God or Religion

so that we can have an idea of what is taking place. Paul started out in this letter trying to address the issue of sin in human race. He begins by talking about the fact that people in the world, no matter where they are, have some evidence of God's presence. They may not know His name, they may not know the things in the Bible, but they do know that there is someone who created the world bigger and greater than they are. And routinely, all people have said, no, I don't want to worship that God, I want to take my life in my own hands, and rejected what they know of God, made idols, all kinds of different gods to represent a God that they could control instead of surrendering to the God of creation of the universe. And Paul makes it clear that in turning away from God in rebellion and obedience to Him, we've filled our lives with sin and become enemies of God. And then he moves to talking about the Jewish community and the fact that they had the law from the very beginning and they had looked at this as a great source of pride on their part. We have the law, and if we do the works of the law, we have a special standing with God. And he begins to address the idea that even the Jewish community, it wasn't a matter of keeping the law that made them safe with God, it was indeed faith. The same thing that would be required of pagans, to have faith in God. And to make his point, he points to Abraham, the man that they would see as the father of their faith, and he points out that Abraham was not made righteous by God as a result of keeping the activities that the law required. Instead, he goes back to point to the scripture that says Abraham believed God when he made a promise to Him that he would have children even though he was old, and because he believed this promise and had faith in God, it was counted to him as righteousness. His point is that Abraham was counted righteous before the law was ever written. So that the general, the idea of pagans having faith, the same kind of faith Abraham did, draws them together in a common community. So we are saved by faith, not as a result of doing the good deeds of the law. And because we are saved by faith, then whether you are Jewish in your background or Gentile in your background, everyone can become a spiritual child of Abraham. Because we have Abraham as our spiritual father of faith. So now all have come together in this one community of trust and faith in Christ. In the last part of chapter 4, as he begins to wind that down, he is bringing this together to say, Abraham, against all hope, believed the promise that God gave him. He means by that, when he said, you are going to have children, Abraham was too old to have children, his wife was too old to have children, and there was no earthly reason for him to believe that this would come to pass, but indeed he believed it was true. And it was counted to him or credited to him as righteousness. So all of us who believe and have trust in God, claim this same basis of faith in God as the source of our relationship with him and with each other. He ends chapter 4 saying, He, Christ, was delivered over to death for our sins, and was raised to life for our justification. So the issue of all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as he says, whether Jews or Gentiles, now all come to find the same remedy. For Christ was delivered over to death for the sins of all people, Jews, Gentiles, whoever they are. And he was raised to life for our justification. This idea of justification is to pronounce us as if we were acquitted of the crimes that have brought us to separation between ourselves and God. So we've sinned and become rebels and enemies of God. Christ dies for us. And this source of our faith allows us to trust him and what he's done for us. And then we are declared as if we are acquitted of the crimes that we have committed against Christ and against God. So he starts with verse 1 of chapter 5, talking about since this has happened and we have been acquitted through our faith, then the result of that is we have reconciliation with God. He says we have peace with God. He is talking now about reconciliation. There are two ideas here. One is that in terms of the legal arrangement, we have been declared acquitted so we're no longer in danger of being enemies of God. And greater than that, there is this idea of reconciliation. You could go to court and somebody could sue you and charge you with some kind of offense. And after the court case was all done and the judge slapped the gavel down and said, Gary, I declare that you didn't do this and you're innocent. But you know, the person that brought that charge against you, it doesn't automatically mean that you're buddies with that guy again. There can still be resentment and bitterness and anger. And what's happened here, he says, is not only have we been declared acquitted or justified, but we've also been reconciled with God. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So we have left that status of having God's glory in our lives and now we are enemies of God because of our sin, our rebellion against His authority. And now that has been taken care of in the death of Christ for we are reconciled to Him. We are brought back together now and joined together with that. Now in chapter 5, Paul uses this phrase, through our Lord Jesus Christ two times, the beginning of this and the end of this. What he's trying to show is that all of this is done not because of our deeds of works out of the law, but it's done through the work of Christ. In other words, it's not your effort that succeeds in making this take place. It is done because of the deeds and acts and work of Christ. So we have been justified and peace has been made between us and God by the work of Christ. He says, through whom we've gained access by faith, again he talks about that idea of faith, through the trust in God into the status or condition of grace. So we now take our stand in the middle of God's grace, saying I'm no longer outside of the grace of God, I stand within the grace of God because of what Christ has done. Through His work, I've been reconciled with God and now stand or live in God's continual giving of Himself to the needs that I have. So that God's grace is a willingness to give to us what we have not earned and do not deserve, but need. I stand in that relationship with Him. So he comes now back to talk about this issue of hope. So we rejoice, and it's really a word translated sometimes, boast. He got on to the Jewish community for boasting about circumcision and the law. And now he tells us that there's a proper way for us to boast about what we have in God. We boast or rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Now remember, he said, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The intention of God in the beginning was for all of us to live a life filled with the glory of God. But because of our rebellion, we were cut off from this. Instead lived as enemies of God. Now because of what God has done by our faith and trust in Christ and being received into His grace, we now stand and we can rejoice in the hope, renewed hope, that we will attain what we have lost in the beginning because of our rebellion against God. Our restoration to this relationship with God has taken place through the work of Christ. We rejoice then in the hope that we have in the glory of God. Now remember he talked about Abraham having hope whenever there was not anything humanly possible he could do. And I don't have to tell you that there's not any earthly way in the world that you're going to be good enough to attain the glory of God. But our hope is not in what we can do as it was with Abraham. It wasn't in what he could do. It was what God was going to do in his life. And God is going to transform us into people who will be filled and representative and represent the glory of God. Not only so, we also rejoice in suffering. Now he said we rejoice in the fact that we have this hope. And now his second point that he brings is we rejoice in our sufferings. Now this is a difficult thing for people to grasp. He doesn't mean that we rejoice in our pain. He doesn't mean we rejoice in being sick. He means we rejoice in our life of obedience to God that results in suffering. And whenever you commit your life to a new level of obedience to God, it means that something has to change. Abraham is telling me the other day that his life was really revolutionized by someone that told him one time that a Christian had to be careful not to have too many passions. Because whenever you have too many passions, your life is divided or broken up. And if you think about that for a moment, you know, if you have a passion for your job, you have a passion for your family, you have a passion for some activity like sports or whatever else it is, and you then come to find Christ, and you have a passion for Christ, something has to go. It just does. There's not any way you can stop it. I remember when Gary made a commitment to Christ and started coming to church. And first, you know, just a little bit. Then he was here Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night visitation. And he had a guy that he was working a pulling crew. If I don't get this story right, you'll tell me it's wrong, okay? And he started, you know, coming in, cutting off early and going to church where he'd work out there with his crew for a long, long time. And he had a guy who was kind of training to step into the business. He got a part of the business, and this guy one day quit because he said, since you started going to church, you don't pay enough attention to the business anymore. Now, it's not that the guy quit, but he was the key to operating the business, and Gary had to get rid of it. His passion for being obedient to Christ cost him that business. You didn't know what you were going to do, did you, for a living? A couple of things. One thing, at least, that didn't quite work out for you. How long would you do that, selling? Three years. Three and a half years. And it didn't work out. But what happened, you see, is that God gave you something better than anything you've ever had in your life. With three and a half years, you have to say, what am I doing? What did this cost me? Every time you give your passion to God, you have to give up something. I had a businessman telling me the other day that he'd made a commitment to be more faithful and active in his work for God. He's around his business, there's a lot of conflict. Finally, he said, I've got to have a meeting with the workers. One of the people spoke up and said, you know, since you've been giving more time to the church, our business just isn't working like it should. Now, this person was just a worker there on salary. The other guy was the owner. Whenever you have a passion for obedience to God and what He asked you to do, it's just going to cost you something. And what Paul is talking about here is that whenever you start out serving God, you can rejoice in your suffering. Why? Because whenever you're doing what God tells you to do, and you're paying the price to be obedient to Him, you will have suffering. But what you're engaged in now is the transformation of your life. Remember he talked about this rejoice in the hope of the glory of God? What God is doing is He's trimming your life down to prepare you to experience or have the glory of God in your life. And some things have to be cut out, some things have to be cut off, and your life has to be focused in a way that God can guide you to what He's trying to do. So every person who makes a commitment to Christ will go through this time of suffering. If you don't, then you really need to search very carefully to see if your surrender or commitment to Him in faith is true and real. So what you're going to have is we can also rejoice in the suffering because we know it is the first step of evidence that we now belong to God. How do you know that you belong to God? Well, you're walking in the footsteps of Jesus. Remember what He said? First thing, deny yourself. Cut off some of your passions. That could be one way to say it. Take up your cross. Do what I've asked you to do. Even though people get mad at you, even though it might cost you your business, even though it might make your employees angry with you, do the things I tell you to do. And whenever you see these things taking place as a result of your commitment to Christ, your first tendency is to withdraw and say, man, this has caused me more trouble than I had before. But it is the road to the glory of God because God is now working in your life to produce in you the kind of person who can have this great glory of God in your life. So the suffering produces perseverance. What do you do? You have to keep on being faithful to God even when it's not working out. Now, it'd be great if you say, okay, I'm going to follow you, God. I'm going to do what you've asked me to do. You make the commitment. The suffering comes and the next day the wonderful life all breaks out all over. It doesn't work that way. Sometimes it's three and a half years. Sometimes it's five years or ten years. A missionary to Burma lived his whole life and had very little to show for it. We don't know the period of time in which the suffering is going to be there, but the suffering will lead to perseverance. What happened to this missionary was he persevered. He just kept on doing what he knew that God asked him to do. This man lost his wife. He married someone else, lost her, sickness, his children. So many things happened to him. Now, the suffering leads to perseverance because whenever you do something and it hurts, your tendency is to draw back from it. And if you want to make sure that it works right, you have to keep on doing that even though it hurts. And that's what it is with this Christian life, walking with God. Now, the perseverance will produce character. Now, the word character in the Bible is really a word that describes someone who's approved. Like you've worked and done a job, and your boss says you're doing a great job, you're the kind of person I want to be, I want to have work for me. So it's a process of developing the kind of person that God approves of. So you sow the suffering, you do the perseverance, and then you become the person that has God's stamp of approval on your life. And this character, this stamp of approval on your life, causes you to say, I know that even though I haven't seen the glory of God yet, it is there for me. It's there for me. I have confidence in the face of death. I have confidence in the face of trouble. I have confidence in the face of trial. Why? Because I can figure this out? No. Like Abraham. He's too old for children. His wife's too old for children. But the promise is there. It's the promise. I will make you my child, and I will bring you to be with me. All those great promises that God makes causes us to have great hope in the face of absolute defeat. It is discouraging, you know, whenever you know defeat is coming. I turned on the radio here at the ball game the other night, 52 to 24 for the Wildcats. And you just get a sinking feeling for a team that you like because you know, you know, this is a big road. Carol said, well, there's still a lot of time left, an hour left. But I couldn't listen to it. I turned it off. I didn't want to go through that. But whenever you're listening to that and it just doesn't come, it's hard to have hope because God never promised that your teams would win. But you know what he did promise? That if you're faithful to me, you will receive a crown of life. It doesn't matter how black it gets. It doesn't matter how dark it gets. We always have that hope, not because of our human circumstances, but because of the promise that God has made to us. In verse 5 then, chapter 5, he says, and this hope does not disappoint us. It's a present tense verb. He doesn't mean that this hope will not, when you die, disappoint you. That you'll live your whole life and not get anything. Then when you die, you'll get this wonderful thing. And you say, whew, finally got something that's worthwhile. He means that in this life, you will not find disappointment. Will you find heartache? Will you find suffering? Will you find pain? Yes, you will. But all along this journey with God, you find the fulfillment of God in your life. So you can be confident and hopeful because of the presence of Christ in your life, and you can be hopeful because of what's taking place in your life. That is, God has got you on the journey that marks its way to this hope of the glory of God, which He's promised to us. And why do we have that? This is the great second range of the reason for our hope. Our hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom He has given us. What he's pointing to is whenever you came to the place the first time in your life to say, I give my life to Jesus Christ. When you do that, God places His Spirit in you. You said the commitments you made this morning, you just felt better. The Holy Spirit gives us peace, a feeling of peace inside, a feeling of joy inside, a feeling of hope whenever circumstances haven't changed. I've seen people in very bleak circumstances commit their life to Christ, and inevitably they say, I just feel better. Why? Nothing's changed. You had all the problems after you got up from your knees and you did when you knelt on your knees. Every one of them is still there. I just feel better. I believe that God is with me. The presence of God by means of the Holy Spirit gives us a sense of optimism because we don't calculate it and we can't place a number on it, but His presence inside of us causes us for some reason to look at everything differently. It's as if someone is walking along beside you and you look at some big problem and you say, there's no way in the world I can solve that. And your friend puts his arm around you and said, I know you don't have any money and you owe $500, but let me tell you something, I've got all the money you need. Don't worry about this. All of a sudden, the $500 doesn't look like a big problem. The Holy Spirit walking with us causes us to see everything through God's eyes, not through our own, but through His. And that gives us hope in these circumstances. So whenever you receive Christ, the Holy Spirit comes into your life. It is a means whereby the hope of God comes to us and gives it to us. This hope does not disappoint us because God poured out His love into our hearts by means of the Holy Spirit whom He's given to us. So that conversion experience changed everything and all of a sudden now it's different. Now, He moves to a new idea that He wants to present. And see that at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Now in these next four sentences, it's not shown in your English Bible because we have a different way of writing things that are convenient for us, but in the Greek language, every one of the next four sentences, the last word in it is die or died. And I'll see if I can read it and redo that so that it comes out that way. You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, for the ungodly, Christ died. And that makes it the last word. Very rarely will anyone, for a righteous man, die. Though for a good man, someone might dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love for us in this, that while we were sinners, for us, Christ died. You see, He's making a point here over and over again by the way He writes this sentence that the key ingredient to all of this is that Jesus Christ died for us. At just the time we needed this, whenever we were still sinners, had no idea about God, before all of us were even born, Jesus Christ came in the plan, in the time of God, to die for us. His death for us, you see, gives us confidence in the hope. The Holy Spirit gives us this inner confidence, but we have confidence in another way. We look around at this circumstance in which we're in and we see that God has done something in the life of Christ that has been tremendous for us. Who in the world would die for me? Well, some people, He said, would be willing to die for a good, righteous man, a holy man. Some other person might be willing to die for a good person, to jump between his wife or the wife between a gunman and her husband to take the bullet for the child or for the spouse or for a friend. But we were enemies. We had taken up arms in rebellion against God. We were not His friends. There was no relationship of trust between us and God. We weren't even born. Jesus did something for us when there was no earthly reason except to say, I care more about you than I do my own life. Love is self-denying sacrifice for another person. And God did that for us, not because of our goodness, not because we deserved it, but because He knew our need and He loved us that much. Now, whatever difficulty or trials you face, if you sit down and talk to God, you're talking to someone who loves you more than anyone in this world has ever loved you. You're not talking to a banker who's sitting there saying, well, I wonder if I can make money off this deal. You're not looking for, you're not talking to someone who has their own self-interest at heart. You're not talking about someone who thinks they're too busy for you. You're talking to someone who has died for you. Given everything for you. So if that person loves you this much and has the power of God available to them, why would you not have hope that the promise of glory that He makes to you will not come true? Why in the middle of all the people complaining about what you're doing in your faithfulness, and when you come to Christ and try to live for Him, I promise you family and friends, people around you will do that because Satan just puts that in your way. Why would you still have hope whenever none of these things appear to be there? Because the presence of the Spirit in our life, that we experience, and then the objective thing that Christ came and died for people who were in desperate need of help. This gives us a reason why we have hope. Since we have been acquitted, verse 9, since we have been justified or acquitted by His blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through Him? Now here's his point. We can have this hope because of His death on the cross. I've already told you you've been acquitted by that. But now because Christ has been raised from the dead, how much more will we be saved from the wrath of God because He is now walking with us day by day, guiding us through this time in which we are suffering, guiding us through this time when we have to persevere without seeing any result that God has promised. He'll be with us in the time that He's giving us the stamp of approval on our lives that causes us to know He approves of us. And He'll be with us right up to the time in which this great hope for our lives comes to pass. So what He did on the cross in the past with His blood and what He does now walking with us day by day are the reason for which we do have this hope. Verse 10, For if when we were God's enemies we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, how much more having been reconciled shall we be saved through His life. If you were a deadly enemy of God and because of the death on the cross Jesus acquitted you of your sin and your crime against God. And not only that, but He took you in one hand and the Father in another and joined your hands together so that you were now Father and Son. If He can break down that barrier that existed where you were then an enemy and now you're a father and a child to God. If He did that in the beginning when you made this first commitment to Christ how much more will He be working out this sanctification, this working out to the glory of God through your life every single day. Verse 11, Not only is this so, but we rejoice in God. He ends this paragraph as he started. We rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we now have received reconciliation. He started off talking about in the very beginning all of us have been alienated from God because of the way we've lived. All have sinned and rejected and fallen short of the glory of God. Now all who place their faith in Jesus Christ have been reconciled and joined together with God. There is peace between us. No more is God our enemy and no more are we His. But instead we've been joined together as children of God in the family of God. And all the promises made to the people of God throughout the Scriptures are now ours. All the promises made to Abraham are ours. All the promises made to David are ours. All the promises made to the disciples are ours. Because we've been brought back into God's family and we're now at one with Him. So if you feel alienated from God, stop. You have to check. Am I living my life going through the suffering by persevering in keeping the promises I made to God? And do I feel alienated from God because I have stopped doing that? I'm no longer living to do the things God wants me to even though they're sacrificial and difficult and hard? If that's true, then you will feel God saying to you, I'm disappointed in you. And if He does do that and you do feel alienated from Him, He will tell you exactly what it is that's wrong. All you have to do is ask Him. Now you may find when you ask Him a few times, He'll bring something to your mind and you'll dismiss it because you don't want to accept that. And you're just saying, well, that's not it or something else. But if you keep asking, He'll keep telling you until finally one day you say, well, you're right, God. And then you say, what should I do about this? And He'll tell you to admit you're not doing what He told you. Leave that behind you. And He doesn't want you to leave something behind. He wants you to take up something in its place. You know, a lot of times people pray for the ability to quit doing something they're doing that's wrong. And what that does is leaves a hole in your life. What God wants to do is for you to take out what's not right and replace it with something that is right. That way there's no hole in your life. So you still have the fullness, but it's full of the good things that God can use. So if you find yourself feeling overwhelmed or maybe like God's not on your side, you stop and say, is there something wrong with my commitment so that I'm not willing to do the suffering? That is, make the choices that put you and your kingdom first. Or am I spreading those out and making choices for other reasons? Look at that. If that's not what happens, then you have to say to God, have I really surrendered my life to You? For what He promises is a surrendered life will bring this assurance of His presence with us and a reconciliation between us and God. It is that lack of reconciliation, the feeling like God's an enemy, that is what the Bible calls conviction. It is God saying to you, there is something wrong. It will either be to bring you into the kingdom, get you to turn your back on the life you had previously, or if you've already done that, it will get you to the place to trim your life so some things are cut out and replaced with other things that are priorities to God. God's plan for you and for me is that we would live with God, join together in an inseparable bond, walking day by day and step by step through every single thing life brings with the assurance of His presence and His power, and confident that every promise made in the Scriptures is ours, guaranteed by God. Would you bow your heads for a moment? I hope you have peace with God. It doesn't come by joining a church, or it doesn't come by being baptized, or it doesn't come by taking the Lord's Supper. It comes by your trust in Jesus Christ. There can be a lot of things that substitute and temporarily make you feel close to God, but He wants you to have that every day of your life. I want to tell you, Jesus Christ has died for you, and all that remains is for you to say, I trust my life to Jesus Christ. I will live in obedience to Him from now to the day I die. And that's what He means when He talks about the Holy Spirit comes into our hearts and He pours His love out on us at the moment we do that. Now I want to ask you, do you know people whose lives are troubled? Who just can't seem to find peace? Can you look at their lives and see that they're doing things that make them enemies of God? Because you've found this great reconciliation with the Lord, you have a responsibility to those people. I know what you need. I've found it. If some name comes to your mind, I want you to be sure you write that down and you begin to pray for that person and for the opportunity to share with them the peace you found with God. Trust Him. It may not come today or tomorrow, but it will. When you're ready and they're ready. This is why God has redeemed you. That you might be an agent of reconciliation with the people around you. The reconciliation with God. So Father, we rejoice in the hope you've given us. The hope that comes from the Holy Spirit living within us. His presence that gives us a positive outlook on life and a confidence that the future is really under your control. And then when we stop to think how much you've loved us. It's overwhelming. It's just hard to be negative about the future when we have the Spirit and the assurance of your love with us. So help us not to be that way. Help us every time the spirit of negativity comes to us that we would stop and remind ourselves that the promise you've made is a great hope that will never be erased by anything in this world. And might everyone around us look at us and see that we're people who see the world differently than them. We see it as a world of hope in the future. This is our witness to what you've done to us, in us and through us. And we pray that it will change the lives of people who know us. In Jesus' name we ask this. Amen. I have some relatives with me. Some of you didn't think I had relatives who would admit it. My cousin Phyllis and her husband Louie came all the way from California to spend a little bit of time with us this afternoon. They're going back, so I want you to get acquainted with Phyllis and Louie. We went out to see them this last year and discovered that they were followers of God. Faithful followers of God and found not only do we have a relationship through common ancestors, we have a relationship through a common Lord. And what a wonderful thing that is. So we're glad to have you all. God bless you for being here with us and thank you for coming. Thank you. I want to announce to you that Debbie Snaywise has been faithfully working to put all of the Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday night services on the internet. So you could go on our website and listen to any of the sermons or Bible studies. We haven't been able to get the Sunday night ones on there because we haven't been able to get the machine to work. I'm sure it's just on Sunday night. It has nothing to do with the skill of our operators. But we hope soon to be able to get those so they can get put on there too. That skill has been approved. Hey, good! It can't be bad. I want to tell you something. I'll give you something. Go, go, go, go, keep going. So right here? Yeah. Go ahead. What are you doing? Look for a calendar. Yeah, I'm probably going to start. Don't you have any more? More for Sacramento? Go ahead. All right. OK. You got to go to the next aisle. I need to know, for real. OK. You have to do two. You've got a hard way. I'm going to do the other side. Oh, you do that? Oh, I did the other side. You did that? You did that? You did that? I did that. I did that. You did that? I did that. You did that? I did that. I did that. I did that.