The small town preacher who, one Sunday morning, decided to call in sick. And so he called

his deacon, and he said, Deacon Smith, you're going to preach today. I'm sick. Whereupon his wife

immediately chided him, she said, how can you lie like this? And sure enough, half an hour

later, he got dressed, took his golf clubs, put him in the car, and he drove 50 miles away

from town where nobody recognizes him. And so when he got to the golf course and he began to

tee off, his two guardian

angels began to talk to each other. One says, what should we do with this guy? Well, the first

one said, let's send the ball into the rough. Well, he can never find it. The second one said,

no, no, no, no, no, let's not do that.

Let's actually give him a hole in one.

He said, what do you mean?

You don't want to reward this guy for lying?

And then the second angel said, well, think about it this way.

Who he's going to tell?

In fact, that same scallywag said that Paul must have been a frustrated golfer

because in Romans 7, he said, I keep doing the wrong things I don't want to do.

Let's get serious about the Word of God in Romans chapter 7. It's all about the issue

that has been a source of confusion among Christians for many years. The confusion is this. It's between the hypocrisy of performance

and the freedom that we have in the risen Christ. This is a huge issue. So many people ended up with going with one extreme or the other, of which

the Bible is innocent of both extremes. One extreme used grace as a license to sin. The other extreme

is the legalism of performance.

Hear me right, please, this is important, because I think both extremes not only erroneous, not only wrong,

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