Romans

Passage: Romans 6:1-7

Last week I outlined and summarized the first five chapters of this great letter to the church in Rome.  I said Paul has been hammering home the righteousness of God and our unrighteousness, how God in His abounding grace, mercy and love has made a way for us sinners to be justly reconciled to a righteous God.  The righteous Savior laid down His life for us unrighteous sinners.  The godly for the ungodly.

Up to now Paul has been preaching grace, grace, grace.  The Gentiles are saved by grace, the Jews are saved by grace, Abraham was saved by grace through faith.  We all sin, and the free gift of God is justification by grace.

Paul had just finished saying in Romans 5:20-21.

Romans 5:20-21 Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, 21 so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

I emphasize this one more time so I can make clear the problem the Apostle Paul addresses in chapter six, which it turns out is a very pivotal chapter in this letter.

It is said among pastors and preachers that the Gospel has not been faithfully preached if at some point someone doesn’t ask, so can I sin that grace may abound?

Every pastor who preaches that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone and not by works knows some people will start thinking we can sin all we want.

Every time grace, mercy, forgiveness, faith and justification are preached our sinful minds and hearts are tempted to misunderstand or worse yet, abuse these precious gifts from God.

Passage: Romans 1-5

Since we have been away from Romans for so long, I thought it would be good for us to do a refresher summary of the first five chapters.

You may remember in my first sermon I waxed eloquent on how great a book Romans is, the Mount Everest of the books of the Bible.

John Knox said, “It is unquestionably the most important theological work that has ever been written.”

“Arguably the most influential book in Christian history” (Doug Wilson).

The great English poet Samuel Coleridge said, “Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is the greatest piece of literature ever written, the most profound work in existence.”

“One of the greatest documents ever written by a human being” (N.T. Wright).

It’s been called “The cathedral of the Christian faith,” “The Magna Carta of the human soul.”  It is in reality the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights of the Christian faith.  Romans is the most complete summary of Christian doctrine.  If all the Bible were lost except Romans, almost no fundamental doctrine would be lost.  This is the Gospel according to the Apostle Paul.

This is the book the Church of the 21st century needs to discover all over again.  We all need reformation, renewal, revival.  May it begin here in our study of Romans.

Let’s sink our teeth into Romans again, read it, reflect on it, pray for the Spirit to open our hearts and apply it.  Make real work of knowing and living this truth.  And the offer still stands, $200 to the person who memorizes it.  It’s a little over 7,000 words, about 15 pages.

We begin with Romans 1:16-17, the thesis and theme of the letter.

Passage: I Corinthians 10:16-17; 11:27-32

It is my hope and prayer you had a blessed and thankful Thanksgiving, most of all because the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever and that is cause for gratitude.

This Sunday is a rare Sunday when there is a Sunday between Thanksgiving and the first Sunday of Advent.  Last time was 2018 and next time will be 2028.

This gives me the opportunity to combine two themes, thanksgiving and preparing for coming to the Lord’s Table next Sunday on the first Sunday of Advent.  We sometimes refer to the sacrament as a thanksgiving feast.  The cup of blessing is also called the cup of thanksgiving.  And Jesus gave thanks before breaking the bread and pouring out the cup.  And, finally, we are always called to preparation the week before we take communion.  So it all lines up.

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Passage: Romans 5:18-21

This morning we turn to the final verses of Romans 5.  After today I am going to push the pause button and take a break from Romans for a while.  As has been my practice for all my years of preaching, I will do a series of sermons for Advent.

Then as has also been my practice I will do a series of topical sermons for the new year.  That will lead us up to Lent for which I am pondering a couple of ideas.  So, Lord willing we will resume Romans after Easter which is early next year, March 31.

Our text this morning is a summary kind of passage in which Paul resumes and then concludes a thought he started in verse 12, but then interrupted himself with a digression which led to some other thoughts.

Paul repeats himself here in vss. 18-19.  He started this point in vs. 12, with a therefore, and he comes back to the same point here again in vs. 18 with another therefore.

I have said before that the way God emphasizes things in His Scripture is with repetition.  We use bold, italics, underline, all caps, God uses repetition.  His book isn’t that big, so if He uses up space to repeat something, it must be worthy of extra attention.

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Passage: Romans 5:12-17

Paul has been speaking at great length about our being reconciled to God through faith in Christ whereby we receive His imputed righteousness and are saved by His life.

All this talk of justification, reconciliation, and salvation leads Paul to bring up what makes all that necessary, namely our fall, our sin, death and ruin by Adam.  Last week we said the very word reconciliation implies a previous alienation and hostility, we were once enemies.

In vss. 12-14 Paul shows the depths of this alienation and in vss. 15ff beauty of the reconciliation.  Paul leads us through a series of comparisons and contrasts between the two great heads of humanity, the first Adam and the Second Adam, and their two actions and the two destinies that follow those actions.  By the first man sin entered the world and with it death, and by the second Man righteousness came into the world, and with it eternal life.

There are two ways to be human. Adam and Eve were Humanity 1.0.  God downloaded Humanity 1.0 on earth in the Garden of Eden and it was glorious.  But that system crashed.

God could have written the whole thing off, but He didn’t.  In Genesis 3:15 God announced that He had a new version ready to download.  Jesus is Humanity 2.0, in the new covenant we are the new creation.

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Passage: Romans 5:6-11

Last week Paul spoke of the love of God that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (5:5).  Now he shows us the extravagance of this love, how over the top lavish it is.  There has never been a display of this kind of love, and this much love in the history of the universe.

Paul starts by creating a contrast by speaking in human terms.  Would you be willing to give your life for someone else?  Have you ever thought about whether you could lay down your life for someone else?

Maybe a husband might lay down his life for his wife or children.  Maybe a sibling might die for a sibling, a grandparent for a grandchild.  Maybe.

There are people who have died for the sake of others, firemen, policemen, rescue workers, soldiers, secret service agents.  But that’s their job, in the line of duty, they signed up for it.  The men on the Titanic who said women and children first, a sense of duty or moral obligation.  Maybe a soldier who throws himself on a grenade for the sake of his fellow soldiers.

What’s Paul’s point?  Maybe, perhaps, on a rare occasion you might find a person willing to die for a good person, but never will you find a person willing to die for an enemy.

Fathers, mothers, would you die for the sake of your child?  Yes.  But would you die for the person who kidnapped and murdered your child?  No.

We can find things, events, in human history to illustrate concepts in the Bible.  I can’t think of any example in human history of someone willingly laying down their life for someone who hated them.  No one dies for someone who hates them and does terrible things to them.  No one dies for an enemy.

What Paul is describing here is utterly outside of the range of human experience.  There is no historical, human analogy for this.  Nowhere in the history of mankind is there an example of love like this.

It is one kind of love when someone lays down their life for a good person.  It is a completely different kind of love when someone lays down their life for their enemies.  How would you measure the difference between those two kinds of love?  It is infinitely greater.  It is beyond comparison.

Why didn’t God strike Adam and Eve dead, wipe the slate clean and start over.  There was certainly nothing in them to convince God to keep them around.

God chose to use this to reveal His infinite love, grace and mercy.  God bound Himself to us in the most extravagant love.

This is a massive truth that needs to get our attention and change the way we live and act and worship and treat others.

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Passage: Romans 5:1-5

Rejoice in our sufferings.  Could Paul have said anything more unamerican?  Who wants to rejoice in our sufferings?  What could be more counter-intuitive?  Who would be so crazy as to put those two words together in the same sentence?  Rejoice and suffering.  Isn’t that an oxymoron?

You know, like act naturally, deafening silence, original copy, accurate estimate, virtual reality, crash landing, awfully good, seriously funny.  And now we can add joyful sufferings.

Rejoice in our suffering.

Paul knows this point is hard to understand, so he expands on it to help us know why and how we can rejoice in our sufferings.  He states three truths to show us why and how we can rejoice in our sufferings.

Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, which does not put us to shame.

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Passage: Romans 5:1-5

We all have significant others in our lives, people who matter to us, people whose opinions matter to us and especially whose opinions about us matter to us.  We all have experiences of when those opinions are very positive and encouraging, and when those opinions are negative and discouraging.  We can rise and fall on the opinions of significant others, whether they are parents, spouses, close friends, boyfriends or girlfriends, employers, co-workers, classmates, teachers, pastors.

Who is the most significant other in the world, in the universe?  God.  What does God think about you?  Does God even think about you at all?  Does He smile at you or frown at you?  Is God pleased with you or is He displeased with you?  What do you think He thinks?

In the first four chapters of Romans we learned three things about what God thinks about us.  First, He is very angry with us.  Second, He is completely right to be angry, His anger is completely justified.  And third, there is nothing we can do about it.

But when we arrive here at the beginning of chapter five, the tone is completely different.  God is all smiles.  The language is different, the Apostle Paul uses words like we, faith, peace, grace, joy, hope, love.  What happened, what changed?  How did the most significant other in our lives do such a 180 and turn from frowns to smiles?

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Passage: Romans 4:17-25

So far in chapter four of Romans Paul has used the life and faith of Abraham to prove to the Jews Abraham was not justified by works but by faith (4:1-8), Abraham was not justified by circumcision but by faith (4:9-12), and Abraham was not justified by the law but by faith (4:13-17).

The Jews thought because they were chosen by God they were superior to all other races and nations.  By their laws and rituals they had favor with God, they were saved by race not by faith.

This is why Abraham is such a big deal, the hero and founder of their faith believed God, he lived by faith and his faith was credited to him as righteousness by grace, before works, before circumcision, before the law.  Paul turns now to focus on this faith and the nature of it.

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Passage: Romans 4:13-17

Paul is continuing to build his case that we are justified and saved only by grace through faith and this is a gift from God.  Paul brought two expert witnesses to the stand, Abraham and David, and then he brought Abraham back and made clear circumcision and uncircumcision were nothing.  It had nothing to do with Abraham’s justification by faith.

Now having dealt with that one aspect of the law, Paul now takes on the whole law.  It was not through any of the law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise he would be heir of the world.

Abraham received the promise 430 years before the law was given to Moses, so the promise is not conditioned on obedience to the law.

God made a promise.

Abraham believed the promise.

God fulfilled the promise based on Abraham’s faith, by grace, not by his law keeping.

We will consider this morning the content of the promise, how the promise is received, and who the recipients of the promise are.

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Passage: Romans 4:9-12

Is this blessing only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised? Vs. 4.9.

Is this blessing?  What blessing?  Remember the blessings from last week.

Remember the blessings of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works.

Their lawless deeds are forgiven.  Their sins are covered.  Their sins are not counted against them.  All four of these are now combined into one singular blessing.

So to whom is this blessing given?  To the circumcised or the uncircumcised?  To those who have the mark of the covenant of God as God’s people or those who don’t?  To the Jews or to the Gentiles?

You know how the Jews answered this question, the blessings are for the children of Abraham.  Why?

In Genesis 12 God told Abraham to leave his own country and go to the land He was calling him to, and Abraham rose up and went, he obeyed God, believing in the promise.  In Genesis 15 God promised Abraham his descendants would be like the stars in the sky and Abraham believed God and God credited his faith to him as righteousness.  Then in Genesis 17 God confirmed His promise by establishing a covenant with Abraham, the sign and seal of which was circumcision.

This was the beginning of the people of God, the racial, ethnic group called Jews.  The Jews were the special, set apart people who had Abraham as their father.  For the Jews identity was everything, who their father was separated them from everyone else.

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Passage: Romans 4:6-8

We all say we have faith in Jesus, we profess it, we sing about it.  We all say Jesus is all we need, He is enough.  But the truth is, we don’t actually live that way.  We all mix our faith with works, with trying to win or earn or deserve God’s favor and approval by trying harder to be better and do better, with being moral and upright, having the appearance of godliness.

We still try to put some faith in being good, well sort of good, more good than bad, better than our parents or neighbors or co-workers.  We are sort of generous, we give some money to the church.  We are sort of loving when it doesn’t cost us too much.  We read the Bible, well not all the time but sometimes.  We don’t swear too much or drink too much usually.  God grades on the curve, right, so we are OK.

We are trying harder to be better and do better in hopes of winning favor with God and man.  We focus more on outward behavior than the inward heart.  We talk about being raised right, about keeping to the straight and narrow, about getting our act together.  Gaining approval by behavior

This is called moralism.  We all into this trap, even churches.  The church in Galatia abandoned the Gospel of God’s grace for moralism.

Moralism doesn’t work, it has never worked.  Churches that major in moralism are joyless, and are full of families, marriages, children, that are destroyed by the lack of grace.

Moralism leads to judgmentalism, disapproval, impossible expectations, critical spirit, constant pressure to measure up.  Husbands do it to wives, wives to husbands, parents to children.

Are we not called to live good and godly and upright lives?  Are we not called to obey the Ten Commandments?  Of course, but they are not the Gospel, we are not saved by keeping them.  We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus.  We are justified by God by faith.  Then we receive grace to live lives transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The best that moralism can do for us is make us better behaved sinners, but still sinners nonetheless.  Moralism is fake news, fake faith.  It imitates holiness, but it is only the form of godliness without the power.  It isn’t real. It might win us the applause and approval of those around us, but not of God.

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