Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing—a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. Hey, have you heard the news? We might be tired, but God isn't. The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary.
His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might, He increases strength. Isaiah forty twenty eight twenty nine. I bless the strength of your spirit during these wearisome days. I bless the endurance of your soul when the journey feels long, despite the toils of the world.
Remember, God feels no fatigue. The sovereign Creator doesn't get tuckered out, and He, the source of unquenchable energy. Lives in you, saint of God. That's the gospel. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Allen Wright.
It just seemed too good to be true, and it seemed too simple. When you had this complicated system of law, and here comes Christ, and what He does, He sums up all the law and says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love one another as yourself." When He sums it up like this, and He starts simplifying it.
Well, it just seems like that it can't be true. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt. Excited for you to hear the teaching today in this series, The Loved: A Study of Romans Chapters 9 through 11, is presented at Renolda Church in North Carolina.
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Here is Allen Wright. Are you ready for some good news? Yes. Christ is the end of the law for righteousness for those who believe. The end.
Say that with me. The end. Problem in life is that there's so much stuff; it doesn't seem to ever end. I've got one wisteria weed in my front natural area that I've been trying to get rid of for five years. If you know how to get rid of it, please see me afterwards.
I've tried Roundup. I've beat it back. I've Cut it back. I've rounded it up again. I have.
I've cursed it in Jesus' name. You name it. I've rebuked it. I've done whatever. And then you'll think it's gone, and then here it comes up again.
And if I don't do something, it will try to take over the whole front natural area, crawl down in the driveway, and come and start taking over the house. I know it would, because that's the thing about life: is that there's no such thing as Hey, I pulled all the weeds in the garden, and I'm glad that's the end of weed pulling. It doesn't work that way. There's no such thing as hey, got the house really cleaned up, so that's the end of housekeeping. No, got the yard mowed.
Whew, glad that's the end of of mowing. No, I got the kids out of high school. They're right. That's the end of parenting. No.
Life has most elements that just it doesn't end, and problems that they don't end, and even the things that you do well, you got to stay at that too, don't you? I've talked to a lot of salespeople who've told me you never stop selling. Just because you land a big client and you made the big sale, that doesn't mean you just can sit back. Then, because somebody else is going to be trying to sell them something a little better, and because stuff like that doesn't end, and we don't have these finishing moments like that, which is the way God has designed most of life to work, it becomes the breeding ground. Of so much anxiety.
When will this ever end? When will I be able to be done with this? It just doesn't seem to stop. It seems like there's another battle, and it breeds within us this sense of the incompleteness. That makes me think I've got to do something else, and that's I think the place where we get attacked with so much of our worries in life.
But there are some things that end, and the most important of which, Paul says today, is the end of the old system of the law, of trying to relate to God through. Our efforts to put ourselves at peace with God through our efforts at righteousness, the system in which there was a temple and there were sacrifices that temporarily covered the people's sin, the the whole system of pledging we'll keep the law and we'll be we'll be good people and religious people in order to that whole that whole system, he says, has come to an end in Christ. That's what he's talking about here. And when something has come to its end and it's perfect, like the gift of Jesus, the thing you do with that is you quit trying to add to it.
Some things don't need another touch; it's been finished. You don't need to have a tourist go into Florence and the museum with a. Chisel and a hammer, and try to add a finishing touch to Michelangelo's David. Let it be. Nobody needs to go into the Louvre in Paris with a palette and a paintbrush and touch up the Mona Lisa.
Some things, what you do is you just say wow, and you just receive it. And what Paul is showing us in this text. Is that that's the very thing that his kinspeople, the Jewish people of which he is one, had such difficulty because they lived with the law as their system for so long that it was very hard for them to accept that Christ had come to be the end of that. And this is what he's sharing with us here. And if you get hold of this, that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness for those who believe.
If you really get hold of this, it be one of the most liberating things that could ever happen in your life, and maybe it's a revelation you've had, but God's here to encourage you in a deeper way, and maybe it's one you've just not seen before, and if so, get ready for some real freedom in your life. Let me start again with these opening verses. What shall we say then that Gentiles? This is verse thirty. Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness.
Have attained it. That is a righteousness that's by faith.
So the Gentiles, people that non-Jews, who didn't have the law, didn't have all that was given to them through what we call the Old Testament. Didn't have all of that. Didn't have all of the temple processes and the priests and the sacrifices. They didn't have all that. He says, "Here's the irony: is that they didn't have any of that, but now many of those Gentiles have come to faith in Christ, and they never were pursuing." Righteousness in the old way of the law.
And so they have it by faith, but the irony is that Israel—he's saying essentially—who should have been in the best position to receive the grace of the gospel has missed it. Why? Because they pursued verse thirty-one a law that would lead to righteousness. They did not succeed in reaching that law. Why?
Verse thirty-two. Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as it were, based on works.
So it was a wrong-minded pursuit, and what? What Paul's saying here. Is so fascinating because he's just spent parts of chapter eight and the early parts of chapter nine talking about how God is the one who goes first. You can call it election. You can call it God's free choice.
You can call it predestination. You can call it the beginnings of grace. Whatever you call it, dead people don't make themselves alive, and spiritually dead people don't make themselves alive.
So God has to do the miracle, and this is what Paul is saying. Therefore, he's saying that that in this wonderful mystery of the grace of God, that God has this this powerful predestining purpose, where He calls and He justifies and He glorifies. And so, on the one hand, you say, "Well, if God is going to do it all and do all the saving, then what does it matter about what we do?" And then, right here in these closing verses of chapter nine, in the very early part of chapter ten, he's making it very clear that the reason that many of his kin's people are not saved is because of the choices that they made, and they did not believe.
So, if you were just reading these verses, you would say it's all about the freedom of human choice for God. And what we've been learning these chapters is something of a great mystery that God chooses and people choose. In other words, there is God's sovereignty and there is free will. And what in the world do you do with this? Right?
It is what is in philosophy called an antinomy, antinomy—two principles or laws that seem to be absolutely contradictory and yet are one hundred percent true. A man. Walks in on a chilly day and blows on his hands to get them warm, and then sits down at the table and blows on his soup to cool it off. Which is it? He was blowing on something to warm it or cool it?
Well, the answer is yes. That's sort of a paradox, but this is something even deeper. This is like saying it is possible for two things. To be absolutely true, and yet with our limited understanding, we can't envision how they can be true, and yet it is true. And maybe the best example of this in physics is light itself.
This is the kind of thing that happens to me when I'm working on a sermon. Is like I just go and get distracted and read for an hour about light because I just all of a sudden start thinking about it. I never took a physics course in my life, but I think I would have loved it because just fascinating these principles of the cosmos. That almost certainly, if you weren't a believer, would make you go, "Wait a minute! Couldn't have evolved into this." Light is the fastest known thing.
It's one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. It means, like, you you blink and light's gone around the Earth seven and a half times. You blink, it's gone around. We can't. It's hard to even conceive of the speed of light, and it is mysterious.
And the the all the all those who study these things are particularly mystified by the fact something that Einstein theorized about that light is a wave, and you can prove that. I don't go into it because I don't barely understand it. But it's it's a wave. But what Einstein theorized and has been proven true too is that also light consists of what they call photons, so it's it's particles. These things should not be able to both be true, and the bottom line is they are true.
Light is both particles and a wave, and nobody in physics really can understand how both those things can be true, but they are true. And essentially, what the scientists say is, we assume that one day we'll be able to understand this, but right now we can't. But it doesn't change the fact that it's true. And I think you just, in the end, have to say of predestination and free will, you have to just say, "One day we'll understand this, but right now we really can't." But there is absolutely no place in the Bible where just because God is so sovereign that human responsibility is ever diminished. And so here's Paul; he's saying that they didn't believe and they pursued.
Righteousness in the wrong way, and so they aren't saved.
So, disbelief and not pursuing righteousness in the right way, by pursuing it by your own efforts rather than submitting and receiving Christ's righteousness, said they aren't saved. And. It's it's an antinomy. It is that it's both true. God does save.
God does choose, but we must choose.
So he moves on to verse thirty-two and he says more about this. Verse thirty-two of chapter nine. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone.
As it is written, Behold, I'm laying in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, and whoever believes in Him will not be put to shame. Quoting two different places in the prophet Isaiah. This is pointing to Christ Himself and to the Gospel, and saying that He's a stone, but to some He's a stone of stumbling, and to some He is the very answer that will remove all of their shame.
So it's possible that something good, even the ultimate good, Christ, can be when misperceived because of the frailty within the person who is looking, or. Become something of an obstacle. That's an astounding thing to say that Christ Himself could be a stumbling stone, and I don't know why I came. I was thinking about my precious mom, who she had. She was the most she was the most noble, spirited, and triumphant, and positive person.
She it wasn't just a facing a pancreatic cancer over a four-year period in the last years of her life, but she had had for many years she had had compression fractures in her back because of osteoporosis, and so she just lived with chronic pain. She didn't talk about it much, but she just lived with it. And so I was always concerned. My mom, who lived by herself, up Until her death, and I was always concerned about her for falling, you know. And so I'd go in her house, and I'd be in there like, "Mom, I'm afraid you might trip over that.
Can I move that out of the way, or can I do that?" You know, and always kind of bothered her. Especially she had this, this, this. Table, what do you call a cocktail table? You know, a in in in their main room there, and it was huge and heavy. This long thing had a marble top.
We'd had that since I was a little kid, and it was it was fine, you know, in our big living room we were growing up. But in our smaller house, it was just taking up a lot of room, and I was just like, "Can we please get rid of that?" She said, "But I love that." I said, "I just don't want you to ever stumble, but it's taking this blocking things out here, and it was there." Until a day she died, so it was a blessing. But because of some of the frailty of her condition, it might not be a blessing. There was this phenomena that happened where Jesus came, and John said he came into his own, but his own did not receive him. And so, the very gift of Christ, because He is a free gift, and the cross, and the resurrection, and the gift of the Holy Spirit—this all comes to us by grace.
Because they've been living in a system that was not grace, instead of being. The liberation and blessing to them, Christ had become a stumbling block to them. This is what Paul says also in First Corinthians one, twenty-two. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
So they're stumbling over grace. They're stumbling over who Christ was, and part of it, and this is just a reality, is that it just seemed too good to be true, and it seemed too simple. When you had this complicated system of law, and here comes Christ, and what he does, he sums up all the law, and he says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love one another as yourself." When he sums it up like this, and he starts simplifying it.
Well, it just seemed like that can't be true. I was thinking about Juan Carlos Ortiz, who was an Argentinian pastor and evangelist, and a remarkable communicator of the gospel. If you never heard him preach, it's just worth checking it out sometime. He just did unconventional things in his communication. He was famous for.
One day, getting up to preach a sermon in his huge congregation in Buenos Aires, and he said, "Today's text is love one another." Everybody got ready for the good message on that, and he went and sat down. Everybody was sitting there staring. He got back up. He said, "I said today's message is love one another," and he kept doing this until finally they got the point that. He actually meant it.
Go love somebody, and people started finding out who had needs next to them. Started sharing their reasons. He was like that, but one day, he was preaching, and he said, "Tell me, somebody, tell me, what is two plus two?" And his congregation was normally vocal and would shout out things. Everybody was silent. He said, "Can anybody tell me, what is two plus two?" Again, he was met with silence.
Nobody, you know, it was like a trick question. Who's going to blur it out? That, and so finally, on the third row, he said, "And you, sir, I know you're a professor of mathematics. Could you tell us, in all of your great knowledge, what is two plus two?" And he was like, "Don't know." And Ortiz goes, "Two plus two is four." But everybody thought it was too simple of a question for them, and Jesus came, and there was something about the gospel that was so simple, and so easy, and so good, that it seemed too simple and too good to be true, and thus became a stumbling block. Give us something to do, and we won't.
We won't be stumbling anymore. You see, chapter ten, verse one, brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. Allen Wright, today's good news message is the end of the law. It's in our series, Beloved, study of Romans, and Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio, sharing his parting good news thought for the day. In just a moment.
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And it's time for our closing good news thought. As we place the bookmark here and come back with more of the teaching next time. The end. Wow!
So many things in life. There is not an end. The chores around the house, no end to it. There is a season you have of wonderful health, and you are like, okay, that's it.
Well, it's not the end of having to take care of your body. You don't pull the weeds one day, and it's the end of the weeds.
So many things they don't end, but for this, we see in Romans nine, Paul says, "This is the end of the law for righteousness, and that is Christ." Christ is the end of striving, the end of anxiety, the end of wondering if you've done enough. The end of all of that. Wow, something has ended, and it has been an old system of law-based living, where we are trying to prove ourselves, and instead Christ came, and He put an end to it all for us. Because he himself died in our place. Wow.
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