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Pastor David Mitchell
All right, well, we've been in Romans chapter 8, verses 28 through 30 for quite some time. We've actually already finished the whole chapter. We're preaching verse by verse through the whole book of Romans.
We've finished the chapter, but I came back to these three verses because they really scan all of time. If you start from before time began in eternity, before time began, and you come into time and you go out the other side, those three verses scan the whole thing.
Isn't that amazing? So I think they merit some time since they actually include all of eternity. So we've been talking about that now. We're actually kind of on a rabbit trail here of a rabbit trail, but we're talking about two kinds of righteousness that the Bible teach.
And you can go back in our archives at parkmeadowschurch .com and go to the beginning of this series if you're just coming in now, because we're kind of towards the end. If you want to catch up, you can go out there online and find those sermons.
But there are two kinds of righteousness taught in the Bible, and the way that you tell which is which is from the context of the passage it's found in. Sometimes the Greek words are the same, so you have to tell from the context.
And one is called positional righteousness, and the other is called experiential. Dave, would you help me out? My water is down there. See, I don't even know how to bring a glass of water up here, let alone work the technology.
Thank you so much. By the way, Maddie, thanks again for that. That was beautiful. I am a little mad at you because you didn't ask me to play guitar with you, but to accompany you, but it's okay. So we have two kinds, positional and experiential.
Now experiential kind of makes sense in and of itself. It's your experience. So experiential righteousness is you trying to do right, trying to do good stuff and not do bad stuff, right? So that's what experiential means.
It means things you do in your walk, things you live out in your life. Positional righteousness is something God did to you. You didn't do it. You received it as a free gift. And a lot of people don't know that there are two kinds, and they just think it's all one thing.
And that's why we have so many denominations that are caught up in thinking that what you do in living out your life has to do with whether you get saved or not. They think it has to do with your justification.
Now what we're actually, the whole big topic we're studying here has been justification. And remember what it means. It's something God does to you because of what Jesus did for you when he died on the cross.
And justified means that God made you just as if you've never sinned. God counted you that way. There's another doctrine that goes with it called the doctrine of imputation, and it's kind of an accounting term in the Bible.
But it means that when Jesus was on the cross, God the Father took all of your sins, even the ones you haven't done yet, because it's your whole lifespan of sins, and he counted that to Jesus as if he had done them.
He literally, the Bible says, placed those sins on the body of Jesus within the body of Jesus while he was hanging on that cross. Your sins were imputed to him. And then when he rose from the grave three days later, God took his righteousness and perfection and imputed that to your bank account.
It went into you as if you had done his righteous life, his beauty, his love, everything about him was imputed to you. So imputation is really why you're saved. Now, we as former Baptist, we don't call ourselves Baptist anymore, but I grew up Baptist.
But I know what a Baptist means when he says, I got saved. What he really means is I got justified because salvation is a bigger word. It goes all the way from before time began, because God knew his children before he made anything.
It goes into time, when you get born again, and that's what we mean when we say I got saved, right? But that's really your justification, and then goes outside into the future, your glorification. So salvation is a huge topic.
So really, we didn't mean I got saved, because you ain't fully saved, right? Your body's not saved yet, is it? It gets saved at the rapture, and you become glorified. But the beautiful thing is, in this very passage, the one I put up there originally while I go on the previous slide, in Romans 8, 28, 29, and 30, it says God sees you as glorified already, but that's talking about God the Father.
God the Father sees you not only as justified, which means made as if you have no sin, because he gave you Jesus's righteousness, and that is what I mean by positional righteousness. He gave you the position of a child of God.
He made you righteous as God is righteous, and it's something God did to you at the moment he saved you, or justified you, I should say. So the reason I'm trying to be clear about when you say you got saved, what it really means is you were justified at that moment.
That's the moment that the Holy Spirit came into your life. You were walking in sin. I was walking in sin at that very moment. And the Bible says, while we were yet in our sins, hath he, that's God, but specifically the Holy Spirit, hath he quickened us, brought us to life?
That's regeneration. It's something God did to us in a moment of time. The Holy Spirit applied the blood of Jesus to my life individually when I was 24 years old and I became justified. Now, what's interesting about it in the verse, it says whom he foreknew, who he loved and knew with a relationship knowledge before time began, that same person he predestinated to be adopted into his family and who he predestinated, then he also called.
Now, those first two things happen before time begins, right? But then time begins and your life begins and here you are and there's a spiritual birthday when God knows it's your birthday. And at that moment, the Holy Spirit lights on you and opens your blind eyes, your deaf ears, your dead heart is quickened, and the Holy Spirit shows you Jesus where you can see him for the first time with free eyes and hear his voice with free ears.
And you receive him as your personal Lord and Savior because the Holy Spirit changed your want to and made you want to because you didn't want to five seconds ago. You see, that's how so salvation is of God.
It's everything that God, the father, the son and the Holy Spirit did to you and me. But we receive the benefit of it, don't we? For us. It's for us, but he did it to us. So he literally justified us in a moment of time.
What did he do? He made us righteous. He gave us, he imputed Jesus's righteousness to us. That's what I mean by positional. It's not something what you do or don't do tomorrow can change. You can't change it by living wrong.
You can't make it better by living right. You can't add to it. You can't make it stay with you by living right. You can't make it leave you by living wrong because it's positional and you didn't do it.
The Holy Spirit did it to you and the father did it to you and Jesus did it to you. And it's all done by the work of God. People ask me, do you believe people are saved by works? And I said, didn't used to say this, but I say, yeah, absolutely.
I do. But God did all the work and is a lot of hard work, including dying for us and letting his son die for us. But he did all the work and it's finished. And the last thing Jesus said on the cross is it is finished, paid in full.
We're redeemed. We're totally without sin. That's positional. Now, see, it took me that long to talk about verse 14 up there. So how am I going to get by the next 75 slides this morning? Not really. I'm teasing a little bit.
So the first verse kind of talks about it's a review of positional righteousness. We are clothed in fine linen and made white and clean by God. That is not something we did ourselves. God put the clothing on us.
Can you picture that? He put white robes on us at the moment, the day that he saved us. He justified us. That's positional. That has to do with the cause of our salvation. And we talk a lot about cause and effect.
God is, has to do with the cause of it. The effects of it are we try to live, right? And that's what we're going to talk about in a minute is experiential righteousness. Why, why is it that we even need to try to live right?
If it doesn't save us? Well, we don't need to live right to get saved. You can't save yourself by living, right? You can't do enough, right? You haven't done enough, right? You've done more wrong. If you did one sin, you can't go to heaven.
One sin, there's no sin in heaven. You can't undo it with 55 good things. And that's where the world is so wrong with their systems of salvation and all these denominations that teach you can lose it or you get it.
You can, you got to do this. Yeah. We believe in Jesus, but you got to do this. This and this, none of that is true. It's all from lying preachers, lying preachers that Jesus said would be here in the end times.
None of that is true. You're not saved by any of that. You're saved by what Jesus did for you, what the father did for you. And the Holy ghost did for you. And he woke you up and showed you Jesus and made you desire him and quickened you and brought you to life and everything else after that's an effect of it.
It means you, it doesn't cause your salvation. You do it. Cause you got saved. You do it. Cause God did save you. You see, that's the difference between cause and effect. So positional righteousness, that whole topic has to do with the cause.
God caused us to become righteous by giving us Jesus's righteousness. Listen, our righteousness would never save us anyway. It's too defective. It's here today, gone tomorrow. Like we can be good for five seconds and then we're going to be bad the next 20 minutes, right?
It's the whole life we live. And that's really what we're talking about. When we talk about the topic of experiential righteousness. Is it's not like we grow up thinking as far as how it relates to our Christian walk, it's not like most churches teach, to be honest, most churches teach that the experiential righteousness is what causes God to save you and they get it from scripture, but they're misinterpreting the scripture because they don't understand the positional side of it.
They don't understand that God, the salvation is of God. They think man plays a part in it. Man plays no role in it. It goes all the way back to the Abrahamic covenant. Do you remember that God put Abraham to sleep when Jesus came down and God and Jesus, Jesus took our position to, I'm sorry, took Abraham's position.
Jesus was, boy, I'm going too fast for you. My own brain. All right. So Abraham was asleep. Jesus took his place and God and Jesus did the covenant. Abraham had no part in it. It was what we call an unconditional covenant.
It was all God making the promise. And we're all saved through the Abrahamic covenant. If you read the new Testament book of Galatians, you'll see that clearly. So that's how we're brought into the covenant.
It's all by the work of Jesus Christ, the blood that he gave to take our sins away. And the Holy spirit applies that to us at the moment that we are regenerated at our spiritual birthday. So what is this experiential righteousness then?
And why is it even important? Why does it matter how we live? If we're already saved? Well, people ask Paul that question, didn't they? Well, Paul, if you're saved by grace, why don't we just live for the devil?
Then we live however we want to, because we're saved by grace. If that's true, we just live how we want to. So people have asked that question for 2000 years, but Paul had the best answer. He said, how can we who are dead to sin live any longer in it?
That was his answer. Because you think about it. You were in Christ when he died, your old man, the part of you wants to sin was in Christ, imputed to Christ. All of that sin is in Christ when he died and when he was buried.
And when he came out of that grave, a new you was born and knew you the new man, the new woman, and first John says it won't sin and it can't sin. And it won't sin. That part of you will never sin. And you know, people don't dig deeply enough in the scripture to see how this whole plan of salvation works, but no man could have invented it.
It's totally unhuman. It's totally divine. And yet God does it for humans. And he even came and took the form of a man. And Jesus was God with us. So in Romans, this to review a little bit, last time we talked about Romans six 14 for sin shall not have dominion over you.
So now let's get to the point here. Let's say we're already saved that the Holy spirit has visited you. And you were born again. And all of a sudden you, if you're sitting there and you don't know if it's happened, here's ask yourself this question.
Is there any part of you that desires Jesus at all, because goats don't have that people that aren't going to be safe. They don't have any desire for Jesus at all. But sheep, even when they're lost, have a little inkling of desire and a little bit of guilt when they sin that the others don't have, others do have a conscience, but then not like a sheep.
So if you care about your soul and where you go, when you die and all that, you're a sheep, you may not be saved yet, but all sheep will be saved because Jesus said of them, I will lose nothing, but we'll rise it up in the end time.
So if Jesus, if you, the Holy spirit's working on your heart, um, that's good. That's what Jesus is doing. And he is drawing you to Christ who will bring you to the father. And it's all a matter of spiritual work that the Holy spirit does in the person's life and hearts to start to open your eyes and make you have a desire for Jesus that you didn't use to have.
That's how salvation really works. All this stuff about repeating the prayer after me and all that, that's not how it works. Now I have to be quick to say this. If you repeated a prayer after some preacher, it won't stop you from being saved.
It's just not what saved you. It won't make you not saved because what saved you was Bible says, whosoever desires to call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. It's the Holy spirit, putting the desire in there and waking you up where all of a sudden you do desire Christ and you receive him as your personal Lord and savior.
And most of us, if that happens later in life, like with me, I was 24, then I definitely knew when it happened. I was in my car driving to work when I got to say justified is the right term, but when I got justified, I was in my car.
Who knows how fast I was going, but the Holy spirit caught up with me and he came in that car and he saved me right there. And before I got to work that day, I was saved. When I came home, I told Charlotte something different had happened to me.
I didn't do any of that. God did it. He totally changed me in that car. Now he didn't take all my, you know, he didn't take my experiential sins away, all of them, but he took some of them away that I hadn't done since.
Right. So he'll, he'll remove some sin from your life immediately when he saved you in another, he'll, he'll work together with you on it a whole lifetime, some of them, I guess, but, um, he only does that with his children.
So if you're, if you're struggling with that, it's because you are saved, you know, a lot of people have it so wrong because they're brought up their whole life thinking that experiential righteousness causes God to save you.
Like stuff you do causes him to smile on you and save you. It's not how it works. And then if you believe that, then when you mess up, you think you lost it. But once you wake up to the fact you didn't get it, you didn't do anything to get it, then you can't do anything to lose it.
But the fact that you struggle and you say, golly, am I really saved? I just did that sin right there. And would a saved person really do that? And Satan comes in and says, no, and lies to you and makes you feel bad.
The very fact that that's happening proves you're saved because goats don't have that going on in their mind. Goats don't worry about the sin they're doing only sheep do. That's really helpful to know these things.
So the first thing we learned last time, and I'm going to put some points to it. We didn't line out points. Last time we just went through the scripture. I'm going to go through it. This time we got eight points.
First one is the mechanism for it. And now I'm going to change totally to experience a righteousness. Now, like stuff you do, like, why do I want to be a good man? Why don't want to be a good wife or a good woman or a good child?
Why should I even try? Why? Well, obviously Lord put in my heart, the desire to be better. Right. When he saved me. So, but what does it matter? Well, it does matter. It's huge. Jesus said, I am holy, you know, be holy for I am holy.
So we're supposed to try to live right every day. But as far as doing it, how does it work? And that's where everybody is so messed up on that because we're just taught wrong from childhood and we're so focused on trying to live a perfect Christian life that when we stumble, we almost give up.
We say, well, I'm not really saved. I didn't, I failed. But once you see what the Bible actually says about this type of righteousness, this experiential righteousness, what it actually says about it, you'll find out you're in pretty good shape.
You're in good shape as the next guy or gal that's a Christian, because the first thing it says is the mechanism of it doesn't come from the law. Look, look, look at this for sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under the law, but under grace.
So you're no longer under law. So keeping a set of rules is not what saves you. It is not what keeps you safe. So the first thing we need to learn is what you do doesn't affect it. It doesn't affect your positional righteousness.
The experiential righteousness does not cause God to smile on us. It's the death of his son that causes him to smile on us. And the fact that the Holy Spirit connected us with Jesus and he sees Jesus righteousness all over us and therefore he smiles on us and loves us and and sees us as perfect.
That's what saves us. But that when you look at your own life, you don't see that kind of righteousness every minute of every day, do you? If you do, we elect you as pastor because I have to live perfect to get to preach.
But you see how silly it is. I mean, people come and ask preacher, pray for me. And I'm thinking, why pray for yourself? Think about it, I'm not the pope, I'm not even a priest, you can't even call me father, the Bible says, Father David, pray for me, I will pray for you.
You know, please ask me to pray for you, just like I will ask you to pray for me. But there's no difference between me and you. And that's why we got rid of the fancy pulpit. Be better off if this weren't here, but then my technology wouldn't be in front of me so that but there's no difference between the preacher and the people.
We're all sinners who God justified, who are struggling in this life to try to live right with a body that doesn't want to. Would that fit most people in the room? And if it doesn't fit one of you, you're an angel unawares in our presence.
So the mechanism has nothing to do with the law, what does that logic tell you? It doesn't have to do with keeping rules, all right, but it's by grace. Now, a lot of people think that's interesting because when you're talking about positional righteousness, obviously that's grace, it's something you didn't deserve.
It's a free gift. That's what grace means, by the way. Free gift is what the word grace means. Undeserved favor from a perfect, holy God. That's grace. That's how your salvation works. God gave it to us as a gift and we don't do anything to get it, but we want to live right.
So what about the living right? Well, it tells us right here, oddly enough, even that doesn't have to do with keeping rules. But we thought it did, didn't we? I mean, we thought it's all about keeping rules, wouldn't you think?
But the scripture, very simple, and that's just pull one out for review out of a whole passage last Sunday, right? That one verse shows us it's not about law. Even the experience of our walk is about grace.
You can't even try to walk right without God. You have to Jesus and me together or it's nothing. And when it's just you, you're sinning. You're going to have sinful thoughts, Jesus said, if you to us men, and or if you look at a woman and lust after her, you committed adultery.
You didn't move from from your car or whatever. You see, you're really going to try to live right to get saved. Oh, you know, it'll be all women in heaven then. But then again, I don't know how scary thoughts women have.
Who knows what they think about? Charlotte won't tell me. Katie won't tell me. I don't know. I bet I bet Gemma would tell me I'm going to ask her. I don't even think Maddie would tell me at this point.
All right, so I like point number one, do you? What do you think about that? Even the trying to live right. It's by grace. It's not by keeping a bunch of rules. The worst thing you can do is make yourself a set of rules or make that for your kids.
Now, I know you got to have rules for manners in your house and in a Christian school. That's different. But like if you try to tell your kid you can't listen to that kind of music, guess what's going to happen the first time you're not in the car?
That's exactly what they're going to listen to. So how about you just tell them, hey, you can listen anything you want to. All things are free to us, Paul said. But if if you sense in your heart, the Holy Spirit does not want to listen to it with you, then turn it off.
Teach them that. See, that works. So it's not law. It's grace. All right. Now, 17 says, but God be thanked that you were the servants of sin. We used to just see people think they got free will, but they don't.
Because they're totally controlled by Satan until they get saved, and the Bible says it in so many places, the world, the flesh and the devil, three enemies that control you completely when you're lost.
And you think you're God and you think you're in perfect control and you're not. You're influenced by those three entities all the time. And that's what you do and what you think. So, God, be thanked that we were the servants of sin, but we have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered to you.
Now, do you think it's interesting that it says when you get saved, you obey doctrine? Do you know what doctrine means? Doctrines are the great themes of the Bible. Like we study, like we're studying through positional righteousness, imputation, redemption, glorification, all these great teachings.
What's interesting about that verse is that you were the servants of sin, but now you obey doctrine. So let me ask you, how important do you think this book and having Bible study, your own personal Bible study, and learning this book better and better has to do with your Christian walk?
It's huge. I would say the number of wins that you have as far as not sinning and doing well is directly proportional to how much you're in this book. I mean, you got to be saved, number one, but number two is trying to live right.
You know, right here it says doctrine. You see that? Isn't that interesting? So the scripture is hugely important in us trying to live right and walk right. Being then made free from sin in the Greek, that's passive, which means God made us free from sin.
That's not something you do by living right. You see the difference? So trying to live right is not what made us free from sin. It's something God did to us that does that because it's in the passive in Greek, which active would be if you did it passes if someone bigger than you did it to you.
So it's God that did this to you. So God made us free from sin, that's positional, has nothing to do what you do or don't do tomorrow is something God did to you because he loved you before the foundation of the world and you became servants of righteousness.
Now, see, when I first studied that, I thought that's cool because the first part is going to talk about positional righteousness and the second part is going to talk about experiential. But then I looked at it in the Greek and even the second part's positional.
Even when it says you'll become the servants of righteousness, which kind of sounds like living right, don't you think? But even that was in the passive, which means God does that to you, too. You don't even have the strength in your fleshly old man or woman to do anything right.
So you have to do it together with the Lord to walk right. You want to walk right. You got to do it together with Jesus. You can't just be a good person. It's good to know this because the more you try to be a good person, the more you'll think you're not even saved.
But the being the good person is not what saved you. In fact, being a good person is not even by experience, it's by position. The only way you even have a chance at doing something right is because you've already been positionally made righteous.
God's already given you Jesus's righteousness when he saved you. So the second thing is it talks about obeying doctrine that has to do with grace. It has to do with imputation, has to do with this idea of being made the servants of Jesus.
All of that is something God did to us. I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity in your flesh. For as you have yielded your members as servants to uncleanness like you did when you were lost, you just yielded your body to do anything sinful you wanted to do.
Right. Just like that. Even so, now we should yield our members, servants to righteousness and to holiness. Now, that is in the active imperative, which means it's something you do. So finally, now that God has saved us and given us his righteousness and given us a new heart and the desire to follow Jesus, finally, now it tells us to do something.
It tells us it's our responsibility to yield our body as servants of doing right things. Now, that is experiential righteousness. But we're already long since saved before you have the ability to do that, you see the difference?
So it's not causing you to be saved, it's the effect of the salvation. She talked about that a little bit. When we were servants of sin, we were free from righteousness, we wouldn't do much right. We did mostly wrong when we were lost.
But now being made free from sin, kind of interesting phrase. You have become servants of God. You have your fruit unto holiness in the end, everlasting life that confuses a lot of people. Because that makes it sound like the fruit, you would think that's works, wouldn't you?
The fruits of holiness is the good works. Well, it is the good works. And it says, and the end of that is everlasting life. It makes sound like you've got to live a life of good works to be saved in the end.
But you can't just read verse 22. You've got to read it with that whole chapter that we've already been studying. It's not standalone. It has to fit the context. So it's interesting if you take a look at the word have you see right down there at the far end where it says you have your fruit unto holiness.
Notice that that doesn't say you do. Fruit unto holiness, it's not something you do, it's something you have, and we know from the scriptures we've studied right before, if you go back to 19, 18, 17, 16, read the whole chapter, the half part is all the stuff God gave you when he saved you, which one of which is he gave you Jesus's righteousness, he gave you Jesus's faith, he gave you the desire to repent, which means change your mind about who's God, you ain't he is all of that he gave you.
So you have it. You see, the word have is so important, but you miss the little words. You have your fruit unto holiness, even the stuff you're going to do that is right in your life. It's something God gave you to do that he will help you do.
It's not something your old flesh did to get you saved. So it's really fascinating that passage we spent quite some time. It's even the English word echo comes from it. So like when you do something good, that's just an echo of something God already put in your heart to do.
Do you see that? I mean, like what is an echo? E. coli or whatever, the commercial, you know, y 'all aren't old enough to know that one, right? Oh, man. So I'm 100 years old. So you're standing on a mountain and you shout out the E. coli, E. coli, what is it?
Recall, I almost got it. See, I'm so old. I forgot the stupid thing. So then it comes back and you hear another voice. That voice could not come back without a real voice making it go out first. Right.
OK. This is saying that God had to put righteousness in you for real before you could echo the lifestyle. Is that cool or what? That's better than my memory. Now, when it says the fruit of right, the fruit unto holiness is positional in its origin.
It's something you have. It's not something you do. Isn't that cool? But see, if you read it wrong, it sounds like you get saved by works, but it doesn't teach that anywhere in the Bible. Verse 23, the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord, the gift that is the grace, it's free, it's a gift, you can't deserve it, you can't pay for it, you can't earn it.
Logic, if eternal life is a gift. And it is the end of something, you step there where it says in the end of the fruit of holiness is the everlasting life. Well, if the everlasting life is a gift and it's the fruit, you know, it comes from that fruit, then that fruit has to be a gift, too.
It's all by grace. So we talked about that a little bit last time. Then we talked about how God likens this life to a woman who's married to a man and the man passes away and then she marries another man.
Is that adultery? The Bible says no, because once the first husband dies, she is free. She's dead to that husband. He's dead to her. She's free to remarry. And it uses that as an example of how when we get born again, we're no longer married to the law and to Moses.
We don't have to keep a bunch of rules. We're not married to that system anymore. That system is dead to us and we're dead to it. And now we have a system of grace where Jesus did all the work for us.
He died for us. He saved us. Even when we do a good work, it's him working in us, with us, together with us to do something in this world. It's his world to get it done, get the job done. And so we're free from the old husband, so to speak.
Why is it that churches want to mix law back in? They want to have a bunch of rules. You know, well, we're going to worship on Saturday because that's the real Sabbath. That's just law. That's law. You don't have to do that.
Sabbath means rest. You rest in Christ every day. You might as well worship on Monday. The reason we worship on Sunday is because it's the resurrection day. It makes sense to me. It's the celebration day for Jesus Christ.
That's why we choose Sunday, but you don't have to. You can have church on Tuesday. But you got a whole group of people out in the country saying, if you don't worship on Saturday, you're not real. What are they?
They're legalists. They don't understand that we're dead to that husband and we're married to Christ. And Christ set us free from every, all of this stuff. So then it says so that we would bring forth fruit into God.
So now we're married to Christ. We live a life of freedom with the Holy Spirit guiding us and the scriptures guiding us and the walk that we walk is together with him and everything we do is with Christ.
And so now we can really bring forth genuine fruit. This is where experiential fruit comes from experiential righteousness. The, the fruit then is a result of who we are, not what we do. It's about who we are.
Who are we? We're married to Jesus. So we do stuff with him and that's where the good works come from. But now we are delivered from the law. It's not about keeping rules that being dead, wherein we were held, that we should serve in newness of spirit, not in the oldness, oldness of the letter of the law.
So now we, when we do something right, it's because we want to, it's because we do it in the spirit because the Holy Spirit moves us to do it and Christ does it with us. And therefore a true good work that God's pleased with gets done as opposed to in the flesh, trying to do stuff to please God, which is the old system that we're dead to now that kind of beautiful teaching.
Don't you think? So the modus operandi of this whole thing of living right is count yourself dead to the law and serve in your new life. Just walk with Jesus hand in hand. That that's how it works. Now, just take his hand.
When you get up in the morning, walk with him throughout the day. He's not going to take you to the wrong place to do the wrong thing with the wrong person. He won't take you there. So you don't have to think about the rules.
You just think about your relationship with Jesus. The fact about our actual ability to do good works, the problem is looking at them as the cause of us being right with God. That's the problem. People look at the good works as if they're the cause that causes God to to love us and make us right with him.
And they have nothing to do with that. So Romans 7, 14, for we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. Now, this little passage of scripture right here. Is the greatest Christian who ever lived, as far as I'm concerned, is named the Apostle Paul.
He used to be a Jew named Saul, who was a Pharisee, the Pharisees who thought he was doing God a favor by collecting Christian families, bringing them for judgment and to be killed. Because he saw that as a cult group.
He was killing Christians when he was on the road, going to gather some when God saved him. The Holy Spirit met with Paul and regenerated him and he was born again on that road. He heard the Lord speak to him when no one else with him heard anything but a noise.
They didn't hear the words, but he did because it was him that was getting called, not the others. So the Holy Spirit has to call us to be saved. He has to he has to move us to want Jesus. And that happened to Paul.
Now, Paul got saved and, you know, the story he wrote most of the New Testament, right? And ultimately, he was beheaded for his faith. It great, greatest Christian that ever lived. He said, look, I'm free from all things because I'm under grace.
He said, but I'll tell you this, I won't let any of them make me a captive. Like if he saw his body starting to make a habit out of something, he would just stop doing that. You talk about a strong Christian experience, a righteous like it could be a thing that's not even wrong, but he's doing it too much and loving that more than Christ.
He would just stop doing it, you know. Not because he had to, it's just how he wanted to live his Christian life really strong. And yet this is talking about him. So let's see what it says. Now, here's what I want you to think about while I read this, because you've read this before.
But here's what I want you to think about in the context of today is what is experiential righteousness? How does it fit in our Christian life and what is it not? Can we like we're going to pretend that we're perfect, like we come to Sunday this morning and see each other, this is how we see each other.
So this is how we always are. We're perfect and we don't mess up and we present that in front of our kids as if they have to be that, so they grow up all messed up about it, not understanding. But can I show you what it's really like, what the Christian walk?
I'm not talking about getting saved. That's something God does to you and for you. And it's already been done probably to everybody in this room. But, I mean, if you have a desire for Christ and it's, you know, either it's already been done or it's about to be done.
I don't think we got any goats in the room. I'm pretty good at spotting goats. I don't know. They say you can't, but I can spot them. No, I'm kidding. Now, this is one of the best Christians that ever lived, for we know that the law is spiritual.
And Paul says, I so this is Paul, the best Christian ever lived. But I am carnal. Now, do you know what we mean when we talk about a carnal Christian? There's somebody to say, but just got through doing some kind of bad act, isn't it?
And now what we mean, oh, they're carnal Christian. The first Corinthians, the church that the book of first Corinthians written about, oh, they're the carnal Christians. And you can read about some sin that was going on that church.
They were carnal. So carnal means fleshly, like you're kind of living by the old man rather than the new born again person. That's really you. You kind of letting the old man take over too much. You know what that is, right?
That's what it means. But look what Paul said. I am carnal, sold under sin as a human being walking on this earth. I've already sold out the sin, best Christian that ever lived. And this is after he saved.
He saved now when he's writing is now I see commentators all the time, brother Bill, and you've seen it. They'll say, oh, yeah. But when we move into chapter eight of Romans, now Paul is born again and it's all different.
He just has a perfect spiritual walk at that point. Guess what? There weren't chapters in the Bible till a few hundred years ago. Right. There are no chapters. So chapter eight is the same Paul that chapter seven is.
The chapter eight, Paul, is this Paul. All he's doing is in eight, he's showing the spiritual side and how you can have victory over sin in the moments that you walk with the Lord. But the moment you let go of his hand, you're going to sink.
And when you hold his hand, you'll walk on water. The picture's in the Bible, isn't it? So that's the life. So we get it wrong. So Paul, the greatest Christian said, I'm sold under sin. I'm sold out to sin.
My old man likes to sin as much now as it did before I got saved. That's what he's saying. It gets worse. For that, which I do, I don't allow it. What does that mean? This man goes around preaching in churches all the time talking about sins you're not supposed to do now that you're saved, right?
He says, I don't allow those things. He says, but I do them. Now he's a hypocrite. Sorry, Apostle Paul, I know I'm going to meet you one of these days, but you wrote it. So that which I do, I allow not for what I would.
In other words, what I want to do, it's kind of old English, isn't it? What I want to do that I don't do. OK, now, what did he just say? What I hate, that's what I do. What did the man say? He said, look, I've got standards that Jesus taught me and it's him.
I want to live like that and I don't find myself doing it all the time. He said, I hate the old life that I lived before I got saved, and that's what I do. What I hate, that's how I live sometimes. Wow, you mean that's the Christian walk?
It's every bit as much the Christian walk as Roman chapter eight is. If then I do that, which I don't want to be doing, I can sit to the law that it's good because it's you see, it's the law that gives us the rules of how to live and not to live.
But Paul says we're no longer married to the law, we're married to Christ, right? But I still have the law. I can read the Old Testament. I can read the Ten Commandments. Can I don't kill? We know I'm all right.
The, our kids in school don't know him anymore because we don't put them on the wall at public school. That's why they're killing each other. They don't know not to kill. How would they know it? They don't go to church anymore.
The parents don't go to church. It's not on the wall. They don't know it. Uh, like they're taught. They come from an animal. Anyway, animals kill when they want to. So what's the big deal? I don't know.
The country's in trouble, isn't it? If then I do that, which I don't want to be doing, I can sit to the law that it's good. Now, then it is no more. I do it, but sin that dwells in me. Now, Paul says this, look, when I find myself doing stuff that I know is wrong, it's not me doing it.
Now that, is that a cop out? I mean, you can take that so far. You say, well, I can just live anywhere I want to. It's not really, it's not me. It's my old fleshly man. So I can do it. So you could take that wrong and think that way.
That would be unhealthy because that's not what it's saying. What Paul is saying is that the real me is the new man that got born again, that's me, that body of flesh that I still live in is no longer me because it was crucified on the day Jesus was crucified.
It's dead. That's not me. The real me does not ever sin. It's in book first, John, I wish I could give you the exact verse, but it's in there. The new man will not sin and cannot sin. So what he says, it's not me that did the sin because the real me won't sin.
It was my old body, but I still live in it. That's actually what he's saying. But my question to you is, did he just do a sin that he's confessing to us? He did, didn't he? Is he a good Christian? Answer it.
Is he or not? Oh, but he's a carnal. I thought he's a carnal Christian, you mean not a spiritual Christian. So like, would you let him eat with us if we were having a meal today? Well, I mean, he's just saying he just like the stuff he just did stuff he hates.
But then he comes back and says, look, but it's not me doing it. It's not the born again. Me is the old man. And there is a principle that sin dwells in this body and you ain't getting rid of it in this life.
You need to know that because otherwise Satan comes, you say, well, you're not really saved, you wouldn't be doing that. Hey, every Christian does that. And nowhere does scripture say they are unsaved when they do it.
Nowhere does it say that the denominations make it up. Some of us grew up in those denominations where they say you can lose your salvation, totally made up and invented. It's not in the scripture. You can't lose something you didn't gain in the first place.
It's a free gift. Okay. You can't pay for it. You did. You can't listen. If Jesus said, it's like getting born, you can't get unborn. Can you physically? So you can't get unborn spiritually. That's all nonsense.
But, but look, here's, here's the greatest Christian. Now look, it gets worse for, I know that in me, that's in my flesh, my fleshly body dwells, no good thing. So why is it churches make all these rules and these things you've got to look like and act like, and be like, and talk like, or God's not pleased with you because that's all stuff we're doing in the body, right?
That's our body doing that in front of each other. Uh, and, and yet Paul says in that part of me, there's nothing good. It's just, there's nothing God's pleased with. Anyway. I know that in me, that is in my flesh, in my, my body, in the bat, in the old man's sense of that dwells, no good thing for to will is present with me.
Like I want to live, right. But to perform that, which is good, I don't find a way to do it. Best Christian ever lived for the good that I want to do. I do it. Not wow. You ever have anything you want to do for the Lord and you just kind of procrastinate and just never did it.
You ever had someone you want, you felt like the Holy spirit said, you need to go visit that little, little lady or that little, little man, and then he died and you didn't, you never went to see him or her, you ever had a feeling you should have prayed more this week, but you didn't, you see that good thing that I want to do, I didn't do it and look at the last part.
But the evil, which I don't want to do, I just got through doing it. That's not me. This is Paul. Can you imagine Paul is kind of being honest. Whereas church people don't be honest and I'm not knocking church.
We all need to be in church. Now, if I do that, that I don't want to do, it's not me doing it. It's the sin principle that dwells in my old body. We need to understand that when Satan comes to you and says, you're not a savior, you wouldn't have done that.
And you say, well, you know what? I didn't really do that. My old body did it and I still live in it and I'm sorry I did it, but I don't have a lot of control over that. And you know it, but you know what?
Jesus gives me power enough to tell you through prayer. Jesus, would you please bind and rebuke this thing and send it away from me? And he, and he'll do. And that's one prayer. Jesus will answer. Yes.
Every time you pray it, do you know the great Martin Luther sensed? Was it him or John Calvin bill? I don't want to get it wrong. Luther since Satan in the room where he was studying his Bible one day, so strong that he picked up the inkwell and threw it against the wall, throwing it at Satan, the spiritual warfare is real and the enemy will come to you and say, you're not saved because you just did that thing.
And you have to say, look, it's not the new me that did it. The new me is bound to Christ. I belong to him. I have no part with you in Jesus. Would you please ask this thing to leave my presence and Jesus will answer it because he's lying, trying to make you feel like you're not even saved.
You can't put up with that. I find that a law that when I would do good, evil is present with me for I delight in the law of God after the inner man, like the new me loves God's law. But I see another law in my members, in my body, the old man warring against the law in my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members.
That's the Christian walk of the best Christian that ever lived. So how important do you think the Bible says experiential righteousness, trying to live right and do right has to do with whether you get to heaven or not on a scale of zero to 10, how much does experiential living have to do with whether you get to heaven or not, as far as the cause of it from zero to 10?
What do you think? Zero, absolutely zero. But I would have to ask this question. If you've had the cause, if the Holy spirit woke you up and you received Jesus as your personal Lord and savior, don't you think there'll be some effects that show some fruit that shows on the good side of this thing?
Of course there is, but are you going to be perfect? No. And do you have to be, to be saved? None of us are including the best Christian that ever lived. Oh, wretched man that I am. He ends it with who shall deliver me from the body of this death.
And who do you think? Well, I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. That's who's going to deliver me at the rapture, but not before that. So now we see that experiential righteousness is important, but it doesn't cause our salvation.
We kind of live between two places as Christians. First Peter 1 16 says, be holy for I'm holy. So we feel like we need to live a holy, righteous life. Don't we? Holy, by the way, doesn't mean perfect in the biblical definition of it.
It means separate and different. We're to be different than the rest of the world. Doesn't mean you're perfect. It, when you talk about God's holiness, it does speak of perfection. But when you speak of man's holiness, you be holy.
Like I'm holy. It means you need to be different from the world because you're not part of the world anymore. You belong to me. You're walking with Jesus. Be like me. Don't be like the world. That's what that means, by the way.
But it does speak of trying to live right. Don't you think? So you have that and first John 2 13, I've written to do fathers because you have known him, that is from the beginning, I've written to you young man, because you're strong and the word of God abides in you and you've overcome the wicked one.
So again, the amount of time you spend in this book is directly proportional to the amount of time and ability to overcome the wicked one in your life. And to live a better life, you're not going to ever be perfect in this life till the Lord comes and gets us, but you can get stronger.
You can get better. You can stop doing the sins that easily beset you. You may not stop it forever, but you can stop it for a season and you can make the seasons longer in between them and eventually maybe it's gone.
I've got one or two that never came back so far. As soon as I said that I'll have to give you another report next Sunday. But anyway, the Bible is the key to these young men being strong and having power over the wicked one.
So we deal with living right. But in the second place, we see Romans 7 22, for I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bring me into captivity of the law of sin.
So we struggle with that, don't we? It's both part of the Christian life. Oh, wretched man that I am. Oh, wretched woman that I am. Don't we feel that sometimes? Cause we let the Lord down and each other down, but that's part of the Christian life, but we, we have both places and it's all part of the same one Christian life.
So what do we do? Well, we can't deny our salvation. Right. What does first John five 18 say? We know that whosoever is born of God, sinneth not. There's one I wanted to share with you. What do you know?
It's on the slideshow. That's what I was talking about a while ago. There's the verse first John five 18, whosoever is born of God, doesn't sin. So the born again, part of you doesn't sin. The new man doesn't sin and won't sin.
But he that is begotten of God keeps himself. The new man keeps himself from sin. And the wicked one does not touch that part of you. Whoa. That's pretty cool to know. Isn't it? So like in your flesh, you, you get down in the flesh and you do something wrong.
Satan comes to you and said, how can you do that? If you're saved and you say, well, like Paul said, I didn't really do that, but I see a principle in me that sin dwells in this body still, but the new me despises what I just did.
And I've already confessed it to Jesus. And he says he took it away. So what are you going to do about that? Jesus, would you bind him and make him flee? And he'll answer yes. And he'll leave. You see when, when Satan comes to you and puts my mentor, put it this way, Dr. Freeman, he said, David, if you ever have a thought that enters your mind, that doesn't build you up or edify you consider the source, because that didn't come from God.
Think about that. How much negative talk goes on in our heads during the week? All right. Well, that's not from God. That's from the enemy. And he can put thoughts in your mind all day long. How you deal with them is how material you are as a Christian.
If you learn to say, all right, Jesus, I hear that thought going around my head. Please give me the mind of Christ right now. So I think like he would, it'll go away. Gentlemen, that's a good one for the men to know.
Here's another, here's another one, um, Lord, if that's thoughts coming from the enemy, would you bind that demon, rebuke him and send him away from me? Cause I had no part with him and it will go. You live, listen all day long.
You're praying these prayers. If you're wanting to live, right, that's what you're doing because you find your body getting in the way. The sin principle is still there, but your new man never wants to sin.
It's always disgusted with that sin and will not do the sin. And you need to, if you reach up and grab the hand of Jesus and walk filled with the spirit, you won't send during those moments, stretch the moments out and have longer periods of the day where you're like that.
And that's the solution. And therefore at times when we're spirit filled, we are strong in the Lord and accomplish many things together with Jesus and do good works in this life. Yet when we go down into the flesh, we can and do still sin.
We cannot deny our salvation. First John three 20, for if our heart condemns us, God's greater than our heart. And he knows all things. God knows we're saved. We know we're saved. So we can't deny our salvation just because we sin.
Now look at this truth about salvation. First John five and look at verse 11. And this is the record. In other words, this is God's word on it. That God has given unto us eternal life in this life is in his son.
Do you see the word give is that grace or is that law that's grace. It's a free gift. I've lost you. So we're going to finish with this slide. Don't worry. I can always tell this is different every Sunday.
Okay. So it's a gift, isn't it? But once the slides up there, I am going to finish it. So listen up and we'll get done quickly. God has given us eternal life in this life. It's in the sun. Now you want to check, you want to check yourself.
Am I saved or am I not saved? Look at verse 12. He that has the son has life and he that has not the son of God has not life. You simply have to ask which group am I in? Do I desire the son? Because the Bible says whosoever desires, uh, the son of God shall be saved.
That's Romans chapter 10, verse 13, whosoever desires to call upon the Lord, name of the Lord shall be saved. Do I have the son or not? So that tells you what group you're in. I look at verse 13, these things that are written unto you that believe on the name of the son of God.
Do you believe that Jesus died in your place was buried and your sins were in him and when he rose again, he gave you the ability to have a new life and to be born again. Do you believe that? Then he wrote this to you.
Why? So that you may know that you have eternal life. Just say, so you hope you have it. Does it say, so you think you have it. You hope you have it. Or just say, you know, you have it. You know, you have it.
Now does have mean you'll get it when you die in the future? Does it mean in the present tense? I have it have means now I have it and it calls it eternal. How long does that last? You have eternal life.
How long does that last? So how could you lose it? If you have it now and it's attorney can't lose it. So that's a lie that some denominations teach and have done for many years. They've taught it 2000 years.
There've been people teaching it in churches. They don't know these simple verses. So you cannot deny your salvation. Just because you sin, you got in the flesh and you sin. You see, that's, that's the whole principle.
And I'm going to end with this one. Sorry. I just, my thumb twitched and I flipped it. Second Corinthians four seven, because the whole message today is about this verse, really look at this. We have this treasure.
What's that talking about? The born again, part of us, the part of the new man, the new woman, the part that's attached to Jesus, that treasure is in earthen vessels. What does that mean? This body is made out of what?
Dirt. I was listening to a Dave Crowder song on the way up here, or it might've been last night, cause I was listening to him last night too. But in that song, Dave Crowder was saying that I'm just inside of me is mud.
He's talking about the old man and the whole beautiful song about great. God saved me. I'm I'm born again. I'm saved inside of my old man is just mud. That's all I am. But God has given me life. He's quickened to me.
And so the treasure, the born again state, that new man, that new woman that's attached to Jesus lives in the middle of this earthen vessel. And guess what? It's not by accident. It's by God's design.
Cause look what it says. Why? So that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us. Do you need to realize this? The walk that you have right now in the schizophrenic life, you're living where you want to live, right?
And you find yourself doing wrong is God's will. God made you that way on purpose, because guess what happens when you do get it? Right? You don't get the glory for it. He does, because he had to be in you walking with you, holding your hand, showing you what to do and saying, let's do this together.
And you had to have that relationship and he had to have died on the cross and been buried and risen to cause you to be saved. And he had to have called you out from darkness to light. And he had to have known you before the foundation of the world and predestined that you would be called one day on your spiritual birthday.
He had to wake you up, get you to see him. He had to get you to love him. He had to give you faith. So you'd believe in him. And he did all of that because he's always loved you from before he made anything and he gets all the glory when you do something right.
So that's what experiential righteousness is all about. It's not to get saved. It's the effect of it. Isn't that great? Let's stand and have prayer together. Father, we thank you so much for your word and it is our light.
It is truth. Lord, you yourself, you said your spirit is life. Your words, they are spirit and they are life. Thank you that you've preserved this Bible throughout many generations that tried to and you promised you would preserve it to the last generation.
And thank you for that. Thank you that your Holy spirit is our great teacher and that we live by the water and the spirit, the word of God and the Holy spirit and Lord, we thank you that we have each other, that you've connected us not only to Jesus and to yourself, but also to each other and Lord, thank you for this Christmas season, where we think about you coming into this world, God with us, Emmanuel, God with us, Jesus coming to pay for the sins of his people and to show us how to live.
We thank you so much for that wonderful part of our knowledge of you and Lord, we ask you to go with us now, protect us on the way home, help us to ponder these wonderful truths in Jesus name. Amen. You are dismissed.