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But now, the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen. You’re saints of God; it’s good to see all of you. And it’s good to be gathered together to rejoice in the Lord’s word, in the body and blood of Jesus and the gifts that He has for us that take us from this life to life everlasting. It’s good to be helped by the Lord’s word in our fight against sin, and that’s especially what I want to consider this morning, especially in light of the Reformation.
And it is this: that the fight against sin happens in two phases, and the second is perhaps the most subtle and the most difficult. The fight against sin first happens when we realize that we are born sinful and unclean, that we have sinned in thought, word, and deed against the Lord our God, that we deserve rightly to be condemned and punished because we break God’s law. This is the realization that Adam and Eve had in the garden when they recognized that they were naked and they went to cover their own shame.
We know that we are lawbreakers and that the Lord is displeased with our sin, displeased with our breaking His commandments, displeased with our living our lives for ourselves instead of in fervent love toward Him and toward our neighbor. So we set to work fighting against sin. And we find there a help, a savior of sinners, a friend who comes to us in mercy and in love to die for us, to give us His life and salvation, His bloodshed, His resurrection, all for us. God be praised.
In other words, we sinners find a friend in Jesus who is gracious and merciful and kind, whose death opens to us the way of life everlasting.
But then there’s a second fight against sin because as we then begin, as humans trying to be good and as Christians trying to please God, a second danger comes along. The danger of thinking that we have managed to achieve a righteousness on our own, a danger in thinking that as we fight against sin that we’ve had some success, or the danger of thinking that because I’ve managed to do something good, God must be pleased with me.
There’s an old theological term for this, a Latin term called the opinio legis. This is the logic of our sinful flesh. It’s the idea that if God is mad at me because of my sin, then He’ll be happy with me because of my good works. If God is mad at me because of my failure, then He’ll be pleased with me because of my successes.
Now, this is a lie; it’s a demonic lie, it’s a dangerous lie, and you see where the lie is. The lie is so dangerous because it makes ourselves into our own saviors—our works and our efforts and our vows and promises, whatever it is. We make ourselves into the Savior instead of Christ.
Now this second fight against sin is always happening. This second sort of battlefront against sin, but perhaps we can illustrate it by considering the parable of the prodigal son. After all, there were two boys. We remember especially the first boy who says, “Father, I want the inheritance,” and he takes it and he goes and spends it in sin, on prostitutes and all sorts of worthless living. And he finds himself destitute, wanting to eat the food, the slop that he was feeding to the pigs, and so he goes limping back to his father’s house to see if he might find a place as the father’s servant.
And the father comes running to him with open arms and kills the fatted calf and welcomes him back. And even as the son begins his sort of canned speech about he’s not worthy to be a son, instead he wants to be a slave, the father just interrupts him and says, “You’re my son.” He even tells the slave, “My son is back. Bring the ring, bring the shoes, bring the robe, kill the fatted calf, throw the party, let’s go.” This is God’s grace and His mercy and His love toward us sinners.
But the parable doesn’t stop there, right? There’s still a second son to be dealt with, a second son who thought he was part of the kingdom, a second son who thought that he had earned the Father’s affection by his own works. Remember how he hears that the son is back and the party’s happening and he’s staying out in the field and he’s moping? The father goes out to him, saying, “What are you moping in the field for? Your brother’s back.” And he says, “All these years I’ve served you.” The word is the same for slavery. “All these years I’ve been your slave,” he says, “and you never even gave me a baby goat to eat with, to barbecue for my friends. And this son of yours who was such a great sinner comes back, and you’ve thrown a party for him.”
But do you see, this is the second fight against sin, and this is the most dangerous one. This is the subtle fight. This is why Jesus told the parable, so that the Pharisees could recognize what danger they were in. Sinners and tax collectors were coming to eat with Jesus because they recognized that they were sinners in desperate need of the Lord’s mercy. But there are the proud, those who have in fact been fighting against sin and maybe have seen some success in their fight against sin, those who are upright, those who are doing God’s will. They are just as far from the kingdom of God as the prodigal.
The older brother was as far from the kingdom of God as the younger brother was when he was sitting in the pig trough. But he didn’t realize it because he had bought into the lie, the lie that all of us are tempted to buy into, that God will be pleased with us because of our works.
Now, this error, this theological error, comes back time and time again in the church. It was the fight at the time of the Reformation. That’s why we’re talking about it now. The Catholic Church had built up for generations of theological work, had built up systems and vows and promises and organizations and all these different things so that people could think that they could achieve a righteousness of their own in this life. That they could do enough, with the help of God’s grace, that they could do enough to make God pleased with them.
Or that they could even help those who are suffering in purgatory. They could help them along the way so that they could do enough that God would be pleased with them and accept them into eternal life. But it’s not just the Middle Ages that we face this fight. In fact, I think that probably Paul wrote almost every single one of his letters that he wrote because the churches were facing that same temptation.
So Paul writes to the Ephesians, “By grace we’re saved through faith, and that not of your own. We’re saved apart from works so that no one can boast.” Or to the Philippians, he says, “I consider all these things rubbish for the sake of knowing Christ who is my righteousness.” Or to the Corinthians, he says, “He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might be the righteousness of God in him.” Or to the Romans, he says, “We hold that one is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.”
And this is also for us, for you and me, that we recognize that there is a great danger, a twin danger stuck in our sinful flesh: the danger on one hand of sin, of disobedience, of breaking the commandments, but on the other side of things, the danger of thinking that we don’t need the Lord’s death and resurrection, that we’ve somehow earned His mercy and love—enough, that we are good enough for His kingdom. So we repent of all sin and fall short of the glory of God.
And perhaps the most dangerous sin of all is the pride that cuts us off from recognizing our desperate need for Jesus. There is not a moment, dear friends, there is not a second in your life when you are not utterly and desperately in need of the Lord’s grace and mercy. There is not a single moment in your life when you are not in desperate need of His cross and His blood and His atoning work.
But there is not a moment when you do not have it. Jesus is the Savior of sinners. That’s His promise, and He cannot lie. His death was for you. His resurrection and ascension is for you. His blood is for you, so that you would stand in His church to hear His promise: that all of your sins are forgiven, and that His righteousness is given to you.
There’s a doctrine that came clear in the Reformation, the doctrine of justification, and that is the idea that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us. And maybe we’ll end with a little reflection on this because I think it’s something that we miss. I missed it for years.
We normally, let me just talk about myself, I normally think that the forgiveness of sin simply means taking away all the things that we’ve done wrong. If you can imagine that there’s some sort of big whiteboard or chalkboard or big piece of paper, and on it—make a chalkboard. On that chalkboard are all the sins that you’ve ever committed, right? And we think of the forgiveness of sins as like the Lord comes along and He erases them and He just takes them all away.
But that’s only the first half of the doctrine of justification, because not only does the Lord Jesus take away all of your sin, take away all of your failures, take away all the things that you’ve done wrong to deserve His wrath and eternal condemnation—not only does He take them away, but He adds to your name, He adds to your account all the things that He has done right.
Your sins are erased and in their place is written in all of the good works of Jesus—all of His obedience, all of His success, all of the joy that He brought to the Father—that is what is given to you. That’s what’s meant by the phrase, the righteousness of God.
Listen, the righteousness of God has been manifest apart from the law. The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there’s no distinction. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but all are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.
The perfect life and death of Jesus, His perfect passive and active obedience is put to your name, so that now in the heavenly court, you are as righteous as Jesus is. You are as holy as Christ our Lord. You are as perfect as Jesus Christ, the righteous one, by faith, so that all of heaven is yours—all of God’s mercy, all of His kindness, all of His kingdom, all of His love, all of His life—all of it belongs to you.
By grace we have been saved through faith. God be praised. Amen. And the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.