Romans 5:1
If you really want to understand who I am, it is important for you to go back and look at all of the components that have gone into the making of my personality. Paul’s writing is a little bit like looking at a person’s personality. We come to the word “therefore”, which is an indication that everything that is said from here on will be predicated upon what was said previously. In other words, you likely won’t totally understand his next teaching if you didn’t fully grasp what he has said up to this point. Paul’s “therefore” opens the door from our past into our glorious future with Christ.
The first two and a half chapters of Romans show us the complete ruin of the human race because of sin and the subsequent estrangement from God, Who is righteous. The next chapter and a half shows us the love of God in providing for our salvation through the death of His own dearly loved Son. Because of what Christ did for us, God sees us in Christ, completely justified, given a quality of life which is eternal and bound for Heaven. In fact, we are already citizens of Heaven and strangers here on the earth. From the beginning of the fifth chapter, the epistle is addressed to those who have been redeemed by the substitutionary death of Christ, Who paid the penalty for our sins. That includes all of us here today who have presented themselves to Christ as a living sacrifice. Today we want to look carefully at the evidence that Scripture presents that shows we have genuinely been justified by faith.
Critical to our thinking today is the fact that when Paul said we are “justified” by faith, he uses the aorist tense. He could have used the imperfect tense just as well, but Scripture consistently refers to our justification as completed action. It is done and cannot be added to or taken away from. It cannot be undone. If I “went” to Spokane, aorist tense, you cannot undo my going, because it is completed action. It’s already accomplished.
The next important thing to note is that it is God who justifies. If it were you who said I was justified, someone might question, “What gives you the right to say someone is justified?” But in the eighth chapter Paul asks, “Who will bring any charge against God’s elect?” And the answer follows, “It is God Who justifies.” Are you, the created one, going to question your Creator? You had better be trembling in your boots if you do. Solomon, the wisest of men, said, “I know that whatever God does, it will be forever: nothing can be added to it or taken away” (Ecclesiastes 3:14).
Obviously, the only one who can declare a sinner righteous is the Judge before whom all cases involving sin must be tried. Justification is the work of God whereby men who are out of relationship with Him because of sin are brought back into relationship by means of the price paid for their sins by Christ. Instead of being condemned for our sins, we are acquitted. Instead of being separated, we are joined to Christ and become part of His Body.
Why did it happen? Because of God’s grace. “For by grace you are saved through faith” (Ephesians 2:8). It was not because of what was in you but because of what was in God. Grace is unmerited, or undeserved, favor shown to us and wholly without cause in the recipient. Romans 3:24 says “...we were justified freely.” Amazing!
Our justification is validated by Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Christ was raised from the dead because God the Father saw that the penalty for our sin had been “paid in full” (Isaiah 53:11). Christ accomplished the purpose for which He came to the earth…to offer Himself as the sacrifice for our sins. When He hung His head on the cross and cried out, “It is finished”, the price for our sins was paid. Never again can anyone come back and accuse you or me of owing something when the debt against us has been satisfied.
Now we come to the believer’s part of the transaction. “Having been justified by faith...” The gift of God’s salvation comes to us through the channel of faith. But we should never think that we have dug the channel for faith ourselves or that we puffed ourselves up to the position of deserving God’s grace, for even the faith we use to accept God’s grace is part of the gift God gives us (Ephesians 2:8). But when God gives a person the measure of faith, he is expected to invest it, or he will lack assurance and the Christian life will be burden instead of a joy.
One of the burning questions that has plagued and split the Church for centuries is the issue of whether a person can lose his salvation once it is given to him. If a person claims to possess the living God within him in the person of God’s Holy Spirit but there is no evidence of His presence in the person’s life, something is wrong. The Armenians would say that he has lost his salvation, and the Calvinists would say he never really had it. I’m simply saying that something is wrong and needs to rectified. To quote the writer to the Hebrews… “If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God…How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace…It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:26-31). You can decide for yourself what this means, but it was given to us as a warning against saying we are a follower of Christ but not fleshing out that which exemplifies Christian living.
We are also justified by our words. Christ said, “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or else make the tree corrupt and its fruit corrupt, because the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers! How can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of your heart your mouth speaks. A good man out of the treasure of the heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things. But I say to you, that every idle word that men speak, they shall give account for in the day of judgment. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matthew 12:33-37). The whole of Scripture teaches that our words are evidence of what has taken place in our lives.
Once we turned away from the pursuit of selfishness and believed in Christ alone, we began the process of what the Bible terms “regeneration”. “Old thing have passed away and everything becomes new” (II Corinthians 5:17). God plants a seed of His own divine nature within the person. Paul told the Corinthians, “We become mirrors that brightly reflect the glory of God, and as His Spirit works within us, we become more and more in every way like Him” (II Corinthians 3:18). We are given a new nature by Christ. Paul told the Romans that “...we are not to be conformed to the world’s way of thinking but to be transformed by the making new of our minds” (Romans 12:2). It is out of that new heart that our mouth brings forth words of life.
First, and foremost, there will be a public confession of faith. Paul said, “If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart man believes and receives righteousness, and with the mouth he professes his faith unto salvation” (Romans 10:9, 10). From this and other passages it would seem that it is impossible to be a secret believer. If a person has Christ living in him, it is impossible to deny that. The surest evidence of new life is the inability to keep quiet what God has done in our lives.
Finally, the evidence of being justified by faith is what we do with our lives. We frequently quote Ephesians 2:8, 9, that we are “...saved by grace through faith, and that not of ourselves-- it is a gift from God and not from our own works, lest anyone should boast.” But seldom do we quote in context the next verse, which says, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do.” It upset James that people in the church were professing faith in God, yet their lives did not reflect the presence of God in their daily actions. You would never have known they were Christians to watch them. He said, “Speak and act like those who are going to be judged as free men.” In other words, you can make your own decisions. If you have asked Christ into your life, live like a Christian!
James is very pointed. He said, “Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do. You believe that there is one God. Good! But even the demons believe and shudder…Abraham’s faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did…You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone…As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead” (James 2:20-26). James is not meaning to say that we are saved by works, but that works automatically go with a changed life. If there is not evidence of a changed life, then we need to look and see if the Source of life is really there.
Anyone can say he is a Christian. But a person who has genuinely been born again will be a new person, and it will be evident! Are you a new person, and is it evident? Is it evident at your place of work? Is it evident in your home? Is it evident to your children and family members?
The point is not to make people feel guilty but rather to stop and ask if we are genuinely representing Christ. If we are not, why aren’t we? Have we genuinely given our lives to Christ? Or if we have, are we daily spending time with Him in Scripture reading and prayer and building that relationship with Him so that we naturally reflect His presence in us to others? God did not come into our lives to be “hid under a bushel bucket.” He came into our lives to shine out of us and to be a light to those walking in darkness. Does your light shine brightly? Are you justified by faith?