I was raised in a Christian home and have been attending church for all of my life, and I have made ultimately a number of professions of faith in Jesus, and I knew how to get saved. Trust me, I knew how to get saved. I did it hundreds of times throughout my life, but I did not understand the mechanics of how to stay inside of and enjoy the good, gracious favor of the God who had saved me. I made my first profession of faith when I was four and a half years of age when we were living in Jacksonville, Florida. I then went to my pastor and I said, I think I'm saved and could you baptize me? And so I got baptized at the age of four and a half. But there really was no evidence of saving fruit in my life. And so growing up, I basically knew I'm not a a true believer. My freshman year of high school, I became overwhelmed with this sense of eternity and the fact that I'm going to live somewhere forever. And I'm thinking, I'm going to live somewhere forever and I'm not a saved person. And so I pulled my Bible teacher aside after Bible class one day and I said, I'm not saved. Can you help me? And so he walked me through the gospel and I prayed the quote-unquote sinner's prayer and And after that, I was pretty excited that now I'm finally saved. And I then went to my pastor and I said, I know I've already been baptized, but I'm really saved now. Can you baptize me again? And my pastor was happy to do that. So I am a true Anabaptist. And everything went great for a couple weeks. I was doing a lot of good things. I was practicing the disciplines. I was in the word and I was praying and abstaining from besetting sins, and yeah, I would stumble and fall at times, but God seemed happy enough to forgive me and extend his grace to me. But eventually, the number of times I sinned and failed God reached a threshold where I became persuaded that God was increasingly getting fed up with me and tired of forgiving me of my sins. And I felt myself falling out of his good favor to the point where after a few weeks I said, I can't keep him happy. I can't stay in his good favor. And I just gave up and it was not long before I was back the way I was before. My junior year of high school, after my junior year of high school, we went to a camp in South Carolina. And I heard the preaching of the gospel that whole week at camp. My heart was being so moved by that. And on the last night of the camp, we had a big service and there was a big bonfire in the middle of all of us. And there was a big bucket that had a bunch of sticks in it. And the lead speaker said, now, if you want to give your life to Christ and get saved, then come up to this bucket and grab a stick. And that stick will represent you. And then come up to this bonfire and throw that stick in the fire. I'm like, well, I want to do that. So I went and grabbed a stick and I went over to that bonfire and I'm like, God, this represents my life. I'm going to really, really, truly surrender this time. And I threw that stick in the fire and the cry of my heart was, oh, God, save me. My heart was overwhelmed. with that experience. And we came home from camp and I was so thrilled to truly be saved now that I went to my pastor and I said, I think I'm really saved this time. Can you baptize me again? And he said no. And to his credit, because if he had baptized me again, I'm convinced he would have baptized me three or four more times. You see, my problem throughout most of my life is I knew how to get saved. I just did not understand the mechanics of how to stay in the good favor of God. I gave a few examples right here, but I can honestly say that I've prayed the sinner's prayer multiple, multiple times, maybe over a hundred times throughout my life. I remember as a kid, we'd go 1,500 miles to Amarillo, Texas to stay with my mom's parents on vacation and I would lie in bed at night and I would hear those howling Texas windstorms, the winds just beating against the house with that howling, whistling siren kind of sound. And as I would lay there, my thought was, what if the rapture came and I'm left behind? And I'm telling you, I did not want to be left behind in Texas. anywhere but Texas. And I would, lying in bed, I would cry out to God and I would pray and ask Him to save me. And I did that so many times throughout my life. And after those moments of commitment and confessing Christ as my Savior, there would be this renewal of energy and trying to do the right things and please God and stay in His good favor. But it would always end up the same time after time. I found over my life that when I was trying to walk with God, I would become almost obsessive over every detail and it just felt exasperating to me. In fact, I observed that I was most irritable when I was trying to walk with God. When I wasn't walking with God, I was a pretty easygoing guy. But when I was trying to walk with God, I would become irritable because I was working so hard to try to get God to stay favorably disposed toward me. And if I didn't feel like he was, I would have to get back into his good graces. And if I did feel like I was in his good graces, then I was agitated over trying to maintain that, afraid that I would lose that. And off and on to varying degrees over the course of my life, that was my story. About 12 years ago, I was 10 years into the ministry at Cornerstone Fellowship Bible Church, and I was in probably the fourth week of a real season of renewal in my walk with the Lord. And God was teaching me many things, I was experiencing his grace, but I have to confess that that same wearisome agitation began to creep over me. I found myself growing increasingly obsessive over, am I in God's favor or not? And I remember one day, I was driving home from work, and my mind had wandered. And I was almost home, and my mind kind of came back to attention, and I started thinking about the Lord. And instantly, my conscience was saying to me, Milton, what have you been thinking about in the previous 10 minutes? And I began to retrace my thoughts because I'm thinking if I've been thinking something sinful, then God's going to be upset with me and I got to get back into his good graces. Or maybe I wasn't thinking of something sinful, but maybe God's bothered with me that I wasn't thinking about him. And so I'm wincing under the Lord's gaze and I'm like, Lord, are we okay? And I'm retracing my thoughts from the previous 10 minutes. And it was at that point that a lifetime of frustration just coalesced in that moment, and I felt this manic urge to just trash the whole thing. My heart just screamed out. I'm like, I can't spend the rest of my life living this way and tending so obsessively to staying in the good favor of God. I got home from work and no one was at home, so I grabbed my Bible and I opened it up to Romans 5. And I began pacing the floor in our living room and just reading Romans 5 out loud. And as I read out loud, in that moment of frustration for me, something began to hit me about my justification that I don't know why, it had just never dawned on me before. I began to realize that I am a justified one all day, every day, good days, bad days, waking or sleeping 24-7 solely based on the work of Jesus and not mine. And that began to sink in as I read more than one time Romans 5, and a spirit of rest began to come over my spirit. And I realized, I would have never said it this way, but it's like all my life I've been obsessing over my justification when I'm observing here that Jesus has already obsessed over that for me. And I also observed in Romans 5 that here is a man who is rejoicing in his justification. In Romans 5, we see Paul who is resting in his accomplished justification in Christ. I'm wrestling over mine, Paul is resting in his. I'm agitating over mine and he's exalting in his. And it was at that moment that the reality of my justification in Christ began to sink in. And I very soon thereafter began to write down some truths on a 3x5 card. In fact, I typed them out on a 3x5 card. And just some truths about my justification that I began to observe in Romans 5. And I would take that card with me wherever I went, and I would read that card out loud. to remind myself of the truths about my justification because I found that as great as that moment was in my living room, it was so easy after that to slip out of gospel mode and get back onto that performance treadmill again. So I would keep preaching these truths about my justification to myself from this 3x5 card. It wasn't long before what was on that 3x5 card turned into the front side of a half sheet of paper and then the front and back side of a half sheet of paper, and it eventually became a book that some call a gospel primer and others call a gospel primer. And this tool, the gospel primer, is a tool that was born out of my own desperation. It's basically the content of what I was preaching to myself as I was just relishing the grace of God that is found in the gospel. There was a point early on, though, where I actually, I'm thinking, this is like crazy. I'm justified. And what that means is that I'm under God's favor all the time solely based on the work of Jesus and not mine. And it also means that 100% of God's wrath against me for my sin was completely absorbed by Jesus. And therefore, there is not one iota, one shred or sliver of God's wrath that is left over for me to bear as a Christian. And I'm like just, I'm falling more and more in love with God as I'm relishing those truths. But then there was a point where my conscience began to say, or the devil, I don't know which, began to say, is that really true? You may theologically be in error. So I actually called a couple pastor friends of mine, began reading evangelical theology books. I even got our elders together at our church and I'm like laying this out saying, is this really true, guys? That 100% of God's wrath against me and against us has been absorbed by Jesus to where there's not even 1% left over for us ever to bear. Is this really true? Is it really true that we're always under God's favor? Is this really true? And I was with fear and trembling just waiting for someone to say, well, here's the passage that proves that this is not true. But I got a green light from all of the checkpoints, from these pastor friends and these theology books and definitely from the scriptures. And our elders said, no, no, this is really true. And I'm telling you, when I heard that from my elders, my dear brothers in Christ, I felt like a kid in a candy store. I thought, if this is really true, I'm going to go crazy, crazy with love for God. And what I found is that as I began to embrace the reality of my justification and rest in it, I began to have enormous amounts of energy to put into pursuing God, growing in holiness, and ministering to other people. I had never had that much energy for those things before because so much of my energy had been consumed with tending to my standing before God. So much of my energy had been consumed with obsessing over my justification. And now that I knew that's done, that's taken care of, I now had tons of energy to put into growing in holiness and loving God and pursuing Him and ministering God's amazing grace to other people. And I also began to observe I'm not making this up. I just began to observe myself changing. I wasn't trying to make myself change, but as I kept the reality of my justification in front of my face and I just sought to live in the good of that and exult in that, I found myself loving God more. I found myself having grace to give to people that wronged me. I found myself saying no to sin that I formerly would have said yes to. Remember one occasion during those days. I was at the house by myself No one was there TV was on commercial came on that had images I had no business looking at and just instinctively I got up from the couch left the room and went into the kitchen and I'm standing in the middle of the kitchen going. What did I just do? No one is here to see what I would be looking at and yet I got up and I left the room How did this happen? And it was a reminder to me that this is the power of the gospel, the power of the gospel. I found myself in moments of temptation. When a temptation would present itself, I would enjoy saying, you know what? I can commit this sin. I can commit this sin and God's grace would abound to me all the more as he graciously maintains my justified status. But it's precisely for this reason that I choose not to commit this sin. And I would turn and walk away from that sin with laughter in my heart. I share all that with you to say I'm very happy to talk to you tonight on the subject of justification because there is abundance here. And there is power here, amazing power. And I can't think of a better way to serve you tonight at the beginning of this conference than to just speak with you on this subject to lay a foundation for what lies ahead. What we'll do in total is we'll observe, as you see on your notes, five truths regarding justification that we do well to see clearly as believers. I'm convinced there's a lot of genuine Christians who are fully justified, but they don't understand this blessing that is theirs, and so they're not living in the good of it, and they're living far below what their inheritance really entitles them to. Well, I just want to try to put some of these things in front of you. The first truth, we get this more from Romans 1 and the early chapters of Romans. Let me just make this point that justification by faith is a very big deal and is worthy of our diligent study. Justification by faith is a very big deal and is worthy of our diligent study. You know, before, I would have said, yeah, it's important, but I sort of view justification as a legal technicality. But I see more and more now the abundance that is in it. John Calvin said, justification by faith is the hinge upon which true religion swings. It's the hinge of your life. as well. John Piper says that justification is the heart of the gospel. You get this wrong, then everything else ultimately ends up being awry. Look what Paul says in Romans 1. He says, for I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God. By the way, when he says I'm not ashamed of the gospel, yeah, he means I'm not ashamed to preach it, but he's also saying I'm not ashamed to believe it's true for me. Paul would say I did a lot of terrible things before Christ saved me. I was responsible for the death of people. I was a violent aggressor. I was a blasphemer. I tried to get other people to blaspheme. And there are some who would look at me and say, Paul, how dare you believe that this grace is yours? You should be ashamed. But Paul says, I'm not ashamed to believe it. I'm not ashamed to believe it's true for me in spite of all that I have done. And I'm definitely not ashamed to preach it to other people. I'm not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God into salvation to everyone who is believing." That's literally how that reads. We'll unpack that a little more tomorrow morning. He says, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. So Paul is saying the gospel is the power of God. It is the location where God's power resides in its thickest density. And then if you said to Paul, well, why is the gospel the power of God? Paul would say, I thought you would ask that, verse 17, for or because in it, the righteousness. That's the same word for justification. The justification that comes from God is revealed from faith to faith. Paul would say, you know why? I would say that the gospel is the power of God, the ultimate location where God's power resides and does its most phenomenal work. You know why I believe that? Number one, because of justification. Because in it, in the gospel, is the reality, the blessing, the gift of justification. And so, we're not surprised that as you read through the book of Romans that, you know, Paul spends the first three chapters laying out the sin problem of man. But then beginning in chapter 3 verse 21, I believe it is, Paul begins to unfold the glories of the gospel. And what's amazing is he spends Romans 3 verse 21 through the end of that chapter talking about nothing but justification, all of chapter 4 talking about justification and all of chapter 5 talking about justification. Paul is writing to Christian people here and he spends 57 verses. talking about justification, what it is, why it was necessary, the mechanics of how it is brought about, the blissful consequences and the lives of those who are justified by God in Christ. He spends 57 verses laying out for us the glories of our justification before he even gets into sanctification. before he even delivers a single command. Guys, please don't do what I did through much of my life. Don't try to do the sanctification thing without a robust understanding of your justification. I know for me, even when I was younger, I memorized Romans 6. I memorized Romans 6. I would quote Romans 6 when I was tempted. I memorized that chapter when I was like 18 or 19 years old. It never dawned on me to memorize Romans 5. What does that have to do with my sanctification? I want to memorize Romans 6. I want to memorize the list. I want to memorize the commands of God that tell me how to live. And I'm here to tell you tonight, if you try, if you bypass a robust understanding and study of your justification, and you try to do this sanctification thing without being plugged into your justification, your sanctification is going to go haywire. It's not going to work. It's not going to work. So don't do that. Martin Luther said it this way. He says, when the article of justification has fallen, and I think we could say when it's fallen from our appreciation, focus, and our understanding, everything has fallen. Therefore, it is necessary constantly to repetitiously teach and impress it, as Moses says of his law, for it cannot be repeatedly taught and urged enough or too much. Now, he's talking about the church at large when it's fallen from the attention of the church, but he would very definitely say that he's also talking about when the article of justification falls from your focus and your understanding and your appreciation, everything falls. So he says the article of justification must be learned diligently, Martin Lloyd-Jones says it this way, Christians often concentrate on the question of sanctification, but it does not help them because they have not understood justification. So you need to understand that justification is a very big deal and it is worthy of our most diligent study so that we understand it and live in the good of it. Let's move to the second truth that we can observe. And this takes us to Romans 5, verses 1 and 2. And that is that this justification comes to us through Jesus Christ and by faith in him alone. And I haven't even defined it yet. We'll define it in just a moment. But whatever it is, it comes to us through Jesus Christ and by faith in Him alone. Paul says, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We're justified. How do we get justified? We get justified by faith, and it is through Jesus Christ. That's how you get justified. You say, Pastor Milton, you know, I believe but my faith is weak. Doesn't matter. Read the book of Genesis. Abraham believed God and he was justified. It was reckoned to him as righteousness. Read the following chapters and observe how strong his faith was and his moments of compromise and trying to help God out and having a child through Hagar. and lying on a couple occasions to save his own skin. There were moments, many moments of uncertainty and doubt. Your faith may be weak, your faith may be five minutes old, doesn't matter. We are justified by faith in Jesus Christ. In Romans 3, look at what Paul says. He says, but now apart from the law, the righteousness, of God has been manifested, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to the one who does not work but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness. You don't have to do anything to be justified. You don't have to do any work. This generation ought to love this truth. You don't have to do anything. to get it. Just look to Jesus in all of your bankruptcy and believe in Him and you're justified. The tax collector came into the temple, could not even lift up his eyes to heaven and says, God, be merciful to me, the sinner. Jesus says he went home righteous. He went home righteous. It's that simple. It's that simple. To believe in Jesus is to essentially abandon our trust. This is why it's hard. To believe in Jesus means to give up on believing in yourself and your own performance and your own righteousness. And it is to withdraw your trust from all of that and deposit your trust in Jesus and say, you are the savior, Jesus, for me. We come to God with all of our sin mess and we believe in Him. We believe in Jesus Christ who died and was raised and is now at the right hand of God. And from His position of absolute sovereign Lordship, He can do whatever He pleases. And what's He doing? He's giving out righteousness and love and relationship and power and freedom to all who see their bankruptcy and believe in Him. What an amazing Lord. You say, well, what is justification? Well, whatever it is, it's crackling with power, right? So let's see what this is. Here's a working definition from Wayne Grudem of justification. He defines it this way, justification is an instantaneous legal act of God in which he, number one, decides to think of our sins as forgiven, and Christ's righteousness as belonging to us, and number two, declares us to be righteous in his sight. Notice the first element of that definition. He decides to think of our sins as forgiven and decides to think of Christ's righteousness as belonging to us. You might want to underline that word think. What this alerts us to is the fact that the locus of justification. Like justification is something that largely happens in the mind of God. It goes to the issue of how he thinks about us. Is that important to you? Man, we idolize how people think about us. That's so easy for us to do. You post something on Facebook and you keep checking back how many people like what I said. Many people like that picture of me that's been posted. We value the verdict of other people upon us. This is the sovereign king of the universe. What does he think of me? What does he really think of me? What goes on in his mind when he thinks of me? Justification covers that. Justification is a phenomenon that happens in the mind of God and it goes to the issue of how he thinks about you and me. But also, number two, he declares us to be righteous in his sight. He audibilizes. He verbalizes this decision about how he will think about us from this day forward. He verbalizes it. As the judge, he slams down the gavel and he audibilizes that decision that he makes about how he thinks about us. And by the way, read through the rest of Romans 5, you see the verb like abound and abounded and abounding. This is a decision that doesn't come begrudgingly or in sprinkles to us. This is a decision that comes aboundingly to us. In other words, God doesn't say, when you come to Him with all your sin mess and you say, I believe in Jesus, you cry out to Him for salvation, God doesn't say, okay, I guess that means you're justified. No, the feeling you get from Romans 5 is God thunders this decision. And the transcripts of heaven, if you could look at all the transcripts of the justification decrees in heaven and you came to the one, that moment where God declared you righteous and justified, as you read that transcript, you would notice exclamation points afterwards. If you're here tonight and you've never, you know, cried out, to God for salvation through Jesus. Let me tell you something, if you come to God with all your sin mess, God will be pleasured to justify you. He will thunder this decree. Now, prior to 10 years ago, I think I would have said, yeah, I believe that. I believe that. I would have agreed with this definition. I would have defended it. But I think I would have viewed it more as some kind of legal fiction that really had no direct bearing on how God related to me and how I would relate to him. On my bad days, I would just sort of imagine God saying sometimes, yeah, Milton, technically you're justified, legally you're justified, but I'm angry with you for what you've done today. and you're going to taste my wrath. That's sort of how I would have viewed it as some legal technicality. And so I want to add one element to Wayne Grudem's definition. God does not just decide to think of us in this way and declare us to be such forgiven and righteous with the righteousness of Jesus. But the only thing I would add to this definition, and it's kind of implied in the definition anyway, but I just want to bring it out, is that God binds himself to this decision and this decree, and he determines that he will be forever governed by this decision in how he goes about relating to us. When God justifies us, He basically says, I will never think another thought about you that is not governed by this decision that I am rendering right now. I will never allow myself to feel another feeling with regard to you or to allow anything in your life or to do anything to you or to show you any countenance that is not tethered to and governed by this decision that I am making." It's almost like the guarantee is, you know, anytime you come into God's presence after you're justified, you come into His presence and He's reading a document and He looks up at you and He says, yeah, you know, I was just reading the transcripts of your justification. Come on in. Come on in. And the guarantee is that He always sees us through the lens of this justification. And it is rock solid. You say, well, man, so God favors me in this way even when I sin? What about when I'm really sinning and doing terrible things? Am I still justified? Absolutely. In fact, read Romans 6 and how it begins. God's grace abounds all the more as He maintains your justified status. He favors you just as much when you're sinning as when you're not sinning. In fact, He favors you so much that if you're His child, He's going to send discipline into your life. pain into your life in order to wean you off of that sin and to make you a deeper participant in his holiness. But you know what? He does that because he's for you now and because he loves you and he disciplines you for your ultimate spiritual and eternal good. This justification comes to us through Jesus and through him. alone. Just a few passages real quick. Paul says in chapter five, verse nine, we've been justified by his blood through the death of Christ. This justification has been purchased. So, it is ours. In Romans 5.18, Paul says, so then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. What he's saying is that our righteousness now, our justification comes to us solely through Jesus and his work that culminated at the cross. It's 100% Jesus. It's not 99% Jesus and 1% us. And by the way, you know why God structured it that way? If our justification was 99% Jesus and 1% us, guess what we would have spent all of eternity in heaven bragging about? We would be intolerable boars in heaven bragging about that 1% that we did. It's all Jesus. It is all Jesus, all Jesus. Romans 4, verse 25, Paul says Christ was raised for our justification. You say, well, so he died for our justification, he was raised for our justification. How does that fit? Well, the death of Christ was the purchase and the resurrection of Christ is the receipt. The fact that God raised Jesus from the dead validates the purchase of your justification. God looked at the sacrifice of his son for you and for your sins. He looked at all of your sins and God said, this is sufficient atonement for every sin you have committed. And he raised him from the dead, that's your receipt. If there was one sin that you committed that Christ's death did not atone for, Christ would still be in the tomb. So, pull that receipt out. And when your conscience is condemning you or the devil is condemning you, this justification comes to us through Jesus, through Jesus, and by faith in him alone. You know, everyone who believes in a God, ultimately, what everyone wants is to stand before God at the judgment, at the end of their life, and for God to say, you're righteous enough to come into heaven. Everyone wants that. And I would think that if everyone wants that from God, that verdict from God, then I would think that God's the one we probably should go to to ask, how can I get that verdict? But what a lot of people do is, yeah, I want that, but I'll figure it out for myself how to get him to render that verdict. But God says, no, you want this verdict from me? I'll tell you how to get it. And it's not through you. It is through Jesus and it's not through works, it's through my son and by faith in him alone. There's a third truth about our justification that we ought to see clearly if we're going to really experience God's amazing grace and that is that this justification brings us into a relationship with God that is characterized by peace. By peace, Paul says, therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. First of all, we see there he's saying that we are with God. We are with God. We have a relationship with God that is characterized now by withness. In fact, the preposition here is the preposition that literally means toward. We now are toward God. We have peace toward God. Now our relationship is one where we're not running from him, but we are facing him in a face-to-face relationship with God. And it is a relationship that is characterized by peace. What is peace? I'm sure you've been taught at your churches that peace in the Old and New Testament, and especially the New Testament, speaks of more than just the absence of hostility, but it speaks of the luxurious presence of all that is needful for a rich and vital relationship with God. When you see peace, think wholeness, think flourishing, think luxury, We now have a relationship with God and in that relationship, there is the luxurious presence of all things that are needful for a rich and vital and close friendship with God. And so, we observe now that while our justification is, yes, indeed legal, it was done with a profoundly relational intent. God justified us to get the sin problem out of the way so that he could then bring us into a very close relationship with himself. One commentator says it this way, God does not confer the status of righteousness upon us without at the same time giving himself to us in friendship and establishing peace between himself and us. God says, that's what I'm after. That's what I'm after. And to foster that friendship, I just want you to know, here's how I'm forever going to think of you. I will always think of you as forgiven, always. I will always think of Christ's righteousness as belonging to you. In fact, listen to me as I declare this to be so. And I'm doing that not as an end in itself, but I'm doing this in order to lay the groundwork for us to have a close relationship. I just want to ask you, Deep down on a gut level, do you believe what I just said? Do you believe that God really wants a close relationship with you? Do you believe that? I'll never forget a few years ago, I was talking to a man in our church who had known the Lord for nine years. And I knew how long because the Lord had, by His grace, used me to lead him to the Lord. And I just noticed that this brother had been discouraged lately, was not doing well. We were meeting on a Friday morning and we prayed together and he got up to leave. And I said, hey, before you go, let me just ask you, are you walking in intimacy with God? Are you enjoying a close relationship with God? And this brother who had known the Lord for nine years looked at me and he said, oh, Milton, You have no idea the things I did before I was saved." You know what he was saying by that? He would say, you know what? I'm saved. My sins are forgiven. But given the things I did before I was saved, God would not want a close relationship with me. I can see God wanting to forgive me and he'll let me into heaven. but not a close relationship. If God did say that to us, hey, I justify you, you're forgiven, you can get into heaven, you'll be living in the suburbs somewhere far away from me. But as far as you and I don't even try to get close to me, you know what? We would still probably spend eternity praising God for His grace. But God says, no, no, I've justified you because I I want us to have a relationship that is characterized by the luxurious presence of all that is needful for a rich and vital relationship between the two of us. There's a fourth truth about our justification that we need to see clearly and that is that this justification brings us into the permanent and unalterable experience of God's grace, Paul says, therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction or our entry. So we've entered into something, our entry by faith into this grace. in which we stand, in which we have taken our stand, Paul says. We've entered into something. We've been ushered into something. We've been ushered into a station of grace before God, and we are standing in it. We're staying here, Paul says. Whenever you see the word grace in the New Testament, think three words. Favor. It means favor. God favors us, think undeserved, you've done nothing to earn this favored status with God, and then think ill-deserved. Not only have we not deserved it, but it's the opposite of what we have, in fact, earned and deserved. If I'm employed by somebody and I go to work, for a day and I get paid at the end of that day for a day's work, I'm happy to receive that pay, but that's not grace, I earned it. If I don't go to work on a day I'm supposed to go to work, and at the end of the day, the owner of the company pays me anyway for the work that I did not do, that's grace, but that's not completely grace. If I don't go into work on a given day that I should go into work, and so I do no work, but I do show up at the company and I commit a crime, an act of arson, and I burn the building down, and as the building is burning down, the son, the only son of the business owner is killed. And if at the end of that day, that awful day, the owner of the business writes me a check, For a day's work that I did not do, that's grace. And all of us are the recipients of that amazing grace. And Paul says, through Jesus, having been justified, we have obtained an entry by faith into this grace in which we have taken our stand, a permanent stand. It is all of grace. John Stott says, justified believers enjoy a blessing far greater than an occasional audience with the king. We are privileged to live in the temple and in the palace. We are in this station of grace, favored status before God, all day, every day, good days and bad days, waking or sleeping, solely based on the work of Jesus and not ours. And it's all of grace. Now, it's interesting that Paul reminds us that it is grace. Here we are in the presence of God saying, man, it's so great being justified and it's so great having a relationship with God that is characterized by peace and, man, this is really great. I'm so blessed to be here. And Paul taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, hey, hey, it's all grace. What he's saying is just know you don't deserve this. In fact, it's the opposite of what you deserve. And you might say, okay, thank you, but why are you throwing that up in my face? He does that to the Ephesians. He's chronicling all these blessings God has given to the Ephesians and he says, by grace, you have been saved. And then a few verses later, by grace, you have been saved. This is all of grace. This is the opposite of what you have deserved or earned. And you might say, why does Paul feel like he's got to bring up the fact that it is of grace? You know why? Because guys, if we can get it through our heads that this whole thing is just, is all of grace, it would forever cure us of ever thinking that our performance has anything to do with it. If we can just believe on our good days and bad days, this is all of grace, ridiculous grace. I've not earned this. In fact, it's the opposite of what I have earned. If we would just believe that and embrace that and get that through our heads, it would forever cure us of ever thinking that our performance has anything to do with it. And we need to be delivered from that. Because believing in moments that our performance has something to do with our favored status before God, that's what takes us on this ugly cycle from pride to condemnation, pride to condemnation over and over again. I've made that journey a thousand times. There have been times in my life where I'd be doing well spiritually, practicing the disciplines and, you know, just abstaining from sin and doing great spiritually. And the devil comes up to me and says, Milton, you've been doing well lately. Look at you, in the word, praying, abstaining from sin. You're doing great. And I've said, yeah, yeah. And then the devil says, hey, you know, looking around at the other people in the church, you're actually doing better than most other people. And I look around and, yeah, yeah. And then the devil says, God must really favor you because you're doing so well. And I say, yeah. And you guys know exactly what happens next. The rug gets pulled out from underneath my feet. I fail in some significant way. And because I bought into the lie that my favored standing with God had anything to do with my performance, now that I have failed to perform, I'm now in a place of condemnation. And Paul is trying to help us and deliver us and he's saying, Get this through your head, it is all of grace, even on your best days. Jerry Bridges says, you don't deserve this grace anymore on your best days than you do your worst days. Get over it. In fact, it's just the arrogance sometimes that's in our hearts, in my heart, you know. We're doing pretty well one day and so we just don't have a lot of trouble believing that, yeah, God favors me. But then the next day, we've really failed and we're feeling like we've lost His favor. Implied in that is that the day before when we were doing better, we thought we were more entitled to that favor. When the truth is, Paul would say, every single day of your life, every moment of every day, This is all of grace. You haven't earned it. You never will be able to earn it. You can't contribute to it. It is always the opposite of what you have, in fact, earned. Deal with it. And if we can let that in and embrace that, the freedom that comes from just knowing that it is all of grace could really deliver us from that cycle of pride to condemnation, pride to condemnation that We naturally go on again and again. There's a final truth that we'll look at tonight regarding our justification and that is that this justification is intended to be a cause for daily celebration. It's intended to be a cause for daily celebration. Paul, at the time that he's writing this, he's known the Lord for a couple decades. Many may have thought, you know, well, you're justified the moment you were converted and maybe Paul has moved on and he's focused on other things. That's not the case. Paul says, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand and we exult. in hope of the glory of God." Verse 3, and we exult in our tribulations. Verse 11, we exult. Paul says, we've been justified and being justified, we are continuously exulting. We exult, we exult, we exult, Paul says. What we observe here is not a man writing dry doctrinal fact. We observe a man in worship. We learn later in the book that a guy named Tertius, poor guy, had to write down what Paul is saying. And Paul in Romans 5, and even in other parts like Romans 8, he is a man who is caught up in this thermal current of worship to God. And here he is in Romans 5, and he's not just teaching doctrine, Paul is worshiping God. We exalt, we exalt, we exalt. Write down Psalm 32, 11. where the psalmist says in the great translation of Psalm 32, we see this exact word where the writer of Psalm 32 says, be glad in the Lord and exalt you righteous ones. Those of you on the other side of having your sins forgiven, be glad in the Lord and exalt you righteous ones. That's a call to worship. And Paul in Romans 5 says, I've done a lot of bad things throughout my life. I've committed many, many sins. But I am forgiven and I am righteous. I am justified and I am therefore going to respond to that call to worship. I exalt, I exalt, I exalt. And every one of us ought to observe this man in worship and come up to the counter and say, God, I'll have whatever that man is drinking. Whatever he's on to, I want to be on to that. And what Paul is on to is the reality of his justification. Don't have the attitude, okay, my justification is done, now I need to move on. Paul would say, I'm not moving on. God is trying to teach us through Paul's example this point and saying to us, yes, I've justified you, but don't ever move on from this. Take this reality, put it in front of your face, and be continuously exalting in it and celebrating it. In fact, I would suggest that the first element of your sanctification is exalting in your justification. That's a critical component to your sanctification. Timothy Keller says it this way, when we feed on, remember, and live in accordance with our justification, it mortifies our idols, it fills us with an inner joy, and a desire to please and resemble our Lord through obedience. And I know the way some of you think. It's the way I used to think. You're like, aha, three things, a list. I got three things I can go out of here committing myself to do. I'm going to mortify my idols. I'm going to be filled with an inner joy. If it kills me, I'm going to be filled with an inner joy. And I'm going to please and resemble the Lord through obedience. Please don't go out of here with a list of three things to do. Instead, just go out of here saying, I'm going to exalt in my justification. I'm going to live my life in celebration of this theological standing fact. and you will catch your idols being mortified. You will find joy welling up in your heart. You will observe a desire to resemble your Lord and please him through obedience. Let's say it this way, justification is indeed a once and for all occurrence, but a continuous celebration of this once and for all occurrence is a key to ongoing sanctification. It is while exalting in our justification that we catch ourselves being sanctified. A big mistake that we can make is to be bored over the doctrine of imputed righteousness. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that, that's done, taken care of, but tell me how to actually be righteous from day to day. And you want to move on from your imputed righteousness to focus on actual righteousness. There is a distinction. I don't want to fuse those two. There is a massive distinction. But listen to Timothy Keller one more time. He says, we don't move on. We don't move on from our imputed righteousness to then focus as a separate thing upon our actual righteousness. He says, any particular flaw in our actual righteousness stems from a corresponding failure to orient ourselves toward our imputed righteousness. Sanctification happens to the degree that we feed on or orient ourselves to or have commerce with the pardon, the righteousness, and the new status we now have in Christ. imputed through faith. As we keep this reality in front of our face and we exalt in it, that serves, that exaltation serves as the fuel for our sanctification. G.C. Burkhaber says it this way, the heart of sanctification is the life which feeds on justification. One Lutheran scholar says sanctification is merely us getting used to our justification. Very well put. You guys believe what I'm saying tonight? I'll close with this. I've just found as a pastor that my ministry anymore is just evangelizing the people of God. Our churches are full of under-evangelized Christians. And I'm still one of them. I'm still being evangelized and trying to understand the fullness of the gospel. I'll never forget a few years ago, a couple, a young married couple came into my office. They were both so beaten down with condemnation and hard on each other. And they came into my office and both of them were just broken in a place of condemnation. They were true believers in Jesus, I had no doubt about that. But I sat there with them and we just walked through some of these very truths and some others, and I'm just trying to love them with the good news of the gospel, talking about these very truths about our justification. And when I got done, I just said to them, what do you guys think of this? And the guy said, well, I don't know, it's too good to be true. He said, we're going to have to go home and pray about this. And I said, well, before you go, let me ask you one more question. Fantasize with me for just a moment. What if this is true and you believed it? If what I'm saying is really true, what would you do? And his eyes welled up with tears and he said, if this is really true, I would so love God. I would go crazy for him." That's the power of grace. That's the power of this justification that is the heart of the gospel. And if we can get this right, we are well-positioned to enjoy the daily surprise of being transformed by gospel grace. Amen. Let's pray together. Lord, you're an amazing God. Your goodness to us is just. It's like the universe that is so big, we are little brains can't even comprehend it. And you say to us tonight, behold, this is the power of God. This doctrine, my justification, is why it is that the gospel is the power of God. And I pray if there's any here tonight that have never entered into this justification that They would just come to you in brokenness and bankruptcy and just cry out to you, Jesus, asking you to justify them. And may they know your joy and your pleasure as you would thunder and reply, you are righteous. justified and I will forever think of you as forgiven from this day forward and as righteous with the righteousness of my son. Touch hearts, Lord, and draw such souls to yourself. For those of us who are your people, Lord, all this stuff is true of us every day and yet we just often don't believe it like we should. And so, our lives fall short of what our inheritance actually entitles us to. Evangelize our hearts, Lord, with the truly good news of the gospel that we might walk in the fullness of what you have done for us in Christ. You're a great God. The salvation you've given to us is phenomenal. You have justified us and we exalt, we exalt, we exalt in you. In Jesus' name, and all God's people said, Amen.