Romans Chapter 3:27-31

So we start talking about grace, there's a belief the theological term is antinomism, and that's pretty much, hey, we're saved by grace, you can go do whatever, it doesn't matter what you do.

No, no, no, that's not right. That's heresy. That's not what the Bible teaches. But here's the thing, okay, we've messed up, we've sinned. Do you understand if it wasn't for grace, your hope of ever doing anything good for God goes out to women?

Welcome to Cross the Bridge with David McGee. God's grace doesn't simply just save us, it also equips us for good works. Today, Pastor David encourages us to live out God's grace as he continues in the book of Romans chapter three, with the teaching unearned favor.

Let's go now to Pastor David. Romans chapter three, verse 27. He says, where is boasting then? It is excluded.

By what law of works? No, by but the law of faith. So again, he's saying, you know what, if you're saved by grace, how can you brag about it? If you're saved by grace, how can you have spiritual pride about it? If you're saved by grace, how can you look down on everybody else in the world that doesn't yet know Jesus as their savior?

So it doesn't give you, it forgives your sins, but it doesn't give you the right to look down on the rest of the world. And Paul reminds us about this concept of grace and let's remember grace is unearned, unmerited favor of God. Each one of us has grace in God's sight. Now, and we'll talk about this more and how do we come into the full inheritance of that grace? Well, part of that is we're told in Ephesians two, chapter two, verse eight and nine, he says, for by grace, you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves.

It is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. And sometimes when I'm studying, I study in the King James, the new King James go to the new living translation. Sometimes I go into the Greek for the new Testament and the Hebrew for the old Testament. Let me share that Ephesians passage. We're going to bounce into the new living translation.

I think it's a pretty good translation to be honest. Let's look at that Ephesians passage in there. God saved you by a special favor when you believed, and you can't take credit for this. It is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we've done. So none of us can boast about it.

Strong words, huh? I read a book a few years ago talking about grace written by pastor Chuck Smith called why grace changes everything. It was interesting as I read through this book, I had been raised in a religious home and very much a kind of performance oriented Christianity, pretty legalistic. And, you know, as long as you were doing good, God loved you and you could be forgiven. And they, you know, when you messed up, God didn't love you anymore. And then, you know, you need to come back and get born again, again, again, again, again, again. And so as I was reading this book, it was interesting because I was disagreeing with him.

Now here's the problem. I wasn't disagreeing with what pastor Chuck was saying. He was backing everything up with scripture, talking about grace, talking about passages like this one in Ephesians, talking about passages like the one we're looking at in the book of Romans.

What was it that angered me about that? Well, there was something in me and might I suggest there's something in you that wants to take credit for this work of salvation, but it's not your work. It's the work of God. It's the gift of God. Now there is work involved in salvation, but that work is God's it's a gift to you.

And over and over the Bible talks about this and let me go ahead and prepare you. You're sitting in here this morning and you've, you know, you you've gotten a little spiritually prideful or something. Then the Bible through this teaching through this teaching is probably going to strip some of that down the life lesson. We should not have spiritual pride or brag about being forgiven. We should not have spiritual pride or brag about being forgiven. Now I want to encourage you to tell people about being forgiven, but we all understand there's a difference between telling people about being forgiven and bragging about being forgiven. In other words, when you brag about having something, you look down upon somebody else that doesn't have it.

When you tell somebody about being forgiven, your hope is, is that they accept the Lord. So we want to tell people, well, I want to brag to them that, Hey, we, we have ours. We've, we've earned our stripes. We've joined this club of do-gooders. It's a very elusive club.

And if you're good enough for long enough, we might consider your application. That's not biblical Christianity. Well, let's continue on and see what Paul says. The verse 28 says, therefore, we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.

Now, again, see if you have a problem with that verse, your problem is not with me. It's with God and see if you've been raised in a, in a religious legalistic home or church, then you may have picked up some things along the way that are not biblical. Now, then now you have the choice. You've got stuff you've picked up, but it may have been a wonderful man or one woman of God that told you these things, but they're scripturally inaccurate.

Now you've got the choice. Well, do I believe what they told me or do I believe what the Bible says? Let me strongly encourage you to believe what the Bible says and to begin, let go of those things that you picked up along the way, because friend, all of us along the way, I've picked up things that were unscriptural and not really in the Bible and picked them up in church. So being justified by grace is separate from being justified by works. So pastor, you're up there saying we don't ever need to do good works. We don't ever need to do good deeds.

We don't ever need to do any of that stuff. That's not what I'm saying, but it's a matter of the order. If you will, the priorities, the timeline, the sequence, however you want to phrase that the order, the first business you have with God is not going out and doing good things. The first order of business with God is coming to him and accepting his forgiveness. And when you come to that knowledge, when you come to accept that, then things begin to change in your life. But oftentimes we get confused and we think, well, and often here as a pastor, well, I'm, you know, after I work a few things out, then I'm going to start coming to church.

When I, when I straighten out my life a little bit more, then I'm going to do that getting saved thing. If you don't think this is a common misconception, do me a favor, ask your family, ask your friends, say, Hey, what, you know, what is keeping you from coming to Jesus and asking him to forgive you of your sins? You know what you'll hear more often than not a very common thing.

Well, I would become a Christian, but I have to quit fill in the blank. And what happens a lot of times is people are, they're leaning on something to get them through life. What they're leaning on is not healthy.

It's going to disappoint them. Sometimes it's going to hurt them, but that's all they got. And we come along and we go, Hey, I just want to kick that crutch out that you're leaning on before I prop you up and give you something better to hope for. It's interesting.

There's an interesting question. People ask to me, it's kind of a telling one and it's, it's where you are with the Lord kind of shows the question. When, when a believer, when somebody who's following Jesus comes to me and says, Hey, can you be a Christian and do such and such and do so-and-so that's not a good question because really what they're saying is they're going, okay, where's the line.

How close can I get to the line without going over and I'm safe? That's not really following the Lord and love and passion. But when somebody who doesn't know the Lord asks that same question, it's a very different question because they're saying, okay, can you be a Christian and do this? And what they're really asking is, you know, this is an issue in my life.

This is a problem. Do I have to let go of this before I begin to follow the Lord? Well, to be honest, the answer is no. You grab hold of the Lord and watch him begin to change your life and he will, but so often people who, you know, they're, they're trying to figure out what's in the way and they'll ask, you know, can you be a Christian and drink alcohol? Can you be a Christian and smoke cigarettes or whatever? Can you be a Christian and smoke dope? And, you know, the simple answer, I'm glad you're sitting down.

The simple answer is yes. Now let me explain, cause some of you are like, Hallelujah, I found my church, man. Praise God.

This is it. Those things don't keep you from accepting the forgiveness from Jesus Christ. Now, once you accept that forgiveness, they can get in the way and they will get in the way and you'll need to start letting go of them. But that doesn't keep you from coming to the Lord. You come to the Lord and watch the Lord begin to change your life. But so many people are convinced that they have to change their behavior before they change their savior. See, they're counting on the world to save them.

That's not going to work. And they think, well, I got to work through this and I got to work through that. And I got to clean up my life before I come to God. You don't clean up your life before you come to God. You come to God and God begins to change your life. I've used the analogy a lot, but you don't get cleaned up to take a shower, right?

Right? Okay. Praise God. Now, once you come to God again, your life begins to change. And Paul points that out in this Ephesians passage.

We'll get back to that again. Ephesians 2, 8, and we'll include verse 10 this time. For by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. Verse 10, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. We talked before that, that word workmanship in the Greek is the word poema. It's where we get our word for poem. God is saying, you're my poem. And I want other people to read your life, be a living epistle, a living letter written about what God can do with a life. We'll go back to the new living translation.

Read again. God saved you by a special favor when you believed. And you can't take credit for this. It is a gift of God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we've done.

So none of us can boast about it. And then verse 10, for we are God's masterpiece. He has created us a new in Christ Jesus so that we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.

So Paul says here plainly, I mean, you can't get more plain spoken than verse 28 says, you're justified by faith, not by deeds, not by works. And of course we immediately begin to attach stuff, but you got to do this and you got to do that. And you got to do this, that, and the other.

And you got to hold your mouth right now, all this other stuff. God says, just believe what I'm telling you. It's an amazing promise. Thank you for listening to Cross the Bridge with David McGee.

We'll return to David's teaching in just a moment. The tragedy in Benghazi, the bombings in Boston, and the current unrest in Egypt are all vivid accounts of terrorism. Each time an event like this occurs, it often causes us to respond with fear. But it doesn't have to, because God knows your future and you can too. With David McGee's teaching entitled, Know Your Future, Be Immune to Terrorism, you'll come to understand the realities of radical Islam while rejoicing in God's promises for your future.

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To help support Cross the Bridge and receive your CD or DVD copy of Know Your Future, call 877-458-5508 or go online to crossthebridge.com. And now let's return to Pastor David's verse-by-verse teaching in the book of Romans. Look at verse 29. He says, Or is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also. See, you got a problem 2,000 years ago.

Paul's dealing with us. If you're saved by the law, you're saved through works, through the law, only the Jewish people knew the law and had the law. So in essence, what you were saying is only Jewish people could be saved. And that's part of the misconception that was happening here. And we talked a little bit about how Claudius had exiled all the Jewish people and also some of the Jewish Christians and also some of the Christians, then they were allowed to return and the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians were having troubles getting along.

Imagine that. And so, so now they're talking, they're talking and they're going, well, I don't know if a Gentile can be a Christian without being a Jew first. It's kind of interesting because now we flipped that around. We, you know, can, can a Jewish person be a Christian without walking away from the tenets of the Hebrew scriptures? And we'll, we'll talk more in depth about that in the, um, in the book of Romans here, but if you're justified by law, justified by works, only the Jewish people could be saved. And Paul says, well, is he only the God of the Jews?

And he says, no, absolutely not. He's also a God of the Gentiles. See this opens everything up because if God said, okay, you can be saved through law and be saved by works. Only Jewish people can be saved. But here Paul says, no, no, no. Anybody can be saved.

Anybody, anybody, anybody. It's one of the beautiful things about the Bible. It always amazes me when somebody makes a statement, well, Christianity is such an exclusive religion. And if they mean by that, that Jesus is the only way to God, only way to heaven, then yeah, you know what? I would have to agree that in that definition it's exclusive, but you know, in the real definition of the word that some people are left out and unable to attain this, it's not exclusive.

It's inclusive in that it's open to everybody. It doesn't matter from what you've done in your life. You can be forgiven. It doesn't matter if you've done this, you've done that, hurt people, killed people, or you've only made little bitty mistakes. Whoever can come to the Lord, whoever. Let me remind you of the phrase in John 3 16 says, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Man, that's such a sweet verse. I have to be honest. When I came to the Lord, I was 17 years old. I was a big, a train wreck as you could possibly be at 17.

I'm not going to go into the gory details, man. I was just a train wreck. And when somebody described to me that you could come to the Lord and ask him to forgive you ever since I did it. But let me be honest with you.

Part of me. When I said that prayer, I was like, I don't think this is going to work for me because I I've done too much. I've done things I will forever regret. And I, I, this isn't going to work for me. I really thought when I came to the Lord, Lord was going to say, you know what? I'm forgiving some people of some things, but you've gone too far for too long.

I can't, can't do it for you. And my heart was so filled with joy when I realized that I was one of the whoever's. And if you're here this morning and you think somehow you've been counted out of God's plan of salvation, or you're listening, you hadn't been counted out.

You've been counted in because everybody, anybody is a whoever. It doesn't matter if you're rich and poor, but it doesn't matter if you born into a great family. It doesn't matter if you born into a sorry family. It doesn't matter if your family was dysfunctional.

Probably most of us. I don't know what, you know, what is a functional family? I don't know.

If you email us, we've been looking for one. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you wandered for a couple of minutes or for years, you're whoever you can come to the Lord.

It's open to anybody and everybody. And verse 30, since there's one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. And just kind of a interesting verse in the way that it's phrasing it.

When again, we're going to go to the new living translation that reads like this. It says, there is only one God and there is only one way of being accepted by him. He makes people right with himself only by faith, whether they are Jews or Gentiles. So it doesn't matter if you're Jewish, you got to get saved by faith. It doesn't matter if you're Gentile, you got to get saved by faith.

It's the same trusting in a sense. See, we're all kind of in that position of owing a debt we can't pay. I heard a story that this King was bad things going on in the kingdom. And, and he said, well, whoever's doing this is going to pay a high penalty, you know, and he come came to find out that it was his son. And so his son stood before him and the King said, you know, you're guilty and you have to pay this huge penalty.

The son said, you know, I can't pay that. And the King stepped off of his throne and went and stood by his son and then said, I will pay the penalty. And that's such a beautiful picture of what the Lord is, is done with the gospel and that, you know what? He stepped off of his throne to come pay our penalty. He left heaven.

I don't even think we will understand or appreciate that until we get to heaven, to leave heaven, to leave the awesome worship, the music, the sights, the sounds of heaven to come down here. You know, there's that story when Lazarus was in the tomb and everybody around his morning at the shortest version of the Bible, Jesus wept. And I've often asked myself, what was he weeping for? The pain of the people that were standing around there could be, I've also wondered if since he knew he was getting ready to call Lazarus back out. And I think Lazarus was in the presence of the Lord, that he was calling Lazarus back out, that he was actually weeping for Lazarus.

And when he was calling him back from heaven, you know, where we, whenever we lose a loved one, we're, we're saddened at our loss, but we also represent, we understand there's a gain and that they are now with the Lord. So we're faced with this thing of, you know what? You can't earn it. You can't pay for it. You can't buy it. You can't lawyer your way in. You can't, you can't do any of that. You're sitting there and you're kind of stuck.

Let me, I'll give you this example. A few years ago, it was more than a few years ago. It was like 15 years ago. I was in ministry and I had a health situation. I was in the hospital and I was in the hospital for several days.

And that's a pretty expensive hotel to hang out in. And, uh, so after a few days or whatever, they released me and, um, you know, a couple of weeks later, he sent me the bill and I didn't have health insurance at that time. I have it now, but didn't have health insurance at that time. And I don't know what I bought there, but it was really expensive. And so they sent me this letter with huge number, huge number. And I was like, man, this is, this is not good. So I called him and said, look, this is my situation and tried to do different things. They had, you know, little grants or trust or whatever, and I didn't qualify or something was wrong with it and it didn't work. So I was still stuck with the bill. I couldn't pay. So I started praying about it, you know, Lord, I got this bill.

Can't pay. So in prayer one day and that's still small voice, the Lord said, call them and ask them to forgive the debt. Devil, I rebuke you. But for the next few days, every time I went in prayer, I heard that still small voice. I thought, man, this is. And then I thought, okay, well, Lord, if this is you and you keep reminding me, I'm going to do it.

This is probably one of those little exercises in obedience. You know, I didn't really expect them to do it, but I call and talk to the guy and I said, uh, so yes, they may give you bill number reference, whatever. And, and he said, how can I help you? Mr. McGee? And I said, yeah, I'm calling to ask you to forgive the debt.

There's a long silence. And he said, well, Mr. McGee, that's a very unusual request. I still remember the exact conversation. I said, well, I understand that, but I felt like I needed to ask, you know? And so he said, okay. He said, well, you know what, what I'll do is I'll, I'll go to my superiors, you know, I'm, uh, I'll, I'm not going to flat out just tell, you know, on the phone, I'm going to go to some of my superiors and I'll give you a call back. And I said, okay, fine.

So I hung out the phone and to be honest, when I was like, I did it look stupid, felt stupid, but I did it, you know, about two weeks later, guy calls back and he goes, Hey, I wasn't, you know, I went to my superiors. I asked him to forgive the debt. They said, no, we're not going to do that. Can't do that. But I was able to reduce your debt down to $99.

Can you pay that in 90 days? Yeah. And, and you know, so I got off the phone and it was like, I knew you'd come through.

Okay. I was hoping you'd come through. See, I was stuck in that place. I owed a debt that I couldn't pay.

And my heavenly father said, get it forgiven. That's the plan. We're stuck in a place. We owe a debt. We can't pay.

What do we do? We seek God's help. And God says, you know what? I'll forgive that debt. And friend, if you think that number from the hospital was big, do you understand what kind of debt we have to God for the things that we've done wrong? That we've done wrong. It's been, it's true that God paid a debt that he did not owe because we owed a debt that we could not pay and God and his goodness through faith.

So here's the thing you start hearing about saved by grace, saved by faith. Wow. This is great. This, this means I can just go out and do whatever I want to do.

I don't have to be worried about that whole right and wrong doing right. No, no, no. Look at verse 31.

It says this. Do we then make void the law through faith? Certainly not. On the contrary, we establish the law. So when you start talking about grace, there's a belief, the theological term is antinomianism.

And that's pretty much, Hey, we're saved by grace. You can go do whatever. It doesn't matter what you do. No, no, no, that's not right. That's heresy. That's not what the Bible teaches. But here's the thing.

Okay. We've messed up. We've said, do you understand if it wasn't for grace, your hope of ever doing anything good for God goes out the window because you messed up.

You can't get that back. You can't be so good that it outweighs your bad. And you know, at that point it leaves you in a place of condemnation. Okay.

Nothing I can do. But once the Lord says, well, you know what? By faith, you can be forgiven. You can have a clean slate. Then it gives you the freedom to do what's right. You're not set free to do whatever you please. You're set free to do what's right and to serve the Lord. Friend, do you know for sure that your sins have been forgiven?

You can know right now. I want to lead you in a short, simple prayer, simply telling God you're sorry and asking Him to help you to live for Him. Please pray this prayer with me out loud right now. Dear Jesus, I believe you died for me that I could be forgiven. And I believe you were raised from the dead that I could have a new life. And I've done wrong things. I have sinned.

And I'm sorry. Please forgive me of all those things. Please give me the power to live for you all of my days. In Jesus' name.

Amen. Friend, if you prayed that prayer, according to the Bible, you've been forgiven. You've been born again. Jesus said He would not turn anybody away who comes to Him.

And He came for those people who knew they needed forgiveness, those who were sick, not the righteous. So congratulations, friend. You just made the greatest decision that you will ever make. God bless you. If this was your first time praying that prayer with Pastor David, we would love to hear from you. You can call us toll-free at 877-458-5508 to receive our First Steps package with helpful resources to help you begin your walk with Christ. Also, if you've been blessed by Cross the Bridge Ministries, would you consider supporting us with a financial gift? When you call with your gift, make sure to ask them about this month's special offer entitled, Know Your Future, Be Immune to Terrorism. This incites you to be immune to terrorism.

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That's 877-458-5508. Or go online to crossthebridge.com. While there, take a moment to sign up for David's free email devotional to browse our large library of teachings. Again, our website is crossthebridge.com. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time as we continue to Cross the Bridge.