Our first reading from God's word is from the book of Acts, chapter two, and beginning to read at verse 14. But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them. Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and give ear to my words. For these men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams, even on my male servants and female servants, In those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy, and I will show wonders in the heavens above, and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and vapour of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day, and it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." Men of Israel hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know, this Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. Amen. Our second reading. repeats a verse from Acts. When we read from Acts, Paul, in his sermon to the great crowd of the people who'd gathered for the Jewish festival of Pentecost, quoted from the prophet Joel. And he quoted, and it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. That verse is also quoted in Paul's letter to the Romans. to this church with some Jews in it, but also many Gentiles gathered in. So our second reading and our sermon will be from Romans chapter 10. We'll read the first 13 verses of it together. Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them, that is the Jewish people, is that they may be saved. I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law, for righteousness to everyone who believes. For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. But the righteousness based on faith says, do not say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven? That is, to bring Christ down. Or, who will descend into the abyss? That is, to bring Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith that we proclaim, because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek. The same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Amen. God, the Creator, the upholder of all things, all powerful and all wise, has been speaking to you. Have you been listening? It's good to talk. It's good to communicate. It's good to talk was a phrase that used to be used in advertising. but it's more than good to talk. It's vital for us to communicate as human beings. We're made to communicate, not to be cut off like an island. Without communicating, we're trapped in our own skull. and we don't understand the thoughts and the attitudes of others. So for children and their parents, for husbands and wives, for brothers and sisters, in families and in churches, we need to communicate and to talk to one another. or we can make wrong assumptions, we can think other people know our views, we can cut ourselves off. So all this communication is very important on the horizontal scale, just with other human beings on our planet. But God is all around us and he is not silent. He has spoken. He has acted directly time and again in human history in acts of deliverance and in acts of judgement. He has sent prophet after prophet after prophet to explain those actions, to give the significance of them, to give promises to give warnings to his people. Those communications from the prophets are the very words of God. They make up the largest part of the first part of our Bible, the Old Testament. And then, on Mount Sinai, He spoke the Ten Commandments to Israel through Moses. And we have the first five books of the Bible, the books of the law, again, God speaking, God revealing His will for humanity. Supremely, He spoke by sending His own Son, the Son of God, to take on human life and to live amongst us. He lived He taught, he died, he rose again in history on earth. And we have the four Gospels as the beginning of our New Testament. Again, the word of God, God communicating, God revealing himself through the ministry and words of his son. And then after his son's return to heaven, He sends his spirit, and in the book of Acts, through the epistles, we have his apostles being inspired, as promised by the Holy Spirit, that they would now, in a greater way, understand the words that Jesus said. Often in the Gospels, they were uncertain of these things. They were slow to understand. But by the ministry of the Holy Spirit, then, in the letters, they're able to open these things out and to explain the meaning of Jesus' words, to look back into the Old Testament and to explain how the Old Testament was all leading up to the coming of Jesus Christ. We have the acts and the letters. And this is why we call this collection of 66 books God's Word. It's a perfect record of God speaking to humanity. And through this book, he still speaks today to mankind, and it contains his call to you." Whenever someone reads the Bible or preaches the good news of Jesus Christ, God's voice is calling out to our generation. God has been calling sinners since the beginning of our history. In Genesis chapter 3, as soon as Adam and Eve had rebelled, what happened. God called to them in the garden. God called Abraham out of pagan Mesopotamia. He called the Israelites out of bondage and slavery in Egypt. Through the prophet Isaiah, he said to Israel, I have called you by name. Though 21 verses later, this is in Isaiah 43, the Lord speaking through his prophet says, I have called you, yet you did not call upon me. When Jesus came, God amongst mankind, he said, for I came not to call the righteous, but sinners, Jesus came to call. The call continuing down through the centuries, from Eden to the coming of the Lord Jesus, I came to call. His fisherman disciple, Peter, addressing the crowd in Jerusalem in the verses we read, He said to them, the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself. And writing to Christians in Thessalonica, Paul wrote, God calls you into his own kingdom. the process of God calling. Now perhaps when the service ends you'll reach into your handbag or your coat pocket and you'll lift out your mobile phone and you'll check to see any missed calls. And if you see there are seven missed calls from the same person you'll think oh There must be something amiss. There's something urgent. I've missed it. I've had my phone on silent, and somebody's been trying to get a hold of me. They've been calling me repeatedly, and I've missed the calls. So I ask you this morning, do you have missed calls from the Creator in your life? God has been calling mankind. How many times have you heard that call? Many times have you heard God's word preached, the gospel announced, witnessing from other believers God's call? Because he's not just calling the Jews, he's calling all ethnic groups, all language groups, all nationalities to follow him. Because when God calls, it requires a response. Jesus, one of his parables is all about people getting a call, getting an invitation to a wedding. And the first people, they don't come. There's something more important to do, and they pass it aside. So the call goes out to others. He was talking about the many amongst his own people who had rejected him and the call going out to other nations, including our own nations. And today, all peoples have a responsibility to respond to that call as it goes out from the church. In Paul's language from Romans 10, people need to call on the name of the Lord. This response then to God's calling, us calling on the name of the Lord, has been seen and looked for again since the start of the Bible. It's a phrase that's often used for that closing with God, committing themselves unto God in a relationship of faith. and it was deemed significant right back, Genesis chapter 4, 26. To Seth also a son was born. At that time, people began to call upon the name of the Lord. It's like a watermark there. It's like an event of great significance. At that time, people began to call upon the name of the Lord. Then the first great figure of the patriarchs, Abram. And in the very early dealings with God, in chapter 12 of Genesis, Abram. And there Abram built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. Isaiah. The Lord's prophet brought this message from God to the people in his time who were being rebellious. He said, seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near. And there's that sort of parallel. So calling is to do with seeking God whilst we have that opportunity. Call on God while he is near. The word of God has gone out with his call. Have we responded? Have we responded to his call? Here is a promise this morning. It comes from God. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Have you known God's saving work in your life? you can. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." For the remainder of our time, let's, because we've started wide, looking at God calling us first, and then how throughout history people have responded to that and called on the name of the Lord. and been delivered by God and been saved and entered into this special relationship with God. So let's look at it in the context where Paul used it of Romans chapter 10. Because in looking at the section that he puts that promise at the end of, I think we'd better understand the significance he saw in it. So we're going to work through just now in our remaining time, Romans chapter 10. and those 13 verses. So Romans 10, and he begins with this heartfelt prayer for his relatives, for those of his tribe of Benjamin, for people he'll have studied with at the theological school with Gamaliel, for his nation. He's one of the Jewish people. They're descended from the famous believers of the past. They've been given the scriptures. They're the ones who have guarded the scriptures through the centuries. And he says they're full of enthusiasm. They're full of zeal. It's not that it's empty of meaning for them. They're full of zeal. They're full of enthusiasm. And yet, Note this, they're descended from believers, they have the scriptures, they're linked to the worship of God, and yet they are not saved. They are not saved. Because what does he begin by praying? His prayer is that they may be saved. In other words, they are lost. He recognises that despite all these advantages they have had, they are lost and in need of God's salvation. They have zeal. He's very kind in his words in recognizing the good points. They've used their zeal, some of them, to arrest him, to beat him, to stone him. But he recognizes this is because they've misplaced zeal. And yet, it's not based on knowledge. Verse two, he says, it's not according to knowledge. And sometimes people have a, an idea that, well, so long as people are in earnest about their religion, whatever their religion they follow, if they're in earnest and they have a sort of faith in that general idea of God, then they will be okay with God. But here we have the Jewish people who've received true revelation from God, not a false revelation from a false prophet. They have enthusiasm and yet not according to knowledge. So a true knowledge of God's revelation, a true knowledge of God's gospel is essential to salvation. A sincere belief is of no use if it is based on a distorted view of God and his salvation. This is Paul's view of his own people. And he goes on then in verse three to introduce two types of righteousness. And he's going to develop this further as he goes through the chapter. So there's two types of righteousness here. The word righteousness is used quite a lot. The state of being right with God, acceptable in God's sight, not subject to God's wrath and his holy and correct anger and punishment, not in that state, but being right with God. So there's two types of righteousness here. The first is a homemade kit. The first is one which is their own version. They've decided they're going to build their own righteousness with God by keeping the rules and the standards of their religious code. And they are seeking to establish, he says in verse three, their own. They're trying to set up their own form of being right with God, their own path. They're building their own ladder and stairway to God. and in doing that they are not submitting to God's righteousness. So God has made a way in which we can come to him and be forgiven and these people are saying, I'm not submitting to that. Now submission You know, we often link it up with pride. You're not prepared to submit to someone else's authority. People are not prepared to submit to this idea that God has of substitution with someone else. They think, no, actually, I can do it myself. I'm OK. You think sometimes if you're working with a toddler and you're trying to get them to help them to do something, no, no, I can do it, I can do it. And you know they can't do it. And these people are trying to establish their own righteousness. So that's one kind of righteousness, homemade righteousness. And then the other righteousness is a righteousness that comes only from God and requires us to submit to God and to say, Lord, I seek it from you. I'm not trying to build my own. I'm not trying to make my own righteousness to be acceptable with you. there's a righteousness that comes from God to which we have to submit. He says they were ignorant, the key part of their ignorance, of the righteousness that comes from God. You don't do it yourself. You can't make it yourself. You can't make yourself right, he says to his own people. He says to us today, you can't make it right. You can't rub out the past. You can't keep God's laws going forward. It has to come from God. And he's going to tell us more of this. And in verse 4, he says, for Christ is the end of the law, Christ is the end of the law. They were looking to the law, they were so focused on the law, they'd counted up 613 commandments, I think it was, and they had them listed and they multiplied and they'd built fences around them and made additions to them in case you broke the central commandment. They were focused on the law and they didn't realize that the only one who could fulfil this standard was God's perfect man, and that everyone else would fail. Everyone else in humanity had flaws from the outset that made them incapable of doing this. They'd reduced a lot of it to a very surface level. On the surface, you could keep the law. But when Jesus spoke to them, he said, it's what's in your thoughts, it's what's in your mind and emotions as well. Don't just tell me that you haven't openly committed adultery in the act, but have you done it in your thoughts? Don't just tell me you haven't actually murdered someone, but has it been in your inner being, if you had the right circumstances and the right place and thought you wouldn't be caught, do you have that hatred? of someone. Only one person could fulfil that law, and that pointed to God's perfect man, to the person who was born without sin, who is in one person both God and man, the Lord Jesus Christ. The priests and the Sadducees, they were busy with the sacrifices and the ceremonies They didn't realise that the goal, the outcome to which the law was leading, because the word end in English, as in Greek, can mean both the end destination and the goal towards a fulfilment, towards its coming. They didn't realise that The outcome of all these sacrifices were all leading and pointing towards God's perfect sacrifice, who was going to come in the person of his son, Jesus Christ, who would be the perfect substitute, sinless in the place of sinners. the one who would bear the curse and the penalty that was set out in the law. All those curses in the end of Deuteronomy, if you break the law, these curses will fall upon you. Well, Jesus was cursed when he hung upon a tree. So he's the one who was the perfect man the true righteous one of God who would fulfil all the moral requirements of the law. He was the one who would bear the curse for breaking the law that others had incurred. He is the one who would be the perfect fulfilment of all the sacrifices of blood of taking an innocent creature to die in the place of the guilty. He alone has passed the test of God's law. And so he alone can give a right standing with God. And that's why the second half of verse four says, he is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. So it's belief in him. He is God's way of righteousness. He is the one God has provided. And when we are linked to him and accepted in him, then as the father looks on his son with pleasure and with love, so he looks on the believer. Not on the basis of our own record and our own reality and our own life, but on the basis of what Jesus Christ has done and achieved. Paul goes on in verse five to quote from Leviticus. He says, Moses, writing about that righteousness, says the person who does the commandments shall live by them. The flip side of that is that those who fail to keep those commandments shall die as a penalty of that. Jesus, by fulfilling the requirements of the law, has secured a place at the Father's right hand and for his followers everlasting life. Paul wrote to the Philippians in chapter 3, he said, that I may gain Christ, not having a righteousness of my own. He didn't want this homemade righteousness, but that which comes through faith in Christ the righteousness from God that depends on faith. So going across into that other letter of Philippians, he's still talking about the two types of righteousness. He says, I don't want a righteousness that's my own. My righteousness is no good. I want the righteousness that comes from God through faith in Christ, God's perfect man, God's perfect substitute. And this idea of true righteousness and that our righteousness must only come from God has been attacked by false teachers at many times through the history of the church. In the struggles around the Reformation and seeking to break free from errors that had sprung up, this was a key teaching of justification by faith, as opposed to justification by works, as was enshrined by the Roman Catholic Council of Trent in the Counter-Reformation. And today, sadly, in some supposedly reformed circles in North America, there is a sort of a loose collection of teachings around something called federal vision. And again, there's an undermining and an erosion of justification by faith, with an idea of justification being something that we contribute to as a process. It is not. It is a saving link to what Jesus Christ has accomplished. Verses six and seven, Paul gives this true righteousness a voice, that this righteousness that comes from God speaks. And it's a Hebrew way of doing things. If you think of the book of Proverbs, where wisdom speaks, wisdom is portrayed as a character speaking. And so we have these words coming to us. And it's quoting from the book of Deuteronomy, taking us back to the time when Moses was preparing the people of Israel to enter the promised land of Canaan. And these verses that we see quoted down about the word is near you, do not descend. He's quoting back to this time when they're on the verge of coming in across the river into the land. And Moses has been emphasizing to the people, this is God's gift to you. You haven't earned this. Don't think that this is too difficult for you. God has done the difficult work and he has given this land to you. And today the message for us is that the hard work has been done by Jesus Christ. God doesn't say, you know, you have to do something really wonderful. You have to go on some sort of pilgrimage. You have to climb a hill on your knees. You have to go for a year without sinning. You have to do all manner of wonderful works. The message is that Jesus Christ has done all the hard work. He's done all the hard tasks. He came down from heaven. He became human. He kept the commandments. He died in our place. He suffered the curses. He went to the grave. He has risen again. He has done what was impossible for any other human being. So when he says in verse six, the righteousness based on faith says, don't say in your heart who will ascend into heaven. These are words that Moses had used in Deuteronomy. You don't have to go up into heaven. I'm not asking you to do something impossible. He says that's to bring Christ down. Jesus has already come down from heaven. God's not asking you to do something impossible to be saved. He's not saying you have to get up to heaven by yourself. He's not saying you have to go down into the grave, into death. He says Jesus has done that. That would be going down to bring Christ up from the dead. Do you not know that Jesus has been resurrected. You don't have to do that. You don't have to go up into heaven. Jesus has come from heaven. You don't have to go down into the grave. Jesus has risen from the grave. The hard work is done, he's saying. We don't have to accomplish the impossible. And indeed, it would be an insult to try to recreate what Jesus has already accomplished and achieved. And then verse eight, the word is near you. Did you ever run for a bus and you get to it and just as it pulls off or you go to the tube and those doors close or a train, they do it to you. I've done it with the Heathrow Express and you just, you think I've got it and the doors close and you can't get them opened again and it pulls off. So close, right there and you missed it. He says, the word is so close to you. The word of salvation is so close to you. What an awful thing it would be to reject the word of God and to think it was so close. I was right that I had the Bible in my hand. I had the words in my mind. People do not have to go to the extremes of creation. They have God's words. They have his invitation. They have his promises. What we have to do is to take it up and respond in faith to the Christ who is God's righteousness, God's perfect man. We're not being asked to do a miracle. The word's right there. He says, it's right there in your hand. It's in your mind. It's on your tongue. so close to you. His promises and the response to that promise in faith. Verses 9 and 10. We can take those words in our lips. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart, we can take that word that's so close to us and we can put it in our lips. We can confess, yes, Jesus is Lord. Jesus is the supreme authority. That In its time, Caesar was claiming to be Lord over all, but the believers said, no, Jesus is Lord. Time of the Reformation, it was the Bishop of Rome. At the time of the Covenanters, it was the King of England, the head of the state, saying, no, Jesus is Lord of all. And today, we read about believers in China suffering under a new wave of persecution there. The head of the Chinese Communist Party is not Lord. Jesus is Lord. He is the one to whom we look for, and we confess his authority. We believe in him who has risen from the dead. He concentrates there on believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, because it's like the stump on authority on everything else. What is the supreme manifestation that All he said was true. All he did was from God. It was his being raised physically from the dead as the firstfruits of all who will rise. It speaks of confessing him before others. We think of the Lord's words in Matthew 10. Everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven. Verse 10 continues, for with the heart one believes and is justified. Just a word on that, about heart religion. It's a phrase that's sometimes used in old books. And we always have to distinguish the fact that, as I'm sure you've heard, that the heart is, in our modern sense we talk about matters of the heart to do with our emotions and our feelings. But what was meant by it in biblical times was everything that wasn't on the surface. So it's like deep religion as opposed to surface religion. It's not just something that's from the teeth out, it's not something that's external and that just other people can see. Everything that you are that other people can't see on the outside. Your thoughts, your intelligence, your mind, your will, your direction, your drive in life, your emotions and your feelings, all of that is your heart. And God wants heart religion. He wants us to love him with all the heart and soul and mind and strength. And so here it speaks of us And 10, with the heart believing. It's not just a cold statement of something. It is that from the heart we accept this and respond and rely upon him. It's with all our internal being. Which brings us back then in the final verses to calling upon God. He's speaking to an audience of people from different backgrounds. He says it doesn't matter if you're a Jew, it doesn't matter if you're a Greek, it doesn't matter where you're from. He says, Everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame. There's no distinction. He bestows His riches on all who call on Him. And so it's at the end of this, of explaining that it's not about us. It's not about us building our own righteousness. It's about confessing Him, believing in Him, placing our trust in the righteousness that He has provided through Christ. This brings us back then to this verse from Joel, calling upon God. His son has met the full requirements of the law, he's borne the curse, and everyone who is linked to him by faith is given righteousness from God. This righteousness that comes down from above as a free gift. It's free, but you have to submit to God's way. This is so close to you." He says, it's so close to you. It's in your hands. It's in your mouth. It's in your mind. God's promise is to you. Your response to it is so close. The Gospel promises are in your ears. Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame. Everyone who calls in the name of the Lord will be saved. Call on him. and he will give you the richest blessing. Call on him and you will be saved.