By
Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
Flat
Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
Sunday
June 07th, 2020 (7/10. How
Jesus Saves.)
Florence
Littauer, a popular Christian writer on Behavior and Personality, was speaking
at a Church Growth Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Florence was winning the crowd with her great
sense of humor. After she told a delightful
story about our human need for God's grace, she spontaneously asked the crowd,
“Does anyone here know what grace means?" A 7 year old girl on the front row, all decked
out in a white dress, stood up and raised her hand. "I know, Miss
Littauer, I know," she said. "Grace is unmerited favor from God!"
Mrs
Littauer was amazed at the little girl’s wisdom and then asked the 2nd
grader to step up to the platform with her. "Great answer," Florence
said, "now tell the audience what that means.". The little girl folded her hands and
shrugged, "I don't have a clue!" (Stan Toler, God Has Never
Failed Me, But He Sure Has Scared Me to Death a Few Times! Tulsa: Honor Books,
1995) 29).
In
our text, right after the apostle Paul says ‘all have sinned and fall short
of the glory of God’ he quickly says ‘they are now justified by
his grace as a gift.
Sinners
are now ‘justified’? What does
this mean? Do you have a clue?
FOR
ALL HAVE SINNED... (23)
Most
of you, as I was, were probably taught a very simplified definition of justification
to mean ‘just as if I have never sinned’. It’s
catchy phrase and easy to remember too, but this oversimplification could lead to
a dangerously mistaken idea that since Jesus died for us, now God ‘let’s us off
the hook’ and we aren’t held responsible for our sins anymore. But that’s not what justification means.
Even
after grace is given to us, we still suffer sin’s consequences. Scripture teaches that ‘the person who
sins will die’ (Eze. 18:20). Death IS
the consequence every person must undergo because we are still sinners. And death is only one of many other possible
consequences of sin we will experience in life; like guilt, shame, jealousy,
lying, deception, alienation, disunity, ignorance and many, many more.
We
all live with the consequences of human sinfulness. In fact, most of the demands, difficulties,
and common struggles of everyday life are due to ‘human nature’ which falls
‘short’ of God’s glory. Think about it,
why are there so many crazy, obsessive laws and rules in everyday life? Why are there so many oppressive regulations
in governmental bureaucracies around the world?
Why can’t we just live anyway we wish?
Why is life so complicated, when it really should be quite simple? And ‘why can’t people just get along’, as Truck
Driver Rodney King once asked.
Most
of the reasons for the complicated structures and systems we must live with in
life are based upon who we are as humans.
We are sinners. We fall short God’s
glorious intentions for our lives. We
all do. The line of human brokenness and
evil runs down the middle of every human soul.
The best among us can do horrible things, while the worst among us can
do good things. The single, most
indisputable Christian truth is that we are sinners.
Have
you ever tried to open a ‘tricky’, almost oppressive, tamper-proof medicine
bottle? It’s not just children who are
being protected. Some of you remember
the Tylenol poisonings in Chicago in 1982.
All the trouble we have getting into those sealed, tamper-proof
containers goes back to 7 murders committed when someone laced Tylenol with
very lethal Potassium Cyanide. No one
was ever convicted of these crimes, however one person demanded 1 million
dollars in an extortion scheme. That
person was caught and convicted but no link was ever established with the
original crimes. It was believed the
extortioner was trying to get rich off the fear and misery of others. One sin leads to another.
More
recently, a Paramedic in Gaston County NC recently killed his wife by giving
her Visine eye drops. Yes, you heard me
right: Death by Visine. If you give a
person too much Visine it can stop their heart.
This man, a paramedic used Visine to poison his wife because it was
readily accessible and wasn’t a controlled substance. After her death was ruled accidental, he
quickly had her body cremated and did not request an autopsy. But since she was an Organ Donor, a blood
sample revealed excessively high levels of a chemical in Visine within her
blood cells.
Why
did he do it, especially since they were high school sweethearts? It looks like he killed her so that he could
collect her life-insurance money of $ 250,000 and move in with his secret
girlfriend.
When
left to our own devices, we humans can become destructive and self-destructive
too. Paul observed this same kind of human
degradation and depravity within his own culture when he said there is ‘anguish
and distress for everyone who does evil’ (Rom. 2:9). Paul
also quotes the Old Testament, charging ‘there is no one who is righteous,
no not one.’ (3:10), because he explains, both Jew and Gentile (Greek) live
under the power of sin (3:9).
JUSTIFIED
BY HIS GRACE AS A GIFT (24)
Even
though our society does talk much about sin today, we have little problem
understanding that something is wrong with us.
We have an almost innate sense
that the way things are isn’t the way things should be.
Things
aren’t the way they should be because ‘the power of sin’ is an
enslaving, corrupting, and destructive power loose in the world. We can see that, can’t we? God sees it too. Paul has already explained, that ‘The
wrath of God has been revealed ... against all ungodliness and wickedness’
(1:18). This doesn’t mean God is angry or mad at us, but it means that God’s
anger has been and is still being revealed to be against all that sin and evil
can do to undo us.
God
is angry, but it’s not at us. God is
angry at what sin does to us; our lives, our relationships and most of all, to
our relationship with him. God’s has
given us moral law to give us the knowledge of sin (3:21) to prove how
close to all of us sin and evil always is (7:21).
But
at the same God’s wrath is being revealed in God’s judgment
against sin (2:1-5) Paul says the righteousness of God has also been revealed
to be ‘for us’ and not ‘against us’ (5: 8; 8:31). This is exactly what Paul means when right
after announcing that we are all sinners, he says they (all) are now
justified by his grace as a gift. This
means that we don’t really know how lost we are until we already learn what God
has done to save us. The true knowledge
of sin is only given to those who have begun to understand the mercy and grace of
the Lord.
The
free gift of God’s mercy is what Martin Luther came to understand as he sat in
his study way back in 1515. Luther had
been on the brink of complete despair.
He was in a religious crisis because became acutely aware of his own
sinfulness. He tried everything to
remedy this crisis; confession, penance, mysticism, self-mortification, and
spiritual counsel of every kind. Nothing
kept him from feeling utterly condemned before God. He was at an impasse. For sins to be forgiven, they needed to be
confessed. But if they are not
recognized or remembered, they could not be confessed. He felt sinful, and lost, pronounced guilty
before God.
But
as he did not give up reading his Bible, especially in the book of Romans,
Luther came across something. He
noticed that at the same time the wrath and judgment of God was revealed from
heaven, so was God’s righteousness. At first this made him tremble in fear of God
even more. But as he continued to
wrestle with the text in Romans, he saw something in Greek that you can’t see
in English. The word ‘righteousness of
God’ and the word meaning ‘justify’ or justification both come from the same
word. And while you can’t see this so
well in English, it’s there in both the Greek and Luther’s German. Right after it the text says ‘ all have sinned’, the very next
thing the text says is that ‘they’ (sinners), are now justified, meaning
they are ‘made righteous by his grace as a free gift. Again, the righteousness of God being revealed
is not God’s righteousness only to prove us guilty, but it’s a righteousness
that makes sinners righteous through faith in Jesus Christ’s and his atoning death
on the cross.
This
justification of sinners by a righteous God was not only the biggest surprise
of the gospel, it was also a big surprise to Luther; and it can be for us. If
you look back over the gospel story itself, you’ll also see that it was because
of Jesus’ welcoming attitude toward sinners that he continually got into
trouble with religious authorities. Even
in one of Jesus’ most shocking stories,
it is the humble sinner who leaves the temple justified rather than the
proud and self-righteous person.
It
was precisely because Jesus justified and made sinners righteous, more
righteous than those who were perceived to be righteous, that Jesus was hated,
rejected, accused and crucified as a criminal by both the religious and secular
establishment. This was no accident, as the gospels claim. It all happened on purpose. What happened at the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry
goes back to the very beginning when John baptized him. This was to fulfill all
righteousness. Jesus was fulfilling
God’s righteousness by identifying with sinners in his and by justifying and
making sinners righteous by his death on the cross.
REDEMPTION...
IN CHRIST JESUS...
God
both proves He is righteous and that he can make sinners righteous. This is what ‘justification’ means in the
heart of God, but what does it mean for us, who are still sinners? Yes, in Christ, while we were still sinners,
Paul says, Christ died for us...He died as the godly for the ungodly (Rom.
5:8-9), but what difference does it make in our world still dominated by sin?
Here,
in this text Paul uses another word to help us see what effect this should have
for us. The word ‘justify’ comes out of
a law court, where a person could be declared in the right and be made right to
get on with life. But the result of
God’s grace is even more than this, so Paul uses another powerful word picture,
with the word redemption.
“To
redeem” someone means to ‘buy them back’ which comes straight out of a world
like Paul’s where humans were still bought and sold like animals. We no longer live in that world, but we’re
still not that far from it. There are
still powers in this world that can ‘enslave’ human life, and there are people
who still treat others without dignity and respect. What Paul wants us to know is that God’s
grace and Christ’s blood pays the price to free us from having to live like
this. Jesus’ died not only to reveal
how much God loves us, but God’s love
can ‘break the power of canceled sin’ and set us free to be a new people. When
understand what God’s love frees us from, it will make a difference not just in
how we live, but in who we are. We are
purchased out of sin and death, and we are made a new people in Christ.
One
of my favorite stories about God’s redeeming grace comes from the late, great
Swiss Theologian, Karl Barth. During his
academic, teaching ministry, Barth used
to make weekly trips down to the local prison in Basel and preach to the prisoners. I don’t guess you can have a more captive
audience, nor better example of people who need hope. Those people had been officially judged and
condemned as guilty.
In
one of his sermons, Barth was preaching about God’s redeeming, saving grace, as
being fully and completely, as Paul says here, a gift of God’s grace; something
we can’t earn, but must claim by faith in Jesus Christ. Barth illustrated by retelling a well-known
Swiss legend about a horse rider who is said to have crossed frozen lake Constance
by night without knowing it. For your
information, Lake Constance borders Germany and Switzerland and is a lake about
the size of Lake Tahoe, but it also has some narrow, but very deep sections. Often the lake partially freezes over in the
cold European winters, but this fellow did not realize the danger he was in. When he was told, he broke down horrified at
what could have happened.
Telling
this story to the prisoners Barth explained.
When we hear the word “By Grace have you been saved” we are like that
terrified rider. When you look back at
your life, you may come to realize what you did was the most foolish
thing! The path you took put you in
mortal danger. In fact, on that path you
were doomed, but now you are safe. We
all live in the mortal danger of sin.
Yes, we live on the brink of death.
BUT WE HAVE BEEN SAVED. Look at
the Savior! Look at our salvation! Look at the cross! Do you know who he died for? Do you realize it was for your sake—our
sake—for our sin and because of our sin?
Again,
like in this story, it is the person who is truly saved who realizes the danger
they were in. On the cross, Jesus was
burdened with our sin! Because of sin, a
righteous God had to deal with us. But through
a righteous Jesus, God has saved us from that darkness and from this
danger. This Jesus, who was God in the
flesh, took ALL OUR SIN upon himself.
God himself bore the cost of sin on the cross. This is how God justifies, and this is how God
redeems through Jesus Christ. When you
look at the path you’ve been on and at the path this world is still on, God has
spared you from this danger. God has
provided a way of safe passage and a way of escape. God has redeemed you, and give you new life
and new hope. Hallelujah!
ATONEMENT
BY HIS BLOOD...
We
are sinners, but we have been justified by grace as a gift. This gift of grace called justification comes
to us through the redemption---the price of buying us back and setting us free
from sin---through Jesus who is the Christ.
And this justification and this redemption comes to us because, Paul
concludes, God put forward a sacrifice of atonement by his blood,
made effective by faith (25).
What
Paul means here is that, just like God allowed once allowed animals to be
sacrifices for sin, now God has given us his Son, as the ‘lamb of God’ who
takes away the sin of the whole world. What this means is what it always meant,
except now everything is turned around.
When animals were sacrificed, that was a way a sinner acknowledged their
sin and asked God to make things right.
Now, however, through Jesus Christ, God is the one who puts forward a
sacrifice; God is the one who acknowledges what sin is, what sin does, and then
God himself is the one who bears our sin and pours out his own love for us in
the blood of his own Son. This is how a
holy and righteous God declared and makes us righteous through his son.
This
is what the sacrifice of Jesus’ blood on the cross means; justification,
redemption, and atonement. But everything
that God has put forward, and everything Jesus accomplished by this blood still
means nothing for us, unless it means everything to us. You must never make God’s justification of
us, to mean ‘just as if we’d never sinned’, but it means that we are made ‘just
and right only by God because we have sinned.
There
was an amazing story in the New York Times about 20 years ago. It told of a march from Charleston S.C. to
Columbia, where marchers were protesting the Confederate Battle Flag. Since then, of course, after the terrible
shootings at the Immanuel Church in Charleston, then governor Nikki Hailey was
instrumental in having the flag removed from government grounds. But about 15 years before that, as marchers
were assembling to march, at the starting point, a white man identified as
Carter Sabo of Charleston stood alone on the sidelines holding the battle flag. The Times reported, “He stood briefly by Sandra and Tommie
Gordon, an African-American couple from Mauldin, S.C. When they came by him, Mrs. Gorden gave Mr. Sabo a hug (From Fleming Rutledge, p. 104, Not Ashamed of the Gospel 2007).
Mrs.
Gordon’s action must remind us of God.
For only God can reach out to sinners like us, and make things right. And in God, this process begins and ends, by
faith and through faith in Jesus Christ. By trusting our lives into God’s hands, we are
declared and made righteous by becoming ‘living sacrifices’ for him; which is
the only reasonable, respectable, and proper response to what God has put
forward for us.
What
about you? How do you respond to God’s
outreached arms in Jesus Christ? Amen.
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