John chapter 14, our topic, our love to God considered. Last time we looked at the love of God considered, now we're looking at our duty, our love to God. And I'm pretty sick, so this'll be kinda short. I got a bad cold. Preaching in a church full of children, and when there's a lot of children, everybody gets sick. Verse 23, Jesus answered and said to him, if anyone loves me, he will keep my commandments. Excuse me, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word. And my father will love him and will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me does not keep my words. And the words which you hear is not mine, but the father's who sent me. And we'll stop there. Now earlier we noted that the expression of the love of God in Greek can mean either God's love for us or our love to God. It's ambiguous in Greek. Although in Paul's epistles the love of God is virtually always speaking about God's love for man, and that's the preferred interpretation because of that fact. The vagueness of the Greek, the purpose of the Lord's love and the fact that this section is dealing with life and behavior indicates that the two senses or interpretations are likely to be combined in application and interwoven in the way that we think about love. Now I'm going to talk about our love to God, but if Paul's praying for God to increase our love, why is he doing that? So we'll have more love toward God. So either way, the application is essentially the same. And we should be praying for God to increase our love to Christ every day, multiple times a day, because we're dependent on the Holy Spirit, as we'll see in a moment. Therefore, as we keep in our mind the primary focus of God's love to us, we must also reflect on the secondary idea of our love to God. Paul's prayer then will be that the inner meditation of believers will be so focused on God's love for them that this increased knowledge will lead to a greater love and faithfulness to God. As we study our love to God, there are a number of crucial things that make up and define this love. First, our love to God is a covenant love. established and defined by God himself. Let me read a passage, 1 John 4, 9-11. In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. So the foundation of everything in the Christian life is God's love toward us. The covenant of redemption, which resulted in him sending Jesus into the world to die on the cross for our sins. God's salvation, which flows from his covenant love, establishes an ultimate spiritual relationship, an intimate spiritual relationship. And this salvific spiritual communion that is established by Jesus' vicarious sacrifice, and for review, what does that mean? Expiation, sin, guilt, and your liability of punishment is removed by Christ's death. The suffering you deserved is placed on Him on the cross. Propitiation, which we just read in John, That means God's wrath against sin is removed because sin is removed. Once the guilt is removed, there's no longer any reason for God to be angry with you at all. God is propitiated. Reconciliation. Yahweh is reconciled with the believer and fellowship with God is established. They logically follow one another. This results in both an ability to love God through regeneration by the Spirit and an obligation to love God who has saved us from the guilt, pollution, and slavery to sin. The covenant of salvation, and when you think covenant, think a marriage covenant. The covenant of salvation that flows from God's love, grace, and mercy establishes covenant obligations. That's why we see love connected to keeping God's commandments repeatedly in the Bible. And this great truth is seen, here's Exodus 19, four to five. They're gathering at the mountain, at Mount Sinai to receive the law. You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bound you on eagle's wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to me above all people. Salvation, and then covenant obligations, covenant stipulations. Like a marriage, there's marriage vows, and there's things you promise to be faithful through sickness and death and health and all these things with your wife. Note also the pattern of the Ten Commandments, the same pattern. This is from Exodus 22 to three. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, and then thus begin the Ten Commandments. He shall have no other gods before me. When you marry your wife or you marry your husband, you take a vow. I'm with you till death. Till death do us part. Unless obviously somebody commits adultery or something. Divorce is justifiable scripturally. But till death do you part. It's a covenant. Before Yahweh commanded Israel how to live in a holy relationship with Himself, and for lack of a better term, we call these covenant stipulations, or covenant obligations, He first identifies Himself as their Redeemer. Salvation was to lead to a keeping of God's commandments. You shall be holy for I am holy. I saved you, I brought you to myself for you to obey me, to obey my commandments. Now all of this, of course, is typical of what Jesus will accomplish at the cross. God's people are saved from sin and slavery to Satan, and the corrupt fallen dominion of sin over them. For example, Romans 6 to 18. The words of Yahweh to Israel which flows from the foundation of all that, forms the foundation of everything that follows, it's the foundation of all the law, and is indispensable to the whole covenant law, speak specifically of the Lord's loving act of redemption. Grace. than law. Love, salvation, then covenant obligations. Those people brought out of Egypt have gone from being oppressed slaves to the status of God's special people to whom Yahweh has given himself. That's why it's compared to a marriage covenant in the Gospels and in the book of Revelation. The Lord's giving of salvation and grace comes before law. The law does not save, but it's the obligation of salvation. Sanctification always follows justification. God's love in Christ is the reason and motivating force in a Christian's life. The basis of our obligation to love God is not simply God's absolute authority as Lord, creator, and sustainer of all things, and that's certainly true. That's why everybody, whether you're a Christian or not, you can be an atheist or a Buddhist. Everybody is obligated to obey Yahweh because he's the creator. Every atom of the universe is upheld by his power. But it's also rooted in Yahweh saving love toward us. So we have a double obligation. The incarnation, suffering, and death of God's only begotten son is the visible, historical proof of Yahweh's love towards his people, the elect. It's covenant law. It's personalistic law. It's a document of love. The father did not spare his one and only son, completely unique divine son, but gave him to his people throughout the whole world. His vicarious bloody death and resurrection gave us life so that we could be as the Lord's own bride and his precious children. And what is amazing, and the Bible emphasizes this, is he did it while we were still sinners, while we were ungodly, Romans 5, 6-8. He died for his enemies. He died for those who hate him. He died for people in rebellion and guilt. Yahweh's saving love took people with sinful, depraved minds. They'd hated God. and me against his rule, he removed their guilt and he gave them new hearts of flesh so they could love and serve Christ. All the people who are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness and rebellion against God, that's love. All love, goodness, and grace originates with God, not with man. 1 John 4.19, we love him because he first loved us. 2 Thessalonians 2.16-17, now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and our God and Father who has loved us and given us everlasting consolation and good hope by grace, comfort your hearts and establish you in every good word and work. And that's why it's critical that we obey the gospel, which is Calvinism or Augustinianism. The idea that God loves people and he sends them to hell is an abomination. It's a wicked doctrine. He only loves the elect. Second, our love toward God is demonstrated through our obedience and faithfulness to the Lord's covenant law work. The Bible's crystal clear about this. Our faith in Jesus Christ and his perfect redemption results in repentance, confession, and a commitment to permanent discipleship under the Savior. Because Yahweh is infinitely holy and righteous, and we are redeemed from the guilt and pollution of sin, God's terms are stipulations for the maintenance of a loving relationship, are primarily ethical. And I'm using ethical in a broad sense. It includes the first table of law. It includes biblical worship. It includes not celebrating Christmas. It includes exclusive psalmody. It includes everything that God requires. We're not allowed to have human autonomy and do whatever we want. We have to submit to the word of God, even when we don't want to. You might want 10 wives, but God says you can only have one. You might wanna have premarital sex, but God says you gotta wait till you're married. You have to obey. That shows your love toward God. The moral law as a way of life, separation unto God, holiness or sanctification, is not oppressive, but rather sets forth the stipulations of love, first and foremost unto God, our Father in Jesus Christ, our special spiritual covenantal husband, and also other men. The focus of the whole Christian life is to be on covenant keeping or living out our love towards God in our thinking, speaking, and living. That's what it means to be a disciple of Christ. Go to all nations. Disciple them. Baptize them. Teach them everything I've commanded you. Why? That's the obligation of becoming a Christian. To obey what Christ has commanded. We don't be saved so we can have a fire escape from hell and go out and fornicate and start coke. We are saved to submit to Christ and bow the knee to him and obey him. Moses in his restatement of the covenant law says this, this is Deuteronomy 5.33. You shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God has commanded you. in order that you may live and that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which the Lord, which you shall possess. So you have covenant stipulations, and you have promises of blessings, and of course, there'll be promises of cursings. And this same point is emphasized toward the end of Moses' covenant renewal preaching in Deuteronomy 21.99. Therefore, Keep the words of this covenant and do them in order that you may prosper in all that you do. So all these preachers today, they have the prosperity gospel, name it and claim it, Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, these total heretics, that knucklehead down there in Houston with a big mega church. No, if you want prosperity, you obey God's moral law and you live your life totally for Christ. That doesn't mean you're going to be rich. It doesn't mean you're going to be driving a Lexus or a Cadillac, but it means you will prosper and you will be blessed. And if you do the other thing, you'll be cursed. This crucial teaching regarding covenant faithfulness, personal and corporate holiness or sanctification has been largely ignored in our day. Due to the negative effect of dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is taught in virtually all evangelical churches. Some are much worse than others. It's been modified. It's been watered down. It's even affected somebody as good as MacArthur. He's got his premillennial semi-dispensationalism. And this is a heretical teaching that the whole Old Testament law was only for Israel and does not apply today, even the moral law. That's for Israel. That doesn't apply to us. While it's important to recognize that the ceremonial law is those laws which typify Christ and his ministry through shadows or beggarly elements, Galatians 4, 3, and 9, which Paul calls the middle wall of separation, Ephesians 2, 14, as well as laws that symbolize separation from the heath under sanctification, the dietary laws, the laws against planting different kind of crops together or mixing different kind of threads together, Those have nothing to do with health regulations. They're to teach them separation from the heathen. Their laws of sanctification are all abrogated, as well as any civil laws that are specifically tied to Israel as a nation. For example, their borders, their method of tax collection, and so forth. But the moral laws, whether moral natural laws that are based on God's nature and character or moral positive laws that are intended to be universal and for all time, they honestly apply to all the nations. They apply today. While the Old Testament focuses our attention on covenant faithfulness, The New Testament simply speaks of our obedience to God's law as an expression of our love toward Jesus Christ and God. They're both teaching the same thing, just slightly different. They're just using different terms. You could talk about, I am covenantally faithful to my wife. What does that mean? I love my wife. I don't commit adultery. I'm a good husband to my wife. I love her. I'm not unfaithful to her. Or you could talk about simply loving your wife and what that means biblically. Jesus said, if you love me, keep my commandments, John 14, 15. John 14, 21, he who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my father and I will love him and manifest myself to him. Covenant language, the language of marriage. Love toward Christ is a spring of true faith. Love to God evidences itself by doing God's revealed will. When we speak of a husband or a wife's loyalty and love toward their spouse, it always centers around faithfulness. You meet these guys, oh, I love my wife so much, I bought her a diamond ring. Well, they're not committing adultery. No, you don't love your wife, you're scum. Your wife should dump you. unfaithfulness reveals a lack of love and covenant loyalty. As Christians, we have an obligation to read and know God's commandments. Just read Psalm 19, 1st Gapel. But if we do not obey them, our profession is false in vain. You know, you're stealing, you're cursing, you're hanging out with pagans. you're fornicating, you're taking drugs, et cetera. Those who learn and habitually obey them are the ones who really love Christ. We prove our love by our obedience, our covenant faithfulness. And our sanctified life demonstrates that Jesus is our Lord and husband and God is our father. So we must pick up our cross daily, we must deny ourselves and follow the Savior and strive to keep Christ's commandments for Jesus has loved us and saved us. How evil and wicked it is to make a profession of faith in Christ and say that you believe the word of God and say that you've repented of your sins after all this amazing love and then not obey Christ and not follow him and not seek to be a good Christian and not seek to be faithful, how wicked that is. People who profess Christ and fall away and go back to the world will suffer more in hell than those people who never heard the gospel. Because outwardly they were in the covenant. Outwardly they profess faith and outwardly there was this covenant relationship, but they spit in the face of Christ and they counted him unworthy. and they didn't love him. That's totally wickedness. God's love comes to us through Christ, and our love and obedience toward God is offered up through Christ. It's all through Christ. Our love of the Redeemer is the source and motivating factor in our obedience to scripture. And we test this love by our faithfulness to the commandments. Disobedience is to be implicit and automatic. Because subjecting God's law to autonomous human reason or our own subjective opinions or our emotions is nothing but rebellion. This attitude, I'm going to go to the Bible and treat it as a smorgasbord. And the commandments that I like, I'll obey those. And the commandments I don't like, I'm going to justify rebelling against them. Such thinking results from self-love instead of the true love of God. By accepting and following Jesus' commands, we demonstrate our trust in his authority, wisdom, and truth. We follow our Lord's commands impartially and fully, whether we fully agree or understand them or not. J. Adams is great on this. You get married, you're gonna be married, you might be married for 50, 60 years. You might not have all those wonderful emotions you had when you were young. You obey scripture, whether the emotions are there or not, and the emotions will follow. You don't follow your emotions if they contradict the word of God. You obey scripture, and those emotions will get in line. Because we believe in Jesus as Lord and bow the knee to his authority, we do not get to pick and choose which doctrines or commandments we would like to follow. It amazes me that shows the complete rebelliousness of modern evangelicalism and even reformed churches with their loose subscriptionism. Faithfulness involves a folk appliance. We must not be led astray by our own emotions or our surrounding pagan culture or even the backslidden corrupt forms of Christianity that are dominant in our nation. Don't be influenced by the modern, lukewarm, saltless, reformed churches whose worship is no different than a pagan church or charismatic church. Don't be influenced by that. The great enemy of covenant faithfulness is syncretism. Read the book of Judges. Read 1st and 2nd Kings and 1st and 2nd Chronicles. The enemy of obedience is syncretism with pagan culture. The common error among professing Christians in our day is the thoroughly unbiblical idea that first table violations, that is laws relating to our duty to God, in the fifth commandment, one toward to parents is kind of in the middle there, because it's your attitude, how you treat your parents really is reflective of how you treat God. If you show disrespect to your parents and treat them like dirt, it shows you really hate God. That's why it's regarded as part of the first table, but it's a transition commandment. The idea that these first table commandments are thoroughly are okay to break, they're somehow less sinful, less serious, and it's less rebellious to disobey them. That is a common attitude today among theonomists, most reformed people, evangelicals. What kind of attitude is that? It's totally pagan. Such perverted thinking permeates the Christian Reconstruction movement and evangelicalism. It permeates CREC, C-R-E-C, or whatever it's called, with Doug Wilson and those guys, with their Romanizing doctrines and their Romanizing worship. It permeates that. We have to hate false worship. We have to treat false worship like we treat adultery. We have to treat false worship like we treat homosexuality. God hates it. It's not acceptable. And this attitude that we can break the first table of the law, that's so common today and it's no big deal, what your worship is like, that's crazy. The common practice of loose subscriptionism to the excellent biblical attainments of our covenant of reformation is a sign of covenant unfaithfulness. It is the corporate governmental acceptance of corruption in doctrine, worship, and discipline. Why is the wonderful doctrine of covenanting, which is so predominant, remember the original Presbyterians were called covenanters. And by covenanting, you swear to uphold the attainments of the Reformation. We've got these great attainments. This idea that covenanting is stupid and bad, it just shows a declined church. It doesn't care about the truth anymore, like it should. It is nothing less than the toleration of sin and error in the name of false unity and a humanistic pagan concept of love. This idea of ecumenicalism, where we're going to ignore our differences, we're going to ignore our differences in worship, we're going to ignore our differences in doctrine, we're all going to shake hands and give communion to each other and pretend that these things don't exist in the name of love and unity, is satanic and pagan to the very core. What happened when they covenanted under Josiah the king? a great reformation in the South. Godly people from the North moved to the South. They didn't stay up there and say, well, churches are corrupt. They're all corrupt. Besides, my business is here. No, they moved to the South. Remember that Paul says that love, quote, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth, 1 Corinthians 13.6. In addition, true love to Christ, we are told by Paul, never fails, 1 Corinthians 13.8. That is, it perseveres to the very end through trials, tribulations, heartaches, setbacks. Life is rough. There's gonna be things that make you upset, that are terrible. And what do you do? You move forward in the faith, and you follow Christ. You pick up your cross, you follow him. Due to the sealing and preserving power of the Holy Spirit, a real Christian will never stop loving and obeying our Savior. Never. 1 John 4, 7-8. Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God. And everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. That doesn't mean just love the best Christians, that means love all Christians. That doesn't mean compromising doctrine, but that means treating people with gentleness and kindness. working with them for reformation, working for them for sanctification. And when somebody repents of sin, because everybody falls into sin, you forgive them. And you don't treat them like dirt, which is a common practice of Reformed churches today. I've seen people, they sin, they repent, they're outcasts the rest of their life. Totally pagan way of thinking about love. Our love of Christ also involves a love for his covenant people. 1 John 5, 1 to 3, whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. That means you're born again if you believe that. And everyone who loves him, who begot, also loves who has begotten of him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. Do you gossip about your brethren behind his back? then you're not loving God because you're not loving your brethren. Do you hate people in the church over stupid, trifle things that are not important? Then you don't love God, John says. Are you willing to follow Matthew 18 and work for biblical reconciliation and then forgive somebody if they repent? If you're not willing to do that, then you don't really love God. And I've been in denominations where people don't do that, where elders don't do that. Oh, I don't like Bob. Bob, get out of my church. They don't even try to argue from Scripture. They act like a bunch of Roman Catholic priests. No, we submit to Scripture, we love the brethren, and we love people, whether they're great Christians or they're baby Christians and they're struggling. You love them all. When Jesus, the Apostle John, and Paul speaks of love as fulfilling God's law, the focus is on God's moral law. comprehensively considered, which includes everything the Lord requires of us. Remember, Matthew 18, that's based on Leviticus 18. I think it's Leviticus 18. A lot of what Jesus says in the New Testament comes right out of the Old Testament. He may clarify against the errors of the Pharisees, but he's basically reasserting the law of God. And this point is made clear in Romans 13, eight to 10. Owe no one anything except to love one another. For he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet. And if there's any other commandment, all are summed up in the same. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law. Now in this passage, Paul is dealing with love to our fellow man, this is in a section on sanctification, and thus does not quote the first table of the law, even though the first commandments still obviously apply. Biblical love fulfills the law in all matters relating to God and man. You can look this up later, Deuteronomy 6.5, Leviticus 19.18, Matthew 5.43, 19.19, 22.39, Mark 12.31. Fulfill, by the way, is a richer term than obey. It means that the law has received the full measure of that which it requires. The completeness of conformity is emphasized and expressed. See Galatians 5.14. Genuine Christian love seeks diligently to fulfill all of God's specific commands relating both to our duty towards God and our responsibilities to man. So the Christmas season's coming up. Everybody loves Christmas. Oh, it's wonderful. It's sinful, it's wicked. Why? It's not commanded. It's based on paganism. It's not in the scriptures. Christ wasn't born in December, so it's a lie. So if you really love God, you're gonna take Christmas and you're gonna chuck it in the dumpster where it belongs. Love sees the perfections and beauty of God and Christ and thus wants to obey and strives to fulfill. Love sees man is created in God's image with dignity and purpose and thus honors the Lord by seeking their good. Love defined by scripture informs our emotions and gives the proper motive for biblical action. True love is selfless in the sense that it always seeks to promote the glory of God and the kingdom of Christ. Most Christians think today in terms of economics, oh, I want to make as much money as possible. Well, let's put the kingdom of God first. Let's put the kingdom of God first. You need money to live. Money is important. You want to leave money to your children and your children's children if possible. Kingdom of God comes first. True love is selfless. It is only through this biblical love that the law is fulfilled sincerely, with correct motives and attitudes. Genuine love must never be separated from God's revealed moral law, for it is the law of God that love fulfills. If men were not fallen, if Adam had never sinned, and men thus possessed perfect love, there would be perfect observance of God's moral law, wouldn't there be? And the only man in human history who loved perfectly, who obeyed the law perfectly, is Jesus Christ, the divine human mediator. The law of love does not reduce love to a mere emotion or a frame of mind, but connects love as co-relative to law, which is manifested in our thinking, speech, and outward behavior. What do you think, look at David, read Psalm 119. David is obsessed with the law of God. He meditates on it day and night. He memorizes it. He puts it in his heart that he might not sin against God because it's the document of our covenantal love to God. So you want to know what that law says and you want to obey that law. True love towards man does not flow except from the love of God and it is its evidence and, as it were, its effects. This intimate connection by the Old Testament, Jesus and the apostles between covenant or Christian love and the fulfillment of God's moral law is crucial in our time. Given the current rejection of God's law in evangelical, charismatic, and even supposedly reformed circles in our day, there's a whole movement in reformed circles today to reject the revealed law of God for, quote, natural law, whatever that is. I have a whole book on this. Natural law today is a smokescreen for simply rejecting what the Bible says. We find ministers and scholars teaching that the whole Old Testament law has been abrogated, and thus has been replaced by the law of love. I was taught that when I was a charismatic. Christians, we are told, simply are to follow some inner impulse of love to lead an ethical life. Others will argue that the Old Testament revealed law has been replaced by an inner subjective leadings of the Holy Spirit. That's another thing I was taught as a charismatic. The ethical good life involves being sensitive and obedient to these inner leadings of the Spirit. This view, which is somewhat popular in dispensational charismatic circles, finds its support in their view of passages such as Galatians 5.1. Stand fast in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and, especially Galatians 5.16, walk in the spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. Well, such thinking is antinomian and dangerous. It's totally subjective. And it easily refuted by the following biblical considerations. Number one, Jesus explicitly said that he'd not come to destroy, annul, or abrogate God's moral law, but to fulfill it. Matthew 5, 17 to 18. I didn't come to get rid of the law. I'm gonna fill it up. I'm gonna fill it to the fullest. By my death and resurrection, and the efficacy of my death and resurrection, the Holy Spirit will come unto men. and then they'll obey the law from the heart. Therefore he requires Christians to follow even what people may regard as the least of commandments, Matthew 5.19. And he commands his disciples to be more righteous than the Pharisees and he refutes their perversion of the moral law through their traditions, Matthew 5.20-48. That's what Jesus says about the law. Now I know that dispensationalists have their arguments where they completely pervert what Jesus says and they turn it upside down. But we reject these heretics. They're a bunch of heretics. Number two, Christ and the apostles quote approvingly of the Old Testament moral law and even from moral laws outside the Ten Commandments. We just read Paul quoting the second table of the law in Romans. And there's many other places. I didn't bother to look them up. I'll look them up later. I've put parentheses here. But the point is, you don't quote things that you don't think are authoritative and abrogated. Why would you quote them if it was abrogated? That's ridiculous. Three, our Lord and apostles make it perfectly clear that the Holy Spirit uses the Word of God to sanctify believers. It's not some mystical thing. It's not a mystical leading of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit applies the Word of God to your heart. John 17, 17. Sanctify thine by thy truth, thy word is truth. 1 Peter 1, 22. 1 Peter 2, 2. Psalm 40, verse 8, 119, 7, 11, 27, 36, 48, et cetera. The Holy Spirit applies God's word to the heart, which brings conviction, and this informed attitude and biblical mindset leads to biblical behavior. These are called, and all the Reformed creeds and confessions talk about this, the means of grace. What are the means of grace? Well, there's the reading of the Bible, there's the preaching of the Bible, There's the singing of the Bible. There's the Lord's Supper interpreted according to the Bible. All our sanctification, all the means of grace are connected to the scriptures, not some mystical experience. The Holy Spirit uses means and sanctification. The common charismatic position is based on mysticism and irrationalism. What do you do when two people disagree? And when I was charismatic, I'd see this all the time. My name's Bill and God told me to marry Sarah over here. Sarah, you gotta marry me, God told me. Well, how do you know if God told her? Maybe he didn't, maybe Sarah disagrees. When everything's based on the word of God, we can all go to the word of God and say, yep, Bill, this doctrine here or this teaching, you're right, I was wrong. The Bible teaches us clearly, I was wrong, I repent. 4. To walk in the Spirit, therefore, means that we live our lives according to the Word of God, and this means that God's moral law is the standard of sanctification. It has nothing to do with being justified, but once you're saved, once you're justified by Christ and His death and resurrection, you're sanctified by the Holy Spirit as it applies the Word of God to your heart. When David said, Psalm 119, one to two, blessed are the undefiled in the way who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep his testimonies. He is obviously not speaking of salvation by law, which is strongly condemned throughout the whole Bible. But the need to study, learn, meditate on, and understand God's moral law so that we will grow in sanctification or personal holiness over time. Why should you read the Bible every day and pray when you read the Bible? Why? Because that's how the Holy Spirit uses that to sanctify you. Now, I remember when I first became a Christian, I read the Bible like a madman. I was reading the Bible 12 hours a day. And all that reading of the Bible, now I'm thinking the Holy Spirit pops a verse into my head. It's super helpful for sanctification. But does not Paul say, if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law? Galatians 5.18 and Romans 6.14, you are not under law, but under grace. These are the great proof texts of dispensationalists. Well, yes, he does. But these passages are often misunderstood. The apostle is speaking against Jews or Judaizers who rejected Christ alone who rejected Christ because they believed in salvation through keeping the law. That's the context. Look at the context. If one does not believe in Jesus as he is revealed in scripture, and depends on works righteousness for justification before God, then one is not united to the Savior in his death and resurrection. Romans 6, 2 to 18, Galatians 5, 25. And one does not possess the Holy Spirit. Well, if you're not united to Christ and you don't possess the Holy Spirit, you can't be sanctified. With other regenerating and sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit which is given to believers due to the efficacy of Jesus' work, his redemptive work, when a spiritually impotent And one is still controlled by the sinful flesh. That is why Jews and Muslims are so immoral. Now Jews, some Jews, Orthodox Jews are outwardly immoral. They try to have families, but Islam and Judaism, they don't have the Holy Spirit. That's why they're so, especially Muslims. Muslims are extremely immoral, violent, sexual immorality, homosexuality. That guy who just got shot in the head over there, the leader of Hamas, the guy was a sodomite. Yeah, he was a sodomite. And a lot of us Taliban, they have little children they keep for sex. They're pedophiles. Only the Holy Spirit can set us free from the dominion of sin. The law of God cannot do anything to justify a sinner. It also has no power to relieve a person from the bondage of sin. That's not what it's for. It gives commands, it pronounces curse against violations of the law, and apart from regeneration, incites the sinner to more aggravated transgressions, Romans 7, 8, 9, 11, and 13. Yet the law itself is holy, just, and good, Romans 7, 12. But apart from the redemptive work of Christ, which makes us new creatures, 2 Corinthians 5, 17, and delivers us from slavery to sin by the enlightening, cleansing, and sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit. The law cannot save, deliver, or sanctify anyone." That's what Paul's talking about. We're under grace. You've been regenerated by the Holy Spirit. You've been justified by Christ. You have the Holy Spirit within you. That's why you're not out there snorting coke and smoking crack and, uh, you know, fornicating like a wild man. That's why you're sticking to the Bible. That's why you're going to church. That's why you're doing all these wonderful things, because the Holy Spirit. Everyone needs God's grace given to us through the gift of God's Son. Now I have more to say, probably a short sermon, but I got sick this week, so this is all I had time to get into. But I want you to focus on that. Love and law in scripture are connected. Why? Because our relationship to God is like a marriage covenant. And God wants us to obey him, to show our love and our loyalty to him. We don't do what we want to do, we do what God wants us to, because we're loyal, because we love him, because we want to obey him, we want to show him our faithfulness. even when we may not want that, even when our emotions may not be on board. We have to submit to the word of God. And if you habitually submit to the word of God, I promise you, your emotions will get on board. They will. Let us pray. Father, we thank you so much. What wonderful teaching about your covenant love. We love you because you loved us. We deserve to go to hell. We deserve your wrath. We deserve damnation. But instead, you sent your only begotten son. And he died for our sins, according to the scriptures. And he rose from the dead. And he gave us his spirit. And we are justified now. And we are regenerated. And now we love your law. Help us to love it much more, Lord. Help us to be consistent, Lord. Help us to hate sin and to love you more and more. For we still have to battle that sinful flesh, the old man. Help us to be totally victorious over it in every aspect of our lives. In Jesus' name, amen.