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There is no distinction for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by His grace as a gift to the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints, through one man sin entered the world and sin brought death, and so death spread to all. All of us are born in bondage to sin, in the corruption of sin. All of us are inching our way towards death. This is the problem in which we find ourselves, from the very beginning, from the Garden of Eden, all the way to the very end. The danger, though, is not in sin. I mean, that’s bad enough. But the danger that we want to talk about today is what happens when you identify sin as the problem.
There’s an instinct that kicks in in every single one of us that says, well, if sin is the problem, then we can fix it. We can do something about it. If God is mad at me because of my sin, then if I do enough good, I can make him happy with me. This is native to all of us, from Adam and Eve all the way to the people who are waiting for the Lord on the last day. All of us have this intrinsic nature to think that we’ve identified the problem of sin, and now we can do something about it.
In fact, the old theologians had a name for it; they called it the Opiniolegis, the opinion of the law. If God is mad at me because of my sin, I’m going to die. Then I can make him happy with me by my good works. It’s part of the native theological operating system of the sinful flesh. And that means it’s going to creep in. It’s going to creep into our own lives, our own imaginations, our own thoughts. It’s going to creep into the church throughout the history of the church.
And that’s what we see when the Lord sends in the Old Testament prophets to preach against it and apostles to preach against it. All through the history of the church, perhaps the clearest moment when that happened was in the Reformation, when Luther stood up and he brought forth these biblical teachings, these biblical texts that were warning us against trying to fix the problem ourselves, about trying to solve our own sin problem, about trying through our own works and efforts to save ourselves or to contribute to our own salvation.
So here’s the danger. We recognize that sin is the problem, but here’s the second danger. We have to recognize that we are not the ones to fix it. I just imagine, I don’t know, I need a better imagination for this one, but this is what I’ve got so far. I imagine some sort of big huge, like a clock tower with all these gears spinning around and all these very complicated mechanisms and all these kind of sharp edges, and there’s probably a couple things that are on fire. You look at it and someone says, well, it’s broken, and I say, well, I can fix it.
And you all look at me and say, no, you can’t. And here’s the point. If you try, you know you’re gonna lose an arm or a leg or your whole life. If you try to fix it, it makes it worse. This is what Paul is saying when he says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift. The solution is not accomplished by us. We are not the fixers. We are the fixed.
We are, and here’s how this is theologically. We are not the savior; we are the saved. Now even this sort of goes against our prideful nature. We all want to be the hero of our own story. But here’s the great difficulty and gift of Christianity, of the gospel itself. We’re not the hero. We’re not the one who comes in to rescue. We are the ones that are rescued by the Lord Jesus Christ, who takes pity on us, who sees the problem of our own sin, and who jumps into it himself, who sinks himself into our suffering and into our sin, and even into our death, and to the wrath of God that we deserve because of all that we’ve done wrong.
He throws himself into it. He gets ground up by that machine so that he can fix it, so that he can deliver us, so that he can save us and rescue us and call us to be his own and bring us to the joy of everlasting life. Now that is the argument of the scripture and the argument of the Reformation. It basically boils down to this: Jesus is the Savior. And if Jesus is the Savior, then you and I are not. In fact, we’ve got nothing to do with it. We are the objects of His saving work.
Now the way this occurred, if it’s all right, I’ll tell you the story. This is my favorite Reformation story, so I’ve told it to you a hundred times, but it’ll get even better this time, I promise. Because we think of the Reformation story of October 31st, 508 years ago this week when Luther went down to nail the 95 theses on the castle church door. All the people were coming to Wittenberg, remember, not for indulgences, but for the relics. Frederick the Wise had all these relics he would put out in the castle on November 1st.
And so all the people were coming to town to look at the relics. Luther posts these theses against the selling of indulgences. And he says, look at… It’s not so easy. Salvation can’t just be bought and sold. The Lord wants us to repent of our sins, but even in those 95 Theses, Luther wasn’t quite Lutheran yet. In fact, it would come later in this discovery, which happens in a quiet moment, but he writes about it later.
Luther was a teacher at the time in Wittenberg, and he was teaching on Romans chapter 1, especially verse 16 and 17, where Paul writes, “I’m not ashamed of the gospel, because in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it’s written, the righteous shall live by faith.” And Luther was trying to figure out what that meant. He had a sense that he didn’t know what it meant because this is what he was taught. He was taught that the righteousness of God was the righteous requirements of God, what God asked of us.
And in fact, this is what they were taught in the monasteries and in the seminaries then, that you had two kinds of righteousness. You had the righteousness of the law, and that was the normal righteousness for everybody, like don’t murder anybody and don’t commit adultery and don’t steal anything and don’t tell lies, the kind of outward righteousness. But then there was the righteousness of the gospel, which was even more—the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. I’m not going to be part of a family. I’m not going to be married and have children. I’m not going to work, and I’m not going to have any money. I’m going to be obedient to the superior in the monastery or the nunnery or whatever it is.
So that the righteousness of the law was already these difficult requirements that God asked of us. And then the righteousness of the gospel was more. That is not good news. It’s like the opposite of good news. It’s like if you’re on a 20-mile hike and you’re about to faint from exhaustion and someone says, hey, I got good news, and they put a backpack with cinder blocks on you. That is horrible news.
So Luther, he says, I was trying to understand this phrase, the righteousness of the gospel, how that righteousness was different from the righteousness of the law. And he says, if you can believe it, he hated that word, the righteousness of God, the righteousness of the gospel. Because if we can’t even keep the Ten Commandments, how can we keep it if God demands even more? And Luther goes on to say, not only did I hate that word, the righteousness of God, but I hated the God who demanded that righteousness.
Wow. And was railing, he says, even if not out loud, in my own heart, I was railing against the scriptures, railing against God. How could you ask so much? I can’t even keep this righteousness. And now you’ve laid this righteousness on me? How can you demand so much? But then something happens, and this is probably the sort of Reformation breakthrough, this one moment.
It’s maybe helpful for us to note that Luther doesn’t say that an angel appeared to him or he had a vision or something, but in fact, he says this: he paid attention to the words. And here’s what Luther realized: right next to that phrase, the righteousness of the gospel, was the word faith.
Now, one little bit of background to make this make sense. Luther had already, through studying St. Paul, recognized that the Lord speaks to us in two ways. The Lord has his word of law or command, which we keep by doing. We keep by obedience. We keep by following the law. And then the Lord has another kind of word; that’s his word of promise, which we can’t do anything about; we can just believe. I mean, the example that—I don’t know, I need a better example, but if I command you to, if I say, hey, pat the top of your head with your right hand, you don’t say to me, “Pastor, I believe you,” because I didn’t give you something to believe; I gave you something to do.
If on the other hand I say, if I give you a promise, like it’s going to rain more this afternoon, you don’t start patting yourself on the head. I didn’t give you a command to keep; I gave you a promise to believe. All you can do with a promise is believe it. That’s what faith does. It believes the promise. And here’s what Luther realized: that the righteousness of the gospel is not given to be followed, to be obeyed. The righteousness of the gospel is given to faith.
That means that this righteousness comes to us not as a demand but as a promise. A promise. That’s what Paul says. The righteousness of God, which comes to us as a gift. So there is no doing. There is no acting. There is no effort. Amen. There is no striving with the righteousness of the gospel. It’s simply given to us through the promise that our sins are forgiven. And believing that promise means that you have it.
The perfection and the holiness of Jesus himself is now given to you, put to your name, applied to your account. When the Lord sees you, then he does not see you in your sin, but rather wrapped in the righteousness of Christ, covered and hidden in His perfection so that you are, and you wouldn’t believe it unless the Lord had caused it to be written down in His word, you are as righteous as God Himself is. That’s what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5: that God made him who knew no sin, that’s Jesus, to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
Through our works, through our striving, through our efforts, no, but simply through faith, by believing that promise. So Luther tells about the story. He says, I realize that this righteousness of the gospel is not a demanded righteousness but a given righteousness. And when that happened, it was like heaven itself opened and I was born again. I ran through the scriptures, and I realized all through the scriptures, this is what the Lord is doing.
His power is the strength that he gives to us. His wisdom is the wisdom that he gives to us. His freedom is the freedom that he gives to us. His perfection and holiness comes to us as a gift, a free gift by grace, not earned or deserved or desired by any of our efforts, but rather simply received when we trust his promise.
Now there’s no going back after that. I mean, once your heart is captured by that good news, then Luther can write these words like take they our life and good fame child and wife; let these be gone; they yet of nothing one. The kingdom ours remains. Because when we know we have God and his heart and his kindness and his mercy and the forgiveness of all of our sins and his name and his kingdom and eternal life and the hope of the resurrection and his beauty and his word and all of these treasures and that nothing can take them away from us because they come to us as a gift.
Now we have everything that the Lord desires to give. In this way, then, the Reformation discovery was simply a return to the scriptures, which are making sure that we know that we are not fixing the problem, but that the Lord Jesus has fixed it for us. That he is the one who saves us. And that he is a, our Lord, your Lord Jesus is an exceptional Savior. He can save even you, and he can save even me.
And in this we rejoice. The Lord Jesus looks upon us and doesn’t see us according to our sin, but sees us according to his righteousness and delights in us. May God preserve this beautiful confession in the hearts and mouths of his saints until he returns in glory. God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen. Amen. And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.