Who? Oh, really? Yeah, well, we're all sinners. I mean, that's a level of depravity I just can't fathom. All right, good morning, everybody. Let's begin with prayer. Father, we thank you so much for your grace and mercy and for this safe and beautiful place that you've granted us to be and to gather as your people and to call upon your name and to hear from your wonderful word. Lord, we do thank you for the gift of your Holy Spirit as well. We pray that you would please enliven our minds and our bodies, Lord, that we could wrap our head around these wonderful truths that we're going to be discussing this morning. We also wanna remember all the people in Los Angeles right now who've been so devastated and are still under threat. We pray, Lord, for your mercy. We pray, Father, for the stilling of the winds, and Lord, that you would please put out these fires and have mercy, Lord. We ask these things in Christ's name, amen. All right, well, the best laid plans, we were gonna be starting the, the whole Christ this week. But as it turned out, providentially, I was laid up most of the week with the flu, but I didn't get to get the amount of studying in for you guys that I would normally have liked to have done. And also, I left last week's class with just a sense of uncertainty that I wasn't being as clear as I possibly could be, and I wasn't making things understood. And what we were talking about, if you remember, was Westminster Confession 11 on justification, because I wanted to do a refresher on that because it has quite a bit to do with what we're going to be talking about when we talk about the whole Christ and issues of legalism and antinomianism and things of that nature. And frankly, we only got through about a page and a half of last week's notes anyway, so might as well Stick where we were at. So again, I want to start again with where there seemed to be a lack of clarity, namely from section one of Westminster 11, which says, those whom God affectionately calls, he also freely justifies. What the Westminster Divine is doing at this point in time is basically giving us a definition, a clarification of what justification is. And they do that by telling us also what it's not. So they're distinguishing it from a certain line of teaching, particularly that out of the Roman Catholic Church, as we'll see later this morning. So it's telling us first what it's not. And he says that God freely justifies not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous. All right, so it's not because God has made us righteous that he's counting us righteous. It's because he's forgiven us of our sins through the sacrificial death of Christ and accounting and accepting us as righteous in his sight. Now that's the, we'll get to the, the wonderful truth of this morning that we are similiustis et peccator, which is a Latin phrase that means simultaneously just and sinful. So when it says that we are justified, we're forgiven, and we're accounted by God as righteous. Much of the righteousness language throughout the scriptures is actually courtroom language. It's a declaration that God as judge makes about our persons. And it's an alien righteousness, as we're going to look at in just a minute from Romans chapter 3. Paul makes it very clear that it's a righteousness that's not ours. We in and of ourselves, the people who God justifies, are ungodly. All right? So the confession is making these clarifications. So, he pardons us, he counts us and accepts us as righteous in his sight, and then they go on to make a negation to further qualify what they mean, not for anything wrought in them or done by them, but for Christ's sake alone. And here's where we got, I think where we got hung up last week. So we are forgiven of our sins. We are effectually called by God and freely justified through faith, and we are counted as righteous in God's eyes. And that aspect of justification, remember, I wanna make it very clear, we're making a distinction here. Spelling in public's difficult. Now, these things, they are not separated in the gospel, but they are distinct, okay? So that Westminster divines are drawing from scripture and noticing that the language that the authors of scriptures use to describe our justification is not founded upon things that we've done, or things done in us, including faith. So these things are distinct, they're not separated, They're related to one another. You get this one, you're definitely gonna get this one. And you see this one, you're more assured of this one. But they're not the same thing. And it's not as if, you know, we got a bit hung up on not imputing faith itself. So God doesn't look at us and just see that we believe and count our belief in him as righteousness. Our belief is what connects us to the imputation of Christ's righteousness. It's the instrumental cause. It's not the efficient cause. So it's not as if, look, God looks out on the world and sees that we're all sinful people, incapable of obeying him, but I still wanna forgive them, even though they've broken my law and they've sinned against me. I'll just count their belief as righteousness. That's not what the scriptures teach. And a helpful way to clarify this in our minds is that it's by faith that we're justified, but it's not because of faith in the sense that God's just looking at my faith and said, I'll count that as righteous. And we can see this if we ask the question, what is being imputed to us? First of all, what does an imputation mean? Any takers? It means a reckoning. It's an accounting. It's crediting us as being something. Again, it's as if a judge in a courtroom is declaring us righteous. That's what happens. That's what faith connects us to. Then we ask the question, what is being imputed to us? Is it because I'm being sanctified? Is it because I'm praying? Is it because of the fruits of the Spirit that are in my life? No, it's through faith. So what is it that's being imputed to me as righteousness? It's Christ. It's the righteousness of God. This is what we see in Paul's argument from Romans chapter three, verses 21 through 24, where he says, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. So Paul's doing a really good job of comparing and contrasting the law with the gospel and grace with works. He does this throughout the book of Romans. He does it throughout his writings. He does it especially here in Romans. But now the righteousness of God's, okay, so what's the kind of righteousness that we're talking about? The righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. Although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God brew faith in Christ for all who believe. That's why we talk about faith as being the instrumental cause of our justification. It's not the thing that we are imputed with, because think about it for a second. We're not imputed with our faith, We're imputed with the righteousness of God, with the righteousness of Christ. Faith is that which delivers it. It's the delivery mechanism, so to speak, of our being counted righteous. Am I getting anywhere with you? Okay. Can I turn this down? I'm already starting to get really hot. Well, they're both gifts. The justification is a gift. It is a free gift of God. But so it's speaking of it as something that's given to us freely, where the imputation is the thing that's given to us freely. All right, it's the imputation of Christ's righteousness. So it's not because I, you know, read the Bible or help old ladies cross the street or I serve at church. They're making this distinction that our grounds before God, that the declaration that he makes of us as righteous, is not because of anything done in us or done by us. It's outside of us. And this is what's called the law gospel distinction. This is the distinction that the authors of scriptures make between faith and works, law and gospel. All right? Yeah, that's actually a metaphor that scripture uses. It talks about robes of righteousness. The white robes of righteousness is the righteousness of the saints. It's similar to what we see in Zechariah, that very same imagery actually of filthy rags and we're cleaned up. Righteousness is not our righteousness. We are being made righteous, through this oftentimes painful and lifelong process of sanctification, but that is not our justification. That's not our standing before God. So again, Paul goes on. Through faith, yeah. You're saying there's a distinction between the righteousness of justification versus sanctification. We're being made righteous in sanctification, but we're already righteous We're declared righteous. Yes. Yeah, there's a... Now I'm going to tell you, while you're talking, I'm like, I totally misspelled that. No, he does not leave us as we are yeah, he takes us as we are but he doesn't leave us there So Again, if we think about, and I think this is where some of the confusion might come in people's minds, where, well, it's because I believe that he counts me as righteous. Well, in a sense that's true, but it's not your faith that he's counting as righteous. All right? Romans four, one through eight. See, again, there's this compare and contrast between faith and works, faith and works, but not before God. Well, it sounds like God's counting Abraham as righteous because he believed him. He is, but that's not what's being imputed to Abraham. That's not what's being said of Abraham. All he believes in that belief is that's going to count to me for righteousness. Paul's argument goes on. Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due. And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. Just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works. Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count sin. So we see that language in scripture, Abraham believed God and was counted in his righteousness. That's again, that's why we speak of faith as the instrumental cause of our justification, because that's what connects us to that ruling, that verdict in heaven where we're forgiven of our sins and counted as righteous in his sight. Because if If we take faith in the sense that faith is what's counted as righteous before God, then why did Christ have to come and die? Faith is actually also commanded in the law. And Paul's making a very strong argument here. Salvation's not of the law. It's not of works of the law. It's not of things that you do. It comes through faith. It's a free gift that God gives you. Is that clear? Hopefully, if that wasn't clear, here's another clarification from John Calvin, from his Institutes, I think it's book three. To be justified in God's sight is to be reckoned, accounted, accredited as righteous in God's judgment, and to be accepted on account of that righteousness The person who is justified by faith is someone who, apart from the righteousness of works, has taken hold of the righteousness of Christ through faith, and having been clothed with it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner, but as a righteous person. Therefore, justification is to be understood simply as the acceptance by which God receives us into favor as righteous people. We say that it consists of the remission of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, There is no doubt that we obtain justification in the sight of God only by the intercession of the righteousness of Christ. This is equivalent to saying that believers are not righteous in themselves, but on account of the communication of the righteousness of Christ through imputation, something to be noted carefully. Our righteousness is not in us, but in Christ. We possess it only because we participate in Christ. In fact, with him, we possess all riches. It is the object of our faith that brings us into a righteous standing with God. And that faith that we have, as the confession states and the scriptures clearly state, is itself a gift of God that comes through the will of the Spirit, through the preaching of the word. So it's not faith in faith that we have, it's faith in Christ. And when we have faith in Christ, we're united to Christ. We get all that he has, all right? His righteousness gets counted as our righteousness. His sanctification is the basis of our sanctification. All the benefits of being in union with Christ, they come through faith. Calvin goes on, to be justified in the sight of God To be justified by faith or works, a man is said to be justified in the sight of God when in the judgment of God he is deemed righteous and is accepted on account of his righteousness. Thus we simply interpret justification as the acceptance with which God receives us into favor as if we were righteous. And we say that this justification consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ. Again, if you wanna just have a sort of a catechetical statement in your mind about what justification is, it's the forgiveness of sins, and it's the acceptance by God as righteous in Christ. Counted righteous in Christ. Forgiven, counted righteous. That's what we see. Yeah. This cuts right through it. Yeah, we're both. Someone used to say peccator. That's the slogan. Yeah. Yeah. Which is important for us to grasp and to recognize that, you know, if we, especially if we struggle in our sanctification, if we struggle in the Christian life, if we fall into sin, if we find that it's difficult for us to put something down, we don't then have to now wonder like, oh my gosh, God's going to be so angry with me. Like I can't, I got to shy away from him. I don't want to have anything to do with him or I better start minding my P's and Q's or, no. No, sin is serious and we need to deal with it. But our acceptance before God is in Christ. It's never going to change. He's never gonna count us more righteous than he counts us right now. That is what grounds our relationship with God, not our performance. Okay. Yeah, we're sinners and saints. Yeah. There's one thing that I try to understand where like Paul says, like, no longer I who do it, that sin that dwells in me. It's like he doesn't really identify like with the old man. I don't know, to me it just seems like kind of a hard line to kind of balance, you know? Sure, sure. And how that relates to, you know, you. Well, I mean, here, you know, everywhere throughout Scripture, when this is proclaimed, when the Gospel is proclaimed, we're then told how we're to live in light of it, in light of the freedom that we've been given in Christ, in light of the fact that we have been forgiven of our sins. and that God counts us as righteous and that now he's our friend and he's our father. Like this is how we live and we live in dependence upon the same one that we depend upon for our justification. We live in dependence of Christ, seeking his grace, seeking his power, seeking his mercy in life to follow after his commands. And we do so freely and willingly because we love him for what he's done for us. We marvel We see this throughout the Gospels. You see people healed. You see them exorcised of demons. You see the Gospel preached to them. What do they want to do? They want to follow Jesus. They're ecstatic. They're ecstatic at the mercy and the grace of God, and they want to follow. They want to do what He wants. That's how, when we receive that love of God. Yeah. Pardon me. No, you're fine. Yeah, it's both. He was raised for our justification as a vindication of himself. He was vindicated in the Spirit, which as a sort of prove positive of the cross work that he accomplished on our behalf. His payment for us having been accepted by God, which just says it's impossible for death to hold him. So when Paul says that he was raised for our justification, it's showing his justification can also mean vindication. It's showing forth the fact that we have been accepted by God and that atonement has been made for our sins. Again, which is why the resurrection is so crucial for the Christian faith. Without it, many more things you could be doing on Sunday mornings. And again, just to further drive home this point of justification as a free gift, that it's not something that we're given that's because of what we do. Paul writes, for we are the circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also, if anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and to be found in him. not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ. Again, very clear explanation of the instrumental aspect of faith, all right? Yes, we can say shorthand, yes, faith justifies us, because it does, but it's how it does it. It does it by connecting us to Christ. Just a further clarification from John Owen on his work in communion with God. He says, The righteousness of Christ is imputed to us as that on the account we're of, we are accepted and esteemed righteous before God and are really so, though not inherently. As if we really are so, though not inherently. Again, just that distinction that the reformers make, and I believe scripture makes, between faith and works, grace and law, law and gospel, and of what it is that's actually being imputed to us. It's not our faith that's being counted as righteous. It's us who are being counted as righteous, and it's not our righteousness. It's not our obedience. You can say true faith. Yeah, yeah. When it comes to our justification, when it comes to our standing before God, it falls explicit that it doesn't have anything to do with us in that sense. It's ungodly people, and that's what grace means. That's why it's not of works, but it's of faith, because they're diametrically opposed to one another in that regards, in regards to justification. Any other comments or questions? You know it's I Think in general you could say it's taught in evangelical churches, but it's taught in a very broad way And here's the thing it's not our understanding of the doctrine of justification that justifies us. It's having simple faith in Christ. Although, because this is so important, because this is, as Calvin says, this is the hinge upon which all religion turns, that's why we take time in Reformed churches. That's why these men took such great care to to make a statement that was succinct and as clear as possible and as accurate with Bible, so it could be more readily taught and received. Because again, this is the Westminster Confession and the catechisms. That's why catechisms are so important, because they explain to us in a pithy statement, like here, question 33, what is justification? Answer. Justification is an act of God's free grace wherein he pardons all our sins and accepts us as righteous in his sight only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone." Great pithy statement. Great statement to teach and to learn and to grow upon. But my overall opinion just From a 30,000-foot view, I think the evangelical churches in the United States of America, by and large, are pretty sick, just spiritually and theologically. I don't think they're doing too well. That's not a statement of condemnation. It's really a statement of care and concern. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean... Yeah, well, see, I think part of the problem is that a lot of times the law of gospel distinction is not made clear from the pulpits in our churches. And in fact, what a lot of people get when they go to church every Sunday is a bunch of laws. And the laws are good. They're righteous in many cases, but if you're constantly fed the law and not the gospel, you're going to think that your relationship to God is based upon your own, is grounded in and based upon your own performance. All right? And... It's exactly right. It's exactly right. Yep. You know, if you're struggling, because your faith is not strong enough, or maybe you haven't ever really had faith. It's why I make these distinctions between justification, sanctification, law, gospel, faith, and works. It's so important to us, because what they help us to see is Scripture's declaration of the gospel, which is what we need. God's responsibility and our inability. Yeah. We need Christ. We need Christ declared to us each and every week. We need Christ in His righteousness. We need Christ in His wisdom. We need Christ in His sanctifying Spirit. We need Christ in His intercessory prayers. We need Christ as our mediator before God. We need Christ as our King. That's where growth in this comes from. It's just a few more minutes. Like they try to, you know, like their main focus is sanctification and like they believe that like you have to push, you know, push the people harder on sanctification to get them more sanctified, but they don't realize that, you know. It's some, some, many churches do where there's just, there's, When I was on sabbatical this past summer, I went to a church and the pastor was preaching from the passage in Genesis that Paul just quoted for us in Romans about Abraham believing God and being counted righteous. And the sermon didn't have anything to do with justification. It was so sad. When you get a steady diet of sermons like that, it trains you to think of, it's me, my Bible, and Jesus is my co-pilot kind of thinking. And if I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this, I do that, then I'll be accepted by God. And if I have problems with this, and I have problems with that, and I have problems with that, well, maybe it's because I haven't been accepted by God. Yeah, do more, try harder. And frankly, sometimes Christians do need to do more and try harder. We do. But if that is the steady diet that you're living on, you're cut off from the source. You're cut off from what helps us to grow in grace, and that is beholding the beauty and the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, presented to us clearly as gospel. helps me as a warrior to make sure once I've been saved, once I've been justified, yes, I'm challenged to go and pray. There's several of that challenge to do that. If you know that you have Jesus, yes, Yeah. Yeah. And also just to, we go into battle knowing that we've already won the battle, as we saw last week from Hebrews. Christ has won for us, you know, and we know that come what may in this life, the difficulties that we often face in this life, we know ultimately one day, come what may, God's promise to us will be fulfilled and we'll stand before Him and see Him in glory. What lies ahead of us isn't worthy to be compared with the struggles and the trials that we go through in this life. Although from this perspective, it's a difficult thing for us to see because we see it through faith. I got a section here from Samuel Rutherford on his book Covenant of Life that I hope will help clarify some of the things that we've been trying to get at. It is true, he writes, Romans 4, 9, that faith is said to be imputed to Abraham for righteousness. but is not meant of the act or work of believing that was counted for Abraham's formal righteousness. There should be no room left to the satisfaction of Christ, reckoned to be ours. If all the righteousness of God should be turned over in an act of believing, mixed with much doubting and in our sinful disobedience, He's pointing the finger at Arminians when he does that. For if our righteousness and inherent obedience may be of grace, esteemed formal righteousness before God by a free angelic pact in an act of God's free will, then the Lord might have esteemed the eating of an apple or any act of obedience to be our formal righteousness. And so Christ died in vain to become our righteousness. Where an act of sinful man or deed of the law even the law of faith is sufficient. See the distinction that he's making? That it's faith justifies us, but it's not that faith that counts, that we're credited with as righteous before God. Because if that were the case, why do we need Christ? We wouldn't. Faith imputed does well bear the sense of the object that faith lays hold on. His language is a little antiquated. He's basically saying that we ought to pay attention to what the object of our faith is. Faith imputed does well bear the sense of the object that faith leads hold on as our righteousness. Now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested. What righteousness of God? And he's speaking Romans 3.22. Even the righteousness of God through faith of Jesus Christ unto all. No, if the righteousness of God is manifested without one law to wit that it works, why not without another law of faith and of inherent gospel righteousness? And what need that Christ should die if the act of believing should be that precious righteousness of God and that according to the law of faith? This, by the way, is hope is put for the object of hope. So he's saying it's almost as if we're saying we believe God and that faith is is our imputation of righteousness. That's not what Paul's argument is. Again, so just going back to the beginning, so if you find it confusing, just stop and ask yourself the question, what is it that's being imputed to me? What is it that God's reckoning of me? What is it that I'm being credited with? And it's the righteousness of Christ, not my faith, okay? Is that more clear? Okay. I felt so bad after last week because this is such important stuff. Like, you know, there can't be a clarity in your mind. Any last comments or questions? So next week is it like the intro? Yeah, we'll start that. Yeah. Yeah. I just was, I don't know if you're here when I told everybody I was wiped out with the flu this week, so. All right, let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your grace and mercy in our lives. We thank you again, Lord. We thank you that now we go to worship you and to sit at your feet and hear from your word. And we pray that by the grace of your Spirit, you would cause us to grow in faith, to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ, and so grow and progress in our sanctification and being made more like him. We ask these things in Christ's name. Amen.