Brethren, let's turn to Romans
5. We'll begin reading in verse
1. It says, Therefore, having been
justified by faith, or having been justified, by
faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein
we stand and rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. And not
only so, but we glory in tribulations also. How could anybody glory
in trouble? How could anybody rejoice in
trouble? Well, it's not so much the trouble
or the trial, it's what God works through it. He says here, knowing
that tribulation worketh patience. God teaches us to submit to his
will. That's what he means by patience.
Submission to God's will. And patience works experience. That's growth in grace and knowledge
of Christ. So He grows us in submission
to His will. He grows us to experience the
grace of God and the knowledge of Christ. He matures us. And
experience works hope. That's confidence in Christ of
our sure salvation by Him alone. That's what hope is. It's not
just a wish. It's a confident expectation
of being saved by Christ alone. And hope maketh not a shame.
That hope God gives never deceives, never leaves us disappointed.
And here's why. Because the love of God is shed
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto us. So we rejoice in trials. Because
through the trial, God teaches us patience. He teaches us to
submit to His will. And He always succeeds in teaching
this. He always does. This is what
brings us to say, not my will, but Thy will be done. And by
this, He gives us experience. We not only hear the gospel preached,
we experience the grace of God in our life. And this grows us
in grace and knowledge of Christ. We understand He's really alive,
really working in our midst through this. And this works hope. This strengthens our hope. This
makes us sure that we have been saved, we are being saved, and
we shall be saved. And all of this is because the
love of God just fills up our heart. The love of God is shed
abroad in our heart by the Holy Spirit. Now I've titled this,
God's Love in Trials. God's Love in Trials. And here's
what I want us to see. Through the trial, God reminds
us of our sin. He makes us behold our sin. And
He makes us to experience God's keeping grace. And by this, God
reminds us from what He's already saved us. And He assures us that
He shall save us. And this is how His love is magnified
to us. In every trial, you see your
sin. I see my sin in the trial. And I'm reminded of what God
has already saved me from. The ruined condition. And that
assures me God is keeping me now and is going to save me in
the future. And this is how His love is magnified
in our hearts. Now first of all, I want to show
you what we were. I want to show you what God did
for us. What Christ shall do for us and
the end of the trial. These four things. Now first
of all, in trials God shows us what we were. He shows us that
awful ruined condition And what He saved us from, He shows us
what we still are. We see the total weakness. We
see Him keeping us in spite of us. And this reminds us of what
we were when He called us, when He saved us. It reminds us of
our sin. Verse 6, For when we were yet
without strength, this is what He reminds us of right here in
the trial. When we were without strength,
in due time Christ died for the ungodly. Look at verse 8. But God commendeth His love toward
us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. This is what we see when we see
our sin in the trial. We're reminded that when we were
without strength, we're reminded that we were ungodly, we were
sinners. Verse 10 says we were enemies
of God. This is what we were when God
came to us in the beginning. Scripture says, Psalm 14.2 says,
The Lord looked down from heaven. You know, men always talk about
the Lord looking down through time and He sees us believing. The Scripture says God looked
down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there were any
that did understand and seek God. And what did He see? They're
all gone aside. They're together become filthy. There's none that doeth good,
no not one. That's what God really saw when
He looked down upon us. Nothing is more helpless than
an infant. That's the most helpless thing
there is, an infant. And you want to talk about really
helpless, an infant cast out into a field and abandoned. That's what Scripture describes
of us. He said, As for thy nativity
and the day that thou was born, thy navel was not cut, neither
was thou washed in water to supple thee, Thou was not salted at
all, you were not swaddled at all, nor did I pity thee to do
any of these unto thee, to have compassion on thee. But thou
was cast out into the open field to the loathing of thy person
in the day you were born. And when I passed by, oh aren't
you thankful he passed by. When I passed by, He said, I
saw thee polluted in your own blood, and I said unto thee,
when thou wast in thy blood, live. Yea, I said unto thee,
when thou wast in thy blood, live. That's how we were given
spiritual life. God spoke it. That's that incorruptible
seed whereby the gospel is preached unto you, and Christ speaks,
live, and you live. And He speaks, you live. And
He said, I spread my skirt over thee, and I covered thy nakedness. That's His righteousness. And
I entered into a covenant with thee, I swear unto thee, and
I entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord thy God,
and you became mine. That's what He did for you and
me. When we were yet without strength, when we were the infant
cast out into the field, unable to do one thing for ourselves,
dead in sin, He describes us here as ungodly. That means we
were everything God is not. God's just. And through Adam's
transgression, we were unjust. Before the unyielding law of
God, unjust. God is righteous. We were unrighteous. Not able to fulfill God's law.
Guilty sinners. We were unholy. God's holy. We were unholy. That means our
inner man was corrupt. We were corrupt through and through.
Guilty before the law and corrupt inwardly. That's to be without
strength. That's to be ungodly. And in
our minds, we were enemies. God was an enemy to us in our
minds. God always viewed His people
in Christ. And He was always from the beginning
determined to show us mercy and grace. But in our minds, God
was our enemy. And we hated God. Scripture says
the carnal mind is enmity against God. That means hatred against
God. That's what every unregenerate
heart is. It's enmity against God. It's
hatred against God. It's not subject to the Word
of God. And neither indeed can be. Paul said these things are spiritually
discerned and so a natural man, he can't understand these things.
He can't enter into these things. They're spiritually discerned.
God has to give us a new heart, a new nature, a new mind, the
mind of Christ to behold what He's done for us. God says we
were alienated and enemies in our minds by wicked works. And
those wicked works, you know what we called those works? We
called those works good works. We called them righteousness.
We called it that by which we were going to make God receive
us. All our benevolent deeds. God said they were wicked works
and they were the very thing that made God our enemy in our
minds. Because we didn't want to let
go of those things. We didn't want to give up those things.
And when we hurt, we're going to have to give up our works.
That made us consider God our enemy. Enemies in our minds buy
wicked works. And God sends the trial to do
for us now what He did for us in that first hour. He sends
the trial to show us in our flesh this is still what we are. Right
here. This is still what we are in
our flesh. And He sends that trial to show
you that He has to keep you. He has to keep you. And it's
to keep us from looking to ourselves. It's to keep us from looking
at us and thinking we can stand on our own and we don't need
God. Remember when Paul talked about that trial that came to
him in Asia? He said we were pressed down.
above measure so that we despaired even of life. We couldn't even,
we had no hope in ourselves, in our flesh, in our strength.
We despaired, we thought we were going to die. And that's what
he sends the trial for. However much pressure you need
to make you despair and make you feel like you're going to
perish, to show you you can't do anything, that's the pressure
he'll give you. And what's the purpose of it?
Paul said we had the sentence of death in ourselves that we
should not trust in ourselves. That's the purpose. So that we
do not trust in ourselves but we trust in God which raiseth
the dead. So that's the first purpose.
Remind us of what we were so that we're reminded of what we
still are. To keep us from looking to us, keep us looking to Him.
Now that's a good reason to have a trial, isn't it? That makes
you appreciate the trial, doesn't it? Here's the second thing.
When God's used that trial to bring us to the end of ourselves,
then God saves us from that trial. He brings us out of it and makes
us see He brought us out of it. And this reminds us how He saved
us in that first hour all over again. We're reminded of what
He's done for us up to this point right now. And when you're reminded
of that, you see His mighty grace towards you. Look here in Romans
5 and verse 6, look at it again. We emphasize a different word
this time. When we were yet without strength in due time, Christ
died. Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous
man one will die. You take a self-righteous, pious
man, You might find one or two that'll die for him. Yet perventure
for a good man, some would even dare to die. You take a man who's
benevolent, he's a good man. There'd be maybe a few more die
for him. He's a little more tolerable. But you take a sinner, you take
a vagrant that's filthy and nasty and can't benefit anybody whatsoever. Nobody is going to die for Him.
And that's who we were. And look, but God commended His
love toward us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died
for us. Isn't God's love amazing? God's
love is amazing because not even our fallen Adam changed God's
love for His people. Our fall didn't alter God's love
for His people not one bit. Why? Because God does not love
His children because of something in us. And not something in us
that causes God to love us. God loves His people freely by
His grace. freely by His grace. And it's
for that cause that He sent His Son to die. It's for that cause
that Christ laid down His life. Because He loved us. Before as
yet we knew Him. When as yet we were these helpless
ungodly enemies. He loved us. He commended His
love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died
for us. Because He loved us freely. He
said in Hosea 14.4, I will heal their backsliding, I will love
them freely. He said in Romans 3.24, being
justified freely by His grace through the redemption that's
in Christ Jesus. This is free grace. No cause
in us. No cause in us. And when He reveals
to you, to His child when He comes in the Spirit and He reveals
to you what you are and what a sinner you are and just a wavering,
changing, unsteady sinner that you are. The best news you can
ever hear is that God loved you without a cause in you. That's
the best news you can ever hear. You hated to hear the message
that said He saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according
to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which
was given us in Christ before the world was made. We hated
that message. We hated to hear that. Because
by our wicked works, that made God our enemy. We hated to hear
that it was not by works of righteousness we had done, but according to
His mercy He washed us in regeneration. and was abundant toward us in
grace because of the work of Christ in His blood. We hated
that message before. But when He's revealed to you
what a sinner you are, that becomes the best news you could ever
hear because since He did not love us for anything in us, nothing
in us is going to change His love for us. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Yea, I've
loved thee with an everlasting love, He said. Everlasting love. Therefore, with loving kindness
have I drawn thee. Therefore, because I loved you
from everlasting to everlasting, when you fell in Adam, it didn't
change, I still drew you to me, because I loved you. He said,
it's of the Lord's mercies that we're not consumed, because His
mercy fails not. His compassions fail not. He
said, I'm God and I change not. Therefore you sons of Jacob are
not consumed. Therefore you sinful, tricky,
conniving sons of Jacob are not consumed. Because I don't change. I don't change. Why was it necessary
God send His Son for us? Because He's just and we were
guilty. He's just and we were guilty.
God reserves mercy for thousands, but He by no means clears the
guilty. And the only way that we could be justified is to die. It's the only way. There was
no other way. And in amazing love, God sent
His Son to take our place, to bear our transgressions, to bear
our curse, to take our place and die our death for us. That
ought to cause us to pause and to really think about the condescension. How far down God was willing
to come to save His people. Talk about saving us to the uttermost. That's the uttermost. The suffering
He endured. The shame of the cross that the
Scripture says He despised. And by His blood, He justified
all for whom He died. He justified all His people.
And this was when we were without strength, when we were ungodly,
when we were enemies in our minds. He did this for us before we
ever even knew Him. Once a guilty man has died, the
law can't say anything to him then. And because His people
died in Him, the law has nothing else to say to us. The law wasn't
made for a righteous man. And we're righteous men in Christ.
The law can't say anything else to you. You've died in Him and
you've fulfilled the law perfectly in Him. And He did this for us
when we were enemies. He tells us to love our enemies.
We really should have a heart to love our enemies when we consider
how he loved us when we were enemies. Shouldn't we? He told Israel, he said, you
be kind to the stranger because you don't forget you were strangers
in Egypt. We were strangers, weren't we?
Cast out aliens and yet he loved us. That ought to make us really,
really love our enemies. Be merciful to them. Thirdly,
this is what shall happen to us. Now, we've seen what we were.
We've seen what God did for us. This reminds us, the trial reminds
us of what God did for us when we were in that condition. And
so, we see what He shall do for us. If we know what He did for
us when we were dead in sin, Then he says, look, verse 9,
Much more then, being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved
from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we
were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more,
being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. If it was
by His death that He did this for us when we were enemies,
then now that we're reconciled friends, will certainly be saved
by His life. And this is what He shows you
in that trial. He sends that trial and He shows
you God will not pour out justice on you a second time. He's already
done it in Christ. And He's not going to lose you.
He's not going to pour out judgment on you. This is the love of God
that we see in the trial. This is why He sent the Holy
Spirit in the first place and gave us life and gave us faith
in Christ. because He would not let us go.
Christ had justified us and He would not let us perish. Justice
demanded we'd be saved, we'd be called out and given faith
in Christ. And this is the reason He keeps
us by the power of God. You've heard it said, God stands
to lose more than we do if He loses one for whom Christ died.
Because His glory is at stake. His justice is at stake. His
very character is at stake if He were to lose one. Because
justice has been satisfied, meaning He must call us and keep us and
bring us to glory. Everyone for whom Christ died.
It's not our works, it's not our faith, it's not our obedience
after we're called. It's God keeping us by His love
and by His grace. That's how we're saved. Our acceptance,
our only acceptance with God is Christ. And for His sake,
He will keep us and continue to save us until the end. And
every trial that we face is reminding us nothing, absolutely nothing,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ. Nothing. And that's where the
love of God is. The love of God is not outside
of Christ. That ark pictured Christ. The
love of God was in that ark. That's why He put His people
in that ark. The love of God wasn't outside. It wasn't outside
where the rain was falling and where the flood destroyed those
outside. That wasn't where His love was.
His love was in that ark. And His love is not outside of
Christ, His love is in Christ where He put all His elect from
the foundation of the world. And because that love never changes,
there's absolutely nothing, life, death, things to come, nothing
that can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ
Jesus. And that's what He's going to
teach us in the trial. Isn't that good news? That makes
the trial worth it, doesn't it? When you face that trial and
it's hard and we don't enjoy the trial while it's happening.
We don't. But here's the end. This is what
he brings us to. That love of God is shed abroad
in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. At the end of that trial, I've
experienced this happen. I experienced it in the first
hour he called me. And I've experienced it a little
bit in some small trials, but every now and then he'll give
you a good, nice, heavy trial. And in 2003, Melinda and I just,
when we thought we was as low as we could go, we found out
we wasn't as low as we could go yet. And it was just one after
another, one after another, one after another. But when he broke
me, and I don't mean, Only financially, I mean in my heart he broke me. And that's when all of a sudden
I realized he's done all this because he loved me. You remember
the story I told you about brother Walter Groover? They had adopted
a little girl and Walter thought he would try to be a little nicer
to this little girl, not spank her or anything and that would
make her think he loved her, you know, because she was adopted.
And he would discipline his other children, but he wouldn't discipline
her. And one day she did something and she kept acting up. She just
kept acting up, kept acting up. Finally, he took her and spanked
her. And she was crying and she just
turned to him and was so happy. And she hugged him and she said,
now I know you love me. That's what he does for you when
he gives you this trial. He makes you know he loves you. Whom He loves, He chastens. Whom
a father loves, he chastens. And God does it for our profit
that we might be partakers of His holiness. Keep us looking
to Christ only. And so when He brings that love
and sheds that love in your heart, we thank God for increasing our
hope. This is at the end of the trial.
We thank Him for increasing our hope. We thank Him for growing
us in grace by experience to make us experience His grace.
We thank Him for giving us patience to submit to His will. He makes
it in the trial where you can't do anything else but just wait
on God to work His will. And He makes us thank Him for
that. And we even thank God for the trial. We even thank Him
for the trial. I know some folks, believers
who lost their mother to cancer, and I've heard every one of those
children say they wouldn't change it at all. Because God did all
these things for them through it. They thank God even for the
trial. But the psalmist say, it's good
for me that I've been afflicted that I might learn thy statute.
We even thank Him for the trial. But here's what we thank Him
for most of all. Look down at verse 11. And not
only so, but we also joy in God Himself through our Lord Jesus
Christ by whom we've now received the atonement. He brings us to
rejoice Not just in the grace, not just in the hope, not just
in the experience or the trial. He brings you to rejoice in God
Himself. There's a living union there
between you and God and He makes you know it. And He brings you
to His breast and hugs you close and lets you know you're safe. He's not going to let you go.
So next time, brethren, you come into a trial and things are tough
and it's hard and you're weighted down, just remember, God's not
doing it to destroy His child. He's not doing it to punish His
child. He already punished us in Christ.
He's doing it because He loves us. And He's doing it to remind
us of all these things that He has done for us that He is doing
for us and that He shall do for us. He has saved me, He is saving
me, and He shall save me. And that will make you thankful
for God. Alright, let's stand together. God, our Father, we so thank
You for dealing with us as children dealing with us in a merciful
and kind way, chastening us when we need it. Lord, strengthen us in the trial
and make us truly submit and not be murmuring and complaining,
but rejoice in what you've done. Lord, we're thankful that's the
end to which you bring us. We're so weak and we're so feeble
and we know so little. We're so sinful. Lord, we thank
you for this grace, this wonderful work that you continue to do
for us to ever keep us mindful of what we are, what we were,
what you have done, what you are doing and shall do. We're
thankful for that. Keep us looking to Christ only.
Lord, we pray you'd meet with us today and teach us that once
again. Make us rejoice in Christ himself. Lord, forgive us our sin. We
ask these things in Christ's name. Amen.