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When we focus on sin on our mind, when we concentrate on not doing sin, you know what we end up doing? We're thinking about sin. What we should be doing is focusing all of our attention on Christ when we understand the text.
Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text as an online ministry committed to teaching sound doctrine and exposing the faulty, visit our website at www .utt .com.
Now here's our host, Pastor Gabe Hughes.
Thank you, Becky, my darling wife who arrived home safe and sound from the Gospel Coalition Women's Conference in Indianapolis and then promptly went straight to bed. No, I'm just kidding. She came home and we spent time with the kids and I got Father's Day presents and then Becky and I talked about some things about the conference and some things about the future and then she went to bed, but she was very quite tuckered out when she got home.
I think she needs a refreshing from her refreshing. Miss Sonia, thank you so much for taking good care of her and driving all of that way. I know you both had a lot of fun. Congratulations to Cleveland fans, the Cavaliers picking up the NBA championship last night.
I watched the game doing the improbable, making history, coming back from a three to one deficit which had never happened in finals history. The Golden State Warriors made NBA history by finishing the regular season 73 and nine greatest record in regular season history, but couldn't cap that off with a title.
Steph Curry of the Warriors, who was the regular season MVP, he lost to the finals MVP, LeBron James, who is the greatest basketball player in the world and I think that he definitively proved that over the course of this finals.
As great a basketball player as LeBron James is, somebody needs to share with that guy the gospel. Because at the end of the game when he was doing his first interview, he said, I don't know why the man above gives me the hardest road, but it's nothing the man above can put you in situations that you can't handle.
And I just kept that same positive attitude like instead of saying why me, saying this is what he wants me to do. Not exactly the gospel of Christ. First of all, that thing that superstars do where they refer to God as the man upstairs or the man above, it's kind of demeaning.
It's not recognizing him as God, it's calling him the man above, nor worshiping him as Lord. But it's almost like you refer to him as a grumpy guy who lives upstairs that just kind of meddles and messes with people's lives every once in a while.
But it's not something that is truly giving praise to God for well being God. And then secondly, there's that that cliche that LeBron uses there. God would never give you more than you can handle. First of all, that's not in the Bible.
Secondly, we've got a what video about that. Perhaps you've heard it said that God would never give you more than you can handle. Unfortunately, that statement is not in the Bible. In fact, it's very likely that you will experience more than you can handle.
In Second Corinthians 1 8, the Apostle Paul writes,. For we do not want you to be unaware brothers of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.
Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead. In Matthew 26 38, Jesus says, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.
This is Jesus we're talking about here. Remember King David? Yeah, the guy who beat a nine foot giant with a stone in a sling. In Psalm 13, he prays for strength, lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest my enemy says I have prevailed over him.
In Psalm 88, he writes, I cry out day and night before you. So the Bible says nothing about God keeping you from more than you can handle. What it does say is that God would not allow you to be tempted beyond your ability to resist.
That's in First Corinthians 10 13. In other words, there's never an excuse to do evil. But when it comes to hardships, they can get pretty rough and teach us to rely on God. He is still gracious, delivering us even from the grave through the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ.
We learn more about his grace when we understand the text. So really, God will give you more than you can handle. But as Paul says there in Second Corinthians chapter one, it teaches us to rely more on God who raises the dead.
If God can raise the dead, what can man do to us? So we place our hope and our trust fully upon the Lord. The other problem with that statement, God would never give you more than you can handle, is it thinks more highly of yourself like I can overcome anything.
I am able to conquer whatever God throws at me. That's really what that's what you're kind of saying with that particular cliche. But there are plenty of things we cannot do. And we must rely upon the Lord for our strength.
Let us worship him as God and rely upon him for all things and give him all the praise and the glory for in him and through him. All things hold together, as it says in Colossians 1 17. All right, let's get to our lesson today.
It's Romans chapter 13. We're looking at verses eight through 14. We'll go all the way to the end of the chapter here. Oh, no one anything, Paul says, except to love each other for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
For the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet and any other commandment are summed up in this word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. Besides this, you know the time that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep for salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed the night is far gone.
The day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.
Coming back to verse eight here, Paul says, oh, no one, anything. And that doesn't mean that we don't ever borrow. But when we have borrowed, we need to pay it back. As we had read previously in verse seven, pay to all what is owed to them, taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed.
So if you have borrowed from somebody, and even if in that borrowing, you've got interest that you have to pay, you need to do that. You need to honor the arrangements of the contract that you had signed when you borrowed money from somebody else, whether you literally signed it or you made some sort of agreement with another person, pay to what is owed to them.
Now, we know that in Proverbs 22, seven, it says the rich rule over the poor and the borrower is slave to the lender. That's something that we need to keep in mind. And as much as we can, let's not borrow from somebody else.
So as much as we can help it, let us not put ourselves in a situation where we owe money to another person. My wife and I don't have any credit card debt or auto loans, but we are still paying on her student loans and we've got the mortgage on the house.
And so these are things that we budget to try to get paid off so that we're no longer subject to the lender. Now a mortgage is a different thing and you'll find different opinions about that because you're investing in something that actually accumulates in value.
Whereas when you take out an auto loan, that car is losing value the moment that you drive it off the lot. Still, as much as we can, we should not have debts that we owe another person because then we have to meet those obligations before we can do anything else.
If the Lord's going to call you to the mission field, you got to pay off all your debts before you can go overseas. I believe the International Missions Board, IMB, which is the, of course, the missions team that is the, or the missions arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, I could put it that way, which is what I'm a part of.
The IMB requires that you cannot have any debt in order to go overseas and do missionary work. So again, it's that sort of a thing where it creates a tie to something. There is a contract that you have to meet and it affects other areas of your life, including the ways that you would be able to respond to God's calling for you to reach out with the gospel.
So let's owe no one anything except, as verse eight goes on, to love each other. Because the one thing that we are constantly going to be indebted to one another to do is to love one another. We will never have fully paid that off.
The love that God has shown for us and the great debt that Christ paid for us on the cross, we will never be able to pay that back. The great thing, the wonderful grace and blessing of God is that we're not expected to pay it back.
But there is a great debt that we owe to our God for the sacrifice of his son, Jesus Christ, for our sins. So the debt that we will never be able to repay, we must constantly be paying back. And that is to love one another.
That is what our Lord God has called us to do. Not with this expectation that we're paying something back and if we don't do it, then we don't get to go to heaven. But rather it is the joy and praise and thanksgiving that we are giving back to God because Christ died on the cross for our sins and now we stand before him as justified.
We receive eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord, because of the love he showed us. Greater love has no man than this, that he lays his life down for his friends. And while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. So let us show the love of God that he has shown to us to one another. It is the debt that we must constantly be indebted to, loving one another.
And in doing so, we have fulfilled the law. Oh, no one, anything except to love each other for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. What are we talking about there? Because isn't it Christ that fulfilled all the law and the prophets?
As he said in Matthew 5 17, do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. So if Christ has fulfilled them, then how are we fulfilling the law by loving one another?
Will Paul explains that as we go on in verse nine for the commandments, you shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not covet. And any other commandment are summed up in this word.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. So in other words, when you look at another person, you don't think of that person.
I shouldn't murder them. Rather, if you think of that person, I should love them as being made in the image of God. Then you're never going to have any thought about murdering them. Instead of looking at another person and thinking, I shouldn't covet what they have.
Look at them and say, I am grateful for what God has given me. And so now I am free to love that person with the love that they deserve, not loving them expecting something in return because of something they have that I want.
So I'm loving them truly and sacrificially instead of loving, expecting something in return. Okay. If a man were to look at a woman and lust after her in his heart, he has committed adultery with her in his heart.
Instead of looking at her as an object, he sees her as a human being also made in the image of God. He respects her as a person. And there is a brother sisterly love between them, which should be present between men and women in the body of Christ.
So by loving her with the love of Christ, then he's not committing adultery. He's not lusting after her in his heart. So you see how when the focus is on loving another person, then you're automatically keeping the law when it says not to murder, not to covet, not to steal, not to commit adultery, all of these things which destroy another person.
But rather you love them as being made in the image of God, respecting them as people who have been created by God and therefore fulfilling the law. Does this make sense? Whenever we focus on the sin, it awakens sin within us.
So if you are angry at another person and you feel hateful feelings toward them and you cycle over in your mind over and over again, I'm not going to murder them. I don't want to kill them. I'm not going to murder them.
Da da da da da. And as you think about that over and over again in your head, what are you actually thinking about? You're thinking about murder and you're still dwelling on the hate that you have for that other person.
But if instead you take those thoughts and you submit them to Christ and you focus on him and you see that person as someone who's been made in the image of Christ, then it resolves those feelings that you had for that other person that may eventually lead to doing them harm if you had let the sun go down on your anger, to borrow the phrase from Ephesians.
The same goes with adultery. So a man lusts after a woman in his heart. If he thinks in his mind, I'm not going to picture her that way, I'm not going to picture her that way. What's he doing? He's going to end up picturing her that way.
This is what Paul is talking about in Romans 7 when he says that the law awakens sin. So whenever we focus on what the law is and what it is telling us to do, what we instead are doing is focusing on the sin instead of taking every thought captive and making it obey Christ and focusing all of our thoughts and attentions on the Lord.
If we do that, if all of our mind and our being, our heart, soul, mind, and strength is focused on God, then we're never focused on the sin. We're never tiptoeing those lines. We don't adopt that mentality of thinking I can get close enough to this line without crossing it and then I'm not sinning.
Well, the problem is you're still facing the sin. You're not turning toward God. But if you're turned entirely toward the Lord and pursuing him with everything that you are, you're nowhere near those lines to even be asking the question, well, can I do this and still not be sinning?
That's not the approach that we should be taking. Rather, our love, our desire should be entirely for the Lord. And then we don't even have to ask the questions about what's okay, what's not okay, what's near the line, what's not.
And so the same should be with the way that we love one another. When you love a person as being made in the image of God, as being treasured by God, you respect them as an image bearer of God, then you will automatically keep those aspects of the law that say not to murder, not to commit adultery, not to steal, do not covet.
And any other commandment are summed up in this word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. We'll pick up from there tomorrow.
Our great God, we thank you so much for this word and I pray that it stirs us to love and good works. I pray that we are doing things even within our minds and in our hearts that's giving honor and glory to you.
Not thinking thoughts that even in our thoughts we are disobeying God, but rather in our very thoughts we are loving one another as we have been called to do. Jesus saying that if you love me, you will obey my commandments.
And that if we love God, we'll also love our brothers and sisters in Christ. So help us to do that. Continue to stir this in our minds to focus upon you, not on the sin, but we focus entirely upon you and you have taken care of those sins for us.
We praise you for that. The salvation that we have in Jesus Christ our Lord. In his name we pray, amen.
Gabriel Hughes is the pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Find out more online at www .utt .com.