So, let's read Romans 3, verses 21 through 26, if you'll follow along in your copy of God's Word. It says, Now the righteousness of God, apart from the law, is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. for there is no difference. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood through faith to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed. to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus." Actually, I think verses 21 through 31 form a unit. And they are extremely important. They're closely related to each other. And we'll look at the last section two weeks from tonight. Since next Sunday evening, we'll have our cell group meetings. But I want to remind you of what we've already learned and seen from this passage of scripture. And let me just also say that I think in a lot of ways, in our understanding of the doctrine of salvation, this would be the single most important passage. This would be like the primary passage that brings in the largest number of the elements and concepts and doctrines related to salvation and presents them rather densely. I'm not dealing with all of the possibilities, but I want us to remember what we've already seen. We have seen the witness of God's righteousness. This passage is about God's righteousness revealed. That's the main point of verses 21 through 31. And we've seen the witness of God's righteousness, which is the whole Old Testament. The Old Testament is a witness to God's righteousness. This is not something new that has just developed or happened with Jesus and the apostles. No, this has all along been the great theme that has been running through the Old Testament. Secondly, we have previously seen the reception of God's righteousness. And so in the order in which Paul is giving this to us, this is in some ways the most practical element, but it was presented at this juncture. And so how is God's righteousness obtained by human beings who are sinful in themselves? And what Paul wants us to know, and of course he hasn't waited until this moment to say that, it's been said previously in the book of Romans, and he tells us explicitly here, it is not by the keeping of the law, but by faith in Jesus alone. That is the way in which we receive God's righteousness. Not by keeping the law, not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but only by faith in Jesus Christ. And then thirdly, we've also seen the need of God's righteousness. And that is we need God's righteousness because we are unrighteous. Now we didn't dwell on that because chapters one at the end of chapter one, chapter two, and the beginning of chapter three had dealt with that in great detail, but he doesn't leave it out. He brings it in here. at the end of verse 22 and verse 23, so that we don't forget this great doctrine that is related to God's righteousness. We're unrighteous, we need God's righteousness, and we don't bring anything to the table, we receive God's righteousness as a gift through Jesus Christ. Now we're gonna talk more about that So this evening we're going to see, first of all, the person bringing us God's righteousness. The person who is bringing us God's righteousness. Now, look with me again, as you just look at this particular passage in your Bible, in verse 22 we have this statement. about the middle way through, in Jesus Christ. And then in verse 24, at the very end, we have in Christ Jesus. And then verse 25 continues, whom God set forth as a propitiation. So he doesn't name Jesus again with regard to propitiation, yet it's Christ that God has set forth. unnamed there in verse 25. And then at the end of verse 26, again, we have in Jesus. So we have in this passage, and I think that those who miss this really miss an important element associated with the revelation of God's righteousness. It comes to us in and through our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, everybody knows that. It's teaching the book of Romans properly and correctly. But I want to emphasize it. I want us to appreciate it. I want us to see that our salvation is not just these doctrines like propitiation, justification, and redemption. And it's not just the practical of receiving by faith the Lord Jesus Christ, but I want us to see very clearly that it is Christ and Him alone who brings God's righteousness to us. So we can say this, God's justice and love are reconciled in the person of His Son in the crucifixion. On the cross of Calvary, the justice of God and the love of God are both seen. And apart from that, we're going to have a difficulty reconciling or coming to a full understanding in our limited capacity how we can maintain and how God maintains and how we can understand His maintaining both His justice and His love. But we see that perfectly in His giving of His Son. Now, before we go on, we've noted that the person bringing us God's righteousness is Jesus. But I need to at least press this a little further. Who is Jesus? Who is the Jesus that we see here? And who is the Jesus in the Scriptures? Now, there's probably a number of ways that we could summarize Jesus Christ, the doctrine of the of the Lord of glory. I think the best way in the way that I have done through the years is to point out these two elements. Number one, the person of Christ and number two, the work of Christ. This is, we can, we can really see better. and summarize more concisely this person, our Savior, under these two headings. So let me take just a second. All of you know this. Very well, but I want this to be a good reminder to us for our evangelism and for our discipleship that we, you know, can really see these two categories. So when we talk about the person of Christ, what I am meaning by that is that Jesus has always been the eternal Son of God, and he entered into the world by the incarnation, being born then of the Virgin Mary, he lived a sinless life and obeyed completely in his life the law of God, not failing in one point in any way, at all, perfectly. That's the summary right there. Now we can add to that that Jesus served God faithfully by ministering to mankind with all the works of love and kindness that we see in His ministry. But in the final analysis, what we can say is this reveals to us that Jesus is the righteousness of God. He is the embodiment of the righteousness of God. But the second way in our summary of the Lord Jesus Christ would be the work of Christ. Now this gets the most of the attention of most evangelicals in the world, but we want to at least touch upon it for just a moment. The work of Christ is that He was made an atoning sacrifice or a substitutionary atonement for our sins. He was buried and rose again from the grave accomplishing victory over sin and death. That's the essence of the work of Christ captured in one brief sentence. Now, what I would like to, I'd like to just build on that for just a second, say a few things about it. For instance, we have a prophecy of amongst many, we have one of the prophecies concerning the Messiah in Daniel 9 in verse 24, and there we see Besides many passages in which Jesus fulfills prophecies related to either one or the other of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, the Daniel 924 passage, the 70-week prophecy, makes this statement about the Lord Jesus that he would be bringing in everlasting righteousness. which fits exactly with the context of Romans 3 where we're studying here and seeing that God's righteousness revealed. Jesus is the one who has come to bring in God's righteousness. There is no righteousness in us or in the world that we live in. The only righteousness is that which Christ has brought to us. To this, we could add the fact that Jesus fulfilled the three offices that God gave to Israel in the Old Testament. And by fulfilling these three offices and taking these three offices, He accomplishes the work of our redemption, which makes us righteous. So as prophet, Jesus reveals God to us and speaks God's Word to us. As priest, he both offers a sacrifice to God on our behalf and is himself the sacrifice that is offered. And then he intercedes for us. on the saints, on our behalf. And as king, he rules over the church and the world for our good and for the glory of God. Now, the idea that some preachers have that you can believe in a Jesus but not the actual person, historical person, who lived on the earth and died on a real Roman cross. That idea is utter nonsense. You cannot just believe in whatever Jesus you make up in your mind. You cannot change the scriptural teaching. You're not believing in Jesus. You've created an idol if you create a Jesus other than the one that we've seen summarized here in the person and work of Jesus Christ. That is who the Bible defines. Now we could elaborate on all of that much more, but that gives us a good summary. Now, in some ways, I would admit that this is probably the deepest and most difficult doctrine in all of the Word of God. But I would also say that our eternal salvation is inseparably connected to believing this doctrine concerning Jesus Christ. And what we've summarized here has to do with Jesus being eternal God. And as I like to say, Jesus, breathed into Adam's nostrils, the breath of life in the Garden of Eden. Jesus Christ is the angel of the Lord who appears and who does all of these works in and among the Israelites through the Old Testament. That's the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. And then, of course, he comes and takes on human flesh permanently there in the incarnation and he comes into the world in order to lay his life down upon the cross of Calvary. And Jesus stated that this was his very purpose when he said, the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom. So if you, if you try to jettison any of that, if you tried to whitewash any of that, or you want to make Jesus a different person, maybe a highly exalted creature or some other, uh, designation philosophically or theologically, you're not worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. So what we see at this point then about the person bringing us God's righteousness is that Jesus removes our unrighteousness by His death and He puts His righteousness to our account. So that brings us then to the second truth that we want to consider this evening about God's righteousness, which has been revealed. And that is, I'm going to call it the transfer of God's righteousness. And I just introduced it to you with that phrase that Jesus removes our unrighteousness by his death on the cross. And he puts to our account, or he clothes us in these robes of righteousness, which he's given to us. His righteousness. But we need to look in verse 24, we can see in detail the transfer of God's righteousness. So the question basically that verse 24 is answering is, how does God save or make righteous sinners who deserve judgment because of their sins? How does God do that? And basically what we see in verse 24 is that Paul presents us with two doctrines which enable us to very clearly understand that God actually transfers Christ's righteousness to us, that is to our account. He puts it to our account. Now the two doctrines, if you look at verse 24, are justification and redemption. But notice how the verse reads, being justified freely by His grace. And how did that justification freely by God's grace come about? Through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. So I'm going to switch the order and I'm going to take redemption first. and present it because our justification is going to be based upon the redemption that Christ accomplishes. So we'll take redemption first. And so the first doctrine is redemption revealed in this passage. And redemption basically means deliverance by the payment of a price. If you want just a concise definition of to redeem the verb or redemption the noun, it is deliverance by the payment of a price. But there's some background that is necessary and there's some real benefits to understanding how some of these words that were very well known to the Greco-Roman world were taken by the Holy Spirit of God and sanctified that revealed to us profound theological truth. So this term redemption was a term that was taken literally from the slave market. And it was used in that context to describe the purchasing of someone by the payment of basically what was a ransom price, bringing that person out of that slavery and giving them deliverance. So when you, when you see this, you get, and this is, this is not new to us. I mean, this would not be new to Bible readers. This would not be new to Jewish people who were versed in the old Testament because they were once in slavery in Egypt and God came and redeemed them. The language that's used by Moses in, in the penitent redeemed Israel out of slavery in Egypt and brought them to himself. So, the concept of redemption is actually a thoroughly developed doctrine throughout the Bible. And some of you that were in the Old Testament Introductional Survey that we did on Wednesday evening some time ago, may remember some of this, but let me just take a second to point out how the, the doctrine of redemption, this is not everything, but the essence of it is brought through the old Testament. First of all, it was developed progressively as part of the teaching of the Old Testament. First of all, we were redeemed by power as illustrated in the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. Secondly, we were redeemed by the shedding of blood as illustrated in the sacrificial system. Thirdly, redemption comes by love as illustrated by Boaz, the kinsman redeeming Ruth And one last one is that redemption is by the warrior redeemer as prophesied by Jeremiah in chapter 50 verses 33 and 34. So this is a great doctrine that's very important to the Old Testament and to the teaching of the Word of God. In Colossians 1, Paul says in writing to the church at Colossae, verses 13 and 14, he describes Jesus this way. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins." We have redemption how? Through His blood. And what do we see here? That we have redemption in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood. When Paul writes to Titus, an apostle, I mean an emissary of the apostle, an associate of Paul, in Titus 2 verses 13 and 14, Paul says, Our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed. and purify for himself his own special people, zealous for good works." And so we can see that the first doctrine that Paul presents to us here, showing how God transfers the righteousness of Christ to us, includes the doctrine of redemption revealed. Christ is righteous, he lays his life down, he sheds his blood and dies for us, he's raised again, and it's that work which Christ accomplished in time, in space and time, on the cross of Calvary that becomes the basis for us receiving that righteousness. Both the active and the passive obedience of Christ being associated in a part of that. The second doctrine that Paul presents to us here in verse 24 is justification declared. So first is redemption revealed, and then we have justification declared. And again, verse 24 says, being justified freely by his grace. through or by the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. So what does it mean when it says justified? Well, the basic definition is declared not guilty by the divine judge in this case. Declared not guilty. Now notice I didn't say made righteous. I said declared. Righteous or declared not guilty. And it's important for us to understand that when God declares someone not guilty, he at the very same time is declaring them righteous. Because if they're not declared righteous, then something's missing. So he declares us not guilty and he declares us righteous in the same act judicially. So. You cannot have one of these without the other. He declares us not guilty, declares us righteous. And we've looked at a number of the scriptures, different points related to this. And we're going to see many more in greater detail about this because justification is being introduced to us here at this point, but the rest of chapter four and part of chapter five is going to be devoted to this very doctrine. So we're going to see a lot more about it. We're not going to discuss all of the possibilities, but we do need to, because Paul here gives us not just the word justification, but he tells us how people are justified. How is it that God declares people righteous? And he answers that for us with two words. God justifies us freely. He justifies us freely. In other words, freely means that it is a gift. It's that which we receive without the payment of any price. We're not paying a price. It's not that he declares us righteous because Jesus does 90% and then we do the other 10%. No, Christ's redemption pays 100% and we are given that righteousness. And at the same time, we're declared righteous. Isaiah 55 in verse 1 says, Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and you who have no money, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. So what the prophet is emphasizing there as he begins to give that gospel presentation of Isaiah 55 is he's saying, God is offering salvation freely. He is saying, come and receive without paying any price, without giving anything of your own for it. God doesn't save anyone because there is something in him that requires it. He declares us righteous freely. God is perfectly and completely free. and He is declaring us righteous freely, not under any compulsion or constraints. Secondly, people are justified not just freely by God, but also by His grace. Now, this is usually, I mean, we sing wonderful grace of our loving, of our wonderful Savior. We have many hymns and songs and much talk about God's grace. And some people talk about God's grace and at the very same time talk about our works and our need for works. And if you understand freely, you can't understand grace any other way than in perfect freedom. God's unmerited favor, kindness, or goodness in saving undeserved sinners from their sin is what grace is. in terms of its definition or meaning. Now, this might be a bit cliche-ish, and this cliche you've heard many times before, but it's so powerful, I think, that it bears our consideration. Grace is God's riches at Christ's expense. G-R-A-C-E. God's riches at Christ's expense. That definition connects God's grace and the declaration of justification with the work of Christ in redemption. Grace does not mean that man is saved against his will, but rather his will is renewed by the Holy Spirit, which thereby enables him to put faith in Christ which is his own act. We would never believe on Christ. We would never trust Christ in our own strength or ability. Just as we saw this morning, we are blind to the gospel. We are spiritually dead. We need to be given life. We need to have the scales removed from our eyes. We need the enlightening work of the spirit of God so that we might see and believe the gospel. And God is the one who enlightens us. and who causes us to see and to believe. And that is all a part of his grace to us. So having said all that, let me give you, as I gave you a more formal definition of the doctrine of redemption, let me give you kind of a formal definition of the doctrine of justification, taking all of this into account. Justification is a legal act of God's free grace whereby He declares one righteous based on the imputed righteousness and substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ and pardons all their sins and is received by grace through faith in Christ alone. So that brings in all the elements and we're going to see that definition basically unpacked for us as we move into the fourth chapter of our study. But I want to conclude, without even really giving a review this evening of what we have seen thus far, I want to conclude by pointing to an evangelistic event in which the Lord Jesus Christ has been preaching the gospel, recorded for us in Matthew chapter 11, And Jesus says at the end of that chapter, verses 28 through 30, he says, Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I'm gentle and lowly in heart. and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." So what I want you to see with me from this gospel appeal, this invitation that the Lord Jesus Christ gives, is that he's speaking to people, he's speaking indiscriminately to the people that have gathered there, and he calls upon them to come to him. to come to him and he calls specifically to those who labor and are heavy laden and he promises to give them rest. Now what does he mean when he says you who labor and are heavy laden? He's referring to the pain and the sorrow and the hurt and the consequences of sin. He's not talking about working in the field. He's not talking about the mental labor of some position of importance and how stressful and difficult that is. No, he's talking about the weight of sin, pictured by Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress of a burden on the back that creates for pilgrims sorrow and hardship and difficulty because of his sin. Men are by nature laboring and heavy laden because of their sin. And they need deliverance. The deliverance is found only, absolutely only in Jesus Christ. There is the necessity of coming to Christ, of trusting in Christ and believing on him and receiving the work which he alone has accomplished. As we talked about faith, faith, just like hope, is trusting, relying upon, having confidence in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ and trusting it and it alone for our salvation. Jesus offers himself as a master. as a king, as a ruler here, take my yoke upon you. He doesn't say, come to me, have your burden released and go and live like the devil. No, he says, come to me and take my yoke. It's easy and learn from me. And I'm gentle and lowly in heart. And in taking me, you will find rest for your souls. and deliverance. Now, part of the reason that I wanted to touch on that in our conclusion today is there's a sense in which this passage that we're studying, Romans 3, verses 21 through 26, is the technical presentation of salvation, while Matthew 11, 28 through 30, is the practical presentation of that same truth Jesus is appealing, come to me and you can find rest and salvation. And so we're not choosing between the two. We're not going to vote as to what we like one or the other. That would be utter foolishness. No, what we're going to see is the technical truths are vitally important for our understanding, for our living for and serving God, and the practicalist also cannot be jettisoned or left behind. We must constantly realize as we proclaim the redemption of Christ and the doctrine of justification by faith in Christ alone, that we also call men to repent of their sinfulness and come to Christ and trust him as Lord and Savior. Paul, as he comes to a conclusion in 2 Corinthians chapters 8 and 9, in chapter 9, verse 15, he concludes that passage with these words, thanks be to God for his indescribable gift. And indeed, could there be any greater conclusion to a message about the person who brings God's righteousness to us and the transfer of that righteousness to us through the redemption of Christ and God declaring us righteous. No, indeed, thanks be to God for his indescribable gift. Let us pray. Dear Father in heaven, we come to you with thanksgiving for the work of Christ Jesus our Lord and for his atoning death upon the cross of Calvary and his glorious resurrection from the grave and we we are Very happy to know of this great salvation and to have a personal saving relationship with you, the infinite and almighty Lord of heaven and earth. Help us, dear Father, as we go out into the Mission field this week that you would make us instruments of use for your kingdom, for it's in Christ's name we pray, amen. Let us take our Trinity hymnal and we'll turn to hymn number 403. Hymn number 403. We wanna stand together and sing, not what my hands have done, It sheds more. And He's a strength for us all. here with me. By grace alone, O God, to Thee did part and speak. But now, O Son of God, can this sore bondage break? Though other hurts take flight, I bless the price. His cross bestows its power. I'm buried in his womb. Each thought of unbelief and fear, each gleaming shade of gloom. I praise the Lord. Joyful, joyful, joyful night. And may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the communion and fellowship of the Holy Spirit abide and continue with us until we see the blessed face of our resurrected Savior, in whose name we pray, amen.