Romans: By Grace Alone

Well, good morning.

Um you'll have to forgive me, my voice is is gone.

I was yelling at a TV last night between 3 30 and 7.

So congratulations, War Eagle, to y'all.

Um I had to go on a prayer walk afterwards to recenter myself in the Lord.

Pray for the confession of my anger.

So I need the gospel this morning.

Maybe you're like me.

You need the gospel this morning for for whatever reason you're showing up this morning.

We are continuing our study through the book of Romans.

If you haven't been with us, this is Paul's letter to the church in Rome.

It's his theological masterpiece.

We've spent a couple months in Romans 1 through 3.

It's been a pretty good beatdown.

It's a diagnosis of our sin and our total depravity.

But then last week we just touched on where we're headed, but now there's a righteousness from outside of us.

But now the whole story begins to turn.

The diagnosis has been true.

We are rebellious and we are self-righteous.

But now.

So for the next three weeks, we're going to study the end of Romans 3.

We're going to use this phrase that came from our reformers in the 1500s, by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone.

That's three of the five solas.

These five solas came out of the Reformation back in the 1500s.

It's a Latin word meaning alone.

Solo means alone.

So the five solas of the Reformation are scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, to God alone be the glory.

So we're going to dig in over the next three weeks to the middle three, by grace alone.

Next week, faith alone.

Third week, Christ alone.

This passage is prime to look at this phrase.

And today we're going to dig into by grace alone.

So Romans 3, 21, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it.

So it's just pure gospel here.

First, let's touch on where we came from.

Point number one, the great problem, we need a righteousness that we cannot produce.

So Paul's recapping what he knew from the Old Testament, Psalm 14, 1 through 3.

The fool says in his heart, There's no God.

They are corrupt.

They do abominable deeds.

There's none who does good.

The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.

They have all turned aside.

Together they have become corrupt.

There is none who does good, not even one.

Isaiah 53, 6.

All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned every one to his own way.

And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

So the problem is not merely that some people behave badly or that you behave badly sometimes.

The problem is that we can't ever get it all together, that we are in fact sinners inward bent.

We love self-reliance rather than reliance on God.

The deeper problem than even just our behaviors, which cause a lot of destruction, but the deeper problem is that we all seek to establish our own righteousness and worth apart from God.

In the New York Times, Aaron Callan, former CFO of Lehman Brothers, wrote, Is there life after work?

We'll just ignore the emergencies.

Maybe if there is a big emergency, you just kind of like an announce it for us, it'd be helpful.

Here's what Aaron Callan wrote.

I didn't start out with the goal of devoting all of myself to my job.

It crept in over time.

Each year that went by, slight modifications became the new normal.

First, I spent a half hour on Sunday organizing my email, to-do list, and calendar to make Monday morning easier.

Then I was working a few hours on Sunday, then all day.

My boundary slipped away until work was all that was left.

Inevitably, when I left my job, it devastated me.

I couldn't just rally and move on.

I did not know how to value who I was versus what I did.

What I did was who I was.

We all know this thought.

Whether you do it with your job or your academics or your parenting, how successful your children are, or how much stuff you have, or even in your religiosity, like Romans 3 really describes, how well you follow these rules.

Is it this production that produces your righteousness, your worth, your justification?

See, we're all asking what makes us right?

That word righteousness in verse 21 tells us of a legal standing.

To be right with a person legally means that you owe them nothing.

There's no liability or claims against you.

So to be right with God means that you're in a condition where you don't owe God anything.

It's been paid.

So Romans 1 through 3 is not a call for bad people to become good.

Paul's moving us to 21, verse 21, but now a righteousness, you need a righteousness you can't produce that's outside of you.

So we're moving our gaze from look what I can do, what I've done, to look what God has done for me.

Paul's building off these passages in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 23, 5 and 6.

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

In his days, Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely.

And this is the name by which he will be called.

The Lord is our righteousness.

Isaiah 61:10 I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall exalt in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation.

Isaiah 61:10

He has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with the beautiful headdress, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.

So Paul's a good Jew, he knows these passages, and he writes, But now a righteousness has come.

That what's been prophesied in the Old Testament is being known in this Jesus.

So we have a great problem, but we have a great provision.

Point number two, the great provision, God provides a righteousness that we cannot merit.

He provides the righteousness.

The word righteousness in verse 21 is the word dikaia sune, sune, but no, but no, meaning the condition acceptable to God.

Integrity, virtue, purity of life.

And when we say integrity, it means perfect integrity.

Not like our integrity.

It's like 80% of the time.

And I would just say, like, do you need to find that kind of integrity outside of yourself, or are you able to produce that?

Have you found that you're able to produce that perfect purity, perfect integrity?

See, Romans 1 through 3 diagnoses us and says, no, no, no, we need verse 21, but now.

Paul expounds in Philippians 3, 8, 9, indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.

For his sake, I've suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish.

Now, why would he do that?

Why would he count everything as rubbish?

In order that I may gain Christ, to be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

Verse 9 is the key phrase, to be found in him.

I think about it as a glass of water.

If this glass of water is Jesus, and all of his provision, all of his forgiveness, and all of his righteousness, and we're just a mere rock, which is about as bright as we are sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes.

And we are found in Christ.

So when God looks on you, he sees you through Jesus.

He knows you, He knows your life and all the horrible things, all the difficult things, all the great things, all the horrible things in you, and all the great things.

He knows all that, but he sees you through Christ.

So he sees you as fully forgiven and fully righteous, a legal standing.

He can't see you apart from seeing you through Christ because you're in Christ.

Your identity and righteousness is never earned.

Your identity and righteousness is a gift given to you.

That is the rescue.

Now we can begin to understand who we already are in Jesus, which that's a spiritual walk, to keep discovering deeper and deeper who am I in this Jesus?

How secure am I?

And what would this mean for my life?

Verse 22.

The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there is no distinction.

I so he's saying, hey, I've taken you through Romans 1 through 3, all those Gentiles and the rebellious people, that prodigal son, the older son, the moral person, the moralistic, the judgmental, the self-righteous.

All of you for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

So point three is that God's lavish grace is free justification.

It is free to you.

Jesus paid the price.

And it's free to you.

We use the word grace as the Greek word caris, meaning gift, undeserved favor.

Free.

It's undeserved.

God providing it to you.

Verse 24, this righteousness and this justification, it's a gift, it's a legal standing.

Now, Paul expounds on that in other writings.

We can look at this grace word as it pops up in different writings of his when he writes the Ephesians in 2, 8-9, he says, For by grace you have been saved through faith.

It's not of your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one can boast.

Frees us of our self-righteousness in our boasting.

Titus 3 5 through 7.

He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his mercy, by the washing and regeneration, renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out us on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified, how?

Romans 11, 6, but if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace would no longer be grace.

And then that leads us back.

Now here, Romans 3.24 again, and are justified by his grace as a gift of the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

So this justification is courtroom language.

The sinner stands before the righteous judge, but the righteous judge sees them through Christ's accomplishments.

So the sinner doesn't stand on his own righteousness, and yet God declares the sinner righteous because of Christ's righteousness.

And that justification that God gives us is legal standing.

That's a way to say it is secure.

By faith in Christ, not by faith in general.

So it's just like, oh, like faith in God, and like faith in like, you know, the trees, and faith in, you know, no, it's like faith in Christ, by faith in Christ's work on the cross, not by general admiration of him.

So it's just like, oh yeah, I love, I love Jesus.

He's a great spiritual teacher.

No, no, it's by faith in the Jesus that died on the cross for my sins and he rose again.

It's faith in Christ's work.

And by faith only as a receptor, not by faith as a kind of moral merit itself.

Meaning it's not faith in your own faith.

That would be using faith as a moral merit in and of itself.

Faith is the receptor.

So we have faith in Christ, not faith in our own faith.

Now Jesus tells a parable about two men, one who tries to perform for that justification and acceptance, the other who realizes he has to receive it.

See if you can hear the difference.

Luke 18, 9 through 14.

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt.

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector.

The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus, God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.

I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.

But the tax collector standing far off would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

I tell you that this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other, for every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

See, the person who lives by performance must continually ask, Am I good enough?

And that's why it's so exhausting.

And eventually they're gonna have to live in comparison to somebody else and hold them in contempt, which is what this story shows.

But the gospel changes the question.

Instead of have I performed enough, the question is, what has Christ done for me?

That shift is foundational to Christian identity.

One man says, look what I've done, and the other man says, be merciful on me, a sinner.

I need to receive.

I have to live in a posture of receiving.

Jesus says it's that guy, it's the receiving guy.

Point number four, the grace-transformed life lives from the root of Christ's righteousness.

When we say the grace-transformed life, we mean a life rooted in and built on Christ's righteousness, that there's a fruit that comes out of that.

The Holy Spirit uses the security that we have as fully, securely righteous.

For me, this is what it looks like.

I just wrote these thinking about this week.

This is what it meant for me.

Maybe some life application to you, perhaps.

When I feel like I need to prove myself, I rest in my belovedness.

It came in very helpful last night at about 7.15 p.m.

Very helpful.

I don't have to prove myself.

I can rest in my belovedness, there's something beyond this, okay?

Like, like surface issue, but it can be applied to so many issues.

When we're so upset about something and we feel like we got to prove ourselves, we've got to prove ourselves.

It's like, ah, I don't have to prove myself here.

I have a security richer than this moment.

Because I'm not righteous by my achievements.

When I fail, I'm still loved and I'm free to confess.

Because I'm not unrighteous, because I fail, because my righteousness is outside of myself.

When someone disagrees with me or disapproves of me, I can still love them.

Because I'm not righteous because of people's approval.

It frees us to love.

Well, you you've been waiting.

Two weeks ago was Fat Bear Week up in Alaska, and some of you have been just keeping up with that and just been waiting, waiting, waiting.

So I mean, we talk about it yearly.

And so, just to catch you up, if you haven't been a part of our church, we like to talk about it every fall.

It's a pretty big deal around here.

So, uh, beginning in June in Katma National Park, all the grizzly bears come out of hibernation.

They come to Brooks Falls and they feed on the salmon.

They come quite scrawny and they got to eat all summer.

So they eat all summer on the salmon, just gorge themselves all summer.

So at the end of September, you get this fat bear week that the National Park Rangers put on.

And they look at the scrawniest bears to where they're at at the end of the summer.

Who got the fattest?

Which bear got the fattest?

And so the fat bear championship was a couple weeks ago.

This year the championship was between Bear 89 and his backpack, who's on the right there, backpack versus bear 910.

And good news, backpack won.

The bear on the right won.

That's our champion.

Now, backpack's mom, just a little history.

Backpack's mom is Holly.

You remember 2019 champion?

Some of you remember because I mean it's so great.

I mean, it's such a great storyline.

So the 2019 champion, Holly.

Now, when Backpack was little, he would always climb up on Holly's bat to cross the river.

And that's how Bear 89 got the name Backpack.

It just always climbed up on Mama.

So out of all the fat bear images that we show you, that's the one I want to leave up there.

And I just want to pretend like it's fine art and we're gonna contemplate it for a little bit.

Because the image in front of us, the river in front of us, is too big for any of us to cross.

And that's the river of your guilt, your shame, your I'm not enough, uh, the river of I'm not righteous or I can't be righteous enough, the river of your worth, the river of pure integrity.

This is a river you can't cross.

You you gotta crawl up on the back of someone stronger.

And that's what we're saying.

Whether the image you come away with is a silly image about backpacking on Holly, or whether it's you in a glass, it's the same thing that in Christ, we need to be in Christ.

That's the strength that we have.

It's a security, it's the root of us, of our Christian life, that out of Christ's righteousness, his strength for us, comes a life of honoring him and walking with him.

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we're so thankful that you see us exactly as we are today.

You see, you could you know all of us, and yet you see us through Jesus.

And you can't love us any more than you love Jesus, you can't love us any less than you love Jesus.

You just purely without limits love us.

And in Jesus, you accept us, you welcome us, you forgive us, you embrace us as you put a robe of righteousness on us.

Lord, all the more help us to put our gaze on you, all the more help us to root in Christ's righteousness for us, that our lives might honor you, that we might know these implications of how to love people, how to deal with disapproval, how to deal with conflict, how to live a life of honoring you and family and friends and church.

Holy Spirit, would you help us all the more root in Christ's righteousness that our lives would honor you as we walk with you?

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.