THIS SERMON was originally part of the series “What is salvation?” Since it belongs equally well in the series on Romans I am reposting it here for anybody who missed it first time round, or who wants to be reminded of the heart of the gospel Paul preached.

16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

What is salvation? What does it mean to be saved?

I want to explain the gospel message message this morning. And I want to do so by unpacking just a few crucial verses of Romans chapter 3 which lay out what it means to be saved, why we need to be saved, and just how God has saved us.

God’s plan of salvation

21 But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. (Romans 3:21-25 NIV)

For us to understand these verses properly I want to spell out the meaning of a few vitally important words. Righteousness. Sin. Justification. Redemption. Sacrifice of atonement.

First – righrousness. The word righteousness, and the related idea being made righteous, occurs a number of times in this short passage.

Righteousness – how can we be right with God?

21 But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. (NIV)
21 But now God’s way of putting people right with himself has been revealed. It has nothing to do with law, even though the Law of Moses and the prophets gave their witness to it. 22God puts people right through their faith in Jesus Christ. (Good News Bible)

Righteousness is a word which carries different shades of meaning in different places. Righteousness is that purity of character only fully expressed in God Himself, in God’s perfect righteousness and justice. By nature we human beings are not righteous – our lives are spoiled by sin. By nature we are not right with God – we are separated from God. By themselves human beings can never become righteous. But Paul talks here about a righteousness from God. It is not a righteousness which anybody can earn or deserve. It does not come by obeying the Jewish Law or any other set of rules. It is not something anybody can achieve by human effort. This righteousness before God, a right relationship with God, is God’s gift to all who put their trust in Jesus Christ.

The reason we are not righteous, and could never become righteous, is what we looked at last week. The problem of sin.

Humanity’s problem – sin

23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (NIV)
For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. (New Living Translation.)
We thought about the problem of sin last week. There are all kinds of actions and attitudes which we know very well are wrong when we see them in other people, but when WE do them, they’re alright! We can always justify our own actions. We see so clearly faults in other people’s lives which we turn a blind eye to in our own lives.
Last week we saw that the Bible has a word for all these wrong things people say and do and even think. All the selfish acts which hurt us and hurt our fellow human beings. The Bible word for these bad things we do is “sin.”
“Sin” is just a little word with “I” in the middle. And whenever a person puts “I” in the middle of their lives, whenever they focus only on themselves and leave God out, that is sin. We all know what sin is. And we all know that every one of us are sinners! We all know we have done and said and thought things which we should not have done!
Romans 3:10 As it is written: “There is no-one righteous, not even one; 11 there is no-one who understands, no-one who seeks God. 12 All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no-one who does good, not even one.”
23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
If we are honest with ourselves we all know that is true. We have all sinned. We all fall short of God’s standard, which is perfection. And all our sins have consequences.

Sin brings on God’s anger

Romans 1:18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,
Sin makes God angry
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened
This is the essence of sin – neither glorifying God nor giving thanks to Him. Running away from God and hiding from Him. Ignoring God and pretending he doesn’t exist. That is sin.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. … 26 God gave them over to shameful lusts. 28. ….. since they did not think it worth while to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. … they invent ways of doing evil;

“God gave them over!” God gave them up. Human beings abandoned God so God abandoned the people He had created. He let them get on with their evil ways.
So sin brings on God’s anger and leads to God’s judgment. Sin deserves to be punished! God is a just and holy God – and judgment is the inevitable expression of that justice! And sin has other effects as well.

Sin separates us from God – spiritual death

Because God is a holy God whose eyes are too pure to look on sin, human sin separates us from God. That separation is spiritual and it is eternal – it is forever. Because even the littlest sin cuts us off from God forever.

Sin also leads to physical death

God is the source of all life. When sin cuts us off spiritually from God, it also limits our human life. Sin condemns our bodies to die.
From cover to cover the whole Bible is concerned with this one theme. How can sinful human beings escape the judgement of a Holy God? Because God’s standard is perfection – and none of us will live up to that standard!
Acts 17:30 In the past God overlooked .. ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”

How much can I get away with and still get into heaven? Absolutely nothing! Sin makes God angry and brings divine judgment. Sin leads to spiritual death and physical death. ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But the good news is that God in His grace is prepared to forgive a person’s sin and declare them not-guilty.. When a person puts their trust in Christ God gives them a gft of rightousness and this makes them righteous too.

God’s solution – justification

24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. (NIV)
24But by the free gift of God’s grace all are put right with him through Christ Jesus, who sets them free. (Good News Bible)

The English word the New International Version uses for this process of being made righteous is Justification. It simply means “being made just” or being made righteous. When we are justified God makes it “just as if I’d” never sinned. All are sinners. Everybody faces God’s judgment. But those who put their faith in Jesus Christ are declared righteous by God. Their sins are wiped away.

The Good News Bible translates Romans 3 using different words. It translates righteousness as being in a right relationship with God. And it translates justification as being put right with God. Instead of a person being in the wrong, God treats a person as if they are in the right. Because God takes their sin away they can be in a right relationship with God.
21 But now God’s way of putting people right with himself has been revealed. … 22 God puts people right through their faith in Jesus Christ. God does this to all who believe in Christ … 24 But by the free gift of God’s grace all are put right with him through Christ Jesus, who sets them free.

So here is the good news! God brings us into a right relationshio with Himself. And He does so by his grace. It is a free gift we can never earn or deserve. GRACE – God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense. That is the “redemption which came by Christ Jesus,” the freedom which Jesus has provided for us.

Justification is more than pardon. Judgment is getting what we deserve for our sins. Pardon means not getting what we deserve. Justification means God treats us as if we had never sinned. William Barclay wrote, “To say that God justifies the ungodly means quite simply that God in his amazing love treats the sinner as if he was a good man. Again, to put it very simply, God loves us, not for anything that we are, but for what he is.”

The story is told of a man who went abroad for his holidays driving his Rolls Royce. While he was there the car broke down. Understandably miffed, he phoned Rolls Royce who immediately flew one of their mechanics out. The mechanic mended the car and flew home again leaving the man to continue his holiday. But when he got home he was worried just how much that repair was going to cost him, so the man wrote a letter to Rolls Royce to ask how much he owed them. The reply came back promptly. “Dear Sir. There is no record anywhere in our files that anything has ever gone wrong with a Rolls-Royce.”

That is how God sees Christians once they have been put right with him, once they have been justified. As if nothing had ever gone wrong.

So now let’s unpack this wonderful redemption. Just exactly how does God set us free?

Through Christ’s death on the cross

25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. (NIV)
25God offered him, so that by his blood he should become the means by which people’s sins are forgiven through their faith in him. (Good News Bible)
25 God sent him to die in our place to take away our sins. We receive forgiveness through faith in the blood of Jesus’ death. (New Century Version)
25 For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood. (New Living Translation.)

Our forgiveness comes at a terrible price – the death of Christ on the cross. It was not just the execution of one criminal among many. The Bible tells us that Jesus’s death had a spiritual and indeed a cosmic significance. Christ’s death was unique because Jesus Christ was unique – in at least two ways. Jesus was unique because he was more than a man. Jesus was also the Son of God, God Himself born as a human being. And Jesus was also unique because He was completely innocent. He had never done anything wrong. He was without sin. He had never done anything to make God angry. There was nothing in Jesus’s life separating Him from God. He did not deserve any punishment. He had no sin which would cause him to die, spiritually or physically.

So Jesus was innocent. he did not die because of His own sins – he had no sin. Jesus’s death was a sacrifice for sin in the same sense as in the Old Testament so many lambs were sacrificed. As John the Baptist said when He first saw Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” 1 Peter 3:18 explains it this way.
For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.

Jesus’s death was a sacrifice of atonement. Atonement could be rewritten “at one ment”. Jesus’s death brings us back to God and makes us one with God again. And all we need to do is receive by faith what Christ’s death in our place has bought for us.

An evangelist had just finished his open air preaching service and was about to leave when a young man approached him and asked, “What must I do to be saved?” The evangelist replied. “It’s too late!” The inquirer was disappointed. “Don’t say that!” But the evangelist insisted, “It’s too late!” “You want to know what YOU have to do to be saved. It’s too late. The work of salvation is done, completed, finished! It was finished on the cross. YOU can’t do anything. Except receive as a gift by faith what Christ has already accomplished.”

So here again is how Paul explains the heart of the gospel, God’s plan of salvation.

21 But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. (Romans 3:21-25 NIV)

The only question which remains to be answered is, “Are YOU saved?”