Peace with God

Introduction

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Sermon in a Sentence

Our salvation, which demonstrates the Love of God, transforms our lives now and forever.

A New Relationship with God

· A very important feature of our salvation is that we have been justified.

· This word removes any notion that we could ever lose our salvation because it exists as an action completed in the past.

· The part of our lives where we were under condemnation has ended and we have been vindicated as having complied with the requirements of the law.

· Beyond justification is a wealth of reasons to rejoice.

· Faith in Christ brings peace with God.

· The justified person is no longer tormented by questions of his relationship with God arising from the fact that he is a sinner.

· Sinner though he is, he is at peace with God because of what God has done for him.

· Believers also gain access into grace in which they stand before God.

· Access to God means we have been granted an audience with a superior.

· It is better to think that Jesus is introducing us before God each time we appear.

· The idea is that of introduction to the presence-chamber of a monarch.

· We do not have the strength to enter God’s presence, Jesus is bringing us in.

· Access to Grace is access to God.

· Grace is goodwill freely given with no expectation of a return and it does not exist apart from God.

· The justified also rejoice in the hopeof God's glory.

· When Paul says that we stand, he means that our choice to follow Christ is continuous.

· Rejoicing in this context means to verbally show off.

· We should always be telling others about the hope we have found.

· Left to ourselves we fall short of God’s glory (3:23), but the work of Christ has altered that.

· We know that Jesus wanted His followers to see His glory while He was on earth, and we know that Stephen was able to see His glory before his death.

· The glory of God is a part of the transformation that God works in us.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. (2Cor. 3:18)

A New Understanding of Suffering

· In this context, “sufferings” is a harsh word that covers any oppressive state.

· It can refer to the physical or economic sufferings faced by first century Christians.

· It can also refer to the verbal abuse and exclusion that we may face today.

· Also in view are the natural disasters, political catastrophe, economic hardship, accident, illness, death, and great wickedness that have occurred in every generation.

· All of these things are suffering, and we can rejoice in them all because we understand that God will use them to grow us.

· Those who follow the old Jewish philosophy that saw all pain as the result of sin and all happiness as the result of righteousness have a hard time dealing with the suffering even the justified experience.

· But believers can rejoice in tribulations because they know pain can produce beneficial results.

· Suffering produces endurance.

· Endurance is the power to withstand hardship or stress.

· This word denotes an active, manly fortitude. It is used of the soldier who, in the thick of a hard battle, gives as much as he gets; he is not dismayed by the blows he receives, but fights on to the end.

· Endurance produces character.

· Character is like dependability, being proven to be reliable like the temper of the veteran as opposed to that of the raw recruit.

· Character produces hope.

· Paul is saying that hope, the genuinely Christian hope, never puts those who have it to shame.

· Never being put to shame means we will never be humiliated for believing in Christ.

· This hope is based on the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

· God's love has been expressed without restraint in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

· The Holy Spirit has become our own possession

A New Assurance for Final Judgment

· Weakness refers to moral frailty or a lack of moral strength.

· Jesus died for us while we were ungodly.

· He was not dying for people who deserved it, but for those who were still hostile to Him.

· Jesus rescued us at the right time

· The right time was according to God's timing and our need.

· God has demonstrated his love for us.

· In 5:6-8 Paul showed the greatness of God’s love for sinful men by comparing it to human love.

· Only extremely rarely would a man give up his life for another, even for a worthy man.

· Righteous means one who keeps the law and good means a person who is good to others.

· By any measure, it is hard to find someone willing to die for someone else.

· But what of God’s love?

· Christ died for the undeserving—the “weak,” the “ungodly” and “sinners”.

· God made a public display of His love for us because we were still sinners when Christ died for us.

· God's actions toward us proved His love for us.

· Christ’s death is God's love because the Father and the Son are one.

· We have now been fully reconciled.

· The blood of Jesus is the seat of His vitality and indicates that he gave his whole person for us.

· Even though our salvation is an action by God completed in the past, it still has a future aspect.

· He will save us from his wrath that will be revealed in the End Times.

· We were enemies of God not so much because of our hostility toward him, but because of His hostility toward sin.

· It is in that state that Jesus died to reconciled us.

· Reconciliation is a vivid word, pointing to the making of peace after a quarrel.

· The reconciliation leads to a salvation that never ends.

· When Christ has done the great work of putting away our sin and bringing about our reconciliation to God, he will certainly go on and bring us salvation through eternity.

· The Christian life should be one of constant and spontaneous praise because of what God has done for us.

Conclusion

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