When Sin meets Grace

Dealing with Guilt

Occasionally you’ll hear an interview of someone who is reflecting back on their life or career. More than once, I’ve heard the interviewee utter the phrase, “I have no regrets”.

Now I don’t know about you, but usually when I hear such a phrase I think: really, there’s not one single thing they wished they did differently?

Now of course, I suspect what they mean is that they are basically happy with the general direction their life has taken.

But I think for all of us, we can think of the time that we spoke those harsh words to someone that caused them hurt.

Now maybe in the overall scheme of things, you can rationalise that your little outburst isn’t going to make a big difference, but yet the knowledge that you caused pain can sit with you.

And so we’re left with a bit of a conundrum. How do we deal with this guilt that we have?

On one hand, we can learn to ignore it. It might take a while, but with enough effort, we can push it far enough down that we let it go.

Or perhaps we try to make amends by making it up to the person we’ve hurt. Perhaps if we’re extra nice to them, it will counterbalance the hurt. Until of course we become careless again, and those hurtful words come out again. The process restarts.

Or maybe we just sit an dwell on the guilt. I suspect we’ve all done this to some degree in the past. It sits with you. You lay awake at night, the words you spoke replaying over and over in your head.

The problem of sin

Over the last few weeks, as we’ve explored Romans 1-2 we’ve looked at the problem of sin.

Now each week, as we’ve explored it, I’ve noted the truth which is close to the heart of us as Christians - that is, that we are forgiven.

Now I haven’t focused on that forgiveness yet, and that’s because it is important that we understand what sin is. We don’t want to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Now today, we’re actually going to get to the exciting part of the gospel story.

But we come up with a problem.

How do we think about the sin in our life?

You see, we have a few choices, very similar to the choices I spoke about regarding that guilt in our lives.

The choice I think many of us try to do is to ignore it. This would be much easier to do if I didn’t preach the previous two messages I’ve just given. But we do it anyway. In fact, if you recall from that message on the second half of chapter 1, once we’ve exchanged the glory of God for an image, then exchange the truth for a lie, we can actually become quite proficient at ignoring it.

But ignoring the problem of sin doesn’t make it go away. In fact, it’s a bit like the saw that you don’t clean or put ointment on. It gets infected and keeps on festering until finally you give it the treatment it needs.

But let;’s assume for the moment that you’re convinced that you shouldn’t ignore it. You’ve acknowledged that it is effecting your life. It is affecting the relationship you have with God. It’s taking you down a path you don’t want to go.

Well, as Christians who know the truth, we tend to go down one of two paths.

The first path is to acknowledge the sin. To recognise that we need to do better. To recognise that there is a huge gulf between us and God. And hopefully over the last few weeks, we’ve begun to do that. Hopefully you’ve recognised that the sin exists in your life, regardless of how hard you try to find that loophole.

But this path has it’s obvious drawback. That gulf between us and God, it is insurmountable. No matter how much you try, you will not get there. And so this path can lead to us wallowing in our guilt.

But as Christians, we know this is not the end of the story. We know that the gospel is a glorious thing for a reason. You see, as I’m going to explore very shortly, we know that there is forgiveness. And so this leads us to another path.

Rather than dwelling on the sin, we dwell in the grace of God. Now this path is amazing. Because we’re not just ignoring the guilt like I described earlier. We’re recognising that it has been dealt with. There is freedom to be found in this path.

But there is also a trap on this path.

To make my point, let me consider an extreme example.

Let’s say I decide, you know what, I’m going to sleep with who ever I want to sleep with. I’m going to hoard all the wealth I can even if at times that means cheating others out of their money. I’ll take what I can. I’ll say whatever words get me further in life. I’ll ignore all advice unless it suits my purposes.

And then I turn around and say: it doesn’t matter, I’ve accepted Jesus as the Lord of my life, he has forgiven me, and so none of those things matter.

Now I’m hoping that I don’t need to explain how problematic that is. In fact, we’ll get to it very shortly as we dive into the passage.

But for now, let’s just acknowledge that both paths that we have a tendency to go down, whether the one that focusses on sin, or the one that focusses on grace - both are going to cause problems.

And so as Paul starts this third chapter of Romans after a sustained treatment on the problem of sin by looking at various objections thrown at him.

Objections

So let’s look at these objections at the start of chapter 3.

Now its worth noting that often these early verses are explored with chapter 2. If you recall the second half of chapter 2, that was where the Jewish person thought that their Jewish was enough, but Paul said it wasn’t.

Well, in this section, it’s almost as if Paul is having a debate with an imaginary opponent.

He lobs up a series of four objections, before answering each.

It’s quite likely that he’s actually heard these objections being made. It’s also possible that before Paul’s conversion he probably made some of these objections himself, so in this way, you can almost imagine this as an argument between Paul, the man transformed by Christ, and his former self, Paul, the pious Pharisee that persecuted Christians.

Now in these objections, what we hear is someone who very well could be going down that path I described before, we’re we can so easily minimise sin. When we go down that path, we are doing so on the basis grace, or perhaps more accurately, a misunderstanding of grace.

We’re about to see the objections of the Jewish person going down the path where they want to minimise sin - not on the basis of grace in the way we understand it, but on the basis of their special status.

Being Jewish

The first objection is a basic objection you might expect from a Jew.

That is, if being Jewish isn’t fixing the problem of sin, then what’s the point.

You see, the Jewish people take a lot of pride in their national identity. But Paul’s arguing that sin is the great leveller. You can understand there disgust at such a notion.

But Paul is quick to point out that just because sin levels the playing field, the Jews do still have a special place.

But let me just reframe the objection for us. You see, I’ll bring back those two paths I described before.

You see, it would be easy for us to say as we walk down that path, basking in the glory of God’s grace: what do you mean all those discussion of sin apply to me, don’t you know I’m washed with the blood of Jesus?!?

Paul would say - yes, that’s great - but how you live is still important.

God’s faithfulness

The next objection is a little more obscure. The objection states: “What if some were unfaithful? Will their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness?”

Now let’s look at this from the perspective of the Jew. They were God’s people. Their spot should be guaranteed.

But they’re being told that you can miss out if they don’t have faith. But if they miss out in this way, then isn’t God not doing what he said he would.

Again they think their status should be enough to get them over the line. That all this talk of the gospel is failing to see the truth. But the reality is, God has let them down, they’ve just misunderstood.

From our perspective, I see this objection playing out in the sense that we couldn’t possibly think that God could be bothered by sin because he is so loving - but it really just misses the point. God’s grace was never intended to forget about sin.

Shall we sin more

The next two objections have a similar theme. The first one tries to twist God into being unjust, because it’s saying that when we sin, God righteousness is made clearer, therefore he would be unjust to show us wrath.

The second in verse 7 and 8 suggests that we should just keep sinning because it would bring God more glory.

Paul throws out such objections because they are so far off the mark.

Now obviously we could explore these in much more detail.

But I get the impression that Paul raises them, first to show that such thinking is futile, before he actually describes in greater detail what the gospel really is about.

And what we’re going to see, is that rather than going down one or the other path, the gospel actually does both.

The gospel says that sin actually does matter and that grace changes everything.

Neither of those truths should diminish the other, rather the two need to be held together.

Maintaining sin

You see, when we get to verse 9, Paul wants to make a final statement that sin is there and we can’t ignore it.

He does this by a series of quotes from Old Testament passages. It’s not my intention to go through this in detail, but it is worth noting how he seems to almost deliberately choose passages that describe various body parts. There are mentions of the throat, the tongue and lips. Mouths and feet.

You see, not only is every person a sinner, but every part of us is sinful.

We are sinful to the core.

Understanding this is core to understanding the gospel.

You see, the gospel is the good news that God has made a way to restore humanity. But to understand this restoration you need to understand what we are being restored from.

But we also need to understand that this restoration cannot happen by anything we do. Because we are incapable of doing it our self.

Righteousness

But now in verse 21, the whole letter takes an amazing turn. It’s a turn that says that despite the fact that you are entirely sinful, you can actually be righteous.

And I want to look at this in a little detail because this is going to be key for the rest of the letter. And once I explore this, I want to come back to this idea that how we hold this concept of sin with the concept of grace without one obscuring the other.

Apart from the law

Well, the first thing Paul makes clear is that this process is apart from the law. That’s not to say the law isn’t important - in fact it is very important. But it’s importance is not in making us righteous.

It can’t, because as verse 23 reminds us very succinctly: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.

It’s a verse that I suspect many of you have memorised, but it is the reason we can’t save ourselves.

But while many have memorised verse 23, it’s verse 24 where the real beauty happens.

Justified

You see it tells us that we have been justified freely by his grace.

Now this is truly extraordinary. In fact the more we understand it the more extraordinary it becomes.

You see, let’s just briefly stop on this word “justified”.

Now with the word ‘justified’, we might be tempted to substitute the word ‘forgiven’ - that is to say, our sin in not counted against us.

But I want to suggest that ‘justified’ is a bigger concept of just ‘forgiven’, although it certainly includes forgiveness.

You see forgiveness tells us that we are let off the penalty which our sin deserves.

Being justified goes further. Not only are we let off we become welcome to enter into the presence of God. It to say, not only are we not going to be punished, there is absolutely no ground for the infliction of punishment at all.

Now, as Paul describes this amazing concept of justification, he uses a series of words which can help us paint a picture of how this happens.

Redemption

The first word I want to highlight comes in verse 24.

It tell us that the justification comes through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

And so it is the word “redemption” that I want to highlight.

In the Old Testament we see this word being used in relation to slaves who were purchased in order to be set free.

And so from this word we start to paint a picture of the price that Jesus had to pay.

It was a price that Jesus paid with his life - when he hung there on the cross.

It was the ultimate price, but the price required for an ultimately sinful people.

Propitiation

The next word I want to highlight is actually translated as a few words in the NIV.

In verse 25, it tells us that God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement.

But that phrase “sacrifice of atonement” is actually one word in the Greek: ‘hilasterion’.

It’s a word that quite a few other translation choose to use ‘propitiation’.

Now propitiation is not a word we use all that commonly in everyday speech, but the word describes the process of turning away of anger by the offering of a gift.

The Greek word was often used by pagans during this time, and it would describe the gift that these people would offer to their pagan gods in the hope that they would become less angry.

Because of this association, a lot of translators chose not to use this word, but in some ways that is unfortunate because the concept becomes quite different when we’re talking about Jesus being the one who offers it to someone who has righteously has become angry because of sin.

You see, understanding this concept of propitiation, (the turning away of anger), helps us to piece together sin and grace together.

Demonstration

The third word I want to highlight is the word “demonstrate”. Twice, in both verse 25 and 26, he describes this idea of demonstrating his righteousness.

You see, this idea of righteousness is not left as a theoretical idea. It is something that can be found in the person of Jesus.

We can see what righteousness is by looking at Jesus.

It tells us in these verses how it has been demonstrated. It was demonstrated in his forbearance, because he had left the cons committted beforehand unpunished. So he’s demonstrated it in the past, but in verse 26, he demonstrates it in the present by justifying those who have faith.

Paul is painting a picture for us of how Jesus brings about our righteousness. It has absolutely nothing about what we do, but entirely about what Jesus is doing.

Faith

Now I don’t want to move further without making special note of the role faith plays in all of this.

You see, faith becomes the means in which we take hold of all of this. Jesus does it all, and we just need to faith to say, yes, I’m going to accept it.

Holding Grace and the Law

Well, let me come back to this idea of walking down one or two paths.

On one path we are acknowledging our sin.

If we are to accept the gospel, this is essential. We need to accept it because otherwise we become misguided and think we can do it ourselves.

Or even if we recognise that we can’t reach righteousness by ourselves, we fail to see that God’s law points us to something beautiful. A life without sin brings us to shalom. The peace and completeness that God has ordained.

This is the real beauty of the gospel. It’s not just saying, okay, we won’t punish you, it’s bringing you to the most beautiful place imaginable.

When we follow God’s law, we find perfect harmony with all things. This is what God’s shalom is. All things and all people working in unison. This is only possible with God.

Grace was not a licence to do anything, it was a means to bring us to God’s way.

And yet, we must go down the path where we recognise grace.

We don’t need to wallow in our sin, because we have been justified. This is not something that will happen, this is something that Jesus has already achieved.

The lesson I really hope you take away from this message is that we can’t separate these messages of sin and the messages of grace. They go together.

I look at verse 23 and 24 sitting right next to each other. One reminds us of our sinfulness, the other of our justification. We hold both together.

When we hold them together, our life will start to take the shape that Jesus wants for us.

It means that our behaviour matters, but that when we fall, God won’t hold it against us.

You may go home and get angry at your spouse. This breaks God’s shalom. But he is there to pick you up and keep you moving forward.

Conclusion

This means there is no boasting to be had. It’s excluded because all that is required is faith.

It is not always easy to keep this tension between upholding the law and dwelling in grace. We naturally go one way or the other because they can seem so contradictory.

But in Christ, they make perfect sense. We need to stay close to him so that we can follow the law and recognise our need for grace.

So let me pray...