SERMON – Being Justified By Faith
Text: Therefore, being Justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 5:1)
What is Most Important To Us
As a congregation of people at St Aidan’s, we need to consider what is most important to us right now.
We have heard about the St Aidan’s Bus, and where we should be as a church in 5 or even 10 years time. But is that really important?
As an aging congregation, what the church might be like in 10 years might not be relevant to us. Some of us are getting well on in years.
I wouldn’t expect people who might feel that they have one foot in the grave to be concerned about the development of the visible church of St Aidans.
What most of us are really concerned about is how we stand with God, and whether we are going to be okay when we go through the last enemy, which is death, and still be able to stand before God without guilt or shame.
There are many people who live faithful lives before God, yet have terrible doubts when they face death. Therefore, in a congregation like ours, we need to have a strong assurance of our faith in Christ, and we need to know exactly where we stand with God.
It is a serious dereliction of duty for a preacher not to give good doctrinal teaching about what Justification by Faith really is.
The definition of Justification: The ability to stand before, and walk with God as someone fully accepted by Him, without any fear of punishment, or any sense of inferiority.
We know that we have achieved this when we believed that Jesus died for us on the cross of Calvary, and accept Him as our personal Saviour.
Justification is what God’s attitude is toward us. When we accepted Christ as Saviour, our standing with God changed, and His attitude toward us also changed. This has nothing to do with our own character and nature. It has everything to do with God reckoning us to be righteous before Him.
Let us not confuse Justification with Sanctification.
Many areas of the church have made an error by teaching that Justification depends on our personal holiness. If we commit sins, then our Justification is at risk, according to their teaching.
This is simply not true. When we accept Jesus as our Saviour, God reckons us to be righteous, even though our own character and nature is still sinful and we make sinful decisions.
Once we are justified before God, and no longer subject to any further punishment for our sins, the Holy Spirit starts working in us to develop Sanctification in us. It is progressive. Over the rest of our lives, we are gradually becoming more Christlike.
Note the hymn we sang this morning:
Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night.
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray; I woke; my dungeon flamed with light.
My chains fell off; my heart was free.
I rose, went forth and followed thee.
It doesn’t happen in five minutes, but it does happen as we are walking in the light of God’s Word in our lives.
Tracing Through the Old Testament
Justification by Faith is not a new concept.
God had it in mind right from the beginning.
We see it reflected in the New Testament reading that we had this morning from Hebrews 11.
When Adam walked with God in the Garden of Eden, he had Justification based on innocence. He could walk and talk with God without any sense of separation. He had no need of Sanctification because he had never sinned.
After failing the test, however, Adam lost his Justification, and became separated from God.
Notice, however, that God did not pronounce a curse of hopelessness on Adam and Eve. He pronounced a curse on the land, and on the serpent.
But He said that the Seed of the woman would bruise the serpent’s head.
The Seed of the woman referred to here is Christ.
This was the first of many prophecies concerning Christ.
I believe that Adam and Eve believed that prophecy.
We are not told in Scripture whether they were Justified or not.
This was the start of the Primeval Phase
Sacrifice of animals was a feature of this time. How people knew about this is unclear, but we can believe that God taught this to them.
If we look at the record of Abel, in Heb 11:4 we see that he made a sacrifice of faith, which was accepted by God, we are led to believe that he was taught this by his parents.
Cain, on the other hand, was self willed in his worship. He had faith in the work of his own hands, and the sacrifice was not accepted.
But Abel was actually Justified by Faith. It was not the sacrifice itself, but his faith that offering the sacrifice was going to cleanse him of his sins, even if it was to be a temporary measure.
Heb 11:5: Enoch walked with God by faith. He got so close to God that He took him instead of allowing him to go through physical death.
The next person is Noah. God warned him about events to come and told him to build a big boat. Noah believed God, He was justified by his faith.
Then there was the Patriarchal Phase
Heb 11:8. Abraham, as we know, believed God, when He called him to leave his home and go to a place where he did not know where he was going; and it was counted as righteousness. He was justified by his faith, and his example provided the basis for Paul’s teaching on it in Romans.
Lot, in the middle of Sodom and Gomorrah, believed the word of the angel and was saved from the destruction that hit those cities.
Lot was justified by his faith.
After this was the Legal Phase
Heb 11:23: Moses, by faith decided to share his lot with his Hebrew brethren instead of continuing to be brought up as an Egyptian
God instituted the Ten Commandments through Moses.
The Jews kept the law by faith.
They knew that keeping the law by itself could not justify them before God.
They had to mix faith with the keeping of the law.
Notice too that the blood sacrifices continued through this phase as well
The Pharisees corrupted the true way through their over-emphasis on keeping every little detail of the law as the only way to be justified before God. They were wrong. Paul says that through the law itself, no person can be justified.
So, right up to the death of Jesus on the Cross, people were justified by faith.
Their faith was their obedience to the observances put in place by God for them.
They were reminded that the Messiah was going to come and make things right again.
The ones who were Justified by Faith, were the ones who looked to the coming of Christ as a future event.
We are Justified by Faith as we look back to the death and resurrection of Christ as a past event that changed everything for us.
So you can see that Justification by Faith has always been the bottom line for having a relationship with God.
The blood sacrifices
The keeping of the Law
Were measures put in place to provide a platform for their faith while they
awaited the coming of Jesus Christ to be the final sacrifice for their sins.
This is the basis for the encouragement of Hebrews 12;1-2.
We are surrounded by all these witnesses who were justified by faith in the things they did in obedience to the commends of God.
So what do we do in response to all this?
Application
We do this most successfully by fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. He started all this off for us, and He is working in us to perfect our faith. As we cooperate with Him by listening to the Holy Spirit’s prompting in our lives, we find that we are steadily becoming more and more Sanctified until the day comes when Jesus presents us all to the Father as the spotless Bride of Christ.
Paul Christensen, 26 November 2007