You can be Turning to the book of Galatians. We'll get there momentarily That is if after I say a few things if you're not already Trying to throw things You will remember last week we thought about that we are not under the law, but under grace. And we thought about all of the ramifications of that and what all of that means. And so this morning, I want to start with something. And let me finish it before you get too upset. Did you know, do you believe, because I'm going to argue that you should believe this, that you are completely and totally saved by works. Someone's having problems? Further, I need to say that not only are you saved by works, but those works, that law must be completely kept in its entirety. Doesn't sound like last week, huh? Yeah, some of you are already getting it. And some of you are about ready to pick up stone, so I guess we should finish it. The law must be kept. You are saved by works of the law. The deal is, it's not your works. You are not the one that had to keep the law. But don't mistake that for a misunderstanding, that the law in some way is not important. The law is God's holy standard. It must be kept. Every jot and tittle of it must be fulfilled. The law must be kept. If the law is not kept, there is no salvation. And so that brings us to about what I wanna talk about this morning. And if you're in the book of Galatians, you can turn to Galatians chapter four. We're gonna spend most of our time in the passage that our scriptures readers read this morning, but we need to start here in Galatians four in verse one. I just want to read a little bit of this. Galatians four in verse one, I mean, that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from slave, though he's the owner of everything. But he's under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. Verse three, in the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. Verse four, this is where we wanna start honing in just a bit here. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. Because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, and an heir through God. Now, these passages this morning, I'm not going to exposit every single part of them because I'm trying to make a point, but what I need you to understand about Christ, if you look in verse four, is that he was born of a woman. That means he was human. He is truly a man, truly human, and truly God, okay? But he was born under the law. Why? He gives it right there. To redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. Christ was required to keep the law perfectly. You say, well, we know that. Now, what we're talking about this morning, I want to put some things together for you because there can be a misunderstanding of the gospel of Christ. And so what I'm trying to do this morning is to labor with us just a little bit so that we would think, so that we would have the whole gospel. You can be turning through Romans 5, we'll get there in a moment. But I wanna introduce some terms. And these terms have been used a long time as I've studied them, but they're helpful to us. And so I'm going to teach you these terms this morning. And the terms are this, they are the active and the passive obedience of Christ. He was both actively obedient and passively obedient. And so as you turn to Romans five, let me explain this because we might get the wrong idea. Jesus, passive obedience. We view passivity as a bad thing, right? Now, we think of passivity, that's not good. Active, that's good, right? Okay, think of Christ's passive obedience in this way. His obedience passively is when he suffered, okay? What I mean, think about the image, he was a lamb, before the slaughter, a sheep that was dumb before his shears." It's not that he couldn't have done anything about it. We know that if he had wanted to, he could have called 10,000 angels to come and take him off of the cross. It wasn't that, but what it was is he chose to passively take that upon himself. And so passively it speaks of his suffering. So we want to talk about that first in the first part of this Romans chapter five. And I just wanna summarize it. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ because we've obtained access by faith into his grace. We are rejoicing even in our sufferings. Right? It says, and when you come down to verse six, it says, when we were weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. And then it goes through this, for one would scarcely be able to die or be willing to die for a righteous person, but Christ died for us while we were sinners. Christ died so that we might have forgiveness. He died for us as a sinner, but here's the issue. Here's the part that we're moving toward, but I gotta get through this part. The gospel is not just that Christ died and He rose again. It's not just that. We must think about the gospel in terms of the whole life of Christ, and here's why. If the gospel is nothing other than this, Christ died, and I've repented, and now I'm forgiven. If forgiveness is the end of it for you, you don't have the whole thing. Here's why. Forgiveness is a really good thing. And when you get forgiveness, particularly from God through Christ, we rejoice in that. We should. But the problem is, at the moment of forgiveness, let's say all of our sin is now pushed aside from the east, now God, from the east to the west, it's no longer there, right? Well, the problem is, is that the very next day, the very next moment, the very next hour, we're liable to sin again. So what happens then? Is the gospel just about forgiveness? So as we come to verse 12 in Romans chapter five, here's what I want us to get. Sin came into the world. Romans chapter five and verse 12, through one person, okay? It came into the world and death through sin and death spread to all men because all sin. Adam is all the world's representative. One person, sin came through all. Now, you might not think that's fair. You might think that, well, Adam did this and now the rest of us are sinners. And I wanna come back to that point in a minute. First of all, I wanna give you some explanation as to why it is fair, but the other part of it is, is that, what makes you think that you get to judge what's fair? If you wanna judge what's fair, go create your own universe somewhere. The air that you breathe is, given to you by God. So you may think that you're pretty tough and pretty big and pretty smart, but you don't get to create this whole thing. You get to live in it. You're created as an image bearer. That's the first thing so that we don't be arrogant. And we're given other reasons. And one of them is that it wouldn't have mattered who would be, if we talked about it in theological terms, our federal head at the beginning, that any one of us would have sinned at some point. And that disease and that curse would have spread to all of us. Now there's an important thing here that I need you to understand because Paul is going to rake this over and over again. But I want you to understand how great salvation is and it is this. It is not through Adam's trespass that you and I were made sinful. You were constituted, I was constituted, in this curse, by this trespass, so that you are a sinner, not just sinful. And the differentiation in between the terms matters. At a person's core, outside of Christ, we are sinners. We are sinners. It's how we're constituted. It is our makeup. That is, it's not just what we do, it's who we are. He goes on to explain in verse 13, sin was in the world before the law was given, but it's not counted where there isn't a law. Still, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam. In other words, they didn't do exactly the same thing. Adam was a type of the one that come. Now we're going to talk about the free gift. 15, the free gift is not like the trespass. For if any died through one man's trespass, that's Adam, much more of the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ abounded for many. So as you're saying, there is a Even in English, the way that this is translated, it's a little hard to get. So I want to simplify it down for you. In Adam, you were constituted as a sinner. It was part of your makeup. It was the curse. In Christ, you have been constituted as being righteous. That's what you're made up of. In Christ, this is a really hard It's a really hard thing for us to get. This is one of the hardest truths. It goes right up there with God's love. That in Christ, I am righteous. Right? Because I know me and I don't think I'm very righteous. I hope none of you believe in your own righteousness because there's no hope in that. So, we have this free gift. It's not like the result of one man's sin, we're in 16. The judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Now, we're gonna look at 18 and 19, and we're gonna kinda camp here. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation, he's just saying the same thing over and over again, by the way, That's what's kind of hard to get about this passage. Paul is just driving this. It's not like he's saying a different thing. He's just saying the same thing over and over and over again in a different way. And here, he says it one more time. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners. So by the one man's obedience, The many will be made righteous. Now, keep your eyes on those two verses because we're going to talk a little bit. We've already been through this, but we're going to go through it again. Jesus was righteous. He kept the law at every point. Humans, people, are not righteous. God has a standard that is called the law of God that must be met. If it is not met, there is no salvation and no one can have anything to do with God. It must be met, no question about it. It is not, hear me, it is not that God is so very loving that he's just gonna look past all your junk and say that he doesn't think that now that it matters anymore because I'm so loving I'm just going to forgive it all and we'll just forget it happened. That is not Christianity and that's not what happens at the cross and during the life of Jesus. The issue is nothing you have ever done that has offended a holy God has been forgotten. It must all be dealt with. Every trespass of the law, every evil thought, every evil deed, every cross word, everything must be dealt with. Do not think you don't understand who God is if you think he just winks at it and says, oh, never mind. You're such a good guy. I like you so much. You're such a nice lady. I'm just going to forget. That is not the truth. Those things are all dealt with in Christ. All of them dealt with in Christ. And we're forgiven. But there's more. Christ also lived a life. Have you ever thought about this? If it was just necessary for Him to die on the cross so that I might have salvation, why didn't He just come for three or four days over a long weekend and get it done? We could have had Good Friday, crucifixion on the cross, resurrection. That would be it, right? Because we focus so much on the cross. Because He needed to live for that 33 years As a human being who was under the law, and think about it, this'll drive you around in a circle, he put himself under the law that he himself gave as a human being so that he could keep it. Perfectly, in every way, he could keep it. That's why he had to be here. He was righteous. He was obedient. Where Adam was not obedient and the sin of curse came, and it infected all of us and it constituted us as sinners, in order to understand the gospel, it's not just that we were forgiven, but we need a righteousness, and that is called, here's the term, there's a double imputation that happens. My sin goes on Christ. His righteousness is credited to me. So if you are in Christ, you are righteous. You are a righteous person. Do you believe that? You have to believe that, but it's a little bit hard to believe. Because you know you, and I know me, and I know some of you too. You're going to sin again. How does this work? Is it that I can be considered a righteous person if I sin? When I have the accusation that comes to me and it says, you have not met God's holy standard. You have not kept the law. I point to Christ and I say he has on my behalf. Christ kept it. The reason you're not under law anymore, but under grace, is because there is no more law for you to keep. It's been kept. Perfectly. That has been imputed to you. So now we come to that second term. We talked about the passive obedience of Christ, and now we want to talk about the active obedience of Christ. Again, passive is not a bad thing. It just means He chose to suffer. But now we're going to talk about the active obedience of Christ. What that means is, throughout His life, He kept the law. Why are we talking about this? What does it matter? We all know Christ was perfect. Why don't we just talk about the cross? Because the part of the gospel that you need to remember is not just that he died on the cross, but that he lived a perfect life. And sometimes when we talk about that perfect life, maybe we get the wrong idea. The kind of perfection we're talking about is not the kind of perfection that we have in our heads about what would be perfect. When we say live the perfect life, We're talking about God's holy and righteous standard. He lived according to that. We need to understand that that's necessary for us because not only do we need forgiveness, but we need righteousness and we don't have any. We need it to come from somewhere else. Jesus must have come and lived like a human being under the law and kept it perfectly so that we could have his righteousness. Must happen. It's not just that he could have come for a weekend and died on the cross. No, it's not that. He had to live a life that was completely submitted to the Father for the whole thing. In every situation, in every way, he had to keep God's holy standard perfectly. And so, what about this? He was actively obedient to God in keeping the law. So what about this now, my righteousness? If you say that you're not a righteous person and you're a Christian, then God can't have anything to do with you. You are righteous. Well, I still sin. Yeah. Yeah, you do. But here's the difference. Everybody listen, this is important and it's not mine. I got it from Martin Lloyd-Jones and adapted it a little bit, but it's necessary. This is a truth you must understand to be a Christian long-term and it's this. Yes, you sin. And if you are a real believer, instead of being treated like a rebel and a criminal and condemned for it, as we looked at in Galatians 4, you sin, but you sin as his son or daughter. And you're treated that way. When you disobey, or When you think wrong, when you do wrong, you are treated. We're going to talk about some things in the church membership class tonight. You are treated as part of the family. That's different. If that doesn't blow your mind, then you don't understand what you've been given as a Christian. You may not be one. I just want to be clear. It's necessary for you to get this. You're not a condemned criminal anymore. You don't get sent to hell for... And it's not like, well, I'm in a state of grace and I'm righteous one day and then I did something the next day and so now I'm back over here under Adam and then I'm back over here under Christ. No, it doesn't work that way. When you're in Christ, when you're truly in Christ, you're in Christ. But you know yourself and you look at that and you look at your performance and you think, well, how is it then that I could ever be acceptable to God? We're saying, holy, holy, holy to the thrice, holy God, how could I be possibly acceptable to him? Only in Christ. The law was kept perfectly. The scripture says that the law is good. You see, the problem is, is that when we start talking about it's good for us, it's in scripture, we're not under law, we're under grace, that gives us the idea that the law is bad. The law is not bad. The scripture says the law is good. We're bad, right? When we have his righteousness, we are treated as his children and his family. And there are no sons and daughters who aren't disciplined and loved, corrected, grown, nurtured, and matured. You're treated like family, not like criminal. See the difference? That's why you need the righteousness of Christ. That's why you need him to have lived 33 years and kept the law perfectly, because you need his righteousness. It's a judicial truth in the heavenlies that if you are a Christian, that you are legally righteous. But it's a very, very practical truth. So, Ron's talked about this. And we don't even need to go much further, but we're going to go just a little bit further. Ron's talked about this before, right? If you tell me that I have Christ's righteousness, if you tell me that I now am considered righteous, and it doesn't matter what I do, that I get to be treated like family instead of like a condemned criminal, then Wouldn't that encourage me to just go do whatever it is I want to do? Wouldn't that just mean that, well, I could just go sin as much as I want to sin? Well, doesn't chapter 6 and verse 1 deal with that? What shall we say then? Shall we sin at grace abound? No. No, no, no. God forbid. But here's why. Here's why. If you recognize what it took to make you part of the family and to be treated as a person that has a righteousness alien from your own, and to be corrected as a child of God and a son and be encouraged and all those kind of things too, you don't want to sin. That's the point. If you have the attitude that I could get all this stuff so that what happens is then I could just go do whatever I want to do anytime I want to do it, then you're not saved anyway and you don't have the gospel. Right? That's the point. If Christ becoming a man and living a perfect life, and living out the law perfectly, and then dying as a perfect sacrifice, a bloody sacrifice on the cross, on your behalf, does not motivate you to want to mature in Christ, then you're not a Christian. Now I wanna be very clear at this point. Over time, if some of this works like it should work, in the individual believer's life and in the church, we should see those of us who look more like Christ. And so some people will argue then, well, the reason Christ had to live that whole life is to be an example for us. And there's some truth in that, but let's be very, very careful. It doesn't do anybody any good to have examples for a bunch of people who are bad at following examples. Like really bad at following examples. You can't think like that, right? We are horrible at following examples. If Christ had just come to be a great teacher and came and said, okay, look, that's how I live, now you guys get after it, we're all going to hell. Yes, he was an example, but the purpose is, He came to grant us righteousness. Well then, how do our lives look? What do we do? We love Him and we thank Him for what He's done for us. And we want to get as close to Him as we can because He's demonstrated that He loves us and that we're family. And as we get closer to Him, we learn that our priorities and our motivations aren't the same as they were before. And I want to be very careful at this point. You will never do that the way that it should be done. You can't depend, even if you get pretty good at that over several decades, or you think you are. I would be very worried if you think you are. But let's say you think you are getting pretty good at following Christ over a period of time. If you depend on one hour of your ability to please God through your own righteousness, you will go to hell. You must always remember that the righteousness that you depend on, this is where your assurance comes from. Even if you've been a Christian many years and God has done much work in your life, and has matured you and given you understanding of scripture, and maybe used you in certain ways, the only hope you have is the righteousness of another, not your own. Never, never forget it. Because the problem is, sometimes we get pretty proud and pretty arrogant to ourselves. It will keep us secure and assured and humble if we always recognize that our salvation is not based on what we do. It's not based on our ability to keep the law. It's based on His ability to keep the law. We don't work to follow some great example of some teacher. Because if you give us, look at yourself, if you give you anything to do, you go and mess it up. Somebody want to argue? You need the righteousness of another. It doesn't mean that we don't grow in sanctification, but sanctification is the work of a loving father of the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for you that changes you evermore into his glory because of his good grace, because of his righteousness, not because you're a good person, because you're not. He reconstitutes you, you're born again, and your priorities change, your motivations change, that's the point. and you are now treated as part of his family. So we don't have much further to go. We're gonna close. Grace. Grace. Saved by grace through faith. Grace means that the gospel is this. And it's afforded to you. Grace means that Christ came to this earth and kept the law that you couldn't have kept. Couldn't have kept it. And He died for your forgiveness. And He rose again to prove His victory over sin and death and to give it to you. And we need all three of those components. And grace comes through all of those to us. His righteousness is imputed to us, our sin is then imputed to Him, and He gives us eternal life to be with Him forever. Either that is just a theological sort of a concept for you like you could just write it down in a list and you could diagram it and you could make it work that way. It's necessary to understand it but either It's going to be something that, okay, I get it. This is how it sort of works and this is what happens. And maybe I wasn't putting as much emphasis on a part of this. And in this sermon, we're talking about the life of Christ and his fulfilling the law. And now I see that in my understanding, I need to put some more emphasis on his ability to have kept the law and that that's part of the gospel so that I include that when I think about the gospel. There's a little of that there, but this is not academic. The reason it becomes important is because you recognize that it is your very life that these things happened. That when your own conscience, your own heart, the devil, even God himself, if you believe that this would ever happen, accuses you of doing something wrong, you have an advocate who kept the law perfectly and he did it on your behalf. He was actively obedient to the Father. And so, now, you're treated as sons and daughters. The last thing is this before we stop. I have to say this. It helps in our study even tonight. Is that true of you individually? Yes, it is true. But you must always remember that Christ came to die for His people, not just you as an individual. Everything is not about you. Christ didn't create the heavens. He didn't make the sunshine today and think it was all about, I just want to make Drew Pike happy today. May have been part of it. He died for the creative people, right? It's not all just about you. And so, yes, we experience this as individuals, but we experience this as a group. And that's why when we spend so much time talking about the church. So tonight, for example, I'm just going to lead into Drew's stuff without stealing it. And it's just this. He deals with our sins as those who have been counted as righteous. and therefore we're part of the family, we've said that. And so when we then begin to talk about things like discipline within the church, when we begin to talk about things like how we would deal with problems within our own lives, or whether it would be positive discipline or negative discipline, the reason that's important is because that's being done in love, both by the Father and that's reflected within the church. If it's not done that way in our own personal lives, And within the church, then your only other option is to treat someone who is sinful like they are a criminal and a lawbreaker and put them under the jail. Right? Because that's where we all go. That's what we all deserve. So you see, all of this correction, all of this working together in this individuals and as a body is because we're family. I mean, family before, family now. Family because he's paid the price so that we have that relationship. So when God looks at me, he thinks, this is really hard to say, really hard to say, but I have to say it because it's true. It would seem like almost blasphemy, terrible lie, but faith requires this of us to believe this. When Almighty Holy God looks at me, He sees a righteous man. Not because of my own righteousness, but because His Son gave His to me. If you understand what that means, you're not going to have this problem of whether or not I should keep sinning or not. You're gonna hate it. It's not that you're not gonna fall, it's not that you're gonna stumble, but when you see it and he gives you the ability to look at it right, that's not gonna be the question anymore. You're part of the family now. Jesus made you part of the family. Well, I want to read just the very last part of this. Verse 20, we'll be done. Now the law, came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. So that, as sin has reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness, leading to eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord. Grace abounded more than sin because He kept the law perfectly. He lived a life that you could not have lived. So everything that you should have done and you didn't do, He did. Every single time, every single moment. Everything that you should think and you thought another way, He thought that way. And the vice versa is also true. He did it perfectly, on your behalf, so that you might be given the righteousness of Christ. So the last part of this is, you can quote this with me whenever you know it. He gave Him, who knew no sin, to be sin for us, and we might become what? The righteousness of Christ. That didn't blow your mind? I don't know what will. This is part of the gospel. Let's pray. Father, we're grateful this morning for your goodness to us. Lord Jesus, we are thankful that you lived a perfect life on our behalf. We're thankful for the death that you took the wrath of God on our behalf, and that we're forgiven, but we're thankful also that you lived a life and kept the law. And in keeping the law, that not only did you forgive us by what you did on the cross, but that you gave us righteousness by how you lived. It seems like an understatement to say we don't deserve that. So we end this morning by thanking you for grace. for mercy. And we thank you for taking criminals and rebels and regenerating them and making them born again and inviting them and making them fit to be part of your family through your work. Thank you that we get to be among that number. And so now, Lord, we just want to live out of a sense of gratitude. We would ask that the righteousness that you gave us will come out of us in practical ways. Not that we would have righteous works of our own. All of our righteous works are filthy rags of ourselves. We have righteousness when it comes out practically. that just comes from you. We want to be more righteous in our day-to-day practice because you're righteous. We don't want to be more righteous because it earns us anything, because we know that you have already fulfilled all righteousness. And we can't do anything without your work in us, so we're grateful for that. Help us to go from this place as grateful people. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.