. Such is, in a sense, the normal way of man in his sin, that we should feel no guilt for it. An unbeliever might simply say when he's sinned against, such is the way of life. such as his expression, this is just the way things are. People are mean to you, you're mean to them, you do what you need to. But John 16 tells us, John 16 tells us that it is the work of the Holy Spirit to convict people of sin. It is the Spirit's work to convict us of sin. You see, it is not just the fact that we feel guilt that convicts us of sin, it is the Spirit's work to convict us of sin. In 2 Corinthians 7, where Paul is talking to the Corinthian church, following their repentance after a previous letter, whether it be 1 Corinthians or a letter we no longer have, Paul describes their repentance for them as being a godly sorrow. And he says, you did not experience a worldly grief which leads to death. You see, he compares two types of confession, two types of repentance people can have in their life. They can have a worldly grief or a godly sorrow. And the real difference between these two is quite simple. Worldly grief hates the consequences of sin. Godly sorrow hates the sin itself. This is really the basic difference between the world's confession and true confession. One commentator, as he looks at this, as he looks at this passage, says that the guilt that Adam and Eve were feeling was not a false guilt. It was not the consequence of false guilt imposed on them by parent or by a social convention. It was true guilt arising from a violated conscience. Adam knew God's command, and he broke it, and he feels it, he knows it, and yet there's this part of him that refuses to turn to God. He feels guilt, and yet his guilt doesn't drive him back to the Lord, it turns him away. You see, he has a true guilt. See, there's feeling guilty, and then there's true guilt. And in the Hebrew, what we see in this, in Adam's response in verse 12, sorry, in verse 10, he says, and he said, I heard the sound of you. We talked about this, it could either be your sound, or it could be your voice. And in the Hebrew, the first word in Adam's response is your voice. As I've told you before, what comes first in a Hebrew sentence is what is emphasized. He's emphasizing, it is your voice I was afraid of. As one commentator points out, he's afraid of God's voice rather than his own sin. You see, what Adam is feeling here is worldly sorrow. It is worldly grief. It is a false form of guilt. It's not true guilt. Whether one feels guilty or not, whoever has sin has real guilt. You see, this is one of the things we need to recognize, is Adam here doesn't have true guilt, at least not yet. See, just as a criminal can commit a crime and feel no guilt over whatsoever, he can do it with, as he would think, just to be able to go about his life, such is the course of life. And yet if he were to stand before a judge and a jury and his crime was to be known, he would have true guilt even if he didn't feel it. This is the way it is for us before God and his law. Even though people may not feel guilty, they are guilty because God has written his moral law upon their hearts and he is the moral law giver. It is because of this that they feel guilt. We have a real guilt because of God's law being on our hearts. And so as we think about this, there's a reality to sin because of the fact that God has written it on our hearts. John Calvin, he writes and says, he, Adam, imputes his fear to the voice of God and to his own nakedness, as if he had never before heard God speaking without being alarmed and had not been even sweetly exhilarated by his speech. His excessive stupidity appears in this, that he fails to recognize the cause of shame in his sin. He, therefore, shows that he does not yet so feel his punishment as to confess his fault. See, for those who feel their guilt, they only turn away from God. This is what guilt does, it makes us afraid of him. Because God has threatened that those who break his law will be punished with death. There's one other aspect of guilt that's worth mentioning before we move on to alienation. So you see there are guilty feelings and those feelings can be wrong or right or missing. There's also legal guilt, as we've just considered. There's a true legal guilt before God, a forensic guilt, something we have because we've broken His law and we know it in our hearts. But there's also a third aspect of guilt. There is inherited guilt. There is inherited guilt. Just by being born into this world, a man has an inherited guilt, a natural guilt. This inherited guilt, this natural guilt, is not guilt natural in the sense of genetics. It's not like it's contained in our bodies somewhere. Rather, it's inherited in the sense of inheritance. You see, Adam was our federal representative. We talked about this when we talked about the covenant of works. Adam represented us as our federal head in the garden. And what he earns, we earn. And so the fact that he breaks God's law means he earns guilt. And so since we are in Adam covenantally as his children, we covenantally have guilt. This is an inherited guilt we have simply because we are Adam's children. This inherited guilt is what we call original sin. Mankind, by feeling, by legal standing, and by his own nature and covenant inheritance, is guilty before God. Well, the guilt of sin does something else. It produces something else. We've talked about this, how the guilt of sin is what produces that sense of shame and that sense of fear, and it also produces alienation. It also produces alienation. The guilt of sin brings terrible consequences upon Adam. As he is experiencing all this, he experiences shame, he experiences fear, he experiences guilt, and he also experiences alienation. That is, he's no longer, in a sense, at home with where he's at. It's as if he's a stranger. Adam and Eve are alienated from four things in particular, and we as their children are likewise alienated. The first thing, and it really doesn't surface so much in this passage, it comes rather later in the chapter and later in the book and later in the Bible, is that Adam and Eve are first alienated from nature itself, from the created world. Adam and Eve and their descendants, by the fall, by their sin, have lost a certain aspect of dominion over the creation. There is an alienation between us who are the image bearers of God, kings and queens of the world, and our subjects, the animals. Animals no longer willingly submit to man, but rather they are afraid of them and they attack them. And while some can be domesticated and they work with us, work for us, scripture actually later turns the wild animals into a covenant curse where they will attack the people. If you didn't know, C.S. Lewis has a sci-fi trilogy. Many of you are familiar with his Chronicles of Narnia or perhaps Mere Christianity or other books of his, but he also has a sci-fi trilogy. And in his sci-fi trilogy, the main protagonist goes to another planet. And while he's at this planet, what becomes clear is that this planet is actually a representation of the Earth if it were unaffected by sin. What would man find if he were to go to such a world? And while he's there, he encounters a woman, and what we find is that she's representative of Eve, if Eve were to be uncorrupted. And he sees this woman approaching him, riding on fish across a lake. She has so much control over the world around her and the animals around her, she can ride on them like water skis. If Adam and Eve water skied on the salmon in the creation, scripture doesn't tell us. But such a picture is worth pondering for just a moment. Man's relationship to his surroundings has been fundamentally changed. Man's surroundings, his relationship to the created world is fundamentally different now. Bacteria and viruses attack us from within. Animals attack us on the outside. The land does not yield its fruit and its produce to us in abundance like it did for Adam and Eve, but rather we see thorns and thistles growing. There's no place safe for us here in this world. The very weather turns into tornadoes and hurricanes and attacks us. The land produces landslides and earthquakes and attacks us. The scene swirls around us, batters us with its waves, and it engulfs us and swallows us. You see, here in this created world, there is no respite. And what this is pointing us to is the fact that we're not only alienated from the created world, but also from the garden. The garden was this place of peace and blessing from the Lord. The garden, in many ways, is symbolic for the place of God's blessing. There in the garden was where God's blessing was, and when they are kicked out of it, so they are also kicked out of the blessing. There in the garden, they had everything they needed. All their needs were provided for. They didn't even really need shelters. They were walking around naked. Sin, as we have already seen though, brings death. It brings death, and because the garden was also the fundamental place of the blessing of eternal life, there was the promise of eternal life to be had. When they are alienated from it, they lose access to this blessing of eternal life. Adam and Eve could not dwell any longer in a place of life because they were under the threat of death. And as we read though in our passage, we see that actually there's another aspect of alienation. In verse 12, after God has asked him, who told you that you were naked, Adam says, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. They're alienated not only from the created world, not only from the garden, but also from one another, but also from one another. We see this in the way that they are blaming one another. Adam points his finger at his wife and says, she made me do it. Like most men, when they say I was late because my wife was still getting ready, we haven't learned anything different over time. We're just repeating the same things our father did. He blamed his wife and so do we. The foolishness of the world, you see, is in thinking that they can mend the broken relationship between man and woman, or between fellow men, simply by enacting peace treaties, and business contracts, and covenantal relationships, and things of this sort. They form these relationships, but they have no true peace with one another, because they can have no true peace without God. We see this play out in our passage. We see in the way that God approaches the couple. Remember that God first gave the command to Adam and then he would have taught it to Eve. And when Satan tempted them, he went to Eve and then Adam sinned. Here though, God doesn't follow Satan's order. He doesn't go to the serpent first and then to Eve. He goes to Adam first. Adam was the head. He was head and God goes to him and he says, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I commanded you? One commentator, again, he points out here that the question here has a special use. What is happening here is that as God asks this question, he's really making a statement that says, surely you have eaten from the tree. It's not so much have you, but surely you have. God's asking rhetorical questions in other words here. Right? God is not confused. He's not blindsided as one unbelieving friend of mine once tried to say. He tried to say that you could watch in this and you see God evolving and changing and that he gets to this point where he realizes, uh-oh, I made a mistake. That's not what's going on here. God already knows and he's pressing Adam to agree with him with what he knows. He's asking him rhetorical questions. God is trying to draw Adam out of his hiding. He's saying, I already know. There's no need to hide Adam. God is speaking and working to elicit from Adam a confession of sin. But Adam, Adam's not going to do that. He doesn't repent. Adam's guilt and his new sinful nature is plain for all to see by his blame shifting. Adam blames Eve and God. Notice what he says, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate. Adam begins by first blaming God. He says, the reason I sinned is because of you, Lord. You did this to me. And then he also goes on and he blames his wife. And he says, she gave me the fruit as if it just plopped in his hand and then he just couldn't help but eating it because it was there. No, Adam is blaming God and Eve. In fact, Adam's blaming of Eve is quite emphatic here. We could translate it and say, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she, she gave me the fruit. So he uses the word she here, which isn't necessary in the Hebrew. They don't need to use pronouns in their language. But when he uses it, it's emphatic. He is pointing the blame at her, turning it from himself. The Venerable Bede, he was a medieval theologian and pastor back in the Middle Ages, probably around 700, 800. He had the burden of embarrassment, is what he writes. Adam had the burden of embarrassment, but not the humility for confession. God's questions were asked for our benefit so that we may perceive how pride oppresses people today. That is trying to assign blame to the creator if they do anything bad, and then wishing to assign approval to themselves if they do anything good. It's like Michael Scott in The Office. I want all the credit and none of the blame. Eve here is blaming. Eve, too, blames the serpent and God. And her statement is true. The serpent did deceive her. And in this way, she has a better defense than Adam, who was not deceived. She's making a statement. He deceived me. but it is God who made the serpent. And by Eve blaming the serpent for her sin, the most cunning of all the creatures of the field, yes, even him, Eve's excuse ultimately falls back on God. If you hadn't created the serpent and he hadn't come to me and tempted me and deceived me, I wouldn't have fallen. But like her husband, Eve blames Schiff's. She follows his lead, and she does not repent. The two of them are like Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts. They are working together. And yet both of them can confess exactly what they've done. At the end of verse 12 and the end of verse 13, the two of them say, and I ate. They both confess that they have eaten, and instead of directly answering, though, they seek to obfuscate what has been done. John Curd, Old Testament scholar says, not even small children need to be taught how to blame shift. You see this all the time. They do something wrong and they say, oh, they did it. It just happened. Only God's common grace, John Curd would go on to say, keeps people from doing this all the time. And as Adam and Eve blame not only one another and their relationship is ruined, they also are alienated from God. Lastly, we see sin alienates us from God. Adam and Eve had something quite special in the garden, as we saw last week. God walked among them regularly. His special presence was there with them, walking with them in the cool of the day. But like the prodigal son, Adam has now abandoned his father. He's running away from him. He's looking for life in another place. Adam tried to separate himself from God first by covering himself with leaves, and then by hiding behind trees, and then he tried to do it by hiding, and he tried to do it by blame shifting and denying his guilt. What is Adam doing here? Why is he doing this? The alienation that he experiences here is most profoundly stated on the lips of God himself. when he says there in verse nine, where are you? Where are you? God is here again asking that rhetorical question. God is omniscient, he's omnipresent. He doesn't need to know. He doesn't need an answer from Adam. Adam doesn't need to tell him. He's offering Adam a chance to repent, to not hide, but to come clean, to confess all before God. Why is Adam running from God when he knows this? Karl Truman in writing about this passage says that the reason why he is doing this is because, the reason why he covers himself with leaves, the reason why he hides is because there is no mediator for him between him and God. With no one to stand in the way between Adam and God, Adam's sin means he stands before God naked, he stands before him shamed, he stands before him fearful, alienated, and deeply guilty. Adam's guilt, you see, is lying heavy upon his shoulders here, and it's indicated by his behavior. Adam likely understood what the author of the Hebrew says in chapter four when he says, and no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. Adam's sin here, you see, is establishing the need for judgment day. As I've tried to point out to you that here in Genesis 1 to 3, we have the seeds of much of later theology in the Bible. Much of the Bible's theology is contained in these first three chapters, and even Judgment Day is here contained. Because in the resurrection on the Judgment Day, those who have sinned will be raised into their bodies to be judged by God, whether they have done good or evil. And even a speck of sin there on Judgment Day merits eternal death. Such a thought is enough to make us despair. It's enough to make some people scoff like it's a fairy tale. And it's enough to make some people try to mend what was broken. But man's attempts are quite pitiful at mending what's been broken. It's as if man was driving a Ferrari, and he crashed it and then drove it into a lake. And he came back to God and said, I'll pay you back for your Ferrari by opening a lemonade stand. And after I've sold enough lemonades for a quarter of pop, I'll pay you back. It just isn't going to happen. It's an impossibility. Because of our guilt and our hiding, things aren't always as they seem to us. Man's guilt drives us to do all kinds of strange things. One biblical council reports that there was a man who came to him with OCD for help. And he had a very strange behavior that he wanted help with. And his strange behavior was that whenever he would come home, he had to drive around his neighborhood in a particular pattern before he could enter into his home. And as the counselor dug deeper into what was going on, he found that the man was struggling deeply with pornography and was incredibly guilty over it. And the man, trying to reason through his guilt, said, I know how I'll make amends. I'll drive around my neighborhood. And after I've gone around my neighborhood enough times, then God will be OK with me. The man repented of his sin, and he stopped his driving. This is but one of thousands of ways people try to deal with the guilt of their sin. We try to absolve our guilt with foolish things, but no matter how many elaborate rituals we make. No matter how many old ladies we help across the street, no matter how many charities we support, no matter how many ways we try to build our children and grandchildren up to live moral and wholesome lives, no matter how big our bank account is or how nice our house is, or no matter how good our voting record is, no matter how anything we have is, none of it matters and none of it can help us with this terrible problem of guilt. None of it can help us. Oh sure, you might feel a little less guilty when you try to justify yourself before God by your works. You're saying, God, look at the good things I've done. Aren't you pleased with me? And surely God delights to see people doing good things. And yet it is not enough to justify them in their sin, to undo their terrible sinning. If you dig deep enough into your own heart and into your own sin, you will realize you are yet more guilty than you imagined. And after you've done everything you can to try to absolve yourself of sin, you will lament and you will grieve and you'll say, woe is me, I've done all I could and it was not enough. My guilt remains. Some speak of trying to get their burden and their guilt off of their shoulders and so they say, if I can just confess it to someone and just have someone to tell, I'll feel better, I'll feel so relieved because now it'll be out in the open. And surely that's true. Guilt causes us to hide, as we see here with Adam. His guilt drove him to hide from the Lord. But often this type of confession is little more than self-soothing. It's just trying to make oneself feel better. It's rather more just a subtle form of legalism. False confession, like Adam and Eve's, is claiming, I ate, but refusing to receive the consequences. True confession is not only admitting you've done something wrong, but it is agreeing with God about His judgment, about your sin, and about yourself for what you have done. It is to say, I have done wrong against the commandment of the Lord, and by the commandment of the Lord, I deserve death. And so as we read through this passage, we see these two effects of sin. We see guilt, and we see how it alienates us from the world around us and from the garden, and it alienates us from one another, and it alienates us especially from God. And part of what we read through in this passage depends, and how we understand this passage depends upon how we read God's tone. Just what does God sound like in this moment to Adam and Eve? What does he sound like? Is God angry and harsh here? Or is he merciful? Is he merciful and gentle? How you read this passage makes a difference. Is God thundering at us saying, Adam, where are you? What is this you've done? Or is he merciful and compassionate? Is he calling out to them? Is he saying, Adam, where are you? What are you doing? What are you doing? Stop running. Stop hiding. Stop pretending. Come to me that your soul may live. One of the Reformers, he says, God admonishes us so that through repentance we should cease from sin. Satan admonishes and mocks us so that those who have already been seduced into sin are struck down and perish altogether through despair. Here, however, you see that our inner selves have been most beautifully described, how we are crushed within ourselves and seek everywhere a way of escape, although none appears until we are converted of God. See, God doesn't condemn us. We stand condemned already. Yes, he will pronounce that the judgment for sin is death, and yet that's not why God needs to come here. He doesn't need to remind Adam. It's clear for Adam. He's covering himself. He's hiding. No, rather it's as the same reformer continues. He says, God does not do with mankind what was merited by the magnitude of the sin. Adam, together with all his posterity, deserved to be completely rejected and wholly condemned. Nevertheless, God gave both to him and to his posterity room for repentance. And he did so through the Redeemer, out of pure kindness and without provocation. Why is it God didn't strike Adam and Eve dead on the spot there? Why didn't the lightning rain down and execute them? Because as this reformer says, one day God would send his own son to be struck for them on the cross. The burden of guilt you see weighs heavy upon the shoulders of the souls of men. But in Christ, God kills our guilt. In Christ, God kills our guilt. You see, when John Bunyan's Christian in Pilgrim's Progress leaves the city of destruction, he leaves carrying a burden on his back, and he's trying to get rid of this burden, and no one can help him. And eventually, a man named Mr. Legality comes along, and he says, I know how you can get rid of your burden. Just climb Mount Sinai, and on the other side of it, you'll find the village called Morality. and there you'll be able to get rid of your burden, you'll live a nice life, Mr. Civility is there, and it'll be a wonderful time. And so Christian, diverting from the straight and narrow road to the wicked gate, follows his advice, and he tries to climb Mount Sinai, obeying all the laws and the commands, and all it does is crush him and threaten him. But when Evangelist comes and points him again to the wicked gate, and he gets back on the straight and narrow path, And after entering through the gate, he eventually comes to the foot of the cross. And there, merely by the sight of the cross, the burden on his back rolls away and is never to be had again, never to return. You see, when we turn to the cross, everything changes. Everything changes at the cross. Adam here is hiding before God because there is no cross between him and God. But brothers and sisters, between us is our crucified Savior, who bears our sins and our weaknesses in his sinless soul, and by his blood he brings us forgiveness. In Christ is contained, you see, the whole of our salvation, not just a part, but all of it. It is in Him. It is in Him. Everything we need, all we need is found there in Him. For our great guilt, everything is found in Him. For when Christ suffered for our sins, He also expiated our guilt. He expiated our guilt. That's a nice fancy church word for you. It means to take away. He took away our guilt. See, in speaking of taking away our sin and guilt, the author to the Hebrew says in chapter 10, and by that will, we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. You see, in Christ's single sacrifice, what has happened is he atones for our sin, he expiates our guilt, and he sanctifies us. That means to make holy, he makes us holy. And because we are holy, that means we are restored into the presence of God. We are no longer alienated from Him, but we are brought in, and as other people are redeemed by the cross of Christ, they too have their sin expiated, their guilt expiated, and they are made holy, and they come to have fellowship with us. You see, no one can be holy but those who have no sin. And so you say, well, Taylor, I look at my sin and I sin every day. I sin in thought, word, and deed every day. How can I be holy? How can I be holy? Well, the answer, brothers and sisters, is the holiness is not your own, but it is Christ's holiness. It is Christ's holiness granted to you by faith. As Adam's children, you see, we have no holiness. Just as our father Adam lost his holiness here, but in Christ we become holy children of the Father. In Jesus we are made new and we can walk before God in holiness. We can be together with him again. And we can strive in our holiness after a new obedience. We can strive to live a holy life with no fear of our guilt because it's been expiated, it's been taken away. For Christ has taken away such things that we might cease to sin What you do, what you must do, is merely to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and to live your life in repentance of your sin, trusting in the Lord Jesus. Let us therefore live a life pleasing to God, obeying His commandments, and walking His love and holiness. And we will have no reason, when Christ comes again, to shrink back from Him in shame. We will have no reason to feel guilty. Martin Luther, The great reformer was tormented by his own guilt. Before he came to understand his justification in Christ, he could say of himself, he says, I torment myself to death to procure peace with God for my troubled heart and my agitated conscience. But I was surrounded by horrible darkness and I could find peace nowhere. Luther was wracked by his guilt, so much so that when a lightning bolt did strike in front of him and didn't kill him, he cried out and said, Saint Anne, I will become a monk, as if somehow this would please God. And so he lives the life of a monk, and he devotes himself to the life of a monk, and he can say, if ever a monk got to heaven by monkery, I would have gotten there. But it was not enough. He continued to be tormented by his guilt. And so he says of this as he was a professor studying the book of Romans, preparing to teach his students, he said, I labored diligently and anxiously as to how to understand Paul's words in Romans 117, where he says the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel. I saw the difference. The law is one thing and gospel another. I broke through and as I had formerly hated the expression, the righteousness of God, I now began to regard it as my dearest and most comforting word. So that this expression of Paul's became to me in very truth, a gate to paradise. For Luther, it is the righteousness of Christ. that is the gateway into paradise. Paradise, you see, is one way of describing the Garden of Eden. To this restoration, Luther says it's found in Christ. In believing in him, the solution is God's own righteousness granted to us in place of our guilt by faith. May your faith then, brothers and sisters, rest in Christ. May it turn to him. May you believe in him and rest in him and find all your comfort there. May his righteousness and his holiness satisfy the deepest longings of your heart. And may you believe in him and know, and may you know that your guilt has been atoned for. Your sins have been forgiven and they have been expiated from you and you are welcomed back into the presence of the Father himself. For Jesus Christ, you see, is the lamb who takes away the sins of the world. Praise be to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, who has worked this most wonderful forgiveness and redemption for us. Praise be to his glorious name and his wonderful work of salvation. Amen and amen. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, You have forgiven us our guilt. Make us to relish the Lord Jesus Christ and to cling to him, to hold to him and to look to him. Father, there is no condemnation for us who are in Christ Jesus. He has set us free. He has set us free from the law, from the law of sin and death and from the guilt of sin. May the people of Stonebridge, Lord, glory in this truth that in Christ they are no longer guilty before you. but they stand forgiven, and they stand as your children. It's in Christ's name we pray.