STANDING IN GRACE
Text: Romans 5:1-11
March 20, 2005, Dave Philips
I’m going to tell you a story that I have heard repeated many times. Perhaps you’ve heard it, too. The first time I heard it I didn’t believe it, because I thought it sounded too good to be true. It sounded too melodramatic, the sort of thing a fund raiser might invent to work a crowd of big givers. We need to remember, though, that sometimes melodramatic-sounding stories are true. And, on the testimony of Floyd McClung, who is a Christian leader I respect tremendously, this is a true story. It really happened. And it’s a wonderful story because it shows us so beautifully our standing with God.
It’s about Sawat, a young man from Thailand who had disgraced his family by leaving home, going to Bangkok, and getting involved in prostitution and drugs. He rose to the top of his profession as a pimp and a drug dealer, even doing such detestable things as selling little girls nine or ten years old to brothels.
Then the bottom dropped out of Sawat’s life. He was robbed, and while he was recovering from the shock of the robbery, he was arrested. Then the rumor began to circulate that he was a police spy, so he no longer had credibility in his trade. He ended up living in a shanty in the city garbage dump.
In this miserable situation, Sawat began to think of his father, a simple Christian man who lived in a village on the border of Malaysia. When he left home, his father had said to him, “I’ll be waiting for you.” He wondered if his father still could be waiting for him after all he had done.
He wrote his father a letter. “Dear Father,” he said in the letter. “I want to come home, but I don’t know if you will receive me after all that I have done. I have sinned greatly, Father. Please forgive me. On Saturday night I will be on the train that goes through our village. If you are still waiting for me, will you tie a piece of white cloth on the tree in front of our house? If the cloth is not there, I’ll know I’m not welcome and keep riding.”
As Sawat rode the train, a kindly stranger noticed he was upset and agitated and asked him what was wrong. Sawat told him his story and of his request to his father to tie a white cloth in the tree. As the train drew near to his home, he said to his friend, “Sir, I cannot bear to look. Can you look for me?” And Sawat the pimp, Sawat the drug dealer hid his face between his knees.
As the train passed Sawat’s house, his friend said, “Young man, look!” Sawat raised his eyes and saw that the whole tree in front of the house was covered with pieces of white cloth, and his father was standing in front of the house waving a piece of white cloth in his hands. When Sawat stepped off the train, his father embraced him and said, “I’ve been waiting for you.”1
In the fifth chapter of Romans we are aware that a wonderful thing has happened to our relationship with God. We have a new standing with God because of what Christ has done for us. We could hardly believe that God would be interested in having a relationship with us after the way we had treated him.
But, like Sawat, we came to the end of our resources. We realized that we needed God. We also realized that we were helpless to help ourselves. We remembered God’s invitation to come home. And so we turned our hearts toward home and took a few faltering steps. But, unlike Sawat’s experience, we found that God had not stayed home and waited for us. He had been on the road with us all the time. Not only that, he paid the penalty for all our wrongdoing. We deserved God’s anger, but God himself in Christ bore that anger. And having paid our penalty, he stepped up and took our hand and helped us along that road until we arrived at his house. Then he brought us through the front door, showed us our room, and invited us to feast with him.
Now, having been justified, we are residents in God’s house, members of God’s family. As far as God is concerned, that arrangement is permanent.
Paul tells us in Romans 5 that “since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through Jesus Christ we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of sharing the glory of God.”2
One of my friends from another church told me that the term “justification by faith” is confusing and needs clarifying. Does justification by faith mean that God justifies us and doesn’t care what we do from then on? Does justification by faith mean that I can sin to my heart’s content and it won’t make any difference to God? Was the French cynic right when he said, “The world is a wonderful place — I love to sin and God loves to forgive sin”? Does justification by faith mean that all we have to do is believe in God and nothing more?
No to all of these. All these questions will be answered as we continue reading Romans. For now let it suffice to say that God justifies us when we admit our sin, admit our need for Jesus Christ, and reach out to him in faith. The thief on the cross did that, and God justified him. God gives us a goodness that we don’t have on our own. All of the goodness of Jesus Christ is applied to our account. Our debt of sin is paid in full. Justification through faith means being put right with God in every way so that our relationship with God is what it should be and we become the kind of people God wants us to be. Stay tuned: in coming weeks we’ll go into these questions in more detail.
Our justification through faith brings us wonderful benefits. Let me mention just three.
First, we have peace with God.
Max Lucado tells of two monks, one young and one older, who traveled from their abbey to a nearby village to conduct some business for the abbey. When they got to the village, they parted company and agreed to meet the next morning. When they met in the morning, the young man was unusually quiet. When the older man asked him if anything was wrong, he shot back, “What business is that of yours?”
As the two traveled back to the abbey, the young man hung back and refused to walk with the older man. When they arrived at the abbey, the older man waited until the young man caught up, and then asked him: “Son, what’s troubling your soul?”
The young man looked defiantly at the older man and was about to tell him to mind his own business, but he saw warmth and love in his brother’s eyes. He sobbed, “Last night I slept with a woman and abandoned my vows. I am not worthy to enter the abbey at your side.”
The older man put his arm around the younger man’s shoulder and said, “We’ll enter the abbey together and go to the church. There we’ll both confess your sin. And no one but God will know which of the two of us sinned.”3
This is what Jesus does for you. He puts his arm around you and says, “Let’s us go confess your sin before God. And I will bear the penalty for what you have done.” Jesus makes peace with God, and then he shares that peace with us. He who is innocent accompanies us into God’s presence and says to God, “We sinned.”
There’s a big difference between the kind of peace God gives us through Christ and the kind the world gives. You can get a peace of sorts by drinking a bottle of scotch or smoking a joint. You can get a peace of sorts by emptying your mind through meditation. You can get a peace of sorts by negotiating a treaty with your enemy and laying down your arms. But all these varieties of worldly peace have a way of disappearing. The peace of the alcoholic binge is followed by the hangover next morning. The peace of emptying the mind disappears the minute the phone rings. And the peace of the peace treaty usually lasts only as long as it is convenient to both parties.
But the peace Paul is talking about is the peace that God gives, not an absence of hostilities, nor a mind that has been turned off through drugs or meditation. Rather, it is a peace that realizes that the enmity between God and ourselves is over, and that God’s kingdom is going to come and God’s will is going to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Perhaps some of you have tried meditation and and I know some have tried booze, and some of you who have tried both have also experienced God’s peace. God’s peace is better, isn’t it! Sophie Tucker said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.” Many of us here this morning can say confidently, “I’ve tried the peace of the world, and I’ve tried the peace of God. The peace of God is better.”
The second benefit of being justified through faith: access. Paul says, “Through Jesus Christ we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.” In a corporation, you know you’ve arrived when you get the key to the executive washroom. You’ve got access.
But the access Paul describes here is a bit different. The word he uses is the word that describes being granted an audience with a king. It’s not so much a key that you carry in your pocket that lets you into places you couldn’t go before. There’s more the idea that you now have a powerful friend who will conduct you into God’s presence any time you need to go there. That powerful friend, of course, is Jesus, the crown prince. He will take us immediately at any time into the King’s presence.
That’s one reason why we Christians use the name of Jesus when we pray. When we finish a prayer we pray in Jesus’ name, or through Jesus Christ our Lord. If we don’t, we should, because Jesus told us to pray that way.4
So, the strong name of Jesus gives us access to the presence of God himself. Because of Jesus, God is no longer the scary monarch who can’t be approached. Not at all. God is the Father of Jesus Christ, and because Jesus has called us his brothers and sisters, God is our Father as well.
Third benefit: we share the glory of God. The glory of God is something we experience in the present through faith, but God’s glory is something we will experience in its fullness in the Kingdom of God. Paul tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.5 But we get that glory back in our relationship with Christ little by little in this life and with the final big payoff in the life to come.
I’ve told some of you this story about an Amish farmer and his family who took their first trip to the big city. While they were there, the farmer took his son into a mall. In the distance they saw something absolutely amazing: two shiny silver panels that opened magically, people would walk through them, and then they would close behind them.
The boy asked his father, “Father, what is that thing?” The father, never having seen an elevator before, said, “Son, I don’t know.” They walked closer, and as they did they saw an elderly lady in a wheel chair approach the door. She pushed a button, the panels opened up, and she rolled her wheel chair into a little room. The doors closed behind her and lights above the doors began to light up: one, two, three, four, five -- then five, four, three, two, one.
Then the panels opened up again suddenly, and instead of the elderly woman in the wheel chair, out stepped a gorgeous young woman with beautiful blond hair and dressed to the nines. The farmer hesitated only a moment before he poked his son in the ribs and said, “Go get your mother!”
We Christians look forward to sharing the glory of God. We look forward to being transformed into the likeness of Christ. Sometimes we think the change in our life should be instantaneous and miraculous. But such miraculous transformations don’t take place in this life. We get the full glory of God only in the world to come. But we get bits of it in this life. Paul says in another place, “All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”6 That’s happening now! As the Spirit of Christ lives in us, we become more and more like him day by day. And in the world to come, the transformation will be complete. St. John says, “We are God’s children now, and it doesn’t yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him.”7
Now, just a word of encouragement as we close. You may be saying to yourself, “I believe all this, but nothing wonderful has happened to me. I wish I had a story to tell like Sawat. I wish I could see some difference taking place in my life. But my life is so dull. I don’t know if my faith is real. What’s wrong with me?”
It’s true that some few of us experience God’s grace in dramatic ways. But most of us don’t. Does that mean that nothing is going on and our experience is unreal? Does that mean that no change has taken place? Let’s not be too quick to make such a conclusion.
A young woman I knew named Sue went to a Christian youth camp for a week one summer. The camp was tremendous, and while she was there, she committed her life to Christ. But then after she went home as the weeks passed and school started, she began to worry. She read her Bible, she went to church, she prayed, but nothing seemed to be happening. She wondered if what she had experienced at the camp was real.
One evening her parents had a dinner party. Sue left the table to go into the kitchen, and while she was there, she overheard one of the dinner guests ask, “What’s this camp that Sue went to last summer?”
And she heard her mother reply, “Oh, it was marvelous. The best thing that ever happened to Sue. You should see the difference it has made in her life!”
Sue couldn’t believe what she was hearing! She did not realize that there was anything different about her because of her commitment to Christ, but her parents noticed it!
Spurgeon once said, “Care more about a grain of faith than a ton of excitement!” Because it’s that grain of faith, that faith no larger than a mustard seed, that causes lives to change. We sometimes grow in spurts, but most of the time our growth is very slow and hardly noticeable. But we do grow! And that growth does change us. And that change in our lives, individually and collectively in the Body of Christ, is what changes the world.