Fight Sin, Find Rest
00:00:00.000 | We close the week with a question from a listener named Bob.
00:00:02.800 | Pastor John, I struggle with understanding what the Bible teaches on grace and how I
00:00:06.040 | should live in light of this wonderful gift.
00:00:08.000 | I've been taught to be killing sin or it will be killing me, but I've also been taught
00:00:12.040 | to relax, that there is grace enough in the Holy Spirit to take care of us.
00:00:16.720 | This all makes my head spin and seems a bit dangerous for how comfortable I can get with
00:00:20.440 | my own sin.
00:00:21.440 | I know that we should not sin so that grace abounds, but then how ought we to live?
00:00:26.520 | What's a biblical view of grace in our sanctification?
00:00:30.920 | There are some head-spinning things in the Bible, and one of the callings of teachers
00:00:38.640 | and one of the hopes I have for this podcast is I can keep his head from spinning off.
00:00:45.160 | The first thing I think I should do is clarify what might be a slight distortion of the meaning
00:00:53.360 | of God's grace in the way the question is posed.
00:00:56.560 | Bob asks or contrasts the work of killing sin with a kind of relaxation.
00:01:06.240 | He contrasts the work of killing sin with a kind of relaxation that seems to say that
00:01:13.480 | grace is what you're enjoying when you relax, but something else is operating when you're
00:01:20.960 | working or striving.
00:01:22.280 | He says, "But I've also been taught to relax.
00:01:26.360 | There's grace enough in the Holy Spirit to take care of us."
00:01:29.680 | Well, yes, and a lot of people have that view, and the problem with it biblically is that
00:01:38.000 | grace in the New Testament is not just the gift of restfulness, but the power of God
00:01:45.280 | to enable us to strive for holiness and work for holiness.
00:01:49.040 | For example, 1 Corinthians 15.10, "By the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace
00:01:54.280 | toward me was not in vain.
00:01:55.760 | On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace
00:02:03.080 | of God that is with me."
00:02:05.680 | So the first thing I want to say to Bob is don't frame the question that way.
00:02:10.640 | Don't say that the Bible sometimes teaches us to strive and sometimes teaches us to be
00:02:18.260 | relaxed in grace.
00:02:20.560 | Rather say, how, Pastor John, do we put together the biblical exhortations to strive and work
00:02:30.000 | and fight by grace with the biblical exhortations to rest and be content in grace?
00:02:38.440 | That's the head spinner.
00:02:41.760 | That's the real head spinner for anybody who reads the Bible carefully.
00:02:48.040 | So the New Testament says things like, and he knows this, he's citing them, Hebrews
00:02:54.760 | 12.14, "Strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord."
00:02:59.480 | And Romans 8.13, "By the Spirit, put to death the deeds of the body."
00:03:05.600 | And Luke 13.24, "Strive to enter through the narrow door.
00:03:10.360 | For many, I tell you, will seek to enter, will not be able."
00:03:13.800 | Now right there in Luke 13.24, those words of Jesus, there's a clue.
00:03:20.640 | At least it points to a clue of how it is that people who are justified by faith alone
00:03:30.640 | and who believe they are secure in Christ and will make it to heaven by God's grace,
00:03:38.120 | how do those people go through the narrow door?
00:03:42.760 | How do they strive?
00:03:44.960 | And the reason I say it's a clue is because there's a parallel in Matthew 7.13-14, which
00:03:51.760 | says this, "Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is easy that
00:03:58.840 | leads to destruction.
00:04:01.960 | And those who enter by it are many, for the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads
00:04:09.840 | to life, and those who find it are few."
00:04:14.200 | Now that sounds, "Whoa, good night.
00:04:18.160 | Christian life is just hard, narrow, work, strive."
00:04:22.960 | Yes, however, four chapters later in Matthew, that's why I think Matthew's the best help
00:04:29.880 | here is because you're dealing in the same gospel with the same Jesus talk in the same
00:04:34.400 | language, Matthew 11.28-30, "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will
00:04:43.640 | give you rest.
00:04:46.680 | Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you'll
00:04:54.520 | find rest for your souls."
00:04:57.840 | You just feel it being lifted, right?
00:05:00.280 | Verse 30, "For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
00:05:08.600 | So in Matthew 7.14, the way is hard that leads to life, and in Matthew 11.30, the yoke of
00:05:19.040 | Jesus is easy and light.
00:05:22.840 | So I get why his head is spinning.
00:05:25.080 | My head spins.
00:05:26.600 | One of the greatest questions in life is how those fit together, and you may take a lifetime
00:05:32.840 | to live it, if not learn it.
00:05:35.880 | And here's my suggestion for how I put those together anyway, and you can think it through
00:05:41.320 | on your own.
00:05:42.760 | The fight, the striving, the narrow, the hard, the work, the warfare is not a striving to
00:05:51.560 | get Christ or to earn salvation.
00:05:56.920 | It is a striving precisely to rest.
00:06:01.880 | Now I know that sounds like a contradiction, but think of it this way.
00:06:06.340 | When Jesus calls us to come to him and rest, he means rest in him.
00:06:15.800 | Find your soul resting in him.
00:06:20.280 | We are to find Jesus to be our rest, or to use different words, and it's important to
00:06:26.840 | use these words, find Jesus to be our contentment.
00:06:32.360 | Find Jesus to be our peace.
00:06:35.400 | Find Jesus to be our satisfaction.
00:06:39.240 | That's what Jesus is for us, and he's bidding us come and find him to be that for us.
00:06:45.840 | And when Jesus is becoming that for us in large measure, that is our victory over competing
00:06:55.640 | pleasures of sin.
00:06:57.720 | And therefore, it is warfare.
00:07:00.700 | The way we kill sin, the way we successfully strive and work to put sin to death is by
00:07:09.600 | doing whatever it takes to be more happy in Jesus, more restful in Jesus, more content
00:07:16.720 | and satisfied in Jesus than in sin.
00:07:20.600 | So all striving, all working, all fighting is a striving and working and fighting to
00:07:26.580 | rest, to be content, to be satisfied, to be happy in Jesus.
00:07:33.160 | This is the only way of gospel sanctification.
00:07:37.120 | If you don't put to death sinful temptation by a superior satisfaction in Jesus, but only
00:07:44.680 | by your willpower, then you're going to get the glory and not Jesus, and that's not biblical
00:07:50.560 | sanctification.
00:07:51.560 | 1 Peter 4, 11, "Let him who serves serve in the strength that God supplies, so that in
00:08:00.080 | everything God may get the glory through Jesus."
00:08:03.520 | So how do we strive and work and fight to serve God?
00:08:08.920 | Answer, by receiving, by receiving power, grace from God so that God gets the glory.
00:08:16.720 | And that power flows through faith, faith in God's promises.
00:08:22.960 | And the essence of faith in promises is being satisfied in the promises, trusting in the
00:08:29.160 | promises, resting in the promises, being content in the promises.
00:08:34.920 | And that satisfaction is the rest of Matthew 11.
00:08:42.120 | So the reason Jesus says it's hard is because we love sin.
00:08:48.480 | We don't love to rest.
00:08:51.020 | We love to find our satisfaction in this world and in sin.
00:08:55.320 | And he says, "As long as you are preferring, as long as you are preferring this world over
00:09:01.720 | me, sin over me, then the only way for you to conceive of the Christian life is killing.
00:09:08.760 | You must kill that."
00:09:11.400 | But the goal of the killing is the rest.
00:09:15.160 | And if you are already at rest in Jesus and he is a superior satisfaction to you over
00:09:22.000 | all sin, you don't have to fight.
00:09:25.360 | You're there.
00:09:26.360 | But nobody's there.
00:09:27.360 | So in this way, we fight, and every day God gives us measures of restfulness, and we defeat
00:09:35.800 | sin.
00:09:38.360 | Fighting our way to true rest.
00:09:40.120 | That is such a helpful way of putting this.
00:09:41.480 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:09:42.480 | And thanks for the question, Bob.
00:09:43.960 | Well, for more details about this podcast or to catch up on past episodes we've released
00:09:47.660 | or to subscribe to the audio feed and even send us a question of your own, go to our
00:09:50.760 | online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:09:55.420 | We are going to break for the weekend, but on Monday we field a question from a mother
00:09:58.380 | of a young son who wants to know, "How do parents prepare their children for the inevitable
00:10:02.700 | suffering to come in this life?"
00:10:04.520 | Oof, that's a great question.
00:10:06.640 | Don't miss it.
00:10:07.640 | That's Monday.
00:10:08.640 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:10:09.640 | We'll see you then.
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