Romans Message #56 September 6, 2009

Romans Message #56 September 6, 2009


The Believer’s Assurance (pt. 3)
Romans 5:6-11

As we begin this study I would like to read to you our church’s statement of faith regarding what we believe about the eternal security of the true believer in Christ.

We believe and teach that all who possess true saving faith are eternally secure in Christ and unable to lose their salvation. By God's indwelling Spirit, they can never finally nor totally fall away from the state of grace, but will persevere in the faith to the end.

We believe and teach that true believers are in a spiritual warfare and due to our remaining corruptions may fall into grievous sins. However, those who profess faith but continue to live in sin and disobedience to Christ without repentance, and who fail to progress in any form of sanctification have no assurance of being born again.


Essentially, what we believe is that not only are we saved by grace apart from any works or merit of our own—we are kept saved—solely by grace and not through our good works, personal merit, or degree to which we have been successful in fighting and defeating sin. In other words, we reject the idea of "performance based" acceptability with God.

There are many within the ranks of the church today who believe that we really are to be in the business of maintaining our own salvation so as to enable God to preserve us in our salvation. These people believe that whereas a person is saved by grace through faith in Christ that their continued state of salvation is kept only by maintaining their acceptability to and with God by their progression in sanctification. In other words, the safest point for the believer in their theological system is at salvation because if you fail to maintain your acceptability with God you will lose your salvation and it cannot be regained. Now if this is true and our salvation is kept and preserved by our own works and efforts in fighting the sinful lusts of our flesh—it would seem to me that the best thing that could happen to the person who has become a believer is that they die or get killed immediately after trusting in Christ so as to not lose their salvation.

And this raises a couple questions in my mind—

Is God more generous in terms of His mercy and grace toward people before they are saved than after they are saved?

Am I saved only by the grace of God apart from any works of righteousness on my part only to be kept saved by works of righteousness on my part?

Is there a sense in which God is more understanding and thus more merciful and gracious to the sinner who first comes to Him for salvation than He is toward that same person after they are saved and have sinned because now that they are saved they know better?

And finally, is it somehow harder for God to keep believers saved than it was to save them in the first place?

Well, these are the questions Paul is going to answer for us in Romans 5:6-10 as he makes the point that:

If God has already done the most difficult thing—which is to justify and reconcile unworthy rebellious sinners to Himself—how much more can He be depended upon to accomplish the easier thing—which is to keep us who have been justified and reconciled to Himself and are in a relationship with Him through Christ—saved?!

Now, before digging into our text, lets review for just a moment. Paul’s whole point in Romans 5 is to teach us about the assurance of our salvation. And he does this before he ever begins to talk to us about our sanctification and our role in that process of becoming more and more like Christ. And the reason why he does this and puts assurance before sanctification is because those who do not have the assurance of their salvation will always struggle with growing in holiness and thus becoming more and more sanctified.

You see, when you put sanctification—the process of pursuing holiness before the experience of having the assurance of your salvation—you make the mistake of creating a situation in which your assurance of salvation is based upon your performance rather than your justification in which God has already declared you righteous and in fact as righteous as He is because He gave you Christ’s righteousness. And when you fall into the trap of trusting in your performance as a believer to keep you saved or at least acceptable to God--every time you sin or struggle with some besetting temptation or just don’t feel very holy and godly—you think you are not saved and therefore to fix this problem you think you need to get saved again, which results in you never ever growing to maturity in the Christian life because you just keep reverting back to the starting point of your faith and never growing beyond that point.

In essence, you will never learn to trust God for and in your sanctification if you are continually failing to trust Him for and in your salvation, which is evident every time you—because you are struggling with a lack of assurance of your salvation—walk the aisle, pray the prayer, and trust in Christ again. The problem with this kind of thinking and behavior is that until we are assured of our salvation we will never truly be equipped to battle our sinful lusts biblically and thus effectively so as to defeat our sin habits and see them lying at or feet dead.

Putting your spiritual performance before your assurance so that you don’t feel like you are saved unless you are performing well spiritually is to be trusting in yourself and your own merits and your own strength and your own ability rather than in Christ’s. It is a form of “works righteousness” only instead of applying it to your salvation you are applying it to your sanctification. And let me just give you this warning—this kind of “works righteousness” thinking and living is actually much more indicative of an unsaved state than struggling with sin issues that are getting the best of you on every turn.

Our sanctification like our salvation is all of grace and yes whereas we do cooperate with God in our sanctification so as to put away sin and grow in godliness this cooperation process is still all of grace so that He gets all of the glory. It is not a process in which we are the driving force behind our own spiritual growth and perfection. In fact, look at what Paul had to say about this very thing in Galatians 3:3 to a group of believers that were thinking it was their responsibility to keep themselves saved and also their job to sanctify themselves.

So you see that this whole argument about losing our salvation or about us perfecting ourselves in sanctification just does not square with Scripture at all. And it all starts—this false teaching and unbiblical doctrine that the true believer can somehow lose his or her salvation—all begins with making our progress in sanctification the basis for our continued acceptance with God and thus our continued state of salvation and thus the basis for the assurance of our salvation. Which again, is why when Paul details our whole salvation process—he places the topic of the assurance of our salvation before the topic of our sanctification. Thus, the reason why he wrote Romans 5 before Romans 6 and 7.

So with all this in our minds lets look at Romans 5:6-10 in which, again, Paul is arguing:

If God has already done the most difficult thing—which is to justify and reconcile unworthy rebellious sinners to Himself—how much more can He be depended upon to accomplish the easier thing—which is to keep us who have been justified and reconciled to Himself and are in a relationship with Him through Christ—saved?!

1. The Harder Thing God Accomplished On Our Behalf. (6-8)

Paul’s big point here in verses 6-8 is that if God loved us enough to send His Son Jesus Christ to the cross on our behalf in order to purchase our redemption, justify us, and reconcile us to Himself when we were not even interested in being justified or reconciled to Him and were in fact living in outward rebellion and living out our hostility to God as ungodly sinners—Then surely once we are no longer any of those things because of the grace and mercy of God in salvation—He can be counted on to finish the job and bring us safely home to Heaven at the end of our lives. In other words, if God loved us so much as unsaved sinners why would He love us less as saved sinners?

And perhaps it would be helpful for us to see just how God did see us when He first saved us. Verse 6 describes us as being “helpless” and “ungodly” whereas, verse 8 states we were “yet sinners” and verse 10 describes us as having been the “enemies” of God. So before our salvation God saw us as “helpless, ungodly, sinners, who were His enemies”. And yet He saved us anyway.

Now it would be good for us to examine these descriptors a little more in depth I think to get the full and complete picture of what God saw when He looked at us in our unsaved state. The word, “helpless” really needs some further clarification to really understand what Paul means in using it. It is from the Greek word, asthenon, which basically means “without strength, power, energy, or ability”. The object of this lack of ability is to be found within the context that the word is used. Thus, what Paul is saying in using this word is that before we were saved we did not have the ability nor even the energy or the desire if you will to do anything about our lost and condemned state before God. We were simply powerless to remedy our state as condemned ungodly sinners before God.

And in God’s sight—ungodly sinners we were. The word in Greek for “ungodly” is asebon, which means “to be without fear for God” so as to purposely live your life doing what God has forbidden with no fear of God and God’s response whatsoever. It basically denotes an attitude of total irreverence and disrespect for God. The word “sinners” as used in verse 8 comes from the Greek word, hamartolon, which means “a deviant”—one who has continually and consistently missed God’s mark of perfection and glory in life.

then the word “enemies” in verse 10 is from ecthroi and means “hateful, hostile, enmity, or enemy”. In other words, we were the hateful, hostile, enemies of God. And this is the condition in which God found us when He saved us.

We were not righteous people. We were not good people. We were not people with good intentions toward God. We were not people with a desire for God or even a true interest in God. We were in rebellion to God and could care less what He thought about it or just might do about it. We did not fear God. We had no respect for God.
And thus, we were condemned before God as completely deviant souls living in total rebellion to Him. Yet, in this condition—this hopeless condition that we were in—God sent His Son to die for us so as to justify us so as to reconcile us to Himself.

And this work of God through Christ on our behalf as we lived in this condition of hopeless condemnation not only was the demonstration of God’s love for us but still is the demonstration of how much God loved us and loves us still. The word “demonstrates” as is translated in the NASV is correct. God sending Christ to die for us is the demonstration that God loves us right now.

Listen, the hard thing in our salvation—if there can be a hard thing for God—was to have saved us when we were in this state of deplorable hopeless condemnation. And that is why when Paul transitions to verse 9, he begins it by saying “Much More Then” and then he proceeds to tell us what the easier thing for God is.

Let’s look.


2. The Easier Thing God Will Accomplish On Our Behalf. (9-10)

Paul makes the point here in verse 9 that if God sent Jesus to die for us in our deplorable condemnation as described in verses 6-8 then now that we are no longer in that deplorable condition but rather are now justified before God—There is absolutely no reason to think that we shall not be ultimately saved from His wrath. In fact, Paul rather emphatically states that “we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Christ.” There is no doubt about it. Paul is as dogmatic here as he is anywhere in the New Testament.

If God justified you when you were a godless deviant who could care less about Him and were living your life in rebellion toward Him why would He love you any less now when you are not in that condition but are in fact declared righteous in His sight?!
And you see, this is where it is so very important to understand the new condition you are in as a believer. You are no longer without a desire for God, you are no longer considered a sinful deviant by God, you are no longer a rebellious traitor in God’s eyes, and you are no longer His enemy. You are now God’s friend—look at verse 10.

Paul writes: that if when we were God’s enemies who lived in a state of hatred and hostility toward Him—He reconciled us to Himself through the death of Christ—now that we are reconciled—Which is to be made “the friends” of God rather than the enemies of God—There is absolutely no reason to believe that we shall not be ultimately saved from the wrath of God which is reserved only for His enemies. “Much More then”, Paul writes—“we shall be saved”. And notice that the text says, “we shall be saved by His life.” In other words, when we were the very enemies of God—Jesus’ death on our behalf reconciled us to God so that we are not His enemies any more.

And now that we have been reconciled to God—our ultimate future salvation from the wrath of God is even further guaranteed by the fact that Christ’s life has been and is being and will forever be lived on our behalf and as our substitute as believers, so that everything that is true of Christ is His perfect humanity is true of us—so that our salvation is not guaranteed by our performance but by His performance on our behalf. According to Galatians 2:20 the believer’s old man—that is his old sin-loving, sin-treasuring, and sin-adoring self was crucified with Christ so that who the believer was in his flesh before being justified by Christ is dead. In fact, Paul makes the point that as a believer—the only life living in him that God sees is Christ. So that, in salvation, the believer is given a totally new identity which is Christ. And since Christ is the only life in the believer that God recognizes what the believer does in the flesh, for good or bad, does not change his status with God.

Listen, regardless of how well you perform in the flesh or how badly you perform in your flesh—in your flesh—you are dead—no longer alive to God thus what you do in your flesh has no bearing upon who you are in the sight of God. If you are a true believer—Christ is your true and only identity and God accepts you and will always accept you because He accepts and will always accept Christ.

CONCLUSION

I don’t know about you….but I would find it very difficult to celebrate and rejoice in a salvation that was only possible or even probable. Given the possibility, irregardless of how slight, of losing my salvation because I didn’t tow the line or measure up and being sentenced to hell for all of eternity away from the presence of God would weigh too heavy on my soul to celebrate anything. I would be on “pins and needles” until I died and found out where I am going to be for all of eternity. In other words, a salvation I am not sure of and am not secure in, which can be lost at any moment and then never regained—is not a salvation I can celebrate. And this is why Paul ends this section the way He does in verse 11. Referring back to verse 2 where we rejoice in the certain expectant hope of experiencing and enjoying the glory of God rather than the wrath of God—And referring back to verse 3 where we rejoice in our trials because they are God’s tools to confirm the authenticity of our faith—Paul now adds the third object we are to celebrate and rejoice in as Christians—and the object is God Himself because—through our Lord Jesus Christ we have now received “the reconciliation” with Him. In other words, the state of being completely and totally reconciled to and with God is not a future event we are hoping for—it is already ours right now.

We are not waiting to be reconciled to God through our good works as believers—we are already reconciled to God and in a state of complete reconciliation with God right now because Jesus Christ went to the cross and paid for all of our sins—every single one of them—thus there is nothing we can do in the future to jeopardize our salvation that God has not already taken care of at the cross.

So, if you are a believer in Christ Jesus—relax and celebrate not only your salvation but the God of your salvation as well!