Alright, return to Romans chapter
10. The messages that I intend to preach
today, both of them began simply as subjects on which I thought
I'd write a bulletin article. They'd been tumbling around in
my mind most of the week, and I sat down to write up the bulletin,
and by the time I got done, Writing an article, I had pretty much
a full-blown outline for a message. Same thing with this evening's
subject on what is it to call upon the name of the Lord. And
interestingly, they both come from the same chapter in the
book of Romans. And as I was thinking on this, of course,
most of the time when I'm meditating on scripture, I'm remembering
it as it appears in the King James, because that's where most
of my Bible memorization occurs, when I was using King James.
And in the King James, it works it this way. It says, for they
being ignorant of the righteousness of God, that's verse three of
Romans 10, for they being ignorant of the righteousness of God. Now, the righteousness of God
is obviously one of the key concepts of the gospel of God's grace,
the gospel that you and I believe. In fact, I would say it's the
linchpin of the whole system. Just about everything the scriptures
have to say has some bearing on this subject of the righteousness
of God. It is certainly a linchpin to
salvation, for he says in verses 1 and 2, Brothers, my heart's
desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may
be saved, for I can testify about them that they are zealous for
God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge, for they are ignorant. of the righteousness of God.
In other words, being of a covenant people wouldn't save the Jews. God made a covenant with them,
a covenant of life. And they were a chosen nation
in the world in that day, and yet all that covenant that God
made with them, all their chosen position as a nation, did not
bring them salvation. They yet needed to be saved.
Their zeal for God didn't save them. Now, these were not merely
a covenant people. These were not merely those that
have been chosen by God, nationally speaking. But they were a zealous
people. Paul gives them credit. He said,
you know, kind of like, I give the devil his due. They're zealous
for God. Brother Mahan used to make the
statement. He said, you say you die for your religion. These
people are killed for their religion. In fact, they did. They often did. That's how zealous
they were for God. And yet they had a point of ignorance. And this point of ignorance cost
them their souls. Now, righteousness is a necessity
if we are to be accepted by God and if we are to have any fellowship
with him. And those two things are distinct. To be accepted
by God and to have fellowship with Him are two different things.
And it's important that we notice these two different things. To
be accepted by Him, you might say, is primarily kind of a legal
thing. It's whether or not He allows you to live. It's the
opposite of being rejected. Now, God, the judge of all, either
rejects or accepts people. But then there's this matter
of fellowship. And fellowship, that word means to have things
in common. We think a fellowship is to have
snacks after church. You know, I put that in a bulletin.
We're going to have a time of fellowship and snacks after church.
And we think fellowship means getting together and having a
good time together. But actually, the word means
to have something in common. To be a fellow with someone else
is to have something in common with them. Now, we cannot have fellowship
with God if we are not righteous. Because God is righteous. God,
the judge of all the earth, cannot do me good if there is guilt
chargeable to me. And God, the righteous one, cannot
have any fellowship with me if I do not possess a nature like
His. Righteous. A man with no righteousness
has nothing in common with God. And therefore, by definition,
he can't have any fellowship with God. Now, the primary issue
of the gospel is how a sinner can be accepted by God and have
fellowship with a righteous God. The gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ is not just a means to escape hell. I can remember as the gospel
was presented to me, that is the version of the gospel that
I was raised in. It was always a matter of choosing
hell or heaven. Do you want to, you know, reject
the gospel and go to hell or accept the gospel and go to heaven?
As though whether or not you were in hell or whether or not
you were in heaven was the whole issue of the gospel. Well, I
know that that's an important part of it, because, friends,
I don't want to go to hell. I mean, you know, that's just I got no
interest in that at all. I'd like to go to heaven. But
that is just a very dim view of the blessedness of the gospel.
The natural mind perceives or thinks about blessings just way
below what God has. God's gospel involves much more
than simply escaping hell. The natural mind often sees nothing
more than a legal problem with God, and therefore it comes up
with only a legal solution. But our problems with God are
more than simply that we're criminals in his kingdom. We have a nature
which is utterly opposed to him. Everyone born in this world is
born with a natural hatred for God. So I never hated God. That means you've never met him. Really? The natural man, the
scripture says, does not receive the things of God. That's foolishness
to him. There are many people that think
they love God. In fact, they simply love the God that they
invented or that somebody else invented and told them about.
But the God of the scriptures is a terrible offense to the
human way of thinking. Because everything about God
is opposed to everything. about me. And so salvation's got to do
something more than resolve the legal problem we have as criminals
against God's kingdom. It's got to change our minds.
It's got to change the way we think. If the only way for me
to be with God, if the only way for me to have fellowship with
God is for us to be of the same mind This I know, God will not
change his mind. It must be that I'm going to
have to change, or somebody's going to have to change my mind. And that's
what the gospel does. Our problem's more than a legal
problem, and God's salvation is more than a legal solution.
God's salvation extends beyond merely relieving sinners of the
pain of judgment. It goes all the way to making
them like God in true righteousness and holiness. Look at that over
in Ephesians 4. Now, I count these things to
be glorious. Sometimes we get into such a controversy over what are called
the legal or forensic aspects of the gospel. And I don't know
any other than those theological words people come up with. But,
you know, we get stuck just on the problem that we're guilty
before God, and then how can we become justified before God?
But that's not the whole issue. There's even more than that,
more glories than that. Ephesians 4 verse 24 tells us
this. It says, And put on the new self,
the new man, created. This is something God did, an
act of creation that he does for every one of his people,
created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Now, we don't become gods. I
don't know what it means, but more it means we become like
God. It means that we become righteous like He is righteous.
Holy as He is holy. Do you remember our Lord says,
be ye holy as your Father which in heaven is holy? Say, how am
I going to do that? You aren't. You aren't. But what you can never do, God
can do. Now, what is this righteousness of God? The phrase itself could
mean three things. It could mean the very nature
and actions of God. When we see what God is and the
things he does, that's a revelation of his very own righteous nature. And then also it means the righteousness
that comes from God and is given to sinners. That's basically
what Paul's referring to here, the righteousness that comes
from God. Every form of religion, except the gospel, has us trying
to manufacture or perform a righteousness which we give to God, which we
present to God. Only the gospel talks about a
righteousness that comes from God to us. Not a righteousness
we produce, but a righteousness we receive. Not a righteousness that's going
this way, but a righteousness that's coming this way. And that's
all the difference there is between the religion of God and
the religion of man. Right there sums it up. And then the righteousness of
God also speaks in James chapter 1, verse 20, of the righteous
way of life that believers should follow. But our text here, is
speaking of the righteousness that God gives to every one of
His elect. It is, first of all, what is
called an imputed righteousness. Now, we don't use the word impute
much in common language, but it's a good word. Imputed righteousness
is the righteousness of justification. We talk about being justified.
How are we justified? Well, it's simply that God imputes
to us righteousness. In fact, the definition of justify
is this, that God declares us to be righteous. He just says
it so. It has nothing to do with whether
we actually are righteous. It has altogether to do with
what God says. That's just the definition of
the word. That word simply means, at least
the Greek word that they translate impute, means to say about. To say something about. If you
impute righteousness to someone, you're saying they're righteous.
If you impute sin to someone, you're saying they're sinful. So if we have righteousness imputed
to us, that's just God saying we're righteous. Injustified
means to say we're righteous. And so when we talk about an
imputed righteousness, we're just talking about being justified.
And God does this many times. We are justified just once. God declares his people to be
righteous on many occasions. He declared them to be righteous
before he ever put a star in the sky. I want you to think
of that now. Now, we're going back and we're actually entering
something that our minds can't totally conceive of. We can only
think within a framework of time, but we're going to try to go
back, as it were, to when there was no time. And even when there
was no time, when there was only God, only God and His thoughts,
only God and His purposes, then He declared His people to be
righteous. when Jesus Christ died for them.
When, as it were, God imputed our sin to Him, said our sin
against Him, He said Christ's righteousness to us. And so we can point to a time
about 2,000 years ago when God said His people were righteous. And then there comes a time in
every In the life of every one of God's elect, when the Spirit
of God creates with them a new nature, and from that new nature,
they believe God. And when they believe God, God
says, You're righteous. He justifies it. And then they
go on through their lives, and you'll know this experience. You who believe, you go on through
your lives and what do you find out? Despite the fact that God
says you're righteous, you're still quite unrighteous in your
nature. And you go on and you commit
sin and you feel the guilt upon your conscience. You feel the
weight of your transgressions and you go to God and you plead
the blood of Christ and you confess your sins. And what does God
do? He says you're righteous. Oh, that sweet testimony. of
the Spirit of God in our hearts when he brings near the things
of Christ and shows them to us and makes them vivid to us once
again. And as it were, washes us clean
once again and says to us, you are righteous. He justifies us
all over again. Not as though we weren't already
justified, but he says it again. And how many times does that
happen in a day, in a week, in your lifetime? And one of these
days, you and I are going to stand in the presence of God,
and the books will be opened. And to some, he will say, you
are sinful. I condemn you. Depart from me,
ye that work iniquity. And the angels shall bind them
hand and foot, and cast them into the lake of fire. And the
smoke of their torment will go up forever. But oh, blessed be
the name of our God on that same day, he shall say to every one
of his elect in the presence of all creation, they are righteous. I'll be justified in that day.
And he does this justifying based on the righteousness and sacrifice
of Jesus Christ. Since God is sovereign, he has
the power and authority to justify sinners at any time and for any
reason that he chooses to do so. Who would stop him? But God
is a just God, and he has chosen to justify sinners in a way that
is completely consistent with his justice. He cannot set us free without
getting some kind of payment. for our sin, a full payment.
And this he does in Jesus Christ, and that's what Paul is arguing
in Romans 3, beginning in verse 21. But now a righteousness from
God, apart from the law, has been made known to which the
law and the prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes
through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is
no difference for all that sin and fall short of the glory of
God and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption
that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice
of atonement through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate
his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed
beforehand unpunished. God justified Abraham long before
Jesus Christ ever died for Abraham. And so when Jesus Christ came, or Jesus Christ did come in order
to to vindicate the justice of God, to demonstrate the justice
of God. Abraham's sin, though put away
by the decree of God, nonetheless must be paid for. He did this, that is, he set
forth Christ as a sacrifice of atonement to demonstrate his
justice at the present time so as to be just and the one who
justifies those who have faith in Jesus. But there's not only such thing,
the righteousness of God is not only an imputed righteousness,
it's also an imparted righteousness. In 2 Corinthians 5, verse 21,
it says, God made him to be sin for us, the one who knew no sin,
in order that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
In justification, we're merely accounted righteous, merely said
to be righteous and treated as though we're righteous. But God's
salvation goes farther than this, for it actually makes us righteous
like God. Now, Christ was made sin for
us in this sense. It was a legal matter. It was
God imputing our sin to Him and making Him to be a sin offering. But our being made the righteousness
of God in Christ goes farther than mere legal considerations. The word that's translated in
2 Corinthians 5.21 says we become the righteousness of God. It's
talking about creation. It's talking about something
new being created. Or the word could also mean something
so radically changed that it is no longer what it once was.
I'll give you an example where that word's used. The Lord's
being tempted. He's out in the desert. Forty
days without food. And then the devil comes and
tempts him. And one of his temptations was
Make this stone into bread. Now, he didn't say make the stone
look like bread. He didn't say treat the stone
as though it were bread. He said make it into bread. And
that's the same word that's used when it says we're made into
the righteousness of God. We become something we were not
beforehand. When salvation is all done. And
it's not finished yet. God's not done with his work
of salvation. That's why it says he that began
a good work in you will perfect it, will continue it till the
day of Christ. But when this work is perfected,
finished and complete, everyone whom God chose shall be exactly
like Jesus Christ in his humanity. We are not going to live forever
as we are now. Paul described the present state
of the believer in this way, O wretched man that I am. You
say, wait, I'm a blessed man. I've been blessed with being
justified and with my heart being renewed. Yes. But you also have
in you and on you, don't you? That all evil nature. It's just
not God, is it? Believers in this world are wretched. In fact, in some sense, they
are wretched in a way that even unbelievers aren't. You know,
the unbeliever, he's a mess, but he's in full agreement with
the mess that he is. There's not a conflict in him.
There's no wrestling between spirit and flesh. But the believer
is wretched not only in this, that he has a nature in him which
is sinful. He's wretched in this. He also
has one that's righteous. And there's a constant warfare
going on in him. He is never satisfied. No matter what he does. Think
about that. Let's imagine. Well, we don't
have to imagine. We just remember. Temptation
comes before us. Here we are, we're believers.
And we're tempted to something. Now, we'll either fall to temptation
or we'll resist it. But you know something? No matter
which direction you take, you're not going to be satisfied, because
if you fall to it, your spirit is going to be grieved. And if
you resist it, your flesh is going to be angry. Is that not true? Never does the believer find
satisfaction in this life. What does David say? I will be
satisfied. when I awake to see you, to see
God. Because when we see Him, says
the Scriptures, we'll be made like Him. Then, oh blessed day,
then we won't have two directions in us. We'll have one. We won't have one direction that
makes us want to love God and the other that just makes us
want to love ourselves. We won't have one direction full of joy
and another full of bitterness. We won't have peace polluted
by trouble. We will be in every respect exactly
as God created us to be. That's God's salvation. We'll
be righteous like God. What is it to be ignorant of
this righteousness? There are three things, three ways in which
this can be taken. Number one, it can mean just
be totally unaware that there is a righteousness from God.
Some are ignorant of the righteousness of God because they simply never
heard about it. They've never heard the word of truth, the
gospel of our salvation. And do you realize that as near
as I can tell, that's the great majority of this world. Oh, how
blessed you are this morning for this reason, if nothing else.
You may have many things unpleasant going on right now. You may be
sick. You may be poor or you may have bills you can't pay.
You may be troubled about kids. You may be troubled about parents.
There may be all kinds of things that are troubling you right
now. But everyone here has this blessing. At least in your mind, you know
what the righteousness of God is. If you come here, you've
heard about it. Now, what you've done with it,
I don't know. That's a heart matter. You have this blessing. You're not in the dark anymore.
Oh, what a pitiable state to be in the darkness of ignorance. But this can't be what Paul means
when he says they're ignorant of the righteousness of God.
It can't mean that he's simply saying they're unaware of it,
because if that was the only problem, then all you have to
do is make them aware of it. I mean, if all this ignorance
refers to is that they're unaware of the righteousness that comes
from God, then all that evangelism would be was us just go out there
and make them aware of it. And gospel faith would be nothing
more than simply having a knowledge in your head of the doctrine
of the righteousness of God. But you know, our congregation,
we've been preaching on the radio now here for 10, 11, 12 years.
The main theme of it being the righteousness of God in one fashion
or another. That's what we're talking about.
Now, there are some who have listened and said they've been
blessed by it. But so far as I know, so far
as I know, no one has ever been changed by it. Now some may have rejoiced in
what they heard because they already understood the righteousness
of God and were glad to hear about it. But I don't know of anybody that's
been saved, that would be a good word, saved through the radio
broadcast. simply by us making people aware
of the righteousness of God. So Paul means something more
than simply being unaware of it. These Jews weren't unaware
of it. These Jews had the scriptures, and the scriptures testify about
the righteousness of God. So they knew about it. See, this
word ignorant can carry other meanings, which I think are Far too applicable to religious
people. And of course, as I've said before,
we don't want to apply this to others. We want to apply this
to ourselves. Do these other meanings apply
to us? This word translated ignorant can mean to be forgetful or unmindful. That is simply to ignore. That's what the Jews did. How
sad to see that some who have had a godly heritage of truth
passed on to them have simply ignored it. They were well-trained
as children, brought up in the truth of God, in a home with
believing parents, but they chose to ignore what they were taught
and they pursued one of the ways that seems right to men, but
ends in everlasting death. How many people did that happen
to? You young people in this congregation, you should thank
God that your parents are bringing you to a church where at least
you can learn about the righteousness of God. But don't get the idea that that's
all that needs to be done. And don't go away from this place
and ignore the things you hear. That's so easy for us to do,
isn't it? You know, we come, we have our church service, we
say amen, that's good and all that. We walk out the door and
put it out of mind. That's what these Jews did. They
put it out of mind. It was in their Bibles. They've
learned it in their Sabbath schools or whatever they had that was
like that. You know, the rabbis taught it to them. They had things
similar to catechism, where they trained the young people in the
primary issues of their faith. And just like many who are trained
that way, they grow up. And once they've learned all
the answers, and gone through the ceremony that says they've
learned all the answers, they forget it. They've got more important
things. They've got their life to get
on with. They've got their place in this
world to establish. They've got their family to raise.
Or worse yet, like these Jews, I got my own righteousness to
build up. And they ignore the righteousness
of God. Many shall perish because they
are unaware of the righteousness of God. They simply never heard
of it. But how much worse it must be to perish, having known
about the righteousness of God, but simply ignored it. And then
to be ignorant of God's righteousness can mean to have no intimate
or personal connection to the righteousness of God. Notice here, it says in verse
two, he said, I can testify about them that they are zealous for
God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Now, that word
that's translated knowledge, there's various words that we
would translate with the English word knowledge. One of them,
I believe, is the foundation for our word idea. And we might
say they don't have any idea about the righteousness of God.
But the word here is a word that means a knowledge that goes beyond
simple intellectual understanding. Now, you can't understand in
your heart what you don't have some kind of grasp of in your
mind. But this is the kind of knowledge that Mary spoke of
when she objected to the angel saying, I can't be pregnant.
I don't know a man. Well, she didn't mean she wasn't
aware of him. Didn't mean she didn't love him. I'm sure she
loved her father. She loved Joseph, whom she's
going to marry. What'd she mean? I've never been intimate with
one. I've never had personal contact with one. We have not
been united. What it means to know, well then
what would it mean to be ignorant? It would mean not to have that
knowledge. Their zeal for God was not according
to an intimate union with the righteousness of God. To know
something in this way is to have an intimate knowledge of someone
or something by way of personal contact. It's an immediate knowledge. That is, it's not a knowledge
you learn from somebody else. It's a knowledge you gain by
your own personal contact. It's a knowledge that goes so
deep as to make that knowledge a part of the person himself. It extends to such a deep conviction
that one's entire thinking would be overturned. Even the person
himself would be utterly devastated if that knowledge were proven
untrue. That's the kind of knowledge
spoken of here, which the Jews did not possess. Let me see if
I can give you an illustration how to distinguish this knowledge
from others. I know about Abraham Lincoln. But my knowledge of him is not
personal. It's intellectual. Everything
I know about Abraham Lincoln, I learned from somebody else.
I've never met the man. So I cannot say I know Abraham
Lincoln. As far as that kind of knowledge
is concerned, I'm ignorant of Abraham Lincoln. I just know
about him. But I know my wife. I spent a lot of time with her. You husbands, you know your wives.
You wives, you know your husbands. You know your children. Why? They have personal contact. They have one-on-one connection.
It's an immediate knowledge. It may be that in your dating
days, someone said, you ought to meet so-and-so. Why, she's
la-da-da-da-da, and they tell you about him. And based on what you learn about
them from someone else, you go and meet them. But the knowledge
you gain from meeting them, isn't that different than the knowledge
you gain from somebody telling you about them? Not a lot of you, I don't think,
would ever enter into a marriage simply based on what someone
else said. Well, Bob, I know this beautiful
woman. She's nice and sweet and all
this, you know. Okay, I'll marry her. You just
don't do that. You want that knowledge of one-to-one
contact. My knowledge of my wife is immediate. It's not through anyone else.
What I know of her was not taught by anyone else. And my knowledge
of her doesn't need to be proven. Nobody needs to prove to me that
she exists. I know that she does. And nobody could convince me
that she doesn't exist. And if someone were able to convince
me of that, that she didn't exist, it would utterly devastate me. And it would put the lie to most
of my life. My life is so bound up in who
she is. If she doesn't exist, there's
nothing to my life. And my friends, he who knows
the righteousness of God, his life is so bound up with it, that if it were proven false,
there'd be nothing to him. He'd be devastated. His whole
view of things would be utterly overthrown. He who knows the righteousness
of God doesn't need it proven to him. It's been impressed on
him. He knows it. And these Jews didn't. They had never had intimate contact
with the righteousness of God. How is this ignorance revealed?
Two things. And actually, it wasn't just
a positive and negative, but the same thing. How can we know if
a person is ignorant of the righteousness of God? How can we know if we
ourselves are? Like this, verse 3. Since they
did not know the righteousness that comes from God, and sought
to establish their own. Those who know the righteousness
of God do not try to establish their own. That word establish
means to stand up. Anybody, anyone who's working to be accepted
by God or to find a place of fellowship with God by his own
works is trying to establish his own righteousness. And that proves they're ignorant
of the righteousness of God. And secondly, those that refuse
to submit to the righteousness that comes from God, that is
simply to receive that righteousness, to claim no other righteousness
but the righteousness that God gives. To claim no other righteousness
to make me acceptable to God than that righteousness which
he assigns. To seek no fellowship with him other than through that
righteousness which he creates within the soul. That's what faith is. To approach
God based on his righteousness. Well, what's the remedy for this
ignorance? If anybody is ignorant of it, how do you remedy that
ignorance? Well, it's very simply this.
Verse 4. Christ is the end of the law. That is, it's the end of us trying
to establish our own righteousness. It's the end of that scheme whereby
we render righteousness to God. Christ is the end of the law
so that there might be righteousness for the one who believes. Not
for the one who works, for the one who believes. Righteousness
that comes from God. It is the truth of Christ. To
remedy. Our ignorance or our unawareness
of the righteousness of God, we tell people about Christ,
because in the gospel of Christ, in the truth of Christ. People's
minds, at least, are instructed on the righteousness of God. It's the nature of Christ impressed
on the soul to remedy our rebellion. Men may know about the righteousness
of Christ and then think that their knowledge of the righteousness
of Christ merits then God's salvation. That's just the sign of a heart
still in rebellion against God. The righteousness of God not
only justifies us, it changes us, impresses the nature of Christ
upon us. and brings us into submission
to God. And then the Christ believed. Christ believed. That remedies
the ignorance. Just to trust Him. In fact, it is not required that
we have a full-blown theological understanding of the righteousness
of God in order to know it. We know the righteousness of
God simply by trusting Christ. We are united to it. We are joined
to it in a union that cannot be broken. Remember what the
scriptures say, what God has joined together, let no man put
asunder. We know the righteousness of
God by trusting Christ. God give us grace to do so.