The Law Has Become Our Tutor

So last Sunday we finished our study of 2 Timothy. And so we're going to be taking a few weeks now due to scheduling before we start our next sermon series, if you will, or book of the Bible. Probably won't be starting that until the end of June or maybe the first week of July. Just because of scheduling, I'm not preaching next Sunday and we've got Father's Day coming up and whatnot. And so we've got a couple of weeks where I have to pick. a topic to preach on. And I often find this to be either very exciting or very difficult. This week, it was, for most of the week, very difficult. But then it became exciting. And it's because there's so much you could talk about or preach on. And there's so much that we need to hear and we need to understand. And so it's hard to pick. What are we going to do as a standalone sermon? So as I was praying and as I was thinking and talking to people, I thought, you know,

I don't think that we as Christians understand what to do with God's law or what he gave it to us for. What's the purpose of the law for us? How is it to be used in the church? And so the question this morning or the topic is, what is the purpose of God's law in the Christian life? As I said, I chose this topic because I believe it's been neglected. I don't think many of us have been taught well what God's law is for, what it is. And I think we would all be well served to know how God intends to use his law in our life as Christians. And so my hope is that God will use our time this morning to show us our need of saving grace and that he'll strengthen us to live by faith as we consider the purpose of his law in our lives. Our text is Galatians 3, verse 24. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? Therefore, the law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ so that we may be justified by faith.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. So we're going to start, you know, this verse in short form answers the question, what is the purpose of the law in the life of a Christian? Well, to lead us to Christ. But most of our time this morning is going to be spent on how that works. How does the law lead us to Christ? You might think of it as if I handed you a pneumatic air gun. Raise your hand if you even know what a pneumatic air gun is. One, two, about 20. Maybe 20, 10 to 20% of you even know what that is. Now if I said, here's a pneumatic air gun, and it's used for nailing things to the wall. You'd be like, oh, interesting. Would you know how to use it? Not unless someone taught you how to use it. Would you know how dangerous it is? Would you know that basically you just got handed a gun? That if you pointed at something and depressed the head, it will shoot nails out like bullets?

that will go through walls and people and all kinds of, that's a dangerous tool. You might not know that. You might not know that you have to hook an air hose up to it to make it work. You might not know how to load the nails into it. You might not know what to do when the nails jam. You might not know what kind of nails to put into it. There's all kinds of things that you wouldn't know. And I could say, here's what it is and here's what it's for. And you say, well, isn't that nice? I could go tell somebody else, that's a pneumatic nail gun.

This is how it works. And you would have no knowledge of how to actually use it. And I'm afraid that the law is very similar. We have some conception that we know that the law is in the Bible, and we know that God means to use it for good ends. And this passage tells us that it's our tutor. It's supposed to lead us to Christ. And we say, okay, great. And I say, all right, how? How does... that nail gun work? How does that trigger work? How hard do you have to press it against the wood? What kind of tip does it have on the end? We need to know more about it than simply its general purpose. And so the first thing that we're going to dig into is this idea of it being our tutor, that the law is our tutor. Sometimes in older passages, maybe the King James, that word would be translated schoolmaster.

We don't think of tutors or schoolmasters in our day the way that it would have been understood in this day. We think of teachers largely as their job primarily is to communicate information on whatever subject matter it is that they're teaching. And there is some truth to that. If you have a math teacher, they're supposed to teach you math. If you have an English teacher, they're supposed to teach you how to read and write. But how do they teach you to do it? If you had to write a paper, How does your English teacher teach you to write? They say, here's your prompt, or here's your book, or here's the outline of what you need. Go read it and go write me a paper about it. And then you go and you do it, and then you come back and you hand it to them, and it's your rough draft, and you say, here you go. And what are they going to do with it? You guys had awful teachers. Tear it up. That's the one thing that's becoming increasingly...

uncommon, which is they would say is, this is no good. Go do it again if it was bad. You know, what you hope for is that they're going to get out their red pen and they're going to write all over your paper and they're going to cross this out and fix this and the grammar that and change this and they're going to strike out a paragraph and a half because they're like, that's just a waste of space. And then they're going to hand it back to you. And what do you do? What do you think when you get handed back your paper? Oh, thank you, teacher, for showing me all of my failures. None of us think that, do we? We're all like, oh, I've got to do it over again. And what makes that, you know, what increases that frustration is if they come to you and they say, you need to do this over again, and you need to try harder this time. Because this paper shows me you didn't try. You threw it together. Go do it again. We rewrite it. We put a little more effort. Then we turn it in. Here you go.

Then what does your teacher do? Throw you a party? Oh, look at you, you wonderful. No. You might go through this problem. They're going to go through the same thing again. Hopefully there's less red ink. And hopefully the red ink that's on your paper is not telling you the same problems that it told you the first time. Right? And you go back and you work on it again. And then at the very end they say, okay, rough draft, rough draft, rough draft, final draft. You turn in the final draft. And then what's the teacher do? Now they judge it. Now they grade it. And it turns out that you don't always get an A plus, right? Now, is that a good teacher or a bad teacher? One that would go through this process with you. That's a good teacher, okay? If you had a coach that did that same sort of thing with you, that would be a good coach. And it's because what they're doing in that process, yes, they're teaching you to write a paper or they're teaching you how to do some physical thing, you know, some athletic whatever.

But what they're doing is they're taking you under their wing and they're saying, I'm going to show you how to do this. And the way I'm going to show you how to do it is by having you put forth effort and me saying, no, that's not right. You didn't do that well. I've heard in counseling, you know, in advice to counselors, and it applies in counseling, it applies in your marriages, it may be that sometimes you're like, you have to tell me a good thing about me before, you know, you have to tell me a good thing before you tell me a bad thing. Because I can't abide the thought of you telling me that I really didn't do much well. Or you can't lead with the problem or the failure. You have to always strengthen, you know, encourage me first. Now, I'm not here to say that's a bad way to go about teaching someone something. You can show them this was a good thing you did. But that counsel is not going to be nearly as valuable to them as the counsel where you show them what they did wrong.

where they can improve. And every one of us, whether it was in our own home as a child, having our parents get us up out of bed because we didn't get our chores done. Okay? That happens at our house on occasion when it's like when the failures have just mounded up high enough and we didn't notice until 10 o'clock at night. Come into your bedroom, flip your light on. Honey, you need to come finish the dishes. Sound asleep. got to go to school in the morning. But before all that, you got to finish your job. Now, am I doing that because I'm a mean dad and because I don't care about my kids? No, it's because I know that my responsibility is to teach them not just dishes have to be done, but they have to be finished and they have to be done well. Just because you rinse them off and stuck them in the dish strainer doesn't mean that they're ready for us or guests or whomever to eat off of them tomorrow. You actually have to do the job well.

And so it's not uncommon in our house, using it as an example, for us to say, you need to sweep the floor. And the response comes, I already swept the floor. And the response back to them is, well, you need to do it again because there's a mess. And the response comes back, well, I didn't make that mess. And I say, doesn't matter. You need to clean the floor up again. It's your job. This is what it means to be a tutor or a schoolmaster or a father. It's hard work. It turns out that the people that you're supposed to train are not usually keen on the training. I'm going to drop this class. That teacher's awful. My mom and dad are just miserable. They make me do it. My friends don't have to. What I say to my kids is, I'm not their dad. If I was, then they'd be doing the same thing you're doing. Teachers used to use corporal punishment.

as a means of discipline in their classrooms, not just for disobedience, but for laziness, where they wouldn't just say, oh, it's all marked up with red pen, and you did a bad job, and you need to go redo it. They would say, we see a moral failing in your willingness to work hard, and we're going to address it. And so to be a tutor, to be a schoolmaster, to be a teacher is a difficult job, because you meet with a lot of resistance. And the whole purpose of the tutor is to Teach the pupil how to do something well. We're on the cusp of teaching our first son how to drive. I was just talking with Daniel and Marianne about teaching their children how to drive. Most of you, none of you, have ever done this. You don't have kids that old, except the Georges who aren't here this morning. It's a hard job. What are you supposed to do? You get in the car and you're supposed to tell the kid, like, did a good job? What if they're stuck in the intersection? What if they caused an accident? What if someone's laying on their horn because they did something wrong?

Huh? What'd you say? Honk back, yes. You're from Venezuela. I'm from Chicago. We like to use our horns. Midwesterners, not so much. How do you teach a kid to drive? Here's your book. Read your book. But when you get out and you put them in the driver's seat and you sit in the passenger seat, do you say, oh, you turned that corner so well? No, most of what you're going to say is, stop! Slow down! Whoa! You know, just like, yeah. That's being a tutor. That's doing the hard work. And it turns out that the more that your life is dependent on it, the more willing you are to do it. You're not going to be like, oh, I guess if they just run into a tree, it'll just be okay. No, it won't. We make it hurt. You're ruining our car. No, that's not okay. Like, you have a real clear expectation. Don't touch stuff with the car. Right?

And so, and if they touch it, and at some point that kid is going to be so paranoid about touching stuff with the car, they're going to be like, you know what? I don't know if I want to drive. And you're as a parent going to say, that's not an option. You have to learn how to drive. So we need to get back in the car seat. You can cry or we can take a day off or something, but we're going to get back in the car and you're going to learn how to do this. That's what a tutor does. That's what a good teacher does. That's what a discipler does. That's what the law is supposed to do for us. Every law is meant to be a standard of measure. And it's meant to determine guilt, you failed, or innocence, you obeyed. That's the purpose of a law.

It sets a standard. It says if you do this, then good, and if you don't do this or if you do this other thing, bad. That's the purpose. It's meant to be a light shining into our lives, exposing failure and success. And it's not only God's law that does this. This is the function of every law. It's meant to adjudicate. It's meant to say good and bad, right and wrong, heaven and hell. We make laws for ourselves. We don't think of them as laws. We think of them as culturally accepted practices, perhaps. That's just what you do. I like teasing Midwesterners because I'm not from the Midwest. I'm from Chicago, but it's an outpost of the East Coast, right? It's not the same. I am not like you. And... Sorry, Michael. Huh? Oop. But...

We set up these laws and these rules and these expectations for how things ought to be done, what is okay to do, right? I was teasing with Daniel and Marianne about driving and Midwestern kindnesses and how much they make me crazy because there's rules about stop signs and there's rules about roundabouts and they both function really well when people follow the rules and forget that and give up like, well, we're going to be gracious at the roundabout. I don't want you to be gracious at the roundabout. I want you to drive through the roundabout when you're supposed to, or I want you to stop. And so, but we change the rule because we're like, well, that might not be nice, or they might not have realized that I was here or coming, or we twist it all up in our heads. And we decide, here's the new standard. And it messes everything up. Maybe we do something wrong at the roundabout. And we say, well, I was just being gracious. I was just being kind.

No, you weren't. What you're doing is rewriting the law so that you come out of this whole judgment thing with innocence instead of guilt, okay? You say, I didn't do anything wrong. I was just being polite. There's a time for politeness. There really is, even when you drive. But don't set politeness in opposition to like the rules of the roundabout. Now, I don't really care about roundabouts. I can live with roundabouts and people doing that. I bring it up to say to you, what we do at roundabouts when we're changing the rules and the standards, what we're doing is we're aware somewhere in our heads that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and at the end of the day, we want to be declared right. I did the right thing. I am innocent. I didn't break the law. You might think of this with a dating couple. What is appropriate physical contact between a dating couple?

Well, we know there's like way over here, it's like, no, can't do that. And then there's at the other end, there's like, we don't even hold hands or something. Like there's no physical contact. And there's this big range in the middle of like, what's okay and what's not? And every Christian couple that has dated and has had to traverse that question. Because they want to come out on the end saying, I did the right thing. What I did was okay. I avoided the guilt. I'm innocent. But what happens in those relationships as they progress is the goalpost gets moved. Well, we're not going to do this. Three months later, well, we're not going to do it very often. Well, we should, you know. You feel pressure. And all of a sudden the rules, the standard for guilt and innocence just becomes wherever you want to put it so that you are just on the innocent side of the line. We do very much want to be innocent.

We do want the law to tell us, you did well. You followed the rules. Good for you. Now here's the problem. That is the exact opposite of what God's law was given to do. It is not meant to say, you did a good job. It's meant to tell you, you did a bad job. Do you realize that? God gave us his law to expose our sins. we may have been ignorant of them. We may have been suppressing in our own mind, no, it's okay, it's okay. We say, no, it's all right to do this. And all of a sudden, here comes God's law, and we say, woe is me. I didn't do the right thing. And so what do I say to the young couple who's trying to negotiate, you know, the dating couple that's trying to negotiate through the temptations of purity? I say, stop thinking about what you can do. Get clear in your mind what purity is.

And pursue that. And it will become clear to you what you can and can't do. What does it take for me to maintain purity? It's a different question. And all of a sudden they're like, oh, well that means we can't. And I'm like, yeah, it probably does mean you can't. God's law is meant to expose our failures and our sins. That's why God gave it to us. Does it instruct us in what we should do? Yes. And then the question that comes right on the heels of that is, do you do it? Do you do it? You remember the rich young ruler who came up to Jesus and says, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, well, you've read the law. What's it say to you? And he says, it does this and this and this. And he lists off the second table of the law. And Jesus says, do those things and you'll live. And the young man says, well, I've done all those things. Was he right? No, that young man was deceived. And Jesus exposed his deception by saying, there's just one thing you lack.

go and sell all that you have and give to the poor and follow me and you'll have treasure in heaven. And all of a sudden the man went, oh, no. Why was he so upset about that? Well, because he was a rich man. And he was like, oh, no, no. I'm not going to do that. And it was Jesus' way of exposing the deception that that man had believed about himself. When he was faced with the law of God, he said, I've done that. And Jesus' way of saying, no, you haven't, was to say, okay, we'll just go do this one other little thing. And the guy's like, uh-uh. And that was sort of, that was the dam, the water starting to come through the dam of, in that man's mind, it should be. All of a sudden, it's like, whoa. I'm not willing to do what the Lord said. I find that I have a will and a principle against it. And that I don't want to be told I have to do things that are...

Now, was Jesus right in what he was saying? What law was Jesus giving when he said, go and sell all that you have and give to the poor? Was he right? Was it a new law? It wasn't a new law. Rich man, you have the ability to love your neighbors, those poor people, because you have a lot. Go and sell it and love them and you'll fulfill the law. I ain't going to do it, says the man. And we would do well to think of ourselves and go, when I find that there's things I just don't want to do, I just don't want to do it. Wife says, you know what? I don't want to do it, my husband. I don't want to submit to him. Husband says, you know what? I don't want to have to lead a woman who doesn't want to listen to me. I don't want to have to spank my kids who don't, it doesn't flip a magic switch in them. I don't want to have to listen to my boss. I don't want to work those hours. I don't want to do it.

Which it occurred to us, we go, whoa, I just saw something about myself that's really good for me to know. And I should assume that if that's true of me in one area, it's probably true of me in a lot of other areas. And here the law is going, look and see. Look and see all of the ways that you don't do what God commands. Now why don't we want to use the law this way? I think in our day, if I went and asked most Christians, I'd say it's abusive to use the law this way. Right, yeah. And they would use this passage. And I was nervous. I thought, if you read just beyond this, it says that we're no longer under the tutor because Christ has come. And that's what they would argue. And I don't have the time today. I decided not to put it in the text because I don't have the time to argue. I'm not preaching through Galatians.

But suffice it to say, just a few verses later, he says we are no longer under a tutor because Christ has come. He's not saying the law doesn't work this way anymore. What he's saying was there was a time when Christ hadn't come and the law was what we had and it was pointing forward to something that wasn't realized yet. Jesus wasn't here in the flesh. He had not come to live and to die and to be raised yet. And all we had was the law at that time in history. Now he has come. Now we understand what that law was pointing toward in a way that we didn't before. Not as specifically as we do now. But Jesus said in his own words, I didn't come to abolish the law, but to fulfill. And so the law, and its utility, its function, remains. It remains for you and for me in this life. But it's something that's very unpopular, very abusive is I think the word that people would use. People will discourage people. They'll be frustrated. They just need grace. They just need to be encouraged. Now, am I opposed to you being encouraged or receiving grace? No. Actually, I think the only way you can receive grace is

after going through this work with the law. You will not come to Jesus unless you are broken by the law. And this is difficult for us because we want to leave Christ out of it and we want to say, show me the law, tell me what to do, I'll do it. And if I have to move the goalposts at certain points so that I'm still innocent, then I'll do it. But God will have none of that. His goal in giving us his law was not to say, follow all these rules, and you can come to my heaven. Because we can't. We don't. The willing is present in us, but the doing is not, says Paul in Romans 7. We're not capable of this. And so you're left with either saying, God was wrong for giving us his law and oppressing us under this unbearable weight that we can't carry, or...

you realize that it's going to take that sort of weight and pressure put on us to lead us to Christ. That we wouldn't come to him unless we felt this way. And so our problem is we want a law that saves us. But the law can't save us. Only Christ can save us. From the guilt of the law. From all the things that we didn't do. From all of our failures. All of that stuff that gets piled up. You didn't do. You failed. You did the wrong thing for a whole lifetime. We can look at that and we can despair. That's what Judas did when Judas went out into the field after he sold his savior away for 30 pieces of silver. He was convicted. What I did was wrong. And so he tried to rewrite. Well, what I'm going to go do is I'm going to get a refund. I'm going to go give the money back because then I won't be responsible. Nope. Pharisees did what you'd expect anyone to do. Nope. We don't want that. That's blood money. We don't want that.

And overcome with his grief and the guilt of what he had done, he gave in to despair and he went out and he killed himself. And that's one of the two options that you will face if you square up to the law of God and you let it expose, you see it expose your sins. One of the temptations, and this will be Satan's inclination is to push you that way, it will be to despair. And so we say, we don't want people to despair, so we have to take the law away because we don't want them to be... upset. We don't want them to come under conviction. We wouldn't want them to cry. We wouldn't want them to feel guilt. And I agree insofar as I don't want people to live there. The purpose of the law is not just to make you feel miserable. It's to lead you to Christ. It's to take you to him and to say, you know what? I've tried fixing the problems. I've tried moving the goalposts. I've tried rejiggering everything in my life so that I'm innocent. And what I find is I'm not.

I'm not. I do wicked things that I shouldn't do, and I do it knowing that they're wicked. I don't have an excuse. None. I have nothing to say to the people I sin against or to God himself. What am I to do? Where can I go for refuge? Where can this problem be solved? In Christ. That's the only place it can be solved. The law is our tutor to lead us. It's meant to drag us through the misery and the pain and seeing what our sins are and what they deserve. It's unsettling. It really is. To look at some sin in your life, some temptation that you're facing, and to be faced with the reality of the fire of hell sitting right there. If I do this, it's hell for me. Time and time and day and day and week and year and decade after decade.

And so much of what passes for Christianity today is a removal of the law. A removal of it. It doesn't have a place anymore. There's a presumption that we know our own sins. That we know that what we've done is wrong. But what I find is true of myself and of the people I talk to is that we don't know our sins nearly as well as we think we do. We have very little knowledge of them. If we were asked to write out a confession of sin, our ability to explain what we did, why we did it, what lies we believed, what we hoped to find, what we forsook along the way, what God's Word says about it, much of it would be left empty. So we have a low view of Christ. We have a low need of Christ. Our sins are small, so our Savior is small. Our sins are insignificant, so our Savior is insignificant.

And that's not how it should be. In Romans 7, Paul says this. He says, sin became alive and I died. And this commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me. For sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. Now, I'm not preaching on Romans 7. There's a lot in that passage. What he's saying when he's talking about that sin came alive through the commandment was that his awareness He didn't know what his sins were. He didn't know covetousness was a thing until he read in the Bible that he's not supposed to covet. And he went, oh, what is coveting? Oh, it means that I grumble and complain and am discontent and I lust after things that other people have because I think I deserve them. And then he started looking around at his life and being like, wow, I do this everywhere. I didn't know what coveting was until someone told me what it was. And then all of a sudden I'm like, I don't know that I do anything but covet. It seems that I want,

what everyone else has, and I'm not content with any of the things I have. And so the law, which was supposed to warn me away from sin, was like pouring fertilizer and water on top of the seeds of sin that laid in me. As soon as it came, all of a sudden I'm like, I just can't help it. Everywhere I turn, I want and I need and I think I'm entitled to, and if I can't have it, you can't have it. It seems to be that's all I found in my heart. And that's just with this one sin. And so Paul says, the law killed me. The law killed me.

And what he means is, it drove me past the end of myself. He went, well, that's a problem I can't fix. I have no hope of fixing. I have made a terrible mess that I cannot clean up. I can't even begin to clean it up. Have you had this happen in your life where you've sinned in some way and you want, with everything in you, to go fix it, but you realize, because of the way you screwed it up, you can't fix it. You're not. You're not the solution. You're the problem. When couples are dating, this is the most often when I see this, they'll end up being impure. And the man will say, I want to fix the problem. And I say, you can't fix the problem. Well, I won't do it again. I say, yes, you will. No, I'm not going to. I'm going to fix the problem. And I say, listen, you can't fix the problem. You are the problem. She didn't have these problems until you came along. You're the problem. You're not the solution.

So please stand down and let people who aren't going to take advantage of her help her heal. And that's just one example. You and I, we make messes all the time that only Christ can clean up and save. That only his blood will wash away. We sin against each other in ways that we can't fix. That only he can fix. And we sit there and we look at all of this and we go, I don't want it to be this way. I would very much rather not to have to go through all of this as a Christian. I would rather not fail. And I'll warn you, that desire is what will cause you to change the rules. That's what will cause you to say, well, that's not as bad as I, you know, I didn't really sin or I didn't really mean to or it wasn't that bad. Your desire not to fail. And I'm sorry. If you're a Christian, you just need to embrace the fact that you really do sin and fail in ways that you cannot fix. You have already.

And you will into the future. And if you want to be saved from them, it will only come through you seeing those things and you feeling those things and them driving you to the cross of Jesus Christ. I've made the mess. I can't clean it up. I want it to be cleaned up. Lord, please clean it up. Wash me and I'll be clean. Make me new. It leads us to Christ so that when in coming to him, we may be justified. When we make efforts to minimize our sins, to diminish them, to hide them, we refuse to come to Christ. We refuse it. Actively refuse him. And we say, there will be another solution. There will have to be another solution. You might even say, I'll pay for my own sins because I'm the one who committed them. If that was God's design, if that was his will or his intention, he would have kept his son in heaven with him.

If he was like, you can pay for your own sins, Jesus never would have laid aside his glory and took on our flesh. He wouldn't have done it. But it's not God's design or his intention for you to bear your own sins. It's not, actually. His desire is that you would see your sins, that you would feel them, and that you would go, I'm dead. I'm a walking dead man because I'm going to go to hell because of what I've done. And there isn't a thing in the world I can do about it. If I was given a hundred years, I couldn't make up for what I've done. I am a dead man. And if I'm to live, it'll be through coming to Christ. And that's it. That is the gospel. And the law is meant to drive you to this end. To the end of yourself. Where any thought of like, I'm a good person, or I do nice things, or I try hard, or I'm not as bad as others, or I'm getting better.

That you take all those thoughts and you pitch them in the garbage and you say, none of that is going to save me. None of it. If I'm getting better, if I'm becoming more obedient, it's only because God's been merciful to me. That's it. That's the only reason. It's not because of you. You're not a good person. I'm not a good person. We're not inclined to do good things. Before we come to Christ, there is nothing in us that wants to obey God. When we come to Christ, and become Christians, then the fight begins, because now that old man in us is saying, no, no, no, keep doing the wickedness. And the new man in you is saying, no, no, no, love and serve God. And you live going, but I don't, and I can't, and there are times I don't want to, and I don't even know how I should. And so we throw our hands up in the air, and we say, enough of all of this. But we throw away Christ when we do that. I know what it is to be overcome and grieved with,

The pressure and the weight and the guilt of your sin. I've been there. I anticipate that I will go through very difficult seasons like that again in my life. And you will too. It's in those times that you're to come to Christ. Most especially. That you would receive him by faith. That you wouldn't come to him and say, I tried really hard and I failed a little bit. Will you accept it? The answer to that is no. I tried, you know. I tried real hard and I failed and I'm continuing to fail and would you save me? The answer to that is yes. But I continue to fail. God knows that. You continue to sin. And when you continue to sin, what you should realize about yourself is how much of a mess you are and how much God loves sinners. Where you're surprised by your sins, where you're frustrated about them, where you're worn out and overcome with them, God isn't.

He isn't. He sees your failures and he says, he knows about them already. He sees your sins and he's not, oh. So you come to him by faith. And you think, man, I'm glad I'm not God because I would never receive people like me. And that is the difference between you and God, is that he'll receive sinners. And we set up laws so that we don't have to. You see this in us failing at this sort of thing in... our marriages. We just want our spouses not to sin. Play by the rules. My rules. Each spouse has their own set of rules. They're different. The wife says, I want you to be in tune with me emotionally and relationally and I want you to be patient and I want you not to solve the problems. I want you to just love me. Those are her rules. His rules are like, I want you not to flip out emotionally and I want you to be consistent and

I'd like for you to be logical and a linear thinker. Those are the rules. And so we both come and we say, here's your rules. And she says, here's your rules. And then you do that when you get married and then you fight. Because neither one of you play by the rules. And it turns out that your desires are not actually God's rules. You're just saying, well, I'm going to rewrite the rules for marriage. Why? Because you don't want to have to forgive your spouse. You don't want your marriage to be built on Jesus Christ the way that it should be. When you get married, you don't say, okay, listen, I'm marrying a sinner and I'm a sinner and we're going to sin. And the only way that this is all going to work out and glorify God is if our marriage is built on confession and repentance and forgiveness. We say, no, no, no, we don't want all of that. We don't need Christ there in the center. What we need is people to follow the rules. And so we fight and we fight and we fight. Do the same thing to our kids. We think that when we tell our kids, you're supposed to do this thing.

That we're giving them life. But you do realize as parents, when you set expectations for your children, you're not giving them life, you're giving them death. And that's as it should be. You're teaching them that they need Christ by giving them rules. Now the question is, when they break the rules, do you give them Christ or do you give them condemnation? As a parent, what do you do? You realize how strong the desire in us to have a rule that we can be obeyed. And so we teach our spouse, you just need to do these three things and then I won't get upset with you. Children, you just need to do these five things and then you won't get in trouble. But what about when they don't? You say, oh, condemnation for you. When you should say, this is why we need Jesus. This is why you need to believe in Jesus. This is why you need to come to him. Because I told you what to do and you didn't do it. You didn't want to do it. You weren't capable of doing it. But Jesus can save you from that sin.

And he's ready to save you from that sin. But all of this starts with the law of God. Not with your law, not with no law. It starts with the law of God. And not like a really thin, watered-down version of the law, but a growing and abiding and deep understanding of the law. What are the Ten Commandments? What do they forbid? What are the Ten Commandments? What do they require? List it out. Okay, how have I failed to do this, that, or the other thing? You say, well, I don't want to do that. And I say, I know, but you need to. Because you'll find Christ if you do it. And you won't find him otherwise. In the law, doing its work, you will find Jesus Christ. And he will become precious to you. But if you won't do the law work, you won't have Jesus. Not Jesus as he is in the Bible. You may have a friend or a, you know, a...

A band-aid for minor abrasions. But when it comes to life-threatening sins, Jesus won't be big enough in your mind to handle that. And he is. Big enough to handle it. Willing to handle it. Able to handle it. And so will you come to him? Will you come to him? You say, well, I came to him. And I say, good. I did too. But I still sin. And the law still shows me my sins. And I still have to come to him. We still have to come to him. We'd all like to mature and grow beyond this simple sort of basic gospel truth. But we will never outgrow it. We sin and God loves sinners and gave his son so that we might live through him. I don't care how big your head is or your brain is or how much theology you know and study or how much money you make or how many kids you have or whatever you think might matter.

You will never outgrow this truth. You're a sinner and you need Jesus to save you from them. We all have our own ways of wandering away from this truth, thinking that we can take these training wheels off. They never come off. When they come off, we fall. They never come off. So don't be afraid of the law. Don't cultivate ignorance regarding the law. Cultivate knowledge. And with that knowledge will come awareness of sin and, Lord willing, conviction of it. and repentance, and God's mercy, and rest for your souls. Let's pray.