What Do You Rejoice and Boast About? based on Romans 5:1-11

I. What do you rejoice and boast about in life? Do you boast about your children and your grandchildren? Do you boast about your work and how many hours you work? Do you boast about your favorite basketball team? Do you boast about your favorite truck, car, or tractor? Do you boast about being a Lutheran?

Boasting about things in life is usually something that goes along with the sin and wrong of pride. Pride is thinking too highly of yourself and your accomplishments. Pride is being puffed up with yourself. Pride often leads to a humbling experience. Your children and grandchildren do not always behave well. Your long hours of work can lead to burnout. Your favorite basketball team will lose games. Your favorite truck, car, or tractor will need repairs. Being a Lutheran does not guarantee a life with no problems.

II. Romans 5:6 gives you something to rejoice and boast about in a good way. Romans 5:6 reminds you, “At the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” Those words are what Lent is all about. Those words are what the Christian faith is all about.

III. First of all, “Christ died for the ungodly” is important because we do not understand how ungodly we are. Already in the late 1970s, famed American psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a book called Whatever Became of Sin? Good question. Maybe in the most people think school shootings still are sinful, but abortion, homosexuality, divorce, sex change—certainly not.

Yet the divinely-inspired apostle Paul writes in Romans 5:6, “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”Ungodly! Without God! Paul even says in verse 10, “enemies” of God! Opposed to God!

IV. And don’t overlook the word “we.” We were still weak, ungodly, sinners, enemies. Maybe we’re right on all those major social issues—abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism. Still, surely more than we want to grasp, sin lurks in each of our hearts. We were conceived ungodly, and that wickedness continues in our sinful nature. Look inside. You don’t even need to look too deep. This thought or that thought that you don’t tell your wife. Resentment toward your husband you only think about after the light’s turned out. The laugh in your heart that Mom and Dad really don’t get it. The jealousy of friends. The secret pact with yourself that God doesn’t know you’re giving him less than your best when you write your offering check or leave your Bible unopened. God does know all of it. By nature, that was you. And you have to face that truth, because the sinful nature lingers still.

V. Yet Christ died for you, one of the ungodly ones. Second, “Christ died for the ungodly” is important because the death of the Christ for us is far beyond anything we can totally understand. Paul writes in Romans 5:7-8, “For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” At our birth we were not sinless saints. At our birth we were a bundle of weakness, ungodliness, and sinfulness. Sin is a messy business, and understanding that truth is crucial to seeing how amazing is God’s dealing with us.

And consider this: Jesus the Christ died for us, the ungodly. The sinless Son of God. The one who never sinned or did wrong a single time. He did not need us. But nevertheless He wanted to be with us and know what we go through. He loved us from eternity, even though we sometimes ignore Him, fail to trust Him, and struggle to love Him.

VI. He carried all of your sin and the sin of all people in His body at the cross. He is your substitute—the innocent for the guilty. There he suffered in anguish and died in your place to satisfy God’s anger over your sins and wrongs. And that, together with His rising from the dead, not only insures victory over sin, Satan, and death, but forgiveness, life, and salvation also are now available through faith in him. Think about that.

VII. Third, “Christ died for the ungodly” is important because His death creates a new relationship that we don’t fully appreciate.

Christ’s dying was all to reestablish that broken relationship. Because God does not want to condemn us, he calls and enables us to repent. The Holy Spirit leads us to have sorrow for our rebellion against the Lord of heaven and earth and to believe “that sin has been forgiven and grace has been obtained through Christ” (AC XII 3–6, Tappert, German). Now, then, Paul writes in Romans 5:1-2, 11, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. . . . More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”

Paul’s words, “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (v 10), make Christ’s death on the cross very personal. His death on the cross justifies us. Then justification results in peace with God and a living hope. Peace means a new relationship, as does reconciliation. Reconciliation means we are changed from enemies of God into friends of God through the saving work of Jesus Christ on the cross for us.

VIII. Finally, “Christ died for the ungodly” is important because His death helps us to rejoice and boast about Him in something we do understand all that well: sufferings.

The unbelievers of the world do a good job of making us aware of sufferings. Aging, illness, and stress to make ends meet. The Christian values we have are assaulted every day in the on the nightly news. Families torn apart. Murders on a regular basis. People suffering from a deadly disease. Yet Paul writes in Romans 5:3, “We rejoice in our sufferings.” Or as the NRSV translates those Greek words even better, “we also boast in our sufferings.”

“Really? Even believers who know Christ died for the ungodly struggle with such a message, especially when the struggles of daily life become almost too much to handle. “Hope” is the key word. Romans 5:3-5 again in the NRSV tells us, “And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

IX. Hope flows out of our trust in God’s grace. And this hope gets us through difficult times because the object of hope is the glory of God, regardless of our troubles. Our Christian hope is certain because Christ died for the ungodly. He loves us that much. And since His death has reconciled us to God, reestablished that relationship of peace with God, we can trust that He will be with us even in the toughest times in life.

X. Conclusion. So what can you as a Christian rejoice and boast about in life right now? You do not need to boast about sufferings and problems. Instead, you can boast about Jesus Christ, the One who endured the sufferings and pains of the world’s sins and wrongs on the cross around 2000 years ago for you. You can boast about Jesus Christ, the One who died and arose for the ungodly and all of the ungodly things you think and say and do. You can boast about Jesus Christ, the One who promises to be with you always in times of suffering you go through. St. Paul in Romans 5:6 comforts you with this important and amazing truth: “At the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” Amen.