Because people who are willing
to wait until January to begin something that they know they
need to do today, probably will not see it through. Because procrastination
is our friend when it comes to discipline. So my prayer for
you is that you are reading the Bible. If you are not reading
the Bible every day, let me go ahead and tell you what you're
experiencing. You are experiencing spiritual dryness. you're experiencing
spiritual drought. You might say, is those the same
thing? Yes, they're the same thing, but when there is a drought,
there is dryness. You are experiencing, you will
experience apathy, you will experience a flare-up of the flesh, you
will experience attitude issues, you will experience a lack of
love for the brethren, a lack of love for your spouse, a lack
of love for your job, a lack of joy. You will experience all
sorts of things where you begin to feel like you're a victim.
You will then all of a sudden decide that the whole world hates
you and nothing's worth living and everything is so wrong that
Jesus could just come back now, but because He hasn't, He's all
His fault and you don't even love Him anymore. All because
you're not in the Bible. If you're not in the Word of
God and you're wondering why you feel the way you do spiritually
and emotionally, that's why. If you're not in the Scripture,
it is because that is the result, excuse me, the way you feel spiritually
is the result of you not being in the Scripture. I get hangry. Y'all know what hangry is? When
you're hungry and you get a little angry. I don't know, if I don't
eat within like half an hour of getting up, I'm short. Not
like this way, but my family can say to me, have you eaten?
And I'm always being reminded, Daddy, you need a snicker? I
mean, you know, what's going on? You get that hangry. When we
get spiritual hangry, we get spiritual hunger, we get these
things that happen to us, and we wonder why, and what we'd
rather do is vent on Facebook, or talk to somebody about it,
or gossip, or self-pity, and invite the whole world into our
party. And friends, let me go ahead and just tell you this,
you know the worst thing that happens when we're not in Scripture? We can't pray,
we can't rejoice, we can't worship, and we cannot know the peace
that surpasses all understanding. But yet we will cry out, oh God,
why can't I get myself together? When we won't even sit down and
hear what He has to say. And we're all guilty of it. We
could all read Scripture more. Robin and I were talking about
this earlier. We just, we want to get, we're going to wait until
January. We want to get to where any time we feel like we need
to be entertained as a family, we're just going to get the Bible
out first. First. And then if we have time left
over, then maybe we'll do something else. Or my kids are going, oh
my goodness, this is gonna be a horrible 2018, the year of
terror. I mean, you know, it's okay. At least I have a good attitude
about it. But anyway, read the Bible. Read the Scriptures. Read it as it was intended to
be read. Don't focus so much on the texts of specific verses. Read the paragraphs. Read the
argument. Let the letter of Romans to the
Romans resonate. How long will it take you to
read Romans? Let me tell you. About 40 minutes, start to finish. How long would it take you to
read out loud with pause and eloquence the Gospel of John?
Y'all know this because I timed it. Ninety minutes. In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was God, and the Word was with... If you read
it like that, out loud, it'll take you an hour and a half.
Alright, we sat through a movie yesterday that was over two hours,
and it went by so fast, and I'm like, no, it was so good! Oh
man, we get through like six minutes of the Bible going...
But maybe we need to get up and act it out for each other. Maybe
that's something we could do, is just say, okay, in January,
everybody in the household is going to take a chapter of the
book, and we're just going to read it out. If you want to do a British
accent and sound smart, that's fine too. If you want to be the
hillbilly theologian, then go for it. But maybe it'll make
it a little more interesting or investing, even if the Word
of God to us is not interesting or investing. So that's a terrible
thing to say. Friends, listen. When Jesus went
to the garden to pray, Who were the three with him? Peter, James,
and John. And what did he say? I am grieved, my spirit is grieved.
Keep watching, pray. And what did they do? Went to
sleep. The flesh is weak. The spirit is willing. And thankfully
what we've been learning in Romans is that we are not on the hook
with God in our failure to have a willing flesh or a strong flesh.
It's about the strength of God. when our flesh is weak. His strength
is our strength. He is our strength. He doesn't
empower our flesh to act. He doesn't empower our flesh
to act. Now that's going to be something a little bit different
when we get to chapter 6, but in this context, He doesn't empower
us to stand before Him so that He goes, look at these people
how pleased I am. And when we look at this here, chapter 5,
we're in verse 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 tonight. We're going to cover
those verses, and that's all we're going to have time for.
Two of them are review, and then the other three we're going to
dive in. Just a little, just on the surface, we're going to
dive in deep enough to get our necks wet. And just, you know,
about right there. Not drowning it, we're just going
to get about here. So when we look at this text, we know that
this is starting where Paul says, I thank my God. And going into
then verse 21 of chapter... or 25 of chapter 4, down even
through verse 11 of chapter 5, we see this one complete thought
of Paul. It's one complete thought. Now
do you look at the Book of Romans that way? No! Why? Because we're reading it chopped
up. I mean, isn't that how we're taught to memorize Scripture?
Let's memorize John 3, 16. That's in the middle of a thought.
It starts with the word for. For what? For. So it's coming
after something else. And if we do John 3, 16, why
not 17 and 18, which actually completes the thought of Jesus?
or Philippians 4.13, or whatever it might be, Jeremiah 29.11.
See, we know these verses, don't we? But we very seldom know the
context. What about Matthew 7? I've heard
that a lot lately. Matthew 7. You've got to be the
salt and the light. Well, what does that even mean?
Or like a lot of people have been pitting, since we've been
in Romans, a lot of people have been fussing with us on the Internet
and other places about Paul and James being at odds with each
other. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. What
is the context of James writing? What's the context? He's writing
to Christians who are ethnic Jews who don't love anybody. That's the context. Love the
church, take care of the church is the work that he's looking
for. Woo! How about that? But what do we
like to do? Pit him against Paul. So much so that many people take
Paul and dismiss him. A lot of Judaizers in today's
culture dismiss Paul altogether. I don't know if you've met them,
but there are people who I have met in the flesh, talked to,
and face-to-face, who have said to me, Paul's writing should
not be canonical. That means it should not be in
the text of Scripture. Because Paul contradicts Jesus,
and John, and Peter, and the rest of them. Paul is a misogynist. Paul is an antinomian. Paul! And I'm thinking, Paul's
the one that said, I turned them boys over to Satan so that their
flesh could be destroyed. Does that sound antinomian to
you? No, it sounds consequential, doesn't it? There's a consequence
for us when we sin as a Christian. But the consequence then is not
that we are condemned by God, but that we are judged by each
other. and judged according to the judgment of God, which is
found in Scripture." So here, Paul is continually talking.
If we go into chapter 5, Paul is continuing to talk about this
promise that was given to Abraham, and it was the faithfulness of
God that gave Abraham faith. Abraham believed in the faithfulness
of God even though time after time after time after time, Abraham
failed to follow after the command of God by faith. He believed
that God's promise was true, but what did he do? He does the
same thing we do, beloved. Listen to this. He does the same
thing we do as adults. He does the same thing that you
guys do as teenagers, that we did as teenagers. We take matters
into our own hands. We go in to say, okay, we know
the Lord has promised this, but what must I do to bring about
the faithfulness of God's promise? What must I do in order for God's
promise to be effectual for me? Isn't that what it is? What does
Peter say? Believe the gospel. Believe the
good news that Jesus Christ is the promised one of God and He's
faithful to save you from your sin. That's what we do. Abraham
is just like we are. And so it was his faith alone
that was counted to him as righteousness. There is no other way by which
we can stand justified before God. And we never measure ourselves
by what we see in the mirror as our hope. We never measure
ourselves by the fruit that man has created. Have you noticed
that? I made the comment, was it Sunday
before last, about some of our fellow brothers and sisters across
the world who have to hide in dirt huts and dig ditches and
hide underground and go into the sewers in order to hear the
Scripture. I mean, I went to a thrift store
today and felt like I needed a bath. I couldn't imagine worshiping
in a sewer. I mean, I'd come in in a bubble.
They call me the bubble man. I'd just come in in a bubble,
like... You know? I couldn't do it. It
would just... But I could, if that's where I was. But see,
in our culture, we believe that in order to worship properly,
in order to honor God, we've got to have certain types of
lighting. We've got to have certain types of staging. We've got to
have certain types of music or instrumentation. What is that?
We're going to have to have a hymnal. I mean, could we not make up
a song? Since we've been justified by
faith, we have peace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom
we had also obtained access by faith into this grace in which
we stand, in which we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.
Could we not sing a song like that? Yeah, we could come up
with a song. And depending on what culture we lived in is what that
song would sound like. You know, if we lived in a boring
culture, it might be really boring. If we lived in an exciting culture,
it might be very exciting. And even those are very, what?
Subjective points of view and subjective statements. But what
is necessary for us to worship? The truth of the Scripture. the
Spirit of God, that we might worship in spirit and in truth,
knowing the one true God, knowing the gospel, knowing Jesus, the
Son that He has sent, that we may have eternal life. For that
is exactly the same phrase out of the mouth of Jesus Christ
our Lord in John 17, this is eternal life, that they know
you, the one true God and the Son whom you have sent. This
is eternal life. So when we talk about these doctrinal
things that Paul is teaching us in this letter, it is not
so that we can become heady in our Christendom. It's not so
that we can become heady in our theology. It's not so that we
can get online and have these great debates with all these
PhDs and APAs and all these other silly things that we see people
putting putting their stock in. Well, this man knows what he's
talking about because he's got a PhD. You know how many friends of
mine have PhDs? A bunch of them, most all of
them. It's sort of like Cracker Jacks. You open it up, there's
a prize inside, but we've all got a box. It's like MBAs. I've got three
friends that are coming to mind right now that have MBAs, Masters
of Business Administration, from really top-end Ivy League schools. And one of them is a barista
at Starbucks, and another one of them is a FedEx driver who
makes $93,000 a year as a FedEx driver. He went to college, got
his MBA, came to see me. I said, buddy, the best job I
can find you is 43. He's like, I made that when I was in high
school. I said, go back to FedEx. That homeboy's gonna retire next
year, he's through. He'll be 45 years old, he's through. And
he'll be an MBA on the golf course. It doesn't matter. Is studying
good? Yes. Is education helpful? Absolutely. But what's the greatest
education that you can receive? The greatest education you can
receive is that by the grace and mercy of God, you hear the
Word of God and the Spirit of God give you life. And in that
life, you have eternity to praise and rejoice and praise God for
His glorious grace. That is the most important thing
that you can learn. And it's the most important education
that you'll ever find is to recognize the authority of God through
the Scripture over your life, and over your soul, and over
your will, and over your choices. And that if it were not for someone
being taught by the Spirit of God, none of us would be regenerate
today. So we are not studying this letter
that we may have all the answers of justification. We're not studying
this thing so that we can understand the doctrine of propitiation.
Though we do and we are understanding it, we are studying this letter
as a body so that we may grow in the knowledge of the grace
and the mercies of Christ. so that we will be justified,
so that we will be redeemed, so that we will have eternal
life. This is written that we may know and believe and live. It's often strange the culture
we live in. I love the time in which we live
because I have everything at my fingertips. Oh, how I wish
I could have had the internet in my teens, what I would have
done. The dog-eared pages of my encyclopedia
sets, my fingers had no mercy. And I don't dog-ear pictures,
I mean books. I'm very careful with books.
I'm a white-glove type guy when I deal with books. But I ruined
the spines of these encyclopedia sets. And I'm not talking about
one. I'm talking about the 1963, the 1970, the 1974, and the 1979. I had the annual books of all
the years. I don't know where they came
from. My grandparents just bought them, I guess. But I read them, and
I read them every single day. I read them, and read them, and
read them. And no matter how much time I didn't have, I found
a way to learn something new. Imagine the Internet. Imagine if we could have gotten
John Flavel in my face. Imagine if I could have gotten
Jonathan Edwards. There wasn't a Jonathan Edwards
book in the state of Georgia when I was a child. I mean, I
just don't think you'd have to go to Boston to get one. I mean,
look at the resources. So I love the fact that this,
I have 12,000 books here. on this iPad. It's the most amazing
thing in the world. I can go, woo-hoo! You know?
And I love the... Imagine. So I love this era in
which we live, but at the same time, we've wasted so much time. Because for every click of something
good that we see, there is something not as good. I'm not saying bad.
I'm not talking about wicked things. Something not as good
that buys for our time. And we may have the intention
to sit down and know the Word of God, but what do we do? We
end up looking at this video. We end up listening to sermon
jams for three hours. You know what a sermon jam is?
Taking two or three sentences out of what I've said tonight
and putting it in front of music and some cool pictures and sticking
it on the Internet for five minutes. Man, that was a good word. No,
that was a pretext. It was out of context. You have
no idea what I'm talking about. The craziest thing one day is
that I had a guy in California that did sermon jams all the
time with my stuff. Didn't, you know, just put it
up there, didn't know. And I'm over at his house one
day and he's showing me some stuff and he's listening to it and I'm
going, that guy sounds familiar. Who is that? Didn't even recognize
it was my voice because, you know, it was in front of all
this cool music and some I don't know, the guy that blows up stuff
in movies. It looked like he directed. There's
always some fire and some old school stuff. But we can get
sideways, just like we got sideways tonight, just in that conversation.
We can lose track of what we're really here for. I could take the next 20 minutes
and just talk about the Internet. And we'd all know this was a
good sermon. Was it? Was it even a sermon? Have we even started
the sermon? No, we haven't started the sermon
at all. Not one thing contextual has been said out of my mouth
since I started this except for the fact when I quoted Scripture.
It has been commentary on what we've learned and some of the
philosophy behind why we learn it. Now imagine that. If I can rob you of that time,
what can the rest of the resources we have at our fingertips do?
It is a war, beloved. It is a war. Now, not that what
I've said is erroneous or fallacious or wicked or deceiving. It's beneficial, but is it good
in comparison to what we could learn from the text? So let's
take that as a warning. Take it as a warning that so
many times we hear things and we see things that aren't good
in comparison to what is divine. Look at this text, verse 6, "...for
while we were still weak." What is this? The hope and the suffering,
the rejoicing that we have for the gospel of grace. It says,
"...for while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died
for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for
a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare
even to die. But God," verse 8, "...shows
His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ
died for us." Since therefore we have now been justified by
His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath
of God. For if while we were enemies
we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more
now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by His life." More
than that. We also rejoice in God through
our Lord Jesus, through whom we have now received reconciliation. This is deep and rich, but it
is so simple. See, people think that something
that's deep or something that's rich means that it's too much
for us. This is so simple, but yet can
be so rich. It's sort of like certain types
of baked items. You can say, oh, that's a simple
little, and then you're like, oh, I need like a gallon of milk
to eat. But what is it that we see in this text as we close
out these thoughts before we get to this teaching that Paul
does in verse 12? It says, "...therefore just as
sin came into the world through one man." And he compares and
contrasts Jesus and Adam and death through sin. And so death
spread to all men because all sin. Here in verse 6 through 11 we
see some things. And the first thing I want us
to see tonight is this, that while we were weak, You know what that shows us?
There's an inability in the human person. There's an inability
in the human mind. There's an inability in the human
affection. There's an inability in the human
ability to do anything for God. There's an inability in all humanity
to do anything for God. Not only can we not do anything
for God, we cannot do anything toward God. You hear that? We
cannot do anything for Him. We cannot do anything toward
Him. So in other words, we cannot honor Him. We cannot seek Him.
We cannot run after Him. We cannot pursue Him. You all
and I cannot pursue God. So what in the world are we supposed
to do? It says it right there, at the right time Christ died
for the ungodly. See, it doesn't say Christ died
for the semi-ungodly. It doesn't say that Christ died
for the seekers. It doesn't say that Christ died
for the zealous. No, as a matter of fact, the
argument that Paul then gives says no one will probably ever hardly
die for a righteous person, a good person. And you're not to pick
that apart. There's nothing there except
an example. I mean, you take the best person you can think
of. Who's going to die for him? Much less an evil person. Die
for the ungodly. But God, verse 8, but God shows
His love for us that while we were still sinners, Christ died
for us. You see what this teaches? Christ died for those who are
truly evil. Christ died for those who are
really bad. Christ died for those who are
depraved and unable in their weakness to come to Him. Christ
did not even look into the corridors of time because God in His mind
doesn't look into the future. He's omniscient, means He knows
all things before things were. God doesn't peer into the will
of the creature that He might move His sovereignty around what
He knows the man will do. God decrees and does. That's
it. That's determinism. You better
believe it. It's determinism. Because that's
what divinity does. God is God. I'm not. You see. We aren't God. God is
God. Christ died for the truly evil.
This shows us. Look at this. But God shows. Some scripture
says God demonstrates. What does that mean? The Greek
word there has an incredible meaning. But this, number one,
is in the present tense. You see that. Currently, currently,
God shows. He doesn't say God has shown. He doesn't say God showed His
love for us. God shows His love for us, and
that while we were still sinners, Christ, what, died for us. So
the present expression of what Paul is teaching through the
Scripture tonight, if we don't get anything else out of it,
like we talked about the love of God as we closed last week,
and the peace that comes through Jesus Christ, We see that this
present moment, this place right now, there is a divine, supernatural
relationship between God and us. And it is happening presently
because right now God is revealing and showing and demonstrating
His love toward us in the present moment through the hearing of
the message of the cross that Christ did 2,000 years ago. So
when we hear the present message of the past victory, we are intimate
with God. See, our condition as sinners
reveals that we are unfit. We're in an unfit position. We're
not worthy to be sacrificed for. We're not worthy to be redeemed.
We're not worthy for Jesus to take our place. Our being then,
quote, still sinners shows that the effectual element of the
death of Jesus was on our behalf as wicked people. Now there's
a lot that I could talk about here and I don't want to bog
down into this. But there are some people in
our world who believe and claim Christ who would say that Jesus
paid for the sins of all people. Then they must receive or accept
that. What does a bank do if I pay
off your mortgage? They send you the note. They
send you the security. They send you the legal document
that allows them to take your house. If I pay it off and the bank
doesn't send that to you, you know what the bank is? A thief. Is God a thief? No. So that when
Christ paid for the sins, He paid for the sins of His people.
They are atoned for. Now don't kick the can down to
the philosophical corner. Don't kick it down into the dark
place of the human psyche and start, well, if that's true,
then oh my goodness. No. Let's just let the Scripture
tell us what the Scripture tells us. And the Scripture tells us
is that Christ, when we were wicked, paid for our sins. So
therefore now there is no judgment against us. So that it is not
there. Do we know that? Not until the Spirit of God shows
us. Do we believe in that? Absolutely not. Not until the
Word of God comes and the Spirit of God blows where He wishes
and opens our hearts and minds. You see that? Who gets the praise
for our salvation when we know that? God does. Who gets the
glory? God does. Where are we? Dead.
I don't like memes. Memes bother me. I don't like
to look at pictures and then contemplate what someone might
be trying to communicate. It aggravates me. Somebody falling
down the stairs, that's one thing, but I mean these deep spiritual
memes. I mean you can't get spiritual
in a meme. By saying spiritual meme, it's almost like saying,
I don't know, stupid smart guy, I don't know, dumb smart guy. It's an oxymoron. But we can't
illustrate these things. We need to understand that when
these memes, and this is the point I was making, show this
really smart person standing there with a skull and saying,
come to life! That's what it's like to say
that we have something to do. That is a good picture. There
was a dead body here that had been decayed for years, and they
dug it up in a dig, and we laid it in a chair, and I just sat
here, and I took care of it, and I talked to it. There's nothing
in that body that could ever bring it back to life. No motion,
no desire, no movement, no glimpse, no point, no wishful thinking. That is what it's like for us
in our sin. While we were still sinners,
Christ died for the ungodly. And this shows us the love of
God. The love of God is the motivation for the death of Christ. The
death of Christ is necessary because of the inability of the
persons for whom Christ died. So this being still sinners,
this was on our behalf as wicked people. The death of Jesus was
effectual for bad, dead, wicked, depraved people. Not for those
that had some good, some faith, a little bit of options, some
zeal, or even those who would make right choices concerning
these things. For us. What does that mean? That's what
I started to talk about. On our behalf. On our behalf. In the interest of us. Christ shed His blood. You see
that. Now pay close attention to this for a moment. Because
this does fly in the face. We as Reformed people, you know,
oh, we're so spiritual. We don't celebrate Christmas.
We don't celebrate birthdays. We're just like a cult. I mean, you
know, some of us. I'm not picking at you. Please
don't take that as an offense. I mean, if it were up to me, we'd never
buy another gift. Put me over here with this guy. But sometimes we feel uber-spiritual
because of what we know and where we stand. Listen, we're just
objects of divine love. We're objects of divine love. And oftentimes, because we understand
who we really are in our flesh, we come to the place where we
don't feel loved. Well, God doesn't love me. He
tolerates. God does not tolerate His children.
He dies for them. God does not tolerate the elect. He replaces them. He replaces
His wrath. He substitutes His judgment on
Jesus. Why would God love us this way?
And this is love not that we have loved God, but that God
has loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our
sins, 1 John 4.10. On our behalf, in the interest
of our life, He shed His blood. Verse 9, Since therefore we have
now been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by
Him from the wrath of God. So this teaching continues to
get better and better and richer and richer and deeper and deeper.
Paul will teach in a few chapters that in order that the righteous
requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk
not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit, Jesus
suffered. Jesus died. God's wrath is satisfied. The wrath of God is satisfied
in Jesus Christ for us, the object of His divine mercy. Why would
He give us mercy? What does Paul tell the Ephesians?
because of the great love with which He loved us. What does
Jesus tell Nicodemus? For God loved the world in this
way, that He gave the only Son that He had. The believing ones would have
eternal life, but the unbelieving ones would perish. And actually, He says, the unbelieving
ones were dead already. So Christ's blood justified the
ungodly, and in doing so, it settles the salvation of the
elect. Peter understood this very clearly. In 1 Peter 2.21,
he says, "...for to this you have been called, because Christ
here also suffered for you, leaving you as an example, so that you
might follow in His steps." He committed, verse 22, no sin,
neither was deceit found in His mouth. When He was reviled, He
did not revile in return. When He suffered, He did not
threaten. but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his
body on that tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his runes you have been healed."
Now this is an echo of the prophet Isaiah. And Peter was a very,
very well-versed Jew. Because in verse 10 of this text
in Romans 5, we see that Paul is reiterating the very same
thing we see in Isaiah, the very same thing we see in John's writing,
and the very same thing that we just heard out of Peter's
epistle. And it says, "...for if while
we were enemies..." Look at this. "...if while we were enemies,
if while we were unworthy of love, that God died for us..."
Jesus, who is God, died for us. that we might be satisfactory
to God, for our judgment is paid, our penalty is satisfied, God's
wrath is at peace. I don't know about you, church,
but what else makes you motivated to walk in a manner of righteousness?
Is it fear? Or is it this glorious gospel? Because you know what fear does
to me? I'm one of these people that reverse psychology works
on, and I know it's working on me, but my pride doesn't let
me stop. If Robin said to me, man, I just
don't think you could paint the house, man, it'd be painted. And I know she's doing it, but
I'm like, I can't be weak enough to argue this. Oh, if I don't obey God, then
oh no, I'm gonna go to hell! And then what happens? We obey
imperfectly and we're still subject to wrath. We obey and then we think, or
worse, we think we got it, and then we're still subject to wrath.
And we can't even see the grace of God. We can't even see the
gospel of God. The good news of God is that He's gracious
to unworthy, unmerited people. It is not fear that motivates
us. John would argue that it's His perfect love. Cast away all
fear. We do not cower. When Jesus returns,
the judge of heaven and of earth, we are not going to hide. Oh
no, He's going to find me. No, we're going to run and we're
going to say, Wow, here's my Savior. I cannot wait. Paul says,
Come bold before the throne of grace where we have an inheritance
whereby we can call God Papa. Our great-grandfather, we called
Papa. It's not something you just call
somebody on the street. I don't call any man Daddy. And we call God Daddy. And no matter how awful our children
are, no matter how much we would truly love to snap the life out
of them sometimes, we love them. and we continue
to hurt ourselves to put ourselves in the position of love. We continue
to waste away our bodies and our minds and our pocketbooks
for what we think they need most, because we love them. How much
more, then, if we were enemies of God, verse 11, and were reconciled
to God by the death of His Son, that is the expense of God for
our redemption. And I'm going to tell you something,
church. I mean, some Sundays we have a lot of children in
here. But if something catastrophic happened, who are you looking
for first? Your children. Fire alarm goes off, we're going,
and when we see our children, almost simultaneously we're helping
each other, right? It's not more like kicking the
Tippins kids into the fire going, yeah, we got rid of them now,
you know. It's a good idea. But we don't look out for our
own, it's just instinctive. God, our Father, has looked out
for His children, and that if we were His enemies and have
been reconciled at the cost of His Son, how much more, now that
we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life? If we've been
reconciled by the death and the blood of Jesus, how much more
shall we be saved by His life? What life? Well, the life of
Jesus that obeyed the fullness of the law of God. That's the
life. And the life of Jesus that He
overcame death and was vindicated and He was raised to life in
His flesh and glorified in His body. That life. How much more
do we have to look forward to? See, this gospel of grace, listen,
the devil has done a wonderful job, church, and it is about
to get, it's so funny, it's not funny. As I use that word, it
doesn't mean funny. It's just, it's an odd, eerie coincidence
that for five or six years, I've been having these small backroom
conversations with people talking about how the gospel, you know,
these people really don't have the gospel, or these people,
you know, are twisting the gospel. And I go, okay, let's just watch
and be patient. And all of a sudden now, five, six years later, it's
on the main stage of Christianity. Now it's in the circles. People
are using terms that we thought we coined in our tiny little
backroom conversations. Just the six of us. We go, man,
they're listening in. Maybe the Word of God brings
the same type of language with God's people. And we're starting
to see now that the devil has done a very good job creating
a cultural Christianity. And we have temples made of gold. We have churches that spend millions
of dollars on building budgets and programs while the world
goes hungry, not just in food, but for the gospel. May God strike
us all dead and remove us from the witness of this world before
we do something that way. that He would still be glorified
in our work. Christ died in order to effectually
save His own enemies. He reconciled us to God. We are
justified through His life and much, much more. Much, much more. Look at verse 11. Much, much
more. We have been called friends with
God. More than that, we also rejoice
in God through Jesus, our Lord, the Christ, our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have now received reconciliation. You understand
what reconciliation is. Let's put the judge of heaven
in contrast to the judges of earth. And let's talk about good
judges of earth. If we break the law of man, which
in most circumstances is also the law of God, according to
Romans 13, Then we stand against the law
under a judge who rules justly according to that law. And if
we're found guilty of breaking this law, then the judge justly
sentences us according to the law. So let's use murder. You're guilty or you're accused
of murder. The evidence shows that you are
a murderer. The jury convicts you of murder. The judge sentences
you to die. And the people who are helping
you, they say, mercy. So the judge says, okay, I'll
give you life sentence forever until you die of natural causes.
You shall be incarcerated until you die. You shall stay in prison. And then you go off to prison
and the judge is righteous in his sentencing and in his judgment.
You took a life, he takes your life. That's how that works.
Either in the flesh or your freedom. And you never see the judge again.
or the evidence shows that you were not guilty, that someone
had lied about you, and you're exonerated, and the judge says,
I'm throwing this out, this is evil, to charge this innocent
man with such a crime, and he throws it out, and you walk out
free, and you never see the judge again. The judge of heaven's
not like that at all. The judge of heaven who is our
Father, because we've been reconciled to Him. When the judges of earth
stand in the bench, they are still subject to the same law.
When we sin against the law of man, we are not violating anything
against that judge, but when we sin against the law of God,
we sin against Him directly. And when we are guilty, this
is what reconciliation looks like. The judge of heaven says,
you are guilty. And then the judge of heaven
says, but you are free. Because your guilt has been placed
on the innocent one, Jesus, the righteous. Now go free. And not only that, but He does
not just dismiss you into your freedom as you rejoice. He enters
into your life. He becomes intimate and reconciled
with you. He pours His love out upon you
and pours, as we saw last week, His love out into us. Look at that. Not only that,
verse 3, but we rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering
produces endurance, endurance character, character 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. So God enters into us the judge
of heaven that says we are guilty, satisfies His own wrath through
God the Son, and then fills us with His own presence through
God the Spirit, and then exonerates us and pours His love as God
the Father into our hearts through the Spirit of God. Friends, let
me tell you something. I could break this stage apart. It excites me so much to see
this and to believe it and to know it. This is the gospel of grace.
This is the gospel of mercy. We stand without even the ability
to speak. Paul has already said that all,
in chapter 3, now we know whatever the law says. It speaks to those
who are under the law, in order that every mouth may be shut,
and the whole world may be accountable to God. I remember in the early days
of ministry and taking evangelism training and people saying, oh,
you know, this is what you do. You say, well, if God asks you
why I should let you into heaven, He won't do it! He doesn't want
to hear what we have to say about why we should enter into His
presence because it's not a question on the table. It's not an opportunity
to say, well, I've done good. Well, that's not good enough.
You're guilty already. We are guilty and we are objects
of wrath. Or we are guilty and we are objects
of mercy. And if we're objects of mercy,
our guilt is washed away because Jesus took the punishment of
it all. That's glorious. And where in the world in our
day that makes somebody say, then I can sin however I want
to, makes me want to poke out my eyes and look a little bit
further at them. Like, I can't see you clearly. Because I don't know about you,
that kind of love toward me motivates me to love back. Does it not
you? And the greatest love is when
we give up our desires for the desires of others. When we lay
down our life like Christ did for the sake of enemies. How
much more loving is it to see the church pursue Christ as their
only hope? I don't know where it exists
in the world. And so my prayer is that we could see, as we get
to now some doctrinal things in verse 12 we won't go into
tonight, I want us to see just what peace looks like, what reconciliation
costs, and what intimacy with God really means. This is the
gospel. This is the hope of glory, Christ
in us. Let's pray. We are so overwhelmed,
Father. Overwhelmed by Your amazing grace. Overwhelmed that without Your
affection toward us in Christ Jesus, we would perish, and rightly
so. But Father, You are satisfied
because Jesus took our sin. You are satisfied because Jesus
took our blame. And You poured Your wrath upon
Him. and You raised Him to life, and You've given us the credit
for His righteous obedience. And You've given us the promise
of His resurrection to be our own, that we might be the righteousness
of God in Your face. Let us rejoice. Let us lay aside
everything that could cause us to take our eyes away from this
truth. Lord, fill us with all Your fullness. Lead us by Your Spirit, not into
temptation. Father, drive us to the core
of the cross of Christ and put in us a divine love for each
other that cannot be quenched by any, any wave of this life. And this is in Jesus' name I
pray. Amen.