Sermon: “Saved by His Life”

TEXT:  Romans 5:6-11

REVIEW

1.  Justification by Faith is Justification by God: There is Someone we need to answer to for our lives besides ourselves.  Paul has already indicated to us that the way of acceptance with God will not come from our own obedience to the Law or even from our own good choices.  Our acceptance will be the result of mercy.  That mercy has come to us through the righteousness of Christ and through His atoning death for us.  This acceptance by God is received by faith, but faith must not be misunderstood to be a work of righteousness, or we are again pursuing righteousness by our own works.  Our acceptance by God is the work of God, which is received by us through faith, which is itself a gift of God and nothing to boast about.

2.  Justification by Faith Comes with Benefits: The person who is justified by God receives the gift of a right standing with God, which is what justification means.  But that is not all they receive.  They also receive the gift of peace with God, and access into a great life of grace, and they rejoice in God, even rejoicing in tribulation.  This is not so much a command for us as to how we should be, as it is a statement of fact concerning what we are, even when we may not feel it.  But the more that we reflect upon the great gifts that we have through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the more that we are made to hope in His word, and to rejoice in God.

TODAY’S PASSAGE:

⁶ For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. 

⁷ For scarcely for a righteous man will one die;

yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. 

⁸ But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 

⁹ Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. 

¹⁰ For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son,

much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. 

¹¹ And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ,

through whom we have now received the reconciliation.

1.  Christ died for us.

            Christ did what no one else could do.  No other life was fully righteous in the sight of God.  No one else could be the sin-bearer.  Many have died, and some have died for a noble cause.  But the death of Christ was different.  He came as the long-expected “Seed of the woman” who would crush the head of the serpent.  These words are from the opening pages of the Bible.  God told us in many ways and with increasing specificity throughout the years of the Old Testament that He would send a sin-bearer.

            It is a rare thing for a person to be willing to die for a man that is considered good in the eyes of other men.  When it happens it is noteworthy and it is to be admired.  But Christ did not die for good people.  He did not give His blood for righteous people.  He died for us.  He died for the ungodly. 

When we confess our sin as a part of a worship service, we really mean it.  But there is something more here than our present sin.  Christ died for us even before we would have been willing to confess our sin to God.  In fact, Christ died for us before we were willing to truly acknowledge His existence in any way.  We refused to bow before Him and worship Him.  We were suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.  We had people talking to us about Christ and we just wanted the noise to stop.  We were intent on doing things our way without even a thought to God.  We were ungodly.  At just the right time, when our spiritual weakness was so plain, Jesus Christ, the God-Man, came and died for us.

            What does it all mean?  It means that God’s love for us is bigger than our sin.  It has a present value that we appreciate now in this life.  But Paul goes on to tell us that this love, expressed through his great death for us, has an even larger future value.

2.  We shall be saved from wrath.

Jesus gave His life for us.  He died, but death could not hold Him forever in its dark prison house.  God would not permit His Holy One to see decay.  Christ rose from the dead.  Even now, Jesus is very much alive.  If the death of our great Savior was powerful, how much more His life!

This is something that we don’t tend to think about very much, but Paul brings the matter to our attention here.  If Jesus is alive now, that means very good and powerful things for us.  The reason is that Jesus is not suspended in some spiritual place of wishful thinking.  Jesus reigns in a real heaven, and the reign of Christ there has everything to do with how your life is proceeding moment by moment here.  More than that, the reign of Christ in heaven has everything to do with your eternal security.

            There is wrath coming.  God is angry with sin every day.  His anger against us, together with His mercy toward us, was expressed on the cross.  It will also be expressed in the judgment to come.  We deserve to be covered with that horrible and just punishment.  But we shall be saved.  Did you notice the future tense in verses 9 and 10?  The Bible tells us that we were saved, we are saved, we are being saved, and even we shall be saved.  Paul here is talking about the last of these.  We shall be saved.  There is a wrath of God that is coming against sinners, and we shall be saved from that wrath.  We are persuaded that we shall be saved from that wrath because Jesus lives and reigns for us. 

Christians commonly used the word “saved” in a way that is much narrower than the Bible.  Being saved is not just about your beginning steps in the faith.  Salvation is bigger than justification and reconciliation.  Justification means that we are declared righteous in the sight of God.  Reconciliation means that we have a right relationship with God.  Here Paul says that we have been reconciled to God (past tense), but we shall be saved (future tense).  We were reconciled by His death – and that happened when we were His enemies.  But we shall be saved by His life.  Jesus is alive.  He is for you.  He is filling you with His Spirit.  He is causing you to grow in faith and knowledge.  He is leading you, and even ordaining and governing the toughest moments of your life. 

If He were not alive to do this, there would be something missing.  You might think that we would be all right without a living Savior.  But do you know that we cannot come into the presence of God without a mediator?  And there is only one mediator between God and man – Jesus.  If Jesus were not alive, we would have no mediator, and we could have no assurance of eternal life in close communion with God.  But He is alive!  He rules.  He reigns.  He prays.  He gives gifts.  This is our assurance.  Our mediator ever lives for us. 

            We shall be saved.  The great salvation that is yet to have its fullest consummation is only through Him, and it will only come about through His life.  A dead Savior simply would not do.  He must be alive, and He is alive.

3.  We rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

            We worship God this morning through our living Mediator.  Our translation says “… we rejoice in God.”  The literal translation of the Greek would be “we boast in God.”  This all fits together.  We have been justified by the work of God.  We do not boast in ourselves, but we rejoice in God.  There is more than reconciliation ahead of us.  There is a future grace that we have bold access to now through Christ.  That is what makes the reconciliation so rich.  But we can never afford to forget our reconciliation, and we can never forget how it all happened – through Jesus alone.

            One more thought on reconciliation: The word used here apparently had a business use in common Greek.  It literally means “exchange” – as in currency trading.  We even talk about “reconciling” financial accounts in English today – making things even.  An exchange took place for us in the death of Christ.  The life of Christ with all His righteousness was traded in for the eternal death that we deserved in all our unrighteousness.  Through His death the claims of death against the elect of God have been more than satisfied.  We should be impressed with that transaction, since it came to us without our paying a penny’s worth of our own righteousness.

APPLICATION:

            Are you impressed with the death of Christ?  There was a point in my life when I had come to the conclusion that religious belief was for people who did not know any better.  Did you have a period in your life when you knew better about something?  When you are thinking this way, you don’t have to actually study a belief in order to have disdain for it.  You just know it’s foolish without any of the effort of investigation.  I was an enemy of God, and I was weak.  But Jesus died for me.  Somewhere along the way of my own success I became impressed with the death of Jesus Christ.  If you have never surrendered yourself to the power of His death, you should do so today.

Permit yourself to be impressed with the success of His death.  And if you will, how much more should you be impressed with the success of His current reign.  The contrast in this passage is between a death and a life. Ecclesiastes 9:4 says, “… a living dog is better than a dead lion.”  The Bible tells us that life is preferred to death.  Life is also more powerful than death.  The death of Christ was exceedingly powerful.  It was the death of death for us.  That is clear.  How much more powerful then is the resurrected ascended life of Christ.  It is the life of life.

            You would do well to consider this.  This will affect your boasting in God – your worship of Him.  Without a living Savior all is lost.  But Jesus lives, and so shall you.  Rejoice!