The War Between Your Selves (Part 1)
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If you're a Christian, you know that your struggles with sin, selfishness, and idolatry don't suddenly stop once you've started following Christ. In fact, the battle between good and evil and between our old self and new self continues to be challenging. Today, Tim Keller explores the war between ourselves that all followers of Christ must face and explains how we can have hope and peace in the midst of the fight.

After you listen, we invite you to go online to gospelandlife.com and sign up for our email updates. When you sign up, you'll receive our Life in the Gospel quarterly journal with articles that feature how the gospel is changing hearts, lives, and communities, as well as highlighting other gospel-centered resources. Subscribe today at gospelandlife.com. Romans chapter 7, verses 1 to 25. Romans 7, 1 to 25.

Do you not know, brothers, for I'm speaking to men who know the law, that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives. For example, by law, a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. So then if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress, even though she marries another man.

So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God. For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code."

What shall we then say? Is the law sin? Certainly not. Indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law, for I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, Do not covet. But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead. Once I was alive apart from law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.

For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good. Did that which is good then become death to me? By no means. But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful. We know that the law is spiritual, but I am unspiritual.

sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me that is in my sinful nature, for I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do, no, the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing."

Now, if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but the sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work. When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law, but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

So then I myself, in my mind, am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature, a slave to the law of sin. That's chapter 7. Now, you know, why would I do this to you? Why would I read a long passage with so much in it that arouses curiosity? I'm going to take two weeks on it, but that won't be enough. It's August. I figured if you're real confused, you can sort of console yourself more easily than other times during the year. You can rest up better.

Here's what I want you to know. I may not, and I'm a limited human being, and my teaching skills are limited, and I may not help you understand what verse 6 means after two weeks. Because it says, by dying to what once bound us, the law, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. I may not be able to help you understand that, and that'll be my failing.

But if that happens, I don't want you to say, oh, I just didn't understand what that preacher had to say. If you don't understand verse six, you don't understand Christianity. Now, I may have been part of the reason why you still don't. And that's a mea culpa. And it may happen. I'm doing this ahead of time. But if you don't understand after I'm done trying to tell you, don't stop. Don't stop trying to find out. It's not just that you happen to

come into a place where some obscure teacher was going on and you really didn't know what he was trying to say. This is the heart of it. This is it. Do you know what it means to be free from the law so that you are free to serve in a new way of the Spirit? That's Christianity. So if I don't help you understand that today or next week, if you're here, don't stop. You have to understand this or you don't understand Christianity. Earlier part of the year, the summer of

I had a chance to read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. No, I didn't see a movie. I didn't see a Broadway play. I haven't. I was just, I hadn't, you know, most of us think we know the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but we've actually, we've seen productions of it. But when you actually go back and read the original little novella by Robert Louis Stevenson, it's not very long, 80 pages or so. It's a terrifying book. It's a terrifying story.

And it talks about the good Dr. Jekyll, and the good Dr. Jekyll was a man who, as time went on, became kind of unhappy with life. And the reason he was unhappy with life was, he says, every day I drew steadily nearer to that truth that man is not truly one, but truly two. I saw the primitive duality of man. I saw the two natures contending in the field of my consciousness and

If I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both." As time went on, in other words, he began to realize that human beings are not one, but they're two. Every individual is not one person, but two persons. There's a radical duality in every human being. And as time went on, he became very unhappy with his life because he felt like this created a sort of dead end. He was getting very tired of being a battlefield for these two selves.

He called himself, it's a great phrase, he called himself an incongruous compound. And he said, you see, nobody can be happy. I've got a virtuous self, a self that wants to deny selfishness, and I've got a kind of grasping selfish self. And both of them keep the other from enjoying life. And finally, he says, if each, I was thinking, could but be housed in separate identities.

Life would be relieved of all that was unbearable. In other words, he believed that this radical duality is probably the reason why there was anything wrong with his life or the world. He says the unjust then might go his way, delivered from all the aspirations and remorse of his upright twin. And the just could walk on his upward path, doing good and no longer exposed to disgrace by the actions of his evil other. So, of course, he comes up with a potion. And the potion, of course, enables him to

for the first time to separate the two out. And when he becomes Mr. Hyde, when he becomes Edward Hyde, he becomes a person who is completely selfish. He says, this being, Edward Hyde, was inherently malign. His every act and every thought centered completely on himself.

The book says that Edward Hyde is the only unmixed human being on the face of the earth. So that when you came up to him, you found no redeeming characteristics. So nothing but selfishness, nothing but a person who completely, as he said, every act and every thought centered totally on himself. And when anyone met Edward Hyde, their flesh would crawl because here was, you know, complete selfishness, unmixed.

But of course, the way the book ends and the way the story goes is, the thing that Dr. Jekyll did not realize was he did understand that he had an evil self. He knew he had a good self, he knew he had an evil self, but he had no idea how evil it was. Because the way the whole book works is that when Edward Hyde gets out, he finds he's far more evil than he thought. And what he says in the book, he puts it this way, the moment he takes the potion, it says, I knew myself at the first breath of this new life to be much more wicked than

tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to original sin. And the thought braced and delighted me like wine. And of course, what ends up happening is he finds he can't control Edward Hyde. Edward Hyde wins. But you notice, when I first read the book through, one thing that immediately caught my attention, and maybe it's caught your attention since we just read Romans 7, he says, as soon as I became Edward Hyde, I realized I was far more wicked. This is a far more wicked self than I thought. Sold

Under slavery you see what he said there He said sold under slavery to my original evil and that comes right out of Roman 7 And so I did a little bit of research and sure enough Robert Louis Stevenson Scotsman was raised in the 19th century in in a staunch Presbyterian home and Yes to some degree this text did inspire this story It's a terrifying story. It's a bleak story and

Jekyll understands that there's sort of a good and a bad self, but when he actually gets underneath to find, he finds out that the evil self is far worse than he ever thought. And there was absolutely no possible way for this battle to be won. Now, here's the question. Is this Christianity? Is this a teaching, say, of Romans 7?

A lot of people think that Christian view of human nature, St. Paul's view of human nature, is bleak and pessimistic like this. This idea that there's good and evil in us and we can never win. It's this eternal battle and all we can do is fight all the time. Is that it? In other words, does Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, does that express the Christian view? And the answer is yes and no. And the way you understand this, when you go back to Romans 7, if you do that, and you go back to Romans 7 and you read through, you do see a battle, do you not?

An incredible battle. In fact, a startling battle. Especially, and this we won't talk about until next week, St. Paul is an apostle. St. Paul is a saint. St. Paul. He's great. He's this incredible Christian leader. How can this incredible Christian leader talk like this? How can he say, I'm unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. The very thing I don't want to do, I do. The very thing I want to do, I don't do. Look at that.

So, I mean, does that sound like Dr. J. Goldmister? Does it? No. What's so interesting about Romans 7, first of all, the first signal that Robert Louis Stevenson only saw half the picture is that there's a change of tenses in verse 14. In verses 7 to 13, there's an awful lot of struggle, but it's all past tense. I was, I did, I saw, you see.

Then suddenly in verse 14, you've got a present struggle. It's all in the present tense. I am, I do, or I don't do. And this is the teaching. This is the thing I'd like to get across and the thing that Robert Louis Stevenson didn't seem to understand. All of life is a battle between two selves. But there's a different war before you become a Christian from the war that happens after you become a Christian.

What Paul is trying to show us here is there's a war between the cells that happens before you meet Christ. And then there's a war between the cells that happens after you meet Christ. The war between the cells before you meet Christ is a war without hope. You cannot win. And Robert Louis Stevenson does a wonderful job of showing the bleakness and the hopelessness of it. But the war after you meet Christ, you cannot lose.

Now, what does this mean? It means a lot. And this is one of these texts where you should either talk about this text for five minutes or a week. And I'm going to be a lot closer to five minutes than a week. Don't worry. But what this tells us is that when you become a Christian, you don't move from warfare to peace. You move from a battle you could not win to a new battle, which you cannot lose. And to understand the difference is extremely important.

And if you actually look at this whole text, this whole Romans 7, you'll see that in verses 7 to 13, we have a great picture of the battle that you can't win. The battle that happens to anybody that will goes on in every human breast. It's out there. It's universal. It's to everybody.

And first, there you see Paul talking about that battle before he was a Christian. But then, verse 14 to 25, is the new battle that comes to a Christian. The Christian life is a battle, but it's a different battle, a very different battle, and it's a battle you can't lose. And then actually verses 1 to 6 tells us how you can make the transition, because you're going to be in one battle or the other. It's a question of which one.

The battle you can't win, the battle you can't lose, and then lastly, how do you make the transition? Now, we're going to have to be brief. I mean, it doesn't mean I'm not going to make, I'm not going to go my full 30 minutes. It just means that there's almost no way we can get into every verse and answer every question that comes up. But sometimes helicopter rides over passages like this are better than an infantry, you know, moving through it and looking at it verse by verse. Number one.

In verses 7 to 13, we see a depiction of the battle you can't win. And what Paul's talking about is the fact that though he, a very real Dr. Jekyll, by the way, Paul was a Dr. Jekyll, a virtuous man, upright man, a pillar of the community, moral, religious, you know, with some awareness that there was sin in his life, but basically it was all held down. Now, in the story, Dr. Jekyll takes a potion and he suddenly realizes...

He was far more wicked. That there's a self, there's a selfishness self, a self that just wants for itself. And it's far more wicked, far more evil than he thought. A day came in which Paul understood that this battle, which had been going on, and it goes on in every human being, in a subterranean way, it broke out.

He says in verse 9, and this is the kind of quintessential place where he talks about it. In verse 9, he says, Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, saying, Sin sprang to life, and I died, I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life brought death.

What does that mean? Now, people have wondered about this. And at first, it sounds like he says, I was alive apart from the law, then the commandment came. And it sounds like he's saying, I was having a pretty good life. I was feeling pretty good. And then somebody taught me the commandments. And then I felt terrible. But that's impossible because Paul was raised in a very devout Jewish home. And it's not possible that there would have ever been a conscious time in Paul's life in which he didn't know the Ten Commandments.

He would have been taught the Ten Commandments from the very beginning. He would have been taught the Tenth Commandment, thou shalt not covet, the one in particular that he's talking about here, from the very beginning. So what does he mean? And most commentators understand it this way, and that is, Paul is saying, I was alive until the commandment came. It doesn't mean he hadn't been taught the commandment. It'd mean he hadn't understood the commandment. The commandment came home, and it slew me. Now, it did two things.

Here's how it slew him. Here's how it killed him. First of all, we're told it's through the commandment he came to understand. Through the commandment thou shalt not covet, he came to understand his covetous heart. And down in verse 13, if you look at the very end, it says, through the commandment, sin became utterly sinful. That means that's a consciousness change. He saw how utterly sinful he was.

So the first thing we see that happens is a commandment came to him and showed him just what a Mr. Hyde there was down there. And the second thing we're told, and this is the thing that's very, very amazing, is that the commandment didn't just reveal Mr. Hyde, but in some ways it empowered and aggravated Mr. Hyde. Because it says, but sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. Now, here's how this happened. Thou shalt not...

Paul says there was a moment in his life in which he very blissfully, kind of like Dr. Jekyll, kind of like most other people in the world, you're kind of aware that there was another self, but no idea how wicked, no idea how deep, no idea how evil, no idea what you're really capable of, no idea. But something showed it to him. A potion revealed that he was tenfold more wicked than he thought.

But this potion was not just the Ten Commandments in general. It was the Tenth Commandment in particular. Thou shalt not covet. And here's why. The way almost all of us shield, all of us Jekylls shield ourselves from the knowledge of the real depths of the degradation of our Mr. Hyde's or that other self, is that we take, when we think of the moral code, and everybody's got a moral code, and by and large, by and large,

Almost all around the world, very, very similar. We believe in justice. We believe in honesty. We believe in keeping our word. We believe in caring. We believe in generosity. And so we understand we have a moral code and we say, I live up to that pretty well.

And Paul had focused on the moral code. He looked at the rest of the Ten Commandments and he said, I don't commit adultery. I don't kill. I don't steal. I don't worship idols. You know, I'm Orthodox. I care for my parents. I listen to them. I take care of them and so forth. Therefore, I'm okay. It's the last one. In the Tenth Commandment, you get a definition of sin that shows what all the other commandments are getting at. Coveting.

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Now, what does the word covet mean?

You know, we don't use it a lot in English, but we have kept it, have we not? There's a lot. We don't say thee and we don't say thou and we don't say a lot of other King James English stuff, but we still use the word covet sometimes. Why? Because the word covet doesn't just mean want. Covet does not just mean to want something. Covenant means to idolatrously want something, to inordinately want something. And the 10th commandment, through the 10th commandment, Paul came to understand that coveting is the essence of sin. Coveting is sin. What is coveting?

Coveting is wanting anything more than God. That's coveting and the essence of sin. Coveting is saying there's something besides God and his love and his salvation that I've got to have as a requirement for being happy. That's coveting and that's the essence of sin. Put it another way, what is coveting? Coveting is not loving and resting so much in God that you can be content. You're not content. God's not enough.

And if you can't love him enough to be content with what you are and what you have, that's coveting. And that's the essence of sin. And Paul began to understand something. And that is that that's the essence of sin. And that's the essence of all your problems. All your problems come from coveting. What is coveting? See, that's what Edward Hyde was. Edward Hyde was coveting itself. This bottomless pit.

In the heart of every human being, a black hole that says, God, I need money, or I need love, or I need beauty, or I need success, or I need comfort, or I need everything just to be like this and like this and like this. And no matter how much you send into that black hole, it wants more. It wants more. That's the essence. That's the essence of what's wrong with the world. That's the essence of what's wrong with you. That's the essence of what's wrong with me. It's sin. It's coveting.

Why you get angry? Why are you so bitter? You get angry and bitter because there's something you say, yes, I know this or I know that, but somebody got between me and something I've got to have. I've got to have demanding covetousness. Why do you get so worried? Why are you afraid? It's because something you've got to have. Why are you indispondent? It's not because you want something. Wanting things are fine. Wanting things are great. God gave you once. Coveting. I have to have it. I must have it. This is the thing that will make me. See?

And Paul began to understand, get this, that all of his morality was nothing but covetousness. It's okay to want to be morally upright. He coveted it. He wanted to have it. He had to have it. He didn't want to feel like he had to rely on God's mercy, like your average person or like your common failures. Not him. And that's the reason why he had all of his problems. It's the reason why he had the moral superiority, that reason why he was so cruel to people, the reason why there was hardness of heart. He had never understood that.

And what's interesting is not only did this law intellectually, the 10th commandment intellectually showed him how deep his coveting was and how in spite of underneath all of his Mr. Jekyllness and all of his decency, there was this grasping Mr. Hyde. He began to say, wait a minute.

The serial killer has a Mr. Hyde, and the form of the covenant is violence. And I have my own Mr. Hyde, and the form of the covenant, of the coveting, is moral rectitude, but we're the same. We're basically the same. Not only did the law reveal Mr. Hyde, his Mr. Hyde to him, but the law also, in some ways, and that's what's very interesting, verse 8 says this, and verse 5 says this as well, in some ways it produced violence.

Not the law, but the covetousness in him was aggravated by the sin. Now, if you don't know this, pardon me, I said it wrong. The covetousness in him was aggravated by the law. Moral education made him more covetous, not less.

Now, if you don't know this, you haven't been thinking. You know, one of my favorite illustrations is Augustine in his Confessions. He mentions the fact that when he was a young boy, he broke into somebody's orchard and stole fruit off the tree. Not because he was hungry. He threw the fruit to the pigs afterwards. You know why? He had no desire to do it until somebody said, what? Don't do it. He's a typical eight-year-old boy. He had no desire for that fruit until somebody said, don't have the fruit. And he coveted it. Why? Because you see...

aroused in him this fundamental sinfulness of heart, and that is desire to be God instead of be under God. Desire to be your own savior instead of to depend on a savior. And there was no interest on his part in the fruit. There was no coveting until he was told you can't have it. And then there was nobody can tell me what I can and cannot do. Now New Yorkers, if you don't know that, you don't know your own heart. But if you do know that, you're looking into the abyss. Do you see this

Have you seen it yet? Paul's inner warfare was subterranean for a long time, and it wasn't until he really saw the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, until he really saw his covetous self, he saw the depth of it, he had no interest in turning to his Savior. You can't become a Christian until you understand what's going on in this regard. Have you seen this? Do you feel this? Do you understand what's going on?

This incredible warfare back and forth between the virtuous self and the covetous self, between the conscience and between that grasping, this bottomless pit. Do you see it yet? Paul, when he finally saw it, it says it slew him. And the reason it slew him, when he says it killed me, probably it means more than one thing. Probably on the one hand, it's a

It killed him in the sense he realized he was dead in the water with God. He realized he was legally dead. He was condemned. He realized just how underneath all of his morality, there was a tremendous self-righteousness. And actually, in fact, when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus, which you can read about in Acts 9, what did Jesus say? He said, Paul, Paul, why are you persecuting me? Jesus was saying, do you realize that all of your morality is a way of getting out from under depending on me as Savior? Right?

And Jesus says that to every human being who's religious. Jesus says, do you realize that all of your religiosity is rebellion against me? It's not getting you any closer to me. It's getting you further away. Do you realize it's nothing but a form of covetousness? It's nothing but a form of a way of trying to be in charge of your own life. Do you see that?

And then Jesus, of course, comes to people who are living lives of violence and cruelty. And he says, do you not see that you're persecuting me? Everybody, everybody, before the gospel comes, whether you're so-called good or so-called bad, you've got this warfare going on. Have you seen it? Do you see it now? The second, and I promise to tell you that next week we'll talk about the second warfare in depth. The second battle...

which is depicted in verses 14 to 25, is extremely different. It's almost completely different. And it's very important for you to see what that difference is.

Rather than try to get you through that because we don't have time and I want to look at it next week, verses 14 to 25 are summed up in the book of Galatians in one verse. In the book of Galatians, in one verse, Galatians 5, 17, we're told this. For the Christian, the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the spirit and the spirit that which is contrary to the sinful nature. They're in conflict with each other so that you do not do what you want. Now, do you hear what's going on? Something very important.

This is utterly different, very, very different than the other kind of war for two reasons. Number one, first of all, in the old battle, the Jekyll-Hyde battle, I think Robert Louis Stevenson was absolutely right in saying they are both you. They are both equally you. The conscience self is you. And the coveting self is you. They are both you. This is something that modern psychology doesn't want to come to grips with.

Freud, I think, was on the right track when he talked about id and superego and all that sort of thing, and ego trying to mediate between the two. Absolutely. But Freud was smart enough to not say which was the true self. Because here's the thing that Robert Louis Stevenson said, that Dr. Jekyll says in the book, and that I think is... Here's the hopelessness of it. They're both equally you. He says they are both radically you. And how in the world are you ever going to find who you are then? You're never going to find who you are. It's hopeless.

They're both equal to you. They're both, each one has as much of a claim to really be your true self as the other. They're both deep. This intuition you have that you should be good and you should be virtuous, people know that that's written on the heart. Romans 2 says that the moral law of God, the golden rule, the sense that you should do unto others as they should do unto you, that's deep in you. You know that. That's part of your fundamental humanity. You're not a human being if you don't know that. That's deep. That's you.

But there's also this desire to be your own God, to have nobody tell you what to do. That's you too. That's absolutely fundamental. That's not superficial. They're both you. And that's one of the reasons why that's a hopeless battle. If you look carefully, you will see Paul says, as a Christian now, there's still a battle going on between good and evil in me. But one of them now is the real me. Do you see that?

First of all, when Paul says it in Galatians 5.17, when he summarizes it, he says, the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the spirit, and the spirit, that which is contrary to the sinful nature, get this, they are in conflict with each other so that you do not do what you want. It doesn't say there's the you that wants this and the you, no, no, it's different. And Paul says, in my inmost being, look at verse 22, in my inner being, the real me delights in the law of God, and there's another person

power in me that pulls me away from that, but it's not me anymore. It's not me at all. It's not me. What's going on here? What's happened here? This is a different warfare. In this warfare, you're not really divided anymore. There's a certain sense in which there's not two selves. You know, Robin read from Colossians 3 verses 1 to 10, where Paul says, you're putting on the new and taking off the old. And there's a sense in which they are both selves, and yet one of them is a husk.

One of them is dead. One of them is dead skin. One of them hasn't got a heart left. One of them isn't really a self anymore. One of them is mortally wounded and inevitably dying. Now, here's the reason why. So there's two reasons why there's different. First of all, the first reason is that in the first warfare, the two selves are equal to you. In the second warfare, only one self is equal to you. And the first warfare...

The two cells have equal natural powers. You've got the power of conscience, you've got the power of the conscience, which is you. You've got the power of the desires, the heart, which is you. But when you become a Christian, the Spirit of God comes down and does something with a law. The law of God, which in the unreborn person does nothing but aggravate the problem.

The more moral education you put into a person in the old warfare, right? All it does is aggravate it. All it does is make the battle feel worse. All it does is make you more conscious of it. That's one of the reasons why Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the book. He was raised in a Calvinistic Presbyterian home. He was saturated with moral teaching. No wonder he was so tortured. He had to write that book. More moral education makes you more and more tortured.

Why? Because the conscience self submits to the law and the coveting self hates the law, but neither of them love the law. They don't delight in the law. Because the conscience self is trying to save itself through the law. The law is sort of a necessary evil. And the coveting self is trying to save itself by rejecting the law. It's a direct evil, you see. But here's what happens. When you become a Christian, the gospel comes to you.

and it changes your whole attitude toward the law. When the gospel comes to you, the first thing the gospel tells you is something along these lines. You're dead. You can never satisfy God. And your religion and your irreligion are both ways, really, of covetousness. None of these things will get you to God. But here's what the gospel says. God says, God made him sin who knew no sin.

God made him become sin on the cross, Jesus Christ. He became sin on the cross. One thing that I couldn't help but remember when I was reading the text and I saw, whenever someone met Mr. Hyde, they just, they got creeped out. They just, they were just, they got nauseated because they had never looked into the face of something that was in a sense sin itself. Second Corinthians 521 doesn't say that on the cross, Jesus Christ was just simply treated as a sinner. It doesn't say that

that legally on the cross Jesus Christ became a sinner. It says legally he became sin. In other words, God poured out his wrath on Jesus Christ, just like you and I would pour out our wrath, just like everybody who saw Edward Hyde wanted to punch him out. Because when you actually see sin, you say, this is it. We have to destroy this. This is the problem. This is the evil. This is it. Jesus Christ, in a sense, became Mr. Hyde. He didn't just become a sinner. He became sin.

And God poured out his wrath on the cross. And he punished him for all the wrongs that we should have been punished for. Now, do you believe that? Do you understand that? Has that moved you? Does that melt your heart? The minute you believe that, the minute you trust in that, what comes into your heart at that point? The Spirit of God comes into your life and it, we're told, writes the law of heart on the flesh of your soul. All that metaphor comes to mean this.

Before you were a Christian, the law was a necessary evil. Now it becomes the way to please the one who lived and died for you. And that is the reason why verses one to six with all that strange stuff about the woman and about the husband. Do you know what? It's a brilliant illustration. And here's why it talks to. It says before we meet Christ in the gospel, we are married to the law. Now, you know why we're married to the law?

The law is like your spouse, because when you get married, your spouse is sort of the hub of your life. Marriage does that. There's something about marriage that makes your whole life revolve around the spouse. And what's fascinating about what Paul is saying is that he realized before he was a Christian, he was married to the law. And he was actually saying, all of us

Before we become Christians, we're married to the law. We're not really... We may think we're serving God, but we're really not. God is remote. God is something else. Our real heart is in our performance. Our real heart is in the law. We're married to it. It's not a means to an end. It's the end. We do it, and God is just a sort of a way of getting us to...

God is really just out there and he's someone we're trying to please and we're trying to obey the law. But when you become a Christian, what happens is you die to the law. And the theologians say you die to it as a way of salvation. It no longer becomes the way of salvation. It no longer becomes the way in which you deal with your uncleanness, which is why a lot of people obey the law. It's not the way in which you any longer try to save yourself. Instead,

What happens is the law now becomes not something you're married to. You're married to Christ. The law becomes a way to please the one you're married to now. The law becomes the one. You see, as long as you are relying on your performance to please God, haven't you noticed you're not married to God? You're not in his arms. You're always kind of mad at him or kind of afraid of him. He's like your boss. You can only get so close to your boss. Your boss can fire you.

And so you see, you're married to the law and God is your boss. But what happens when you become a Christian is you fall into God's arms. And then the law just becomes the way to please the one who died for you. The law no longer is the way, the law becomes the way in which you nurture love and you maintain love and you reflect love in your life.

Now, I told you at the beginning two things. One is that next week I'll look at that second kind of warfare. And for many, many of you who are Christians, you need to look at this. The second thing I told you was that if you don't understand what it means to die to the law, and I said, no matter how hard I try, I'm not going to be able to tell you the whole story here, you mustn't stop exploring and studying until you do know it. You mustn't stop.

Because this is the essence. This is the difference. Christian friends, some of you really need this morning to remember this. Suppose you had a habit in your old life. Suppose you had a drug habit. Suppose you had a sex habit. Back in the old warfare...

And you used to fall into it and you used to get out of it and you used to be upset. And then you would, you know, pummel yourself and you'd do better for a while and you'd make resolutions and you'd fall back into it. But now you're a Christian. And here's one of the things that goes wrong. Sometimes, as a Christian, you go back into that habit. You fall back into it. It happens. Now what's going to happen? Immediately you're going to say, nothing's changed. Same old thing. Wrong. It's a different battle. You're now in a battle you cannot lose. And in the old days...

that habit was expressive of your real self. No longer is it. That's just not true. You'll never get the same kind of... Go ahead, try it in a sense. You'll never get the same kind of pleasure. If you're a real Christian, you go back into that thing and you say, why doesn't it taste as good as it used to? Why doesn't it sort of satisfy me the way it used to? Why not? Because it's not expressive of your real self anymore. In my innermost being, I delight in the law of God.

You're now in a battle you cannot lose. You were in a battle you cannot win. The way to make the transition from the battle you cannot lose to the battle you cannot win to the battle you cannot lose is when you're willing to say, I see what Jesus Christ did for me. He is not just an example. He's not just a way in which I try harder to live a better life, but rather he died for me. He became sin itself for me. And when you see what he did for you, that changes your heart.

And instead of complying with the law or hating the law, you delight in the law and you love the law. Do you see it? Do you see it yet? All I can say, if there is no way to become a Christian without, as Paul says, a death. The only way to move from one spouse to another is a death or a divorce, which is like a death anyway. Every psychologist, every counselor will tell you that the most traumatic things you can go through are either the death of a spouse or divorce. If you're going to become a Christian, Paul says, you go through something like that.

There's a huge change in your life. You were going in this direction and there's a death. You move and you've experienced a new passion and a new delight toward Jesus. Has that happened to you? If it hasn't happened, you don't understand Christianity yet. Go and discover what this means. The blood of Christ cleanses from all sins. Thanks for listening to today's teaching. We trust you were encouraged by it and that it gives you new insight into how you can apply God's word to your life.

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This month's sermons were recorded in 1997. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.