Bible Talks - Family Church (9:45am)
Called to Glory
Sunday, 21 August 2005
Feedback:
Share using:
Tweet
Post this to:
Facebook · Delicious · Google · Twitter · Email
(suggest another share link)
In Romans 1:17 the Apostle Paul quotes the prophet Habakkuk "The righteous will live by faith." Probably a better way of putting it that brings out the meaning is “The person who through faith is righteous, will live”. Well what do we mean to be righteous through faith and what do we mean live.
The clear teaching of the bible, and I hope we’ve been teaching clearly, is that our own righteousness is like filthy rags, hardly something we can present to God when he asks us why he should let us into his heaven. None of us can claim to be without sin. It doesn’t matter if we’re nice, squeaky clean, religious people, or something out of the pits of human depravity, none of us measures up to God's standard of perfect righteousness which is the entry requirement for heaven.
What we need from God isn’t justice, it’s mercy and the Apostle Paul describes to us in his letter to the Romans how God has demonstrated his love, mercy and grace by sending his Son, Jesus, the only truly righteous person, to pay the penalty we deserve, to satisfy the demands of the justice and righteousness of God. All we have to do is to respond with faith in Jesus as our Lord and Saviour and we’ll be counted as if we have the same perfect righteousness as Jesus.
Now I want to talk about the bit about living. I want to talk about the nature of that eternal life that we have through faith in Jesus. To do this I’ll be looking at selected bits from Romans chapters 5 to 7 and there in more detail at part of Chapter 8 which has just been read for us. It would help if you can have your Bible open as we consider what Paul says to us.
Firstly In Romans 5:1 Paul says, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” He is stating that the New Life we have in Christ means freedom from the wrath of God. He repeats it in Rom 5:9, “Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him!” It’s important to realize that when we talk about being saved, what we’re saved from is God’s wrath against the sinner.
The peace we have with God isn’t just an inner sense of calm or tranquility, it is rather an ending of strife, disunity and enmity between us and God. Not that God has been our enemy, plotting and actively pursuing our destruction but rather we were God's enemies. We both consciously and unconsciously went against God's proper rule in our lives. We are like rebels, being pardoned and welcomed back into God's kingdom and once there it is right and proper that we obey the laws of the kingdom. Not only are we are no longer rebels, but we are beloved children, restored into the family of God and therefore enjoying peace and protection not only as citizens of God's kingdom but as children of God himself.
Paul points out that as we are the physical descendants of Adam so we share in the heritage of the consequences of Adam’s sinful rebellion against God. We have inherited an innate tendency towards rebellion against God, and this innate tendency results in our rebellion against God's proper authority and that’s what sin is all about. Us parents see this very clearly when we have children. We don’t have to teach them to be naughty. We spend all out time trying to teach them to be good. When we stand condemned because of sin. It’s not Adam’s sin were condemned for, it’s our sin because like Adam we’ve all sinned. But if we have faith in Jesus Christ, then just as Christ is righteous then we are justified or made righteous. So Paul says in Rom 5:19 “For just as through the disobedience of the one man (that is Adam) the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man (that is Christ) the many will be made righteous.”
Because of our sin, like Adam we became subject to death. Genesis chapter 5 brings this out clearly as it goes through the genealogy down from Adam. “When so and so had lived this many years, he became the father of such and such. 10And after he became the father of such and such, so and so lived a further so many years and had other sons and daughters. 11Altogether, so and so lived a whole lot of years, and then he died. When we read the genealogies in our amazement as just how many years some of those guys lived we forget the main point of the genealogy. Each one died.
Secondly from Chapter 6 of Romans Paul states that this new life we have in Christ means freedom from sin. The Chapter opens with Paul saying Rom 6:1-2 “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” and in Rom 6:11 “In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
He uses the illustration of slavery to show what he means. If we are slaves of somebody we must obey them. He says that this principle applies whether we are slaves to sin which leads to death or slaves to obedience which leads to righteousness. Which we spoke about a few weeks ago.
When Paul speaks about freedom from sin he’s not saying that when we become Christians we somehow become sinlessly perfect. If we read on into the end of chapter 7 we see that having become Christians we are actually engaged in the struggle with sin. Before then we didn’t even know the hold sin had on us, but now we’re in the thick of the fight. Paul likens it to a battle going on within himself. A battle between his old sinful nature, which he calls the flesh, and his new Godly nature which he calls the Spirit. When he tries to do the right thing he finds himself doing exactly the opposite. He says in Rom 7:21 “I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Then he gives an exultant cry as he realizes the truth of his freedom from sin through his faith in Jesus Christ. “Thanks be to God--through Jesus Christ our Lord! “
So our freedom from sin is a progressive thing. First we’re feed from the guilt of sin, we’re no longer condemned by it. Then we’re feed to fight against sin, and we’re given the power of the Holy Spirit with which to fight and finally, at the return of Christ we freed from even the possibility of sin.
The third great freedom that Paul states comes with this new life we have in Christ is freedom from the Law. I don’t mean that we’re not going to have policemen knocking on our doors any more or that we can drive down whatever side of the road we like at whatever speed we fancy, or that we don’t have to pay our taxes or we can generally do what we like when we like.
No Paul means something quite different when he says we have freedom from the Law and I think this is the hardest of the four freedoms to understand. You see you might want to say, “If we’re free from the Law, and Paul means God's Law, doesn’t that mean we don’t have to obey the 10 Commandments any more?”
You see what Paul is saying is that when he says we are free from the Law, he means that we’re free from the bondage to the Law. This brings us straight back to that old problem of believing that you’ve got to be good to go to heaven. How good? How do you know if you’re good enough? Well here’s God's Law summed up in the 10C’s and the 2 great commandments. If you can keep that perfectly then you’re good enough to go to heaven. So the hope of heaven becomes a continual struggle to keep the Law. When you finally wake up to the fact that you can’t possibly do it. Well then we can do a number of things:
You can try to change the Law. Rewrite the rules so that they’re easier to keep. I remember when I was a kid playing soccer. Rule no 1 says that you’re not allowed to touch the ball with your hand unless you’re the Goalie. There we’re always some kids who changed that rule to mean that as long as you kept your fist clenched it was OK. The Pharisees of Jesus’ time were like this (remember Paul was a Pharisee before he became a Christian) they took God's Law and turned it into a whole lot of little rules and
regulations on how to live every moment of your life. There were rules for getting out of bed in the morning, rules for preparing your food, rules for eating it, rules about washing the dishes, rules for walking and talking and working and sleeping. Rules for building houses and visiting your friends and going to church and staying at home.
You name it they had a rule for it and if you expected to go to heaven then you’d better obey the lot. And of course if you believed that you did a pretty good job of obeying the rules then obviously you were better than those rotten tax collectors and other sinners. They didn’t like it when Jesus told them that if they were trying to get to heaven by obeying the rules then if you broke just one, just once, then you may as well have broken the lot because if you weren’t 100% absolutely perfect then you were going to hell anyway.
Other people react to this demand for perfection by saying, well I’m better than him, or her or I’m not as bad as Jack-the-Ripper. Paul says that freedom from the Law means that we are free from the condemnation that comes from the Law. The Law, properly used sets before us God's standard for living. If we are honest with ourselves we realize that there’s no way we can live up to it. When we realize that we should turn to God seeking his mercy and forgiveness. And that comes through faith in Christ. When we do this we’re free from the burden of the Law. Of course it’s still the standard we should live by but instead of spending our lives preoccupied with trying to meet its demands we can use it as a guide for living. And if we fail then all we have to do is confess, repent and receive God's forgiveness through Christ.
Fourthly and lastly Paul states that this new life we have in Christ means freedom from death. Rom 8:1 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.” Rom 8:11 “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in
you.” Another way the Bible puts this is that death no longer has dominion over us., we can thumb our noses at death because we have the assurance from God that though our bodies may die we will receive the resurrection to new life just like Jesus did. The gift of eternal life has already been given to us, we are already living it and so physical death no longer has a hold over us, there is nothing left to fear about death. We may be apprehensive about some of the less pleasant ways for our bodies to die, but death itself no longer has a hold over us. The eternal death that is the penalty for sin no longer applies to us.
The new life that Jesus and Paul and the other Apostles and Christians down through the ages talk about has several aspects.
It is life now, lived to the full, in the light of those four freedoms. It started at the moment of conversion when we were “Born again” to use the term Jesus used to Nicodemus. Jim Packer in his book “I Want To Be A Christian” says, “When the Apostles’ Creed speaks of ‘the life everlasting’ it means, not just endless existence (demons and lost souls have that), but the final joy into which Jesus entered and which he promised and prayed that his followers would one day share......Being with Jesus is the essence of Heaven; it is what the life everlasting is all about.” .... What shall we do in heaven? Not lounge around! – but worship, work, think and communicate, enjoying activity, beauty, people and God. First and foremost however, we shall see and love Jesus, our Saviour, Master and friend.”
The Bible doesn’t have a lot else to say about what heaven is like. It speaks mainly in symbols, pictures and metaphors. To a people living in a desert area it’s a stream of living water. It’s a fabulous city with streets paved with gold, buildings of precious stones and gates made from massive single pearls. One thing is clear is that it is where God and Jesus are present with their people. We’re told that’s God’s glory so shines there that there is no need for sun or moon and there is no night.
The bit I like is that we will receive new, resurrection bodies fit for heaven, that don’t have all the aches, pains and illnesses of the ones we’ve got now. We have already been renewed inwardly through faith in Jesus by the processes we call redemption and sanctification. Then we will have bodies to match, linked to the old but different from it. Jim Packer says it’s like trading in your old Ford Prefect for a brand new Rolls Royce.
In the absence of more specific information from the Bible, most of us have mental images of what we think heaven will be like. Unfortunately most of those images are wrong, drawn from medieval art, folk religion, old wives tales (though I reckon old husband tell tall stories as well), popular superstition, all mixed in with a bit of Hollywood and a dash of wishful thinking.
Paul in Philippians 3:20 tells us “our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”
The challenge is there. Do we really, from our hearts, welcome and embrace our promised destiny to be like Christ. For many people. and unfortunately this includes many Christians, their whole identity is found in gratifying the demands of their present physical bodies and the thought of an eternity without them would be nothing but an eternal ache. I Find that I cannot comprehend what it means to have a body like Christ’s. I cannot understand a quality of relationship with everyone in heaven that far transcends the special relationship I have with my wife and other special friends and family. I don’t want to go on forever living the type of limited life I live now.
We can only trust God, trust Jesus and eagerly await the glorious future that Jesus has promised us.
Let us pray.
