Saints Alive

Paul wrote in Ephesians 1 for he chose us before the foundation of the world that we should be saints and blameless before him. It is also our current position which produces a number of benefits, among them the intercession of the Holy Spirit. Paul says in Romans 8 27, he the Holy Spirit makes intercession for the saints.

There are past, present, and future benefits of those the Bible refers to as here and now. Living saints. God never goes to a sinner and picks him or her up out of the mud of sin and says, now try your best to become a saint. What does it mean to be called by God? And why does Paul refer to believers as saints? In today's message from God's Word, we dive into Romans 1 6-7, where Paul emphasizes the powerful truth about our identity in Christ. You aren't just saved from sin. You're called for a purpose, loved by God, and set apart as holy.

But how does that change the way you live? If you've ever wondered what it means to truly belong to Christ, to be deeply loved by God, and to live as one of his saints, you won't want to miss this message. It's a reminder that being a Christian is more than just a title. It's a calling that transforms everything.

This is wisdom for the heart, and Stephen called this message Saints Alive. Once upon a time, there was a shepherd tending his sheep at the edge of a country road. A brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee screeched to a halt next to him. The driver, a man dressed in a designer suit, expensive shoes, flashy wristwatch, and sunglasses, asked the shepherd, Say, if I can guess how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them? The shepherd looked the man over and then looked at his sprawling field of sheep and then said, all right.

The young executive parked his SUV, connected his notebook and wireless modem, scanned the ground using his GPS, opened a database, then printed his report out on a mini printer. He turned to the shepherd and said, you have exactly 1586 sheep in your flock. The shepherd answered, that's right. Wow. Well, you can have one of my sheep.

The young man took one of the animals and put it in the back of his Jeep. The shepherd called out and said, hey, before you leave, if I guess your profession, will you pay me back? The executive smiled and said, sure, go ahead and try. The shepherd said, you're a consultant. The man said, that's right, but how did you know? The shepherd responded very simply, first, you came here without being called. Second, you charged me to tell me something I already knew.

Third, you really don't understand anything about my business and I'd really like to have my dog back. In our last discussion together, we discovered that it was possible for people to look good, to sound spiritually tuned in, to have all the right equipment. And yet in the final analysis, not know the difference between genuine faith and deceived faith, or in the words of this parable, they don't know the difference between a dog and a sheep. What's even more tragic is that they are in the process of traveling down the highway of life, believing they have packed the genuine item along with them, where in reality they are in the process of being deceived.

And the deception is rampant. It is so widespread that we uncovered a moment in the future when that great mass of religious people will stand before the Lord as recorded in Matthew chapter seven. And they will stand before him having had miracle working ministry and prophetic ministry and healing ministry who did everything that they did in the name of Jesus Christ, whom they claimed as Lord. Yet at that moment in Matthew chapter seven verse 23, Jesus the judge will look at them and say, I never knew you. In that group, there are pastors and there are Sunday school teachers, there are evangelists, there are deacons, there are well known supposed miracle workers and healers, Bible study leaders and denominational heads.

People that you would never for a million years ever guess that they would ever be part of that deceived body of people, yet they are indeed deceived. And in that horrible moment, there is revealed unto them the depth of their unbelief. No wonder Paul commanded the church to examine themselves to see if they are in the faith. No wonder Paul told the church, brethren, be all the more diligent to make certain of his calling and election, 2 Peter 1 10. Frankly, I believe that the desire and submission to that kind of evaluation is as much a proof of genuine faith as about anything else. The world, ladies and gentlemen, has never been told to examine its faith. The believer or the one who claims to know Christ is told to examine himself.

To ask yourself the hard questions. Is there an internal affection for Christ? Is there a shame in my heart over the slightest of sin? Is there submission to the things of Jesus Christ motivated not by pride or a following or by money or applause or the promise of a blessing or the promise of comfort or for comfort's sake, but simply the surrendered passion of a heart that is to please and obey and honor God from the heart with the entire life? You say, but won't that kind of evaluation produce doubt?

No. If done prayerfully and with the Scriptures, your guide in the Holy Spirit, your evaluator, that kind of self-examination will not produce doubt. It will produce depth. Examined faith is not destroyed.

It's deepened. And Paul referred to that deep, genuine faith in Romans 1 5 as faith that is obedient. In the mind of Paul, obedience and faith, as we studied in our last discussion, is synonymous with one another in the life of the believer. Obedience and faith are synonyms in a true believer's life.

Saving faith, as we have already discussed, comes independently of any works, yet saving genuine faith works. Now, with that as the backdrop, for the first time in Paul's declaration of the gospel truth, he addresses the reader with personal, emotional language. Our text for today is Romans 1 6 and 7, among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ to all who are beloved of God in Rome, called as saints. You can't help but perhaps notice the repetition of a word now used three times by the apostle.

You could get out your pencil and circle them. In verse 1, we're told, as Paul informs the reader of his calling, his calling to be an apostle. In verse 6, he says we are called of Jesus Christ. Then in verse 7, he says we are called as saints. The verb form is calao. Transliterated means call, to call. The assembly of believers here today comes from that same word, only a different form, ecclesia.

It is calao plus ek, to call out. So a church is a body of called out ones, called by Jesus Christ, who is in the process of forming his body. Paul's description here is that they are literally called to belong to Jesus Christ. The idea is one of possession. It is personal.

It is possessive. If you saw my four children after church hanging around waiting for their father, as they normally do, and some visitor asked you the question, hey, whose children are those? Well, if they're behaving, you could say those are Marsha Davies, because she deserves all the credit if they're behaving. If they are misbehaving, you could say, I don't know.

I would appreciate that. To say they are Marsha Davies' children means that there is a possession there. This is the same thing that Paul is doing here as he emphasizes the possessive nature.

You could simply read it this way. They are called Jesus Christ. Whose children are you? You are Jesus Christ's children.

And you happen to have his name, Christian. Just as my children carry around the name Davey because they are my offspring, so we carry around the name Christian because we are his offspring. We get illustrated a little differently by saying we are called North Carolinians because hardly of us any by birth, but we happen to reside in the state of North Carolina. We are called Americans, most of us by birth, because our citizenship happens to be in America, and you have certain rights and privileges and responsibilities and duties as a citizen of this country. You are a North Carolinian because you live in North Carolina.

You are an American because you live in America. You are Christian because you live in Christ. And as one who lives in Christ, then, did you know that your citizenship is truly in heaven? Paul wrote, we wait for our Savior, having our citizenship in heaven. That is our Savior Jesus Christ, Philippians 3.20. We are all, he writes, fellow citizens of the saints, Ephesians 2.19. I happen to believe that the more mindful you are of your citizenship in heaven, the better you are as a citizen on earth. The more committed you are to that heavenly city, the deeper impact you will make upon this city.

People who are mindful of that city impact this city. Paul says we are called by Christ. That is, we are his personal possession. That's who a Christian is. One author I was reading just this past week talked about his conversion experience as a college student.

He and his buddy who lived in his dorm room went to a meeting one night, and the gospel was preached, and they both accepted Christ. For this author, it would mean a change in life, and he would never be the same. But his friend came down the next morning and said to him, you know, wasn't that the craziest thing we did last night? Can you imagine? We got caught up in that.

And by the way, you wouldn't tell anybody, would you? You see, he had heard the call of the preacher. The other one had heard the call of Christ. And he had become Jesus Christ's child. Not only are we called to belong to Jesus Christ, Paul goes on to say in verse seven that true believers are beloved by God. Now, that word is a wonderful word. It's used only of the believer.

It's never used of the world. Now, we know that God has a general love for the world. We read, for God so what? Loved the world. He has a sustaining love for all of the world so that by his grace, it will reign as it did last night, not only on your yard as a believer, but it will reign on the yard next to you of the unbeliever. He has a sustaining love. He has a general love, but now he moves to this description where he calls some his beloved. You remember when the first time that word appeared in the gospel account where Jesus was being immersed by John the baptizer, and as he was in that process, they heard a voice from heaven that said, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.

It is that word that he uses now to relate to those who have been called by Jesus Christ to come. Do you know what it means to be beloved of God? Oh, if this truth would penetrate our hearts to think that we are God's special possession and that he deeply and faithfully, eternally, specifically, unfailingly, loves us. What an amazing thing that we are his beloved. I can't help but believe that Paul's very next word or two is intended to speak volumes of encouragement to the believers here. Notice verse 7 again, to all who are beloved of God in Rome. That was another way of saying to them, God knows exactly where you live.

And that was incredibly encouraging. They hadn't somehow slipped out of his peripheral vision if he had been bothered with something else and he took his eye off them and they slipped out of sight and now, oh my, I can't seem to spot him or I can't seem to find her again. No, that's not it at all. But if there was a group of believers that might have wondered whether or not God knew the specifics about where they lived, I think it would be the Romans. You see, at this point, they haven't been visited by an apostle. We have no record of Paul or Peter ever making it to Rome until later in Paul's life.

The church wasn't planted by an official delegation from Jerusalem and planted by those who were stalwarts of the faith. In fact, from everything we know, the church was founded by a group of people that had been in Jerusalem visiting during Pentecost. And they had heard the apostle Peter preach. Acts chapter 2 verse 10 tells us that some, listening to Peter, were visitors from Rome.

They evidently believed the message and so they left and they went back to their city and they began to establish their walk and their faith and gather about them those who would believe the message as they delivered it, having heard it themselves. And so I can imagine what a difficult city to try and build a church in that was Rome. This is Rome, Italy.

Put this on the map in your mind. This was the home of Nero. This was the city of the powerful.

This was also, Seneca, one of their own historians said, a cesspool of iniquity. This was the place of the gladiators and the gamblers. This was home to religious prostitution and superstition. This is the city where tens of thousands of people would pack into a coliseum and watch chariot races and later Christians fed the lions.

It was San Francisco, as it were, and Las Vegas and New York and Washington, D.C. all rolled up into one. How could the church ever hope to compete for the hearts of men and women in a city like this? And what an easy place to become discouraged in this huge metropolis called Rome. What an easy place to fail.

Oh, what temptation was here. Surely God wouldn't care as much about us as he would his church in Jerusalem or Antioch. Has it ever occurred to you, my friend, that God never specifically sent a letter to the believers in Jerusalem? But he specifically sent a letter to these believers who lived in Rome. You see, God didn't want them to forget that he was aware not only of who they were, but where they lived. And a personal letter to them and to us from the heart of God. And at the very first few lines, we are told this incredible truth that we are beloved by God.

There's one more calling. They've been called to belong to Jesus Christ. They have been called the beloved of God. Now here in the last phrase of verse 10, Paul writes, They are called as saints, hagios, holy ones. The Latin translation of hagios is sanctus, which gives us our word saint. So these then here are the holy ones. They are the saints. Now would you carefully notice that any words you may have in your text which have been italicized have been added by the translators to give clarity to the meaning of the text.

But sometimes, as in this case, they actually obscure, I believe, the impact of the statement. We are not called to be saints. KJV and NIV. We are not called as saints, the NASB, although it's closer to the original meaning, but I still believe it obscures the weight of Paul's statement. Paul simply wrote, To all who are beloved of God in Rome, called saints. You see, my friends, there is a vast difference between being called to become a saint and being called a saint. If we are called to become a saint, that's a goal that we must attain. If we are called saints, then that's a position we already have, right?

Are you with me? Now if God called you to become a saint, you'd better get on your horse and start working real hard because you may not make it. In fact, you probably won't if it's something you attain. The Roman Catholic Church has a process whereby a few special people can earn the right or the name of sainthood. If you'd like to be a saint and follow that process, well, first you have to die and be dead for at least 150 years. Then application can be made to high ecclesiastical authority by those who believe that you were indeed a saint.

Meanwhile, you happen to be suffering in purgatory, paying for those rather unsaintly moments. Finally, the church will agree to view your case, and so they will establish an avocatus diaboli, a devil's advocate. And that committee will condense all of the information they have about you that would prove that you are anything but a saint. If, however, there can be evidence of some miracle at your hand or even a miracle of some healing at your graveside or perhaps some supernatural power emanating from a relic of yours, some clothing or some cup you drank from or some chair you sat upon, then all of that evidence is collected as well. And if, when all of the evidence is collected, that the evidence of your saintliness wins out over the evidence of your sinfulness, then you are decreed by the highest ecclesiastical order to become a saint. And you are immediately taken out of purgatory into the bliss of heaven where you receive the prayers of people still on earth today.

There's one problem with that entire application process. None of it has any biblical basis whatsoever, not one biblical verse. In fact, the Bible, if you look at it, refers to saints as people who are still alive. Paul wrote, to the saints who are at Ephesus, Ephesians 1-1. He wrote to the Philippians, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are living in Philippi, Philippians 1-1. And again, to the saints in Colossae, Colossians 1-2.

These people were very much alive. According to the Bible, sainthood is not a goal of the believer, it is the position of every believer. It has been our position from time past. Paul wrote in Ephesians 1-4, he chose us before the foundation of the world that we should be hagioides, that we should be saints and blameless before him. It is also our current position, which produces a number of benefits, among them the intercession of the Holy Spirit. Paul says in Romans 8-27, he, the Holy Spirit, makes intercession for the saints. If you weren't a saint now, you wouldn't have the benefit of the intercession of the Holy Spirit on your behalf. There are past, present, and future benefits of those the Bible refers to as here and now living saints. God never goes to a sinner and picks him or her up out of the mud of sin and says, Now, try your best to become a saint.

No. He picks them up out of the mud of sin and he says, You are now my Holy One. You are now a saint. But how could he call us saints? We live with ourselves, right? How many of you feel like you're a saint?

It's unanimous. How can he call us this? Well, he can say this, my friends, listen carefully. Not because we have intrinsic righteousness or we have attained to some righteousness or we've done enough righteous things. He calls us this because we have been given as a gift, as part of salvation, the gift of righteousness.

The only difference between a sinner and a saint is the Savior the gift of righteousness that comes on the heels of the calling of Jesus Christ. When you became a believer and you followed the call of Jesus Christ, your status changed. You became the bride of Christ. The status changed immediately. Now he's going to work on your heart and your character and your personality for the rest of your life. Isn't that wonderful news? He is committed to changing you and me into the image of his son.

Your status is now you're a saint. Imagine that. Now one of the reasons it's difficult for us to understand that is we muddy the positional truth we are holy ones clothed in the righteousness of Christ with the practical authenticity of that application. So this positional truth has practical outworking.

Let me illustrate it this way. I was born into the Davey family and my mother and father had four little Davies. We had the status of being a Davey. But I can remember a hundred times if not a thousand times as I went out to play and wreak havoc in the neighborhood that my mother or father or if I went to get the keys to the car as an older teenager about to drive away they would say something to me like, don't forget what your name is.

That took all the steam out of it a lot of times. But see they were telling me that my behavior needed to match my status. My position needed to result in some practical application. We're given the same challenge in the Bible. Paul wrote in Ephesians 5-3 But immorality or any impurity or any greed must not even be named among you as is proper among the saints. The position of sainthood is to have an immediate impact and a life changing impact. In other words you are not a saint because you are saintly. You attempt to live a saintly life because you're a saint. You are to pursue a life of holiness because you are one of God's holy ones. Not so that you will become one of God's holy ones. In Ephesians Paul wrote, lay aside the old self, put on the new self which is in the likeness of God and has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth. Ephesians 4-22, listen as Peter wrote in 1 Peter 1-14 Don't be conformed to the former lusts but like the holy one who called you be holy yourselves also in all your behavior because it is written you shall be holy for I am holy. In other words your behavior should match your status.

He's saying don't forget what your name is. You say but this is an awfully high standard isn't it? Holiness? It is. But God doesn't lower the standard.

He does empower the saint. One Wall Street article reported two weeks ago that the city of San Francisco did what the world does with standards. That Board of Education met. They had learned that nearly one out of every three of San Francisco's high school seniors would not be graduating on schedule because they weren't meeting graduation requirements. So the San Francisco Board of Education promptly did what?

They lowered the requirements for graduation. Now I expect the world system to dumb down to whatever people seem to want to meet. They seem to believe I think that one of the worst sins is perhaps some low self-esteem that comes from not meeting some standard and that is tragic to think it that way. I am however more disturbed when the church seems to do the same thing.

The headlines of an AP news article caught my eye. It said this acknowledging that many divorcing couples suffer guilt over the end of the marriage. A bishop in Hanover, Germany says it's time the church stepped in to help people better deal with the pain. Margo Keisemann, a bishop for the German Protestant Church, suggested today that churches introduce a special religious end of marriage ceremony. A lot of people have problems of conscience after divorce, so a separation ceremony would help them and their children cope, she told the German daily newspaper.

Keisemann suggested the whole family would meet in church to renounce the marriage vow. Sometimes saints do divorce, sometimes saints fail their graduating class, sometimes saints do all kinds of other sins, but the biblical standard of living for the saint doesn't change to accommodate the sins of even the saints. It is still holiness.

It doesn't lower itself so that we feel better about our failure. In fact, the true sign of a true saint is probably someone who has a full admission of sin as sin and a full confession of that sin to the Savior. The sign of a true saint is that they are troubled over the infraction of God's standard of holiness.

And as they grow in that grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, their sensitivity to sin, even the slightest of sin, increases. See, the truth is, for the saints in here today, you're in the process of discovering that if living the life of a saint were something we could easily do, we wouldn't need to depend upon the Holy Spirit, would we? We wouldn't need to get into this book. We could treat it casually like a manual and view it every once in a while.

Well, who would really need it? But the opposite is true, isn't it? The true saint in here is a person who is pursuing holiness and pursuing that attitude which sets its affections on things above, and it is also in the process of discovering that living the life of a saint is not difficult.

It is impossible. We've been called to belong to Jesus Christ. We've been called the beloved of God, and we have been called saints to live holy lives. So, my friends, when you go out into your world, don't forget who you belong to. Don't forget who deeply loves you, and don't forget what your name is for the glory of God. As believers, we are called to belong to Christ.

We're loved by God and set apart as his saints. Let's live out that calling with confidence and commitment, knowing that our identity in him is secure. I encourage you to install the Wisdom International app on your phone or tablet. You'll have access to Stephen's entire Bible teaching library. You can follow along with the Wisdom Journey and Wisdom for the Heart and listen or read Stephen's sermons. The app also features daily devotionals, Stephen's blog, and a built-in Bible. You can either read the text or listen to the Bible being read aloud, which is perfect for when you're driving or on the go. One helpful feature is the link to Stephen's teaching from any Bible passage you're reading. If Stephen has a lesson on that section, you'll see a link right at the top of your screen. To visit, simply search for Wisdom International in your app store. It's available on iTunes and Google Play, and of course the app is free to install and use. Please join us next time to discover more Wisdom for the Heart. Thank you.