Please turn with me to Paul's epistle to the Romans, chapter 5. Paul's epistle to the Romans, chapter 5. We'll be looking at some things in verse 1, but let's hear God's Word here in this entire chapter. Remember, this is the Word of God. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we had access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance, and perseverance character, and character hope. Now, hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. For when we were still without strength, in due time, Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation. Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because all sinned, Until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who was a type of him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the offense, for if by the one man's offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man Jesus Christ abounded to many. And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned, for the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification. For if by the one man's offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one Jesus Christ. Therefore, as through one man's offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one man's righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one man's obedience many will be made righteous. Moreover, the law entered that the offense might abound, but where sin abounded, grace abounded much more. So that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Now, may God add his blessing to his word today. Over the last couple of weeks, you have been blessed to be hearing a lot from Ephesians. Kind of quick, but useful overviews of chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4. In chapter 2, you may have remembered reading verses 8 and 9, for by grace you will remember that I do all my and have done all my memory work in Old King James, for by grace you save through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. We see Paul talking about this here as he looks at how we are justified. Now, you've got to understand, and I'm sure you do, that there is a logical order in the teaching that Paul is giving here in Romans, just as Larry pointed out, that there has been a logical order overall in Ephesians as well. We see, we have been seeing, how all are lost under sin, Jew and Gentile alike, and all are worthy of death. But then Paul brought along the example of Abraham showed how he was saved by, in faith, looking to the One who had come, looking to the Lord Jesus Christ. He was saved by the grace of God alone, by faith alone, in Christ alone. And so we come to chapter 5 here now, where after Paul has been talking about Abraham, whose promise, he received the promise of God through faith, He now concludes his argument and then brings out consequences of it. That's why we have this verse here, this first verse of chapter 5, starting out, therefore. I don't know how often you children use this word, therefore, but it means because of something else, then this comes along. Okay? Just as a kind of a casual example of this. Your parents may say to you, children, you can't keep your eyes open, except when you yawn. Therefore, you need to go to bed. Now, that's not a real formal argument, but it gives you an example of how that word, therefore, works. Because of this and this, therefore, we can say this, or we must act in this way. Because of the fact that Abraham is saved by grace through faith, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, here is the way of salvation even now for us. He looked ahead to the one who would come. We look, says Paul, and we look, we say today, back to the life and the death and the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the first three chapters, as I mentioned, Paul was at pains to talk about the need to have sin forgiven. It's been much of what Paul has been teaching in this letter so far. And as we would have seen had we gone through chapters one through four, actually we did this some years ago, we would see that we have sin in all parts of our life. There is no part of your life that is untainted by sin. You children know what it means to paint something? It means to discolor it. If you had a glass of water, children, and you put a drop of ink in there, ever so slightly, it would taint it. It stains it. It gets it all through. I wonder if you children ever play hard out in the yard during the summer and maybe you're having so much fun you slip or you trip or you're just having fun sliding around and you get grass stains on your pants. on your shorts, on your skirt, whatever. Well, now your clothing is painted by the grass. Do you see how I mean with the word? Alright, now then. How would you like it to accidentally slip and fall into dog poop? and your clothing would be tainted by that stinky, disgusting stuff. How much worse would it be if all your clothes that you were wearing had it not just on the surface, but all the way through? That's really yucky, isn't it? And in fact, I'm going to be really gross here, children and adults. If somehow you'd slid in head first, you'd gotten some in your mouth and you'd swallowed it, that's really gross. But I want you to see, as disgusting as this is, and perhaps some might say, oh, pastor, you should be more delicate. We can't be delicate when discussing sin. And as disgusting as this seems to you, far more is your sin that is through and through you disgusting to God. No part of you is missing some at least small piece, small deadly piece of sin. sin in your life, no matter how small, is highly disgusting, highly offensive to God. He demands perfection. And any sin in your life, anywhere, messes up that perfection. He accepts only absolute moral purity. Well, but I'm not as bad as... Oh, that doesn't cut it. That's not the way God measures things. Being relatively better than anyone else, that's not good enough. And that's what Paul has been talking here in Romans about the Jews versus the Gentiles. Oh yeah, relatively speaking, maybe you're a little bit better, but God doesn't count that. God doesn't look at it that way. God doesn't grade on a curve. I've talked about this before. God does not give out grades. God grades on pass-fail. And the only way to pass is to be absolutely perfect in every part of your life, without one break, without one miss. always and ever through your entire life. You don't have that. You never did. And as far as that goes, as Paul is kind of talking about here in the back end of chapter 5, which we've just read, we already are conceived into this world, we're already born into this world with an account that's bankrupt already because of the sin of Adam in the garden. Now we see throughout scripture, and particularly here in the book, the epistle to the Romans, God is holy and righteous altogether. He cannot and will not accept sin or a sinner unless somehow the sin is paid for and the sinner redeemed somehow. We sing about that sometimes in Psalm 5. In our metrical version, evildoers thou dost hate. Liars thou wilt bring to naught, that means to nothingness. God abhors, that means hate, children, the man who loves deeds of blood for lying thoughts. That doesn't sound very much like God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, does it? We know that Jehovah is the God of truth. He says that you are a sinner. That's a lot of what chapter 3 in Romans is about. Paul takes a whole bunch of scripture portions from the Old Testament and weaves them together to show, well, that there is none righteous. No, not one. The God of truth says that you are a sinner and that he will punish. Will you dare to say that he is mistaken? Will you cry out in the assembly of the saints, liar? Oh, what a fool you would be. And even now, If your sin is not paid for, if things with God are not right for you, then His judgment is hanging over you. Children, there is a story about a man long, long ago. His name was Damocles, and he always thought it would be wonderful to be the king. Well, the king heard about this and thought, this man needs to be taught something. And so, he invited Damocles to come to the royal palace and when he got there, he made him to be king for the day. Now, that would be pretty cool, wouldn't it? And at the end of the day, there was a special dinner. And Damocles got to sit in the king's special, I'm sure it must have been golden chair, something of the sort. And it was wonderful, children. And all this yummy food, and all the wonderful things that he was surrounded by. Well, I don't know why he did this, but as he was eating, he kind of looked up, and what do you suppose he saw up above him? There was a sword, a sharp, sharp sword, hanging with the point down, right just a few feet over his head. Now it was hanging there, it wasn't attached to a cable. It wasn't attached to a strong, thick rope. It wasn't tied there by a string. It was tied there by a thread, like your mom uses to sew with. Now, what was the real king trying to teach Damocles? That even the king is in danger constantly. And there's just a thread between even the king and death. So, it's not all that great to be a king sometimes. Everyone else wants to be the king and to kill the king, so they can be the king for a while. Now, why am I telling you this story? Because, children and adults, if you are not right with God, if your sin is not paid for, then your life hangs by a string. pardon me, by a thread. The only one holding it back is the one against whom you have sinned. The only one holding it back is the one who hates your sin. He's just holding it back till the right time. You are in desperate trouble. Perhaps if you are not right with God, I hope that everyone here is, but I do not read hearts. I have a hard enough time with my own. Perhaps you feel this already. Perhaps you've already been thinking this is the case with you. You may be inching toward despair as you feel the load of your guilt the pollution of your sin, the guilt of your transgression, and you feel the warmth of the wrath of God drawing closer and closer and hotter and hotter? Well, there is some wonderfully glad news for you. Paul dealt with this earlier in his life when he wrote to the people in the province of Asia, in the Presbytery of Ephesus. If I recall right, having listened on Sermon Audio, Larry covered this pretty well in his first sermon in there in Chapter 1. There is a way, and only one way, Sin can be forgiven. Paul dealt with it in talking to the Ephesians, and he deals with it here. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We are justified by faith. Now, in the Greek, this is in what we call the passive voice. That is, if something that happens to you not something that you do, it's done to you. All right, children, let me illustrate this. Some of you girls like to have your hair brushed by your mom, right? Kind of fun. You just kind of stand there, mom sits on a chair or on the bedside or on a stool or something, brushes, brushes, brushes your hair, okay? And your mom can say positively, I brushed my daughter's hair. But you, kiddo, you say, my hair was brushed by my mom, right? It's something that happened to you. Mom was the one who did it, you just had it done to you. Alright, so it is here. We are justified by faith and it's something that's passive, it's something that happens to us. There is nothing that you can do, because God does it all for the people whom He loves, the predestined, mentioned back in Ephesians 1. Now, we have this long word here, justified. Justified. It's real closely related to justification. It means that God says, you are innocent. You are no longer guilty of the sin that you did, despite what actually happened. It's just like going to court because you were speeding and you find out that you were declared innocent because somebody already kindly paid the fine for you. And in fact, they took the points on their own license. Wow. This is what happens with sin for all who want it to be gone. For all who go to Jesus to take care of it, as we shall see in a moment. You see, when you go into traffic court, it's not as though the judge says, ah, forget it, we'll let it go this time. No judge ever says that, as far as I know. No, he must deal justly. Now, in the case that I just kind of illustrated things with here, the only reason you're let off is because somebody else paid the price. Somebody else paid out the money, took on the points, so that you wouldn't have to. God, the Holy God, The God of Truth who says that He punishes sin does not overlook sin. But He, before the world was ever made, made a plan actually to deal with sin while sparing the ones He loved and loves. So what do you do? Well, throughout Romans here we've been seeing what we do is cry out to Jesus, to rescue us, to deliver us, to save us from our sin. Take hold of this forgiveness of sin by giving your heart to it fully, and that's what faith is, putting trust in someone or something. Now, let's illustrate this a little further for you children. When you sit down in a chair, are you children listening? Sit down in a chair. You trust it to hold you up, right? Every once in a while a chair won't. I remember visiting at one of my brother's houses and he had this antique cane-bottomed chair and I didn't know that I wasn't supposed to sit in it and it tore the ancient caning right out. Or did I feel stupid, and it didn't hold me up? I had faith in the chair, but that chair wasn't worthy of my faith, my trust in it, was it? Now, if I had known, I wouldn't have sat down in it. If I had known how brittle and old it was, I wouldn't have trusted it. Sometimes people put faith in the wrong things, though. And they put faith in the wrong people. We sometimes trust the promises of some people, and they break those promises. It's a horrible thing when they do so. They promise, but then they ignore or completely break their promise. So faith, in and of itself, nothing that is particularly good. It is all dependent upon the one or the thing upon which we put the faith. And that leads us then to see, therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God. How? Through our Lord Jesus Christ. We're justified by faith alone, faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. We see throughout Scripture and throughout this particular letter that Paul wrote to the Romans, that God gave up His Son to be in the place of all who want forgiveness of sin. But it's not as though Jesus did this protesting, kicking, and screaming. No. Jesus willingly took this burden upon Himself. We read that He went to the cross despising the shame for the joy that was set before Him. He willingly came from heaven. We sing about that sometimes in Psalm 40. He willingly came to live a perfect life in the place of His people. He willingly set his face as flint to go to Jerusalem where he would be and where he was delivered up to the Gentiles by the elders of the people to die in the place of sinners. He paid, he took the punishment that his people deserved upon himself so that they wouldn't have to bear it eternally in hell. So how can you have forgiveness of sin? It is through faith alone. Faith in Jesus Christ alone, who at the cross gave his body to be broken, his blood to be shed, and as we read in the Old Testament, without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. Put your trust in Him. Cry out to Him. For He did it not for Himself. He had no sin to die for. He did it not for Himself because He was innocent. He had lived a perfect life. Death could not touch Him unless willingly. He gave the fruit of His obedience to someone else. and took the fruit of their sin from somebody else. Come to Him then for the forgiveness of sin. Come to Him for a new heart that loves goodness. Come to Him to have your load of guilt lifted from off your heavy heart. Come to Jesus who receives sinners and you will find that No longer are you rejected as you fear and as you really are. Come to Him and you will find you are accepted by God in Jesus Christ. Now then, Laird had remarked in these sermons that there is not an awful lot of gospel in Ephesians because it is primarily speaking to believers So is Romans here, yet there's a bit more, because Paul does not know these people, and so he goes into more stuff that he wouldn't need to with the Ephesians, whom he knew very well. He'd been their pastor for several years. He knew many of the people there, but the people in Rome, he hardly knew at all. There were some people he knew through his travels, but overall, all the little house churches there, he didn't know these people. And so he explains here what the gospel is. And as we trust in it, we have been justified. It's something that took place in the past. It is on the basis of what Jesus has done already. In the time of Paul, it was but a few decades before. Quite possibly not much more than about 20 to 25 years before. In our case, it's nearly 2,000 years ago. But we are justified by what happened back then once for all at the cross. We are not justified. We are not declared righteous because of what Christ is doing in us now. Otherwise, Paul would say something like, therefore, Since we are being justified, da-da-da-da-da. But he does not say that. We have been justified. It's a one-time thing back in the past. It is not dependent upon what Christ is doing in us now. And you might think this is a little thing. It's not a little thing. It is huge. We depend upon what Christ has done for us his life, death, and resurrection, particularly what he has done once for all at the cross. But because of that, in the past, one time, all done, we do have something in the present. And that is this. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Much of what I've said already is relating to those who do not know the Lord Jesus Christ. And the call to come to Him is for any and for all who see that they need to be right with God. And perhaps through the preaching of the Word, whether you're listening to it here or you're listening to it years from now over the internet and to the ends of the earth, If you want to know the Lord Jesus Christ, if through the preaching of the Word your heart has been stirred and you suddenly see, yes, this I need, this one I need, then come to Him. But now, let us say that Paul is also speaking to those who are already in Jesus Christ and the benefit and the blessing that they have now because of their justification, their adoption, and their sanctification. I brought along my church constitution. I forgot to bring it up here. I think it's down in the pew here. Perhaps not. It was in my car trunk and I don't know where it is now. But in question 36 of our Shorter Catechism, which I don't have memorized anymore, In question 36, one of the benefits in this life that comes from these benefits of justification, adoption, and sanctification is peace of conscience. Since we're justified by faith, we have peace with God. Here's a little aside. Children, if you learn your catechism, and that's not something that's done quickly or easily, don't waste all that time and effort by forgetting it. It's really stupid. Okay, anyway. Because of the work of Jesus, for his people, there is now peace. By grace. Do you know Jesus? By grace. Are you saved? Then let your conscience be edified here. There is Now, peace. Some of this, some of you may have experienced entirely. Others of you may struggle with it by times as I do. But let's look at the peace that we have because of the doing and the dying of Jesus. There is an outward peace. God is no longer at war with you. nor are you with him. There is no longer the fear of God coming in wrath because he is at peace now with you and with all his people. Everything has been dealt with by Jesus Christ. Do you have some darling sin in your life? I shouldn't call it darling. Some persistent sin It's not a darling, it's a hateful thing to you. But you haven't been able to throw it yet. And you think perhaps, maybe, God might be coming to the end of his patience with you. You're wrong. You are wrong. You may be thinking to yourself, this is the five millionth time I've forgotten to do this thing. This is the five millionth time I've done this wicked thing. Surely, God has had it with me. You're wrong, friend. Blessedly wrong. Jesus died for all five million of those. It's already covered. And if you go to another five million, It's all covered. It was all at that time. He has known you from eternity. The triune God has known you from eternity. And Jesus lived in your place. And it is His perfect record that is on your record. He paid for all your sin. All of it. As I've explained before, not all your sin up to the point where you Cried out to Him to save you from your sin, but after that you're responsible for it. No, not at all. All of it is covered by the blood. Are you covetous? You find yourself kind of waking up from a shopping jag and thinking, oh, I've done it again. I've been greedy. I've been an idolater. Oh, God, how can you still love me? Jesus never did that. Jesus was always perfectly content with what His Father gave Him. And guess what? In the Book of Life, it is written, you are perfectly content with what God has given you. You have not broken the Eighth Commandment. You have not broken the Tenth Commandment. You have not broken a first commandment? No. Legally speaking, Jesus did. That's why He died. And you? Well, you have life evermore. There is an inner peace as well. Believer, remember back when you weren't. Remember back when you were being awakened. Remember back when you were coming under conviction of sin. Remember the guilt. Remember the shame. Remember the inner turmoil, the fears, the heaviness. As you put your faith in Jesus Christ, they're all gone. And as you learn to put your trust in Jesus more and more, you find more and more there is now trust that all is right, all is forgiven, all is new, and this is the way it's going to stay. There's the confidence that Even when you stumble into sin again, it's dealt with. It's already been dealt with. You have the confidence that the Spirit who indwells you will continue to work in you and on you to make you more holy. Now some who are listening to this, would it be any of you, might think this is too good to be true, but it is true nonetheless. Does it sound like what your heart has been yearning for? It can be yours. Jesus saves all who come to Him in truth. Come to Him then for peace with God, Come to Him to be right with God. Come to have sin, all sin forgiven forever. And believer, rely upon this promise. It is sealed. Not with a little gold paper embossed. Not with wax imprinted with the mark of a king's signet ring. Ever seen one of those, a red wax seal? This is sealed by the red blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. So take it, believer, take this promise. He has made peace with God. You have been, by His grace, justified by faith. Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now whether you feel it or not, you have peace with God. Peace purchased at the price of Christ's broken body and shed blood. Amen.