"No More Law, I've Got Grace"

No More Law, I’ve Got Grace

According to the Scripture, there are three lifestyles. One is a lifestyle of living under sin, the bondage of sin. A second is living under the Law, and a third is living in grace. And all of us fall into one of those three categories.

We’re either under sin, under the Law, or in grace. Which one best suits you and which one would you believe that best describes you? Two of those are lifestyles of bondage, but only one of them is a lifestyle of freedom. And this is our fifth message in this series: “Grace At It’s Finest.” And the title of this message, “Grace Sets Us Free.”

John 1:14-17 (NKJV)

What I want to do in this message is make a comparison of how two different groups of people live. One is that group of people who attempt to live by the Law. And secondly, I want to talk about that group of people who live by grace. Now, all of us who have been saved have been saved by grace, but what happens is that oftentimes a person is saved by grace and then, without knowing or having been taught properly, they just naturally fall into attempting to live the Christian life by Law.

And that is, attempting to live the Christian life the best they know how, doing the best they know how and trying to read the Bible and pray and go to church and give and do all the things that a Christian ought to be able to do and should be doing. The only problem is that most of us discovered pretty soon after we became a Christian that something wasn’t working.

And I remember when I first got saved and I went to a particular church, and they told me that I was to do certain things now that I was a Christian. You know what, I tried and I tried and tried and tried, but I found a bunch of things in the Bible that really bothered me. “Thou shalt not do this and thou shalt not do the other.”

And I think, sometimes when I’d see a “thou shalt not,” I’d just check that out to see what happens if you did. And all of us have, I’m sure. And the truth is, if I were to ask you today, “How many of you have really been successful at living your Christian life?” I wonder how many of you would throw up your hand quickly.

Well, I certainly wouldn’t because I would have to say that in my own attempt to live the Christian life for years and years and years, I fasted, prayed, begged, pleaded, cried, and you name it, preached, did everything I knew how to do, and over and over and over again I found myself failing.

Now, the problem is nobody ever told me what I want to tell you this morning. And I’m sure that many of you know it. I wish everybody did. But I’m sure that there are a lot of people who sort of think they understand the comparison or the relationship between grace and Law, but they don’t.

And so when it comes to this matter of the law versus grace, it’s very important you and I understand what part each plays in our life today, because you and I are not Old Testament Christians. Now, once in a while, I meet one. Says, “I live by the law.” Well, I want to say good luck with that, but you have failed already. I can tell you have failed, because you can’t live by the law. It just doesn’t work. Well, how do you know it doesn’t work? Well, I’ve got 50 years of experience.

I’ve been a Christian since I was 8, and 50 years of experience tells me you can’t do it. You say, “Well, why should you even tell someone to give themselves to Christ if you can’t live it?” Well, giving yourself to Christ is part of it, living is another part, and there is a way, but it isn’t the way most people try. So, what I want to do is to talk about two things: the inadequacy of trying to live by the Law and the sufficiency of the grace.

So, first of all, let’s talk about what we mean when we talk about Law. In the Old Testament, the Law of Moses spoke of three things primarily. First of all, the moral Law. That was the Law that governed their relationship to God and to each other to some degree. Then there was the civil Law which governed their conduct, their social conduct with each other. Then there were the ceremonial and religious laws by which they were to abide. And these laws were given to a specific people for a specific purpose for a specific form of government and lifestyle. Listen carefully, they were not given to the world.

Included in that Law is the Ten Commandments. God did not give the Ten Commandments to the world. God gave the Ten Commandments, primarily, specifically to the nation of Israel.

“Now, are you saying, well, no one else should abide by it?” No, I didn’t say that. Now, I want you to listen carefully, I’m going to say this about three times so you won’t misquote me. You are not going to hear me say, “Do away with the Ten Commandments” because I don’t believe that. You’re not going to hear me say, “The Ten Commandments don’t count anymore” because I don’t believe that. You’re not going to hear me say, “Toss out the Ten Commandments.”

No, I’m simply saying that the laws of God, that Law that made up the Mosaic Law was given to a particular people at a particular time for a particular purpose, and it was not what most people think it was. It was a lifestyle, a rule by which they were to govern their lives

God brought them out of Egyptian bondage and made them a nation for its ultimate primary purpose, that through the nation of Israel, the Messiah would come. And it was their responsibility to identify the one true God because they lived among heathens. And so, their responsibility was to identify the one true God who was Jehovah God, through whom–the nation of Israel–this God would send a Messiah. This nation’s ultimate mission in life was that the Messiah would come through the nation of Israel.

Now, what I want us to do is to speak primarily of the moral Law because all their ceremonial laws and those things do not apply to us today, of course, and their social laws do not apply to us.

If you were to ask the average person–what is the purpose of the Ten Commandments? Many people would say, “Well, the purpose of the Ten Commandments is to save us.” And some would say, “Well, to make us good, to get us to heaven.

So, all of those sound-like good answers. The only problem with those answers is every single one of them is absolutely, totally wrong. The Ten Commandments were never given in order to make us good, make us holy, get us to God, get us saved, get us born again.

That’s not the purpose of the Ten Commandments. So, the moral Law of God, given in the Scriptures as you and I know it, was not given for that purpose. Now, the Ten Commandments, that moral Law of God was given for a purpose, sort of a like an X-ray machine is in the hospital. The X-ray machine doesn’t cure you. The X-ray machine identifies what the problem is and labels it. It tells you what the bad news is if there’s bad news. Another example is the mirror. When you look in the mirror in the morning, what does the mirror tell you? Well, the mirror doesn’t make you handsome or beautiful, it just tells you the facts, doesn’t it? It just tells you the truth about yourself.

The purpose of the moral Law of God is not to save, not to make good, not to make holy, but to identify what’s wrong with us.
That is, the Ten Commandments: thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet, and all of these things, were given in order to expose the true condition of our heart, and that is that the heart of all men is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

Now, I want you to follow me with some verses of Scripture, and let’s move right along. Look at Romans 3. What he’s talking about here primarily is the purpose of the law.

Romans 3:20 (NKJV)

How do we know that these things are sinful except God gave us a Law? And He says, “Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not bow down before these idols.” We know what’s right and wrong by the Law. Now, the Law’s purpose was not to save us or to make us right but reveal, like the X-ray machine, what’s wrong.

So what happens? We lie, we know that it’s wrong. We’re deceitful, it’s not what we call a big lie, but it’s still a lie. Or we are lustful toward the opposite sex. He says these things are sinful. Or we steal. We may be even stealing by getting off of work ten minutes early when you’re supposed to work eight full hours or whatever it might be. But the law of God has as its primary purpose to reveal what is wrong, our inadequacy in life. Now let’s look at Romans chapter 7.

Romans 7:7 (NKJV)

So again, the primary purpose for which God gave the law to the nation of Israel is to reveal what’s wrong. Let’s look at 1 Timothy 1:8-9

1 Timothy 1:8-9 (NKJV)

He says, now, you want to know what the purpose of the law is? The purpose is to expose the sinful condition of man, and to expose man’s inadequacy to be acceptable to God on the basis of his own human effort. How many of us has not broken all of those Ten Commandments? You say, “Well, now, I don’t know about that first one and bowing down and so forth.”

All of us have had, at times, other gods in their life. It may have been money, people, time, systems, whatever it might be. The truth is we’ve all broken all of them. And He says in His Word that if you break one of them, you’re guilty of all of them. So, the truth is, the purpose of the moral law of God, the Ten Commandments, is to show us that you and I cannot live godly live trying to abide by a set of rules. First of all, that is not its purpose, and secondly, it won’t happen, it can’t happen. Living by the law won’t get you anything but bondage, disappointment, and failure. Now let’s look at Galatians. Now, listen to what he says about the purpose of the Law. He says, “You really want to know what the Commandments were given for?” Here they are.

Galatians 3:24 (NKJV)

Listen to this, the purpose of the Law was to lead us to absolutely, total, complete realization of our inadequacy to be made acceptable to God on the basis of our effort and our absolute, total dependence upon Jesus Christ.

Now, you say, “But now wait a minute now, hmm. What about in the Old Testament, all of these sacrifices and all the things that went on back over 2000 years ago? Surely those people were saved by keeping the Law.”

No, they weren’t. The Bible says that Abraham believed God and that He applied–that He accounted him as righteous. It was faith! When a person brought a lamb or a sheep or goat or whatever it may have been and offered it as a sacrifice, it wasn’t the offering and the sacrifice that brought about forgiveness. It was their faith in what God said about their confessing their sins and repenting of their sin and the offering of that sacrifice. That sacrifice didn’t bring them forgiveness.

The sacrifice was a picture, a foreshadowing, a very important part of their ritual and their law to foreshadow the coming of Jesus Christ and His sacrificial death at Calvary. His death at Calvary fulfilled all that. That’s why there need be no more of that going on.

And so it was their faith in God, in Jehovah God, who said, this is the law. You want forgiveness, you take a sheep, have the priest cut its throat and shed its blood. It is the shedding of its blood, and faith in what I said that really is going to bring about the forgiveness. And so these people were made righteous. The same way we are today through the blood of Jesus.

Now, remember this. You say, “Well, that’s thousands of years ago.” When God looks at life, he sees all of time like this, beginning, end of time on earth. He sees all of it at one time, whereas He recognizes time because He created it, He sees everything at the same time, therefore, He does not figure out what’s going happen next, He knows beginning to end.

So when He had them sacrificing, it was sacrificing because the cross was done. He says Jesus Christ was the Lamb of God slain before the foundation of the world. So that’s the way He sees it. So, the Law that was given was to bring about a realization of man’s inadequacy and his absolute, total dependence upon God. So, he says, in this passage here: “Therefore the Law became our tutor to lead us to Christ, that we should be justified by faith.”

Now, we’ll go back to Galatians 2:16.

And all through this book, he makes it very, very clear that you don’t get saved, that you are not forgiven of your sins, that you don’t get God’s acceptance by trying to live up to the Ten Commandments or any kind of law.

Galatians 2:16 (NKJV)

There is no such thing, no possibility of anybody, getting right with God, being reconciled to God, having their sins forgiven, being born again, saved, all the words we use, none of that will ever take place on the basis that you attempt to keep the Ten Commandments because, first of all, you can’t keep them, you don’t keep them.

Somebody will say, “Well, but now I do.” No, you don’t. You say, “Well, how do you know I don’t.” Because the Bible said you don’t. Because you see, He said if you violate one of them, you violate all of them—you mean to tell me that you never even say anything that is deceitful, which is lying? You never have a lustful look? You always–now you’re always absolutely honest? You’ve never taken anything that belonged to somebody else? You never covet something that someone else has? You’ve never had any idols in your life? Which is anything that you put before God. All of us are guilty. Every single one of us is guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.

Now we say, “All right, then what– This sounds like a terrible problem, that God has given us this law, and somehow it’s not working.”

This takes us to Galatians 5:1-3. This is defines grace.

Now, when you think about what he said here, he’s talking about there being no works of the law that will justify us. They are not only no works of the law that will justify us and make us right with God, you can’t get God’s acceptance even after you’re saved by living up to and abiding by and fulfilling certain laws and regulations and rules. But that is exactly what has happened to so many Christians.

We think that now that I’m saved by grace, I have to do the following things in order to either to stay saved or to keep God’s acceptance or to keep His approval. And so what do we do?

We work hard at getting God’s approval. We work hard at getting rid of guilt. We work hard at pleasing God, and there are many people who read their Bible, because if they don’t, they’re afraid– they’ll think what’s God going do? Or they give out of fear, or they share their faith because the pastor said if you don’t, God’s going be displeased. So many rules and regulations, they live in this bondage.

What is the bondage? The bondage is fear of losing God’s approval. Now, how did you and I get approved by God? The way you and I received God’s acceptance and approval had nothing to do with abiding by the Ten Commandments or any other commandment in the Old Testament. No moral law of God got us acceptance. What got us acceptance is that Jesus died as the ultimate, final substitute, the fulfillment of all of those sheep and goats and bulls that were killed.

His death was the blood that paid the penalty for our sins. We received Him as our personal Savior, and in so doing, we moved from law into grace. We move from the law into grace the moment we receive the Lord Jesus Christ is our personal Savior.
Now, what good in the law in the world in which we live and how does it apply to our life. The law of God is essential to come into the grace of God. The law of God is what convicted us of our sins. The law of God is the thing that exposed our wickedness and our vileness. It was the law of God that showed us we needed something. It was the law of God that showed us we were going to destroy ourselves. It was the law of God that caused us to feel guilt and condemned and unworthy and unfit and certainly beyond God forgiving or even saving us. What brought all of that about? The law of God.

What makes us feel inadequate? The law of God. Is that where God intends for us to stay, under this bondage of inadequacy, this bondage of guilt, this bondage of condemnation, this bondage of never knowing exactly whether I have God’s approval or not? Is that the way I’m to live? That is exactly the way many of God’s people live. They live under bondage, and I guarantee you, many of you sitting right here are trying to please God. And many of you who are watching are trying to please God, you’re trying to get His approval. And so you work harder, you try to be good, and you try not to do certain things.

You say, “You mean to tell me that if I don’t do a lot of things that are sinful, and if I do a lot of good things, that God isn’t going to count that to me for righteousness?” Absolutely, absolutely not, because there is absolutely nothing within us that is worthy, not one single solitary thing can you and I boast of but the grace of God. Not by works of righteousness which we’ve done are we saved. There is another way, a better way, and that is what grace is all about.

You see, if I don’t understand His grace, I cannot accept that God loves me absolutely, perfectly, completely, totally, wholly, couldn’t do anything else but love me.

But if I don’t understand grace, I can give Him a thousand reasons why He shouldn’t love me. Without raising your hand, I wonder how many of you really and truly feel like, oh, I know God loves me? Most Christians don’t really and truly believe that they’re worthy of His love.

God doesn’t use us based on our worth. Look at the characters He used in the Bible. I mean, they committed all kinds of things. God didn’t choose to use them simply on the basis that they were perfect. You and I are imperfect. The law keeps telling us imperfect, imperfect, imperfect, imperfect, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. If you listen to the law, you will be guilty.

If you ask what does grace teach me? Loved, forgiven, accepted just like we are.

But so many of God’s people are living under the law. And so what Paul is saying here, and what I think is so very important for us to understand that that wasn’t even the purpose of it.

Now, you’re saying, “Well, just forget the Ten Commandments”? No, I didn’t say that. I’m simply saying that was not the purpose for which it was given.

You see, back in those days, it was always faith. For example, in John 3:16 it says,

By faith, salvation is by faith, everything in the Christian life is by faith. We move from the law to grace. When you and I trusted Jesus Christ as our Savior, here’s what we said. This is the reason we got saved. We said, “God, I’ve blown it, I’ve sinned against You. No matter how much good effort I put forth, God, I just can’t do any better, and I’m making a mess of my life, and Lord, I need You. I’m asking You to forgive me.

When Jesus died, He took your sin debt in full, and the moment you accept Him by faith as your personal Savior, based on the work–what work?

When He died, that was the fulfillment of all of God’s plan. Listen, that was the work, and that was the fulfillment of the completion of the work. When He died for our sins, He paid our sin debt, the work was over.

You say, “Well, you’re not supposed to work as a Christian?” Oh, now wait a minute now. When I move from law unto grace, everything changes, so let’s move. Before you were saved, you were under the law, under sin, and nothing was working.

And so you came to a point of desperation, you said, “Lord Jesus, I do receive You as my Savior.” But what did you do? Well, you got saved. Now, when you move from grace, here’s what happens. You move from your efforts, your abilities, your self-dependence into a whole different sphere, and now, ooh goodness, what freedom I have.

What wonderful, wonderful freedom I have. I don’t have to do this, I don’t have to do that. It’s no more shoulds, oughts, and must, thou shalt not this, thou shalt not that.

But grace isn’t like that. Let me define grace again. We could say, in a very simple way, that grace is God’s undeserved kindness.

But let me give you a better illustration–a better example and a better definition. Grace is God’s kindness and graciousness toward humanity, toward us, without regard to our merit or what we deserve or our worthiness to all of us who receive it in spite of what we deserve.

Then how in the world could He do it? Because when His Son died, He paid my sin debt in full, and therefore I’m free. I’m free of the guilt and free of the penalty of sin. I no longer have to live under the Law because the Law brought me to this place of receiving Christ Jesus as my Savior and my Lord.

So now I’m in grace. Does that mean the Law is of no account? No. Does that mean that I can do anything I please? No. Well, what does it mean? It means now I am free to be what God wants me to be, and now the way I live will be because I love Him, not because I’m scared to death of Him.

But now grace is a whole different story. And if you’ll notice in this passage, back again, in John 1:14-17, notice what he says, first of all, in verse 14. He speaks of Jesus as being full of what? Full of grace and truth. Verse 17, he says the Law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. And then look at verse 16. Now, I say them in that order for this reason, “For of His fulness we have all received, grace upon grace.”

You know what that means? Here’s what it means. When you and I trusted Jesus as our Savior, he said He’d just start piling up grace on top of grace on top–blessing on top of blessing on top of favor on top of favor. And every good and perfect gift comes from the Father above.

Every single one of us, every single solitary good thing that comes our way is, listen, is an act of the grace of God. What does God owe you and me? Not a single, solitary thing. He doesn’t owe us anything.

It is all a work of grace. Every single, solitary thing comes our way is a work of grace. You say, “Wait a minute now, but what about those difficult times? What about God’s chastisement?” That’s grace. You said, “I thought you said grace was favor.” It is favor. “Well, how can it be favor and at the same time be chastisement?” Even divine chastisement is an expression of the goodness and love and mercy and grace and kindness of God.

The grace of God is God’s love in action. It is God pouring out His love into our life and heart. It is God pouring out His kindness in our life. Sometimes good things, wonderful things, things we want. Sometimes things we don’t want, but it is still the grace of God.

There are principles by which we live, but here’s the difference principles and law. Jesus died for our sins, but here’s what He said. He said, “That’s not even enough.” It’ll get you to heaven, but in order to get you through life, I’m coming to live on the inside of you and to live through you, this life, this Christian life, because I know you can’t do it. In our own human effort, we can’t do it. So what is the Christian life? The Christian life isn’t a series of rules and regulations I abide by. The Christian life is Christ, the Son of the living God (presence of the Holy Spirit) living on the inside of us, living through us His very life. That’s what the Christian life is all about.

It is all grace and grace alone. Grace is our only hope. It’s pure grace. You say, “Does that give me a license to sin?” No, There’s not a single verse in the Bible that I know of where we have license to sin. I choose to live a righteous life because I love God. For example, it’s one thing for me not to commit sin because I’m afraid of God. Friend, that’s bondage. That’s terrible bondage, and there are a lot of people who live like that. Not–don’t want to watch that program because God wouldn’t approve of that. Well, you know what? If I’m really walking in grace and loving Him, I don’t want to watch it, not because God doesn’t–I just don’t want it in my life. We don’t want to do those things because of who we are in Christ and who He is in us. They don’t fit who we are.

You see, the way people become godly is falling in love with Jesus. And when you fall in love with Him and you understand who He is and who you are in Him and your grace and liberty and freedom in Him, you don’t want to do anything that’s going to hurt your testimony or is going to cause you to fall and be disobedient to God. You want to do the right thing. But rules and regulations don’t make us right. What makes us right is a heart that is in love with Christ. As the song says, “If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to right.” Or a better one is “Falling in love with Jesus is the best thing I’ve ever done.”