But Now

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Don Filcek; Romans 3:21-31 But Now

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. Well, good morning, welcome to Recast Church.
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As David said, I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here. And a special welcome to those of you that are maybe here for the first time.
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I recognize that it can be kind of a dicey thing to check out a new place, and so just glad that you've taken that opportunity and that time.
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I encourage you to make yourself comfortable. There's coffee, there's juice, there's donuts. At any time during the service, you can take advantage of that.
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And I hope that you have come this week with coming from a week filled with gratitude and worship to God.
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I hope that that's been a characteristic of your week. I recognize that on any given Sunday, we are a gathering of people that are coming from a variety of experiences and a variety of places in our lives right now.
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Some of you had a great week, one that's worth writing home about, and things were really clicking for you, and things were going great.
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And then I also recognize that there are some of you here who are barely hanging on to a shred of sanity after a crazy week.
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And so we come from a variety of places, and I recognize that. And I would confess that there are times when
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I come to a text of scripture, and it's the next text that I'm preaching, and I ask myself, why this passage?
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Well, I ask myself that every time, but sometimes it's like, why this passage for my congregation on this
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Sunday? Now, don't get me wrong. I believe that all of it is God's word, and therefore all of it is beneficial.
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All of it is helpful for us. But really, as a church with the core value of truth, meaning that we believe that God's word is true, it might sound strange to have your pastor admit that he thinks like this from time to time.
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Now, what is the value of this? What is the benefit of this? Why this passage this week? But our text this morning is, it's pretty technical, and that's part of the question in my mind.
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Why write about the gospel in such technical language? It's a text this morning that's very deep, and very thick, and very dense, and can even be a little bit difficult to wrap our minds around.
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It has big theological words that result in big theological concepts that could easily turn into a vocabulary lesson this week.
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Like, okay, let's talk about the words propitiation and redemption, and justification, and divine forbearance, and all of these concepts that are gonna be covered in our text this morning.
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And I could completely understand if someone was sitting here this morning thinking, Don, I don't really, I don't really feel it this morning.
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I don't really feel like what I need is a theology lesson, and I certainly need much less of a vocabulary lesson this morning.
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What I need is some hope for my marriage that's crumbling, or what I need is some direction for my life as I've got some major life decisions coming up, or what
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I need is some power to overcome fears and anxieties that have been gripping my life this week, and have been keeping me up at night, or some of you moms are just thinking
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I could really use some advice on how to make sure I make it out of this next week without being institutionalized, right? Like, there's some practical things that at the end of the day, it's like, why discuss theology?
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Why get down into these deeper concepts of the faith? Well, we are gonna need to understand the words this morning.
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So, just as you think about it being a vocabulary lesson, it's not particularly that. It's so that we understand these bigger concepts, and we do need to understand the big picture of the way that all of these big words and concepts tie into the grand scheme of what
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God is doing to bring about salvation for an unrighteous and ungodly people, and that's fundamentally because we've been covering a bunch of messages at the start of Romans about how we are ungodly, and we are unrighteous people.
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But even more so, we need to open our hearts and minds to these first two words in our text, because this text marks the shift in the outline of the book of Romans from sin to salvation.
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We are now going to exit, not completely exit. We're never gonna completely get done with a conversation about what sin is doing to us, but we're now gonna begin that process of seeing that change, and it begins with these first two words in our text, but now, but now, and that changes everything.
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That changes the discussion. Something has changed. There's something new. There's something different.
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You see, for the past three chapters, Paul has been battering all of us with indictment after indictment after indictment.
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We're sin -cursed. We're broken. We're fallen. None of us are righteous. None of us, without Christ, are seeking after God.
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Not a single one of us, apart from Christ, is capable of doing any God -honoring goodness. And now that Paul feels satisfied in allowing none of us to escape the implications of our complete and utter depravity before our
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God, he now kicks off an explanation of the inner workings of the salvation that is found in the gospel with the words, but now.
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And this turn in scripture is not here for our academic study. It is here to begin to expose the glorious, breathtaking, life -giving, amazing salvation that God has provided to humanity through his
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Son, Jesus Christ, so that the troubles of this past week and the troubles of this next week, and even the deepest and darkest troubles we will face leading up to our very final breath, all of that difficulty will be dwarfed by the magnificence of his glorious grace brought to us who have faith in his
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Son, Jesus Christ, for our salvation. So I'm convinced that if we think correctly about these things, if we take this message on, it is eminently practical to our day -to -day lives.
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These things that are presented in these 11 verses have the power to release us to a lifetime filled with joy and peace, regardless of the storm swirling all around us.
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And I'm gonna do exactly what I told you Jesus did for the thief on the cross last week. Jesus didn't heal him physically, he didn't take him down from the cross, but instead he offered him reconciliation with the
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Father and the promise of eternity with him. I cannot stand up here and give you what you think you need.
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I can only stand up here and give you what God declares that you and I need, and I seek to do that one passage at a time.
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And so that is the charge that is placed on my shoulders each and every Sunday, is to step up here and say what
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God says. Not what we think we want him to say, not what we feel we want him to say, but what he actually says to us.
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And so open your Bibles to Romans 3, verses 21 through 31. Starting in 21 all the way through the end of this chapter, we're gonna read that together, so open up in a device, if you've got a device to navigate there, your own
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Bible, you can grab a Bible and there's a seat in front of you if you have no other way. I recognize that's really small print, but if that's the only way you can follow along, then grab that, your scripture journal, whatever.
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Recast, this is God's precious and glorious word written to us, and ultimately a word that is brought to us this morning for the purpose of transforming us internally, to change us, to give us hope, to give us encouragement, to give us correction, and to help us to understand most importantly how he has saved us.
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Starting in verse 21. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested, apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.
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For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom
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God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.
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This was to show God's righteousness because in his divine forbearance he has passed over former sins.
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It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
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Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law?
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By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith, for we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.
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Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of the Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith.
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Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means. On the contrary, we uphold the law.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your word. I thank you for the book of Romans and this letter that was written by Paul inspired by your spirit to guide us and direct us into the truth of just the magnificent mysteries of the internal workings of salvation and the way that you brought about a salvation for us that would result in our justification, would result in us being declared righteous and acquitted in your court of law as we will one day stand in judgment before you but acquitted based on receiving the righteousness of Christ.
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And that you did so in a way that upholds your righteousness as well. And so, Father, I pray that as we come with a variety of concerns, some of them that may not seem to be addressed directly by this text,
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I pray that you would open our eyes to see that they all are. Every need that we have, every substantial and significant need that our existence, our soul requires is found in these 11 verses.
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Everything that you have done for us that will have any eternal significance is found here. And so,
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Father, I pray that you would open our eyes to that truth. And, Father, if there's anyone, if there is anyone here who this is a mystery to, that their eyes have not been opened to the reality of the meaning of the cross of Jesus Christ, that today might be a day of salvation for some.
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And for those of us who are here resting in you, I pray that you would give us delight and joy to rehearse these things,
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Father. The gospel is not the appetizer. It is the full main course.
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It is the entire meal that you have laid out before us. And I pray that you would help us to feast on it this morning as your people.
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I pray that as the people who are redeemed by your Son, Father, that we would lift our voices now in worship and praise to you.
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Father, that these songs would be a reflection of our hearts and that the words would become adopted by our hearts in an effort to genuinely honor you and glorify you above ourselves.
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I thank you for this band, and I ask that you would help them to fade into the background as that is their wish, but that at the end of the day, we would all see you as high and exalted and sing our praises to you this morning in Jesus' name.
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Well, you can go ahead and be seated. And a big thanks to David Schrock for filling in for Dave Bunt in his absence.
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So, I think I actually saw Dave kind of sneaking in back there. So, but maybe don't shake his hand this morning.
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He's not, he's out a little bit, so. But glad that you're here. And make yourself comfortable.
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Keep your Bibles open to Romans chapter three, verses 21 through 31. That's gonna be our text this morning.
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And so, we're gonna dive back into that. And as we already read it, just have that open and on your lap so that you can follow along.
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And then remember, if at any time during the message, you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, use the restrooms or out the barn doors, down the hallway on the left -hand side there.
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But our goal is to keep our focus on God's word and to hear from him, not to hear from Don, not to hear my message, not to hear my sermon, but really ultimately open your hearts even now to what
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God wants to say to you through this text. And my hope and prayer every week is that God would just use me as a conduit through which his word would come to you and become alive to your context and where you live.
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And so, Martin Luther, not Martin Luther King, not Martin Luther King Jr., but Martin Luther, the great
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German reformer of the Roman Catholic Church, called verses 21 through 26 of our text, the ones that we're looking at this morning, this is what he said of this text.
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Now remember, he was transforming the world by coming back to the gospel. The church had gone astray into all kinds of works, all kinds of things that you had to do in order to be saved and all the hoops you had to jump through, even down to how much you had to attend church and what church you needed to be connected to and all of that.
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And so this is what he said of the verses 21 through 26 of our text. He said this is the, quote, the chief point and the very central place of this epistle.
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That is, he's talking about the letter to the Romans. But then he goes on to add this phrase, and of the whole
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Bible, the central text. Martin Luther declared this, and his opinion, of course we're talking about a man, we're talking about another human, but he said this is the most important text, this is the hinge point of the entirety of the
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Bible. Now that's a pretty extreme statement. How many of you think that that's a pretty extreme statement to say about anything?
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I mean, it gets your attention. When somebody as notable and as scholarly as Martin Luther is saying this,
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I'm gonna pay attention to it. But I'm also not gonna just take it wholesale. I'm gonna try to figure out why he's saying that. And although it seems like an exaggeration, because how many of you know that already, you already knew, raise your hand if you already knew that all of the
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Bible is important. All of the Bible's important. So why does it matter if this is, is this more significant than other passages?
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Is this more valuable? But I would agree with him on this one simple point. We find in these six verses of our text, we're gonna look at 11 of them, but in those first six, we find the most concise explanation of the way that the gospel works.
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The way that the gospel works. This is explaining why the gospel is able to save you.
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That's the point of this text. In context of all the crud, all the mess that we've looked at over the last several weeks going through the book of Romans, all of the mess of our lives, you ought to have finished last week going, how can a person be saved?
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How is it possible that God could remain righteous and set us off the hook?
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How could it be that we could be set free? How is it possible that someone as evil and as wicked and corrupted as I am could be acquitted in any way, shape, or form from the almighty, holy, righteous
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God? How could he set me free? How am I not condemned is the question that this text is gonna set out to seek to answer for us this morning.
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After spending nearly three chapters clarifying the desperate need of humanity for a salvation from outside of ourselves,
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Paul is now going to launch into a couple of chapters describing the way that God has reached down to rescue us, and it all begins in this first two words of our text, but now, as I said in the introduction.
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A major shift here occurs in verse 21. The focus is shifting from the darkness of our unrighteousness and our ungodliness to the righteousness of God being manifested in the salvation of his people.
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In verses 21 through 26, in Pauline fashion, this is one of the fun things about taking apart
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God's word and trying to figure it out from the basics of the original languages and trying to dissect it and figure out.
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Verses 21 through 26 are one long run -on sentence in Greek. That's what Paul loves to do.
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He tacks on all kinds of clauses and subordinate clauses and all kinds of things in there, and so I don't know about you, but I'm very thankful for translators that break those clauses down into smaller sentences for us and try to use prepositions to show and to demonstrate the way that they relate to one another, because otherwise, if this was all written in one long sentence, you'd have a hard time keeping all the pieces together.
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It's hard to keep all that in your mind at once, trying to figure out what the relationship of these clauses and phrases are together.
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So I'm glad for translators who break that down for us. But verse 21 sets the backdrop of our salvation in the character of God, and this is really important.
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It's important where Paul begins when he's setting out to describe the gospel, which is the purpose of the book of Romans.
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When he sets out to explain that, he begins with God and his righteousness.
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We might be tempted to think that God's salvation of people starts with us, that it begins in a sense with our importance or our value or something like that, and it's not that at all.
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See, we might think that the starting point of salvation is wow, God was in a catch -22, because he really, he let us go and needed to get us back.
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That's not the case. He saved us. You see, the mindset might be there that he saved us, therefore we must be special.
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But the reality is, to think of it this way, he saved us, he must be special.
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There's a book that I read a few years ago called Cat and Dog Theology. Any of you ever heard of that, Cat and Dog Theology?
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The funny notion behind that is a cat says, you feed me, you love me, you pet me,
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I must be God. Okay, the dog says, you feed me, you love me, you pet me, you take care of my every need, you must be
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God. You see the difference? How do we approach God in those terms? Do we think, wow, he blesses us, he does great things for us, he saves us, we must be awesome.
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Or do we say, wow, you did all that for something like me? You must be awesome.
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And so, the way that he starts with the righteousness of God being manifested, do you think of your salvation as an expression of God himself, his character?
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It's saying much more about him than it is about us, that he would reach down and save us. That's the point.
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And we see it stated clearly that his salvation of humanity has been an expression of his righteousness. He is showing us his character of justice, even in the method, even in the way that he has brought about salvation.
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We know he is holy and righteous by the cross of Jesus Christ. You can be assured that if there was some other way that he could save us and remain just and righteous, he would have done it that way.
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But his holy righteousness requires the expression of wrath and judgment toward all sin.
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Therefore, all sin had to be punished. Even that for which we will no longer give an account for, it had to be punished, it had to be reconciled.
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And that's what the cross is all about. So, in verse 21, we also see another important character of this salvation.
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It is simply this, that it has been manifested apart from the law. Over the last few chapters,
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Paul has been going, over the last couple chapters, Paul has been going to the nth degree to try to explain to us that you cannot save yourself.
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You cannot be good enough. You cannot obey laws enough. You can't follow and cross all your t's and dot all your i's and bring about your own salvation.
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It's not the way that it works. And so, this salvation is manifested apart from the law, a major theme that he's gonna be carrying forward in the next couple of weeks in this text, really talking, mining down deeper into what is faith.
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But even though the law pointed to, he's gonna say the law has a role to play, and even by the end of our text, he's gonna say, no, by being saved by faith, it doesn't abolish the law, it doesn't nullify the law, it actually upholds it to some degree.
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But even though the law here is said to point to salvation, coming through the Messiah, the law is not the means of salvation.
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The law points to the need for salvation, but it doesn't save. Ravi Zacharias said it this way.
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It was really interesting because I just, I stumbled upon this, somebody had a clip of Ravi Zacharias responding to a
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Muslim student in one of the video that I watched this week. Somebody posted it on Facebook, so I watched it, and I was like, that's my message.
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That's crazy, I'm gonna use that. So, this is from Ravi, but he's responding to a Muslim student who stood up at one of his debates.
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How many of you know Ravi Zacharias? Am I just, a handful of you. He's an apologist, Indian man,
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Indian American, who has just brilliant mind. But this Muslim stood up and said, hey, our law is comprehensive.
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It tells you how to brush your teeth, okay? It tells you everything about your life. Your law, your rules are mamby -pamby as Christians.
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What you have isn't comprehensive. How do you reconcile that with the law? And Ravi Zacharias said, well, we see the law differently.
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You believe that the law is for your salvation, but we believe that the law points us to the need for a savior.
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And he went on with this illustration. He said, the law is like a mirror. How many of you have heard that illustration before?
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The law is like a mirror. It shows you who you are. You look into it, you gaze into the law, it reflects back to you how you fall short.
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So, in a sense, it's like a mirror. You look into the mirror, and a mirror performs its duty consistently.
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If it's clean, if it's a good law, if it's a good rule, it shows you that your face is dirty.
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Just say, you've been out working in the yard, you come in, you look in the mirror, your face is all scrubby. You're gonna have guests, so you need to get cleaned up.
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So you look in the mirror, and it says, yes, you are dirty. But nobody then, says
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Ravi, nobody then goes to rub their face on the mirror to get clean. That's not how you get clean.
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All that the mirror is good for is showing you that you are dirty, and that you need some soap, you need something to wash your face with.
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The mirror shows the problem, but you need something else to make you clean. And think about the way that the
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Old Testament does that for us. The Old Testament is rich. I meet people all the time, and there's even some of you that have said to me before,
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I'm a New Testament kind of person. I don't like the Old Testament, it doesn't make sense to me. I get in there, I get lost,
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I just get, you know. Or even the other flip side, I just like the stories. Just give me the stories. I like the
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Old Testament for the stories, for those Sunday school classes or whatever. But think about how the Old Testament, what it shows us regarding the salvation that was to come.
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So much rich depth in the way that it foreshadows and tells us about what the Messiah was gonna be like and what salvation was gonna be like.
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There was the pledge all the way back in Genesis three to Eve and the guard that one born of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.
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A rich and beautiful picture of the salvation that was to come. Abraham was given the promise that one of his descendants would be raised up to be a blessing to all the nations.
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An image and a picture that for their time and for their era that was saying, this is not a Jewish thing.
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This is a worldwide scope of salvation. All the way back in the Old Testament being clarified.
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You have the Passover lamb. All the imagery that goes into the Passover where the blood was sprinkled and then the firstborn was saved through the sprinkling and the shedding of blood.
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David was promised one from his royal line that would sit on the throne of an eternal kingdom.
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This is not just a kingdom for this earth, an eternal kingdom that would go on forever and ever. All of these amazing promises.
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The Day of Atonement, Old Testament Jewish holiday and festival.
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The Day of Atonement foreshadowed the need of the wrath of the father to be appeased by sacrifice.
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And even that entire sacrificial system of the temple and the tabernacle showed the need for the shedding of blood for the removal of sins.
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All that rich history and the depth. We don't throw out the law. We don't throw out the Old Testament because hey, we live under grace now.
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No, we read it to study it to see the beauty and the glory of the way that God has unfolded this awesome, awesome, global, cosmic story all the way begun back in Genesis.
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And by the way, these things that I've shared here are just scratching the surface of the ways that the Old Testament points to the way that God would express his righteousness through saving us, as Paul mentions here in Romans.
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Really, verse 21. But verse 22 goes on to clarify the most pointed, pointedly, in a pointed way, that this righteousness of God is available for all.
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It's available for everybody, anyone. It's available for all, but not applied to all.
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We see that in verse 22. You might start off reading this text and say, doesn't it not imply that everybody is under this grace?
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That everybody receives the righteousness of God in Christ? But notice the delineation between those who have the righteousness of God and those who do not.
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And it's stated twice in two different ways in verse 22. To say that there's something that delineates.
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There is indeed a barrier between those who are children of God, redeemed, and those who are not, and it is this simple, these two phrases in verse 22.
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Through faith in Jesus Christ. Faith is the delineator. And then second of all, it goes on to say, for all who believe.
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Faith and belief in Jesus Christ is the line between being made righteous in Christ and sitting in your own unrighteousness and ungodliness before the judgment seat of God.
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The way of salvation, the way that it's applied to an individual's life is through faith.
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And we're gonna talk a lot coming up in the next couple of messages about what faith is, but remember that faith, for the purposes of this text, is remember that it's an open -handed, empty -handed approach to God.
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It is a way that comes to God and says, I have nothing to offer in exchange for the free gift that you would give me in your son,
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Jesus Christ. That is what faith is. It is by nature the very open -handed approach to God.
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And Paul now goes on to state that all need this righteousness from God that comes by faith in Jesus Christ, because all of us are in the same boat.
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And he's gonna reemphasize some of the major themes that he's clarified for us in the last couple of chapters, but he's gonna restate it in a different way in verse 23.
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He's beaten that reality into us over the last couple chapters, but he recaps for us by saying, beginning at the end of verse 22, there is no distinction.
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In other words, by saying there is no distinction, there's nobody that has a special in with God.
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There are no VIP backstage passes given in this case for the special people in the world.
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Nobody gets through the doors based on any other standard than having the ticket of faith in Jesus Christ and his blood covering your sins.
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All must come through the door of faith in Jesus Christ, because all have sinned and all are falling short of the glory of God.
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In verse 23, he covers both our behavior, the way we act, and our status, our very being, the essence of who we are.
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He begins by saying all of us have sinned. It's an interesting point because he reverses this sometimes. Sometimes he talks about our heart first and then goes to the behavior.
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This time he chooses to deal with the behavior first. We've all committed actions, we've all sinned, all have sinned, all have committed actions, behaviors, thoughts, and failures that are an affront and condemnable in the face of our holy creator.
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But further, we're all in a state, it goes on to say, of falling short of his glory. Another way of explaining this is just to remind ourselves of where we've been, that none of us do righteousness, but none of us are righteous, he had said earlier in chapter three.
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Every single human has not reached their potential. We have not come close to the glory that God has designed us for.
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Did you already know that? And further, we haven't scratched the surface of his glory.
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Not only are we not like him, but we're not even what he wants us to be, what he's designed us to be yet.
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And the verb in the Greek for fall short here is a present tense verb meaning simply that all humanity is in a perpetually fallen state.
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That defines our lives, perpetually fallen. We are moment by moment coming up short of the glory to which we ought to attain.
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And that flavors your definition of sin a bit, doesn't it? Perpetually and always short of what you were meant to be.
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That's the status of the human heart aside from the righteousness, the gift of righteousness from Christ.
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We bear his image, but we are broken mirrors always casting a broken and unrecognizable image of the glory of our creator.
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We were made to represent him to the created world. And instead, we consistently misrepresent him to others around us.
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And that's, by the way, one of the things that, just a little side note, that's one of the beautiful things about Christ. He's called the image of the invisible
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God. He is the perfect mirror, the one who perfectly images his father to us.
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And he came to live among us. He is what we were made to be. And that's why we talk in terms of the
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Christian life being more and more like Christ. Christ -likeness as a goal of the spirit of God alive in us that we would live out his meekness, his kindness, his forbearance, his love, his anger at sin, all of the things that he showed us in his life here on this earth.
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Those are the things that the spirit is seeking to work in us and through us. We are meant to image the glory of the father.
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And if you want to know the glory of the father, look to the son. And one day, one glorious, precious day, church, we will be like him.
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We will be like him because of what comes next in the text. Really, verses 21 through 23 have shown the overall solution to the problem.
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The problem back in chapter one, verse 18, it's been one long argument. It's gonna be one long argument throughout the book of Romans, so it's beneficial for us to go back and identify what
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Paul has said is the problem that faces every single one of us. Well, some of you are thinking, my boss is the problem, or my kids are the problem, or my parents are the problem, or this illness is the problem.
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But he's identified the real problem, the biggest problem, the deepest problem that any human faces, and that is that the wrath of God is being poured out on all unrighteousness and ungodliness.
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How many of you see that as a problem? That's a big problem, especially for those of us that have woken up and finally realized,
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I am unrighteous, I am ungodly. Wait, what did the text say?
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His wrath is being poured out on the unrighteous and on the ungodly, and it will be in a finality in condemnation at the end of time.
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And so that's the problem that these verses are seeking to resolve. But now, we in our unrighteousness, we in our ungodliness, but now the righteousness of God is available to all through faith in Jesus Christ.
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This solves our problem. We as an unrighteous humanity are under the wrath of a holy
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God, but now by faith in Jesus, we can receive the very righteousness, the very righteousness of God himself.
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How does that work? What could Jesus have possibly done to divert the wrath of God from us who deserve it?
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I'm glad you asked. Because now, verses 24 through 26 are gonna go on to explain the amazing way that salvation has been worked so that God remains both gracious and still righteous, merciful and still just.
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In verses 24 through 25, Paul gives the mechanism of salvation, he's giving us the inner workings of it.
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And before we dive deep into some of these technical terms that he's gonna say here, I wanna be sure that you understand why this even matters.
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Because we can talk about terms like propitiation and justification and redemption and all of those things and define them and you can write them in your little journal or whatever and walk away going,
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I learned something, I learned how to define this word or whatever. There is no other mechanism by which a person will be declared righteous on the final day of judgment aside from understanding these things.
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This is the white hot reactor core of the Christian life. And either you have these things that we're talking about or you are under the wrath of God.
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There is no middle ground, there is no halfway saved. So buckle up and let's dive deep into the most fundamental, most basic of truths that we can ever discuss.
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Things that we ought to never outgrow, things that we ought to never, I feel it sometimes and I see it. I'll be preaching in the
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Old Testament, I'm preaching on 1 Samuel and I start to wrap up with the gospel to lead us into communion.
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Do you know what I see? Close up your Bibles, put it away, check out. How could we check out with the gospel, folks?
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How could we get diverted from that glorious, awesome, magnificent truth?
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We should never be able to get over this truth. There are times when
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I've heard it and I'm like, oh yeah, that's that gospel that I believe. I'm with you, I'm not just bashing you,
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I recognize that tendency. But folks, we need to get back to the reality of the glory and the beauty of this message.
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Not just an academic pursuit or not even worse yet is just the thought that oh, this gospel is for those people out there.
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That's right, he's talking about evangelism. No, I'm talking about the way you live, the fuel for your tomorrow, your fuel for this afternoon.
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The fuel for why to not look at pornography tonight or tomorrow night or the next night or the next night.
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The fuel for why not to backbite and stab your best friend in the back. The reason to speak kindly to your family and to your kids.
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The reason to be honest in your business dealings. All of that being fueled by the reality and the glory.
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The way that you process the hurts and the pains of this life through the good news of Jesus Christ.
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How many of you have ever had that experience where the gospel has put suffering into perspective? Where you go, not this life alone.
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Oh, praise God, not this life alone. Somebody has once said, actually
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I heard it from Mark Driscoll, I think he was quoting somebody else, but he said, this world is the closest to hell that the
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Christian will ever come. This is the hell for us. But worse yet is the reality that this is the closest to heaven that the unregenerate will ever come.
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Let that fuel your understanding of the gospel. Let that move you out with a mission and a passion for others.
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We're talking here about the mechanism of salvation. And either you have these things or you don't.
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The one who has faith in Jesus Christ is justified, it says in the text. Justified, that is to be acquitted by his grace as a gift.
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To be justified means to be made righteous. It's a legal term and most of these words are metaphors and they're rich and they're powerful.
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In that context, they would have understood them. And we have to do a little bit of translating to get them to our modern ears to understand exactly what it is.
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But it's a legal and a courtroom term. To be justified is to be acquitted of all wrongdoing and declared innocent.
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That's what God is doing when he justifies you. When you express faith in Jesus Christ and his sacrifice for you, you're acquitted of all wrongdoing.
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Just that alone ought to elicit an amen. I mean, just that ought to elicit a hallelujah.
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Me, acquitted? Me, declared righteous? Me, off the hook for all of the crap and crud that I've done in the wake of misery and pain that I've caused in people's lives behind me?
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How is that possible? Raise your hand if you know that you're not innocent. Just be honest.
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We're not innocent, folks. So how could God be just?
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You stand before a judge and he says, not guilty. When you know you're guilty, how many of you feel like maybe there's some injustice going on there?
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Like, just being honest. There's maybe a skosh of injustice there. How could God do this? Did we get off on a technicality?
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Did our attorney adequately give a defense from insanity? This passage is crazy interested in making sure that we understand that God remains both gracious and just throughout this process of saving us.
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If God is not holy and righteous and just, then he is imminently untrustworthy, which was an issue
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Paul already covered back in the first eight verses of chapter three. We already had a sermon on the fact that God is trustworthy, he is faithful, he is righteous, he is just, he is holy, always true to his promises.
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But God has justified us by his grace through a gift, the text says. It's redundant somewhat to say grace as a gift.
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Both words grace and gift are somewhat synonymous. But this doubling down is
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Paul's style and I think he likes to cover his bases and make sure those of us who are thick get it.
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To make this as clear as possible, let me say that God is in no way, this grace as a gift is saying that he is in no way compelled by any external forces in saving you.
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It is not our goodness that got his attention. It is not some higher moral code that he is obliged to keep.
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It is not some necessity outside of him that has saved you. He is completely motivated solely internally by his kindness, his goodness, his mercy, his grace.
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It is a gift completely bought by him, wrapped by him, and given by him.
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Our part is to receive it with open hands. And the entire previous three chapters were there to highlight just how thoroughly empty our hands truly are.
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If you haven't been here for those last few sermons, if maybe this is your first time here, I'd encourage you to either go back and listen to those or go back and at least read that text leading up to this one so that you can see just how thoroughly indicted all of us were in that section titled sin in our outline.
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But the first hint of the mechanism of salvation is given in the word redemption in verse 24. Redemption was a word used in the market of that day and age.
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Again, something that we have to wrap our minds around in order to really grab this word as a heinous part of our history.
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Because this word is a word that can be defined as liberation by paying the purchased price.
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Liberating someone by paying their price. In times of slavery, a slave could be liberated by paying the owner an agreeable price and then setting them free.
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And that would happen routinely in our American history as well as in ancient history. And we were slaves under sin, the text it said last week.
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And therefore we were slaves to the very wrath of the Heavenly Father. Under His wrath, because we were under sin.
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Slaves to sin, therefore His wrath is towards sin and sinners, therefore the logical conclusion we were under His wrath.
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We were rightly trapped under God's holiness. His righteous justice must result in judgment toward all sin.
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But God put forward, verses 24 and 25, God put forward
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Jesus, the Messiah, as a propitiation by His blood. And here in verses 24 through 25 is the deepest, most profound understanding of the gospel wrapped in metaphors and big theological words.
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Propitiation is an appeasement of the wrath of another. It has substitutionary overtones to it.
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It has bloody overtones to it. That's why it's a propitiation in His blood. It is a sacrifice.
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It is an accepting of the punishment of another. So that the flow of this text regarding the way that salvation works is most simply stated.
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We can be acquitted of our unrighteousness in the court of judgment before the
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Almighty God because Christ has paid the price to liberate us from slavery to sin and wrath.
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And He willingly paid this price to His Father by serving as the sacrificial lamb, the propitiation in His blood.
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In other words, He took on Himself the wrath that was due us, appeasing the wrath of the holy and righteous
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Father for you and me. And He goes on in verse 25 to clarify that salvation was worked out in this way so that God could be proven to be both righteous in the past as well as righteous in the present.
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God therefore is proven to be faithful to punish each and every sin, even those committed in the past.
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And we come out from underneath accountability to our sin by someone else taking that punishment for us and appeasing the wrath of the
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Father on our behalf. Does that snap into focus, the love of Christ toward you?
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Who would ever step in and take the death penalty for another? Who would suffer torture and a gruesome and painful death that they did not deserve?
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You see, in the old covenant, God was passing over the sins of His people. They deserved divine punishment, and instead they were receiving divine forbearance.
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When David committed adultery with Bathsheba and then slaughtered one of his best soldiers in the process of trying to cover it up, where did that sin go?
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Did God just go, you know what, David, I like you. You're a man after my own heart. I, you know, at the end of the day,
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I'm just gonna skip that one. Because you're a good guy. Because you're my king, you know, you're special in my eyes,
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VIP backstage pass, you're gonna get into heaven. Don't worry about it. Just, I'm God, I'll just overlook this one.
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No, because He's God, He can't. He doesn't overlook. His righteousness and His holiness consumes the sinner.
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And so what happened to those sins? They were, it was divine forbearance. It was
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God waiting until the cross of Christ. You see, Christ died for the adultery with Bathsheba.
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Christ died for the murder of Uriah the Hittite. Christ died for all of those sins that you see in the
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Old Testament. Anyone that was atoned for by faith that God would provide a sacrifice, it all came back to the cross.
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So from that standpoint, think about all the sins funneling towards the cross in eternity past. And all the sins from the future funneling towards Christ from eternity future.
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And all of that being borne by the Son of God and pushing away, really taking on Himself the wrath of those sins so that God would be just and righteous in acquitting us.
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Because there's no double jeopardy. We're not gonna pay for those sins, why? There won't even be a mention of them.
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There is therefore now no condemnation. As far as the East is from the West so far, God has thrown your sins away for those who are
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His children. Why? They're taken care of. His wrath has been spent regarding your sins.
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And where were they spent? At the cross, on the very Son of God.
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You guys see how important this is? You see how vital this is? Do you see how grasping this and understanding this sets us free to go out and launch into a life of joy and peace and kindness and love?
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The price for all those sins were paid. And further in verse 26, Paul makes explicit that this method of salvation proves
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God to be both just and justifier of any individual who has faith in Jesus. He is just in that He keeps
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His promise to judge all sin. But He is justifier in that He has made a way for the acquittal of His people.
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We get to walk free and He remains just and righteous. And the gospel is brilliant.
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The gospel is extravagant. It actually, as I was trying to write this this week and think through it all and try to figure out how to convey it,
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I can't convey what is in my heart and what is in the text regarding this. Language seems paltry and ineffective to try to describe the glory and the wonder and the majesty and the awesome wisdom found in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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I could call it the greatest gift and that would be a trite approximation. I could call it amazing grace, but that's overused to the point of emptiness.
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I could call it the best news ever and that would be insufficient. God's Son bearing the punishment we deserved, the divine and holy wrath of the
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Almighty God poured out on His Son for you. The rescue mission of the
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Son of God who came to pay the redemption price to buy us back and gave up His life in the process,
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His blood as the purchase price for you. And our acquittal, our acquittal on that final day in God's courtroom, as Jesus says,
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I paid for this one, I paid for this one. All of those elements come together.
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I hope it does for you like it does for me to just drop your jaw to the ground and on. I hope that it fuels you this week.
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I hope that it empowers you to go out into this week with joy, with love, with a passion to share this glorious news with others who don't have it.
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See, this is the mechanism of salvation and it isn't expressed merely to help us to dissect it for the sake of knowledge so that now we understand salvation better and we've got these categories to think of it.
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It's explained here to draw each and every one of us into a life of humble gratitude. And the remainder of the text from 27 through 31 tackles that very important product of faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, that is humble gratitude.
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How do you live? How are you gonna launch out into this next week? What is it that you're gonna go out, wow, I'm awesome,
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I'm saved, I'm amazing. He's awesome, he's glorious and my entire life should point to the one who redeemed me and saved me.
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Where does boasting and pride go in light of this salvation by grace through faith?
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Paul says it's excluded. There's just no room for it in this.
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There's none of it. There's no room for pride or boasting in any of us except for what
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Paul would say, if I boast, let me boast in Christ. It's the only thing I have to boast in. And not boast in the sense of Christ is,
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I'm awesome because Christ loved me. Christ, Christ, Christ, all Christ, don't look at me. Look at him.
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I hope that if there's anything that I leave to recast when I breathe my last, and I hope this church goes on, is that it goes, we've been connected to Christ, not connected to Don.
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That'd be a tragedy. Connected to Christ. It's all about him. And so, so pride has to be excised from our lives, cut out from our hearts by the gospel.
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It's excised like a tumor. And it's excised not by law, it's cut out not by law and the rules and regulations, but it is cut out of our lives by faith.
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Empty handedness. That empty handedness cuts out pride like nothing else. Nobody can boast because salvation cannot come by obedience to the law, but by faith.
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Can you see how silly it would be then to boast in your faith? I mean, we're human, so some have tried.
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But we must remember that in context, Paul has been working overtime to convince us that we are not, that we are only worthy of condemnation in and of ourselves.
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If we bring what we have to offer to God, it's all worthy of condemnation. It all falls short of his glory.
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You fill your hands with your good works and he's gonna say, filthy rags. This is not done for my glory, this is done for you.
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You're trying to earn something with it. Be gone. Empty hands and say,
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I need what you have to offer. I have nothing to pay, I got nothing to give. I got no currency that can buy this salvation, but I accept the currency of heaven poured over my life, the very blood of Jesus.
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When we see that salvation comes by faith, we should be so broken down that we recognize no room for pride regarding our salvation at all.
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The God over all, according to verse 29, is the one who acquits both Jews and Gentiles only based on an empty -handed faith.
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Faith is the only thing that can save the religious and the irreligious alike, the most religious of people who thinks that they are acceptable to God based on performance.
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What do they need? Empty -handed faith in the Son of God. The most wicked person who's out living it up and doing their own thing and is, at the end of the day, just living for themselves and destroying other lives around them, what do they need?
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Life reform, some counseling, incarceration. What do they need?
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I mean, what, at the end of the day, is the fundamental need of their heart? Faith in Jesus Christ. And Paul's final point in the text is that the salvation doesn't make the
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Old Testament worthless, but instead upholds the law. The Old Testament is beneficial.
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You see, the law serves to reveal to us our unrighteous hearts in the light of the amazing righteousness of our
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God. I recognize the risk of this text being a bit technical, but I hope it proves enlightening to you, but more importantly, deeply encouraging to you.
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When we come to communion, we come to the tables in the back to take a cracker and a cup of juice to remember his body that was broken for us and his blood that was shed for us.
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Let me just encourage you, even this morning, to pause before you eat that cracker and you drink that juice.
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Pause and think that this represents the fact that he took the wrath of his father on himself for you.
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He paid the price of redemption. He appeased the wrath of the father that was on its way to us.
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We had a destined day of judgment coming for us, and he took that price, that penalty, that sentence on himself.
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And it's for this reason that I remind us to take communion together with joy. For anyone who has faith in Jesus Christ and his sacrifice,
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I encourage you to come to the tables with joy. Come to the tables with wonder. Come to the tables with awe.
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God has proven himself both just and justifier through his plan of redemption. So go out, recast with this message to others, and bring it faithfully with joy to those who once were as those, rather.
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We know that we were those who were once unrighteous and ungodly. But now, but now, but now, you have been made righteous through the immense love of Jesus for you, if you have faith in his cross.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the redemption that is ours in Christ, for the wonderful and amazing and glorious and awe -inspiring plan that you worked up in eternity past to bring about redemption for us.
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I wouldn't have come up with propitiation. I would not have come up with the plan of the appeasement of your wrath by your very son, the one who was capable as God in flesh to take on the sins of so many, perfect lamb of God.
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Father, I pray that we would move out from this place with joy, with delight, and even with marching orders to share this glorious gospel with others.
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Father, that you would just move in our hearts, move among us, move in our community to bring more to this essential, life -giving, glorious, beautiful gospel.
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And Father, if there's anybody here who, even just as I've talked about it, it just hasn't made a whole lot of sense, it hasn't really clicked,
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I ask that you would give them a boldness and a directness to come and talk with me, maybe at the door after the service, to just say,
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I wanna talk more about these things, I don't know where I stand in terms of Jesus Christ. And Father, for those of us that are all in, some of us have been
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Christians since we were little kids, and we've been around the church, but Father, I pray that this would never become routine or mundane or just the, it's kind of the run -of -the -mill gospel stuff.
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That you would continue to ignite our hearts, that you would continue to spark us with the flame of your spirit to rejoice and delight and to genuinely be moved this week to put a swing in our step because of the salvation that we have in Jesus Christ.
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I thank you for that salvation that we celebrate now in communion, as we remember his body broken for us and his blood shed for us, as a propitiation and a redemption for us all, in Jesus' name, amen.