Unearned Salvation (Part B)

There's no power in the physical blood of Christ. If there were, the Roman soldiers would have been instantly saved when they crucified him or when they were whipping him.

We don't believe in magic. It is the death of Christ, the will of God to be sacrificed. And we refer to it as the blood of Christ because it was a bloody affair. But it goes deeper than just what they did to him on the cross. It goes to him saying, no one takes my life.

I lay it down. And if he did not give up the spirit, he would not have died. This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Book of Romans.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Now here is Pastor Rick with his message called Unearned Salvation in Romans Chapter 3. Man has to do something to merit the favor of God. Whether it is an animal sacrifice, walk upstairs on your knees, put extra money in the plate, do something. Whatever you do, don't trust your salvation to the finished work of Christ.

That's their position. Be it ritual or the deeds of men or combination thereof, they think you've got to do something. True Christianity, because there are counterfeit Christianities and there are counterfeit Christians, but true Christianity cannot be earned.

It's received. And so I started out as many as received him and not according to the flesh or the will of men. It's something that God does in people.

We all should know this verse and memorize it. For by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God. Not of works lest anybody should brag. So when God says, by grace you have been saved, that means God has opened an invitation.

He's made it available. Faith is the key. I have to activate what God has given to me and all I have to do is submit to it. In the gospel, deeds do not result in salvation. They result from salvation.

We're big on deeds. We're big on the commandments, but they're not going to save your soul. There should be evidences that your soul is saved.

It is the outcome of salvation. Quick proof of that is just in the thief, the outlaw on the cross. He didn't have any time to do any works. He couldn't put his hands to anything. Literally, he was nailed to a cross. All he could do is what? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and he was saved. And with just a couple of hours, he was in heaven.

Just like that. To all who, and he continues here in verse 22, to all and on all who believe. Well if you don't believe, then you won't receive. What is so unfair about that?

Is it too much to ask? This is illustrated in the story of Naaman. That Assyrian general came to the prophet Elijah with his leprosy. He said, hey, I hear you can cleanse people of leprosy. Elijah says, yeah, yeah, look, I'm busy right now, but go dip into Jordan seven times. And he closed the door.

I'm sort of caricaturizing it, but essentially that's what was going on. And Naaman was insulted. He thought he would have to climb some mountain. He'd have to do something. He'd have to earn this cleansing.

But he had people who loved him, Naaman did. And they said, what's the big deal? Dip into Jordan. If it's wrong, you just get a little wet. So he does and of course he's cleansed. And he comes back. And he's a different man.

Well I would love to spend more time on that, but we've got a lot to do here this morning. The same, Naaman illustrates the grace of God there in the Old Testament, according to the law and the prophets, to all and on all who believe. So to benefit from the salvation of Christ, we must agree with God about Christ's identity and his work.

I hope you're understanding what's going on here. You may be familiar with all that I'm saying, because you've been around Christianity a long time. But are you able to articulate these things to a lost soul? At the end of each service, I give you an example of an altar call. So that if you get in front of somebody and you can see you've been preaching to them and it's time to save their soul, to lead them into the kingdom, you know how to do it. You have a template.

You can use a different one, but you can use that one. You can ask them, you can look them in the eyes, are you ready to receive Christ as your Lord and Savior? Are you ready to repent from your sin? If they say yes and you say, then make this prayer with me, Lord Jesus, and then it goes on. So as you're listening to this, you say, oh, you know, I know all this, the salvation from Christ.

But can you work it? Will God call upon you to share it? After over three decades of Christianity, none of this has grown old to me, and it shouldn't to you either. You don't have to wait three decades, some of you.

Some of you got more than three decades. Well, to all who believe that he alone is the divine Savior, and that is critical. He is not a created being, but he is the creator of being, and if you need some coordinates for that in Scripture, John 1, 3, Colossians 1, 18, Hebrews 1, verses 1 through 4. We do not need to be faithless as Christians, nor do we need to be fatalistic or pessimistic with our faith about our salvation. Twelve men were sent into the promised land by the Lord through Moses from the desert of Moab to spy it out. Ten were faithless pessimists. They displeased God by snubbing his word. Yeah, yeah, we heard what you said. We reject that.

They died in the desert of Moab, as such people always do. Don't be one of them. Trust God's word. If it's not working out the way that you want it to work out, then understand you've got an opportunity to stand face-to-face with the devil and beat him by not moving away from your faith. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation, distress, persecution, nakedness, famine, or sword? None of these things. Just Christ doesn't come and deliver me from the sword or the famine or whatever problems I may have. He's no less my Savior. Hell can't beat that.

Didn't work with Job and shouldn't work with us either. Pessimism doesn't serve well, the Christian life. You have to take it. I'm sure there are many churches out there going to tell you that, you know, just put on a happy face, God's going to make it all okay. Tell that to the martyrs as they burned at the stake, holding true to their faith. Tell it to Christ as he went to the cross. We accept these things in Christ because he's worth it. And where we're going is a lot more important than where we are.

For there is no difference, Paul says, between Jew and Gentile. And there's a war right there. That's what he had to deal with in his day.

We have stuff to deal with in our day. You know, we look at these people, you know, free Palestine. They know nothing of what they're talking about.

Nothing. If we took the Palestinian people out of Gaza and put them in their neighborhood, they would be crying like a baby. The work that Satan has accomplished in those people is deep. And it's a problem in our day to tell people, listen, Israel is one of the proofs of God's word being true. And if it's true on that point, and 40-11 others, it's true about who you are and where you're going if you don't get this fixed, too. It means something. These are just not, you know, little Bible studies that we walk around with.

This is reality that we're dealing with, hopefully. And in Paul's day, he was attacked by people saying, well, salvation is for the Jews and of the Jews and only for the Jews. And he says here, no, there's no difference. God does not make distinctions on race. If you could just picture standing before the throne of God and God's, oh, you're Jewish? Oh, yeah, sure, come in. Doesn't matter that you were a mass murderer or anything like that or that you were an idolater, come in.

Well, that's not going to happen. Same with the Gentile. It's, there is no difference with God. Lot, Lot was a Gent, well, essentially, he was a Hebrew, not a Jew.

There's some subtle differences there. He was the nephew of Abraham, the great father of faith in Scripture. And he had two, at least, Gentile sons, and he invited them to escape the ensuing judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah. They laughed at him and perished in the flames.

The serious stuff. There's no difference. Those were Gentiles. They had a chance to get out. Lot's wife was a Gentile. His daughters, they were all pulled out of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of course, the wife looked back at the old life with desire, and she perished in disobedience. Those are strong lessons in Jesus. What does he say about the whole, what is the summary of the Son of God on that episode? Remember Lot's wife. That's all he said. Remember Lot's wife? You know the story.

Don't play dumb. So verse 23, we come to, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And anybody who says they've not sinned is lying at that moment and proving that they have sinned. And they know it.

Or they're delusional. Which is not a virtue. This verse is headline news for humanity. It could have served as an alternate to the Bible's first verse.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Well, God could have said, you know what, rather than give them the details of how we got in this mess, maybe I'll just tell them who they are. He could have done that.

It would not have been out of place. Of course, he chose the better way. I'm just making a little suggestion. This summarizes man's problem. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Gentiles as well as Jews. And that's what Paul is saying. You're all sinners. 1 John chapter 1, if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar.

Well, if you want to say to God he's a liar, you have at it. This is, for all have sinned, past tense, fall short of the glory of God, present tense. Ongoing sin. The practice of sin. We're not only sinners by nature, we're sinners by practice. By this, he does not mean that we all sin equally, but we all sin enough.

Enough to be damned by a holy God. Now, we talk about this present tense sin, this ongoing recurring sin, needing recurrent grace. See, those who don't understand the grace of God, well, for instance, if you're driving and you have an episode of road rage and you drive off the road and you hit a pole and die as a Christian, you didn't get a chance to say, oh, forgive me, so now you're going to hell on a technicality.

You missed a password. That's a silly doctrine. That's a bad doctrine. Recurring grace says no condemnation has overtaken you except such as, well, that's way in my mixing verses. No condemnation has overtaken you. And that is the gospel.

And so it's not dependent on my work of remembering the password. It's dependent upon the work of Jesus Christ and my heart. God looks at the heart, not the outside. An old time, Old Testament lesson that we love so much because the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked and who can know it? God says, I know it.

I test the heart. And if the righteousness of Christ is on that heart, that's what I need to happen for the soul to be saved. I need them to come face to face with their guilt and my grace and make a choice.

And that's our message. So all fall short of the glory of God, past tense perpetual, just like your salvation is perpetual in Christ, unless you renounce him. Who would do that? Well, Judas Iscariot would. Jesus alone is sinless and no one has the right to arbitrarily nominate another one to be sinless also. This is part of our salvation message. Not anyone could die for sinners. Anyone who tells you that Jesus is not the only sinless one makes themselves an enemy of God's word because that is not what the scriptures teach at all. This is all have sinned. And the only one in scripture that says remain sinless is the Son of God, born of a virgin. There were no illusions about being sinless with Moses and the gospels flattered no one.

No one is flattered by the gospels of Jesus Christ. Man is first condemned. Now we come to verse 24, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Now justified means, it doesn't mean to make one righteous incidentally, but to count one as righteous.

If you had to wait to be made righteous to behave righteously to be saved, nobody would be saved. Justification is not God changing us, but God changing our relationship with him because of Jesus Christ. And so we're not only set free from the condemnation upon us as sinners, but we're cleared of all charges payment made by Christ. So summarizing God's work for sinners is being justified.

Here's maybe another example. Those who crucified Christ, those who nailed the spikes into him, they were forgiven for that act, but they weren't justified. To be justified, they had to come to Christ according to the scriptures, like the Ethiopian eunuch did, like the apostles did, like the Gentiles who Peter was preaching to in Acts chapter 10. They were forgiven of the crucifixion, but they had other sins on them. When Jesus said, Father forgive them for they know not what they do, that did not justify them.

That bought them time. And we have to consider these things. We look at these things and say, yeah, I can see how this works and how it applies when I'm preaching Christ to people who are verbally crucifying him.

I can say, Father, in front of them, right to their face, you do not know what you're doing and may God forgive you, but you're not justified with that alone. Freely without charge, he says freely means without charge. Salvation is free or not at all.

It goes back to what I was saying earlier. The religions of the world think you've got to earn your salvation. Your salvation in Christ is free or not at all.

You have to pay nothing for it. You just receive it, but only in Christ. And the flesh doesn't like this because the flesh wants to feel, have you ever done something good for somebody and they insist on paying you back? It could be something petty and you almost get the feeling like, man, what is it?

You think I'm going to like, you know, ruin your credit if you don't, why are you so insistent? Why can't you just receive the gift? Why can't you just say thank you? Now there are some times, of course, you want to be paid back, but there are, or it's okay, but there are other times you just receive the gift. By his grace, imagine as a pastor sometimes people give me things and if I had to pay them all back, I'd be broke.

I mean, it wouldn't work. So I just have learned to receive the gift and I've opened a registry up at, no I have not. I'm always, I always get a little like, oh Lord, come on, I don't deserve this. And it's always very humbling. But anyway, it's sort of like the priest receiving the offerings, the meat that they were able to partake in.

Anyway, I do digress. By his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Well, the only thing necessary for justification is a changed heart. God looks at the heart. It's what we believe before how we behave.

That's how it is. God classifies our faith as righteousness in this sense. There's the righteous behavior and there's a righteous standing. We're talking about a righteous standing before God. Because righteous means, righteousness means right. To be right with God.

It's going to have to come from my heart. Now to do right things as a result of that is another story. It's like faith. There's saving faith. When I give my life to Christ, I trust him. Then there is serving faith.

When I'm trusting him to do the work that he's called me to do. So there are different tenses or forms of these things and they're illustrated clearly in scripture in perfect context. Faith submits to truth. Saving faith does.

Serving faith acts on that truth. The very thing the devil and lost souls do not do is submit to the truth of Christ and that damns the soul. Redemption that he talks about here is not only that I have been bought back but restored into fellowship with God and free.

I am freed. We are damned because of who we are. Sinners. We are saved because of who Christ is. The sinless one. Romans 5 verse 1, therefore having been justified by faith we have peace with God.

He's just saying the same thing in another form. And he says we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. See the New Testament says things about Jesus that you can only say about a divine being. You cannot say about, could you imagine Peter saying believe on me. Can you imagine Paul saying I am the way the truth and the life. Can you imagine an angel.

No you cannot. You know that'd be blasphemous. The one that says that has to be equal with the Father just as we are told in Philippians 2 and other places.

Well we continue to verse 25. Whom God set forth as a propitiation by his blood through faith to demonstrate his righteousness because in his forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed. God the Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten. Now this is the Athanasian Creed. Athanasius was a man there in the fourth century who stood up against everybody when the Arian heresy which is a form of Jehovah Witness teaching on Christ was overtaking Christianity.

And he was told Athanasius he said you know it's you against the world Athanasius then it'll be me against the world. And he upheld the Trinity. And this comes out of his upholding that Trinity. He said God the Son is of the Father alone, not made, not created but begotten. Well Hebrew says he is the expressed image of God, not, it does not say that he is the expressed creation of God. He is the image of God.

You know how deep that is? Well taught from Zechariah, John 16 27 verse 28 that Jesus says it right, Jesus says it right out, extending from the Father as a branch from the tree. That's the incarnation of Christ but there's so much more to Jesus than his incarnation. Then he continued Athanasius and he goes now and talks about the Holy Spirit. He says God, God the Holy Spirit, of the Father and of the Son neither made created or begotten but proceeding, proceeding from the Godhead.

And so when we look at verse 25 whom God has set forth, this is who we're talking about. Not three gods but one God, three distinct co-existing persons. Members of the Trinity are not separate persons as the shack.

If you fell for that, would have you, you see it. They are only distinct persons in one divine nature. Now that's a lot of information and it's all backed up in New Testament scripture and Old Testament scripture. He says of whom God sent forth as a propitiation. Talking about Jesus now, this is a theological term.

It's found, John uses it a lot in his letter, relatively speaking to how much he wrote there in that letter. In the regular usage of the word propitiation, it means to appease but it does not mean that theologically. Theologically, it is satisfaction made for sinners through sacrifice. That Greek word for propitiation here, hilasteion, now remember that, it'll get you $5 off at the gas pump.

You just go in there and you tell them. I try not to say these words because really what, unless you're in front of it studying, it really doesn't have much difference but anyway I said it. It occurs only here and in Hebrews chapter 9. But there, the translators rightfully translated the word in Hebrews 9 according to its context and its meaning and so I'm going to read that to you.

Hebrews 9 5. And above, above it, speaking of the Ark of the Covenant, above it with a cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat. That's the same Hebrew word but instead of being translated overshadowing a propitiation, they said overshadowing the mercy seat.

Well why? Because the word, the Greek word, the meaning is merciful, the mercy of God with sacrifice and the mercy seat spoke of that and Paul in context in writing the Hebrew in that ninth chapter, he's speaking about the mercy seat of God and the propitiation for sins. God dealing with sin, satisfying the requirement of holiness through Jesus Christ. And so if we only translate it mercy seat here in Romans 3, instead of propitiation, we miss the blood sacrifice. We just then we're focused almost the mercy seat of Christ. Yes, it is the mercy seat of Christ but at the cost of blood, the sacrifice.

And so the translators again doing I think in these two cases just an outstanding job. Some translations use mercy seat here where instead of propitiation. Now you may be saying I lost you at propitiation. So suffice it to say it is the mercy of God in dealing with our sin. That's what it is and that's what the temple spoke to the Jew.

God is not finished with sin and it is about your salvation and your righteousness and his love. The temple spoke all these things to the people. No one else had that temple, especially in the wilderness. Well Leviticus 16, 15 and Revelation 5, 9 if you compare those two, you'll get a closer look at what is being said here. Because you know when the priest went in at the day of atonement, he took the blood of a sacrificed goat and he sprinkled it on the mercy seat on behalf of the people. Well what does a goat really speak of to us in the New Testament? Our fallen nature.

The sheep and the goats and Christ has dealt with that fallen nature. And so by his blood it tells us here that is his death. There's no power in the physical blood of Christ. If there were the Roman soldiers would have been instantly saved when they crucified him or when they were whipping him.

We don't believe in magic. It is the death of Christ, the will of God to be sacrificed and we refer to it as the blood of Christ because it was a bloody affair. But it goes deeper than just what they did to him on the cross. It goes to him saying no one takes my life.

I lay it down. And if he did not give up the spirit it would not have died because he's God the Son. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross Reverence Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.

We're currently going through the book of Romans. If you're in need of hearing this message again or want to listen to others like it, head over to crossreferenceradio.com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast too so you'll never miss another edition. Just go to your favorite podcast app to subscribe. On our website you'll be able to learn a little more about the ministry of Cross Reference Radio so make a note of it, crossreferenceradio.com. That's all we have time for today but thanks so much for listening. Pastor Rick will be back next time in the book of Romans here on Cross Reference Radio.