The Need for a Savior

 July 4, 2021

Romans 5:1-12

         Well, here we are on the Fourth of July and we are so blessed that this year, unlike last year, that we can celebrate  this holiday together. This just seems to be the way that it should be, because this is what makes us great as a nation is that we know that we are able to be so much more together. This is also the fifth week of our summer series, Confident. We are confident because as Jesus tells us despite having to face afflictions, we can be confident that Jesus has overcome the world. In this series we are covering the sixteen articles of faith that we believe as the Church of the Nazarene. So far we have talked about our Triune God, whose nature was revealed to us by Jesus. That nature we learned is that God is love, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit having loved one another before the foundations of the world. Then we learned about Jesus, that he is the Son of God  who was raised in power from the dead by the Spirit of holiness. Jesus through the Virgin Birth, was fully human and fully God having taken on our mortal and corrupt flesh. Through being united with us, Jesus in his death put to death our sinful nature and when he rose again he raised us all to new life. When he ascended to the throne room of heaven we too have ascended with him. We also learned about the Holy Spirit that he is the third member of the Trinity, the one who is the Paraclete, the God who is nearby, speaking truth into our lives, leading us in the Way we know as Jesus, the Way unto the Father. Through the Spirit we are filled with the love of God, we have communion with God and we experience God as our Father just as Jesus did. Last week, we talked about the Holy Scriptures, how the central theme of all scripture is that we are to do unto others as we would want done to us. This is what Jesus tells us that the Law and the Prophets, the Old Testament is all about. It is Jesus who came to fulfill this Law, to make it possible that through the taking upon himself our judgment now the Holy Spirit of God can be given to us when we ask for him and through the Holy Spirit we are filled with the love of God so that now we can love others as we would want to be loved. 

         So far, as you can see all that we have covered is very positive, we have a loving God who is willing to come to us as one of us, a God who desires to be close to us and indwell us so that through him the world might be full of people loving each other as they would want to be loved. We could say that this is the ideal, the perfection God desires because it is also quite evident that the world we live in is a long way from this ideal. On this Fourth of July weekend, it is easy to think of our countries ideal, these unalienable rights, as we have often heard it, to be endowed with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These too are ideals that we are aiming for but we haven’t always achieved. What is interesting about our country’s ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is that these are the very ideals that Jesus fully denied that he had any rights to. This is something that was brought to my attention by a Nazarene author by the name of Tom Noble. He states that Jesus recognized that before God, sinful humanity could claim no rights and since he fully embodied our humanity with all of its sinfulness, yet without sin, he nonetheless would claim none of these rights for himself. Jesus knew that he could claim no right to the pursuit of happiness and so he became a man of sorrows who was acquainted with grief. Jesus knew that he could claim no right to liberty and thus gave himself up to be held captive as a prisoner of Rome. Jesus would claim no right to life for he gave himself up to death upon the cross to do his Father’s will.  I thought that what Tom Noble has so wonderfully written helps us as people who now live under grace and not under judgment to fully understand and to feel the terrible weight of sin experienced by Jesus knowing that as one who had been embodied by sinful flesh he could claim no rights before his Heavenly Father.

         So, yes, our fifth article of faith deals with sin, that which is the cause as to what holds our world back from experiencing the wonderful ideal that God has in mind for it. Here is what the fifth article of faith tells us. Sin, Original and Personal: we believe that sin came into the world through the disobedience of our first parents, and death by sin. We believe that sin is of two kinds: original sin or depravity, and actual or personal sin. 5.1 We believe that original sin, or depravity, is the corruption of the nature of the offspring of Adam by reason of which everyone is far gone from original righteousness or the pure state of our first parents at the time of our creation, which is averse to God, is without spiritual life, and inclined to evil, and that continually. We further believe that original sin continues to exist with the new life of the regenerate, until the heart is fully cleansed by the Holy Spirit. 5.2 We believe that original sin differs from actual sin in that it constitutes an inherited propensity to actual sin for which no one is accountable until its divinely provided remedy is neglected or rejected. 5.3We believe that actual or personal sin is a voluntary violation of a known law of God by a morally responsible person. It is therefore not to be confused with involuntary and inescapable shortcomings, infirmities, faults, mistakes, failures or other deviations from a standard of perfect conduct that are residual effects of the Fall. However, such innocent effects do not include attitudes or responses contrary to the spirit of Christ, which may be called sins of the spirit. We believe that personal sin is primarily and essentially a violation of the law of love; and that in relation to Christ sin may be defined as unbelief. Wow, what a mouthful. Again, like last week we have some big words to sort out like the word depravity which in its original meaning is something that is completely crooked or perverse. This is how  all of humanity is since the Fall. Another important point of this statement of faith is our belief of sin being original and actual. The reason for this is that sin as it is written of in scripture is written both as a power or principle that we live under and sin is also the actions each of us do that go against the ideal God has for each of us.

         Now, as we begin to talk about sin, it would seem quite natural that we begin where our statement of faith points us to, to the actions of our fore-parents, Adam and Eve and their corruption in the Garden. However, what should have become evident by now in our series, is that we don’t really rightly understand anything without Jesus. It is Jesus who revealed that God’s true nature is that he is the three in one God. It is Jesus who is the Way upon which the Holy Spirit leads us, the Truth that the Spirit speaks to us about. It is Jesus who reveals that the Law and the Prophets are about doing to others the same way that we would want done to us and it is Jesus who is the fulfillment of that Law. And it is Jesus, once again that must be the one who defines for us just what is meant by sin. Nowhere is this most evident than in the life of Paul who writes in the third chapter of Philippians, that as to righteousness under the law he was blameless. In other words, Paul before he met Jesus thought himself to be without sin and surely in no need of a Savior. He held onto that belief right up until the day that the risen Jesus encountered Paul and through that encounter Paul at last understood his sin because he first had met his Savior. You see, the question that has to be figured out is just why did God need to come into our world, clothe himself with our mortal and corrupt flesh and take his life and lay it down upon the cross to die for all the world? The small answer to why Jesus, the Son of God did what he did was sin. You see we cannot begin by claiming to know ourselves as sinners and then go and find a Savior who corresponds to whatever our problems are. We must begin with Jesus who is our Savior and then know that it is Jesus who diagnosis our condition and it is Jesus who is the one who is the remedy for our condition.

         So, we cannot speak of sin without speaking of the Savior who saves us from our sin. This is exactly what we find in Paul’s letter to the Romans in the fifth chapter of this letter. In this chapter, beginning with the sixth verse through the tenth verse, four short verses, Paul mentions the death of Jesus three times. Within these four verses Paul also speaks of four realities that necessitated our need for a Savior. The first is that we are weak. The word used here is the same word found in the fifth chapter of Matthew, where Jesus tells his disciples that blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God. We are blessed when we realize our weakness, our poverty of spirit which is unable to control our flesh. This is what Paul speaks of in the seventh chapter of Romans when he writes, “I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. It is for this weakness, this inability to do the good we know to do, this is why Christ died for us.

         Paul also goes on to say that in our weakness, in our spiritual poverty, we were ungodly. This term, “ungodly” is one that means a failure to respect or honor that which is holy. And it is this ungodliness, this lack of respect for the holiness of God that Paul tells us in the first chapter of Romans that God’s wrath is coming against.  As Paul further in that first chapter explains, for although people knew God, they failed to honor God or give thanks to him. Now, to understand what Paul is saying here we have to remember that in the fifth chapter of Romans, Paul states that it was while we were weak that Christ died for the ungodly which implies that it is our weakness, the inability to do the good that we know to do that is in some way connected with us also becoming ungodly people who do not respect or honor what is holy. The connection is understood when one realizes that in our weakness we are simply unable to do the good that we know to do, to be the holy people that God created us to be and therefore our lives simply cannot respect or honor that which is holy.  In not realizing the inability of our flesh to do any good, we then attempt to do that which gives the appearance of being good, drawing attention to our actions instead of what God is able to do through us therefore depriving God of the honor and thanksgiving that he deserves.

         Paul goes on to say in the fifth chapter of Romans that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have been justified by his blood how much more shall we be saved from the wrath of God. What Paul says here echoes what he writes about in the third chapter of Romans where after stating that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, Paul goes on to tell us that we are justified in our claim of being righteous by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forth as the mercy seat by his blood to be received by faith. The word, ‘redemption’ is a word that points us to the Exodus, of God delivering his people from slavery down in Egypt. Here it is Jesus who has paid the price to deliver humanity from the slavery of sin, the original sin spoken of in our article of faith. It just follows that we would be in sin since that we are weak, poor in spirit, unable to do good and in that state of poverty we find ourselves being ungodly unable to honor the holiness of God. In this understanding then we can at last figure out that sinners are people in need of a Savior. Sin is the condition all of us have for needing Christ, the one we are told in the ninth chapter of Matthew, who comes to call not the righteous but the sinners. It is Jesus, the Son of God, who took upon himself our flesh, only he could shed his blood to cleanse  away  the judgment which stood against us and in doing so, now we could be at last considered righteous in the eyes of God. It is this laying down of the life of Jesus, an act of the greatest love, this is what creates the transformation. It is this awareness that we all begin in a state of nothingness, deserving death, the very coming of ourselves to nothing that it is here that God comes to us and gives us everything, for no other reason than he loves us.

         Yet as wonderful as all of this is, Paul goes on to say one more time that Christ has died for us and this time the reason given is that Christ gave his life upon the cross to reconcile the enemies of God to himself. Now, we have to wonder just what is meant by this term an enemy of God because as Jesus taught his disciples in the fifth chapter of Matthew, our God is a God who already loves his enemies, a God who will always love his enemies; this we know for this is the same love he calls us to show to others. The only ones who we are told by Jesus who are in need of reconciliation with God are those who refuse to forgive others and be reconciled  with them. So, what Paul is implying when he tells us that Christ died so that the enemies of God might be reconciled to him is that the death of Christ, the forgiveness we receive through the shedding of his blood, this is to make us forgiving people. It is only those who refuse to be merciful who are unable to receive God’s mercy and thereby remain under his wrath. Now, because of Christ’s forgiveness we are changed into people who forgive, people reconciled with each other and thus reconciled to God.

         So, by looking at the ones that Jesus died for we can begin to see that Jesus died for people who are weak, people who are poor of spirit unable to will their corrupt flesh to do the good, the good we would want done to us, to do this as God created us to do. It is because we are unable to do the good we know we should do that we in turn do not display the holiness of God in all that we say and do, and so we dishonor God and we do not give him the thanks we deserve. This means that we end up being a people who are unable to be holy people in the presence of a holy God, people who need a Savior, people who know themselves as sinners. Someone has to pay the price to set us free and this price was paid by Jesus. His blood was shed to cleanse the mercy seat, and so in Jesus we find that place where at last we can come to meet a holy God without fear. The reason that Jesus has done this for us is simply love, and it is this love that transforms us. As transformed people who have received mercy then we extend mercy to others, becoming reconciled to them and at last we are reconciled with God.

         When we begin to understand sin as being this whole reality where we are weak, ungodly people, sinners in need of a Savior, people refusing mercy to others then it becomes clearer as to  why our church speaks of two states of sin. Actual sin or personal sin is when we realize our own weakness, our spiritual poverty, our inability to do the good we know to do and how this is a state of ungodliness because our lives do not reflect the holiness of God. It is when we can cry out to Jesus as sinners in need of a Savior and experience his mercy, trusting in his blood shed for us, this is when our sins, our actual sins are at last forgiven. What needs to follow then as we experience the power and love of the Holy Spirit is that we become aware of how we refuse to extend the mercy we have received from God to those we have decided as being unworthy of our mercy. This is original sin, or universal sin, the sin of the world and the nations to love only those we are certain who will love us in return, to forgive only those who we know will be merciful to us. To be set free from original sin then means that at last we will love with the perfect love of God, no longer ungodly but finally displaying God’s holiness to all. Amen!