The following resource is from Desiring God.org.

Let me give you a glimpse into the autobiographical reason for why this entire conference is devoted to the topic of sin.

I suggested to the team last summer that we consider this because I was reading the new book by Stephen Westerholm on the justification reconsidered.

And I was deeply moved by chapters two and three

on the relationship between sin and the doctrine of justification.

Westerholm is dealing with the new perspective on Paul, which you don't need to have even heard about to

understand this message, so I'm going to just give you a glimpse of why that

matters and see if I can take you with me to what happened to me as I was reading these chapters.

In the last 50 years or so in New Testament scholarship, there's been this movement called the new perspective on Paul

and the gist of it goes like this.

For the last 500 years or more, especially in the Protestant

church, there has been a significant, fairly profound misunderstanding of the nature of first century Judaism and what it believed about grace and works and therefore because we had

gotten first century Judaism wrong, we got Paul wrong in the way we

understood how he was responding to the Jewish believers or unbelievers of his day.

And the mistake was we thought Paul viewed 1st century Judaism that he was interacting

with as legalistic and earning their way to God's

favor through the doing of works of the law when in fact Judaism the new perspective says was profoundly a

religion of grace there was sacrifice, and atonement, and forgiveness, and free election, and therefore

it's a distortion to caricature the first century Judaism as a religion of law or legalism, graceless

when in fact it had a very profound doctrine of grace.

So when we read in Galatians chapter two,

something like this, Paul, we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through

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