Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

Good morning everyone!

I’m so happy to see all of you here.

I hope you noticed on your way in that the shed has been moved from beside the building next to the tree.

I think it really looks nice and I know quite a lot of work has been put into shoring up the shed’s frame to make it stable enough to move.

Next we’ll plant some grass and I think it’s going to look very nice.

I want to take a moment to welcome our visitors and returning guests!

You have blessed us by joining us to worship God, and we hope you’ll stick around for a minute or two after services so we can get to know you.

There are cards on the hallway table if would like to provide us your information or have any way in which we can stand beside you.

You can fill them out and place them in the trays or hand them directly to me.

I also want to wish all our mother’s a happy mother’s day!

I hope this day is warm with love from your loved ones!

Assignment

Romans 5:12-21

I’ve modified our teaching schedule so this week changed.

The purpose of these assignments is to help you cultivate your heart to receive the message that God is speaking to this church through his word.

I know people don’t really talk like that anymore, but I think they should.

I don’t believe our working through Romans is an exercise in futility.

I think God is really speaking to us.

So we should prepare our hearts to receive his word.

And I hope you do.

Challenge

Our challenge in may is to be intentional about making yourself accessible to the community.

We cannot carry God’s mission forward if we do not engage anyone.

And, for Christians, that means overcoming social barriers and connecting to people.

There are many ways to do this: I recommend finding an outlet for some kind of outing that is suitable to your personality and making an effort to be accessible to those people.

The thought occurred to me while preparing these comments that I should probably correct one possible misunderstanding of our church’s vision: we’re putting a lot of effort into reaching new people, but “new” does not necessarily mean “young”.

We welcome young souls, but we welcome all people into our family.

So make yourself accessible to your community and trust God to bring glory to his name.

Now let me invite you to open your Bibles to Romans 5:6-11 as we prepare for today’s lesson.

Pause to go live > > >

Reconciled

Welcome again and good morning!

Today we’re going to unfold God’s plan for our reconciliation and see how God is bringing people who were once separated from him into his holy presence by his grace in Jesus Christ.

Or more precisely, we will begin unfolding this plan as the good news that we are beginning to unfold will be the consuming thought of Romans from here onward.

And this is precisely the turn and Paul’s narrative that one would expect at this point in his discourse.

You’ll want to make sure your Bibles are open so you can follow along.

Exegesis

In writing to the Christians and Rome, Paul’s purpose is to show how the righteous will live by faith (1:17).

But he must necessarily deal with the imposition of sin in humanity.

So, he demonstrates how everyone, both Jews and gentiles, have fallen short of the glory of God (3:23).

Indeed, our sin frustrates all of our attempt to reconcile with God by means of our own works.

So Paul’s first argument establishes the universal condemnation and guilt of all humanity.

He shows how everyone is guilty before God, either through the law or through their conscience.

This is the argument in Romans 1:18- 2:16.

Which necessitates the second argument (Romans 2:17-3:20), which explains why the law is unable to resolve human guilt because of the weaknesses of our flesh.

The law does not atone for our sin, it only exposes guilt.

After proving the universal guilt of humanity and the insufficiency of the law to resolve our guilt, Paul necessarily restates his argument that the righteous will live through faith, and expands this argument in Romans 3:21-31.

Then Paul uses the story of Abraham as a case study on the righteousness of faith to present his third argument in Romans 4:1-25.

The story of Abraham illustrates how God’s grace, and his grace alone, is sufficient to set the world right again through faith when we believe and trust in him.

This sets the stage for Paul’s short fourth argument in Romans 5:1-11, where the triumph of faith is determined to be the grace that God gives us through Christ, which is realized in our life by the power of the Holy Spirit who dwells in us.

Unlike the law, which succeeds or fails according to our own strength, faith triumphs over sin because of God’s grace, which overcomes our sin through his mercy, and inwardly renews our brokenness through his love.

This triumph accounts for Paul’s emphasis on our celebratory confidence in God’s presence.

We come boldly before the throne of grace being escorted into God’s holy presence by Jesus Christ himself!

This is the idea that we see in Paul’s use of the word “boast”, which is also translated as “exult”, “celebrate”, and “rejoice”.

This is the them of today’s message as Paul continues to unfold the basis for our reconciliation to God in Christ.

This reconciliation stands, not in our inherent goodness, but on God’s faithful love.

So let’s see how the triumph of faith finally reconciles us to God so that we can now confidently enter his presence with shouts of joy!

“For” (“γὰρ”) (v.

6): Paul now explains how the hope of our celebratory access into God’s presence does not disappoint us.

Unlike the vain hopes of this world that stand on vanishing dreams, this hope does not disappoint because it stands on the real sacrifice and proof of God’s love in Jesus’ crucifixion.

“While we were still helpless” (v.

6): in this case, “we” does not simply have in mind a collective of “individuals” for whom the comment is true, though I’m sure this statement is also true of each one of us before we know Christ, but, more specifically, this has in mind the condition of the whole human race.

So, in what manner was the human race helpless before Christ came?

First, we were under God’s holy wrath because of our wickedness:

God’s wrath stems from his holy nature: his wrath is not provoked along arbitrary lines, but by the evil spawned by wicked deeds.

God is tormented and provoked by such sin.

Not only would God himself never do the terrible things we do to one another, but, as I so often emphasize, God actually suffers with us under sin’s cruel oppression of humanity.

And this explains the nature of God’s relationship to the human race.

He is not distant from us, nor does he wish to, but we are separated from him because of our sin, though is never far from any one of us!

However, that we have simply sinned against God and so deserve his wrath doesn’t fully describe the human predicament.

We have also become estranged from God, and, in fact, we have become so depraved in our thinking that humanity has fully lost sight of our Creator:

You might recall how the argument Paul is making at this point is not simply that their idolatry was one of their sins among many, nor even that idolatry was their chief sin, but that idolatry was the source of human corruption.

The reason for this is that we are made in the image of God, therefore, to turn away from God and draw our sense of identity, understanding, and perception of the world from anything else - whether a stone idol or the enlightenment of science - results in the ultimate corruption of the human race which was designed to experience life in correspondence with God!

This would be enough to terrify any thinking person.

But we have not only rebelled against God and become so depraved that we have lost sight of him entirely, but, where God once defined our identity, now we are so lost that now the very essence of humanity is defined by our corruption.

This is the condition of the human race into which the good news of Christ triumphantly resounds!

“At the right time, Christ died for the ungodly” (v.

6): God sets his wisdom apart from human wisdom by his patience in that he never does anything before its proper time.

He understood the ramifications of sin for the human race.

In this sense, the scene from Avengers Endgame is a fitting illustration of the point.

Dr. Strange uses the time-stone to look through all the possible eventualities of their battle with Thanos (whose name actually means “Death” in Greek), and sees the one possible path to victory.

But it requires their sacrifice and willingness to play the long game.

In my impatience, I probably would have attempted to initiate the redemption of the human race sometime a little bit closer to Adam and Eve.

I would have thought, “hey, let’s try this before they forget me!”

But God’s plan charted another course.

When viewed in this way, we actually see that “faith” was chosen from the beginning as the means by which the world would be reconciled to God, and so, everything God has done has been fashioned in such a way as to bring forward this perfect faith to us all.

So we see:

So, God has providentially crafted the whole outcome of history for this purpose:

This removes any doubt of God’s control in this world.

“Yes” we face an adversary who is described as “the god of this age”.

But God is not scrambling to react to Satan’s schemes, instead, through his foreknowledge, wisdom, and sheer power, God works out his plan from the very beginning for the glory of his name and the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

So we are not saddled with the burden of working God’s plan out.

Instead, we are called on to trust him and follow Christ where he leads us in this world.

To God’s glory, “victory” is in his hands!

“For” (“γὰρ”) (v.

7): Now Paul explains the significance of this grace by contrasting it with human action.

“Rarely will someone die for a just person, though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die” (v.

7): On this verse more than a few people have noticed Paul’s contrast between the “just person” and the “good person”, and wondered about his purpose here.

Most scholars agree that Paul is momentarily setting aside the normal theological force of these words and using them in their common sense to make a point.