This message is from the teaching
ministry of James Tippins, pastor of Grace Truth Church. More information
can be found online at gracetruth.org and anchoringfaith.org. A people
for His glory, by His grace. Tonight, church, if you'll turn
to Romans, and if you will look at where we have been in chapter
7 and where we sort of did a review last week, tonight I'm going
to topically deal with the doctrine of God's righteousness. Because
we see Paul as he teaches, he continues to start, he actually
starts out this entire letter about the righteousness of God
and the justice of God and the wrath of God being poured out
in the contrast, poured out on the unrighteousness of men. And
so God's righteousness is a constant theme throughout the Scripture.
God's righteousness is to be known through the revelation
of Scripture. And so when we come to the idea,
for example, like 2 Corinthians 5.22 that says that we should
become the righteousness of God. You know, when you think about
those words, a lot of times people misunderstand what that is teaching
because they really misunderstand the righteousness of God. When
we think of righteousness in our day, we often think just
very surface level in the fact that what we do that is right.
For example, if we do not lie, that is righteous. It's right
in the eyes of the Lord. If we do not steal, the fact
that we're not stealing is right. So righteousness comes from one
angle of knowing that what we are doing or are not doing is
good, and that's part of it. But the problem, especially as
we sit in our day with many false Gospels, many false interpretations
of Scripture, many erroneous uses of the Law of God, we come
to find ourselves at odds with our brothers and sisters in Christ
because they want to challenge the idea of grace with the weird
expression of, but you can't live in sin, you know. Of course
not. but if you do, your righteousness
is not forfeit, you see. And so as we see these words
about God's righteousness, you'll find nowhere in the scripture
that talks about the righteousness of humanity. As a matter of fact,
everywhere we look in Scripture, though we may see the allusion
or the foreshadowing to the righteousness of man in small, significant
ways of how we relate to one another. For example, in the
Pauline epistles and the pastoral epistles and the epistle of James
and others, it teaches us to relate to people in a certain
way. So in that sense, God, through the apostles, would say that
it is righteous for the church to love one another. So those
are relational aspects of how the local church is supposed
to, what, behave. with each other. It is good that
we should have no what? No sin named among us and that
we should not be known for wickedness, specifically in Ephesians. We
should not be known for coarse joking and sexual immorality
and things of that nature. Should not be named among us.
And so we can define that in the sense of humanity, that we're
doing good things and we're doing obedient things to the best of
our ability by the power of God. And we also see a lot of unregenerate
people doing those good things as well. For example, the law
of God tells us not to murder. And there are many people who
do not physically murder, but there are most of us, if not
all of us, who are murderers at heart because we are bitter
sometimes. We hate our brothers and sisters. We hate our enemies.
We hate our neighbors. We hate ourselves. And sometimes
even we take it beyond that hate in our heart and mind and we
gossip. We treat them with disdain. And
so we're not escaping the command to do not kill because we are
actually committing murder when we practice these things. But
for some strange reason in our culture and in our day, people
think, well, why don't we just go ahead and sin? And I hate
to use the word because it so means such things to so many
people. When you use terms, words, as
you'll hear me say a lot in the next few weeks, months, words
cannot be heresy. Only meanings can be heresy.
Words cannot be error. If I say Farfignugen, I mean,
I don't even know what that means. I know it's some German word
that was related to the Volkswagen. I hope it's not anything off,
but there I am using a cultural reference that doesn't, that
I don't know what it means. Well, if I know, if I don't know
what the word means, but I think it means something and I use
it, I've not said something wrong. I have just maybe inappropriately
used a term that I don't understand. The same is true with the idea
of the word righteousness. So if I say, you know what, you're
really acting in a righteous way, some people will say, you're
crazy, that person's never righteous, they're wicked. Okay, I get that,
that's true, but you know what, what they did is right in their
actions. It doesn't make it divine, it
doesn't make it anything that merits some type of appreciation
by God whereby He's going, wow, y'all are so good, you're doing
such a wonderful job, I'm so glad you clean your room and
brush your teeth and obey your mama and daddy. Good. No, God's not up there applauding
our righteousness. As a matter of fact, Jesus, in
that sense, the right way we act, Jesus actually teaches this
in one of the Gospels as a parable. He says these words. Let's say
that there was a man who owned a slave and he worked hard in
the field. And at the end of the day, does the master of the
house say to the slave who worked very hard, Come on in, you've
worked a hard day, put your feet up and dine with me." Jesus says,
no. He says, slave, where's my supper?
Where's my supper? For you do not get accolades
for doing that which is required of you. You get paid the wage
that is required of you. So in that sense, the righteous
works of man are like filthy rags to God, for we have violated
the law. In Adam, we are guilty of violating
the law. In our depravity, we are guilty
of violating the law. We are guilty before God before
we ever do anything good or bad, Paul would argue just a few sermons,
just a few chapters later. There is no one righteous, no
not one. So when we talk about the righteousness of God, or
the word and the action of righteousness, or the idea of righteousness,
we are always careful to distinguish the temporal aspect of relational
living in the human realm that is good and right and law-abiding,
to a degree, but not perfect and still makes you guilty, versus
who God is in every aspect of His character, nature, et cetera.
So for us to understand what the Bible teaches about imputed
righteousness or alien righteousness or forensic righteousness, whichever
term you prefer to use, we need to realize that in order for
us to grasp the necessity of the righteousness of God, in
its working of the Gospel, when Paul, as he said last week, is
the law sin by no means? For if I had not known the law,
chapter 7, verse 7 of Romans, I would have not known sin, for
I would have not known what it is to covet, had the law not
said, Thou shalt not covet. But sin, seizing an opportunity,
Through the commandment produced to me all kind of covetousness,
for apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart
from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.
The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me,
for sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived
me, and through it killed me. So the law is holy and the commandment
is holy and righteous and good." So we need to keep in mind as
we move forward in this conversation, that the law is righteous and
good. The law is perfect and holy. It is set apart because
it is the distinct nature of God's intrinsic worthiness. It
is established so that we might see the perfect illustration
of the reflection of the revelation of God in the understanding of
our own society, of our own justice ideals, and everything in between. Though we are imperfectly grasping
the perfection of God, the law shows the perfection of God at
An amazing point. And especially that when Paul
says, before the law came alive, before the law came alive and
he saw it, before he was born again, he was a zealot for the
law of God. He was a zealot for what he called
righteousness. He was a zealot for who he called
God, which was not the God who was Jesus Christ. And then he
said when he was born again, when he received the life that
was given to him through Christ by the Spirit, the law then came
alive and he died. Because he saw that he had never
kept the law that said thou shalt not covet. He saw that he never
kept the law to have no other gods before him. He saw that
he never kept the law thou shalt not steal, thou shalt honor thy
father and mother. He never kept the law. He saw it for what it
was, and he saw in the face of Christ its complete fulfillment. He saw that God has just decreed
and showed us His perfection in the work of Jesus Christ,
not just on the cross. It's there. Romans 3 tells us
that. Not just in His obedience, but in the perfection of Jesus
in His human person. to completely fulfill the commandments
of all the laws of God from conception to death to resurrection and
beyond. I want this to take our breath
away. I want this to take our mind for a moment and put it
in a slow motion type thing as though we're trying to swim through
molasses, for those of you who know what that is. I want it to slow us down so
that we can just be in awe, that we can wonder, we can percolate,
as we used to call it. It used to take forever to get
a cup of coffee. Used to percolate. I want us
to sit and stew on this for a minute, for a couple of weeks, that we
might realize that when the Scripture says that we have been given
the righteousness of God to our account, that it is the complete
and holy perfection of Jesus Christ Himself. And that at no
time Does the Bible teach anything to the contrary about the righteousness
of the church except that it is only and completely the righteousness
of Christ? So for us to understand that,
I believe we need to understand the righteousness of God. You
know, we can talk about God's holiness, we can talk about God's
immutability, we can talk about God's decree, we can talk about
God's law, we can talk about God's justice, we can talk about
God's wrath, But what is it that Paul really is trying to help
us see? When we hear these words that
he has written to this church about the law and what it did
and what it brought up and alive in him, it shows us that the
law of God is supposed to bring us to a place of seeing the absolute
necessity of the unimaginable, ineffable grace of God through
which He saves sinners. God, either God saves sinners,
or sinners perish in their sins. Either God causes sinners to
be made righteous, not through any work of our own, nor any
act of obedience, nor any expression of our faith after conversion, or we perish in our sins. Now,
think about that for a second. Ask yourself what it is that
brings you before God perfect in His eyes. Is it even that
you believe? I believe God. Well, that's faith
in your faith. Faith cannot skip over its object. Faith cannot play leapfrog into
the abyss of nothingness. We cannot have spiritual black
holes in our understanding of the gospel of grace and say,
well, I believe. Because many people say they
believe, but they do not believe. Many people say that they trust,
but they do not trust. Because there are a lot of people
who resolve to just have a faith in something and a belief in
something, but they have never attached those feelings or those
thoughts or those emotions that they call believing to something
significant enough to counter the wrath of God that rests upon
them. So we cannot put faith in our faith. So when I say you
cannot even really see the expression of your faith in that context,
we must understand that this is what the Scripture is showing
us. This is what we need to realize is at stake when it comes to
the Gospel. That we are indeed either believing
in the fullness of Christ's righteousness, or we are believing in some small
degree in our own righteousness, which is forever accursed. when we trust at all in our righteousness.
We trust at all in our works. We trust at all, here's this,
in the works that God may produce in us. Because as Scripture shows
us, God can permit and does allow and sometimes, through His processes
of disciplining His children, bring us to a place that temptation
overcomes us and we fall into rebellion. We sometimes fall
into a cognitive, now very careful, don't hear what I'm not saying
here, but anyone who confesses to be in Christ, who says they've
never had this experience, I doubt their salvation. But sometimes
we can even fall into a cognitive doubt that we're even born again.
Sometimes our faith, our mental expression of our faith is so
weak that we sometimes would even say to ourselves in the
mirror, there's no way I'm saved. Maybe we've even come to a place
before to go, is this all just a big cosmic joke? Is this Christianity
just the cultural thing that I've been hoodwinked? Am I even
wasting my time pursuing this? If you've never had that, I pray
that you never do. But when you've pastored churches
for as long as I have, and then you come in the middle of a sermon,
and all of a sudden that hits your thoughts. It is a very difficult
battle. What brings us out of those types
of things? It is the work of God. It is
the Word of God. It is the Spirit of God guaranteed
to us because of the finished work of Jesus Christ. Because
Christ is righteous, I don't have to sit here and wonder what
it is in my life that I must do to prepare myself for the
presence of God. Because Paul says in Colossians
that God has granted us a great inheritance with all the saints
because of the blood and the body of Jesus being sacrificed
on our behalf. Now we can academically expound
upon these things, but I think from the context of Scripture,
we have enough under our belt in the last 36 sermons on Romans
thus far, in the last 64 sermons from John just in the last year
and a half to two years. We know what the Bible teaches
about who God is. We understand. And so from this
point forward, when someone says to you or your mind says to itself,
how am I righteous? I want you to automatically think
about what I'm about to teach. And I want you to understand
that it is the righteousness of God given to us, the church,
and has no respect to how we live in the context of our own
righteousness. Now, there are many types of
thoughts related to this, and trolls will gather around our
lives over and over again, and they will bark and hiss and slobber
and stomp and spit fire. But they cannot argue with the
simple fact that the only way we are right before God is through
the finished work of Jesus Christ, whose perfection and holiness
and righteousness and glory, etc., is granted to the account
of the sinner. by the will of God as He chooses
through the Word of God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, etc.,
etc. And that as we learn then as
believers how we should relate to one another and to the world,
and what we should and should not do, those things will ebb
and flow. Never should we ever, ever, ever
consider our lives and the way we live righteous before God
except that we are pursuing Christ by faith. Because I believe that the Christian
who is truly in tune with the gospel, truly growing and maturing
in the depths of the roots of the grace of God, understands
that even in the greatest of their comprehensions of the glorious
perfection of Christ, they will never measure up. Paul came to
call himself the chief of sinners. Why? Not because he lived a sinful
life. Not because he was a rebel. Not
because he has a bunch of closet sins that disqualified him from
the ministry. Not because he was doing this
or that or hateful. No. Paul grew. He learned and
he strived. But even then, those things were
not what counted him righteous. So much so that when he looked
into the depths of all of his faults, he came out and says,
I'm the chief of sinners. that everything that I've ever
tried to accomplish has been evil in the eyes of Christ. But
everything that Christ accomplished is perfect in the eyes of the
Father, and everything that He did has been credited to me.
This is the perfection of God. We, in our greatest of days,
in our most perfect examples of obedience, should never, ever
say, look at me. I really got this under control.
Or worse, you might say, how's it getting worse than that? Thank
you, God, for getting this under control in my life. Thank you,
God, that I walk this way. Thank you, God, that I'm not
like my neighbor. Thank you, God. And a legalist
will say to me, that is blasphemous. And I will say then, spit again
in the face of our Savior who said that very thing about the
example of the Pharisee who said, thank you God, you have caused
me to be like I am and I'm not like that tax collector. And
the tax collector weeps and does not turn his face to heaven and
tears his clothes and says, oh God, have mercy on me. As a matter of fact, the Greek
there, he says, propitiate me a sinner. That's the words. propitiate
me, a sinner. Satisfy your wrath on my behalf. Oh God, I'm a sinner. So when we think about our righteousness,
let's be clear to distinguish the difference between the relational
outpourings of our life as people that might be right and good
according to the law, which is good, supposed to be that way,
believer or unbeliever, and what God has done for us to give us
the righteousness that is not ours, except that it is Christ's
for us. So think about Christ. Think
about God the Father. Think about God the Holy Spirit.
Think about the Trinity. and ask yourself what it must
be like to be credited with the righteousness of God. In what
way is God righteous? God is righteous in His being. The Scripture says that God is
perfect, that God is all-powerful, that God is omnipotent. That's
what all-powerful, that's the word that means all-powerful.
God is omniscient, He knows all things. God is omnipresent, He
is in all places, all these different words that we use to expressly
talk about. How do we know these things?
Because the Bible teaches that. God sees all things, not just
that which is happening, and God knows all things. Not that
which He will learn, but He at all times knows all things. that
God is sovereign over everything, that He rules over everything,
that He can cause anything to take place, even in the free
agency of man, whether I choose pizza or hamburger. If God wants
me to choose pizza, I will choose pizza, if it's part of His purpose. And I will be none the wiser.
400 million times I may choose to drink water, and one time
I may drink apple juice. And I might not know why I want
apple juice, but God can cause me to drink apple juice for the
greater good of His decrees, because He wants something done
that needs apple juice in me. Why? I don't know. If God knows the count of the
hairs on our heads and takes note to them falling to the floor,
and the sparrows of the air falling from the sky, beloved, we as
Christians have nothing to fear because God is really involved
in our lives. He is really intimate with us.
So that means that not only is He intimate with us and has given
us life through Christ because of His love for us, and it cannot
be lost and it can never be avoided. That's the beautiful thing. Those
for whom Christ died, they will never avoid eternal life. The
gospel will come to them. They will hear and they will
believe. And it'll be through you and through me and through
others. So God is intimately and intricately a part of our
lives in His sovereignty and in His power and His being and
His presence. And that is good. Therefore, it is righteous. God's love is righteous, it's
always perfect. God's presence is righteous,
it's always perfect. Everywhere He is, is everywhere
He needs to be. And everything that He does,
His actions, His thoughts, His words, His works, all of these
things are perfect and good and righteous so that every ounce
of God's work with His church is righteous. In the same way
that God is with us intimately and intricately, God is with
us in the work that He does through us, and in the gospel of grace,
God has established that His people would be saved through
the finished work of Jesus Christ, whom He put forward, remember
this, Romans 3, to satisfy His judgment and wrath against us,
so that there is no debt for the sinner. How is that possible
when we are continually a work in progress to no avail of perfection? because the righteousness that
is ours is Christ's. It's Christ's. So God's work
in us, God's intimacy with us, God's power in our lives, we
can rest in its goodness. We can understand that James,
when he says that all good gifts are from above, We can understand
that even the hardest of pains, according to Romans 8, are a
gift from God. Why? Because they're righteous.
The suffering is righteous. The gift of suffering is righteous.
The gift of not suffering is righteous. When God gives no
suffering to the wicked, it is righteous. Why? We don't really
comprehend the fullness of that. And when God disciplines His
own, it is righteous. Why? Because He loves us and
He wants to shape us and to build us. What is greater, that we
get the desire of our flesh and live a temporal joy, a real small
little snap in the wind joy for just a moment that is fleeting
and fading, or we suffer and grieve for a season that we might
see that which is ineffably joyful that we sometimes can't even
express, as Peter says? so that we see the fullness of
the picture of what true happiness is. It's not about the plans
of this world, or the treasures of this world, or the intimacy
of our relationships, or the perfection of anything that we
plan to do. It is about Christ and Christ
alone. And that should be where our hope is. And this is part
of the work and the person of God. God is righteous in all
that He does. In all that He is. He's never wrong. He's never
missed a step. He's never made a mistake. He's
never caused anything that we would see as tragic to be without
warrant, without being just. What is it? How many years has
it been now? Seventeen years from the 9-11 incident? Seven
years ago, Monday, that we moved back to town. seven years ago
Monday. And every ounce of things, every
intimate detail of everything I envisioned happening has not
happened. None of it. None of it has happened. Not one thing has gone the way
I thought it would go. Some things have been rapidly
accelerated. Some things have never taken
place. Some things have gone really askew. All sorts of tragedy
has taken place. All sorts of hate. All sorts
of frustration. All sorts of sinfulness has taken
place. Everything that could possibly go wrong in the world
with planting a church and working a ministry has taken place. Just
take a number and throw it in the fire because you're not going
to have your number called. It's not going to work the way
we think it's going to work, and none of it's worked. But
guess what? Everything that has happened has been intimately
worked out by the plan of God. Everything. And I would rather
have that, and the suffering that belongs to it, knowing that
it is righteous, because God is at the helm of it. than have
my way and ruin the very blessing that God would give me, most
of all in submitting and surrendering every moment of my mind and hope
to the finished work of Jesus Christ by His mercy, instead
of trusting in my ability, trusting in my plans, trusting in my wisdom. I trust in His. And that in itself
is not even my work, it's His. So that which God is, is righteous. God is just in all of His actions. Everything God does. What I was
saying about 9-11 is I remember 17 years ago, it was the day
after Grace's first birthday. She turned 18 Monday. And she crawled for the first
time that day. because my wife was in the children's
building of the property and she called me on the cell phone.
She said, you will never believe it. Grace crawled. She was a year
old and she'd always lean forward and just grunt and moan and point.
Nobody would even speak words because Katie spoke for her very
well and moved for her very well. And so we just, and she finally
crawled and picked up something on her own. We're like, wow,
great. So we're talking on the phone. We're having a wonderful
conversation about Grace who crawled. And then Robin goes,
oh my goodness, hold on a minute. She turns up the radio that she
was listening to. She says, there's a plane that has crashed into
a building in New York City. Oh my goodness, that's terrible.
So we run over to the worship center and we turn on the big,
you know, 400 foot screen, turn it on. And then as we're watching
and trying to figure out what happens, another plane flies
into the center. And then I went, this isn't an
accident. This is bad. So we go back to the office,
we try to call some other people, and we can't get through because
at that time everybody else knew something was wrong. And whether
they did it on purpose or whether it was just, there's a federal
center there where the church was, and all of the cell phone
services were down. It was jammed, you couldn't use
it. Internet was off, you couldn't use it. It was pretty bad internet
anyway. because you didn't know what was happening. Nobody knew
what was happening. And all of a sudden, we called
for a large prayer meeting in town. We had about 700 people
show up that midweek service and just begin to pray. And that
Sunday morning, we had almost triple attendance in our three
services. And I remember hearing people
say, oh, this terrible God has turned His back on America. You
hear that when people are praying out loud and it's like, huh?
What? It's like if you were at a funeral and somebody says,
get your peanuts, hot peanuts, cokes, sodas, pickles, peanuts.
And you're like, what is the world? What is this? Dude, you
got the wrong venue, man. This is a funeral. Get out of
here. The ball game's next door. Oh, I'm so sorry. When someone
said, oh, God has turned his back on us, it's like a record
going. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I immediately
stopped praying. I'm looking around, I'm like, who prayed
that? What nincompoop prayed that? And then one thing led
after another. One little comment after another.
Oh, we better repent. Oh, if our people who are called
by my name, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm not mocking
the Word of God. I'm mocking the abuse of the twisting of
Scripture to apply where it does not apply for the sake of humanism. And I'll never forget D. James
Kennedy and some others, you know, God's judgment on America
because we've turned from God. I said, we can't turn from where
we've never been. When has the world that we know as
the United States ever bowed to Christ? Never in its exception
has it ever, ever bowed to Christ. Oh dude, you'd think I'd have
burned a flag and done the Bellamy salute. It was terrible. Who are you? Mr. Prophet. No, no, no, no,
no, no, no. This is good because God determined
to bring this type of thing to our land. This is a wake-up call. And guess what? It was short-lived,
wasn't it? for the unregenerate of the world,
for the religious zealots of the world, for the Judaizers
of the world, for the legalists of the world, for the evangelical
cults of the world. It was short-lived. Some two months later, church
attendance was back to normal, and unless you lived in New York
or had somebody related to it, it was not even on your radar.
And the first anniversary, you know, it sort of wound it back
up, and then after a while, all it did was incite hatred toward
other races, hatred toward other religions, and fear. But God is good and righteous
in the sending of that. The Scripture says in Thessalonians,
Paul teaches that there will come a day where God will bring
strong delusions by the work of Satan to cause people to believe
in a false gospel. Do you hear that? False gospel.
It will be through the Scriptures that the devil continues to bring
corruption into the religious of our day. Let me tell you something,
beloved. I believe there's no greater
deception than people thinking they have some righteousness
in their lives of their own. God is righteous in 9-11. God
is righteous in World War II. God is righteous in Vietnam.
God is righteous in Korea. God is righteous. God is righteous
in war. God is righteous in peace. God
is righteous in famine. We're filling up water bottles,
you know, we got the big five-gallon jugs. We don't buy new ones every
week, just, you know, we fill them up, put new caps on them,
just in case we're out of water for a couple of days. And I was
pouring that water in, and I thought to myself, it takes one gallon
of water to flush most toilets. There are countries in the continent
of Africa that would die for that gallon of flush water. How
blessed are we? And if a storm comes and takes
everything we have, God is righteous. See, Job knew that because he
was saved by the mercy of God through the Spirit. He could
say, blessed be the name of the Lord, when he got the news that his
children died in the crumbling of the house that God sent Satan
to do. God sent the enemy to destroy
the house of Job. Go destroy the house of Job.
Go kill his children. Go devour his crops. Go ruin
his finances. Go take away his friends. He
will not curse me. Why? Because God is sovereign
and righteous and good. But the caricature of Christ,
the caricature of God, the caricature of righteousness puts man at
the center of it all. But beloved, imagine you knowing,
doing, orchestrating, decreeing the most egregious social injustice
that the world could fathom. and the world looking at you
and hating you, but God says that's righteous
that you did this. You want me to give you an example? Jesus Christ was arrested and
crucified. And to the world I live in, that's
egregious. An innocent man dying for no
reason, being acquitted by two courts, And because of popular
opinion and social justice, Jesus is put on the cross? It'd be
hard to crucify Jesus today. You'd have people rising up.
Friends, God was righteous and good to cause it, because it
was the eternal plan before the foundation of the world through
which He would save His people by causing Christ to die so that
He would be just in the forgiveness of their sins, not because He
would turn them into these great righteous beings, but because
He would give them the perfection of His Son. God is righteous. in these things."
God is righteous in His words. He's righteous in His gospel.
He's righteous in His law. He's righteous in His judgment.
He's righteous in His wrath. He is perfect in everything that
He's ever said or done or caused. Every event that has ever happened
in the history of man, both good, bad, and indifferent, is by the
decree and the will of God. And therefore, everything that
we could think is the most heinous, God is righteous in its permission,
God is righteous in its working, God is righteous in it. There
is no way that anything that God does is not righteous, because
that's who He is. Whether we can comprehend it
or not, it is the righteousness of God in all perfection. And
beloved, we, by faith, have been given the righteousness of God. You see that? So it waters down the very essence
of God's divine nature when we start thinking, looking, poking,
evaluating, testing, or whatever it is we like to do to concern
ourselves with how good we really are in view of our standing before
God. But because of our standing before
God, beloved, we can Strive to love each other. And when we
feel our flesh is still alive, it rises up with a little bit
of an indwelling life, we can by faith trust in the finished
work of Christ, that we stand before God justified, righteous,
because it's not me that does it well, it's Christ that did
it well. You see that? And I'll be honest,
I'm growing very weary of this conversation in the world. And so for the sake of our assembly,
for the sake of our unity, for the sake of our intimacy, I want
us, as we continue in this teaching of Romans, to have a real clear
picture of just what our righteousness is. The rebuttal to this is always
some weird bullhorn expression. But what about that? But what
about antinomian? But what about sinners? But what
about people? Here's the answer to that. Church
discipline. We teach the full counsel of
the Word of God. And when a brother comes to me and says, you know
what, I really hate that guy over there in that seat. I really
just can't stand him. I don't have to counsel him in
some pragmatic way of saying, you know, let's talk about your
feelings. Let's see what's going on. I might say, what did he
do to deserve that? And he might give me this long
laundry list of all this main stuff that this guy said, and
I can return to him this very word. Brother, you've been saved
by the grace of God who loved you and gave himself for you.
Jesus Christ gave himself for you. While you were still sinners,
Christ came and died for the ungodly. How dare you not be
loving to that man? You hold him accountable for
that which God has not held you accountable for. And you know
what happens? It's like, gosh, wow. You know, if we don't teach the
gospel right, that person will try really hard to make himself
right before the Lord in that circumstance. If we teach the
gospel right, they will rest in the sufficiency of the righteousness
of Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and the brothers and sisters
as we encourage each other to love and good deeds, and the
Word of God, all working together, we will work to the end until
the next time he gets frustrated. It's gonna happen again. It's
not consistent. It's not persistent. But it is
common. And if it's not that, it's something
else. It may be doubt. It may be fear. It may be overwhelmed
attitude. I can't take this anymore. Beloved,
Christ endured all things for the sake of the elect. You are
the righteousness of God. Your perfection is not yours,
but Christ's perfection has been credited to you. So when God
the Father sees you, even in that sin, you are forgiven already.
Make peace with God in this relational sense by understanding and resting
in the work of Christ. Do you see that? But we don't
let each other just run wild into oblivion. But why is it
so difficult when the gospel is truly taught that people want
to bark back with, but, yeah, but. You know what I think? I think it's the Thessalonian
delusion. I think it's the culture we live
in that's nothing but Judaism, nothing but Roman Catholicism,
nothing but warmed over Arminianism, which is no gospel at all. Because
it puts man and everything he is at the center of everything
God hopes to do by man's power. When God's glory and God's righteousness
and God's name is all at stake. I believe we need to keep that
in the forefront of our mind, beloved, as we continue in Romans
7, starting next week, that the righteousness and the perfection
of God in its completeness has been given to us and there is
no stopping it. There is no taking it away. There
is no detracting from it. It is perfect. So we, therefore,
are perfect before our Father because He sees His work His
Son and His gospel, so He's satisfied in His righteousness. Let's pray. We thank You, Lord, as we do
every moment of our lives, that You love us. We thank You, Lord,
that You've given us Christ. You've destroyed Him and His
body. to satisfy Your judgment. You
raised Him from the dead to secure our salvation. Father, every
ounce of who Jesus is and His perfection has been granted and
credited to us in our account. But it is not, Lord, as You show
us clearly, our own. It is alien. We worship You for
Your glorious grace. We praise You for Your glorious
work. We adore You for Your love toward
us in Christ. Help us to rest in Him. as we
continue to grow as a people, as we continue to work out our
salvation by trusting in You. Lord, give us a great faith,
but make it not be in itself or in us or in anything else. Cause it always to be in the
finished work of Jesus Christ. It's in His name we stand. It's
by His authority and His name we pray. Thank you for listening. We hope
that this message has encouraged you in the faith. Subscribe to
these messages and other teaching resources and podcasts at anchoringfaith.org. More information about the church
can be found at gracetruth.org.