The Prepper Broadcasting Network - 2024.02.05 - Reliance - The Body of Death

Episode Date: February 11, 2024

God bless Steven Menking

What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not. On the contrary, I would not have known sin except through the law, for I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, you shall not covet. But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire, for apart from the law sin was dead. I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me. Therefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. Has then what is good become death to me? Certainly not. But sin, that it might appear sin,

was producing death in me through what is good, so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I am doing I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice. But what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do that I do not practice, but what I hate that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, nothing good dwells. For to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find.

For the good that I will to is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do. But the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

body of death. I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. Jesus, be with us, Lord. We glorify you and praise you and thank you and honor you. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for your mercy. Thank you for your forgiveness, Lord. Forgive us this day and every day for the sins that so easily beset us. God, set us free from whatever captivity ensnares us. Set us free to do your will, to follow you wholeheartedly, to pursue you with faith, and strengthen us for that journey and that task. Call us, Lord, to a higher calling. Instill in us and write your word and your law upon our hearts, Lord, that we would be given

strength each and every day, renewed and overflowing and vast enough to overcome the temptations that face us. God, you are good and your mercy endures forever. We lift up our own lives, the lives of our families and our communities, our loved ones, our colleagues. We lift up our brothers and sisters to you, Lord. And we pray for breakthroughs, for marvelous, majestic miracles, for your will to be accomplished in our lives. And Lord, thank you for the blessed hope of the new heavens and new earth where there

will be redemption and restoration and a new creation and the abolition of sin. God, let your will be done. Help us to fight this battle. Help us to represent you properly. Help us to avoid hypocrisy. Lord, we repent. Help us to avoid hypocrisy. Lord, we repent.

We come to you praying for your forgiveness and for the strength to turn from our wicked ways. God, we love you. And Holy Spirit, we pray that you would quicken us, quicken your word for us and nourish us, Lord, with the bread of life, the word of God, and with the love that you have for us, despite our condition. We bless you, Jesus. We praise you and we honor you in all things. Amen. Brothers and sisters, this time needs to be redeemed. I'm speaking to myself in my own life, but it is something that all of us could essentially always use a reminder of. And when we read through these passages in Romans 7, which one of us dares to say that we do not identify wholeheartedly with the anguish that is in the Apostle Paul as he writes these words, as he observes the differential between the law leading us to understand what sin is and the

consequences of understanding what sin is. Surely all of us has at some point in a cynical moment of reflection thought, what if there weren't these moral boundaries? What if there wasn't this guilt that is felt sometimes on a consistent or even constant basis? Wouldn't it be better to just be ignorant of these things? After all, people do say that ignorance is bliss. Maybe that is not just for knowledge in general, but specifically for moral knowledge. After all, we have a general excuse that we like to bring forth that, well, if we don't know something is wrong, then how can we be blamed for it? And it certainly appears that to a certain extent, blamed for it. And it certainly appears that to a certain extent, that kind of dynamic is what Paul is discussing when he's talking about the law, saying that apart from the law, sin was dead.

And I don't think we want to say that a lack of knowledge of moral principles of right and wrong contains the full measure of absolution from that, but we don't necessarily at this stage want to get too technical into what it means and what it would constitute to truly be ignorant of these things, because certainly as beings created in the image of God, there is implanted into us, at least until it's potentially seared by wrongdoing, a conscience that speaks to us and leads us and guides us, but in a still small voice. And we can suppress that. We can suppress it in unrighteousness. We can move forward in a way that dulls that voice and makes it impossible to hear. But again, we don't need

to get into the exact semantics and the metaphysics of it all. But I think the baseline plain reading principle is clear that when we are aware of the nature of sin and the definition of it, of sin and the definition of it, particularly when we are earnestly seeking to follow the Lord, that we will more and more readily be confronted over and over and over again with our own actions and their consequences. Sometimes things that have been going on and have been buried for a long time, and when they are brought up, it is not without anguish and concern and regret. Even the proper process of repentance that brings the only kind of catharsis that delivers us and heals us because of what Jesus has accomplished for us on the cross to provide atonement and reconciliation and just getting into a state of peace. That is all the best parts of the path forward.

But in this moment and in the times in which we live, even for the Apostle Paul here, we see him drawing this distinct contrast. And we would look at Paul rightly as a paradigm example, a pillar of the faith. And so we can ask ourselves, if Paul is having this kind of reaction, then what should our reaction be? Where are we? What can we do about this? And there are a handful of lessons that I think are important for each one of us to take in. Number one, there is a progress and a maturity that comes along with Christian living, with walking with the Lord, with being discipled, with staying in the word, with being sensitive to the Holy Spirit, with all of these necessary components of our faith, where, you know, when Paul is writing these verses in escalating, devastating sins that he's being thought of. I certainly don't

want to think that we would look at Paul and say, oh, secretly he is doing this, that, and the other thing. It is possible, as he does elsewhere, that he's remembering the activities that he participated in before he was saved. But Paul understands the nature of forgiveness. He understands it well. He understands it certainly perhaps better than we do. And so what Paul is being distressed over in terms of a sin, might I suggest, we don't have biblical data on this, but it might be a sin that many of us, brothers and sisters,

where we are positioned might say, oh, well, that's just something little. And yet it's bringing Paul anguish. And if this thought experiment is legitimate, and I think it's a case study, even if we don't want to bring any more doctrinal conclusions from it, don't want to bring any more doctrinal conclusions from it. From a discipleship perspective, sin is sin. Yes, there are gradients discussed in the Bible. The Bible describes a sin that is unto death and others that are not. But leaving that aside, any degree of rebellion, which is what sin is, any degree of rebellion from a holy God is a manner of life and death. When we go back all the way to the beginning of the Bible and we see the curse and we see this description, the wages of sin is death, it doesn't say the wages of a little sin is just fine, but that the wages of these major mortal sins is death. There is no distinction there. And so as we walk with the Lord, as we

progress, as we move forward haltingly, stumblingly, only by the grace of God and only by his power, one of the marks of the progress of a disciple is to understand and to perceive our own sins the way that God perceives them. Every sin is drastic in its rebellious content, whether we, through our own perception or the lens of our culture or anything else, would see it that way or not. And I think one of the problems of disputation is when, whether it's within the church or external with respect to a secular culture when we identify scenarios where on both sides of the straight and narrow path, there are different sins. And oftentimes there's a division where one group for whatever reason is going to prefer one side of that dilemma and overcorrect against the other, and both are ending up in a ditch. And it's such a challenge

here because when we move forward, we need to be extremely careful because we can't say, well, at least I'm not doing this major thing and then have these quote unquote minor things on the side, I think a mark of maturity is understanding that that kind of gradation, that kind of accounting, for lack of a better word, is not just insufficient. I think it's non-biblical. So I don't think you need to imagine here that the Apostle Paul has all this grandiose secret sin that's going on in his life, I think that he understands the teaching of Jesus and that our own attitude, our own mentality, our own fleshly and carnal desires

themselves bring about this temptation and can bring about sin in our thought life and in, and indeed. And so we find ourselves in this world and Paul is probably in a situation where because of his sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and his knowledge of, of theology and his practice and discipleship, he is likely very sensitive to the, to any sin that is taking place. And so he can rightly bewail these sins, these acts of rebellion, and say, I don't want to do these things. Whether it's thinking about the wrong things, and again, I would distinguish between an intrusive thought that immediately gets taken captive versus dwelling on these things, whether it's covetousness or lust or even just a deprioritization of God's will in favor of our own, self-seeking, self-centeredness, all of these things that are so bound up in the cultural milieu that we find

ourselves in that to separate ourselves from them is not just tremendously difficult, but I would say impossible without supernatural and spiritual help. But brothers and sisters, as we come to this point, as we see what the Apostle Paul is going through, we should understand that that in and of itself is actually a mark of spiritual maturity, of growth, and that the Holy Spirit is actively and has been actively working on the Apostle Paul. And the same can be true for us. We can get to the point where the quote unquote supposedly smaller things bother us just as much. But usually in order to get to that point, a lot of bigger, more obvious, more glaring things need to be cleared out of the way. But if we're talking about cleaning a house and you have a room that's just a complete and utter disaster and you start to rearrange some things, replace things that are broken, get some things in some semblance of order, then there's the next level of arrangement and restoration and polishing that needs to take place. If you think about a house that belongs to someone who

is hoarding objects, you're never going to get to the point where the baseboards are clean because there's just mountains and mountains of just junk in the way before you can even get to that. And so if we find ourselves distressed and really trying to grapple with things that we know if we talked about them with others, some people would just shrug their shoulders and say, really, that's not that bad in the grand scheme of things. Why is it troubling you like this? good sign, not just that we are in line with the Apostle Paul here, but because it's an indicator that the Holy Spirit has been working to transform our lives from image to image and from glory to glory. We make more and more progress. And so part of it is the difference in the psychological perception of sin. That too can get changed. And to a certain extent, this feels rather burdensome, right? And you sense this in the way that the Apostle Paul

is writing and the Holy Spirit is communicating this, that when, let's say you're someone and you have a bunch of big things to deal with, And by the grace of God, you're able to repent and move forward for those to receive forgiveness, to receive healing and restoration, all of these things. But then you just go right to the next level of it and there's all these other quote-unquote medium-sized things. And now those medium-sized things appear just as large if we have the right spiritual eyes to see. Because again,

sin is rebellion, full stop. And even though there are degrees to these things, we should be just as abhorrent to one kind of sin as to another. Ultimately, sin cannot stand in the presence of a holy God. It doesn't matter what degree we're talking about here. God is perfectly holy. And any excuse that we have is just nothing in the sight of his power and holiness and righteousness. And so it can feel like we're just being trampled upon by the nature of sin. And even when we make progress, there are these other things that get dug up and these other things can come up that just bring us back into that situation. And do we need to continuously be on this endless cycle of repentance and disaster and just feeling down because of this seemingly never-ending parade of

sin. And I would encourage you, brothers and sisters, that we have to be judicious here in that there are multiple judgments that we could make, multiple reactions that we could have that would end up pushing us in the wrong direction. The primary observation, to repeat myself a bit, is that when we find ourselves dealing with sin and we recognize it and we're troubled because of it, number one, that should be evidence that the Holy Spirit is working in us, which should be an encouragement. It should absolutely be an encouragement. Number two, we have to know the full biblical counsel and we have to understand the nature of the Holy Spirit's leading. Sin is traumatic and devastating and rebellious and cannot be overlooked. But there is no condemnation for those who are in

Christ Jesus. When we are searching for the Lord, when we ask for forgiveness, when we repent, he will not turn aside. He will not shut us down. He will see that. He will honor that. His forgiveness never runs out. His grace is never emptied. His love never fails. He is perfect and he is righteous and he is holy and he is true. And he does not condemn, but the Holy Spirit leads in the best way possible. But if we are not sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit, then we won't feel that tenderness, that grace, that loving embrace that God wants to provide us to help us to navigate through these things. And we can end up feeling crushed by these overwhelming

sensations of guilt to the point where we just tamp them down and say, well, I'd rather not deal with that negative emotion right now. Let me flee and go in a number of different directions, most of all including more rebellion than at the start. So we have to know how God deals with his people and the nature of God's correction and the conviction of the Spirit. And we have to keep our eyes on the ultimate purpose of all of these things. We are to be sanctified. We are to be made increasingly holy by our cooperation with the will of God to sanctify

us. And we aren't going to be able to boast that we cleaned ourselves up, that we followed the law, that we purified ourselves. We are going to be able to boast in Jesus because of the victory that he has won to allow us to be freed from captivity by the agency and his power purely by the grace and love that he shows us and that we have just been endeavoring to follow him, to pursuing his kingdom, to knowing his will and to acting it out, again, only through his power because

we understand who he is. We understand the nature of the love that he has for us because we see what he has done for us at the cross. While we were yet sinners, he gave his life for us. While we were still mired in everything that had us bound, he showed mercy upon us. He reached out to us. He drew us to himself. He saved us by his grace. And when we place our faith in the Lord, when we are truly born again, when we receive a new nature, it is a reception of a newness of life that goes directly into this battle. And brothers and sisters, why would we pursue anything else? We should be pursuing this repentance, this cleansing. We

should say with the psalmist, try me, God, and know my heart, Know my thoughts. Purify me, Lord. Help me. We should be repenting of our ways, turning from our sinful nature and recognizing this struggle and the meaning of it and what is to become of it ultimately. And that is all in favor of a huge part of the hope that is within us for the new heavens, the new earth, where there will be no more sin or temptation to sin. When Jesus will rule and reign, when we are glorified, when we no longer have a body of death, but instead a glorified and eternal body of life.

instead, a glorified and eternal body of life. It's so difficult for us to even conceptualize this because of the framework that we're in here. It's so, like, I don't even know, apart from a heavenly revelation of it, which would be so overwhelming, overwhelmingly positive, it probably wouldn't even be capable of being articulated. But there will come a time, brothers and sisters, that God will wipe every tear from our eyes. There will be a full restoration and there will be no more temptation, no more sin, no more sorrow, no more pain in that sense. And these are such integral and just ever-present components of the lives that we lead that it's hard to imagine. It's impossible to imagine. A lot of times when people are talking about, oh, God has prepared things beyond our imagination. God has things in store that we've never dreamed of or perceived.

Sometimes my mind will go or potentially other people's mind will go. I don't want to speak for anyone else. But it's like, okay, well, what are the blessings? We think about these different material things and provisions. Yes, I suppose there could be things beyond that. But what about in the moral realm? It is beyond our imagination to understand what it's like to operate in a world without sin. desperately should we desire and love and hope for the arrival of this state where this burden is lifted, where we recognize that Jesus accomplished a victory over sin and death and hell, and his victory over sin is just, it's unfathomable, I think, to us. Because like Paul, we are embedded in this fight that feels so exhausting. It's spiritual trench warfare. It's up into no man's land, getting pushed back, moving back, moving forward. And like in World War I, ending up four years later with an

unfathomable level of casualties and no territory to show for it. That's what it can feel like sometimes, brothers and sisters. And it seems like in Romans 7, Paul is in one of those moments. And so how do we navigate this? Because when we see that narrow path, we don't want to become discouraged. We don't want to grow weary in doing good. We don't want this pursuit to overwhelm us. And the way that we can allow ourselves to be protected from that is by drawing close to God, studying the scripture to understand how God deals with his people, and experiencing the love and the grace of God and the forgiveness of God firsthand. Without that regular time spent in worship and in prayer and in the presence of God,

we just don't have the strength. We're not going to be able to be sustained to go through this. We will end up in a place of cynicism, a place of just saying, well, I guess this is inevitable, so we're just going to have to deal with it. It's a place that can be difficult to make progress from. And it's only by surrender to understanding the nature of sin as a captivity that we can break out of that, that Jesus can set us free from these things. of stacking one sin against another and putting that in the balance and in the scales and making a judgment that one thing is fine, but another is not. That's the pitfall of not seeing sin for what it is. And then there's the pitfall of just feeling this burden that is so dramatic that it doesn't seem like there's any way out. And that pitfall can be avoided by just walking more closely with the Lord and his word and understanding more about who God is.

And then part of that dynamic is as we go along, as we actually make progress, dynamic is as we go along, as we actually make progress, the sharp two-edged sword of the word, the prompting of the Holy Spirit cuts a little deeper, gets a little more pointed, gets more precise. Instead of a blunt instrument that's necessary to take away whole chunks of things, to take away whole chunks of things, the tools and the expressions and the finer things have to get dealt with in a different way. And those things then become amplified. So as we go through this process of sifting, of purifying, of cleansing, of healing, of repentance, this ongoing journey for a Christian that we see, we need to understand that, again, that journey itself, that struggle itself, that fight itself, that battle itself is evidence of the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And so rather than being downtrodden by it, rather than seeing

what Paul says here and then just throwing up our hands and saying, well, if that's what's happening to the Apostle Paul, then I'm never going to dig my way out of this hole. It's a true statement because we can't dig our way out of that hole on our own merit or on our own righteousness or on our own strength. It has to be the power of God that is transforming us. Jesus is the author and the finisher of our faith. And he is still in that process with you. He is still in that process with me. And it will be all glory to him for the transforming power that he has enacted in our lives until we achieve the state of glorification upon his return and the resurrection and the new heavens and the new earth. And so at the end of it all, brothers and

sisters, when we recognize this process, we should receive the courage and the strength to not get just so beaten down by this. It should ultimately be an encouragement to us when we recognize this battle that's going on. And we say that this is not foreign to anyone. This is something that is a universal human experience. And the thing that we should not do at any point is say, I wish I just didn't care about these things. I wish I were like those who aren't following God and who these days seem to take pleasure and freedom in any type of activity. I wish I didn't have this judgment in my spirit that said, this is right and this is wrong. I wish I were free from my conscience. Like Paul says, God forbid, the law is not sin. It points us to it. It is a tutor in that fact. But we should not yearn for or seek this altogether more pitiable state of being free from those guiding principles in such a way that leads us so far adrift that we're just completely off the road without a map, with no

guidance, with no way of coming to grips with true reality in a moral nature. Even if we see people appearing to be pleased or happy or joyful or even ecstatic in those sorts of states where they're just carefree. It doesn't matter if you don't have any moral standards and you don't experience any guilt or punishment or any feeling of regret for anything that you do. It is tempting in many cases to say, I wish I had that kind of attitude, then I wouldn't feel so bad, then all this guilt would be gone. But that is precisely part of the deception, that the guilt that we experience is actually something that, if it is controlled and understood properly through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, is actually moving us in the right direction.

And even if there is this appearance of happiness from people who are operating outside of moral bounds and don't acknowledge any moral codes or restrictions, we should understand that for what it is. It's escapism. It is empty. It is ultimately fruitless. And the appearance of being carefree can be deceiving. Because after all, we are made in the image of God. We are made with a conscience. We are the type of beings who benefit substantially from direction, from what is right and what is wrong, or at the very least, understanding that there is that kind of a framework. Otherwise, we are simply a slave to our desires and caught in a prison of not just delusion, but complete confusion. We lack any proper orientation. And without that kind of orientation, we can, I suppose, convince ourselves, delude ourselves

into thinking that there is something being accomplished. Well, at least we're free from guilt. But you don't achieve true freedom from that sort of thing by abolishing the category altogether. The category exists for a reason. And as Christians and as reasonable people, we want to say, yes, there are, of course, moral absolutes. And that comes with it, the scenario where guilt arises when those moral absolutes, when those commands are not followed to their fullest extent, not followed properly. But that is something that the Holy Spirit is there to help us manage.

Brothers and sisters, we don't have to shoulder this burden on our own. Not only that, we can't. We don't have it in our power to not be encumbered, not just to the point of fatigue or exhaustion, encumbered, not just to the point of fatigue or exhaustion, but complete collapse from the battle between the body of death, the law of sin that's in our members versus the law of God. We understand what we want to do, and we see ourselves doing the opposite in many cases. We understand what we're not supposed to do, and yet all of a sudden here we are doing it yet again, yet again and again and again potentially. And so this is just such a crucial part of the battle that we're fighting. If people are saying out there that faith is easy, that it's an opiate for the masses,

just a complete misunderstanding of the nature of what it means to believe in a moral and a righteous and a just and a holy God. It is far from being an opiate of the masses in a sense that people are therefore dulled from their sensibilities. It is the height of a call to challenge and rigor and perseverance, but it's a fight that we can't manage without supernatural assistance. And so if you're in that kind of fight right now, if you have repented for something and you're struggling and it just feels like you have to repent again and again, if you're burdened by this guilt, go to the word, go to worship God, enter his gates with thanksgiving and enter his courts with praise and say, thank you, Father, that I feel this way.

Help me to see if there's anything that's condemning and help me to separate what is coming from the enemy versus my own mind versus what is coming from you. For I know that whom you love, you chasten and that you are in the process of reforming me and delivering me and healing me and helping me. So thank you, Lord, that I have this burden because I can cast it upon you, Jesus. And your yoke is easy, and your burden is light. And I don't have to shoulder this myself because it would be too overwhelming. So I surrender, Lord, and I pray that you would guide me in this process. I want to seek you. I'm asking. And you said, whoever seeks will find. Whoever knocks will be open to them. And Lord, you hear us. You know us.

You have given us this moral sensibility. You have given us this indefatigable notion of right and wrong that can only be suppressed by just an incredible effort of denying our own nature and the nature of everything, God. And so go to the Lord, brothers and sisters. Go to the Lord for help with perspective on this. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I can point you in the right direction. It's to the Bible. It's right direction. It's to the Bible. It's to Jesus. It's to the proper spiritual disciplines. And it's to understanding where the various pitfalls lie as we go upon this path. But know that there is one who is with us.

God will never leave you nor forsake you, brother. God will never leave you nor forsake you, brother. God will never leave you nor forsake you, sister. He is there. His grace and his mercy and his love are never ending. They can, will, should, and must be yours because his word is true and he is faithful to his word. Jesus is his word. There is not something in there that will not be honored by the Lord when done according to his principles and according to the way that he prescribes it. So brothers and sisters, if you're burdened, if you're weary, if you are laden with guilt and with this battle that the Apostle Paul is describing in anguished terms here in Romans 7, this battle between the law of God

and the law of sin, this battle between the mind that we have that wants to serve God and this body of death that we abide in. Go to him. Go to Jesus. He will receive you. He will embrace you. Whether you are as far away as the prodigal son was to his father, or whether you are close but still dealing with this, whether you're cleaning up the baseboards and you're getting the dust out from the cracks in the floorboards with the toothpick, or you're just looking at a mountain of junk in a particular room. The answer is in one place and in one place alone, and that's at the throne of God, where our glorious Savior sits, ready to receive you, ready to hear you, ready to lead you, ready to transform you from image to image and from glory to glory because of his love for you. He made you after all. He is our father

and he is a good father. Let's humble ourselves and go to him and receive the rest that he has promised. He is faithful. God, thank you that you are faithful to us. Thank you that you are merciful to us. Thank you that you are loving to us. Thank you, God, that you understand us, that you know everything about the struggles that we have. Thank you that you have foreknowledge of what is going to happen. Thank you that you see us through the righteousness of Christ. You see us for who we can and will be as transformed by your grace as opposed to who we are. Thank you, Lord, for the way that you correct us and chasten us.

Thank you for the power of your word. Thank you for the opportunity that we have, Lord, to fellowship with you, to come into your presence. that we have, Lord, to fellowship with you, to come into your presence. Thank you, Lord, for this opportunity, for your Holy Spirit to lead us all together in the way that we should go. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you for healing us and for setting us free. Who will deliver me from this body of death? You will. You will, Jesus. Thank you. In your name. Amen.