If you would, turn in your Bibles to the book of Romans chapter 6 and verse 14. I was reading last night from the book of Hebrews chapter 2 verse 1. It says, Therefore we must give the more earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest we drift away. And I was thinking of Stephen's prayer just now and how we're called to give attention to the Word of God and to focus on it, to not let distractions deter that Word or keep that Word from taking root in our hearts. Think also of the parable of the sower and the soils. and how that word can easily be lost and of no benefit to us if the cares of the world choke it out or as Satan steals it and so on. So let's give attention to this one verse today. It is Romans 6, 14. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. Sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your holy, inspired, inerrant, authoritative, life-giving word. It is, Lord, a lamp for our feet, a light to our path. And I pray that we would do as Hebrews tells us to do, to give the more earnest attention and heed to the Word of God today. In Jesus' name, amen. So the Bible tells us that Jesus Christ is Lord. He is the King of kings and Lord of lords. We just sang that hymn that tells us to hail the power of Jesus' name, the name that's above every name. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. He is the head of the church on earth. There are many definitions around of what a Christian is. If someone asked you that question, what is a Christian, what would you say? Well, at minimum, a Christian is someone who trusts in the saving work of Jesus Christ and submits to him as Lord and King of their lives. So does that describe you this morning? Is Jesus Christ your savior from sin? And is he also your Lord? Does he rule your heart and life? If Jesus is your king, you might be interested to know how it is that he performs that office. The threefold office of Jesus in the Bible is that of prophet, priest, and king. And the shorter catechism, question 26, says, how does Christ execute the office of a king? How is it that he performs this office in our lives? And the answer is Christ executes the office of a king, first of all, in subduing us to himself. I remember some years ago, the son of J. Adams, Todd Adams, who died at a young age, he was giving a testimony. And he said, I'm so glad Christ conquered me. Christ conquered me. Christ subdues us to himself. He conquers us first. And then it says he exercises the office of a king in ruling and defending us. So he does rule over us. And as a ruler, as a king, he defends us. And lastly, in restraining and conquering all his and our enemies. We sang a song that was all about, Lord, put my enemies to rout. Defeat my enemies, destroy them. And so that's one of the things he will do. So when Jesus takes over our lives as rightful king, then we can say that sin, Satan, and the world have been dethroned in our lives. Dethroned. From the moment we receive Jesus Christ to the moment we leave this world, Jesus is our King. And we need to live in light of that. And so, one of the ramifications of His Lordship over us is, as Paul says in this verse, that sin shall not have dominion over you because Jesus has the dominion and the rule over you so if Jesus is your master sin cannot be your master and we need to understand then verse 14 in order to live the kind of life that pleases our king and so it's two simple points and they're just the two parts of this verse. And the first point is, sin shall not have dominion over you. Now, if we're going to understand this verse, we do need to understand what sin is. It's always good to define your terms. You say, I know what sin is. Well, let's just think about it again. Let's do some review. We could quote the Shorter Catechism again that sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. It's not living up to the law and it's breaking the law. That's what sin is. Sin is lawlessness. It's a violation of His holiness and His commandments. Sin is turning away from the will of the Creator to do my own will, to go my own way. Sin is rebellion. against God. It's both the disposition of your heart and the actions of your life. We sin daily in thought, word, and deed. And we sin because we are sinners. We are born in sin, born under sin, and its dominion. By nature, sin rules our hearts and controls our ways. Now, sin came into the world, as we know, at the very beginning of the creation of man, Adam and Eve. They defied God's rule. They disobeyed his command because they desired to be their own gods. You see, until we are born again, until we are regenerated by the Holy Spirit, We live for ourselves. We do worship ourselves. We live for the satisfaction of our desires. And though we imagine that we are in control of our lives, until conversion, before conversion, sin controls us, sin rules us, and Satan rules us through our sin. So, before we know Christ as our Master and Lord, we are blind to that. We are in sin and rebellion against God. We are serving sin and we're blind to that fact. We're blind also to our need of salvation. If you don't know you're a sinner, you're not even going to seek salvation. So we're blind to that as well. But when the Holy Spirit gives us a new heart, A couple of things happen, we begin to see sin for what it really is. We understand that we have rebelled against our creator, one who loved us and made us in his own image. We realize that we deserve God's punishment and when God opens our eyes and our hearts, we feel a deep sense of sorrow for what we have been and what we have done. We confess our sins to God and we grieve over those sins and we turn away from those sins unto God in Jesus Christ. The Bible calls this repentance. Jesus said, repent or you will perish. And as we repent of our sins, we also as we turn unto God from our sins, we put our faith in Jesus Christ and him crucified. We trust in the death of Jesus on the cross as the payment for our sins. Jesus died for our sins, not for his, he had none. The night I was converted to Christ, I was alone in a very low-rent apartment in the state of Colorado, and I remember distinctly asking the Lord to come into my heart, to be my Lord, and to cleanse me of every sin. I tried to confess every sin I could think of in my life and then to take over as Lord of my life. I knew before that I had been thinking about it because I had been reading the Gospels. I knew that if I called on the Lord that he would save me from my sins. But I knew that meant that he had to become my Lord as well and that was the hesitation. I did not want to give up control of my life. But by the grace of God, by the work of the Holy Spirit, I bowed the knee and said, Jesus, take over the throne of my life, of my heart. And so he did come in. He did forgive me of all my sins. He did take over my life. Has he done that in your life? Have you received him as both Savior and Lord? If not, then I would urge you to come to Christ today. Today is the day of salvation. Jesus said, come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Has sin become a burden to your soul? It does burden us. We feel the weight of our guilt and our inability to find relief. But when we come to Christ, when you come to Christ and receive him, You find relief. You find rest. You find salvation. You find forgiveness, cleansing. And your life is never the same. You are changed. Now the Bible says if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation. We have a new nature. We have a new position before God. We are now justified. We are declared righteous before Him. Not because of our righteousness, because we have none. because of the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone. And so we have this new heart, this new relationship. We have new desires to please him. We have a new king. Instead of living for ourselves, or Satan, or sin, Jesus takes over. And Jesus brooks no rivals. He's a jealous God. So if you're in Christ, you need to know sin shall not have dominion over you. It shall not have dominion over you. Sin is still in you, but it won't rule over you. If you go back to Cain and Abel, when Cain was angry with his brother and he wanted to kill him, he was about to kill him and he did, the Lord spoke to him. and said, sin lies at the door, and its desire is for you, but you should rule over it. You must rule over it. Well, Cain did not have the strength to do that. You see, God had given to mankind dominion over the earth, and that meant also dominion over their souls, to possess their soul in righteousness. That's how Adam and Eve were created. But when sin entered in, it took over, it gained the dominion, over us. But thanks be to God, Jesus Christ the second Adam came into the world and he conquered sin. He conquered sin, hell, and death. But he took back the dominion that sin and Satan had over this world. And when we receive him by faith, he takes over our lives. And sin will not have dominion over us. Now though sin has been defeated, and though it has been dethroned, it will still try to take back the dominion it once had in our lives. You know that, don't you? It still wants to take back the dominion and will try. In some of these passages in Romans 6, sin is personified. And so it tries to take back dominion. The Puritan John Owen wrote a treatise in one of his works on this verse, Romans 6, 14. So you can look it up and find it and read it, but it goes into much more detail than I'm doing today. But here's what he said. He said, sin will abide in us. It will contend for rule by deceit and force, yet it shall not prevail. It shall not have the dominion. It will compete. It will try. by deceit and by force to regain it, but it shall not prevail. Now, the dominion of sin, of course, is broken by grace, by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. It's not by our willpower. It's not by our decision. It's not by our fortitude. It's by Jesus. And Owen went on to say that there are two things that are difficult with regard to this matter. And the first is to convince someone who is still under the dominion of sin that they are under sin's dominion. Because a lot of people think that they are not under sin's dominion, but their lives show a different story. And the second difficult thing is to convince some true believers, in other words, that sin does not have dominion over them, and especially in the line of the fact that sin wars against their souls. There's the battle. You see, some people think because they struggle and fight against sin that they must not be saved. They must still be under the dominion of sin, but that's not true. Owen said it's hard to convince people who know the Lord, who are Christians, that in fact sin does not have dominion over them because they know that there's a battle and they mistake that as still being under the dominion of sin. He says unless we can convince Christians of this fact of the first half of verse 14, it's impossible for them to enjoy solid peace and comfort in this life. You say, my peace is lacking, comfort is lacking in my life. Maybe you need to believe the Word of God. You need to trust that this is so in your life, that sin shall not have dominion over you. This is an assured fact. It's an authoritative promise for all who are in Jesus Christ, who are truly in Christ, sin will no longer be your master because another master and Lord has taken the throne and taken possession of your soul. Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Dr. Lloyd-Jones comments, he says, this is not a command. It's not an exhortation. It is an encouragement. It's an encouragement to do what Paul's been commanding us to do. And what has he been commanding us to do? If you go back to the two verses before this, he says, don't let sin reign in your bodies. Don't present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourself to God, present your members, the members of your body, as instruments of righteousness to God. So these things we should do, these things we can do because Sin no longer has dominion over us. Now Paul goes on in the second half of verse 14 to give the reason why he can say that sin has no dominion over us. And that is for you are not under law, but under grace. And this is why sin has no dominion over you. You're not under law, but under grace. So when he says the believer is not under law, what does he mean? Well, and you would ask the question, what law is he talking about here? Well, I think he's just talking about the law of God, his commandments, summarized in the Old Testament by the Ten Commandments, and all the commandments we find in the New Testament. If the believer is not under law, then does that mean he can live however he wants to live? Does that mean he can disregard the law? Does it mean that the Christian doesn't have to obey the law anymore? Does it mean the law doesn't have a place in the life of the Christian? No, no, not at all, not at all. This is Paul's point in verse 15, the next verse. Shall we sin because we're not under the law but under grace? Certainly not. Well, what is sin? If sin is the transgression of the law, then we're to strive not to sin, and to strive not to sin is to strive not to break the law, it's to keep the law. So, obedience is the opposite of sin. Sin is breaking the law, obedience is keeping the law. Those who think the law has no place in the life of a Christian are wrong. They're just wrong. on the authority of the Word of God, not my saying so. This is what is called the antinomian era. The word antinomian means against law. An antinomian is someone who professes to be a Christian but is against the law, who doesn't believe in the ongoing validity of the law in the life of the Christian. Was Paul an antinomian? Well, some people accused him of being that way because he said we're saved By grace alone, through faith alone in Christ, we're justified before we ever do a single thing. Of all our law-breaking, God forgives us and declares us righteous. We're justified. But he goes on to say, and to tell us this is where we are now, that that does not mean that we live any way we want. It means that's the first step. the beginning of the Christian life, and now God works in us by the Holy Spirit to enable us to keep the law. In Romans 3.31, he's already said this. Do we then make void the law through faith? In other words, if we say we're saved by faith, does that mean that the law is void now? Here's his answer. Certainly not. On the contrary, we establish the law. Now, Paul was not an antinomian. He was not against law. He establishes the law for the life of the believer. And again, the confession of faith that I read earlier on the chapter of the law of God, I'll just read a couple pertinent points from that. The moral law does forever bind all, justified persons as well as others, all people, to obedience. Neither does Christ and the gospel in any way dissolve, but strengthens this obligation that we have to keep the law. After all, didn't Jesus say, if you love me, obey my commandments? Jesus was not an antinomian. There's three primary uses of the law of God in scripture. First is God's law is a restraint against evil in society. Second, the law is a mirror to show us our sin and our need of Christ as Savior. And the third use of the law is the one the antinomian rejects, but it's biblical, that the law of God is of use to the Christian as a rule of life. It shows us the rules to live and how to please God. It shows us how to love God and love our neighbor, which is the summary of the Ten Commandments and of all God's moral law. So, do you want to know how to please God? Then the law gives you instructions for that. And it shows us how to please Him. So God's law is holy, it's righteous, it's good. But it's not good to be under the law. Okay, so having said all those good things about law, it's not good to be under the law. He says we're no longer under the law. But before Christ, before we know Christ, we are under the law. And what does that mean? Well, first, to be under the law means to be under the condemnation of the law. When we break God's law, we incur His judgment. We incur His condemnation. We're liable to wrath and the indignation of God. And before we are saved, we are under the law. We are under His judgment. The believer, of course, has been justified by faith, is no longer under the condemnation of the law. The law condemns sinners, shows them they deserve judgment, but we know that our Savior took the judgment that we deserved when he died upon the cross. He took our sins upon himself, he took God's judgment on himself, and he fulfilled the law's demands. And now, as Romans 8, 1 says, we haven't gotten there yet, but there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ. The law cannot condemn you if you are in Christ. You're no longer under the law as a curse and the punishment of it. Secondly, to be under the law means that you are attempting to justify yourself by keeping the law. There's really only two ways that people seek justification. One is by keeping the law, whether their own laws that they've made up or the laws of God. To be under the law is to try to keep the law by your own efforts and be saved by your own works. And the Bible says to do that, in order to do that, you would have to to keep the law perfectly, which is not possible. So to be under the law as a way of salvation is to be doomed. It's not possible. The law can't deliver you from sin. It's good at showing you your sin, but it can never save. And so if you're still living under the law, if you're still under the impression and hoping that you're doing good, your good works and your law keeping your obedience will get you into heaven, you are in big trouble. You're still under the law. That's not a good place to be. Sin still has dominion over you. So the law cannot deliver us from the power, the penalty or the dominion of sin. It exposes It convicts us of sin. It even incites us to sin because of the sinful hearts that we have. But the law could never justify us. It only condemns us until we come to Christ and become partakers of His saving grace. If you know the Lord Jesus Christ by faith, you're no longer under law. You are under grace. Grace to me is one of the most beautiful words in the Bible. It is the free and undeserved favor and love of God toward man as a sinner. It's unmerited. It's undeserved. It's a free gift that God gives to us. It's bound up in the gospel. In the gospel, we see that Jesus died for our sins, that he was buried, that he rose again on the third day, And the gospel salvation was purchased by our Lord and it's offered freely to us. Grace gives us something we do not deserve that we could never have earned, not by our own keeping of the law. So Christ kept the law perfectly and earned a perfect righteousness. He gave himself as a sacrifice to pay for our law breaking. He kept the law. Because we couldn't. He committed no sin that he might deliver us from the dominion of sin. So the believer, the person who by faith is in Christ, in union with Jesus Christ, is under grace. That means you're saved. by grace. You are kept by grace. You overcome sin by grace. We live by grace. And so to be under grace is to have the guarantee that sin will not have dominion over you. It will not rule you. To be under grace is to be under Christ as your gracious Lord and King. The Bible talks about, as we go to God in prayer, that it is a throne of grace. So God, through Jesus Christ, rules over your life, but what kind of ruler is he? What kind of throne does he have? A throne of grace, a throne of mercy, a throne of wanting nothing but good for you and for me. He rules Over us for our good and he defends us from from our enemies he defeats our enemies the world the flesh and the devil and everything else and He gives us the law No longer can it condemn us, but it helps us to know how to live in under his grace. So thanks be to God we're not under the condemnation of the law any longer. We're under the freedom of grace. We've been set free from the curse of the law that we might not serve sin any longer but serve our Savior and our Lord. Now it's unthinkable to me that a Christian would reason like this, that because I'm no longer under the dominion of sin, that it's okay for me to keep sinning. I trust that you all here today realize that that is twisted logic. It's not logic at all. The person who says he's a Christian and yet goes on sinning as if it's okay to do that because you're not under the law but under grace, that person is still under law. that person is still under sin's dominion. So there's only two alternatives. Either you're still under law and it's condemnation and it's futility or you're under grace. It's one or the other. For those who are under grace, the law of God It's found not only in the Bible, it's found somewhere else for you. It's written in your heart. Hebrews says, in Hebrews 8, 10, speaking of the new covenant, it says, for this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days. Notice he calls the church, the believers, as the house of Israel. I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will put my laws in their mind and write them on their hearts. I will be their God and they shall be my people. That's the language of covenant, the new covenant. And so the law of God written on our hearts, well it's still written in the Bible and we need to know what's written there. But the law is written in our hearts and he does that and he gives us his Holy Spirit so by grace We have a different view of the law. We begin to love the law. The psalmist said in Psalm 119, Oh, how I love your law. How can we love law? Because it's God's loving law. It's God's word to show us how to please him. And he gives us the ability to keep it, never perfectly in this life, But in Jesus Christ and the gospel of grace, we find pardon for every failure to obey. But we find grace that motivates us to get back up and try again and keep going and keep obeying his law. We find grace to help us in any and every situation of need Hebrews 4 16 let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need that applies to everything in your life whether it's seeking wisdom and making a decision or knowing just how to apply God's law in your life just how to find God's strength to keep that law and and to do God's will So grace, it makes us thankful for all that God has done for us in Christ. Grace gives us life, it gives us an abundant life, it brings Eternal life and heaven is a free gift for us and those who have received Christ in his grace will live a life of thankful obedience Knowing that sin no longer has dominion over them. Let me close with the words of the Heidelberg Catechism question 86 it says this since then we are delivered from our misery merely of grace and You mean I don't have to do anything to be delivered from my sin? No, you have to receive Jesus. He's already done it. But since we are delivered from our misery merely of grace through Christ without any merit of ours, why must we still do good works? It's a good question, isn't it? Why must we obey? Because Christ, the answer, because Christ having redeemed and delivered us by his blood, also renews us by his Holy Spirit after his own image so that we may testify by the whole of our conduct our gratitude to God for his blessings, that he may be praised by us, that we may be assured of our salvation by the fruits of it, and that by our godly conversation others may be gained to Christ. See, when you leave here today, you're going out into the world to your mission field. And how are you going to be a missionary? By telling people the gospel, but also by showing what the gospel has done in your life. That by your godly conversation, others may be gained to Christ. We know that's biblical. So praise God for His saving grace. If you leave here with nothing else, just leave here with that beautiful word, grace. Are you under law or are you under grace? Are you in Christ or are you still in your sin? Is Christ your King? Where does sin still reign in your life? I pray that for each and every person in this room, Jesus Christ would be both Savior and King of our lives. Let us pray.