849. What Makes Grace So Amazing? Part 1

Welcome to The Daily Platform. Our program features sermons from chapel services at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Whether it's the general chapel service for the whole student body or services for those in the ministerial class or seminary, everyone at the school is blessed by the preaching of the word each day from the chapel platform.

Today on The Daily Platform, we'll hear an evangelistic message preached by BJU President Steve Pettit, which was preached to the student body at the beginning of the 2020 fall semester. This is part one of a sermon from Romans 3-24 titled, What Makes Grace So Amazing? Romans chapter three tonight, we read verses 19 down to verse 24 and I'm going to actually focus our attention on one verse that's sort of the conclusion of the whole passage of scripture where Paul is talking about how a person can be rightly related to God even though he's a sinner. How does God do this? How does this happen? How does he make it happen? And that's really what verse 24 in a nutshell is all about.

So let me read it to you. Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. I wonder how many of you have ever heard of a man named John Newton. You ever heard of John? He's a very well known, famous Christian throughout world history, but a lot of people don't know his story.

By the way, he's kind of goofy haircut there, but anyway, that's what he used to look like. When John was seven years old, he went through a very heartbreaking trial where his godly mother, who actually taught him the Bible when he was a little boy, suddenly died. At 11 years old, he left school and he joined a ship and he began to live the life of a sailor.

Back in his day, of course, that was a very wicked lifestyle, a lifestyle of immorality, rebellion, so much sin. He served on a number of ships that worked off the coast of West Africa in the slave trade business. Eventually, he became the captain of his own ship where he captured, transported, and he would sell slaves to the West Indies and to America.

However, on the 10th of March, 1748, as he was sailing back from Africa to England, he went through a very fierce and a very frightening storm. And as we would say, it put the fear of God in him. He got scared. And so he began to do a search. He didn't forget the words that his mother spoke into his heart when he was a little boy. He began to read religious books of his day. And through this process, God sowed in the heart of John Newton the seeds of eternal salvation through the word of God. And John was converted and accepted Jesus as his savior. God radically transformed his life. He left slave trading and he actually became a crusader against it for an abolition of slavery in England.

He was part of supporting a young man named William Wilberforce who led that. He went on to tell his life story and he was most famous for the fact that he was a hymn writer. He wrote 282 hymns to be exact. And his most famous hymn was entitled Faith's Review and Expectation.

You probably have never heard that, but you've heard of the name it was changed to later on. And it's the song Amazing Grace. Tonight, I want to speak to you, as the Lord helps me, on the theme, what is it that makes grace so amazing? Because really we should be awed.

We should be stunned. We should, as they were in the Bible, astonished and they marveled at the grace of God that is found in Jesus Christ, his son. So tonight, I want us to see three very simple truths that we find here in Romans 3 24 about what it is that makes grace so amazing. And number one, the first thing we see is that grace is amazing because of what it does. Now, if you think about it, on the one hand, the word grace is it's a beautiful word.

It's never viewed as an ugly word. I mean, before a meal, we say grace. When somebody does something for us out of kindness, we are grateful. When we eat a meal and we leave a tip, we call it gratuity. When somebody does something for us and they don't charge us, they call it gratis.

If a bill is overdue and you pay it late but you don't get a penalty, you're fine. We call that a grace period. When somebody gets in trouble, we say maybe we should show them a little grace. We call our daughters grace. We call our churches grace. The word grace is definitely a beautiful word, but when we understand it from a biblical perspective, it's actually a shocking word. And the reason why it's shocking is because of what it does. What does it do? It says in verse 24, being justified freely. What does grace do? It justifies sinners.

Now let me explain it in a way that I hope that you'll not only understand it, but you'll feel it. On the 22nd of July, 1992, police stumbled across a man standing on a street corner with handcuffs on in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The man claimed that he had just escaped from another man who'd been trying to kill him. So the police were then led to an apartment where upon further investigation, the apartment turned out to be a chamber of horrors. For when they walked in, they found the floor littered with skulls and bones.

When they opened up the freezer, they found human body parts. And the apartment belonged to a man named Jeffrey Dahmer. And the police had stumbled across, they had uncovered one of the most gruesome killing sprees in American history where 17 men and boys over a period of 14 years had been sodomized and cannibalized. Dahmer was convicted of his crime and he was sentenced to life in prison. So question, if the judge knowing Dahmer's guilt set him free by absolving him from his guilt and declaring him righteous, that is right with the law, what would you say about the judge? You would say he is evil, he is corrupt, he is as guilty as Dahmer. Now here is the question of Romans 3 and it is the question of the ages.

It is the question every one of you need to ask yourself. And it is this, how can God who is righteous and just and perfect and holy pardon somebody who is guilty without the penalty of their sin being paid for? Is it right for a judge to pardon a Dahmer who is guilty for his crimes?

What does that say for a judge? How can he do that and be righteous? And that's what grace is all about because it does something that defies logic.

It goes against the natural way we think that God can pronounce an unrighteous person righteous and he can do it in a righteous way. The grace of God is amazing because it can pardon us of our sins and God can legally declare us righteous and he can do it without any charge to us, without us doing anything. And this is not a trick, this is the truth of God. God's grace is amazing because of what God does and yet at the same time he maintains his own righteousness. And that leads me to the second point and that is grace is amazing not only because of what it does, it justifies sinners, but grace is amazing because of how it is accomplished. How did God do this?

And we actually find the answer here in verse 24 when he says, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. A number of years ago I was flying back from the country of Greece. My trip was from Athens to Frankfurt, West Germany and then to the United States and so on my leg from Frankfurt, from Athens to Frankfurt, I sat next to a Greek man who was from the island of Cyprus. I began to witness to him and share with him the Gospel. I told the man that I'd actually studied Greek when I was in seminary here at Bob Jones University. And I, I actually talked to him about the Lord from Romans chapter three and in particular verse 24. And when we came to verse 24, him understanding knowing that the Bible was originally written in Greek and that I had studied Greek, he asked me about two words in verse 24. The first word he said, what is the Greek word for, for grace? I remember that.

I said it's the word charis. He said, oh, he said, I know what that means. He says, that means to do somebody a favor.

Now here I am talking to this guy about the Lord and he's telling me what the Bible means. God does you a favor. Have you ever had anybody do you a favor? You ever ask anybody, hey, would you do me a favor?

Would you please take me too? So when God justifies you, He declares you righteous, He's doing it as a favor to you. And a favor is not something you charge. You don't charge people for favors. It's done for you and it's free. And folks understand God, whatever He does for us, it is something He does for us freely.

It is a favor to us. And then he asked me the word redemption. He said, what is the Greek word for redemption? And I thought, what is the Greek word for redemption? And the Lord really helped me to remember. It's amazing.

I usually would not remember it. He said, I said, it's the word lutron. He said, oh, he said, I know what that means. He says, that means to pay the price to buy a slave and then to set him free.

And I was thinking, cool interpretation. And so I took the verse being justified freely by His grace, by His favor, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. And then I preached to Him how it was that Jesus Christ was the one who came to set us free from the slavery of the bondage of our sin.

Christ is the one who perches our freedom from our sin. And probably the greatest illustration of this in the Bible is the story in the Old Testament that every Jewish boy and girl learns by heart. It is the story of redemption of the Jewish people from the bondage of the King of Egypt named Pharaoh when God delivered them through a little lamb called the Passover.

What's the story about? Well, God was going to deliver, redeem the Jewish people. They were slaves living under the control of Pharaoh and God sent a deliverer named Moses. And God said to Pharaoh, let my people go.

And he said, no, I'm not going to do it. And so God began to sin through Moses' various plagues to motivate him to turn and change his mind. But instead, it hardened his heart. And finally, after nine plagues, God said that the tenth one will come and He will let you go. He will release you from your slavery. And that tenth plague was sending an angel of death into the home of everyone living in Egypt and taking the life of every firstborn son and every firstborn animal.

But God came to the Jewish people because they were God's people. And He said, there's going to be a way for you to be protected from the angel of death. And that is, it is going to be through a lamb.

Now that would defy logic. It didn't make sense. But God said, take a lamb of the first year, a little lamb, one year old, and bring it into your house for three days.

Why three days? Number one, for inspection, to make sure that this lamb had no spot or blemish. It was a clean lamb.

But then secondly, I want you to bring it into your house, not only for inspection, but for affection. You see, you can't bring a little lamb in a home and the children not make it a pet and give it a name and love it. There was a reason why God did that because He said, after three days, I want you to take the lamb and I want you to kill it. And I believe God wanted that lamb killed after three days to break the heart of everyone in that family of knowing that that lamb's blood was being spilled for them because God said, take the blood, put it in a base in a bowl, and I want you to take the blood and smear it on the doorpost of the house. And here's my promise to you that if you put the blood on the doorpost, when I pass over that night, I'm going to see that, that, that blood and instead of coming into your house and you experiencing death, I'm going to pass over you and you're going to live. And every child and every parent and every aunt and every uncle and every grandparent was sitting in that house knowing that night that they were delivered from the powerful angel of death because of the blood of that lamb that was on the doorpost.

And while they were in that house, what were they doing? They were taking that roasted lamb, that cooked lamb, and they were consuming the lamb and they were feeding upon the lamb and they were receiving the lamb because the lamb was their deliverance and the lamb became their life. And when Jesus began His ministry and was baptized by John the Baptist at the Jordan River and John saw Jesus, what did he call Him? The lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. Who is the one that delivers us from God's judgment? Who is it that, that, that is, is the one who gives His blood to deliver us? It is God's lamb.

It is Jesus. We are redeemed through the blood of the lamb. We are not redeemed with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Jesus Christ. And so Paul writes here, Romans 3, and he's explaining what defies human logic. That we are saved by this lamb who went and died for us.

God is able to justify us, not because of what we do, but because of what Jesus did when He died as a spotless lamb on the cross. Go back tonight in your mind, if you will, 2,000 years ago to the city of Jerusalem. It's another hot day in April. It's Friday morning and death is in the air.

Why? Because the Romans are planning an execution. Three men have been chosen to be put to death through crucifixion. The crowd gathers outside the city walls at a place of execution called Skull Hill or Golgotha.

It's right on a busy road, a great place for people to see that you can't mess with the government of Caesar and get away with it. Word spreads like wildfire because one of the men being put to death was a rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth. The crucifixion begins at nine o'clock sharp.

Iron spikes are driven through the hands of the feet and the feet of the criminals and now they are nailed to a tree. And when you look at those three crosses, the one in the middle, the center cross is where Jesus was hanging and it looks like He's not gonna make it. He's not gonna survive. He's already been beaten severely. The skin is hanging off His back in tatters. His face has been beaten and bruised. His body is covered in blood.

It's just a horrible sight to look at. While He hangs on the cross, He speaks some words. He talks to the soldiers and He mutters, He utters, Father forgive them for they know not what they do.

He speaks to one of the thieves on the cross and says, today you'll be with me in paradise. And then not far away was His mother. And He says some words to His mother and then suddenly at noon after three hours, the Bible says darkness falls upon the whole land. It comes so quickly.

At one moment the sun is right overhead and the next moment it looks like it goes on vacation. And the darkness is as dark as pitch black night. And for three long hours Jesus hung on that cross and you could hear Him crying from the cross.

I thirst. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And then suddenly as the darkness had descended, now it disappears at three o'clock in the afternoon at the hour of sacrifice in the temple.

And all eyes are focused on the center cross. Jesus is there at the point of death. His strength is almost gone. His struggle is nearly over and then suddenly He shouts a reverberating statement. He cries out, it is finished.

And then a few moments later He dies. What did Jesus mean when He said it is finished? Well, it means to complete something or to finish something successfully. It's what the mountain climber says when he reaches the top of Mount Everest and he says it's finished. It's what you say when you turn in your final test, your senior year of college and now your college career's concluded and you say it is finished. It's what you say when you make your last house payment and you say it's finished. And it's the word that was used in Bible days when you paid your taxes.

It is finished, it literally means paid in full. Why did Jesus die? Why did He have to die? Because God is too holy to let you into heaven with your sins and God is too loving not to do something about it. And so through the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, God accepted His death and His blood as the payment price for our sins. How can God justify a sinner? He does it through Jesus, He does it through His bloodshed, through His sacrifice, and here is the favor of God, and here is grace. No matter how many sins you have piled up in your lifetime, no matter how guilty you think you are or how bad you have been, no matter what you have done in your past that still presently haunts you in the present. When you come to Jesus Christ by faith, not by works, not by anything you do, but as a humble and broken sinner, what will He do with your sins?

He will stamp them paid in full. It is finished. I remember the day I got saved. At the age of 19 years old as a freshman in college, I didn't grow up in a Christian home. I didn't go to — I didn't have a Christian education. I was a public school kid. I didn't know anything about salvation until I was 17 years old as a junior in a public high school and a friend of mine shared the Gospel with me and I didn't get saved right then because I didn't want to get saved. I went off to college in Charleston, South Carolina at a school called the Citadel and there my freshman year I tried out for the varsity soccer team and I made the team that year.

There were only two of us on the team that were freshmen, myself who was a walk-on and my — who became my best friend, a guy named Maxie Birch, who was a scholarship player. Little would I have known in the plan and providence of God that he would have brought in my life a born-again Bible-believing Christian who loved the Lord and he would share the Gospel with me. He would tell me over and over, Pettit, you need to get saved and I knew I needed to get saved.

But I had all kinds of stuff going through my head. One moment I thought I was too bad to get saved. Another moment I didn't know if I wanted to get saved. I didn't know if my life — I wanted my life to change. The problem I had is the problem that all sinners have and that is we love our sins.

Men love darkness more than they love the light. You, you love your sin. If you don't get born again, you're gonna die and go to hell. I'm gonna say it again, if you don't get born again, you're gonna die and go to hell.

You know why? Because you love your sin and you love your darkness and you love your way. And if God had not worked in my heart and the Holy Spirit had not began to change something on the inside of me, I would have never come to the Lord. And on Easter Sunday 1975, coming back from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, listening to a preacher over the radio preach the Gospel and he preached the simple message of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. And in that message, it clicked, it dawned on me God loved me and Jesus died for me and that His grace will forgive me. And God will forgive me of all of my sins. I'm quite confident that I was probably worse at my age than anybody in this room. I, I, I don't say that proudly.

I don't say that I'm not trying to boast, but I'm quite confident that I was probably worse than any body in this room. And what grace, what makes grace so amazing is that God will freely justify any sinner that comes to Him. God does not sell you salvation. He gives you salvation. He's not offering salvation at a half price deal. He is offering salvation free of charge. He pays the full price and Jesus paid it all and you don't pay anything. If you try to pay for your salvation, it means that you don't think He paid it all.

He left no unfinished business and what, what He came to do, He did. And when you come to Jesus, no matter what your sins are, no matter what your life has been like, He will forgive you. He will cleanse you. He will wash you. He will make you His child.

He will adopt you into His family. He will deliver you from slavery and set you free. He will take you who's in need of you who's an enemy and make you His very best friend. He will take you who are condemned and He will declare you righteous. He will clean you up.

He will make you suitable for the master and He will use your life for His glory. Amazing grace. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today's sermon titled, What Makes Grace So Amazing from Romans 3-24. Join us again tomorrow as we'll hear the conclusion of this sermon preached at an evangelistic service at Bob Jones University. I'm Steve Pettit, President of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Thank you for listening to The Daily Platform. If you're looking for a regionally accredited Christian liberal arts university, I invite you to visit our campus and see how God is working in the lives of our students.

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