London Baptist Confession Ch 6

All right, I've done asked this before, and maybe you remember, maybe you don't. Which is the correct pronunciation of the capital of Kentucky? Is it Louiseville, Louisville, or Louisville? It's Frankfurt.

Now, that's a dumb old joke that really illustrates something very helpful as we begin our time tonight, we're going to talk about sin. We're going to talk only about sin. But the thing you need to know when we talk about sin is everything we're saying in the safe confines of this here church and in our context as we go through the London Baptist Confession of faith of 1689 is absolutely foreign to people outside of Christianity. There's not. There's almost no subject that has more distance or disparity between what we think as Christians and what the world that doesn't believe in the Bible think than the subject of sin.

Even the nature of God is probably closer in people's minds because at least people, unbelievers, might think of a loving God. Right? That's somewhat related to our faith. But sin, the subject of sin, is so far different from people outside of Christianity and what they think compared with people inside Christianity. Have you ever met the person that says, I'm a good person.

I've never killed anyone. Do you know how many times I've heard that in my Christian experience? Like, that is your standard. So anybody that doesn't kill anybody is a good person. Well, except for Hitler, right?

He's a bad person. But everybody else are basically good. These people say things like that a lot. They will say things like, they only make mistakes. They don't actually sin.

They're not sinful. They're dysfunctional. Right? They have mental illness. They're not sin.

They have mental illness. There's all kinds of things that people do to do anything other than say, I am a filthy, rotten sinner. Now, you might think that it's fun for a preacher to call people sinful, and it probably is a little bit. It probably is fun to get to say things out loud as a preacher that are strong like that. But I do want to make sure we're clear why it's important.

It isn't. It is primarily important because God says what he says about it. And God defines the reality of these things. Right? God decides what is and what isn't true.

But also there's something that happens if you don't think of yourself as all that bad. Then you won't need a savior that is all that good if you are a good person. To put it bluntly, Jesus died For nothing. God allowed his son to be killed. Commanded his son to be killed.

Even if you're a good person, you don't need a savior. So either God is doing something very strange by letting us all be very good people and letting his son go to the cross, or the truth is, we're not all that good. In fact, you're going to find out we are no good according to the word of God. So don't be upset if you get caught hearing this language. I always remember the story.

It's vivid in my mind. You know, I don't know about you, but I remember being an unbeliever. I say this often. I remember being an atheist. I remember thinking like an unbeliever.

I remember it vividly. And so, because I remember that, and I also happen to be a person that's pretty empathetic and thinks of other people and what they're going through. Those two things combined make me pretty adept at recognizing what people might be thinking in a given situation. So this story happened years ago at MJC with someone. I would name them and Becky would know who they are, but I'll just keep it to myself.

It was an assistant to my dad, who at the time was the main manager over all of the facilities and operations. His assistant went to a funeral over the weekend, and then she came in on Monday morning, and she was really upset with the preacher at that funeral. Okay. She was very upset what he said. And she began to tell me, obviously at the time I was a Christian.

She began to tell me why the funeral was bad. And it was because the preacher said it was the person who died. It was because they were sinful that they died. And that was so offensive to her. And I didn't let her get away with it.

I carefully asked, so tell me exactly what did he say? And she couldn't reiterate it. She couldn't. She couldn't express to me what was said at that funeral. And I said, could it have been that he said something like this?

And then I explained the doctrine of sin and how sin affects everyone and how sin causes death, that the result of sin and disconnecting from the Lord brings death. Is it possible that he said that? And she goes, yeah, maybe he said that. So that's a lot different than saying the guy's individual sin killed him. Right.

If the preacher gets up and says, this guy's in the casket because it's his fault, yeah, I could see that bothering you at a funeral service. But if you're talking about the doctrine of sin. Remember she's outside of the church, she wasn't a Christian. So this language of sin and, and mistakes and unfaithfulness and transgressions and trespasses, all causing death is a foreign concept. You might as well be speaking Japanese or something.

So it's good for us to remember that not everybody has been down the road that we've been down. So we all know what sin is and we'll talk about that today. What sin really is. We are going to look at sin and its effects, what the definition of sin is according to the London Baptist Confession. We're going to recognize something and this is maybe the most important thing to remember.

It's all important. But I will tell you if you want to put something in your front pocket and just hold on to it and something that will always help you in the discussion. If you're discussing these things with people that don't understand what the Bible says about sin is, try to always remember that there is a difference between Adam pre fall and post fall. If you can keep that on the front burner at all times, then you're not just talking about people in general being good or bad. You're talking about the doctrine of the fact that we were created good and then we fell and we all live in the post fall world.

So if you can keep that in your head when somebody says, are you telling me my little 10 year old niece that got a disease and died is guilty and judged by God? Just take a time out, time out, take a timeout and say, before I say anything, do you understand what the fall is? The fall into sin and its effect on the world. So you have to. I just got into these discussions with a friend, a new friend that you practically have to world build.

Do you know what that is in video game terminology? You have to build worlds. You practically have to start from scratch these days when you have any discussion because there's no thought of sin at all or righteousness at all, or holiness at all. So if you can keep the idea that you as a Christian understand there was a before the fall and after the fall and you can keep that in your mind as a framework to always be discussing things with that in mind to communicate that we live post fall, oh, you'll get, you'll stay out of a lot of trouble. You won't look like you're just condemning normal people every day like you are filthy and awful.

You know what that sounds like, right? If an unbeliever hears you say that, if you Say you are a child of wrath and an object of God's hatred. Do you understand? When you say that to somebody, they say you think you're better than me then. Because they don't think you think that about you.

They just hear you judging them. So I'm trying to help you in conversation and being able to talk to people about these things. And this confession is really great on this section, chapter six. Last week we did chapter four, five and skipped six and went to seven. This week we go back to chapter six in the confession.

It's a few paragraphs, five paragraphs, maybe six. And it's so good. It states it so beautifully and clearly with all the right proof text. And so I'm gonna have to go really fast. I got a ton of notes and so I'm going to go faster than I would like to go.

But hopefully we will. We will cover things to a satisfactory degree and leave here understanding what sin is and why God hates it and the solution for it in Jesus. So let's pray. Father, these are subjects that for Christians, especially Christians who have been saved and walking with the Lord for a good amount of time. They're things that we understand, they're things that we have a clear grasp of, especially if we were in a good church and foundational years of our faith.

But also, Father, we're getting farther and farther away from that. And we have to talk about these things with people who don't know you. So I'm asking that our time tonight would equip us for that, that we would take what we learn here and find good ways to relay it so that people understand that Jesus is the answer to the sin problem. And we have to know we have a problem before we can find the answer. So help us communicate that in Jesus name, amen.

Well, I am going to do more reading tonight than I have in the series so far from the actual confession. So if you have a copy of it, we are in chapter six. I will tell you this. This chapter, I told you before that the London Baptist Confession was a direct copy for the most part of the Westminster Confession. It was just sort of Baptistized, you know, made Baptisty instead of Presbyterian.

And this chapter is one that has a lot of changes. This chapter looks like it was patched together from the Westminster Confession as well as the first London Baptist Confession of 1644. So this one is quite different from the Westminster, but I will read from it. And so the first thing you're going to see is the setting of fall. So the fall when we use that language, the fall.

If you want a technical, we're talking about lapsarianism. If you want to impress your friends, you can say lapserianism. Lapse just means fall. But we're talking about the idea that man was created upright. I'm going to say that in a second.

And then he fell from God. He fell from God's favor. So when you hear us using that language of fall, we mean fall from God's direct planned perfection down into sin. So that's what that language is, if you've never heard it before. So the opening of this section says, although God created man upright and perfect and gave him a righteous law which had been unto life, had he kept it and threatened death upon the breach thereof, he'll go on to say he didn't live long in that honor.

So God created man upright. That doesn't mean, by the way, that he's bipedal. Of course, we do believe that. We believe God created man on his two feet. He wasn't an evolved ape.

Right? But that's not what the confession means. It means upright as in righteous. It means he was good.

The Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, truly this only I have found that God made man upright. But they have sought out many schemes. So man was created good. When we come into the subject of the fall away from that good, you're going to hear me say a couple of times, we fell both in conscience and in command. Meaning man knew what was right in his conscience and did the wrong thing in his conscience.

But he also acted by his actions wrong too. So he fell in here and out here. He fell in his invisible part and the visible part. So when we get rolling on that, keep that in your mind that sin is, isn't maybe, what we think it is? Because sometimes we think, well, if nobody knows I'm doing it, then I'm not guilty, right?

So if you fly through the school zone at 100 miles an hour, when nobody sees you, were you doing the right thing? Well, just because you didn't get caught didn't mean you didn't do something wrong. So we're talking about that inside and outside aspect. The Bible doesn't call this, by the way, a covenant of works. I said that last time when I talked about the covenant.

The Bible never uses the phrase covenant of works. It never uses the phrase that Reformed guys do called the probationary period. This is language that we might use in theology that Reformed people might use, but it isn't Bible language. So be careful. Right, Be careful.

The Bible doesn't say something to put it in there. That's dangerous. So when did it happen? This is interesting because the next line in the confession says, yet he man did not long abide in this honor. That means it didn't last very long.

How long did it take Adam and Eve to fall? Now, you've heard the joke before about Satan. Like, how old was Satan when he fell? And you say the Bible doesn't tell us how old he was. But one comedian guy says, but my guess is about 15.

You know, because he's a teenager, all the teenagers cause trouble. Now, I didn't make that joke up. The other guy did. But how long did it take Adam and Eve to fall? Luther said they fell the very first Sunday.

I don't know how he got the Sunday. Other people said it could have lasted a good long time. The minimum it could be would be 130 years. And if you don't know why that is, because that would have to do with Seth's birth and the things that happen with Cain and Abel. But my guess is it didn't take very long at all.

In fact, it's very possible it took hours, right? So there's nothing in the Bible that tells us how long it took. But one thing we know is it was a short period of time for man who was made perfect, made righteous, made good in every way, had perfect fellowship with God. There was nothing between him and God. There was no separation to fall into sin.

And we'll talk about that next. The occasion of it is Satan using the subtlety of the serpent to subdue Eve, then by her seducing Adam, you know the story of the serpent. Now, here's a question for you, and you can go wrestle with this on your own. Was Satan the serpent or did Satan use a serpent? So you can go wrestle with that on your own, because the confession says Satan used a serpent.

And it could be that that is the normal doctrine as most people understand. People argue over such things, but you don't have to argue. Then the man said in Genesis, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the tree and I ate, right? So the serpent tricked and manipulated and Eve fell for it. And then Adam blamed her, of course, which is what every husband does when something goes wrong.

They blame their wife. This is important that I. That as I say, this is how the confession records it, because it tells you that the Baptists historically have understood this as a historical event, that it is not a concept that man became sinful. It literally happened There was a man and a woman in a literal garden and they literally fell. Now, you, you in the room who believe the Bible say, well, what else are you going to believe?

The Bible is always under attack. The literal interpretation of Scripture is always under attack. But the Baptists have always held it is like Genesis says it is literally, okay? So it's important to know. And then it says, who without any compulsion.

That means nothing made them fall. So, yes, Satan tricked them into falling. But you have to understand, you don't get to blame anybody for your failures. No human being gets to say, it's grandma's fault, it's husband's fault, it's Trump's fault. Nobody gets to blame anybody else for their failure.

I would have done right, except the Book of Amos says, thus says the Lord, for three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not turn away its punishment. By the way, those were his people that he was punishing. That wasn't the evil people, that was Israel that were sinning when God judged them because they have despised the law of the Lord and have not kept his commandments, their lies that led them astray, lies which their fathers followed. So people do what they want to do always, 100% of the time. But please put that in your pocket.

And the subject of sin and the subject of disobeying God's clear commands, people always do what they want to do. And you might have that in you. Just like Paul's audience, hey, well, if he made me this way and then now I'm fallen, how can he have made me this way? And then what does Paul say? Who are you to reply against God?

Are you going to tell the Creator because he created you good in Adam and we fell in Adam. So God did his part in giving us every opportunity for success. James says, let no one say, when he is tempted, I'm tempted by God. You can't blame God for you being pulled away to sin. So nobody is compelled to sin.

And you say, well, what if? Even at gunpoint, what if tells me to do? People tell me to do the wrong thing at gunpoint, you're free to say, shoot, you don't have to sin. No human being ever has to sin. Now, we do by nature now and in the fall, but nobody is compelled to.

There's nothing outside of us compelling us to sin. It goes on to say, they did willfully transgress the law of their creation and the command given unto them. And that is the definition of sin right there. The definition of sin is Any violation of the moral law of God in thought, word, or deed. That is what separates our faith from the ethics of this world.

Our faith says it's not just adultery if you physically cheat on your wife. It's adultery if you think lustful thoughts. Right? Isn't that what Jesus says? It's not just murder if you actually take someone's life.

It's murder if you're angry with someone. Jesus says. So our belief system is not just what happens on the outside. It's also what happens on the inside. So in the conscience and in the actions.

So I want to keep saying that the Lord holds us accountable. You might think you're getting away with things because nobody can see them. But God can see them. And he's counting every one of them, every single little sin. There is no hapless mistake.

There is no the devil made me do it. So they willfully transgress the law of their creation. Remember when they were born, there were no ten commandments yet, but God said don't. Now this is where it goes into actual sin. The idea, the language of the confession says what they actually did to transgress in eating the forbidden fruit.

Now we have. I said this this morning about John when he says the sin unto death. Not to think of the idea that there's like, really, like, my sin is no big deal. This thing down here where I lied a little bit is no big deal. But when you kill somebody, that's a really big deal.

Or you, you know, give me a bad review on Yelp or whatever. If you do something really bad, that's a bad sin. But mine are smaller, right? The Bible doesn't have that. The Bible starts and has the understanding of whether you are guilty or innocent.

And when they ate the fruit, when was the last time you thought eating a piece of fruit was capital punishment worthy? But it is, because God said don't. And he says, if you do, you'll die. So if God says don't and you do, that is literally the definition of sin. And if he says do and you don't, it's the same thing.

So any violation of the moral law of God, now, some of that is written. We have 600 and what, 13 or 33 laws written in the New Testament. You can go into the commands of Christ when he says, this is my commandment, when there's a direct commandment. You could count them all up and say, these are the commands of Scripture. But what we're saying is the moral law of God doesn't even have to be written, Did Adam and Eve know they sinned?

When they sinned, where was the commandment? Where was the book? They didn't have a book. God told them no, and they did it. So that's the moral law of God.

And Bible even talks about disobeying our conscience, that God gives us a conscience, and we know things are wrong. So when you sin against God, God says you die. You eat the fruit, you die. Romans says, the wages of sin is death. The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I always use the example, if this helps you, and I know this is kind of a dumb illustration that I'm doing here, but there are ten commandments, right? And if you think of each commandment as a chain link, right? It's a chain, and there's 10 links. If any of those links break, the chain is broken. Does everybody understand that?

So it isn't how small or big the commandment is. The first question is, are you innocent or guilty? We're not asking how guilty. We're asking, are you guilty? So that if somebody tells a little white lie, are they innocent?

No. But are they as guilty as a murderer or somebody that hurt somebody or beat somebody? No, they're not as guilty. But we're not talking about how guilty you are. This isn't about degrees of going from innocent to guilt.

You go from innocent to guilt with any sin. Now you're guilty. Now, you can talk about degrees of guilt, but there's no degrees from innocent to guilty there. Does everybody see that? So when God says don't and they did guilt, maybe they didn't commit espionage, maybe they didn't commit acts of terror.

Maybe they didn't do some horrible thing. But when God said don't and they did, that makes them guilty. So that automatically that sin separates them from God. In fact, that's what comes next. Now, listen to this language.

This language might be touchy for some people. Some people might not like this language. I do. Again, these are doctrines that have never been difficult for me. And again, I'm not bragging about that.

When I say the doctrines of grace, even the hard parts about total inability and total depravity and all of those things and limited atonement, those have never been problems for me. And it isn't because I'm super smart. It's because I feel like as much of a dirtbag as I am, as sinful as I am, as bad as I was before God saved me. It has to be that way, or I was never going to be saved. So my personal experience is I understand how rotten I was before I was saved.

So I didn't think I was seeking the Lord. I hated the thought that he was coming after me. So I don't just love the doctrines or say they're easy because I think they are understandable by, like, I knew me before I was saved. I was never going to come to the Lord if He didn't kick my door down and come and kidnap me. And so I'm happy he did it the way he did it.

So I just want to make sure I say that is what I'm about to say. From the confession, I believe wholeheartedly, not just because it appeals to me, but because I appreciate the reality that this is how far God goes to rescue people. It says God was pleased, according to his wise and holy counsel, to permit. Listen to this. Having purposed to order it to his own glory.

So our confession says God purposed the fall, not that he was out of control. One of the pucks slipped past the goalie. He fell asleep on the job. He tried to stop it, but couldn't. No, the Bible makes it very clear that God ordained or purposed even the fall.

Now, that doesn't mean he caused sin. It doesn't mean that any more than you deciding, you know, tomorrow when I get up in the morning, it'll be easier to get in the car and get rolling to work. If I leave it unlocked and you go out in the morning and your stereo is gone, did you purpose your stereo to get stolen? Did you ordain your stereo to get stolen? Are you guilty?

Did you cause your stereo to get stolen? That's the way people think about God. That if he ordained the fall, that must mean he's the cause of sin. But that's wrong. People sin by choice.

They didn't sin because God made them sin. Nobody makes anybody sin. So it's really important to be careful not to judge God for those things that he didn't do. And I had a good question from, I think it was Valentino a few weeks ago. Why did God make us so that we could sin?

Why didn't he make us so that we couldn't sin? A kid asked that question. That's a good question, isn't it? Why didn't God make us so that we couldn't fall? Do you know the answer to that?

Because there is a good answer. And the answer is, there is only one infallible being. There's only one being that doesn't have the potential for Failure, and that is God. And God cannot create a second one of those. So the only other options he has is to create fallible things because he can't recreate himself.

So don't ever get pushed in the corner like why? Why doesn't God stop me from sinning? Here's my question for you. Why don't you stop you from sinning? Don't try to blame God for it.

You're the one doing it. You can stop anytime you want. So God ordained or purposed the fall. And be careful to think that that means he causes evil. He doesn't cause evil.

It just means that he's in control over everything, including evil. And we say to that, thank the Lord. I always give the dumb same illustration. Forgive me if it's repetitive, but it just helps me. And maybe it'll help you think of an umbrella, right?

You've all used umbrellas or seen umbrellas. And think of God's sovereignty as an umbrella over everything, right? Everything that's created and not God is under that umbrella. Everybody got that? So everything that's created is under the umbrella of God being in control and being sovereign.

And so you can't have anything out from under that umbrella. You can't say everything's under the umbrella except man's choice, which is over here. And he's completely free and sovereign himself. No, no, no. There's only one sovereign.

And all of the other individuals that have choice and will are under his umbrella. Nothing's outside of his control. There can't be anything outside of his control or he's not God. If there's any molecule, any choice, any of man's decisions outside of God's control, then God is not control, he's not God, he's not sovereign. That means the man is sovereign that can make a choice in opposition to God and resist God.

So that comes into play too back to what I said earlier, which I love, that God is the hunter, he comes after people, he's the hound of heaven. And I love that. So we need to be careful to think that we can out muscle the grace of God, that we can out muscle his strength and his sovereignty. So just remember the umbrella. Now let's talk about representative sin.

The next section in the, in the confession deals with the fact that Adam, when he fell, represented you and me. And so when he fell, we fell. This is, we can talk about the federal headship of Adam. Our first parents by this sin fell from their original righteous and communion with God. So Adam and Eve are our great, great Great, great, great, great grandparents, right?

And when they fell, we fell on them. You could, if you want to get really into the weeds. Oh, that's. I just made a funny pun right now, and it's a theological pun, and I don't even get credit for it. I got to call my professor the pun.

The doctrine is traditionism. Traditionism. What do you. What do you guys call those little things that come up out of the bottom of the trees out there that are little mini trees? Suckers, Shoots.

Right? All those things. Traditionism says that we get our immortal soul from our parents, not just our body. So the doctrine would be either God creates a brand new soul in every human that's made, conceived, and conception, or that we get our soul like we get everything else from our parents, like we get the genetics. And if you want to fight about that, have fun, because I'm not fighting with you.

I don't have a view on it, but I am bringing it up because it does speak to the idea of how we get our sin nature. It does speak to that. And what we see here is our original parents fell from their communion with God. And the question now is, what effect does that have on me if my great, great, great grandpa fell? What does that.

Why does that have something to do with me? And you'll see in a minute why that has a lot to do with you. And when we fell, there became a wedge between God and man. And that separation was not distance. Now, even though there is a distance from heaven to earth or whatever, you can think of it as, you know, geographical.

That's not the meaning of the fall. The meaning of the fall is relational. Think of it as more like a door was shut, and now we're no longer able to go in where God is. So when we fell into sin, we were separated from God. We fell from communion.

Communion means fellowship, closeness. So when Adam and Eve fell, first of all, they fell. But now that they're being called our parents, when they fell, they lost fellowship with God. They could no longer be in God's presence. They were too sinful.

He was too pure. They could no longer be in his presence. And when they fell, we fell in them. The Bible says we were once in darkness, but now we're light. The Bible says that we were once foolish.

All this language. We were once not a people. The language is that in Adam, when everybody falls, we fall with them and we lose that relationship, are now in darkness. And then it goes on to say, the confession does, and we in them, that's us. In Adam.

So this is weird to talk about, but let's talk about it. That in Adam and Eve's genetics. And I think everybody in the room knows how genetics are passed on to progeny, to children, right? In Adam and Eve's genetics. They had us in their genetics.

Do you all understand that? Like, I had three children in my genetics, okay? That's how many children we have. I'm saying that to you because when the Bible says we were in him, it means it quite literally that we were in Adam when Adam and Eve were born, that all of humanity's genetics and all of the offspring were coming from that family. And.

And the confession says we were in them. And when their genetics were cursed by God and died, so were ours. In other words, we. Our life was cursed in Adam and Eve because we were there, back there before we were born in the sense of genetically and offspring. The Bible says in Adam, all die.

Everybody dies in Adam because he fell. We died in him. We got the same disease he did when he fell. All fall short of the glory of God. Everybody has sinned and falls short of the glory of God and listen to Romans.

Just as through one man, that's Adam, sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because all sinned. Now, this is the part that's fun. When I'm doing discipleship, I love having this discussion because people act not in discipleship. I've never had anybody say this to me, but I have had it happen over the years in discussions that people don't like the idea that I am guilty because Adam sinned. That's absolutely okay for you to have a moment and think that and say, well, that doesn't seem fair because if I was in the garden, I wouldn't have eaten the fruit.

Right? That's essentially what you're saying. You're saying that you're better than Adam, but just. I'll grant for a second that Adam fell. And you might say to yourself, I don't think it's fair that I am charged as guilty for somebody else doing something wrong.

I wasn't there and I didn't do it, so I'm not guilty. Be careful if you say that, because if you think that his guilt cannot be transferred to you, then you have to say your guilt cannot be transferred. Christ, you don't get to say, you have a savior and he'll take my guilt on him. Because it's exactly what Jesus does on the cross for Christians, is he takes their guilt. So if you don't like the idea that guilt can transfer from one person to another.

You don't like the gospel, so be careful what you're saying. But the real truth is, Adam was our representative. I know you probably aren't in love with your representatives on Capitol Hill, right? Any of you really loving your representative government right now? Your government that's of the people and by the people, for the people.

And y' all feeling really good about the government right now? I'm saying that to you because we vote for them, and they're supposed to be, whether they are or not, representing us. Right. We all understand that, that they come from our districts and represent us in Capitol Hill. That's the idea with Adam.

When Adam was born, he's essentially saying, my wife and I are every human. We stand here representing all humans. And when he fell, our representative fell. We fell with him. He was our representative there.

He was our ambassador there. And he blew it. And now we all look bad because now we all have the same problem. That's the idea of sin in Adam. We all die when sin.

We sin in Adam, and we die in Adam, we die in Christ, and we live in Christ. Now here it gets a little hairier. All becoming dead in sin and wholly defiled in all the faculties and all parts of the soul and body. So here's the part where you say, well, yeah, I know I make mistakes, but that doesn't mean I'm all bad, does it? The confession says we didn't just fall, we fell all the way.

So we fell 100%. We didn't fall 97%. We didn't fall into enough sin to where we have just a little bit of good left in us. No sin corrupted all of us. Listen to the language of Paul.

To the pure, all things are pure. But to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. But even their mind and their conscience are defiled. So think of sin as a disease that completely pollutes human beings. When we fell, we fell utterly, completely.

We were all the way sinful. Now, when I say we were all the way sinful, I don't mean we do every sin. That doesn't mean we commit every sin. Like I told you before in the links, if you think of a lie, a lie is not as bad as murder in the judgment, right? But a lie can make you guilty.

But a lie isn't as bad as murder. So just because the Bible says there is nothing good in us, it doesn't mean we can do the most bad. And we do all bad. What it means, like right now, if you are nice to somebody, if you're an unbeliever and you don't know the Lord and you give somebody food and you want to help somebody, that's a nice thing. It doesn't count for heaven at all.

God isn't counting it as righteousness, but it does mean that that's different than if you hurt somebody, right? So we are all the way fallen. All parts of us, our whole beings, our mind, our will. Our will is fallen. Did you know that?

That your will, the ability to choose, is also fallen. This is actually the doctrine of original sin. Did you know that? If you ever hear the phrase original sin, the idea here is that sin has its origin in Adam. Well, in Satan, but then in Adam, right?

So the origin of your sin is Adam. That's why we call it original. It doesn't mean the first sin. A lot of people think original sin means number one, the first sin on the list, that it's original. No, what we mean is our sin has its origin and in Adam, and it's important.

And then it says this, they being the root and by God's appointment, standing in the room instead of all mankind. So they are the. Like what I said earlier, traditionism, by the way, it's T R A D U C I A N, if you want to look it up. It's. It's a strange spelling, but I mentioned the roots and the suckers because that word, tradition, that word means that.

It means a branch or a sucker. It means a shoot. So the idea is that sin, our soul is given, passed along genetically or through procreation. But here we're saying that the root of our sin, the. Our standing, everything that we are now because of Adam is fallen.

When the Bible says in Adam all die, it means we are literally born dying. I think everybody understands that, right? You all understand that when a baby is born, that baby is instantly dying. I mean, it was dying when it was conceived. Now that's a negative thought.

It's a sad negative thought. It's a terrible thought that we are born dying. But it's not. If you see that the answer to that is Jesus Christ, it's not the. It's not hopeless.

It's not terrible. You don't have to be preoccupied with it. You just have to think, okay, what would be a solution? How can we fix that problem? And then we all know Jesus is the solution to that.

So the problem is if you try to minimize sin and you try to make sin not Sound as bad. And you don't talk about. As being born with it. And you don't talk about us all having complete corruption. And you don't talk about us all being completely depraved.

If you just keep trying to minimize sin. Minimize sin? Minimize sin. You're minimizing the Savior with every. Minimizing.

You're minimizing the need for Jesus to do what he did. But if you go all the way and say what the Bible says. You mean literally from conception, the second I become a thing, I'm already sinful? Yeah. That bad.

Then what's the hope of mankind? That's where the gospel comes in. Jesus fixes that. I think if we loved, if we understood how terribly sinful we were, we would appreciate the Savior so much more because he rescues us from that level of sinfulness, the kind that you can even be born with. It's actually very powerful.

Just as through one man, sin entered the world. I already. I read that verse. But the idea is that death came to all men. So he is the root.

But he also stood there for us. So it was written, Paul says the first man, Adam, became a living being, and the last Adam became a living spirit. So he's our. He's the first man. The first man was a man, and he represented us all as humans.

And you ladies don't get to say, well, I'm not in that. Because he was male. It's the male's fault. But we all know the story that the woman had very much part of that. That fall.

A man was of dust. So were we made of dust. And as is the heavenly man. So also are we heavenly? The idea is that we get and become what Adam was.

The Bible uses the word imputed. It's a word we don't use much, but it's a simple understanding. You all know when you tap your card, remember the old days when you slide your card. Oh, wait, who's old enough to remember this? Where you put the card in the thing and go, yeah, you're old, if you know what that is.

I'm sorry, but if you know what that. How about before that? When people would just do credit with writing something? They would sign something. It wasn't even a machine yet, right?

But now you just walk up and drive by McDonald's and tap the thing and keep going. In fact, sometimes they don't. They have such good sensors, they don't even need to take your card. They can get you as you're driving through. Okay, what happens.

What happens when you Use that tap. What is happening? What, what transactionally is going on? So you get your double extra giant large Coke from McDonald's. That's what I got today.

You get that, they hand me a Coke. So they impute a Coke to me. Then I use my tapper thingy and my tapper thingy imputes my money to them. Do you understand that? So the word imputed is easy to understand.

That's what's happening. When Adam sinned, his sin was imputed to us, charged to us. Thanks a lot, Adam, right? You're like, hey, I wasn't asking for that. But that is what happened.

So we got his sin. That's what happened. The guilt was imputed to us and so was the corruption that the confession says that the corruption and his nature was conveyed to us. That's why the psalmist says, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me? So I got news for you.

Babies are not innocent. They're cute in some cases they're chubby and they're, they smile and they're beautiful, but they're not innocent. Nobody's innocent. We're all born in Adam and in trouble again. Don't think of that as only bad news.

The bad news is supposed to point you to the good news, right? The news that Jesus is who he says he is now. Ordinary generation. Here's the language of the confession and the Bible to all their posterity, right? So the guilt of sin was imputed, corrupted, nature conveyed.

So the guilt of the sin was given to us. We're now guilty. We're charged guilty because of Adam and then his messed up nature. Now that he fell and disconnected from God and is no longer connected to the source of life, to God Almighty, he separates. And now he's dying, he starts deteriorating.

If you didn't know why, you couldn't find your shoes or lost your keys, it's Adam's fault. That's called the noetic effects of sin. It affects your brain. If you want to know where cancer comes from, it came from Adam. If you want to know where being tired comes from, it comes from Adam.

If you can't remember things, those are all effects of the fall and over time, deterioration. Where we decline at the basic level, a genetic level, to where we have all these deficiencies and problems, all of that comes, are corrupted by us falling into sin. And his problem was given to us and has been given to all humans since then. And then it says, and to all their posterity, descending from Them by ordinary generation. Do you want to know how easy it is to get sinful?

Just get born. If you get born, you get sinful. And you might yell at your parents if you want, go tell your parents. Why did you do this to me? I didn't want to be born sinful.

Well, that is the way it works. The only way for you not to get your parents and great, great, great, great grandparents sin is to be born of a virgin. Did you know that? Of somebody who did not get the sin passed down. Does that sound familiar to you?

That's the gospel, that Jesus was born of a virgin. He didn't get his parents sin because he was miraculously born of Mary. He didn't get anybody's sin. He didn't get Joseph's sin. He didn't get what we normally get by procreation and becoming a child.

Yes, he was a child and he was a child of Mary. And it is true that she. There's another doctrine you want. If you want to fight about traditionism, you can also fight about whether or not Mary had a new zygote implanted by the Holy Spirit. In other words, it was a new creation that wasn't sinful or Mary's egg that was in a sinner was somehow fertilized by the Holy Spirit.

These are things that theologians argue about. Yeah. And by the way, I got called a heretic because of my view on that. Because I believed Mary's egg that she had already could be miraculously fertilized. And my professor called.

Well, he didn't call me a heretic. He didn't say, johnny, you're a heretic. He said, anybody who holds that is a heretic. So I had to remind him quietly, respectfully, next week, are you going to call Charles Spurgeon a heretic? A lot of good people hold what I said.

And it's just because he comes from a world that a lot of people don't hold it. He didn't know that it was an accepted view view in theology. But I'm just telling you that those are the. These are the kinds of things that people might argue over. And they're not insignificant, but they also might not be the thing you spend all your time on.

What are the consequences of original sin? The confession says, being now conceived in sin and by nature children of wrath. That doesn't sound very good. The servants of sin, the subjects of death and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free. So listen to the language of that.

We're children of wrath. Ephesians says that, right? That we were by nature children of wrath. It uses that language. And you might not like that with the language that says you were a slave of sin.

I'm not a slave. I could do whatever I want. Then why don't you always do the right thing? Ever ask yourself that? Apart from me and my Christianity, why you make mistakes, why you fail, why you hurt people while you think thoughts you don't want to think, while you get addicted to things you say you have control over?

You're going to blame me for that? No. No. That's because you're a slave of sin. We are all born in Adam.

Slaves of sin. We were once dead in trespasses and sins. Can dead people decide to make themselves alive? Is there a difference between being sick and being dead? Does the Bible describe us as sick or does it describe us as dead in our sin?

Dead. The wages of sin is death. So this is the judgment we are when we sinned in Adam and then we sin in ourselves, we practice it. So we sin by example in Adam and by pro generation. We also sin in our own lives.

And when we break our own commandments, what we are essentially doing is saying, I don't want to be a child of God. I want to be a child of the devil. That's what we're doing. We're choosing to have ourselves as our father or the devil as our Father or the world is our Father, instead of having God as our Father. That's why the Bible calls us children of wrath.

So it's tough. It also says we have no hope in the world. Scripture is actually clearer than the confession on this. Scripture is perfectly clear. It's weird to me that the Bible can use that kind of language.

And even a Christian sometimes might say, well, I'm a good person. I have to say this often and I don't want it to sound condescending. You all agree with me. I know you do. That sinning against a helpless person is worse than sinning against somebody who can defend themselves.

We all agree on that, right? Like sinning against children. Think of. Think of people who hurt children, who abuse children. We all understand in our guts.

You all understand that that is worse than two gang members fighting in the middle of the street, right? We all understand that. I don't have to explain that to any of you. That's in your guts, by the way. I think God put that in your guts.

But what I want to make, the point I want to make right now is that God is the most innocent. We think of innocent as helpless. But when we're talking about violating innocence, even babies, children, women, the weak, right, the people who are marginalized society, people in our world that are weak and can't defend themselves when we think of them as more innocent because they can't defend themselves. I want you to understand, God is the most innocent. Nobody is more innocent than God.

So a violation of him, defying him, disobeying him, dishonoring him is a worse sin than dishonoring any sinful human. Because he's more innocent than any sinful human. It's the ultimate violation. So this is why don't think of God as just this peer of yours, like he's like you. He's not like you.

He's perfect and holy in every way. And he says, I made you Adam and Eve perfect. Now just don't eat that fruit. And you and I will be in a relationship with each other. And then Adam and Eve say, we want to be our own gods.

We don't want to listen to you. We want to be our own gods. And then the Creator says, if you do that, I will curse you and you will be children of wrath. And then we do it. And the craziest part is we turn around and get mad at God for judging us.

It's exactly what we do. But the Bible is really clear. We sin because we want to and because we like it. And God hates it and he has every right to judge it. You know, if you go to a courtroom and you find out somebody was abusing a child, you would hope the judge does a good job of making sure that guy gets a fit sentence.

You all understand that, and we all have seen, haven't we, perversions of justice where the bad guy didn't get what he deserved. And it bothers you because you know that's wrong. Well, God is a good judge, and God is going to judge correctly. And if he's the absolute perfect innocent victim of sin, then we need to be careful judging him for judging he deserves to judge. And we deserve to be children of wrath.

Continuing on, it becomes practical. We not only sin because of all of that and what we are and how it got to us through Adam and Eve. It says, from this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good and wholly inclined to all evil do proceed all actual transgressions. This means that not only our guts or our nature are corrupted. It also means our actions are.

And this is the part where things get really weird. What if I told you, me as a Christian and another person as an unbeliever, see somebody in need, okay? We see somebody, let's say a homeless person, and they need food, and I go get them food because of compassion and a desire to honor that person because they might be the little one, they might be the Jesus, right? Where he says, the least of these. They might be the least of these.

And I think I want to represent the Lord to this person and show them kindness because God gave me means, I want to serve them. So I take them things for the glory of the Lord and they eat. Okay? Now you take the other person who's an unbeliever, who thinks of themselves as a good person, who has never killed anybody, and they're everybody's favorite uncle or whatever, and they go help the same person to make themselves feel better. I want you to.

I just want to say it plainly because we're running out of time. One of those is righteous. The other one is not neutral. It's not neutral. It's evil.

It's evil. It's called filthy rags. It's what Isaiah is talking about in the Old Testament. When you take a righteous thing that could and should be done for the Almighty and you do it and rob him of his glory, you take what's his. When you do it, you use his resources to do things for your own glory.

And you're going to say that you deserve reward from heaven. When you ignored the Creator who made the food, who made the homeless person, who made your ability to give them something, God gets left out in the cold. That's why the Bible says even the same action, two people doing the exact same action, one of them is righteous and the other one is wicked because one of them is done for the glory of the Lord and one of them is done for the glory of man. So don't. Don't misunderstand that.

I think sometimes people don't understand. Wait, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Who gets the credit? That's the answer to your question. If you get the credit, it's bad.

Wait a second. I was singing a special music at church. If you did it for glory, you stole that glory from God and God didn't like your song. Now, you might have fooled the church, the church might have been fooled by your song, but the Lord wasn't fooled by your song. So this is the idea of what gets called sin.

If it doesn't bring God honor and glory. It's sinful. That's why? Jesus says this is the condemnation that the light has come into the world and men love darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. It says that if you live according to the flesh, you will die.

But if according to the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the flesh, you will live. Do not lie to one another since you have put off the old man. Christians do things for God's glory. Unbelievers do things for their own glory. That's why they're evil.

I don't mean the people they are evil, but I mean their actions are evil. We can't do anything to please God. Did you know that? So the unbeliever, somebody who has disconnected from God because they're an atom and by their own practice. But Paul says the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, nor can it be so that those who are in the flesh listen to the language.

Those who are in the flesh, that's somebody who is not a believer. Those people cannot please God. It doesn't say they do not please God. It's literally the word where we get the English word dynamite, Dunamis. Ability.

Can. Did your teacher ever say, if you said, can I go to the rest of them? They say, well, I don't know, can you? Because you didn't say, may I go to the restroom? What do they mean by that?

Do you have the ability to. Right. They're trying to get you to see the difference between can and may. Well, can is a word that has to do with ability, potential. And the Bible says people in the flesh cannot please God.

Then what are they doing? If they're not pleasing God? I tell you, they're making them mad is what they're doing. They're heaping up for themselves judgment. We got to keep going.

We got to go fast. Now then, there is something called remaining sin. The corruption of nature during this life doth remain in those who are regenerated. The idea is that we are so fallen that even though we're sin, we are saved. We get saved from our sin, we believe in Christ and we have all of our sins forgiven.

We still carry with us that remaining sin. See, some of us will call that the old man or the old nature, right? And then the Southern Baptist. I kind of like the way they say it. They say indwelling sin.

The reason I like that is because it doesn't say that our nature is sinful. Because when we were by nature children of wrath. We were one thing, but now we're sons and daughters of God. So that language of saying what I am now is a son or daughter of God sounds good to me. And that the old man is just the old man, right?

It's okay if you use that language. I just like the idea that there's more victory in my mind of saying the old man, he's old, right? I'm not what I used to be. I'm no longer in Egypt. I'm no longer in darkness.

I'm no longer lost, I'm found. I'm no longer a slave. I'm free, right? So. So all that language is now, I'm in Christ.

I'm a new creation. So I want to emphasize that new creation. But the Bible is really clear that we still have a sin problem. We all still struggle. You know that.

You believers all know that. That you didn't lose the temptations to sin when you became a Christian. But whoever's born of God does not sin. We've been talking about that, right? They don't make their habit of life sinful.

That's why you want to remember the answer to all of this isn't trying to do better. That's what people do. You can't do better if you are sinful. Does everybody understand that? Do I need to repeat that?

You cannot do better if you are sinful. Sinners sin. That's what they do. So you can't do better. You can't make yourself something other than what you are.

And if you're a sinner, that's all you are. So you need God to recreate you and make you a new thing. Which is exactly what Paul says. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away.

Behold, all things have become new. And even in your life as a Christian, you can always confess, you can always be right with God. You can always be what I call current, always up to date with the Lord. So even though we still have that old man hanging on and trying to trip us up, we'll never ever go back to darkness. God will never, ever let any of his children go that he saves out of darkness.

So sin is that bad. But the gospel is also that good to rescue you, to keep you, to protect you. And even though you're going to battle all that old sin and still struggle with temptation and still deal with all that, you have the victory in Christ because Jesus won at the cross. It's powerful. And although it be through Christ pardoned, that's our old nature.

Even though our old nature be through Christ pardoned and mortified, yet both itself and the first motions thereof are truly and properly sin. What the confession is saying is even when you're saved, you can still do the thing that is called sin. You can still sin as a Christian. It's just that the difference is that now what that does is that breaks fellowship with you and the Lord, but it doesn't break the relationship. So you have closeness with the Father in heaven who saved you with His Son's blood.

And you sin. That makes you distant, but not like it did in the garden. In the garden it made you an alien. You were kicked out, but now you can never be kicked out again. It is important to see the distinction between those two.

That Christians do sin, and they can sin, but that sin will never ever have victory over them again. They will never, ever be lost again. You cannot lose your salvation. If somebody is in Christ, they are indeed safe. They cannot be lost again.

We are debtors. Not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.

For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but received the spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, Abba for Father. So God didn't save us just so that we can feel terrible about all of our sin. No, he wants us free from sin. You were really, really, really lost. But guess what?

Now you're really, really, really found. And you're his child. You call him Daddy. That's what ABBA means. It's a respectful form of Daddy.

But it's Daddy. He's your Father in heaven. He rescued you from all of that terrible sin. The Spirit himself bears witness with our Spirit, that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs and heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified together.

That's why we talk so much about salvation, that idea of being saved. Maybe tonight I could ask you and you could just think about it. Maybe this is what you talk about on the way home tonight, or eating popcorn, whatever you're going to do. Do you appreciate when you find out that you were genetically in Adam, conceived in the womb, already sinful, hopeless, sinful, born a child of wrath. You were born in Adam a child of wrath.

And then you lived your life apart from God, a child of wrath. You deserved wrath. And God was going to give you wrath. But instead he gives his son that. If you believe in His Son, he will forgive you of all your sins 100%, past, present and future.

Do you ever meditate on that? The bigness of salvation? First of all, the bigness of sin. How big it is. And then you say, it's so big, how can I ever have that problem fixed?

Ah, that's where Jesus comes in. That's why the Bible says he's so much better than Adam, so much bigger than Adam. So what Adam did was, was big and polluted mankind. But what Jesus does is rescue us from that. It's powerful.

So I hope you know Christ first of all. And if you don't, ask us and we'll help you with that. But if you do know him, please appreciate the price paid. Appreciate what he gave you in the Gospel. I was so lost and now I'm all that much found.

I know my grammar is not good, but take it with you anyway. Let's pray. Father, thank you for saving us, those of us who are saved. If there's somebody here that isn't, I would ask you to work on their heart. Draw them to you.

Press these truths of the depth of our sinfulness in so that they understand them. But then, oh Father, help them find the solution in Jesus. We want to see people saved, want to see people rescued. Of course it hurts to hear the bad news, but oh Father, thank you for the good news. In Jesus name, amen.