WWUTT 131 Essential Christian Virtues (Romans 5:1-5)

There are three essential virtues every Christian must have, faith, hope, and love.

And the greatest of these is love, according to 1 Corinthians 13. Why is that? Because faith and hope we need in this life, but love endures forever, when we understand the text.

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Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky. Hey, we are four chapters into our study of the book of Romans. We just finished chapter four.

We're ready to start chapter five today, verses one through five. If you want to open up your Bibles and join with me there.

You know, one of the difficult things to keep in mind is we are reading Romans and exegeting it, okay?

Exposing these scriptures verse by verse. This is all one continuous thought. Paul, writing this down from chapter one to chapter 16, well, really, it was

Tertius that was writing it. We see his name come up in Romans 16 .22. Timothy is there.

Their names are mentioned in this also. Because I want to know, how many drafts did they go through until they came up with Romans as we read it now?

Or was Paul just dictating the theology by the power of the Spirit, and Tertius was just writing it down as Paul was dictating it?

I mean, it's some heavy, deep stuff, but we have to keep in mind that it is one continuous strain of theology.

We're breaking this up day by day, coming to different verses and talking about what's being said here.

But the Roman Christians would have received this in one sitting, okay, as they're gathered together as the church and hearing this letter read aloud.

It's from chapter one to chapter 16. Of course, you know, they didn't have the chapter and verse markings back then, but they're listening to the whole thing.

And so we're breaking this up, trying to understand it, where they're just listening to the Apostle Paul pour his heart out in this doctrine that the

Holy Spirit has revealed through Christ Jesus. And so, you know, we see so many therefores, and we don't realize that this is in light of the previous thought.

And I bring that up again today, because our section, chapter five, verse one, begins with a therefore.

And every time you see therefore, it's in light of what we had just talked about. Justification by faith,

Abraham is the example that's being used all the way through chapter four. We are justified not by anything that we have done, not by any work, just as Abraham was not justified by any work, but because he was faithful, he had faith in God and it was credited to him as righteousness.

Therefore, chapter five, verse one, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our

Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand.

And we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

I've talked on this program before about three essential Christian virtues that Paul brings up over and over again.

And Peter used them as well, faith, hope, and love. And we see those three essential

Christian virtues appear in this paragraph. You probably identified them as we went. We've been justified by faith.

We've obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the

Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Faith, hope, and love. If we are in Christ, those three things will be produced, not by anything that we have done.

Again, this is not something that we manifest. You don't concentrate or try hard enough to produce love.

You produce love because God gave it to you. He poured his love into you. We love because God first loved us, as we read about through the

Apostle John. We have faith, which we've already talked about, being a gift that is given to us by God.

And hope is the natural result of the faith that we have, or should

I say the spiritual result of the faith that we've been given by God. We have a hope that does not put us to shame.

It does not disappoint us because God has poured into our hearts his love.

Those are the three essential virtues there, okay? And as we read in 1 Corinthians 13, 12, 13, 1

Corinthians 13, 13, these three remain faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.

Why is love the greatest? Because faith and hope we have in this life now, but we will not need them in eternity.

When we pass from this life into the next, and we are forever with our Lord in our glorified bodies, we will not have faith or hope.

As the hymn writer, Horatio Spafford, writing, It is well with my soul, he says,

Lord haste the day when my faith shall be sight, the sky be rolled back as a scroll, all right?

There will be no need for this faith. Remember the definition of faith as we have it in Hebrews 11, 1, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

We won't need that faith anymore because we will see

God as he is, because we will be made to be like him. We read that in 1 John 3. So faith and hope are things we need in this life.

Love goes on forever. We have love in this life poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, but we will live in the eternal love of God forever, and nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Not in this life and not in the next, that's an assurance we have in Romans 8, which we'll get to that later.

All right, so I'm babbling on about these great things that God has given to us, these wonderful virtues that we have, and they are an evidence of the

Christ, the Spirit that is within us. You should identify in every

Christian evidence of faith, hope, and love, even if it is very, very immature, but you should still recognize there that there is a growing faith, hope, and love in every single believer.

Be careful about, though, judging a person based on the measure of faith, hope, and love that you think that they should have.

We've been told in Micah 6, 8, what does the Lord require of you, but that you do justice, you love mercy, and you walk humbly with your

God. And we're going to see later as we get to Romans 12, 3, for by the grace given to me,

I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

So to each person is given a different measure of these three Christian virtues, faith, and hope, and love.

And we should not judge another person based on, again, as I said before, the measure that we have, okay?

We're looking at through the lens of the measure of faith, hope, and love that we have at somebody else and thinking, hey, you should at least be at the level that I'm at.

And then we'll look at people who have, we see these Christian virtues displayed in a much greater measure than we have, and then we have a tendency to raise them up on a pedestal and make them into something that they're not.

They're still human beings just like us in this walk of sanctification, which we all must go through. Every person has been given a different measure of faith that God has assigned,

Romans 12, 3. So we must be careful with how we judge one another.

This is a judgment, okay? I'm not talking about a judgment as in a condemnation, but it is a judgment call, a judgment of a person's character that you make of them.

Do not think less of them than you should, and therefore thinking more highly of yourself than you should.

We read this also in Romans 15, we who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.

Let each of us please his neighbor for his good to build him up.

For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, the reproaches of those who approached you fell on me.

So here's what we understand by this. You can identify in somebody else that they may not be all that mature in these

Christian virtues. Don't use that observation to rub it in their face in any way or to look down on them or make them feel bad about where they are.

Now there may be some cases of discipline where you might have to say to a person, hey, grow up.

You've been a Christian for five years and you don't understand this yet? What's wrong with you? Doing that in love, a patient rebuke, admonishment, that's the word that we have in Colossians chapter three to admonish is to correct with goodwill.

That's the way we should go about that. So it is necessary for us to recognize that a person is not so mature in their

Christian virtues, but we recognize those things not to rub it in their face, but to help them grow for their good and for their benefit and therefore be growing the body of Christ in the process.

Because as they are maturing, we are also, we see this in Ephesians chapter four, that we are to attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes, rather speaking the truth in love.

We are to grow up in every way into him who is the head into Christ from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped.

When each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

And that is what we are to do for one another, building each other up in love.

And in the process, we build the whole body of Christ. Beautiful thing, isn't it? That itself a gift from God, Lord, we thank you for this word today.

And I pray that it humbles our hearts. It brings our spirits to a place where we need to let the

Holy Spirit work and not think that we have to force ourselves on a situation in any way to see that Christ is going to grow in a body.

The Holy Spirit will do his work. Keep us faithful to our walk and let us humbly submit to the things that you have impressed upon us and grow respectively in our various walks of faith so that we might be an assistance to one another in helping one another grow and also being humble enough to receive that instruction from those who are more mature than us.

God, we are grateful and help us be gracious. And we pray this in Jesus' name,

Amen. This is a protection of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Find us on the web at www .utt