Justified Believers Live By Faith

I want you to picture yourself standing in a courtroom. The evidence is overwhelming.

Every failure, every sinful motive, every broken command is laid out in full view.

There is no defense left to offer. You are guilty, and you know it.

The judge enters, and silence fills the room. But before the verdict is read, someone else steps forward.

Jesus Christ. He does not argue that you are innocent. He does not minimize the charges or the sin.

Instead, He places His own record on the bench. A life of perfect obedience.

Complete righteousness. No stain of sin.

And then the great exchange happens. Your guilt is credited to Christ.

His righteousness credited to you. The judge now looks at you again, not through your record, but through Christ's.

The gavel falls and the words ring out, justified. Not on probation, not mostly forgiven, but declared righteous.

You walk out of the courtroom free. Not because the law was ignored, but because it was fully satisfied in Christ.

And that verdict does not change tomorrow, or the next failure, or the next struggle.

It rests entirely on Him. Justification means this.

When God looks at you, He sees you in Christ. And Christ has passed the test.

You see, justification is when God declares a believer to be righteous. On the basis of faith.

On the basis of the finished work on the cross of Calvary. From the beginning, going all the way back to when you study, some scholars believe that it's possible that the book of Job, in terms of chronology, might have actually been the first one penned to paper.

We won't know for sure until we get to heaven, but there's certainly a percentage of people that study these things that think it's possible.

So if that is the fact, going all the way back to the first book of inspired Scripture that was penned to paper at the time, but you know what

I mean, penned to paper. In Job 25, 4, Bildad, one of Job's supposed friends, asks the question, how then can mortal man be made right with God?

So the questions that we see asked before us today in our world, nothing new.

Man has always asked this question, how can we be made right with God? Well, the answer is found in Jesus Christ.

Justified believers, we're going to see this morning, live by faith and not by legalism.

Over the last two weeks, we have discussed legalism and how it adds and puts weights and burdens on us that we were never meant to carry.

And this morning, we're going to see why. We're going to look at the fact of who we actually are and how we are actually meant to live.

And it's a better way, a much better way. You see, we don't live by that which did not save us.

Legalism cannot save you. All the outward conformity you can muster in your life will not save you.

We are saved by a person. We are saved by the second person of the Trinity. We are saved by God Himself encased in human flesh, dying on a cross of Calvary.

We're saved by Him so that therefore we live by Him. So how do believers live by faith and not by legalism?

We're going to notice three important points this morning in verses 15 through 21 of Galatians 2.

Number one, believers are justified by faith and not by the law.

This is the first way in which we live by faith is recognizing the fact that our justification comes by faith or through faith and not by or through the law.

Verse 15, it says, We are Jews by nature and not sinners from among the Gentiles. This is coming on the heels of everything

He said before this that we said in the last two weeks. He confronts Peter. He says, Peter, you ought to know better.

You had the vision. Jesus Himself, and I believe it's in Mark 7, talks about how it's not what goes into the man that defiles him making all foods clean.

I believe it was Acts 13, Acts 11 where Peter has a vision.

And he says all foods are clean. If you remember I said, especially for us Baptists, our favorite chapter in the

Bible is Acts 11 when it says all the foods are clean because I love to eat all of them. We love eating our four -legged friends, the proper four -legged friends, cows, pigs, and pork and all this stuff.

We enjoy these things. Some people may choose not to and that's okay, but it's clean. It's something we can do.

And he says, Peter, you're wrong for pulling back and separating yourself from that just because these

Judaizers have come in and act like you shouldn't because you weren't saved by following their rules or your rules or anybody's rules.

You're justified by faith. And so what he says here when Paul says we're Jews by nature and not sinners from among the

Gentiles, what he's saying here is, Peter, why are you compelling these people to live under the

Judaizers' rules? We're Jews. Of all people, we should know what it's like to live under a system of law, under a system of rules.

We're not Gentiles. We're not people that didn't have the law or didn't have these things.

That's what he's saying here. So because of that, he says, nevertheless, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, not justified by works of the law.

You see, if man could live perfectly, then he could be justified on his own merits.

Man's problem, while it may show up in the outward actions and behavior, as Jesus tells us in Mark 7, it's what proceeds out of the man.

It's the sinful heart that's the problem. In Mark 7, verse 17, it says,

And when he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples were asking him about the parable. And he said to them,

Are you lacking understanding in this way as well? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from the outside cannot defile him?

But because it does not go into his heart but into his stomach. Verse 20, he says,

That which proceeds out of the man is what defiles the man. For from within, all the heart of men, all the heart of men and women, proceed the evil thoughts, so on and so forth.

God demands perfect righteousness to enter his kingdom. And the problem is we can't produce it on our own.

If we could, then we could stand before God and boast of our righteousness. But Romans 4 makes this clear.

It says, How was Abraham justified? By works? No, by faith, because if it was by works, he'd have something to boast about before God.

But it's not. Not any single human being that has ever lived, except for the

Lord Jesus Christ, can produce perfect righteousness. And that's the problem. Not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.

He says, Even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith and not by works.

Since by works of the law, no flesh will be justified. None.

No human being, not one single person, will ever be justified by anything they can produce.

Because even if you are unsaved and produce quote -unquote good things, or maybe morally good things, or maybe you conform to something morally good, it's still coming out and coming out from a heart that is unregenerate.

A heart that is unsaved. A heart that is inclined towards sin. So believers live by faith by recognizing that we are justified not by what we have done, but by what

Christ has done. You see, sinful transgressions of the law are outward expressions of a sinful nature and a heart stained by sin.

And this is why legalism can't save or take legalism out of it. Anything other than Christ, any religion, any person, any system, anything that is not the

Lord Jesus Christ cannot save you. Because you see, every single religion in the world that is not biblical

Christianity has one thing in common. It only seeks to address the outside and can't do anything about the heart.

In Acts chapter 13 verse 38 and 39 it says,

Therefore let it be known to you, brothers, that through Him, meaning Jesus Christ, forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you.

Notice there, there's an absence of any thought of works on behalf of the people being forgiven.

The forgiveness is by grace, is by mercy. It comes through Jesus Christ.

In verse 39 it says, And that in Him everyone who believes is justified from all the things which you could not be justified through the law of Moses.

All throughout the book of Acts you see this. The proclamation of the gospel, the new covenant, instructing first to the

Jew and then to the Greek that anything that you would have thought you could have been justified for does in profit you nothing.

It's only through the Lord Jesus Christ. So believers are justified by faith and not the law.

And this is how we live by faith. Number two, believers do not live on a foundation built on the law.

We're justified by faith and that's how we are to live. And we certainly do not live on any foundation built on the law.

Verse 17 it says, But if, while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have also been found sinners, is

Christ then a minister of sin? What he's saying here is he's telling Peter, Hey man, you were told by the

Lord Jesus Himself He declared all foods clean. You saw in the vision and were told it were clean.

So you're going around rightfully eating with Gentiles, proclaiming the gospel to them, eating with them, fellowshipping with them, nothing wrong with it.

But now when the Judaizers and legalists come around, if you're going to shrink back and separate yourself and say,

Oh no, no, gosh, you got me wrong. I weren't eating with them. It just looked like I was eating with them.

If you're going to act like now it's sin, well then you're saying

Christ has made you or caused you to sin because he's the one that told you it was okay to do it to begin with.

That's what he's saying here in verse 17. He says, May this never be, verse 18, for if I rebuild what

I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor. This word rebuild here in verse 18 in the original is a word that means simply to build a house or to build up from a foundation.

When we build houses, if you ride down Old Farm Road, I forget the name of the subdivision, but they're building up houses left and right over there.

They don't start with the roof, do they? If you start with the roof, you're probably going to have a lot of problems.

You start with the foundation. You lay the foundation. Then you build up.

And see, that's the problem with mankind. Our whole foundation's wrong. Our hearts are wrong. We have to be internally transformed, have a new foundation which is laid by Christ, and then we build up.

And he's saying here, if what you had been doing by eating with the Gentiles is now going to be wrong, you're going back and rebuilding on a foundation that was allegedly and supposedly and is done away with.

That's what this word destroyed here means. He says, if I rebuild which

I once destroyed. This word destroyed in the original is a word that means to dissolve or to render vain or particularly to overthrow.

So he's saying, look, if we're saying that Jesus overthrew sin on the cross, if we as Christians say that our sin debt is dissolved on the cross, it's destroyed, and the whole house we were trying to build is unsaved people based on our works, that house that had to be crumbled and destroyed and brought down, if we're going to start rebuilding right back on that same foundation, then we're a transgressor.

We're still in our sins. We're to be building on a foundation that's not built on the law.

Because he says in verse 19, through the law, or in other words, to paraphrase this, if I'm going to live by the law, if my justification is going to be based on my following of the law, you will die.

But he says, through the law, I died to the law so that I might live to God.

You see, if I live, I die.

In my unsafe state when I was unregenerate, if I wanted to live, live by my own means, my own rules, how

I wanted it, my way, right away, Bird King now, which I love, I love me some Bird King. And as much as I love it when

I pull up that little drive -thru thing and they say, welcome to Bird King, you rule, I probably should start doing this.

It would be a good way for me to overcome some of my fears and talk about Jesus in public.

You say, a pastor would have fear about talking about Jesus? Yeah, human being up here, I struggle with fears too.

What I should do is when I pull up there and they say, welcome to Bird King, you rule, I should say, no ma 'am, Jesus Christ rules and he's on his throne, and I'll take a

Whopper with fries and a Coke, thank you. That's what I should be doing.

I probably should do that. Oh man, I would get so anxious trying to do that. What I should do is say, no ma 'am,

Jesus rules, but I'll take a number one with cheese, please. That's what I should do because if I live, if I rule,

I'm going to die. But if Christ lives in me, I live. That is the difference.

If you seek to either establish, build, or, and this is what we dealt with in the previous two weeks with legalism, if you seek to maintain your justification by works, my friends, you've abandoned grace and embraced the very law that Jesus died to save you from.

The law that only Jesus could perfectly keep. You have embraced the very law that you are supposed to die to because you and I are wholly incapable of living by it.

So don't build your life on the foundation of law because not only can it not save you, it can't help you maintain your

Christian life. If you weren't saved by it, you're not going to live by it. Now as we've said in previous weeks, this doesn't mean that there are not things in Scripture that are prescriptive.

God tells us we need to be doing this. We shouldn't be doing that. God's moral law never changes.

It's wrong to steal in the Old Testament. It's wrong to steal in the New Testament. There are some changes between the Old Covenant and New Covenant which when we eventually get back down the road, possibly in the fall to the book of Hebrews, we'll see a lot of these discussions come back into play.

It doesn't mean that the Bible is absent of instruction. The point is that we don't add other weights that we were never meant to carry.

You see the law, following rules, works -based salvation cannot produce life.

It can only show you your need for a Savior. And the law's hold over us was destroyed and overthrown.

So why, oh why, oh why, good Christian sir and madam, why would we ever go crawling back to it?

It did not set us free. It's probably a better example it could be used, but I think so much of these situations where we see women in these hurtful and abusive situations.

It always boggles my mind and it's because I've never been in that so I don't know how they're thinking. So we say, well why would you keep crawling back to him?

He hurts you, he abuses you. I don't know what it's like to experience that.

I don't know what that mindset's like, but we see this happen a lot where people will be in these abusive relationships and instead of getting out of them, they seem to keep crawling back to them and they'll say things like, well it's all

I've ever known or it's a level of safety there. And it's like you can't compute it.

You just want to help them and help them see that there's a better way. It's very similar. The law beats you, it abuses you, it's not good for you, it can't produce life in you.

And yet legalism keeps wanting to take Christians and help them crawl back to it.

It's not how you were meant to live. Which brings us to our last point this morning.

How do believers live by faith and not legalism? Well we've seen that it's because we need to understand we're justified by faith and not the law.

We don't build our foundation on the law. And then lastly it's because believers live by faith on the foundation of Christ's righteousness.

That is the foundation upon which we live. Verse 20 says,

I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Pastor John MacArthur, who was the pastor of Grace Church in California, he actually passed this,

I believe it was his past year, finally went home to be in glory. I think he had, I think it was somewhere between 50 and 60 years at the same church.

That's a wonderful testament to faithfulness. But in his commentary on this chapter in the book of Galatians, he's quoted as saying,

When a believer trusts in Christ for salvation, they spiritually participate with the

Lord in His crucifixion and in His victory over sin and death. What's being said there, this is one of the most fundamental and life -changing concepts you could ever have in your heart and mind.

When we are saved by the grace and mercy of God, when we repent of our sin and put our full faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation, spiritually we are united with Christ.

That means His death becomes my death. His burial becomes my burial.

His resurrection becomes my resurrection. And His life becomes my life.

You know what else that means? When you repent of your sin and put your full faith and trust in Jesus Christ, Christ's death becomes your death.

His burial becomes your burial. His resurrection becomes your resurrection.

And His life becomes your life. It's not limited to pastors or Sunday school teachers or those special Christians that are really great and we're just little, you know, peon

Christians. No, all Christians, every single believer.

Christ is a perfect Savior and He saves perfectly. And our message to the world is that every single person that puts their faith and trust in Jesus Christ will find

Him to be a perfect Savior. Not on probation, not 50 % forgiven and then you have to do the rest.

Declared righteous, justified. You're standing before the Father as perfect because your

Savior is perfect. Anybody, any religion, any church, anything that would teach, well, you know,

Christ is okay, He's good, but you've got to do this to finish it up. My friends, there is not one thing man can ever do to add to, take away, or change the cross of Calvary.

It is perfect, it is fully satisfactory to the Father, and anything we would try to add to it nullifies everything.

That's what He says here in verse 21. He says, I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then

Christ died needlessly. This word needlessly here in the original means without purpose or without cause, and that's the whole point.

If salvation is based on something we have to do, then what is the point of Christ coming, taking on human flesh, and dying on a cross?

What's the point? It does nothing, it clearly doesn't save us. That is the point exactly, that we rest entirely in the cross of Christ.

You see this in Hebrews 4 and throughout the book of Hebrews.

It talks about the believer's rest. You think about yourself, you've got to push that rock up that hill every day, and as you go up the hill it gets more inclined, the rock gets heavier, and there's no end to the hill.

You'll never reach the top. That's what works -based salvation is.

And that's why it's said that in Christ we rest from our labors.

And my friends, there's no better rest than the rest entirely in Christ Jesus.

We are crucified with Christ. We are spiritually united and joined with Christ.

Galatians 2 .20 is both the greatest and clearest truth about our salvation and also one of the greatest mysteries to me about our salvation.

Think about this for a minute practically, y 'all. What Galatians 2 .20 is saying is

I'm crucified with Christ, I no longer live, it's Christ that lives in me. Even though I can't be perfect,

I never will be perfect on my own, I can't die on a cross to save myself, much less anybody else.

But even though I never died on a cross, I was never buried in a tomb, and I was never raised from the dead, the

Father treats me as if I have the exact same righteousness as Christ.

And He treated my Savior as if He was the one that performed all of my sin.

There is no greater truth in all the world that now

I who live, it's Christ living in me. In the life which

I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in a Son of God who loved me and gave

Himself up for me. Jesus Himself says there's no greater love than someone lays down his life for his friends.

My friends, you here this morning, if you were saved by the grace and mercy of God, collectively, yes, all

Christians, but individually, it means Christ loved you. He loved you, and He loved you enough to die for you.

If you were the only person He ever saved, He still would have died for you because He loved you, and He gave

Himself up for you. You're in the courtroom, you're guilty, you're a sinner. You deserve everything coming your way, and right at the moment where judgment is pronounced,

Christ says, no, they're one of mine. I died for them.

I paid their price. They're free. And the judge says, done, justified.

On the basis of what Jesus Christ has done, you're rendered righteous and just, you're declared righteous, you're free to go.

And it's not just freedom to leave a courtroom, my friends, it's freedom to walk into the blessedness of eternal life.

And my friends, let me remind you, eternal life is not some future thing for you, it is a current possession.

We still reside in sinful flesh, that's why He says, while I'm on earth, the life which

I continue to live in this flesh, with all of its sinful temptations and pains and limitations,

I'm living by faith in the Son of God, because I know one day I'm going to have a body that fits for eternity.

My friends, you were set free to live, not set free to die. And I know it's hard, trust me.

One of my sins I deal with is complaining. We complain about physical ailments, we complain about this, or this work, or these things that get in our way.

And yes, these things are hard, yes, they're there to teach us, but we've got to stop, we've got to stop allowing the limitations of our body and the pains of this world to limit, hide, or restrict us from fully living in Christ.

We were meant to live and have life more abundantly, because we've been united with Christ.

This means we live not on the foundation of our own righteousness, but on the foundation of Christ.

If it were based on us or the law, then Christ's sacrifice would have been pointless. And some Christians are just simply not living out the full joy of what

Christ has done for you. To close this up,

I want to read for you. And we could spend probably weeks in this chapter.

Of course, we will not do that this morning because time will not permit, but in Romans 6, verses 1 through 14, we see a beautiful picture of what the spiritual unification with Christ looks like.

I'm just going to read just a few verses for you here. Romans 6 says, He's saying, if you've died to sin, you are not going to be justified by works, you're going to be justified by Christ.

Why in the world would you seek to live in that? Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ, Jesus, were baptized into His death?

Now, in English translations, we translate this, the word baptized. In the original, it's just a word that means to immerse, to dip or sink.

You're fully immersed. So if you think about why we do baptize, we put somebody under a water, you're fully immersing them into the water because it's a picture of what's going on spiritually.

So what's being said here is, do you not know that those of us who are spiritually immersed or united into Christ are immersed into His death?

Therefore, we were buried with Him. His death becomes our death. We're buried with Him, but just as He is raised from the dead, we are raised as well in newness of life.

We become united with Him in the likeness of His death. Also, we're united in the likeness of His resurrection.

Verse 6, he says, knowing this, that the old man is crucified. Galatians 2 .20,

I'm crucified with Him. In order that the body of sin might be done away with so that we're no longer slaves or servants to sin, for he who has died has been justified from sin.

Verse 9, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again, death knows no longer master over Him.

For the death that He died, He died once for all, but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

My friends, I want you to live. I want you to live joyfully. I want you to live fully.

And you cannot do that if you seek to live based on I've got to follow this rule or that rule.

And if you remember the fence we talked about from last week, the fence that's rotting, it has cracks and decay, and it's falling apart.

But we don't want to deal with the inside, so we'll just put a fresh coat of paint on it, and boy, doesn't it look pretty.

Didn't change the fact that it's still rotting and decaying. You can bring and fill this church up to where there's no room to sit.

And if all we tell the people that come in is, hey, I've got a list of 100 rules for you, and if you follow all of them perfectly, you'll be good enough.

My friends, I would not want to have to face God and answer for telling somebody that.

You were not saved by it. I was not saved by that. And if anybody comes in our doors and they say, what must

I do to be saved? Or they say in concert with what we read in Job, when Bildad asked, how can

I be right with God? They say, you don't know me. You don't know my life.

You don't know the sin I've done. I'm a horrible sinner. God couldn't possibly love me or save me or do anything to me.

Surely I've got to do something to make up for it. We tell them, there's good news.

And the good news is that you can be made right with God, not because of what you're going to do, but because of what

Christ already did. I said, my friends, our justification is

God -centered. Every bit of it. It starts with God and it ends with God.

And because of that, I want you to know that your life should be God -centered.

Everything about who you are, everything about what this church is and will be in the future needs to be

God -centered. Why? Because everything that we have and everything that we are is by the grace of God.