Living Hope Church

Pastor Phil Steiger: If you have your Bibles, turn with me please to the book of Romans. We're in Romans chapter 13. In just a few minutes, we're going to start reading. We're going to pick up here in verse 11 and make our way through the end of the chapter of Romans chapter 13.

But as we do so, the end of this chapter plays this really unique role in the history of the church. And so I want to talk about that here for a couple of minutes. About 350 years after the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, we find a young man in North Africa who is struggling mightily with what is true and what is right and what is good.

He was a very bright young man. In fact, as he grew up, he became a teacher. And back in those days, what it meant to be a teacher is you were a traveling teacher. You were kind of a traveling philosopher. In every town you would go to, people would pay to come and hear you speak, come and hear you talk.

He was searching for the truth. And so he would hear that there are other teachers in the area, and he would travel to go spend time with them. He thought for sure, "If I go talk to this teacher and ask them questions, they'll have answers to my questions." He would go to this teacher, and sure enough, they didn't have the answers to his questions. So he would go and travel to this teacher and ask them questions. None of them actually had answers to his questions.

But while he is doing this and he is struggling with what is true and how to form and shape his life, Christianity starts to creep into his vision. It turns out that his mom—we know his mom's name, his mom's name was Monica—she was a prayer warrior. Her son was not a Christian, so she prayed magnificently for her son.

Along the way through his mom, he found a bishop by the name of Ambrose, who is famous historically for his own reasons, but it turns out that he became a powerful spiritual and intellectual influence in the life of this young man. But still not yet. He's struggling with these things. His mom is praying for him. He's got some spiritual friends and mentors, but he hasn't yet given his life over to Jesus Christ.

As he tells the story, several of his friends began to convert. And so he's watching this happen, and they're joining the church, and their lives are changing, and things are going well for them with Christ and with the church, and he actually begins to struggle and he begins to struggle mightily. He thinks Christianity is true, but he's not ready to give himself over to Jesus Christ.

As he writes about this struggle, he realizes looking back on things at this season of his life, he says this, "I realized that my struggle was not actually intellectual; it was the resistance of my will." As he writes about this part of his life, it's very moving. He said, "I pretended that I thought Christianity was false. I had all these questions. I knew that it wasn't true, and I was pretending I had better ideas than Christianity."

But what was really going on, as he puts it, is that he was entangled by the earth. It's a great little phrase. I was still wrapped up in my own sin, the things I wanted to do, the power of my own intellect. At this time in his life, he had this young mistress that he loved. And he knew that if he became a Christian, he was either going to have to give her up or marry her.

And so he prays this—what is now a famous prayer during this season of his life—he goes, "Lord, give me chastity, but not yet." Some of you have prayed a very similar prayer. I want to get rid of this sin, but man, I love it too much. I can't get rid of it. So this becomes a genuine struggle for him. It becomes existential and it becomes physical.

As he tells the story, there was one day in which he is literally violently shaking with this issue about coming to Jesus Christ. But he can't, he won't. He can't let go of his sin. He can't let go of the world, but he knows that these things are true. So one day he finds himself, as he says, in a violent shaking agony at a friend's home. And this friend has a garden in the back.

He goes out with his friend in the garden. His friend sits a few feet away to give him some privacy. And while he sits there and he's in turmoil over this issue, he writes this about what happens next. "I went on talking like this and weeping in the intense bitterness of my broken heart. Suddenly I heard a voice from a house nearby, perhaps the voice of some boy or girl, I do not know, singing over and over again, 'Pick it up and read, pick it up and read.'"

"My expression immediately altered, and I began to think hard whether children ordinarily repeated a ditty like this in any sort of game, but I could not recall having heard it anywhere else. I stemmed the flood of tears and rose to my feet, believing that this could be nothing other than a divine command to open the book and read the first passage I chanced upon."

"I snatched it up, opened it, and read in silence the passage on which my eyes first lighted: 'Not in dissipation and drunkenness, not in debauchery and lewdness, nor in arguing and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh or for the gratification of your desires.' I had no wish to read further, nor was there need. No sooner had I reached the end of the verse than the light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shades of doubt fled away."

This is written by Augustine of Hippo in his book, *The Confessions*. Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential pastors and theologians of the Christian church for the last 1,600 years, was converted by being convicted of sin and surrendering his will to Jesus Christ. I've always been fascinated by this story from the first time I read it. You get to that point and it's a famous passage inside of what is really a very famous book inside of the life of the early church.

If you're into this stuff, I would suggest buying a modern translation of *The Confessions* and just spend some time with it. But when I first read it, I thought to myself, "What a weird passage of scripture to read." When we think of that person that I've been praying for that I would love for them to hear God tell them, "Pick up your Bible, open it up and read it," I'd want them to open up to John chapter three verse 16.

I would want them to open up to Psalm chapter 23 and the Good Shepherd, and he'll take care of you and whosoever will. These are the verses we think of. But the passage that we read, that he read, convicted him of sin, caused him to surrender his will, and he gave his life to Jesus Christ. Friends, there is power, there is literal saving power in coming to terms with the sinfulness that is within us and coming to a point of surrender to Christ in all things.

We're going to read that passage of scripture this morning. We'll spend some time with its context and with what it says as well. So in what we read here at the end of chapter 13, we're going to put in basically three stages or three steps: repent, resist sin, and put on Christ. All of these things are in this passage for us today.

So let's begin reading in Romans chapter 13, beginning in verse 11. Friends, this is the word of the Lord. "Besides this, you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake up from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone and 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 orgies 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." We close the book and the light of Christ shines on us and we have no need to walk in the way of sin anymore. It's beautiful, right?

We pick up our thoughts here in verse 12: "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." We've been told by the Apostle Paul, and we spent a fair amount of time with this thought last week, we've been told that it is time to wake up. It is time to wake up from our spiritual slumber, our moral slumber, our apathy toward Christ, our apathy toward His word, our apathy toward the power and work of the Holy Spirit, of the advance of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It is now time to wake up. He said the day of the Lord is closer now than it was last week when we talked about that, just by virtue of the math that needs to be done. It's seven days closer now than it was last week. Isn't that good news? The coming of the Lord is even closer. So now is the time, Paul says. And he speaks to the Christian.

He says now is the time to get rid of the works of darkness, that way of life that you have come out of. Remember, all of these Christians in Rome are first-generation Christians. Most of them are what we would call adult converts. They've lived their entire lives as Romans, as Greeks, as whatever else it was, as many of them Jews as well.

So they lived with a completely different view of things. Now Christ has entered their life. Now it's time to wake up. We've gone from darkness to light. We no longer walk like we're in the darkness; we walk as if we are in the light. Some of the language that he uses in verse 12 and verse 14: so cast off the works of darkness, put on the armor of light, put on the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is wonderfully evocative imagery that he uses. The word that Paul uses for cast off is exactly that. It's like you're throwing a garment off of you. If you can imagine a jacket that you're wearing that has caught fire, what you're going to do is you're going to cast it off as quickly as you possibly can. So Paul says imagine you've got sin clinging to your heart.

You find it, you see it, you've been convicted of it. It's far more dangerous than wearing a jacket that's caught fire. You've got sin close to your heart. You've found it; throw it away as fast as you can. We're not walking that way anymore. We have a different life. We're walking in a different way now. So he speaks very plainly of biblical repentance.

In its most straightforward sense, repentance just simply means to turn around and walk in the other direction. We've been walking in this way; Christ has a hold of us; now we walk this way. So Paul uses that language of we put off, we cast off those ways and we put on. It's something new; it's a brand-new way of life.

Friends, if you don't think this is a very big deal, that we have to find sin in our hearts, do what is sometimes called mortifying our sin, putting it to death so that we can give room for Jesus Christ, recognize this: Christ's first sermon in Mark chapter one verse 14. He said, "The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel."

So Jesus' first sermon is basically, "I'm here. The kingdom of God is at hand before you. The time is short, so repent and believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ." The night is far gone, and we are putting off the ways of darkness. And he says we put on instead the armor of light. I've loved this imagery this week as much as anything else.

I've just sort of allowed that image to sit inside of my heart and mind, that what it means to walk with Christ on purpose, what it means to read and learn and understand and love the word of God, to allow the Holy Spirit to convict me of sin, to change those things inside of me that were sin but now need to become righteousness, the fruit of the spirit, all these things, now is putting on this armor, but it's armor of light.

I love that imagery. The Apostle Paul speaks of our armor in other passages as well. The one we know best comes from Ephesians chapter six. This is part of that passage, recognizing that we are in spiritual warfare. Every Christian is in a spiritual battle. And friends, can I tell you, the closer we get to the day of Christ, the more obvious and in our faces that spiritual battle is becoming.

We are watching demons manifest themselves on the streets and, can I be honest with you, on the news. You're watching it happen. The closer the day of the Lord comes, the more important it is for us to wear this armor of light and to understand what's going on. In Ephesians chapter six, a few of those verses go like this: "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil."

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood." It looks like that, it feels like that; that's what we see. "But against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." He's speaking of these spiritual forces at work, the things that we don't see.

It's been said, and I think there's truth to this, there's more going on that we don't see than we do see. And Paul says we are wrestling against those things and we do it with the armor of God. We do it with the sword of the spirit and the belt of truth and the shoes of peace. We do it with all of these things. "Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm."

Some days are evil, aren't they? Some days it feels that way. But you are not unprepared, follower of Jesus Christ. There is armor to put on. We are being called to wake up and see. And we read this last week: to know what time it is so that we see what's going on and how it's going on and what it is for us as followers of Christ to live in this world here now.

So we put on God's armor. We deliberately pay attention to the things of God and to the ways of God that are revealed in His word, that we learn from each other in faithful fellowship with followers of Jesus Christ. Because you and I, Christian, we are living for the kingdom of God and, honestly, we are fighting for the kingdom of God as well.

The work of the kingdom, the reason we have missionaries, the reason you and I are called to be evangelists, is that all of us are ambassadors. That means we go out into foreign territory with the message of Christ as His people to proclaim His rule and His reign in a world that is dark. In the evil day that we might stand.

So we need to recognize that there are forces out there that want to separate us from God. There are forces out there that want to keep us separated from God as well. And Augustine is an example of a man who realized those things, who saw those things. He saw the sin that was in his heart. It was being revealed to him to the point of profound physical conviction.

He realized, "I know it's true, but I've come to the realization I don't want it to be true." Yet the Holy Spirit breaks open his heart, the light shines, and everything changes in his life. It's that moment of complete surrender of our will as well as our minds. So Paul calls us to be aroused from spiritual slumber, and he calls us to action.

He calls us to holiness and righteousness and the defense and the work of the kingdom of God. "The night is far gone, the day is at hand, so 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 orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy."

And just in case you might think to yourself, "Well, my favorite sin is not on that list, so it doesn't count," don't think that. There are many other of these lists in the New Testament, and you will find yourself in those lists. In the New Testament, they're called vice and virtue lists. The fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience—it's also often called one of the virtue lists.

This is what the kingdom of God looks like inside of our hearts. But the fruit of the spirit is prefaced by a list that's like this, and it's the works of the flesh. It's the way the kingdom of this world works. These are the vices that, as Paul says often, don't inherit the kingdom of God. So we're supposed to be people of the day, supposed to be people of the light of Christ.

We're supposed to be the kind of people who see and understand the differences between lives of sin and lives of holiness, and to learn how to hate sin because sin destroys God's image-bearers. Sin separates us from our Heavenly Father. Sin works its way into, like a virus, our relationships, our homes, and everything else. We need to learn what that looks like and how different it is from the righteousness of Christ.

It is literally the difference between night and day; it's the language Paul keeps using. So we repent, we cast off, we resist. We are aware of what sin is, where it lies inside of our lives, and what it does. We need to learn to hate it. We need to learn to hate it. So Paul actually lists some details.

Just in case you can't think of some sins, Paul lists some of them for us: orgies and drunkenness, sexual immorality and sensuality, quarreling and jealousy. And we could spend all morning listing these things inside of the New and the Old Testament. But these things are important, and they're especially important as Paul writes to the Christians in Rome. And again, the lives that they've come out of and the world that they live in, the city that they live in, the people who are seeing their lives, who are hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ and how it's different than the lives that they live.

Those first two on the list, orgies and drunkenness, the words that he uses were often used in the Roman world and in Greek literature to talk about the way people would worship the deity Bacchus. In orgies and drunkenness, this is just what it looked like. And so he grabbed these words that they would understand as part of their pagan worship before they became Christians.

Part of the pagan worship that was around them; this is what they did, this is what that was like, this is maybe even what my life was like before Christ got a hold of me. Sensuality more literally just simply means shameless behavior. Shame is a good thing because it's that marker that tells us, "Now wait a second, God doesn't like this; this isn't good for me."

Shameless behavior, sensuality, sexual immorality. This thing that's from beginning to end of the word of God, that is at the very core of human rebellion against God, always and invariably involves sexual immorality. It's a stunning reality. We find it at the very beginning of the fall of humanity and the rebellion against God. It's what brings Noah's flood.

We find it right at the very end in the book of Revelation as God's judgment is poured out and poured out and poured out and poured out upon the earth. It literally says, "And they just simply did not give up their sexual immorality or their worship of demons." But that's not us now, that's not our culture now, right? So we can think, "Well, somewhere in the future, people will be worried about that one."

So these were common sins then as Paul writes to the Roman Christians, new Christian converts. Their lives were being changed. Their lives are being changed by the work of the Holy Spirit away from those things, away from those behaviors, away from those desires. And friends, these are two different things, but they are ways in which the Holy Spirit does this for us: convicts us of sin, removes sin from our lives, and puts Christ into our lives.

Our behaviors change, but if you're honest with yourself, you often know that even if I have changed my behavior, so often that desire still sits inside of me. "Lord, free me from this sin, but just not yet," right? But the Holy Spirit is able to do the work of changing what we want, which is an incredible thing. Those early Christians were changing their behaviors; their desires were changing as well.

They were changing who they worshiped. They were getting rid of their pagan idols and idolatry. And friends, they were separating themselves from communities that did those things and encouraged those things. And instead of being a part of those communities, they're becoming witnesses to those communities as well. They were common sins then and, I don't know if you've noticed or not, but they are common sins now.

Many of which are often encouraged by places that call themselves churches, by places that call themselves churches. Sexual immorality isn't really what the Bible tells you it is. It's not any of that. You're allowed to behave and desire whatever it is that is inside of you to do and to want. And when a place does that that calls itself a church, it has quit being the church of Jesus Christ.

It is now allowing people to feel good about themselves as they make their way to hell. These things are not only practiced in our world today, they're celebrated. They're celebrated often as your only way to happiness, as your only way to get rid of the shackles of oppression that have been placed on you by those nasty Puritans. But all it is is rebellion against God.

And Paul is telling the Christian we need to see what sin is and what it does, and we need to learn how to get rid of it as if our coat is on fire. Cast it off and put on Jesus Christ. He finishes the list with these things. And you might again think to yourself, "Well, I'm not involved in any of that." And Paul says, "Well, have you ever caused an argument? Are you quarreling?"

"Is there any jealousy or envy inside of your heart?" These things that divide us from each other—these quarrels, these divisions, these moments of strife. This is a word that Paul uses often in these lists in the New Testament. That kind of quarreling, this kind of strife—it doesn't belong amongst you, Christians. And so this is the thing that causes division outwardly, so to speak, and jealousy or envy is the kind of thing that causes division inwardly.

"They have something I don't think they deserve. They have something I want and I don't. I want to take it from them because they shouldn't have it and I should have it." This is jealousy in all the ways in which it manifests itself. He says we need to get rid of all of this stuff because these sins, they ruin relationships and they ruin families and they ruin churches.

And they divide our souls. They corrode our souls in our relationship with one another and our relationship with God. We should remind ourselves of something else that the Apostle Paul has spent some time with in the book of Romans: sin is a slave master. Sin is a slave master. Where sin has its way inside of me, wherever it is inside of me, it is my master, and it drives me like a slave master.

Paul uses that language in Romans chapter six. Part of that passage here is in Romans six verse 16: "Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?" If you have willingly given yourself over to that, he said, then that sin becomes your master and it will drag you to death.

It will create corrosion and darkness inside of our souls. But if you willingly present yourself to Jesus Christ, he says in the rest of that context of that passage, you have actually been set free from that master. You don't have to observe that sin. You don't have to follow that sin anymore. You now have a new master, and this is Jesus Christ, and we become slaves of righteousness, he says.

So the Christian, the Christian who's been a follower of Jesus Christ for a week and for 104 years and everyone of us in between, we need to be attentive to these things. We need to be aware of these things. We need to be self-reflective. We need to allow the word of God to do its job. You know, the writer of the book of Hebrews says the word of God is more powerful than any human device, more powerful than any two-edged sword because it's going to cut to the bone and marrow of your soul.

God knows every human being, the word says. So we need to be attentive; we need to allow the word of God to speak to us. We need to allow the Holy Spirit to actually speak to us and submit to what He has to say. We need to learn where sin lies in our lives. We need to learn to see the kind of damage that it does and see it for damage.

To learn to repent and to learn to stand against it, to resist it. So we do ourselves and we do our world no good if we cannot call it out and if we cannot resist it in our own lives. This is a call to holiness, and holiness is power in the Holy Spirit. I am convinced, the more I spend time thinking about this kind of thing, we read from Ephesians chapter six, spiritual warfare.

When we think of that phrase, a lot of people who speak on spiritual warfare—and I'm not saying that this is not true—but we get all excited talking about demons and demonic manifestations and exorcisms and these crazy things that really do happen in the world around us. Friends, I am more and more convinced that your primary weapon in spiritual warfare is holiness.

It's holiness. That's not boring, it's not dull, but it is a powerful thing that God uses in our lives and it is something the enemy cannot penetrate. It is righteousness, it is holiness, it is following Jesus Christ. So we learn to resist sin. Some of you can tell us in gory detail and explain to us this truth, that sin does not stay put. It doesn't stay where you put it.

You think, "Oh, well, I'm going to have this over here. I'm going to indulge in this over here. I know this is wrong, but I'm still attached to it and everything's going fine anyway." What we learn in people's lives, what we learn in the word of God and the nature of sin itself, is that it is a creeping darkness inside of our souls. It just doesn't stay put.

We don't sin unto ourselves; we sin against God and we sin against those around us as well. So we need to be deliberate and we need to be practical with these kind of questions. And the answer to these kind of questions are sometimes obvious to us and sometimes it takes some work. But we ask questions like this: "Where is sin most present in my life? Where does it show up?"

If I am honest with myself, I know when and I often know why. I know what triggers it. And I know what I do for that emotional release or whatever it is because this has come up, this is what I do and I know that this does not honor God. This does not honor the image of God inside of me. This is not part of the fruit of the spirit. I know it's none of these things.

And I can't tell you that, but the Holy Spirit can tell you that. You can become aware of that. We have to be open to, again, the examination of the word of God and the examination of the Holy Spirit inside of our lives, that this is where it lies. Again, some of those are going to be obvious and some of them won't be obvious. I heard one Christian minister put it this way, and I have forever used this image in my own brain to help myself with this very question.

And the question is just this: "Where are my red flags?" Where I know that that flips my switch, this is what happens to me. "Where are my red flags?" And they're going to be different for every one of us. And those are the places where now we need to stop and we need to do examination with the Holy Spirit. We need to do examination with the word of God and we need to invite the work of the Holy Spirit within us.

How would you pray the prayer, "Lord, give me but not yet"? What would you put inside of that prayer? The Puritans loved writing about sin and repentance, and they were very good at it, as a matter of fact. There's a book called *The Doctrine of Repentance* by Thomas Watson. He simply says sin robs God of His glory, Christ of His purchase, and the soul of its happiness.

This is what happens in the soul, that the unrepentant life that is walking away from God doesn't care about God, maybe even hates God. That's what's happening. Then if sin is creeping inside of my own soul, it is robbing God of what He needs to do inside of this life, the glory and honor that this life needs to be bringing Him. And it robs the soul of its happiness in God.

And Paul says, but instead of that, we repent, we resist. He says, and then put on the Lord Jesus Christ. So the doctrine of repentance is not just get rid of it, turn away from it; the doctrine of repentance is turn toward Christ. Receive what it is that He has to give you. We are aimed toward something so much greater than, right?

It is that there is so much, there is something so much better for you. The way the human heart works, it needs to know how sick it is; it needs to know exactly what the disease is, and it needs to know that there is a cure. This is the doctrine of repentance. This is the doctrine of salvation and transformation. And every person needs something to grab onto.

We're letting go, we're putting off, but Paul then moves the next step and he says take hold of, put on the things of Jesus Christ. Something with greater purpose, something with greater meaning, something with greater power than whatever else is being offered to me by this world. Whatever little promise it is that if maybe I do this but it does not honor God, I'm going to be fine—friends, that's garbage.

But the things that God is offering us, these things are so much greater and there's so much power in the things that God offers us. So much of how the world goes wrong is that we are replacing God and His kingdom with human beings in all of their petty kingdoms. We're replacing the things of God with the things of humanity, the things of our own hearts.

But in doing this, in putting on Christ, the love of Christ will begin to replace our lusts, our passions, our desires. This is the vocabulary of the New Testament often, that when we get rid of lust, you'll read that word often inside of your English Bibles. They're words for passion and for desire, the drives that we have inside of our sinful human heart.

The more that we love Christ, the more that we learn His word and learn and love His word, the more these things work their way out inside of us, the love of Christ will replace the lusts of our heart. The love of Christ will purify the desires within us that aren't pure, that don't glorify God and do not bless the relationships that He has given us. Lust is a cheap imitation of the love of God. It's just a cheap imitation.

Our sinful desires are temporary replacements of God's lasting love. And the writer of Hebrews says there's the pleasures of sin for a season. "Lord, grant me freedom from it, but just not yet." This fleeting, right? But then the word of God says that the love of God never ceases. The steadfast love of God never comes to an end. Isn't that beautiful?

And so we repent and we are resisting, we're finding where these things are, and we're learning to allow the Holy Spirit to have His work and the word of God to have its work within us. And we put on Jesus Christ as well. When we started Romans chapter 12, we said a companion passage that we were going to read from time to time comes from Colossians chapter three.

And in Colossians chapter three, if this moves you and drives you, I would encourage you to go through the first 17 verses of Colossians three with Romans 12 and 13 to help kind of put these things together and find more vocabulary for it. But here's part of how the Apostle Paul puts this in Colossians three. And again, we hear the same language because this is important.

In Colossians three verses five and six: "Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry." Did you know that your jealousy is idolatry? It's false worship. On account of these things, God's a little grumpy—the wrath of God is coming. So Paul says like a jacket that's on fire, get rid of these things as fast as you can.

He moves on in that passage as he works through those, he gets to the flip side. In Colossians three verses 12, 13, and 14: "Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved..." Here's what we put on. Here's the content of what we pay attention to. Here's what we write down in our journals. Here's what we circle in our Bibles. Here's what we spend time praying about and working on: compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.

Bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. That is one of the most stunning statements, requests, commands that you receive, Christian, in the New Testament. Do you know how Christ forgave you? You know. While I was still in my sin, Christ died for me. As Christ has forgiven you, sinner, we need to learn to forgive others.

As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these, it's almost as if the word of God is on the same page with itself. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. If the love of God, the character of Christ, is at work more and more inside of this broken soul, if it's at work more and more inside of our relationships and our church and our relationships with the people around us, Paul says this is part of what the love of God does, is it puts all of this together inside of our souls and amongst us in perfect harmony.

And part of what's beautiful about this is that we're not left to our own strength to do this. It's not as if God says, "Okay, I've saved you; now let's see what you can do. You're going to have to work really hard on this, Christian. I'm just going to kind of stand back and watch you do it." That's not how this works.

We are literally given the spirit of God so that we may strive against our sin. The power of the Holy Spirit is given to every follower of Jesus Christ to be the power that works against the sin in our lives. What a great passage in Galatians five. The first half of verse 17 just simply says this: "For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh."

The spirit of God is Himself at work against the desires that destroy us, our sin. The spirit of God is at work inside of you, follower of Jesus Christ, so that you also have that power of the spirit against the desires of our flesh. You see, as we've read and as we've seen in so many ways, unrepentant sin strips us of our spiritual comfort and peace.

But putting on the life of Christ puts us right in the middle of the presence and of the power of God. We can ignore our Savior and walk our own way, or we can turn to Him and find the comfort that we require. Sin untunes us—I read this this week, I love this phrase—it untunes us from God. If you sit down to listen to an orchestral piece, you're sitting inside of the room and the musicians show up and they all sit down and oh there's this quiet rattle and chairs are moving around and everybody's getting their instruments.

And then one person stands up and they just start to play. And then everyone else starts to play and you hear all this... and then someone else stands up with another instrument and they play a note and everyone... what are they doing? They're tuning themselves to each other so that when they play, they all sound like this. Sin does this with us.

God is singing, God is speaking, God's notes are playing, His music is playing, and sin untunes us from what God is doing. And so it is the righteousness that puts us back into harmony with the things of God. Another Puritan, John Owen, in a book called *The Mortification of Sin*, he says the contest is for our lives and souls.

Not to be daily employing the spirit in new nature for the mortifying of sin is to neglect that excellent comfort which God has given us against our greatest enemy. We repent of it when we see it. We resist it and we turn our way toward Christ and we put on the better thing. We put on Jesus Christ. God truly takes us out of sin and brings us into new life with His Son.

Augustine, in the very next paragraph of what he writes, it's great. You know, he says the light dawns, I closed the book, I didn't need anything else; everything had changed. He went and found his friend and said what happened and he said we rejoiced together. Then some of you parents are going to like this one. He said, "I went and I found my mom and I told her what happened and we rejoiced together."

You see the tuning of the work of the holiness of the righteousness of God. The very next thing he writes is this. He says, "Oh Lord, I am your servant. I am your servant and your handmaid's son. You burst my bonds asunder, and to you will I offer a sacrifice of praise. May my heart and tongue give praise to you, and all my bones cry out their question, 'Who is like you, Oh Lord?'"

"Yes, let them ask, and then do you respond and say to my soul, 'I am your salvation.' How sweet did it suddenly seem to me to shrug off those sweet frivolities, and how glad I now was to get rid of them, I who had been loath to let them go! For it was you who cast them out for me, you, our real and all-surpassing sweetness. You cast them out and entered yourself to take their place, you who are lovelier than any pleasure, more lustrous than any sight, loftier than all honor."