Transcript

Go to the book of Romans, the book of Romans 5 this morning. Romans 5. I want to talk about God’s love, a love that must be known, a love that must be proclaimed, a love that must be made much of to all corners of the earth. It grieves our hearts to see the pictures of these people locked in darkness and if you’ve traveled as much as Brother Steve and I have and done mission work, you see these people in darkness, the things they believe in; and in poverty-stricken countries we’ve seen people lean over a bridge and cast what money they had into the sacred river hoping that somehow it would appease the sins of their forefathers already dead and you just, locked in darkness. But then in those countries, you’ll find a remnant of the church who loves Christ and you see the light of joy and hope and you think, “Oh, could we just help multiply that.” So we’re burdened about what’s happening to the people, yes, but the crime beyond all is that Christ is not being worshiped; Christ is not being made much of; Christ’s fame and renown is not embraced. He is not exalted in their hearts and minds and on their lips.

Romans 5:6-10,

6 For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. 8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. 10 For if while 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.

For us to do missions well, for us to proclaim him at all, we need to know as fully as we can who he is, and one of the ways God teaches us about who he is is he allows us to see something that we’re very, very hindered and limited in seeing, we see through a glass dimly, the Bible says, we know only in part, the Scriptures tell us, but yet to see something of the contrast between what man is compared to who God is. You see, God is holy. When we think of holiness, one of the things we should think of is that in all the ways that God has shared his attributes with us, he is yet infinitely superior to us in all of those ways. Name what it is. Maybe think for a moment. Think about the most giving person you know, that person just gives all the time, you say. Think about the greatest servant spirit you know, a person that just serves and serves and serves and seems to be happy with it. Think about the person with the greatest caring or the greatest mercy or the greatest patience. And all of these virtues or attributes, God infinitely exceeds us. He goes beyond us. In every good respect, God is immeasurably superior to man.

Now, if you’re a Grace Life Shoals person I preach this very often because I want you to get it. I want it to just be in who you are and that is that we cannot have too high a view of God and this intentional or ignorant spirit of our age that has come into our churches whereby we want to make God relevant and cool and trendy and hip and understandable, I don’t want God to be like that because he’s not like that. He’s infinitely beyond us. And then in those communicable attributes of God, or rather incommunicable, those things that are not like us. We find in God and his holiness that he is transcendent. He is other than us. He is far apart from us. For example, God is infinite. God is omniscient, knows everything. God is omnipresent, everywhere at one time. God is spirit. God is eternal. On and on we could go, so God is something far, radical, beyond and outside of anything we can grasp or understand so all we can do is just bow and say, “Holy, holy, holy.” He is unlike us. He is otherworldly. You see, in a real sense you can’t say God is like blank because he’s not like anything you could put in the blank. You just must humble yourself before the Scripture and receive by faith the truth that he reveals himself therein and in the Scriptures, we know him truly but yet still only know him partially. And by the way, when you get to the eternal state and you’re glorified in heaven for all eternity, you will never, never, never ever know God fully. You will know him truly but being infinite, every day will be a new learning experience of the infinite wonders, pleasures, joys, wisdom, power, glory of God.

That’s the kind of God he is, but one way to grasp more of who he is and of his holiness is, again, to examine what the Bible says about us. Now, we’ve been doing that in this conference and I want to hit on some things this morning from Romans 5. I can’t exegete every phrase here; it would take much, much too long. But it’s interesting here in Romans 6-10, Paul mentions four descriptives, four titles for what we are apart from God. The first one we see in verse 6, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” I’m afraid we just kind of sprint through that. Yeah, we’re ungodly, we go on. No, no, no, we need to think on that. Ungodly means that we are not just totally unlike God but that we are contrary to God. You see, God is everything that is right, ethical, good or moral and we are radically opposite or in contrast to that. We don’t fit. We are warped. Peter preached, “Be saved from this perverse generation.” There’s just a perversity. We are the ungodly therefore being ungodly we are guilty sinful creatures before him that deserve to perish. To God, we are totally repulsive. You can’t have the word “ungodly” and not also grasp that before God we are repulsive. Remember the banana? The banana laying on the sidewalk in the hot Alabama sun in August; it’s been there for a good while; it has shriveled up about half its original size; it’s completely black; it has an offensive stench; has a little bit of a yellow green ooze coming out of one end. There is totally and completely nothing attractive about that banana to us. That’s the way we stand before God.

“Pastor, that’s weighty. We want our spirits lifted.” I didn’t come in here to lift your spirits. You’ve got to understand, our job is to know God even if it takes the discipline on Sunday mornings of training your heart and mind to be open to and receive sound doctrine because the discipline follows in the flow after that, or rather the joy follows in the flow after that. But there’s always the argument, “Well, pastor, if I’m totally offensive, if I’m repulsive to God, what about all the good things that people do?” My question to you is, “Friend, who told you you were good?” Isaiah 64:6, “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; And all of us wither like a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” But you sit here and you’re just halfway numb and you’re thinking about what you did last night and where you’re going to go this afternoon and you kind of say, “Well, I don’t feel that I’m ungodly.” No, you are deceived. You’re deceived by your desperately sick and deceitful heart. You’re functioning from a limited and perverse view of God. We carry around in our natural fallen humanness an idolatry of God; we make God in an image that we are comfortable with. We bring him down so that he is somebody that we can relate to, a little bigger, a little more powerful, a little cleaner but where everything is okay. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s not that serious. It’s more serious than you know. It’s just like what the Psalmist said as he was rebuking the unfaithful of his day, he says speaking for God and as if God were speaking, Psalm 50:21, “You thought that I was just like you.” You see, one of the most great travesties, blasphemies and errors any pastor or church can embrace is that God is pretty much something like us, and that theme is all over Christendom today and it’s wrong. This idolatrous view, this bringing God down from his holiness, it appeases our conscience for a little while, perhaps, but it is a fatal error. This is idolatry of ungodliness and it’s one of the many, many ways that we become repulsive and loathsome in God’s eyes. We fail God so completely in our hearts and our minds and our actions that we are completely and continuously loathsome and repulsive to him.

Years ago when Hurricane Katrina came crashing into the banks of New Orleans and the entire city was under water, it must have been a a horrifying thing, just water, water everywhere, nowhere to go, and people found refuge in the Superdome there in the city and then there began to be the reports that there were some malicious, vile beasts in the Superdome. We got reports that little girls horrified and terrified already from the storm had gotten up to find their way to the restroom and on their way to the restroom some men grabbed them and viciously raped them. I’m just telling you, I’m the father of daughters, in a million years, I can’t fathom how someone could be so vile, so corrupt and wicked to take little babies basically when they’re already scared to death and ravage them and rape them and abuse them like that. We look at that and it is justly so and we say that is so repulsive. Have you ever thought of yourself, and far, far, far more you are repulsive before a holy God. Peter writing to the church at Rome says, “I want you to know you are the ungodly before God.”

There is another descriptive he gives, we see it down in verse 8, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” We touch on this all the time. We did in this conference. The primary word in the Old Testament for sin and the primary word in the Greek New Testament for sin have the same root; they come from a root word from archery which means we “miss the mark.” God is saying, “I made man in my image. He’s the height of my creation. I stamped on him my very image. It is man who is to represent my goodness, my uprightness, my ethical nature, my greatness, my perfections, my glories. Man is to represent me to the rest of the universe.” But we all fall short. We all fall short. That’s what a sinner is. God says in Isaiah 43:7 through the prophet, “Everyone who is called by My name, And whom I have created for My glory.” Everything glorifies God but you have to go far beyond everything else in the created order when you come to mankind. Mankind uniquely represents God to the rest of the universe but we fail. We fall short. We continually fail.

We should all have a deep abiding joy and a delight in God. We should all have a deep and abiding joy and delight in God’s law. By the way, that would be normal humanity, but we do not. Our selfish sinful hearts loath God’s law and consistently break his law. God says in his law, “Always tell the truth,” we’ve all lied. God says in his law, “Always respect property rights, do not steal,” and we’ve all stolen. God says, “I have made a structure for proper wise functioning on the earth. I give you a law, honor your father and mother,” and we have all dishonored our parents. God says, “I have set aside a day to worship me and honor me. Honor the Sabbath day,” and at least in our hearts, even in the new covenant, we have dishonored the Sabbath. God says, “Honor your marriage vows. That’s my law,” and we’ve all committed adultery at least in our hearts. We fall short. God is offended.

If a man were an inventor and he made a contraption and I don’t know what kind it might be, any kind of contraction, and he looked at it and it didn’t just need a tweaking here or a correction there or an adjustment over here, the entire thing malfunctioned; not one part of it worked like he planned. Do you know what he would do? He would chuck it in the scrap bin, have it burned for scrap metal. That’s the image here. You have fallen so short. Look, man is not here for his self-fulfillment and self-actualization, man is here for the glory of God. That’s it. And if you fail that, you fail. That’s what a sinner is, “I fall short.”

Do you remember the kite story? I was six, seven, eight years of age and me and my buddies in the neighborhood would run down to the dimestore and we would buy a kite. I believe they cost $.25 apiece, and they were red, yellow or blue. Just very simple. They didn’t have anything fancy. We didn’t have the fancy kites you have today, just a very simple kite. We were flying our kites out in front of my house one morning and I looked up into the sky and there was a large gray kite kind of behind ours. I could see the string went down about two blocks behind our neighbor and I kept looking and I thought, “That’s fascinating. All you can buy are red, yellow or blue kites and this is a gray kite and it’s bigger than our kites,” and I was a very inquisitive child. I wondered where is this coming from, what’s this about, how did this happen. So I saw it starting to come down and I thought, “I’m going to follow that string and find out who is flying that kite.” And I followed that string down and it went about two blocks behind my house and I looked up and there in the distance I saw a boy flying that kite and that boy was probably 14 or 15 years old and I was impressed. I was only about seven but, I mean, if you were 14, you’ve got to understand, I grew up thinking older people were just wise and brilliant and smart and, honestly, I just had the highest esteem of older people and especially educated people and that’s part of what led me to Christ. I got older and realized, “Well, they’re just like the kids I knew. They’re just full of jealousy and hatred and ugliness and selfishness.” I really thought older people were just pure and honest.

But anyway, I saw this older boy about 14 or 15 and he’s flying that kite, he was bringing it down. I ran over there to him and I said, “That is amazing. What is this?” He said, “I made it myself.” Oh, and all of a sudden I thought, “This guy is brilliant. This is the climactic exhibit of mankind right here before me.” I was just so intrigued, I said, “How did you do that?” He didn’t say it this way but he had taken an old-fashioned wooden yardstick and he split it in half and took part of it and made the horizontal beam, and part of it and made the vertical beam, of course, you have to bow it a little bit, bowed it back and made him a tail out of an old bedsheet and he made and it flew, his own kite. I was overwhelmed and I went back to my house thinking, I spent the rest of the summer trying to make me a kite and it was great because he just used newspaper for the skin on the kite. But here’s my point: as that kite flew in the air, to me it it illustrated the wisdom, the ability, the glory of that kid. You see, God made you to be his kite to fly in the universe, to say to all the universe, “Look what I can do.” But the Bible says we have all crashed and we have fallen completely short of showing off the goodness, glory, wisdom, power of God in our lives.

3. Not only does the Bible tell us that we are ungodly, contrary, radically opposite, repulsive before God, not only does it say we are sinners in every way, we have malfunctioned and we fall short of the purpose he made us for, but thirdly the Bible says we are enemies of God. Look at it in verse 10, “For if while we were enemies of God.” The word “enemy” means we are in active hostility against God. Oh, sinners don’t like to think about that because sinners don’t like the truth. Sinners like to say, “Well, I may not be sold out and I may not be dedicated but I’m not against God.” Yes, you are. You are an active hostile enemy against God. There is no neutral ground. The Scripture says, “Who is not for me is against me.” Enemies here is in the plural, all are God’s enemy; all are actively working against God; all are trying to thwart God’s kingdom advance; all arre traitors and rebels to the one God Creator we owe all loyalty.

Think about it, our minds are continually in active rebellion against God. In our minds, we naturally, pre-conversion, explain away sin, do we not? Oh, we might admit there’s sin, “But mine isn’t so bad. I’ve never really done anything that bad.” That’s hostility against God because you’re taking his law and warping it and perverting it and dishonoring him by your interpretation of it. In our minds, hostile, rebellion against God, we soften the edges on God’s law to make ourselves comfortable. We should with all of our minds, all of our strength, love him but we reject him in our minds. We ignore him in our minds. We pervert who he truly is making him out to be something he’s not in our thinking. We explain him away in our thinking. We are active traitors in rebellion in our minds against God.

Think about our hearts. Every morning when you wake up, it doesn’t take two or three breaths before you begin to think on or treasure something or something in the way you think on it that is dishonoring to God. Your heart treasures. Your heart longs. Your heart takes joy in that which God says is wicked and against him. You see, sin isn’t just wrong, sin is against him. Are you with me? It’s not, sin is not just this objective and personal thing, it’s objective but it’s personal. It’s an attack against him. With our minds we are actively rebelling against God. In our hearts we actively rebel against God. In our actions we are actively enemies against God. Every sinful deed, little or small, is an attack against God. It’s the strike of a hostile enemy. It’s the act of a traitor and a rebel. It is true, you have heard it before, pre-conversion, if you could, you would charge into heaven, drag God off the throne of the universe, cast him into hell and put yourself on the throne. You say, “I wouldn’t do that.” Every moment you do not joy in him and his law, you in effect do that. It’s just who we are, active enemies against God.

But, you know, the horror of being God’s enemy is that God is our enemy. People get this notion that, “Well, you know, I’m trying to be a good person. I may not measure up completely. Hey, we’re all sinners. But, you know, God’s patient.” He is, he’s long- suffering and patient but that’s not all he is. God, listen to me, God is continuously active as the enemy of the sinner. Right now, listen to it, Romans 2:5, “because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.” Every moment of every day, every sin, every violation, every disregard, every perversion of God in your mind, every treasuring of something that dishonors God in your heart, every action or deed that is against the law and the standards of God in your behavior, every day, God is actively storing up against you retribution and wrath that he will pour out on you on the day of judgment. Brother John O., when that great white throne unfolds as you so powerfully explained to us the other day, God will pour out on sinners what he has been working up to do against them. Now, can you imagine how fierce the retribution of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God will have toward sinners? The Bible says if God be for us, who can be against us but, my friend, I remind you and warn you: if God is against you, it doesn’t matter who is for you. What a state. Paul says to the church at Rome, “I want you to understand something, you’re the ungodly; you conflict with God; the totality of your being is a contrast to him. He finds you repulsive. You are a sinner. He created you to fly you in the heavens and shine to the universe, ‘Look, they represent me like none else of my creation represents me.'” But we all totally fail. He says we are actively against him as traitors and rebels.

Then Paul gives us one other descriptive here, at least one other, verse 6, “For while we were still helpless.” Helpless. We are ungodly, we are sinners, we’re enemies and we’re helpless. Helpless here, of course, means without strength. It means we are altogether unable to help ourselves in our condition. God is our Creator. He is our King of all. He rightfully expects and demands all to love him, all to honor him, all to obey him which all that means we should be glorifying him. Mark 12:30, we are to love him with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. God is God, why wouldn’t man fully honor him and obey him? He is worthy of all of this but we don’t. We don’t do anything. We keep failing. We are actively against him. We are his enemy. We’re in contrast to him as the ungodly. We fall completely short in every way. And then Paul says on top of all of that, we are helpless. Listen, what he’s saying is we are helpless either to resist sin or to do good. The next time one of these works-religion cults knocks on your door, the Jehovah’s FalseWiitnesses or the Mormon church and they begin to tell you, “Here’s the works, here’s the steps you must do to be right before God,” you need to say, “You don’t understand something. I’m helpless. I’m unable either to stop sinning nor to do good so everything you say to me is null and void. You are just casting more on me and I can’t do anything about any of it.” “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. No one does good, not even one. He who has not believed is judged already. If God is for us, who can be against us?” But if God is against us, it doesn’t matter who is for us. Helpless. Helpless, Paul says.

Another word that the New Testament uses that’s real closely kin to this is the word “lost.” Lost. We’re lost without compass, without map, without guide and without strength. We’re like a quadriplegic, no strength in our arms, no strength in our legs, and someone has placed us in the middle of a vast wilderness and there are savage beasts all around. If someone were to drop us a compass, it wouldn’t matter. If someone were to give us a map, it can’t help. If someone were to say, “Follow me, I’ll show you the way,” we have no strength. Helpless. Helpless.

Do you know one thing God can’t do? God can’t change God. He’s immutable. He changeth not. He can’t change that he is infinitely holy and his infinite holy justice must crush sin and sinners.

Man tries to help himself but he’s helpless. That’s why Proverbs 16:25 reminds us, “There is a way which seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death.” We try philosophies; we amuse ourselves with, “This is my viewpoint. This is mine. I follow this teacher. I follow that.” It doesn’t matter. It’s just a delusion. We try religion, put on religion, take the sacrament, participate in the ordinance, join the church, but the Bible says when you do that kind of self-cleaning, you might get out one demon but seven worse demons come back and inhabit where the one left. At the end of it all, man is only deeper in the muck and the mire of his helplessness.

You might ask, “Pastor, can I be saved being the ungodly? Can I be saved being the sinner? Can I be saved being the enemy of God? Can I be saved in my despicable utter helplessness?” No. No. You cannot save yourself. Unless God does something for you, you’re doomed. But will he love you? You know, the weight of our sinful condition cannot be exaggerated. You can spend the rest of your life trying to plumb the depths of your vile, ungodly, sinful, enmity, helplessness before this holy God and you’ll never get to the depth of it. It’s worse than you could ever imagine. The weight of your sin cannot be exaggerated, yet the weight of his love for sinners is greater still. Yes, yes, he will love you. He will love you. He will love you. You are not lovely. You are repulsive. You are actively his enemy. You didn’t form an alliance. You fall short radically and completely of anything and everything he made man to be. You are despicably weak and without hope. But he will love you.

Romans 5:8, Brother John O., you’re the only theologian here I know this morning. Romans 5:8 is just like a hinge or the hub of the will that all of this hinges on. “But God.” Conjunctive word; it’s connected to everything else he’s saying here and in theological truth and spiritual interpretation, it’s connected to everything all around it. “But God demonstrates His own love for you,” the ungodly. For you, the sinner. For you, the enemy of God. For you, the despicable helpless one. You changed nothing. You just happened to have a God who has his own kind of love. God will love you. His own love, he says he demonstrates it. In other words, two concepts here, he has illustrated before the world, “I have a capacity to love that no other aspect of my creation can even comprehend.” Aren’t you glad he didn’t love you with a love that’s just a little better than human love? He didn’t love you with the love that mama has for a baby which is wonderful beyond compare, it’s beyond all of that multiplied a thousandfold. His own love, he demonstrated it in “that while we were yet sinners,” ungodly, enemies, helpless, “Christ died for us.” What a thought. What a thought.

The word “demonstrates” there, he demonstrates his own love, it comes from two root words and it literally means “to stand beside.” It’s as if you are on the ground crushed with nothing to offer, nothing to give, nothing to do and God says, as if he is personifying love, “I am sending my mighty love to come and stand with you.” What a love. In Christ, God loves the ungodly. In Christ, God loves the sinner. In Christ, God loves his enemy. In Christ, God loves the despicable helplessness and helpless one. In Christ, the ungodly becomes attractive and desirable. Did you hear that? The rotten banana looks like one just perfectly ripe and on the vine. In Christ, the sinner reaches the mark. In Christ, the enemy becomes a cherished friend. No, better than that, a precious and beloved child of God. In Christ, the helpless are picked up and carried to safety. “Where sin abounds, grace does that much more abound.” The old songwriter said,

“If that isn’t love, The ocean is dry. If that isn’t love, There are no stars in the sky. If that isn’t love, The sparrow can’t fly. If that isn’t love, Then heaven’s a myth, And there is no feeling like this, If that isn’t love.”

You see, his love is deeper than the ocean. His love is higher than the heavens. His love is broader than the universe. His love is too glorious to be captured by the poet’s pen. His love is too marvelous for the singer’s song. His love is too amazing for the scientist to observe. His love is more beautiful than a rose. His love is more fragrant than the most costly perfume. His love is more desirable than all the world’s gold. His love is more enduring than the universe. The universe will pass away, but his love won’t. His love is more pleasure producing than all the earth’s delights combined.

The love of God. It must be known. It must be preached. It must be proclaimed so that all over the world those who are the ungodly, the sinners, and the enemies, and the helpless will raise their hand and say, “Praise be to God’s Son Jesus Christ. His love has saved me. His love has saved me.” And that’s exactly what we do when we support missions to the end of the earth. We are the means, not the only means, but we are the means God has ordained that he might be known for his Son, for his Gospel, for his love. Aren’t you glad in the midst of our predicament that God sent his love to the rescue?