Living Hope Church

Pastor Phil Steiger: If you take your Bibles and turn with me, please, to the book of Romans. We are in Romans chapter 8. We're going to read the first six verses or so of Romans chapter 8 here in just a couple of minutes. But let's remind ourselves of where we are because as the Apostle Paul continues to move through chapter 8, he begins to lay one stone on top of another of this beautiful thing that he is teaching us about what God has done for us, both in our forgiveness and now in the life that He has given us to lead.

This incredible move from the frustration and the agitation that Paul describes internally in chapter 7. I see these laws at work within me. The things I want to do, I don't. The things I don't want to do, those are the things that I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Last week, we moved from that question into the first verse of chapter 8, the first thought: there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. This incredible move from the forgiveness that God gives us now to the life that He gives us to lead.

So He doesn't leave us in the tension or with the question. He brings us to God's forgiveness and now to the life that He gives us to lead by the Spirit of God. Paul in the book of Romans so far has talked to us about the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God. But now the third member of the Trinity becomes one of the focal points inside of the energy and the movement and the power here of Romans chapter 8.

The Spirit of God is the Spirit that was promised to us by Jesus Christ, which is now living inside of the church and of every believer and is now the power for our lives, the kind of lives that can now be lived that honor and glorify Jesus Christ. Chapter 8, as we move through it, is going to help us understand what all of that means for us. So as we begin reading and we listen to what Paul says about the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer and in the life of the church, right at the very top of the list is that He is the Spirit of life. He is the Spirit of life.

How incredibly important is that for us this morning? In a world that often feels so full of meaningless hate and uncontrollable evil, there is a Spirit of life that is given to everyone who would believe in Jesus Christ. There's a Spirit of life that is given to the church and something new now is possible because of it. Friends, we're going to talk about it later on, but I hope you guys realize, and our friend over here feels it, we are in a spiritual war. We are in a spiritual war. And friends, a spiritual war requires a spiritual empowerment. It requires the Spirit and the work and the gift and the power of God inside of the lives of believers.

So as we roll through the first few verses here of chapter 8, we realize we're not just forgiven, but we are filled with the power of God. And now we have a new life to live and a message to boldly proclaim in a world that so desperately needs it. In our passage of Scripture this morning, a couple of thoughts are going to help us make our way through what Paul has to say. The first is this: the Christian has been set free. The Christian has been set free. There is freedom in Christ that means both forgiveness and this brand new life.

Paul uses the language here, he uses this language in other epistles: Christ has set you free. In our sin and weakness, and Paul's going to talk about this in this section, in our sin and weakness, we have twisted and we have ruined the goodness of what God has given us. But now in Christ, filled with the Spirit of God, it can be restored in the church, the body of Christ, and in the lives of believers. Our sin has twisted and weakened things, but the Spirit of God is busy building the work of God again inside of the church of Jesus Christ.

The Christian has been set free. And then, friends, we carry, we are responsible to carry the Spirit of life with us into this world. We're responsible for doing this. The church is the answer, not because you and I are very special people. The church has the answer because we are children of God. We are ambassadors for Jesus Christ, and we are intended to be a courageous witness to God's power as He saves and as He changes.

So I want us to read Romans chapter 8. We're going to begin in verse 1. We're going to read through verse 6. Friends, this is the word of the Lord. "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace."

I still get choked up at verse 1. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Paul just very quickly then moves on to what now is possible. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free from the law of sin and death. All of that turmoil at the end of chapter 7, he's walking through those two laws that are inside of him, and he says, Christian, if you walk according to the Spirit because you follow Jesus Christ, you now have the Spirit of life instead of the law of sin and death at work inside of you.

Again, we are forgiven, but we are also filled with the Spirit of God to live this brand new life. A life, friends, not just of being nicer and more pleasant and smiling more often and being just a little bit more patient, but a life of a brand new way of thinking. New thoughts, new desires, new actions, new priorities, new loves that are birthed within us, new goals for our lives. All of these things change at the very center of who we are to the outer edges of who we are because of the law of the Spirit of life. He is changing us from the inside out into people who look more and more like His Son, Jesus Christ.

So he speaks of the law of the Spirit of life. For a long time in this chapter, the Apostle Paul's going to talk about the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is the third member of the Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. One God in three persons. This doctrine of the Trinity that is revealed to us throughout the word of God and it's often expressed sometimes very clearly. The Apostle Paul will often use this kind of formula when he talks to believers about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

One of the clearest places in which he speaks of or makes reference to our triune God is in 2 Corinthians chapter 13, verse 14. "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." You see, the Spirit of God is the member of the Trinity who is with us now. If you're a follower of Jesus, He is at work inside of your life. He is in you, living inside of you, changing you, drawing you closer and closer to Jesus. So may the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. What a wonderful benediction.

We think sometimes the doctrine of the Trinity is a little bit esoteric, it's a little bit technical. Maybe I don't know exactly how to explain it, so it probably doesn't have any kind of practical application inside of our lives. But friends, the way the word of God unfolds the Trinity to us is actually very important and precious to the follower of Jesus Christ. The word of God tells us that God the Father sends His Son for us. God the Son in flesh, this is the Christmas story, He comes and lives amongst us. As Paul says, He comes in the likeness of sinful flesh to deal with all of that stuff that we can't.

God the Father sends God the Son. And when we read in the Gospels the story about Jesus, God the Son, He says there's a day coming when I'm going to be taken away, but I won't leave you as orphans. I will send you the promised Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who will be with you forever. God the Father sends God the Son, God the Son sends the Holy Spirit. And Jesus tells us that one of the things the Holy Spirit does is He testifies to Jesus and God the Father. So we have this circular relationship, and you and I, friends, find ourselves at the very center of the work of the Trinity amongst us.

God the Father, being glorified, sending God the Son, God the Son sending the Spirit, who indwells His church and then speaks about and sends us straight back to God the Father and God the Son. So when we talk about the Holy Spirit in chapter 8, we're talking about, and we're going to use this phrase often as we go through chapter 8, the word of God sees the Spirit of God as our empowering presence. It is the power of God inside of the church, inside of the lives of individual believers.

Here's some of what Jesus says about the work of the Holy Spirit. In John chapter 14, verses 15, 16, and 17, he says this: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. You know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you." Christian, you know the Holy Spirit, the presence of God amongst us, because He's dwelling amongst us and He is in you, Jesus says.

It is very clear inside of the word of God, the very moment you surrender your life to Jesus Christ, you are filled with the Holy Spirit. This is God putting His seal upon your life. This is God giving you His presence for His power and for His life now. And this is critical because Paul has just expressed in chapter 7 that under my own power, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot overcome sin. I can squint enough, I can squeeze enough, I can work enough, I can build enough habits inside of my life, but Paul says, listen, under my own power, I cannot defeat the law of sin and death within me.

So who is going to deliver me? Who is going to change this? And it turns out it is Jesus Christ giving you the presence of the Holy Spirit inside of your life. I cannot overcome the sin that is within me. So this freedom is a power that God gives to us to live a life that He actually created you to live. You see, the more the Holy Spirit has His way inside of our lives, we come closer and closer and closer to why God made you, and I mean you specifically. Why He created you, put you here now, with the way that He created you. As we walk in the Spirit, we come closer to how God made you to live this very life, and it is freedom in Jesus.

Here's another place the Apostle Paul speaks of this freedom. In Galatians chapter 5, verse 1, he says, "For freedom Christ has set you free. Stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." One of the implications of what Paul says here is inside of so much of what he says about the Christian life. It is a blessed truth that you have been given freedom because of the Spirit of God within your life. Now, Christian, I need you to pay attention. I need you to endure. I need you to turn your eyes toward Jesus Christ. I need you to work in the power of the Spirit so that you do not submit again to the garbage that used to control your life.

Don't submit again anymore to the wickedness and evil that sometimes you see around you and sometimes you see well up inside of your own heart. Don't do it again. You've been given life, let's stay away from death. Walk toward the light and not away. All these images that we're given in the word of God. Don't submit again to a yoke of slavery. Don't find yourself again in the law of sin and death, as he puts it in chapter 8, verse 2. And Jesus told us this in the passage we read from John 14, and Paul will tell us this in chapter 8, that this is a reality that the world without Christ doesn't have access to.

This is a kingdom that belongs to those who have submitted their lives to Jesus Christ, who have intended and resolved to live in a way with their lives pointed toward Christ according to the word of God and the way that He has taught us to live. Jesus said the world does not know Him, the world cannot know Him. They don't see Him, they don't know Him, but you do. Paul says, this is a kingdom that comes alive in us because of our salvation and the infilling of the power of the Holy Spirit.

The world does not have the power to give you the life that God can. The world does not have the power, it doesn't matter what it promises, it doesn't matter how much it yells and screams it from the housetops, it just does not matter. It doesn't have the power to give you the life that God can give you. The world can only mimic this life and the world can only in the end try to destroy what God gives. This is the role of sin and death. It's why it's called the law, it is the principle of sin and death. It is a tearing down and a destruction.

And friends, this is the constant story, the conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world, between the law of the Spirit of life and the law of sin and death. This is the constant story of that tension. The world without Christ is controlled by the law of sin and death, and it hates the light. I hope you know that. It hates the light. Darkness hates the light. We will often from behind this pulpit put it this way: vice hates virtue. Vice hates virtue.

Darkness hates light. The word of God is clear about this. This is what happens when sin and death has its way inside of the human heart, inside of the structures of this world. Where light is clear, where the gospel is clear, where lives of virtue being formed in the shape of Jesus Christ come clear, what does darkness do? Darkness rails against it. Darkness cannot stand it. So God does something for us. In verse 3, the passage says this: "For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh," He walked in this world in real flesh and blood, "and for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh."

God has Himself given us His Spirit because our sin has taken the good gifts of God and has weakened them. That's the language Paul uses in this passage. So now God has done something because the good gift that He gave us in the law, and we've discussed in chapter 7 what Paul means when he talks about the law is still good, it is still tutoring us, it is God's law after all, so it can't be evil. So what God has given us that is good, he said our sin has weakened it. The word for "weakened" in the Greek is actually just very straightforward. It means to make it powerless, to decay it, to make it less than what it is supposed to be.

James in his epistle later on inside of the New Testament, he tells us that every good gift comes from God. Every good gift comes from God. And Scripture teaches us that everything that God created, which by the way is everything, is good. This is the story of Genesis chapter 1. He creates on day one and He says it is good, it is good, it is good. Every single day it's good, it's good, it's good. It's very good. Everything that God created is good. But what our sin does is it takes all of those good gifts and begins to weaken what God intended them to do. We twist them. We twist them morally, we twist them intellectually, we twist them socially, we twist them scientifically. We weaken what God has given us.

Friends, this is critically important. And we're going to reflect in a few minutes about these last couple of weeks that we've gone through. And the passage of Scripture that we've been given here I think is going to help us, help give us some lenses to understand these things. And here's one of them: evil cannot create anything. It can only destroy, it can only corrupt what God has given. This is as a matter of fact an incredibly important point of Christian theology going back at least 1,600, 1,700 years. As the early church bishops and pastors were writing about Christian theology and what it means in our lives, they began to talk about, well, what is evil? Evil is not a thing. Evil is a twisting of all the things that God has given us.

Evil can't create; evil can only destroy. So, friends, here's one of the clues to understanding what's going on in the world around us right now. There's a certain kind of flywheel of evil. The same thing happens over and over and over again, and it happens this way intentionally. The flywheel begins like this: stoke anger, incite violence, blame the victim. Stoke anger, incite violence, blame the victim. And round and round and round that goes because evil can't create anything. It can only destroy. It hates the light of God. It hates the goodness and the virtue of Jesus Christ.

You see, when you move God out of the picture, when you take the God of the Bible and His authority out of our lives, individually and corporately, there are plenty of human ideologies out there that still promise you salvation. They still promise you utopia. They still promise you that they're going to be able to fix everything for you. We just no longer need this God. They promise utopias and they deliver bloodbaths. That's what happens because they've removed God out of the system. And so what they have to do is stoke anger so we can get rid of the people who don't think the way that we do. It creates violence, and when that violence occurs, we blame the people who we think are wrong, and then we start all over again, and the flywheel keeps on turning.

Avoid breaking into a horrible song. We're going to hear Os Guinness say in this documentary on Tuesday nights, "Their revolutions never end, and their promises are never fulfilled." An ideology without God can only destroy what God intends. Our flesh makes powerless. It twists and destroys what God gave us for our good. So Paul says, what God did is He sent His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh so that He is going to deal with that sin.

Now it is absolutely true on the individual level. And we've talked about that the last several weeks. That on the individual level, there's now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because God sent His Son to die in my place and rise again so that I may have life. And so on an individual level, we respond in repentance and belief. But God also sent His Son to deal with the sin that we find ourselves in as structures of society. The kingdom of God is here to not just save the individual soul, but to become a place of light and life for our neighbors, for our communities, and for our culture and society.

Jesus Christ comes to deal with these things, and He comes to show us again God's good design for everything about us: our bodies, our families, our sexuality, for civilization. We see this goodness and truth in Jesus, and now we have the Spirit of God within us to be able to live it out in truth and in wisdom, in love and in truth. So friends, we see this in this passage, that God in flesh judges sin. The Spirit in us is the power for the freedom that we need. God in flesh judges sin. And now the Spirit in us is the power for the freedom that you and I need to live the life that God has called us to live.

So Paul's going to say in weeks to come, don't worry, we'll come back and we'll spend more time on this passage of Scripture because there's so much here. We can now walk according to the Spirit instead of walking according to the flesh. It is entirely possible for you and me to live this life without Jesus Christ. This is walking according to the flesh. But if we walk through this life without Jesus Christ, Jesus told us we don't have the empowering presence of the Spirit within us. We don't know Him.

Paul tells us that we can't escape the sin of the law of sin and death that is inside of our hearts and minds and souls. We can walk that way if we want to, but we don't have to because Christ has come in the likeness of sinful flesh and He has given us the Spirit of life to overcome the law of sin and death that is within us. He says in verse 5 that if we set our minds on the things of the flesh, then guess what your life is going to look like? The junk of the flesh. If we set our minds on the things of the Spirit, guess what now becomes possible? Your life, my life can look more and more like the Spirit of God instead of the sin that is just always so close at hand.

Think about your soul as a warehouse. And you have control of the indoor and the outdoor. Everything that is inside of your soul, you have allowed in. You have put in inside of that warehouse. And that warehouse gets stacked up with all the stuff that you have spent time thinking about and doing and scrolling through and watching and thinking about and reading, and the people you spend time with. Your soul just gets filled with all that kind of stuff.

So then on the other side, when it's time for you to talk, when it's time for you to think, when it's time for you to structure the priorities of your lives, you only have one room to draw from, and that's the room that you have filled things with. Jesus said, "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." So what you have inside of that you now are going to live that. It's inevitable. And so you can fill it with the thing, you can set your mind on the things of the flesh, and so that's what's going to come out. Or now because of Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit, you can fill that thing with the things of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit. And friends, what an amazing thing that that's what can come out the other side. That's what can actually come out of our lives.

But the contrast is the point: to live according to the Spirit of life or to live according to the law of sin and death. It's been a rough couple of weeks. It has just been a rough couple of weeks. From the death of the young woman in North Carolina to the shooting of the Catholic school in Minneapolis, the school shooting in Evergreen, the shooting in Annapolis, the school shooting that was just barely averted at Mesa Ridge High School, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk just a few days ago, it has been a difficult week.

And friends, I want to take this passage of Scripture, and we'll come back and spend more time with it, but it's going to give us insight and ways to think about the life that God has given us versus the life that is being lived out in the world around us. And what is now not just possible for us, but we are responsible for it. We are responsible for living a life according to the Spirit of God instead of reflecting the law of sin and death inside of this world.

You may have, and if you're a follower of Jesus Christ, I hope on some level this past week, this past couple of weeks, you just literally felt things changing. You felt things happening in the world around us. And you feel that because this is a spiritual battle. We're dealing with two kingdoms: the kingdom of the law of the Spirit of life and the kingdom of the law of sin and death. They are at war in our culture, and the things that have happened this week have brought them straight to the surface. And if you have eyes to see it, you have watched the doctrine of demons at play around us.

I'm going to say a couple things you may or may not agree with, but I think these things are very important for us to hear. The assassination of Charlie Kirk was significant. If the only things that you know about Charlie Kirk you have heard from people who hate him, I would encourage you to go and listen to him and the things that he said. It is true he was a conservative commentator and activist and advocate, but you will quickly discover, if you did not already know, he is, to my mind, one of the most effective evangelists that we have had in this culture for the last several years.

It is stunning to have watched that, to have seen that inside of his life. You may or may not know, depending on what you follow, over the last 24 to 48 hours, literally around the world, millions of people have gathered to pray and worship in memory of Charlie Kirk. Listen, friends, if 12 people gather together to pray and worship when I die, right, that's great. But a life that bears witness to Jesus Christ, no matter what people say about him, a life that actually bore witness to Jesus Christ, that upon his death millions gather to pray and worship, something has happened. Something has happened.

This phrase has been going through my head, you can do with it what you will: he was killed because he believes basically what I believe. This is why he was killed. But this is the law of sin and un-niceness. This is the law of sin and unkindness. No, no, no. This is the law of sin and death. This is the law of sin and death. It's not just something about, it's not just about what happens inside of an individual's life who does not belong to Jesus Christ. This is a law that actually, a principle that leaks out into the rest of the world and causes more sin and just brings more death.

There is a growing worldview in our culture today that has completely enslaved the cultural and the political left that you and I live amongst. It is a doctrine that encourages division and strife and evil, and it's easy to find this if you disagree with me, it encourages violence. And there is a clear law of sin and death at work in the world around us right now. And it is, friends, a doctrine of demons. It just is.

I'm going to take a few minutes to talk about what this is, how it's structured, where it came from, what it looks like, and hopefully some of the things that I'm going to talk about here for the next several minutes is going to help kind of give us lenses to understand what has been happening and is likely to happen again very soon inside of our culture. But these things help us understand what this law of sin and death looks like in our culture right now. If this kind of thing is interesting to you, our Tuesday nights will be awesome for you.

Let me give you some of these thoughts. What's going on, this rising worldview that has enslaved so much of our culture right now, we can use the word "woke," "wokeism," that's maybe the most common term for it. But here's what's going on. It rises from the leftism of the last 150 years, coming from Marx and from Darwin, through Marxist thinkers and Darwinist thinkers. And there is a straight, unbroken line from Karl Marx and Charles Darwin and the ideas that they wrote and propagated and that became very popular and powerful. There's a straight line from those guys to this week. Their ideas and people who have taken their ideas, they are their disciples, they've developed their ideas, they continue to promote their ideology. It's not something that was written 150 years ago. It is something that is at play inside of our culture right now.

Secondly, it rejects the existence of God. All right, so if a doctrine at work inside of our world right now rejects the existence of God, if I'm a follower of Jesus Christ and I believe that God exists, I immediately have red flags going up. There's something wrong with this if the first place we go is God does not exist, so immediately the Christian's going to have to think something is deeply wrong about these ideas. The ideas at play inside of our world around us right now, it rejects the morality of the Bible and the church. This is not just implicit; this is explicit. Both of those guys I mentioned explicitly in their writing denied the doctrine of the church. Other philosophers and powerful people in this vein have done exactly the same thing. Karl Marx called it the "opiate of the masses." You are drugged and you are in a daze until you are released from the church and from your religion. Friedrich Nietzsche called it "slave morality" if you are a Christian and you follow Jesus Christ. And on and on and on the story goes. It openly rejects the word of God, the morality, the ideas of the Bible and of the church.

So as a result, it constructs its own moral system in direct contradiction to Scripture and to God's design. So this is what you have to do: you have to actually construct a new moral system because you've got to gather people around you. You've got to figure out how to point them all in the same direction, control them. And so you've got to build your own doctrine. You've rejected God, you've rejected the law of Scripture, so now you're going to build a moral system that is in direct opposition to the law of God, direct opposition to the law of God and His designs.

Moving on, it treats Christians and the church as an obstacle to their political utopian goals. It openly does this. One of the other significant Marxist-communist thinkers, most people don't know his name, but nonetheless he became very influential in the 20th century. He was an Italian communist in the 1920s, Antonio Gramsci. He literally said, quote, "Socialism is the religion that must replace Christianity." The religion that must replace Christianity. So it treats Christians and the church as an obstacle. We have to silence it, we have to get rid of it, we have to overcome it. This is one of the reasons why in openly communist societies, the church is the first thing that has to be silenced. This is why we pray for the persecuted church very often inside of socialist and communist societies, because this is just the game plan. This is just how it works.

It purposely creates divisions of oppressed versus oppressor. This is the lens that is used in this ideology to see every relationship, and it is fundamentally the only lens that is used to see these relationships. And when you create this dynamic of oppressed versus oppressor, the hate and the violence that come from this ideology, they're not bugs, they're not mistakes, they are features of the system. From the very beginning, the oppressed, in order for them to put their lives together, they have to rise up against their oppressor. And so now the magic wand is, we're just going to name a group of people who are your oppressors and we're going to stoke that division. Stoke anger, encourage violence, blame the victim, rinse and repeat, right?

And so it makes this colossal error. And if you see this, if you know this, friends, this is sometimes what the kids call a "life hack." You're going to see this everywhere and you're going to understand how this works. This ideology makes a colossal error, but it is one of its most powerful doctrines: that disagreement equals hate. That disagreement equals hate. Now, first of all, as followers of Jesus Christ, we have to be careful to not fall into that. That if we disagree with someone, we treat them with less dignity than they deserve, we treat them as if we hate them. We can't make that mistake. But this is one of the most powerful doctrines inside of this system: that if you disagree with me, you hate me. Now this is a natural outcome of the very first thing that we said. If you deny the existence of God, you see God is the source of all truth, truth in creation, truth intellectually, truth morally. He is also the source of all meaning and purpose inside of the human life. But if you eliminate God, in the end, the only source of meaning and purpose in our lives is me. It is what I think, it is what I feel, it is what I've decided for whatever sets of reasons. So if you disagree with any of that inside of me, you're not disagreeing with an idea and we can talk about transcendent or objective ideas, you are disagreeing with the very core of who I am and you must hate me. I think all of us in the room feel that. We understand that. It is a profound mistake, but it is a powerful doctrine in this system.

This system also enslaves individuals by convincing them that they are perpetual victims. And because they are perpetual victims, the way this ideology works, it convinces many of them that they are due their ounce of flesh. It's the only way to get out of being a victim: to take something else away, to do something to somebody else. Darkness hates the light, so now we've got to do something about it. If someone can be convinced that I am perpetually a victim of a system that I cannot do anything about, there is no God, there is no hope, there is only me, there is only oppression, I'm owed my ounce of flesh.

And as we've watched the last 48 hours, 72 hours unfold, we continue to learn that this ideology revels in the shedding of blood. Literally revels in the shedding of blood. It wasn't seconds after the news that Charlie Kirk had actually died that my social media feeds and your social media feeds, and some of the news and the headlines that you might see online, they were full of joy. They were full of people saying that this is exactly what was supposed to happen to him. This ideology, and I don't care where you stand on the political spectrum, understand this: this ideology revels in the shedding of blood. Stoke anger, create violence, blame the victim. Stoke anger, create violence, blame the victim.

Paul told us about this. Heather reminded me of this passage of Scripture. We actually went through this, I don't know, it was two or three weeks ago in Romans chapter 1. In Romans chapter 1, as Paul is talking about what happens in the human heart when we deny the law of God, here's the last thing, the last set of things he kind of crams in at the end of that thought. In Romans chapter 1, beginning in verse 28 to the end of the chapter, he says this: "And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." It's almost as if the word of God was written by God. It was almost as if God understands how this stuff works.

We're watching it unfold. We're watching it unfold. And friends, if I can be so bold this morning, Christians can have nothing to do with that ideology. Nothing to do with that ideology except to defeat that ideology and to save souls that are burning in the fires of it. That's what Christians have to do with this ideology. Souls need to be saved and these ideas need to be defeated.

I love one of the things that one of my favorite authors, he's a Christian philosopher and writer in discipleship issues, Dallas Willard, he once said this in a lecture. He said, "When the mind goes wrong, the will is enslaved." When the mind goes wrong, the will is enslaved. So we see two kingdoms in conflict. And it's what Paul describes to us there in verse 2. There's no condemnation, you have been forgiven and now you've actually been given a new kingdom. A new place to live, a new way in which to live, and it is the law of the Spirit of life. You used to belong to a different kingdom, the law of sin and death, but God has brought you into something else because of Jesus Christ and now the fulfillment of His Holy Spirit inside of your life. And there are two kingdoms at play in this world right now: the law of the Spirit of life and the law of sin and death. And all of these things that we just described, they have their power in this culture. But take courage, Christian, you belong to a risen and triumphant savior and Lord Jesus Christ. When He rose from the grave, yes, when He rose from the grave, He defeated all of that.

And now there is the story of salvation for whoever believes. And God's done this, His Son has done this because He loves the world. Because He loves the world. That's the kingdom that we belong to now. It is the triumphant kingdom. It is the kingdom that bears witness to Jesus Christ. He told His disciples before His ascension that all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. I have the final say over everything. Now, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go into all of the world and I want you to make disciples. They need to repent and believe in me, but then I want you to teach them everything that I have taught you to do. Friends, that's the law of the Spirit of life: living according to the commands of Jesus Christ.

Then I want you to baptize them. This is our public proclamation of faith. We do this as the body of Christ to celebrate a brand new life. Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And then Jesus said, and I'll see you sometime later. That's not what He said. And I will be with you even until the end of the age. He will come back and He will put everything in order. So we now, we go into the world to make disciples. We are His ambassadors of the life that He has made possible and that He gives to those who believe. We are His, and I love this phrase more and more, we are His joyful warriors. We are those who bear witness to the world of the life that has been given to us.

The pastor John MacArthur, he reflected on this kind of thought this way once. He said, "You have a message that is the truth, the only hope of the world. And they're not going to like you for it, which only raises the stakes of the commitment. Make your life count for the gospel." Make your life count for the gospel. Christian witness is the courage, it is the assurance, it is the joy of the person who knows that they have been set free and that Christ can set you free too. This is our witness. It is the understanding that the law of sin and death is not always going to like the news about the Spirit of life, but we want our neighbor to know it anyway. We want the world to know it anyway. It is our responsibility to let the world know about Jesus Christ. And friends, the Christian has truth and the King of all creation with them until the end of the age. Let's pray.