Turn in your Bibles, please, to Romans chapter 7 for our passage this morning. I'm just looking at verses 1 through 6, but I think I'd like to read Romans 6.15 through 7.6. Romans 6.15 through 7.6, and I didn't look up the page number, I'm sorry. If you're having trouble finding it, the person next to you will certainly help you. Romans 6, 15 through 7, 6 for our reading and the preaching passage, first six verses of Romans 7. God's holy, inspired, inerrant, and infallible word. What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law, but under grace? By no means. Do you not know that if you present yourself to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed. Having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations, for just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification. When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness, but what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. Now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Or, do you not know, brothers, for I am speaking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives, Thus, a married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress. Likewise, my brothers, you have also died to the law through the body of Christ so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit. Thus far the reading of God's word. May he write this word on our hearts and give us true faith to understand it. Congregation of the Lord Jesus, the state of marriage in North America, and I guess I'm thinking mainly of the United States, but I assume some of these trends are true of our nice Canadian cousins as well, does not seem to be very good. The typical report that we see is that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. That may not be true. The story is almost certainly more complicated than that. The divorce rate, as far as I'm able to tell by looking at some of the census records, would sort of climb and fall through the early part of the 20th century and probably spiked in the mid-70s, which is where I think people got the idea that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. But then it seems to have leveled off in the 70s. And what's been happening since is that people are either delaying getting married or simply ignoring marriage altogether. There's perhaps an increase in serial marriage in some ways where people go from one spouse to the next. And we seem to have lost, this is just an inference based on what I hear, what I read, what I see. We seem to have lost the ethos of married for life and maybe we're losing the ethos of marriage. So in some ways, what Paul says here might be a little foreign to us because he's assuming some things that our culture no longer seems to assume, and that is that ordinarily, all things being equal, as our Lord Jesus said, once you're married, you're married, unless, of course, the other spouse commits adultery, or Paul adds, perhaps, desertion, or dies. Those are the three ways that a marriage comes to an end. So we need to bear that in mind as we meditate on this passage this morning so that we can understand what Paul is saying. And of course, he's writing here to the Roman congregation, congregation of Christians in Rome, about A.D. 57. Nero is still relatively young at this point, But, within less than a decade, within less than a decade, Christians are going to be blamed for what apparently was a kind of a property deal, a land redevelopment deal in Rome that went bad. Nero was, had some sort of scheme, maybe a kickback scheme, who knows. But apparently it went bad and there was a fire And for reasons we don't know entirely, but we can infer a little bit about the status of Christians in the pagan Roman Empire, he chose to blame the Christians for setting the fire. And he used them as scapegoats for this land deal and this fire that destroyed part of the city. And so, an unknown number, some have said, I've read some rather large numbers, an unknown number, perhaps a large number of Christians were arrested, and they were put on trial for their faith, and some of them were even covered with tar, and children, this is a true story, they were actually put to death merely for being Christians, remarkable thing. I don't hear this much anymore, but as a boy I used to hear if one football team defeated another one, they would say it was like the Christians and the Lions. And as it turns out, that sort of thing, that wasn't just a figure of speech. That actually really used to happen. Christians actually used to be marched into a kind of a stadium. And they used to be actually thrown to lions merely because they would not bow the knee to Caesar and they would not say that Caesar is Lord. They would only say Jesus is Lord. They would pay their taxes, they would serve, they would not break the law, but they wouldn't honor Caesar as a god and they wouldn't pour out a drink offering and renounce Christ. They wouldn't do those things and so they were put to death. Well, that's the context that's coming anyway. That's not quite what's happening yet, but it gives you a sense of the status of these Christians to whom Paul was writing and they're surrounded by unbelief. They're a small minority and everything they see around them is unbelief and most of them come out of an unbelieving pagan background. Or at least some of them. And they're certainly tempted to follow the pattern of the pagans. And they're wrestling with how do we live the Christian life in light of the gospel, in obedience to the law, And just as we are, they were being tossed back and forth, apparently, as to how to relate these things. And so the Apostle Paul wrote this epistle to sort of summarize all these things. One of the men who helped to edit and probably contributed to our catechism, Caspar Olivianus, summarized the entire book of Romans as saying it's about the distinction between the law, what God demands, and the gospel, the free salvation that he gives to all of his people. The distinction between the law and the gospel. So the first three chapters of Romans up to 3.20 are the law. He's prosecuting, in a sense, all of us, but particularly the Romans, and reminding them of God's holy, unyielding, righteous standard. Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything which is written in the book of the law. Love the Lord your God with all your faculties, as Pastor Kamiga used to say, and your neighbor as yourself. And he prosecutes them. And then, beginning in 3.21, he begins to announce the good news. And you can be relatively sure that Paul is about to say something really wonderfully good when he starts a sentence with but. He often follows that with good news. 321, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, though the law and the prophets bear witness to it. He goes on to explain in chapters 3, the rest of 3, 4, 5, the gospel, and then in chapter 6 he begins to lay out the consequences of the gospel, the Christian life, which again our catechism very wonderfully summarizes in 88, 89, and 90 as the dying of the old man, the putting to death of the old man, and the making alive of the new, in the grace of Christ, in union with Christ, in light of the gospel, empowered by the Holy Spirit. We obey not in order to be saved, even, certainly not to be justified, but because we have been justified, we have been declared righteous, and we have been saved, and we are being saved by God's sovereign, powerful, unconditional grace because Jesus has satisfied the law for us. But Paul knows as soon as he lays out this wonderful doctrine of the Christian life in which we become slaves of righteousness, we're going to begin to ask ourselves, well, almost as if he hadn't written 3.21 and 4 and 5. Almost as if he hadn't written that. We're going to begin asking ourselves, well, I don't know. I don't know if this really describes me very well. I don't know if I'm making it. Maybe I won't make it. And so here in chapter 7, the first six verses, he reminds us, as he often does, as he's explaining the Christian life, of the foundation of the Christian life, and that is the good news of the gospel. And he's going to go on again and talk some more in the rest of chapter 7 about the real struggle of the Christian life, and perhaps there's no more honest place, except perhaps in the Psalms, no more honest place at all of Scripture where the real, actual, day-by-day, moment-by-moment struggle of the Christian life is laid out before us in the rest of chapter 7. So I'm calling this even the holiest of men, and in my mind this is part 1 in the providence of God. We'll see if I get to come back and do part 2 in the rest of the chapter. And the question that we face here in this sort of prologue to what has been historically a somewhat difficult passage, although I will say it hasn't been difficult for most of the Reformed most of the time. It's only become difficult in the minds of some probably since the second half of the 20th century. But we can think of this as kind of prologue 6.15 through 7.6 to what is about to follow through verse 7 through the rest of chapter 7. The question here that Paul faces in this prologue is what is our relationship to the law for salvation? That's the question. What is our relationship to the law for salvation? Is it the case that we have to keep the law in order to be saved? Or is it the case that we keep the law out of gratitude, in grace, in union with Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, imperfectly because we have been saved. Well, if you know a little bit about what usually comes from this pulpit, you know the answer to that question. But let's look at this passage, verses 1 through 3. And I call these verses, Till Death Do Us Part. I don't know, it's been a while since I've been to a wedding, so I don't know what kind of vows people use now. I've heard some vows. But the vow used to say something like, till death do us part. We used to use words like love, honor, obey, cherish. So long as you both shall live. Till death do us part. And then we said, I do. And we said, till death do us part, because as I said already, there are very few conditions under which a marriage can be said to have been properly dissolved, and death is one of them. And that's the premise of the first part of Paul's argument here. He says, or, he says, picking up from the previous section, do you not know, brothers, for I am speaking to those who know the law, and the interesting thing here is it's not entirely clear to which law he's appealing. Look at Deuteronomy, look at Numbers, at Exodus. Nobody really seems to know exactly to what law he's appealing, and maybe the law that we have seen, we heard already from the lips of our Lord Jesus. He does reflect on this in 1 Corinthians 7.39. He says something very much like he's saying here. In 1 Corinthians 7.39, he says, A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes only in the Lord. He's speaking to Christians there. So this is a principle with Paul, and he takes it, I think, as a matter of something that we all know, which our older Reformed theologians used to call the natural law or the moral law. It's built into the nature of things. You're married until the marriage is dissolved by desertion, adultery, or death. And what's in view here is death. Do you not know, brothers, for I'm speaking to those who know the law, which is apparently everyone, that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? Don't you know that? And then he illustrates it. Thus, a married woman is bound by law to her husband. And the word he uses here when he says bound to her husband is literally under her husband. And it's a word he only uses in this passage. And he means to say something which our translations want to downplay a little bit. Because it's a little sensitive in our culture. We are in, scholars say, a third wave of feminism. First, and I won't go through the three waves, but we're in a fairly radical stage of feminism. So the idea of a wife being under her husband, now men don't get too excited about this. This is only for illustration purposes. Don't try this at home. The idea of a wife being under her husband is hard for us to hear, but that's the idea that is embedded in this text. She's in subjection to him while he lives, and he's using this language not because he doesn't know the realities of married life, but because he wants us to understand the relationship that we have to the law. That's the point. The point here, the illustration is, marriage is just an illustration. The point is the law. And the law is that we are bound to it as long as we are alive. If that is the way by which we intend to present ourselves to God, we are bound to it as long as we are alive. But if her husband dies, she says, or Paul says, she is released from the law of marriage. And so it is with us in verse 3, accordingly, if you, in a state of marriage, and literally, it probably says something like, take another man, you're a polygamist. He says, adulterous, yeah, but you're a polygamist. adulterous. You can't have two husbands while your husband is alive. If he didn't commit adultery, and if he's still alive, you're still married and you don't get to have another one. Why you'd want to have two, I don't know. But evidently some women are gluttons for punishment. I'm quite confident Mrs. Clark has got all she can handle with me. I'm not worried at all. She's going to look for another. I'm just glad when I come home that the locks work. I have the right keys. All right, so I'm okay. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she takes, literally, another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she's free from the law, and if she marries another man, in that case, well, that's okay, because the first marriage is dissolved, but you can't have another. In other words, you're under the law, and so long as you are alive to the law, the law being your husband, we being the wife, as long as you are alive, as long as he is alive, You are obligated to the law. So this is what this means. If you are outside of Christ, in other words, if you think, yes, I believe in God, and yes, Jesus was a great man, but I don't know anything about trusting him for, you know, yeah, well, perhaps he died, perhaps he didn't, I don't know. Well, I hear that all the time, but who knows? Maybe it's true. If you're in that state and you haven't consciously, deliberately put your trust in Jesus Christ as your substitute, then you are married to the law. The law is alive and you are alive and you are obligated to the law for righteousness before God and God is utterly holy and his standard doesn't move, it doesn't bend, it doesn't yield. He doesn't look the other way. You can't talk him out of the ticket. The law is going to wreak its havoc. Its penalty is going to be executed. relentlessly. Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything that is written in the book of the law, Deuteronomy 27, 26, Galatians 3, 10. That's the nature of the law. So that's your test. If you're here this morning, you're listening to me, you haven't put your trust in Christ, that's the test that you have to meet. And the truth is, you haven't met the test, and you can't meet the test and you won't meet the test. It's too late. You're already in trouble. You were in trouble from the moment you were born. The wrath of God is hovering over you. And it's only by His mercy that it has not been executed on you. That's Paul's point in the first three verses. Verses 4 and 5. I've got good news for you, but it's the kind of good news that you normally expect. You go into the doctor's surgery or the little theater there, and you're sitting on that paper, that stupid gown that doesn't close, and the air conditioning is at 50. So it's just miserable already. And then you come in, you know, and they knock like, well, what are you going to say? No, you can't come in. And then they give you that look and they say, I've got bad news. Your heart sinks, you think, oh, what now? And you have terminal X, cancer, whatever. We don't normally think of that as good news. But for Paul, it's good news. Look at verse 4. Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law. In this case, it's good news. You've died to the law for your salvation, for your righteousness, for your standing with God, for your deliverance from sin, for your final consummation, for your glorification. You've died to the law. That's not the basis on which you are now relating to God. As they say in one of the podcasts I listen to, the sports talk podcast, don't get it twisted. You don't relate, if you are a Christian, you don't relate to God on the basis of your performance of the law. Children, when you do things that are bad and your mom and dad get angry with you, sometimes dad gets red in the face and you think, uh-oh, I've really done it this time. I pushed him just a little bit too far. My dad once took his belt off. I don't remember him actually using it, but he showed it to me. And he snapped it together. He didn't convince me that he would kill me when I was four. I always believed that. Until the day I saw him in the hospital, right? I thought, my dad, you know, he could yet rise up out of this hospital bed and just put an end to me. Kids would come to me and say, let's go do X. And I'd say, nope, not going to do it. Not because I was a good person, I just feared my father. He was a wrestler, he had great reflexes. Could not get away from him, big, strong guy. Likewise, my brothers, you have also died to the law through the body of Christ. You're free from that standard. So, children, you think you've done it and Dad's going to come after you, this is it. But he doesn't. Do you know why he doesn't? Instead of screaming and yelling and taking the belt off and taking it to your kind in? He just sits down with you and he talks to you and he says, now you know what you did was wrong, right? And you know I love you. And you know that what you did was hurtful to your mother and to your brothers and sisters and to yourself and to me. That's mercy and that's grace. And that's how it is with us. God has taken on himself in the person of Jesus Christ the punishment that we deserve, the death that we earn. He's absorbed that, Jesus did on the cross, and he's turned it away, and we are no longer under that. We have died to the law. The law has, relative to our standing with God, our deliverance from sin and our glorification, The law hasn't anything to say to us. So that you may belong to another. To him who has been raised from the dead. You're not married to the law anymore. You're married to Christ. You've been joined to Christ in order that we may bear fruit for God. Instead of bearing fruit for death and unrighteousness, we bear fruit for God. Our sanctification is a work of the Holy Spirit. because we're united to Christ. God made you alive. You were dead in sins and trespasses, and God the Holy Spirit came and made you alive and united you to Christ. He gave you true faith, and through that faith, the Spirit connected you to Christ. You're married to Christ. And out of that comes fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions aroused by the law, you see that chemistry between our sin and the holy law? They were at work. That chemistry was at work in our members. And we were bearing fruit for death. But now we're united to Christ and we bear fruit for life. The good news is you've died to the law. When Christ died, you died. When Christ died, you died. And the power of the law to convict you and to condemn you died when Christ died. He bore it all. He fulfilled the law. He satisfied the law. He did the law. He performed righteousness. And his righteousness is yours. It's been credited to you. He's already said that to us in chapter 5. He uses this wonderful word, imputed. You log on to your bank account and you look to see how much is in there. And there's a bazillion dollars. And you call the bank and you say, right you call the bank you don't just say you call the bank and you say I think there's been a mistake in my favor you can leave it there but I think but you should know there's been a mistake and the bank says the bazillion dollars has been imputed to your account. That's God's grace. Christ's righteousness has been imputed. It's been credited to you. It's as if you did it. You didn't do it. Christ did it, but you were with him legally. When he died, you died. When he was raised, you were raised. His righteousness is now your righteousness. When God looks at you, he doesn't see you legally. as if you really are a sinner. He sees the righteousness of Christ. And he's not threatening to condemn you. Oh, I saw what you did. I'm going to get you. There's none of that. That's all gone. That's all done. You're righteous. You're not married to the law anymore. You're married to Christ. You died with Christ. You've been raised with Christ. You're free. That's the last point. you are free to serve. He's already hinted at it, hasn't he? When he says, bear fruit for righteousness. Look at verse 6. But now we are released from the law. Sometimes they translate this, discharged from the law. Having died to that which held us captive. What was that? Sin and death. We were captives to sin and death. In Christ, we have died to that. It no longer holds us captive. So that we serve not under the old written code, which is kind of a paraphrase of what the text actually says. He uses a kind of rough but really wonderful expression. Let me read to you the way I would translate it. But now we have been discharged from the law in which we were held in order that we might serve in the newness of the Spirit, not in the oldness of the letter. We serve in the newness of the Spirit. Isn't that wonderful? You're free. You're free. Not free to do, should we sin that grace may abound? Paul says, may it never be. The King James paraphrased, God forbid. No, of course not. Because you have been set free, not to sin, but to serve. Not in order to make God love you, but because God has loved you in Jesus Christ. God the Son took on flesh, loved you from all eternity, took on flesh, obeyed in your place, suffered in your place, died in your place, took what you deserve, was buried in your place. You were punished, crucified, buried, raised with Him. All of that was not for Himself, for His sake, but for your sake. And now you are free. It's as if when Jesus walked out of the tomb, you walked out with him. You're free. So when dad says, son or daughter, I forgive you, it's okay. What do you want to do? You turn to dad and you say, dad, I'm going to go rake the leaves because I love you. And I'm so thankful. because I'm free. You're free. God, the Holy Spirit, is at work in you, setting you gradually, slowly, painfully free from the dominion and power and imprisonment of sin because the chemistry has been changed, because the law that interacted with sin and produced that bondage, That law has been killed, so that now you're free to serve. Not in the oldness of the letter, but in the newness of the spirit. It doesn't mean that you're not obligated now to obey God's moral law. Surely you are. But not in order to be saved, not in order to be justified, but because you have been saved, you are being saved, and you have been justified, and you are free to serve him. Because he loves you. He accepts you. And he never will do anything other than that. Let me leave you with that. He's never going to change his mind. Because your righteousness and your salvation is sealed with the death of Jesus. It can't be changed. It won't be changed. It shall not be changed. You're free. Let's give thanks. Almighty God, we come to you in the name of Jesus giving great thanks this morning for all that you have accomplished. For the death of Jesus which set us free from the condemnation of the law and for the life of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit which has set us free to serve and which empowers us to serve. We're so thankful. Oh Lord, we want to serve. Help us. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.