Trusting God and Justification Through Faith

The conclusion is, we were delivered over to death for our sins and raised to life for our justification. He means Christ died to give us freedom from sin. He's raised to life to be able to bring us through the process of sanctification or justification. Those two words are complementary to each other. Now, that's the basis on which he starts chapter 5. Therefore, since this is true, since we have been justified through faith, he brings it back to that point. And now he does something in the beginning of this paragraph that's a little bit different. The word justified really refers to being acquitted of the sin or crime that we've committed, the spiritual crime that he has. But here it's in past tense. He's referring now not to the process of our turning our lives over to Christ, but he's talking to the church. People who in the past at some point have said to God, I give my life to you. And at that moment of commitment and surrender of their life have been justified because of their faith that they have in Christ. Now from this single sentence, Baptists draw a very important conclusion about the nature of the church. We are distinctive from many denominations because we believe that the church should be a group of converted, baptized believers, people who have yielded their life to Christ and are committed to Christ, that every person who becomes a member of the church should be able to say, I have been justified through faith, past tense. That there is a time in my life in which I committed my life to Christ and in that moment was acquitted of my sins. So justified is used here in the past tense, not a continuing, ongoing tense. Faith also is used in a past tense. He's talking about one time event. The Greek language has a unique way of being able to express action. They have a tense of a verb called the aorist tense. The aorist tense means that the action took place at one particular point in time. And that point in time has an ongoing result or consequence. And all verbs can be expressed in this aorist tense. In this aorist tense, it means at one spot a person was justified. And at one time in their life, they expressed this through the faith that they had in Christ. Now, we take from this, Paul writing to this church, that he's saying to them, all of you in the church at Rome have been justified because at one time or other you've expressed your faith and trust in Christ. So we gather from this that the doctrine of the church that Paul is expressing is that it's a believer's church. We mean by that that every person in there is a professing believer. Now whenever you have churches that baptize children at birth, they don't call their church believer's churches because the child has never had the process or the step of baptism, especially a newborn infant. So they don't count theirselves as believer's churches. Baptists have always had this idea that the church is comprised of born-again people who express their faith, have been justified or acquitted of their sins, and have placed their faith and trust in Christ. It's also the reason that Baptist churches have discussed something we call the Age of Accountability. When is a person capable of expressing to God a surrender of their life? When is a person able consciously, because of their mental development and emotional development, able to say to God with some kind of idea of what it means, I give my life to you? We believe this is an essential part of the makeup of the church because of what Paul writes here. He's talking about all have sinned, so a person has to get to the place where they know that they've sinned, rebelled against God, not that they know that they've done something bad because you can do something bad in your parents' eyes and still not have rejected the authority of God. So every person has to be old enough to be able to think that there is a God and know what it is, know that there is someone else in the world that I can't see, and they have to get to the place where they can conceptualize this idea. And when they get to that place, then to recognize, I have rebelled against the authority of God. All of this has to take place in terms of emotional and psychological development. And then they get to the place where they realize, I have rebelled against God, am guilty in God's eyes of being an enemy of His. And then I place my trust in Christ, and I am acquitted of the sin of rebellion against Him. Now, whenever you read this passage of Scripture in commentaries, if you were to get someone who's of the Catholic faith, for example, or tradition, they would say a person has been justified through faith, but they would interpret faith to mean at the moment of baptism. So that at the moment of baptism, a person then is justified. Baptists see the Scripture as being exactly as it describes here. Faith is not representative of something else. It is an expression of the reality of trust in God. That's why we see the Scripture as so important to begin to guide our practice of what our church is to be made like. We read the Scriptures, and the Scripture itself tells us how God defines the church. Our responsibility is to make sure that we guard this protection, and make sure that the church is indeed a body of Christ filled with people who know that in their past they have been acquitted of their sin, that they knew they'd rebelled against God, understood what it meant, and then expressed their personal faith and trust in Christ, and were acquitted, and that act of faith changed their life, this trust in God. Now, this is his conclusion. Therefore, since we have, and he's talking about the paragraph we had before, since we have been justified through our trust in God, here's what happens. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Now all the way through chapter 5, Paul is going to use this idea, through our Lord Jesus Christ as the means whereby these events come to us. Now why that's important is, if you haven't placed your faith and trust in Christ, then these results cannot come through Christ. It is our trust in Him that allows Him to be able to operate in our lives to bring us those things. Excuse me just a minute, my lips are sticking together. So what we understand is that when a person has this trust in Christ, something happens inside of them. This trust in Christ allows the peace of God to come to us. Now the word peace in the Bible doesn't have the connotation it has for us. We think of peace as the absence of conflict, and it's something, somewhat of that. But the Bible has a rich heritage of the concept of peace all the way through the Old Testament. It's very powerful for the Jewish mind to be able to get past this, the word shalom. You may have heard people use this word, the word shalom. It is translated in the Old Testament in Hebrew as peace, but sometimes you will actually see the word shalom not translated. It's not translated often because it has such a wide variety of meanings. It can mean peace in the sense of the absence of war. It can mean peace in the sense of the absence of conflict. It can mean peace in the sense of the absence of fear. It can be peace in the sense of the absence of anxiety. It can be peace in the sense of a fullness of life. It can be peace in the sense of prosperity. It can be peace in the sense of fulfillment. It's a word that describes everything that ought to be right about a human's life. Now of course, what ought to be right about a human's life is you shouldn't be in conflict with someone. You shouldn't be shooting at someone. No one's shooting at you. Of course that's true. But it's much, much greater than that. But now, though it's not absent from this idea, the word peace is used in a little bit of a different way than the Hebrews would have used it at all. We have peace with God. You see, he's describing here what happens to a person who's at odds with God. If you are in rebellion against God, there is between you and God some kind of fence that results because of your resistance to Him, your rebellion to Him. We call it conviction of sin. We call it a life that is misdirected. And you have to have this experience of being at war with God before you can turn to Him in salvation. One of the things I try to do when I talk to small children about wanting to make a profession of faith because they oftentimes see what adults do and they want to do what adults do, whether it's shoot a gun, ride a bicycle, ride a horse, or whatever else it is. And going forward in the church and being baptized is one of the things they see adults do. And eating the Lord's Supper is one of the things they want to see us do like they see adults do. So they oftentimes have these desires to do what adults do without understanding all the things that it means. In other words, you can have somebody come home, you know, that's four or five years old and say, Mommy, Mary and I have decided to get married. And usually to a five-year-old you laugh at that. But when a five-year-old comes in and says, I want to get saved, we're inclined to just accept that idea without probing to see what's really going on in their mind. So I ask them whenever the children come to me and they're talking about wanting to commit their life to Christ, to be baptized, do you think that Jesus is mad at you? Most of the time they look at me with surprise and say, well, no, he's not mad at me. See they're not at war with God. So there's nothing that needs to be removed between them and God. There's not rebellion. So to take a cure for rebellion when there is none puts a child in a very difficult state. He's affirmed that he's fully believing in God and he's saved and he's going to heaven. And then as comes from Paul's writings, what happens to him is what happens to every human being who comes into the world. One day he does rebel against God and you go to him and say, now you need to profess Jesus Christ as your Savior. And they say, but I did that. Sometimes when I go speak at Southern Baptist churches about evangelism or teach courses that reflect on this, I'll sometimes ask a congregation, how many of you here have been baptized twice? And oftentimes almost half the crowd, it gets as much as that, half of the crowd will hold their hand up and I'll say, now if you were baptized as a child, you stay with your hand up. If you were baptized twice as adults, you could take your hand down. Very few do. What happens to them, you see, is they get in this situation where they want to love Jesus and they want to do what they can, but they don't have this conflict or war between them and God. And as small children, they want to express their love for God. Why can't I be baptized? I love God as much as you do. They do. They never sinned against him. They love him as much as we do. Baptism is not just for people who love God, it's for people whose lives have been changed from death to life, you see. And so you baptize a child and then they come to that place where their life is in rebellion against God and they don't quite know what to do. They've been told I was saved and you're saved forever and they don't know quite what to do. And then as adults, they get to looking at their life and hearing the preacher preach when they're in church and they realize, I haven't really turned all of my life over to God. I went through the teenage years and lived by my human flesh and now here I am as an adult with a family and children and I've never really given my life to Christ. So they come and make another profession of faith and are baptized again, but really only baptized for the first time. And that's not bad, not terrible, tragic. What's really tragic is when someone gets to that place and their life is a mess and then you say to them, you need to commit your life to Christ and they say, oh, I did that when I was seven years old. And they're not ready to accept the remedy for the circumstance in which they find themselves. It's like in a vaccination or an inoculation. They've gotten a little bit of religion and enough that they're immune to the solution that faces them. See, Baptist belief from Paul's writing that there is a time in your life in which you're at conflict with God, all of sin and fallen short of the glory of God. There's none righteous, no, not one. And we have to allow our children to get to the place where they're at war with God. And when they're at war with God, then we come to them with the remedy because God in his great mercy will touch the hearts and minds of children raised in an atmosphere of the church. And those of us raised in that atmosphere of the church knows what it means to have God say, I want your life. And to give his life or give our lives to him completely and totally. Therefore, since we have had this experience, we've been acquitted of our sin against God because at that time we trusted in God. We now have peace with God. It means we're reconciled with God. We who have been alienated now with him have been brought together so that there is no longer a wall of separation between us. No longer a state of conflict between us and God. It has all the implications of what the Bible in the Old Testament calls Shalom. It is the promise of a fullness of life. The promise of everything that God has to give. But the point here is that you and God are now one together. He is with you and you are with him. And we have this peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. It is by means of his life and his death on the cross for our sins and his being raised to life to lead us down the road to justification or to build in us Christian character, what is sometimes called sanctification. Through Christ, we have gained access by faith to this grace in which we now stand. It is through Christ, because of the work of Christ, that we now have gained access by faith, committing our lives to Christ, trusting in Christ, to this state or condition or sphere of grace. Grace means simply that God is treating us better than we deserve to be treated. He is overlooking our sin and treating us as if we had never done it. We live in a condition or state. That is what Paul is driving at. Now once you have confessed your sin, yielded your life to Christ in trust and faith, then you are made forgiven, you are reconciled with God, and you live in this condition of God's care. It's the state of grace, sort of like a condition or a world or an atmosphere in which God is in control and His grace is always given to you, a condition in which God's goodness is constantly coming to you. Now can you see how if you understood this, you would always be able to look at your life in a positive and hopeful way. I'm not living out here in the world subject to all these things that overwhelm me. I am living in this condition or state of God's blessing. If I could shape my mind to think this way, there would be nothing that I would face that would overwhelm me because I would believe that I'm in this place in which God has given me to stand around me to protect me, to stand around me to provide for me, to stand around me to guide me. It is the condition of grace that comes from the covenant. I know God is going to help me make the right choices. I know He's going to provide for me. I know He's going to protect me. I know that He'll guide my life so that it's useful and valuable. My life is going to be successful. There is no room for pessimism in this condition. All of it comes, you see, as a result of the work of Christ in our life. And because of that, we stand in this condition in which we're in a perpetual, constant state of God's goodness to us. Do we go through bad times? Of course we do. But remember, we're in this constant state of grace. It is in this grace that we stand, this translation says. It could be translated, it is in this state that we take our stand. That kind of implies that you have something to do with it. You know, you could be in a state of wonderful blessings and not know it. I read a story years ago, and I don't know if it's really true or not, but this story about a lady who had a son who had been very successful. He had moved away. It was a long way away. In those days, whenever there wasn't very much travel or way to get back, every week he would send his mother a money order. And she didn't really know what it was. But when she got this money order with her son's name on it, she was very proud of it. And she tape-pasted it on the wall. And she had a lot of financial problems because she didn't have any money. People around her in the neighborhood gave her food and tried to help her the best they could. And finally, someone wrote her son and said, your mother's just in poverty. Why don't you do something about it? So he immediately went to see her. And when he walked into her living room, she had her whole wall pasted with money orders that he'd sent to her. You could live in a state of constant wealth and be in poverty if you didn't know what you had. And a believer who's given themselves to God lives in a state of grace, this covenant relationship with God in which he's made wonderful promises to us. I will guide your choices. Trust me in this. I will provide what you need. Trust me in this. I will protect you from the things that will crush you and destroy you. Trust me in this. Because you live in an area in which I have surrounded you, an area in which I'm going to pour out my goodness into your life. So we take our stand there. What does it mean by that? Well, whenever something comes and I'm overwhelmed with all these choices I have to make and it looks like I can make choices and my life would be ruined, I have a choice to make in which I can take my stand in fear and look at all the possibilities that might go wrong or I can take my stand and say, I know God's going to guide me in this process. I can do the same thing about provisions in my life or protection in my life. I can take my stand on the fact that God has made me a promise. A promise that these things will indeed come to pass. And I can be protected. Then we rejoice, and the word rejoice used here can be used, also translated boast. If you remember back in chapter 3, Paul was arguing with the Jews who boasted because they were Jews. He now uses this same word to say, you can't boast because you're Jews and you've been circumcised and you had the law, but my friend you can boast because of what you have in Christ. You can rejoice or you can boast in the hope of the glory of God. What is our hope? It is God is great. God is great. That's what the Islamists call out. God is great. That's our great hope. In the middle of all these circumstances, living in this condition of grace, it's not that we have no trouble or problems. We're surrounded by them, but our hope is not in our ability or the absence of the problem, but the hope is that our God is great. He knows what we should do. He has the provision to give to us. He has the power to protect us, and so we rejoice in this. He knew that that wasn't all there was to it. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings. How can you rejoice in suffering? You can only rejoice in suffering because you live in a state of grace in which God has made you promise. You promise, okay, I'm in a condition where I have choices and none of them look like they're good choices. What am I going to do? Well, I can give in to fear. I can give in to the idea that my life is going to be crushed, or I can live in the promise that God said, I will give you the right choices, and if you keep making them, you're going to get through this, and everything's going to work like I want it to work. Trust me in this, you see. I can rejoice in my suffering because it's an opportunity for me to experience the grace of God that's going to come to me. If I'm sure that God is going to guide me, I'm sure He's going to protect me, I'm certain He's going to provide for me, then when suffering comes, I realize there is a victory over this thing that's come into my life. We can also rejoice, not only in the hope of the glory of God, but we can also hope even in the face of suffering because we know that suffering produces perseverance. When you have faith in God and you continue to live in obedience to Him, you develop the quality of perseverance in your life, and perseverance produces character, and character produces hope, and the hope that it produces will never disappoint us. Now, the word that's used here for disappoint is, in the Greek language, is the present tense, and the present tense, imperfect in the Greek, implies a repeated, ongoing set of events, as contrary to the one that means just one particular circumstance. It's a period of constantly repeating events. So here we have a hope that is continually providing us with the courage and the right choices and the circumstances so that we are never ultimately disappointed in what takes place. Why? Because God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Now, what Paul is talking about is that God has poured into us His very nature and character, His love. This love that God has placed in us, this Holy Spirit that God has placed in us, brings us the presence of God's love. It's a spirit inside of us that lets us know that God is there, that God is guiding us, that God is caring for us. And this presence of God is an ongoing event in our lives. Now Paul, and this hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out His love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us. Now we see this, Baptists see this, as the Holy Spirit that comes at the point where we have been justified by our trust in Christ. We have announced to Him, we know we've rebelled against Him, we've announced to Him that we're ready to trust Him with our lives, and in that moment the Holy Spirit comes to us. Some churches believe that the Holy Spirit is given at baptism, even with babies or small children. We believe that it's given as a result of this yielding of your life to Christ and being justified by the act of faith that comes in our life. So all this comes about, this presence of God, this state of grace, this confidence in the middle of difficulty and trial, because the Holy Spirit is in our life and He pours out His love for us. His love that does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Love is self-denying, sacrificial service to another person. When the Holy Spirit comes into our life, He acts as this self-denying, sacrificial servant to us, to give us all of the things that God promised in the covenant. So whether our lives are good and we live in this state of grace, not aware of any difficulty at all, we have hope that life is going to get better. When trial and difficulty comes because we know the promise that God's made to us, we cannot be discouraged or overwhelmed because we know that God, in His mercy, has placed His Holy Spirit within us and the covenant will come to work with us and this will all work to God's good and ours. So it is a matter of claiming the presence of the Spirit and depending on the Spirit that gives us hope in the middle of all circumstances, whether they're good or bad. All of this has been done through Jesus Christ, who died on the cross to remove our sins, and through Jesus Christ, who was raised to life to give us the present justification or righteousness day by day that allows us to experience this grace and allows us to find our way through the trials and difficulties that come. So we rejoice in the good times and we rejoice in the terrible times for one reason. Our God has made us a promise. He has redeemed us and He is in the process of justifying us or making us holy or making us righteous day by day by day. We have a wonderful future. It doesn't matter what the present looks like. We have a wonderful future, guaranteed by the blood of Christ and the resurrection of Jesus our Lord. Let's pray. We go through this world and there are a lot of scary and frightening things and they're not imaginary, they're real. We face trial. We face anger. We face resentment and bitterness. We face suffering. We face difficulty, just like everyone else in the world faces. But you have made us something different. You've allowed us, because of our trust in you, to live in this state of grace so that we can rejoice in your presence in our lives. You've allowed us to have this state of grace even in the middle of the most difficult trials that come. Knowing that these trials will never be bigger than the power you have to overcome them, teach us to be able to look past these things into your face, the face of grace and mercy and love, that we might find hope in even the most difficult and humanly impossible circumstances. It is through Jesus that we claim your promise. Amen. Thank you.