Galatians: The Believers Rule of Life Now-Romans 7:7-11
Romans 7:7-11 · Mike Doyle · Apr 7, 2019
Galatians (2018-20), No. 17
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261914317579

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. So last week we were talking about, we were in Galatians chapter 2, and we were talking about, we were working on verses 17 and 18. It said, but while seeking to be justified in Christ we ourselves have been found sinners. Is Christ then a minister of sin? May it never be. For if I rebuild what I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor." So Paul, as we were talking about, is disproving, showing as incorrect the conclusions that the Jews had made against the Gentiles regarding justification by faith. So if we seek to be justified in Christ by any other means, We have been found sinners and as we talked about that then bear with me a minute As we talked about then the word if here was referring to a fulfilled condition since While seeking to be justified by means of Christ we ourselves have been found sinners you remember a couple of weeks ago we talked about the fact that the Jew because Their frame of reference, because of the Mosaic Law, every Gentile was a sinner just because he wasn't a Jew, and he wasn't under the covenant. So what Paul is saying, well, if we have discovered, we Jews who have become Christians, that we've been found to be sinners also. And that being the case, then is Christ the minister of sin?

So the ground upon which the Galatians stood was that they had never found justification in the law. Or maybe I put it another way. Had they ever found justification in the law? Answer, no. Had the law ever done anything for them but condemn them? No. Had not both Peter and Paul themselves believed in Jesus Christ that they might be justified by faith? Answer, yes. Had they not both learned that by works of law no flesh shall be justified? Did they learn that? Yes, they did. So then, why deny all this and put a yoke upon the necks of the disciples?

Well, the point being that they were concerned, the Jews were concerned, not concerned, but what was happening was that they were told I had a piece of toast this morning and it had honey on it. The honey got on my paper and Donna said, hey, you got honey on your shirt. You better wipe it off before it gets on everything.

The Judaizers had argued in this case that there was a violation of the law because they had gone to faith. You see that? Their deal was that if you were justified, it had to be by the law, some sort of law system. And they said, well, if you don't do it that way and you do it by faith, then you have actually committed a violation against the law just by saying justification is by faith. Peter and the rest of the Jews had abandoned that law in an effort to be justified in Christ, and they were accused of being sinners, which meant that Christ was the promoter of sin, and that's why Paul said that couldn't possibly be. And last week we talked about what makes this such a serious, this question of law so serious to a believer.

It tends to show that there is no deliverance where and while it is maintained from the condition of a sinner. As long as you're under a lost system, you never get away from it. You're always forced to look at yourself and how you're doing. You never get free to behold Christ, who is your very life. The second thing you don't ever really get to do is you don't get to worship God because I'm always under circumstances. I can never get free from me because the law forces me to look at myself.

So if this is the case, then Christ becomes a minister of sin because I'm supposed to be left by him under the bondage of my sin instead of being delivered from it. So he said in verse 18, for if I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor.

It's really interesting logic when you think about it because If you abandon the law system to be justified by grace through faith, and then you go back to it, what have you done? You've become a transgressor. So, that is, in going to Christ, I give up the law completely. It's after all that's happened, and I go back to the law, I make myself a transgressor. It's plain that if I'm right now, I was entirely wrong before. I can't be both. So who was it that made Paul give up the law?

It was Christ himself on the road to Damascus. So if you go back to the law after you behold Christ as your Savior, it means the making people transgressors and not justifying them at all. And that's why it's so serious. The Galatians never entertained this thought until Paul brought it up in this letter. The Holy Spirit brings to light this truth to bear upon them, and it showed them that what they were doing and what they were involved in was a transgression. The effect of enforcing the law was virtually to make Christ the minister of sin instead of delivering them from it.

Christ cannot lead a man to do wrong. He's not the minister of sin, and that's what the accusation was. It's evident That if you turn back to the law as a means of justification, we're building again the things which we have destroyed or walked away from. And we make ourselves a transgressor for having given up the law. So God brings souls out from under the law. It is a transgression to return to it.

So, today we're going to talk about verses 19 and 20. 19, I for through the law, I died to the law so that I might live unto God. And then this tremendous verse 220, I have been crucified with Christ. And it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life which I now which I now live in the flesh, How do I live it? I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

So what's the word death mean? Let's see if we can do this right. So what's the word death or dead mean here? Death means a really simple word. It means separation. We just separated. Our dear sister Vera went home to be with the Lord yesterday. What happened? She got separated from here to be home with the Lord. That's what death is, it's separation.

Through the law, he says, I'm dead to the law. The law, maybe put it this way, if I live under law and I break it, what happens? The law chases me down, it grabs me, it tries me, it convicts me, and it slays me. That's what it does. So he's saying, I threw the law, I'm dead to the law. And Kurt read Romans 7, 11, and that's why I wanted him to read it, because Paul says the same thing back in Romans.

What shall we say then, is the law sin? No, it's not. It can never be. On the other hand, on the contrary, I wouldn't have not known sin except through the law. In other words, when the law shows up, it begins to catalog for me in my heart sins, puts them in order. I would have come to know sin except through the law, for I would not have known, the King James and a lot of versions say coveting, which really means desiring, if the law had not said you will not desire.

You ever think about that? What's the one thing your sin nature wants to do? It wants to desire. It doesn't matter what it is, it desires. And so God takes the law and brings it to the sin nature and says to him, you know that thing you really like to do? You can't do it anymore. You cannot desire. Oh, well how about some... No, desire. You just can't do that thing.

But Paul says sin, taking the opportunity through the commandment, produced in him all kinds of desiring. And then he says, apart from the law, sin is dead, or it's out of business. The law is not there, I'm not desiring. I was once alive, apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. For sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it, it killed me. The law did that.

So, in Romans 3.20, Paul says that because of the works of the law, no flesh will be justified in the sight of God, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. That's really what it's for. Now, four aspects of the spirituality stated by the Mosaic Law system. This is what it does. First thing is it puts all members of the human race under sin. All of them.

Romans 3.19. Second thing it does is it stops every mouth. You don't get the excuse. When the law comes and shows up, you have no excuse. It makes every person aware of his or her guilt before God.

Again, Romans 3.19. To make apparent the exceeding sinfulness of sin. Exceeding sinfulness of sin.

And the last one is to serve as a tutor, which we'll get to in a couple of months, Galatians 3.24, to lead us to Christ for salvation.

God never intended, never intended the law of Moses to be a justifying agent. In fact, I think he just intended the very opposite of that. He intended it to be a condemnatory agent. So if I apply the truth to himself, if Paul applies the truth to himself, he gives a summing up of Christian principles. He says the gospel proclaims the righteousness of God to man, not the law, the gospel, the good news. The law demanded righteousness from the man and pronounced death upon the man who does not get it and keep it. Real simple.

God told Adam in the garden, the soul that sins, it will surely die. It will surely be separated from me. Seeing that we've all sinned, and that neither Paul nor anyone else has ever kept the law, therefore the law can only pronounce the sentence of death in judgment upon us. That's all it can do.

So, in this verse, for through the law I died to the law, He uses the word law here as governed by the use and the contents. If we go back a couple of verses to 16, which we covered a couple of weeks ago, 16 says, Nevertheless, knowing a man is not justified by the works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. Even we have believed in Christ so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. since by the works of the law no flesh will be justified." This verse speaks of the divine law conceived of as a means of acceptance with God in the case of a sinner who obeys it, if you can obey it. Paul doesn't say that he is lawless in the sense that I'm going to abandon law totally and become a lawless individual. That's not what he's saying. He still holds to principles. We live by principles, not legal statutes. In the principles we live under are grace and love, justice, faith, which are eternal in their significance and their great underlying principles that adhere in God's character and in his government.

What does Paul mean? What does Paul mean when he says he died to the law? It means that he died to the thing, law itself. He means that he has ceased to have any kind of relationship to it, so that he has no further claim upon or control over him. It is law as conceived and as a body of legalistic statutes that he has died to, the whole Mosaic system, all of the 600 plus laws.

And he uses here very carefully the personal pronoun I, which indicates that he's speaking of his own personal experience. He realized that an attempt to fulfill the requirements of the Mosaic legislation as a means of salvation. If he did that, and he did, he tried, it taught him of his own inability to meet his demands and his inability to make himself righteous. So finally he abandons the whole thing, and he accepted salvation by faith in Christ.

He found that the law was there to reveal sin, like we just talked about, and it provokes sin, in a certain sense, to create sin. For where there is no law, sin was not reckoned. He found that it provided no remedy for sin, but rather condemned him hopelessly, for one cannot fulfill its requirements. So what the law does is it exercises kind of a double power over a person. It made him a sinner, and it punished him for being one. I'm sure you've heard this little poem before. I really like this. This has to do with law.

Do this and live, the law commands, but gives neither feet nor hands. A better word the gospel brings, it bids me fly and gives me wings. So faith in Christ is the means whereby Paul's complete and irreparable break with the law was affected. The only person that ever lived under the law perfectly was the Lord Jesus Christ.

He's the only one. He fully obeyed every part of it. Then he got to the cross and he assumed all the guilt of all the violations of all the law for all eternity of the human race who had violated the law. He took the punishment. And in dying under the law, he satisfied the requirements of the law. The law only has one requirement. The soul that sins, it will die. It doesn't say the soul that sins, you know, the fine is forty bucks and three Hail Marys. It doesn't say that. You die.

So, Christ passed out of the realm of the law in its legalistic aspects that had control over him. All believers, I should say, have been identified with Christ and His death and His resurrection, and thus they have passed out of this realm of divine law as far as the legalistic aspects of it are concerned. Now, watch this next part. Paul says that he died unto the law.

Why did he say that in this verse? Why was that important to him? Because he said next that he might live unto God. That assumes that he couldn't do it before. He couldn't live under God in a law system, so he had to die to it in order to live under God. Subjection to the law as a means of acceptance with God in reality prevented him from living a life of unreserved devotion to God. He couldn't do it under the law system. This is one of the most grievous vices of legalism.

It has come between the soul and God. I was having lunch with a guy early on in my Christianity, and I probably should have brought two of these up here to show you, but he put the salt and pepper shaker on the table. He said, this is Christ and this is you. And every time you accept the law, you decide that you're going to live under the law, you slide a piece of paper between you and God. And I'm going to do the next one. Pretty soon, you're starting to get more and more separated.

I thought, boy, that makes a lot of sense. Because as long as I'm trying to adhere to a law, it separates from God rather than unites me to Him. So, for I as for myself, expand the translation, I through the intermediate agency of the law, I died to the law for the purpose that I might live in respect to God.

So, how am I to live towards God? What's the believer's rule of life? Have you ever seen this term before? It's kind of a term that is the law, is it some sort of a law system, the believer's rule of life, or is it grace? Or is it, well, I don't have to live to the ceremonial aspect of the law, but I got to live to the moral aspect of it. Or should I live under grace?

And so I know a lot of you have seen these before, but I wanted to repeat some of them. In William Newell's Romans chapter 6, right at the end, he has about three pages on what grace is and what living under grace is like. So I want to reiterate a couple of them to you. The first thing he says is that grace is God acting freely according to His own nature as love.

And He has no promises or obligations to fulfill and acting of course, righteously, in view of the cross. That's the definition that Newell gives you. Grace, therefore, is totally uncaused in the recipient. Its cause lies wholly in the giver, God Himself. Nobody in this audience ever earned God's grace. Never. Because if you did, it wasn't grace. Grace also is sovereign. It doesn't have any debts to pay. or fulfilled conditions on man's part to wait for you, can't act towards whom and how it pleases. Grace can't act where there is deservedness.

No man can go to God and say, I did these things, you must recognize me. It doesn't work that way. Christ did it all. You enter into it by faith. You enter in under grace. Your ability doesn't matter here. It doesn't matter how smart you are, how well educated you are. It has nothing to do with that. Grace does not help us. It's absolute. It does everything.

There being no cause in the creature why grace should be shown, the creature must be brought off from trying to give God cause for His grace. Very difficult thing to come to grips with. The discovery by this creature that he is truly the object of divine grace works the utmost humility in the heart of a believer. For the receiver of grace is brought to know his own absolute unworthiness and his complete inability to attain worthiness, yet he finds himself blessed anyway.

But it's on another principle, outside of himself completely. Therefore, the flesh has no place in the plan of grace. It's a great reason why grace is so hated by most people. Because it does not give you any room to do anything other than receive. You can't earn it. You can't accumulate it. You just have to receive it.

That's the secret. But for this very reason, the true believers rejoice, for he knows that in him that is in his flesh dwells no good thing. And yet he finds God glad to bless him, just as he is. Just as he is. So a man under grace has been accepted in Christ, and the Lord Jesus is his standing. And we're not under probation. We don't get six weeks to work this out. We're not under probation. As to His life past, it doesn't exist before God anymore, because we all died at the cross with Christ, and Christ is now our life.

Grace once bestowed can never be withdrawn, because if it could be withdrawn, it wouldn't be grace by definition. The failure of devotion, then, does not cause a withdrawal of grace bestowed, as it would under a lost system, wouldn't it? If you disobeyed, or you failed to be devoted to God, grace would be withdrawn, but not under the grace principle.

To believe and consent to be loved while unworthy is the great secret. That's pretty cool. To refuse to make resolutions and vows, because that's to trust in the flesh. To expect to be blessed, though realizing more and more the lack of worth and to testify of God's goodness all the time. To be certain of God's future favor, yet to be ever more tender in consciousness towards Him. To rely on God's chastening hand as a mark of His kindness.

A man under grace, if like Paul, doesn't have burdens regarding himself, but he has burdens regarding others. So, to sum up the last part of this, this is my favorite part. To hope to be better is to fail to see yourself in Christ only. And this is my favorite one. To be disappointed in myself is to have believed in myself in the first place. To be discouraged is unbelief as to God's purpose and plan for blessing for you. To be proud is blind. For we have no standing before God and ourselves, none. So the lack of divine blessing, therefore, comes from unbelief and not from failure of devotion.

So, how did Paul die to the law? I think that's the next question. How did he die to the law so he could live under this grace thing? Verse 20 says, I have been crucified with Christ. We talk a lot in this congregation, in this group, about being co-crucified with Christ. And Courtney loves to talk about, here's all this wonderful stuff, do you believe it? That's always this question. And it's the right question. Do you believe that you were crucified with Christ? Do you believe that?

It says so right here, I have been crucified with Christ. And this crucified is in the perfect tense, which means it happened in the past and it has abiding results from now into the future. I have been crucified with Christ. He uses this to show that he was identified with Christ at the cross as a past fact. Well, I could say to you, well, I was crucified with Christ, but I don't remember it.

Because it happened 2,000 years ago. Were you there 2,000 years ago? Answer, yes, you were. You were in Christ at that time that He died. Romans 6 says, don't you realize that when you were baptized into Christ, you were baptized into His death. So if you stretch out the timeline of Christ's existence, when did you go in? When He died. Because that's when you were included.

The spiritual benefits that have come to Paul through his identification are present realities to him now. He's understanding, wow, being crucified with Christ has a lot of benefits. This statement also shows how he died to the law, namely by dying with Christ he died under the penalty of law. The law demands were satisfied when Christ died and therefore I died with him. Paul died with him. They don't have any demands on us anymore.

You can't condemn a man to death because of the life that he has led. I'm sorry, the law can condemn a man to death for the life he has led, but when the man is dead, the law doesn't have any control over him. I remember years ago, there was, and I forget the name of the man, but he was probably the last man condemned in Colorado to die. executed. So let's say he's walking down to wherever the chamber is and he has a heart attack and he falls over and he dies before he gets to the place where they give him the injection. Is it now over for him? They're not going to lift up his body and take him in there and give him the juice anyway?

Once you die, Whatever circumstances happened to you before are over. Every human being that believes in the Lord Jesus Christ died on that cross with him. So all of the old is over with. It's gone from God's sight. The law can have nothing to do or say to a dead man. The law has nothing to do or say to you and me. Thus being crucified with Christ meant also to Paul the death to all that he was an Adam.

Now what you find, what's interesting is you go back to Romans 6 and it says that my old man was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be put out of business. In that case he's dealing with the issue of sin. I was separated from my sin nature on the cross. In this case he's talking about my association with any kind of a law principle. I have been crucified. I have been separated from it.

We could say with Paul, Paul died with Christ. It was the Pharisee Saul who died. You get that? What he was and did up to the time, he passed away so far as he and God are concerned. God doesn't look at Paul anymore as Saul of Tarsus, Pharisee. He's now Paul the Apostle, seated in Christ. He was buried and resurrected in Christ.

The dominating control of the entire Adamic nature and its power over him had been broken. For the one who believes in Jesus, this sentence of death has been carried out. That sentence of death has been carried out in everyone in this room. His death was our death from the old man, the man under judgment. So the believer can say, I have been crucified with Christ.

Then he says, but nevertheless, I'm living. What am I living? When Paul's dead positionally from law and sin, he says, the old man, the old Paul is dead. But I'm still living in this dead body, and we talked about dead bodies at Sunday school. Paul, the person, I remained, but, and he was living alive on the planet, but now it's a new man who's alive, a new man in Christ. But then he says, yes, not I, but Christ lives in me.

It's no longer the self-centered Saul of Tarsus. It's no longer the self-centered Mike. Put your name in there. It's no longer whatever your name is, self-centered that lives. The old I, but it's Christ-centered now. I have this new life. This new life was a person. It wasn't just a fact. It was a person.

It's the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus is being manifested in his walking around physical existence, his life. The new life is no longer like the formal one, dependent upon intellectual efforts of a man attempting to draw near to God to get his righteousness. The new life is a person within a person. It's the Lord Jesus within you, and you in him.

And he wants to live his life out through you. Not to the detriment of who you are as a person, but he wants to manifest who he is through you, the person. So, last question. What does Paul mean when he says, and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. What does he mean by that?

So instead of attempting to live in obedience to a set of rules in the form of legal enactments like he would under the Mosaic system, he now yields to the indwelling Holy Spirit. And he cooperates with the Spirit by faith in the production of a life that's pleasing to God. The Holy Spirit energizes him with divine life, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who is resident within him. And it's the work of the Spirit. We all live by the work of the Spirit. Instead of a sinner with a totally depraved nature attempting to find acceptance with God, by attempted obedience to a set of outward laws, he's now, as a saint, living his life on a new principle altogether, which is the principle of grace that we just talked about. The indwelling Holy Spirit manifesting forth the life of the Lord Jesus through him.

So, expand the translation a little bit for 20. With Christ I have been crucified. And it's no longer I who live, but there lives in me Christ. And that life which now I live in, the sphere of the flesh walking around in this body, by faith I live it. Which faith is in the Son of God, He's the object of my faith, who loves me and gave Himself for me. Having thus passed from death In the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, we are free from, in this case, law. Moreover, if as believers we have died to the old life to which the law applies, we have a new life in Christ.

So the Apostle can say very carefully, nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. It's our privilege to hold ourselves dead to the law. and that we may live under God. We have the privilege of doing that, not the order and stature of it. It's a privilege for us to say, I now am alive under God. We can now say, the Lord Jesus is my life.

He's also personally the object of my life. I'm focused on Him. The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God. He's the focus of everything I do. He loved me and He gave Himself for me. Faith sees Christ, it looks to Him, it confides in Him, it feeds upon Him, abides in His love and in the blessed consciousness that He is for us in all the depths of love that led him to give himself for us.

Let's pray. Father, how we thank you for the work of the cross. We thank you for all that happened there, especially the fact that we were included in the death of the Lord Jesus so that we might live unto you. And that's what we desire to do. We desire to live unto you and you've made it possible by including us in the death of your son, his burial and resurrection, that we can walk and function day by day, moment by moment, on the principles that you have revealed to us in our resurrected life in Christ. And we pray in his precious name. Amen.