A heart that desires to hold God at a distance would prefer a contractional relationship with Him where a person can earn approval and acceptance from God; a situation where God owes them something as a payment for their good deeds and behavior. But grace, something given without merit, something extended in the place of deserved judgment takes a claim upon us… it gives birth to a gratitude that binds us to the one who loved us in our sins and our brokenness. And that kind of intimacy and that kind of claim upon our hearts is resisted by the sinful and independent instinct of our flesh.

Does Saving Faith include within it a surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ?

So here is my situation. Sin is no longer in my spirit. I am changed. I am a new man. Christ lives in me. And where the Lord Jesus lives… it is holy… it is pure. But sin is still is at play in my flesh and I am more aware of it than ever. I hate it. It is not what I want. But to often it is what I find myself doing. What can I do? What is the next step? What do I do when sin comes upon my flesh? Comes at me?

We have redeemed spirits in complete fellowship with the living God and nothing can separate us from that love. And yet, and this is the point of our message today, we are not fully redeemed. We are redeemed spirits but our bodies… not so much. "We are redeemed spirits living in unredeemed bodies." Consider now what this means for living a faithful life to the glory of God.

What is Paul's or the Bible's view of the human being as to their essence? What lies at the foundation of our being? When Paul declares that we have been baptized into Christ and into His death; when stating that we were buried with Christ so that we may walk now in newness of life; when he says we have been united or planted together with Christ in the likeness of His death so that we may be in the likeness of His resurrection; when he says that our old man was crucified; that we have died to sin, that we are free from sin, that we are to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord… We must ask the question who or what of ourselves is Paul addressing? Now this may sound like an unnecessary philosophical question but actually it is quite important, and I hope you see that the answer to this question will be a very practical thing for us to know and find out.

How can it be said that Christ died to sin once for all. In what way did the sinless Savior die to sin.

Jesus didn't merely die on the cross for what you had done in committing sins. He also died for what you were and had become as a sinner. He didn't just die to take away your sins. He died to take away the sinner and replace him or her with a saint. And if you have been born again you are not the sinner you once were. You instead are a holy one on the way to a glorious future. Because this is so, for the true believer, your answer to sin and its temptations is not in trying harder, or in developing a different frame of mind or attitude towards sin. At the foundation is it embracing what you have become through Jesus Christ. The answer to sinning for the Christian is found in the regenerating work of Jesus Christ where the Christian has become a whole new person in Christ.

The Christian's surprising attitude of aloofness towards sin considered.

Or the message could be entitled why you should not be a universalist and why consider being a pre-millennialist.

It is for the purpose of bringing us to that faith, that belief, that saving faith in the finished work and perfect work of Jesus Christ, that Paul says that the law entered. It is there in verse 20. Let's consider this more this morning role of the law in our salvation. Romans 5:20 Moreover, the law entered that the offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more...