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Welcome to the Daily Blade. The word of God is described as the sword of the Spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

Freedom In Christ Explained

Works Of The Flesh Listed

Grace Is Not Permission

Kill Sin Before It Kills

Put Sin To Death Today

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Hey, welcome back to the Daily Blade. We are in Galatians chapter 5. I'm going to pick it up in verse 18, but just in case you're late to the party, a big part of what Paul has been talking about in the book of Galatians is that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. The Judaizers that come in and try to lay the law upon the believers. And Paul is making it abundantly clear that it's the gospel of Jesus Christ alone. It's faith in Christ alone that saves us, not faith plus works. But that freedom does not give us freedom to sin, it gives us freedom from sin. It frees us from the power of sin. It frees us from the penalty of sin. And one day it will free us from the very presence of sin. Galatians 5 18 says, But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now, the works of the flesh are evident. And he's going to give a long list of the works of the flesh, sexual immorality. The Greek word there is porneo. Sound familiar? Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Now, what he's not saying is that there is some kind of sin that is unforgivable. The only unforgivable sin is the sin of rejecting Jesus Christ. That is the sin that grieves the Holy Spirit. But what I want to point out here is after he has just talked about the reality that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free, then he warns us to not use that freedom to think that we can do whatever we want and then simultaneously call Jesus our Lord. I think, I praise God for the churches, like our church, that preaches the grace of Jesus. Grace is God's unmerited favor towards us. But if you think that is a license to sin, then you have not surrendered your life to the Lordship of Jesus. And I think there's so many of us that do not take sin seriously enough. The gospel takes sin very seriously. In fact, sin was such a big deal that Jesus had to die on the cross in order to do something about it. And so John Owen, one of the great Puritan pastors, used to say that we had to kill sin or it will be killing you. And a lot of times we treat sin like it is a pet. We think we can tame it and we can just keep it in the cage and keep it in the basement somewhere, but it is not a pet. If we don't try to take sin out, sin will take us out. It is a killer, it is an apex predator. Now, when Paul says that, as I warned you before, those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God, there is a difference between a sin that you struggle with and something that you have just given yourself over to. So you cannot simultaneously look at Jesus and say, I do whatever I want. I can sleep with who I want, I can drink and get drunk if I want to, I can do whatever I want to with my body, and I can still call you the Lord. That is not how this thing works. If Jesus is your Lord, you do what he says that you should do and not what you want to do. This is why the writer of Hebrews says that we need to put off the weightiness of sin and all of the things that would entangle us as we fix our eyes on Jesus and run the race that he has called us to run. So let me ask you what are some areas of your life that you need to put away? What is some sin in your life that you have not been dealing rightly with? You've been trying to make excuses with it, you've been trying to put up with it, you've been trying to tone it down and tame it. And what you actually need to do is take it to the throne of the cross and put it to death once and for all. When Jesus pushed up on his nail pierced feet and he said, It is finished, he goes to the grave and he pays the full payment for that sin. So why in the heck do we continuously carry it around and keep it in our pocket like it's something to make us comfortable? No, no, no, no, no. It is a trick, it is a tool of the enemy to lead us to destruction. So if there is anything in your life, any work of the flesh that is out of alignment with the gospel of Jesus Christ, may by the power of the blood of Christ, standing on the authority of the Word of God, under the banner of the love of the Heavenly Father, and dwell with the power of the Spirit in you, may you put that sin to death. Amen.

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