Faith and Hope What about the law part 3

Welcome to episode 108, In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the Word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.

Welcome to episode 108. I am going to continue the talk on the law, of all things. I know it, it says faith and hope in the title, but in order to kind of get an idea, a better idea about faith and really hope, I'm going to cover them as best I can in later episodes. But where I left off yesterday talking about the law, I was going to talk about one of the problems I see in the church, the modern church today, and maybe it's just over here in America. The way that the church is using the law after you've been saved. And I don't think that that does any of us Christians any kind of service to use the law as the whipping boy. The law is— it was created by God to show man that he needed God to live a perfect life. There was no way that you and I could not sin. There was absolutely no way. It said all have sinned. And the law— what the law did is it showed man God's standard, which was perfection. And we talked on yesterday's episode that it's impossible for man to live by the law, that— and if we failed at one area in the law, one little law broke, we're guilty of the whole thing. So we might as well have committed all sin. We might as well just been the most rottenest, worstest person in the world. And I know the worstest is probably not a word, but if we're going to commit one, we might as well commit a thousand. Because we're guilty of the whole thing. God sent his son Jesus because he needed a savior. He needed someone that would come and take this law on head-on. Jesus came and just conquered the law. He, he walked a sinless life and died a death for you and I so that we can look at the cross and say, look, I can't be perfect, but he was perfect, and he said if I believed in his perfection that I could be saved. Jesus took all of our sin, all of our failures, everything, and put it on the cross, and all we have to do is by faith— and there's that word again— by faith we have to believe. If we just accept what Christ did for us, we can be saved. And I want to go back to Romans 3:19-20. Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore, by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in his sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin. So God put the law there to show man, show you and I, that we are going to stand guilty. That when we stand before God, if we say, look, we didn't accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, but we didn't break the law, and then he's going to show us each time where we did break the law, and then with his own word, the word of God, is going to make us guilty of the whole deal. So you don't want to stand before God using the law as your standard. You need to stand before God using Jesus Christ as your standard and say, look, I didn't live a perfect life, but he did, and he said that if I accept what he did, I can have everything that he has. And that's faith, that's by putting your faith and trust in the Son of God. That's the salvation message. It's kind of a paraphrasing of the salvation message, but I, I want to talk about the church and kind of how they use the law, like, for something that it was not intended to be used for. The law is used to, to show that you cannot live by it.

That is it.

It is just to show you that you are not worthy to enter into God's kingdom based on the law. When I look back at what I thought the Bible said before I was saved, my first 29-plus years, almost 30 years without Christ, I thought the church was just a bunch of cants. You can't drink, you can't smoke, you can't chew, and you can't associate with those that do. And so I really honestly thought that it was just a bunch of rules. You just— it's just a bunch of cants, and there's no way that you know, that you're ever gonna have any fun ever again if you become a Christian. But that, I mean, that was so wrong, and Satan is so good at what he does, he just kept me blinded to the truth and kept me away from the church. In all honesty, the person with the most freedom is the Christian because he's no longer bound by the law, and that's where I wanna just take a little bit of issue with the church, and I know they're doing the best they can, and I know that if I was running a church and I had a bunch of deacons and I had a bunch of people running around, with my bumper sticker on their car or the t-shirt with my church name and logo on their back. You kind of want it— you kind of want those people to behave. And you don't want to read in the paper that the deacon of XYZ First Whatever Church of God has fallen and did all this horrible stuff. So instead of having all that, you just— they just whip everybody into shape and say, look, you can't do that. And look, you can't do that, and don't do that. And I'm not here to say what, what you can and can't do. I am— I tell you multiple times, I make a horrible Holy Spirit. I am just a guy who reads his Bible and who does the best he can do with what he has to work with every day. And I know I'm not perfect, but again, perfection is not the goal. But I want to talk about something that I'm not— I had to— haven't heard a lot of people talk about, and I know It's out there, but I just want— as you're working out or you're mowing the yard or you're driving down the road, I want you to think about Noah, and I want you to think about Abraham, and I want you to think about Moses. And then I want you to think about what they all had in common right up into the point where Moses had crossed the Red Sea and went to Mount Sinai. And that's found in Exodus 19:20. Then the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai, on top of the mountain, and the Lord called Moses to the of the mountain, and Moses went up. Well, the one thing that Moses did when he went up was he went up without the, the law. So none of the people before Moses went up to Mount Sinai to the top where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments— nobody prior to that moment, no one was under the law there. And I don't know if you've ever thought about that. I don't know if you've ever kind of walked around that idea. But from Genesis 1 to Exodus 19:20, or actually everywhere in the Bible before Exodus chapter 20, man was without the law. So there was no law hanging over their head. Now, there was still sin once Adam bit the fruit. Remember, we're going to talk about that here in a minute. Adam bit the fruit and it was counted to all men, one act, and that's in Romans. And let's just go to that real quick. And that's in Romans 5:12. We're gonna start in 12, and I'm gonna hit you with some of my superior reading skills. Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because all sinned. For until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless, den— death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam. Who is a type of him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man's offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many. And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned. For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification. For if by one man's offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one, Jesus Christ. That's Romans 5:12-17, and I know that's tough to listen to, and I wanted to read that so that you could hear it. You can go back and read it for yourself and just kind of ponder that. This is where I've been talking about where one sin— and it was kind of where I was going like, God, You know, why would you put one sin and cover the whole world with sin? Again, we've talked about this before, but the way God's plan worked out was if one man's sin could cover all of us in sin and we were all born into sin, then one man's righteous act or one man's gift, which was Jesus Christ, could release everyone from sin. And that's what's happened, is Jesus died on the cross and he's released us from the law. So the law is no longer an issue for believers. The law has done its job. If you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, it was probably because someone told you, look, you broke one of the Ten Commandments, or you broke all of the Ten Commandments, or you've broke multiple of the Ten Commandments. But you know that you had sinned and you had fallen short of the glory of God, and you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior to take place— because he took your place on the cross. And when you— he died a death that you should— you or I should have died, and so that we could live forevermore. So with all of that said, and I'm going to have to go to another episode, I thought I could wrap it up, but again, I'm trying to keep this into a 10-minute time frame, and it's very difficult to kind of get because the law and faith and grace and hope, all of these things are such— not complicated topics, but they're, they're simple, but they're hard in 5, 10 minutes to figure out. And I don't want to give you too many things to think about, but I do want you to kind of— this is— I kind of want to do a quick summary. Everyone who walked on the earth before Moses went to Mount Sinai was not under the law. They were under sin. Sin was in the world, but they were not bound by the law. Hopefully I can kind of finish this, the law, up tomorrow. But it's not going to be today. Let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for sending your Son to die a death I should have died. And Lord, you, you lived the perfect life. And I thank you, Holy Spirit, for giving us your word so that we can look into it and we can ask you, what— how does this apply to me? Holy Spirit, I pray that the person listening to this would be encouraged by the word and by you. Lord, and I thank you for being there. You said you'd never leave us nor forsake us. Lord, thank you for being with us every day. We thank you. We love you. We ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you on the next episode.

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