Romans Chapter 6, we'll be looking at verses 11 through verse 13. Here now God's Word, Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lust thereof. neither yield ye your members as the instruments of unrighteousness unto sin. But yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God." Lord, again we do thank you for your goodness to us. We thank you for the salvation given us, we are like everyone else, Lord. We were born in sin, and Lord, in sin, as David says, were we conceived. And so now, Lord, help us to realize that You have come to us. You have saved us, and through the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, You have paid the judgment of our sins and applied His righteousness of keeping the law to us. And now, Lord, we are yours, and therefore we have died with Christ unto sin, and we live unto you. And we ask all these things in thy Son's name, Amen. You may be seated. Again, remember as we are going back through chapter 6, remember the whole chapter has become part of the practical application of the theme of this chapter and all the way up to chapter 8. Again, it's the reign of grace. In the first ten verses we're talking about the grace of God and the reign of grace in its practical application. And remember, Paul always in all of his books, he lays out the theology before he gets to the practical, and right now he�s kind of making a switch in the middle of the book, and it�s kind of a long, drawn-out process, but he�s giving us the theology which is the BASIS upon our actions. He's told us about Christ as we were speaking of again at Easter, remember? Paul tells us again that when Christ died, that was a HISTORICAL point in time, but the historical part of it still had THEOLOGY. He died and was buried, but He was buried and died for us. That's THEOLOGY. And this is where he's been going through, and all the way through from chapter 1 of 6 all the way to the end of it, he keeps talking about you DIED in Christ. Christ was crucified, you that sin died. Again, you were planted with Him that sin may die. You again were baptized in Christ, death. Over and over you get in this picture, and sometimes it's hard for us because Paul intends for us to understand certain things as he's speaking that often we miss. If you're reading Paul and he says, You died once for all to sin in Christ. So are you now perfect? That's one of the questions that he understands. We'll pick it back up. He's already talked about it. Shall we sin that grace may abound? Because grace is so much GREATER and overcome sin. So just go ahead and sin, because the more sin you do, the more grace you get, which is more glorifying to God. That's the logic he's arguing against. And he understands by the LANGUAGE that he s using, someone might say, You talk so much that we have died absolutely one time for sin, because we were in Christ. We were raised with Him, and over and over, and there s where it kind of rubs us. What is he thinking? And I personally have struggled with this all my life when I read Paul, because it sounds like sometimes he says, You re perfect now! you died from sin, and if I understand death right, once you're dead you have no sensitivity to anything. We have to understand when he is using this language, he's talking about a process that God has given to all those that Christ calls out of this world of sin unto sanctification. His theology back here, again, deals with the work of Christ and how it applies to us, but now once we come to the practical application, again, it has effect on us today. The Christian Church, Protestantism pretty much today, has become what we would say in a philosophical school is Gnostic, though we do not understand it. The Gnostics believed that the PHYSICAL world was evil. In other words, this podium is evil because it's made out of the material wood. You are evil in your PERSON because you've got FLESH. But now what really matters is the SPIRIT, and you�re to live in a spiritual way. Now, there were two schools of thought there, OK? There was those that John talks about in the first epistle of John, he�s talking about Gnostics. They believed that Christ, some of them believed that Jesus was a phantom. The Jehovah's Witnesses got most of their stuff through a man named Serenthes, all the way back to Arius in the early Church, who believed these kind of things, and they taught this in the Christian Church as a heresy. So they would say if Christ walked on the beach, on the sand, He would not leave footprints, but He looked real. Then there were two schools, again, within that context of the Gnostics. There were those who said that flesh is evil, We need to punish it. This is where we call the ascetics. They, you know, they pulled away from the world. One man was called Simon Stylides who lived on a pole for 50 years. They went out into the world. They founded the monasteries and pulled out of the world because they needed to have a place they could punish the flesh and deny themselves of the pleasures of the world because the flesh is evil. And they said, we have to punish the flesh, but the spirit is what's going to be living eternally, and that's what counts. But there was another school, and both of them, you might say, in some sense, have logic. This school said, well, if the flesh is evil and there's nothing I can do about it, I just need to enjoy life because it's the flesh that's going to die. It's the spirit that's going to live on. So it doesn't matter. And those two schools and John in the first epistle deals with that when he says that which we have seen and handled with our hands and heard with our ears. He's talking about Christ is no phantom. he's real, he's a man, and therefore he is a man LIVING before God. And there again, in the church today we still have, though we may not go in to use philosophical terms, we kind of think, well, all I need to do is just live so I can get to heaven. I know I'm going to die, so what is going to happen? And what's happened in the church today, we have forgotten everything that the BODY and the SOUL TOGETHER has meaning. Most of us today have never been brought up with a sense of why do the old people in the ancient times build castles, as it were, to worship in? Because they believed their job was on Earth to honor God with their hands and their body and everything around them should be beautiful to God. Not only the churches, but everything they did was to God's glory in the flesh. God made us as He made Adam and we do everything to glorify Him, not just sing hymns, but everything we do. And as we look at our day and time, we see as Christ comes, He comes to break the curse. and therefore everything you do, EVERYTHING you do, is to the God s glory, to again re-establish God s rule ON EARTH since He has CRUSHED the head of the serpent. And as you ll know, after they left the Church, remember, after Christ and the Apostles left, the miracles began to drop off. But as we move from Christ, remember he was crucified around 30 AD. He was back 40 days after resurrection. He was glorified in heaven with his father in his ascension. And now we begin to see the church move out from Jerusalem, driven out by the Jews. They were the first persecutors of the church. They were the first attackers, all the way up until around 300. They were the enemies of the church, not the Romans. Yes, the Romans were. Now, as we see time begin to develop, we see the church is established. Remember the early monasteries, as bad as we would say they are, there were points in which God began to move. It was in the monasteries, yes, These men who became monks and lived in the monasteries because they had this kind of a monastic idea that the body is evil, they still went and worked in the monasteries and they gave birth to things like animal husbandry. They began to look about cross-breeding. They began to do planting. They founded the hospital. Early hospitals were for the poor, they weren't for the rich. But that was where many of the monks began to take up ideas of medicine, and in the monasteries they would help the sick. In 1100s we have the birth of what we would call civil engineering. We had the first pipe organ built. You say, what has that got to do? It had over 11,000 parts. I don't know HOW they figured this out. You're talking 1,100 things that had never been found before, but they BUILT this to the GLORY of God, and in future centuries we find like Handel, and we find men like Beethoven and Bach, who were Christians, founding MUSIC and establishing what we would say THE THEORY of music. It wasn't all that. They were singing, again, monotone chants. And so, again, we see God say, No, the WHOLE WORLD, I want to be gloried, body and soul. YOU will worship God, body and soul. It's not your souls more important, because God punishes the soul and the body. Remember, Christ said it's better that you had never been born. because He is going to cast BODY and SOUL into HELL. But as we live our life today, everything you do has a MEANING in BODY and SOUL. When you hear the people underneath the altar in Revelation, remember, these are people who are STANDING BEFORE CHRIST. It appears it is possibly after His resurrection, and they are praying out, LORD, HOW LONG IS IT GOING TO BE BEFORE YOU PUNISH THE WICKED and then we have the resurrection also. The soul is WAITING the resurrection, those two things. So what you're doing HERE has meaning. It's not all, again, the Bible is not just a spiritual thing, it has to do with your LIVING. Why? It's because Christ BECAME man! Jesus Christ became man. You were already a man. God made Adam and he fell. You are a man, and Christ came to save man in his human form as well as his soul. And so that means for us we are to do ALL things for Christ, anything from changing a diaper to sweeping the house to putting fertilizer in your garden, to becoming a doctor, lawyer, computer operator, whatever you are, as a Christian, everything you do is to glorify God, and as it were, to bring heaven down to us, because Christ has broken the curse. Now, in our day and time, there have things happened in this world that could not be explained by anyone before. in your lifetime, probably 90% of all what we would call GREAT INVENTIONS have been MADE, and they've been made because of the CHURCH! Believe it or not, the father of genetics, Gregory Mendel, was a monk living in a monastery, and he began to do cross-pollination. He wrote PAPERS on this, But you know what? At the same time, a man by the name of Charles Darwin came along. Charles Darwin was fathered by all these pagan liberals, atheists. They refused to allow Mendel's works to be published publicly. Why? Because his works SCIENTIFICALLY debunked everything Charles Darwin wrote. Where did genetics came out of the church? Harvey was a Christian. He was the one who established and followed the blood running through the body. Many medical people in that time. because they believed their work was not just, I'm a man, so I've got to worry about my soul. No, it's man and body is important. You are important in both ways. Everything you do, you do to the glory of God. And now, as Paul's talking to these people, he's looking at them, he says, now, you are those who have died with Christ. And again, at this particular time in history, the Gnostics were already started. They had started in Egypt about a hundred years before Christ. Philo, who was a Jewish theologian and philosopher, had started this idea from the pagans, okay? The pagans always had a hard time with soul and spirit. He interpreted the whole Bible as a great metaphor. It was just a big story, and everything had its own meaning, and it had an effect on the Church. And so as Paul is reading, you can see how they were thinking now. How is what he's saying, is it the SOUL that is important? Therefore, we died SPIRITUALLY in Christ. He died, we died. Therefore, are we perfect? Already, he said, you're going to say, grace is greater than sin. Therefore, the more grace I have, the greater glory it is to God, so I can sin that grace may abound. That's that idea. They don't have a connection. I can sin no matter what in the flesh, because the SOUL is going to be saved. And so now, when He's talking here, how do you understand Him? As we look in verse 11 now, all these things, chapter 1, verses 1 through 10, is the RAIN of grace in the practical life, but now He's going to start looking at grace as it, again, is our DUTY. What s the Law of God? Does the Law have any problem or does it have any actions with you, any place? Is sin STILL the transgression of the Law? What about my sins? And so Paul says in verse 11, he's saying this all the way through ten different times, more than ten actually. In verses 1 through 11 he talks about you died to sin. You were crucified with Christ in the death, and sin died when you were crucified with Christ. You were PLANTED, remember? with Christ and sin died. You were crucified. You were all these things pointing to you died to sin. Now, is he saying since you were in Christ, you died to sin and therefore everything is settled. Live your life because it really doesn't matter. Here's how some people are going to interpret this. You died to sin, so no more problem. Just live your life and go on because sin has no problem with you. It can't do anything to you. You're going to Heaven no matter how you live. This is what he's saying. So now when we get to verse 11, he says, Now likewise, and that little word there is pointing all the way back from verse 1 all the way to 10. Likewise, as Christ has died for you and you have died in Christ, Christ was raised that you might live unto God, go ahead and live, okay? This is where he, likewise, like Christ died to sin in His death. Like Christ lives in His resurrection for us. Likewise, now, he's going to give four different commands in these three verses. First of all, he starts out, likewise, reckon you, and now the word ye is the plural for you. And Paul s talking to the Church, those who have no Christ as their Lord and Savior, and he s emphasizing this, You Christians! He s not talking to the Romans and the Jews who know nothing of Christ. He s talking to you and I, he says. Now, you reckon And remember that word was used in Chapter 4 eight or nine times when He says, God has IMPUTED the righteousness of Christ unto you. It's the same word, imputed, and therefore you have been imputing the law of God or Christ's righteousness to yourself. He says now, reckon, that is, COUNT yourself. You look upon yourself in the way that God looks upon you. And it has PRACTICAL application. It IS theological, but it's also practical. So He's saying now, YOU COUNT YOURSELF when you look at your life as the people around you, the world, the curse of the earth on the world because of sin and sinners that you're intertwined with. He says YOU need to look at THEM because you UNDERSTAND the wickedness, you need to look at yourself in the way that GOD looks upon you, because you were IN CHRIST, you DIED TO SIN. Now, is he saying, and this IS the issue, is he saying, You died to sin, therefore you don't have any problem. Now, a man by the name of S. Lewis Johnson is kind of a philosopher. He's a preacher out in Arizona, but he's also kind of a theologian, philosopher. He makes this point, and I think it drives it home to us because I want you to understand, you can never be perfect in this life. You as a Christian WILL sin. So how do you live? What does it mean for you? Remember, you are BODY and SOUL. If the BODY was no problem, there would be no resurrection because just the SOUL would live. No, BODY and SOUL to God. Christ became man. The Incarnation meant that man had value more than Adam ever had in one sense. Adam was the first man. He talked with God, literally talking, and I believe the person he s talking with as God is the second person of the Trinity who is the Creator of all things, but he became man. God in two natures. He was divine always, but He took upon Himself a body, and His taking upon a body meant, again, the resurrection was real, and the union between God and man was truly real. for flesh and body. That's why when you put your hand to work, you do it unto the glory of God, looking to point out that you are seeking to see the world brought to Christ in every aspect. I was just listening to a guy speaking the other day, it was a news thing, but he was talking about the perversions in the West, talking England, Spain. He said they literally have pornography on billboards all over Europe. He said literally anything you could imagine, they have it publicly. How do you think about that now? You and I might want to go over and throw up if you see these things, but this is what God says, not for the Christian. You see the woefulness of the wickedness of man. This is how it brings out. They HATE God, they hate everything that He commands man to do, therefore they will go to the GREATEST EXTENT to be able to fight against God and project it PUBLICLY IN BODY! Why is that? We'll come to it in just a minute now. So this is where we're going. Paul says again, likewise as Christ died for us, and we died in Christ and therefore we died to sin, but also he says we made a lie. But now, the first command is now, YOU THINK ABOUT YOURSELF IN THE SAME WAY THAT GOD THINKS ABOUT YOU. You have the love of God in you. God has placed His love upon you. He s given His Son as a man to die in your place as a man, because MAN sinned. Man must pay the debt of sin, and that man will also, whom God saves, will be with Him eternally in human form. And so he says, Now, likewise, you think of yourself, you judge yourself, you Christians, also yourself, to be dead indeed to sin. So why can t I have victory? Is he saying, Well, don't worry about it because Christ died for you, period. You were in Christ. He died for you, so nothing. No, he's not saying that, but he said again. S. Lewis Johnson makes this point about the whole chapter. He's dealing with the whole chapter. But he says, It is not talking about the eradication in the sense that when we believe in Christ, the old nature is eradicated, and we live sinless. Man, that would be great, wouldn't it? You wouldn't have to ask forgiveness. That's one of the first things that John talks about in his epistle and his work. We always have to come in before God when we sin, not if we sin. When we sin, we go to him. We confess our sins. We ask God to forgive us our sins. That's a reality. We live in a sin-cursed earth, and this is what he said, Paul said, now you died with Christ, now what effect does that have? He goes on to say in that, he says, no, he is talking about the gradual eradication of sinfulness that takes place in a believer as long as he lives here. Again, Paul is trying to encourage us to realize we sin, we sin daily. I mean, the very fact that God says, love me with your whole heart, mind, body, soul, and spirit. If I asked you, we'll have an altar call. Everybody that holds that perfectly come down. I'd be standing by myself, not by myself, I'd be sitting with y'all. Nobody of this, I love God, you love God. That separates us from the world. We are not yet what we will be in our life as here on earth. Christ has crushed Satan's head. The curse has been again done away, but there's a process in which God is saying now, okay, in this life UNTIL the resurrection of the body or you go home to be with the Lord. You live in a sin-coerced Earth and you have sinners all about you, and you yourself are now going through a process. The difference between you and the world is we all as Christians love God. As humans, we love God. but we are humans still also living in a cursed world. We have, again, we've been made in the image of God in Adam, but we've also been made new in this world, but like a new child is born when he's conceived, you are born anew and a new creation in Christ Jesus when you believe and like a child has to learn and again fight with everything about to learn life as he grows so we are still as we are saved here you are saved you are justified that means before the law of God there is no condemnation come to you you can rest on it for every sin that you have committed will commit and are committing right now God saves you from that Christ has died for that sin And now you are again justified. That has to do with your relationship to the eternal law of God. God's already held, as it were, the courtroom meeting of the judgment. Your FINAL JUDGEMENT has said there's now NO CONDEMNATION to those that are in Christ Jesus. But remember, Christ told the disciples the night He was going to the cross, He says, YOU ARE CLEAN, YOU'VE BEEN JUSTIFIED IN MY BLOOD, YOU ARE IN ME, I KEPT THE LAW PERFECTLY FOR YOU, AND APPLIED IT UNTO YOU. I COUNTED IT AGAINST YOUR COUNT BEFORE THE THRONE OF THE FATHER. the Law of God, there's now no judgment. You're saved once for all. Now, you are JUSTIFIED, but now you have to LEARN to live a justified life. You are set before the Law, has no judgment, but now He says, I'm going to wash your feet. What was that? He was saying, You live in a sin-cursed world. You're dressed, as it were, in the robes of Christ. Remember, that's the garments that they were wearing that night. They were white garments. The only thing that had contact with the world was the shoes on their feet, or their feet if they were barefoot. That's why Jesus is washing their feet. He said, Now, you need to be sanctified. You're living in a sin-cursed earth. That very night, Peter's going to curse Jesus Christ. Deny Him. All the others are going to flee. These are the apostles. Christ was dying, and they are in Christ, and their sins are paid for. But now they've been justified. YOU have been justified. There's no more day of court for you in the final. But now you live among sinners. But YOU have been justified. You were regenerated as you were given birth by the Holy Spirit to receive the things of God. And now you must still live among people who are sinners. The only difference is you love God. The world hates God. This is the situation. The reason you live the way you live is because you died in Christ and you were born again and were RAISED with Him in the resurrection, your sins. He says, rising He justifies, He declares our justification. But now He says, Be holy as I am holy. He DEMANDS that we be like Him. What does that mean? That means we be just like Him. Because God, who cannot look upon sin, cannot look upon a sinner. So how can you have justification? How can you have freedom and peace with God? It's because being IN Christ Whatever happened to Christ for us happens to you. You died with Him on the cross, you were crucified with Christ, but now when Christ came to life as a being, as a man, remember He died, He volunteered to die for us. His life was not taken, He gave His life for us that we as men may also be raised with Him. And so now we are raised with Him. And so now, that s how you see yourself. Living in a sin-cursed world, you love God, you desire to love Him more. One day you will BE like Him, Jesus Christ, when you see Him. That s talking about His PHYSICAL looks. You are in Christ as in your SPIRIT you're with Christ, but now that's the BODY and the SOUL TOGETHER will be like Christ. We will have a BODY now that does ONLY WORK to glorify God in PHYSICAL THINGS. And so he says now, likewise, RECKON YOURSELF, that's a COMMAND, CONTINUOUSLY, RECKON YOURSELF ALSO TO BE DEAD INDEED TO SIN, but now there's a BUT, a BUT is a STRONG ADVERSITY, ON THE CONTRARY. You are alive unto God through Jesus Christ, being alive unto Christ. Notice the difference? Alive, as we were talking about last week, the salmon in the ocean swims AGAINST the current to get back so it can lay its eggs. The jellyfish just floats around and goes with the tide. You might say, It's dead, I don't think a jellyfish has much to think about other than just floating around. Now, you're ALIVE! That means YOU have something to do! God has COMMANDED you, now that you are alive, to LIVE and BE something as a MAN and WOMAN, AND as you have a SOUL and BODY. Together we are alive unto Christ through Jesus Christ. As a man, Christ rose from the grave that we might see. But now notice He says in verse 12, and here again two more commands. Let not, now when you see that in the King James, that's a way they interpret the Greek, that generally is a command, let. Let not sin, that's a command. Do not let sin, positively. So he says, Let not sin, therefore, reign in your mortal body. Now, is he saying don't let sin because the body's evil already, so don't let it grow any worse? That's not what he's saying. Notice he's talking about the body, the word mortal is there, that is in the body that's gonna die, it's mortal. So he said, you are not, he says, do not let sin therefore reign, absolutely, in your mortal body. But you're gonna die. So what does it matter? He said, no, because the man and body and soul are one person. They both have equal amounts of importance to God. That's why we have the resurrection. That's why the saints who have been, again, they were BEHEADED because of the name of Christ, they are speaking of their SOULS, and they're talking about their BODIES being RESURRECTED again, and why is God WAITING? That's an interesting thought there now. Wouldn't you think if I'm in my spirit when I die, everything is even, I'm okay, I'm just sitting there waiting on Christ to come and things can't get any worse anyhow, I'm just HAPPY! The saints in Heaven are WAITING on the Resurrection. If you lost loved ones that you really cared about, they're waiting for you and you're waiting for them to be reunited with them in Heaven, but not JUST in spirit. See, and so he says again, let not sin, do not, absolutely do not sin. Reign, remember this is again, the idea of dominion, reigning, kingdom, you're in the kingdom of righteousness. Sin reigns and so does grace. And so in the reign of grace, again, it has to do with your mortal body. How many of us have ever thought, have you ever thought about, am I a witness when people come into my house? See, the early Church, the Puritans had a hard time. I love the Puritan writings, they were deep, but many of the Puritan churches were just a barn. You had hardback pews like we used to have, no lights, no hymns, because they thought in the sense that any kind of pictures, any kind of symbols, that's Roman Catholic. They didn't even have MUSIC, and I haven't figured this one out. They said, we believe the Bible. Well, what did you have when you go into the temple? You had beautiful art. They had tapestries with pomegranates and palm trees and the flowers and all kinds of trees embroidered. You had the seraphim who were carved—no, they weren't idols—but carved images in wood and covered with gold, and they were also engraven in the walls around the rock. All these things, it was a BEAUTIFUL thing! And as I'm saying, how do we know if you're going to, the Puritans would say, no, we can't do that. God just wants us to just sing, sing Psalms, read the Bible and go home. That was some of the real problems we had. Because they, in some sense, had this mixture with the spiritual word is the real thing. God to worship him in spirit is real. They can't do anything physical because that all automatically makes it an idol. Well, God often didn't make idols, but He made us to be able to have SYMBOLS. And so again, this is where He's coming in. Sin reigns over man, but sin also rolls in the Scripture. Now, when it talks about bodily sin, how does sin, where does sin, is the body evil? To sin is human, to err is human. Is that true? Now, we DO, it's NATURAL, because of our sin. Was it NORMAL for Adam, before the Fall, to sin? Was he evil? No, he wasn't. Remember, HE sinned, but why did he sin? Was it because of his BODY? No, we find again, the BODY is the INSTRUMENT by which we see the OUTWARD REVELATION of sin. Remember, Christ says, As you think in your HEART, So are you. He's not talking the heart. He's not saying in that thing that pumps or in your brain. No, He's talking about the spiritual aspect of man. As you THINK, so are you. And therefore, how does someone show forth his sin? A man. It's through his hands and through his labor. You can say to the Lord, I don't like this job. I hate it. Where is that coming from? You may not work as you're supposed to, but it comes out of the heart. You have a battle with God. God has made you to LABOR for Him with your body, soul, and spirit. We are all one person, body, soul, and spirit. And now, how does it show? What I'm thinking in my brain, in my spirit as a man, comes out in my reactions. How many times have you watched a movie on television about somebody just murdered and they say, well, you know, I really didn't mean to do that. That's not who I really am. Well, who did it? Who are you? You know, here's a man who's killed several people. You know, I really didn't have any personal problem with them. I really didn't like them as a person. I don't know why I did it. It wasn't me. Whoever you were at the time is who will punish. That's what we OUGHT to be doing, okay? But the point is, again, the instrument of sin IS the body, because out of the heart come, Christ says, murderers, adultery, fornication. All these sins come from WITHIN man, his SPIRIT. We see again, the BODY which comes under POWER of sin REACTS. So remember why God gave us the Ten Commandments, and when He gave us the CASE LAWS, remember He says, a man who kills another man by his blood, his blood shall be shed, literally it's by a MAN, but He's talking about the LAW. But remember, He goes in and lays out, here's the principle of judgment of God and the King, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, burning for burning, death for death. People today, oh, that's CRUEL! That's cruel, that's mean. Why? It's just a body. You know, it's the soul that matters, isn't it? So where's sin? That's what sin, in its thought, works out into the reactions and how man acts. He acts from his heart, and therefore, again, and it enslaves a person. Why is a man caught up in alcoholism, or pornography, or sports, or whatever you can imagine? We become fanatics to what we're doing. Why is that? It's because of the heart. And man, again, you can say, well, it's a chemical imbalance. Those things do happen. That's why God gave us His grace to have doctors and people that could study those things. But the point is, it's the SIN that comes out. We see how it reacts to the body when it works out. A man becomes an alcoholic because he gets ATTACHED to it, and he HAS to have it! And almost every sin is the same. It becomes we are ADDICTED to it. Our SOUL cries out for it! and therefore we can't stop ourselves. And we blame it. on our environment, or whatever. But Christ says, No. He says, again, we are to NOT sin in this mortal body, again, that we should OBEY it in the LUST thereof, the idea of LUST here. Now, the LUST here is different than the mortal body. The mortal body is what SHOWS us, REVEALS our sin. LUST is the thing that kind of CAPTURES it and DRIVES it to it. Because the idea of lust is the idea of PASSION in the Greek idea. It�s how when a man becomes so enriched in something that he�s just got to have it. It�s a PASSION with him. It overtakes him, and it works out in his external life. See, that�s one of the things when we talk about sin, how is it? As Christians, we struggle with those things. We fall in love with things. We want to have them. We need them, we think. It's that passion. But Christ says, you're a Christian. Christ has died for them. You need to think who you are and what Christ has done for you. You reckon yourself dead to sins. You may have to fight, and we will fight those things until Christ comes again. That's what Paul's saying. You have to be prepared, and what he's saying now, you need to understand what Christ has done for you, and in you, body and soul. You understand that within you comes sin, in the heart, the things that you prepare for in this life, you prepare for, and they work out in the physical sense of the body, and it captures you. crisis you're going to have to fight. you have been forgiven and there is forgiveness that's one thing that you and I have that the world does not have we God has said that when you sin you have an advocate with the Father Jesus Christ the righteous Christ who has not only taken your place and paid the debt of your sin but he's also become a man and kept the law perfectly that he might apply it to you he again accounts it to you who is a sinner. He has paid the debt of your sin and you are in him and when he died, you died to sin. He kept the law perfectly and when he kept the law perfectly, he applied that to you. He accounted it to you. And this is how you are living as a Christian, because the Holy Spirit IN you now guides and directs, and this is something that you must remember. How often have we then come and said, Lord, you know, I just can't break this habit. I just can't get rid of this sin. Does that mean you quit? One of the points that shows you no crisis, God's Spirit WILL NOT let you quit. believing, fighting. When you sin, you sin often, you continuously sin every day of your life because we cannot love God whole body and soul as we ought. We struggle with that, we want to. And when we sin, the Holy Spirit comes to us like He did David, and again, how much sin can He do? David is the example for us. Here's a man who is called the man after God's own heart, a man whose passions went crazy. God doesn't say, David, you're a bad boy. He was, he was a wicked man. He let Himself be LED into this sin, no doubt I think He probably understood what was going on in the background anyhow. And what does He do? He lets PASSIONS OVERRULE His righteous HEART and SOUL and MIND and BODY. And what happens? He doesn't look to God. It appears that maybe he didn't have too many feelings after the event, because now when her husband, she finds out that she's pregnant, her husband comes, a man after God's own heart. What's he going to do? He's the King of Israel. He takes a life. I don't say that in pleasure, but that's something for us. This is how God says, YOU DIED TO SIN. This is how far you as a Christian CAN go! But what was the difference between David and Saul? Saul didn't commit adultery. He just did one little thing. He let the people have the animals that God said, Saul killed ALL those animals from Agag the king, all the way down. Everything goes. They are wicked evil in my sight. YOU destroy them and you don't save them at all. All he did is let the people have the best of the cattle. And what does Saul say when Samuel goes, oh, I did this because they were gonna give the best of the cattle to God in sacrifice. God's gonna take the kingdom from you. But it's not my fault. I couldn't help myself! I was doing this for God because they were good cattle, I mean, they were beautiful, they were perfect, they were perfect sacrifices. I had never intended to disobey God. God said, The Kingdom is going to be torn from you. See, He was always making an excuse, What did David do? Because the Holy Spirit came to David, and He told him the story, remember? And He said, David, you're the man. David didn't make excuse, well, it was HER FAULT! No, he says, I HAVE SINNED. That's what you do, and you keep doing that. All through your life you will be doing, Lord, here I am again. I'm your child. You've promised me. You will always hear my prayer of confession because the Holy Spirit of God has made me YOUR CHILD. you have ADOPTED me, you have GIVEN your SON for me, and I died to sin. Therefore, I LIVE, and there because I live, I confess my sins to you to forgive me and never leave me." That s the promise we have. Let s pray. Lord, again we come to thank you for your goodness, mercy, and grace. We who are sinners, as the hymn says, prone to wander, prone to leave the God I love, how often many of us struggle with these struggles daily. But because your Holy Spirit has made us alive, we cannot and will not leave you. We can sin greatly. We can go through many things, but you will always chasten us restore us and you will keep us because we're yours. And we pray that you would guide us and help us to see what Paul is telling us. Lord, you died for our sin. We died for our sins because we were in you. But we also rose with him from the grave to live as his people and help us today in Jesus name. Amen.