Justified Freely by Grace

Scripture Reading

Will you please turn in your Bibles with me to the book of Romans, Romans chapter 3. And I apologize for changes in the order of worship. As I said last time, I decided with just the richness of the beauty of the gospel that's in these passages not to fly by it. And so we're spending some time savoring the beauty of it. So we're not going to be looking at Romans 3, 27 through 31. We're going to park and stay in verses 21 through 26. Specifically this morning, verses 23 and 24. So if you're using your New King James Pew Bibles, you'll find that on page 1001. I will now read Romans chapter 3 beginning at verse 19 through verse 26.

Prayer for Illumination

Hear now God's perfect word. Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in his sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets. Even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe, for there is no difference. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier, of the one who has faith in Jesus. One portion of reading God's Word there. Let's pray together.

Sermon

Father, You have given us Your Word, and it is perfect and it is true, objectively, outside of us, because it comes from You, the God of truth. And so we pray that as we come to Your Word this morning, Your Holy Spirit might make us alive. Lord, that we might read and understand. And that we might rejoice. God, please let Your Word be like golden drops of honey from heaven. Father, please do something so foundational in our hearts that we might truly rejoice in You, that we might want to love You and enjoy You forever.

We pray this reliance upon Your grace, needing Your Holy Spirit, in the name of Jesus, Amen. I have been excited, excited, excited, excited to finally get to this point in the book of Romans. I even told Olivia when we were wrapping up the middle half of Romans chapter 3 that I couldn't wait to finally get to the explicit declarations of the good news of Jesus in this second half of Romans chapter 3.

And last week, I'm not going to rehash everything, right, but God freely justifies, He declares us righteous in Jesus. And so today's message, there's really just two points that build on that. The first is that, and this is a hard one from verse 23, you're not righteous. The second point coming from verse 24 is that you are declared righteous if you are in Christ Jesus. So you are not righteous in and of yourself, but you have been declared righteous if you are in Jesus.

And I hope that by the time you walk out of the doors today, your heart will be filled with such gratitude and awe at the love of God who has cared for you so much. I hope that you'll be able to receive God's good news. of a declarative righteousness that the Lord God Himself would draw unbelievers to Jesus. That you who are believers, that you would rest not in your own works, but I hope you'll rest in Jesus' righteousness. And I hope each one of us will walk away with a deeper love for God.

First Point

So first, the whole point of the first half of the book of Romans, chapter 3, is you aren't righteous. You're not righteous. In verse 23, look at it with me. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Is this really a universal declaration of condemnation of all humanity? Yeah, it is. Just like the good news that Paul is not ashamed of, for it is the good news of God to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. That is God's powerful good news. It's for everyone, because everyone is a sinner. This is the universal declaration.

I don't want to beat you over the head or beat a dead horse here, because we've gone through that before. If you're curious if that truth still stands, look at Romans chapter 3 verses 9 through 18. I'll let you do that on your own and see if you can find a clause that says, but not me. You won't. All people, whether they're Jewish or Gentile without exception, are sinners. For all have sinned. That's our status. That's our state. We've sinned.

And as we look through the scriptures, the phrase I'm about to say is from the Westminster standards, it's not in the scriptures, right? But from the scriptures we see that we sin in the ways we think, we sin in the things we do, and we sin in the things we say.

There are good things that we should say to people imparting grace and we don't. There are things we ought not to say, tearing down people's reputation and gossiping and slandering, yet we do. There are good things we should do with our hands, giving to the poor and helping people and yet we don't. And there are blatant things that God has said you ought not to do these things. We shouldn't steal and yet we steal. There are things we do or we think. We ought to think the best of others, we ought to cherish the people we have made vows to love and yet we don't.

Instead we often harbor suspicion and bitterness and hatred. We sin in the way we think. So this is what Paul has been getting through is the depth and the pervasiveness of sin all throughout humanity. For all have sinned. But it's not just something we have done in the past. But notice the second part in verse 23. Right, so first is a universal condemnation for all have sinned.

But notice he does something else. And fall short. Now I don't know what all your translations say. Maybe some of them change it to and have fallen short. I hope your translation doesn't do that because Paul switches something here. It's not just that we have sinned and so we have baggage in the past we've got to deal with. If we were to translate it more literally it would be and are falling short. Are falling short of what? Of what? What's the standard by which we're falling short of? It's God's holiness. It's God's righteousness. He's the standard of perfection. He's the standard of righteousness. He is the one who is good and just and true and holy. God is. And you were made and I was made to be in His image. And yet, the bar is up here. And I don't care if you're a D student or an A student, we're not measuring up. I think there's a part of us that wants to think that we're able to measure up a little bit.

But it's kind of like one of my favorite sports to watch, just because it's a sport. boggles my mind that people do this. Have you ever seen this sport where people run as fast as they can with a sharp pointy stick that's three times as long as them. They run as fast as they can, they jab it into the ground and they see how high off the ground it could fling them in the air. And then they let go of the stick and they measure how high they got. That is the most adrenaline type sport I would love to try but I'm too much of a chicken.

Pole vaulting is one of these amazing things. And imagine you're a pole vaulter and you think, yeah, I'm pretty good. I'm pretty good. I can get six feet in the air. I can get eight feet in the air. I can get 12 feet in the air. But the issue is the world record is 1,000 feet in the air. And no matter how long our stick is or how high we try to get up there, we don't. get high enough and we fall. If you're like me, sometimes it's not gracefully on the mat, it's like right on the floor. We're falling short.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God right manifest outward projection of God's holiness, His glory of God, that we see, that we know that He is perfect, and He is true, and He is good, and He is just, and yet when we see justice and we don't live up to justice, when we see truth even in our society and we don't live up to truth, when we see what love looks like, and God is love, and yet we find ourselves not loving, we know we're no match for His glory. And so there's a universal condemnation or a declaration of unrighteousness. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

But this is a good news sermon. All right, that's just again summarizing the first half of Romans chapter 3, verse 24 keeps going on. If you ever memorize as Awanas or Bible school or Sunday school class or whatever, Romans 3, 23, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but you didn't memorize verse 24, you didn't finish the sentence. Notice it's a comma, not a period. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, comma, means the sentence continues, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

No, you're not righteous. But there is a way for you to be righteous, and it's in and through Jesus. Because God is gracious. Do you see verse 24 when it says being justified? That word is a legal declaration of your righteousness. It's not saying that you yourself are righteous. It's saying that even though you're under the guilty verdict. That's what we talked about in chapters 1, 2, and 3, right? God judges even the secret things of the heart. We got issues. That's why Romans 3 23 has to be there.

We're sinners. You're justified not because of what you do, because of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done. So why do you have any right as a person to think you can step into the glorious throne room of God Where the angels cry out, holy, holy, holy, and they cover their eyes because He is too pure for them to see. And cover their feet because they know that the ground that they are standing on, because God is there, is holy ground. And what makes us think that we're able to just waltz in there, sinners and all, and say, yeah, you gotta accept me.

The kids and I were just watching a movie last night where there was pirates. I don't like pirates. As a guy who was in the Navy, I detest pirates and pirate movies. But one scene was actually a pretty good scene where there's a pirate and he's sleeping with pigs. And I thought, that's a good place for pirates to sleep. But he wakes up and he gets water thrown on him and one of the guys throws a third pail of water and he says, I'm already awake. And he said, yeah, it's because you stink.

Sometimes we sleep with the pigs and we just act like we can waltz into God's presence and be like, yeah, accept me as I am. But he doesn't. He cleanses us of our filth. And even though he knows that we by ourselves like to mire in the mud, he declares us righteous and he loves us anyways. being justified, being declared righteous. But then notice there's three qualifiers on this justification, or being justified. How are we declared righteous first? God freely, God freely justifies you. You don't have to earn it. The word here behind it, we lose it a little bit in the English, but the word is tied explicitly to the idea of a gift.

You don't get a Christmas gift because you were good enough. Well, I don't know, maybe you got a lump of coal because you were really bad that year. But on your birthday, your parents don't give you a birthday present when you were a kid, or if you are a kid, because they think, oh, you're just the perfect little angel, and you never sin, and you never cause us heartaches, and you're just always wonderful. Why do your parents give you birthday presents? Freely, because they love you. Out of the overflow of their heart, giving you good gifts.

Jesus says that explicitly. You, even though you're wicked, you know how to give good gifts to your children. How much more your heavenly Father? God gives you freely. He gives you this righteousness as a gift without payment by you. But secondly, notice the second qualifier of this justifying. being justified freely by His grace. The idea there of His grace. God justifying you as a free gift by His unearned favor. Charity is how it is in the Greek. And if you've ever met anybody named Charis, their name means grace. And grace just means unearned favor.

I was talking to some kids recently who are kind of fighting against one another, butting heads, and just stopped for a second. I was like, when's one of you going to bless instead of curse? When is one of you, even though the other person has sinned, even though the other person's annoying you, even the other person's getting underneath your fingernails, right? When's the other person, when are you just going to love them? Obviously they haven't earned the peace. Obviously they haven't earned the affection. Obviously they haven't earned the love. But when are you just going to love them?

See, that's what God did with us. We were dead in our trespasses and our sins in which we once walked. And God saved us by His grace. God reached down from heaven and rescued our dead souls out of the bondage of sin and death and breathed life into us. It was not by works which you were saved, but as the gift of God and not the result of works.

Why? Because then we would boast about it. You were never good enough to earn your father's smile. God chose to smile upon you in Christ Jesus. That is the whole beauty of the redemption that we find in the good news of the gospel is that there is a God in heaven. There is a God in heaven that if you are one of those who heard verse 22, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, if that was you, if you were one of those who believed, God's not like an executioner waiting in heaven to put your head in a noose. He's your Heavenly Father smiling down upon you with favor and love. And having proved that love through the redemption of Jesus.

And that's the third qualifier, verse 24. Being justified, right? That's what we're talking about, being declared righteous. How did God declare us righteous? He declared us righteous freely. How else did He declare us righteous? By His grace. But third, how did He justify or declare us righteous? Through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

There's two backgrounds here you need to understand for this section. The first background is what Elder Turner read up here just a few minutes ago in Exodus chapter 12. God would again and again talk to the Old Testament people and he said, when I redeemed you out of Egypt by my righteous right hand. The whole idea is that the people of Israel were in Egypt, they were in slavery for over 400 years. And God himself paid the price to redeem them and bring them to a place of freedom. No one in all the mixed multitude of Israel could say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we were smart enough to get out of Egypt. Oh, yeah, yeah, remember all those plagues? We had a part to play in those. Remember how all those things happened when Pharaoh's son and all the firstborn and all those people died? No, they didn't have anything to say about that. Other than God rescued us. God redeemed us. We were in slavery without hope. And he reached down out of heaven and did everything necessary that we could live with him.

And so all the Jewish people in the community in Rome, they would have understood this idea. Because every year they celebrated the Passover. That was the meal, the ceremony that was read for us in Exodus chapter 12. It was such a pivotal, such a pointed part. We celebrate New Year's Day. They celebrate the month of Elul. They celebrate the first month of the year. And every year they start off their month, they start off their year remembering God redeemed us. God brought us back out of Egypt. But for all the Greek people in the congregation, they may understand some of that, they may not. But they did understand this idea of redemption.

Did you know that at the time when Paul was writing this letter, that up to 70%, 70%, 7 out of 10 people in the congregation either were slaves or had been slaves. And the whole idea of had-been slaves is that in the Roman world, there was a slave market, and the slave market was brutal.

Just brutal. Dehumanizing. Imagine your entire worth being boiled down to how much silver or gold you were worth. Put on display, sometimes being treated like an animal at the 4-H show. looking at your teeth, looking at your muscles, trying to figure out how much are you really worth, trying to figure out your temperament, just humiliating.

But unlike chattel slavery in the US, where people, once they were a slave, they're a slave forever, you could buy your freedom. Either somebody else could buy your freedom for you, or you could earn enough to buy your own freedom. And the picture here is that God himself bought our freedom.

We were slaves to sin, slaves to death, for the wages of sin is death. But God did the amazing thing. God sent his own son, the second person of the triune Godhead, And even though the Son had all the rights and privileges of heaven, all the regalia, all the crown jewels of heaven that belonged to Him, and all the glory due to His name, He made Himself of nothing. And when Jesus came, Jesus went to the slave market. He said, I'm going to pay for your freedom. but you're more valuable than silver or gold. I'm gonna pay for your price of freedom with my own blood.

Do you see the love of God for you? You didn't clean yourself up and then God loved you and redeemed you. God saw you in all your sinfulness and out of his free gifts and out of his loving kindness, he looked upon you and his face smiled. The rest of the world would have turned their back on us and said, they're not the best of the lot. And yet our God is so loving and gracious, so kind and merciful that he sent his own son to redeem you. to purchase you to be His own.

You don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to act like you've got it all together. You don't need to hide behind, well I just need to be good enough. If I'm just good enough Christian. If people just look on my outside reputation, but they don't see what's going on in my heart. No, the beautiful blessing of the Gospel is that you are seen.

And God still loves you. God loves you. He's not going to let you stay wallowing in the mud. But He knows where you've come from. He knows what we love to go do. But He looks at us and says, that one's mine. And I'll spare no cost. I pray, I pray that you hear this as good news, that you hear of this gracious God who has literally moved heaven and earth I mean just messed up theological categories that we're still trying to wrestle with today.

Did the absolutely insane thing of even sending his own son in the flesh to die on the cross that you might live forever with him. And I hope your heart overwhelmed with joy. And that you might taste and see that the Lord is good. And that as you rest in Him, you might find peace. A peace that surpasses all understanding. Because your hope and your peace is found in Jesus. That your confidence is not in your own goodness, but in God's grace to you. And that as you rest in Him, as you receive Him, that then you're able to see the things of your life and be honest when you're confronted with sin.

Closing Prayer

I said, that's me. I know God still loves me. So I get to repent because he still loves me. I get to enjoy him. Because my justification, my righteousness is not because I'm good enough. I get to learn to be like Jesus because I'm in Jesus. So I hope you walk out of those doors this morning. And I hope you have received and continue to rest in Jesus. And that your heart is warmed and filled with joy and peace and comfort that comes only by knowing that the Holy Spirit has made you rest in Jesus. Let's pray.

God, thank you for giving me the privilege of not being ashamed to preach your good news. And thank you that it is good, because you are good. Father, we pray that your Holy Spirit might knit our hearts more and more to Jesus, because you have made us alive in him. Thank you for the love that you have shown us in your son. And Father, we pray that we might love You always because You have first loved us. Thank You that You have declared us righteous and purchased us, redeemed us. You are good. Thank You, God, in Jesus' name, Amen.