©2000 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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7/9/00
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The Heart Of The matter
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Romans 3:22-24
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7/9/00 The Heart Of The Matter
Last week we entered our study
of the second major section of the book of
Romans
with these words written by Paul
in Romans 3:21:
But now apart from the Law the
righteousness of God has been manifested,
being witnessed by the Law and the
Prophets...
In the first major section of the book
Paul offered us an answer to the question, "Why
was Christ needed?"
He answered that question
by painting for us
a vivid portrait
of what the human race looks like
without Jesus Christ.
It was a portrait that revealed to us
a world standing hopeless
and justifiably condemned before God
on the basis of His Moral law.
Rom. 3:20 ... by the works of the Law no
flesh will be justified in His sight...
But then,
having brought us to that understanding,
and having created within us
the longing that somehow,
some way our God would be able to do for us
what we could never do for ourselves,
in Romans 3:21
Paul turns a major corner in his writing
and enters the section in His letter
written to explain to us
the new agreement between God and
man
based upon Jesus Christ
and our faith in His work for us.
So, just to keep you on track in our study,
the first picture Paul paints
in Romans 1:18-3:20
is a picture we'll call, "The World
Without Christ".
Then he paints his second picture
in Romans 3:21-8:39,
a picture that we will call simply,
"The Christian".
And that picture begins
with a ten verse summery statement
of the new agreement God is offering us
through Christ.
We are walking through that agreement in six steps.
We took two of those steps last week.
Step #1 was found in verse 3:21
where Paul says:
But now apart from the Law the
righteousness of God has been manifested,
being witnessed by the Law and the
Prophets...
In that first step we saw Paul telling us
that God is offering us
a means by which to become righteous,
a means by which to become holy,
but it is a way to righteousness that is completely
separate from,
apart from our obedience to the moral Law of
God.
And in that first step
we saw Paul calling upon two witnesses
who testified to us that this righteousness
God is offering us apart from the law
is exactly the same righteousness
we were trying to achieve through the moral
law of God
but could never reach.
He called upon the Moral Law of God itself,
and the Old Testament Prophets,
both of which examined and verified
that the righteousness,
the holiness God is offering us
through Christ is the real thing.
Then, step #2 comes in 3:22-24
where Paul says:
Rom. 3:22 even the righteousness of God
through faith in Jesus Christ for all those
who believe; for there is no distinction;
Rom. 3:23 for all have sinned and fall short
of the glory of God,
Rom. 3:24 being justified as a gift by His
grace through the redemption which is in
Christ Jesus;
In these verses Paul does not yet answer the "how"
of this new pathway to righteousness,
but he does explain what the offer is.
He tells us
that God is offering us His gift of righteousness
in exchange for our faith in the redemption
which is in Jesus Christ.
God offers to give us holiness,
to give us absolute moral purity,
to give us true righteousness
in exchange for our faith,
our belief in Jesus Christ.
In response to our faith in Christ
God offers to make us righteous
even though none of us have acted righteous
in the past
or can offer God the assurance
that we will act perfectly righteous in
the future.
When I reached this point in my preparation for this
morning
I stopped for more than an hour
mentally searching for some way
to illustrate what God is saying to us in
these few verses.
I'll offer you something in the way of an illustration
in just a minute,
but I need to tell you first of all
that I didn't find what I was looking for,
and I think the reason I didn't
is because there is nothing in human
experience
that accurately parallels
what our Creator is saying to us
at this point in His
communication with us.
I ended our time together last week
by making a distinction between
God giving us forgiveness for our sins
and His giving us righteousness.
I said it is a little like the difference between
someone
paying off our entire load of financial debt
and someone paying off the entire debt and
then placing $14,000,000.00 into our checking
account.
God does tell us clearly, repeatedly
that He has forgiven the sins
of all those who come to Him through faith
in Christ.
And that is certainly good news.
But most of what He says to us
is not about His forgiving our sins,
it is about His making us righteous through
faith in Christ.
He doesn't just make us morally debt-free,
He recreates us into morally pure beings
that are as holy, as righteous as God
Himself.
Quoting a prophetic statement from the book of
Leviticus,
given by God through Moses,
Peter says in 1 Pet. 1:16,
... because it is written, "You shall be
holy, for I am holy."
The same word used to describe God's holiness
is the word used to describe our own.
In the Sermon on the Mount,
looking ahead to what He would accomplish in
the lives of those who came to Him,
Christ said, "Therefore you are to be
perfect, as your heavenly Father is
perfect."
60 times in the New Testament
God calls Christians His "Holy Ones",
using the same word for "holy"
that He uses to describe Himself.
This past Wednesday morning
those of us living in Soldotna
woke up to solid grey skies
and rain falling.
By mid-morning the rain had stopped
and the mass of clouds covering us
was moving to the east.
At about 11:00 a.m. Sandee and I were driving west
on K-Beach road,
right here in front of the school,
and we saw before us a sharp, black edge of
clouds that were still covering us,
and just beyond them
a window into a brilliant, cloudless,
sunlight world of deep blue sky
with Mount Redoubt glowing right in the
center of it.
When I saw the revelation
of that world
that, just 30 minutes earlier,
was completely unseeable,
I told Sandee, "That right there
is what I want to happen to our spirits
in our understanding
of the truth Paul is revealing in these verses."
The difficulty, of course,
is that only God can pull the clouds away
and give us eyes to see.
You see, God has already done in us
what we are trying so hard to do for Him.
And because we have not yet seen
what He has already done in us,
because we continue to believe
we are forgiven sinners
called to try to act like saints,
the truth of our true, holy identity
has no power to transform our lives.
The truth is the righteousness of God
through faith in Jesus Christ has already been
given by God Himself to all those who believe;
The very fact that God can only speak truth to us
is at the heart of why what He says
makes so little sense to us.
We begin with our minds full of lies.
He speaks only truth,
and the result makes it seem as though
we are actors reading lines
from two totally different plays.
In our minds we will say to our God,
"Well, Lord at least I am a little more righteous now
than I was a year ago. I am making
progress..."
To which God responds,
"No, you are not.
You cannot be "more righteous". There is no
degree to righteousness.
You are either righteous
or you are not righteous.
You are either holy,
or you are not holy.
And you, my child, are exactly as righteous today
as you were the 1st day you came to me in
faith.
On that day I did not just forgive your sins.
I recreated you
at the deepest level of your being,
and what I recreated
was created in absolute moral perfection
equal to My own moral perfection.
You were on that day,
you are now,
and you forever will remain My holy one,
my righteous, pure child and friend."
To which we respond by saying,
"Yes, Lord, I really do want to be your
righteous one,
and I'm going to keep trying, I promise."
To which He responds by saying,
"My child, you cannot try to be what you already
are."
To which we respond by saying,
"Lord, one of us seems to be reading from the
wrong script."
To which I think the Lord would respond,
"Yes, my child! I could not agree more.
Here, why not try reading from Mine for a
while..."
I promised you an attempt at an illustration, so here
goes.
We are going to return to that one I offered last
week
about the Jr. High boy in Algebra class.
Only now we are going to make some additions to
it.
This time the teacher of this Algebra class
is the boy's father.
And this boy's greatest longing in his young life
is to please his father
and to model himself after him.
Unfortunately, though,
he simply does not have a math mind.
He signs up for his dad's class,
and from there everything goes just as I outlined
it last week.
Every night he pours over his assignment,
and even with his dad's patient help
it just doesn't work.
Every assignment comes back incorrect,
and every test is an agonizing defeat.
Then, on the last day of class
his dad hands out a sheet to each student
listing their grade for every assignment,
every test,
and their final grade for the semester.
And when this boy gets his sheet
he sees written across it
an unbroken line of A+'s,
with an A+ as his final semester grade.
After class he waits until all the other students have
left,
and then he brings his grade sheet up to his
dad's desk and says,
"Hey, dad, I don't get it.
I failed every one of those assignments,
and every single test,
and yet you've given me all A+'s. Why
did you do that?"
And his father responds by saying,
"My son, with every one of those assignments
what you did not realize
is that your grade was being based
not on how well you did the problem
but rather it was based on your math heart,
and your math heart is absolutely perfect.
You don't understand Algebra yet,
but your heart longs to
as much as any other student I've ever had.
As my son your grade will always be based on your
heart desire."
OK, that illustration has got a bunch of holes in it,
but it may help.
You see, when God tells us
that through our faith in Christ
He has given us a righteousness
that is apart from,
separate from our performance
as measured by the moral law of God,
He is talking about the righteous heart,
the holy, godly heart He recreates
within every one of His children.
Heb. 8:10 " For this is the covenant that I
will make with the house of Israel After
those days, says the Lord: I will put My
laws into their minds, And I will write
them upon their hearts. And I will be their
God, And they shall be My people.
Heb. 8:11 " And they shall not teach
everyone his fellow citizen, And everyone
his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' For
all shall know Me, From the least to the
greatest of them.
Heb. 8:12 " For I will be merciful to their
iniquities, And I will remember their sins
no more."
Every true child of God on this earth today
has a recreated heart
that is righteous,
and holy, and pure,
a heart that longs to live in a way
that is pleasing to God.
When God looks at you
it is that heart He sees as the true you,
because that heart IS the true you.
There is a scene in the recent film version
of Victor Hugo's classic novel, Les Miserables
that gives a good illustration
of what I see God saying to us here.
Jean Valjean is caring for a dying prostitute
who once worked in his factory.
The prostitute has a little girl, Cosette, who has been
staying with a family in another town.
As Jean Valjean kneels beside the dying woman he
says,
"I'll bring your daughter to you."
The prostitute responds,
"But you don't understand... I'm a whore, and
Cosette has no father."
And Jean Valjean responds,
"She has the Lord. He is her father. And you are His
creation. In His eyes you've never been anything
but an innocent and beautiful woman."
We look at ourselves
and see our continued inability to do algebra.
We see ourselves continuing to wrestle with sinful
impulses
that war against the life of God's Spirit within
us.
We see ourselves daily continuing to fall short of the
life,
and the attitudes,
and the actions we long for.
And then Satan slips in along side us
and says to us,
"Look! Look at this failure,
and look at that failure,
and look at this one over here.
That's who you really are, you know.
You are God's pathetic little failure.
You are a little bit of worthless nothing on
the face of the earth,
unworthy to be called His child.
You have always failed,
and you always will.
And those failures define
who you really are."
Our God, on the other hand,
picks us up in His love
and says, "My child, look at the deepest
longing of your heart.
Do you see what I have created there?
Under all of your confusion,
and your ignorance,
and your fear,
and your wrong thinking
there exists at the core of your being
a deep love for Me
and a longing to live a life that honors Me.
That, my child, is who you really are.
That new heart within you is My creation, my
handiwork,
and nothing will ever again change it.
I call you "My holy one" because that is who you
truly are.
The battles you and I fight together
against the sin and evil that still disrupts your
life are important battles,
and together we will find victory and
stability in those areas.
But those battles never have
and never will define who you are.
You are now,
and shall forever more remain My righteous
one,
absolutely holy and pure in heart."
Now it is true that there are other forces at work
within our lives,
forces that continue to wage war against the life
of God within us.
And Paul will have much to say about those forces
and how God wants us to view them.
But the first crucial step
in preparing us for that discussion
is our understanding and acceptance of the
reality of the Christian's heart righteousness before
God.
Rom. 3:21 ¶ But now apart from the Law
the righteousness of God has been
manifested, being witnessed by the Law
and the Prophets,
Rom. 3:22 even the righteousness of God
through faith in Jesus Christ for all those
who believe; for there is no distinction;
Rom. 3:23 for all have sinned and fall
short of the glory of God,
Rom. 3:24 being justified as a gift by His
grace through the redemption which is in
Christ Jesus;