The Just Shall Live by Faith

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But last week I started telling you a story about a man named Martin Luther, and it’s a name that a lot of people are familiar with, but it’s a story that not many people know as well as they know the name. Or if they know about his story, they know that he was the founder, I guess you want to call it, of the Lutheran church. He was really the spark that lit the Protestant Reformation.

But fewer people know where he came from. He came from a family in Germany where he was expected to, his parents invested heavily in him being able to go to school to become a lawyer. That was his father’s goal for him, his dream for him.

Because he thought if he’s a lawyer, he can make a lot of money, he can support us when we’re old. I get it, why do you think we had so many kids? Right?

This is my retirement plan. No, not really. but he thought okay the dad thought if we invest in young Martin he’ll he’ll be a successful lawyer he’ll take care of us but he was also raised in a religious atmosphere where he just constantly felt God’s disapproval I remember once reading a story about him talking about the paintings and stained glass on the church where he grew up and and and the the judgment and the condemnation even in the damnation, we might say, that he just felt and felt like he never could measure up.

And he would pray for hours on end, confessing his sins, trying to feel some relief from them. The story says that he was returning to school from home one day and got caught in a thunderstorm and was so terrified by the lightning and everything going on around him that he fell to the ground and prayed to one of the saints and said if she would protect him, if she would intercede on his behalf, that he would become a monk. He would dedicate his life to God, and that’s what happened.

And he thought, surely with a life of religious devotion, spending all your time in prayer and meditation and study of the scriptures and religious good deeds, surely I can find some way to have peace with God. Surely I can find some way to get this weight off of me, this feeling that it’s never enough. But the deeper and deeper that he dove into religion, the heavier and heavier that burden of condemnation felt on him, that feeling that he was not enough.

And I do remember talking about this last week that many of us feel that at times. In various parts of our lives, in our relationship with God, we just feel like we’re not enough and we can never do enough. Luther would even go to a priest for confession and would confess for hours on end to the point that the priest got irritated and said, why don’t you go out and do something bad enough to confess and then come back because I’m bored listening to you for hours on end talking about every thought and every attitude, but Luther was gripped by the fear that if there was some sin he didn’t remember, that he wouldn’t be able to confess it, wouldn’t be able to find forgiveness.

And Luther agonized. Somebody told him, why don’t you become a theology professor? Surely by doing this.

But everything he did, everything he did, only led him to feel the weight of his sin even deeper, to feel that sense of not measuring up. And Luther being one of the relative few people who had access to the scriptures and was able to read them in his day as a monk and as a theology professor in the 1500s. One day when in the grips of this overwhelming burden of his own sin and his own inadequacy came across a passage of scripture that changed his entire life and changed the course of history.

And it’s a passage that I shared with you last week. It’s a passage that we’re going to read again this morning and unpack a little bit. It’s found in Romans chapter 1.

And these few words changed his life and began to make plain the truth of the gospel to people in a way that they had not heard publicly proclaimed in many years. I’m not saying that the gospel was lost, but as far as public proclamation of the gospel, it was often not clear and not proclaimed the way it should have been. But it was there all along.

And so we’re going to be in Romans chapter 1 this morning. If you’ll stand with me once you find it in your Bibles. If you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Romans, that’s all right.

It’ll be on the screen for you here. Romans chapter 1, and we’re going to look at verses 15, 16, and 17. This is what Paul says.

So for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, but the righteous man shall live by faith.

And you may be seated. So this is talking about the power of the gospel, the power of the gospel to save. Paul says, I’m eager to come to Rome and preach to you the gospel.

He’s writing to people who are believers, but they needed to hear the gospel over and over again. Because even once we’ve believed, I know this and you know this, our feelings will lie to us. Our feelings will tell us things are true that are not true.

And our feelings will tell us things are false that are not false, that are, you know what I’m trying to say. I forgot what I’m trying to say, but you know what I’m trying to say. You get the idea.

Our feelings lie to us. And our feelings may tell us in the dark of night, in the grips of some difficult situation, our feelings may tell us that God doesn’t love us, God doesn’t care about us. All we have to do is reflect back on the gospel and the fact that God sent his only son to pay the ultimate price for our forgiveness.

If God never did another thing to bless me or you, that right there shows that God possesses the ultimate love for me and you. God could not care about us more than He does. And so we need a steady diet of hearing the gospel.

Yes, we move beyond the basic core tenets of Christianity and we move into the meat of the Word, but we never move away from the foundation. And sometimes we have to go back and shore up that foundation. It’s like putting piers under the foundation of a house.

The house may be in good shape, but sometimes you just got to make sure the foundation is held in place. And so he was eager to go back and reinforce them in the gospel. Because he says, I am not ashamed of the gospel.

This is not just a feeling of embarrassment. Now, in our day and age, we might be ashamed of the gospel from time to time. We might feel embarrassed.

We live in a world that is increasingly hostile toward the things of God. Somebody asked me a couple weeks ago, why do you think the churches are so empty today? Is it that people quit believing?

I don’t think as a society we’re seeing a smaller percentage of people who are believers. I don’t believe Christianity is dying out. I believe Christianity has gotten more difficult.

It used to be 20, 30 years ago, there was a certain number of people who would go to church that would participate in Christian things because that was the way the culture went. It was even more so true 50 or 100 years ago. As that was the direction that culture and as that was the direction our institutions were going, that was the easy way to go.

And if you’re going with the flow, you’re going to go that way. Now to be a Christian, we are swimming upstream. Now to be a Christian, we’re faced with difficulties that we have not faced before in this country.

I don’t want to say we are persecuted, but we’re certainly being marginalized and mocked in a way that has not been the case. But that’s not the shame. That’s not the embarrassment.

That’s not what Paul’s describing here. When he says, I’m not ashamed, he’s saying, I am not willing to let the gospel lay by the wayside in spite of what it’s going to cost me. In their day and age, in certain parts of the Roman Empire, to be a Christian meant signing your death warrant.

Baptism made you an outlaw. And so it was not a step lightly taken. It was a step taken because you genuinely believed that Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, was buried and rose again three days later according to the scriptures.

You believed that, and so you staked your life on it. Paul says, I am not ashamed, even if it costs me my livelihood, even if it costs me my social connections, even if it costs me my family, even if it costs me my life, I’m not going to let go of gospel. When he says, I’m not ashamed, that’s what he’s talking about.

Not just I’m embarrassed, but I’m going to say it anyway. He’s saying, I am willing to incur the cost of the gospel because it’s worth it, because it is the power of God for salvation. The gospel is the message that God has sent that can save anybody who hears and repents and trusts Christ. And it’s not because we’ve earned it or deserved it as we’re going to get into.

It’s because Jesus has done everything through his death and resurrection. He has done everything that’s necessary and proved everything that’s necessary for our salvation. They’re both important.

Jesus paid for our sins on the cross, but with the empty tomb, he proved that he could pay for our sins on the cross. Because anybody could die claiming that they were dying for your sins. Jesus backed it up.

And he said, it’s the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. That doesn’t mean just two nationalities of people. When he says the Greek here, he means the Gentiles.

He means anybody who’s not Jewish. That would include most of us in here, if not all. But thank God, the power of the gospel, means that salvation is not just available to those who were part of the first covenant with God, but it’s available to all of us, regardless of our ancestry, regardless of our background.

It’s available to all of us. The ground is level at the foot of the cross. And he comes to this issue of righteousness.

And often, like Luther, we feel like we don’t measure up, and in one sense it’s true. There’s a lot of self-esteem talk in our world, and I’m not necessarily against it. We tell people, and I’ve even seen it on shirts, and if some of you have that shirt, I’m not attacking you, okay?

I’ve seen it on bumper stickers, I’ve seen it on coffee mugs at women’s ministry events. You are enough, okay? There’s a sense where that’s true, but in terms of our relationship with God and our standing with God, it’s not true.

When we sense that we don’t measure up, when we sense that we’re not enough, it’s because we’re not. It doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love us. It just means that what we bring to the table, what we have to offer, is not enough for our salvation.

It’s not enough for us to be right with God. And if you wonder why that is, Paul spends the first three chapters of Romans explaining why that is. He explains the sin that lurks in the human heart, and the further and further we wander from God, Not only do individuals get worse, but society just spirals and becomes unrecognizable.

To the point that he says to the Gentiles and to the Jews as well, those who thought that because of their descent, because of their background, that they were right with God. He says, you’re not immune from this. He says, all are without excuse.

And even in the verse after we stopped, it says, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. now our feelings as I mentioned earlier will lie to us but occasionally our feelings get it right you know that old saying even a broken clock is right twice a day sometimes your feelings get it right they don’t understand why they get it right but your feelings get it right when we feel like we don’t measure up it’s because it’s true and it doesn’t matter how religious you are it doesn’t matter how moral you are listen I grew up in church I grew up with christian parents who taught me the right things. I grew up being too scared of them to step out of line.

I grew up for many years being an overachiever for that reason. Not that I thought they were going to hurt me, but I just wanted my parents’ approval. So I didn’t live a wild life. My parents were our college Sunday school teachers, and one day at a class activity, we were sitting around talking at somebody’s house, and everybody was sharing the most rebellious thing they’d ever done.

I couldn’t think of anything. I asked my parents, what’s the most rebellious thing I ever did? Mom said we were still waiting.

And so I’m telling you, I have tried to live a good life, but when I hold my life up to this mirror right here, there’s no way that I measure up to the holiness of God. And none of that story is to say, oh, the preacher thinks he’s better than us. No, because in God’s economy, I’m a sinner, just like everybody else.

Because God’s standard is absolute perfection. And we don’t look at it as a missionary I know who tells a story about the Ten Commandments, And he said, people think of it like it’s 10 individual plates. And even if I broke this one over here, the other nine are still good.

He said, no, it’s just one big plate. If you put a crack in it anywhere, you’ve broken the whole thing. And that’s what the Bible tells us.

If we’ve broken God’s law, even in one little area, we’re guilty of the whole thing. So when I say we’re all sinners and we never measure up, I’m not saying to you today that you’re Hitler or you’re Charles Manson or you’re anything like that. I’m just saying we all fall short of God’s law.

And if God is holy and sinless perfection, if sin is completely foreign to his nature, you and I can’t ever reach those lofty heights. So the question for us then is how can this be changed if you and I can’t do enough to measure up? If no matter how good I’ve tried to live, if no matter how religious I try to be, if no matter how many things I try to do and earn, if I can never get there, how can this be changed?

And that was the fundamental question that Luther was dealing with every day of his life until he came to this passage. If we can’t make ourselves right with God, we have to rely on Him to make us right. This is why it says in verse 17, in it, in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.

He’s talking about the righteousness of God. He’s talking about that holiness, that state of God just being right. All those places where we fall short, all those places where we’re wrong, God is right.

And not just right in the sense of his argument and the things he believes, but who he is, is right and good and holy. And it says that righteousness of God is revealed, it’s poured out from faith to faith. And that same verse refers to the righteous man, which is quoting Habakkuk 2.

4, talking about the righteous man or the just will live by faith, those who have been justified. We’ll talk a little bit more about what justification means in just a few minutes. And one of the things that struck Luther, and hopefully, maybe you’ve noticed this as well, he says, in the midst of talking about all of our sin and how we all fall short, he talks about a righteous God and talks about a righteous man.

And it’s not just a translation issue, it’s the same Greek word, that Paul is describing people in the same terms of righteousness that he uses for God. This is impossible for us, given the description of us in the first three chapters of Romans. But it is possible for a righteous God to look at us and in spite of our unrighteousness, to consider us righteous.

And the way he does this is through faith. This righteousness is revealed to us in the gospel through faith. And that’s why he says, the righteous man shall live by faith.

Or the way I grew up learning it, the just shall live by faith. So here was Luther trying all these things to get out from under the weight of his sin, trying to work it off, trying to earn some way back into God’s good graces, and comes across this and says, wait a minute, Paul here is describing a man who is just or righteous, describing him in the same terms as God himself, and it says he lives by faith. He got there by faith.

He didn’t get it by going to confession. He didn’t get it by doing penance. He didn’t do it by any kind of religious activity, by being a good person.

He got it through faith. And that was the key that unlocked for him so many other passages in the New Testament that talk about the importance, the utter importance of faith in our salvation. Like Ephesians 2, 8, and 9, For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, lest any man should boast. It’s like the sun came pouring through the clouds for him, realizing that it’s not our works that make us right with God.

It’s our faith. It’s our faith. The Bible teaches justification by faith.

And justification is the idea that our slate is wiped clean. If you could think about God keeping a list, say on a chalkboard, of all of our sins, how big would your chalkboard need to be? I’m telling you, mine would need to be pretty big.

Well, you just said you tried to live a religious life. Yeah, religious, good, moral people don’t do a lot of things out here, but there’s a lot that goes on in here. Probably all of our chalkboards would be about the same size, and I’m not sure they make them big enough.

So we look at that and say, how do we get that erased? And justification is that chalkboard being wiped clean. And folks, God doesn’t just take an eraser to it.

It’s one thing I hated when I was teaching. I was switched to whiteboards, because we’d have chalkboards and you’d erase it, but there’d still be all that nasty dust left over. God doesn’t just take an eraser to it God takes a power washer to that thing and how does that happen he says by faith elsewhere in the scriptures it says Abraham believed and God accredited it to him as righteousness Abraham was a sinner too but he was righteous in the eyes of God why because he believed and so when we think what is it that God wants from us how is it that we get this slate wiped clean how how is it that we get right with God again and and get out from under this weight of sin were justified that slate is wiped clean by faith.

And not just faith that God exists, but we’re talking about faith in the gospel, believing the gospel, believing that Jesus Christ died to pay for our sins on that cross, just like the scripture said that he would, that he was buried and that he rose again three days later to prove it. And realizing that he did that for us and all we’ve got to do is accept it. All we have to do is believe it and accept it.

God says your slate will be wiped clean. We spent all through December talking about faith and talking about the importance of faith. The biggest reason why faith is important is because faith is the key to being right with God.

Now, we’re not earning our salvation by believing. The Bible still says it’s God’s grace. It’s a gift that He gives us just because He’s kind enough to offer it.

Just because He’s loving enough to offer it. It’s not something we still don’t deserve it. I can believe with everything within me.

I still don’t deserve salvation, but God said this is how you get it, is by faith. And I’ve wondered before, why of all things did God pick faith? God could have made us do anything.

As a matter of fact, there are probably some things that would be easier for some folks to do. One of our deacons at Seminole used to say, if we told you to get out there and roll a quarter with your nose down I-40 all the way to the city for salvation, some people would get out there and do it, who are not willing just to believe. So why is it that it’s faith and nothing else?

It’s because ultimately we are the problem and he is the solution. Anything else other than him offering it, us just believing that he’s telling the truth, is somehow relying on ourselves. If we come to him by faith, we’re acknowledging that only he is the solution.

That’s why there’s no other way but to believe, to trust in Jesus. Through the gospel, we receive the righteousness of Christ. It’s not just that there’s a blank slate now. It’s that that chalkboard, after it’s been cleaned off, is filled up with all the righteousness of Christ. Now, that doesn’t mean we become Christians and we become perfect, sinless people.

What it means is that, imagine it like a court of law. We’ve been acquitted. We can’t be charged with that anymore because Jesus has paid for it.

It’s already done and over with. And all the good that Jesus has done has been put on our account. And so when God looks at us, God knows we’re sinners, but God has chosen to see us through the lens of the righteousness of Christ. So when God looks at you as a believer, it’s the righteousness of Christ that he chooses to see.

Because of Jesus Christ, God declares us righteous through faith. And I’ve kind of gone around the edges of it this morning, but I want to take a moment just to be very clear about what the gospel is. Because there is so much confusion, and so many people even in the church world have made everything out to be the gospel.

The Apostle Paul explained the gospel is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. And it’s the forgiveness that we have as a result of it. You and I have sinned against a holy God.

And we can stand here and wonder, why is our sin so offensive to him? Why can’t God just chill out? Because the standard of right and wrong is based on who God is.

And when we choose sin over God, we’re telling God we’re not just rejecting his ways, we’re rejecting him. If somebody came to you and said, I hate you and everything about you, and I’m going to do this instead, how would you feel? Probably wouldn’t like that too much.

So our sin is offensive to God. God is holy and just. And like any good judge, our sin has to be punished. Our crimes have to be punished.

Why can’t God just let it go? Listen, do we want everybody who’s committed any crime, no matter how heinous, to be able to go before the judge and him say, oh, it’s not a big deal. Have a nice day. We would demand that judge be thrown off the bench if not put in jail.

God is a holy judge and a just judge, and our sin has to be punished. It has to be paid for. And you and I could spend eternity separated from God, and it’d be exactly what we deserved.

We could be separated from Him in this life, be totally separated from His love. We could be separated from Him in eternity in hell, and it would be what we deserve for rejecting Him. And yet God loved us enough, not because we were lovable, but because He is love.

God opened the door for us to be right with Him and to have forgiveness and to have that relationship. Jesus Christ, God the Son, came to earth as a human being, had no sin of his own that he had to go pay for, but instead he took responsibility for my sin and your sin. It’s like the day I was teasing Charlie and Abigail.

I told Abigail she needed a spanking. She hadn’t done anything. But I told her she needed a spanking.

She was just being ornery. Charlie said, no, no, don’t spank her. I said, okay, I won’t.

Are you willing to take her spanking? Yeah, if she doesn’t have to have one. And that boy hates spankings.

Oh my goodness, that was a sacrifice right there. He hadn’t done anything at that moment that he needed a spanking for, but he was willing to take hers. Folks, Jesus didn’t have anything that he had to pay for, sin-wise, but he’s willing to stand in our place and take our punishment.

And that’s why he was nailed to the cross and he shed his blood and he died to pay for those sins, not just in part where we now can go work off the rest. He paid for it in full. That’s what he meant when he said, it is finished. It’s all done.

It’s over. It’s finished. and then he died.

And then to prove that he was who he said he was, to prove that he could do what he said he would do, he rose again from the dead three days later. And he sent his followers out with a message that we continue to preach today, that if we’ll simply trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of our sins, not try to earn it, not try to deserve it, not try to do better, but trust in him. He will forgive us.

He’ll wipe that slate clean and make us right with God. What makes it so hard though for people to come to Jesus by faith instead of trying to work for it. What makes it so hard, even as simple as it is, just acknowledge this is true and believe it and accept it.

What makes it so difficult is that to get there, we have to acknowledge we’ve done wrong. We have to acknowledge that we need to be justified. To come to Jesus Christ is to acknowledge that I’ve sinned against a holy God and need forgiveness.

I pray that today, if you need to trust Christ as your Savior, you don’t let that pride of saying, I just don’t want to admit that I was wrong, don’t let that keep you away. It is just as simple as talking to the Lord this morning and expressing your faith in what Jesus Christ did for you. It doesn’t have to be done at the front of the auditorium, although I’ll be glad to talk with you when we stand in just a moment for invitation.

It doesn’t have to be something you do at the front of the church on Sunday morning. There aren’t magic words. There’s not a formula you have to say.

You tell the Lord you know you’ve sinned. You know that Jesus was the only one who could save you from that, that he paid for it in full and you believe it and you trust him as your savior and you ask his forgiveness and it’s that simple but you can have that forgiveness today not because you’ve earned it or deserved it but you can have it because jesus paid for it if you simply have faith and ask him for it