Romans – Where Hope Comes From

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Let's get to work, everybody.

We are in part five of a 10-week series.

It's a world record long series for Access Church, our world.

That's it.

But it's five, uh week five of 10 weeks.

And here's what we've talked about in this series.

Romans is one of the meatiest, one of the most meaningful books in all of Scripture.

It is full of doctrine and theology.

Honestly, if you're new to faith, it can be kind of difficult to walk through this book.

So we wanted to teach it as we went through it together.

I want you to understand how big of a deal this is.

Martin Luther said about Romans that Romans is the true masterpiece of the New Testament.

It is a masterpiece of a book.

And so we're going through it one chapter at a time.

I started week one in the series by saying this: that Romans 1, 16 and 17, Paul says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The word gospel simply means good news.

The message of Jesus is good news.

So we should be unashamed of it.

Week two got a little heavy.

The book gets really dark.

And he talks about the wrath of God.

And I don't want to go and teach the whole thing again, but I want you to watch it if you missed it because it is foundational to understanding where the rest of the book goes.

And if all you had was Romans 1 and 2, it really feels kind of dark, feels kind of desolate.

Then Romans 3 and 4, it's like God shines the light of hope in for all of us.

And he talks about what God did through Jesus coming for us to bring us close to Him again.

The last two weeks, Pastor Ida and Pastor Isaiah bought beautiful messages.

Today, we're in week five, and Paul talks about a topic that's gonna leave us feeling supercharged today.

It's this real upper of a message on suffering.

So we'll see, we'll see how that goes.

Okay, let's get to work.

Um, many years ago, when my kids were really little, I wanted to be a good dad.

So part of my goal as their dad was to introduce them to music and to movies and to culture.

I wanted my kids to be cultured.

So as early as I could in life, I introduced them to the trilogy.

You know what I'm talking about.

The trilogy.

These are the things that people love.

Adults love, adults dress up like them.

You know what I'm talking about, right?

Obviously, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, the Alvin and the chipmunks.

And my kids, when they were little, they loved Alvin and Simon and Theodore.

Now I've got three kids and they argue about which one is which.

And so, anyways, they loved these movies.

I'll never forget.

There was one time when I was sitting in the living room working, and my boys were watching one of the movies.

If you don't know the story, I'm gonna ruin it for you.

Spoiler alert, this movie's like 20 years old.

But the movie is about these three chipmunks who can sing, and they meet this guy named Dave, and they want Dave to adopt them as his kids, and so there's this whole back and forth there.

And then we meet a villain, an antagonist, his name is Ian.

Ian discovers their talent and he wants to take them so he can exploit them and make money.

So, this whole movie, at the end of the movie, there's this moment where Ian captures the chipmunks and he's got them in a cage, and it seems hopeless, like all hope is lost.

And I'll never forget, I looked over and my boys are watching this and they're just sobbing.

I'm like, guys, you've seen this movie dozens and dozens and dozens of times.

You know what happens at the end of the story, you know that Dave's gonna rescue them, you know it's going to be fine.

And I remember one of them said, Dad, right now, all I can think about is right now.

How many of us that's our life?

That no matter how faithful God's been to us, no matter how good he's been, no matter how many times he's broken through when you needed a breakthrough, no matter how many times he's spoken to you, you get in the middle of a difficult day or a dark season in your life, and all you can see is right now.

It's like your perspective gets completely nearsighted.

You can't see all that God has for you because you're so consumed with what's happening right here and right now.

But we live in a world where it's all about my happiness, it's all about me, it's all me-centered.

In fact, if you feel that way today, if you feel like you you can't really see past how you're feeling in this moment right now, I need you to know you come by it honestly.

Almost 250 years ago, our forefathers in our country wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Let's see how much you remember from sixth grade history.

Here's a line.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, good for you.

You see, baked into the Declaration of Independence, one of the founding documents of our country is this belief that we should have life and liberty in the pursuit of happiness.

Got a question for you.

How's it going?

Like, how's that pursuit of happiness?

How's it working out for you?

Because according to a lot of national surveys that have happened in the last five years, it's not going super well.

The use of prescription anti-anxiety medication has literally jumped 34% in just the last two years.

Over 50% of people claim to have anxiety and stress in their life based on money.

It's been studied that what happens is that about$75,000 a year of income, that's when happiness stops and stress actually begins to start.

It's been reported that the happiest age in a person's life happens in their mid-20s.

And after the person's mid-20s, the happiness and joy index takes a free fall until a person hits their early to mid-50s.

And I don't know why that is.

I have no stats, but I just believe it's because God created grandchildren.

Any grandparents in the room, yes, like grandkids are God's reward for not killing your own kids.

That's what I've heard.

Um, this one of the studies from Gallup last year said this only 38% of Americans identified themselves as happy or satisfied in life right now.

It doesn't seem like the pursuit of happiness is going super well for many people, does it?

And I think that that darkness is actually one of the most beautiful opportunities for the church to rise up and to stand out.

I think that in the middle of a world that's full of misery, the church can stand up and offer ministry.

What does it mean?

In the book of Romans, chapter five, where we're going to start today, Paul says this before he talks about suffering, he uses a word that he calls Christians to.

This is a hard word, it's not a word that we use very often, but it's the word rejoice.

This word rejoice is beautiful.

He uses it three times in the first 11 verses in this chapter.

The word rejoice means to find joy, and then when you put re in front of something, it means you do it again.

So you find joy and you just keep on finding it over and over and over.

If you go to the dictionary and search for rejoice, an archaic definition of the word is to cause joy around you.

I think there's something beautiful in that.

Like what if the church, more specifically, what if you and what if what if me?

What if we all just made this decision that we're gonna be people who rejoice in the middle of our circumstances, regardless of what's happening around us?

You see, for so many people, their joy comes from their circumstances, it comes from what's happening around them.

Can I offer you a little bit of perspective today?

Happiness is an inside job.

What that means is it happens inside of you.

No matter what's happening in your circumstances, no matter what's happening externally, joy, true happiness, it comes from within.

So here's what I want to do.

We're gonna read the first 11 verses of Romans chapter 5 today, and I want to show you the three ways Paul encourages us to rejoice.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

Now, the word that he uses for rejoice, we're gonna see it three different words used, but in Greek, it's the same word.

If you go to different translations of the Bible, like the ESV, it replaces the words we're gonna read with the word rejoice.

I'll point it out to you as we go.

Here's the first one.

Paul encourages us if we're gonna be people who can stand up in the middle of all the devastation in the world, number one, we rejoice in God.

Now I know this seems obvious to so many of us, but let me explain it.

Romans chapter 5, verse 1.

Romans 5:1

He says this.

He says, Therefore, and anytime you read a verse that starts with, therefore, you should ask the question, what's it there for?

What's it there for?

Why is this there?

It's because he just said the world is dark, and if we're not careful, we will be subject to God's wrath.

But because of Jesus' sacrifice and because of his love, we can be made right with God again.

So therefore, in spite of all that, since we have been justified through faith, I'm gonna talk about these words in a moment, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

He says, Through whom we have gained access, that's a good church name.

We have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

He says, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God.

This word boast is the same Greek word that some translators translate to the word rejoice.

He says, So we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

Now I want you to see some stuff from these verses because this is so important.

The first thing he says is you need to understand, therefore, we've been justified by faith.

This word justified is such an important word to understand, and it's not a word that you probably have used in your conversations very often.

The word justified means moving from unrighteous to righteous.

Last week, Pastor Isaiah said righteousness literally means being in right standing with God.

So to be justified means there was a point in your life where you were far from God.

In fact, we'll read later today that because of sin, we are literally enemies with God, unrighteous, and justification is God saying, no, no, no, no, you were once that, but now because of what Jesus did for you, because you've received his gift, I'm literally redesignating.

I'm changing your whole identity from unrighteous to righteous.

This was God's decision for you.

He moved us from righteousness, unrighteous to righteous.

And then he says this because of what Jesus did in that moment of justification for you, now you and I can walk in peace.

Now, why does this matter?

It matters because the reason we can rejoice in God is because we get to walk with the peace or a sense of holy confidence that the rest of the world doesn't have.

This is the reason worship matters so much.

Worship is literally magnifying something.

If you go to a football game, you see people throw their hands up in excitement, they're magnifying the moment.

Here's what many of us tend to do: we tend to magnify our problems.

What do you mean?

Well, look at the way you pray.

Oh God, help me with this problem.

Oh God, step into this relationship.

Oh God, I need you to intervene in my finances.

Oh God, I need you to step in because she's threatening to leave me.

Oh God, I desperately need a promotion.

What are you doing?

You're telling God how big your problems are.

Worship is reminding our souls of how big, how magnificent our great God is.

What happens when you do that?

It makes all of the problems in this world take their rightful place as small compared to Him.

Are you with me on this?

So in the middle of your difficulties, you can worry or you can worship.

What happens when we worship?

Our heart gets aligned with God's, and what happens is he fills our heart with peace.

You ever known someone who's going through the most difficult situation and they're just like, it's fine.

God'll get me.

I'll get through this.

There is a peace that comes when we worship him in this.

And then he says this, and then he says, and we have access by faith to God.

This is funny.

Many years ago, I was speaking at something, and the person who was introducing me said, Pastor Jason started a church called Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

He goes, Jason, I don't even know how you got the name Access.

Is it from Romans chapter 5 where he says we have access to God by faith?

Romans 5 · chapter mention

And I didn't know what to say because the truth was when we started our church many years ago, I just needed a name.

And this is back in the day when the internet wasn't as big of a deal, but we had yellow pages.

Anybody old enough to remember yellow pages?

And like the closer you named your organization, your church, or your business to the top of the alphabet, like A, the higher you were listed.

I was just trying to cheat the system, everybody.

I didn't have a good name.

He says we have access to God.

Let's talk for a second.

Have you ever been denied access to something?

Can you remember 2020 when the whole world shut down?

And all of a sudden you couldn't go to school if you were a kid.

Many places you couldn't go to work if you had a job.

You couldn't go to stores, you couldn't go to restaurants, you couldn't go to movie theaters, you couldn't go to pools.

Everything that was fun was closed.

The government was open, but everything that was fun was closed.

We should have reversed that.

But I'll never forget there was a day when uh we found out that my wife's favorite breakfast spot, First Watch, was gonna be opening.

And we were so excited.

We literally got up early.

We were the first people in line the day that First Watch opened.

And I'll never forget, like I've been going to restaurants my whole life, but I felt like a million bucks walking in because for a long time I've been denied access, and now I was given access.

I'll never forget.

It was such a funny thing.

I was never like a fighter when it came to all the COVID rules.

Like I didn't care, vaccine knot, mask not, I didn't care.

But I just didn't like rules that didn't make sense.

I'll never forget the waitress comes and she takes our drink order.

She fills the drinks, she puts them on her tray, she walks the tray to us, but instead of like giving us the drinks, she just kind of did this.

And I was like, you've literally touched it at every single step of the way.

You can't, anyways, just make it make sense.

That was my whole thing.

It didn't make sense to me.

It felt so good to be invited back into a place that I felt like I should have access to the whole time.

Here's what here's what the picture of Scripture is.

Because of faith in Jesus, now we have direct access to God.

Timothy Keller, who just recently died, he said, Who would dare wake up a king at three o'clock in the morning to simply ask for a drink of water other than a child?

Think about this.

A king has the power to put someone to death for disturbing his sleep.

But a child walks in with no fear because that's not just a king, that's his dad.

You and I have uninterrupted access directly to our Father in heaven.

You don't have to build a sacrifice, you don't have to slit the throat of an animal, you can literally just approach God whenever you want.

We have access to God.

This is a reason to rejoice.

Second reason we rejoice is we can rejoice in hardship.

And no one cheered for this.

Like no one gets excited.

We get to rejoice during suffering.

And no one, no one is excited.

Oh God, thank you so much.

I lost that job that I so desperately wanted.

Thank you.

Oh God, she walked out on me and she's threatening divorce.

Yes, this is the best day ever.

No, no one does that.

When life gets hard, we tend to tell God how big our challenges and our problems are, but you are actually invited by God to rejoice in the middle of your suffering.

Let me show it to you like this Ephesians 5, verses 3 and 4.

Ephesians 5:3

He says, not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings.

This word glory is the same Greek word that translated to boast, which also translates to rejoice.

He's like, we rejoice in our sufferings.

Does anybody here do that?

Like, I don't.

I got a long way to go with Jesus.

I don't rejoice in my sufferings.

Here's the reason.

He says, because we know that suffering produces perseverance and perseverance character, and character hope, hope does not put us to shame.

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

I love this.

This is the first time in Romans chapter 5 that he talks about the Holy Spirit.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

It's the first time he's talked about the Holy Spirit since Romans chapter 1.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

By Romans chapter 8, which is the middle of the book, if you can imagine scaling a mountain, you get to the pinnacle of the book.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

He mentions the Holy Spirit 20 times in Romans 8.

Why?

Because the only way through the challenges in your life is to do it empowered by the Holy Spirit.

You cannot live the life that God has called you to live in your own strength.

I don't need, and I don't know who needs to hear that, but some of you are exhausted because you've depleted yourself trying to fight the battles in your life in your own strength.

You need the power of the Holy Spirit.

So he says, we can rejoice in our sufferings, we can boast in our sufferings.

How do we do that?

Well, he gives us this beautiful pathway.

Number one, he says this.

He says, We rejoice in our sufferings.

Now, this is so weird because the whole world rejoices after their sufferings, right?

We rejoice when the restaurants reopen, we rejoice when the tragedy's over, we rejoice when the difficult season is done, we rejoice after.

And I think the greatest ministry you can have to the world is when the world is crying and desperate for help.

You stand up and say, I'm rejoicing, God, in the middle of it, because it's not my strength that carries me through in the first place.

This is one of the things I so admire about my wife.

You know, when you get married, like I don't care how much you say, you don't really know the person.

Like you may think you know the person, but marriage is a great revealer to you.

And so we fell in love and we got married.

Six months into marriage, she found a lump in her leg that turned out to be stage two, non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

For six months, she went through eight grueling rounds of chemo.

For six months, every few weeks, she had to spend several days in the hospital to get this toxic drug forced through her body.

There were days I came home, found her asleep with her hands over her chest like this, and her breathing was so shallow, and her eyes were so sunken in from the anemia that I thought she had died.

And every time we went to the hospital, she was the one bringing joy to the whole oncology floor.

Seven months into marriage, she's had the diagnosis we had to shave her head because her hair was falling out.

I mean, months later, this beautiful girl who always has beautiful, perfect hair looks like she stepped up out of a Maybelline commercial, you know.

Like every time, every time she, every time she would like see people with no hair, she would make a joke about it.

Like I remember her asking one of the nurses, hey, does this place have a hairdryer?

You know what I mean?

Like it made no sense.

But she had joy in the middle of difficulties.

How can you have joy?

Why does this matter?

Here's what I want you to get.

It's because your character is actually forged through hardship.

You need hard days in your life because God uses it as a way, like a sculptor with an empty stone, to carve out of you capacity.

It's what carves out of you the character that God has for you.

Number two is this he says that we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, which is strength to keep on going.

Look, I'll never forget about five years ago I joined a CrossFit.

And I thought to myself, I got this.

I was cocky, I thought I could do this, it should be no problem.

I showed up on the first day.

I was so naive.

I had no water with me, I had nothing with me at all.

I thought I got this, this can't be that hard.

At the end of the warm-up, okay, not like the workout, like we hadn't lifted weights.

I had to lay down because I thought I was gonna pass out or throw up.

Do you know what I mean?

But then what did I do?

Showed up the next day.

I kept showing up, and I don't want to lie and pretend that I'm good at it because I am not, but I do want you to understand something.

If you keep showing up, you eventually get better at something.

It's the same thing in your relationship with God.

If every single day that you face a storm in your life, you just stand up and keep going, you know what happens?

You build endurance to get through.

And here's what endurance does.

Number three, endurance produces character, it produces character.

Here's what you need to get.

You need to understand that you cannot decide what happens to you, but you can decide who you become as a result.

John chapter 17, Jesus said this, and I want you to this is Jesus' words.

John 17 · chapter mention

He says, In this world you will have trouble.

Like I wish he would have said happiness.

I wish he would have said the business will be all up and to the right.

No, no.

Jesus says, in this world you will have trouble.

Remember the parable where Jesus tells the story about the two people who build their house, one who builds it on the rock and one who builds it on the sand.

If you've heard the story, it says there went the rain and winds came, and the house that was built on the sand fell, and the house that was built on the rock stood.

And everyone says, you know, you got to pay attention to the foundation of your life.

And that's true.

You know what else is true?

The storm came to both houses.

Like you will face difficult days.

When my wife was diagnosed with cancer, I'll never forget, I uh I called up a mentor in my life.

I don't know if you have anyone in your life who, when they see you, they just read your mail.

Like they just know what's going on.

And I went and sat down with him and I kind of poured my guts out on this guy.

I'm like, I'm so mad at God and everyone in life, and this was my trajectory in life, and I don't know why this happened.

And he said to me, He goes, Jason, look, everyone in this life suffers.

Some people suffer early, like you, most people suffer late in life.

Here's what suffering does suffering carves out of you the capacity to trust God more.

It's true.

Well, were there not that suffering season there?

There is no access church.

You have no idea what it means.

Let me offer parents one thought in the room.

Parents, if you stop your kids from ever suffering, if you intervene anytime life gets remotely hard for them, you are robbing them of the ability to carve out the character they need to make it through this life.

They need to face some challenges.

Number four is this you need to understand that character is what produces hope.

And hope is what we need.

One of the most foundational formational books in my whole life was a book I read in college called Man's Search for Meaning.

It's written by an Austrian-born Jewish psychologist named Viktor Frankel, who studied the people who were going through the Holocaust with him.

He was thrown into a concentration camp, and he said, if I'm going to be here, I might as well learn from this.

And so he started documenting what was happening in the Holocaust, and he realized that there was one differentiating characteristic of people who lived and people who gave up the will to live.

And it was hope.

He said, those who had the ability to believe that tomorrow might be the end of this war, that tomorrow might be the day that they're released and they get back to their wife or back to their kids, those were the ones who kept on living.

But those who lost hope lost the ability to see the future and they lost the ability to live.

I'll never forget a story he told.

He said he was in a jail cell.

He said it was incredibly small and everything was gray.

The floor was gray, the concrete walls were gray, his prison outfit, his prison garb was gray, everything was gray, colorless, and lifeless.

And he said at the bottom of the floor there was a drain in the bottom, and he noticed at the bottom of the drain there was a little tiny weed growing up in the drain.

The kind of weed, if it was growing in your sidewalk, you'd pick it up and just throw it away.

He said, When I saw it though, something about the color of green flooded his heart with hope.

Maybe this world isn't all gray.

Maybe there is beauty and color still to be excavated out of it.

And for him, it was all he needed to keep going.

Here's the point.

If character produces hope, if the fruit of the Spirit, love and joy and peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, if that's what leads us to hope, then we need to pay attention to our character.

Why?

Number five, it's because hope does not put us to shame.

Essentially, God's character is on the line.

If you want to get through this life in the way that you can have joy in the midst of unbelievable darkness, here's the pathway.

Let me take a minute and take a side trail and talk to the leaders in the room.

If you lead anything, if you lead a family, if you lead a business, if you lead a group at your business, if you're a mid-level manager, if you lead a Fortune 500 company, if you lead anyone at all, you need to understand the simple principle that's found from these verses.

Leadership is about increasing your pain threshold.

What do you mean?

It's because pain has this way of revealing who you actually are.

It has this way of forming your character.

And here's what I know about leadership.

Every single level of leadership that you ascend to comes with a different level of pain.

One of the greatest problems that you could ever have is to wish to have what someone else has because you have no idea the levels of pain that they went through to even get there in the first place.

If God took you from where you were and elevated you to their level, the pressure of that moment could crush you.

So if you want to be a bigger leader, if you want to have more influence, what do you do?

You increase your pain threshold.

Here's why.

The greater the pain, the greater the impact.

If we go back to the pathway that we read a moment ago, here's what we understand about pain.

Pain is a tool that God uses to form us into who He's called us to be.

If you want to be who God's called you to become, stop running from every situation of pain and realize that God uses it.

I joked about 2020 earlier.

Let me say this to you: 2020 was the hardest year of my life as a leader ever.

I went to a therapy thing earlier this year to kind of unpack and process some of that pain.

And what I told the therapist was for a whole year I felt a knot in my stomach.

For a whole year I felt like I couldn't win.

Said too much for this group, didn't say enough for this group, didn't act, didn't do this, did this.

Every person was mad about everything.

Remember all the madness from 2020.

I told him all these things, and then um I said I just couldn't win for a whole year.

He goes, but what's come out of it?

I was like, that's a good question.

And I hadn't really thought about it, but here's what I learned has come out of it.

Everything that I have any sense of influence in, our church, my family, everything is better, bigger, stronger, and with it has come new levels of pain.

But here's what I've learned.

The stuff that would have killed me in 2018 and 2019 don't really affect me at all anymore because the pain of 2020 is something God used to elevate me to the level I'm at.

God wants to use the pain in your life, so don't run from it, but allow him to be the master sculptor who is sculpting and carving you into that which he's created you to be.

We can rejoice in God.

We can rejoice in our hardship.

Number three, we can also rejoice in reconciliation.

Yet you ever had a relationship fall apart?

It doesn't have to be romantic.

It could be a friendship, it could be a family member.

There is nothing more beautiful than when people who have fallen apart for some reason say, I love you more than what we went through.

I love you more than whatever those circumstances were, so therefore, and they they bring reconciliation to the table.

See, the older you get, you understand something.

The most important stuff in your life isn't stuff, it's relationships.

The most important stuff in your life isn't stuff that you can buy at a store.

The most important stuff in your life is the people you will do it with.

And God understands this.

The end of Romans 5, 1 through 11, which we're gonna read in a moment, shows God's heart for us.

And as we read it, I want you to find your part in this story.

Romans chapter 5 says this.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

You see, at just the right time when we were still powerless, what does this mean?

It means unable to fix the chasm between God and us, unable to somehow get past our own sin, unable to earn forgiveness for our sin while we were powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

Let me pastor you for just a moment on this one phrase alone.

When the world around you is acting ungodly, when you see Christians rising up and boycotting different stores or places or people because of what they've done, I want you to ask this question of yourself.

Why are they doing that?

Ready?

Because they're ungodly.

What do ungodly people do?

Things that are ungodly.

I want you to remember this.

Christ died for them.

Listen to me.

What does scripture teach?

It is the kindness of the Lord that leads to repentance.

It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict.

It is not my job.

So I don't influence anything with the Facebook post.

I influence things by loving the people around me who see differently than what Scripture teaches.

Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person, someone might possibly dare to die.

Let me ask you to make a list.

Who are the people in your life that you would die for?

Might be a pretty short list.

Here's a shorter one.

Who are the people in your life who would actually die for you?

It's got to be infinitesimally small.

But here's God's response.

But God.

Two words that are monstrous in importance.

Two words that the whole rest of the chapter hinges on.

Two words that are the tipping point to our salvation.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this timeout.

Here's what you need to understand: love always does something, love always has an action.

Love never just says, I love you without following through.

We live in a culture that's tried to re-identify what love is.

Love isn't a feeling, love is demonstrated.

Love isn't something you feel in your heart, love is something you do.

I mean, I've premarital counseled hundreds and hundreds of people over the years, and I love asking, why do you love them?

And they're like, oh, he just makes me feel a certain way.

I just love her dimples.

No, no, you love what you get out of the relationship, but that's not love.

Love is what you bring to the table, and love is always what you do.

He said, but God demonstrates his love for us.

He put it on display.

Here's how.

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Then he goes on and explains that since we have now been justified, which means made in right standing with God by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him?

For if we were God's enemies, that's a big phrase, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son.

How much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life?

And then I want you to get this one more time.

Here's the word rejoice.

He says, Not only is this so, but we also boast, this is the same Greek word for rejoice, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have been we have now received reconciliation.

Here's the picture, he says, Because of sin, you were once not just distant or alienated from God.

According to Paul, you were enemies with God.

That's strong language.

But you need to understand that in contrast to God's holiness, anything that does not measure measure up to his holiness is seen as an enemy of him.

You were once enemies with God.

Here's what I want you to get.

I have three phrases I want you to think about, and I want you to apply these to yourself.

Okay?

Here's the first one.

I want you to think about before Jesus who you were.

Who were you?

According to the verses we just read in a moment ago, powerless, unable to save yourself, enemies with God.

But then number two, I want you to think about how you were saved.

How were you?

Well, it's not by your works, it's not by effort.

According to scripture, it's you are saved by grace through having faith in Jesus.

It's not something you did, it's something that was done for you.

But then here's the third one, and this is so important.

I want you to think about who you are now.

Let me teach this for you for a moment.

If you were once enemies with God, because of what Jesus did for you when you receive his gift of salvation, you move from enemies to family.

You move from distance to near, damned to eternity away from God, to being given the gift of heaven.

You were once far, but now you're close.

You were once lost, but now you're found.

You were once powerless, weak, unable to save yourself.

Now you are the sons and daughters of God.

Let me end with this.

When I took classes in college on how to preach, there's always one question that every preacher should ask.

If you want to preach, you need to always be able to answer this question.

So what?

I didn't teach this whole thing to fill your head with knowledge about Romans 5, 1 through 11.

This applies to you, and let me show you how.

For the last few weeks, I've gotten a couple emails from people who are a little worried about their own spiritual condition.

I've gotten emails from people who said, You talked about the wrath of God, and now I find myself struggling.

Like, am I actually saved?

Have I actually done enough to receive the forgiveness and the salvation of God?

So what?

Is you now get to live with peace in a world that feels chaotic, in a world that feels completely in shambles, in a world that feels like it could change tomorrow, in a world where there's political uncertainty and financial uncertainty and relationship uncertainty and health uncertainty.

In a world full of uncertainty, there is one thing certain that you can have peace.

Because remember, happiness and joy, it's an inside job.

Peace is also an inside job.

Let me explain it to you like this.

How can a person have peace when the world feels so chaotic?

It's because when the condition of your soul is at rest, when you know that you are in right standing with God, what's the worst thing that can happen to you?

I tell you, I don't like doing funerals, but I actually like doing funerals for Christians.

Why?

Because I turn them into a party.

Scripture teaches that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.

Like, how bad can it possibly be when your soul is saved?

Like, how bad can your circumstances actually get when you realize that this world is momentary and temporary?

But the peace I have is a peace that surpasses understanding because it's not based on circumstance, it's settled.

So, how incredible would it be if you and I left today, knowing once and for all, God, my security is in you.

My joy and my happiness is not circumstantial, doesn't change.

And God, when I feel like I'm walking through a season of suffering, I'm gonna trust you in the middle of it.

When the world is crying out in misery, I will turn it into a place of ministry.

When the world around me begs me to worry about my circumstances, I will turn to you and I will worship you through my circumstances.

Why?

Because I'm rejoicing in you.

I'm rejoicing in the fact that if I'm walking through something, you're using it to carve into me and out of me the ability to love you, to know you more, to be who you've called me to become.

Ready for this?

So that you can live the life you were created by him to do.

How incredible would it be if we left today, no longer slaves to the circumstances of this world?

But instead we left with hearts that were so content, so at peace, so full of love and so full of joy that nothing that happens in the world can rattle us.

Can I get a good amen from someone who wants to leave that way?

Come on.

Would you bow your head and close your eyes all across this room with me?

Let's pray together.

Jesus, we thank you that you are our peace, that you are our strength, that you are our joy, you are our everything.

So, God, today we're just making this decision as a church.

We're gonna rejoice in you.

We're not gonna glorify and magnify our problems, we're gonna magnify you.

We're gonna rejoice in the middle of our suffering because we realize that you are always at work in the middle of it.

And we're gonna rejoice in our reconciliation, which simply means you don't see us as enemies, you see us as sons and daughters.

So, God, give us the courage today to leave different, changed.

God, I pray that this church will stand up as a beacon of light in the city.

That when the world around us freaks out, we don't have to freak out because our peace doesn't come from circumstance.

Our peace comes from you.

We thank you for it, God.