Romans 5, 1 to 11, this is God's word. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings. knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person, one would dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more Now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. Let's pray. Fathers, we come to this your word. We do ask that you'd open the eyes of our hearts to understand what you have for us. to know your truth. Illumine our hearts. Give us joy and comfort in knowing you. Convict us and challenge us if we have need. Teach us by the power of your spirit. We ask in Jesus' name, amen. Tonight, we look at Romans 5, 1 to 11. And this morning, we looked at Romans 1, 16 and 17, which really is the theme, if you will, of the whole book of Romans and could be suggested that it is Paul's theology summed up, if you will. As we look at this text, We see Paul throughout this book contrasting salvation by grace over against what people often thought salvation was really grounded in, an external obedience. What he's doing is driving home to us the truth of what God has really done in and through Christ for his people and what true salvation is really ultimately all about. In chapter one, Paul does a greeting, an introduction to the church. He gives them the idea of what this book will be about, that it will be that the just shall live by faith. And then he moves into a section talking about the fact that God's wrath is being revealed in the world against all unrighteousness. He talks through the process that people suppress the truth. That means they actively hold it down. Now, if we're honest, there are times we actually hold the truth down too. I know I ought to do this, but. You know, I know this is really right, but. So we can be guilty as well. But we recognize that we live in a world where people actually hold the truth down. It would seem that that's happening more clearly and more powerfully in the world that we're living in that we see kind of across the board right now. Where it would seem that there are things that people could see and realize, but they seem to completely miss. When you hold the truth down, you suppress it, you turn your mind away, and you latch on to other things. So Paul begins with that concept that this was really the way it was from the very beginning. This is not new. This is something that the world has dealt with through the process of time, if you will. In chapter two of Romans, he really basically says that you have No excuse when you pass judgment on other people, because when you pass judgment on other people, you really are passing judgment on yourself. Think about the things that really bother you. Aren't those the things that you're kind of guilty of yourself? Those are the things that bother us. There'll be some things that we don't worry too much about, And especially with kids, we want to purge out of our children the things that we could never really purge out of ourselves. And so there's a sense in which when we judge other people, we accuse ourselves of our own sin and fallen humanity. Chapter three, he really talks to Jews in particular that those who come from a Jewish background are guilty as well. They were entrusted with the law, with the word of God, with God working, and yet they harden their hearts against the truth. So that in Romans chapter three quotes the psalm, there's no one righteous, not even one. There was no one who seeks after God, not even one. Together they have all become worthless. He wants to break down for us a clear understanding that we cannot earn our salvation, that we are not righteous, that we are fallen, that we are sinful people, that there is no one left to himself or herself who will be right before God. Paul wants to make sure that nobody has any sense of any excuse that they're okay, or even that they're better than someone else. That's one of the things we have to be careful in the church. We can very easily fall in that pattern where we look at ourselves as us and them. We're all them. There ain't no us. Or us is them. We're all together in this. We all need God's grace and mercy. When he moves into chapter four, he talks about Abraham as being the father of faith and that he was justified not by his actions, but by his faith, his confident hope in the living God. And that the promise of God to Abraham came through faith. Abraham believed God and God credited to him as righteousness. It's a radical concept. And this is what people needed to hear. It's what we still need to hear and be reminded of. Because we so easily gravitate back toward a legalism, toward an external outward obedience that I can just, if I just try a little bit harder, I can do this. Lord, just give me a little push. I need a little nudge. I'll be okay. And we are bankrupt. We are lost without God's grace and mercy, without his work. That's what Paul wants them to understand. So when he comes to chapter five, that first word, therefore, he's really drawing a conclusion from everything he said before. This is where the apostle Paul walks us through the book of Romans. He is constantly bringing us back to see how this all fits together and what God's argument for us to really understand grace, mercy, forgiveness, and our need for God's work in our hearts is all about. So he says, therefore, since we have been justified by faith, notice his first point, we have been justified by faith. The concept of justified, notice it's a past tense. That fits the original. It's a done deal. It's something that's already happened. And the idea of the verb here is it's encapsulated. It's completed. It's finished. It happened. So justified is to be declared righteous in God's sight. It is that God sees us as righteous in his sight, but it's not through anything that we've done. It's through the work of Christ on the cross that God, by his grace and mercy, has applied to us through Christ's death on the cross and the faith that God has given to us. We've been justified by faith. Our faith is the instrument that God gives to us so that we would know our salvation. Now, sometimes as believers, we'll struggle with our faith. Normally, we struggle with our faith because we look at ourselves. When I look at me, I realize I'm a sinner. I'm a loser. Why would Jesus do anything for me? I get skewed because I don't look at Jesus. That's when we struggle, I think, because we see our weakness, we see our sin, we see our struggles. We recognize I struggle with the same kinds of things. We have sins that are besetting sins. Every one of us do. They're different, but we have besetting sins, things that we struggle with in this life. When I look at myself, I could very easily question, am I really saved or not? What Paul does, he will look at himself, Romans 7, but he moves us again and again back to Jesus. That's where we have to look. Now, it's not that we fail to tell God the truth about our sin. We do tell God the truth. We do confess our sin. We do ask for forgiveness. But we recognize that my justification is not based on my ability to perform, but it's based on Jesus' ability, His perfection, and what he's done on the cross by paying the penalty for my sin. That's what my salvation is based on. We can never ever forget that. And so Paul all the way through the book of Romans is bringing us back to that. As we struggle with our salvation, the book of Romans actually can be tremendously comforting because God brings us back through Paul again and again to the fact that our justification is by faith. It's faith, our trust in the finished work of Christ, what God has done, not what we have done. When you look at Adam and Eve in their sin, they fell. Dying, they died. They died spiritually. They died physically. They fell. And we were all plunged into the state of, as the Westminster standards put it, sin and misery. A fallen, broken world where work is by the sweat of the brow, where giving birth, can I say it, is painful, as a gross understatement, right? Yes. What happened was, People wanted the law to justify them before God. Even in the church, we struggle with this. We want our obedience to somehow count for something with God. When you do, we just went into trouble. Our obedience is a response of love. It's not something that makes us better before God. It's only Jesus finished work on the cross. When we get up every morning we want to remember the gospel. Jesus came and died and paid the penalty for my sin. He died on the cross to set me free from the bondage of sin and death. I now have peace with God. The peace here is not an absence of strife. It's not an uneasy, you know, he loves me, he loves me not. It's a finished reality because of what Jesus has done and because God by the power of his grace and mercy has given me his Holy Spirit. And notice how the scripture puts it, a deposit guaranteeing what is to come. I know that I'll go to heaven. I know that God's at work in my life now. I know that I will never be alone, that God has sent his spirit to my life. And it's based on his grace and mercy. And that gives me great joy, great comfort to know that God is at work in a powerful way. You think of the Hebrew word shalom, means more than just Hello, it means more than just an absence of strife. It means a fullness of joy, of comfort, of relationship, to truly be at peace with God. Sometimes we struggle with that because in this world, we don't have relationships that are always based on peace. I mean, think about it. If half of all marriages end in divorce, when are you ever really safe? People can turn on us. Relationships can be strained. People misunderstand. They jump to conclusions. They move away from us. As people, we're flaky. That's a technical term, just so you know. But God isn't. we can know the truth of the mercy of God. And notice here, as the Lord puts this, therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, we have also obtained access, introduction, relationship by faith into this grace in which we stand. Jesus is the introducer of peace and mercy as the Son of God introducing us to the Father of God through his righteous life and gift of salvation for us. We have access to this grace in which we now stand. We are firmly established because of the finished work of Christ. We are right before God because of what Jesus has done for us. It's a new standing. And it's not that we have to be afraid that our salvation will be lost. If you're like me, there are things in your life that you look back on and you regret. You wish you could change them. I actually have a long list. all kinds of things I'd love to change, but I can't. But the one thing that I know is God's grace and mercy. It's sufficient for my weakness. God in his sovereign mercy has sustained me through myself. Praise be to God. I now stand, you now stand in this grace that God has given to us, and that we as God's people, for all of us who put our faith and trust in Christ, we are now at peace with God. How amazing is that? We don't have to be afraid. There are people that are afraid when they die. Even people in the church, they're afraid. We don't have to be afraid. We can know that we will go to be with the Lord forever because we know the promises of God are true. We know the word of God is true. We know that God has revealed himself to us and we need not be afraid. This was about five years ago. I got up early because my son was sick. Felt some tightness in my chest, but it wasn't a big deal. And my wife was going to have surgery, have a breast removed on Friday. This was Wednesday. She didn't want to take care of him because she didn't want to get sick because she's going to go to the hospital and have surgery. Didn't blame her. And he normally would even frequently come over to me first anyway, but so I went down and rubbed his back, spent a couple hours with him. When I went back up to bed, she was awake. Six o'clock in the morning, she's not awake. She was awake. I still had this tightness, didn't have any sharp pain, just tightness, just tightness. I lay down, but I didn't feel comfortable. That never happens. So I sat up and my wife wanted to talk. That never happens at six o'clock in the morning. She said, what's the matter? I said, eh, I feel a little, my chest feels a little tight. I think I'm just gonna sit up. The cardiac nurse, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And she starts talking to me and asking me questions. And so I decide, okay, I'll go to the bathroom and I'll come back. Maybe I'll feel a bit better. She hands me an aspirin and she says, here, you are going to the ER right now. Well, the girl's just like a daughter to me, was there with us. She's going to drive you. And my wife knows me very well. And if you won't go, I'll call 911 and it will cost you more. That's all I had to hear. So I went to the ER. Long story short, I had a very mild heart attack. They put two stints in. They let me go home the next day. I was told that I would recover completely. But I'll tell you, as I lay in the hospital that night, alone, I'm just gonna be honest. It occurred to me, I almost made it home. I almost got to be with my Lord and Savior. And honestly, I love you guys. I'm delighted to be here, but I was disappointed. And then I rejoiced because I could stay and torment my family and you longer. God works in amazing ways, but that's what we want to see because that's what the scripture tells us. is that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. And that's where we want to find our hope, our confidence, our joy, to know that as long as he keeps us here, we want to serve him. When he takes us home, we get to be with him forever, both places. our delightful gift, because God is with us in whatever circumstance we find ourselves. So we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. That word for rejoice there could also be translated as boast, which is really intriguing. I think it's by using that word, the Lord through Paul is really challenging us not only to be happy but to delight and to affirm and to speak powerfully about the joy of the hope of the glory of God, to brag about God's glory, that our focus is on Him and on who He is and what He's done. And our hope here, this word is not as we often use it because we often think, oh, I hope things will work out. This hope is a certainty. It's just the anticipation, the future joy of being with the Lord and being in heaven, and the hope that God will reveal his glory. God is gonna reveal his glory, there's no doubt. And so we rejoice in that, looking to the future and trusting him, rejoicing in all that he's done. But notice how the Lord through the apostle Paul shifts here. He takes us where we don't really expect him to take us. Because we go from the hope of the glory of God to rejoicing, boasting, same verb, in our sufferings. I wouldn't go there. Paul does. Again, by divine inspiration. Verse three, more than that, it doesn't mean that he's even more than the hope of the glory of God, but he's saying really in addition, that's really what that means there. We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame. Think back of chapter one, when Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. Our hope in God does not put us to shame. because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit has been given to us. We rejoice, we boast in our suffering. That's really hard to do. I don't like to suffer. I want things to be smooth. I want them to work well. I want everything to go the way I want it to go. But God in his divine, sovereign wisdom doesn't do it my way. I don't know why you suffer the things you suffer. We've suffered lies. We've suffered Judgment, judgmentalism, hatred, unforgiveness. You've got scars nobody can see. I don't know why. I wish you didn't. But at the same time, I know that God is sovereign and he's good and he ordained it. I don't know why. but he will use our suffering to produce in us patience, endurance, character. He will use the things we struggle with to give us grace to grow in him. Some of us will encounter or have encountered extreme things. I don't know why. But I know God is good. I know God is sovereign. I know God is at work. I know we can trust Him at all times. It's often hard when we see our kids go through difficult things. We pray for them and we struggle with and for them. And we don't know why things happen. But we know that God is good. And we know that He's at work. And we know that we can trust Him in all things. God works out all things for His glory. So we hold on, we trust Him, we look to Him in faith, and we rejoice that hope in Him, verse five, does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. who's been given to us. God has poured his love into our hearts. What a powerful joy and comfort. And for us to know that no matter what we go through, the Lord will never leave us. He will never forsake us. He will give us the grace we need to sustain us through whatever difficulties we encounter. And so we rest in him. And here, notice how Paul really ends this little section, that Christ died for the ungodly. He reminds us of our complete need for his grace. While we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For one would scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person, one would dare even to die. Probably a shift between righteous and good. Righteous would be obedient to the law, if you will. Good is even more than that. We like good people. Righteous people, we don't necessarily like, because they're just obnoxious, usually. Good people, we appreciate. But God chose his love for us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we now have received reconciliation. Here, we were enemies of God. We were in the opposite camp. We were against him. It's not that we were neutral. It's not that we just weren't good friends. We were God's enemies. We were under the wrath of God. We were opposed to him and his kingdom. When we were enemies, God reconciled us to himself through Christ. God is the one who has done it. He has brought us into his family, into his kingdom, that we now belong to him. He has given us life. When we were his enemies, when we were sinners, at just the right time, Christ died for us. We now belong to him, and he's taken us from being his enemies Now we're at peace with God. So no matter what we go through in this life, no matter how difficult things are, no matter how we struggle, even when we question, God, where are you? What are you doing? Why is this happening to me? We can come back to Romans chapter five and be reminded he's here. He's with us. He's at work. We can trust him at every moment. The Apostle Paul wrote this book out of his own experience and understanding of being an enemy of God. And as he was going to destroy God's people, God saved him. It's amazing. Paul understood the grace of God powerfully. And God's given us his spirit so that as his people, we can understand by his grace, his mercy, his forgiveness, and the joy that we are at peace with God. Let's pray. Father, work in our hearts. Sometimes for us, life is difficult. There are things we don't understand. There are things that we question. But we know that you are Lord, that there is no other. We know that we have been justified by faith and that we are now at peace with you. Fill us, Lord, with the joy of our salvation. Work in our hearts. and give us comfort, and lead us in your everlasting way, we ask in Jesus' holy name, amen.