THE GOSPEL OF GOD - GRACE IS GREATER - PART X - ROMANS SERIES

Transcription

1 Good morning Life Fellowship. Please join me in a word of prayer. Father, there are these certain moments in life where we just need to pause before you and remember that we are part of something so much bigger then meets the eye. And right now I just thank you that here we sit as a church but we don t sit here on an island all by ourselves; rather the message that is presented, the worship that is declared, the praises that are offered up to you, the lives that are changed, is something that happens not only here at Life Fellowship but throughout the world. And we are so thankful that we are one church connected to many churches that comprise The Church. God, we just want to say thank you. Thank you that we can align in spite of so many differences on the edges. We thank you that at the heart, at the core there is a common belief that Jesus died for our sins, rose again, and by faith and trust in His grace we can experience forgiveness of our sins and eternal life. And Lord, we exalt in that. We relish the opportunity to say thank you. And God I pray this morning as a pastor serving amongst other pastors in this community, I pray you will be with our local church leaders in our local churches and help us as a family of churches to be salt and light in the community. Lord, I know that it is not my role to go around and be the moral police of Lake Norman; rather it is to be salt and light and to live and show why this message that we so much believe in is worth considering, and is worth believing. May we share it humbly, may we live it authentically, and may we be the kind of church amongst other churches whereby we work together so that the community could not imagine being without the churches, because the churches care for, impact, pray for, serve and make a difference. God, be with Pastor Steven Furdick at Elevation, with Pastor Mike Moses at Lake Forest, with Bobby Blanton at Lake Norman Baptist Church, with Pastor Mike at The Cove, with Pastor Farrell at Grace Covenant, and with Naeem at Mosaic. And Lord be with all the other pastors that can rally and acknowledge the death, burial and resurrection. I pray that you will be with those pastors, protect them, unify them and help us all to make much of you. In Jesus name. Amen. You can see that I finally had the opportunity to wear my Munster shirt, right? I loved The Munsters. Did any of you like The Munsters when you were growing up? There are a few of you. Give it up for Herman or Grandpa. The Munsters was one of those programs that I thought was cool. Some of you probably thought they were just creepy, but I liked The Munsters, Tales from the Crypt and Twilight Zone. Those programs just kind of drew me in. Now when people see Herman Munster here on my shirt, they may think this is Frankenstein. But this is not Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein was supposedly the one Page 1 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

2 who created the monster in Mary Shelley s great novel that came out in 1818, nearly 200 years ago. And Mary Shelley s novel depicts a monster very much different from Herman Munster of The Munsters. Herman Munster had a life and a family. He was just a good old boy. Dr. Victor Frankenstein in the novel was the creator who made the monster. So the monster is not Frankenstein; the scientist or the doctor is the one who has the name of Frankenstein. Now Mary Shelley wrote one of the greatest novels in all of literature. She began penning it at the age of eighteen and she finished it when she was nineteen. It was published when she was just twenty years old. It is gothic in its features, but what you have is this story is there is this great scientist playing with experiments. He dreams that he can create a human, and while he is working with different anatomical parts he creates this being. And when he sees what he has created, the color of it, the eighty foot size of it, he is repulsed. He is shocked that he has made a monster and he is torn up about what he has done. So he absolutely rejects his creation. Now the monster in the midst of this rejection feels isolated, lonely, unwanted, unloved, unaccepted and uncared for. The monster in referring to himself uses words like monster, creature and wretch, the type of language that he feels because his creator wants nothing to do with him. He even describes himself as the atom of your labor to his creator. All he wants is a soulmate. He says to Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Please just create a partner for me. I just need one person. I am lonely. Just give me a co-hart for life. Finally he gets Dr. Frankenstein to agree, and the scientist starts a procedure, but then he changes his mind and all hope is lost for the monster. So the monster gets very angry and resentful and he seeks to get revenge on his creator. He strives to get revenge by going to great lengths and taking Dr. Frankenstein s loved ones away from him. And when it is all said and done, you have this gothic, dark story of this scientist whose creation doesn t turn out like he wants and as a result the monster turns and rebels against his creator. When we stop and think about this story, one thing that I can say is that sadly many people view God like the monster would view Victor Frankenstein. Why did you create me? I feel so unwanted. I feel so unloved. I feel so lonely in this world. I feel like I had no choice but to be made, and I have to live here in this filth pot. Why don t you show up and do something? Why don t you give me a companion, a relationship? Why don t you meet my needs? Why do you reject me? But I can tell you that there is a big difference between the scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and God. There may be some similarities like both create, but there is a Page 2 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

3 difference because God is not an ungracious God. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, God pursues those whom He creates. God invites us into companionship so that we are not lonely. He hardwired us with a purpose. He loves us and He is a benevolent God. So when we think about the story of us, the story we find ourselves in, the narrative that is being constructed, we can look at the Scriptures to see a story that unfolds like this: There is creation, a fall, redemption and then restoration. There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible and you can look at Genesis Chapters 1 and 2 and see a creative God creating His creation. And in Chapter 3 there is something that goes awry. Mankind slips up so to speak and falls into sin. And there are some similarities at that point to Shelley s Frankenstein. You have a creator and you have a fall. But the similarities stop there. What makes the Bible so much better, what makes the drama so much more suspenseful is there is creation and there is fall, but it doesn t stop with the fall. It doesn t stop with the creator rejecting what he created; rather in the Scriptures the story goes on. Like the monster, all of us have fallen. All of us can recognize there is something broken, something undone within us. Yet the drama of Scripture, the story that we find ourselves in, the narrative goes on and now after the fall we have a redeeming God who is the great hound of heaven in pursuit of us. So you have creation, fall and then redemption. And then ultimately there is restoration. It is a beautiful story, and as I was studying this week in the book of Romans I thought Romans has that fourfold drama as well. In Chapter 1 we see the creative God. And then we see that mankind has definitely fallen before its creator. Then we see there is this God that is a redeemer. He has given mankind a solution, an antidote. And then ultimately there is the zenith reaching its apex, its consummation standpoint in glorification and restoration. That is the story we find ourselves in. So all of here are at least at stage one. We have been created, right? And Romans Chapter 1 through 3 has shown us that we are even at stage two because all of us have fallen. And in our fallen state the question is what do we do? Do we view God as Victor Frankenstein? Do we reject Him? Do we say that God has rejected us and doesn t care about us? Or do we go on and find more to the story? For more of the story I would invite you to turn Romans Chapter 5. As you are turning there, we are going to look at verses 12 through 21. These verses in a lot of ways provide a nice summary for the first five chapters of Romans. Really starting in verse 18 of Chapter1 through Chapter 5 these verses nicely summarize what Paul has been saying. Page 3 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

4 He has been showing us that man has a problem. We have talked about that problem, and it is the problem of guilt as a result of our sin. But then in the latter part of Chapter 3 a shift happens. And we see that we are not left in this problem. We are not left in this fall because God is a solutional God and there is a great solution through Jesus. God comes to rescue us in the person of Jesus Christ to give us hope, to give us restoration, to give us redemption. Paul is going to kind of wrap some of that summary up and then when we transition in Chapter 6 we will go into our third part of our series - The Gospel of God - and we will be looking at this idea of transformed. We will see how the gospel doesn t leave us as we are, but it shapes us and transforms us. And it affects us in our thoughts, emotions and in our will. It offers us a life giving gospel meant for more than just a point by which we get right with God, but rather a point whereby we begin to love Him and live for Him. Maybe you are sitting out here today and your view of God is like Richard Dawkins, the famed Atheist, and you think that God is just a moral monster. Or like the late Christopher Hitchens who claimed that God was a moral tyrant. Maybe you are struggling to get your mind around God. I hope you will listen today and try and see what you can learn about God. Here is what I want to say - our God is a gracious God. He is a redeeming God, a forgiving God, a loving God, and a pursuing God. When we think about what we are going to do today, I want you to be aware that what Paul is going to do is he is going to juxtapose, that is to say he is going to place side by side two characters - Adam One and Adam Two - the first Adam and the second Adam. The first Adam is the Adam that God created in the Garden of Eden. The second Adam, though it doesn t use the language second Adam is referring to Jesus, the greater Adam. The second Adam, or Jesus, is the one who pulled off what the first Adam failed to do. What we see when we begin to look at this passage is that we are all in desperate need of God s grace. Certain questions are going to pop up as we walk through these verses, and I am going to ask you to put on pause some of the things that you might be thinking of, because this is a passage that can lead down many rabbit trails. What I will do at the end is I will address some questions that I have already anticipated you might be thinking. To keep us focused on the big idea, I will save those questions for the end of the message. So let s start by asking the question - why are we in desperate need of grace? What has gone awry? What is wrong? In verse 12 of Chapter 5 it says this: Therefore, and just as I said last week, anytime we see a therefore we need to find Page 4 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

5 out what it is there for. It begs for us to go and understand some context. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. Paul is kind of going back to this whole idea of sin, and now he is qualifying that sin came into the world through one man. What do we learn here? First of all we learn that sin came into the world. Our problem in the world that we live in is that we live in a fallen world, a broken world, a world bent toward rebelling against God. Our world is just shadowy, its motives are compromised. Ours is a world filled with spiritual blindness, with soul death. Our world is a world in need of hope. And many of the ancillary problems that we face first are caused by this fallen world that we live in. So to find this origin of sin we would have to go back to Genesis Chapter 3. And there we see that God created Adam in a perfect state. God did not create the monster that Dr. Frankenstein did, so to speak. God created a perfect being. And God gave Adam lots of freedoms in this paradise, but then sadly to use John Milton s language, it became Paradise Lost. While Adam was in this paradise what happened was God gave him a warning that he was not to eat of this one tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God told Adam to enjoy the garden and there was just one boundary, but first Eve, and then Adam, couldn t resist. And we will talk about that more in a little bit. So paradise became Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve had to live outside of Eden, and so we would become the descendants of Adam and experience this idea of sin. After Adam and Eve rejected God, the creator did not reject them; rather He pursued them. What happened to Adam and Eve is very typical of what happens anytime we become bothered by sin. Adam and Eve covered themselves, they hid, they blamed each other, and they were filled with shame and guilt. And when we rebel against God and we sin if our conscience has not been deadened, we feel those same feelings when we break God s moral law. We feel this sense of violating God, and it eats us up with guilt, shame, secrets and paranoia. And we look to blame others. But God, not like Dr. Frankenstein, pursues us and seeks us out. That is the story from Scripture beginning in Genesis Chapter 3 all the way forward of God pursuing through His prophets, through His apostles, through His judges, and ultimately through Jesus. He pursues us and He pursues a relationship with us. We realize as a result of this sin that took place that death ensued. God told Adam In the day you eat of this, you will die. And maybe you wonder why Adam didn t die immediately; he didn t die physically that day but he did soul die. His soul died that day and then ultimately he died physically. We are born needing our souls to Page 5 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

6 be redeemed. And also if we don t trust Christ we die a second death. But God in His grace has provided a way for us to experience this renewal. Words like sin in our culture, or guilt, don t fly too well. Ours is a culture that doesn t like the word sin, because it has a moral twist to it. So what we want to do is we want to expunge the idea of morality in our culture. We want to get rid of it. We want to flush it down the toilet, so to speak, make it unnecessary. Instead what we have sought to do is give a linguistic swap to our language, swapping out our language and instead of morality we talk about mental health. Instead of sin and guilt we talk about psychosis, or we talk about DNA, or we talk about social issues, or the lack of education, dysfunctions and pathologies. I would agree that there are pathologies and there are dysfunctions, and DNA can certainly create and contribute to our problems. And I think the church ends up doing a disservice to people when we don t realize that there are mental health issues. But it is not exclusively a mental health issue; that is just a convenient way to feel better about our guilt though. It is a convenient way to feel better about our sin. And science, when it seeks to explain everything, making it the end all, be all, it becomes scientism. So I would say that we don t want to pit mental health and morality against one another. The church is sometimes anti-learning what it can from counseling and science and psychology, but then over here what happens is sometimes science is skeptical of the whole idea of real moral issues. And I think there should be a proper integration. You and I are mutating to death. We have a hundred more mutations than our parents did and your children have a hundred more mutations than we do. I am so thankful for the acceleration of scientific advancement that can help us to understand how to deal with our deficiencies. I am thankful for the studies that are being found now as it relates to ADD in particular. I was a kid who struggled with that tremendously and it always tended to look like rebellion, or not caring and not listening. It was so moralized. But now the pendulum is swinging and it is considered pure mental health and there is no culpability for our actions. And I would maintain it is both. There are mental things that add to it, but there is also this moral component, and with the Fall we have to realize that that is the case, because with the Fall the world that we live in became gravely shaken. It is twisted. It is dysfunctional. Our souls and our bodies are in need of redemption. The Fall affected us mentally, socially and physically. We are completely twisted up and in need to be untangled. And we should be holistic in our approach to helping us to figure out the solutions to who we are. We should be seeking to find things that would lead to the glory of God and helping us to honor and please Him. Page 6 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

7 It is not either/or. And we have to be careful to not try to explain it all away. This sin spread and we were found like Adam. See, I couldn t control the state that I was born into. I was born in the state I was because that is how my mother delivered me. And we were born into a state with a fallen nature. The Bible portrays us as in Adam that we were there with him. In the same way that we who believe in Jesus are in Christ and His righteousness is counted to us. So now let me just push pause for a second and talk about this idea of sin because it is obviously something that we can struggle with. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German Atheist who died in 1900, claimed that God was dead. And he talked about Atheism as a hope for a second innocence. He said that Atheism would hopefully provide a second innocence. He later saw that it didn t provide a second innocence, but what did Nietzsche mean? Well, the way Nietzsche thought we should deal with this moral itch, this moral angst that we have, was that we had to realize that the church, that the priests, that the pastors, that the leaders have enslaved us and there is this slave morality. And if we could realize that God is dead, that He was a useful fiction that served us for a season but now He has died. The idealism is no longer necessary. If we could realize that, if we could come to terms with that, what we would be able to do is erase that fictional standard that has disturbed us for so long. And he taught that we would get a new birth of sorts, a second innocence. Not a Christian new birth, by admitting you are a sinner, but Atheism s new innocence by believing that there is no such thing as sin because there is no standard that we are measured by. Rather instead of sin there is just acting foolishly or acting distastefully, because there would not be an objection moral standard. There would be no such thing as real right and real wrong. That is where Nietzsche ended up. And he would say, Man, you have been duped. What a hard thing the church has done to make you admit your filth, admit your sin, admit you have done wrong, admit that you are messed up. And he would say, You have erected a God and you have allowed yourselves to feel guilty next to God and His standard. You go through life beating yourself up because you don t measure up to the standard. And frankly, without a theistic lens and a bigger understanding, you can see scientifically how someone could start thinking that way. But then when you think about Nietzsche s view of God and his misunderstanding of Christianity, and his solution and what it leaves you with - there is nothing. Hitler was deeply influenced by the works of Nietzsche. Nietzsche would go on to write one of the greatest moral treatise as far as philosophical tradition is concerned since Immanuel Kant would write his stuff. Page 7 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

8 In Nietzsche s genealogy of morality, he is someone who would end with really no morals, no absolute rights and wrongs. He would say that will is the purpose of life, and the strength of life. He didn t respect others as equals; he believed it was the strong who would survive. What Nietzsche did was take morality where Darwin would never go. He took morality to its logical conclusion without God. The belief in Nihilism means there is nothing, just emptiness. But if there is no absolute right and wrong, if there is no moral standard, then what? When we stop and think, folks, I am thankful for God s standard. The standard would be overwhelming if there wasn t a gracious God willing to forgive us and to love us and to pursue us. It is what protects us from each living as relativistic subjects in this immoralistic world. Our world is a moral one because our God and creator is a moral God. Now let s pick up in verse 13. For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. We are in Adam, we are Adam. And what we have to realize is we identify with Adam. And that is very difficult in an individualistic culture like ours. It is not hard for other cultures to see because they can see community and all of that. What we have to realize is that God created Adam as a perfect being and we have to assume that if we were Adam literally we would have done the same thing. So we are in Adam in that way. We would not have done any better than Adam did. Mankind rejects God. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one to come. Adam is a type; he prefigures the one that is to come - the second Adam - the greater Adam. Adam is also a type of us that we all can relate to. This heart that is prone to wander, these emotions that are fickle. Waking up in the morning convinced you are going to live one way and by the end of the day realizing you have checked out on your commitments. I can really relate to that. That is us - we are fickle. Let s continue reading in verse 15. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. In other words we can t out sin God s grace. His grace abounds over our sins. That is the beautiful picture of the God we are talking about here - where grace abounds, where grace is greater, where God is a redemptive God. When we look at these verses we see the phrase free gift that shows up five times in this little cluster of verses. Verse 16 says, And the free gift is not like the result of that one man s sin. Page 8 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

9 And now moving forward down through verse 19 Paul is again going to juxtapose Adam one and Adam two, Adam against Jesus. What are the results that take place? Let s continue in verse 16, For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man s obedience the many will be made righteous. Let s push pause again. Now we have seen that Adam and Christ were compared, the first Adam against the second Adam, so what can we learn? Well here are a few things to show their differences: The first Adam disobeyed and the second Adam obeyed. The first Adam brings guilt into the world and the second Adam brought grace into the world. The first Adam is of the earth and from earth and the second Adam came down from Heaven. The first Adam is created and the second Adam is the creator. The first Adam is the image of God and the second Adam IS God. The first Adam forsakes God in his ways and the second Adam pursues man in spite of his ways. The first Adam led to our separation from God and the second Adam invites us into restoration with God. The first Adam was tempted in the Garden of Eden and failed and the second Adam was tempted in the wilderness and was victorious. The first Adam would have to say Father, forgive me and the second Adam would declare from a cross, Father forgive them. We see then that the second Adam is the superior Adam. The first Adam was before the Old Covenant; the second Adam was the fulfillment of the New Covenant. Where do we belong? What are we going to believe? Plato s great allegory of The Cave, was written in his Republic. We know that Socrates mentored Plato and Plato mentored Aristotle in about 400 BC. And Plato s allegory of The Cave is about perception and how we perceive reality. Let me just draw an illustration now that I have been thinking about as a way to apply this passage for you today. In this allegory of The Cave Plato depicts three prisoners who have never been outside of this cave. And inside Page 9 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

10 the cave they are tied up and all they can do is look straight ahead. They look straight ahead to a wall and they can t move their head to the right nor to the left. All they can do is look straight ahead, bound up in this cave that they have never been outside of. But behind the prisoners is a fire and there is a staircase. People come in outside of the cave and they walk by with their animals or their food or their other items. But the prisoners have no idea of the real people behind them. All they see is the shadows up on the wall in front of them projected from the fire up on the wall before them. So these three prisoners look straight ahead and each time someone walks by with something they try to guess at what it is they see in the shadows on the wall. One day one of them escapes this prison and goes outside of the cave. He steps into the sunlight and all of a sudden realizes he that the sun gives meaning and lights up purpose in this world. He realizes that all along what he thought was reality was fiction, was shadowy. And so burdened to go and release the other two prisoners he goes back into the dark cave and he is warned that they will kill him if he seeks to set them free. Now I imagine all of you are wondering why in the world would I be telling you this story of Plato s cave? I am trying to illustrate the way you and I were born into the cave of this world, imprisoned to a fallen, sinful nature. And we sit around in speculation looking at the shadows before us and trying to find our substance saying, There is no God, or God is Allah, or God is X. But in Christianity the beauty is this. God in the person of Jesus breaks into our cave, enters into our cave and meets us in our fallenness. He calls to us, these prisoners who are enslaved and bound up, and He rescues us. He tells us to come on out and see Him, the sun (Son), the light of the world. He gives an invitation to come out of the cave, to come out of our imprisoned state, out of the state of original sin. This is the passage in Romans where it talks more about the idea of original sin than anywhere else. Augustine would be the first in the 4 th -5 th century time to write the greatest treatise on it for probably a thousand years, before it really got tackled more. Here we see that all of us need rescued. Do you want to stay in the cave? Or do you want to get freed? Let s continue in verse 20, Now the law came in to increase the trespass. It exposes that all of us fall short, that none of us can keep God s standard. But thankfully God in the person of Jesus kept it for us. When we blew it, grace abounded. But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Page 10 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

11 We have been told how to get out of the cave, how to get out of this world and go into the other world. I will tell you, folks, there is a transfer that can take place that will absolutely transform your life. The righteousness of Jesus transferred to you and me. I have a radically refreshing takeaway. I think when we look at this passage today and when we look at the first five chapters so far in Romans in our study, I would want to say that our guilt is great but God s grace is greater. Our sin is great but grace is greater. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. We cannot out sin God s grace no matter what we have done. We are fearfully and wonderfully made and loved unconditionally by God. That is good news! It is like that great song, He Loves Us. Oh how He loves us. I love the lyrics, If grace is an ocean, we re all sinking. We are drowning in the grace of God. With a few minutes left, let me catch a few rabbits. The first one is a question. Isn t it seemingly unfair for God to hold us accountable for a sin nature that we inherited through Adam? I mentioned a few weeks ago in football if one person is offline, the whole team is penalized, so to speak. If I committed an atrocious act and I had incredibly violent parents and I showed up before the judge and said, Judge, you don t understand but my parents are really angry people. That is why I did what I did. Do you think the judge would be like, Oh thanks for clarifying that. No problem, you are off the hook. Of course the judge wouldn t buy into that. We are accountable. And as I mentioned, we were there in Adam. He represents what all of us would have done had we been there. The second question is this - Don t verses 18 and 19 teach universalism - that is everyone will be saved? If through the one act of the one man all are made unrighteous so too through the act of the other won t we all be made righteous? Isn t there a sense that everyone will be saved? Well, there are a couple of things that we need to know. First of all when we look at verse 17 it says that we have to receive Him. And we know that in John Chapter 1 and verse 12 it says, Yet to all who receive Him, to those who believed on His name, He gave the right to become children of God. Where all of us would sin not everyone is interested in believing in God. And those who think, Oh man, I am just going to wait until later, look, if you don t like the idea of praising God, telling Him how wonderful He is now, why would you think that you would want to be with Him later in Heaven? If you don t want to worship Him now why would you want to do that in heaven? So everyone will not be saved, just those who believe on the name of the Lord Jesus. The third question is - Why did Paul hold Adam responsible? Wasn t it Eve who first rebelled against God s command? Wasn t she the first to eat? And that is an obvious and fair question. First of all Adam was the one who was warned by God. Secondly when we look at the Scriptures closely we see that Adam was with her when Page 11 of 12 pages 4/2//2017

12 she took and ate. So in other words Adam was passive and he didn t prevent Eve from doing it, and he also jumped in and ate also. And when God came down to deal with them He ultimately dealt with Adam first. So he was the one who was culpable. One final question - What s with the word many? Did Jesus die for many or for all. It says, By the one act of His righteousness the many will be made righteous. We have to be careful that we always don t get too wooden in the Scriptures that we read. Many sometimes means all and sometimes all means many. The question is - what is the context? For instance when John the Baptist was out in the wilderness of Judea it says all the people came out to him. So did everyone come out then? No. It is like if I asked you, Who all came to the party? and you said, Man, everyone was there. You should have been there. Well, if everyone was there and I should have been there but wasn t, it means everyone wasn t there. We just use this type of language, and what ends up happening is some people will fall under this thing and think, Yeah He just died for some. But He is not willing that any should perish. He loves you. And you can have a relationship with Him right here and right now. In the end we all can identify with Adam, the question is - do we identify with Christ? Why not through placing your faith and trust in the Lord Jesus be taken out of Adam and be placed in Christ? No matter how bad your guilt and sin is, grace is greater. We are all invited to place our faith and trust in Him. Come out of the cave and see the sun (Son). Let s pray. Lord, thank you for your word and the book of Romans. It has been a real treat to study it and to share the gospel in it. It helps us to understand what it was that you pulled off at Calvary. Help us all to love you and to leave today being thankful that our guilt, though great, knowing that grace is greater. We love you and praise you. In Jesus name. Amen. The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the actual words of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew and Greek words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases. Page 12 of 12 pages 4/2//2017