Our Sunday Message

The Benefits of Justification: Romans 5:1-11
Rev. Richard Wright
June 3, 2007
Trinity Sunday

  “Before the Spirit of God comes into a person’s life, he is like being in a darkened room: he cannot see anything in it.” This was the interpretation of Charles Spurgeon, one of England’s most beloved preachers of the 19th Century. He further concluded that “one cannot discover the cobwebs, the spiders, the foul and hateful things that may be lurking there in the dark. But when the Spirit of God comes streaming into the soul, a person is astonished to find that he is what he is.”
  It’s this imagery that will carry us as we discover Paul’s message to these struggling Christians in Rome. It can be stated fairly simply. We are weak without God. We have a total incapacity for good when left on our own. Without God in our life, we cannot see our faults and we are blind to what is really there. This causes us to boast in the wrong things. But when God’s light illuminates our shortcomings, we discover that we are justified not by our own attempts, but by faith in Jesus Christ.
  The very first word in verse one speaks volumes. It’s the word “Therefore.” It sets the stage for a list of benefits that we can expect as a result of our justification. We are not justified by phony attempts to keep the law of good works. Rather, justification is found by faith in Jesus Christ. We are declared innocent although we are guilty.
  Now there is a good chance that I’m simply speaking about what you have already internalized. Understanding that you were once dead in sin and now walking in a newness of life is a basic truth of the Christian experience. Justification is not a word we use every day, but realizing that God has declared you as innocent in spite of your guilt is paramount to grasping the full meaning of the gospel.
  So the question is, “Where do we go after the phrase, ‘Therefore we are justified by faith?’” “What does it mean for us now that we have this right relationship with God?”
  Well, there is good news. Paul immediately tells us that our justification before the Lord brings us peace. I have to admit that on several occasions, this verse has been way too idealistic for me. I’m guessing that you do not always feel at peace with yourself or with others. There are good days and bad days. You may ask, “How did Paul do it and why can’t I measure up?” As a result, you may not have much of a use for a verse like this because on some days you just feel crummy and disappointed. Inner peace is truly a benefit of the believer, but Paul is not talking about that here.
  For if Paul is only referring to a feeling of peace so that we can simply carry on in life on our own, then we are all in trouble. If peace in this passage only means that we feel enlightened by God in spite of our troubles, then God is only being sentimental with us. And sentimentality always stands in opposition to the gospel because it only touches the surface. It would only exist as a veneer that covers up the ugly stuff. Sentimentality is an ugly word. It is weak and artificial by nature. For example, if one of you becomes deathly ill and a medical doctor, upon leaving the room tells you merely that he’ll be thinking of you; then he has done you little good. Something deeper must be given to you and you must take hold of it if it is to fully heal you. Sentimental feelings just won’t do it.
  In the opening verse, Paul is not telling us that we will maintain a warm feeling of peace all of the time. Rather, he is telling us that because of what God has done the hostility is over. Hostility between who you may be asking? Answer: Hostility between God and us. We should rejoice in this reality and rejoice in it everyday.
  This entire idea of opposition between you and God might strike the wrong chord in you. I don’t like to think about God as being hostile to me. But if we consider the human predicament of sin, we find that we are the aggressors who have now been declared innocent in spite of our guilt. And once this peace is established, as William Loader says, “there is no need to ever feel like we have to renegotiate our peace. Renegotiated peace is really no peace at all.” Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace (the absence of hostility) with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. And it is final.
This alone should give us the ability to boast in our future sharing in the glory of God. We should have confidence in joy (boasting) of our relationship that has been established. We no longer need to boast of the wrong things because we now have the freedom to boast in the right things.
  And the justified believer who knows peace with God, and values it, is able to take joy in something that distinguishes us from all others. This is the ability to take joy even in the sufferings that life throws our way.
  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the well-known German professor and pastor who opposed the Nazi take-over, wrote a book entitled Letters and Papers from Prison. He wrote this collection during his imprisonment in a jail where he was later executed. The writings are important for several reasons, one of them simply being that they contain his perspective of the war as a Christian. The content of the book is important. The fact that it was actually written from a prison camp is nothing short of miraculous. But how we have them is even a greater story. These letters and papers were smuggled out of prison by Nazi guards.
  They saw something different in Bonhoeffer. The one stain of Bonhoeffer’s earlier life was that he was anti-Jewish. But, in prison, he was seen as tending to the needs of Jewish prisoners. Although the sights and sounds of the camp were indeed tragic, Bonhoeffer remained calm and confident. And while the distractions must have been unrelenting, he was able to write a very important piece of Christian literature that has stood the test of time. His suffering produced endurance, his God-given endurance produced character, and his God-given character produced hope. He wrote, “We in the resistance have learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the excluded, the ill treated, the powerless, the oppressed and despised…so that personal suffering has become a more useful key for understanding the world than even personal happiness.”
  I tell this Bonhoeffer story not to inspire you. Rather, it is to demonstrate that the Holy Spirit that has been poured into our hearts can give us an authentic, faith-based hope no matter what is going on. This is a hope that is based, as Douglas Moo writes, “on an inner certainty that God does love us.” It’s a hope that is “not based only on our intellectual recognition of God’s love.” Again, our abundant hope is based on an inward assurance that God does indeed love us. When our minds fail at convincing us of this love our inward certainty can take over and provide us with needed hope.
Why? Because it was while we were at our most weak that Jesus died for us. The Apostle Paul wrote that “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died.” And this takes us back to being in that darkened room. Before the Holy Spirit is poured out at the moment of belief, we are completely helpless in cleaning up our dire situation. Yet, while we were helpless, Christ died for the un-godly.
  As a result of this great work, we are not only placed into good standing, we are invited into a life of spiritual participation. Reconciliation with God has its benefits. And a primary benefit of a right relationship with God is the opportunity to be involved in the life of his Son. Christ lived so that we can become like him. He died so that we could die to ourselves. He rose so that we could actively participate in the life of the Spirit. He loved us so that we could love others and ourselves. Each day we can participate in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
  Isn’t great to know that our reconciliation with God is not based on attempts to impress him? If this was the case then reconciliation would be impossible. There are no hidden hurdles that we must jump or qualifications that we must achieve. Indeed, God truly loves us. William Loader again expresses this by stating that God’s love is an unconditional love which greets us—long before we are even able to evaluate ourselves. And the problem is that when someone offers us this kind of relationship, it can be very threatening, because the invitation is to be loved for who we are, not for who we are trying to be. Dropping the mask can be a long and difficult process. As a result it is often hard allowing ourselves to be loved. Nothing is required but just one thing; and that’s acceptance of the love offered by faith.