Alright, so, we're picking up in our study
in Romans here, and we're moving tonight into
the fourth chapter of this great epistle to
the Romans.
As Paul concluded the third chapter, he, as
I pointed out, he began to lay down
and expound this glorious doctrine of justification by
faith.
And there he stated in verse 24 of
chapter 3, being justified freely by His grace
through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
So he's beginning to explain to us in
depth what it means to be justified before
God, what it means to be justified by
faith.
And one of the things that it results
in is that no one's able to boast.
And he goes on to talk about that
as he wraps up the third chapter.
Where is boasting then, he says.
And boasting's eliminated.
Now, of course, Paul's background was in an
intensely religious culture, and with the Jews, and
particularly the Pharisees, there was a ton of
self-righteousness, and that lent itself to a
lot of boasting.
People boasting about their own goodness, their own
good works, and things like that.
But this is something that God will not
tolerate.
He doesn't tolerate pride.
He doesn't tolerate boasting.
And so Paul says through the gospel, through
the way God has saved us, he's eliminated
the possibility of human boasting.
And if anyone is going to boast, all
we can do is boast in the Lord,
because he's the one who's done everything in
regard to our salvation.
So Paul, having laid down the principles of
justification by faith, he's now going to show
that this has been God's way of justifying
men all along.
The Jews had completely misunderstood the message of
the Old Testament.
That's why they were boasting in their own
perceived righteousness, because they didn't really understand their
own scriptures.
They didn't really understand the law.
They really didn't understand how the patriarchs had
a right relationship with God.
They misunderstood and misinterpreted that whole thing, and
because of this misunderstanding, they felt that the
gospel was contradicting what God had previously said
in His Word.
So to them, the gospel was a contradiction
to what was stated in the Old Testament,
and specifically their misinterpretation of the Old Testament
that people are saved by good work.
So Paul is seeking to clear up these
Jewish misunderstandings.
Remember, Paul's writing to the church in Rome.
It's a church that's probably predominantly a Gentile
church, but there are obviously a fair number
of Jews, and probably a number of influential
Jews that are there in the church or
in that region.
So Paul takes this epistle to the Romans,
and he explains the doctrine of salvation to
the Gentiles who knew nothing about salvation, and
he clarifies salvation to the Jews who had
misinterpreted and misunderstood their own scriptures.
So he's already shown that although this righteousness
he preaches through faith in Christ is apart
from the law, it's separated from the law.
In other words, we don't get this righteousness
by adherence to the law, but he shows
us that it's witnessed to by the law
and the prophets.
So the law and the prophets were talking
about this salvation that would ultimately come.
He's also shown that the gospel does not
nullify the law, or it doesn't make void
the law, it really establishes the law, he
says.
And what he means by that is that
the gospel reveals the true purpose of the
law.
See, the true purpose of the law was,
as Paul said in Galatians 3.24, the
law was a schoolmaster to lead us to
Christ.
The law was not given to justify people.
The law was actually given to show man
that he could not save himself by his
own good works.
So the law was intended to really condemn
somebody in order to drive them to the
Savior, who then, of course, would give them
salvation freely.
So Paul is clarifying that.
Now, to prove his point, and this is
where we see Paul, he was brilliant in
his argumentation.
Of course, he was inspired by the Spirit.
But in order to prove his point that
a man is justified by faith alone apart
from works, rather than just, you know, insisting
himself that this is true, he is going
to use two of the greatest men in
the history of the Jewish nation to prove
his point.
He's going to go back to Abraham and
to David.
So he's going to illustrate from their own
lives how what he's saying about the law
is correct, as opposed to what they thought
about the law.
He's going to show through both Abraham and
David that, in a sense, they were saved
by the gospel.
Even though the gospel had not yet come,
they were saved by the exact same principle
that would be manifested when
the Let
me say, this idea that man is saved
by doing some sort of work is not
an exclusively Jewish idea.
All religions except biblical Christianity teach that salvation
is obtained by works.
This is one of the common denominators with
all of the religious systems of the world.
There's only one exception.
And notice I said biblical Christianity.
There is a manifestation of Christianity, a very
large manifestation of Christianity, that is not biblical.
It's not rooted in the scriptures.
And in that type of Christianity, you find
a similar kind of a thing.
You find that there is a mentality that
salvation comes through works.
Real quickly, let me just give you some
examples.
In Hinduism, there are three possible methods that
one can utilize to obtain the Hindu version
of salvation.
There is the way of works.
That's one possibility.
The way of knowledge is another possibility.
The way of devotion.
So, works, knowledge, or devotion.
Obviously, works implies works.
But knowledge and devotion imply works as well.
So, you're working hard to grow in your
knowledge.
You're working hard to be more devoted.
So, the principle of works is they're firmly
rooted in Hinduism.
The same is true in Buddhism.
For Buddhism, there are ethical rules.
For example, kill no living thing.
Do not steal.
Do not commit adultery.
Do not lie.
Do not drink alcohol or take drugs.
Eat moderately.
Avoid what excites the senses.
Do not wear adornments.
Do not sleep in a luxurious bed.
Accept no silver or gold.
And if you do these things, then you
will hopefully attain whatever it is in Buddhism.
That, you know, state of blissfulness.
Islam.
Islam has its five pillars.
The creed, the daily prayers, the almsgiving, the
fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
With Judaism, it's the adherence to the 613
commandments of the Torah.
So, you see, in each one of these,
there's this common thread.
This is why people say, well, you know,
don't all religions kind of teach the same
thing?
Yes, they do, with one exception.
Biblical Christianity.
But as I said, there are many who
identify themselves as Christians who believe in a
similar fashion to the Hindus, the Buddhists, the
Muslims, the Jews.
They believe that it's through certain types of
works that they're going to gain salvation.
Whether it be by being baptized, or attending
church faithfully, or tithing regularly, or keeping the
Ten Commandments perhaps, or doing to others as
they would have done to themselves, or by
just putting forth their best effort to be
a good person.
Many people who would refer to themselves as
Christians would tell you that those are the
kinds of things that will get you to
heaven.
So, we see that this thing of a
works righteousness is and has been from the
earliest days of human history.
It's ingrained in the thinking process of man.
And if we were to go out tomorrow
into our local community and just start asking
people the simple question, well, how do you
suppose one gets to heaven?
Guaranteed, most people would give you answers that
pointed to some sort of works that they
would do to ultimately obtain salvation.
But there's absolutely no excuse when it comes
to Christianity.
There's no excuse for any manifestation of the
Christian faith to hold to any kind of
a works righteousness because the Bible is very
clear on this issue.
But what does that tell us?
It tells us that a large segment of
what's known as the Christian church doesn't pay
attention to the Bible, doesn't take the Bible
seriously.
Sadly, that's the case.
Now, with all of that as a rather
lengthy introduction, picking up in chapter four, verse
one, Paul says, What then shall we say
that Abraham, our father, according to the flesh,
has found?
He's our father according to the flesh.
What is Abraham found?
See, because the Jews are insisting that Paul
is wrong.
A man cannot be saved apart from the
deeds of the law.
So Paul says, in a sense, Really?
Well, let's talk about Abraham.
You respect Abraham, right?
You know who I'm talking about, right?
The father of the nation.
How was Abraham saved?
Was Abraham saved by adherence to the law?
Of course, this would present an immediate problem
because the law was not given until 400
years after Abraham's time.
So what then shall we say that Abraham,
our father, according to the flesh, has found?
For if Abraham was justified by works, he
has something to boast about, but not before
God.
Abraham had nothing to boast about before God
because Abraham didn't attempt to justify himself by
works.
And look what Paul says in verse three.
For what does the Scripture say?
What does the Scripture say?
Let me take just a little diversion there
for a second.
This is the question that we always need
to ask.
Whenever we're uncertain about something, whenever we're wanting
to know what the truth is about a
matter that pertains to spiritual life or moral
life and things of that nature, we've always
got to come back to this.
What does the Scripture say?
That's the question.
We always want to take it back to
the Bible.
Scripture is, for the Christian, the final court
of appeal.
Now, I think probably mostly everybody listening to
me understands that and agrees with that.
But, you know, sadly, that's not the case.
For many in the Christian world, Scripture is
not the final court of appeal.
They would appeal, in some cases, to tradition.
In other cases, they would appeal to church
dogma.
Some would appeal to catechisms or the Declaration
of Councils.
And I'm not dismissing catechisms or the Declaration
of Councils out of hand.
All I'm saying is that that's not the
final place of authority.
Sometimes when I'm reading different, maybe, systematic theologies
or something like that, they will be appealing
to different catechisms or confessions.
They will be appealing, maybe, to the Westminster
Confession that was a document that came out
of the Reformation or the Heidelberg Catechism or
something like that.
And these documents have value and they contain
some good things in as much as they're
in harmony with the Scripture.
But, you know, at the end of the
day, we don't appeal to that.
We don't appeal to the writings of the
church fathers.
We don't appeal, ultimately, to the writings of
the Reformers.
We go back to the Scripture.
That is where we ultimately look to for
the truth.
And that's what Paul does here.
What does the Scripture say?
The Pharisees had their opinions.
The rabbis had their traditions and their ideas.
But Paul is asking this all-important question,
what do the Scriptures say?
What did they say?
Abraham believed God and it was accounted to
him for righteousness.
That's what the Scripture said.
See, they had developed a theory, like I
said, that Abraham was saved through the law.
The Jews became so obsessive over the Torah
that they actually surmised and went beyond surmising,
they were very dogmatic about it, that Abraham
kept the Torah himself, even though it didn't
exist at his time.
But they would insist that it did exist
in some form, even though Moses would not
come for 400 years.
They would become so fanatical about it that
they would say that God spent eternity past
in the study of the Torah.
Now, that was convenient to help support their
position because that's what they did.
So, in their view, God was just an
eternal rabbi.
He just spent all of eternity studying the
Torah.
So, one of the things that would be
at issue here would be the authority of
Scripture over the authority of oral tradition.
The Jews were hugely into oral tradition, the
traditions of the fathers.
But you see, Paul dismisses that just as
Jesus did.
Jesus just dismissed the traditions of the fathers.
You remember they would come to Jesus on
occasion and they would criticize him or they
would criticize his disciples because they were not
keeping the tradition of the elders.
And Jesus just dismissed those traditions.
He referred to them as the doctrines and
the commandments of men.
And he did not see them binding in
the least.
And you would have thought that the church
would have learned the lesson not to enshrine
the opinions of men and elevate the opinions
of men to a place of equality with
the word of God.
But sadly, you can find numerous cases throughout
church history where they've done exactly what the
Jews did.
They put tradition on the same level as
the Scriptures.
Paul sees the Scripture as the ultimate authority.
What does the Scripture say?
The Scripture says that Abraham believed God.
That's the key word.
He believed God and it was accounted to
him for righteousness.
How was Abraham declared to be a righteous
man before God?
By the works of the law?
No.
By simple faith.
He believed God.
Genesis 15.6. Paul is quoting from Genesis
15.6. And there we have God declaring
to Abraham what he's going to do.
And the text simply tells us that Abraham
believed God.
God said, this is what I'm going to
do.
Look up at the sky.
Look at the stars.
I'm going to make your descendants like the
stars in multitude, like the sand on the
seashore.
And God is giving to Abraham this messianic
promise.
And Abraham says, I believe you, Lord.
And the Scripture declares Abraham was righteous.
That's how he gained his righteous standing before
God.
Now, he says in verse four, to him
who works, the wages are not counted as
grace or as a gift, but as a
debt.
So we all know this by common experience.
If you work, then you receive a wage
that is indebted to you because of the
work you've done.
It's not a gift to you.
You've earned it.
So to him who works, the wages are
not counted as grace, but as debt.
The idea that you could mingle
faith and works together is something that the
Bible completely rejects.
These two things in regard to justification, in
regard to how a man is made right
before God, they're mutually exclusive.
They cancel one another out.
Paul will say later in this epistle, essentially
he will either say it's all of grace
or it's nothing.
It's got to be one or the other.
It's got to be all grace or it's
got to be all works.
But you can't blend the two together.
Now, of course, Paul was insisting on grace.
Some of the Jews themselves would be insisting
on works.
But there would be those in the middle
that would be trying to bring them together.
And there's still confusion even in the church
today amongst some people.
There seems to even be contradictory statements in
the New Testament about this whole thing of
whether a man's saved by grace alone, through
faith alone, or whether works has a part
of it.
And we'll get to that in our next
study.
One of the big questions that people so
often ask is, well, what about what James
said?
We know Paul is saying here that a
man is justified by faith apart from the
works of the law.
But what about James who comes right out
and says, so we see that a man
is justified by works and not just by
faith.
I mean, wow, doesn't that sound like a
contradiction?
It sounds like a contradiction, but I promise
you it's not.
And we'll see why, but we won't see
that tonight.
We'll see that next week.
But I got all excited thinking about it
today.
Because there is just a clear and a
beautiful explanation.
And it's kind of sad, really, that there's
been such a controversy over it.
And some people have just flat out felt
that, well, here is a contradiction in the
Bible.
But it's easily resolved when you really look
closely at it and see what's going on.
But let's carry on in the reading here.
So, coming to verse 5.
If you haven't underlined anything yet in chapter
4, underline verse 5.
But to him who does not work, but
believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his
faith is accounted for righteousness.
Just as David also describes the blessedness of
the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart
from works.
So, first it's Abraham, the father of the
nation.
Now Paul is referring to David, the great
king of Israel.
The sweet psalmist of Israel.
The man after God's own heart.
How was David justified?
Was David justified by this keeping of the
law?
No, David describes the blessedness of the man
to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.
And he's referring here to the 32nd Psalm.
Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven
and whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the man to whom the Lord
shall not impute sin.
So, in Abraham's case, there was no law
for him to be justified by.
In David's case, there was a law, but
he broke it.
In David's case, he couldn't be justified by
the law because he violated it.
He violated it severely.
So, was there any other alternative?
Was there any other possibility of salvation for
David because he had violated the law?
Yes, there was.
What was it?
Blessed is the man to whom God imputes
righteousness apart from works.
Blessed is the man to whom the Lord
shall not impute sin.
Now, there are four things that I want
to look at concerning the justified man.
And they are declared right here in verses
5 and 6.
Four things concerning the justified man.
And remember, the justified man is the man
or the woman who is declared righteous before
God.
Remember that.
We talked about that previously.
Declared righteous before God.
God acting in the role of a judge.
These are legal terms, remember.
And God is declaring us righteous.
It doesn't mean we are righteous.
It is a declaration from the judgment seat
by the judge himself that we are righteous.
But here we are told four things about
the person who is justified by faith.
Number one, notice this.
But to him who does not work but
believes on him who justifies the ungodly.
The ungodly.
The word could be translated the wicked as
well.
So, the first thing that we need to
understand is that God justifies the wicked.
He justifies the ungodly.
This is the point that we need to
understand.
Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
He came to save sinners.
As long as a man persists in thinking
that he is basically good or that he
can somehow do something to earn God's favor,
he will remain condemned.
This is vital stuff.
Justification is for the ungodly.
Christ Jesus came into the world to save
sinners.
Jesus said, I did not come to call
the righteous to repentance but sinners.
You see, in order for a person to
be saved, we have to come to the
end of our own attempts to save ourselves.
We've got to come to the place of
full realization that I am lost with no
possible means of restoring myself to favor with
God.
And until a person comes to that place,
they'll never be justified.
Because until I come to that place, there's
always somewhere in me some belief that I
can do it myself.
And lest you think that that's a minor
sort of an infraction, it's a denial of
everything God has clearly said.
So when we refuse to accept our own
ungodliness, we're essentially saying, God, you're wrong about
me.
I am better than you think.
I'm actually good.
And your word concerning me is false.
That's what we're ultimately declaring.
And we're also, even beyond that, declaring that
the sacrifice of Christ was unnecessary because I
could save myself.
So you see, these are serious offenses with
God.
This isn't stuff that's just, you know, sort
of a minor misunderstanding.
This is the type of thing that keeps
a person outside of that position of being
justified.
So if we have not come to Christ
as hopeless sinners, seeing our absolute inability to
do anything to merit our salvation, we have
yet to be justified.
There are lots of people that are devoutly
religious people, that are faithful churchgoers, that are
faithful tithers, that are full of good works
that are not justified.
They're still in their sins.
Why?
Because they see themselves as basically good.
And therefore, if anything at all, Jesus might
help them get to heaven, but he certainly
isn't totally necessary.
He might contribute a little bit, but it's
just a little bit because they've got quite
a bit of their own goodness.
So the justified person is a person who
recognizes their ungodliness.
The second thing that we see concerning the
justified person is that they do not work
for their justification.
And I love this right here.
I mean, this to me, Romans 4, 5
is the irrefutable argument against any kind of
a works righteousness.
You know, you can't say it any more
forcefully than Paul says it right here.
But to him who does not work, that's
it.
Him who does not work.
Now, William Newell said this, and I wholeheartedly
agree.
He said, what is written here, every believer
should commit to memory, for it states what
no mind of fallen man ever imagined.
No fallen man ever imagined that salvation would
be given to him who does not work.
As we've already pointed out, all of the
religious systems of the world have salvation going
to him who does work.
But you see, this is where biblical Christianity,
I'm emphasizing that again, biblical, right out of
the pages of the Bible.
This is what the Bible says.
Justification is for those who do not work.
Let me remind you of how many times
this is stated in the scriptures.
Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, familiar passage to
many of us.
Let me read it again.
For by grace you have been saved through
faith, and that not of yourselves.
It is the gift of God, not of
works, lest anyone should boast.
Again, could there be a clearer statement than
that?
By grace you have been saved through faith,
that not of yourselves.
It's a gift of God, not of works.
Again, but then Paul writing to Titus in
the third chapter, the fourth and fifth verses.
He said, but when the kindness and the
love of God, our Savior toward man appeared,
not by works of righteousness, which we have
done, but according to his mercy, he saved
us.
So it's not by works of righteousness that
we have done.
So you see, these are the clear statements
of scripture.
How could it be possible that the church
for so many centuries even could have completely
missed this message?
This is the primary message of the New
Testament.
How could it have been missed so radically?
Well, it was missed because they just turned
away from the Bible itself.
Tradition took precedence over the scriptures.
Church dogma took precedence over the scripture.
The catechisms and the councils, all of that
took precedence over the scriptures.
And so for centuries, nobody knew the simple
truth of salvation by grace alone through faith
alone.
Now, like I said before, it doesn't mean
that people weren't saved at that time.
There were those that had just, you know,
enough information and trust in the Lord.
But to understand these doctrines and to be
blessed and benefited by them.
To live free from the guilt of sin.
To live free from condemnation.
To live with the joy of the Lord
because God has saved you.
Because he's good.
So many people, sadly, for so many centuries
were deprived of that because they did not
have access to the scriptures.
The scriptures had been taken from them and
basically hidden away.
So, justified man is ungodly.
The justified man does not work.
The justified man believes on him.
So this is how it happens.
How does it happen?
It happens by belief.
I think one of the, you know, let
me say this.
I shared this with you before and it's
still true to this day.
There are people that say today that Paul
is the one who invented all of this
stuff and he completely got it wrong.
Jesus didn't teach this.
They say Jesus taught that we're saved by
works.
And Paul came along and confused everybody.
And that's why we don't want to listen
to Paul.
So they say that Jesus never said anything
like justification by faith.
Jesus made it clear that you had to
do good works, keep the law and so
forth if you were going to be saved.
This is what they insist.
Well, let me just remind you that we're
told in John chapter 6 verses 27 through
29.
As the people are listening to Jesus and
as they're coming to him, they ask him
this question.
They say, what shall we do that we
may work the works of God?
Jesus answered and said to them, this is
the work of God that you believe in
the one, believe in him whom he sent.
They were asking basically, what do I have
to do to please God?
What do I have to do to merit
God's favor?
What do I have to do to be
saved?
What do I have to do to go
to heaven?
This is the question they were asking him.
What did he answer them?
He said, this is it.
Believe in the one whom he has sent.
You see, Jesus did teach salvation by grace
through faith.
He absolutely taught it.
This is what the apostles preached when they
went out into the world.
You remember the story recorded in Acts chapter
16 where Paul and Silas are in Philippi.
And they're put in jail and they're worshiping
the Lord.
And at midnight, there's the earthquake.
And you remember the jailer, he's afraid that
they've escaped.
So he's about to, he draws his sword.
He's about to kill himself.
Paul says, do yourself no harm.
We're here.
And the man then responds and he says,
what must I do to be saved?
Here's this Roman centurion.
What must I do to be saved?
And what is Paul's response?
It is, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ
and you and your house shall be saved.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
It was that simple.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you
and your house shall be saved.
Later on in this epistle, Paul puts it
like this.
If you confess with your mouth the Lord
Jesus and believe in your heart that God
raised him from the dead, you shall be
saved.
But then probably the classic text of all
time is the one that we're most familiar
with, John 3.16. What does John 3
.16 say?
For God so loved the world that he
gave his only begotten son that whoever believes
in him should not perish but have everlasting
life.
How do we, how do we get everlasting
life?
The answer's right there.
Whoever believes in him.
So the justified man is a man or
a woman who recognizes their own inability to
save themselves.
They do not work for their salvation.
They simply believe.
They believe the testimony of God.
That Christ died for our sin.
Now, there's one other thing that I want
to point out to you.
And it's another important word.
We looked previously at the word justification.
We looked at the word redemption.
We looked at the word propitiation.
Here's another word and it's the word impute.
And notice here if you have a similar
translation to what I have.
Verse 6, just as David also describes the
blessedness of the man to whom God imputes
righteousness apart from works.
And then verse 8, blessed is the man
to whom the Lord shall not impute sin.
So the justified person is a person whose
sins are not being imputed to themselves.
That's the negative side of it.
The positive side is the justified person is
a person that Christ's righteousness is being imputed
to.
To impute sin is to lay sin to
the charge of someone and to treat them
accordingly.
Similarly, to impute righteousness is to set righteousness
to one's account and to treat them accordingly.
Thus Paul speaks both of God not imputing
sin to sinners, although it actually belongs to
them.
And of his imputing righteousness to us, although
it doesn't belong to us.
See that's what imputation is.
God doesn't impute sin to us.
He doesn't put it on our account.
Again, these are financial terms or economic terms.
God's not putting sin on our account.
Instead, he's putting righteousness on our account.
Now, of course, sin is what's really in
our account, isn't it?
We've all sinned and come short of the
glory of God.
So I've got a bank full of sin,
but God's not looking at it that way.
Instead, God is putting into my account the
righteousness of Christ.
He's disregarding the sin in the account.
He's overlooking it.
He's emptied it out.
Whatever he's done with it, he's disregarding it.
And instead, he's putting the righteousness of Christ
on my account.
And then that's how he's looking at me.
He's looking at me as righteous.
But it's not my own righteousness that he's
seeing.
It's the righteousness of Christ.
That's what imputed righteousness means.
So justification involves a double counting.
Counting, crediting, or reckoning.
On the one hand, negatively.
God will never count our sins against us.
Isn't that amazing to think of that?
God will never count our sins against us.
How is it that we are always fearful
that that's what he's doing?
Isn't it true that even as his children,
even as believers, even as those who have
trusted in Christ, we still so often go
about feeling as though God is counting our
sins against us.
But he's not doing that.
He's not doing that.
He will never count our sins against us.
On the other hand, positively, God credits our
account with righteousness.
As a free gift, by faith, altogether apart
from works.
You see, this is the gospel.
And as I said earlier, weeks back, this
is the good news that we need to
immerse ourselves in.
This is the good news that we need
to just bask in, to soak in.
It's stated all over the New Testament, but
somehow we miss it.
It's so easy, even just in reading our
Bibles, isn't it sometimes easy to find those
verses that are sort of condemning or those
verses that are making you feel like you're
just such a lousy Christian?
And we completely pass right over those passages
that would tell us otherwise.
I remember as a young pastor, because I
didn't know enough about the grace of God
in my own experience, and I certainly knew
a lot about my own failure, I preached
so often on how we all are always
coming short, how we're all always failing God,
and all of the messages were sort of
crack the whip, and come on, we've got
to do better, and we've got to pray
harder, and we've got to witness more, and
we've got to be more righteous and more
spiritual.
And boy, everybody went home just beat.
Beat up.
It was a time of beating the sheep
so often.
And I remember a season, this was a
really bad season, where if I didn't beat
the sheep, I felt guilty.
Because surely everybody deserved a beating.
But then as time went on, I began
to see some of these other things, and
began to understand God's grace and love, and
that to me has become the focus and
the passion.
And of course we need sometimes to be
exhorted.
Sometimes we need a rebuke.
Sometimes we need those things.
But I think more often than not, we
need to just be secured in the grace
of God.
And the love of God.
And that's what this doctrine, this justification by
faith, that we are accepted in Christ.
That's what my acceptance with God is based
on.
This is the picture.
To quote Lloyd-Jones, There is a man
standing in his rags, in his filth.
There is the condemned guilty sinner before God.
What happens?
Well, God puts on him this robe of
righteousness.
He puts on him the white robe of
his perfection, and now sees that and nothing
else.
He is accepted in the beloved.
He has accepted us in the beloved.
That's another way that Paul put it in
writing to the Ephesians.
We've been made accepted in the beloved.
You're in Christ.
God's not imputing our trespasses to us.
He's imputed to us the righteousness of Christ.
When he looks at us, he sees us
clothed in that righteousness.
And as I've said before, and I'd love
to just repeat it, you can never be
more righteous than the day you believed in
Jesus, from God's point of view.
Now, from our own human perspective, of course,
we grow in righteousness, we grow in holiness.
Sanctification is a process that we're going to
talk about as we move on.
But know this, the moment you believed in
Jesus, God declared you righteous, and you can't
improve on that.
Because you've got the perfect righteousness.
It's the righteousness of Christ.
And that's what he does.
And he does it for the ungodly.
He does it for the wicked.
This is not to put a premium on
ungodliness or wickedness, but it's the reality.
Until we realize we're ungodly, until we confess
that we're wicked, until we finally give up
trying to save ourselves because we're convinced that
there's some spark of good in us, we
will never be justified.
It's the moment that I give up on
all of that.
That's when that declaration of righteousness comes.
And so God declares us to be righteous,
and he then begins to indwell us simultaneously
by his spirit.
We're regenerated.
We're born again.
We're given a new life.
We enter into the sanctification process, and God's
going to be working out sin in our
lives and working in his character and his
love.
But all the while, all the time he's
doing that, we're still in this other area.
We're safe over here.
We're already perfected in one sense.
As Paul would say to the Ephesians, he
actually says we're seated already presently in heavenly
places in Christ.
We're already there.
But then on the practical side, God's working
it out.
But since he's already got us there in
one sense, we can be sure he's going
to get us there in the practical sense.
God's not going to stop.
He's going to keep that process going, and
he's going to bring you to that place
where you're more and more like the Lord
Jesus as time goes on, because that's where
we're already at, from where he sits and
how he sees us.
And that, again, is what it means to
be justified by faith.
That's how Abraham was justified, who lived 400
years before the law was given, and that's
how David was justified, who lived 400 years
after the law was given and broke it,
but was still a blessed man, a man
to whom God did not impute sin, but
imputed righteousness.
Let's pray.
Lord, thank you for this great and glorious
truth of justification by faith.
And, Lord, would you just burn this into
our hearts?
Oh, Lord, how we thank you that your
love for us is so grand and glorious.
And, Lord, you look at us and you
see us in Christ.
You don't look at our failures.
You don't deal with us according to our
iniquities.
Lord, and you've removed them from us as
far as the east is from the west.
And as a father pities his children, Lord,
so you pity those who fear you.
You remember our frame.
You know we're dust.
Thank you, Lord, for your patience as you
work this sanctification process out in each of
our lives.
Lord, we thank you that it's not of
him who works.
Lord, some of us tried to work.
We tried hard to work our way into
your favor, and we just found ourselves miserably
condemned.
And then your grace came along and showed
us that you'd already done all the work,
and we just needed to enter into it.
How we thank you for that.
Lord, thank you that there's not a person
that's too bad.
There's not a person that's good enough.
Everybody needs grace, and you've got a supply
for everyone.
How we rejoice in that.
Lord, pour out your grace upon us tonight.
Thank you, Lord, that you've saved us by
your grace.
We praise you for your glorious grace in
and through Jesus our Lord.
Amen.