This morning, if you have your Bibles, we want to continue our study through the book of Romans. So if you have your Bibles, turn with me to Romans chapter 5 this morning. Romans chapter 5. And we’ll be looking at the first 11 verses of Romans chapter 5. The last couple of weeks we’ve looked at Abraham’s faith in God, what that meant.
What his faith meant. Was it by works? Was it by merely faith that Abraham was saved? And what does faith mean to us? And what should our faith be? And last week we looked at the fact that we, as believers in Jesus Christ, need to look to the Lord for our strength, our hope, and that He would come to give us a new heart, a new life, a new vision, a new understanding. And that as our sins are forgiven, we have a new desire to serve and walk in obedience to Him.
Part of the problem is that God doesn’t just save us and redeem us the minute we accept Him as Lord and Savior and take us that moment to heaven. But instead He leaves us here in the midst of a world that’s at war with Him. Why does He do that? Part of the reason is He wants us to learn to walk as men and women by faith as Abraham.
As Abraham was called out of Ur of the Chaldees, and the cultures around him were cultures that were not unlike what we live in today in America. Pagan cultures, cultures that didn’t worship or honor God, even though they were much closer to the flood than we are. Even though you go to cultures around the world today that have remembrances of God’s judgment with the flood, even though they don’t have the scriptures, their ancestors were there and knew God.
Abraham lived in that type of a culture, a culture that was based on worshiping Satan and the philosophies that Satan would hoist upon the world, his schemes. But we’ve been redeemed out of it as Abraham was. God called us and we looked last week that we’re men and women who need to have faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ.
But as I mentioned, God left us here for a purpose. That we could be conformed to the image of His Son. And the process of justification should be at work in our hearts and lives.
And that we could see God drawing us closer to Himself on a daily basis. Let’s just read what Paul has to say in chapter 5. Let’s pick it up at verse 25 of chapter 4 for context.
Romans 4:25
who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.
Paul is speaking in that verse of Jesus Christ. He was delivered and crucified for our offenses and raised again for our justification.
Romans 5:1-11
5 Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: 2 by whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; 4 and patience, experience; and experience, hope: 5 and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.
6 For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. 8 But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. 10 For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. 11 And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.
Let’s just bow in prayer. Dear Heavenly Fathers who have come before you this morning, help us to understand the great privilege that we have in being called your children, and what that means.
The life you’ve called us to live. How you’ve called us to be transformed in character, and desire, and thought, and in relationship to you. Lord, I pray that you would just help us to see that as Jesus went to the cross to pay the penalty for our sin, that as Abraham had faith as you called him out of Ur of the Chaldees, that you would deliver upon your word, and that one day there would come the Messiah that you had promised, that would take away his sin.
Likewise, we can look back to the cross of Christ, and see that He paid the penalty for our sin, that He who was without sin became sin for us. And Lord, not only did He pay the penalty for our sin, and die upon the cross, and shed His blood for us, that His shed blood could pay the penalty for our sin, yet He was buried, and then He rose again, that we could be justified in your presence. And Lord, help us to understand that today.
And help us to see what that means. This we’d ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Justified in the eyes of God. What does it mean? Prior to coming and accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior, when God looked upon you, all He saw was your rebellion and sin. He saw one who had been given all things, and yet turned His back on all things, and embraced a world that Satan was orchestrating to rebel against God their Creator.
When Jesus came, the Bible tells us that there’s only one means by which sin could be forgiven. We looked at what sin was just a few weeks ago. Transgression and sin.
Sin is missing the mark, or not being able to fulfill the walk and the truth of God’s character, and to obey His righteousness and holiness that is found in His character, and to rebel against it. Transgression occurs when we willfully disobey a law that we know is given. People say, well, everybody hasn’t seen the law, not everybody has the Bible, so not everybody… That’s right.
Transgression is when we see that law and we know, and we willfully choose to disobey it. If you look at the Ten Commandments, the Ten Commandments are given as a guideline, the first five, how we relate to God, the next five, how we relate to our fellow man. And as you look at those, and you confront people and introduce them to the Ten Commandments, sometimes they didn’t grow up in a religious home.
But you introduce them to the Ten Commandments and you say, have you ever done this? And it’s amazing because even if they didn’t grow up in a righteous and Christian home, even if they didn’t go attend church as a child, even if they grew up in a pagan culture where they knew nothing, it’s amazing. You come and you ask them, have you ever taken something that doesn’t belong to you? And you say, I want you to be totally honest. They’ll say yes.
And when you ask them, what does that make you? A lot of times they don’t want to answer. They’ll say, like everybody else, it makes me, they will not answer and say, it makes me a thief. Why won’t you answer and say, I’m a thief.
I’m a murderer. I’m an adulterer at heart. Because God has placed in our heart a conscience.
And that tells us what is right and wrong, even though we may not have the written law before us. So the Bible tells us that there is none righteous in the world that can stand in their own righteousness. And so God looks upon men and apart from the saving grace that is found in Christ, where His righteousness is imputed or placed upon us, the only thing God can see is a sinner.
Someone who has sinned and transgressed against Him. What happens when you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you accept the gift of salvation where Christ says, I will pay the penalty that is yours, but I’m paying it for you. You have no right to come into the presence of a holy and righteous God and stand before Him and say, I am here on my own merits, but I will enable you to stand on my merits and my blood shall cover you.
And when God the Father looks upon you, He will not see your sin and transgressions, but instead He will see my righteousness. And as Jesus did that for us at Calvary, the Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 that He didn’t stop there. It says that He died on the cross, He was buried, and the third day He rose again from the dead.
Why is that key? Not only so that we can say, well, Jesus isn’t in the grave anywhere, Buddha’s in the grave, Muhammad’s in the grave, their bones are in the earth. Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father in heaven. And Paul said that is key because it shows that we have been justified by what He has done.
Justification means that when God looks upon us, He doesn’t see our sin any longer when we are Christians, but instead He sees the righteousness of His Son and His grace and His mercy and His love have been poured out upon us and He wants to conform us to the image of His Son. He wants us to be like His Son in character, in action, in thought, and in speech. Paul tells us then, therefore, being justified by faith, we have, number one, peace with God.
What does that mean? Peace with God. Well, the Scriptures tell us that prior to coming to know Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we were at enmity with God. That means that you and I were at war with God.
What God wanted, we didn’t want. What God hated, we loved. What God loved, we hated.
And then we were so devious that the Bible tells us that our hearts are so deceitful that they are desperately wicked and no man can know them. You can even think that you are doing what is right when your motives are totally wrong and you will even deny your motives. But Jesus says that when we’re justified, we’ve come at peace with God and we’re no longer at war with Him.
What does that mean? It means that there’s a transformation of our character. This is what is gravely disturbing when you look at many people who name the name of Christ and yet the pro-abortion. They name the name of Christ yet they don’t support God’s view of marriage.
They say that they’re a Christian yet they have no desire to fellowship with God’s people. They have no desire to read God’s Word. They have no desire to come closer to the Lord.
And one asks, where is their relationship? Because the war doesn’t appear to be over. There’s a song in our hymnals that we sing once in a while and it’s called, It’s Finished. And it talks about Jesus when He goes to the cross and the battle that went on there for the hearts and souls of man and that Jesus cried out, It’s finished.
The last words that Jesus spoke before He died is, It’s finished. The price has been paid. The debt is canceled.
That is what happened when Jesus paid the penalty for our sin at Calvary. But the last verse of that hymn talks about an individual who didn’t realize that the war was over. That he had been bought out of the enemy’s camp.
He’d been redeemed and brought back on the righteous side. And as he didn’t realize this, all of a sudden it came to his attention what it really meant by Jesus’ words, It’s finished, when it’s applied to his life and he receives it. It means, I’m no longer at war with God.
I’m at peace with Him. He’s my God. He’s my Redeemer.
He’s my Savior. What He loves, I love. What He desires, I desire.
But that’s not only where it stops with justification. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ to whom we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand. Now what does it mean to stand in the grace of God? The Apostle Paul gives us a quick glimpse of that.
If you keep your finger here, turn back to the book of Ephesians. And in Ephesians chapter 6, Paul is talking about this great spiritual battle that’s going on where we were once enemies with God. And he looks at the fact that in chapter 6 verse 10, he’s been talking about in the whole book of Ephesians and to give you a little background into this little verse here, who were the Ephesians? The Ephesians were the people that lived in Ephesus.
Ephesus is still a city in Turkey today. But at the time that Paul was writing this, in the city of Ephesus, they had one of the seven wonders of the world and it was the tower, not the tower, the temple that was built to Diana. Diana was one of the Greek forms of the god Astra and it can go all the way back to the tower of Babel when Semiramis, the wife of Nimrod, exalted herself and was desiring to be worshipped.
That’s where all of these female goddesses that you have around the world, they have their roots there. That is the culture which Paul found himself speaking to in Ephesus. A culture which had been bathed in rebellion against God.
And so he says in the book to the Romans, which was a very similar culture because they had similar gods, different names, same root, Satan. And he says it’s interesting as he says that you shall be able to stand wherein we stand in the grace of Christ. In Ephesians chapter 6 verse 10 we read, Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.
Not our strength, God’s strength. Where is that strength found? That strength is found and revealed in the cross of Christ where God showed that He was greater than all the sin of the world. There is no sin that Jesus cannot forgive or pay the penalty for.
People say, well what about the unforgivable sin? Well the unforgivable sin is the sin when you reject His Holy Spirit and you do not yield to the conviction that God places on your heart to give your life to Christ. There is no salvation for you then because the only means of salvation is Christ. Jesus said there is no way to come to the Father but by Me.
I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by Me. And so if we reject that, we in essence have no other means of salvation.
But if we accept it, we stand in His grace. And Paul tells us and he’s laying out in these last few verses of the book of Ephesians the battle we’re in.
Ephesians 6:10-17
10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. 11 Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. 13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
o back to Romans and it says what? As we walk in His grace, in the depths of His mercy, He enables us to stand when there is trouble all around us. And we’re going to see that in just a moment. So we see here, how do we stand? We stand in the power of God.
Going back to Romans, it says not only do we stand, but we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Now what does that verse mean? We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Now, what is the glory of God that is revealed? The Bible tells us that no man has seen the Father and lived, but yet people see Jesus throughout Scripture.
The Bible tells us that Jesus Himself said when His disciples asked, Who was the Father? Where was the Father? How were they to know the Father? And Jesus said, If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father. Jesus is the glory of God revealed to men. The depth of God’s glory is that in spite of our rebellion against Him, He still loved us.
In spite of our hatred of His character, He still showed us mercy. And in spite of our rejection of Him, He still sent His Spirit to convict us that we could experience His grace, the hope of His glory. One of the things that’s really saddening as you look at the church today, if the hope of His glory is Jesus, and the Bible tells us that the Lord is going to return for His saints, and Paul talks about that in 1 Thessalonians.
He also talks about it in the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 15. He mentions it in Titus. The hope that we have is the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The hope is seeing the glory of God. You know, many people today don’t even believe in the rapture, don’t even want the Lord to return. What’s wrong with that picture? They don’t want to see the glory of God, the hope of our salvation.
Jesus shall come to catch His bride unto Himself. The Bible compares the church to the bride of Christ. He says rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
nd not only so, but we glory in tribulations also. Wow, that sounds like something that’s interesting for a Christian. You become a Christian, you experience the grace of God, you see the grace of God manifesting itself in your life, and as you have been justified in the eyes of God by the work that Christ did for you in the resurrection that occurred, and all that is going on in your life, He says that you shall have joy in tribulation.
What does He mean by that? Knowing that tribulation worketh patience. Have you ever had anything happen in your life, and you’re going, Lord, why did this happen? I don’t understand. But if we really look to God and call upon His name, Jesus tells us interesting things, you have not because you ask not.
Well, sometimes I wonder why don’t we see how God is using tribulation in our life to draw us closer to Himself and for us to be a greater witness for Him. I shared with you before the story of Richard Wurmberg. Richard Wurmberg suffered under both the Communists and the Nazis.
He was imprisoned by the Communists after they took over Romania where he lived. Prior to that, the Nazis during World War II had taken over Romania, and they put a bounty on Richard Wurmberg’s head. In essence, they had said that he was to die, he and his wife Sabrina.
They called them in to face the Nazi tribunal consisting of some SS officers. There appeared to be no way that they weren’t going to face a firing squad or some other means of death. All of a sudden, at the last minute, the ambassador from Sweden walked in and said, I have orders that these people are to be set free.
Would you call that tribulation? During this whole time that that was going on, they were being exposed to a Romanian man who had joined the Nazi youth brigade and was enjoying killing Jews. They were let go. They went back to their apartment.
This man moved in next door. Richard Wurmberg went to his neighbor who this man had moved into his neighbor’s apartment. They just moved in if they wanted to.
His neighbor was talking to him and he said, Richard, I think this man may have been involved in the killing of your wife’s family. Richard Wurmberg went over that night to visit this man. Richard Wurmberg could play piano.
He knew Romanian folk songs. He knew this guy liked Romanian folk songs and he began to play some Romanian folk songs for him. Then he told him, I know what you’ve done.
He said, what do you mean you know what I’ve done? He said, you killed my wife’s family, but I want you to come with me and meet her and I will tell you what she will do. She will fix a meal for you and she’ll share with you Jesus. This man was terrified.
He went over to Richard Wurmberg’s place and Richard Wurmberg had gone there first and he went in and his wife was sleeping and he said, I’ve got a man out here that I want you to meet. He’s the man that killed your family. Would you call that tribulation? How would you respond? Richard Wurmberg’s wife came out.
First thing she did is she walked over. She kissed the man on the cheek and then went to prepare him a meal. And this man did not know how to respond.
Because of that, later on he became a Christian. He says, And not only so, but we glory in tribulations, also knowing that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience and experience hope. Now sometimes you hear stories like about Richard and Sabrina Wurmberg and what they did, how they suffered for the Lord Jesus Christ, how God used them to touch lives of people that were so lost.
An amazing thing that Richard Wurmberg said is he and Sabrina had the opportunity to flee Romania. As the Russians were coming in and the Nazis were being driven out, the war was over, but the Russians were going to be taking over Romania. And Richard Wurmberg’s wife said, We need to go.
And Richard said, No. He said, Have you looked at their eyes? He was talking about the Russians. He said, Have you looked at their eyes? There’s no life there.
They need the Gospel. And who will tell them if we leave? Because he stayed, Richard Wurmberg later on found himself in a Russian prison. They beat him continually.
They would take him and beat him on the bottom of his feet. They beat him so hard on the bottom of his feet that when he finally did get out, he never could quite walk normal. After one of these beatings, and the reason they would beat him is all they would say is, Renounce Jesus and we’ll let you go! After one of these beatings, the guard that had been out beating him took him back to his cell, threw him in his cell.
And as he walked away, he heard Richard Wurmberg talking. He opened up the little door where they could look in to see. And he saw him kneeling and praying.
He opened up the door and said, Who are you praying to? Why are you praying? And who are you praying for? Richard Wurmberg turned to him and said, I’m praying for you. I’m praying for your salvation. We don’t see things happen.
Because in America, I don’t know about you, but often times, the first little difficulty that comes along it becomes, Oh dear, I’m being persecuted. We don’t know what persecution is. We don’t know what tribulation is.
But we also don’t see the power of God. Paul says, Tribulation, also knowing that tribulation works with patience. We’re not going to give up.
Even though it appears that everything is impossible. In the Old Testament, he had Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers. Then when he gets to Egypt, he’s sold into slavery at Potiphar’s house.
He’s falsely accused, put into prison. Years pass, but he does not denounce God. And God ultimately uses him.
Patience comes out of tribulation. And experience, out of patience. And hope, out of experience.
I went and heard Richard Wurmberg speak when I was either in junior high or early first part of high school. He was speaking in Grand Forks. And I listened to this man speak and he had hope.
He had hope! We as Christians today need to have that hope. And hope maketh not ashamed because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. Each one of you here that is a believer in Jesus Christ has been given a very special gift.
You’ve been given the Holy Spirit of God that indwells and empowers you. Not to give you some super ability to speak in tongues or to heal people, but it’s been given to you to accomplish great things. And the greatest thing of all is to have hope in the face of tribulation.
To be a witness of truth in the face of relativism of our culture. And that you will stand firm in all the schemes of Satan because you have hope no matter what Satan can do. There is hope because Christ is greater than he that is in the world.
And our hope rests in Him. And hope maketh not ashamed. When you meet somebody and the Lord places it on your heart to share the Gospel with them or to share what Jesus has been doing in your life with them, are you ashamed? And you go, Lord, not now.
Not this person. But you know in your heart God has placed that person there for that moment. We’re not to be ashamed.
Paul told us at the beginning, for I’m not ashamed of the Gospel for it is the means of salvation both to the Jew first and also to the Greek. No man can be saved apart from Jesus Christ. What does justification do for us? I’ve got to wrap it up.
I’m over time. What does justification do for us? Justification enables God to see us as His child. Justification enables us to experience the things that we’ve been looking at this morning.
Justification because God has justified us in His eyes. He gives us His power, His grace, His mercy, His Spirit that we may possess hope in the One that has redeemed us and has said, I will never forsake you. I’m going to return for you.
He longed for that day. Let’s just close in prayer. Lord, I pray that You would just help us to understand the justification that occurred when we accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior and He died on the cross, buried and rose again from the dead that we could be justified in Your sight.
That we could be called Your sons, Your daughters, Your children. That we could be part of Your bride. Lord, help us to understand what that means.
This we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen