Greetings
Greetings to everyone in Jesus’ name. I am so thankful to see each of you here this evening, and I also greet all of our listeners online. We are praying for you all, and we are thankful for each one of you.
Turn with me to Romans chapter 3, and I will read the text for our message this evening: Verses 20 to 31.
Romans 3
King James Version
20 Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.
21 But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets;
22 Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:
23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
24 Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
25 Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;
26 To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
27 Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith.
28 Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.
29 Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also:
30 Seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith.
31 Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.
Let us pray
Lord God, as we take time this evening to look at the scripture, Father, we are looking at the greatest truths contained in the Bible. I pray that You will open our understanding and illuminate Your word. We ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.
In my last message, I preached on justification. We are justified by what Jesus did for us on the cross through His death, burial, and resurrection. Jesus Christ is our justification, and it is a good justification, and we were justified by it. If someone asks you how do you know you’re saved? How do you know you’re going to go to heaven? How do you know you’re going to make it? We can say because Jesus died for our sins, we are fully justified. We’re fully justified in saying we are saved because Jesus died for us. We are fully justified before God and man. We are going to make it because of what Jesus did for us. I’m not justified because of what I did, but I’m justified because of what He did. And verse 28 was my focus in my last sermon; verse 24 is especially my focus in this message. And this will probably be another short one. There are a lot of things in these verses, and I am hoping to just tackle one concept at a time, and then when we are done, we will put them all together.
There’s something that comes alongside justification that is so important. It’s about how we obtain justification. We know what it means to be justified, but what is the cost to us?
We are justified by claiming Jesus Christ and what He did as our justification. But what is the cost to us to have that justification? What do I have to give to obtain it? What is the cost to me? In verse 24 is where we see the answer to that.
In verse 24, it says we are justified freely. Freely. There is no price, there is no cost to us. It is free.
Jesus paid the penalty, and now I don’t have to. I am pardoned because I am justified, and that pardon is being offered to me. And it is free. And that is so amazing. It is incredible. It is almost unbelievable. It’s something so amazing and wonderful, it’s hard to find anything to even compare it to. It’s more surprising and more amazing than getting a letter in the mail that your long-lost uncle died, and you are inheriting a billion dollars. It’s more amazing than discovering a gold mine in your backyard. It’s more amazing than having all your wildest dreams in this life come true. God giving me a free pardon for all my sins is almost unbelievably amazing. It sounds too good to be true, but it is true.
And it can leave us with a question: Why would God give me something so amazing for free? Why would He allow me to be justified for free? God doesn’t really owe fallen mankind anything. He could have just wiped the slate and started over fresh after man fell. He doesn’t need me for anything. He could snap His fingers and make me disappear and make something perfect appear in my place. But He didn’t. He has the power to snap His fingers, snuff us out, and just start creation all over again, but He didn’t. Why not? What could be His motivation for stooping so low, for humbling Himself so low, as to even care about us?
There is something about God that He does not want to just snuff us out and start over. It goes to the very heart of God, who He is. God is good. God is inherently good and loving; it’s the very fiber of His being. He didn’t snuff Adam and Eve out because He loved them. He didn’t restart creation because He loved the people that were in His creation. And from the very beginning, He had a plan to redeem His creation and the people in it because He loved them and wanted to show them how great His love was.
Verse 24 both demonstrates to us the manner in which He’s going to redeem His creation and the depth of His love. He’s going to redeem His creation through Jesus Christ. God is not starting over; He is not wiping the slate and starting fresh. But He is going to redeem what is here. He is going to take this fallen world, and He is going to fix it. And Jesus is the way He is going to do that. And He is going to do it for free, at no cost to us. Man is going to be justified freely by His grace. And it’s not because they deserve to be justified freely, nor is it because they earned it to be justified freely. But He is going to redeem mankind freely by His grace. His grace is why He is doing this. He is going to justify and redeem mankind as a demonstration of His goodness, as a demonstration of His grace.
And as I looked at justification in my last message, in this message, I’m looking at grace. I just want to spend a short time exploring what that word means and its implications.
If you look up the word grace, you’ll find the definition is unmerited favor, undeserved favor, unearned favor. Grace is when someone is being good to you simply because they want to be good to you—not because you deserve it, not because you earned it, not because they owe it to you. The word grace means, inherently, that you are not worthy of what you are getting. The word grace means you do not deserve what you are getting. Grace means you are getting something out of the goodness of their heart.
If you are worthy of the thing you are getting, or if it is owed to you, or if you deserve it, then it is not grace. Grace is when you get something you don’t deserve.
Maybe let me put that into an illustration. If I go to work and work 40 hours, and the end of the week comes, my boss is going to give me a paycheck. He does not give me that paycheck by grace; he gives me that paycheck because I worked to earn it. My paycheck is not charity; it’s something I earned. But if I was a person down on my luck and couldn’t go to work and couldn’t earn a living, and the Salvation Army comes by and sees I am going hungry and offers something to try and help me, that is grace. When someone comes, and they are under no obligation whatsoever to do so, but they help you out, that is grace. So getting something by grace and getting something because we deserve it are two different things, and they are totally incompatible. You either get something because you deserve it, or you get something by grace. It cannot be both.
If you deserve it, it’s not grace. If it’s grace, you don’t deserve it. It’s that simple. Getting it by grace and getting it because you deserve it or earned it are opposites.
Paul is going to explain this in detail later, so let me just jump ahead to chapter 11 and read a verse there to you so you can see what I’m talking about.
Romans 11:6
King James Version
6 And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace: otherwise work is no more work.
So Paul is very clear in that verse. Grace and works, or getting something by grace and getting something by works, are opposites. It’s either one or the other. It’s either something you obtained through your work or you get it through grace. You cannot mix it. You can’t have a little by grace and a little by works. It has to be one or the other. And if you think about it, that logically makes sense. It’s either free or it’s not free.
Our justification is either free to us, or it’s not free to us. I either got it by grace, or I had to pay for it or earn it. Maybe let me make another illustration. I went to Arby’s for lunch, and we had a coupon—we got our
lunch for half price. It was a really good deal, but it wasn’t free. Even if it’s 99% off, that’s a good deal, but it’s still not free. The justification and salvation that God is offering us is not cheap or discounted to us. It’s free. It’s not a 99% discount; it’s free. There is no cost.
And the moment you start to add some cost to it, the moment you add even a little works to it, then it is not free anymore. It is not grace anymore.
And when you listen to people talk about this, especially in places we come, they actually mix grace with works. Listen to what they say carefully, and watch how they actually implement and carry out what they believe. They mix grace with works for salvation. But you cannot mix it. If there’s even a little works, then it’s not grace anymore. Even if it is really cheap, a 99% discount, it’s not free anymore. If there’s a part of it that you earn, then it’s not every gift anymore. It’s no longer grace.
So going back to chapter 3, verse 24, it says:
24 Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
Our justification is free, by his grace. It is a gift; we did not earn it or deserve it. We obtain it through unmerited favor. God gives us this justification freely out of the goodness of his heart because this is the manner in which he determined to redeem creation and fallen mankind. God wants to save mankind freely, to show how good he is. He wants to do this free of charge.
Have you ever heard the saying, “When you stop someone from giving, you’re stealing”? When someone wants to give, and you stop them and prevent them from giving, you’re robbing them of their opportunity to show kindness. Sometimes you see someone who wants to pay for dinner because they’re a nice person. If you let them pay for dinner, they show they are kind, and they feel good about it. They did something nice for someone. But if you stop them from doing that, then you are robbing that person of an opportunity to show kindness.
And you can take that illustration and apply it to God. God wants to show us how kind and good he is; he wants to show us his grace. And verse 24 tells us how he wants to show us how good he is. He wants to give us this gift of justification for free.
But if we refuse to accept this gift as something free by his grace and we turn it into something where we are contributing towards paying for it, then we are robbing God of the good thing he wants to do for us. God is saying, “I want to give you this gift for free,” and we’re saying, “No, no, let me contribute something to that.” God says, “Let me pay that bill,” but some people refuse. They say, “No, no, no, I’m going to pay my part. I am going to chip in.”
And when they do that, it’s a refusal to accept God’s gift as free. When we insist on doing something to contribute towards our salvation, we are refusing to accept it for free.
And in the natural, there are lots of things we can pay our own way. We can refuse to let someone else give us a gift. But with God, this gift of salvation is something we can’t buy on our own. The only way to obtain this justification and salvation is to accept it as a gift. No amount of washing dishes can ever pay this bill. There’s nothing we can do on our own to take care of this bill. We must accept it as a free gift. And if we refuse to accept it as a free gift and insist on contributing towards the bill, then you know what? You’re not saved by grace. If you are insisting on contributing of yourself, then it’s not a free gift anymore. If you add even the least amount of works to the equation, it is no longer free. If you add any contribution of yourself, then it ceases to be grace. And you depart from the scripture. And if you depart from scriptural salvation, then is it real salvation? Can you be saved by something other than pure grace? I don’t think I want to find out. I don’t think I want to take my chances. That seems to be exactly what Paul is warning against in these verses. I think I want to accept salvation and justification the Bible way. I want to believe it the Bible way. It is not a gift I have to earn or that God gives me because I deserve it. But I want to receive it as a free gift that Jesus Christ died for, and God gave it to me because he’s good.
24 Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
25 Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;
26 To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
27 Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith.
Verse 27 tells me there is no boasting in this for us. Just after telling us it is free and Jesus paid for it, he punctuates that by saying, “Where is boasting then?” There is nothing to boast of in our own salvation as though we contributed something towards it. God wants it to be a gift. And if you catch it, this is about the sixth time Paul has made this point in just three chapters. He has pointed this out over and over, several different ways, that works and law can never save us. There is nothing to boast of; there is nothing we did to be worthy. Not our heritage, not the good life we lived, not our law-keeping, not our works. It was free, and he gave it to us for free. By grace, not because we deserved it. But by grace. And the law we are keeping now is the law of faith—faith in Jesus, faith that he paid it all.
Paul is helping us narrowly understand what salvation, justification, and grace are about. It is about Jesus dying to pay for our sins, and it’s a free gift. It’s not about our works. It’s not about our law-keeping. The only thing we can boast of here is that we have faith. God has given us faith to be saved, and we exercised that faith, and we believed.
As I bring this topic to a close, I know it’s not a very long message. Let me turn to the book of John, chapter 3. As I think about being justified freely by grace, I realize this concept is throughout the Bible. Being justified freely by grace is not something just mentioned once, and we are taking you out of context. This is the meaning of it: it is free, and it is for everyone who believes. And John 3:16 captures it and is perhaps the most well-known verse in the Bible:
John 3:16
King James Version
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
That’s grace. God gave his Son as a sacrifice to pay for the sins of fallen man. And anyone who believes in him will receive everlasting life. That’s faith in him and being justified by what he did. For God so loved the world—that’s why God did it, because he loved the world. God loved his creation, and he loved the people in it. He wanted to offer them redemption as a free gift, and that’s exactly what he did. He gave his only begotten Son to pay the price, to pay the penalty. The love of God in Christ Jesus—Jesus Christ showed us the grace that flows from the love of God.
It’s not of the law. It’s not of works. But it is of faith.
This is the simplicity of the gospel. You don’t need to understand the book of Revelation. You don’t need to hear from some special teacher. You don’t need to belong to some special group. You don’t need to keep some special rules. You don’t need to know the special mysteries. You just need to believe in Jesus. And that is enough to have everlasting life. That is enough to go in the rapture. And anyone who tells you otherwise is a deceiver. Anyone who tells you otherwise is preaching another gospel. And you have authority by the word of God to try that spirit and judge whether it is of God.
Amen.
Let me close in prayer.