You can be turning to Romans chapter 5. First thing I'd like to say is greetings from your sister church, Grace Fellowship in Hazleton. It's exciting to be here. You folks are a blessing. There's so many people I don't know. I've gotten to know a few people over the years, but so many of you don't know. I'm looking forward to getting to know you better. You folks have been a blessing to us. We pray for you regularly. You've got kind of an extra special tie to us. Your pastor is one of our dear, dear people and an elder in our church. And so we're glad he's here. We're excited for what God is doing. And so I convey my greetings from Hazleton. We're going to be looking at a passage from the book of Romans in a moment. I understand that Pastor Chris is working through the book of Romans. I'm glad that, I always love to hear that. So I'm sure he's already given you a summary of what Romans is about and so I'm not going to do anything in that line except to say Romans explains a great deal concerning salvation and its relationship to the Christian life. So I'll let him be the expert on it and you remember what he was sharing. Before we look at our passage, I'd like to give you an idea of what we're going to hopefully see in the passage. I hope we see plain, because it's there, I want us to see the wonder of God's love and how that love is demonstrated by means of the redemption that he has provided. I hope for us to see also the security we have in our redemption. I'd like us to see the completeness of God's redemption. And then I'd like to see how the passage points out how we should react to God's redemption. So if you would follow along with me, I am going to read, I'm going to start in verse 1. We're only going to be dealing with verses 6 through 11. Verse 5 particularly gives us a jumping off point into the verses that we're going to look at, although I'm really not going to spend any time in verse 5 at all. Let me just start reading in verse 1. 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 us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person, one would even dare to die. But God, I'm sorry, King James always squeaks out there. But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we are reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. Let's pray together. Father, we praise you for many things, but as we've come to the reading of your word, the preaching of your word this morning, we thank you that we have this. I thank you that since you have given it to us, For all eternity, we'll be able to turn to Romans chapter 5 and see the truths that are there. We can hold on to them. We can know that you gave them to us. We can be sure of the promises that are there, the truths that are there. And Lord, for all eternity, these words can be those things that spur our love for God and for the Lord Jesus Christ. And I pray that you would, by your spirit, open the truths that are here. I pray that by your spirit, you would apply them to our hearts. May we leave this place seeing the love of God. May we see this place rejoicing in the steadfastness, the secureness of our redemption. And among the other things, Lord, I pray that our lips will be full of praise today because God has saved us in such an amazing way. I pray that you would be with us, be with my lips in Jesus' name, amen. So as we look at this, I'm just gonna jump right into an exposition of what's going on here. Although I'm not gonna go verse by verse, I'm gonna gather some things together and try to make some gathered observations as we go. And we're gonna talk first of all about God demonstrating his love for us. But first in doing that, I wanna emphasize, I wanna bring out how scripture here talks about our condition. It's important for us to know our condition. We have too high an opinion of ourselves. We have too high an opinion of our ability. We think, and we all live like this, maybe we don't admit it, but we all live like this. We say, I can do it. And we often live like we can somehow work to please God and somehow be pleasing in God's sight. But it's important for us to see our condition. And so as we look at these verses, you can be scanning back and forth through these verses. I'm going to pick these out of several places. I want to first point out the scripture says we are weak. We have always been weak. We have always been a people who are unable to help ourselves. We are born sinners. We are born totally helpless. We are born with any ability to do anything about our fallen condition. We are a people who are weak. We try to do something about it. In fact, the bent of man's heart has always been to try to do something about our weakness. We try to help ourselves. We try to make ourselves good enough to be pleasing to God. Try to be good enough to make God take note of us, and then maybe He'll do something for us. But the Bible says that we're weak. We're totally unable to do anything about our fallen condition. The Bible goes on in these verses to speak about the fact that we're ungodly. We were born this way. We were born in a way where we wanted to live totally without reference to God. We did not want God to rule over us. We did not want to be like him in his moral character. We had no desire to obey him. We spurned his law and we chose to live for ourselves. And I don't know if pastor has gotten to this point yet, but reading from Romans 3 verses 10 through 18, scripture says, there is none 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. Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. In their paths are ruin and misery and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. We are ungodly, and we have no desire in our natural ability to want to do anything to live as God had created us to live. As we go on. Further in this passage, we see that it describes another part of our condition, and that is that we're enemies. Now we've alluded to this, the fact that we don't want to be under God, but we're enemies. We have chosen to hate God. We've chosen to live in opposition to Him. And we could go back, and I'm not going to take the time, but you could go back to Romans 1 and see how Paul begins to describe the sinfulness of man. and the rebellion, the enemy that man is to God. In every case where God has called man to do this, man has said no. And because of his wickedness, because of his enmity towards God, God has said, okay, my judgment to you is I'm going to let you go. I'm going to let you follow your enmity. I'm going to let you be that enemy that you want to be. And it will bring further judgment. We are enemies. And it's a sad situation. It puts us, it really brings us, if we understand these truths right, it shows us that we're absolutely helpless, we're absolutely hopeless. We think we can do something, we think we can take steps to try to please God and gain the eye of God and maybe he'll bless us, but we're hopeless and we're helpless. But while we were in that condition, God demonstrated his love towards us. God showed He loved us. Christ does what no one else could or would. And again, you can scan through these verses. I'm going to be pulling phrases from different places. I want us to see first of all that Christ helps the helpless. We were weak. and yet Christ came to help the helpless. Christ comes and lives the perfectly righteous life that God requires. He suffers and dies for the sins of his helpless people, and then he makes what we see in 2 Corinthians 5 as that great exchange. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creature. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them. and entrusting to us the ministry of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God, and this is where the exchange takes place. For our sake, he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. We were helpless. We couldn't do anything. And so God, in His love, sends His Son and sent Him to live this perfect life, perfectly sinless. From the instant of His conception to His death, burial, and resurrection, He lived that perfect life. And then He said, I'm going to take what Christ has done, in living that perfect life. I'm going to take my sin from you and I'm going to put it on Him. And I'm going to take all the goodness that you couldn't do, all the things that you were unable to be, and I'm going to give it to you. You're going to live in the righteousness and perfectness and have your sins forgiven that Christ has provided. And He's going to go to the cross. And He will die. Because you are helpless. And I want you to step back and think, this is God demonstrating His love towards us. Why would He do that? I mean, you all seem like nice enough people. Like I say, I know a few of you. I wouldn't do that. I couldn't. I'm not good enough. But I wouldn't do that. In fact, scripture here even points that out. He pays for the sins of undeserving people. No one is willing to die for someone just because they're righteous. Now in that verse it's speaking of a righteous person. This term righteousness refers to someone that would look righteous on the outside. Looks like they do everything correctly. One might think of a Pharisee here as, I think, a good illustration. Now we know, based on what Christ said, that these were people who were whitewashed tombs, and they were looking good on the outside, but inside they were filthy. But to the average person walking around that day, they would look at a Pharisee and say, there's a righteous man. I mean, he does his tithing. He does his observance of the Lord's Day. He keeps his feasts. He does what sacrifices he can. He does all these things right. He's a righteous man. And yet, what one person walking around in those days would look at a Pharisee and say, boy, that man, if something happens, I need to die instead of him, because he's just such a righteous man. Well, they didn't really like them, even though they were righteous. And Paul here's using this example of this idea that, you know, righteous people. They're not even something that we would die for. He goes on to mention the idea of a good person. Now this is not a person who's necessarily morally good. The term good person might refer to someone like the Roman centurion that's mentioned in Luke chapter 7. The centurion has a sick servant, I believe it is, and he sends to Jesus and wants this servant healed. And people around go, hey, Jesus, he's a good guy. Sure, he's a Roman centurion. Sure, he's not a Jew. But you know, this man loves our people and he has built the synagogue in Capernaum. He is worth you doing this. You might picture that kind of a person, a good person. And sometimes people die for good people. Someone might say, well, you know that centurion? He's done so much good for the Jewish people. You know, I might die for him. I would rather what he's doing continue than my life persist. And so someone might die for someone like that. And so Paul is setting up this contrast. No one's going to die just because someone's righteous. Somebody, very few, but somebody might die for someone who's doing good all over the place. But who's going to die for the stinkers of the world? Who's going to die for the people that make you so mad because they do everything wrong and they're so mean? I mean, you could just go up and slap them because they're so... Who's going to die for that? How much different do we look in God's eyes than what I've described as a stinker that you might hate? God demonstrated His love towards us. He didn't look down and say, you know that man is doing so much good, I think I ought to die for him. He didn't look down and say, you know that man is righteous, I think I ought to die for him. He looked down and saw every one of us as being vile, wicked sinners in God's eyes. and yet because not because of something in us God didn't look down at any one of us or even the whole of us together and say you know if you take the goodness of that person and that person and that person and that person and you add them all up maybe they're worth dying for he looked down and all of us together were as an unclean thing. We could not stand in his sight. And yet, not because of something in us, but because of what God is, because of his attributes, because of his character, because God is a loving God. He said, I will show my love to these people. I will send my son to die for them. Does God love you? If you're his child, he certainly does. Christ demonstrated God's love by being willing to die for us as undeserving sinners. Christ also demonstrated his love by reconciling his enemies. Christ dies for those working in hatred against him. Paul is such a good example of this. I can imagine he's kind of thinking maybe even of himself, Yeah, enemies. Paul could say I was the very kind of person who went around hating these people who followed Christ. In fact, he hated Christ. And God demonstrated his love towards Paul, the man who held the coats to those who killed his beloved Stephen, willing to live to the very, or to testify to the very death of the goodness of Christ. Speaking of the gospel, Christ demonstrated God's love by dying for his enemies. He pays for the trespasses of enemies who are to be his people. And then supernaturally brings that offending party into restored full righteousness with God. that picture of Paul, with blasphemy on his lips, heading to destroy God's people, God says, I love you, Paul, works in his heart, draws him to himself. God loves him. Christ does this while we're still in our sin, and we're enemies. I want you to think through this. Christ did not do this after we decided we needed help. Christ did not do this after we chose not to be God's enemies. Christ did not do this after we decided to clean up our lives a little bit. I think I need to make things a little better and God will like me and God will do things for me. One of the things this passage is teaching is that Christ provided our whole salvation before we wanted it, before we knew we needed it. We were literally enemies. It wasn't in any shape or form that we had taken one step away from being an enemy of God. We weren't in any way shape or form taking one step towards wanting to do God's law, to loving God. Christ did all this while we were enemies. And you know what one of the blessings about knowing that is? It reminds us that not one single stitch of our salvation depends on us. Not one single stitch before we got saved, and not one single stitch after you got saved. Are you struggling with dealing with sin in your life? It's all paid for. It's all paid for. Now, I'm not saying that we don't have to repent and seek God on it. But everything was done for us. It doesn't depend, our salvation does not depend on us to maintain it. Now I say that and I'm trying to stick to the very, can't think of the term, the ludicrous statement that Paul makes in this passage. You know, Christ paid it all. Oh, does that mean I can go out and sin like I want? No, it doesn't mean that. It doesn't mean that at all. But when Christ pays for the sins of his people, it's all done. It's all done. We can't mess it up. I'm not saying that a person can profess Christ and then turn from Christ, blaspheme him, live in rebellion the rest of his life, and be considered a Christian. The person who is truly trusting Christ will not want to ultimately turn from Christ. I'm not saying I once saved, always saved. I prayed a prayer and the rest of my life I'm saved. The Christian is going to pursue Christ. The person who struggles, well let me say it this way, the person who trusts in Christ will struggle with their sin the rest of their earthly life. But that struggle with sin will not ultimately affect the outcome of God's work on his behalf. Salvation is the work of God provided for his people, accepted by faith. The work of salvation is sure because God has done it all. Remember, we were enemies, we were ungodly, we were sinners. We had nothing or wanted nothing to do with God and he did it all for us before. These verses go on also to demonstrate that while it demonstrates his love for us like this, when God demonstrates his love for us like this, I'm sorry I'm confusing meaning my own stuff, he will certainly complete our salvation. Paul uses an argument here that's called the, I'm going to say it wrong, I want to say forte, it's not that, something else, but it's the stronger to the lesser. If God was willing to do all that it took to save you, Won't He certainly bring you to Himself? Won't He certainly finish the job? Since Christ has been willing to die for sinners, our deliverance from God's wrath to come is a foregone conclusion. Now we think about Christ dying on the cross, taking God's wrath for us, and I'm not trying to confuse the situation, but just for the sake of illustration here, there's coming a day when God will pour out all his wrath on those who don't know Christ. And sometimes Christians get scared. They say, well you know I trusted Christ and I've made a mess of my life. Will God still keep me? And this argument is, Well, if God sent Christ, his son, to do all this for you, and he did it while you were his enemy, and he did it while you, to use from Ephesians, you were dead in your trespasses and sins, won't he certainly save you from the wrath to come? It's all taken care of. God's people will be delivered from that wrath because Christ has already suffered and died for our sins. Since Christ has died for sinners, our being saved by his life is also a foregone conclusion. Now, this is a little bit more difficult of a phrase. I'm just going to simply go at it like this for time's sake. Christ died, was buried, and rose again, and now he sits in heaven making intercession for us. Since he has been willing to take on flesh, come live a perfect life, die with our sins upon him, be buried and rose again, and he's now seated in heaven. Since he's been willing to do all that. Don't you think, and this is the argument from the greater to the lesser, don't you think that Christ remains in heaven, seated at the Father's right hand, making intercession for us? Don't you think that He is going to be praying and asking for what you need to make it through your life? To make it to be that prized possession that He's died to redeem? To make you glorified, as Romans 8 talks about? To make you into the image of Christ, as Ephesians talks about? If Jesus has done all that by his life he will get us to the end, and he will bring us to himself. Now one of the things I wanted, I really want, and I think this passage deals with it in a great way. I'm not going to go into the depths of it, but when it's done I want you to walk out of here sure of your salvation if you're trusting Christ. I want you to be sure of the things that God has done, did it before. You were able even to put one finger towards it, has totally accomplished it, saved you from the wrath, is interceding for you. I want you to go out here with praise on your lips. Because that's what God's done. Our reaction to our reconciliation should be several different things. Let me list several of them. First of all, an assurance that we are delivered from God's wrath. If he's done it all, it's taken care of. Our reaction ought to also be an assurance that we'll be saved by Christ's life. And this is just a rehashing of what we said, so I won't make much of it. But let me just make this statement, because Christ lives, he will help us to finish the race in him. Our reaction ought to be also that we rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have received reconciliation. I'm going to break this down just a little bit. I'll back up just a little bit. No, I won't back up. I'll give you a little bit of my background. I was raised in a theology, maybe some of you were, that separated the Old Testament from the New Testament and engendered, although it wasn't often spoken, but engendered an attitude. I knew better than to accept this, but yet it was still pushed at people. It engendered an attitude that in the Old Testament, God was angry with his people. And in the New Testament, God loved his people. And they would say sometimes, or point towards, in the Old Testament, the father hated us, and in the New Testament, the son loved us. And it was the son's job to twist the father's arm, saying, you need to love these people, because I'm going down there. But that's not at all what's taken place. We need to rejoice in God. And by God, I'm saying the triune God. The father is not the angry one who had to have his arm twisted to love us. He didn't have to have the son come behind him and say, you need to love these people or else. The most well-known verse in the Bible says what? For, it doesn't say Jesus, it says for God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son into the world that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. We ought to rejoice in God. God the Father from eternity past has loved us. It wasn't just Jesus. It wasn't just the Spirit. You have a triune God who's loved you from eternity past, has set in motion all these unbelievable actions to demonstrate that love, and the chief being that He asked His Son to take on flesh, and sent that Son to live a perfect life, and then took all my sin, all your sin, and put them on Christ, and punished him for it. I would say that's a God who loves us and has done a really good job of demonstrating that love. We rejoice because all the persons of the Godhead loved us in spite of who we are. Nothing good in us. And so sent Christ into the world to die for his people, delivering them from God's wrath, bringing them safely home to glory. Now it says we are to rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ. And I'm going to speak of it this way. We're going to rejoice in Christ because it's what Christ has done that can make us rejoice in all of God's love for us. We rejoice in Christ because he came and took on flesh to die for us while we were weak, ungodly, and totally unworthy of a perfect righteous person doing anything for us. That's just a statement that sums up exactly what these verses have said. We rejoice in Christ because He's the one who actually did the actions that showed us that God loves us. So we rejoice in Christ because He's willing to do that. We rejoice in Christ because of His work, we are reconciled to God. Now, there's never been an instant in time, never will be an instant in time, where some human being says, God, I want to be close to you. Can we make things right? There has only been, through all eternity, a God who says, I love these people. I will make things right with my people. And it was the work of Christ. and he's delivered us from the wrath to come and will bring us into glory. Let me just give you a couple of quick further applications, kind of summations. You're going to hear things that we've talked about, but let me just give you these kind of wrap-up summations. Christian, are you afraid of messing up your salvation? Do you look at yourself and say, I struggle with sin so badly, how could God love me? Do you look at yourself and say, I don't think I'm going to make it. I've made such a mess of my life. I want you to take to heart this passage. When God called for you to trust Him, be assured, He has done all the work before you were even born. He did all the work to provide you with a complete, finished salvation. He provided that salvation while you were still His enemy. In calling you to trust Him, be assured that Christ's death has fulfilled your every requirement. And by His life, He will assuredly bring you to glory. It's all done in God's eyes. Rest in it. Now that doesn't mean I don't confess my sin. It doesn't mean I don't long to live like Christ, and I pray towards that end, and I read towards that end, and I fellowship with people towards that end, and I just do all the things that God has called me to do. I am to do those things. But I'm to do them from a standpoint of rest. God will bring me through it. Don't be afraid of messing up your salvation. Trust Christ. Question, have you contemplated the demonstration of God's love for you spoken here? This is not God just sending you a note that says, hey, I was thinking of you, just wanted to say that I care. Or this is not God just saying, you know, I think I'm going to make your day go pretty good because I just feel like blessing you. It wasn't even, when we think about what God did for us, it wasn't even something as small as if He were to give you a whole planet, and servants to run that planet, and everything that you got from that planet was your gain. I mean, something small like that. I want you to see, I want you to remember that God's Word says that He demonstrates His love not by these gifts, these little things. God demonstrates His love by sending His Son. Have you fathomed the fact that the Son of God took on flesh? He is now and forever through the rest of eternity will be the God-Man because God loved you. He will always have a body. He will either sit or stand as the God-Man. And he's done that. He's lived that perfect life for you. He's taken that sin. He suffered under the hands of men. He endured God's wrath. He died in your place. He did all this while you were unable to help yourself, while you lived in sin and were rebellious. This is God's love. It's so undeserved. There's no, you know there's a joke that I've heard that goes around in seminaries or something like this, and I've never been to seminary, but there's a joke that goes around in seminary, define Trinity and give three examples. You can't do that. You can't say illustrate God's love with anything except the work of Christ. And so it should be our consuming passion. If a God has done all this, my lips, my heart, my mind need to be responding in praise and worship of our God. And that's why I asked our pastor to read Revelation 5. Let me read three verses, four verses. Then I looked and I heard around the throne and living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands saying with a loud voice worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing and I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea and all that is in them saying to him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever and today We, and there's other things that we can say this for, but today we say this because God demonstrated His love for me. He demonstrated it for you by sending His Son to die and doing the whole package before you ever wanted anything from God. And the last thing I'll say, if you're here and you're beginning to see that your actions make you guilty before God, you say, I stand in judgment. I have offended a holy God. This passage has the best news for you. This passage tells you God loved you and sent his son to die in your place while you were still helpless. And he calls you to turn away from trying to make yourself acceptable in God's sight to accepting what Jesus has done by faith. and trust the work that Christ has done for you. Let's pray. Thank you, Father, that there are promises and that are statements, that we don't have to twist into something weird. We can simply tell the truth from your word, and it fills our hearts with worship because you've done amazing things. I pray that forever and always, throughout eternity, and Lord, we need help here, We get so forgetful, we get so bogged down with other things. But Lord, may it be that which utters out of our mouth all the time, Christ has died for me and I didn't deserve it. I pray that you would help us to praise you, help us to live in the light of the completeness of that, And I pray that we would rest in you. And Lord, if there's one here who doesn't know you, who's beginning to see I have offended a holy God, and I am in danger of his wrath and his judgment, I pray that they would see Christ has provided this salvation, and they can have it if they turn to him. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.