Truly Free

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins in salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Rosebrook. The Holy Gospel according to St. John, the 8th chapter.

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So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

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And they answered him, We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say you will become free?

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Jesus answered them, Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever, the son remains forever.

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So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. This is the Gospel of the

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Lord. In the name of Jesus. Reformation Sunday. By the way,

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I don't think it's a good idea to celebrate Reformation Sunday by talking about all the great things that Martin Luther did.

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That's not the point. Isn't the point of Reformation Sunday the recovery of the

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Gospel and the great things that Christ has done for us? You'll note that we human beings, we have a problem, and that is that we are one messed up bunch.

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Holy waka moly. Look at the world around us. It is a complete mess.

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Look at your own lives. You sit there and go, I've got my act together. Now do you really? By what standard do you make such a claim?

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Because if you consider your life in light of God's law, and it has a purpose, and that purpose is stated very clearly in our epistle text today.

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When you compare your life to God's law, can you really legitimately say you've got your act together?

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I can't, and I'm a pastor. You can't talk that way. Pastor, you're supposed to be inspirational, you're supposed to give us three easy steps on how we can conquer our sinful nature, and how by this time next week we'll be even holier than we are this week.

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Really? By the way, I say that because I've been to churches like that.

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I've had those expectations. I've lived with the delusion that I was getting better.

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Every way and every day I'm getting better and better, said the crazy man.

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I think about Stuart Smalley. You think about, it was a complete panning of pop psychology and self -help culture.

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There's Stuart Smalley, obviously a guy with issues. He's looking in the mirror and he's saying,

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I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn, people like me.

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Here's the thing. I look in the mirror, and when I'm honest, I'm not good enough, neither are you.

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In fact, I'm not smart enough either, not by any stretch of the imagination. You know what?

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Gosh darn, there's a lot of people who don't like me. Here's the thing. Some of them don't like me because it's my fault.

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You'll note that when we confess our sins together, we sin against God in thought, word, and deed, by the things we've done, by the things we've left undone.

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When we come into this world, everyone thinks, oh, how cute, a new baby, they're so innocent. No, they're not.

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They're not. They're just not able to act out on their sinful passions the way we are as adults, but they still have them nonetheless.

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As they grow up, I think about my being raised. Man, childhood was magical, at least it was for me.

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That's not universal. Over and over again, I have the privilege of talking to people, getting to know their lives.

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In getting to know people's lives, some of the stories I've heard about how people were raised, it's awful.

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It's absolutely terrifying, but one of the things I've learned is that for every person who grows up in an abusive circumstance, they end up, you know what, paying it forward themselves.

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Abusers abuse, sinners sin, and what was done to us as children oftentimes becomes the things that we do to our own children.

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It's terrifying to me when I was raising my kids, and sometimes hearing the way I would blurt out stupid commands, not because I was interested in actually sitting down with my kids and disciplining them, because discipline is supposed to lead to self -discipline kind of thing, but I was disciplining them because they were annoying me.

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That's not discipline when you do that, by the way, and I sometimes would hear the words coming out of my mouth, and I'd go,

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I've become my mother, right? Forget the gender issues here, but you get the idea, right?

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I recognize, and you all need to recognize, that the law, when it does its job on us, it's not to show us that we are winners, nor is the law given to us to be a program by which if we just apply ourselves to these things, we can say like Charlie Sheen that we're winning.

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Sounds awkward now, that didn't age well, did it? No, it really didn't, and that's the thing.

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When I was at the 1517 conference, I had the ability to sit in and listen to Dr.

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Rosenblatt record a podcast with his son, and one of the things that's kind of struck me is that decades later,

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Rod Rosenblatt says the same things he did in class, he just says them on a podcast now with his son, but Ted, Ted really said something that I thought was very emphatically awesome.

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He says, listen, so many churches, they try to convince you that they are the winners, that they're on top, that they're pulling it off.

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You think of churches like Joel Osteen's Lakewood, it's an attraction to people because it has that same pop psychology, feel good, pull myself up by my bootstraps, and I can become successful and influential and rich and healthy and wealthy and wise and all this kind of stuff, and how do

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I do it? By looking in a mirror and saying I am wealthy and all this kind of stuff, and Ted says listen, if you are attending a church full of winners, you're in the wrong church.

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Come hang out with us Lutherans, we're the losers. Kind of a zinger if you think about it, but that's the point, when the law has its way on us, we recognize that we're not winners, that we are losers.

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Losers that are in danger of the fires of hell, that's the purpose of the law, and Luther, you know, the history of Luther, it's set in stone now, it's happened, it's passed, but it's very well known the terrors that he had while trying to save himself using the most rigorous forms of Roman Catholicism of the medieval period, and that didn't give him any assurance, it only terrified him further, and where he has that big aha moment working through this very passage, which is our epistle text, and recognizing that the righteousness of God was not a demand that we had to fulfill, but the righteousness of God is instead a gift given to us by grace through faith.

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Consider our text, Romans 3, we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those that are under the law so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world held accountable to God.

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If you are squawking, if you are saying, but it's really not that bad,

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I'm not as horrible as that other person, I pay my taxes, I've never been to prison,

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I've never been arrested, what a horrible standard that is, by the way, completely false and misleading.

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I remember growing up, Nazarene church, and we got it over and over and over again, how we needed to sanctify ourselves and dedicate our lives to the

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Lord, and really be intentional, and you know what it ended up doing, was driving people to despair, because you know what happens to kids?

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They grow up, and they give in to temptations, and when they give in to temptations, oftentimes they feel like, the thing that I said

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I would never do, I've now done. And as a result of it, what happens to their faith?

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It's in complete tatters. The thing I said I'd never do, I've done it. You may have said,

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I'll never touch alcohol, and then you end up as an alcoholic. Well, I will always be honest in how

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I handle all of my finances, and then you cheat on your taxes. Or worse, you steal something from the store, maybe you get arrested for nicking things when you're at Walmart, and they catch you.

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In California, I guess you could do that without any problems, but not here, right? Alas, I was just in San Diego.

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And then, maybe you think, I'll never go that far with my boyfriend or girlfriend, and then you go that far.

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I'll never be one of those kids who has a teen pregnancy, and then you do. What happens to people when they're fed law, law, more law, and some law on top of that law salad?

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And then when they don't come up to the standard of God's law, because none of us does, and then they sin, what do they feel?

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Well, now I've done it. I'm not worthy enough to be a Christian. God's not going to want to have anything to do with me.

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I've gone too far, I might as well just walk away from it all.

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And the terrifying thing is that too many pulpits, they reinforce that message.

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And the reality is this, none of us measures up. None of us.

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Not me, not you, not nobody. And sinning, by the way, I'm not endorsing it.

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I need to say that, otherwise somebody's going to say, Rose Peril's become an antinomian. No, that's not how this works.

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Sin is awful. Sin is slavery. I cannot begin to tell you how awful it is, and yet as a 55 -year -old man looking at my life going, don't you think by this time

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I'd be done with sin? But I'm not. I don't wrestle with the same sins

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I wrestled with when I was a teenager. They're worse. You say, how do they get worse?

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Oh, they're more subtle. They are just more subtle, and deeper, and awful.

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Some of the sins I pursued as a teenager, I just don't have the energy for. It's not that I'm sanctified,

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I'm tired. Right? I'm just tired. Who wants to stay out till four in the morning partying all night?

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Oh, forget it. 7 .30, I'm in bed, and I'm comfortable, and I like it. Whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world be held accountable,

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God. For by works of the law, no human being will be justified in God's sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.

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If we only had this one verse, we could still rejoice and know that we are saved by grace through faith.

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I do not measure up, and my salvation is not based on me measuring up.

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It's not based on you measuring up. You'll never measure up. And I'm not trying to scold you like your mom, what's wrong with you?

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You're going to end up, you're not going to become a doctor or an attorney like I want you to be, you're just going to end up becoming a trash worker.

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That's not what I'm saying, okay? I've heard those kind of scoldings before by parents, and I always cringe at them.

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By saying that you're not going to measure up, this is just the truth. There will never be a day in your life when you do not need to pray, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

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And the reason being is because you aren't even aware of just how deep your sin runs.

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Neither do I. Therefore, there is no hope for anybody who runs off into the darkness with fig leaves covering their sin, thinking that somehow they can figure out how to sort it out, to work it out, and to measure up and to stop sinning.

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This is the reason why by works of the law, no human being will be declared righteous or not guilty in God's sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.

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But now, the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.

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And this is the righteousness that is not a standard that you have to attain to, and this was Luther's big aha moment, wait a second, righteousness is not something

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I have to do. This righteousness of God has been manifested, and it's for you, it's for me, it's to give us hope.

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The righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets, they bear witness to it.

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This is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, and it is for all who believe.

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You're not righteous, I'm not righteous, I'm not righteous enough, you're not righteous enough, but Christ is righteous for us.

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God laid on him the iniquity of us all, by grace through faith,

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Christ clothes us with his righteousness. This is the righteousness of God.

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It is not for the winners, it is for the losers, losers like me, losers like you.

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The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ is for all who believe. There is no distinction, all, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

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And I can hear some people just screaming, but, but, but, but, but, but, no buts, there's no way out of it.

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All here means all, every single one of us, you, me, everybody, we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

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But it goes on to say this, we're justified, that means to be declared not guilty.

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We are declared not guilty by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

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And here's the thing, our sinful nature doesn't want to believe this. Our sinful nature is delusional.

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My sinful nature, that guy is a nut, an absolute wackerdoodle, okay, closet charismatic,

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I mean, just weird stuff, right? And here's the thing, we hear these words and say, yeah,

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I know it says it's a gift, but it's really not. I know it says here that he gives it, but you have to earn it.

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We take these words and we just flip them around and it's, it's, it's the craziest thing.

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And we human beings, we even do this to each other, right? My wife will say something to me and I think

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I know what she's saying and then I'll say it back to her and she'll go, I didn't say that.

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What do you mean you didn't say that? That's what I heard. I didn't say those words nor did I mean them.

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You just completely flipped everything around. I did? Yeah. What I meant to say, again, that you need to do this thing because the house is falling apart.

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I thought you said I can wait until next year. That's what

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I heard, right? But here's the thing, we human beings, we hear that this righteousness is from God.

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It is through faith. It is for all who believe and we sit there and go, I got to earn it.

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It's the same thing. That's the craziness, the depth and magnitude of sin. And this is the reason why, at the end of the day, there's only two religions in the whole world.

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There's only two. There's the religion that says you cannot earn your salvation. It is a gift given by God because of his great love, his compassion, his mercy.

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Because Christ himself, he was put in bondage. He was whipped and scourged and crucified so that you could be set free, so that you can be pardoned.

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And he did this out of great love and compassion and the whole kit and caboodle of it.

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From the salvation to the faith to the eternal life to the mansion that Christ is building you in the new earth to the eternal life in a world without end and all of the glories that goes with seeing

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God face to face and enjoying each other and our God forever in a world without end.

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Every last bit of it, gift. And here's what we do.

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Well, let me get busy. I got to earn that. Stop. You can't. It's impossible.

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In fact, you insult God deeply when you try to pay for the gift with your paltry, anemic, sin -stained good works.

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They can never measure up. Christ measured them up for you in his sinless righteousness.

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All fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

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And God is the one who put him forth as a toning sacrifice, a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.

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And this was to show God's righteousness because in God's divine forbearance, he passed over former sins.

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This is one of the things I love about God, is that God has chosen when it comes to salvation, he's not going to tally up all of our sins and try to measure everything out.

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Christ's sacrifice on the cross is more than enough to cancel every spreadsheet out there documenting all of our sins.

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God is not a bean counter. But if you want to be saved by your works, we can pull the spreadsheet out if you want.

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So God passed over the former sins in his divine forbearance, and this was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in him.

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And you'll note, I said it before and I'll keep saying it, this text is so beautiful, what becomes of our boasting?

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Why does Paul have to ask that question? What becomes of our boasting? You know why Paul asked this question? Because he knows perfectly well what it was like to be a

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Pharisee. Somebody who believed that he was sinless and righteous before God and that he had merit in God's favor and that he was on his way.

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Paul could have possibly have been just exactly like that guy in the temple.

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You remember the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the temple?

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Oh Lord, I thank you that I am not like other sinners. Look at me,

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I go to synagogue every Shabbat, I tithe all the way down to the herbs in my garden.

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Oh, what a shiny penny I am. That's the delusion of self -righteousness.

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It boasts. The Pharisees were the winners, right? When I was a

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Nazarene, the Nazarenes were the winners. The reality is this, as a

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Nazarene, the only thing I was busy doing was putting a lot of paint on the facade of my self -righteousness, knowing full well that if you just push a little bit on that facade, the whole thing will come crashing down, and it needs to.

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So what becomes of our boasting? Well, boasting is excluded. Why?

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We hold that one is justified, declared righteous by faith, apart from works of the law.

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Well, there you go, Roseboro, you're an antinomian, you're running the law down, you're saying that we're justified totally as a result of faith, wah, right?

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I didn't say it, the text said it. We hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

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What about sanctification? Don't you think you ought to put something in here about sanctification, otherwise people are just going to run wild.

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Have you ever heard anyone say that? I have. I've said it, right?

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And here's the thing, every time somebody says something like that to me, you know what

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I say to them? That says a lot more about you than it does about the truth of what we just read.

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If you think that being justified by grace through faith apart from works is going to cause people to run wild,

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I think you're projecting. You think the gospel is a license to sin, and that somehow the pressure relief valve when it comes to sin is to just use the law.

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No, the pressure relief valve for sin is the gospel. Sin thrives in the dark.

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Sin thrives under the pressure of God's law. In fact, you keep preaching to people law, law, law, and more law, you're going to give them a lot of examples of ideas of sin that they hadn't even thought of.

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I remember as a teenager hearing over and over again, you don't want to listen to this band, you don't want to do that thing, you don't da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da.

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And I'm thinking to myself, that kind of sounds fun, right? We hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

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And this is what Christ is getting at in our gospel text. Jesus said to the

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Jews who had believed him, and listen to the words, if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples.

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And this is not Christ saying you're saved by your works, because you'll note that the The Word of God, from beginning to end, points us to Christ.

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These things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life in His name.

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The one who abides in His Word, guards His Word, reads His Word, comes to church to hear

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His Word. They will hear the comforting words of the forgiveness of their sins in Christ.

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And you know what? We need to hear it week after week after week after week.

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How many Sundays in a row are you going to tell me I'm a sinner? I'm going to keep saying it until you stop.

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Alright? Good luck on that, by the way. Good luck. But the other thing, I'm not going to stop there.

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Week after week, we losers, we sinners who know exactly what it means to be bound up in our sin, we also hear these words.

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That we will know the truth, and the truth is that Christ has bled and died for us.

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The truth is that salvation is by grace through faith apart from works. The truth is that God gives us

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His righteousness. It is for us as a gift because of His great love and mercy.

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You will know the truth of the Gospel, and it is the truth of the Gospel that sets us free.

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Not the law. The law is bondage. The law alerts us and makes it very clear that we are in bondage, but only

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Christ by His shed blood on the cross. Only Christ by His free grace. Only Christ by giving us the gift.

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Only Christ by Him being bound up. Him being arrested and brought in the darkness to a fake kangaroo trial.

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Him being bound to a pole and scourged. Him being nailed to a cross, losing

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His freedom in His very life itself. It is only through what He's done that we are truly set free.

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And they answered, listen, we're the children of Abraham. We've never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say you'll become free?

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Jesus said everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. Slave, the slave doesn't remain in the house forever.

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The son remains forever. Kind of work that out. You'll note that the self -righteous, they act like slaves in the house of God rather than sons.

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Oh, I've got to earn. I've got to, hey, master, pay attention to me. Master, look at what I did. Master, aren't you happy with this?

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Master, do you think I did a good job on that? What would you like me to do next, master? Master, what do you want me to do?

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Oh, well, I do enough, master, that you'll finally give me a kudo, a that -a -boy, way to go, a good job.

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You know, something like that. Self -righteousness reduces God to a master.

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But the son, he sets us free in a way that is way, way better.

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He sets us free and redeems us and then adopts us as his sons and daughters, as a gift by grace through faith.

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This is why the slave does not remain in the house forever. Only the son remains forever.

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So note then, brothers and sisters, this Reformation Sunday. All of you losers, you sinners.

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All of you who have fallen short of the glory of God, Christ has bled and died for you. And yes, you are guilty of sin.

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And you are guilty of sin in a way that you deserve to be enslaved to it, just like the rest of humanity. But Christ has, well, he's done it all for you.

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Gives you salvation as a gift. So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

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In fact, you are. In the name of Jesus. If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue Northwest, Oslo, Minnesota, 56744. And again, that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue Northwest, Oslo, Minnesota, 56744. We thank you for your support.

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