09 Grace and the Law (Romans 6:15-7:6)

SPEAKER_00: We are in uh Romans chapter six today. When we were when my first child was born, I was living in Eugene, Oregon. And you know the joke about Oregon is that old hippies never die, they just move to Oregon. And it's really true. And at the time, um I was in a church in a community where I was kind of in the not in the right age group. So everyone I knew either had older kids than me or they didn't have any kids at all. So here I had this newborn, and I was kind of desperate to meet some other moms who had babies and newborns. So I joined this group called Birth to Three, which was a support group for parents who had children from um birth to three years old. And, you know, being a new parent, I was hoping I could find some other moms and and learn something because, you know, they didn't give me the manual when we left the hospital. I don't know why. So the first time I went, we had this featured guest speaker, and she was a fairly young psychologist. She was right out of school, and she had no children of her own. She was, and this was this was Oregon too. And she was speaking on how to help kids have a healthy attitude towards food. And so she maintained, and this was kind of the main point of her talk, that children covet dessert as opposed to say vegetables, because we make dessert special. We offer it last and we use it as a reward, you know, clean your plate, and then you can have dessert. And if we would just stop doing that, then children wouldn't overeat in dessert. So her advice was to put the dessert and the green beans on the table at the same time. And that children would just naturally choose some of each. I'm thinking, I know this is not gonna work. And I wanted to raise my hand and go, could it just be that maybe ice cream tastes better than Brussels sprouts? Anyway. So I bring that up because that's essentially the point of the passage today. Uh I know you're gonna find the hard to believe that there's a connection between that and Romans. But Paul's gonna answer the question, if I'm no longer under threat of the law, then why not sin? If there's no punishment. So it's kind of the why can't I eat dessert first question. If if there's no um no threat, no punishment of the law to come down on me, then why not? And his answer is essentially you'll still get fat. So metaphorically speaking. All right, so let me let me explain that rather bizarre opening. Just to set the stage of where we are, and remember in chapters one through five, he laid out his case for justification and that we are not justified by keeping the law, we're justified by faith. And now in chapter six, he's begun answering questions that are objections to the gospel that he's he's just laid out. So these are not the questions of sincere and eager disciples so much as questions that people would raise in objection, saying, Well, if your gospel is true, then it means this, and so your gospel can't be true. So the first question was, should we pursue sin so that God has more to forgive, and the more he has to forgive, the more glorified he will be. So shouldn't we pursue sin? And Paul's answer is no, because grace includes more than just forgiveness, it includes breaking the power of sin in your life such that we now have a hope of the holiness of God or the glory of God. So to continue in sin would be to mock that part of the gift. So now we have a related question in 6.15. He says, What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means. So the point of this, the objection here is okay, granted we shouldn't pursue sin, but there's no reason not to, because you've told us that we can't jeopardize our inheritance. We can't break God's grace, we can't lose it, we can't unearn it somehow. So it doesn't matter how much we sin because we're still gonna be forgiven. So there's no reason not to. Um, isn't that what you're saying? And Paul's answer is no, that's not what we're saying. And he's gonna answer it two ways. He's gonna say there is still a reason to avoid sin, it's called death, and that's what's in 16, verses 16 through the end of the chapter, and then in 7.1, he's gonna answer it another way and say, not only that, the law didn't stop us from sinning anyway. So his first part of the he this is a two-part answer. The first part is there's still an incentive to avoid sin, that's death. We're gonna talk about what that means. And um, or they you will still get fat, part of the answer. And then the second one is the law wasn't an incentive to avoid sin anyway. It made us, in fact, more aware of our sinfulness and increased our sinfulness in a sense. That's what he's gonna talk about. It's funny, I was listening to the radio yesterday and they the collins yell, and totally on kind of tangential to the point he was making, one of the callers said, Sins can be forgiven, but stupid is forever. Okay, that's kind of what we're talking about today, too. Your sins can be forgiven, but there are consequences to our sins and that are not removed. Okay. So let's go over it um verse by verse. So we're gonna start in 16. I'm gonna read from the um English Standard Version. Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone, well, I I read the question in in 15, what then? Are we to sin because we are not under law, but under grace? By no means. Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness. Now, the first thing I want to remind you is remember how we've defined death, because I think this is again the way he's using it here. He doesn't have in mind just the fact that one day our hearts will stop beating. He has in mind something about our present experience. And I'm often when I teach this, some people ask me, where do you get this definition of life and death? And this is the main passage. Well, Romans 1 that we looked at the very first week, the end of Romans 1. But this is another one because Paul's arguing there's still a reason not to sin right now, and that's death. So that doesn't make sense if he's talking about a future death. It makes a lot more sense if he's talking about something I experience here and now. So death is not just the end of life, but it's all the things that make life frustrating. The hostility, the strife, the sharp tongues, the frustrations, the anger, um insensitivity, neglect, abandonment, bitterness, um, all those things that make relationships fall apart, that make marriages uh fall apart, that make parents and children not get along, or office politics seem to be the norm, all those things that are in our life every day, Paul I think would call death, and they are the direct result of sin. So when you sin, you experience one or more of those consequences. Um and his answer is do you not know that if you continue to sin, you're going to get death? If you strive after righteousness, you're going to be to move toward life and righteousness. So there's your incentive not to sin. God will still forgive you, God can redeem it, God can forgive it, but there will still be consequences. You will still feel some kind of pain or um brokenness or bitterness or something. I'm sure you're all aware of it. So let's look at the language, because the language is confusing. He's going to speak metaphorically throughout this whole section. And he's using again, he's coming back to his master slave analogy. So he says, You are slaves of the one you obey. Um his point is basically your master will determine the kind of life you have. So if your master is sin, the kind of quality of life you will have now will be a life marked by death, anger, bitterness, frustration, corruption, decay, um, sharp tongues, all those things. If you pursue um righteousness or God is your master, then that will be the quality of life. So the point being, you don't have the option of sinning and having life. That's the one mistake we make. We think if I don't get caught, it won't matter. Or no one will get hurt because no one will ever know. This is a great thing to drum into your children. It doesn't matter whether you get caught, it doesn't matter if the teacher finds out or your principal finds out or uh the neighbor or whoever, there will be death of some form. There will be hurt, there will be brokenness of some form. You can count on it. There's no way around it. And you can't pursue sinfulness and enjoy the life of God. It doesn't it doesn't work that way. The master, your master and his metaphor determines the quality of life you have. So you will be slaves of the one you obey. That is, I think that's the metaphor that he's talking about. You um the one you obey will determine the quality and character of your life. So obedience leads to righteousness, disobedience leads to death. Okay, seventeen then. But thanks to God, but thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin became obedient from the heart to that standard of teaching to which you were committed, and having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. So he's making the same point. Thanks be to God, even though you were a rebellious sinner, you responded to the gospel, you trusted in Jesus to make you holy, and thus you were freed from this prison of sin and death, or this master of sinfulness, and instead became a prisoner of holiness. So I think all he means by obedient from the heart is you responded to the gospel, you became convinced of faith, and you were slaves to sin, but now you obeyed the gospel, you're no longer slaves to sin, but slaves of righteousness. Now, nineteen and twenty then are a little bit confusing because it sounds paradoxical. He's gonna s he says in seventeen, you were set free from sin, and now you're a slave of righteousness, and then he goes on to say, Therefore don't sin. Well, wait a minute, if I'm freed from sin, why do you have to tell me not to sin? And he has this funny verse in the middle of I'm speaking in human terms. I think the thing, the key to remember to understanding this is 19 goes forward. So this is not a conclusion, it's a preface. So he says, What I'm about to say, I'm saying because of your humanity, because you're still human. And that is, ultimately you will be completely freed from sin. That's categorically true, that's your destiny, that's your inheritance, but it's not fully realized now. And because of that, the exhortation is present yourselves to righteousness. So let me read it. For just as you once presented yourselves, presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. So 19 refers forward. What I'm about to say, I'm speaking in human terms, because you still live in a fallen world, because you're still fallen, because of the weakness of your flesh. The exhortation is just as you once pursued sin, so now pursue righteousness. Again, it's ultimately true, uh, but in the moment of the day I have a choice to make. So God has made a claim on my life, He'll never rescind. I cannot lose my grace, I'm my inheritance, His grace is sure, the ultimate direction of my life is still holiness and righteousness. That's what he means by having been set free from sin in 17. But tomorrow I have to make a choice. I'm faced with a moment by moment choice. Do this or do that, speak or hold my tongue, um wait, be patient, get angry, whatever. And when you're in that moment, the thing to remember is if you sin, you experience death. And as far as you are able, you want to pursue righteousness. Now he's going to go on in the next in the end of seven in chapter eight to say we will not be perfect in that. That's a hope we have before us. Um the dis and but insofar as our choices are line up with obedience and righteousness, we will experience life. Insofar as they don't, we will experience death. Now we ought to be moving toward the direction of righteousness. As our faith matures, as God uh grants me more wisdom, as He works more and more in my life, I ought to begin to see more and more of my choices moving in the direction of righteousness and my response when I fail, moving more and more toward brokenness, repentance, humility as opposed to pride or self-righteousness. Now, it's not my responsibility to go out and make myself choose better every day. I don't have to earn my sanctification because God is going to be the one to change me. And He's again going to make that clear as we go on in the chapters. So the outcome's been decided, um, but we have not yet been fully restored, and because of our present fallen humanity, or some translations say the weakness of your flesh, you're gonna struggle. You're gonna face a choice. And when you're struggling, remember sin leads to death. You won't jeopardize your inheritance, but you may get hurt now. There are consequences. That's the yes, you will still get fat part of the to go back to my earlier analogy. Yes, God can forgive, he can redeem, he can restore, he can bring goodness out of even the most tragic circumstance, but there still are consequences. And it's interesting to me as you go through the Old Testament stories and the biblical stories, I cannot find a single case where the consequences of sin were absolutely, completely wiped away. I've never I've if you find one, let me know. But I have yet to see a story of anyone in the Old Testament, especially or in the New Testament, where they sin and God says, Oh, well, we'll just wipe that one clean. Now, he does bring good out of it, he often restores, he often does something completely wonderful and unexpected in spite of it, but people still get hurt, they still face the consequences, they still face the um the pain or the loss. And this is something I think as parents is a great parenting tool. And especially now I have teenagers, we're trying to drill into them that you will face a hundred temptations every day, and they need to know that there's no escaping the consequences of sin. So if it's whether it's lying or cheating or promiscuity or uh destructive behaviors or addictions, there are consequences to those actions. And they think, oh well, my parents will never know, my teacher will never know, I won't if I don't get arrested or I don't get in trouble in school, what's what's the difference? I can get away with it. Um and what Paul's saying here is you can't get away with it. There's always a consequence. Um it will damage, even if it's just in your own soul where you're damaged or scarred, it's inescapable. That's also something we tried to teach our children when they were little. Um, you know, when you're struggling with sharing and you get into these fights, you can point out, look, is anybody having fun here? See how everybody has more fun when you share. When you're selfish, it leads to everybody's in tears, everybody's fighting, everybody's unhappy. And make those those connections between the choices they make and the consequences they face, because they're inevitable. Um and it also gives you the opportunity then to sometimes show grace, say, yes, you're absolutely totally guilty in here, you deserve punishment, you're um, you know, you you broke the family rules or whatever, but I'm gonna not punish you this time. That's what grace is all about. I'll take the punishment for you. Um we tried to do that when our kids were little, I don't I don't know how successful we were, but it's something to strive for. To make the connection between the choices you make, they have consequences. And that's I think as a society, we're trying to get away from that. You know, there's an awful lot of I'm just a victim here, or it wasn't really my fault, I was tired, or it was my upbringing, it was my mother's fault, it was uh, you know, whatever. It's never my fault, I'm always a victim. And I think Paul would say, you make choices, there are consequences, they're inevitable, they're inescapable. Okay, so the first deterrent then, why should we just if there's no if the law doesn't apply and I can't lose my inheritance, why shouldn't I just keep sinning? Paul says, because if you keep sinning, you'll experience death. So that's the first incentive not to. Okay, let's look at 20 through 23. When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of these things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification, and its end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. I love this 20. You were free in regard to righteousness. He's making a it's ironic. This is like saying fat-free. You didn't have any. You were righteousness free, you know, like none, fat-free, no calorie-free, the way we use that. He's it's an ironic statement. When you were slaves of sin, you had no righteousness. It's similar to the phrase we might say you were free from worry, meaning you didn't have any. He's saying you were free from righteousness, you didn't have any. I love that. So it's like so ironic. So, what were the results of your lifestyle? Look around you. When you were slaves to sin, what kinds of things marked the character of your life? Um, the end of those things is death. The benefit you got from pursuing sin were all those things that you're now ashamed of the corruption, the bitterness, the anger, the decay, um, the sharp tongues, neglect, the abandonment, all that stuff. But now that you've been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification, and its end is eternal life. Eternal life here is I think is a phrase we can need to understand more fully. It's not just a kind of life that will never end, it is that. But he has in mind something else. That word is literally translated the life of the age of ages, and I think what he's looking at is the kind of life you will have in the age to come, the quality of life. Um, and it's imagine a world without death. It's hard to imagine, we don't even have the words to describe it. But imagine a world where you don't have to work at relationships because you naturally and inevitably move closer together. You don't have to work at a marriage or a parent-child relationship or a boss or a student because you know, you understand each other, you know exactly what to do. It's inevitable. It's just the way you are, and where every person you meet is better for having met you because you naturally and inevitably, that's the kind of person you are, and vice versa. Imagine a world where you don't have to think about, oh, did I say the wrong thing, or despite my best intentions, it all turned out wrong. It would always turn out right, it would always be the right thing to say. Because we are not we would no longer be fallen people. That's the promise of life. And God's saying that's the kind of life that's coming, that's the inheritance you have in the kingdom of God, and this is the promise you have. This is the fruit of obedience, this is the fruit that I'm promising you. So the wages of sin is death. If you sin, the egg the uh inescapable result is death or a life marked by death, but the free gift of God is this incredible, wonderful kind of life that's coming. And that ought to motivate us. Because for most of us, it was the death in our lives that drove us to God in the first place. You know, we got tired of the failures, we got tired of the brokenness or the bitterness or the anger or falling into that pit of of self-pity or destruction, and we wanted a way out. And Paul's saying, if that's the thing that drove you to God in the first place, why would you continue to stay there? Why would you want to stay in that pit when God is offering you the very thing your heart desires? So let's see. Why would you ever go back to it? I think is is his point there. We are moving fast. This is good. We'll have time for questions. Okay. So that's the end of his first argument. So from 6 uh 15 to the end of the chapter, the question is, why shouldn't we just sin if there's no law? In other words, there's the punishment has been review review removed. So why can't I just eat dessert first if it doesn't matter any longer? And his answer is, you will still experience death, or in my analogy, you will still get fat. The calories are still there. So um we do have an incentive not to sin. It's called death, and we experience every time. Now he's going to change it around a little bit in 7 1 through 6 and say, the law didn't work anyway. If you're looking To the law to be the thing to keep you from sinning, it had the exact opposite effect. It had the effect of making us more sinful, of making us more aware of our sin and of multiplying our transgressions. And he uses this analogy of marriage and death again. It's a little confusing, but I think you'll see as we go through here. So in this section, he's basically going to turn the question around and say, the law didn't work anyway. So, 7-1, or do you not know, brothers, for I'm speaking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives. Thus a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives. But if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not as an adulteress. So his poigner is saying, just as a woman is bound by the law to be faithful to her husband as long as he's alive, but when he du he dies, she's free to marry another. So long as I am under the law, it has the effect of forcing me to try to make myself holy. So the m as long as I'm under the law, I have to try to keep it, and I have to keep trying on my own to make myself holy. Once I place my faith in Jesus, or the analogy, once my my sin, my the husband who's the law dies, I'm no longer forced by the law to make myself holy. I can trust God to do that for me. So that's the analogy. It's kind of um it's it's a little bit confusing, but it it makes sense when you stop to think about it. So his he's drawing the analogy between the law and the woman's relationship to her husband. So as long as the Mosaic covenant is binding on me, it has the effect of marrying me to my sin, if you will. It forces me to try on my own to be holy. So it forces me to look at the standard and realize the standard's up here, not down here where I want it to be. You know, the standard is all the law with all my heart, with all my soul, all the time, my thoughts, my actions, my speech, everything. And the more I look at the law and try to keep it, the more I see I fail. So the law has the effect of marrying me to my sin, of binding me to the very thing that I'm failing in. So if I'm married to the old me under the law, then I have no choice but to sin because, remember this situation, I am I am a prisoner of sin and death. Once the law ceases to bind me, which occurs at the moment of faith in Jesus, then I'm no longer bound to the law that way. I'm no longer hopelessly trapped in sin and death. Now I'm free to be married to another, to continue his analogy. I'm free to be a slave to God or married to God, if you will. I'm not bound on my own to keep the law. I can now trust God to make me holy. And that's the point he's trying to make. When you were under the law, you had no hope. When you're out from under the law, you have hope. Let me finish some the verses and then we'll go back and flush it out a little more. Because this is in four is where he spells it out. Likewise, my brothers, you have also died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit for death, but now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit. So here he's going to spell out his analogy. You were released to your marriage, your marriage to the law by the resurrection of Jesus, so that now you might be made holy. So what the law did was show you the depth of your sin, the depth of your sinfulness. In a sense, it promoted sin by making you more aware of it, by making you try harder, by make by multiplying, if you will, the number of laws you could break so that you can see exactly where you stand. But now you will be made holy because of what God has done for you through faith in Jesus. So his point in answer to the question is the law wasn't an effective means of prev of preventing evil and sin. In fact, it had the exact opposite. Because the more we strive to keep it, the more we saw how sinful we are we were. So it enforced this marriage, if you will, between me and my sinfulness. I had to do this, I had to keep the law, and I couldn't. So the law says, you know, show God how good you are, show him your stuff, uh, do this and you'll live, and don't and you um won't. And the deeper I looked for for that kind of righteousness, the more I tried, the more sinfulness I found. So instead of promoting righteousness, it forced me to confront my sinfulness by proving that it was that I'm not good enough. Just a couple of um words I want to pick out. He says, While we were living in the flesh, I think what he means there is while we were living apart from God. So the flesh is not necessarily our physical body as opposed to the spirit, but the me that was apart from God, the me that had no access to the Holy Spirit, the me that was under God's wrath and um left on my own. So while I was living under the law, apart from God, the only thing I could do was bear fruit for death. So flesh is everything I am apart from God. Anything I try to do in my own resources, and it that's going to become more clear in chapter 8. He's going to continue using that word, and I think in there especially he means everything we have apart from God. So the me that is under the law, the me that has no resources from the Holy Spirit, the me that was on my own. So all the law accomplished was making me face my inadequacy. Now, we say all the law accomplished, that's a pretty wonderful thing, because that's the first step of saving faith. So to if we don't come to that point where we realize, oh, I'm not going to make it on my own, I have to look outside myself, I need a sale savior, then we haven't taken, we have nothing. I mean, we're still trapped. So when I I don't mean to minimize this by saying all the law accomplished was forcing me to face my inadequacy, that's a wonderful thing. And it seems to me God lets us have those experiences throughout our lives. You know, whenever I know in my life, whenever I get too self-important or start taking myself too seriously, some I'll do something really stupid. And it's like, oh yes, now I remember why I'm here in the first place. You know, we we are it seems like when I was a new Christian, I thought I was sinful and I became a Christian because of that, but then I got married and found out I was more sinful than I thought. Now I had kids, you know, and all those dreams of being the perfect parent went right out the window. So saw that. Oh, it goes even deeper than that. And now I have teenagers and they like to tell me every day, you know. Just in case you've missed it, Mom, let me tell you where you're wrong. Um so I mean I don't want to pick on them, but uh those experiences are valuable, I think, because they're the things that keep us on our knees. They keep us from getting, from creeping back under the law and saying, Look how good I'm doing now, God, aren't you pleased with me? When we're confronted again with our sin, it keeps us back on on the track of thank you, God, for changing me, for saving me. The the progress that I see is from your hand and keep going. So the point of his analogy is the law doesn't promote righteousness. It's um and if you remove the incentives of the law, you're only you're not um wait a minute, I'm lost in my sentence. So the law doesn't promote righteousness, it promotes, in a sense, sinfulness by making us more aware of it. And so to say I've removed the incentives of the law, therefore we should pursue sin doesn't make sense because we still have death and the law wasn't a deterrent from sin anyway. Um, release from the law then, that's another phrase in here. I don't think it means that the law is no longer a valid description of righteousness. It doesn't mean that, you know, God changed his mind and all those things in the Old Testament don't apply anymore and they're not they're not true. The law is still a valid picture of what a righteous person would look like. It still tells us what's good, what's bad, what God values, what he doesn't, how he works, and we can still learn a lot from it. So when he says we've been released from the law, it doesn't mean the law is no longer important. It means we've been released from it in terms of a contract, we've been released from the binding effect of it. We are no longer bound to keep the law on our own. We have a new contract, if you will, with God who's promised to give us life. So we can still learn a lot from the law, we can still learn what God values, we can still see what a righteous person would look like, what morality is in God's eyes, what standards he's built into the world, but we're not bound to it in the same way. Um the last verse, some translate the English standard has we serve not under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit. Some people translate that the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. Um I just wanted to point out if that's what your translation says, that's not the same idiom as our letter of the law, spirit of the law. He's not talking about our interpretation of the law versus the intent behind it or the understanding. I think he's talking about the oldness of the letter is, or the um the letter of the law is when you had to do it on your own, when you were under God's wrath and trying to keep it on your own. So it's more of an old covenant kind of term. The newness of the Spirit is now God has made available to you his spirit, you have resources to keep the law you never had before. Um and so now we have the hope of keeping the law. Now we won't do that perfectly, but we will move we will make progress to that point. So he's not talking about intent versus literal or a literal interpretation versus uh the intent of the law interpretation. I think he's talking more from a theological point of view of trying to keep the law on our own versus now trying to keep the law with God's Spirit working in us. So the objection we looked at today, and I'm gonna give you time for questions and answer one other question that came up from last week. The objection today was if the gospel is true, then grace removes any incentive not to sin, because we're no longer in jeopardy of losing our inheritance. And Paul says that's not true because there's still a very good incentive not to sin, and that's death, the kind of life you will have. The wages of sin and death, if you want to be free from that kind of corruption and bitterness and decay, the only way is to pursue holiness. And furthermore, he answers the law didn't deter us from sinning, it actually made us more aware of our sin, it multiplied our sins by forcing us to come up with holiness on our own. So it spelled out how high the standard is and how far we are from it. The next section he's gonna go into in seven is one of my favorites. It's the one I've been promising you. We're finally gonna get to the thing that I do, I don't do, and the thing that I want to do, I don't do, and we're gonna look at that. There's one question I want to answer briefly from last week, and I'm sorry if I was confusing about this. I did not mean to be. The question came up what about professional help? And is it wrong for a Christian to seek professional help if we have this grace, if we have this reason to rejoice, why are we still depressed or why do we still need help? And I want to speak to that because I didn't mean to imply by the fact that when we talked in chapter five about having a reason to rejoice and to hope in God that you would you would feel happy every moment of every day. That's not a valid promise. It's interesting, I think, in fact, God made it so we need each other. And he designed it that way, he built us that way on purpose. So in our society, you know, we've rightly, I think, emphasized you need to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That's true and that's valid, but we've lost sight of the fact that we are also called to be part of a church, to be in community, to be part of the body of Christ. I think God has gifted us such that we need each other. We we cannot do the face this walk alone, and if we try, the m the more we try to do it alone, the more we will fail. So we haven't talked about this too much, but how do you get from A to B? You know, we've said sanctification is a process, it's a hope we have before us, we're not there yet. How do you get from here to there? The amazing thing to me is God lets us be part of the plan. I mean, how we get from there to there is we rub shoulders with each other, we talk to each other, we bear one another's burdens, we hold each other up along the way, we encourage each other, we admonish each other. I mean, that's kind of an amazing thing to me that he took us sinful, fallen creatures, and then made us instruments of grace in each other's lives. I mean, how how great is that? Um, I think, especially in the Corinthian letters, Paul makes this really clear with all his analogies about some are hands, some are feet, some are eyes. We're all part of the body of Christ. We need each other. We are called to be in community to each other. So we don't want to walk alone. Um we want to gri and God has gifted us so that we need each other to be around each other, and that you know, Fran may be the person who speaks the word I most need to hear, and that's part of God's plans. He's using her to further grace in my life that way. Now, that necessarily I think implies that there are times when you will need professional help. There that you may. There are times when you need to seek out, maybe not just a friend, but a pastor or a teacher or a counselor or a professional of some kind, and that's okay. That's part of the plan. Um, that's part of us growing and rubbing shoulders and and being together. So I didn't want to imply that because you've been saved and you have this hope before you, you will now never struggle, you will now always be happy. That's not the promise, but you have hope that you didn't have before. And Paul says in Thessalonians, we grieve, but not like those who have no hope. Yes, it still hurts, but there's an underlying reality we don't want to lose sight of. Um so, yes, we need each other. Um that's the beauty of a place like Wednesday in the Word where we can talk and grow together and hold each other accountable and share things from our lives and learn by what God is is doing. That's all part of this sanctification process. And I didn't mean to imply that now you're you know, go and be perfect and do it all by yourself. That's not the implication. Okay. I think that was their Well, let me open it up to you. What questions do you have? Actually, let me pray. Close this section in prayer and then I'll give you time to ask questions. Father, thank you that you're the God who loves us and gifted us and designed us. And we pray that as we face those choices, as hard as they may be, that um we would know that no matter what happens, you're in control. And that when we fail we can come to you in repentance and forgiveness and know that you will love us and move us forward no matter what. And we pray for each person as they struggle with sins in their lives or difficult situations or uh temptations or burdens. Um that you would be working this hope into our hearts to remind us of who we are and who we're becoming and that the dark night won't last forever, but the morning is coming and there will be joy in the morning, even though we might have tears now. And pray too um that we would be able to show this love outwardly to others as we go through our lives and our days. Um that it wouldn't just be um that it would be something we'd learn to share and and release and grow to the world so that others might um see your love. In Jesus' name. Amen.