Sola Gratia #4 - Justified by Grace
Description
Senior Pastor Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the Sola Gratia series focusing on the doctrine of grace. Looking at Romans 3:21-31, he explains that all people—without distinction between Jew and Gentile—have sinned and fall short of God's glory, but are freely justified by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ, which doesn't nullify God's law but rather upholds it as justified believers who live according to the Spirit fulfill the righteous requirements of the law.
Summary and Application
In a world obsessed with achievement and earning our way, the biblical concept of justification by faith alone stands as a radical counter-cultural message. Dr. Kurt Bjorklund's sermon on Romans 3:21-31 unpacks this transformative truth that lies at the heart of the Christian faith.
The Core Message: Justified by Faith Alone
The central message of Romans 3 is clear: we are "justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." This justification—being declared righteous before God—comes not through our works or obedience to the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.
As Dr. Bjorklund explains, this truth eliminates any grounds for boasting. When asked what we have to feel good about in our justification, the biblical answer is startlingly simple: nothing. Romans 3:27-28 states, "Where then is this boasting? It's excluded... For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law."
This can be uncomfortable for those of us who want to feel we've earned some credit with God. We naturally desire to point to our good deeds, church attendance, or moral living as reasons God should accept us. But the gospel strips away these pretenses, leaving us with only Christ's work on our behalf.
Common Objections to Grace
Dr. Bjorklund addresses several objections people raise to this teaching:
"If I'm justified by faith, what do I have to feel good about?" The answer: nothing in ourselves. Our boasting is excluded because salvation is entirely God's work.
"If I'm justified by faith, do those with a 'thinner resume' have the same outcome?" Yes! That's the beauty and scandal of grace—the lifelong church attender and the deathbed convert receive the same gift of righteousness.
"If I'm justified by faith, does it nullify God's standard?" Paul's emphatic answer is "Absolutely not!" or "By no means!" Grace doesn't lower God's standards; it fulfills them through Christ.
The Security of Justification
One of the most comforting aspects of justification by faith is that "there's no future exposure." Dr. Bjorklund explains that once justified, "there's nothing in our future sin that can unjustify us." We are secure because "we can't sin our way out of being justified" since it's "a definitive act which God does in response to seeing faith in our lives."
This doesn't mean we're free to sin—Paul will address that misconception thoroughly in Romans 6-8. Rather, "justified believers who live according to the Spirit fulfill the righteous requirements of the law." Grace transforms us from the inside out.
The Good Samaritan: Law and Grace in Action
Dr. Bjorklund references Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan to illustrate how the law exposes our need while grace meets it. The parable shows that no matter how many times we help others, there will always be someone we walk past. We're not perfect neighbors, which is why "we need to be justified by the love of Jesus Christ."
Yet Jesus concludes the parable by saying, "Go and do likewise." This isn't a contradiction—it's the proper order. First comes justification by faith, then comes the transformed life that reflects God's character.
The Universal Need for Grace
The sermon reminds us that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Some of us minimize our wrongdoing, thinking "I'm not really in as bad a place as other people." Others feel overwhelmed, believing "there's no way God, Jesus, anybody would ever justify me because I've gone too far."
But the Christian message is that "God justifies sinners, and He does it because it is in His good pleasure, because of what Jesus has done, that it isn't because of what we do." This righteousness is "given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe" with "no difference between Jew and Gentile."
Practical Application Questions
Self-Reflection: In what ways do you still try to "earn" God's favor? What would it look like to fully embrace that you are justified by faith alone?
Heart Check: Do you secretly feel superior to others because of your spiritual resume? How does the truth that justification is by faith alone challenge this attitude?
Grace and Obedience: How does knowing you're fully accepted by God through faith motivate your obedience differently than trying to earn His approval?
Sharing Grace: Who in your life needs to hear that they don't have to clean themselves up before coming to God? How can you communicate this message effectively?
Living Securely: How might your daily life change if you truly believed that "there's no future exposure" and your justification is secure in Christ?
Extending Mercy: Like the Good Samaritan, how can you extend grace to someone who society says doesn't deserve it? What would it look like to "go and do likewise" from a position of being justified rather than trying to justify yourself?
Community Impact: How would our churches change if we truly embraced that everyone—regardless of background, achievements, or failures—stands on equal ground at the foot of the cross?
Remember, the beauty of grace is that it's freely given to all who believe. We don't earn it, we simply receive it—and then live from it.
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Let's pray together. God, thank you for bringing all the different folks to be a part of the different times and locations that have made up Orchard Hill this weekend. And Lord, in this moment, I pray that you would speak to each of us, and that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
One of the things that happens to almost everybody in life at some point is that you end up incurring some debt. Sometimes it starts with a college debt. You go off to college and you have to take a little loan and you say, okay, I'll hopefully be able to pay this back or maybe you're fortunate and you didn't have to do it for college, but it was that first car. And you said, I need a car that's reliable. I can't can't do it anymore with the old car.
I need a new car. Maybe it was the second car, the third car. Or maybe it was the house. You couldn't do a house without going into debt so you borrow for a house, maybe it was a business, but most of us at some point in our lives go into some kind of debt. But when we go into debt there's always the assumption that we will have the ability to pay it back on the backside.
When it's education, we think my education will help me get a better job. When it's a car, I'll have enough earning power to take care of the car. You buy a house, you think I'll be able to take care of the house someday. But I want you to imagine with me that you buy a house and when you buy the house, you have a series of unfortunate events that happen in your life. You've incurred the debt, but all of a sudden you lose your job, So you don't have income, and you can't find a new job because the market tanks a little bit.
And when the market tanks, the value of the house goes down, so you can't sell it to get out of it for what you have into it. And then you get sick, and you're not able to work even on a lesser paying job, and all of a sudden, you're in way over your head when it comes to debt. Now imagine that somebody comes along and says, I'm gonna pay for your debt. You don't owe anymore. I I took care of it.
You would be overwhelmed with gratitude if somebody took care of a debt that you knew you could not pay. Today, we're looking at this idea of being justified by grace. It's part of our series that we've called sola gradia, which is the idea of being saved by grace alone. And justification is a legal phrase, not so much a commerce phrase, but a legal phrase that means once you have incurred guilt, that you can be justified, that you can be declared right, and it's what God ultimately does. And we're going to look specifically at Romans chapter three verse 26 through 31.
But but but I want to just ask you this. If I said to you today, you know, we all incurred debts and some of us have some of us have gotten in over our head, but I was able to secure a paid stamp. I may have taken it from the church office. And if you'll bring your mortgages, your car loans, your student loans, your business loans next weekend, I will stamp them paid, And I'll let you walk out of here with a paid version. These are just note cards, but a paid version of your loan to say that thing is paid.
I don't need to pay it anymore. I have it stamped paid. How many of you would bring your loans? Now, maybe a few of you would, but you shouldn't because clearly I cannot forgive your debts. Now, I might be able to, if I had resources, pay your debt, but I can't forgive your debt because you don't owe me the money.
The debt has to be paid to who it's owed to. And in verse 26 of Romans three, we're told something about Jesus that's significant. It says that he's the one who is just and the justifier, or the one who justifies. This is a beautiful statement because what it's saying is Jesus is just, meaning he has the right. He is the one who has lived correctly, completely, and he's the one who can declare others right.
Now sometimes, we hear this, depending on where we're coming from, and we have some different reactions. Some of us activate our inner lawyer at this point, and we say, well, I don't really owe. I haven't done anything that bad. I'm not sure that I have a sin issue that I need God through Jesus Christ to justify me. So some of us may realize we owe, but we say, compared to other people, I don't owe as much.
Therefore, I'm not really in as bad a place as other people. And probably some of us hear this, and we feel overwhelmed by what we owe. And we say, there's no way God, Jesus, anybody would ever justify me because I've gone too far, and I have little little hope. But the Christian message is the idea that God justifies sinners, and He does it because it is in His good pleasure, because of what Jesus has done, that it isn't because of what we do. In the verses that just precede what we're going to look at, here's what we read, Romans chapter three verse 21 and following, it says this, but now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the law and the prophets testify.
So he's saying this isn't in discontinuity from the Old Testament, the law of the prophets. They're talking about this righteousness that's been made known, and and it's apart from the law. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There's no difference between the Jew and the Gentile. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace, though through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement through the shedding of his blood to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. And what that is talking about is that there is this justification that comes by faith apart from the law, and this is God's way of working in our lives. And this is much bigger than just a legal declaration for some future, but this impacts the way that we live. But before I try to, help us understand how Paul argues how this impacts how we live, I want to just just point out something and that is there is a difference between how Orchard Hill believes that we are justified by faith and how the Catholic church understands this doctrine.
And I don't often single out a church and say, this is what that church believes. This is what we believe. And sometimes it's hard to say what another church believes because you say, how can you say what one whole church believes? It's got lots of churches, lots of people. It's a little bit like saying, you know, Steeler fans think we should sign Aaron Rodgers.
I mean, there's a lot of diversity of opinion there, and we should not. But, but, yeah, biggest amen I've got in a month. Now, here is what Scott Hahn writes, and Scott Hahn is a Catholic theologian. This is in the Ignatius study bible. The big volume of this just came out.
The New Testament's been out for a while, but the Old Testament is out. And the reason I give you this background is this is sanctioned by the Catholic church. So this is what they are saying. We believe that this is new scholarship out there today. Here's what he writes about Romans three twenty three.
Romans three twenty three, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That's that's what it says. So everybody's guilty. Here's what he says, and I'm gonna change the words just a little for clarity, but this is essentially what he says. Not all without exception.
In other words, all have sinned doesn't mean everybody, but it means without distinction, the Jew and the Gentile alike. That there are exceptions is clear, he says. Jesus was sinless. Children below the age of reason do not willfully commit sin. And tradition holds that Mary, by the grace of God, lived her entire life unstained by sin.
So here's what he's saying. There are exceptions to all people's sins. Certainly Jesus, Mary, because Mary didn't actually sin, tradition holds that she didn't sin. And then he says, and kids, until the age of of some kind of accountability, reason, knowledge, baptism, they're also unstained by sin. Now, that goes against the understanding that that protestants have typically had of original sin.
You're guilty from the moment you're born, and here he follows this up. This is his comment on verse 28. And here's what he says, faith is a gift of grace that moves us toward God. It leads us to justification because it leads to baptism. The object of justifying faith is both personal and propositional.
It embraces God as well as the revealed tenants of the gospel. Catholic theology holds that faith does not act alone in this process, but it reaches out with hope for divine mercy and the love for the Lord. Faith manifests itself in the lives of believers through obedience, love, and good works. So so up to now, he's saying something very similar to to to what I would hold and Orchard Hill would hold, that that faith leads to something. But then he says this.
He he references the Council of Trent here in his notes, and then he says this, this grace is an entirely free gift of Jesus Christ conferred in baptism. So how do you get the gift? You have to be baptized in the church and continue in the faith ultimately is part of the the the way that that's understood. Here's why I say this matters. This is, there's a lot of things that are very similar, Catholic church, Orchard Hill, but there are some differences that really matter because if you believe what Orchard Hill believes the Bible teaches, that means that we believe that you are justified by grace through faith alone.
It has nothing to do with your works. It means that if you try to add to your salvation through a work, you actually negate that salvation because then it isn't faith alone. You're saying it's faith plus. And if you hold what the Catholic church believes, it's distinct from Orchard Hill because what they would say very simply is, is you're not actually sinful when you're born. And if you get baptized beforehand and then continue in the way of the church, then you're taken care of.
In other words, it has to do with our works. But faith that justifies ultimately means that there's no future exposure, that there's nothing in our in our future sin that can unjustify us, that that that we are secure because we can't sin our way out of being justified because it's a definitive act at which God does in response to seeing faith in our lives. And what Paul does in Romans chapter three verse 27 through 31 is he basically comes and he he takes this idea that that you're justified by faith alone, there's no future exposure, that your future sins won't count against you, therefore you're secure, And he deals with the objections that come, and we're going to look at this through three questions. There's more in the text, but several of the questions are asking the same question or related to it. And here are the questions, basically.
If we're justified by faith, what do I have to feel good about? If I'm justified by faith, do those with a thinner resume basically have the same outcome? And if I'm justified by faith, does it nullify God's standard? So first, we'll look at verse twenty seven and twenty eight, which is this question, if I'm justified by faith, what do I have to feel good about? Do you know what the answer is in the text?
Nothing. Here's where we see it, verse 27. Where then is this boasting? It's excluded. That's his nothing, by the way.
Because of what law? The law that requires works? No. Because of the law that requires faith. For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.
So what does it mean? You and I don't get to walk around saying, you know what? I've kept God's standard. Therefore, I feel good about myself. And certainly within faith, there there's a there's a part of many of us that wants to feel some credit, that wants to feel like we have done something that has brought this credit to ourselves.
But what we see here is he says, where is this boasting? And then he says, you don't have any reason to boast. Frederick Buechner put it this way a generation ago. He said, there is no way to earn it or deserve it or to bring it about any more than you or I deserve the taste of raspberries and cream. Says, this is something that's just a gift, but pride makes us want to feel like we have earned it in some way.
We deserve it, and to feel good about ourselves. And you might think this is negative, but it's actually incredibly freeing because you don't have to keep trying to commend yourself to God in order to feel justified, or to people you can say instead I'm justified on the basis of the just Jesus, therefore I have security and it really doesn't matter how you see me or what I've done or not done because it's all what Jesus Christ has done. C. S. Lewis, in writing about this idea of pride, says this.
He says, there is one vice, which no man in the world is free, which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else, and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I've heard people admit that they are bad tempered or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they're cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who is not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time, I have very seldom met anyone who is not a Christian who showed the slightest mercy in it to others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves.
And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. And the vice I'm talking about is pride. What the cross does, what justification with faith alone does is it moves us into a place where we say, I have no occasion for pride. So the first question, what do I have to feel good about? Nothing.
The second question is this, and that is, does do those with a thinner resume have the same outcome? And by thinner resume here, I'm talking about spiritual resume. And his answer is a resounding yes to this question. So this is Romans three, this is verse twenty nine and thirty. He says, or is God the God of the Jews only?
Is he not the God of the Gentiles too? Yes, of the Gentiles too, since there is only one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through the same faith. Now I recognize that even just just reading that, that it's a little confusing. Jews, Gentiles, circumcised, uncircumcised, same God, same faith. What is this talking about?
The Jews generally thought of themselves as being God's special people in the sense not just that God had chosen them to reveal himself to humanity, but that they kept the law, and by keeping the law, they were in a privileged position, and their privileged position made them somehow special before God. And here, Paul blows this up because he says, God is the God of the Jews and the Gentiles, and then he makes sure to make this point. He says, let let me even drive this harder. He said he said he justifies the same way on the basis of, of faith for the circumcised and the uncircumcised. Now, again, this this feels a little disconnected because now in our culture, circumcision is largely just a hygienic preference decision.
But in that culture, it was part of the religious ritual that God wanted his people to use, the Jewish people, to demonstrate and and be a sign of the covenant. And so as a result, when Gentiles would come to faith, even adult Gentiles, they would want to circumcise the men in order to say you're proving that you're Jewish enough or you're faithful enough to God. And now this raises some questions, and I'm just gonna go on a little detour here for a second. So, if I lose you in the weeds here, come back in about five minutes. But, but this does raise some questions about how we understand Old Testament law because this whole passage is about saying you're justified apart from the law.
So what does that mean? Does that mean that the Old Testament law doesn't matter anymore? How am I to understand that? And in Christian theology, both Catholic and Protestant, by the way, there has been this understanding that the Old Testament law is made up of three different sections. There's what has been called the moral law, so this would be you shall not commit murder.
Okay? It's good law, still enforced, moves into the time in which we live. There's what has been called the civil law, and the civil law is this idea that that there are are certain laws that God gave the people of Israel that were about their national life that are not enforced in the New Testament. So this would be, for example, in Deuteronomy 24 where a man is told that when he's first married, he shouldn't be conscripted to go off to war for the first year. Okay?
That that that is a civil law unique to that civilization, not part of where we are. And then there's what theologians have called ceremonial law, and this is the idea that there were things that God gave to the people about ceremonies that pointed forward to Jesus that were ultimately fulfilled in Jesus, meaning that that when you get something like in Leviticus one that talks about a burnt offering and bringing it that is completely without defect, that there's no need to bring burnt offerings without defect today because Jesus has fulfilled the law. Okay? So so quick high level view of that. Now, I often try to say, okay, what does that mean as we think about it because people will get confused.
They'll go back into the old testament and say, we should keep this. Okay? By the way, anybody here have a tattoo? Do you know you don't need to raise your hands, but, and you certainly don't need to show us, but, especially depending where they are, but, I digress. In the Old Testament, there's a place that says don't tattoo yourself, but that's not something that I believe is enforced.
I don't think you're in the wrong if you have a tattoo because that was not part of God's moral law. And here's how here's how I think about it just to distinguish very quickly, and that is a law is binding and continuing into our day if it is rooted in the character of God or in created order or it's repeated in the New Testament. And the laws that are clearly rooted not in those things were ceremonial or civil for the day in which they were given. Now you may say, okay, what does this have to do with with superiority and thinner resumes? You you see, in the New Testament, there were those people known as Judaizers who would go back to the law, and they would keep saying, everybody needs to keep the law.
And it was a way of saying, God likes me and my kind better. And Paul here is saying, no. He's the same God for those who are circumcised, uncircumcised, ceremonial peace fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And what that means is that is that when somebody comes to Jesus, being justified is the same blessing wherever you come from. And sometimes this is offensive.
When Jesus was on the cross and the thief on his one side said, Lord, remember me. Do you know what Jesus said? Today, you will be with me in paradise. What he was doing was he was saying, you will get to be justified by faith in a moment. Your resume is incredibly thin.
It was true for Rahab in the old testament when the Jewish people were observing all of their laws and she was observing none of them and she had faith, all of a sudden she was justified. In other words, God justifies sinners, and he does it on the basis of what he's done, not on the basis of what we've done. And we end up in the same place in terms of our commendation before God. Let let me put this another way. When I was in grade school, I went to this school for a few years.
That's a school, big highway there on the side, four lane highway. The horizontal road dead ended right before the highway. And the land around the school was owned by a paper company. So what would happen is it would grow up, and then they would clear cut it and take all the wood and sell the wood. So across the street, across the the horizontal road, that used to be a field.
Now it's a grown up trees. But when I was a kid, it was trees around the school on three sides, field across the street. So the reason I tell you this is when I was a kid in grade school, evidently we got bored with kickball. It was so third grade when we got to fourth grade. And so me and a couple of my buddies decided that that what would be fun during recess is if when the teachers weren't looking, the aids weren't looking, we would sneak into the woods, which was clearly against the rules.
Everybody knew it. It was a big deal, don't go in the woods, which by the way was a good rule for grade school kids. And so we would go into the woods and we'd kind of peel off one by one. We'd meet in the woods, then we'd circle around and go out until we were across the street, which again was a field at this time. We would either run or crawl our way across the field, undetected, come back into the woods, come back in in time to go back in and sit down at our desk and continue our fourth grade education.
We thought this was fun, that this was just our idea of how to make make grade school recess more enjoyable. And we did it several times, got away with it, until one day one of the kids who was with us evidently decided that he wanted to tell more people. And so he started talking about it, soon the teacher heard, the teacher was concerned, she told the principal, and the principal called us down one by one to get the story and we cracked. And here's how I remember this this playing out. It's been a few years, so my memory may be a little foggy.
But what I remember is he basically said to us, Yeah, I've got to give you a detention because I have to do something. Justice has to be served here. Tomorrow afternoon, your recess will be with me. And then he proceeded to take us into the gym and play basketball with us for the entire recess. Now why why do I tell you this?
I'm sure there were other kids who thought, that's not fair. I've never gone in the woods. I've never gotten a special basketball session with the principal at lunchtime. How is that fair? And if you understand justification by faith alone, there will be some days in which you'll say, that doesn't seem fair.
But the message that Paul is driving at here is he's saying, do you think that God appreciates you more because of your resume? Do you think that that that that somehow you're going to be in better standing? No. Because it's not about you. It's not about what you've done.
It's about what Jesus has done. And that changes everything. And that leads us to one last question, really an objection. And this is in Romans three verse 31. It says this, do we then nullify the law by this faith?
Not at all. Rather, we uphold the law. And here, at least in part, the the question of law is a little problematic on this level. And that is, law here, I think, isn't even necessarily referring to the moral civil ceremonial, but he's using this differently. John Stott in his commentary, talks about this.
And I'm gonna read just a little bit of this. I tried to explain it last evening when I did this, but John Stott says it way better than I can, so I'm gonna I'm gonna read a little bit. I know reading can I can lose you for a second, but this helps bring clarity to this this verse, this concept? He says, what does he mean? He's talking about the word law here.
Our answer will depend on a connotation, on what connotation he's giving to the law in this context. If he's referring to the Old Testament in general, then his gospel of justification by faith upholds rather than undermines it by showing that the Old Testament points to. And then he says in Romans four, he shows us because he talks about Abraham being justified by faith. In other words, God upholds the idea. If you're saying this refers to the whole testament.
Then he says if if on the other hand, Paul is using the law in its more restricted sense of the Mosaic law, then his assertion that faith upholds rather than nullify the law nullifies the law may be understood in two ways. First, faith upholds the law by assigning to it its proper place in God's purpose. In this scheme of salvation, the function of the law is to expose and contend sin, and so to keep sinners locked in their guilt until Christ comes to liberate through faith. In other words, it's fulfilled in Jesus. And then he says this, but the alternate explanation, this is the second alternative, he says, is that Paul's statement sees it as being a response to a different set of critics.
These help that by declaring justification to be by faith, not obedience, Paul was actively encouraging disobedience. This charge of antinomianism, Paul will decisively refute in Romans six through eight, but he anticipates these chapters here by the simplest affirmation of faith and upholds the law. What he means, and will elaborate on later, is that justified believers who live according to the spirit fulfill the righteous requirements of the law. He says, it seems to me this is the best explanation. Now here's what he's doing.
He's saying he's saying, does it nullify the standards of God, basically? So so now he's using law differently than than the three Old Testament uses. He's saying, the standards of God, is it is it eradicated when we talk about justification by faith? And then he says, not at all. And this is a phrase that appears 14 times in Paul's writings.
It's it's a phrase in the original language. It has a negative word, may, and the word genetah, and it means not at all or may it never be. Here's a bunch of ways it's translated. The CSB and NET say absolutely not. The RSV, NRSV, ESV, by no means.
The NLV, no, not at all. The NIV84, New King James version, certainly not. The King James, God forbid. You've maybe heard that different times. The ISV NLT, of course not.
The NJB, it's out of the question. The New American Standard, far from it. And the NIV2020, not at all. Now why do I show you all of this? Because it's hard to translate.
But what this phrase is is it's the strongest negation possible to a question. Daniel Wallace in his grammar says, says that this is a negation of a question. So when he says, does this nullify the law? He's saying, what a ghastly thought. He's saying, this is is completely not what it's saying.
Now again, using law, I believe a little differently than saying keeping of the Torah. He's using it here to say God's current standard somewhat. What he's doing is he's saying, you fulfill the law ultimately as Jesus has fulfilled it for you, and then you are fulfilling it yourself. So just back to the the school and the principal. Do you know that day that I was called into the office and given the the hall pass recess thing?
I never went in the woods again, at least during recess. Do you know why? Because I had experienced grace and I did not want to disappoint the principal. Now some of you say, well, that was dumb. You should have gone back in the woods, and and you may have gone back in the woods.
But the point is when we really get what it is to be justified, what happens is not that Jesus says you no longer need to do certain things, as much as it changes us to being led by the Spirit so that we understand. In fact, you get this. If you've had kids when you have little kids, what do you do? You you say, do not cross the sidewalk. Do not go near the road.
The road is dangerous. Stay back from the road. It's a law. It's a rule. What happens though, as your kids get older?
You don't need to tell them not to go near the the road because they have learned the lesson. They've internalized the principle. It's not that the rule goes away, it's that it's not needed because because you're you're living out of an internalization of God's good ways, good heart. Just like a parent's good heart is saying, you shouldn't go in the road, and I'm giving you a hard rule for your own good. And that's what God does with us.
You see this, by the way, in Jesus. There was a time when Jesus was interacting with some people, and we're told a lawyer came to him. And a lawyer, by the way, doesn't mean a lawyer like we think of lawyers today. Usually, it means an expert in Old Testament law. This is in Luke 10.
And the lawyer comes to Jesus and the lawyer says, tell me who my neighbor is. It was a bit of a trick question because what he was trying to do was say, I want to get out of it some of the obligations on the technicality. And Jesus says, Well, let me tell you a story. Says, There's a certain man who's traveling between Jericho and Jerusalem and some robbers overtook him, beat him, left him on the side of the road. And he said a certain priest happened to be going by.
And he said, the priest, the person you would most expect to stop and have have compassion for this man, passed by on the other side. A Levite came by, did the same thing. And then he says, a Samaritan came. Now, Samaritans and Jewish people didn't get along. This was the person you would least expect to stop, least expect to put himself out.
When the man stops, he cares for this man. But then not only that, he takes the man to an inn and he says to the innkeeper, look, take care of them until I come back and I'll pay you whatever it costs. It's like taking your credit card and saying, here, whatever this costs, I'll take care of it. For somebody who probably hates you and you have been taught to hate in reality from an ethnic standpoint, he's saying he's saying, I I don't care. I'm gonna do this.
And Jesus' question then is, which of these do you think is like the neighbor? Which one's most neighborly? And the lawyer says, well, I suppose the the Samaritan guy. Right? I mean, I okay.
I get it. Yeah. Now, what is Jesus doing? He's not negating the law. What he's doing is he's using the law to say it exposes your need, and no matter how many times you stop for somebody on the side of the road, there's somebody you're gonna walk by.
You're not a perfect neighbor. You need to be justified by the love of Jesus Christ. But then what does he do? Do you know what the last phrase is? What he says, verse 33, 34, now go and do likewise.
See, Jesus upholds the law. He keeps the law on your behalf, and without all of the ceremonial and civil law of the old testament says, and I want you to live it out of a place of being justified. No fear that you'll be condemned if you don't keep it, but you you you endeavor to keep it because of the grace you've experienced. That is where you have come to experience justification by faith. And when that's true, what it does is it changes your approach to spiritual life because you say, it's been paid.
Jesus has paid for me entirely. Why would I not want to follow what he asks? Justification by faith alone is one of those cornerstones of understanding what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. And if we get it wrong, we fall back into trying to earn our way somehow through our behavior, our goodness, our comparative goodness, instead of resting in and celebrating and savoring the grace of God. You know, if you're a husband, a wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, in all chance in all likelihood, there's been a day where you've said something, done something that was offensive to your spouse, your boyfriend, your girlfriend.
And some of us maybe are okay with that and we keep going down the path, but if you've experienced forgiveness for something you know that was wrong, chances are your response was not to say, cool, they forgive me, let me do it again. Chances are your resolve was to say, wow, I want to honor them and how I live moving forward. It doesn't mean there's never a fall, a stumble, but but it means that there's a there there's a sense in which you're responding to what they've done, And God loves to justify those of us who don't deserve to be justified, which is all of us. And he does it through Jesus Christ, and it is the great movement of worship that we have in response to that. So with that today, we're going to partake in communion.
We have tables here at the front to the outside, in the balcony, in the lobby behind. And when you come today, if if you come, we invite anybody who says I've been justified by grace through faith. We invite anybody who says I've been justified by grace through faith. We invite anybody who says dunk it in the wine and say, God, I thank you. That it is because of Jesus, the one who is just, that I am justified, that I have been justified by grace.
That means I don't need to live with insecurity or fear about my future sin, my past sin, but it has been paid for by the work of Jesus Christ, and that leads us to worship. And if you're here today and you say, look, I'm not sure. I've always thought that I had to perform. I just wanna say very clearly that that that faith, current faith in the new testament leads to being justified, and you can start that journey today. You can know that today by saying, God, I trust that I've sinned, but Jesus paid.
He's the just and the justifier. And receive what he's done, and say, now I'm justified, and begin a new spiritual journey. Father, we thank you that your word is clear about what makes us right. It doesn't leave it ambiguous, and God, I pray that you would help me and every person who's gathered today to respond not just intellectually but with a heart of worship and wonder and gratefulness for what it is Jesus has done on our behalf. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.
This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any errors.
