Please open your Bibles to the book of Romans. The book of Romans chapter five. I will be reading the first five verses and in the sermon actually we will only get through verse one. And so I think we have about three weeks to get through this amazing passage of God's gospel. This is God's Word, it is His holy, perfect, infallible Word. It is His Word that He has given to us as a gift, that we might know Him, that we might love Him, and that we might experience His love. Hear God's Word. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put to shame. because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Let us pray. Our Father, Lord, as we consider the heart of the gospel, Lord, may we see Jesus, and Lord, may you draw us close to you. Apply your salvation to our hearts. Redeem us, increase our faith, cause us to grow as only you can. In Jesus' name, amen. Justification. It is the article of faith on which the church stands or falls. And this was first said by Martin Luther. And if you know something of the torment that Martin Luther felt over his sins, then you understand how Luther felt when he finally grasped the gospel. Luther was reading through Romans 1, verses 16 and 17. And he read, for I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God to salvation, to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Luther was a man greatly troubled by sin. Now he wasn't a great sinner, perhaps by a lot of standards, but he saw his sin very clearly. And he knew that sin was against God. And so Luther said that when he read this passage and he understood that the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel was not the righteousness which he had to achieve on his own, but it was the righteousness of God by which God saves sinners who cannot achieve righteousness in themselves. And he said, the revelation was so startling. He said he was born again. He was set free from the law of sin and death. And he felt that he was brought in to the kingdom of God's marvelous light. And so today, I want to consider the gospel in Romans 5.1. And it is my prayer that we might experience together, as Luther did, the glorious power of the gospel to set us free from the law of sin and death and to bring us in to God's kingdom of his marvelous light. And we will consider this passage in three sections, the need for justification, What is justification and the results of justification? So firstly, we consider our need for justification. Now think with me for a minute. What does God hate? Well, God hates idolatry and every false god. Exodus chapter 20 verse 3 in the Ten Commandments. God says, you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God. visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me. You see, God made man, male and female, to worship him alone. He designed us to find all our joy, all our satisfaction in him alone. He designed us that the very meaning of life might be in God alone. And idolatry is always a substitute for God. You know, addiction, which is rampant today, is a modern day idolatry. The addict finds relief from the stress and sorrow of life and intoxication rather than in the love of God. It is a substitute. And the problem with idolatry, the problem with every substitute for God, is that God designed human beings to become like what they worship. When we worship the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we become more and more like the image of God. And it is a beautiful thing. And on the other hand, when we worship idols, we become like the idols that we worship. You know, it's interesting, Israel, when they went into the land of Canaan, they adopted the gods, the idols of the people of the land of Canaan. And those were very cruel gods, demanding even child sacrifice. And so as the people of Israel worshipped these false gods, they became a cruel people, even offering their own children in sacrifice. 2 Kings 21, verse 12. Says Manasseh, king of Judah, has done more evil than all the Amorites did who were before him, and has made Judah also to sin with his idols. He sinned with his idols. He caused the people to sin with idols. Every human being who has ever lived always worships something. Today, people worship the idols of freedom, identity, reason, prosperity. And every one of those idols is heartless, impersonal. And the end of that worship is evil, isolation, and death. And we see it all around. We see it in the chaos and the sin and the trouble of the world. And so here's the point. God hates idolatry because it steals his glory. which God says he will not share with another. And in this way, idolatry destroys the human soul. And God would spare you from that ultimate destruction. We were made to worship God and to worship God alone. Anything else leads a man or woman into ultimate evil, to destruction and death. You see, God's glory and your good are interlinked. God's glory is your good. Idolatry is war with God. And we know that many people in the world today are at war with God. God also hates injustice. Psalm 89, 14. says of God, righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne. Oh God, steadfast love and faithfulness go before you. God rules by righteousness and justice. All that he does is good and right and true. The sinful human beings can be very unjust. Amos 2, six through seven, speaking of the people of Israel. Thus says the Lord, for three transgressions of Israel and for four, I will not revoke the punishment. Because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals. Those who trample the head of the poor into the dust and turn aside the way of the afflicted. You see, the people were afflicting the poor. They trampled them underfoot, and yet God had commanded them to care for the poor among them. Someone suffered a tragedy, well, too bad. Pay up or be sold into slavery. See, this is the kind of injustice. Well, that comes from a sinful heart. It's the kind of injustice for which God says over and over again, Israel was exiled into judgment. It's the kind of injustice we see around us today. You know, amazingly, even after Israel was exiled, precisely this kind of injustice, when they returned after 70 years, injustice continued. the poor had to bring a complaint to Nehemiah. In chapter five, verse five, they say, yet we are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but it is not in our power to help it, for other men have our fields and our vineyards. Injustice. Nehemiah 13.10, Nehemiah also found out that the portion for the Levites had not been given to them. God appointed the Levites to give up owning land so that they could lead the people in worship, so that they could teach God's word. And God commanded the people to care for him. To fail in this duty was injustice. And the New Testament says the same. The end of letting sin go in life is described in Romans 1 verse 29. Says they were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil. Disobedient to parents, faithless, heartless, ruthless, And for this cause, the justice of God, the judgment of God rests on such as do these things. God also hates divorce, and of course he would. To divorce is to defraud someone who has pledged their love to you and whom you have pledged your faithfulness to. God hates hypocrisy and all forms of lying and deceit when the people brought the very worst from their flocks, but claimed that they brought the very best. God said he hates such dishonest worship. He hates deceit, for it is the means by which men defraud both God and neighbor. Satan is called the father of lies, a murderer from the beginning. Proverbs 6.16, there are six things that the Lord hates. seven that are an abomination to him, haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers. And we could go on with what God hates, but here's the point. God's law and God's rule is always good and right and true. God's goodness is a blessing. You know, it's not just, well, here's the law, you violated it, and so you're out of here. No, see, God's law reflects God's character. And God's character is good and holy and perfect. And God created his children that he might love them, that he, they might love him. And so he created them to enjoy his goodness. And ultimately, that we might be in the very presence of God's goodness for all eternity. You see, sin doesn't just violate an arbitrary law. Sin violates God's very character of goodness. And so sin, all sin, is war with God. to violate God's law is to declare conflict, war with God himself. It is against all that God desires for his children. And this is not an arbitrary thing. It is the only standard for what is good and beautiful in the universe. And so, brothers and sisters, every one of our sins is war with God. And God cannot be just and good and not judge sin. He can't simply turn aside and say, sin doesn't matter and let sin reign among his people and on the earth and for all eternity. Romans 6.29 says, the wages of sin is death. and that is to truly be cast from God's presence and from all that is good. You know, I'm not sure that we always see clearly the evil of sin. After Adam and Eve sinned, one son murdered the other. Zero to 60 evil in one generation. This is the fruit of human sin. You know, I once read a story about a woman who was fed up with the violence in the city. And so she moved to the woods. I'm sorry, I can't remember her name. Only to find violence everywhere in nature. Insects eating insects. Animals eating animals. And, well, it was despair. You see, God says all of creation was subjected to futility because of our sin. There is no escape. You know, the problem in our day, as a culture, we think that we are enlightened beyond sin. And I know there is great sin, horrendous sin, But without God, it never seems to be called sin. Psychiatrist Carl Menninger once wrote, the very word sin, once it was a strong word, an ominous word, a serious word, but it has almost disappeared. the word along with the very notion. C.S. Lewis once said, the barrier I have met over and over again is the total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin. Jerry Bridges wrote a book called Respectable Sins. He was trying to break down the barrier that modern people have raised against sin. He was trying to break down that barrier that people say, well, those are just little sins. They don't really matter. He was trying to show that all sin is the root of evil. He writes this, sin is a spiritual and moral malignancy. Left unchecked, it can spread throughout our entire inner being and contaminate every area of our lives. Even worse, it will often metastasize from us into the lives of other believers around us. He writes, if I gossip, I both tear down another person and corrupt the mind of my listener. In other words, sin is not content to stay home. It spreads like cancer. And so Jerry Bridges sought to show that anger, lust, anxiety, unthankfulness, envy, judgmentalism, selfishness, gossip, pride, a lack of self-control, you know, they're not just part of the human condition. They are a great evil that are at war with God. They are at war with God's very goodness expressed in his law. And scripture says that all these things lead to enmity, strife, rivalries, dissensions, divisions. They are a blight on God's good, loving, and just rule. You know, if I look back to the Jesus movement of the 60s and 70s, it was very, prevailing attitude was, sins that you committed before you become a Christian, okay, they're all gone. But sins you commit after you become a Christian, those are on you. Don't think you can escape. You see, they missed entirely that sin is a matter of a corrupt heart. It's not what you do, it's who you are. And so sin lost power. And so the gospel was crippled. So by the way, don't think that this kind of legalism is new or is confined to Reformed churches. And I often think perhaps that's why many parts of the Jesus movement faded away. The sin nature in our heart is at war with God, and at war with the very goodness of God. You know, one illustration that helped me see the evil in my own heart, someone said, well, what if all of your thoughts, all of your words and actions in private were projected up on a movie screen? Ooh, that would be bad. and not one of us could stand. Our facade would fall. And the mere thought of such a thing is enough to break through any sense of self-righteousness. Romans 3 says as it is written, none is righteous, no not one. No one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless. No one does good. Not even one, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And there it is. Over here is the corruption of our heart. And over here is the beauty of God's goodness, His holiness. And in between, there is a great chasm that we can never cross on our own. Let me read from verse one again. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. You see, here's the point that I'm trying to bring across. God's holiness shines greatest against wickedness. Peace with God. shows its greatest comfort in contrast to war with God. When this says, justified by faith, we have peace with God, that is a significant thing to say. Sin is war with God, and it must be dealt with. And so secondly, we consider the way out of this problem. And the way out is by justification. It is by justification that we can be restored to peace with God. You know, this is, peace with God, this has always been one of my favorite verses just for that phrase. It's so amazing to think about such a thing. But you know, if we think that we're pretty good, then it becomes not so amazing. If we don't see the chasm as wide as it is, then it's loosed as its power. The beauty and the perfectness of God's character is set apart from the wickedness of human beings. And it is only the gospel that can bridge that chasm. Only the gospel picks us up and carries us over into the presence of God. Only the gospel brings peace with God. Only the gospel does what we could never do for ourselves. And so we ask, what is justification? The word justification has a primary meaning of setting a person in right relationship to another person. And used here, it means you and I, as fallen, sinful human beings, set in right relationship to God. And of course, that's why justification results in peace. If we're in right relationship, peace is a characteristic of a right relationship. And so the question is, how does justification put me in right relationship to God? And the answer is by putting me in right relationship to God's righteous character as expressed in his law. In other words, when a judge evaluates an offender, compares the offender to the law, and he makes one of two declarations, guilty of transgression, condemned, or justified before the law in right relationship, set free. And so to be justified is to be declared by God himself to be righteous. To be declared to be in right relationship to God himself. To be declared to be in right relationship to God's holy character, to his law. And when God pronounces guilt forgiven, he does so righteously. He has a perfect righteousness, and so he has a good reason for pronouncing justification. And so you might be thinking, now wait a minute, we just spent, I don't know, 20 minutes talking about how human nature is at war with the goodness of God. How can God declare such a lawbreaker of which every one of us are to be forgiven, to be justified, Ah, enter Jesus Christ. And notice what verse one says, it says we have peace with God through, through, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Justification is always through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ stepped up to take our judgment. He stepped up to take the death. that we deserve. He died in our place so that we might be restored to God. You remember the example of a movie screen of all of our thoughts? Well, that's all wickedness. But what if we saw the movie screen of all of Jesus' thoughts and words and actions? It would be nothing but pure love and justice, righteousness, goodness. Jesus lived a perfect life. Well, he was God come in the flesh. And so Jesus can step up and take our punishment. There is no punishment due to him as a man. And so for this reason, when Jesus stepped up to die in our place, our guilt and our sin are completely cleared. a great exchange takes place. 2 Corinthians 5.21, for our sake he made him, Jesus, to be sin who knew no sin so that we might become the righteousness of God. You know, I used an illustration once before that I wanna use again. In college, somebody had me write my name on this side of the paper. And then, all my unrighteousness. Okay, that's a pretty bad list. And then on this side, the name of Jesus. And all of Jesus' righteousness, his holiness, his goodness, his love. And then he says, this is what happens. Cross out your name and put Jesus over here with all these sins. Cross out Jesus' name and put your name with all this righteousness. And then it says that God casts our sins away from us as far as the east is from the west. It says that Jesus took our sins and nailed them to the cross. Jesus condemned sin on the cross. Now a question. Did God just wipe those sins under the rug and say no sin doesn't matter? Doesn't matter that you're at war with all my goodness? No. Those sins had to be judged by Jesus' death on the cross. And then think about it. What's left with you? All your sins are gone. What's left with you is the righteousness of Christ that God imputed to you. And so God looks and he sees the righteousness of Christ, and he declares, justified, righteous, set free. And he calls you his own child. You know, this is a picture that we'll see in the Lord's Supper. When Jesus took all of our sins, he died. His body was broken. He shed his blood that our sins might be forgiven. And so someone will say, but that's not fair. Jesus died as an innocent man taking our sin. And that's right, it's not fair. It's mercy. It's God's wonderful grace in Romans 3.23. for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness because in his divine forbearance, he passed over former sins. And there it is, the righteousness of God in the gospel. It's not that righteousness by which we must attain in our life. It is God's righteousness, the righteousness of Christ by which he accounts us righteous and calls us to be his own. We are justified by grace as a gift. You see, if eternity is to be without pain and sorrow, there cannot be sin in eternity. With sin comes hurt and conflict and sorrow. It is the very opposite of peace. The wages of sin is death and it must be death. Sin must be cast away. And do you think that God created you and I to have fellowship with him just to let us die in our sins? Absolutely not. God's love demands that he pardon our sin. His justice demands that an actual atonement, an actual death take the righteous judgment for our sin. You know, Jesus said of himself, he said, the son of man came not to serve, I'm sorry, came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. This is the gospel justification. You know, the very next verse in John 3 says this. Whoever believes in him is not condemned. But whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only son of God. And so there are only two options. Human beings are at war with God. Their war is a war of evil against good. of wickedness against God's righteous, perfect holiness. Whoever believes in him is not condemned. And so let's consider the effect of justification. And we see that justification is entirely the work of Jesus. And so how does God apply justification to us personally? How can we receive the justification that Jesus accomplished? And the answer is, it's by faith. And that is first by believing the content of the gospel, that Jesus was born. He lived a perfect life. He died to atone for our sins. He was raised from the dead. This was an actual occurrence in history. And second, by believing that this great truth is for me personally. It's not abstract, it's not irrelevant, it's not out there. The gospel is for me in my life, right here, right now. And third, by placing my full trust in Jesus. By casting my life into his care. By saying, Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner. In other words, by seeing your helplessness and trusting entirely in Jesus to pick you up from the pit of sin and to carry you across the chasm into the righteousness of God. Now, why would you trust in Jesus to redeem you? Well, because God is good. Because God is perfect and loving in every way. Because an eternity with God is to be desired. Because of who God is. And because an eternity without God would be a terrible thing to contemplate. It would be an eternity surrounded by evil. You know, I will tell you that when I became a Christian, I understood that I was a sinner. I could see the condition of my heart. And I could see the condition of the world. But the primary thing that compelled me to put my trust in Jesus was that I saw the beauty of God's holiness. I saw that I wanted what was good and right and true. Excuse me. I wanted to be in God's presence. He was the only true God, the only good God. And that's what I wanted. And by God's grace, that's what comes through the gospel, that we can not only in this life, but for all eternity be assured of being in God's holiness, in his presence. Now, let me just conclude with this. In the 1970s, there was a very popular poster. And on this poster, it was along a seashore, there was, well, two sets of tracks, and then one set of tracks, and then two sets of tracks, and one set of tracks. And those tracks represented a man's life. And the second set of tracks was the Lord Jesus walking alongside. And the man looked and he says, Lord, but right here and right here at the very most difficult times of my life, there's only one set of tracks. Why did you leave me? And Jesus answered, well, those were the places I had to carry you. And that was a comforting thought at the time. But I've come to see that reality is a little different. In real life, Jesus has to carry us every step of the way. There is no place where I can walk on my own. I must rely on the Lord Jesus always. There is no part of me that can walk on my own. And so my appeal to you today, trust. call upon the Lord Jesus in trust to forgive your sins, to carry you across the great chasm between your sinfulness and God's perfect, holy righteousness, and do so today. You do not want to miss eternal peace with God in the beauty of His holiness. Let us pray. Our Father, Lord, you are all beautiful. You are all holy, all righteous in every way. And it is your decree by your good heart, by your love, by your grace, that Jesus died, that we might be picked up and carried into your presence. And that we might be there not only in this life, but in all eternity. And Lord, that is the great desire of our heart. Lord, grant us faith that we might turn and trust you, that we might turn our lives to you in every way. Lord, that we might be saved by your grace through faith in Jesus.