Inward Motions of Sin

So if you open your Bible to Exodus chapter 20, in Exodus chapter 20 verse 17 we have the 10th commandment. I started to think we'd never get here. I'll tell you, when we started this series, I think we've done about 35 or 40 sermons. I think it's been longer than 1 Peter was. I thought it would be 20 sermons. I did two sermons per commandment and fly right through it, and everybody would get it. and it's been a little longer than I had planned.

And I was tempted, I guess here's my unpracticed intro, I was tempted when we began this series to do the Tenth Commandment first, or somewhere inject it earlier, because in some ways the Tenth Commandment violation is the root of all your other sins. same can be said about the first commandment in some way as well but I stuck with the plan of just going straight through and so there are aspects of every other commandment that certainly a person could say well he could have done that one more thoroughly sure I can say it I've thought of things since finishing other commandments and I thought I wonder if I said that. If I didn't, I wish I had. But the 10th commandment ultimately will cover everything for you.

Because if you can figure out how to obey the 10th, you'll be the perfect man. And so let's dig into the text. Verse 17. Also, this is about your last chance to start memorizing this passage. Folks, you've had nine months almost. So here's your chance to finish it.

You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey. And if that wasn't enough to help people understand the point. Or anything that is your neighbor's. It's a reading of God's holy word from the Old Testament. So when we talk about covetousness, when we talk about coveting, that's a word that I think everyone knows and uses, but can we define it?

Coveting is ultimately just the same word as lust or desire. So there may be a person in your life who at some point has said, I covet your prayers. They're just saying I desire your prayers. There's nothing wrong with coveting prayers. I covet. I desire to be with the Lord Jesus Christ.

I long for that. Nothing wrong with coveting in and of itself. So this isn't a word where the word itself is bad. I just want to establish that. I tend not to say I covet your prayers to people. It's just I don't like to say that phrase personally.

But I think what we need to understand is it's the object of what you're coveting that is the determining factor in whether or not you're sinning. So if you think about grammar for a moment, I covet is first person singular pronoun I. I and then you've got a verb covet that's your action right if you're diagramming a sentence here for some of you homeschool kids you better be soon if you want to read the Bible I fully expect to have kids from this church translating the Bible from Greek and Hebrew and other languages someday I don't see why one kid can't be the one God called to do that kind of thing and at a young age with most of these kids in here you could master both those languages in three years and some of you wouldn't be teenagers yet and then you can start translating the Bible for people that don't have it.

But, side note, the direct object of the sentence, the object of that verb covet, is the determining factor in whether you have a problem or not. Coveting someone's prayers is not desiring something that's forbidden by God. So to simply desire something, or to long for something, or in this case to covet, is not in and of itself sinful. The question becomes, is what you're coveting forbidden?

How do you know if it's forbidden? Well, there's a few ways, but the easiest one is to check if God has forbade it. And how do you know what God has forbade? Well, in this case, he gave us some examples. And he uses examples that are things that somebody else either owns or at least has stewardship over that you don't have stewardship over. So he says in verse 17 of Exodus 20, you shall not covet your neighbor's house.

Well, that's his stuff. So we were already told two commandments earlier, you shall not steal. We established that that means that there's such a thing as private property. It's all owned by God, but God allots it out to individuals. and so yeah you can't steal somebody else's house and if you tried to you'd be in a lot of trouble it'd be hard to hide that one but this commandment is breaking things down from the outward action into the inward action the inward motivation or inclination So very few people would ever attempt to steal a home But in this case, God's letting you know that if you just look at your neighbor's house with envy, wishing it was yours instead of his, thinking you deserve it instead of him, that you've already sinned against God and your neighbor, in fact, I think.

He gets into a little more detail. He says, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife. Well, three commandments ago, we established that you should not commit adultery. Most people would know that actually lying with somebody else's wife would be adultery in the flesh. you would be guilty of violating the seventh commandment. And we talked about in the sixth and seventh commandment in particular that our heart is where all these sins begin.

And I don't know if I mentioned it specifically at the time, but it is, in fact, the coveting the thing that begins it all. Whenever you find out that somebody has broken the seventh commandment, you can be sure that they broke the tenth commandment in their heart at some point before the seventh commandment was actually physically broken. So whereas you can hide your adulterous heart from those around you by outwardly obeying the command not to commit adultery, you cannot hide your covetous, lustful heart from the Lord when you harbor thoughts of lust and adultery inwardly, yet have the control somehow not to act on them.

So, the author of Exodus, Moses, adds, he says, or his male servant or his female servant, probably would say male slave or female slave. This is somebody who owes them something, maybe works hard for them. So if you imagine if you own a business, right? Somebody's got better employees than you. Somebody's working hard for another business, helping them make a lot of money.

You're not to wish that they were with you and not the other person. The Tenth Commandment means that you're not to grieve at your neighbor's success or gain. you're actually supposed to celebrate it for him. Now I understand the idea that if somebody's performing evil we don't necessarily celebrate if they're successful. That's a different thing. But this is about you and your heart desiring what God has given to someone else.

Thus meaning implicitly it's not yours. If it was yours he'd have given it to you already. this is also different from looking at your neighbor's house and thinking oh that's a nice house I would like a house like that or I would like to work hard like my neighbor and save money and do the right things in such a way that I might prosper so I could buy a house like that or maybe even buy his house if he's if he's selling it there's a distinction between simply looking upon something else and thinking, well, that's a nice thing and I want something similar, and wanting it for yourself. And he uses the analogy of a house, he uses the analogy of a wife.

The same would go for husbands. If you're a wife and you've got a husband, maybe he's not perfect. Don't tap him or anything. There's only one couple that's actually here together. but you can sometimes look at other couples, especially when you don't live together in the same house all the time. And you can look at the other couple on Sunday or Thursday night or whenever you happen to be around other couples and they look happy and joyful.

Because when people go out and they're around you, they tend to be able to put away their differences, even husbands and wives for a few minutes. And all of a sudden these guys look great, you know. and your husband's just the guy that hasn't fixed the fence yet or whatever it is. And you're not to covet other people's spouses. He also adds an ox or his donkey or anything.

It runs the whole gamut by this point. So you've gone through Ten Commandments and you've been utterly destroyed by the fact that there's only one God and you can't even see Him and you're not allowed to even try to draw pictures of Him because that's just plain wicked and it misrepresents them. Every time you open your mouth, you're tempted to blaspheme his name.

He gives you one day a week that you're supposed to rest. And instead of wanting to rest on that day and worship him, we'd rather have it for ourselves because we're so covetous that we want all seven days for ourselves. He tells people to honor those in authority. He tells you not to murder, not to commit adultery, not to steal, not to lie. And you're overwhelmed.

And then he says, oh, and by the way, your entire heart attitude all the time about all these things can never have a sinful desire even. And if you're not already at the beginning of studying the 10th commandment, broken down by the fact that you need a savior, then you're not listening to the commandments. There was another man who wasn't listening to the commandments very well.

His name was Paul. Turn to Romans 7. Romans 7 is a really famous passage because a lot of guys that we consider good Bible scholars disagree on the interpretation of it. What I've noticed is the ones who are right happen to agree with me So I give you the right interpretation I not going to go through the whole chapter anyway but Paul was a man who knew God law better than most people from an earthly perspective he certainly had more of the Old Testament memorized than we probably do and he probably had read it more than we do and he read it in Hebrew he was much closer to understanding the original language than most of us would ever be even if somebody spent their life studying Hebrew probably at this point.

But Paul, although he knew what the law said, thought of himself as blameless before the law. That's how he thought of himself before he was born again. So I'm going to say something here. Until you're born again, God's law is always going to be something you don't quite get. You may know that you hate it. You may know you can't obey it.

But you're never going to quite understand the depth of it at all. And you won't even as a believer. But as a believer, you can start to have an idea. Listen to verse 7. Paul says, what then shall we say? He's asking a question because he's trying to prove that although the law brought you the knowledge of sin, And in fact, he'll say in here, the law incited the sin in you.

He's trying to claim that the law is not bad. The law is holy. The commandment is holy because it's from God. It reflects God. It can be nothing but holy. Your problem is the same problem Paul had.

If you think righteousness will be found by the law, that's that's the problem. The law is not the problem. Your use of it's the problem. Be like if you called me and said, my hammer's not working. and I said, well, what's wrong? He said, the screw won't go in. There's nothing wrong with your hammer.

You're using the wrong tool to try to screw in a screw. He says, what shall we say then, that the law is sin? He says, by no means. Don't you dare say that. You realize there's people today that basically will say that. There are people who call themselves Christians.

Let me clarify, there's Christians today who will say the law is bad. Because they read that the law couldn't save them, and it's by grace, through faith alone, apart from the law that you have redemption of sins. And therefore, they throw away the law. And inevitably, as I've said before, when you create a vacuum, they fill it with something else. So you get their laws. it's amazing how people that don't believe in the regulative principle of worship I guarantee if you walked into their church and tried to worship some way they don't like they'd regulate it real quick their way but he says yet if it had not been for the law so now Paul's going to say but here's something the law was able to do it's not all useless it's just not designed for you to be righteous or to be redeemed and saved.

He says, I would not have known sin if it wasn't for the law. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, you shall not covet. I find that really interesting because he picks that commandment out of all of them. And I find it interesting, regardless of the fact that that's the commandment we're on now. I've always found it interesting.

But I think there's a reason for that. And I think one of the reasons is there is an idea that I think we can defend from Scripture. That God's law is written on the hearts of people who don't know him. now this is why when you go almost anywhere in the world and you read history books most cultures have laws against murder most cultures have laws even the pro-murder people in our society in their mind it's for the preservation of mothers lives of some type they still think it's a non-murderer concept.

They're deceived. They're wrong. But it's not like they're just bloodthirsty. Like, I just want to kill things. Most of the people, they actually think they're trying to help. Deep down inside, we know that it's a little worse than that.

Most cultures have a law against murder. Most cultures have a law against stealing. And even the ones that become totally socialist and have the little ruling class that are the only ones that are actually taking other people's stuff, they would sure be mad if you tried to take more than they allotted for you. They'd call it stealing. It's an amazing deception that somebody's life would be stealing from you and then they'd be mad if you took a little more than they said you could have.

There's laws against even breaking contracts and lying. most cultures that last any bit of time have laws about adultery not just adultery but just breaking a marriage covenant they have incentives for families to get married and have children do you realize that if you don't incentivize people to get married and have children they probably would anyway but a culture that actually incentivizes that is the culture that in in 30 or 40 years is going to take over the whole environment. This is one of the hopes we have as Christians in the United States, is that the people that hate children and are consistently murdering their own children, as bad as that is, there's a hope that in 30, 40 years there just won't be that many of those people anymore. And those of us that have had 4 5 6 8 whatever number of kids we end up with or adopt them and raise them the right way we just have huge blocks of people voting in a Christian way We make Christian laws And I'm not talking about theonomy.

I just mean good laws that come from biblically deduced concepts. I think that's a real hope. I'm not post-bill today because of it, but I think it's a real thing we hope for. at some point you're going to outnumber people that just hate having kids it seems like but you also have to get your kids saved but Paul says he wouldn't have known coveting if it wasn't for the law and so we have this beautiful idea that the 10th commandment is super important it was important to Paul to share this and I think that this tells us a little bit about it.

So a couple of verses. You don't have to turn there. I can share them with you if you want. Just to remind you how bad covetousness is. Luke 12, 15. I'm going to turn there.

This one had a couple more verses surrounding it. In Luke 12, someone in the crowd, verse 12, verse 13. Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. So, you know, at the time, the brother had so much inheritance allotted to him, the first brother got, like, double the inheritance of the other brother.

So it's one of the reasons you have to learn fractions, is so you can figure out how Jews did inheritances, because it changed depending on how many kids they had. But he said, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. And so this guy, it sounds noble. He's telling Jesus, hey, you're the king, right? This is like a declaration. You're the boss.

You know, and he's telling him to share his inheritance with me. You're the boss. You can do whatever you want, right? Of course, Jesus knows the Old Testament law, and he's not going to go against it. But Jesus says, man, I love that. He says, man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?

You kind of ask him this rhetorical question, you know, like, why are you even bugging me about this? But then he tells them, take care. He says, be on your guard against all covetousness. He says, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. His response to this guy just wanting a little more inheritance from his parents is don't be covetous.

You're desiring something that is beyond what God has allotted for you. Thus, you're desiring something forbidden. okay so it's easy it's easy to think this through if it's forbidden for you to have to even want it at all is covetousness so for example anybody else's wife in fact if you're married already to desire anybody else other than your own spouse is now forbidden to you. It's a form of coveting.

If you're unmarried and you're just still looking, there's got to be some gray area there where you start to like somebody and you think maybe it'll work out but then it doesn't. I wouldn't call it coveting that you expressed interest and maybe tried to start courting. But he says be on guard against all covetousness. The most common one that will come to most of our minds is going to be money.

Financial things. I would probably adultery too but Romans 129 speaking of the culture that has met its demise basically after announcing that he's turned people over to a debased mind Paul says they the people turned over to a debased mind were filled with all manner of unrighteousness evil, covetousness malice He says, but they're full of ending murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They're gossips.

There's more. But in these lists of sins, one of the things I want you to remember when you read the Bible is in these lists of abominable sins, sometimes there's some sins that we don't think are so bad. And here's why. Because those are the ones we commit. Because if you're in church right now on a Sunday afternoon, and you've decided we're going to actually take the whole day for God because we're Sabbatarian and we're one of the 1% of Christians in the United States probably that even care about that concept.

And we actually try to practice it. We don't just say it. And we're going to have a fellowship meal and we're going to spend time together and we're going to stream it because people at home who are sick, they still want to have a little bit of a sermon and get to sing with the church and stuff because it's that important to us. And we're not going to go march in a pride parade this summer. we're probably going to go down and preach at one and hand out tracts.

And you know what? God hates your coveting in your heart as much as He hates all these outward sins as well. Some of them are just more destructive to a society, but one of them is really destructive to your soul, the one you're committing. The sin that pagans commit isn't going to damn you, okay? your secret desire for things that have been forbidden for you, that's what's going to damn you if you don't repent of it.

And I'm not saying that Jesus can't cover all your sin, but if you harbor it knowingly, and you won't repent, that's a bad sign. Ephesians 5.3, similar list to Colossians 3.5, Paul says, but sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you as is proper among saints. In 1 Corinthians chapter 5, forgive me, I think it's 1 Corinthians 5, Paul tells people not to associate with someone that bears the name of Christian if they're sexually immoral.

And he says, or if they're greedy, or if they're an idolater. He says, put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you, in Colossians 3.5. It's a similar passage to Ephesians. He says, sexual morality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. to desire that which God has forbidden that you may righteously gain for yourself is to deny the God of Scripture.

Is to take Him, in your mind, we can't actually take Him off His throne, but in your mind, it's to dethrone God. And to decide that there is another God. And it's whatever God lets you have what you want. That's covetousness. Covetousness, that's why it's called idolatry. Sometimes covetousness is translated as lust.

Which also can just mean desire. I want to read what John Gill said about this. So in Romans 7 he's speaking of, he says, By lust, or covetousness, he says, this means the inward motions of sin in the heart. Any and every desire of the mind after it. He says, not only studied and concerted schemes, but every loose, vagrant thought of sin and inclination to it.

Yea, every imagination of the thought of the heart before the imagination is well formed into a thought. and not only a dallying with sin in the mind, dwelling upon it with pleasure and thought, he says, but even such sudden motions and starts of the mind to sin, to which we give no assent. He says, such as are involuntary, even if they are displeasing and hateful to us, these are meant by lust, and which by the law of God are known to be sinful, he says, and only by that. So my own side note here is natural theology doesn't get you here.

So if you don't know what natural theology is, I learned a little bit about it last week. Natural theology cannot give us what God's revelation gives us. You can't know coveting is a sin unless God told you. That's how Paul knew. And you really can't understand it unless you're born again. So moving on with John Gill.

He says, these were not known to be so by the Gentiles, who had only the law and light of nature. And then he says this, nor are they, okay, these inward sins of the heart, okay? He's using a lot of pronouns. He says, nor are they, where did I go? Nor are they condemned, nor any provision made against them, nor can there be any made by the laws of men. laws of men cannot help you or control your coveting is what he's saying we can control if you're caught in adultery we can control if you steal something and we find it we can't control if you're just sitting around coveting he says yet inasmuch as they were not punishable by men and could be covered with the guise of an external righteousness multitudes who were born under and brought up in that law were secure and indolent about them they did not look upon them as sins or as at all affecting their righteousness this is basically the Pharisees the people that just thought as long as I obey the letter of the law outwardly I'm okay in my preparation I was remembering a guy who I met Planned Parenthood and we got there, I think it was maybe the first time we went even I don't remember, do you remember Elijah? and we got there and this man Elijah was there and there was a bunch of other people not Elijah Thompson, so this isn't like some reverse story and we walked up to these guys and they just immediately welcomed us and I knew that was a bad sign I knew they had no discernment.

We started talking, and I made it clear right when we got there, we are not Roman Catholic, and we're not partners with Roman Catholics. And as odd as that even felt to me to do I was immediately confronted by these guys that well you know we all in agreement about I don't even remember. I just know I heard his... We have to team up with Roman Catholics.

Cheer is what he was giving me. And I said, okay, you know, I don't want to talk about this now. And he starts telling us that he goes to a holiness church. I thought, oh, well, I love holiness. In fact, I cannot wait until I'm perfectly holy. Okay, that's how much I love holiness.

God, take me in the middle of the sermon, all right? Fine with me. I have a desire to be holy, and I hate the fact that I'm still unholy. I have a desire to one day be in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ and actually see Him face to face because I will be made like Him. and what that means is that I will now be unable to sin like he is unable to sin and always has been unable to sin so holiness is a word I love and if there's anything I hate it's when people take God's words and they make them mean something different than what they really mean and so we started talking to this guy Elijah and he shares with us that he goes to a holiness church and we're kind of like, well what's that all about?

I don't remember how the conversation started. I remember not wanting to talk to him much, but he was pushing it on us. And I remember what he said to us that really set me off. He said, well, we believe you don't sin until an outward action. Looks like Hannah's here. Awesome.

Come on in, guys. He says, we believe you don't sin until you outwardly sin. And I thought to myself, well, wait, what? I'm like kind of dumbfounded here, you know. And so he explains to us, you know, what he believes enough. And I don't remember whether I rebuked him right then or if I just said, okay, well, thanks for sharing.

And I took his tract home and I read it and it was the typical perfectionist tract. And I remember I was busy and Josh Richardson read it and he agreed. He said the same thing. So there are people out there that actually believe that they can have all sorts of evil desires. And they probably think they don't dwell on them. They probably would tell you, oh, well, I don't dwell on them.

And as long as it doesn't come to life in outward sin, they haven't actually sinned. And I will tell you that I think if somebody believes that, that you have every reason to believe that they're still dead in their sins. Now, they may just need some discipleship and to be pulled out of what I'll just say is a bad church with bad teaching. I think it's possible for a Christian to fall into that error or in particular, like in this particular guy's case, I think he was raised in a church his dad started that is one of those holiness churches and it's just all he's ever known. but that's a very dangerous teaching and it's exactly what the people that crucified Jesus believed, the Pharisees.

They believed that their inward actions were not a reflection of who they really were or a manifestation of their original sin. They believed that as long as they didn't outwardly do all the bad things, they saw the prostitutes and tax collectors doing that they were righteous. And what Jesus knew about each and every one of them and what God knows in heaven is that they were as wicked in the heart as any person who had ever lived.

And maybe God in his judgment of them gave them the power to control this stuff outwardly. You may remember the people during Jesus' time who were most likely to come to him were the ones who had the most outward grotesque sins. Jesus was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard not because he was getting drunk and overeating because he hung out with those kinds of people who he was giving the gospel to and they were getting saved because prostitutes were getting saved repenting of their sin and so you need to have the right theology of sin which begins with Adam in the garden sinned as your federal head and you're as guilty of it as he was and now you are in what we would call a state with a sin nature You have a nature about you that actually can do nothing but sin Unless the grace of God intercedes.

In fact, before you're saved, this is a hard saying, before you become a Christian, everything you did was sin. Because you did none of it out of pure faith in God. now does that mean that every non-christian is exactly the same in our estimation no i think i think we all know the difference between having a neighbor who likes to watch movies with violence and a neighbor that would actually kill people okay i think we know the difference between a roman catholic married couple where the guy yells at his wife too much and looks at porn and a homosexual couple next door or some kind of couple that isn't uh isn't married they're living together and fornicating. I think we all know the difference between how a society may function differently with people who can at least have some self-control outwardly.

But in the eyes of God, it doesn't make a difference in their damnation. And it won't make a difference for you if you're one of the pretenders who has figured out how to cover up things outwardly. Pray that the Lord would break you under your sinfulness. Pharisees this is John Gill again he said these people were brought up in the law they were secure and indolent about their sins in their heart they did not look upon them as sins or as at all affecting their righteousness but imagined so this is their imagination and he quotes Philippians 3.6 Paul's resume I call it touching the righteousness of the law, they were blameless.

So they imagined they were blameless according to God's law, because they had figured out how to find a tent of a little jar of cumin, so that they could say they tithed. All the while harboring adulterous thoughts and hatred for other people, and they didn't care at all about the poor. And it says, he says, which was the case of all the Pharisees, he said, and of the apostle Paul, whilst such.

He says, but when the law came, this is beautiful. When the law came and entered his conscience with power and light attending it. So this is when he was born again. He started to understand the law. Paul was on the road to Damascus. He had read, you shall not covet your neighbor's house, your neighbor's wife, your neighbor's male servant, female servant. son, daughter, ox, donkey or anything that is your neighbor's he'd read it hundreds of times already I take the liberty to say hundreds of times but maybe I don't know he knew it, he could have quoted it I promise he didn't learn you shall not covet as the words in the scripture on the way to Emmaus not Emmaus, I'm sorry Damascus Emmaus was Luke 24 when the two guys were walking with Jesus and they didn't recognize him.

He didn't learn the 10th commandment then, but the 10th commandment became understandable to him when his mind was regenerated by the Holy Spirit and he was granted faith in Christ. So listen. When the law came and entered his conscience with power and light attending it, so now you've got the Holy Spirit's power, you've got the light of Jesus Christ, Then he saw such innumerable swarms of lusts in his heart, and these to be sinful, which he never saw and knew before.

Just as in a sunbeam we behold those numerous little bits of dust, which otherwise are indiscernible by us. he needed the light of Christ in order to even have some understanding of his sin so I have a few points that we will get into next week trying to decide there's one more thing I wanted to quote here but it's a good one for next week as well when we talk about the 10th commandment I just say this is the big one this is the one that if you a church person you are probably not even scratching the surface of awareness of how much you are violating it. And I am going to try to open up that for you. I am going to try to come up with examples.

I am going to try to tell you these things. And I will say that I'll sound mean, and maybe I'll point, maybe I won't point, that's probably a bad idea, but I'm going to say hard things to you. And the whole goal here, we'll look at one of the points for next week real quick. We must notice Christ's perfection in the matter. The whole goal here is not to beat you down with the fact that, oh wow every time I even have a bad thought involuntarily I've now sinned it's not to beat you up for it you shouldn't be shocked that I'm calling you sinful but it's to point you to the fact that there was a man who never never did that you realize there was never a moment that Jesus had any sinful inclination whatsoever he didn't even have what we could classify as a sinful thought I would dare say I'd be happy to defend it if someone argued with me that he never would have had a dream where something sinful occurred in a dream that even as a little child He never even thought sinful thoughts.

So when you tell your kids obedience must be immediate and cheerful or it's not obedience, that means every single time Jesus obeyed, it was with cheerfulness and love in his heart to his parents, even when they were wrong. But it's because Jesus did that that even little kids can have hope that he can save them from their sins, right? And then every single one of your dirty thoughts, every single time that you've just coveted that which wasn't yours, every time you've complained, every time you've wanted something that was someone else's because, well, you thought you deserved it or whatever reason, every single moment of your existence up to the point you were born again and everything you did was out of selfish motives and self-glorifying motives, Jesus Christ had to pay for those as well. and he did it happily submitting to God in heaven dying for the sake of his bride so that he could cleanse her from her sin and so he could make you perfect one day so you can dwell with him for all eternity and he died and rose again and so now you have hope so the correct response is that you repent and it's very hard to repent of sins in your heart but you can and the way you repent is by going to God acknowledging your weakness and asking Him to not only forgive you but then give you power some of you want power, you want to be able to make a lot of money you want to be able to lose weight or who knows what things we ask God for right?

We want Lindsay to feel better right? We should all pray for that kind of thing. God has that same power that raised Christ from the dead to actually just take away your covetousness. Or in the case of our sinful flesh that we'll carry around at least lessen it and give us more strength over it and dominion over our own flesh. So pray. Ask for his help.

Let me pray for us now. Father your son Jesus is so perfect. And if we spend any time on your law and we fail to turn our eyes upon Jesus, we will suffer. We will suffer from self-righteousness because we can only look at your law so long without the balm of Gilead healing us from its cuts before we decide we will heal ourselves. and so cause us to be mindful of even our thought life.

Cause us to be hopeful that your word has power to change us from within and to help us to live lives that are pleasing to you. Amen.