Today we are back in the book of Romans and we're only going to look at one verse and it is verse 13 of Romans chapter 7. Hear the word of God. The Apostle Paul writes, has then what is good become death to me? Certainly not. But sin, that it might appear sin, was producing death in me through what is good, so that sin, through the commandment, might become exceedingly sinful. The exceeding sinfulness of sin is our topic today. Let us pray. Father, we need your help. We need your wisdom. We thank you that by the Holy Spirit, this is a portion of the breathed out Word of God. And may you illumine this word to our minds and may you open our hearts to receive it. Even though it may be in some ways difficult to to hear, but we know that the truth that it is by the truth that we will be set free. May we hear the truth, gladly today, about sin. In Jesus' name, amen. In 1973, a long time ago now, psychiatrist Carl Mininger wrote a book titled Whatever Became of Sin. And in that book, he predicted the day would come when we would no longer use the word sin, that it wouldn't be in our vocabulary, that it would be replaced with words like, instead of saying sin, we would talk about, well, it's an illness, it's a disorder, it's a dysfunction, the psychologizing of biblical terms. He projected that crime would go unpunished and criminal activity would be justified or minimized based on things like race or medical or societal conditions for which of course no one can be held responsible. He was a prophet although even in the 70s it wasn't difficult to see what was happening in our society. And today, of course, people still believe, and this has been a belief for a long time, that people are basically good. And if they do something wrong, if people mess up, it's really not their fault. It's got to be blamed on somebody else or something else. And so we rationalize sin away. And this is true in our culture. Everyone today is a victim. No one is to blame for his or her actions. In 2005, another author named Christian Smith wrote a book titled Soul Searching, The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. We have a few teenagers here this morning. We were all once teenagers ourselves. And in that book, he coined a phrase moralistic, therapeutic deism. And he said that that is what is characterizing teenagers in the church. And what the church is sort of preaching is this moralistic, therapeutic, deistic message And moralism is the opposite of the gospel of God's grace and salvation by grace. Moralism is the idea that if you're good, God will save you. Salvation by works. Deism is the idea that God created all things, then he just kind of removes himself. He's not really interested or intimately involved in this world. But the central goal in life, according to this worldview, is to be happy and feel good about oneself. God's there if you need him occasionally, but you don't really have to think about God unless you really need him for something. Well, the Christian faith used to be seen as the solution to the great problem of sin. Again, nowadays, the church is a means for a lot of people just to feel good about themselves. But the Bible teaches that in order to feel good about ourselves, and that's, I like to feel good about myself, but in order to do that, we first need to feel very bad about ourselves. You say, Pastor, oh, I can't wait to hear this sermon. But sin is the greatest problem you have. It's the worst evil you face. Your own personal sin is the greatest problem you have and the worst evil you face. All suffering stems from our sinfulness and from the curse of God on our sinful world. So Romans 7, 13, urges us to consider, to reflect on something we would rather not do. And this is, again, this is a problem for us, and that is the sinfulness of sin. I don't like to think about my sins, but God wants me to. So we're going to take a survey of scripture today to try and understand how sinful, how awful, how odious, how terrible sin really is. You say, why should we do that? That sounds so depressing. Well, that shows how much we think like the world. When you come to church, what is your goal? Well, you It's not wrong to want to feel uplifted, and you will feel uplifted if you come in the right spirit, but your goal should not be to feel good about yourself. If you have come here for that purpose only, you're really in the wrong place. You're in the wrong place. So we need to know, we need to not have a goal to feel good about ourselves, but to know the truth about ourselves. And the Bible is very good at helping us to see the truth about sin. And we're only going to scratch the surface today. I mean, this could be an all day long sermon because the Bible tells us how awful, how disgusting, how exceedingly sinful it is. It only has six points today about the sinfulness of sin. And we see it, first of all, the sinfulness of sin is that sin is contrary to the will of God and to the law of God. And that's the context of verse 13, because Paul had just said in verse 12 that the law is holy, the commandment is holy and just and good. But he realized through the commandment, that's how he came to see his sin. He was convicted about the 10th commandment, as we saw a couple weeks ago. You shall not covet. And then he realized he was guilty. So sin became sinful in his sight through the law. So sin is contrary to the law and the will of God for our lives. Now, God is the creator of all things. And he's made us. He's made all mankind in his own image. He created us. That means he has the right over us to command us to do whatever he wills. In Romans 7, Paul said, I would not have known sin except through the law. So sin, by definition, is a transgression of the law or a lack of conformity to God's law. As sinners, we tend to think that God's law is restrictive. We think of God's law as sinners, as being that which is a burden to us, limiting our personal freedoms. We want to be able to live the life of our own choosing. And God comes along and says, no, you must live this way. You must not live that way. And so we don't want to hear that. But here's what 1 John 5 verse 3 says, for this is the love of God that we keep His commandments. So first of all, if you love God, you want to keep His commandments. You show it by keeping His commandments. And then it says, and His commandments are not burdensome. Oh, they're not? Well, you see, it's the sinfulness of sin that twists the commandments of God into something that's a burden. It puts the blame on God for giving us commands instead of blaming ourselves for breaking the commandments of the Lord. So God's laws are good. They are actually a reflection of his own character. The first prayer I learned as a small child is, God is good. God is great. Let us thank him for it. God is good. And out of His goodness flow His commandments. So His commandments are good. They're meant to be a blessing to us, but we have to keep them. We have to obey the commandments in order for them to be a blessing. And the sinfulness of sin is that we take the commandments, which are holy, just, and good, and we break them over and over and over again, thousands and thousands, literally millions of times, and often we think little or nothing of it. And in doing that, we're expressing what we really think about God. We're showing and demonstrating the sinfulness of sin. So to break His commandments, it makes us guilty. As guilty sinners, we deserve God's punishment. So sin is exceedingly sinful because it is rebellion against the rightful authority of God over our lives. And he exercises that authority through his commandments. Sin is exceedingly sinful. Second, sin is exceedingly sinful because it separates us from God, the source of life. Isaiah 59 too, but your iniquities have separated you from God and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear. In the Garden of Eden, before the fall, Adam and Eve would walk with God. They talked with Him in the garden. They had this wonderful relationship. And there was open communication. There was no separation. But when they sinned against God, they hid from Him. They separated themselves from God. Have you ever tried to hide from God? Have you ever tried to run from God? I have. Well, God Of course, it's not the one who moved, it's us. But sin separates us from God. The Puritan preacher, Ralph Venning, wrote a classic treatise, much longer than this sermon today, and it was simply titled, The Sinfulness of Sin. And you can find it on the internet and read it. And Venning said, since God is man's chief good, to be separated from him must be his greatest evil and loss. God is our chief good. To be separated from him is the worst thing that could happen to us. In Ephesians 2, we read that before our conversion, that we were, quote, without Christ, without God in the world. We were afar off. We were created to be close to God. That is seen with Adam and Eve. We were created to walk with Him, to live in union with Him, because He's meant to be our life, our light, our hope. So to be separated from Him is to be in darkness, is to be dead, is to be without hope. The good news, according to Ephesians 2.13, is that now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. So this sermon's about bad news, but it's not all bad news, is it? The good news is that if you're far from God, and maybe that's where you are today, maybe you have drifted from God, but you're here in worship, and that's good. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. If you are far from God, I can say this, you are not happy until you return to the Lord. There's no true joy in life while we are separated from God. Now we cannot, as Christians, be completely cut off from God. If we're in Christ, we're in Him forever. But we can distance ourselves from Him by turning away from Him at times. So return to God. Repent of your sins. The Bible says Christ suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. He brings us to God when we're initially converted, but he brings us back to God anytime we need, anytime we have drifted from him. Turn to Christ and he will bring us back. His death on the cross is the bridge that's always open for us to cross back over and reconnect with the Lord. Thirdly, sin is exceedingly sinful. because it pollutes and defiles the soul. It pollutes and defiles the soul. In the Old Testament, there are several Hebrew terms that talk about this pollution and defilement. And these words can mean pollution, defilement. They can mean to make profane, to make godless, to make corrupt, to make unclean or foul. We just sang in that hymn, foul, I to the fountain fly. we are confessing in that hymn our foulness. So there were different types of defilement identified in the Old Testament. There was physical defilement. If you touched a dead body, you were unclean. There was sexual defilement, ethical defilement, ceremonial defilement. So there were detailed laws. There are detailed laws in the Old Testament about how a person becomes unclean and then laws about how they could be cleansed of that defilement and be declared clean again. Now in the New Testament Jesus taught like he did in the Sermon on the Mount that it's not so much the outward things that God is looking at, but he's looking at the heart, the attitude. And he said it's not so much the eating with external, with unwashed hands, or eating foods that were declared in the Old Testament to be unclean. Later, you know, the Lord declares all foods are clean. So that's not the issue. As he said in the Gospel of Matthew, it's out of the heart that proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts. false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man. We commit sin, we commit unclean deeds because we have unclean, filthy, foul hearts. Job 14.4 Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one. Can't bring cleanness out of an unclean heart. And then in Job 25, it goes on to say, how then can man be righteous before God? Or how can he be pure who is born of a woman? If even the moon does not shine or the stars are pure in his sight, aren't pure in his sight, how much less man who is a maggot and a son of man who is a worm." These are not complementary terms to describe human beings. I read an article this week by an author who said, we ought to stop employing, and this person claims to be a Christian, I don't doubt that he's Christian, but he says, we ought to stop employing dehumanizing and subhumanizing terms such as monsters, animals, beasts, probably would include maggots and worms in his descriptor, in his list there, but he was referring to the words that people have used, politicians and others have used, that describe the Hamas atrocities that occurred on October 7th, 2023. His argument is that we shouldn't call these people monsters, because all people are created in God's image and that goes against God's teaching. But I disagree with what he said in the article. You see, sin dehumanizes us. It turns us into literal monsters and beasts and animals. The things that the members of Hamas did were ghastly, they were beastly, they were monstrous. The Apostle Paul said to Titus in Titus 1.12, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. Well, there you go. I guess Paul needs to repent of this dehumanizing terminology. No, he's just being honest. You see, we like to paint over ourselves and our sin, but this is the harsh reality. And Christ's own words to the Pharisees who thought, and the people thought, that they were the most righteous, most holy in the Jewish community in that day. He said, woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, View are like whitewashed tombs, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead man's bones and all uncleanness. Now Jesus, the apostles realized that this was a great insult, but he meant it. He meant it because it was true. And the reality is, if we are honest, we are all monsters and beasts at heart. We're all worms and maggots. We're all capable of the worst sins we can imagine. And if we don't believe that, we don't know the sinfulness of our own sin, of our own hearts, of our own nature. Have you seen the uncleanness of your own heart? Have you felt the inner defilement that sin has brought to your soul? Thanks be to God. Here's the good news. There is cleansing for our defilement. There is washing. available for our filthiness. Isaiah 118. Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord, though your sins be as scarlet. They shall be as white as snow. First, John 17 says the blood of Jesus Christ, his son cleanses from all sin, cleanses from all unrighteousness, cleanses from all defilement. I did get a new tool yesterday. Well, a couple, a week or so ago, but I used it yesterday. It's a pressure washer. You know what that is, right? And I didn't think that, you know, our sidewalks were that dirty. But I started using the pressure washer, and man, they were filthy, you know? And now they're clean. And the good news is, you don't know how filthy your soul and your heart and your mind are. A lot dirtier than you think. But Christ is able to wash all your sins away. What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. Fourth, sin is exceedingly sinful because it is contrary to all the attributes of God. Sin stands in opposition to all the attributes of God. Sin is especially opposed to the holiness of God. Holiness and sin are exact opposites. God's name is holy and so is his nature. He has a holy hatred of sin. He doesn't just dislike sin, he despises it. He declares it to be an abomination in his sight. He hates it with a holy hatred. Now God tells us in the Old and the New Testament, same command is repeated to us as Christians, be holy for I am holy. God does not approve of any sin for any reason. God does not accept any excuse for any of our sins. But boy, we've got lots of them, don't we? That's all we do is make excuses for our sin. But God doesn't accept any of them. He hates every sin with a perfect hatred. Habakkuk 113, he says, you are of purer eyes than to behold evil and cannot look on wickedness. Do you think God can look down on you with favor and bless you while you're walking in sin? Again, to quote Ralph Venning, he said, as God is holy, all holy, only holy, altogether holy, and always holy, so sin is sinful, all sinful, only sinful, altogether sinful, and always sinful. Romans 7, 18, which we'll get to soon, Paul says, for I know that in me, that is in my flesh, nothing good dwells. Nothing good. In God, nothing bad dwells. He's perfectly holy, pure, untainted by sin. So sin opposes the holiness of God But he does so with all the attributes of God. Think about the sovereignty of God. God is the rightful ruler and king over all that he's made, and yet in our sin we would dethrone him. We would put ourselves on the throne and put God off of the throne. We would rather be our own gods than submit to his rule and bow down to his sovereignty, and that's exactly what happened in the garden. Psalm 12, verse 4 says, with our tongue We will prevail. Our lips are our own. Who is Lord over us? God is. You see, we rebel against His sovereignty. Sin also denies and opposes the omnipotence of God, His almighty all-power that He possesses. Psalm 94 says of the wicked, they slay the widow and the stranger and murder the fatherless. That's bad enough. Yet they say, the Lord does not see, nor does the God of Jacob understand. Have you ever thought, well, God's not, He's not really seeing what I do, or if He does, He doesn't care. It's just a little thing anyway, right? Sin is, the act of sinning is the act of despising the goodness of God. As I've said, Romans 2, 4 says, where you do despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, and not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance. All right, we take the goodness of God and say, oh, God's blessed us. He's so good. So I don't have to worry about being that circumspect about my life and being that particular about obedience. You know, he doesn't care about that stuff. He just loves to bless me. That's a wrong view of things. You see, we all look at God's goodness and say, oh, Lord, how can I sin against such goodness? Forgive me. So every sin we commit is a slap in the face of God and it's an insult to His perfections and to His perfect character. The truth is, our sinfulness, the exceeding sinfulness of sin is that we hate God. We don't like His character. We don't like His commandments or the reflection of His character. We, by our sin, oppose every attribute that God possesses. So we need to repent of that and see it for what it is. We are despising His goodness, His wisdom, His power, His holiness, His justice, His truth. We could go on. And then we need to turn in faith and love to adore God for His attributes, to thank God for who He is, despising ourselves instead and the exceeding sinfulness of our sins against such a great and glorious and perfect God Fifth, sin is exceedingly sinful because it condemns us to eternal punishment and damnation. Psalm 9 verse 17, the wicked shall be turned into hell and all the nations that forget God. So God clearly has a right to punish sin, whether you think he does or not. He must punish sin. He's a God of perfect justice. Sin is so exceedingly sinful, it deserves to be punished, not just a little bit, but with everlasting fire and banishment from the loving presence of God. As sinners, we are, the Bible says, by nature, children of wrath. John 3, 36 says, he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him. So we are conceived in, as David said, in sin. We are born sinful from the moment of conception and birth. We enter this world, therefore, under the wrath of God. And if we fail to turn to Jesus Christ, the only refuge for sinners, God's wrath will remain on us in that forever endeavor. Many have thought, well, that's just unjust. That's not justice. For God to punish us for all eternity, for just the sins of one short lifetime? But again, people think that way because they don't understand the exceedingly sinful nature of sin. If sin is not removed, you see, by faith in Jesus' blood and His resurrection, then it remains forever. The sin is not removed, it's still there. The guilt of the sinner who never repents and believes in Jesus continues for eternity. And not only that, the sinful heart and the attitudes of a sinner in hell remain. The sinner does not have a change of heart in hell. He still hates God more than ever. Continues to sin. and his heart and thoughts toward God in hell. And so God is therefore just to continue to pour out his wrath on those who continue to sin against him. Jonathan Edwards in his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, noted several things about the wrath of God. First thing he said, it's the wrath of an infinite God. Quote, the greatest earthly kings in their greatest majesty and strength when clothed in their greatest terrors are but feeble worms in comparison of the great and almighty creator and king of heaven and earth." You see, the great wrath of the king of kings far exceeds the wrath of a Hitler or of a Stalin. Secondly, Edward said, we are exposed to the fury God's wrath the fury of God's wrath Isaiah 66 15 for behold the Lord will come with fire and with his chariots like a whirlwind to render his anger with fury and his rebuke with flames of fire revelation 1915 the wine press we read of the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty Here's what Edward said about this. He said, these words are exceedingly terrible. The fury of God, the fierceness of Jehovah. Oh, how dreadful that must be. Who can utter or conceive what such expressions mean? God is not just a little upset about sin. He's furious and his wrath will come in fury. Third, Edward said it's an everlasting wrath. He preached. to his congregation, but he's preaching in that sermon to those who are lost in sin. And he says to them, it would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one second, but you must suffer it for all eternity. There will be no end to this extreme, horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see a long forever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts and amaze your soul. And you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, any mitigation, any rest at all. You see, sin is exceedingly sinful because the punishment is exceedingly great. Finally, the sixth point from this verse today is that sin is exceedingly sinful as we look at what Jesus Christ endured on the cross. The Bible says that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. In fact, it actually says he became sin for us. Jesus Christ is perfectly holy. He was sinless, and yet he became sin. for us. He suffered literally the infinite wrath, the pains of eternal hell while he hung on the cross. So sin is so sinful it caused the death of the righteous and pure Son of God. The question is asked, who is responsible for the death of Christ? And I think it's good for us to do this, to rehearse this from time to time. Certainly the religious leaders were responsible for Christ's death. They schemed to arrest him and have him killed. Judas Iscariot obviously is responsible. He betrayed his lord to the hands of his enemies. Pontius Pilate was guilty. He's the one who sentenced him to die, to be crucified. But the crowds bear some responsibility. Pilate was just giving in to their wish when they cried out, crucify him, crucify him. The Roman soldiers are the ones that actually nailed him to the cross, actually put him to death. They're guilty of Christ's death. And we think of all the sin that went into putting him to death so that he could become sin for us. But in the end, each and every sinner must confess their own part in his death. I have to confess that it was my sins that put him there. It was my voice that cried out for him to be crucified. It was my hand that picked up the hammer to nail him to the cross. It was the sinfulness of my sin that caused him to have to die if he would save me. And that makes me realize, why did God even bother? Why would God save a wretch like me? So if you want to see the sinfulness of sin, look at Jesus Christ dying on the cross, becoming sin for us, being punished in the place of sinners. There was no greater injustice, certainly, in human history. No greater sin committed than to put Christ on the cross. Our friend Pastor Spurgeon of a century ago, said, in the agonies of Jesus, in the shame and spitting and the woes and anguish that he endured, we read of the sinfulness of sin written in capital letters that even the half-blind might see. O sin, murderer of Christ, thou art exceedingly sinful. Have you begun, even on a small scale, to see? your own sinfulness before God, have you begun to see the sinfulness of that sin? You know, many Christians have, professing Christians, have been shocked to reach a point in their life to discover that they were really sinners through and through. that they broke every commandment, and they did so all the time, and that they were far worse, more sinful than they ever knew. You see, every sin, even the least, is abominable in the sight of God. Venning said sin is the worst of evils, worse than the worst of words can express. We can't even express the sinfulness of sin. I think when we get to heaven, those who believe on the Lord Jesus Christ will enter heaven. This is amazing. We will, at the moment of Christ's return, we will be changed. We will be like him. We will be perfectly holy. And we will, at that moment, realize how sinful sin truly was, how awful it really was. But we need to grasp it as much as we can here and now, because when we do, Something wonderful happens. We begin to appreciate the mercy of God. We no longer take the grace of God for granted. We will turn to Jesus for salvation and we will turn to him over and over, clinging to the cross, our desperate need of forgiveness each and every day. You know, sin turns us into wretches. But by God's amazing grace, He can save a wretch like me and you. Have you turned to Him in faith for the salvation of your soul? Ask yourself that right now. Honestly, have I truly sought salvation in Jesus Christ? Have I turned my life over to Him and have I received Him as my Lord and as my Savior from sin? For those who are believers in the Lord Jesus, seeing the sinfulness of sin will make us hate it and strengthen our desire to resist it and resist temptation. You see, there are some things, of course, oh, I would never do this or that because we think how horrible it is. I could never do what those Hamas, terrible Hamas people did. Well, whatever the sin is in your life that you're willing to do, or that's tempting you, you ought to say to that. Lord, like Joseph said when he was tempted to lie with Potiphar's wife, he said, I cannot do this sin. against my Lord. Whatever that sin is, that's the attitude hopefully we will have. To know the sinfulness of sin will give us a greater yearning for purity of heart and holiness of life. It will humble us and cause us to pray each and every day in the spirit of the tax collector. God, be merciful to me, a sinner. Knowing how sinful we are will help us to have compassion on other sinners. It will help us not to judge others, not to stand in judgment over them knowing that we are no better, we deserve the same condemnation as they do, but to have compassion on people who are lost in sin as we once were. And finally, knowing the sinfulness of sin will help us to grow in our love for Jesus Christ. The great commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Understanding what God has done to redeem you from the sinfulness, the horribleness of sin, if that does not motivate you to love God and to love His Son, Jesus Christ, I don't know what will. May it move us to love Him more and to please Him who saved us from our sins. Let's pray together.