How to use the Law correctly, and allow grace to move in people’s lives

I don’t know if you noticed from that reading, the guards, they witnessed Jesus being raised from the dead. They witnessed that earthquake.
They witnessed the angel being there. They just pretended to be dead men.
They were so scared. But some of them then went home, and I expect they thought a lot about what had happened.
Others went and reported to the religious leaders.
And obviously, the religious leaders were jealous of Jesus. Well, all the time in Jesus’ ministry, they wanted to stamp out what Jesus was doing because they were jealous. The crowds were following Jesus. Jesus was doing the miracles, signs, and massive crowds were following him. And they were just jealous.
And they wanted to stamp on that. So why did those guards behave like that?
They’d seen all that, and yet they still wanted to go to the religious leaders and get some money out of it.
Well, that’s where the first reading comes in from Proverbs 28:5, and it says, “Evildoers do not understand what is right, but those who seek the Lord understand it fully.”
Even when it’s presented before people’s eyes, they do not understand what is right. And we probably all know people who will swear that black is white and white is black, and there’s just no way of persuading that person off that thing in their mind.
Even if they know what you are saying is right, they won’t admit it, and it can apply to any walk of life, in any situation.
Some people are just so stubborn that they will not admit to the right thing.
Those guards saw those things, and yet they still didn’t want to change.
So how on earth is the church going to get people to believe in Jesus?
We, or many of us, might say that is where God’s law comes in.
We can point out what God requires.
So I suppose the first question to ask is, which may seem quite an obvious one, or an easy one to answer, I should say, what is God’s law?
So the immediate answer that might spring to your mind is the written law of Moses, that law that God gave, the Ten Commandments, all those laws written that came from Mount Sinai when God was speaking to Moses.
But is that God’s law?
What about when we look at Cain, when he disobeyed God, before that law came into being?
We’d got Cain and Abel, and they presented their offerings, and God accepted Abel’s offering, from his sheep.
Cain’s was the fruit of the land, the vegetables and that sort of thing, but God didn’t accept that.
The reason being that Abel’s offering was in faith. We’re told that in Hebrews 6, it says, “So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you must rule over it.’”
Well, as we know, Cain did not rule over his thoughts, and he killed his brother Abel.
So you could say that God speaking to Cain was God’s law being shown to Cain; you must rule over it.
But this law had no effect.
So let’s turn to Abraham.
Abraham obeyed God’s commands, and again, that was before the law, Genesis 26:5, the Lord said, “because Abraham obeyed me and did everything I required of him”
Now I found this next bit interesting, it said “keeping my commands, my decrees and my instructions” and that was before the law of Moses!
And here is God saying about commands, decrees and instructions.
So it sounds like Abraham followed written laws, but no, Abraham just obeyed God’s voice. If you remember, he obeyed by leaving Ur of the Chaldees.
He was willing to offer up his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice, and he obeyed by starting circumcision.
So God speaking to Abraham became these commands, decrees and instructions.
When God speaks, that is his law.
The Israelites, think about them. They had to obey in the wilderness before the law. Exodus 15:26 “If you listen carefully to the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees.”
Bear in mind, this is before the law again.
“I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord who heals you.”
What commands and decrees?
This was before Mount Sinai, before the law of the Sabbath, before not misusing the name of the Lord.
The commands and decrees were a general law of behaviour.
They were moaning at God for delivering them out of slavery, and now they needed water, so again they complained, and this was wrong complaining against God.
Exodus 16:28 “How long will you refuse to keep my commands and my instructions?”
The Israelites should not be moaning about God, and that is the general law of behaviour. We must not moan against God.
What else is in this general law of behaviour?
Romans 2:14 “Indeed, when Gentiles who do not have the law do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts, sometimes accusing them, and at other times even defending them.”
But we know that many people harden their consciences so they cannot hear this inner voice.
So, conscience, God’s written laws and his direct commands seem powerless in all this. The whole of the Old Testament is the story of these laws not working.
Some may point out that the law exposes sin, and yes, in Romans 3:20 it says, “Through the law we become conscious of our sin.”
Conscious being knowledge, we have a knowledge of our sin.
We become aware of the wrong things that we do.
But the thing is, we may realise, or we may know that is what the Bible says, but it doesn’t mean that we’re going to obey it, so the law fails.
And why won’t we obey it?
Because in Jeremiah 17:9, it says, “the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
So, with all this, we may think, ‘Oh, well, that applies to such and such, or that applies to so and so.’ But we all have this natural desire to turn a deaf ear.
In Zechariah 7:11, it says that they refused to pay attention. “Stubbornly, they turned their backs and covered their ears. They made their hearts as hard as flint and would not listen to the law or to the words that the Lord Almighty had sent by his spirit through the earlier prophets. So the Lord Almighty was very angry.”
Naturally, we are obviously all very prone to wanting not to obey what God wants. Hebrews chapter 2:1 gives us a warning. It says, “We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard so that we do not drift away.”
So the bottom line is that the law can only say this is what the Bible says.
It cannot actually change us.
So what about others that we think are failing or sinning?
I personally think that if we go back a few years, with the situation with the gay community, and I think the way the Christian church really seemed to bash the gay community was not good.
Some of the Christian church confronted them head-on, and it stirred up a hornet’s nest basically.
And if you think back to what Jesus did, he never confronted head-on.
The only time he challenged head-on was to religious hypocrites, and only for this reason, because they could do so much damage.
But all those people who were living what we call in sin or whatever, he never confronted them head-on.
So the question is, I suppose, are we tempted to bash people with the law?
And I know our first reaction is, if someone is doing something wrong, yes.
And churches, whole churches come forward into this trap, and we’ve been, we, Jackie and I, have been in some situations like that, and it’s not been nice.
And the only thing it does is it drives sin underground.
People pretend that everything is okay and there’s no sin here, and it becomes an unreality.
So what did Jesus do?
If we look at the rich young ruler, did Jesus use the law?
Well, the young, rich ruler knew the commandments.
And yes, Jesus did use the law, but he didn’t bash him.
I think it’s really interesting if you look at this situation.
Jesus mentions the law, the commands, but he mentions only the ones that he knew that the rich ruler was obeying.
He didn’t go for the ones that he knew the rich ruler was disobeying.
He brought up the ones that he knew he was obeying. And I thought, that’s interesting.
So, the rich man was able to say in Mark 10:20, “Teacher, he declared, all these things I’ve kept since I was a boy.”
But the ones he was not mentioning must have been the thing that was nudging his conscience, because Jesus hadn’t mentioned it, it would be that gentle nudge.
So notice what happened next. Jesus looked at him and loved him.
He didn’t say, ‘You are not obeying the law.”
He said, “One thing you lack”
He could have said, “There’s a lot wrong in your life”.
Jesus said, “One thing you lack, go sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me.”
And I think that bit is very interesting, where it says everything you have.
Some other translations say all you have.
So surely Jesus was not saying sell everything you have, sell your house, sell your car, go and live on the streets, you know, with nothing.
Surely, he wasn’t saying that.
I think a better translation of the Greek is, the meaning is, “Sell whatever you hold, whatever you keep.”
And actually, that makes more sense.
It’s whatever that rich man was holding onto, clutching onto, keeping for himself, sell that and give it to the poor.
Jesus didn’t want him to go and live on the streets with nothing.
But he wanted him to let go of that stuff he was holding on to himself.
But at this, the man’s face fell.
He went away sad because he had great wealth.
The reason was that he was holding on to a lot of wealth.
So hopefully that rich man did think about it later.
But Jesus did not bash him with the law.
He just slightly shone a light into his life and left him with it.
All these situations are spiritual situations.
So, I suppose the question to ask is, do we do things according to the world or to the flesh?
In John 3.6 it says, “flesh gives birth to flesh, but the spirit gives birth to spirit.”
It’s not up to us to turn that person around.
We do not have the power to do so.
We’re absolutely powerless, aren’t we?
We’re really powerless in the things that we do for God.
If it wasn’t for God’s grace, if it wasn’t for God working in us, we would be powerless.
We can do our part and then let the Holy Spirit continue to work.
They may be turned, they may not.
We can’t make them turn.
Another example is the Samaritan woman at the well. Perhaps we know the story, the lady had five husbands and was living with another man.
Surely this was an opportunity for Jesus to point out the law to this lady. Well, it’s the 7th commandment, you know, “You shall not commit adultery”.
But Jesus just talked about the well and the water.
And then in John 4.13, he says, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
Well, obviously, she wants that water. Who wouldn’t want that water?
And then Jesus comes in with the thing that convicts her.
So does he quote the seventh commandment?
No. Jesus says, “Go call your husband and come back.”
“I have no husband”, she replied.
So did Jesus respond with, what? What?
No, he said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is that you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”
So then he goes on to explain how he is the Messiah, the Christ, and her spiritual eyes are opened.
But Jesus did not bash her with the law.
We start to come into a more exciting area of the grace of God working in people’s lives.
I suppose we could say, ‘Well, surely we need the law to show the boundaries.’
Yes, but we need to remember that using the law within New Testament times is not to smash things, to smash a person.
You might think, well, hang on a minute, what does it say in Jeremiah 23:29? “Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?”
We’ve got to remember that the context is in regard to false prophets who were misleading the Israelites.
So now the law has to be used as a light, because through the law we become conscious of our sin.
But it has no power to change our lives. It has no power to change our hearts.
Galatians 2:21 states, “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing. For if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing.”
But we could say that trusting in grace is scary.
A human way of thinking is, ‘Yeah, I love laws, you know, that’s the boundaries, that’s brilliant. The area of grace, hang on, where that is sort of working, I can’t, I haven’t got any control over that. Grace working in my life and other people’s lives, well, that’s scary, I can’t control that.’
So the concern might be, ‘Well, what if we remove the laws and people do what they like?’
The Apostle Paul addressed that same concern.
In Romans 6.15 he said, “Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means. So now offer yourself as servants to righteousness leading to holiness.”
We need to offer ourselves.
What about when someone else is going off the rails, and we see them going off the rails, and we think, ‘Oh no, how do I stop them? Do I need to put the laws in place? Do I need to hit them with the law?’
No, we’ve got to put grace into this situation, and that means faith, and that means trusting that God is in this situation.
So we’ve got two choices.
One, use the law to bash them into submission, but it won’t work, and we will alienate them, and we’ll drive them away.
Or two, we need to gently speak to them. We can use the law as a light and leave them to the work of grace within their lives.
And that requires faith on our part to trust in the power of grace.
And I think that’s really scary, but really exciting that if we start to see, actually, grace is able to work in each one of us and in everyone out in the street.
We can say something, and we can know that God, or trust that God is working by his grace.
And grace is that ever supplying supply. We’re like a massive river of giving, giving, giving, loving, loving.
And we sort of open the floodgates for that into our situations, into people.
I think that it is scary, but it is very freeing and liberating that we can trust in God to work in these situations.
So, we need to realise that grace is not passive.
It struck me that we sort of know about the grace of God, and it comes to us, and we don’t deserve all this goodness.
But actually, grace is working in lots of situations in our lives, in the village where we work, people we meet; grace is actively working.
It is actually working, and we need to trust the work of grace within people’s lives.
So, I’ll leave you with Acts 4 33, which says, “With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all.”
And I think I just want to pass it on to you that God’s grace is powerfully at work within you, within each of us, in everything we do, in everyone we meet, in all those situations. God’s grace is so powerfully at work. Amen.