For our scripture reading tonight, we turn to Romans chapter 3, Romans 3, reading verses 9 through 31, the end of the chapter of Romans 3. I also ask that you turn in the back of the Psalter hymnal to page 9, Lord's Day 2, Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day 2, the first question and answer that begins the first part of the catechism entitled Man's Misery. Before we turn to Romans 3, let's confess together what we believe in Lord's Day 2 as I read the question and together we respond from questions and answers 3, 4, and 5 of Lord's Day 2. Page 9, in the back of the Psalter hymnal. Question 3 asks, how do you come to know your misery? The law of God tells me. What does God's law require of us? Christ teaches us this in summary in Matthew 22. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. Can you live up to all this perfectly? No. I have a natural tendency to hate God and my neighbor. Romans 3, beginning at verse 9, as we give our attention to the Word of God. What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all. We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written, there is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away. They have together become worthless. There is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves. Their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes. Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore, no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law. Rather, through the law, we become conscious of sin. But now a righteousness from God apart from law has been made known to which the law and the prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. Where then is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law. No, but on that of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law. Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. Do we then nullify the law by this faith? Not at all. Rather, we uphold the law. Beloved, let's bow together in prayer. Father, indeed, we confess that Your Word is a lamp unto our feet and a light upon our path. And we also confess that apart from the working of Your Holy Spirit, that which is before us, that which we have read, is just ink on a page. We depend completely upon Your Holy Spirit opening our hearts, removing the blinders from us that we might understand the truth of Your Word. We thank You for the beauty of Your most holy Word, and we pray, Father, that You would indeed instruct us and be pleased to strengthen our faith and increase our assurance of salvation in Christ Jesus. In Jesus' name alone, we pray these things. Amen. Beloved in Christ the Lord, one of the first songs of the faith that no doubt many of us learned even as young children, and I'm sure the boys and girls here tonight could sing it right now if we ask them to, is, Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. I know that Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me. This is God's Word, boys and girls. This is God speaking to us. And He tells us and He shows us in His Word that He loves us and we believe because the Holy Spirit gives us faith to believe it. But we can only know this and believe this if we know and believe something else the Bible tells us. And that is the truth about our sin and misery. Now that doesn't sound so nice, does it? That isn't so very comforting, is it? The catechism, you see, goes from the positive note of talking about the joy that we have of living and dying in the joy of the comfort of belonging to Jesus Christ to the negative note of talking about knowing our misery. And you see, the catechism makes this shift for good reason. The Bible does this. The Bible, especially Paul in Romans, considers the outline of sin, salvation, and service, or guilt, grace, and gratitude. You see, beloved, God's Word seeks to build up His people by telling us the truth. the hard truth, the disturbing truth about ourselves. Yes, indeed, we might say the Bible builds us up. God, through His Word, builds us up by tearing us down. In a sense, that's completely opposite of how the world would operate. They would say, phooey on that. Forget that. We need to build each other up by telling each other how good we are to exalt our good qualities and not talk about the bad things. But you see, beloved, misleading one has never, ever helped them. It is never for good, and it never works, it never promotes restoration. We must know the reality about ourselves, or we will never, ever desire or seek for a Savior. And we are brought to see and know the reality about ourselves through God's Word, and especially His law. God gave His people His law, which is His standard for living for you and for me. And only when we measure our lives against His standard will we see the truth and find true comfort. How do you come to know your misery? Question 3 asks, The law of God tells me. You see, the function of God's law, and really it's a disturbing function, is actually found in this very question, and that is to cause you and me to know our misery. To know how miserable we have become. Now you see, it's only because we have the comfort of belonging to Jesus Christ that we also understand our sin and misery because the Holy Spirit has taken the blinders off of our spiritual eyes. The Holy Spirit has indeed begun that good work in your heart and mine. And therefore, we know that our misery is because of our sin. True misery is the result of being alienated or separated from God because of sin. Now, we're not talking necessarily about being miserable. We know that there are many things in this life that make us miserable, whether physically or emotionally or mentally or even spiritually. Lots of things make us miserable. And those things indeed result from our misery, which the world doesn't understand at all. But we know that misery happens because things are not right. And in this case, things are not right with God. Why? Because of sin. Now, boys and girls, what is sin? Well, you see, the Bible uses different words to describe sin in general. One of those specific words is transgression. And that means to cross the boundary. To go outside of the boundary that has been set. Your parents might tell you that you may play anywhere in the grass of your yard, providing you have grass. A lot of the yards in California don't. But providing you have grass, or you may go anywhere up to the wall of your yard, but you may not go on the street where the grass stops and where the street starts. That's the boundary. If you go off the grass, you go into the street, you have transgressed. You have crossed over the boundary. you have gone out of bounds. We know that in a lot of sporting activities, there is an out of bounds. Another word, another specific word, is iniquity, which means unrighteousness. Not doing what is right, but instead rebelling. Now, boys and girls, when you go off of the grass, you not only transgress, cross over the boundary that has been set for you, but you rebel against what your parents have told you. You do not do what is right according to the rules they have set. Even as you go out of bounds, you break the rules. And then there is also the word sin itself, which means missing the mark. If you have a target with a bullseye on it, that's the mark you want to hit. If you go to the left or to the right or above or below, then you miss the bullseye mark. And by rebelling against the rules of your parents, You miss the mark because you do something other than what they have said you may do. Sin is missing the mark or standard that God has set for us. Rebelling and going our own way and crossing the boundary, going out of bounds of what He has said we may do. And how do we know what that is? God tells us. It's called His law. We can't know that we have broken the rules if we don't know what the rules are. You can't know that you are traveling in basketball if no one has ever showed you and told you what traveling is. But when we know the rules, beloved, when we know the rules, then we also know if we have broken them. And that's disturbing. Paul says in verse 20, through the law we've become conscious of sin. But of course, again, we live in a world that doesn't know the rules. The wicked world doesn't understand what sin is because as Paul says in Romans 1, verse 18, the wicked suppress the truth by their wickedness. The world sees man as basically good and that's how you should treat man. Again, you should exalt the good qualities. That's what the world says. The world says the problem is not in me, but it's outside of me in all of those things that make me miserable. maybe the problem is our social structures maybe it's our economic policies maybe it's our political system you see it's not man that needs renewal but our society needs that needs changing then everything will be alright but of course each one of us I trust can see the fallacy in that it doesn't work somebody is always miserable But God says, no, the problem is you. Beloved, our misery is the result of sin. How do you come to know your misery? The law of God tells me. The law of God shows us our sin. Now, we know that God created laws of nature, for example, by which His creation operates. But we're talking here with regard to the law, we're talking about God's law given to His people. God gave His law to our first parents, Adam and Eve, in the garden as a covenant bond which showed the special relationship between the Father in heaven and His children on earth. And that law was the basis for fellowship and for happy living. It was the realm in which and the standard according to which man was to live and work and exist. And that law of God is not arbitrary. Adam and Eve found that out immediately. We cannot take it or leave it as we desire without any result, without any price to be paid. If you do not keep God's law, then a price has to be paid. And now this isn't necessarily the case with man's law, is it? You can speed in your car and if there's no law enforcement officer, there's no police officer around, you won't get caught necessarily and there will be no penalty to pay. But God sets the standard for living for His creatures. And if that standard is broken or violated, there will be evil results. Just as the law of nature for a fish, boys and girls, is that it shall be in and it shall move in water because when they break that law, when they leave the water, what happens? They die. In the same way, man and woman, human beings were created by God to live according to the standard that He established for them. Again, that is His law. The law of God is His will concerning man's will and life in his relationship with God and all things, and it is reflected and expressed in the Ten Commandments. God established His law to govern human life. Man was created to live within the boundary of and to keep God's law. Let me try to explain it this way as well. God's law, again, as we have said, is the standard that we were created to live by. We could also call it the norm. When man keeps God's law, that is normal. That is the way it is supposed to be. But when man departed or left God's law, he became abnormal. And therefore, because of sin, each and every one of us is abnormal. Just like a fish out of water. When we departed God's standard, when we transgressed His law, we became dead. in transgression and sins. And again, this is the cause of our misery. And therefore, to know how miserable we are and to know how abnormal we are, we must measure or compare ourselves with what is normal. And that, again, is the disturbing function of God's law. To show you and me how abnormal we have become. To make us conscious of our sin. The law of God, as we hear from time to time, is like a mirror for you and me. And when we look into the mirror of God's law, we can see what we were meant to be. We can see the requirements of the law and we can also see how we have done. We can see what we have actually become. Unfortunately, it shows us how we have missed God's mark. How we have crossed the boundary that He has set for us. How we have gone our own unrighteous way instead of following His righteous way. Beloved, only the law of God gives us the proper diagnosis which we desperately need, not ourselves. And the second detail we want to notice tonight then is the impossible requirement of God's standard of living. What is God's law? What does God's law require of us? Once again, Christ teaches us this in summary in Matthew 22. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind it with all your strength. This is the great and first commandment, and a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. Now again, these are familiar words to us. This is what we call the summary of the law, and we usually hear it as we did this morning, along with the reading of the Ten Commandments. Brothers and sisters, we hear the law of God every Lord's Day, whether from the Old Testament or from the New Testament. But in order for it to function properly for us, we must hear it in the right way. So I ask you, how do you hear it? How do you hear the law of God? When you hear the law of God, does it expose, as it should, your misery and sin? Or do you hear it in such a way that it simply covers up your sin? A Pharisee asked Jesus which was the greatest commandment in the law. It was a question, of course, that was meant to trap Jesus. But Jesus quotes the summary of the law from the Old Testament to reveal the mishearing and the misuse of the law by many of the lawyers of his day. Now, two dangers of not hearing and understanding God's law correctly are legalism and formalism. And we're talking about legalism here in the sense of earning salvation by obedience to the law. Now, in one sense, we're all legalists. If you desire to be obedient to God's law and strive to be obedient, each one of us is a legalist in that sense. That's a good sense. But here we're talking about legalism in the sense of earning salvation by obedience. The Pharisees, of course, believed that righteousness comes through keeping the law. And therefore, to increase their righteousness, very simply, they increased the law. Taking God's law as expressed in the Ten Commandments and literally adding hundreds more. And understandably, then, they wanted to know which was the greatest. Formalism is only concerned about the form of the commandment and sees the law as only an outward code. The outward appearance is the important thing, not the heart. And therefore, if I don't literally end another's life, or if I don't literally take their possessions, then I'm not guilty of murder or stealing. You see, both legalists and formalists are able to hear the law and find satisfaction in themselves and in the commandments they have kept, not worrying about the commandments they have not kept. You see, it's like a scale. And if the side that they have kept is heavier, that's got more in it, then they're okay. But Jesus reminds them, and He reminds you and me, that the law does not redeem you and me. But it condemns you and me because of its impossible requirements. God's law is not to be seen as just a mere set of rules, but it's the heart of the matter that counts, and that is love. The depth of the law is love. Each command is to be clothed in, wrapped in, done from love. Love is to be the motivation behind keeping each and every one of God's commandments. Jesus said, if you love Me, it begins with love for Him. If you love Me, you will keep My commandments. 1 John 3 says, and this is His commandment, that we believe in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as He commanded us. In the summary, Jesus commands love. And he said in another place, love one another as I have loved you. It's unmistakable, isn't it? Love is a command. It's not a feeling. The biblical definition of love is based on actions. 1 Corinthians 13, that chapter on love, talks about what love is and what love is not. It talks about what love does do, what love does not do. It is action. It is the action of giving yourself totally to another. And of course, this may sometimes be contrary to what you feel. Now Jesus said the first and greatest commandment is to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And beloved, this means obedience. Obedience with your whole being. And it begins with your heart. The heart is the place of your desires and motives and thoughts and purposes and words and deeds, and it belongs fully to God. Your soul, meaning your very life and your breath, belongs to God. The intellect and the reason of your mind belongs to God. And your strength, the very work of your hands and feet, all of your actions along with your whole being, it all belongs to Him. And then love for our neighbor flows out of our love for God. You can't and you won't love your neighbor if you don't love God. 1 John 4 verse 20 says, If someone says, I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. For the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. Jesus commands us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Now let's be honest. We love ourselves, don't we? Each one of us. We love ourselves. We wouldn't do. I don't think we could find anybody here tonight, I trust, that would intentionally hurt ourselves. I don't purposefully hit my thumb with a hammer or stub my toe. I don't purposely try to make mistakes with my bank account and hurt myself financially. We try to promote ourselves. We try to promote our own interests. But we are to love our neighbor in the same way, even those who drive us crazy. Even those who may try to take advantage of us. Jesus doesn't say that we are to love them more than we love ourselves, because in all honesty, not one of us can love another more than we love ourselves. It's not possible. But we are to love them no less than we love ourselves. People of God, Jesus says, on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. And that means keeping God's law correctly depends very simply on these two commandments. That means our obedience must be from love-filled hearts. That we are to think highly of our neighbor, desire their good. Outward obedience means nothing if love is missing. Without love, one is only missing the mark. The outward actions may look good, but if they are not wrapped in that heartfelt, that true godly love, they are missing God's mark. But beloved, when you live loving God above all and loving fellow man as yourself, you are living as you were created to live. When you follow the requirements of God's standard, that is normal. That's the way He meant it to be. And of course, it sounds pretty easy, doesn't it? After all, we're certainly not hateful people, are we? We don't act in hateful ways, do we? I think for all those of you that I know, I can say that you don't purposefully act in a hateful way. But you see, now it's time to apply this standard by looking, by facing and looking into that mirror of God's law of love. And actually the Catechism does this for you and me, and it probably comes up with a different answer than if we applied it ourselves because the law's honest application proves its requirements are impossible for you and me. Question five, can you live up to all this perfectly? No. I have a natural tendency to hate God and my neighbor. Now what a harsh reality slap in the face. Just when we thought that we were fairly loving people, we are reminded that it isn't love that is a natural part of who we are, but it's hate that is natural. But now we understand how we're looking at this. We're looking at this as redeemed people, aren't we? Which is a blessing. It's the only way we can understand this. But we're looking back now at our nature. At our nature apart from Jesus Christ. And we must consider the truth of our nature apart from Jesus Christ. That's what we're doing here. When we look in the mirror of God's law, any and every one of us, it doesn't take long to see and realize that by nature we do not keep God's law perfectly. In fact, we don't keep it at all. But notice the question doesn't ask, do you live up to all this perfectly? It asks, can you? Are you able to do this? And the answer says, no way. I can't keep it. Even if I wanted to, I am abnormal. All people are abnormal. Paul says in verses 10-12, there is no one righteous. Not even one. And he includes himself in that. There is no one who understands. No one who seeks God. All have turned away. They have together become worthless. There is no one who does good. Not even one. And Psalm 51 speaks of our sinful nature when the psalmist says, Surely I was sinful at birth. Sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Now that's obviously hard to understand, but even from the moment of conception, from the moment that heart started beating, as tiny as it might be, You and I can't even see it. We were sinful, worthy of eternal death. Not even having committed one actual sin, but even one actual sin is enough to condemn us for eternity. By nature, people of God, we have become exactly opposite of what God created us to be. In sin, we are the ones Paul is talking about in Romans 3. Unrighteous. Turning away from God instead of seeking fellowship with Him. You see, to love God is to desire to have fellowship with Him. And to seek this fellowship with Him in His Word. To hear it and to obey it when it is preached. To keep it close to our hearts all day long. To seek to follow His purpose for our lives and to find our worth and our value in His service and nothing else. but to find our worth and our value in His service. But when we reject God's Word, beloved, we break fellowship with Him. And we turn away from His law. We do this when we reject God's law governing our marriages and our relationships with our children. We do this when we reject His law dealing with stewardship. We do this when we find excuses to not participate in the life of the church or not attend worship services. Congregation, we do this because by nature, we hate God. We have changed. It's not God who has changed us. It's our fault. We have changed from what He intended us to be. We became the opposite. God created you and me for life with Him, but because of sin, we are abnormal. We are worthless to Him. We are dead. And Romans 3 describes very graphically the deadness and the deadliness of man. Verses 13 and 14. Their throats are open graves. Their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. And notice the order again. Throat, tongues, lips, mouth. Dead from inside out. Rotten to the core, we might say. That's you and me by nature. And then we read in verses 15 through 18, their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and misery mark their ways. And the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes. Even man's lifestyle is sinful and deadly. Congregation, man's hatred for God can be clearly seen also then in his hatred for fellow man, which is displayed, for example, in abortion, gay rights, Children divorcing their parents. We heard about that a number of years ago. Prayer taken out of the schools. And the desire of our society to deny true Christianity. You recognize that? It seems like every religion somehow is accepted and acceptable. But not true Christianity. You see, Satan knows what he's doing. He knows that all of those false religions aren't going to hurt his cause. They're going to help his cause. And because our natural tendency is to hate, not love. And therefore, even anger against another person is murder. And lust for another is adultery from the heart. Because of hate, we're selfish, not selfless. And beloved, we need to understand that it is possible to deceive ourselves. John says, if we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. It is possible to deceive ourselves and it's not possible to love God and at the same time hate our brother. John also says, the one who says he is in the light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. God's law is our standard for living and the foundation of his law is love for him and for our neighbor. And when we examine ourselves in the light of God's standard, then we realize just how abnormal we are. We have left the purpose for which God created us. That's our misery. Our misery is being abnormal. That is not being and doing what God meant for us to be and do. Then now we need to ask the question, how do we come to look into that mirror to examine ourselves? Remember, part of our hope, part of the joy of living, or living in the joy of that comfort includes knowing our sin and misery. How is that comforting to you and me? How do we look into that mirror? Only by the grace of God through the working of the Holy Spirit. Paul says in verse 24 that we are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. Only those who believe in Jesus Christ by true faith, Again, looking backward. Only then can we look backward and understand this. Only those who believe in Jesus Christ by true faith desire to see how they measure up to God's standard and want to try to live up to that standard. And even that very desire is a gift of God's grace. The unbeliever doesn't care. His sin doesn't bother him. He looks into the mirror of his own standard and says, I'm good. I'm right on target. Everything is fine. But he doesn't truly love. He can't. John says in 1 John 4, verses 7 and 8, Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love. Only one born again can love as God commanded. And as the believer looks into that mirror and realizes more and more his sinful, totally depraved nature, on the one hand, he realizes more and more his misery and he is more and more humbled and sorry for his sins. Should this grieve the believer? Yes. But does this drive him to despair? No. Because as he realizes just how unrighteous he is, he is illumined by the Holy Spirit to recognize the gloriousness of the grace of God and that alien righteousness which comes only from Christ Jesus. Only when one is broken down in humility will he know how great is that deliverance. Now Romans 3, 21 and 22 tell us that there is a righteousness, that alien righteousness from God that comes through faith in Jesus Christ. In Christ and only Him can you and I be restored to what is normal to fulfill our creative purpose. And this restoration will be complete when He comes again to gather His people. But until that time, we understand that even our righteousness in this life is not perfect. That we continue to sin. We are reminded daily of the impossible requirements, but yet we live in the comfort and the assurance of being clothed in Christ's righteousness, which covers our unrighteousness. Only in Christ can we be restored to love God and each other. You see, our love does not come first. Our love is in response to God's love for us. We love, John says, because He first loved us. And God showed His love for you and me by sending His Son to be the propitiation for our sins, to remove the wrath of God from us, which He alone had earned the right to do. Because He alone fulfilled God's law perfectly. congregation hearing about our true state as believers is hard it hurts no one likes to be told when they've done something bad and especially this it hurts but it is oh so necessary and it is oh so comforting as backwards as this is to the world it is only when we understand that god demands perfect righteousness and service and that we can give nothing but unrighteousness and disservice, it's only when we understand that by the power and the illumination of the Holy Spirit that we might also have comfort. Again, there's comfort in Jesus Christ who fulfilled all righteousness for us and demonstrated such perfect and great love by giving Himself for us on the cross. But not only for us, but also for all who call on His name alone for salvation. And there's more comfort that you and I might have. And that is that as we recognize by the illumination of the Holy Spirit that we do desire to love. We are to be reminded that indeed the Holy Spirit has begun that good work in us and He will be faithful to complete it on the day of Christ Jesus. Beloved, praise God that since you couldn't do anything to fix your sin or take away your misery, that He did something about it for you. Thank Him for Jesus Christ, the only name given among men by which we might be saved. Jesus Christ is your righteousness and my righteousness. And He is the only hope before God for those whose every tendency is to hate Him. What amazing love. Amen. Shall we pray. Father, indeed, at times we sing, Amazing love, how can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me? We thank You, Lord, for telling us the truth about ourselves with the purpose of lifting us up in the joy of such a great salvation. And we pray, O Lord, that you would continue to work in our hearts and lives in a most powerful way that we might desire to love and that we might indeed exercise that gift of love for you above all and our neighbor and each other as ourselves. And Father, may it not be that we would be noticed or recognized or received the praise of men, but may our every desire be that you should be honored and glorified and praised, Let your kingdom be advanced. That your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Hear our prayer, O Lord, for Jesus' sake and in his name alone. Amen.