God Does the Work

God Does the Work

Intro: In , when Jesus is accused of working with Satan to perform the exorcism of a demon possessed man, Jesus says “if a house is divided against itself that house will not be able to stand.” Abraham Lincoln quoted this or paraphrased this verse in his speech before

We need to get a little bit of background for Paul’s Letter, since we are jumping three chapters in the writing this week. Paul is writing to the church in Rome and he is anticipating his coming to visit them, so he had never been there. The tradition is that Peter founded the church, but it may be that Christianity was most likely brought back to Rome from Jerusalem either by Jews who were converted, so what we call Jewish Christians and or Gentiles, non-Jews, who were converted at some point. “As Paul writes, the Roman church was a mixed community, partly of Jewish, but predominantly of Gentile background.”[1] Luke tells us in that in the crowd at the day of Pentecost, there were “visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes.”[2] It was probably a mixture of both groups being converted and bringing the message back home and then finding each other in the city and starting the church.

Paul has heard that there has been infighting or strife in the church between the two groups, the Jews and Gentiles and ahead of his visit, he is writing to try and unify the church and get them to understand that through God’s eyes, they are all the same.

Read Verses: 3:20-27

Main Point: God Does the Work in your Salvation, but that does not mean you have work to do.

I. God Does the Work Ahead of Time (v. 21)

Explanation: Paul seems to be speaking to the Jew Christians in the crowd here and he brings his argument to a point that levels the playing field for Jewish Christian and Gentile alike. In verse 19 he says “Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; 20 because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.”

“But now,” Paul is giving a transition not only in his idea, but also time itself. He does not only say but apart for the law, he says but now, giving a specific time frame to when this change that has taken place and the idea that they are now living in the “new era” of how and why salvation and justification works.

A. Through The Law

“Apart or separate from the Law.” So without the Law’s help, the righteousness of God has been manifested or revealed. When you testify in a court, you are telling people what you say or heard. The law and prophets, so the Old Testament Scriptures, tells you what they know about the righteousness of God.

As we have seen in our time in Genesis with Adam and Abraham, God makes the covenants and he upholds the Covenant. Men have failed to do so. Later in the rest of the scriptures, a lot of the people who do not uphold the law are Jews. It is a Jewish book mostly about Jewish people. And they are proven time and time again that they do not have or live up to the righteousness of God. God is the only one that does that. As Charles Hodge puts it, “God’s righteousness is something that has nothing to do with the law. It is not a product of the law and does not consist in our inward conformity to its precepts.”[3] Paul is preparing to bring Abraham and David into his argument in chapter 4 which we just covered in the past month or so.[4]

Paul is making his case Jesus is the one that the law and prophets have testified about Jesus and Luke echoes this statements from what Jesus said to the travelers on the Road to Emmaus in , which is what we are doing this year, we are walking along the road to see Jesus in all of the scriptures. “[Jesus] said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

B. Through The Prophets

The prophets existed a few centuries ago, and in them, the prophets are warning the people of what God would do and then that word was fulfilled. They were rescued from Egypt and led by Moses. They were warned of exile and punishment and the Assyrians and Babylonians both played their part in making that happen. They were also told they would be restored to the land and at the last part of Daniel, all of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Israelites returned to Jerusalem and the surrounding area to rebuild and reclaim their city. All the while God is orchestrating these major movements to get people in the right spots at the right time.

Abraham was saved through God’s righteousness not because of what he did. And the same is true for us.

Illustration: Back in Pennsylvania, we hunted, and a big thing was spotting for deer at night. You can do the same thing with frogs or alligators. You use a very bright spot light to see any deer from the highway or if you are hunting alligators you can see their eyes because they shine and reflect the light. You can’t do that during the day because the sun is too bright. Nothing lights up or the beam doesn’t show up because the sun overpowers it. Would you use a flashlight outside in the middle of the day if the sun was shining bright?

This is the relationship between your actions and God’s actions. And the Law and God’s righteousness. God’s actions overpowers yours. Your flashlight does not help anybody see better at noon. And we did not save ourselves. We had no hand in that. God’s righteousness did. And so when we are welcoming people or you are sharing the Gospel with them, you can reassure them that you don’t have to wait until you are good enough to come to church or become a Christian. God is building this church just as he was building the church at Rome and Paul was instructing them how to ensure it had a true and strait foundation built on Christ.

Application: You can control how you respond to the potential Christians that you meet

The Jews were God’s chosen people because of God, not because they had any special trait or luck. God chose them. God chose you too to become one of his followers. You were justified.

Sometimes I think the longer we are Christians, the more we forget that and we start thinking we became a Christian because of our choice, like it something we can go buy or get with enough UPC codes. It was Jesus who as Paul says in When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, 14 having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

Instead we think like the Jews that Paul is writing and that we are chosen and no one else is. And we may look down on people who don’t get it. And then they look different than us, they are somehow, like the Jews viewed the Gentiles, maybe not worthy to be Christians. So people say ok. I am not coming here because those people think they are better than me.

Because you forgot that you sinned this morning and need God’s forgiveness, but you don’t feel like you have it and you don’t show the new person any forgiveness or love. You forget you are being sanctified as you live your life and so you may be (hopefully) a little more spiritually mature, but you are not yet perfect until you are glorified.

How do we counteract these tendencies? We focus on Jesus and how he lived his earthly life.

The longer list that Paul encourages people to their new lives by comes from But here are two to help us as we build our church:

1. Be Humble

Don’t think more of yourself than you ought to. says “When arrogance comes, disgrace follows, but with humility comes wisdom.”[5] I kind of like the use of arrogance here because having pride or being proud of your accomplishments is good, but arrogance comes when you think too much of what you did or overstate your role in the whole process.

Humble yourself to help in ways that are meaningful. And maybe not so much meaningful to you, but meaningful to them. This may mean getting out of your comfort zone more.

Who are the outcasts now in our community and maybe in your life that need to be taken in?

You may say, yeah but….There is no yeah but with God. Because he takes us in when we

We should be motivated because we also have a heart of compassion

2. Be Compassionate

If you have a hard heart you look at people differently.

But the idea of the Lord is compassionate and gracious is written about in ; ; ; ; ); the Lord is compassionate and merciful ()

If we are striving to be more Christ-like, so when we are more compassionate, we become more like Jesus.

Christ Connection: Jesus humbled himself to the point of death on the cross. A rebel’s death. Out in the open in front of everybody, and we will come back to this in the final point, but he humble himself when he did not fight back or resist. He knew what had to be done. He knew the price for sin had to be paid and Jesus was the money that paid our debt.

If you look at his life, Jesus was humble. He talked to everyone, especially the people no one talked to or wanted to be around. Women, fisherman, lepers, the possessed, the tax collectors and even the Romans. Women. He was not always soft with them and he called them out when necessary but he showed them love first and then he corrected them.

Transition: God’s work is recorded in the Old Testament. The work we perform is to humble ourselves and be more compassionate because as Paul is going to tell us in verses 22 and 23, because performed the work freely.

II. God Does the Work Freely (vv. 22-24)

Explanation: Paul keeps the focus on God’s righteousness but goes a step further in saying that this righteousness is given by or through faith of Jesus Christians of for all those believe. God’s grace is the gift he gives us and that grace is displayed in Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection.

A. A Gift Given

“In Jewish thought humans lost their share in this glory when they broke their relationship to God, but that relationship is to be restored in the age to come. The original intention was that people reflect the glory of God (cf. ). By eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve sacrificed their relationship to God and determined the essential nature of everyone born into the human race ().[6] Paul establishes all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. He is making this point to say the playing field is level. All means all everyone.

In verse 24, Christ is the gift freely given. The verb means freely given. There is no cost or price to buy God’s grace though Jesus. God was also not enticed or coerced into providing in the gift of grace. He is because He is Grace. God is merciful, that is one of His attributes.

B. Who are Those Justified?

The people who are justified by God are the ones who act on the faith. Abraham is considered righteous because He had faith in God and he trusted God enough to agree to His covenant. But Abraham is our example on how to be faithful, it is in Jesus and his work on the cross whom we place our faith

“Christ himself is the concrete manifestation of God’s uprightness, and human beings appropriate to themselves the effects of that manifested uprightness through faith in him. Indeed, that divine uprightness is comprehended only by those who have the eyes of faith[7]

The believers, the ones who are justified are now united in Christ. We are apart of a team or a church. You belong to the Body of believers that God is building.

Illustration: For those of you who have been in the military I’m sure you have fond memories of Basic Training. 50 or so men or women that you don’t know yet all show up in a strange place and get yelled at by strangers for the next 2-3 months. In the Air force the new flights, or groups of people are called rainbow flights. This is because they are all in their civilian clothes and they still have their individuality and they are waiting on every person of their flight to show up. They are not uniform.

For the guys, we get our head shaved, and you start to see that without hair, a lot of people look similar. Then we get our uniforms issued to us and you change in the building there and now everyone is in camouflage or OD Green and all of a sudden unless you are really tall or really short, everyone looks a lot alike. That is one of the reasons we have nametags. We started off different but we learned how to work together as a team and march in formation, help keep the barracks clean and graduated together with most people that you started with. The drill instructors were making disciple of us for the Military. And so we must make disciples for Christ

Application: Disciple Making starts with helping people understand they are forgiven by God

As we get new people in who are new believers and they are converted, you as a congregation are there to help them assimilate into Christ’s church.

Mark Dever says that the church exists “to worship God, the edification of the church, and the evangelization of the World.”[8]

Each of us plays a different role with different people to help teach them how we as a local congregation worship God. the order of service and the like. People need to be made to feel comfortable and not lost in the service, but it may take some time for them to adjust to how we do church. But as James says we must also be doers of the word, not just hearers. Worship includes corporate and individual worship time.[9] You must establish doing both in your life.

To edify of build up the church: We should be in the business of building up people, much like the military is building up people to be soldiers or Airmen. We can’t use the same methods as the military does though. Paul tells the Ephesians in 4:15 and 16 says,

“we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.”

Evangelize the world, We are to educate the next generation as it were and then spread the good news that Jesus Christ died in order to make them holy in God’s sight and they can be at peace with God and He will provide

Christ Connection: Jesus sacrifice his life to make you right in God’s eyes. You can sacrifice some of yourself to become more like Jesus.

Transition: God is the one who freely justifies us and he does not carry out His justice in private, but He does it publicly.

III. God Does the Work in Public (vv. 25-26)

Explanation: Paul goes on to explain that God righteousness was not just given in secret or at night, like we see with Abraham or on a mountain top like we see with Moses. Jesus was very much in the public eye. We see in the Gospels that people followed him wherever he went and he taught them and fed them. He healed them. In contrast, Jesus was arrested and then tried at night. Pilate even tried to pardon him in Public. People knew who Jesus was. And then he carried his cross through Jerusalem to Calvary’s Hill and was publicly executed and Romans Attested to his death. tells us of the Roman Soldier who verifies that Jesus is dead. God’s grace is on full display, in public. Jesus is made the propitiation. God sends Jesus as the one to satisfy the Law does this for two reasons

a. Being Just

As Paul said we all fall short of God’s standards so we are sinners and we are subject to God’s wrath. The covenant was made with Adam and it was broken and God is under no obligation to fix it. the law is satisfied by us being punished for our transgressions. However, With the Sacrifice of Jesus, Jesus atones for our sins. God the Son satisfies the requirement and removes the wrath, which is really at the heart of the term propitiation.[10] God is just because he satisfies the law that the transgressions must be paid for and his wrath must be appeased. He does not violate His own law which would cause God to be untruthful and thus not Holy.

b. Being The Justifier

God is the justifier because he has from, time past, orchestrated the justification of his flock. As Paul started off in verse 21, the Prophets foretold that the justifier would come. “Christ is the fruit of God’s good pleasure.”[11] This fruit is pleasant to us because we get to savor it.

Paul says in about Jesus Christ, “who gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father,” You see that “But Now” in verse 21 may have some more weight to it, because up until the time of Christ’s death and resurrection,. Previously God “passed over” his people’s sins rather than punishing them justly (paresis in 3:25 means “postponing” or “neglecting” punishment), but now he was revealing or proving his righteousness by showing that he was both righteous and the one who would put his people right with him (his people here being those with Jesus-faith).[12]

God in His Hesed, which can mean, mercy, compassion, covenant, justice, faithfulness and goodness, to name a few of the uses of the word, that we have talked about over the last few months puts us right with God, through Jesus’ work on the cross.[13]

Illustration: Merlin Carothers, author of the book Prison to Praise, had firsthand experience of what it is like to be declared righteous. During World War II, he joined the army. Anxious to get into some action, Carothers went AWOL but was caught and sentenced to five years in prison. Instead of sending him to prison, the judge told him he could serve his term by staying in the army for five years. The judge told him if he left the army before the five years ended, he would have to spend the rest of his term in prison. Carothers was released from the army before the five-year term had passed, so he returned to the prosecutor’s office to find out where he would be spending the remainder of his sentence. To his surprise and delight, Carothers was told that he had received a full pardon from President Truman. The prosecutor explained: “That means your record is completely clear. Just as if you had never gotten involved with the law.”[14]

Application: God deserves all the Glory

This is idea should help us be humbler because we cannot boast or take credit for any of the work for our new life.

We should live want live to glorify God. This is as what our chief end is according to the Westminster catechism.

How we live our lives should be like Paul where everything we do, how we act, what we say, how we treat others, how we take care of what we have been given is all in the light of Glorifying God.

says “For I say that Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God to confirm the promises given to the fathers, and for the Gentiles to glorify God for His mercy; as it is written, "THEREFORE I WILL GIVE PRAISE TO YOU AMONG THE GENTILES, AND I WILL SING TO YOUR NAME."

says “Whoever speaks, is to do so as one who is speaking the utterances of God; whoever serves is to do so as one who is serving by the strength which God supplies; so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belongs the glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”

And lastly Paul instructs the Corinthians in “For you have been bought with a price: therefore, glorify God in your body.”

Christ Connection: In Jesus’ death, we are made alive, we are resurrected with Him and by Him. and we are also made Holy in God’s eyes. It could now be said that any who accepted Christ’s sacrifice by faith had therefore fully paid the penalty for their sins and could now stand guiltless before God. Thus, God is both just and justifier.[15]

Transition: Paul gives us good news in these six verses, which is really the climax of his argument through the first three chapters of his letter.

Conclusion: God does all the work in our salvation. He saves us. He has made everything right in his eyes so we, the ones who have faith in Jesus’s work can reap the benefits of God’s mercy and covenant faithfulness. God is both Just because he adheres to the Law and he is the justifier because, through Jesus, we are made Holy in His sight. That is the good news. We do not have to do the impossible and earn our own salvation or justification before God. We could not bring enough Good deeds to earn it or outweigh our iniquity on God’s scales.

Action: Reflect on how you can be at ease with the work you may be trying to do, in earning your salvation either initially or to keep it. Because there is no work to be completed there. That Job is complete in Christ. But the work that needs to be done is building a healthy church that welcomes people no matter their state

Think about how you can be humbler and more compassionate in your life. What will your role be in building this church? What can you pass along to the new people to help them grow and teach them about God? Are you doing anything that may hinder or prohibit people from returning or making them uncomfortable?

Closing Prayer

[1] Joseph A. Fitzmyer S.J., Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, vol. 33, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 33.

[2] All Bible Verses are from the NASB unless otherwise noted.

[3] Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 88.

[4] Tremper Longman and David E. Garland, eds., Romans-Galatians, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 2006), 69.

[5] quoted from the Christian Standard Bible.

[6] Robert H. Mounce, Romans, vol. 27, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1995), 115.

[7] Joseph A. Fitzmyer S.J., Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, vol. 33, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 345.

[8] Mark Dever, The Church: The Gospel Made Visible, (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2012), 69

[9] Dever, The Church, 73.

[10] Mounce, Romans, 117.

[11] Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 367.

[12] Craig S. Keener, Romans, New Covenant Commentary Series (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 60.

[13] Michael Card, Inexpressible: Hesed and the Mystery of God’s Loving Kindness, (Downer’s Grove IL: IVP Books, 2018), 11.

[14] Michael P. Green, ed., Illustrations for Biblical Preaching: Over 1500 Sermon Illustrations Arranged by Topic and Indexed Exhaustively, Revised edition of: The expositor’s illustration file. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989).

[15] Robert E. Picirilli, The Book of Romans, Clear Study Series (Nashville, TN: Randall House Publications, 1975), 62.