Saved By Grace Through Faith

SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Text: Romans 3:19-28 (John 8:31-36)
Series A (added) (NRSV)

Dear People of God: Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, AMEN
The text we have today from Romans is one of the central texts in the New Testament for our understanding of the Gospel, the Good News of our salvation. It was central to Luther, it was central to the Reformation; it is central to the Confessions of faith upon which the Lutheran Church stands; and, of course, it was absolutely central to St. Paul, as well. For everywhere he repeats its message as the vital core of the Christian faith: we are justified and saved by God’s grace through our faith in Jesus Christ. That statement, the Augsburg Confession states, is the article of faith upon which the Church either stands or falls. Whether you or I stand or fall spiritually depends likewise upon whether we grasp in faith this basic affirmation: we are saved solely by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ. Today’s text has four major points. The FIRST deals with the function of the Law of God. “Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For ‘no human being will be justified in His sight’ by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.”
The context makes very clear what is meant by the phrase “those who are under the law.” That actually includes all humankind. “…So that every mouth may be silenced,” … “and the whole world may be held accountable to God.” What does he mean, “so that every mouth may be silenced?” Let’s examine what the Apostle says in verse 27: “Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded.” The divinely intended function of the Law of God is to wipe out our boasting - in other words, our PRIDE, our sense of self-sufficiency. It’s that muttering of the “Old Adam,” the sinful nature within us, that says (echoing the devil himself), “What do you need God for? What’s all this business about Jesus Christ? You’re getting along just fine. You don’t need all that religious junk! Look! You’re a fine person, everybody respects you in the community, you’ve never murdered anybody, you’ve never committed adultery or stolen anything. You don’t need that religious pablum!” Recognize that insidious voice? To kill the Old Adam within us who speaks that way, God’s Law comes in full power and with the conviction of the Holy Spirit and says, “You are a sinner. I am GOD ALMIGHTY, and I am utterly HOLY. You are a creature, and I am your CREATOR and JUDGE. You are accountable to Me, whether you like it or not.” And the Law goes even further than that. It cuts deep, way down deep inside where the sinful human boasting and pride really fester. The Law says that your feeling like you don’t need God is the same thing as worshipping yourself, putting self in God’s place - IDOLATRY - breaking the First Commandment. And what about the other commandments? You’ve never committed MURDER? Jesus said, “If you are even angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement.” You’ve never committed ADULTERY? Jesus said, “If you even look lustfully at someone, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart.” You see, there’s no escape! There’s no place you can run to when the Law of God, in all its fullness and severity, really confronts you. There’s no way to hide, no way to evade the issue, except to say “I’d rather go to hell than have to deal with God.” But the fact is, GOD never sends anyone to hell. People wind up there trying to run away from God. The Law of God zaps our excuses, and destroys our flimsy facades, ruins our rationalizations, and leaves us standing before the throne of the Almighty, naked, wide open to the eyes of God, with every deed, every thought, every failure to act, every motive right out in the open. We stand there absolutely defenseless before God’s holy Law that says, “You shall be holy, for I am holy,” and we know that He sees all our unholiness. As if that weren’t enough, the Law then makes us look at what we are; we’re forced to see ourselves as GOD sees us. Have you ever let the Law of God honestly show you yourself? Have you ever looked at yourself through GOD’S eyes? Then you know why Paul says that our boasting is excluded. Because we are simply reduced to nothing; we are revealed as ungodly, selfish, malicious sinners - even the most upright women and men! ABSOLUTE HOLINESS is what the Law of God demands, and when it hits us, we are killed by the blow. Our boasting mouths, our prideful pretensions, are stopped. We realize, suddenly, in the revealing presence of the Almighty, that, no matter how much we tried to deny it or run away from it or evade the issue, or live like there’s no such thing as God or Judgment, we still are “held accountable to God.” And that’s a terrifying realization. It’s the ultimate experience of guilt.
You know what most people then try to do? They say, “Okay, God. I finally give up. I recognize that You are God. So from now on, I’m determined to live a holy life according to Your Law. I promise that, Lord.” And then they go out and make a remarkable and very painful discovery: they cannot keep their promise! No matter how hard they try, they cannot keep from sinning. The evil thoughts just pop into their minds. Those vicious words seem to materialize from nowhere. What’s happening here? Well, the Law has already accomplished its major purpose, which was to show them their sinfulness; and now they’re trying to use the Law for a wrong purpose, to gain acceptance with God or to earn a place for themselves in Heaven. Maybe that’s where YOU are right now in your life. There are an awful lot of people in the churches who are right at that particular point. They’ve had an encounter with the Holy God, and they’ve been spiritually reduced to rubble by His demand for absolute righteousness. Now they’re out there, puffing away, trying desperately to be absolutely pure and holy, and they’re in a constant state of despair, because it simply can’t be done! Hear that, please! If you could be holy, then you would be God! And you certainly wouldn’t need a Savior!
So let’s go back to St. Paul in our text. He says right there, it can’t be done. “For no human being will be justified in [God’s] sight by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.” The purpose of the law is to give you knowledge, or consciousness, of your sin. In other words, it is to show you that you have a need. A need for what? For a Savior! The Law can tell you what God demands of you, but the Law cannot give you the power to be or to do what God commands. For that you need a Savior. The purpose of the Law is to drive you to that Savior, NOT to keep you in constant despair because you cannot live up to God’s requirements.
Now comes POINT 2 in the text: “But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” There is another way to attain the righteousness of God, Paul says, apart from the law. Here all those who have been trying fruitlessly to live a holy life under the law can cry out, “THANKS BE TO GOD!” The Law and the prophets bore witness to it. The prophets kept announcing the coming of the Messiah, and the Law kept the people of God living in the hope of a Savior. And then the righteousness of God became, at last, manifest (made public, open) apart from the Law. Paul describes exactly how.
FIRST, it is the righteousness of GOD, - so it’s the real thing; it is divine and holy, not fake or imitation. It comes through FAITH. But not just “faith” the way we use that word so often nowadays: “Oh, just have ‘faith’ and everything will work out…” Faith, to be faith, must have an object. So Paul says, it is faith in JESUS CHRIST, the Son of God. And then he says whom this righteousness of God is for: it is for ALL WHO BELIEVE, a word that can be even better translated from the Greek as “trust”. This righteousness of God that is apart from the Law, comes through FAITH in JESUS CHRIST —and it’s for all those who trust in JESUS as their SAVIOR from sin, death, and the devil.
Then immediately comes POINT 3, which is just about the same as Point 1. Paul says, “ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We might call this point the UNIVERSALITY OF SIN. It’s as if, before Paul moves to Point 4, which reveals the Good News about the way of Salvation, he wants to make doubly sure that every mouth is stopped, and the whole world and everybody reading or listening to this would know that they are in fact held accountable to God. That all people have sinned and fall short of the glory of God is the stern pronouncement of the Law of the Holy God. It excludes no one, not one single person. The need for salvation exists, whether you “feel” like it or not. GOD says it exists, and His Word is true and trustworthy & final! Symptomatic of our time, perhaps even more so than Paul’s, is a feeling that a lot of people have, that they have no personal guilt. Guilt is almost a stranger, an alien feeling. “Society caused it. I’m just doing (or thinking) what everybody else does. Why should I feel guilty? Why should I have any consciousness of sin? What do I have to confess? I’m really a decent person.” “ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” People with an attitude that denies that statement have clearly not yet encountered the Holy God of Eternity Whose very presence would smash their cosmic self-sufficiency. “Our God,” wrote the author of Hebrews, “is a consuming fire.” The fire of God’s holiness, and the blazing pronouncement of His divine Law, burn away our defenses. Paul is setting the stage here for the Good News. But first, all that self-deluding rubbish has to be cleared out of the way — the rubbish of feelings like: “I don’t need God,” “I can make it okay on my own,” “What do you mean, I’m a sinner!?!” When that’s all cleared away by the Law of God, and we stand naked, exposed to God and to ourselves for what we really are, then the message of the Gospel comes not as just another bunch of words, not some religious hokey-pokey or a pleasant fairy tale for children, but as the very Word of Life, the GOOD NEWS that tells us, “Hey, before you give up and turn to either despair or rebellion, listen to this! There is a way! God has made it possible for you to be saved apart from the Law! JESUS has done it FOR you! God has given you a SAVIOR!” And we breathe a sigh of eternal relief and lift up our hearts in praise and thanks to the Holy God who reaches down in love and gathers into His kingdom such unholy creatures as we.
And that’s the substance of POINT NUMBER 4 : the article on which the Church, and each individual human being, stands or falls, spiritually. Point 4 is The Remedy, provided by God and given to us. We are, wrote Paul, “justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by His blood, effective through faith.”
In this sentence is the sum and substance of the Gospel.
First, Paul wrote, we are “justified.” That’s a special word. In the Greek, it’s a legal term, taken right out of the law courts of Paul’s time. It means a verdict of complete acquittal! A point of grammar also must be noted here: Paul uses a passive verb. That’s very important. It says that we don’t justify ourselves, but we are justified by God. GOD does the whole work of saving. GOD HIMSELF sovereignly pronounces us “NOT GUILTY”. I may have shared this with you before, but it bears repeating because it’s a helpful device for remembering what it means to be “justified.” If I am “justified”, then God looks at me “Just-as-if-I’d” never sinned” - that’s how pure and holy we become in His sight.
How? Paul answers that. We are justified by His grace - and grace is a word which means free, undeserved, unmerited love, favor, and forgiveness. Those words, “by His grace” tell us something all-important about the nature of our God: that He is loving, that He actually wants us to be saved, and that He virtually hands us that salvation free of charge. That’s precisely what Paul means when he adds the phrase, “as a gift.” When we experience the reality of salvation, we experience it always “as a gift,” as something we don’t deserve and cannot achieve on our own. It’s just a pure GIFT, wonderful, surprising, majestic, and eternal. The gift comes through the redemption, Paul says, -that means literally, through the purchasing power which is in Christ Jesus. And notice, it’s not in us, but it’s in Christ Jesus. How was that purchasing power used? Paul explains that God gave Jesus as a “sacrifice of atonement,” a sacrifice for sins. Paul specifically mentions the BLOOD of Jesus. That was the “purchasing price” of our salvation - the blood of Jesus, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” And finally, Paul says, all this is to be received by FAITH. Now the most important aspect of saving faith is TRUST. Faith isn’t just head knowledge, but, far more than that, it’s HEART knowledge. If I have the faith that Paul is talking about here, then I TRUST God’s Word, that when Jesus died on the cross and shed His blood, He paid for all my sinfulness and selfishness, everything in me that the Law of God condemns as unholy and evil. As I put my trust in that Word that pronounces me forgiven and free, and as I put my trust in JESUS who has made me free from the penalty of sin, then I am justified. And when I am justified, that means that I am SAVED - now and for all eternity, provided only that I continue in the faith. That’s the message at the core of the Gospel: it was the rediscovery of that fantastic message that sparked the Lutheran Reformation 475 years ago, and it’s that continual rediscovery of the glorious verdict, “NOT GUILTY, FOR JESUS’ SAKE,” that keeps the Christian Church and the people within it a rejoicing community of God’s faithful, living with the assured hope of eternal life and the presence of God’s Spirit among us. He causes us not only to repent of our sins, but the Spirit makes alive and real to us the genuine forgiveness of our sins and clothes us with the righteousness of Jesus Christ — “the righteousness of God manifested apart from the Law, that comes through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” AMEN.
MAY THE PEACE OF GOD, WHICH SURPASSES ALL HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, STAND GUARD OVER YOUR HEARTS AND YOUR MINDS IN CHRIST JESUS, OUR LORD AND REDEEMER. AMEN.