Dead to the Law

Romans 7:1-6

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All right. We are continuing in our studies in the New Testament this morning. We're shifting from the book of 1 Thessalonians to the book of Romans. I have described Romans in the past, I'm sure others have the same sentiment, that it is the most theological book in the Bible. That's because Paul is dealing with issues of salvation and how Jesus' death and resurrection saves us rather than works. And he's doing so with both Jew and Gentile in mind, as it is clear the Roman church have both Jew and Gentile in attendance. So he's exercising great care and concern as he goes forward. And it's one reason I think the book is as long as it is, and why he keeps coming back to the same themes but reiterating them in different ways. And Lou was speaking to that when in the verses that she was reading in Romans 3 and 4 and 5. He wants to explain how God's plan has been put in place for the benefit of all mankind, not just the Jews, and how the plan has shifted now that Jesus has come and died and rose again. Well, we started our systematic study of Romans way back in 2022. We've made our way up to chapter 7 now. And I'm doing a bit of a digression here to tell you some things about what I've been thinking and how we are what I plan on doing and where we're going. What I want to do this year and then cover hopefully in later years. My plan this year is to cover Romans 7 and 8. Chapter 8 is in particular is fairly long, and I'd say, uh, and some of you may feel this way, it's regarded by a number of people as one of the greatest chapters in all the Bible. And as such, I don't want to get too hasty with it. So my goal is to complete these two chapters maybe by mid-September, and then the idea after that is we'd go into a little mini series on prophecy for maybe two or three sermons. But anyway, I just wanted to give you a little bit of the overarching thought here so you can prepare yourselves by praying for me, praying for your fellow brothers and sisters, and praying for yourself as well as we approach these things. Because my extended goal in all this is to put us at Romans 9 in 2027, and I want to cover Romans 9, 10, and 11 all in one unit next year. And I just wanted to bring this up, and I'll tell you what's triggering me to do this. It seems to me in current evangelical climate that these particular chapters are instrumental in how we approach both soteriology and eschatology. Now, some of you will be aware of those big terms, but just in case, soteriology is the doctrine of salvation, eschatology is the doctrine of the end times. Romans 9 in particular is probably regarded as the strongest chapter in the Bible for the Calvinist view of salvation, the one that I have been railing against, as you will be aware, most of you that have been here. But it is there in that we read in verses 22 through 23 of Romans 9, what if God, wanting to display his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience objects of wrath prepared for destruction? And what if he did this to make known the riches of his glory on objects of mercy that he prepared beforehand for glory? The Calvinist sees this and other verses in the surrounding context as the Bible's affirmation that God has created some folks to be objects of his wrath and ultimately predestined to hell. Now, as you know, I don't believe that at all, but we need to go through this in some detail so that it's clear to you how the church viewed these passages for the first 400 years before Augustine got a hold of it, and then John Calvin systematized all this later during the Protestant Reformation. What Romans 9 is actually doing in context is setting the stage for how the Jews have gotten to the place they have and where they are ultimately going. The culmination of that then comes to us in Romans 11 and verse 26, where Paul writes as follows, In this way all Israel will be saved. Now, that statement clearly has some meaning for the end times, but the question is, what does it mean when he says all Israel? Is it in the sense of every person in the physical nation of Israel? Is it limited to only those folks who are living in Israel at the time of Christ's return? Or does it even refer to the physical nation at all, but rather refers to what the Bible refers to as spiritual Israel? For after all, in Romans 9 and verse 6, when Paul introduces this topic, he says, not all that are descended from Israel are Israel. So that's a little bit of why we are here and where I anticipate we are heading. And again, if you're wondering why I would spend time introducing subjects that we won't get to until the end of chapter 8, basically, when predestination comes up, that is simply so. Again, you may pray and you may prepare by hopefully considering different viewpoints that are out there as you have time. As much as we try to stress let's have compassion in areas of disagreement that are not fundamental to saving faith. Both of these areas concerning the deterministic view of salvation and end-time prophecy remain among conservative Christians the biggest points of contention. And even if we don't consider ourselves conservative politically, we're all in the conservative Christian camp. And so I would argue that how we interpret the Bible through our salvation lens and our end time, our prophecy lens, not only affects our outlook on life in general, but our outlook really on God's character and on how God is operating, which is of course of very much important and supreme importance to all of us. So, with that, for now, we are at Romans 7. And I want to set the stage there just by reminding us of where we were in Romans 6. In Romans 6 and verse 14, Paul told us that Christians are not under the law, but under grace. That's what, again, Lou was pointing out. Paul then goes on to give some practical implications of what it means to be under grace and not under the law. He writes that just because we are under grace, does that not mean that we are free to sin? And he says, No, absolutely not. It doesn't mean that. Rather, we have been set free from sin and we should now be enslaved to righteousness. And because we are now enslaved to God, we have fruit which results in sanctification, which means we have been set apart not only for eternal life, but also to live holy lives. Now, so in chapter 7, Paul is going to explain more completely how it is that we are no longer under the dominion of the law. So let's go ahead and pray and then we'll read. Father in heaven, thank you again so much for your word. Thank you that it reveals your plan for us. It reveals you. And we ask, Father, though, as we study these things, we do ask for your guidance. There's no hope for us to understand without the Holy Spirit illuminating for us what you want us to know and understand. So we do ask for your wisdom as we consider these things together. In Jesus' name. Amen. Alright, Romans 7 and verses 1 through 6. Since I am speaking to those who know the law, brothers and sisters, don't you know that the law rules over someone as long as he lives? For example, a married woman is legally bound to her husband while he lives. But if her husband dies, she is released from the law regarding the husband. So then if she is married to another man while her husband is living, she will be called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law. Then if she is married to another man, she is not an adulteress. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you also were put to death in relation to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another. You belong to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions aroused through the law were working in us to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the law, since we have died to what held us, so that we may serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the old letter of the law. Not only in chapter six, of course, but thus far through Romans, Paul has spent some time discussing the various negative aspects of the law. And here in these verses, I think Paul kind of sums up the previous points, but he extends it further by introducing us to how the negative side of the law affects individuals and believers in particular. I'm going to provide you an outline this morning. I probably will do that more than I have in the past. I I tend to think outlines can help you. I know after you leave here you forget a lot of what we say. In fact, I forget it myself. So I think an outline helps us, at least if there's something comes to mind and the Spirit brings something to mind that can help us recall things. Um I should have I have more time to prepare than I used to, which I don't know if that's good for you or not. We'll see. Uh but anyway, the outline is as follows. First, we'll have an explanation of the law, then an example of the law, then the end of the law, and finally an elaboration of the law. So if we if we frame it from the general principle of how the law impacts us, we have an explanation, example, ending, I guess you could say an elaboration. First, the explanation that comes to us in verse 1. Don't you know the law rules over someone as long as he lives? Now, there is actually some debate here over what law Paul is referring to. The natural inclination for most, I think, is to believe he's referring to the Mosaic law. And the reason for that is understandable. That's what he's normally done as he's gone throughout Romans. But what causes the debate is that in the original Greek there is no definite article here. In other words, there is no the in the the law statement there, and that all the translations I saw say the law here. They don't just say law. Since Paul normally used the definite article when he referred to the old covenant, some believe that what he's doing here is broadening the term to help us think more clearly about it. And so if he's doing that, what he's including is the natural law, we could say, and even man's law, and probably also what we might call the moral law or a moral law. Uh and if you think about that, that's what we discover just from creation or conscience, or of course, if if man has laws in place. And if he's doing that, he's simply saying there are laws that have dominion over all of us. We're all under some kind of law. And thinking about it, either is okay, I'm sure. I think it does make more sense if he is broadening the term here. He's he's saying law rules over us as long as we live. There's going to be some law that we're subject to. And we all know that, right? We get that. There's definitely natural law. I try to walk a lot because I'm trying to trim this waistline a little bit. And anytime I'm going up a hill, I'm feeling that. I'm feeling that law of gravity because it's pulling, it's harder to walk. So that law, that's part of the natural law. Um, there's the man-made law. Every time I go up this five-lane toward Mitchell County, it seems like you should be able to at least drive 70 miles an hour to me, but they don't go for that. It's just 50, which doesn't make sense. It goes up to 55 in other places. It's weird, but um so it could be man-made law. Um, the moral law, I would say, in our day and time has changed a little bit. I mean, but generally speaking, there are still a few things that that are pretty much universally agreed on. Those are wrong, and that would be kind of the general moral law where everybody agrees that's wrong. Now, in our country in particular, that's kind of going by the wayside because some people's rights are our wrongs and some people's wrongs are our rights, and that sort of thing. So it's not as coherent as it was, but given other cultures, I think there's still this idea that there is a generally accepted moral law. Um, whether he's speaking of it in that broadened sense or whether he's doing it as the Mosaic Law, if it's the Mosaic laws, the Jews certainly would have understood. They were under the old covenant law before. And I think it's fair to say that Gentile Christians, who would at this time be somewhat familiar with the Old Testament, they would understand what he meant. So again, it's not it's not a huge difference. But the reason it's relevant goes back to chapter six. Paul has said at the end of chapter six that despite being under grace instead of the law, you still have your fruit. So what he's doing here is reiterating what he said in chapter six, but he's coming at it from a little different angle. Instead of saying, Yes, you also bear fruit under grace, he's going to point out how the fruit from the law is a different sort of fruit, we might say. He's intimating what we know about the law, and he's going to get more explicit later on in the chapter. But it's basically this: the law is an external code, the fruit is forced, we might say. Well, it it looks more like plastic fruit in a bowl. Any of you ever have those little bowls where you got the plastic fruit in? My mom had that. I always thought that was a little weird because they look like it'd be so good to eat, but if you pick it up, you can't eat that. And I like to chew on straws, but I couldn't even chew on one of those because those are just too big, you know. So it's just weird. But anyway, that's the type of fruit that the law produced, is what he's getting to. It might have looked good, but it wasn't real. It was not fruit for life. So his initial explanation is the law just rules over people, but it does so by providing rules. It's external, although he's not as explicit about the external part of it here. And then he comes to an example to expand on his explanation, and that is in verses two and three. A married woman is legally bound to her husband while he's living. And by the way, the same is true with a man. He is legally bound to a wife while she's living. Now, I think it's probably here that Paul references only the woman for simplicity's sake, yes, but possibly also because there were still apparently some very limited polygamy being practiced in Judaism. And polygamy of this sort was always one man with multiple wives, which on its face seems to be quasi-adultery, but was not labeled as such in the Old Testament. So I'm suspecting that Paul doesn't want to deal with that at this very moment. So he just uses the example of a woman who is being unfaithful. So if a wife is married to another person while her husband is living, she is an adulteress. But if her husband has died, she is free from that law of marriage. So if her husband dies, she's free from that law of marriage. Now, of course, if she's the one who kills her husband, we have a whole different set of problems. Just thought I'd throw that in. Mariah says, You never have to worry me about me killing you. You're not getting off that easy. So, anyway, you get you understand what is being said. But the actual point of what is being said is a little more difficult to ascertain. Some have tried to say this is an allegorical illustration where the woman whose husband dies is like the Christian who dies to the law. And that way both the woman and the Christian are free. So the death of the husband frees the wife to remarry, and the death of the Christian to the law allows the Christian to belong to Jesus. But as you think about it, if you're thinking about it, you may realize that's kind of a weird parallel. If he's making the woman analogous to the Christian, why does he say there in verse 4, you were put to death in relation to the law? You, Christian, were put to death in relation to the law. So it seems strange if he's making the Christian analogous to the woman. We don't think he's making the woman analogous to the law. So it's like he's actually saying the Christian has both died and been freed. So I think here the point is let's not overthink it. I think it's just a more general example, and Paul is saying that death can indeed bring freedom. And he's also saying at the same time, when it brings that freedom, a new relationship can begin. So we can go further with the analogy then and say he's affirming at least indirectly, you are either under law or you're under grace. You can't be under both at the same time. And he actually makes various attempts, I think, through Romans to clarify this truth. Because again, he's having to explain this to the Jews who have grown up thinking the Torah, Ten Commandments, the law is everything, and that's how you have a relationship with God. So the explanation of the law, then we're all under the law. Those living for God before Christ, under the old covenant, were under the old covenant law. But the example of marriage shows that a law's hold on a person is broken by death. So even in the most permanent human covenant, the law does not hold if there is death. Okay, so then that brings us to the end of the law, and that's verse 4. I mentioned earlier. But again, you were also put to death in relation to the law. Back in Romans 6, Paul explained that we died to sin when we believed in Christ. Here he says, we also died to the law. Now, this is I don't know what a good word is, pretty heady, maybe. And so we're gonna have to think it through. This answers the question of whether we must live by the law to please God. The answer is no. I mean, it's clear enough to us, I think the law can't put us in right standing before God. To be dead to the law also indicates the law doesn't even represent a principle of living. Well, what does that mean? Can we do just anything? Well, again, Paul's answered that question already. Of course not. The end of the law means we now belong to Jesus. Okay, and since we now belong to Christ, we can now bear fruit to God. Believers are now able to be joined to Christ, and that's the point of the example. Again, Paul assumes a person cannot be bound to the law and joined to Christ at the same time. So to be joined to Christ, you first have to be released from the authority of the law. And that, of course, happens through the grace of Christ when we believe in Jesus, and when we do that, we are free from the law. And again, though, this is important. We are not freed unto ourselves. We are freed to be bound to Jesus. That's the point. The end of the law means we are now free to bear fruit, real spiritual fruit to God. The workings of the Spirit are inner. Yes, they produce an outer result that may be similar to the law's outward appearance in any number of situations. But the reality is to be bound to Jesus and his body means a change from within. Now that's real fruit that's coming out from us because it's inner, it's in our heart. That fruit has real life. It's not just in rule keeping. It's, as verse 6 says, serving in the newness. Serving in the newness of the Spirit. And verses 5 and 6 are where we have an elaboration on this, as Paul is trying to clarify it. And hopefully it'll help clarify it for us as well. In verse 5, Paul tells us the problem with the law. When we're in the flesh, the law actually arouses passions in us to do the wrong thing. To bear fruit to death, he says. And he will explain more on this next time, we'll see as well in the next set of passages. Suffice it to say for now, Paul explains that we only come fully to the place of bearing fruit for God when we are free from the law. And that makes sense, right? It's real fruit versus force fruit. It's just an external show versus an internal change, a heartfelt change. So the flesh is translated here in the CSB. If you have an NIV, it may be translated sinful nature. All those are good terms. They make help us to understand what Paul is saying. It's that nature, it's that pull that we have, and the nature that we have to yield to that before we are saved, when we are apart to God, when we are in Adam, Paul says there and elsewhere that the law in dealing with that doesn't bring relief from sinful passions or death. To the contrary, again, the law makes our nature worse and brings certain death. The sinful passions are aroused by the law. We all get this, right? Don't tell me I can't do something. Did you say not to do that? That means I want to do that. And we see this very early with children. Um, one of the first words our toddlers learn is no. And it's hard to grasp how they can learn that so quickly, but they do. Um and then verse 6 then makes all the more clear why we have to die to the law to be able to faithfully serve God. It says the letter of the law. The letter of the law refers to the specifics that were rewritten in the old covenant. So, in effect, as as commentator Douglas Moore says it this way, as that law was written on stone tablets, that law cannot change the human heart. Only God's Spirit can do that, which is united with your spirit when you're born again. And we'll see more of this when we get to chapter 8. But how do we sum this all up? Well, let's think about Christians and the law. The central claim of this text is that believers have been released from the law. But what does that really mean in practice? Well, I'm gonna try to say a few things about it. As alluded to already in this message and spoken clearly in the preceding chapters, Paul is not teaching that Christians are no longer responsible for obeying any commandments. It's clear here that Paul is specifically here in this section talking about the old covenant. So when he says we have been released from the law, he means that we are no longer under the Mosaic law. But I want to know what he says in 1 Corinthians 9, and that's just a book over, flip over to 1 Corinthians 9, and verse 19. He says, Although I am free from all, and not anyone's slave, I have made myself a slave to everyone in order to win more people. To the Jews I became like a Jew to win Jews, to those under the law, like one under the law, though I myself am not under the law, to win those under the law. To those who are without the law, like one without the law, though I am not without God's law, but under the law of Christ. So while we are not subject to the Mosaic Law, we are subject to what Paul refers to there as the law of Christ. When we were coming out of the worldwide church of God, that some of you will be familiar with, where we were, in effect, trying to follow a Jewish custom of life because that's how Jesus lived, so we were trying to do the same. Um people came to realize fairly quickly that nine of the Ten Commandments are reiterated in the New Testament, but the Sabbath was not, and the idea also came that well, it would need to be because if you have Gentiles coming in to Christianity and they're required to keep the Sabbath, they're not going to understand that because they weren't doing that at all, so you would have to have a lot of that. Because the moral law normally is brought forth, but not in every way. And certainly the ceremonial and civil laws, no matter how strident they were kept in the old covenant or how strict, if they're not stipulated in the new, they're not for us. I think I mentioned Acts 15 last week, but I I want you to see this because this really speaks to it. Acts 15, at least as far as like how what we're under as far as the law goes. Acts 15, verse 1 and 2, some men came down from Judea and began to teach the brothers, unless you are circumcised according to the custom prescribed by Moses, you cannot be saved. After Paul and Barnabas had engaged them in serious argument and debate, Paul and Barnabas and some others were appointed to go up to the apostles and elders in Jerusalem about this issue. When they had been sent on their way by the church, and I'll just skip down to verse 4, when they arrived at Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church, the apostles and the elders, and they reported all that God had done with them. But some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, It is necessary to circumcise them and to command them to keep the law of Moses. So it wasn't just about circumcision. That whole thing was a big package, and that made clear there that it is circumcision and the law of Moses. And so from that there's this discourse where Peter and others go on about understanding that God, what God had revealed to them concerning the matter. And then ultimately we see James, the brother of Jesus, who was the leader of Jerusalem church apparently at that time, gives the final verdict on whether the Gentiles are to keep the law of Moses or not. And he starts in verse 13. He actually quotes a passage in Amos 9, verses 16 and 17. I won't tarry there at all. I would just maybe issue a little note here that when we interpret Old Testament prophecies, our safest course of action is to look if it's interpreted in the New, how did they interpret it? And we can go from there. But we'll talk more on that later. Verses 19 and 20, then James is still speaking. He says, Therefore, in my judgment, we should not cause difficulties for those among the Gentiles who turn to God. So again, the issue is here: should they keep the old covenant, the Gentiles who are coming to God. But instead, we should write to them to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, and eating anything that has been strangled and from blood. And so basically what James is saying, leave the Gentiles alone. They don't need to do all these old covenant regulations. That is not what has happened through Christ and through grace. We don't need to do that anymore. Now, he also provides this guidance with practical instruction. The idea was that it was important that Gentile believers did not act in a way that would offend the Jewish community in every city and destroy the church's witness among the Jews. The command about sexual immorality is probably not talking about what we may tend to think of as sex outside of marriage first. Gentile Christians would have already known about that. This was probably about not marrying family members or based on the relations that are given in stipulations in Leviticus 18. That would have offended the Jews, but the Gentiles probably wouldn't have thought anything of it. The other two commands, of course, have to do with the eating habits of the Gentile Christians. And though, and Paul makes this clear elsewhere, the Gentiles were not bound under the law of Moses, they were bound under the law of love. And the law of love told them don't unnecessarily antagonize your Jewish neighbors in and out of church. That's the point. This moves well beyond that. And how do we truly love our brother and sister? How's it coming from our heart that we love them? So let's bring it down to this because this may be the question that we wonder about the most. What role does the Old Testament and the Old Covenant have in the law of Christ that governs Christians? Most of you are probably aware whether you fully realize how we got there, and I'm not even sure I did, but we we operate under the general principle of what has been referred to as the Puritan tradition. And they basically said there were two different primary functions of the Mosaic Law. One, of course, was the work of the covenant with the Jews, an old covenant, but the other was to function as a revelation of God's moral will so that we can understand more about how God thinks. Um again on the moral side. But that said, we do see here we are released from the law. So I don't think we can see anything other than we have definitely been released from the commanding authority of the law. We are dead to the law, Paul says. We are delivered from its dominion over us as a principle of justification or sanctification. In other words, the law doesn't make us right with God. We know that. But more than that, it doesn't take us into any kind of deep relationship with God or make us holy before Him, no matter how we keep it. We're no longer under that law. Um my son Tyler, some of you will know he's in South Carolina now, and he's he's doing an internship down there, and he called me the other day, and and you all know I worked in the court system, you know, my time with the state. So he calls and he's telling me he's been in court, and uh they he was before a magistrate, and it was like a temporary restraining order or something. I'm like, magistrates can't do temporary restraining orders, and I thought, oh, he's not in North Carolina, he's in South Carolina, that's a whole different deal. Uh, he's not under North Carolina law anymore. And that's us. We have moved to grace, we're not under that law anymore. That said, and I think we understand this, there is truth in the Puritan ideal that we can gain understanding for how God thinks by looking at the Old Testament. I think when we're trying to determine, is this loving or is this how I should live, we need to first look to the New Testament for Christ's law, if we want to call it that, or or how Christ wants us to live. But the Old Testament is still God's word, it's still valuable to us. And you'll note also the Old Testament's a lot bigger than the New, right? It's there's just a lot more of it. So there's the New is not nearly as detailed as the Old, partly because we are now in the Spirit, and the Spirit's gonna lead us. He didn't give us all these specific details, but also I think partly because the New Covenant writers knew we had the old covenant for some of these details. So I think it's true. We can still understand how God thinks about these issues by looking, or at least some issues by looking at the Old Testament. We just need to make sure we're looking at it through a New Testament lens. I I have a very personal example, not very inspiring, but applicable nonetheless. Paul used a marriage example, so I will too. After I was divorced from my first wife, I struggled with whether to date and whether I was free to remarry. I mean, I thought I was, but if you've read Mark and Luke, they write that to remarry is to commit adultery. And there's no exceptions given. Now, of course, Matthew and Paul provide exceptions for divorce, but neither are explicit about remarriage. So I also knew that divorce assumed remarriage for most in the Jewish culture, but I still struggled with it. But eventually she remarried. And I knew what the Old Testament said about that. And I'll just read it, Deuteronomy 24. If a man marries a woman, but she becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, he may write her a divorce certificate, hand it to her, and send her away from his house. Again, ladies, don't get bothered here that the woman is only mentioned. It is well known in Judaism that Israel's judges applied the same principle for the wife as they did the husband in these instances. So verses two through four. If after leaving his house she goes and becomes another man's wife, and the second man hates her, writes her a divorce certificate, hands it to her, and sends her away from his house, or if he dies, the first husband who sent her away may not marry her again after she has been defiled, because that would be detestable to the Lord. You must not bring guilt on the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. Now, why would this be? That once a couple once married, then divorced, would not remarry. Because if you think about it, we look at it, we might say, Well, it seems like it might be a good thing if they get back together. Well, I'll give you a couple of reasons. First, this command was made because God wanted both marriage and divorce to be seen as serious business. And we know that, right? Because he says later, I hate divorce. He just says it that bluntly in the Old Testament. He wanted, people understand this is lasting. You can't be married or divorced casually. It had to be carefully thought out because marriage is intended to last. This actually elevated the status of women from surrounding cultures because what it did was greatly discourage wife swapping or the easily transfer of one woman to another in that culture when men dominated because of the physical attributes that they were needed to survive, you know. Um, but another reason for this law, this also strengthens the second marriage. And in this example, it discourages a spouse from thinking, well, I'm having trouble with this guy, I'm gonna go back to the old and try that. It discourages that. Or the man from doing that as well. In other words, you don't break two vows to try to fix one that's already broken. Now, again, don't turn this into legalism either. You know, based on me saying this, don't think, well, I don't know if talk about this, I don't know if Aunt Sally should have got remarried or not. Well, what I'm saying is the Lord spoke to me through this passage, gave me peace about moving on with my life. And that's what we can get to from the old covenant. This is God's word. A lot of it's narrative. And when you read through it, you can say, well, I'm kind of relate to that situation they're going through. I can see what God will be telling me there. We get insight into how he thinks, even if we're not obligated to the old covenant as a covenant. There is still much to help in the law to help us understand God and how he thinks. And of course, the Old Testament, much more broadly, and we think about Proverbs and Psalms, there's much there to help us to deal with stress and just trials and all that, and we understand that. And so when we put it all together, Paul is saying we should serve in the newness of the Spirit. The freedom we have is not so we can stop serving God, but so that we can serve him better. We are serving him for the reasons he served us, because he loves us. It's out of love he serves, and it's out of love he wants us to serve. It's not because that we're afraid of everything we do will bring us the wrath of God. We're not under the wrath of God. We're in Christ. We serve God because we love him and we're thankful for what he's done for us. We might ask ourselves, how well do I serve in the Spirit? To my shame, I have served not only sin with more devotion at times, but also legalism. And we know it's wrong to sin against God, but it's also wrong to have fear to motivate us more than love. So, in thinking about these things, let's just thank God for Christ every day and the freedom that God's salvation brings to us. And let's serve in that newness and freedom of the Spirit. Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you for your word. Thank you, Father, that you do love us. We know that uh you are holy and you are righteous and you want us to live holy lives, and we know we fall short, but you still love us. We thank you that you want us to be secure in our salvation. We thank you that you help us when we stumble. And Father, we pray that you will help us just to look to you to be growing in strength, and that we would turn our cares and worries over to you, and that we would also follow you, Father, and avoid sin, but also avoid legalism. That we would just serve you in love and serve our fellow man in love, and that we would uh be a reflection of Christ. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.