Wondrously Saved with More to Come #2

Salvation is about God showing favor to you that you did not deserve.

It's about Him bestowing such great marvelous riches upon our soul that we could never have asked for, that we had no claim on. We're so glad you've joined us on the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello, I'm Bill Wright, and we're continuing our series, Titus, God's Glorious Plan of Grace. Don will be wrapping up his message titled, Wonderously Saved with More to Come.

Last time we got a thorough definition of justification. We were reminded that justification both transfers guilt and punishment for sin to Christ and imputes His righteousness to us, all as an unmerited gift from God. Today, Don will highlight the magnificent eternal implications of salvation, and it promises to be an exciting study in God's Word.

So have your Bible open to Titus chapter 3 as we join Pastor Don Green now in the Truth Pulpit. What does it mean to be a Christian? For us to be so wondrously saved, it means that salvation has left us justified. Sinclair Ferguson said it this way, in the sight of God, we are not only innocent, but we are as righteous as Christ is. That's what is on your accounts in the book of heaven, is the perfect righteousness of Christ. You and I, because of a gracious gift and a gracious work of Christ, you and I, this is such a bold statement, but it's true. You and I are as entitled to be in heaven as Jesus Christ is, because God in His grace has taken the righteousness of Christ and put it on our account.

It's incredible. There's no other righteousness that could get us there. Think about it this way.

I want you to think rightly about your position before God. Suppose that you owed a man an utterly unpayable debt, a man of great wealth, and you owed him a debt that was far beyond your ability to pay in your lifetime. It would be wonderful if that man graciously forgave your debt and said, I'll wipe it away. Go free. And that debt is relieved.

That would be wonderful as far as it goes. But if you're completely in debt and you have no resources, to forgive this debt still leaves you broke. It leaves you without anything. The difference in justification is when that wealthy man says, I'm not only going to forgive your debt, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to write your name on all my bank accounts so that what I own also now belongs to you as a joint owner. That's what Christ has done with His righteousness for us, beloved. He hasn't simply forgiven our debt of sin against Him. He has shared the infinite merit of His righteousness with us and says it applies to you, it belongs to you. Christ actually paid your spiritual debt with His blood, but further, He has shared His infinite merit on your spiritual account. And beloved, with the debt paid and the law fulfilled, it's on that basis. This is how, as an utter substitute, God declares us righteous. He says, what my Son has done is credited to you. Now, let's back up for a second.

That means a couple of things. Fundamentally, we can see that there's a very real sense in which salvation is not about you and me at all. This is something that God did. This isn't something that we earned. This is about, at root, at root, beloved, oh, may God open our minds and hearts to understand what's about to be said. Your mind and mine. Salvation is about God showing favor to you that you did not deserve.

It's about Him bestowing such great, marvelous riches upon our soul that we could never have asked for, that we had no claim on. You could walk up to a wealthy man. You could walk up to Bill Gates or whoever. I don't care.

I don't care who those men are. I really don't. You could walk up to him and say, hey, would you share some of your loot with me? And he's going to say, on what basis do you ask? Get away. You have no claim on me. In an infinitely more significant and greater way, we have no claim on this gift of righteousness. Do you start to see the foolishness of thinking that there's ceremonies that we could do to earn God's gift of salvation?

Do you start to see the foolishness that if I just keep a few certain external rules, and I do this or that, and God would give me? No. No. Oh.

Oh. You start to see why Isaiah said that all of our righteousness is like filthy rags. In comparison to the magnitude of what God has done. The magnitude of the righteousness of Christ. Credited to our account, there's nothing that we could do to deserve that. That's why it says in verse 5, not on the basis of deeds that we've done in righteousness.

And so, and so, go back to Titus 3 now. I just want to get today's text actually in front of you again. Verse 7, so that being justified, being declared righteous, here it is, by His grace. On the basis of undeserved favor, God has poured this out upon us. For something that you didn't earn, God has given you so, so, so, so much. And see, the only way that we can properly respond to that is with a sense of holy hush. That says the magnitude of this, in exchange for my guilt, God has declared me righteous on the basis of a life I did not live and a death I did not die?

That's been given to me? Someone find words that are worthy to express some kind of measure of the magnitude of the goodness of that. There aren't words. There aren't words. And there should simply be a sense of holy awe and worship and reverence and grateful reverential fear that says, God, who is like you?

Who is like you? That was the words of the prophet Micah. The prophet Micah ends his prophecy with this.

And listen, he was seeing it on the front end of the cross. And he said, Micah chapter 7 verse 18, he said, Who is a God like you who pardons iniquity and passes over the rebellious act of the remnant of his possession? He does not retain his anger forever because he delights in unchanging love. He will again have compassion on us. He will tread our iniquities underfoot. Yes, now he speaks directly to God.

You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. What kind of God is this that is so compassionate? What kind of God is this that delights in unchanging love? What kind of mercy have we received that we are on the receiving end of such grace and mercy and kindness from the hands of a holy God?

Who is he that he's like that? And who am I to receive it? You see, beloved, when we're thinking rightly about salvation, about biblical salvation, it leads us to wonder and awe and praise. If salvation, let me say this, if the doctrines of salvation to you have seemed kind of superficial and unimportant, if you've grown a little bit tired of the idea of being a Christian, it's because you've utterly lost sight of the truth. Because the truth of the matter is that the truth overwhelms us with its power and its majesty. Salvation leaves us justified.

God looks at us as if we had lived the life that Christ lived, and he does not hold our sins against us anymore. Wow. That's worthy of praise. And you know what? It's not even the best part. It's not even the best part! This is the foundation for something else!

Something even bigger! And that leads us to our second point today. Salvation leaves us justified. Secondly, salvation leads us to glory. It leads us to glory.

Look at Titus 3.7 with me again. So that, being justified by His grace, we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. We have now become heirs of a future. There's a future that belongs to us now, but yet we haven't fully entered into. There's a future that is reserved in heaven for us that we have yet to see. Oh, beloved brothers and sisters in Christ, salvation is not about this life primarily.

I would say even secondarily. We are on the receiving end of something that is yet to come. The purpose of salvation transcends this earthly life. We are waiting to enter into a fuller unfolding of the magnitude of the grace of God in glory. It belongs to us as an heir. We are going to receive this gift that is yet to come. We don't have it yet, but we are the heirs.

It's going to come to us without fail. The certainty of receiving our inheritance in heaven is greater than the certainty of you getting home today. The certainty of our inheritance in heaven is greater than the certainty of your next breath. We wait for God to fulfill it, and we know that He will because He has promised it to us.

Our hope is not a wish. It is a certain expectation of something certain to come because it's grounded in the promise of God. Turn back to Romans chapter 8 for a moment. We are heirs of eternal life. We are heirs of a glory yet to come. We stand in the possession of one who will certainly receive it, but we don't possess it just quite yet.

Romans chapter 8 verse 16. The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God. We're children of God. We've been adopted into His family. And if children, heirs also, children are heirs of their parents' estate, what belongs to the parents will one day be passed to the children.

Well, here it is! All that belongs to God we're heirs of. It's going to be passed to us. Heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him. The glory of heaven is going to become ours. That is why He saved us. Oh, beloved.

Oh, beloved. God help us to get our minds around the greatness of salvation. It's not just to be forgiven in this life. He saved us, not only to bless us in this life. This great, majestic, holy God saved us so that He could bless us forever. Throughout all the ages of ages upon ages of unfolding eternity, God is going to be blessing us. We're going to behold His glory. We're going to behold the face of Christ. We are going to be free from sin. We are going to worship with the saints. Throughout all the ages, we are going to be with our God forever. He is never going to abandon us.

He's never going to set us aside. If you're in Christ, that is your destiny. That is what you are an heir of.

That is what you are going to receive. It is what you are going to possess. And nothing in this life can take it away from you.

No demon, no Satan, no nothing can take it away from you, because an omnipotent, mighty God has determined that He wished to bless you like this, and He has, and the best is still yet to come. He's going to bless us forever. He's just started. It's just begun. We've just gotten a little wisp of a passing mist of the goodness of God in our life so far.

The full substance of this is still to be revealed. Turn over to 1 Peter chapter 1. What do you say to God? What do you say about God in response? Well Peter does a pretty good job.

Peter does an inspired job. 1 Peter chapter 1 verse 3. You ascribe glory and praise to God in response.

That's all you can do. 1 Peter 1 verse 3. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, according to His great mercy, has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. It belongs to you. It's yours. It's not going to die. It's not going to go away. It's imperishable. It's perfect.

It's undefiled. And what I like about this passage in Peter is that it will not fade away. Do you understand that we are never going to get tired of the glory in heaven? Heaven's not going to get old to us. The majesty, the glory of it is not going to fade away. We're going to be stunned. We're going to be staggered by the majesty, the stunning glory when we enter into the inheritance that God has reserved for us. And after 10 billion years pass by, it's still going to be as stunning and as magnificent as it was at the start. I understand you can't quantify eternity with time references like that, but somehow we've got to say something that gives us a sense of what we can receive here in this earthly body. It's never going to get old.

I don't know what it's going to be like to first enter into that, to first see Christ, but I know it's going to be staggeringly wonderful. If there could be anything more staggering than that, it's the fact that it's never going to get old. It's not going to fade away. What supremely rejoices our heart in this life is our Lord Jesus Christ. When we see Him for the first time, it's going to be exponentially infinitely greater, and that's never going to die down.

It's not going to burn out. That's the nature of the inheritance that He has for us. Christian, let me say one last thing to you. This gift is secure. There is no way that a true Christian could lose this gift, because it was never about you in the first place. It wasn't about you earning it through your merit, and so it's not about you possibly losing it through your demerit.

This is all about the power of God and the merit of Christ and His perfect sacrifice on the cross that has utterly washed away every sin in your life so that God will never raise it again in His dealings with you, to judge you for it, to cast you away for it. That's never going to happen. It can't happen. He would have to reverse what He's already determined to do. He would have to divide against Himself to reverse it.

It's not going to happen. If you're saved now, you're saved for forever, because of the greatness of what Christ has done. You didn't earn it by your past deeds of righteousness.

You cannot forfeit it by future deeds of unrighteousness. This is the bounty of the grace of God on our souls. God has determined the verdict in justification, and He has determined to bless us still more in time to come.

I feel about this big right now, don't you? Eternal riches of glory poured out on you and me by one who was under no obligation to bestow it upon one who had no merit to deserve it. And yet, here we are. Here we are, justified certainly one day to be glorified and to be with this great and gracious God forever. We should be grateful toward God. Beloved, and the point of Paul's passage here in Titus 3 is that that should make us gracious to men, the men around us. If we're rightly overwhelmed by the grace of God, we take a whole lot less offense at the sins of men against us and at the nature of the culture around us. Yes, it's bad. Yes, it's sinful.

But that's the whole point. The culture in macrocosm is what you were in microcosm, and God delivered you from it. If God had grace on us in our microcosm, the command then is for us to be gracious to what's around us. To carry the word of the Gospel, not to retaliate when we're wronged against. Because our minds are so locked in and so dominated and so overwhelmed by the wonder with which we have been wondrously saved. And by the wonder that we're so wondrously going to receive so wondrously much more still to come.

You can't do anything to earn this. For those of you who don't know Christ, He offers it to you as a gift. He offers it to you.

He says, come to me. You receive Christ and you rest in Him. That's what it means to have faith in Christ. You receive Him, you surrender to Him, and you rest in Him. You stop trying to earn it. You stop the attitude of rebellion, and you give yourself over to Him without reservation.

That's the call. We receive this gift of justification by simple faith. And Christ offers it to you now and says, come to me. I'll give this gift to you.

It's hard to even imagine the concept of eternity, but Scripture's promise, backed up by our resurrected Lord Jesus Christ, promises not only eternity, but a wonderful eternity. Let's share that good news with those around us. Pastor Don Green will move further into our series, Titus, God's Glorious Plan of Grace, on our next broadcast. Join us then on The Truth Pulpit. Meanwhile, we invite you to visit our website, thetruthpulpit.com. There you can download podcasts or find out how to receive CD copies of Don's radio messages for your personal study library. And if you want to go even more in depth, you'll also find the link Follow Don's Pulpit. That'll take you to Don's full-length weekly sermons not subject to the time editing we need for radio broadcasts. And if you're in the Cincinnati area, check out our service times for Truth Community Church, also on the website, and do plan a visit. We'd love to welcome you. Thanks for listening. I'm Bill Wright, and we'll see you next time for more from The Truth Pulpit.