We continue our regular reading this morning in Paul's letter to the church at Rome. And as I have said a couple times now already, the Apostle Paul is conducting the gospel ministry through letter that he desires to conduct in person in the city of Rome. You recall that he said in chapter 1 how he longs to get to that city to bring the gospel ministry to bear upon them through his own gifts, not that they are devoid of the gospel without him, but he desires to bring his faith and receive from their faith. Well, until he gets there, he will give them a letter where he will do the same thing. And what is he doing in these chapters, one through three thus far? The Apostle Paul is bringing as many people as he can with him to the foot of the cross. He is tearing down strongholds, his own expression in a letter he wrote to the Corinthians. He is pointing out false views that many hold on how they can find acceptance with God. And knowing those are faults, Paul is tearing them down carefully so that as many as the Lord will give him will join him at the foot of the cross and glory in Christ crucified for sinners. We see some more of that today. And then we move to his glorious conclusion of this section next Sunday, Lord willing. Let us pray. Our gracious God and Father, help us now, we pray. Lord, we pray that our help would be from your own spirit, that your Holy Spirit, by the merits of your Holy Son, would give us a believing heart so that we might have an understanding mind, so that we might enjoy and participate in the reforming of our will. And Lord, we pray that you would grant it to be so, that all in this place would be blessed of heaven to repudiate every false way of seeking your justification for their lives and come down that narrow way, that wonderful, glorious way the way to the cross, the boasting in Christ's work, in Christ's death, in Christ's resurrection. O Lord, help us, we pray, to the praise, honor, and glory of your name. Amen. Romans 3, verse 9 through 20. What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin. As it is written, no one is righteous, no, not one. No one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. In their paths are ruin and misery and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. This is God's word. There is a fascinating moment in the life of Job, the Old Testament saint, when the Lord takes a break from interrogating Job and gives him an opportunity to speak. In Job chapter 38 and chapter 39, the Lord is asking question after question to Job. Here is a small sample. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Have you commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place? Have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have you entered the storehouses of snow or have you seen the storehouses of hail? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? Is the wild ox willing to serve you? Will he spend the night at your manger? Do you give the horse his mite? Do you clothe his neck with a mane? Do you make him leap like the locust? Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes his nest on high? Those are just some of the questions cascading like a waterfall, pounding on Job's heart. But then the Lord takes a break and says to Job, do you have any answers? And Job speaks briefly. Here is Job 40 verse three. Then Job answered the Lord and said, behold, I am of small account. What shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. Job has only spoken up to say, I have nothing to say. Beloved, this is the same experience that you and I need to have with God. If you have had this experience, blessed are you. This is the point Paul is making in verse 19 and verse 20 of our text today. Paul says there is a kind of speech coming at us from the Bible. The law is speaking at us. Its voice must speak into our conscience so that we, like Job, would stop our mouths before God. To stop your own mouth means you are convinced. You are persuaded. You are done evading the truth about you. You are done making excuses for you. You are done lying for you. To have your mouth stopped is an expression from ancient courts of law. When a man accused of wrongdoing finally got his turn to speak in court, instead of saying something clear to clear himself, he remained silent. He had nothing to say. Why? Because his own conscience had convicted him. He had already heard the truth about himself in the courtroom. The prosecution had even won him over. In silence, he now waits to hear the court declare him guilty because he has already declared himself guilty. No more hiding. Beloved, this is the experience you and I need to have with God. We need to hear that peculiar voice Paul speaks of in verse 19, the voice of God's law. It is that voice, Paul says, that testifies against you. You need to hear it speak of your guilt before God so you will be persuaded of your guilt before God. When you are persuaded of your guilt, true repentance has been granted to you. The mercies of Christ for the penitent soul are always greater than the sin and guilt of our soul. Blessed are you who have been brought to that stopping of your own mouth before God. But if you are not persuaded of your guilt, Only judgment will come because Almighty God is already persuaded of your guilt. In Genesis 8.21, the Lord says to Noah, the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Are you convinced of that? About you? Are you convinced that your guilt before God is the awful truth about you? Matthew Mead put it this way, until the sinner is convinced of sin, he can never be converted from sin. So long as sin is unseen, Christ will be unsought. Thomas Watson said, till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet. And John Calvin, in the opening chapter of his most excellent book, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, wrote, we cannot aspire to God in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves. Of course, Calvin was careful to immediately say that man never attains to a true knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God. and come down after such contemplation to look into himself." Beloved, contemplating the face of God is the very experience the Apostle Paul draws you into in this section of his letter this morning. Notice his words in verse 20. Here's Paul's summary statement for this whole section. He says, for by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. Now that short phrase, in his sight, means Paul is speaking of God. He is speaking of man in the presence of God. In the original Greek, Paul has literally said, before his face. For by the works of the law, no human being will be justified before his face. Paul is anticipating here all the highest hopes, all the highest aspirations of the human being. Our highest hope, our only hope, is for God to declare us righteous before him. This is what it means to be justified, that word in verse 20, that God would declare us righteous before him. That's the best, highest, only hope of the human being. When God declares us righteous, before his face, we are then welcomed and accepted in the presence of God now and forever. To be justified is to be as welcome and as accepted as Jesus Christ himself, the son of God. We cannot place too high a value on being declared righteous before God. But Paul says in verse 20, that the works of the law will not result in anyone being declared righteous before God. He is saying the effects of the law upon our human lives, the way the law works on us, it will not result in any one of us becoming righteous before God's face. Why? Because the law cannot defeat the power of sin that is at work within us. Through the law comes knowledge of sin, Paul says, not freedom from sin. If we were to totally cover ourselves with the law, like a man who's outdoors in sub-zero temperatures is covered head to toe with winter clothing, Even then, the law still leaves us subject and bound and enslaved to sin's penalty and to sin's power. The law does not end the dominion of sin over you. Only Jesus Christ can do that. Only Jesus has paid sin's penalty. in his death. Only Jesus has diffused sin's power in his resurrection. Only Jesus can bring you before the face of God justified. You will only be declared righteous in God's sight when by faith alone your life is hidden in Christ with God. If my plan in life is to double down on law to go harder in the law, sin will still keep and continue its dominion over me. Why? Because as Paul says in verse 20, through the law comes knowledge of sin. Brothers and sisters in Christ, you are going to meet people all over this Western society in which we live in. who are exhausted with the lawlessness of this present hour in human history. And they will be able to testify to you like the interlocutor of chapter two, tell you all the things that are wrong in the lawless culture of late modern America. I almost slipped and said the late Roman Empire. And their ability to inventory for you all the lawless ways of modern Americans will tempt you to think that they understand the way to be justified before the face of God. If you keep listening and keep asking them questions, you will soon learn that they don't understand at all. Because they will tell you soon that their solution is to double down on the law, to teach everybody to be better law keepers, to strive harder in law keeping. And they will not speak of Jesus Christ. And little do they know it, that they have just advanced the kingdom of Satan. Don't you be fooled. The kingdom of Satan is not advanced merely by those black-stained sins of Las Vegas. The kingdom of Satan is advanced by those white sins of middle-class Americans who promote law-keeping with great energy and zeal and speak nothing of the cross of Jesus Christ. Don't be fooled. Don't be fooled. the way into the eternal kingdom is narrower than you think. There are not two ways to be declared righteous before God, one in Jesus and one Jesus plus law-keeping. There's one way, Jesus alone. I'm gonna come to this again in a minute, but for now I want you to understand this with me. Paul wants us here to contemplate the face of God in his sight, verse 19. He wants us to understand that because of God's splendor, because of the beauty of God's holiness, because of the glory of God's being, we fallen humans cannot just come to God as we are. As verse 20 says, we need to be declared righteous by God if we are to be blessed in his sight and kept before his face. Yet verse 19 shows that if I do not discover my guilt before God, if I do not stop my own mouth before God, I will not be declared righteous by God. If my mouth is still open defending myself, excusing myself, justifying myself, proving myself, then I am trying to do what Paul says in verse 20, cannot be done. I'm trying to get God to declare me righteous by the works of the law. Isn't that what you hear whenever your own mouth tries to defend yourself You pull out some principle of the law, even if you're arguing with your spouse, and you say, but I didn't do that. And you are trying to put a little justification in the water. Paul says it cannot be done. I am resisting in that case. I am resisting the discovery of my guilt in all its mouth-stopping totality. If I am still trying to find excuses for myself, I haven't shut up yet. Before God, I must be silent. Not because it's a affectation that a bunch of people in a room on a Sunday morning are putting on. I must be silent because The Spirit of God has cut me to the heart and has convinced me that I'm guilty before him and that he is right and just to condemn me. But lo and behold, such a rare creature, such a divinely created creature can still be declared righteous before the face of God. In fact, that's the only creature who can be. One of the most common ways people avoid dealing with the trauma of their guilt before God is they tell themselves they have dealt with some of their guilt. I might tell myself I felt really bad about the bad things I did. But feeling really bad does not remove your guilt in God's sight. I might tell myself, I really tried hard to be a better person, but trying to be a better person does not remove your guilt in God's sight. Or I might say, I have lived a much better life than that person or those people. Beloved, being able to see the faults of others does not remove your guilt in God's sight. Go back to the first seven verses of Romans 2. That was the point. Being able to see the faults in others is not a guilt-removing atonement for you or for me. Last week, we heard King David's cry for mercy from Psalm 51. He had committed adultery with another man's wife and then had her husband killed. The law had come and had spoken to David's heart. And it could say nothing to make him feel better about his situation before God. That's when you know you're hearing the law rightly. It does nothing to make you feel better before a holy, glorious, beautiful, excellent being, the living God. But when the Holy Spirit cut into David's heart, he went begging for the only thing that could remove his guilt, the mercies of God in Christ. And David, in his prayer of Psalm 51, does not just declare how ashamed he was, he declares his guilt. In fact, he experiences the mouth stopping Not literally, but confessionally. Listen to what he said. Against you, you only God, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Psalm 51.4. David does not try to atone for his sin. He does not try to pacify God's just anger by his remorse or by new resolutions. Instead, David confesses that before God's throne, he is condemned. That's mouth-stopping. He will not try to justify himself. In fact, David acknowledged not only his sinful action, adultery, He acknowledged his sinful condition from his mother's womb. You see, this sin of David's opened up a crevice in his soul through which he looked and could see the truth of the race of men. He not only acknowledged his actual sins, he acknowledges his participation in original sin. Here's how he said it. Psalm 51.5, behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me. He's not saying there that she was a prostitute or that she had some illicit relationship that produced pregnancy. When he says in sin did my mother conceive me, he's referring to the very nature that has fallen in the family tree of Adam the first. What you hear in David's prayer there is the revulsion of the whole soul toward its alliance with sin and death. Now I can imagine someone hearing everything I just said so far and saying, you Christians are neurotic. I don't want to discover my guilt, get away from me. You guys sound absolutely psychologically oppressive with your talk about guilt. Leave me alone. Now, if that is you, beloved, I want to try to persuade you another way. Discovering your guilt is absolutely necessary to discovering what kind of being you really are. You are a being who exists in the presence of God. In fact, you live and you move and you have your being in God. Scripture says that in Acts 17, verse 28. You only have being because God has being. But the divine being is not just about raw power. It is a false definition of God To say God is the being who can do all the things lesser beings can do and also do all the things lesser beings can't do, that definition is a false definition because it reduces God to what he can do. It defines him by raw power. God's being is not defined in such a narrow pagan way. When Moses visited God atop Mount Sinai, God revealed himself to Moses in these words as he had Moses turn around and put him into a cleft in the rock, and God passed by him and spoke. The Lord passed before Moses and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty. You see God's being is defined by both his power and his goodness. This is why the men of the Westminster Assembly, when they met in London in the 1640s, they defined God more broadly than raw power. What is God, they asked, in question four of the Westminster Shorter Catechism? Answer. God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. Now listen, if you are that hard-hearted person that thinks all of this talk of guilt is neurosis, listen to what you have just heard about God. Our human being was made by and for the divine being whose goodness and beauty and loveliness and purity define not only himself in perfection, but define what the human being was created for. I cannot have communion with this God if I am not reconciled to the kind of being he is. This is why it is essential I discover my guilt, so I might be declared righteous, not by the law's effects on my life, those are miserable, but that I might be declared righteous by the gift of righteousness received through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. And you see in verse 22 of our chapter this morning, Paul says that very thing, that righteousness is a gift. It's not a reward that comes from the effects of the law working upon your life well enough. What are the effects of the law working on our life? If the law is pulled out like a yardstick Kids, do you know what a yardstick is? It's a three-foot ruler. I had a professor in seminary who said, there are no yardsticks in this class, just one ruler. And he pointed to himself. But the law comes like a yardstick. And the yardstick comes to discover whether we are straight or crooked. If you give my life a pencil, and I am told to draw a straight line, I know exactly what you want, and off I go with my pencil. But you bring the law alongside my line and lay that yardstick down, and we will both quickly discover how crooked my life really is. That's what the law is. It comes to speak and give its verdict on the straightness or crookedness of our lives. And what does the law discover about us? Well, Paul tells you right here. He tells you in verse 10 through 18, and quite noticeably, everything that Paul says in verse 10 through 18 is a quotation from the law. a quotation from various Psalms and the prophets. In verse 10 through 12, Paul brings in a quote from Psalm 14 and Psalm 53. In those three verses, 310 through 12, Paul shows us the law's verdict on the internal life of man. What has the law found? The law has found that in our internal life, we have no desire for God. We have no seeking of God in truth. We may have externally a lot of religious activity in our life, but as long as we remain outside of Jesus Christ, as long as we remain uncut by the Holy Spirit, We have no internal engine for the living God. Do you realize how remarkably sad that is? That the very being in whom we have been is not desired by us. As long as we are simply dead in Adam, outside of Christ. In verse 13, Paul brings in a quote from Psalm 5, verse 9, and Psalm 140, verse 3. And now, in these verses, Paul's starting to do something fascinating. Beginning in verse 13, he starts to march through the entirety of the human body. He starts at the top and goes down to the feet, and by the end of the passage, verse 18, he's back to the eyes. What is he doing? He's showing us that when the law is brought out like a yardstick and laid against our lives, not only does it find our internal life wanting, it finds our external bodily life wanting. The law finds us quarreling. It finds us lying. It finds us boasting in the creature instead of the creator. In verse 14, Paul uses the quote from Psalm 10, verse 7. In verse 15 through 17, he uses a quote from Isaiah 59. And then verse 18 is a quote from Psalm 36. Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart. There is no fear of God before his eyes. Paul's entire point in verse 10 through 18 is to show us what the law speaks to us. Remember, that's his language in verse 19. What is the law speaking to man? It's only able to speak condemnation, because it only finds crookedness and corruption in us, as long as we remain outside of Jesus Christ. Blessed is the man who hears the law and discovers his guilt and stops his mouth and waits for God's guilty verdict and agrees that he deserves divine condemnation. Blessed is that man because he has now just been rescued from the deception by which a man would seek his justification before God by the effects of the law upon his life. And that's exactly the man in chapter two, isn't it? I'm circumcised, I'm a Jew, I teach the law to children. I'm catechized. You're guilty before God because you are outside of Christ. And it is the very law in your hands that has risen up like a yardstick, a straight edge that has found you guilty. Maybe one more picture here. Suppose you inherit an old rickety house. And to you that house looks awfully cute. All inheritances look cute. And you are certain this old rickety house is sound, livable. And so you approach it with your yardstick in hand and a can of paint. And you soon discover two things about your inherited house. The yardstick tells you that all the walls are crooked, even wavy. And the paint quickly tells you the wood is rotten. What does that house need? Well, you might be tempted to say, well, I need a better yardstick. I need one of those wavy yardsticks. You know what this house needs, don't you? The house needs to die. This house cannot come back to life until it dies. Beloved, this is what the law reveals to every human being. Outside of Christ, I need to die. The law gives enough testimony and verdict against me, it condemns me, it says I deserve to be crucified. This is what the law speaks. What does the gospel speak? The gospel speaks surprisingly, radically, generously, shockingly, It says, I have been crucified. I have been crucified. The sentence of condemnation has indeed not only been announced, it has been carried out upon me. Where have you been crucified, sinner? I have been crucified not in my psychological space between my ears. This is not emotional therapy that we're speaking of. I have been crucified quite really, quite truly in history. Where, sinner? I've been crucified with Christ. When Jesus Christ went to that cursed cross to die a sinner's death, I was united to him in his death by the will and power of God. And so all of my sin has received God's judgment. Praise be to God. Now that I am in Christ and that all of his righteousness is freely gifted to me by faith alone, how can I not be declared righteous if I'm holding his righteousness? Praise be to God. Now before I finish this sermon, I do want to poke you on one more thing, because we're talking so much about guilt this morning. Because we are 21st century Americans, we have been greatly trained, even against our will, we have been trained to think in therapeutic terms about guilt. We have been trained to have our instincts oriented towards falsehoods as it concerns our guilt. What I mean by this in particular is we have largely been trained to think that we can atone for our guilt by feeling guilty. This is the most dominant therapeutic view of guilt in the Western world. You atone for your guilt by feeling guilty. And what does that mean then for those who believe that? If that false idea has its foot in the door on your heart, here's what it starts to mean in your life, that you want to feel guilty. The more you feel guilt, the more you think you have atoned for your guilt. Now, very obviously, this whole false system of emotional therapy concerning guilt makes you look away from Christ. And it keeps you in control of where you're guilty and how much you're guilty. instead of the law telling you how guilty you really are and before who. 20 years ago or so, Brian Chappell wrote an excellent book I commend to you all called Holiness by Grace. And even then he was bringing up this subject of the way our Western culture has trained us to think about guilt's atonement through the feelings of guilt. Brian Chappell writes, all of this longing for guilt comes from the conviction that if we will make ourselves feel bad enough and carry a burden of remorse long enough, we will merit God's grace. But who really wants us pressed down and paralyzed by a burden of guilt? Satan. He is our accuser. Nothing pleases Satan more than for Christians to beat themselves down into paralyzing depression and unproductive despair. The Bible does not say our guilty feelings or our compensating recriminations will make us right with God. God makes us right with God. He does not want us bowed down in despair. He is the lifter of our heads. Now you might think, well, pastor, that's not what Paul is saying. Well, it's absolutely what Paul is saying. We just aren't done with Paul yet in Romans. If the book ended right here at verse 20, you might be able to make a good argument for that. I don't think you would even then, in light of what he's already said. But Paul is going to go on indeed to show us that the ministry of the gospel to us is to not only reveal our guilt, but to take it away objectively, to fully answer for our guilt. To what end? So that our head would be lifted and that we would walk in the freedom of the gospel. Satan, you can accuse me all you want, you and your minions who might even wear leather shoes, you can accuse me all you want, but my savior Jesus Christ has answered for every sin that you can hang around my neck. and none of them have any weight with him. He has indeed settled my debts of guilt." So finally, congregation, it is absolutely necessary that you discover your true guilt, not the guilt that simply comes out of your feelings, but the guilt that comes out of God's law It is absolutely necessary that you discover your guilt. As long as sin remains unseen, Christ will remain unsought. There is no Christianity by which you lay hold of Jesus Christ, but not to deal with your guilt. That is not the Christian faith. That is some other religion. I would stay far from it. The true Christian faith, the religion of the eternal God, is a solution, an eternal solution, a gracious solution to man's guilt before the eternal God so that we might have communion with him forever. Let us pray. Father, we do ask and pray especially for those in the room who might be the most hardened of sinners, who find us neurotic for even speaking of our guilt. Father, we pray for them that you would be merciful to them, that you would be slow to anger toward them, that you would not count their trespasses against them, but count their trespasses, even this hardness, count them against your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, so that they too, Lord, might have their mouth shut, that they might indeed put their face in the dirt and find there that they cannot err in condemning themselves before a holy God, and that they might rise, O Lord, and you might lift their head and let them rise in the radiant glory and love of Jesus Christ and that they might enter into your service and proclaim the gospel and its freedom and joy and live in newness of life. Father, we also pray that you would help every believing Christian in this room. Help us all, Lord, hold fast to the true gospel Help us, Lord, keep far from trafficking in a false gospel that says Jesus is for some needy people, but not for those who are guilty before God. Oh, Lord, help us stay far from that. Help us, Lord, stay far from making Jesus a therapist or a life coach. He is an atoning sacrifice. May we glorify him as such, not only in the way we speak of him and offer him to sinners, but in the way we rejoice in what he has done for us guilty sinners. In his name we pray, amen.