Living Hope Church

Pastor Phil Steiger: If you'd like to turn with your Bibles with me, please, we are in this morning Romans chapter 5. We're going to start reading in verse 6. No, I'm not going to go through verses 1 through 5 for a third time. We're going to move on to verse 6 and keep making our way through, I think, verse 11 this morning.

If you don't have a Bible, feel free to use the one in the chairs in front of you, around you. We'll have Scripture on screen as well to help. But friends, there are some, I think, really important and powerful things inside of this passage of Scripture for us this morning.

And I'm going to start with this question. Why does God love you? Why does God love you? We know that God does love you. We know, in fact, Scripture tells us, it uses this great little phrase that God is love. We know these things, but why you?

Why does God love you? We can also answer that in terms of, well, what is God up to? In His expression of love toward us, how He does it? What is He up to? What is He doing amongst His people as He expresses and shows His love to us?

Paul actually finished his last section with that beautiful thought. We go back to chapter 5, verse 5 and we can just pick up real quickly this last thought because it pushes us straight into the next section. Paul says, "And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

This guarantee of the presence and goodness of God, but also the guarantee of the love that God has given to us. I love the image. He's poured it into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, the very third member of the Trinity who is here with us this morning.

How can we know that something like this is actually true? Well, in our passage, we're going to discover that it's because of the reasons that God loves us. It might sound like the rest of this morning we're going to talk about how awesome you are. It's unfortunately not what Paul does in verses 6 through 11 in this passage of Scripture. And as a matter of fact, what Paul tells us about the love of God and the work of Christ actually makes the love of God so much greater when we hear what Paul has to say to us.

So in this passage of Scripture, a couple of the thoughts are going to help make sense of what we talk about this morning. First of all, this is a glorious phrase that comes right out of this passage. At just the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. At just the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. And it turns out that you and I are the ungodly. So is everybody else.

But but Paul tells us that at just the right time, this is why Christ came, this is why Christ died, was for the ungodly. I think it's going to be beautiful unpacking that thought. And then this thought that I think is going to hold all of this together this morning, and hopefully become true to us in a special way this morning, you are radically loved.

You are radically loved by God. This is in many ways, probably the cry that is at the core of the human heart, the need for this kind of love, the kind of sacrifice and expression and work that God is doing in our lives through the love that He shows for us, is right at the core of the human need. And how else could it be except this is how God has actually made us to seek after Him and to find our final meaning and hope and purpose and love in Him and in Him alone. Friends, we are radically loved by God.

But God's love is, I think, a shock to the system in a lot of ways. And it's a shock because I don't deserve the love of God. I cannot demand the love of God, but He shows me more love than I can possibly fathom. Than I can possibly fathom.

Let's read our passage of Scripture this morning. Romans chapter 5. I'm going to start here in verse 6. And friends, this is the word of the Lord. "For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would even dare to die. But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since therefore we have now been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by His life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation."

For while we were still weak, at just the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. Christ's death is for the ungodly. Our weakness is our ungodliness. So this word weak in the Greek has this wonderful kind of breadth of meaning. It means to be sick or to be infirm. It also means to be morally infirm, to be morally or even intellectually incapable. While we were still weak, at just the right time, Christ died for those kinds of people.

Now, sometimes pastors have to say these kinds of things. And again, this is why I have an escape hatch out the side door here, right? We are spiritually infirm people in our very nature. That is who we are. That is the result of the sin nature. We are spiritually infirm, morally weak and broken.

But this is why Christ came to die for the ungodly. So we recognize first of all, we are morally frail. We are morally frail. We are unable to turn ourselves into exceptional creatures. Again, this is just part of the result of the fall. There are things that we can do by the grace of God, but to reach this level of righteousness and holiness that matches the standard of God, friends, we are not able to do that. While we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly.

So we're not able to build ourselves into exceptional creatures unless your bar for that is very, very low. Then you can meet that bar, right? But that's not the bar of God's holiness. So we are morally frail, we are intellectually frail. As I've mentioned before, our moral frailty and intellectual frailty are two sides of the same coin. We tend to compensate for what we realize is our moral incapacity. We compensate by justifying more and more sin.

We may know on some level that it is wrong, that it is destructive, that it is an act of deception or lying or corruption that we bring into our lives or into others. And then we realize that we can't or don't want to change our behavior. So then what we do is we tell ourselves and everyone around us that as a matter of fact that behavior is just fine.

While we were still weak. This is this is what the Apostle Paul is trying to get us to understand as He starts down this incredible path. But the good news is this, that God's love triumphs when human weakness fails. God's love triumphs where human weakness fails. We are not able, so God does. This incredible exchange that God makes.

So we need to just continue to come to terms with this thought that Christ actually died for the ungodly. For the ungodly. For those who don't think that they need Him, Christ died for them. For those who are powerfully aware of their own sin and brokenness and darkness, and believe that they are beneath the love of God, guess what? If that's you, Christ died for you. For those who mock Christians and the Christian faith, Christ died for them. For those who find themselves in a position where they will just tell you, I hate God, guess what? Christ died for them. Christ died for the ungodly, for all of us.

This incredible phrase where Paul says, "At just the right time." This is God's doing, this is God's work in His hand through human history. This is where He decided to put the pivot point of all things in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. At just the right time this all happened. So the life, death and resurrection of Jesus happens in the the course of God's providence throughout all of human history. The Apostle Paul actually says this a few times in his epistles.

Another place he puts it like this in Galatians chapter 4, "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons." When the fullness of time had come, when God decided it was right, Christ came. So that through His life, we might actually receive His adoption into His family. He calls us into His family as He adopts us.

So God chose that time on purpose. Now, we cannot know all of the purposes and the work inside of the mind of God, but it's interesting historically to just simply note a couple of things about this period of time. At this moment inside of the Roman Empire, they had conquered enough land and they had conquered enough regions and tribes and smaller nations that we get this this span of time that is often called the Peace of Rome or the Pax Romana. Now they had done this with a heavy hand, but part of what that means is this: they're able to build roads through the Roman Empire and it became relatively safe to travel. Where if you tried to travel from nation to nation previously, you're going to have to deal with raiding parties and other tribes and other kings. Rome kind of settled a lot of that and so you could travel. So suddenly you have this interchange of of the marketplace and economics and religion and ideas, but one of the other things that it does at that time is it then allows the disciples to scatter through the then known world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. From North Africa, throughout the Mediterranean ocean, all the way to India, the disciples were able to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, this may be part of what God's purposes were, we don't know all of them, but Paul tells us, "When God decided it was right, when the Gospel could spread, then Jesus comes and this story begins with the Gospel of Jesus Christ." At just the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. And so then the Apostle Paul moves on in verse 7 and he wants to he wants to emphasize how unique this is. That Christ actually died for the ungodly.

So he says this in verse 7, "For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person someone might dare to die." This phrase, "For someone will scarcely die," another way of taking that phrase and translating it, is something to the effect of, "It's difficult to find someone who would die for a nice person." He uses these two different words, a righteous person and a good person. They're very similar, but you might die for a righteous person, someone that you think, well, that's that's one of the good ones. We want them kept around. So yeah, maybe, maybe I would actually lay down my life for that person. Or a good person, the word that he uses here, sort of communicates this notion of not only they're a good person, but they're endearing. I like them. I want to be around them. So yeah, you know, as a matter of fact, I I might take a bullet for this individual.

But this is what Paul is expressing is that you might find that person under extraordinary circumstances this may happen. There may be people that are close to you that you would say, yeah, as a matter of fact, because of how important they are to me, because of how much I love them, yes, as a matter of fact, I might dare to die on their behalf. But he's noting that this is actually going to be in the regular course of things, this is going to be pretty rare. And even under the best of conditions, it might be hard to find someone to die for someone that you might consider to be good.

Jesus foreshadows part of the importance of His death, using the same kind of thought when He talks to the disciples in John chapter 15, verse 13. He says, "Greater love has no one than this, than someone lay down his life for his friends." This is exactly what Jesus is getting ready to do for His disciples.

So if this is the case, you might find someone to lay down their life for someone that they think is good or valuable, or someone or something that they love or like. How incredible is it that God shows His love for us, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How much more incredible is that? This is the kind of phrase that should sit somewhere inside of the Christian's heart and mind at all time. All times, one of these notions that can come to the surface about the hope that is that is within us. The value that God has placed inside of our lives. The recognition of who we are and what God has done, that while I was still a sinner, Christ died for me. This thought says so much about us and so much about God.

Friends, there's a lot to learn here. There's a lot to take. There's a lot to sort of gather in about this notion, and learning about who God is and what He has done. Again, none of us have reached God's standard, and then we were loved. None of us were able to demand God's love so that then we can feel fulfilled and cared for. We're able to go to Him and tell Him to love us and He does it because we're nice people. God just looks down on this earth, he goes, well, aren't you adorable. You're easy to love. Who couldn't love you, right?

But that's not the story. While I was still a sinner, while I was still, as Scripture says, actually an enemy of God, He died for me. It's incredible. All of us were sinners, not only unworthy. But in our sin nature, we didn't want the love of God. We didn't desire the love that God gives. But God shows us His love through the death of His Son, Jesus Christ.

God loves us because of what He is, not because of what we are. Love is this proactive movement in the character of God toward creatures that He has made in His image. Who in their sin and rebellion have separated themselves from God, but He wants to save sinners, draw them to Himself and transform them into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ. Love is a proactive movement from the character of God to you. This is incredible. It is incredible.

This is a beautiful glimpse in how much God wants to be reconciled with you. Paul, he finishes this section by saying, we rejoice in this through the reconciliation that we have received in Jesus Christ. And it's not just Paul who sees this in Jesus and explains this to us. The Old Testament sees this clearly as well. In fact, the prophet Isaiah, in Isaiah chapter 59, has some incredible things to say about this separation and the power of God and our sin and what God does, what He sees and what He does as a result. In Isaiah chapter 59, the first two verses, the prophet Isaiah puts it like this, "Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save, or His ear dull that it cannot hear." So the prophet Isaiah is making sure that we understand, and all this is put in the negative so we have to put it back in the positive. God's arm is strong and He can save anyone. God's eye sees everything. God's ear hears everything. This is the God that we worship. He has not abandoned you. He has not lost track of you. He sees and knows and He is able. This is what Isaiah is saying to us.

Comma, but, "Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear." Where the problem lies is not in God. It's not in His lack of power, lack of ability, lack of love, that's not where it lies. The prophet Isaiah says it's because of my iniquities that this separation has occurred. And so now we've got this thing that because I might, see, my movement is to move away from God and my sin and my iniquity. But God is powerful enough and knowing enough and loving enough to save me. And you keep reading there in Isaiah chapter 59, the next several verses, and it goes on and on about the injustice and unrighteousness and pain and suffering that God sees. He looks on the earth and because of our iniquity, all of these things that are are happening that are contrary to His desires for us.

So then we move down a few verses in Isaiah chapter 59, verses 15 and 16. It says this, "The Lord saw it and it displeased Him that there was no justice." It's good to know that God is also upset when He sees injustice, right? That's comforting. He looked and He saw and it upset Him that there was no justice. "He saw that there was no man and wondered that there was no one to intercede, then His own arm brought Him salvation, and His righteousness upheld Him." The chapter started with, God's arm is strong and God's arm can save.

We've separated ourselves and God looks at what's happened as a result. And it upsets Him that there's no justice. So we go back to the strength of the arm of God and it brings salvation to us. Isn't that glorious? So Paul is telling us, maybe we would do this for someone that is worthy. God does it for someone who is unworthy. God's love goes beyond our love.

He dies for those that we know and He knows are unworthy in that sense. And friends, coming to terms with this kind of love, true love that is based on the character of God, changes, I believe, the way that we can see life. I really do believe it can change the way that we begin to see life. Think of it like this, God's love is unspectacular if I am perfect just the way I am.

Right? Then his love is unspectacular. Then guess what, you're very lovable. You're easy to love. I can tell you, I'm not all that easy to love all the time. But if I'm perfect just the way I am, then the love of God is no different than your love or my love. It is unspectacular.

And so much talk right now, this term love really needs Christians to stick it back into the word of God to make sense of it. And the more we make sense of it according to the word of God and the character of God, actually, friends, the more incredible and beautiful and profound it becomes. So much talk right now about God's love, so much talk about love in general, misses the first essential truth according to this passage of Scripture: my sin. It misses this first essential truth. I'm a sinner, and God loved me.

We've got to think this through a little bit. Because we hear these terms, we hear these phrases over and over and over. And as Christians, let's think about it for a minute. Love is love. No, it's not. This is one of these phrases that is intended to be a kind of emotional trump card. I mean, who can disagree with that? Who can disagree with the notion of love? And the the not so subtle subtext is that anybody can love anybody the way that God designed love to act inside of a male-female marriage relationship.

Well, that's love and I got to tell you love is love. People can love whoever they want to love. So it's intended to sort of throw that emotional trump card out there, stop the conversation and everybody's supposed to shrug their shoulders and go, yeah, you're right, love is love. But it doesn't bear up underneath about 60 seconds worth of reflection. Love is not love. Not only should I not, I cannot love anybody the way I'm supposed to love my wife.

I cannot. I should not. And just a you can run through these own examples in your own brain. But the way I love my wife is not the way I love pizza. The way that parents love their children is different than the way that they might love taking a hike in the mountains. It's not the same thing.

My one of my professors at Denver Seminary, Doug Groothuis, he's come and he's spoken here a couple of times. He used to call these things thought stoppers. And they're thrown out into conversation and make you stop thinking. That's exactly the moment at which you're supposed to start thinking and start asking questions. Well, is this love like this love? Well, it's just it's not. Love is love. We've got to think these things through. There are a couple of more that I continue to see more and more. Love has no boundaries. There's a mailbox next to my house and someone has put this bumper sticker on that mailbox and so every time I mow my lawn right next to it, I'm told that love has no boundaries.

Love has a lot of boundaries. To love appropriately is to draw boundaries around that kind of love. Again, the way husbands and wives love each other actually requires boundaries. For that love to flourish and do what God wants it to do and be what He wants it to be, I cannot express that same kind of love to anybody else. Right? I'm not allowed to cross that boundary. Others are not allowed to cross that boundary. Yeah, love has plenty of them.

And then a very similar phrase we see a lot, love does not discriminate. Again, love is discrimination. If I love God, I am not going to love any other god. I'm going to say those gods are not worth my love. They're not worth my soul. They're not worth my life. They're not worth my breath. I'm going to love God and I'm going to discriminate against them and say they are not worthy of my love. So yes, as a matter of fact, it does discriminate. Here's the slippiest, slipperiest one of them all.

God loves me just the way I am. And you know what? He does, just not the way you think. Christ died for sinners, because God loves you, sinner, and He wants to exchange the darkness of sin in your soul for the light of His life. That's what this means. It's not because you're awesome. It's not because you get to express yourself. It's because God knows that you and I are sinners.

And that He wants to reconcile you to Himself and exchange your sin for His brand new life. Because what it says in verse 10, we've been reconciled and now we also know that we have been saved by His life. It's beautiful. And then something else the Apostle Paul says, verse 9, "Since therefore we have now been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God." You see, this is part of the power of the love of God. And what He is up to when He displays His love to us. We shall be saved by Him from His own wrath. This is an incredible thought.

God's plan is that because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, His children will be saved from the inevitable and final wrath that we poured out against sin. This word for wrath that Paul uses here, this is one of those things, you can go spend some time studying, it's kind of a cool little study in the New Testament, but it's a word that is used in the New in the New Testament to describe God's final judgment against Satan and evil itself, and against those who remain in their rebellion against God. And in fact, it's the word in the New Testament that's used to describe that final moment where God settles all things and judges sin and sinners. Paul says that we have actually been by Christ, we have been saved by God from His wrath against sin. It's incredible.

A couple of other passages where Paul says something like this. First Thessalonians chapter 1, verse 10, he says, "And to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come." Jesus has delivered you, sinner. He's delivered me, sinner, from the wrath to come. A little bit later on in the same book, First Thessalonians chapter 5, verse 9, "For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ." That's incredible.

God's wrath against sin is just and it is inevitable. So what has God done? His arm has reached down here and with His own righteousness, He has created the path of salvation for those who would believe. God's love saves us from wrath against our sin. Friends, our worldview of love is that it is unloving to believe that there is wrath for sin.

Very different things. But we can see there how it is, like we mentioned earlier, how the human heart would rather justify sin than repent of sin and find life. Again, this is just how brokenness inside of the human heart works. We're going to justify it as long as we possibly can.

So friends, sin must be sin or we cannot understand the love of God. I mean, that's a crazy thought. I think this is part of what the Apostle Paul is telling us here. It's got to be genuine sin and rebellion against God, otherwise, the love of God is unspectacular. But because it is this kind of rebellion and brokenness, we can go back to one of those original thoughts that you are radically loved by God. Radically loved by God.

"For while we were enemies, we were reconciled," He said. While we were enemies, we were saved by His life. This is the cost. This is the process of reconciliation. Part of what's beautiful about this is that God wants it. And so God makes it possible so that we repent and believe and obey. And He adopts us into His family. We become His sons and daughters and we now have the love of God poured into our lives by His Holy Spirit. Friends, this is good stuff. This is really good stuff.

And this is just the first step of reconciliation. There is this lifelong power of our salvation. He actually says we are saved by His life. Friends, our salvation in Christ never ends. This is incredible. It secures our life with God now and for all of eternity. We were once hostile to God, Colossians chapter 1 tells us, but through Christ, now we have been reconciled.

And then verse 11, let's look at this one more time. "More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation." This is the third use of this word rejoice in the first 11 verses of Romans chapter 5. Now remember that this is kind of this is one of the early pivot points inside of this book. As chapter 5 opens, what Paul is starting to tell us is he goes, well, this is now what this life looks like. This is now what we have. Remember that phrase early on. We have this life now in Christ. And so this is what it looks like. So three times now he's used this verb for rejoice. Some of your translations actually say, "We can glory in these things."

He said early on, "We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God." That's great stuff. And then he says, "But more than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that they produce endurance and character and hope, the hope that doesn't disappoint because of the love of God poured out into our lives." We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. We learn how to rejoice in our sufferings. And now we rejoice in the reconciliation that we have received in Jesus Christ. As much as been inside of this passage of Scripture, even about trials and suffering and tribulation, Paul keeps drawing us back to that for which we should rejoice. What God has done for sinners. He's showed us His love. He's reconciled us to Himself. And now we can actually live in that new life that He has given us.

The gift that we have been given in Jesus Christ is worth so much more than we think we might receive from anywhere else. It is worth so much more. Paul says, "This is what we rejoice in now." Friends, the world would teach the church that sin is not sin and that love means that we look approvingly on what God calls sin. Let me say that again. The world would teach the church that sin is not really sin and that love means that we look approvingly on what is actually sin. That's what the world would teach the church.

But the church would teach the world something else. The church would teach the world that down that path is self-inflicted pain and eventually death and separation from God. The love of God, the purest expression of real love is His sacrifice on behalf of sinners, so that we might be forgiven and transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. This is, friends, the love of God. Let's pray.