I hope you have a bulletin today because in there you will find an outline for this morning's sermon. So the hope is that, although I will mention the points in the message as I go, the hope is that you will not be needlessly distracted by trying to get that down and then miss the rest of what I'm saying. So you can follow the outline that is provided in your bulletin. The title of my message this morning for Romans chapter six is Free to Obey. Free to Obey. Appropriate, I think, in light of the last song we sang about the slaves of sin and hell being released to be Christ's and to safe in Jesus dwell and blessed in Jesus live. Some of us have been trained to evangelize people using a brief gospel synopsis known as the Roman's Road. Have any of you heard of that, the Roman's Road? Yeah. And I was trained in that, even as a child, partially because it's very simple in one way to get down, to memorize. It's a string of verses to memorize, mostly from the Book of Romans. That approach basically cherry-picks a few verses out of their context, hopefully they're used according to context, but it cherry-picks them out of the Book of Romans and uses them to present some basic gospel concepts. We know Romans 3.23, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. So you want to start a gospel conversation telling someone communicating that the Bible says they are sinners before God, and that everyone is a sinner. You use Romans 3.23 to start it out. You go to Romans 6.23, that the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. And you go on in the book of Romans to say how we can have that gift of eternal life. Well, the Romans Road does indeed highlight some key verses and concepts in this epistle to the Romans that we have from the Apostle Paul. The danger, and there's usually a danger with good things, the danger is that many have memorized the bullet points, basically, of that approach, more or less, without really even trying to understand the flow of thought in the context of that letter that Paul wrote that we call Romans. For that reason, some verses are misunderstood and misapplied. It's just like taking a few short phrases and sentences out of any letter, any other letter you could think of. Yes, I know, Romans is not any letter. It's an inspired letter written by God through a human author. But the point is, just like any letter, You can't simply take just little short soundbites out and necessarily know what those soundbites mean in the context of the fuller letter. Those statements could be used either for or against the true meaning of the entire letter. Romans 6.23 is one of those verses. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Clearly, we know certain things very clearly just from hearing that one verse on its own, right? Clearly, death is something that sinners earn. And eternal life is a gift rather than wages that are earned. There's a contrast there, we get that, right? And this gift of eternal life is only given in connection with the Lord Jesus Christ. That much is true, and you don't need to qualify that in any way. It's true. But it isn't the whole picture of that verse. If that's all we get from that verse, then we haven't gotten the point. So let me ask you a question. And here's where we get a little more interactive, perhaps, than some of you are used to in a sermon. But nonetheless, here we go. In Romans 6.23, who pays us these wages? What do you think? Let's take a poll. Does God pay us these wages? The idea would be, because we sin, God in his justice must give us the sentence of death. We earned that sentence. If that's what you think the verse is saying, go ahead and raise your hand. People are scared now. They're like, what's he doing? If that's what you think, raise your hand. It's fine, it really is. Okay, people are wary, like, I don't know. Yeah, if you think someone else is paying us those wages in the verse, raise your hand. People don't want to raise their hand at all. That's what's going on here, yeah. We got a few brave souls out there willing to express what they think. Maybe you don't know what you think, that's fine. Well, let me just tell you, that's usually how the verse is presented, okay? But that's what it's talking about. And there's good news and bad news with that approach. The good news is the Bible does teach that. God is a righteous judge who must give people what they earn, and sinners can only earn death, right? The bad news is Romans 6.23 doesn't mean that. It's actually saying something else. Well, let's look at what it really says. That's really what the sermon is all about this morning. Let's look at Romans 6. Earlier in the service, we read a good bit of this context leading up to our sermon text. We read all the verses right up until the text for this morning. Remember, at the end of chapter five, the apostle Paul, as he writes, exclaims that the law, well, he explains first that the law, the law of Moses, came into operation in the Old Testament era. so that the transgression would increase. It would simply provoke more sin and show people to be really, really sinful. But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. Although people went deeper and deeper into sin, God's grace abounded more and more towards sinners in this process. So that, chapter five verse 21, as sin reigned in death, Even so, grace would reign through righteousness, through eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, the first verse of chapter six, Paul asks a question. He says, so what does this mean then? If when we sin a lot, God's grace abounds even more towards sinners, what does that mean for us? Should we sin even more so that grace will come even more? He says, may it never be. Your King James, God forbid, in the original Greek is just about as strong a word as he could use to say, no, never. That's not the point. You've missed the point of the gospel. If you think God's grace is a reason to, well, sin it up. So we read that whole context, how he says he's objecting to the idea that God's grace is a reason to sin all the more. He's objecting to it, first of all, because Christians have been not only symbolically baptized in water, but truly, in a spiritual sense, Christians have been baptized into Christ Jesus. They've been united to him in his death and resurrection. And when he died, he died to sin. But when he rose from the dead, he rose to live life for God. And that's our new life that we have. We read all that earlier in the service. So let's pick up in verse 12 of Romans 6. Romans 6, verse 12. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body, so that you obey its lusts. And do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be. Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed. And having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh, For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Therefore, what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now, having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. The main principle, as you see there in your outline, the main principle in this text, I think, is this. Christians are free, but they're not free to serve sin, though. They are free to obey God. What is Christian freedom that Christ purchased about? It's not freedom to sin, it's freedom to obey God. That's Paul's large point here. So in developing that thought, we first see verses 12 and 14. That's the first chunk here in Paul's argument. And these first three verses are a command to those who are dead to sin and alive to God, to Christians. Paul's addressing them, remember, based on the previous verse, which said, in verse 11, even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. So this is a command to Christians as those who have died to sin, not just that sometime in the future they will die to sin, but by the very fact that they are Christians, they have died to sin and they are alive to God. So when we say Christians, as Paul is addressing them here, obviously we mean those who truly trust and follow Jesus Christ, those who have spiritually participated in Christ's death and resurrection. When He died to pay the penalty for their sin, it was also their death to their old sinful life. And when He rose from the dead as the vindicated Son of God, it was also their resurrection to live a new life as justified and holy children of God. So Christ-saving work doesn't simply secure a Christian's future. It's not just that it saves us for some time in the future. It revolutionizes our present spiritual experience. Not only does Christ's death save us from the second death and the fires of God's coming wrath, Jesus' death also ends our old life at the very moment God gives us faith in Christ. And not only does Christ's resurrection guarantee that we one day will share in that resurrection bodily with new bodies fit for eternity with God, beyond that, The Lord's resurrection gives us a new life, a new resurrection life now of fellowship with God the moment we are spiritually born into God's family. So we Christians are now dead to sin and alive to God. In light of that, we're commanded to do something. So Paul says, if that's the case, and it is for you Roman Christians that I'm writing to, stop doing one thing, Start doing another thing. The content of the command here in verses 12 through 13 is give allegiance to God, not to sin. The moment you believed in Christ and thus died with Christ, sin lost its grip on you. You have risen from the dead to live in a different domain with different rules. You used to be a subject of sin, but like Paul said in Colossians 1.13, God the Father has transferred you to the kingdom of his beloved Son. You know, and this is very important to understand, to understand the rest of this text, this passage. The picture Paul is painting here of sin is of a king or a dictator. Sin is essentially an old dictator that rules the land in which you used to live. You used to live in sin land, under sin's authority, under its sway. You were sin's vassal, its serf, its slave. It exercised its rule over you how? Well, Paul mentions how it uses your mortal body and the lusts or desires of that body. The temporary desires of this life and this body were used to control you according to the principle of sin. But now you have a different king. You have an almighty king, in fact, who has given you new desires and who will give you a new immortal body one day. A lot has changed. But since you still have your old body, I don't think any of us body shifted when we got saved. That wouldn't be in accord with the biblical teaching. We still have our old body. And because of that, sin still tries to control you. That's what it always used to control you in the past. It tries to act as if nothing has changed. Because sin, by definition, is rebellion against God's rule. So why is it going to give up now that you say, well, now I have a new king who is God? Sin says, who is God? It still wants you to treat it, sin, as your king in the place of God. So it keeps sending you self-important letters on its official letterhead. You keep getting phone calls and emails and text messages from sin. And it's more like, these messages are more like demands than simple requests. Sin demands to be Acknowledged, to be heard, to be served. Well, it keeps sending its dignitaries to show up at your front door. It doesn't give up. It still addresses you as if you were its abject servant, its slave. It still tries to manipulate you with the desires of this life, and it still threatens you with consequences, real or imagined, of refusing to sin. It's still trying to make you heal and obey it. Now, see, you may not, it may be hard for us to get our minds wrapped around this, probably because when we were without Christ, when we were slaves to sin, we were very happy in a sense. in that condition, that is, we thought we were doing just what we wanted to do, but what we didn't understand is that our natures were twisted and warped and totally controlled by this sin thing. But now we can begin to understand this, now that we have a new nature placed inside us. And now there's a competition between sin and righteousness. If we are true Christians, there is that battle to the death. So, sin still tries to manipulate you and threaten you and try to get you to do what it wants. But Paul is clear in his command here. Don't let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires. Don't act like you owe allegiance to your old master. And don't offer your services to that old despicable king. Don't go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments, or it could be translated even weapons of unrighteousness. Sin still tries to conscript you into its service. It still sends you notices that you've been selected by its draft board. Sin wants to use your body as its soldier, every part of your body. It demands that your eyes long for things that God says you can't have. And it wants to see in your eyes that look of a haughty, defiant sinner against God. Sin wants your tongue. It demands that your tongue speak lies and corruption. It demands that your hands take and keep what doesn't belong to them. Sin demands that you use your brain to thrive on worthless and wicked thoughts. And it demands that your feet be swift to run to evil. That's how you always lived before, If you don't believe me, read Romans 3 earlier in this letter, and Paul said that's how we all once were. And sin demands that you keep doing that. Oh, you know, it may lie to you and say it only wants one little favor here and there. Oh, yeah, I know, I know, you don't want to be bothered too much, but I just have a few favors to ask. Well, actually, in reality, sin still wants to enslave you, body and soul. That's its purpose. And it will do whatever it can to get that purpose accomplished. So don't give sin an inch. You died. They held your funeral in sin land. Do you realize that? You rose from the dead as a new creation in Christ. Live like it. Give God your full allegiance. You have a new master. You have a new king. He gave you life in every sense. You belong to him and not to sin. Now you still have your mortal body. Things haven't changed that way yet, but that body belongs to God as well. When Christ died on the cross, he died to redeem your body as well as everything else. So use it in his service, not in service to his enemy. And that really is how it is. It's not that you can have a full-time job with God and then have a little side job moonlighting for sin. We're talking about two opposing forces, which are diametrically opposed to one another. This leads us to verse 14, where the Apostle Paul reminds us that we have the power to give God our allegiance. Verse 14, we see the truth behind the command. The truth that grace, in contrast to simply law, grace has freed Christians from sin. It's not just that you should refuse allegiance to sin, it's that you can. Grace has freed you to do so. Verse 14, for sin shall not be master over you. For you are not under law, but under grace. See, what's Paul talking about? We're not under law, but under grace. Well, if all we had was God's law telling us to obey God and reject sin, we would be helpless to do so. God's law, good as it is, can tell us all at once to do right. That doesn't give us power to do right, to be free of sin. That's a big point Paul makes in his letter to the Roman Christians here. Some people, particularly Jews of Paul's day, thought they could impress God and be in a relationship with him by keeping the Old Testament law, the law of Moses. And it's not that the Old Testament law was bad. God himself gave it for a certain reason for a certain time. But all people are born as sinners. It's our nature. We're born in service to sin. So on its own, God's law can only provoke us to sin more. Oh, really? Oh, God says not to covet things that aren't mine. Well, you know what? I feel like coveting some more right now. That's how Sid responds to God's law. We hate God's law in our natural state before Christ. We're enslaved to sin. Sin won't let us keep God's law in any consistent way that pleases God. Oh, we might do some good thing But it's always for the wrong reasons. It's always in service to sin. And God didn't redeem sinners from sin slavery only to give them the law as their new master. The law can't give us what we need. See, if we attempt to get a new life with God by just turning over a new leaf and keeping his law, we find ourselves back serving sin. We need something more powerful than just words, even if the words are holy and righteous and good. as God's law is. We need something more powerful than words to free us from sin's tyranny. So God gave us His saving grace, what we've been singing about this morning. Grace is His unmerited favor to us, and since it's God's grace, it's unstoppable, it's almighty, it's life-transforming. It is grace in the form of the Holy Spirit, God Himself, who invades our lives with the message of God's grace to us in Christ, message of God's gift to us. And that Spirit convinces us that God is holy in His perfection, that we are sinners and condemned because we are sinners before God, and that Christ is the one and only sufficient Savior from our sin. By God's enabling grace, then, we believe the good news that Jesus graciously died in our place, paid the penalty of sin in our place, that He rose from the dead, and that gives us forgiveness of sins and eternal life with God. And the moment God's Spirit gives us that gift of faith in Christ, He gives us a new life in Christ. So we now have the gift of a new nature that sees Christ for who He is and loves Him for it and wants to serve Him and honor Him. And throughout our lives then, the Holy Spirit enables us, by His grace, to progressively rid ourselves of sin. That's the whole point. And that's all what we call God's grace. You could look at God's grace as a gift. You could also look at it as His power towards us, which we didn't earn the right to have, of course. to saving power in our lives. He's taking us to a destination that is eternal life without sin, eternal life with God without any hindrance to that relationship. And as the hymn writer John Newton put it, grace has brought us safe thus far. Grace will lead us home. And so, verse 14 does not say For sin must not be master over you. Instead it says, for sin shall not be master over you. For you are not under law, but under grace. It's not so much giving a command as stating a fact. That is the reason we can obey the command Paul already gave. Don't give your allegiance to sin, give it to God. Why? Because you can now. That's what you are freed to do. Now, we've gotten through verse 14. And because we still have sin in our hearts, we can sometimes hear all that Paul has said in these verses and come to a wrong conclusion. That's what the apostle now proceeds to address. That brings us to our second point here, verses 15 through 23, the response of those who are subject to grace rather than to law. There's a wrong response that immediately comes up here in verse 15. The wrong response would be to say, well, I'm going to sin because I'm not under the law. I'm now free to sin because the law was the thing telling me not to sin. So the law is gone. Here I go. Now that response on the one hand might've been a hypothetical one that was posed by people who insisted you have to keep the law of Moses, or else you're just going to be a flagrant sinner. Paul might be anticipating that, that some people would say, well, if what you're teaching is right, Paul, then it's going to lead to careless and immoral living. You just said we're not under the law. How can you say that? If that's the case, sin is no longer a big deal. Without the threat of condemnation by God's law, people will just sin all the more. I've talked to a lot of people who have kind of viewed that way, even in the church, they think, okay, you know, why do we need hard preaching? Well, because if people aren't like scared half silly, then they won't straighten up and they won't do right. Well, that might be something Paul's addressing, but on the other hand, it's also a very real response to biblical teaching that we find in our own sinful hearts sometimes. Is our freedom from that old condemning jurisdiction of the law, is that a reason to now sin with impunity? Paul says, may it never be. Sometimes in our sin we feel that way. Later in Romans 7, Paul is going to explain more about our relationship, our new relationship to God's law. But first, here, he focuses on the sinister suggestion behind that sinful response. See, our sinful heart suggests to us that we can do what we want as autonomous people with allegiance to no one but me. And that's the carrot it dangles out in front of us. You can be your own person. You don't have to serve anybody. So if the law is gone, do what you want. Sin wants nothing more than to make us think we can violate God's law and get away with it. So did we just hear the Bible right? We're forgiven of our sins and we're not under the law? Your sinful mind can hardly believe it's good fortune. We might slightly adjust the words of an old hymn to express this. We're free from the law? Oh, happy condition. Jesus is bled, so I have permission. Well, when we start to think that way, we're listening to the propaganda department of sin. There it is again, sending out its pamphlets, and we're reading them, and we're ignoring a basic truth. Verses 16 through 18, there's the key truth here that we have to get to understand why that's the wrong response. Key truth is that we all have one of two masters, sin or righteousness. There's no third option in there. Verses 16 through 18, let's briefly read those again. Verse 16, do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed. And having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness." We're not very familiar with first century slavery in our day. But the reality was, many people, especially poor people in the first century world, maybe people who were greatly in debt, something like that, Many people actually offered themselves as slaves. They essentially sold themselves into slavery. And they bound themselves to a master who they thought would provide for them. So how could you tell whose slaves they were once they did that? How could you tell who had bought them as a slave? Watch who they obeyed. We could make a little bit of a parallel to employment today. You can claim all you want that you work for, I don't know, McDonald's. I was going to get creative, but I'll keep it simple. Well, if I want proof that you work for them, I'm going to be less and less convinced if you have all this free time on your hands and you never seem to be at work. And like you can't produce a paste check stub of any sort. There starts to be a question in my mind. You say that's your master. Or let's say, or let's say, on the other hand, you say you work for the CIA. But I see you flipping hamburgers at McDonald's like every day. Oh, oh, trust me, trust me. I work for the government in this top, I'm a top secret agent. in the fry pit, but no, I don't believe you. It's the same way spiritually. You can say all you want, that you were baptized, prayed a prayer, that you've been a Christian all your life, God is your master, seriously, he is, he is, and I love him, I serve him, but you cannot wait to go down to the factory to work for sin every day, day in, day out. I don't believe you. At least I question you." That's what Paul is saying here. We all have one of two masters, and the way we know whose we are is who we serve on a consistent basis as a lifestyle. Now, he's acknowledging, just by the very fact we're talking about all this, he's acknowledging there's a struggle in the Christian's life. There's this battle between sin and righteousness. But is there a struggle or is it just that you're always working for sin and you appear to love it? There are only two choices of master spiritually. We all have one of two masters. We can either serve sin or righteousness as we've said or as Paul puts it, sin resulting in death or obedience resulting in righteousness. We can live life in disobedience to God or we can live life in obedience to him. There's not like a third option there. Well, I can live life just kind of doing my own thing without regard to God. Well, that's disobedience, okay. That's still one of the two options. God's grace uses the gospel to enable us to again be his obedient people. That's the whole point. That's what had happened to the Roman Christians that Paul rejoices in. They were once slaves of sin, but God enabled them to obey the teaching of the gospel. And that teaching took them and changed them. He doesn't say the teaching was entrusted to you. He says you were entrusted to the teaching and it took you and it changed you. That teaching of the gospel freed them from sin and enslaved them to righteousness. And Paul knows the analogy isn't perfect and he knows people even in the first century might have gone, oh, you're talking about us being slaves to righteousness? Well, he says, I'm speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. So Paul knows what you might be thinking. This is a radical picture, slavery to righteousness, but he thinks he needs to put it that strongly for us to get the point. We belong to God and His righteousness and His grace now. You know, even if he'd said, you do some work on the side for righteousness, that would not communicate the point. He's saying you are slaves of righteousness. So this shows us what the right and only response is to God's saving grace. Verse 19, just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, or you could view that as him saying, excuse me, You are slaves to lawlessness, which means it wants you to do lawless things. Just as that's how you once were, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification. You are now slaves of righteousness, so act like it. How do you act as a slave of righteousness? Well, you do what righteousness asks of you, which is to progress in sanctification, In the New Testament, sanctification is basically the same word as holiness. Same concept. You become more and more like your holy God. You reflect Him in His virtues, in His goodness. So the right response in verse 19 is to obey righteousness and produce holiness. Now having seen the wrong and right responses to God's grace, as well as the key truth that drives us to that right response, we end with some further perspective on the whole issue. The proper perspective in light of all this is that sin paid us death, but God's grace grants us eternal life. That's the message of verses 20 to 23. We are under grace, which unlike the law, has freed us from sin. The law couldn't do that, but grace could and it did. How should we feel about that? How does that change our lives? Well, it should give us great motivation to serve God all the more. See, unlike sin, God is a wonderful master. Now, we may not have realized When we were sinners without Christ, we may not have realized just how bad of a master we had, because that's all we knew. But on this side of salvation in Christ, we can see it much more clearly. God is a wonderful master, sin's a horrible master. This can be shown when we compare sin's wages with God's grace. And that's why I did that unkind little thing at the beginning where I asked you to raise your hand and you were scared. What this verse is saying is sin is the one that pays out, it pays its workers in the wages of death. That's what sin gives its workers. They earn it, yes, but it's sin providing the wages. He says, verse 20, for when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. That is, sin certainly didn't expect you to be righteous. So in that sense, if you want to complain about that, Paul says, now that you're a Christian, okay. If you think it's just too hard for God to expect you to progress in righteousness, okay. I suppose sin did not expect that of you. Okay, I feel so sorry for you. But, verse 21, therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? When you were living life totally that way, not even caring about righteousness, what benefit did you get from that? For the outcome of those things is death. But now, having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Let's pause before we wrap this up. We just read verse 23, very familiar verse again. So William Hendrickson reminds us to carefully understand it. It says, the free gift of God is eternal life. Well, Mr. Hendrickson says this, as to life everlasting, it is a gift entirely free. Oh yes, it has been earned. Not however by the sinner, but by Jesus Christ for the sinner. Somebody earned it, it's just not you. Christ earned eternal life and gave it to you as a gift. So in light of all this, why are we still tempted to sin? Well, let's close by recognizing one reason, just one. There could be others. We sometimes have a distorted recollection of sin's wages. We still sin because we think sin just might give us satisfaction. Our bad memory of sin's wages is kind of like how the emancipated Israelites remembered their Egyptian slavery. When Moses was God's instrument to bring the people of Israel out of Egyptian slavery, we find over and over and over again in that story, these people having really bad memories. really wrong, incorrect memories of their past in Egypt. When life seems to get hard in our case, and we think God is asking too much of us, we fondly look back on our slavery to sin as if it were a paradise of blessing, a promised land. We forget what sin's tyranny was really like. For instance, Exodus chapter 16 verse 2 tells us that the whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. And the sons of Israel said to them, Would that we had died by the Lord's hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full. For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. Really, that's how it was in Egypt? You just had this buffet line that you were always at? That's not the only time. Exodus 17 verse 3, a chapter later. The people thirsted there for water. God was just about to give them water, but they grumbled against Moses and said, why now have you brought us up from Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst? Why did we ever have to leave Egypt? At least we had water there. Numbers chapter 11, verse 4, the rabble. who were among them, among the people of Israel, had greedy desires. And also the sons of Israel wept again and said, who will give us meat to eat? We remember the fish which we used to eat free in Egypt. We had free fish days. The cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic, but now our appetite is gone. There's nothing at all to look at except this manna. Numbers 14. They're about to enter the promised land, but ten spies come back, give a bad report. People are scared. They lift up their voices and cried, and the people wept that night. And they grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The whole congregation said to them, would that we had died in the land of Egypt, or would that we had died in this wilderness. Why is the Lord bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become plunder. Would it not be better for us to return to Egypt? So they said to one another, let us appoint a leader and return to Egypt. Oh, that's a good idea. I know I'm stringing together quite a few. This is the last one. Numbers 20. There was no water for the congregation and they assembled themselves against Moses and Aaron. The people thus contended with Moses and spoke saying, If only we had perished when our brothers perished before the Lord. Why then have you brought the Lord's assembly into this wilderness for us and our beasts to die here? Why have you made us come up from Egypt to bring us into this wretched place? It is not a place of grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, nor is there water to drink." What had life really been like in Egypt? The Egyptians, Exodus 1, compelled the sons of Israel to labor rigorously, and they made their lives bitter with hard labor and mortar and bricks, and did all kinds of labor in the field, all their labors which they rigorously imposed upon them. Exodus 2, verse 23, the sons of Israel sighed because of the bondage, and they cried out, and their cry for help because of their bondage rose up to God. Can I also remind you that the Egyptians had hunted down Israel's male infants to slaughter them, What about the time when Pharaoh demanded the same quota of bricks without supplying any of the materials for making them, without supplying straw? What about the time when the Egyptian army pursued the Israelites in the wilderness to conquer them and enslave them again? Apparently, the Israelites soon forgot these minor details. They wanted their onions and their garlic. Sin promises wonderful things, and sinners act as if they can't wait to return to it. But what does it pay? Shame? Heartache? Ruined relationships? Strife? Bitterness? Alienation from God? We can skip all that, though. Paul skips all that and just heads to the end. God's wrath. Spiritual, physical, and eternal death. As Paul wrote about sinners in Romans 3, verses 16-17, destruction and misery are in their paths, and the path of peace they have not known. Christian, what has sin ever done for you? Ever. What promise of satisfaction has it ever kept? It gives temporary twisted pleasure sometimes. I got to yell at that person. That made me feel really good inside. I got to get out of some temporary consequence because I lied about it. But what will it give you at the end of the week on payday? Only shame and corruption and death. And that's what it makes you work so hard to achieve. Sin drives you. I mean, some of you can't sleep at night because you're thinking of new ways to sin. Sin drives you hard, it's a hard task, Master. And on payday, it's gonna say, here you go, death. What does God give you? Justification before Him, the righteousness of Christ, a high and holy calling. Jesus said, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. In a word, He gives you life. Eternal life given in Christ Jesus our Lord. Now tell me, why serve sin? Why do it? Because you got something from their propaganda department? Christian, you are not free to sin. You are free to obey God. Let's pray. Lord, we cry out to you for forgiveness. Over and over again, we listen to sin. We act like it has some claim on us, and like it'll actually pay us good wages in the end. But we know that Christ died and shed his blood, and your heart was broken over your Son to free us from this sin. We ask for your forgiveness, for your mercy, for your transforming grace in our lives. We know that we will never be entirely free of sin until the day we see you face to face, but we also know that you promise us progressive victory over sin in our lives. Lord, if there are people here today who have thought of themselves as Christian is not because they hate sin and love Jesus Christ, but simply because they took the label somehow, some way, We ask that you will make reality very clear to them, and that they will run to Jesus Christ, and that they will today know that they have the free gift of God, which is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. For the rest of us, Father, who do know you but still struggle with sin, help us to be different people. Help us to stop this insane desire to please sin on the side. And Lord, we thank you for your promises that you have committed yourself to this work in us, that you are the one who began this work in us by your grace and you will complete it and you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. We pray this in his name, amen.