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God Demonstrates His Love
God Demonstrates His Love Romans 5:1-21 Key Verse: 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” In the last passage we learned what faith is from Abraham. Like Abraham, we must believe that God justifies sinners through faith alone. As human beings, it is important for us to work hard. However, we cannot earn our way to God. We can only come to God by faith in Jesus. Moreover, like Abraham, we must believe the great promises of God; God wants each one of us to be a father of faith or a mother of prayer for the whole world. Finally, like Abraham, we must believe God who raises the dead. With this faith we must overcome the world and render glory to God. In today’s passage Paul develops his gospel message by explaining the fruits of being justified by faith. It is a wonderful new life with peace, joy and the love of God. Many do not really claim this new life by faith, because they haven’t really taken the time to consider what the Gospel, and God, are really saying. They haven’t really thought about how God has demonstrated His love to us and connected that with Jesus’ command to us. As a result they remain bound by the thoughts and habits of their old life. This does not please God. God sacrificed his one and only Son Jesus Christ so that we may live a new life in him. May God help us to claim this new life by faith. Today let’s learn about this fruitful new life we can have in Christ. First, we have peace with God (1). Look at verse 1. “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ....” We have peace with God as an immediate result of justification. Before having peace with God, we were God’s enemies. The enemies of God cannot hide from God, and they certainly can’t defeat God. The enemies of God experience God’s wrath while on earth, and are doomed to eternal punishment thereafter. This is the real reason that people are anxious, restless, and fearful. Still, most people do not realize what their real problem is. So they seek human solutions that fail. People do all sorts of things in their search for peace: Some people might drink or take drugs, or indulge any physical desire they may have. Other people do things that are less obvious. They may become addicted to shopping, or internet gaming or they may just waste their time watching television. However, whatever they do, they do not taste peace. Instead they taste the restlessness and ever-increasing anxiety of those who are separated from God. However, when we accept Jesus in our hearts as our Savior, God justifies us to be right with God. We are no longer enemies of God. We are no longer under the wrath of God. We are no longer restless wanderers on the earth. We have peace with God. When we have peace with God our souls can truly rest. When we have peace with God, we also have peace with others. Consider the Samaritan woman who met and accepted Jesus at the well. Because of her wayward lifestyle, she had made many enemies in her community. She was outcast by her community and had to go to the well alone because she didn’t want to be with the other ladies and they didn’t want to be with her. One day she met Jesus there all alone. Jesus loved her until she could accept His living water welling up to eternal life in her soul. She was finally satisfied and found peace with God. Then she went back to her community and testified about the love of Jesus to everyone. She became a source of reconciliation with God for her entire community. True peace comes from Jesus. Let’s come to Jesus for peace instead of seeking peace in the world. Second, true hope (2-5). Look at verse 2b. “And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.” Another fruit of faith is true hope in the kingdom of God and this leads to joy. The Greek word that Paul uses here has a slightly different meaning than the English word hope. In the English word there is the sense that we may not receive the thing that we are hoping for or want. In the Greek word that Paul uses here there is no such meaning. If there is something that we hope for out there, this Greek word says that we will get it. Out there, there is God’s glory and His kingdom. As Christians we hope for this and we can be certain that we will get it. This makes the Christian life really joyful. This joy has its root in the hope of the glory of God. Here, “the hope of the glory of God” refers to the restoration of God’s kingdom. More precisely, it refers to the complete transformation of each person into the image of Jesus. We will be like Jesus. We can fully glorify God as Jesus glorified God. This hope gives us real joy. Look at verse 3. “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;” Although Paul has said the Christian life is full of peace and joy, it is not without sufferings. The “s” on the end of “sufferings” indicates that there is not just one suffering, but many sufferings, one after another, continuously, throughout our pilgrimage in this world. To people of the world, suffering is a terrible thing, to be avoided if at all possible. It is really ironic that people of the world expend so much energy and effort to avoid suffering. But to Christians, sufferings are not to be avoided. Sufferings are to be welcomed as ingredients for spiritual growth. Therefore, we can glory or rejoice in sufferings. Why is it so? It is because we know that suffering produces perseverance. Perseverance means to continue to struggle in the midst of adversity, to the end, until it is overcome. Perseverance is highly valued in academics, business, athletics and so on. However, even though perseverance is so highly valued, there are not many people who really persevere. Most ordinary people give up when things are difficult. So they remain average or mediocre. God does want his children to be like that. God gives his children sufferings and helps them to confront them and go through them to the end. God helps his children to go through sufferings one after another until they become strong. Finally, God’s children become strong enough to overcome the world. For example, there is Isaac in the Bible. As the only son of his parents, he could have been spoiled and weak. But God let him experience being offered as a sacrifice on the altar, sparing his life only at the last moment. Later, God allowed fierce Philistines to claim wells that Isaac had dug, driving him out from one fruitful place after another. Through all these sufferings, Isaac did not become weak. He persevered and became strong in his inner man until he overcame the world. This kind of victorious life gives us true joy. Look at verse 4. “...perseverance, character; and character, hope.” Character means that we grow in the image of Jesus Christ. As we persevere through one suffering after another, step by step, the image of Christ is formed in us. We come to have a Christian character. Once again we can look back to the book of Genesis for a good example, Jacob’s son Judah. Because he and his brothers were jealous of their younger brother Joseph, they committed the sin of selling him as a slave to Midianite traders to get rid of him. Afterward, his guilt and shame were unbearable and he went to live among Gentiles. He married a Gentile woman and had three godless sons. The Lord put the two older sons to death. Later, Judah’s wife died. It was unbearable hardship for Judah, brought about because of his sin. But God used it to build his character. After tasting the pain of losing his own precious sons, he could surely understand his father Jacob and how much he had hurt his father by selling Joseph. He repented. When a crucial moment came, Judah offered his own life to save Benjamin. By God’s divine discipline, he grew in the character of Christ. Through his line God sent the Savior Jesus. It is amazing that God helped Judah in such a way. God helps each of his children to form the character of Christ through sufferings. As Christian character is formed in a person, he or she begins to grow in hope. This hope is to be fully restored in the image of Jesus and to inherit the kingdom of God. It is a living hope that fills our hearts with power and joy. Verse 5 says, “And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” This hope does not disappoint us. It is because our hope is in the kingdom of heaven that never perishes, spoils or fades away. Someday all the things of the world will disappear, but the glory of God in the kingdom of God lasts forever. Moreover, as we live in this world, God pours out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit bridges the gap between the hope and reality. The Holy Spirit assures us that God’s hope will be fully realized. This hope is a source of joy in any circumstance, so we can rejoice in our sufferings. Third, God’s love for sinners (5-11). God pours out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. We cannot see the Holy Spirit, but we can feel the love of God when the Holy Spirit enters our hearts. However, our assurance of God’s love does not rest on spiritual experience alone. God demonstrated his love in history through Jesus Christ. Look at verses 6-8. “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” These verses tell us about God’s love for sinners. It is divine; it is God’s love. This love was expressed to us when we were powerless, ungodly sinners and enemies of God. In other words, there was nothing in us that merited this love. It was given unconditionally when we had no strength to give anything back to God. God’s love is beyond comparison to human love. Human beings love those who are attractive and beneficial, but feel burdened by the powerless and we even hate our enemies. In rare cases someone may give his life for a good person. But God sacrificed Jesus, the holy Son of God, for us when we were powerless creatures and acting like His enemies. Jesus’ death on the cross demonstrates God’s love for us. We must know that God’s love is not like human love. God’s love is unconditional and eternal. God never stops loving us. When we accept this love of God we can love ourselves and others. Whenever we remember the cross of Jesus we can renew God’s love in our hearts and live in God’s love. I have thought about this verse perhaps more than any other verse in the Bible. However, I have not often thought of it on it’s own. When I think about this verse, I almost always think about Jesus command in John 13:34. “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” How did Jesus love me? Verse 8 tells me how God demonstrated (showed) his love for me. Jesus died for me when I was a helpless sinner, His enemy. Jesus died for me to give me life. Am I ready to do this for anyone? Could I even do this for my friends, let alone the people of the Islamic State. Yet Jesus did this for me and for you and He commanded us to love one another just like he loved us. I am a very weak Christian, but thank God, because he has given us some great examples of Christians who have deeply accepted verse 8 and Jesus command. Perhaps the best example is the writer of this letter, Paul himself. Let’s think about Paul for a moment. Paul was once a great enemy of God. He was a Pharisee trained by one of the leading men in Israel. He had a promising career ahead of him and he was pursuing this career wholeheartedly. He was doing everything he could to stamp out the new Jewish sect that believed in Jesus. He hated Jesus. But one day, this same Jesus came and visited Paul. Paul suddenly realized just how much God loved him. He realized that Jesus had given his up life so that he, Paul, could live. This love of God completely changed Paul forever. Paul died on that road to Damascus when he experienced the love of Jesus. In fact, Paul later wrote to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” If we look at Paul’s life, we can see that this was really true. After meeting Jesus, Paul accepted Jesus command to love other just as Jesus loved him. Paul did everything he possibly could to take the love of Jesus around the world. He suffered a lot, but he persevered to the end. Day by day he grew in the image and character of Jesus until he was even willing to die to show others just how much God loved them. In first Corinthians 15:31 he said that he died every day for the gospel and his life shows this. He died so that others could know the love of Christ themselves. He lived to obey the command of Jesus because he experienced the love of Jesus. He understood how God had demonstrated His love for us. I have to ask myself, “Am I willing to give my life like this?” Are you? This is what it means to be a Christian. God demonstrated His love for us and He wants us to demonstrate this love to others. Look at verses 9-10. “Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” Simply speaking, these verses teach us the assurance we have in God’s complete salvation. God has already done the most difficult thing. While we were powerless, ungodly sinners God sacrificed Jesus for us. Thus, we have been reconciled to God. Christ, who rose from the dead, is living to save us. When we see where we were and where we are now, we can be sure that God will bring us safely to his kingdom. We need this assurance because our struggle is not always easy. Sometimes we groan over our unchanged elements. But we must not look at ourselves. We must look at God and what God has done. Then we can have absolute assurance of our salvation. Look at verse 11. “Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” We are in the blessed state, having been reconciled to God. We can come to God freely, like a child going to his father when he needs encouragement and help. This living, personal relationship with God gives us all the more assurance and great joy as we continue our pilgrimage to the heavenly kingdom. Fourth, the importance of one man (12-14). Through just one man, Adam, sin entered the world. Then sin spread to all men and brought death and destruction to the human race. In the same way, through one man, Jesus Christ, God’s grace was poured out on mankind and brought eternal life to all who believe. God’s way of working in history is through one man. When we realize this, each of us can find our value before God in his redemptive history. Fifth, grace is greater than sin (15-21). The power of sin is indeed great and fearsome. Just one man Adam sinned. But sin spread to all men. Sin made all men sick to the point of death. We cannot resist this power of sin with a strong will or a stubborn character. But there is something that is stronger than the power of sin. It is the grace of Jesus. Look at verses 20b-21. “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” When we are in the grace of Christ we have victory over sin. By this grace, we can claim the spiritual fruits of peace, joy and the love of God. In this passage we thought about how God demonstrated His love for us, His enemies. We also learned a little bit about how God wants us to live a glorious new life in Christ that is full of the spiritual fruits of peace, joy, and the love of God. God wants us to grow in the image of Christ until the full glory of God is restored in each of us. Let’s not remain in our old habits and ways of thinking. God demonstrated His love to us very clearly, so let’s accept this love through faith in Jesus and share it boldly with everyone. |
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