Trinity Baptist Church

Key Words of the Christian Life

Justification: Not Guilty!

Romans 3:24-28

 

I don’t know if you ever look at the bottom of the screen or the bottom of the page of the hymnal while we’re singing to see the names of the people who wrote the songs and music, but if you do, you might remember seeing the name P.P. Bliss.

 

He served as a musical song writer and associate evangelist for the great D.L. Moody. In the early years of Moody’s career, P.P. Bliss was his favorite songwriter and the man he took with him to all his revival campaigns. Bliss died when he was 38 years old, but had already written many gospel songs became traditional hymns of the church.

 

And if you were raised in an evangelical church, whether you realized it or not, chances are high you have done a lot of singing of the music of P.P. Bliss. He wrote the song “Hallelujah, What a Savior”.

 

He also wrote the invitation song “Almost Persuaded”. He wrote the tune that goes with the words “It is Well With My Soul”. He also wrote a little chorus we used to sing called “Dare to be a Daniel”. He also wrote “Jesus Loves Even Me”.

 

But perhaps his best-known and most-loved and the one sung the most down through the years is the song that says, “Sing them over again to me, wonderful words of life. Let me more of their beauty see, wonderful words of life. Words of grace and beauty, teach me faith and duty, beautiful words, wonderful words, wonderful words of life.”

That old song came to mind this week as I was thinking about the New Year and what I should be preaching in this first few weeks.  I want to begin today a study of some of the wonderful words of the Bible.

 

I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the time to study the words of the Bible, but if you take your Bible and begin to read through it, especially the New Testament, you will soon discover there are some words that are of extreme importance.

 

In fact, I’m going to say understanding those words is crucial to understanding the Bible.  In fact, I’m going to go a step farther and say unless you come to understand these few words you will never fully understand what the Bible is teaching.

 

And unfortunately many casual Bible readers, when they encounter these words on the pages of the Bible, rather than digging and seeking out their meaning, just read by them or skip over them and never understand what is being said.

 

We are going to be looking at six of the key words of the Christian life. These are not the small words. They aren’t the incidentals.  We are going to look at six of the big words of the Christian life.

 

I’ll just give them to you in a list to begin with.  Then over the course of the next few weeks we’ll look at them closely and intently in an attempt o understand what God wants us to know and understand through these words.

 

Here are the six words we are going to look at:

 

 

I think it is important to take some time to study these key words for three reasons:

 

At the top of the list is the unbelievable Biblical illiteracy that exists among Christians today.  My own experiences, as well as all the surveys of today reveal the same thing.  Far too many of God’s people today know nothing about the Bible.

 

In fact, we are now living in an age when the average Christian gives more credibility to experience than they do the Word of God.  So when we have to make a decision between an emotional experience and standing on Bible doctrine, we are swayed by an emotional experience instead of by the clear teaching of the Bible.

 

That is critical because uninformed or misinformed Christians are far more likely to make stupid decisions.  Therefore when we are placed in a position where we are tempted or called upon to make a moral judgment, if we don’t understand the Bible, we make the wrong decisions and wind up messing up, not only our life but the lives of those around us.

 

Thirdly, well-taught Christians are strong Christians. That is why the writing of the Apostle Paul always focuses on Bible doctrine.

He does it in Colossians, in Philippians, in Romans, in Ephesians, and in I Corinthians. Then he takes the Bible doctrine and applies it to life.

 

So for the next few weeks we are going to go back to the fundamental basics of the News Testament to consider some of the great doctrines of the Bible. My hope is, not just to create Biblical literacy, but in so doing to help you and I avoid some of the tragedies of life and in the process become stronger Christians.

 

The first key word that we are going to look at is justification. I think it is easy to understand why we are beginning with that word. There is no doctrine more central to our faith than the doctrine of justification.

 

Martin Luther called justification “the cornerstone of Christianity.” J.I. Packer said that any church that has lapsed from justification by faith can scarcely be called a Christian church. If you know anything about church history and the Protestant Reformation, you know that justification by faith was spark that created the fire of the Reformation.

 

In the early 1500’s, Martin Luther was a young, disillusioned Roman Catholic monk in Wittenberg, Germany.  For years,, even as a learned teacher of the Bible, he had desired and looked for peace with God. He was reading through the Bible, searching for peace and couldn’t find it. He felt God was angry with him and far away.

 

 

 

 

The turning point of his life came when he made a journey to Rome. He was crawling up the stairs of the church in Rome, with tears running down his face, kissing each stair and saying the “Our Father” and praying to God for Him to make himself real to him.

 

While he was climbing to the top of those stairs, a text of scripture burst into his mind, “the just shall live by faith.” In that moment, Martin Luther came to understood that peace with God does not come by crawling or kissing or by going to church.  It’s not by human effort, but only through faith in Jesus Christ that a man is made right with God.

 

From that great realization came the spark that ignited the flame that became the Protestant Reformation that eventually spread around the world. In fact, because of that Reformation movement, millions of Christians were able to catch up with where Baptists had always been.

 

What Martin Luther came to believe is exactly what Bible-believing Christians have always believed.  It is what we believe today.  Man is justified through faith alone in Jesus Christ.

 

Centuries ago, Job asked, “How can a man be made right with God?” There is only one answer in the Bible. He is made right with God through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

 

Now, when we use the words “justify” or “justification”, we are generally talking about a person seeking to justifying themselves.

What that typically means is someone has done something wrong and is going to offer some excuses to mitigate or explain why they did what they did.

 

That is not what the word justify means in the Bible. In the Bible it is a legal term that comes straight out of the courtroom.  In the Greek language, “justify” means “to declare righteous”.

 

So in Biblical terms, you justify someone when you declare them not guilty and innocent and righteous in the eyes of the law. It does not mean to make righteous; it means to declare righteous. It means to look at someone who is guilty and declare that they are now not guilty.  They are innocent, righteous and free from any consequences of their wrongdoing.  The record has been expunged.

 

If you want a technical definition, I would give it to you this way: justification is that divine miracle whereby God declares righteous the sinner who believes in Jesus.

 

 

In order to give you the means of justification, I want to read some well-known verses. If you go back and read the Bible, you’ll discover that the doctrine of justification is found throughout the New Testament. There are many places where you find it, but there is no place laid out so clearly as in Romans chapter 3.

 

So let me pose the question and together we’ll see the answers from the Word of God.

 

 

How can a person be justified before God?  What is the means of justification?

 

First, justification is

 

 

Romans 3:24a

 

 Justification starts with the grace of God. It is not something that you have to work up. It is not something you do through your effort. You are not justified before God by coming to church or being baptized or giving money. Those things count for nothing at all when it comes to justification.

 

Then look at the rest of the verse.

 

 

verse 24b-25a

 

notice it is “through faith.”

 

Those two thoughts are the most fundamental aspects of our salvation.  We are saved “by grace through faith” and notice they come directly from the pages of God’s Word.

 

Thirdly,

 

 

Notice it is not just faith, but our faith is placed in what He did “as a propitiation by His blood”.

Propitiation is one of the words we’ll look at in this series, but for now just understand it’s talking about a sacrifice and that sacrifice involved the blood of Jesus Christ.  Jesus died on the cross and shed his blood. He was buried and he rose from the dead so that through the effects of the blood of Jesus Christ you could be justified or declared righteous in the eyes of God.

 

It happened because of the grace of God and we place our faith in Him, trusting that what He did on the cross will satisfy God.

 

Then notice,

 

 

Read Romans 3:27-28

 

The law referenced here is the Old Testament. Paul is talking about the Law of Moses.  Most likely he had in mind the Ten Commandments. And what God is telling us in this passage is that you aren’t going to be justified by anything good that you do, no matter how good you are.

 

Listen:  nobody has ever been good enough to be justified. That’s why he begins this discussion in the way he does.

 

Romans 3:23

 

Do you know how many sins it takes to send you to hell? Only one. If you commit just one sin and then are righteous for the rest of your days, that one sin is enough to send you to hell forever.

So if God is going to justify you, it has to be apart from the law, apart from coming to church, or making any human effort whatsoever because nobody can live a perfect life and even if you decide one day to be perfect and pull it off, you still have no way to undo all the things you did before you reached perfection.

 

By the way, if you have not memorized Romans 4:5, it is a good verse to become familiar with.

 

Romans 4:5

 

What does that mean?  The “work” mentioned there is what we might consider all the good things Christians do.  The man who does not “work or doesn’t come to church or hasn’t been baptized or forgets to bring his tithe on Sunday morning or disobeys in many ways, but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.”

 

Listen to it from the Message:

 

“If you see that a job is too big for you, that it is something only God can do, and you trust him to do it- you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked- well, that trusting-him-no-matter-what is what gets you set right with God, by God.  Sheer gift.”

 

Now that is shocking to hear because deep down inside we all like to believe we are doing our part.  Nobody likes a deadbeat who refuses to work.  We like to brag about how much we’ve down and how fast we’ve done it and how efficiently we’ve done it.

 

But the heartbeat of Christianity is that nobody can ever do enough.  There are no human bragging rights in Christianity.  In fact, it’s worse than that.

 

Not only does God not give any credit for hard work, instead He justifies the wicked. There are too things that keep a lot of people from coming to Christ.

 

One is they think they’re good enough.  Listen to them talk and they will tell you how good they are.  They do this and don’t do that and are better than their neighbor who goes to church.

 

The other things that keeps people from coming to Christ is they think they are to bad.  They feel they are too lost in sin. They are lost in sexual sin or addiction to alcohol and drugs.  They are too full of anger or bitterness, lost in a terrible, destructive way of life.

 

There are people who say, “You don’t know how I have been living.” No, I don’t, but let me tell you this: our God is not in the business of justifying the good. He is in the business of justifying the bad. He doesn’t justify the righteous. He justifies the wicked, because that is the only category of people God has on earth to deal with.

 

He justifies the wicked while they are still wicked. He justifies the sinner while he is still a sinner. What I am saying is God never said to anybody, “Clean up your act and then I’ll save you. Get yourself in a better shape and then I’ll forgive your sins.”

 

 

 

People in church sometimes say that.  We may think it. Maybe we have told them they are too dirty, but if they would get their act together, we could get them together with God. But God never said that. God simply says, “Turn away from your sin.  Run to the cross, embrace Jesus Christ and you will be justified even while you are still in a wicked state.”

 

A few years ago the headlines were dominated by a young man named Jeffrey Dahmer.  He was one of America’s most notorious serial killers.

 

Dahmer's home was searched on July 22, 1991, after a young man fled his apartment and flagged down a police car. An investigation revealed that the apartment contained the remains of 11 young men, ranging in age from 14 to 33. The bodies had been dismembered, and Dahmer confessed that he had cooked and eaten some of the remains.

 

On February 15, 1992, Dahmer was found guilty on 15 murder counts in Wisconsin. He was subsequently convicted of another killing in his Ohio hometown. He was sent to prison in Wisconsin with 15 mandatory life sentences to serve.

 

In 1994 he was sent to a maximum security facility in Portage and was eventually beaten to death by a fellow inmate.  Before his death, he went public with his faith, claiming he had been converted and baptized.

 

As you can imagine, there was all kinds of doubt about his sincerity.  The pastor who baptized and discipled him during that time is convinced of his sincerity.  Here’s an excerpt from his book:

“One of the most common questions put to me about Jeff has to do with the sincerity of his faith. And I usually hear this from Christians. They ask if Jeff was truly sincere in his desire for baptism and in his Christian life. My answer is always the same: Yes, I am convinced he was sincere.

 

This question bothers me. Why question the sincerity of another person’s faith? Baptism represents a change in lifestyle. A person is expected to change after being baptized. When people don’t change, we begin to wonder. Why were they baptized? Did they did not fully comprehend what was involved?

 

I can understand those kinds of questions.  But Jeff’s circumstance was different. The people asking me didn’t know about his post-baptismal life. They were basing their question on what he did before he was baptized, not after. That bothers me.

 

Jeff was judged not by his faith, but by his crimes. The questioner always seemed to hope I’d answer: “No, he wasn’t sincere.” The questioner seemed to be looking for a way to reject Jeffrey as a brother in Christ instead of seeing him as a sinner who has come to God. The subtext of such questions was simple. They didn’t want to think of Jeff as a brother. Such ungraciousness is contrary to the Christian spirit.

 

Was Jeff saved? Were his sins taken away? Is he a Christian believer? Did he repent of his sins? Or was the blood of Christ shed on the cross somehow too weak, too thin, too anemic to cover his sins? Did Jeff mean it when he said, “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done. God help me, I’ll never do that again”?

 

Why was it inconceivable that Jeffrey Dahmer could come to faith? Is he in heaven today?  I don’t know the genuineness of his heart. That is between him and God.

 

He is a really good example for us to test our doctrine on because when we look at a guy like that and most of us secretly say, “Hell couldn’t be hot enough for a guy like that.  In fact, if he’s going to heaven, I don’t want to be there.”

 

We don’t even like to think about God letting a man like that into heaven.  But if this doctrine of justification means anything, it means that God justifies serial killers while they are still guilty of their sin and I want you to know something:  if there is no hope for Jeffrey Dahmer, there is no hope for you and me. After all, no one wants to be judged by their crimes rather than by their faith!

 

Listen:  Justification is a divine miracle of God. It starts with God. It is not something you work up. If you are justified, it is because you have received a miracle from God.

 

It’s not just an experience or emotional feeling. It doesn’t matter if you feel justified or not. Justification happens to the believer at the moment you trust Jesus Christ. There is no such thing as somebody who is partly justified or half-way justified. There is no one more justified than someone else. Justification happens to every believer at the moment of salvation.

 

That means your salvation must be eternally secure because it does not rest on you, but wholly on God and his work on your behalf.

So in closing, let’s think about

 

 

If you are justified, you are completely forgiven and given a brand new righteous standing before God.

 

What does 2 Corinthians 5:21 say?

 

“God has made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”

 

Let me see if I can explain this somehow. Let’s let one of my fists represent you in your sinful state. That is the state of every man and every woman. We this fist blackened with sin and raised toward God.

 

So what happens the moment the sinner comes to Jesus Christ? What happens when the sinner says, “Lord Jesus, I believe you are the Son of God. I ask you to come into my life, forgive me of my sin and save me?”

 

At that very moment God justifies you. He declares you righteous. Then he takes the perfect and pure righteousness of Jesus Christ and he covers your sin so that when God looks down from heaven he doesn’t see the blackness of your sin anymore.

 

All he sees is the purity of the righteousness of his son. Your sin is covered and it is gone forever. All that God can see when he looks at you is the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

 

 

Romans 8:1

Justification means you can never be condemned by God. You can never be condemned by Satan or anybody else, including yourself.

 

Later in

 

Romans 8:33-34

 

Can the devil condemn us? No. Can our friends condemn us? No. Can our enemies condemn us? No. Can the demons condemn us? No. Will God condemn us? No, he won’t. Will Jesus condemn us? No, he won’t. He died and rose again for us.

 

Can we condemn ourselves? We can try, but we can’t even condemn ourselves, because through justification you have a standing that is eternally secure in the eyes of Almighty God. Do you really think what you declare or anybody else declares will change or alter what God has declared?

 

God is not confused by your confusion. He is not bothered by the fact that you do not even understand this completely. God says he will not condemn you, and he won’t. That is the great implication of justification.

 

Dr. Roy Gustavson, who used to work with the Billy Graham Association used to tell the story of a man in England who had purchased a new Rolls Royce. The man decided to take a holiday in Europe and he wanted to take his Rolls Royce with him to tour through the French countryside.

So he put the Rolls Royce on the ferry and went across the English Channel. He was going through Europe, looking at the sights, when suddenly his Rolls Royce broke down and there was nobody there who could fix it.

 

He sent a cable back to the company in England and they flew a man over who did the repairs. He got the car running again, then left and went back to England. The man thought to himself, “This is going to cost me a ton of money” but he never received a bill.

 

When he finally got back to England, he sent a letter to the company telling what had happened, how the mechanic had come over, and wondering what the charge would be. He got a letter back from the Rolls Royce Company, saying as follows, “Dear Sir, Thank you so much for your letter. You need to know that we have no record in our files that any Rolls Royce has ever broken down at any place, at any time, for any reason.”

 

That’s what justification is all about. You may fail, you may break down.  You may run yourself into a ditch.  But God Almighty looks down at you and says, “There is no record that any child of Mine has ever broken down at all.” That’s what justification is. It is just as if you had never sinned at all. The record is wiped away and you are credited with the perfect, eternally secure righteousness of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

No wonder this is a central doctrine of the Christian faith. No wonder Martin Luther said this is the cornerstone of Christianity.

No wonder this was the flame that went around the world.  It is the very heartbeat of all that we believe. In fact, I think you can argue that justification is the greatest miracle of the Christian faith, greater even than the new birth itself, because this is the miracle whereby God declares righteous a wicked sinner, while he is still lost in his sin.

 

What was Job’s question? “How can a man be made right with God?” There is an answer but you need to know there is only one answer and that is you can be right with God only through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ who paid it all for you.

 

I close with this question: Have you ever been justified through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, or are you still trying to justify yourself through religion, through baptism, through good works, through trying to do the best you can, through trying to obey the Ten Commandments?

 

Listen my lost friend:  Run to the cross, lay hold of Jesus Christ, grab onto him and let him take you all the way to heaven.

 

Let’s pray.