Peace with God (Romans 5:1-11)

And our gospel reading this morning is from Matthew chapter 9, beginning in verse 35, all the way till chapter 10, verse 15.

Matthew 9 · chapter mention

Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every affliction.

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Then he said to his disciples, The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.

And he called to him his twelve disciples, and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction.

The names of the twelve apostles were these first Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus, Simon the zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them, go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and proclaim as you go, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons.

You received without paying, give without pay.

Acquire no gold or silver or copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics or sandals or a staff, for the laborer deserves his food.

And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it, and stay there until you depart.

And as you enter the house, greet it, and if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, and if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you.

And if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet, and when you leave that when you leave that house or town, truly I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.

The word of the Lord.

And friends, let's take a moment and let's pause.

Let's invite the Holy Spirit to fill us once again, that we would receive the Lord's word.

O Lord, from whom all good proceeds, grant us the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may always think those things that are good, and by your merciful guidance accomplish the same, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

And may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our Rock and our Redeemer.

Amen.

Amen.

So I remember quite vividly in my church growing up.

I didn't grow up Anglican, I think most of you all know that.

I grew up at a wonderful Bible church in Ottawa.

And as we as we'd exit the church building growing up, we had this beautiful old facility that was built much like a theater in the 1930s.

You would leave and head out into the heart of downtown, and you would walk right past an enormous wall of gospel tracts.

You remember gospel tracts?

You don't see much of those anymore.

But we'd walk right past an enormous wall that encouraged us to open up conversations and opportunities for evangelism.

I remember a number of those.

Some captured my imagination as a young child more than others.

But I remember one tract in particular, you might remember it with me if you remember these tracts.

It's called Steps to Peace with God.

And in Steps to Peace with God, there were four steps suggested, four biblical steps to coming to a reconciled relationship with our Savior.

The first step was to admit our need that I'm a sinner.

The second step was to be willing to turn from your sins, which is to say, to repent.

The third step was to believe that Jesus Christ died for you on the cross and rose from the grave.

And finally, the fourth step was through prayer inviting Jesus into our hearts and into our lives through the presence and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which is to say, to receive Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

These were the steps to peace with God.

The thing about steps to peace with God suggests that before we take them, we're not at peace with God, are we?

There's something that needs to be worked out.

There's something that needs to be reconciled.

I think our passage today from Romans chapter 5 is something like the original steps to peace with God.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

It's something like Paul's working out in real time.

What does it mean to have a right, renewed, restored relationship with our Heavenly Father?

What does it mean to have a saving, vivifying relationship with Him through Jesus Christ?

Peace with God through faith.

Therefore, writes the Apostle Paul, since we've been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

What's at the heart of peace with God?

It's this big five-syllable word that theologians and biblical scholars like to throw around, justification.

But what does justification mean?

What is justification about?

Paul's using it, it's a legal term.

It brings us right into the courtroom.

And it's as though we were acquitted from our wrongs.

It's as though we've been found righteous.

We've been found rightly related to our good judge.

Justification is a big deal for Paul.

It doesn't take long going through his letter to the Romans or Galatians or any of his other letters to discover that this is at the heart of what Paul wants us to know about the gospel.

Justification is a big deal for the church as well.

One of my heroes of the faith, the church reformer Martin Luther, said that justification is the doctrine by which the church stands or falls.

This is a very, very big deal.

At the heart of peace with God, at the heart of salvation, lies this pig word justification.

So what does that mean for us?

What does it mean to have peace with God?

This is what I want us to explore this morning.

How can we be assured that we are at peace with God?

Why do we need to be brought to peace with God?

Let's explore this together.

Romans is a wonderful letter.

It's Paul's lengthiest letter.

It's known something as his magnum opus on the gospel.

Paul is writing this letter to a very divided church.

It's a church that's split right down the middle.

See, five years previous to Paul's writing this letter, Emperor Claudius expelled all Jewish people from Rome because they were quabbling over some guy named Crestos, which scholars almost are certain is a misunderstanding of Christ or Christus, right?

There's some kind of dispute happening, and to save himself the trouble, the emperor expelled all Jewish people from Rome.

And now five years later, the Jews are coming back, and Jewish Christians are coming back to find a very different church than when they had left it.

A church that's primarily a Gentile or non-Jewish church, a church that practices the faith in unfamiliar ways, a church that worships in new and distinct ways.

And so suddenly there's a whole group of Christians who feel very divided and very disenfranchised from the church that they left.

So here Paul is writing a very divided, a very a church that's engaged in a whole lot of cultural and social tension here.

And Paul wants these Roman Christians, Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians alike, to become united in the gospel.

And as they become united in the gospel, they become united to the God who gives them this good news.

Paul writes this in the first chapter that the gospel is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes.

That's Jew and Gentile alike.

The gospel is the power of salvation for all those who believe.

Paul wants this divided church to understand that if you're going to have unity, you're only going to have unity in the good news of the gospel.

But if we're going to understand what makes the gospel good news, we need to understand the bad news.

We need to understand the predicament we find ourselves in, that the gospel answers.

So in chapters 1 to 4, Paul begins his letter by acknowledging that God is a holy and righteous God, and the problem that we find ourselves in is that we are not.

We are not holy.

We are not righteous in and of ourselves.

We are, in fact, idolaters who've exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped the creature rather than the creator.

The very trajectory and heart of our lives is aimed at something other than who God is in his glory, in his beauty, and in his love.

We actually dove into this passage together the last time we gathered together in person in March.

We looked at the grim, fatal diagnosis of sin so that we could understand the good news of the gospel.

Paul continues by exploring a possible solution to this problem.

Well, if I'm a sinner, if I'm unrighteous, then I need to work really hard to become righteous and to earn it before God.

And so Paul explores the problem of performance.

He explores this idea that if we vigorously apply ourselves to performing God's law, we can earn our righteousness before God.

And he builds off of familiar texts like we just read out of Exodus 19 that introduces us to God's law, where the people of God say, this is what we're going to do.

But the law gets misapplied and misunderstood.

The people of God understand that they start to think, if I can perform what God asks me, then I can earn righteousness on myself.

And what Paul wants these Roman Christians to understand is that there is no amount of performance that will earn righteousness before God.

If you try and earn it with the law, you better keep the whole law.

And because none of us keeps the whole law, we all stand condemned before the law.

So, Paul witnesses to the problem of sin, the problem, the inadequacy of performing the law, and now Paul wants to witness to the power of our salvation.

Paul writes this, Romans 3.23, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, full stop.

That's where we find ourselves apart from grace.

We find ourselves separated from God.

We find ourselves alienated from God.

We find ourselves under God's wrath.

But the good news, Paul continues on, is to say that all are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.

We receive our salvation, our justification by faith as though it were gifts, something freely offered to us through the cross of Christ.

And now we're brought into this family of promise, not a particular ethnic group, but a multi-ethnic, multinational group that are gathered together in the faith that the true ancestors of Abraham, who was justified by his faith, are not one particular branch of descendants, but are people from all around gathered into this very same faith.

Here's where we find ourselves, friends.

Here's where the Roman Christians found themselves.

Here's where we are too.

So are you tracking with me?

That's a little bit of a lengthy introduction, I know, to Romans.

But it's important because Paul sets up the foundation of his argument right here in the first four chapters.

And if we start right in chapter five, if we start with a therefore, it's like we're starting the movie halfway through.

We're not gonna understand what's going on unless we understand what Paul is talking about and what's he what he's setting himself up for.

When we encounter a therefore, I just find it's a very helpful principle to ask the question, what is it therefore?

We've probably heard that one before, right?

When we see a therefore in Scripture, we gotta ask, what is it therefore?

So here we find ourselves in the middle of the book of Romans, chapter five.

Therefore, since we've been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

What does it mean to be justified?

It means we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

So the first question I think we gotta ask is what does peace mean?

Because there's a lot of different ways we use this word peace.

I think the way I hear peace used most often in relationship with God kind of talks about our own interior inner landscape, our own subjective interior landscape.

And I'm not trying to say that's unimportant to the Lord.

I think that's a very important thing and a way that the Lord can speak with us and help us discern.

But this isn't what Paul is talking about, our own inner landscape, how we're kind of feeling today, right?

I feel like, yeah, I feel like God and I are kind of getting along today.

Paul's talking about something so much more foundational and so much more important than our feelings, which can change day to day.

Paul is talking about more than the warm fuzzies we might have on one particular day or another.

He's talking also more about this sort of peaceable or pleasant relationship that we might assume we have with God.

I mean, I think the difficult truth is I think many assume that we, just by being us, are entitled to a peaceful and pleasant relationship with the Lord, right?

I'm a likable person.

I generally try and do what's good.

Here we all are coming to church on Zoom, right?

I mean, we're we're doing the stuff that God wants us to do.

We're likable enough, we're generally good.

And you know what?

God's generally agreeable and kind of grandfatherly, right?

He kind of wants to get to know us.

Why wouldn't he want to get to know us, right?

Now it's so true that God loves us.

I don't want us to lose sight of that fact.

We're going to see just how deep this love goes in a moment.

But I think when we sell ourselves short of God's holy love, then we've lost something very important about who God is.

When we've lost sight, when we've divorced holiness from God's love, then we've lost something that is very true and foundational to who God reveals Himself to be.

Apart from grace in Christ, we find ourselves under God's wrath.

Paul writes this in the first chapter of Romans.

Friends, Paul is talking about all of us, everyone, apart from grace, we are under the wrath of God.

So when we talk about salvation, we're talking about being saved from sin.

Yes, it's true.

Our predicament is that sin results in the wrath of God.

We need to be saved and brought from a wrong relationship with God and into a right one.

And it's precisely because God loves us that that's his desire for us.

His God's wrath is God's love burning hot.

He will not let us, he will not let us run astray or run amok, but wants to call us into the right way, into the way of life, into the way of truth, into the way of justice.

This is God's desire for us, and it's why he calls us to repentance.

See, we need more than just divine toleration.

We know we're a sinner God, but maybe you can kind of ignore that and put that to the side, and you know, we'll we'll kind of just we'll kind of just get along from a distance.

We need more than just divine toleration.

We need divine reconciliation.

And that means we need forgiveness.

That's what Paul is talking about in verse 11.

Through Christ, we have now received reconciliation.

I think the most vivid picture, biblical picture of this reconciliation is right in Luke 15 when we talk about the prodigal son.

Here's a son who's taken his father as inheritance, squandered it, gone off into the far country, and now very sheepishly finds his way, coming back to the father.

Right?

And he's rehearsing his lines in his head, saying, I don't even deserve to be your son, I just want to be your servant, because at least servants get fed more than pig slop.

Here, and and as the son approaches the father, the father runs out and throws his arms around the son.

This is the power of grace and reconciliation and forgiveness.

It requires us to turn from our wickedness and back to God so that we can find grace and live.

And this is God's desire for the sinner, folks.

Let's make no mistake, God does not delight to punish or to condemn or to subject sinners to his wrath, but his desire for sinners is that we would turn and receive his love and forgiveness once again and find life in his name.

Paul writes in verse 2 that through Christ we obtain access by faith into this grace in which we stand.

Friends, grace, forgiveness, reconciliation is that gift that we receive by placing our faith in Jesus, who has earned that reconciliation on our behalf.

God's grace is revealed in his superabundant, generous love.

It's the overflow of the love between Father and Son that spills out into creation and spills out particularly towards us in Christ.

We need the grace of the Father.

And we come to our Lord Jesus Christ, who is eager to give us this grace of reconciliation and to renew us and to bring us back into peace with God our Father.

What does justification mean for us?

It means peace with God.

More than just warm fuzzies, more than just, I think God and I are sort of okay, we hang out sometimes.

This is a foundational, fundamental peace, regardless of our day or our performance.

No matter how joyful or hard our week has been, we can rest assured that we are saved, that we are in a right relationship with God in Christ, not because of our performance, friends, but because of His, because of His cross, because of His righteousness, because of His sinlessness.

See, that's the good news of justification, isn't it?

The good news of justification is that while we were still weak, Paul writes in verse 6, which is also a word that I think you could even more accurately translate as helpless or powerless, while we were powerless to save ourselves, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

That's you and me.

When we were powerless to save ourselves from the wrath of God, Christ accomplished this for us on the cross.

And now God chose his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

That's how much God loves sinners, friends.

He's not looking to see who's performing well, he's not looking to see who's trying real hard.

He loves sinners enough that he gave us his only son, that whoever would believe in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

That's why Paul concludes how much more can we have confidence that as when he died for sinners, so too will he see us through in our justification and our hope for glory.

We can take great assurance that we are saved by his name.

So that's the cross.

When we look at the cross, we see the very love of God put on display as Christ dies our death, as he puts the power of, as he breaks the power of sin, and as he puts our death to death.

And so that by his resurrection, by his vindication, by his victory over death, we too can share in that vindication and victory, and we can be justified in his name.

We can be filled with the Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee that God will see this justifying work through that it has been accomplished.

And now we can rest assured of our salvation.

If we've placed our faith in Jesus, we are rescued from God's wrath against sin.

Full stop.

There's no transaction here.

There's no, I'm gonna try real hard, God, so that you know you'll give me a little bit of what I want.

I'm gonna try real hard so I can, you know, earn it, fake it till you make it, so to speak.

There's none of that.

There is only Jesus, you have accomplished this for me, and I trust you.

I don't trust in anything or anyone else for my salvation but you.

Since therefore we've been justified by his blood, that is Jesus' blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.

For if we were enemies when we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

So, friends, if we ever doubt our salvation, if we ever doubt that we're at peace with God, we have only to look at the cross and see our eternal security put on display.

To see our hope, our hope of glory, our hope of eternal life, our hope of peace with God right then and there.

And that means we can practice hope in all circumstances.

Because you'll notice Paul says that we have hope of glory, but we also rejoice in the hope in present suffering.

Hope is a funny word, isn't it?

It can kind of sound like wishful thinking, like I hope the weather sure warms up, or you know, I hope my Amazon package arrives today.

It can sound like wishful thinking, but what we're talking about is a confident assurance.

I can stand by this, I can take this check to the bank with full confidence that it will come through, that Jesus will come through.

Hope will not put us to shame, is what Paul says in verse 5.

God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

The Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ, and this is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Friends, the Holy Spirit indwells us.

He's our guarantee that in all circumstances we can have hope of eternal life.

Friends, we find ourselves in very distressing circumstances.

We look at the world, we look at this pandemic, we look at our own lives, and we see the suffering and the trials and the tribulations that we face each and every day, and yet we are not left without hope.

Because we know that there was an answer for this in Christ.

We can face each and every circumstance with the confidence that comes with peace with God.

Not only do we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

I'm convinced that God doesn't delight in suffering.

He's not dealing out suffering gleefully.

God does redeem our suffering, and the cross is the proof of that, isn't it?

God enters right into our suffering and turns it around.

Because we're justified, we experience that peace, that grace, that glory, and now we can endure present suffering with a sure and certain hope.

We can practice what James says in the first chapter of his epistle.

We can count it all joy, brothers and sisters, when we meet trials of various kinds.

You know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

Suffering is not something God retreats from, it's something God enters into, and we can have the confidence, the hope of faith, of peace with God in Christ to enter into suffering as well, with the full assurance that this too will be redeemed, that this too will give way to an even greater glory, that this too will form us and shape us, and God will redeem this for his purposes.

Suffering is never wasted time.

There is hope in all circumstances.

So, friends, what does justification mean for you and I?

In every circumstance we have peace with God.

It doesn't matter on how we feel on this particular day.

It doesn't even matter what's going on in our external circumstances.

We might be on the mountaintop, we might be in a deep and dismal valley.

But here we are with perfect confidence that Christ has won for us peace with God.

And when we put our trust in Him, we are renewed, regenerated.

We are brought into a right standing with Him who has created us.

And we're invited into that very hope of glory.

So, friends, wherever we're at with the Lord, maybe right now we're just exploring who this Jesus guy is and what he says and what he's about.

And that's a wonderful thing, and I'm so glad you're joining us.

Perhaps Jesus wants you to consider what that promise of peace means for you, that confidence that you, that God is for you, and that you are secure as you put your trust in him.

I invite you to consider who this Jesus is, this peace that he has won for you on the cross, and even to place your faith in him who has won this for you.

Perhaps some of us are seasoned disciples and we've been through many storms and many trials and many sufferings of life.

Friends, we can take confidence that this suffering too will be redeemed.

God will use it.

God has not abandoned us, and this is not wasted time.

But this suffering will give way to a greater glory and a greater peace, and we can have confidence that we will behold the face of God in that day.

So, what does justification mean?

It means peace with God through Christ by faith.

So, friends, let us sing to Jesus Christ, who is our living hope.

Amen.