Romans 6:14–18Scripture
We're almost to the end of chapter 6. Next week is our last week in this chapter, and then we move on to chapter 7. Chapter 7 is going to be like running 15 miles when you haven't run since high school and you're over 40, running 15 miles uphill in five feet of snow with no snowshoes and animals trying to eat you while you climb it up the hill, run up the hill. That's what it's going to really honestly... That's a very difficult text, and honestly we can get lost in chapter 7. So I think it is important for you to understand that chapter 6 really does set the groundwork for chapter 7. I'll say this: if you're lost in chapter 6, you're really going to be lost in chapter 7. And when we move on to chapter 7 in a few weeks, one of the things that I want you to understand is, do not think that Paul has changed his mind regarding the things he said in 1 through 6.
And so because we don't want to lose the idea that Paul has a cohesive flow of thought, that he isn't changing his mind, he's not undoing what he just said in the previous chapter, then it's very important for us to understand what the chapter says, right? So we'll look this morning, and I feel like he is almost, as he nears the end of chapter 6, I feel like he's almost kind of repeating what he's been saying for a few chapters here. We're looking at Romans 6, we'll start with verse 14. I always back up one verse because I think it helps lay context a little bit to the next flow of thought, but we're going to look at 14 through 18. Verse 14: For sin will have no dominion over you. Of course, he's talking about
Introduction
Believers, those that by grace through faith have been saved, right? And so this is the promise, this should really encourage our hearts this morning: for sin will have no dominion over you. I don't know about you, but that's encouraging to me, that it is not, hey, I hope sin doesn't have dominion over you when you become a believer. Are you really going to struggle with sin trying to take over and rule and dominate your life? He doesn't say that.
You're going to constantly struggle day in and day out once you become a believer, and you're never really going to be free from the bondage of sin. He doesn't say that, which these are all ideas that we think because we would rather trust our life experiences over his Word.
He's clear: For sin will have no dominion over you, since you're not under the law but under grace. That's the important part.
The only way sin has no dominion over you is if you're not under the law but you're under grace.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 3:12
Verse 15: What then? And he's talking, basically defending an argument that had come to him in the midst of him preaching from place to place. What then? Are we to sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves. That's what it says slaves, of righteousness. Slaves of righteousness.
Listen, we're saved by grace, not by works. That's good news, right? Because if it is meritorious, if I have to merit the gift of salvation, I'm in trouble, right? I can't even use the rag my wife tells me to use in the kitchen. If I have to do everything God says to the T without fail, I'm doomed, right? I'm really in some serious trouble. And today, honestly, I want to talk, I'm
Point 1Transcendentalism has shaped the American church
Going to just hit pause for a second, and I want to talk about something that is, oh man, the American church really has been shaped by this idea of evangelism and decisions to such a degree. In fact, in the greater evangelical church in America specifically, and we know that we've sent missionaries to different parts of the world, but I would say from the mid-1800s, and we're going to talk about that a little bit, during the Enlightenment period, birthed out of some of the enlightenment period is a word called transcendentalism, right? Big word, you could chew on it forever. This idea and thought, what I would say has not affected but has infected the church in America. It was here that concept, the idea behind that word, and I'm going to explain it in just a minute, all of the philosophy behind the word was birthed right here in America. We are the jumping-off place of this kind of thinking. And just so you know, transcendental thought and the philosophy of all of that affects how we interpret the Bible, and really most of all Christendom from the beginning, from the first century all the way really up until that point, really adopted grace. We're saved by grace alone through faith alone. Faith is a gift that no man can boast, you can't earn it, he gives it. This idea of the sovereignty of God, this idea that he predestines the elect to be won. All of these things, these terms that are used in the Bible, transcendental thought rejected that and began to preach the gospel that was not necessarily the gospel. And so what you need to understand is that as you read Romans, we have been so inundated in this transcendental thinking that it begins to affect and confuse our thought process when we hear the Word. We begin to read Romans and war and battle with wanting to go to work to either requalify us that we might be justified, or that we might keep our salvation by the things that we do, and it just causes some massive problems with interpretation, like massive problems. We have talked so much about free will and our choice and our decision and our authority and our sovereign rule, that we do not really serve a king, we are a king and he is our servant, and we ask him, and if we pray a certain way he will do what we please.
But you're not the king of your life. You don't sit on the throne of your life, God does, whether you invite him to or not.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 8:18
He is King of kings, and this wars against us in America. It is problematic.
But regardless of what you think, regardless of what thought you've been shaped in, we are saved by grace alone through faith alone, and it is a gift.
No matter how hard you work to try to earn it, your work will never do it.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 8:45
You want to know what your profession of faith in Jesus Christ is worth? Listen to me today: nothing.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 8:58
If that concerns you, or if I say that and the hair stands up on the back of your neck and you get troubled by that, if you're wondering, where is he going, is he taking us to Crazy Town? I want you to know that there are people who have large professions who stand before the Lord,
Point 2A profession of faith without obedience is empty
And this is the scene. Everybody turn their Bibles to Matthew 7:21–23. I'll give you a moment. I want you to read along with me. While you're looking, I'll just repeat what I said. You want to know what your profession of faith in Jesus Christ is worth? It's worth absolutely nothing. Here's how Matthew 7 puts it: Not everyone who says to me, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. Well, but I declared him as Lord, I profess him as my Lord, I believe in him. So does the devil. But the one, so listen to who, listen, who is saved? But the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
Notice here, this is what Paul's talking about. Now some of you are like, Shawn, so you're trying to say you work, then? Right? No. This is what Paul's been saying for two chapters, that living righteous lives, that is evidence that you have faith.
Living righteous lives does not gain your faith, it does not save you, it is evidence of what has already happened to you through grace by God, as a gift.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 11:14
So in other words, there are people in Matthew here who will stand before the Lord and he will say to them, I don't know you. They're like, but what about my profession? Don't you know when I was five I prayed a prayer? Don't you know I went to a high school camp when I was a senior and I... And they asked me who wishes to be saved and I came down to the front and they said, repeat this prayer after me, and I repeated it word for word, and I was excited about it. That's my profession. Doesn't that mean anything to you, God? And God goes, no, it doesn't.
It doesn't mean anything to me, because here's how I know if what you did at camp, when you came down to the front and you prayed a prayer and you did that, if that was genuine, here's how I know if it was genuine: you do the will of my Father in heaven.
And then so here's their retort, here's the retort, verse 22: On that day many will say to me, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, you have to do the will of your Father who's in heaven. And then they go, yeah, but I prophesied in your name, and then the next thing is, I cast out demons in your name, and I did many mighty works in your name. And then will I declare to them, I never knew you.
Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. Now here's what's so crazy. So they have a profession, and they did many mighty works in the name of God, but God cast them off into eternal damnation. How much does this imagery look like the church in America? I did this for God, I do this for God, I did that for God, and I prayed a prayer and repeated after the pastor, so I must be saved. Listen, there are people who have that way that think that way, that Matthew says that's not evidence of salvation.
Notice there are two works that can be done. There's mighty works that can be done in the name of Christ that have not been assigned to you, because when you are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, that no man can boast, you are then given good works that he prepared in advance for you to do.
So there's a difference between you doing works you want to do and you doing works that God has planned for you to do. One comes by his power and through his design, the other comes from your flesh, and works from the flesh, not from the Spirit side of you that has been redeemed, but works from the flesh are filthy rags before the Lord, no matter the intent of the heart. And so what he's saying, Paul has been saying over and over again, is you are only justified by the gift I give and the power I give and the releasing you from sin that had bondage over you, and when I do this you will live righteous lives before me. That's the promise. So we know that not everyone who professes to be Christian will enter the kingdom. Then how do we know when someone is entering into the kingdom? How do we know when we specifically will enter into the kingdom? And God says it's easy: the one who does the will of my Father. Evangelism in America is all about decisions. You make a decision today.
Salvation has come down to a man in the power of his own will making a decision for Christ. Now let me just pause here for a second.
Where does this come from? Because it doesn't come from the Bible. It isn't in there.
God takes people, he overshadows people, he knocks people off their mules, he gives them a sight, he blinds people and makes them go mute so he can tell the gospel to them and then reopens their eyes and their mouth, because he doesn't want them to talk while he's trying to tell them the gospel.
God is sovereign and he saves who he wills. He's the boss.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 16:24
In a world where everybody starts a company so they could be a CEO of something and be in charge of something, some people will start a company, they don't even know what they're getting into, they just don't want to be bossed around, so they start a company and they're in more misery in the company that they started than being in submission to the boss that they thought they didn't like. We want to move away from authority, so when we talk about God we put him in a position that is either equal to us or is below us. Our relationship with him is controlling because we got some control problems.
But God reigns. God's the king, and the King does what he pleases.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 17:17
So this Great Awakening, and I want you to write that down, and I want you to go do some research this week on the Great Awakening. I do, I think it's important. I'm only going to give you a minute of this. I went to a couple different sites here's the most basic breakdown of the Great Awakening: Camp meetings began to spread the world. It said online that people could bring about their own salvation, a direct contradiction to what had been commonly adopted by churches worldwide prior, worldwide. This whole saving yourself thing was not even on the table until the Great Awakenings.
The sovereignty of God wasn't in question until the Great Awakenings. What is our will and what is God's will and how do they work together wasn't a problem in conversation until the Great Awakenings, alongside this religious fervor.
Transcendentalists advocated a more direct knowledge of... Now listen to the New Age sound in this, right? Transcendentalists advocated a more direct knowledge of the self and an emphasis on hyper-individualism. Does that sound like the gospel? Neither does it sound like it to me either. Transcendentalism is one of the first philosophical currents that emerged in the United States following the Great awakening. So now I talked about the Great Awakening and I've talked about the transcendental movement that birthed out of it in America during the Great Awakening. That's important for you to understand. So there's two terms: Great Awakening, second term, transcendentalism, which was birthed out of the Great Awakening. It is therefore a key early in the early point in the history of what is now referred to as American philosophy. So what they did, in other words, is they took transcendentalism, they saw that was birthed out of the Great Awakening, and they said, this is the Americans' philosophy of God and the things of God. This American philosophy emphasized,
Point 3Subjective intuition replaces the authority of Scripture
Listen to this, subjective intuition. Come on now, subjective intuition. In other words, each individual gets to determine what they feel about God, what they think about God, outside of the Bible, the church fathers, those who had gone before that had written on the Lord, any theological teacher. I stand in isolation and through my intuition I will encounter God and decide who he is. It's just crazy, and honestly in your conversation, whether in a small group or church or around a dinner table, you will hear this stuff. I mean, have a conversation about prayer, if you will, and see how much intuition, subjective intuition, comes into that conversation, where Christianity and the church and ministry and Bible study and all of those things is just, you know, it's just one big, you know, response, we respond and think it's truth when we feel something or we think, we, I mean, I really think this is right, so it must be right.
This whole idea of thinking, this subjective intuition, is how we got my truth and your truth. It's how, it's subjective, so I get to determine what my truth is and my truth is the truth. There cannot be then, in transcendentalist thought, there cannot be any absolute truth, because it's dependent on the individual to determine that subjectively through feelings. Through feelings. How much of our worship services have been about feelings?
Am I against feelings? No. Actually, I went to see a movie last night, and at the very end of the movie, there was this whole movie of this father and daughter, who, the mother had died and they were wanting to bring her back to life, and there was a friend that was a woman that from the very time that the daughter was a newborn she was there, that this woman was her mother, not her mother, not her mother but was her mother. They were looking for a way to bring her back to life. In the very end there's this imagery of her growing up with this woman who was not her mother, that picture stirred in my heart. I'm still a man, I'm still tough, but I was, you know that feeling, men, when you're in a movie and you're like, and you go like this, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it, don't, no tears, no, don't, don't do it, oh shoot, and they just, yeah, I mean, you just get teary-eyed. Feelings, I think feelings are okay as long as they're birthed with a thought.
But what we have done in the church is we say, hey, turn off your brain and let your feelings guide you.
Feelings became king, intuition became king.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 23:42
And you know how we use intuition, you know how we use intuition. You know how we know whether, like, we decide and we discern through intuition what is right by how we feel.
How many of you really know, because you came from death to life, from sin to righteousness, how many of you know you really can't trust your feelings just a whole lot? So any faith built on intuition and feelings is not the faith of the Bible. Feelings have their place, it just can't be king. So this revivalism, this Great Awakening that was through multiple revivals and people coming to altars and all of this stuff, I'm not against people coming to the Lord. I'm just saying, give me a Sunday two months from now to pack this house out four times and let's see how many people we can get to respond, and then two years from now. Because I can get a lot to respond, because if you talk the right way and you do the music the right way and you do the lighting the right way and your cadence is the right way and you inspire people the right way and you lean into them and make them feel they're special the right way.
People will stand up and come to the altar in droves, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're saved.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 25:10
So we've capitalized on transcendental ideas. Pastors, so they can feel effective, have abused transcendental thought that came from the Great Awakening so they can lay their head down at night and feel good about their service to the Lord, when in all actuality we're leading people into chasms of nothingness, emptiness, and it's a problem.
Subjective intuition over objective empiricism. You look it up, its adherents believed that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past masters. Matter of fact, they did not want to hear from the past masters, they wanted to sit in a closet all by themselves and intuit themselves into revelation.
Sound familiar? It arose as a reaction to protest the general state of intellectualism and spirituality, a spiritual movement that objects to... Spirituality. It's crazy. Just do some research and then think about the church in America. Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States.
A core belief in this inherent good, a core belief of this idea is that everyone is inherently good. Does that sound familiar?
Everyone is good. It went counter to everyone is depraved, and they began to teach that everyone actually is inherently good. The reason for this shift from all of Christendom saying we are absolutely depraved to us being inherently good came from hyper-individualist ideas, where we wanted to function alone and free will, because you can't make a stand for free will if you're depraved, because how would you choose to do good? So inherently they went against everything it says in the Bible, and it's a lot, that we're dead, that we're inherently not good, that we're born with iniquity, a bent towards sinning.
It went and rejected that. All of Christendom accepted that, it rejected that and said we're good, so that we could as an individual choose and have the free will to do what we please. Because you can't build a theology on free will if you're actually bad, because you'll choose to do bad and who will come to God?
This is what we war against. When we read the Bible, we read the Bible, it says one thing, but we're going, wait a minute, I think another thing. Yeah, you do.
And this is why, and you need to know about it. Sorry, it's a history lesson, sorry, but you need to know where your thoughts come from. We've been shaped by this stuff. So we're inherently good people and we inherently have, listen, they say a good nature, and while society has corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly self-reliant and independent from all things.
What about God? Transcendentalists saw divine experiences as inherent and necessary in everyday life, rather than believing in a distant heaven where the miraculous is finalized. So they began to chase experiences. Remember the Experiencing God movement, which happened when I was in college? I need an experience, and I just don't need one experience, I need one every day. We chase experiences then in church and at home, and our faith is dependent on it. We cannot go anywhere unless the gas of our faith is an experience, we are fueled by it, and when we don't have it we become apathetic, lazy, sit down, and we wait for it to happen. Here's a couple other things that transcendentalism brought: transcendentalism declared meaning in everything, even in things that didn't have meaning. Sound familiar? Transcendentalists declared everyone had the power to transcend the apparent confusion and chaos of the world.
All on earth... Let me just stop there. I wasn't going to stop there, because you're like, well, isn't that a good thing, that we transcend the chaos of the world? Some people are in different parts of the world, not in America, are put in tires and lit on fire and burned alive because they believe in Christ. How are they transcending the chaos of that situation? Are you with me today? People are laying their life down because they won't hand over their Bible, heads are being cut off because they won't renounce Christ. How are they transcending that troubling situation? Though our situations are nothing like that, we have some problems of our own in America, amen. We have problems of our own, I wouldn't belittle them, they're not those problems, but we have problems too. How many of you know you ain't transcending? They believed that if you didn't transcend, you weren't saved. If you didn't get that healing, you must not have faith. Are you with me?
And it's a problem, because as far as it depends on you're doomed, but as far as it depends on God, great.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 32:24
All on earth have this, they say this, and this is where you hear this from, this comes from transcendental thought: all on earth have a divine spark in them. This is New Age. Transcendentalists valued the individual over society to the degree that if it helped the individual, it was worth forsaking how it would affect the society, that all choices were made based on what the individual wanted. This is where things like the things we're seeing online unfold before us in America, that's where that came from. The church should take credit for some of the debauchery going on in the world, because we've made it about us in the church first. Are you with me today?
And because it's about me and not about society, it's about me and not about my marriage partner, my marriage, it's me and not my kids, we make all kinds of choices that hurt those around us because it's really more important, I'm more important than society. That's how people can abort babies because I want to go to college, and it doesn't matter how this affects society or doesn't affect society, doesn't matter how it affects my partner, it doesn't matter how this affects anyone, it's about me. Transcendentalists declared one must follow intuition and not conform to contrary social decrees, even inside the church. Transcendentalists believed people are at their best when they are truly self-reliant and completely independent.
Transcendentalism was not born as this one blew my mind, this just, I did not know this blew my mind. How many of you know about what a universalist is? Universalism, the basically anybody can do whatever they want and everybody's going to heaven, everybody eventually will be one in the end and go to heaven. God will save everyone through Christ Jesus in the end, no one will go to hell, everyone will go to heaven. This is what Paul is arguing in Romans, that you can't stand under grace, do whatever you want, because if you do whatever you want you haven't been touched by grace. Universalists counter that which is explicitly written in the Bible and say, actually, God so loved the world that he'll save the whole world, although that's not what it says, so they create that idea. Listen to this: so now that you know kind of what universalism is, or Unitarianism is, transcendentalism was not born as a counter-movement to that but rather a parallel one.
Transcendentalists loosed themselves from the long-held view of predestination and the sovereignty of God, and it replaces those beliefs with the idea of free will, free conscience. It swept through America in the mid-1800s and still influences the greater evangelical world because of America today.
Sound familiar? So we have a decision to make when we read his Word, that we either put our faith and our trust in the words that fly off the page or we formulate what pleases us and makes us comfortable based on our intuition. It's one or the other.
But ladies and gentlemen, the Bible is not confusing. You are justified by grace, not by the law.
And the reality is some seek to be justified by the law due to fear of abusing grace. That's the wrong direction as well.
Some people will say, you know, here's a word that people hate, once saved, always saved. But people hate that, and so because they hate that as an individual, and because their intuition doesn't allow them to feel comfortable with it, then they formulate an idea that is kind of, when we get into Romans and he says, you know, I gave the law that sin may abound, we learned that in chapter 5, I gave the law that sin may abound more, that grace would be more sweet. And so if the law is given and sin abounds more, then how much more do we need grace?
But some people create an argument of, oh, so you're saying once saved, always saved, so if I'm under grace I can do whatever I want? And Paul says, no, absolutely not.
If you're saved and you're under grace, you will not do whatever you want, because you're a slave of Christ and you're a slave to righteousness. He defends the argument, and it's almost as if Paul's saying, I know you don't like the whole once saved, always saved, in the grace thing, and when I say you're under grace, but you don't get to live, because you're trying to almost create boundaries and bumpers to protect people from doing whatever they want. See, you don't get to control people, you just have to preach the truth, and when they hear the truth they respond to the truth, and that truth sets them free. You don't set them free by saying a little bit to the left, a little bit more to the right, don't go over there. God captures hearts and he leads through his Spirit.
His Spirit leads. Galatians 5:4 says, you have become estranged from Christ, you who attempt to be justified by the law; you have fallen from grace.
Listen, Old Testament story real quick. In the Old Testament, God's presence would rest in the Holy of Holies. They had the outer court, the inner court, and the Holy of Holies. This was a section of tent upon tent, and in the very middle was a small tent where the priest would go in, offer sacrifices, and there was in this place where the presence of God would literally reside, in smoke and fire and in light, and it would rest in the midst of this thing that was built by the nation of Israel. It was called the mercy seat. It is a symbol of what God has for us, and his presence rests there. It was literally a box, it was a rectangular box, it had rings on the side and poles that went through the rings so that they could carry it. No one wants to touch it, if they touched it they died. And on this were these cherubim, beautiful angelic creatures that had wings, and they were standing there with their wings outstretched and touching at the tip. Below this is where God's presence would reside, and on the bottom, or the top of the box and below the cherubim, was a velvet seat which was called the seat, the mercy seat. Inside of this box then were three items: one, the staff; two, manna. I can't imagine what that was like, because if you pick up manna and you keep it for longer in the day it gets all worms in it, so that was probably, you know, yeah, so that's in there. And then the tablets, the Ten Commandments that were given to Moses. These three things were in there.
They symbolize and remind us of being freed from bondage, they remind the people of being freed from bondage. So when he says that if we hope to be justified by the law, which is covered by the mercy seat, are you with me, that's the picture we're reading in Romans 6, that you fall. So if you go from mercy and you turn and present yourself to hope to be justified by the law, you then fall from the mercy and grace to the law, and you hope to be justified by that law, that's a fall from the mercy to the tablets below. So it's symbolic, if you will.
The writer then of Galatians is trying to help us understand why, if the law was covered by the mercy of God, why then would you turn to be justified by the law? Why would you do that? I want to encourage you as we leave
Point 4Sin grows exponentially, but so does righteousness
With this thought: sin grows in our world exponentially.
You agree? Sin does not grow in small steps, it grows by doubling. I don't even know that the sin we saw in the world when we were 18, the sin we see now, we see exponential increase and growth and acceptance of sin in our society today. Would you agree with me? It's concerning, and because we see that, then much of our conversation as we work through Romans talks about, yeah, but what of this sin? And although at the very beginning of the text, although it starts with, in verse 14, for sin will have no dominion over you, we look out in a world where sin is exponentially growing and doubling day by day, and that promise is lost on us as individuals, but it doesn't make it any less so. This is why we don't live by sight, but we live by faith, because we are people of faith. And although we see sin growing exponentially, we have a promise we can hold on to: sin, although growing exponentially, has no power over my life, it has no dominion over my life. Good news, right? I read this one recently.
I read this recently, there was a, to explain exponential growth, I'll go ahead and read this Scripture and then I'm going to tell this story. Let's look back at Romans, what we did in verse 16: Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
But here's the promise: if sin can grow exponentially, then so can righteousness.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 45:05
Don't miss this promise, because you are inundated with sin, surrounded by it, in the very presence of it everywhere you tread. Thanks be to God that you were once slaves to that.
What's growing exponentially now? You have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and having been set free from sin, you are now slaves to righteousness.
If sin rules your life and grew day by day, then, ladies and gentlemen, when righteousness rules your life, it will grow day by day. It's called sanctification.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 45:42
So here it is, and I'm closing. How many of you have ever seen the Wembley Stadium? It's big. Let's just say the Chiefs stadium. Five. Good. Okay, great.
I'm sure more of you have seen it. Have you? No, really, have you? Only five of you seen the Chiefs stadium? Okay, I was just making sure. It's okay, you don't have to answer, I was just making sure. That was weird, I actually haven't been there. I've been to the Royals stadium, but I haven't been to the Chiefs stadium, so maybe I have to do that, right? The Wembley Stadium is huge. It's huge. Now let's just say that it's all concrete, there's no AstroTurf where water can absorb down into the ground, no drainage system, it's just solid concrete in this huge stadium. Here's what exponential growth does, it's crazy, this is what it does with your money for retirement as well. But it's just really crazy when you think about it in this term. So it gives this idea of the Wembley Stadium, and if you take a dropper, how many of you have ever used those, the droppers to put, like, one drop in your eye, just a dropper, if you took a dropper and you had never-ending water, and every minute you did, one for the first minute you did one drop of water, and the second minute you doubled it's exponential growth, you doubled it, two drops of water, and the third minute you did four drops of water, and the fifth minute you did eight drops of water, how long would it take to fill up the entire Wembley Stadium? Here's what I read, and then they did the math.
I mean, I just went like this because I had no clue what the heck they were talking about, but they showed the math on this. It would take 44 minutes to fill up the whole stadium. That's right. That's crazy, right?
That's like sin, right? Think about the last ten years and what sin is, where it is common, how much we accept sinful lifestyles and sin like that today. Now think a year from now, think in terms of exponential growth, it ends up being like this. And God looked to and fro through the whole land and saw only one man who was righteous, and so he told Noah, build an ark, and Noah and his whole household, just know this, people in his household weren't righteous but were saved because of their connection to Noah. Sounds like Christ, right?
The whole earth was so taken over by sin that God had to destroy it. Exponential growth. Think of our world now, think in terms of exponential growth, and think about what God does when no one he can find is righteous. He shows back up again, and he doesn't destroy it with a flood.
The Bible is pretty clear on the way that he destroys the earth and rebuilds it, but you have to do that in your own study time. But I said all that to say this is important: if sin exponentially grows in a world like that, then how much more does righteousness grow in the life of a believer? So when we talk about the gospel, when I combat, you know, transcendentalist thought, when I try to move us out of this individualized, emotion-driving, feeling-driving thing which only values me, and I'm calling us out of that, I'm calling you towards Christ, because how can you be an individual and value the one that will save you if all you need is self-reliance?
Point 5We need a Savior, not self-reliance
We need a Savior, and in a world where everything is so individualized and I have to be in control and I can't submit my life to anybody, listen, we have a problem in America.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 50:41
And let me tell you, sin is dealt with, you know how sin is dealt with? Light casts out darkness.
And so if you get the gospel wrong, if you get the gospel wrong, then you won't walk in righteousness.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 51:07
You'll do a bunch of stuff for God, you'll serve at the church for God, but if you don't understand the gospel, you'll look like a Christian and you'll have a profession of a Christian, and you'll profess that you're a Christian to God and you'll talk about the works you did, but if you get the gospel wrong, he'll say, depart from me.
And I'm afraid today we have people in churches across America and the world who've gotten the gospel wrong, and they sit in the church and they don't know, and they think they're safe, and one day they hope that their profession and the prayer they repeated will be their saving grace, and God is going to say to them, how in your life did righteousness exponentially grow? Because that's evidence of whether what you profess is either true or false. So today, for two reasons: one, it is evidence of our salvation. Two, the world needs a light in the midst of darkness, and true believers are that light. It is not okay for us to get this wrong.
It is not okay to formulate a way of thought that makes us comfortable. We must get this right.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 52:35
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