The Treasured Letter

Today, as we head into Thanksgiving week — our second Thanksgiving under a global pandemic — it seems like a good time to consider all the things for which we are thankful.

I’ve got a long list, and it includes all the things you might expect — a loving and patient wife, a generous and godly mother, bacon, a place to lay my head at night, all of you who are here this morning or watching on Facebook, bacon, my seminary professors and the faculty at Dallas Seminary, and, of course, bacon.

I hope you’ll take some time this week to come up with your own list, and I hope that as you do so, you will spend a bit of that time thanking God for three things that I think sometimes we overlook when we’re being thankful — salvation, assurance, and the Bible.

Now, my thoughts on these three topics have been shaped recently by our Wednesday night Zoom Bible Studies in the Book of Romans, and I want to take a moment here to plug that Bible study.

I think that I speak for everyone who has been a regular part of that group when I say that it has been an incredibly rewarding experience. If they have learned half as much on Wednesdays as I have learned while preparing the lessons, I know they have been blessed by it.

And it’s never too late to join us. In fact, after this morning’s sermon, you’ll be caught up with where we are in that study. So, just let me know, and I’ll send you the Zoom link.

Now, one of the major themes of the Book of Romans is the righteousness of God and man’s desperate need for it.

God is perfect and holy. He is the God who creates only good things, who brings light into darkness and order out of chaos.

And we were created in His image, in other words, created to display his righteous character here on earth.

But you all know the story. Adam and Eve sinned against God in the Garden of Eden, choosing to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, wanting to be able to decide for themselves what to call good and what to call evil, wanting to deny God and set themselves in His rightful place.

And so, God cast them out of His presence in the Garden, demonstrating His perfect justice, even as He, in His perfect love, promised that He would someday send a redeemer who would reconcile fallen mankind to Himself.

And since that day, mankind has gone out of its way to ignore God and to deny God, despite the evidence for Him that we have all around us in His very creation, much less in His Word. We have sought every opportunity to try to put ourselves in His rightful place.

And God, who made mankind to be in fellowship with Him, has responded in a manner that is appropriate to a rightful king whose subjects are in open rebellion against Him. He has promised that they will experience His just wrath.

The Apostle Paul talks about this in chapter 1 of the Book of Romans, where he writes:

Romans 1:18–19 NASB95

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.

Even though we can see evidence of God in the stars that light up the night sky, in the rich tapestry of colors on a crisp fall day, in the beating heart of an unborn child, mankind has chosen to suppress the truth.

As one commentator puts it, “whenever the truth starts to exert itself and makes them feel uneasy in their moral nature, they hold it down, suppress it. Some drown its voice by rushing on into their immoralities; others strangle the disturbing voice by argument and by denial.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ro 1:18.]

Others suppress the truth by convincing themselves that their own goodness will somehow put God into their debt, that they’ll somehow negotiate with a perfectly righteous God based on their belief that their goodness outweighs the evil within them.

But here’s what Paul had to say about that:

Romans 3:23 NASB95

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

In other words, not one of us — not even that nice, sweet old widow down the block who bakes cookies for all the new families in the neighborhood — can stand before God in our own righteousness. We are NOT all basically good; we are all basically evil, sullied by the sin that is within us.

And the penalty for sin is the same as it was in the Garden of Eden, death — physical and spiritual separation from the God who created us to be in fellowship with Him.

And no amount of good deeds — no amount of cookies or nice words or even gifts to the church — can ever close the gap that we have created in our sins.

So, we have a problem that we cannot solve, but God solved it for us, and this is what I meant when I said I am thankful for my salvation.

Because of His great love for us, He sent His unique and eternal Son, Jesus Christ, to live a sinless life as a man and take upon Himself at the cross the just penalty for your sins and mine so that those who repent of their sins, believe that He is the Son of God and that His death, burial, and resurrection are their only means of being reconciled to God can have eternal life — everlasting life in perfect fellowship with the Father and the Son.

Romans, chapter 3 talks about how we sinners who place our faith in Jesus are justified by God. That’s a legal term that means God declares us righteous based on the sacrifice of His Son and our faith in Him.

We are, Paul says, “justified as a gift by [God’s] grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.”

Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

So, because the righteousness of the sinless Jesus has been attributed or credited to us, we who place our faith in Jesus are justified — we are declared righteous, even in the midst of our rebellion.

Here’s how Paul puts it in chapter 5:

Romans 5:8 NASB95

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

But there’s more to salvation than simply being declared righteous.

For those who place their faith in Jesus, that moment of justification begins a process we call sanctification, which is another way of saying that we are being conformed into the image or character of Jesus.

The ongoing work of salvation in a Christian’s life is the work of being made to reflect the character of the Christ whose name we bear.

And one of the interesting things about this process of sanctification is that it’s a process in which we are participants.

Whereas justification is all about God declaring that we are something we were not, sanctification is about God making us into something we are not — the image of His Son.

But sanctification is something we can choose to participate in or not. We who have followed Jesus in faith can choose whether to sin or not, and that’s what chapters 6 and 7 of the Book of Romans are about.

In chapter 6, Paul describes the situation of someone who understands that God’s extends His grace to cover all of the sins of a believer, and who then decides to sin more so that God’s grace can be demonstrated even more clearly in that person’s life.

He then describes a similar situation in which a person recognizes he or she has been saved by grace through faith and then chooses to continue to live in sin because he or she knows that they’re covered by God’s grace.

Both situations suggest a person who has a woefully poor understanding of the cost of God’s grace, which was the death of God’s only Son, with whom He had been in perfect fellowship for all eternity.

When we make either of the mistakes that Paul describes in chapter 6, we Christians make a mockery of God’s grace and of Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf.

And so, the Christian is called to work with the Holy Spirit to put aside the sins of the flesh, to become ever more like Jesus, whose sacrificial love for His Father was demonstrated in His obedience to the cross and whose sacrificial love for us meant that He gave Himself as a sacrifice for us while we were yet sinners.

But Paul knew a thing or two about the flesh. He knew a thing or two about our sinful natures, and he knew that Christians would — just as he did — continue to struggle against the pull of sin for the rest of their mortal lives, and he hated that thought.

Here’s what he said about that near the end of chapter 7.

Romans 7:22–24 NASB95

For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?

And with those words, we might think we have reached a low point in this letter from Paul to the church in Rome. How broken, indeed, Paul sounds here. “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?”

But then we read the next sentence, and we see that, instead of a low point, Paul is now reaching to the highest heights in praising God for his salvation.

“Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Paul was, indeed, thankful for his salvation, as I am thankful for mine, and as, I hope, you are thankful for yours, if you have followed Jesus in faith.

We who have put our faith in Jesus have been saved by His finished work at the cross. We who should have been condemned in our sin have been pardoned based on the sacrifice of God Himself in the person of His own Son.

And if this work was God’s doing, Paul tells us in chapter 8, then we who have truly repented for our sins and put our faith in Jesus for salvation have no reason to be unsure of our salvation, because it is God’s work.

But what about condemnation?

“There is therefore now NO condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus!”

Romans 8 Presentation

This chapter moves from no condemnation to no separation. It begins with no condemnation and ends with no separation! What a wonderful passage of Scripture this is, indeed!

We who have followed Jesus Christ in true faith can have blessed assurance of our salvation because it is entirely the work of God, and “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus.”

Let me tell you something: If your salvation depended on you, you would be in trouble. If you could lose your salvation, I assure you that you would.

How do I know this? Because that’s pretty much the message that runs throughout the whole Bible.

From Noah to Abraham to the nation of Israel to the apostles to the young churches, what we see in Scripture is that God chooses to declare righteous those who were not, that God gives them the very faith that He then declares as righteousness, and that He keeps those who put their faith in Him through Jesus.

And there is hardly a place in Scripture where this is more evident than in this beautiful passage in Romans, chapter 8.

I want to tell you today just how thankful I am for this passage and for the Bible as a whole.

As I was thinking a couple of months ago about this Thanksgiving message, I remembered that we demonstrate our thankfulness for the blessings God gives us by some action, some kind of giving back to God what He has given us. We talked a little about that last week in the context of finances.

So, if I was truly thankful for this wonderful passage of Scripture, how could I demonstrate my thankfulness, I wondered.

And that’s when I committed myself to memorizing chapter 8. I would demonstrate my thankfulness by immersing myself into this glorious chapter, by giving God the many hours it took me to commit it to memory, and by sharing it with you today.

I did not do this today to earn your favor or your compliments. I am no better than anybody else here because I did this. But I WILL tell you that I am more blessed.

I am blessed, because in the process of trying to bless God by committing His Word to memory, He has revealed things to me about this passage that I never would have understood otherwise, even though I have studied it carefully for our Bible studies.

There has been something wonderful about recognizing the cadence and rhythms of Paul’s writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As I discovered those things, I began to make connections that I’d never made before.

I did this as an act of love for God and for His Word, not out of a desire to earn His favor. But He has favored me — he has blessed me in the process.

And that’s how God’s blessing work. When we are blessed by Him and then return the blessing back to Him in some way, He turns right around and blesses us back.

You can’t out-give God.

I concluded last week’s Thanksgiving message with a challenge, and I want to conclude today’s with another challenge.

I’m not going to challenge you to memorize a whole chapter, though perhaps you will find a chapter that resonates so well with you that that’s exactly what you choose to do.

Perhaps one of the Psalms, for instance, brings you such peace and comfort when you read it that you’ll decide you want to treasure it in your heart.

But what I WILL challenge you to do is to take a new approach to reading your Bible. Read it like a love letter written from God to you.

Read it the way you might have read those love letters when you were young. Over and over again, looking for every nuance and shade of meaning, every turn of phrase, and every little snippet of memory that was shared to remind you why you fell in love in the first place.

Read it the way a young man who has gone off to war might read the letter from the one he loves back at home, with the eager longing to be reunited and the consciousness that these words come directly from the one who loves you most.

Read it as a letter from the lover of your very soul.

Treasure the words of Scripture in your heart. I promise you will be blessed.