Lawrence Taylor Ministry

Guest (Male): Hello and welcome to Teaching the Word with Dr. Lawrence Taylor. Each and every week, Dr. Taylor will be sharing a relevant message from the scriptures designed to inform and instruct us in the ways of our God. Dr. Dr. Taylor has been the pastor of Kenilworth Baptist Church in the Midwood section of Brooklyn for the past 22 years. He brings a wealth of experience to each broadcast, having been a New York City public school teacher and a theology professor. Stay tuned to the end of the broadcast to find out how to stream today's message. Now, here's Dr.

Taylor.

Dr. Lawrence Taylor: Welcome everyone to Teaching the Word with Dr. Lawrence Taylor. I'm so glad that you were able to join us today. If you miss any of our programs, you can go to my website Lawrence Taylor ministry.com or dot org and you can listen to past episodes. Also, while you're there, please hit contact and leave us a message if you've been blessed by this program. This ministry is committed to expository preaching and teaching. Today, we will examine Romans chapter seven verses 14 to 25. Let me remind you that Paul began his discussion about sanctification in chapter six.

And from chapter six through eight, he discusses this topic. In chapter seven, verses seven through 13, the apostle Paul wrote about his struggle to keep the law as a Pharisee. What period of time is he referring to in verses 14 to 25 has been much debated. However, I believe the period is still talking about his past as a Pharisee. I do not believe that this is a reference to the present Christian struggle, the dilemma that the Christian finds himself in as he attempts to live a life that is pleasing to God by the Spirit and the problems that he has in the flesh.

Although Paul does write about that in Galatians chapter five, I don't think that's the issue here. Here, he is describing his life as a Pharisee and his attempt to live according to the Torah. He wrote in verse 14, For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh sold into bondage. When Paul wrote that the Torah is spiritual, he did not mean that the law was for spiritual people. The word spiritual and I'll spell that p n e u m a t i k o s means that the law was of divine origins.

Paul realized that his commentary on the Torah could be easily misunderstood as a an attack against the Torah. So he asserts his belief that the Torah is holy. You see this expressed in verse seven, verse 14, verse 16, verse 22 and verse 25. Paul employs the analogy of slavery. Note the expression in verse 14, sold into bondage to sin. The analogy is this. The eye in verse 14, ego that's e g o is the slave. The flesh is the seller and the buyer is sin, the slave master. The slave analogy is used from verses 14 to 20.

We should also note that Paul uses another important Greek word here, fellow t h e l o, t h e l o. Fellow is translated will, w i l l. You find it in verses 15, 16, 18, 19, 20 and 21. This is clearly a case of the bondage of the will. Note what he writes. Quote, for what I am doing, I do not understand. For I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. And if I do the very thing that I do not want to do, I agree with the law, confessing that the law is good.

So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is in my flesh. For the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing that I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. End of quote. Sin, the slave master, has taken charge of the will of the slave.

He drags the slave to wherever he wants the slave to go. The will of the slave is held in captivity. It is not what the slave wills, but what the master wills. In verse 17, Paul identifies who the master is. It is sin. The picture of slavery to sin was also discussed in chapter six verses 16 to 22. Augustine says that the human race is one sinful mass of perdition. In 1525, Martin Luther, the reformer, wrote a discourse against Erasmus. This was a dialogue between Erasmus, the Catholic humanist, and Martin Luther. The name of this work was called the bondage of the will.

This work was Luther's magnum opus. In other words, his greatest work. The controversy was over the issue of free will. Erasmus believed that the work of redemption was synergistic. In other words, he believed that man's will was free to accept God and that man had the freedom, that is the free will, to come to God. Erasmus therefore disavowed the idea that sin had totally corrupted the human will, that it had not completely enslaved the will. Luther, in his diatribe against Erasmus, accurately describes the human condition based on the book of Romans. He believed in what became known as the monojestic doctrine.

m o n e r g i s t i c Salvation was by grace alone. Monogism just simply means a work that God does alone without the help of man. The human will did not play a part in the work of redemption, Luther said. Luther wrote in this work, quote, for if man has lost his freedom and is forced to serve sin and cannot will good, what conclusion can more justly be drawn concerning him that he sins and wills evil necessarily? Luther went on to write, the commandments are not given inappropriately or pointlessly, but in order that through them the proud, blind man may learn the plague of his impotence.

Should he try to do as he is commanded, he will fail. Luther believed that the law was a necessity. Why? Because it revealed to us our helpless state. It showed us that we could not live up to the righteous standards of God. The human will cannot free itself from the bondage of sin, so it cannot ascend to the height of saving faith. It must be set free from the bondage of sin in order to exercise faith in God. While I do not accept all of Luther's conclusions, one thing is for sure. The will as described in Romans is under the slave master sin.

The slave master cares nothing for the will of the slave. The servant must do as he is told. The master dictates must be adhered to. His decrees are non-negotiable. The ego, the eye, struggles in its futile attempt to do good and it is only frustrated by the will of the master. Lustful passions drag the slave to places he doesn't want to go. Every escape exit is blocked. The good he wants to do, he cannot. What a horrific predicament the person finds himself in who wants to do good. Paul wrote in verse 18, for I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh, for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not.

Paul employs the use of two infinitives in this verse, to will and to do. He tells us that the will is there, but the doing is not. What is a person to do in such a predicament? Paul wrote in verse 21, I find then the principle that evil is present in me. The one who wants to do good. While the apostle is describing his life as a Pharisee, the last part of the verse is revealing. He generalizes at this point the one who wants to do good. Applying this principle to a person trying to live a righteous life without the power of the Holy Spirit.

In verse 23, Paul wrote, but I see a different law in the members of my body waging war against the law of the mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin, which is in my members. End of quote. There in this verse, Paul uses two interesting words. He uses the word waging war, which is a one word. It's a participle uh in Greek, and making a prisoner, which is another participle in Greek. Both of these participles are in the present tense. The picture we see is an ongoing battle within the person. The battle is between the mind and the passions of the body.

A part of the mind that desires good is enslaved by a sinful body. Scripture is a witness to our slavery to sin. In John 8 34 it reads, Jesus answered them, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. Titus chapter three verse three reads, for we also once were foolish, ourselves disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our time in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. Paul wrote in Ephesians chapter two verses one and two, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

In Romans six verse 16, it reads, do you not know that when your that you when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death or obedience resulting in righteousness. And in verse 17 he writes, but thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. Paul identifies two laws in the final verse in verse 25.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, on the one hand, I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh, the law of sin. There he identifies the law of God and the law of sin. The apostle draws the picture of a dichotomous person. In other words, two aspects to this person. And this is his life as a Pharisee. He shows that his life as a Pharisee trying to keep the law was full of tension. He failed miserably in his attempt. The mind wanted to ascent and follow all the precepts of the Torah, but the body drove him in another direction.

That is why he cries out in verse 24, wretched man that I am, who will set me free from the body of this death? Note in verse 24, the key word in this verse is the word body. He refers to the body as carnal in verse 14. In verse 15, he refers to it as flesh. In verse 23, members. And again in verse 25 as flesh. He is speaking about the body. Paul keenly pinpoints where the crux of the problem lies, the body. He cries for freedom. And this depicts the agony of his slavery. He wanted to be set free.

Paul's statement in verse 25 only reveals the profound sorrow of a man who wanted to please God, but was trapped in a body of sin. He was crying out for freedom. If I can use an analogy here, on January the 5th, 1863 during the Civil War, the President of the United States Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This executive order declared slaves who resided in states that were in rebellion against the Union were now free. Many historians have criticized this proclamation because they said it didn't go far enough. The border states were still allowed to keep their slaves.

However, I think these historians are unfair in their criticisms and they underestimate the significance of this proclamation. While the proclamation did not free all the slaves, 600,000 were still in the border states, it did free close to 4 million. And as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation, close to 200,000 black men became soldiers and they became agents in their own liberation. They didn't just sit by, but they actively participated in freeing themselves. A great transformation took place, changing the war from a war to merely unite the North and the South, now to a war of liberation, a war to set slaves free.

Workers in England and France applauded this proclamation and they prevented the aristocracies in their country, those aristocracies that were interested in Southern cotton, from intervening in the war on the side of the Confederacy. Lincoln said that this proclamation actually caused a reverberation of freedom across the land. Slaves left the plantations by the thousand, causing a general labor strike which crippled the economy of the South. This led to the inevitable defeat of the Confederacy. Most important, the proclamation did this. The disinherited now had engraved in their hearts a hope coupled with a new vision of freedom for perpetuity.

While the future was uncertain for them, the shackles of slavery had been removed. The nail had been driven in the coffin and the monster slavery was issued a fatal blow. A President who had equivocated over this issue now signed this wonderful document with absolute resolve that he was doing the right thing. He knew that it was right to do this. The issuance of this executive order would be enshrined in the annals of history forever. Lincoln said that I will not be remembered for most things I have done, but I will be remembered for this. And he was so right.

This pestilential institution known as slavery that had degraded a race of people because of the color of their skin now had been driven to the brink of destruction, not merely by bayonets, but by a mortal resolution that refused to be extinguished by the criticisms of the masses. The Emancipation Proclamation declared slaves to be free from henceforth and forever. The proclamation was not written in the lofty prose of the Gettysburg address, but what it lacked in poetic rhetoric, it made up in content. It was a declaration that caused an inducement for the disenfranchised to leave the life of toil and sorrow and embrace a brighter day.

The proclamation summoned the dispossessed to the fellowship table of human dignity and they probably took their seats among the rest of humanity. It was a great day when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But a greater day was when Jesus, our Savior, completed the work of redemption at Calvary's cross because he wrought in us a new freedom, not the removal of shackles from our limbs, but the divine infusion of a new heart. Greater than Lincoln's proclamation was Jesus's proclamation because Jesus's proclamation is whom the Son set free is free indeed. The old slave master sin has been dethroned.

His reign is now over. His reign in my life and in your life has come to an end. He will stir up his ugly head every once in a while to let us know he is still around and he may even entice us to fall, but his shackles have been removed. Sin's grip has been loosened and it ain't got a hold of me anymore. I remember a number of years ago when I was teaching in a church in Pennsylvania, I used to live there. And one day I was teaching and the deacon's son came in and I thought this would be a good meeting, but he was intoxicated.

And he came there not to learn, but he came to destroy this meeting. He was disruptive and he kept trying to challenge me on biblical issues. I found out later on that he was a black Hebrew and he belonged to this cult. And he kept coming to the meeting to interrupt and to destroy it. His father was helpless. His father was embarrassed. His father was a godly man, but there was nothing he could do about it. So this man kept coming, but I gave him the gospel. I did not let up. I told him about the grace of Jesus Christ.

A number of years later, I went back to that same church and that same man was there, but this time he was not drunk. He was a new creature creature in Christ Jesus because there he was sitting down as an officer of the church and he had a beautiful voice and he became the choir director because God brought a new life in him. You know, he was a black Hebrew and he was still enslaved by alcohol and drugs, but Jesus set him free because whom the Son set free is free indeed.

Guest (Male): Thank you for listening to today's program. This broadcast is an extension of the ministry of Dr. Lawrence Taylor and the Kenilworth Baptist Church. To stream today's message, please go to lawrencetaylorministry.com and click on lawrencetaylorministry.com message. Please join us again next week at the same time for Teaching the Word with Dr. Lawrence Taylor.

Guest (Male): Teaching the Word as long as you are near. Please be near me to the end. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Thy