Christ Life In Us Romans 7:9-11 The Commandment, Sin Nature and Death

Well, good morning. Okay, this is a cool lesson. Actually, it goes very well, if you were in the Galatians class, you have a leg up on today's message. It's just a lot more of the truths we learned in Galatians there. Okay, so, all right, so let's get started here. Okay, so there's three things I want you to think about in today's message.

The commandment, And notice it say, the commandment. It's not commandments plural, it's the commandment. So there's one commandment that just really, the use of an acronym, nailed Paul to the wall. It just, he said, Lord, I can't do that. I just can't do that. It just, it's too much. You can't ask me to do that.

Then there's a sin nature, which we talked about a lot in Sunday school. That's the Adamic nature that every believer has. Believers have it. And then there's death. Okay, so we got the big three here. So here's the commandment. Commandment is number 10. It's the singular commandment. The 10th commandment. Thou shalt not covet. Or literally, it's even worse than that. Thou shalt not desire. So how are you doing at that today? Do you have any desires that are ungodly? I'll leave that for your own contemplation. Anyway. Then we have Charlie here. And Charlie has a sin nature, just like Sally and Joe and Miles and whoever else.

We all have a sin nature. We all come from Adam. And the story about that is told well in Romans 5, 12. Through one man, the sin, the sin nature entered into the world and death through sin. So death spread to all men because all sinned in Adam. Every man, every woman, every child, every person on the planet all sinned in Adam. So we all have his nature and we all have a sin nature. And then the third component is death. So this is not a very bright, uplifting trio, right? Thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not desire, we all have a sin nature, and death. But death, we want to define some terms here.

So before you get too, and this is a struggle. Paul's taught, this is a very personal letter. Seven is a very personal thing. He's talking about the struggle that he had. Paul, Paul had to learn something. So Paul spent three years with the Lord Jesus. And he still hadn't learned this. And he talks about, in these verses today, he talks about how he learned something. It's amazing. It's just amazing. So actually, it gives us hope. Have you learned everything about the Christian life? Do you have it all down? Do you have it all, you know? We don't.

Our brother Paul, who's, and at the end of 7, what does he say? O wretched man that I am, who would deliver me from this body of sin? And the question is answered. He answers the question. But this is a chapter of his struggle with the Christian life.

Okay, so let's define some terms. First of all, the sin, the sin nature, Adam's fallen nature, or as we learned in Sunday school, you could say the flesh. Flesh is more than just this stuff you squeeze right here. It's in many contexts, especially when Paul's talking, it's the sinful nature. Okay, let's go on. We have the law without the article. It's the principle of the law or the inherent law, man-made laws. Many times the principle of law is the best definition. Then we have the law and we capitalize it because it's speaking of the law of Moses.

And this is commandments plural. And it's talked about in Romans 4, back in 4, all the way through 14. And then we have the singular commandment. One singular commandment, the 10th commandment, this is the one that just, I said, nailed Paul to the wall. He just said, I cannot do this. I cannot, because literally it says, thou shalt not desire. And, you know, I'll just, I paraphrased it here.

You shall not covet your neighbor's house, wife, male servant, female servant, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. Ever thought about your neighbor? They have a kind of nice house. Mine's not so nice. I wish I had a house a little bit nicer. I know I've thought about that sometimes. Anyway.

So, and one last one, death. And this is a key one, death. Many, many times, a fundamental idea of death is separation. It's never, actually in scripture, amazingly enough, it's never denotes nonexistence. Death is always separation, and the ultimate separation that men should be shaking their boots about is separation from God. That's the ultimate death that man should really fear.

Okay, so there's my definitions for the lesson here, so let's carry on here. So here's an overview. This is from Chester McCauley, and it's overviewing 7 through 13. So you could say the law is a teacher. We saw that. Myles taught that. I have come to know the sin. It taught us I have come to know the sin, the sin nature. The law is an agitator. Myles talked about this last week. The commandment produced in me coveting. The law is a terminator.

So I borrowed this little guy off the internet. I never saw any of the movies. I'm not into that. This is the Terminator movies. Raise your hand if you saw a Terminator movie. Hey, okay. All right, some did. I never did. So that's the guy there. I think Arnold Schwarzenegger was the guy. He was the big guy, the Terminator. Anyway, so Chester McCauley used this term to describe the verses we're going to cover today. The law is a Terminator.

When the commandment came, I died. I was terminated. It, the commandment, resulted in death for me. It, the commandment, killed me. And kind of the thought, the gem of this is that the commandment killed all human hope of keeping it. If you really think about that, that commandment is impossible. All of God's commandments are impossible, but thou shalt not desire is just, Lord, you mean I can't even think that? That's in your mind, that's in your head. I can't think that? That's, how am I ever gonna be pleasing to you?

For a Jew, that just blew Paul's circuits. You know, Paul said, as to the law, What did he say? He basically said, I'm it. I'm the, as a Jew, before salvation, I'm it. Look at me. I kept the law perfectly. He didn't understand. I think we'll see that kind of comes through in this message. Okay, and then we're going to see next week, the law is a revealer. Okay, so let's carry on here.

Okay, it reveals, okay, through the law, through the commandment, the sin will become utterly sinful. And that's kind of another key here in this message is that the Lord would desire that we come to know, even though the sin nature is not something we're to focus on, we're to focus on Christ, we're to know our sin nature, we're to understand what's happening there, what's going on. And Paul's going to talk about his struggle with his sin nature. Okay, so from last week, I'm gonna try to review what Miles did in 40 minutes. I'm gonna try to do it in five minutes. And it's a little bit different take, so I'm not gonna repeat. Anyway, what shall we say then?

Is the law a sin? May it never be. On the contrary, I would have not come to know sin except through the law. for I had not known, and I put in rather than covet, I had not known evil desires except that the law kept on saying you shall not covet or you shall not have evil desires.

So I'm just going to focus on the last part, the last, the C part of this verse right now. So the law kept on saying, it's lego, kept on saying, so that Paul pictures God's written word as It just keeps on telling me, keeps on saying, keeps on speaking to me in past times. That's kind of the verse. It kept on telling me, thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not covet. Kind of ongoing.

This commandment is the only one that addresses your thought life. If you look through the commandments in the first three are God word. You'll have no other God before me. Kind of the middle section is, honor thy father and thy mother, thou shalt not steal. And then this one is the only one that goes right after our thought life.

Paul is saying, I have not naturally known the specifics of covening, except the law said you shall not coven. It's as if Paul, and we know Paul was the Jew of Jew, he knew the law perfectly, he felt he kept it perfectly, but then he became a believer And it wasn't, even though with all his teaching from the Lord, it wasn't an overnight change. It took a while for him to really see, well, I can't keep the law. God's holy and righteous and good law, I can't keep. It took him a while. And this is, he's going to describe that today. Okay. And this is from last week.

But sin, the sin nature, produced in me covening of every kind. The sin nature is a subject and the source here in this verse. The verb here is produce, to affect, to be the cause of, the author of. So the sin nature produced in me, so the sin nature is the author of coveting or desiring in me. But produce in this verse has two modifying statements, the A and the B part, I mean the B and the C part of this verse.

So the B part is taking opportunity through the commandment, And secondly, for apart from the law, sin is dead. So we're going to look at each of those. Taking opportunity through the commandment. So the sin nature acted as follows. Taking opportunity, we had the same, Miles taught this a little bit in Sunday school, the same combination shows up in verse 8, also in verse 11. Lombano, having taken.

So this is Aoristens which you can look at as an event. So this was an event. Paul came to a critical point or an aha moment. So he's saying taking opportunity in the flesh. So the sin nature acted taking opportunity. Opportunity is Afro me or a base of operation. That's like, you know, in the military, that's like you have these bases of operation where your troops assemble.

And it's, it's through by means of taking opportunity through the commandment. And it, in this case, Paul says it was that 10th commandment that just really got to me. The commandment was a launching pad, the base of operation for the sin nature. The commandment pushed the sin nature into operation. It's like pushing into gear and step on the accelerator. It pushed, it got it going.

And we're gonna learn that we need to, you know, to define what sin is, you need to have rules, you need to have a law. So the law is a good thing, so you know what sin is. Without that commandment, you don't know what sin is. Sin can be anything. There's no definition of sin without a commandment.

So part C, for or because, apart from the law, sin is dead. Now here's a case where we're going to see law, actually I don't know why they capitalized it, and it probably should not have been capitalized. So apart from or without or separated from the law, law is a principle because it's really the The article V is not really there in the original. Law is a principle. So sin is dead as a principle.

This is going to sound like double talk, I know. So sin as a principle is dead, but think about it. Sin can't be dead, right? But sin is never dead, right? We have our old buddy Satan here, right? Sin is an active principle in the universe motivated by Satan. Sin is going on 24-7. It never stops.

So we're talking about the principle of sin, and it's all tied back to the commandment. Without commandments, plural, of God, sin is not realized, and everything is relative, right? If there's no commandment, no rules, then everything's allowed, right? So there has to be a rule. So this is the principle of sin. Conclusion, without the law, sin as a principle is dead. And we see in another verse that kind of parallel, the power of sin is the law. Okay, so that's our review.

Today's verses. Okay, 9 through 11. Notice in here, before we start, the word commandment, the commandment, 10th commandment shows up in every verse. Death or dying or killing shows up in every verse. And sin shows up in 9 and 11. So my three topics, right? The commandment, death, and the sin nature show up in every verse. And oh, by the way, sin singular there is the sin nature in both cases.

Okay, so let's start here. So we're going to go another kind of overview again before we start. This is from my brother Hal Malloy, The Nature and Power of the Law. The law is not, we learned in 7-7, the law is not sin. What the law does, the law is a standard of right and wrong. The law reflects the sinfulness of the sin nature. We wouldn't know how bad our sin is unless God had defined that that sin is sinful. It clarifies, it points the finger at, that is sin. It tells us exactly what that is.

And the one we're covering today is going to be the law provides a realization of our separation, our death from God, if you will. And then on the positive side, We're gonna learn in 12, the law is holy, the law is righteous, it's the character of the giver, the law is good or beneficial. Okay, so that's our starting point. So we're gonna focus on the law provides realization of our separation from God. So verse 9a, I, Paul, was once alive apart from the law. And this is really amazing.

I didn't do this count myself. I trusted Chester McCauley. It might be worthwhile if you can print out chapter 7 and start circling. There are 30 I's in chapter 7. I don't have a detailed count for the rest of it. So I, me, my, and myself. 47 personal pronouns. Have you ever talked to somebody who always talks about themselves? You never can get a word in edgewise. I mean, so you're nice. You listen and listen and listen. Maybe you get a tiny word in. How about a letter you get?

And it's all about, this is what I did. I think I'm going to, now I'm not going to say that. I was going to make a comment about social media. But anyway, that's what I think social media is. Roger's point of view. If you love it, it's okay with me. All right, here we go.

So Paul was, he focused on himself because he knew this struggle was important for believers to understand. They need to understand there's a struggle. And he wanted to show us that. So he talked about himself a lot. So Paul is speaking of how he was continually living his life in past times. That's kind of, for the Greek folks, that's an imperfect tense. Continuous action and pastime. So he's speaking about something in the past. So I believe he's talking about he was a believer, but maybe a young believer, if you will.

So Paul had apparently in time past not yet experienced the coming to know his sinful nature by the law. Paul's talking about his condition, not his position. This is how he's, Paul is like all believers. He's seated with Christ in the heavenlies. He has the very life of Christ. The question is, how does he conduct his life? That's called his condition. However, in past time, Paul had lived unaware of the law's true demands. and was therefore self-righteous.

And the verse that kind of shows that, this is a verse that before he became a believer, Philippians 3.6, and this is his pedigree, this is what he was as a Jew of Jews, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness, which is in the law, found blameless. He had a super high opinion of himself in terms of the law, right? He could do it all. There was nothing that fazed him. So when he becomes a believer, it wasn't an automatic switchover, so to speak.

The B part. When the commandment came, notice it's singular, the commandment, not commandments, the commandment, commandment number 10, thou shalt not covet or desire, came, sin became alive and I died. The coming of the commandment was an event, another Aorist tense, an event in his life when he encountered thou shalt not covet. Sin became alive. It responded to the command. You know, and this is why, do you ever wonder why you don't need to teach your children to sin? I don't have to tell you that. I'll tell you a story. When our first child, Mark, our youngest child, came, I was sure he was just going to be perfect. And I was amazed.

Vonnie was trying to feed him, breastfeed him, but he was being very belligerent. He wouldn't help her out. He wouldn't do his thing. I said, where did that come from? I scratched my head. You know, I, oh wait a minute, that little guy, he's not perfect. He has Adam's nature. Anyway, okay.

Sin became, so that's, and he didn't know about, he didn't know anything about anything I'm talking about today. He had a sin nature, okay. It became alive, it sprang into action, the sinful nature regained its strength, its vigor, and I died, he says. I died, Paul realized his separation from God because of his sin nature.

And this was an event. It happened, seems like he doesn't say when it happened, but it was an event based on the tense of the verb. And this commandment, which was to result in life. This is one of the more challenging verses in this section. And it's this kind of commandment, it's kind of the idea from Merriman, And it's the same commandment. It's this referring back to the, thou shalt not covet or desire. And so I took the, this is a translation from Weiss.

The aim of which was life. The idea is toward life. Life is zoe here. Life as God has it. It's real life. Use of eternal life in scripture is zoe life. The commandment was toward the highest form of life, zoe, in contrast to bios, which is physical life.

This life can only, as we know, and but Paul didn't, you know, Paul didn't quite grasp it, believe it or not. This life can only be obtained by faith, not by trying to keep God's holy and righteous and good commandments. It must be by faith. proved to result in death to me. This was for, so life I found to be toward death. The contrast is toward death or toward life. Death is spiritual separation from God. Here was a commandment that promised life. And I think it, you know, and this, I struggle a little bit, so it promised life.

You say, well, how can How can Paul teach us that we're not under law, we're under grace, and say that the commandments promise life when I'm not to try to obey the commandments, I must have faith in him? So I kind of resolved this by saying, I think this is focused back on where he came from, so to speak. That's what he thought initially. It promised life, but he quickly realized that even though as a Jew, he was taught righteousness was obeying the law, doesn't apply now as a believer. When I followed it, I found myself in the area of death. Paul's former state of happy innocence has given way to a realization of his actual position before God via the commandments.

That verse, 10, is a tough verse, I found. Okay, let's move on. 11. For sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it, it killed me. So I just want to focus on the subject and verb here. Sin is the subject. Now we're going to see that the sin nature was responsible for two, I call them, catastrophic results in Paul's life. First, the sin nature deceived me. So the sinful nature, or you could say, beguiled me.

Deceive is the word, to deceive completely, beguile, means to lead out of the right way. It was this event that happened to him. And the word for deceive is the same word used describing Eve, deception by Satan or being deceived by Satan. And here's a verse in 2 Corinthians 11, 3. For I'm afraid that as a serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds may be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ. So that's the first thing that got to Paul.

He was deceived. His sin nature deceived him. Secondly, for the sin nature killed me through the commandment. The sinful nature through it killed me. Killed me is spiritual separation from God. So now we've gone through the two. It deceived me. It killed me. And then the middle part is going to tell us how this happened.

We go back to our same phraseology we had back in verse 8. For sin, take an opportunity through the commandment. So taking is lambano again, to take, to lay hold of. Opportunity is this word for the base of operation. So same idea here again. This was a launching pad for the sin nature. The commandment was the launching pad. Okay, so let's go on. A few more thoughts here. So Paul expected one outcome. He's thinking from his Jewish upbringing of the commandment, but he experienced another. I expected life by thinking I could obey it. He thought he could obey it, the commandment, but I found that myself in death, separation from God.

God did not give the law to deceive Paul. It is his sin nature that caused the law to be deceptive. It is the sin nature that deceived Paul, not the law. That's just really key. The sin nature is the issue here. The law is holy, righteous, and good. It's the sin nature that is the issue in this. Okay, so to close here, Our brother Hal kind of went through this, maybe a little personal to some extent. How bad is our sin nature? We talked a little bit in Sunday School about this. How bad is our sin nature?

Well, first of all, as I come to know Christ, and we've said this, you know, Holly Hilde has said this many times. I come to know Christ, I learn His ways, His thoughts, we see what He thinks through the Scriptures, we see His mind revealed in Scripture, And that's what we should be. That's our life in Christ. His ways, His thoughts, His mind. We see the very character of our Savior in Scripture. And we get to know Him. We get to hang out with Him via the Word.

But also what happens as we do that, what happens? I also come to know about my flesh. And we're learning about that in Galatians, the flesh versus the Spirit. We see the flesh in contrast to the beauty of our Savior. And the flesh, again, is my sin nature. So it's that battle. So next to knowing Christ, nothing is as important as knowing my flesh.

You need to know your opponent, right? If you're into football, today in the big football game today, knowing your opponent is the name of the game, right? Knowing better, you probably will win. Anyway. So you need to understand the subtleties of my flesh. It's pretty subtle.

Our flesh, our sinful nature is probably, we know it better than the Lord. I hate to say it. We probably know it better than the Lord. Because we lived it our whole life. You know, we have hidden agendas. We seek personal influence, maybe without even trying. This one gets to me. We seek preservation, therefore we're defensive. I need to preserve how smart I am.

I'm a elder at Holly Hills. Wow. Think about that. Ooh. You know, I ought to be something. So I got to defend myself. I may be wrong, but I'm going to defend myself. So, I mean, you can see how deceitful the sin nature can be. Seeking popularity, reputation, prestige.

All this is how you use a modus operandi. If you don't know what that word means, it's how things operate. It's how your flesh operates. The world said, that's okay, that's just what we all do, right? We all seek our own, we all look out for ourselves, we're all self-focused.

But you know, the verse that just kind of nails me to the wall right here, how bad is our sin nature? Look at Jeremiah, you guys have memorized probably, I do. Jeremiah 17, 9, this is King James. The heart, here referring to the sin nature, I believe, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked who can know it. So the sin nature, the flesh, is a foreign opponent, but as we learned in Galatians, I'm to walk by the spirit, I will not carry out the desires of the flesh. God has a plan and a purpose. He knows how bad the sin nature is.

He knows what we need to understand, and it's to be His life that is our life. And we do have His life. Okay, let's close in prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we just thank You so much, Lord, for Your Word. Thank You for the struggle that Paul tells us, how he struggled with the, thou shalt not desire. And he saw his sin nature being a part of that. But we know that you provided through your son and through the Holy Spirit a remedy for this situation. In Christ's name, amen. So now Miles is going to come up and we're going to do the Lord's Table here.