Sunday sermon: "You Know Better"

As a child, when we did something wrong occasionally our parents would admonish us with the line, "You should know better!" Other kids may have gotten away with the same thing we did, but what mom or dad was saying was that we were raised to follow a higher standard. Truth be told, we probably did know better, but we let our own desires and our own will have control instead of doing what was right.

Paul reminds us in Romans 7:7-14 that this is exactly what the Law of God does for us. It reminds us of the higher standard that God holds for His people. If we did not have this standard revealed to us, we might be able to convince ourselves that we aren't so bad after all. Paul says he was "alive" before he knew the Law. We know from his previous discussion that objectively he was still dead in his sins, as we all are, but here I think he is trying to say that he felt alive. It was the Law that revealed what sin was.

Not only does the Law show us what sin is, it shows us what the consequences of sin are. Sin breaks our relationship with God fatally. When we breach the Law, we are separated from God, eternally condemned to death. If we didn't see God's standard, we wouldn't realize just how impossible keeping the Law is.

Yet this revelation of our condition before God is the beginning of the good news. Before we can understand our need for the saving work of Jesus Christ, we need to know that we have that need. As long as we think we can take care of ourselves, we won't look for an answer from Him. Once we know we are dead, and unable to help ourselves, we start to look for the way out. That's when we are open to hearing the good news that our sin was paid for by Jesus on the cross.

Sometimes Christians disparage the Law. "We aren't under Law, but under grace!" we cry. That's certainly true, but we need to have the attitude toward God's Law that Paul had. Without it, we wouldn't know the high holiness of God, the absoluteness of His standard, and the ways we fall far short of it. Without the Law, we wouldn't realize we need Jesus. The Law has a purpose, even for us today.