Sermon Title: Justified by Faith to Live by Faith

 By

 John Orlando

Jul 26, 2009, Voice of the Gospel Mission Church , Middletown , NY  

Text:  Gal 2:11-21. 

Background:  The last time I preached here, we saw that there were false teachers known as Judaizers who infiltrated churches that the apostle Paul had started in the region of Galatia .  They were teaching that for a person to be right with God, faith in Christ alone was not enough; a person also had to do the works of the Law of Moses.  So Paul writes to the churches of Galatia , and says that anyone that would dare preach or teach this false Gospel should be cursed by God.  Moving on in chapter 1 we read of Paul’s personal history and conversion, and then down into chapter 2 we read of his meeting with the apostles in Jerusalem and their subsequent recognition of his ministry and apostolic authority.

Read Text, Pray

Intro

            Recently I read an article about a High School in Mississippi that has segregated proms.  In other words, Blacks and Whites who attend the same High School nevertheless go to separate proms even though segregation was outlawed in 1954.  But the reason that these proms could still be segregated was because they were organized by parents, not the school.  Now, the Black proms were never segregated. White students could always go to the Black proms, but they never do because of fear.  One person said that “some white students were frightened of what their families might do if they were friends with black students.”[1]  

            And we see something similar to this going on in or text today. The apostle Peter, who was a Jew, didn’t want other Jews from Jerusalem to see him eating with Gentiles, because this was thought to be a violation of the Law of Moses.   

            Yet, even though Peter knew that the Gospel had destroyed all barriers between Jew and Gentile, when he saw other Jews approaching him, he separated himself from the Gentiles—he stopped living in a way that was consistent with the truth of the Gospel because he was afraid of what others might think about him. 

            So the apostle Paul confronts Peter, and reminds him that the Gospel is something that changes the way we live.  And the transforming reality of our text today is that: We are justified by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone so that we might live our lives by faith in Jesus Christ alone. There are 2 points we’ll look at today: the Core of the Gospel; and the Control of the Gospel.

I.  The Core of the Gospel: The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news that God has determined to save sinners through the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that all who turn from their sins and trust Christ alone to save them will have eternal life.  Now, there are a number of foundational truths that must be believed related to the Gospel: The Trinity; Jesus is fully God and man; Jesus’ substitutionary death on cross; His bodily resurrection. However, the false teachers that Paul confronted believed all of those things, yet Paul says they were preaching a false Gospel.   

            So we must ask the question, what is the core, or the very heart and center of the Gospel, that if it be denied, we no longer have the “Good News” of the Gospel?[2]  Well, when Paul confronts Peter, he tells him in very specific terms just what the core of the Gospel is.  Look at v. 16.  Paul says “we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.”  

            Paul here tells us clearly that the core of the Gospel is the simple truth that justification is by faith in Jesus Christ alone, and not by the works of the law.  And this raises the question: what is this doctrine of justification all about? What does “justification” mean?           

            The term “justification” is a legal term. It has to do with the law and issues of justice, guilt, and righteousness.  One way to think about it is to just think about our legal system here in our country.  When a person is accused of breaking the law, he’s brought before the Judge.  After the Judge reviews all the evidence, he then renders a verdict of guilty or not guilty.  If the person is found guilty, the Judge then sentences the person to the appropriate punishment.     

            The doctrine of Justification works pretty much the same way.  God is the Supreme Judge of the Universe who has given us His law, such as in the 10 commandments, and because He is holy and perfect and just, He requires that we obey His law perfectly in word, thought, and deed, and if we don’t—if we are found guilty of having broken His law at any point—we must suffer the penalty and punishment that Justice demands.[3]   

            But how did this all come about?  Well, to answer that question we need to go back to the beginning, to our first parents, Adam and Eve.  It was there, in the Garden of Eden that God entered into a covenant of works with Adam.[4] In that covenant, God promised life to Adam and his descendants, upon the condition of perfect and continuous obedience to God’s law.  So, God required perfect righteousness. If Adam met that requirement, man would live forever.  But if God’s law was broken at any point, he would suffer the penalty of physical and spiritual death, meaning that man would be alienated from God, under God’s curse forever.      

            Well, as we all know, Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s law by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  And when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they plunged themselves and all of their descendants after them—us—into a state of sin and misery and condemnation. And so now everyone born after Adam has inherited both the guilt of Adam’s first sin, as well as a corrupted sinful nature.  And what this means is that man’s entire being:  his mind, emotions, will, has been radically corrupted to the core by sin.  We are conceived in sin, born in, and we are slaves of sin; sin dominates and controls everything we do; all of our desires, all of our choices, and all of our actions.  Man is, as the Scriptures make clear, spiritually dead and blind and deaf to the things of God so that he is unable to obey God’s law, nor is he able to respond savingly to the Gospel apart from God’s grace.  This may sound harsh, but listen God’s Word:

 Psalm 51:5 “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.”

Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked…”

John 6:65 Jesus said: “…no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.”

John 8:34  Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.”

Romans 3:10-12 "There is none righteous, no, not one; There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside…There is none who does good.."

Rom 8:7 ^“the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so.”

Ephesians 2:1-3  “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins...Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.”

             I know we don’t hear about this very often especially on so-called Christian TV, and there are many other Scriptures that could be mentioned.  But we need to hear the bad news, and just how serious our dilemma is before a Holy God before we will ever understand the Good News of the Gospel!  And the bad news is that even though we are born in sin and incapable of keeping God’s law, the Scriptures teach that God’s requirements haven’t changed.  He still requires perfect obedience to His law.   

            Some people might think that this isn’t fair and that God should lower standards, because if not, all people would be doomed.  But you see, this objection fails to understand 2 things:  it fails to understand who God is, and it fails to under the purpose God’s law.  In terms of who God is, God is absolutely holy, and perfect, and just, so, God can’t lower His standards because if He did, God would no longer be holy, or perfect, or just; He would cease being who He is! God’s law has been broken, and Justice must be satisfied.  Secondly, the purpose of God’s law was not show us that we have the ability to keep it and that by our law keeping we might climb the ladder of our good works into Heaven!  The whole point of God’s law is to show us that we can’t get to heaven by keeping the law, because the law has confined all under sin.  The law only reveals just have far short of God’s glory I actually fall.  It shows me that I am doomed, and that I am in desperate need of Savior!  

            As you all know, I am currently attending seminary, and I remember this past semester, I took a quiz, and out of 21 possible points, I got 20½!  That’s 98%, an A+!  But let’s suppose for a moment that I had to get 100% in order to pass?  As good as my score was I would have failed.  And now let’s suppose that I had to get a score of 100% on every quiz and every test that I ever had to take, and that if I failed any single quiz or test, I would be kicked out of school, because the standards of the school is that only those who possess a perfect score can ever remain there.

            This captures a little bit of our dilemma before God.  Because God is absolutely holy and perfect, He requires nothing less than 100% perfection. 99.9% isn’t good enough.  God’s standard is absolute 100% perfection. And the kicker for us (as if we haven’t kicked enough already!) is that not only is achieving a score of 100% with God impossible in terms of keeping God’s law, but, when we factor in all of the ways we break God’s commandments in word, thought and deed, our score is actually in the negatives.  And the problem is that there is absolutely nothing we can do in and of ourselves to make it better.  As a matter of fact, our situation only gets worse for us with each passing sin that we commit:  our sin debt just keeps getting higher and higher, and we are just storing up wrath for the Day of Judgment (Rom 2:5).   

            Do you feel the weight of this?  Do you really grasp just how horrifying our situation is before the face of a holy God? (PAUSE) Most of us don’t. We’re masters at distraction. We do anything we can just so that we don’t have to contemplate the horror of standing before an absolutely holy God with nothing between us and His justice and wrath.  But, the inevitable plight for every human being is that we’re all going to die, and after that, we’re going to face the Judge.  These things are frightening.  And frankly, they should be.  

            But, by God’s grace, this is not the whole story!  God, in His grace, was pleased to make a second covenant, called the covenant of grace.[5]  In this covenant God freely offers sinners life and salvation through faith in Jesus Christ alone.  But in order for that to happen, Divine Justice still had to be met.  God’s justice requires perfect obedience to His law, and demands that those who break His law must suffer the penalty due their sin.  And so Jesus comes and fulfills everything that God requires, and He succeeds where Adam and we failed:  He obeys God’s law perfectly on our behalf.   

            But not only this, Jesus also pays the penalty for our law-breaking. So when we trust in Jesus Christ alone to save us, we are forgiven because Jesus has paid the penalty for all of our sins on the cross, and Jesus’ perfect record of law-keeping—His righteousness—is credited to our account.  And this is what the doctrine of justification is all about. The Westminster Shorter Catechism really sums it beautifully when it states that justification is “an act of God’s free grace, wherein He pardons all our sins, and accepts us as righteous in His sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”   

            So, there are four things we need to see here:  first, justification is act of God of God.  In other words, this is something that God does; it is something that God declares about us—we are totally passive.  Secondly, it is an act of God’s free grace.  In other words, we don’t deserve it, and we can’t earn it; it is not according to our works, as Paul has made crystal clear in our text.  thirdly, in justification, God pardons us of all of our sins, past, present and future.  So, we stand before the Judge, and He pronounces as not guilty.  Now as wonderful as that is, if we are merely pronounced as “not guilty,” we would still not have eternal life.  Remember, Adam and Eve weren’t guilty before they sinned, yet, they still didn’t have eternal life—they needed to have a positive record of perfect righteousness because that’s what God requires for us to be in His presence.

            And this is precisely what we have now in Christ.  Which takes me to the fourth thing to see:  Not only are we declared “not guilty”, but, we have a positive righteousness before God.  We have the righteousness of Jesus Christ credited to our account, and God now declares as righteous, that is, He looks at us as though we have kept His law perfectly in word, thought, and deed, because Jesus’ record of perfect obedience is now ours forever.   

            Maybe this illustration will help us get a picture of what God has done for us:  Let’s suppose for a moment that every detail of my life: all of my thoughts, words, and deeds; everything that I have ever done and ever sin I’ve ever committed is recorded in this book, which we’ll just call my Record Book of Sins.  What God did was that He took my Record Book of Sins, and placed it on Christ on the cross, so that Christ paid the full penalty for all of my sins, past, present and future. But that’s not all.  God also now gives me a new book, and stamped on the front cover of that book is “Forgiven and Righteous in Christ Forever.”  This is the book that I possess right now, and when I do stand before the Supreme Judge of the Universe, He will have before Him that book, and it will be on the basis of that book that I will be judged, and the judgment will be “not guilty” and “righteous” and He will say 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” (Matt 25:34)

             And so, we have seen then that the core of the Gospel, is that Justification, or being right with God, is by grace alone, through faith alone, in and because of Jesus Christ alone, and not by our own works.  But now we must ask, what difference does this truth make in my every day life? This takes me our 2d point:

II. The Control of the Gospel: When the apostle Paul confronted the apostle Peter, the problem wasn’t that he and the others with him were denying the Gospel by their words; rather, they were denying the Gospel by their actions.  So when Paul confronts Peter he reminds him about the truth of the Gospel, and how it is to affect how we live our lives.  Look at vv 19-20. Paul says: “For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if justification were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.”  

            Paul’s point is that in Christ he has a new identity which defines everything about him, and he’s not about to compromise that for anyone.  Paul identifies himself so closely with Christ and His work that he says here in v. 19 that he has been crucified with Christ.  In other words, Paul is saying that he is completely united to Christ in His death and resurrection, and because of this intimate union with Christ, he has been set free both from the penalty and condemnation of the law, as well from the bondage of trying to earn God’s favor on the basis of keeping the law.   

            And all of this directly affects how he lives his everyday life.  Paul says that the life that he lives, he lives by faith in the Son of God.  In other words, Paul doesn’t live his life as if he is trying to earn God’s favor or acceptance through the works of the law.  Instead, Paul says that he lives his life trusting and resting in Jesus Christ, the one who delivered him from the curse of the law, and the one whose obedience to the law has been credited to Paul’s account.   

            And then Paul just hammers home his point in concluding his thoughts to Peter when says in verse 21:  “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if justification were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.”  In other words, if we live as though our right standing and acceptance with God depended on our own performance and good works, instead of on God’s grace and the work of Christ on our behalf, then there would be no need for God’s grace, and the horrible death of Jesus on the cross would have been an absolute waste.     

            But lest we come down too hard on the apostle Peter, the fact is that this truth that Paul is speaking about is very difficult for all of us to grasp.  You see, many us think that the Gospel is only something that we preach to unbelievers so that they might be saved.  And after we’re saved, we put the Gospel on the shelf, and then the hard work of the Christian life begins.  In other words, the common view that most of us have is that initial salvation, or justification, is by the Gospel and the grace of God, but sanctification, that is, the life that we live as Christians and our growth in Christ, is all by the works of the law and dependent totally upon my performance, and we live as if we need to earn God’s favor and acceptance.[6]  So for example, you begin to think that if you do certain things, then God is going to bless you….If you give more money, if you go to church more, if you read your bible more, if you do a lot of good works, then God will accept you and be pleased with you, and you can fully expect to receive only the best from God.   Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do all of those things.  We should!  The problem though is that we end up doing those things and looking to those things as the basis of our acceptance and favor with God.  Our faith then turns away from Christ and what He has done for us, to what we are doing, to our own performance and our own good works.  We begin to put our trust in the things that we do instead of in Christ, and the Christian life becomes something that is based entirely on our performance and how well we perform whatever list of do’s and don’ts that we create.  And then, we begin judge other Christians to see if they measure up to our standards of self-righteousness, and if they don’t we puff ourselves up, thinking that we are the spiritual giant, while the others are spiritual weaklings.   

            Dr. Greg Johnson really captures the truth of this when he says:  “There are two religions calling themselves…Christianity today: Strength Christianity and Weakness Christianity. Strength Christianity is that religion which places both feet squarely on the Bible and proclaims, “I am strong. I sought the Lord. I’m a believer…I read my Bible and pray every single day. I’m for God!” Weakness Christianity, by contrast, places both knees squarely on the Bible and says, “I am weak, but the Lord has sought me. I believe, but help now my unbelief. I fail and am broken by my continued sinfulness. Have mercy on me, Lord…for apart from you I can do nothing. Those who pursue Strength Christianity will never find joy in God, for they will never find God. Our Father refuses to be approached in that manner. They will find only increasing religious pride and secret hardness of heart. On the outside, they will project a picture of righteousness. They’ll have it all together. They’ll be spiritual. But only on the outside. For those who stumble across the rare jewel of Weakness Christianity, however, there is provision beyond what we can possibly imagine. Our suffering, our failures, our weaknesses and disappointments all gain an incredible spiritual significance. God never says he’ll be glorified in our religious accomplishments. But he does promise that his power will be made perfect in our weakness.”[7] 

            So the Gospel is not just for unbelievers, it is for believers, because as believers, we will never cease being weak and needy people.  And this is what Paul makes clear when he says that the life that he now lives, he lives by faith in Christ.   

            But what does it mean to live by faith in Christ?   

It means that we live recognizing that in and of ourselves, we are weak and needy sinners who left to ourselves deserve nothing except the wrath of God for our sins.   

It means that we recognize that apart from Christ we can do nothing.   

It means that we look away from ourselves and live with an absolute reliance upon Christ and His work on our behalf.   

            And here’s the thing:  when we stop trying to impress God with our good works, and we live trusting in Jesus Christ alone; we will obey God’s commandments.  We will pursue holiness.  We will read our bibles.  We will go to church.  We will give money to the church.  We will do good works. When we live by faith in Christ, we will hate our sin, but, we will also rejoice at the truth that all of our sin and all of our guilt was nailed to the cross.   

            And when we live by faith in Christ, we will do all of those things with the right motive.  The motive for doing our good works won’t be so that we can exalt ourselves, or so that we can get something from God.   

            Rather, when we live by faith in Christ, the all consuming passion of our lives will be that God alone would be glorified in all that we do.  When we live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave Himself for us, we will live lives of self-sacrifice and service to others, not to gain acceptance or favor with God, but because we are already accepted and have favor with God.  When we live recognizing that we have been crucified with Christ, we will do things not to get anything from God, but, because we already have everything we could possibly imagine in Christ.  

            And so, we do things that please God, not to gain righteousness, but because we have been declared righteous in His sight.  We do things that please God, not to gain favor with God, but because we already possess the complete favor of God.  We do things that please God, not to get a blessing from God, but to be a blessing to others for God because Christ is our treasure, He is our reward, and in Him we are already blessed beyond measure!             

III. Conclusion

            Well, today, we have seen the Core of the Gospel.  The very heart of the Gospel is that we are right with God forever by God’s free grace, through faith in Jesus Christ alone.  But God has promised to eternal life to everyone who turns from their sins and trusts in Jesus Christ alone for their salvation.  And so the application here is related to a simple question: What are you trusting to get you to heaven?  If you were to die today and God asked you, “Why should I let you into my heaven?” what would you say?  Let me encourage you this day to agree with God, that you’re not perfect; that you are a sinner who needs to be saved.  Turn from whatever it is that you are trusting in for your right standing with God, and place all of your trust in Jesus Christ alone. 

             Next we saw the Control of the Gospel, and the truth that what God has done for us in Christ is to control every area of our lives.  And the application for us today is to realize that we never outgrow the Gospel.  Not only did the Gospel save us, but, it is the Gospel that is needed for our every day lives, and what we need to do is that we need to preach the Gospel to ourselves everyday.   

            In other words, we need to remind ourselves of the wonder of God’s amazing grace, and the incredible work of Christ on our behalf.  We need to remind ourselves that before the Judge, we have been pardoned from all of ours, and are counted as righteous in His sight because of the righteousness of Christ that has been given to us.  We need to remind ourselves of our desperate need for Christ every waking moment of the day.   

            And so let us then meditate on the Good News of the Gospel and how it affects our lives on a daily basis. Are there ways that we may be denying the essence of the Gospel by our actions?   Do we live in a way that we are trusting in our own good works for God’s approval, and we are in turn casting a judgmental on others when they don’t live up to the standard we have created? Let us, with Paul, say that the life I now I live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.  I do no set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness comes by the law, then Christ died in vain.

             We are justified by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone, so let us now live our lives by faith in Jesus Christ alone, taking hold of who we are in Christ, and then living out that all to the glory of God alone.

 Amen.