THE CROSS OF RECONCILIATION
You may be sitting here this morning going through a hard time. Do you feel like you are drowning on the inside? Like your prayers are barely making it past the ceiling? You just can’t find the words. You feel dry. There’s even dust on your Bible. And then there are those nagging sinful habits that you can’t seem to overcome. As a Christian you feel like a failure and wonder how God could love someone like you.
Do you feel like this? You’re not alone. Every Christian knows the feeling of falling short. We all feel like we come up short of being a “good Christian.” Our failure eats away at our assurance of God’s love because we have become convinced that we must earn it.
The truth is, according to the Bible, there is nothing we have done or could do to earn the love of God. You cannot read your Bible enough; you cannot serve on enough committees; you cannot do anything to make God love you more. We can do nothing in and of ourselves to help ourselves – so Jesus did it for us.
Last week we talked about the Cross of Substitution and how Jesus took our place and bore our penalty. That’s court language. It helps us to know that while our sin condemned us, we are declared innocent in God’s court. But today we are talking about another aspect of the cross that speaks of relationship. The Cross of Reconciliation speaks of God’s desire to have a relationship with us; it is heart language. The Cross of Christ is the assurance that God has made every effort to make this possible.
So why do we struggle with the idea of God loving us? If you doubt your access to God’s love, let’s reflect on the message of reconciliation that we see in Romans 5. The message of this passage is simple but powerful: if God reconciled us to himself when we were his enemies through the death of Christ, then we can be absolutely certain that he will finish saving us now that we belong to him.
1. The Certainty of Our Salvation (Rom. 5:1-2)
At times you may wonder, “How sure is my salvation?” The question has been asked many times by many people. Specific Christian groups even deny that a person can have the assurance of salvation. God’s love is in doubt as a result.
When Paul wrote to the Romans, many Jewish people believed that forgiveness was temporary. They had a hard time believing that their sins were off the books; they thought God was storing up his wrath for the judgment day. Am I really forgiven? How can I be forgiven? To use court language, am I really “not guilty” in the eyes of the judge?
Yes! And Paul begins with court language saying, “…since we have been justified by faith…” speaking of forgiveness with a perfect certainty. There is no doubt in this statement and no condition to be met. We have been justified – declared “not guilty” – that’s it! Believe it! That’s the key: by faith, we believe God when he says we are forgiven.
Then Paul slips into the language of reconciliation when he says, “…we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…” You see, we start with the court proceedings and settle the penalty for our sins with Christ’s substitution. But then God moves beyond the legalities because he wants more. God wants that relationship with us and so declares that we have peace with him. Our sin created a wall of hostility between us and God, but sin is dealt with through Christ and we don’t need to fear God’s wrath.
God moves EVEN closer to us by opening his most intimate sanctum to us. Through Christ “…we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand…” The progression is astounding: the first move is to forgive us our sins; the second move is to declare there is nothing between us and God (peace); but the third move is unexpected – we can come to God and know him.
The tone of these verses is an undeniable certainty that our salvation is assured because God has done this.
2. Our Helpless Condition (5:6-7)
What makes this salvation all the more incredible is that our condition before God was such that a) God had no obligation to help us, and b) we could not help ourselves. For our part, there was nothing we could do to reconcile with God. Consider how our condition according to verses 6-10:
Paul begins “For while we were still weak…” The NIV says “powerless.” What he means is, we were spiritually and morally powerless people. We were/are unable to prove ourselves worthy of Christ’s sacrifice. We were helpless to do anything that might attract God’s love. There’s that old saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” That’s garbage. God helps those who are utterly and absolutely helpless.
We are ungodly people. As it says “…at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” To be ungodly kind of means “being unlike God.” God is pure and consistently holy; he is so good and there is no evil or hypocrisy in him. It also means that as ungodly people we stood opposed to God. When we say someone is “un-Canadian” we mean they don’t like hockey – or rather, they embrace an ideology that is contrary to Canadian thinking and practice. To be ungodly means we reject God’s values and truths. We don’t like God. When God says “yes” we say “no.” These are the people Christ died for.
Sinners. Do you see the flow of thought? While we were weak…while we were ungodly… “while we were still sinners.” There are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at math and those who are not… But there are not two classes of people when it comes to sin: those who sin and those who don’t. We are all defiant sinners.
The last description is the hardest to hear. “…while we were enemies…” of God. Don’t play it down; it means everything that you think it means. Paul does not say we were merely mistaken. He does not say we were spiritually confused. He says we were enemies of God.
But salvation never begins with human initiative…
3. The Cross is Proof of God’s Love (5:8)
Salvation is fully God’s initiative. Note these beautiful little words: But God! We were helpless, powerless, useless… “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Who would you die for? I would take a bullet for my wife. You may give a kidney for a friend. Mothers would gladly die for their children. But would you die for the person who kidnapped your child? Fathers would give their lives for the sake of a child. But would you give yourself for the drunk driver who ran them over? No.
Paul reasons that we would be reluctant to die for a good person, a righteous person. The logic suggests that, in all honesty, we would have to assess the situation. Is this person worth dying for? If God’s logic was like this, he would surely say that we were not worth it.
So, what motivated God to send his Son to die for us? Love! God did not wait for us to love him before he sent his Son to the cross. Jesus died for sinners. Jesus died for those who messed up their lives. Before you and I even thought of God, God thought of us – and planned to give up his Son.
God decided to drench us with his love. Earlier Paul described God’s love like this: “…God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us,” (5). I hear in this picture of God’s love a waterfall roaring over us. Not a trickle, but an overwhelming flood of love.
As we observe the cross of Christ, we see then a “demonstration” of God’s love. The cross did not move God’s heart to love you. The cross IS God’s heart of love for you. It is an unusual symbol of love considering that it is one of the most horrible ways to kill a person. It is cruel and grotesque as the story of Spartacus reminds us, where thousands of rebels were crucified along the Roman roads.
But if you wonder if God loves you, and you feel like he doesn’t, the cross is proof that he does. (Micah Tyler)
4. Much, Much More (5:9-11)
What are the benefits to us of this incredible act of love as seen in the cross of Christ? And to this, you should ask, “You mean there’s more?”
Paul proposes that there is more. “Since, therefore, we have been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if we while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”
Paul cannot contain himself as he thinks of the benefits we now enjoy because of the cross of Christ. His argument is surprisingly simple. If God did the hardest thing when we were his enemies, how much more will he finish the work now that we are reconciled to him. There are three “much more” advantages that we see in this text:
1 – Much more – we are saved from God’s wrath.
2 – Much more – we are reconciled to God through Christ.
3 – Much more – we rejoice in God with a new perspective.
He explains himself a little better in Romans 8:32 where he says of God, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will not also with him graciously give us all things?” So, Paul’s argument simply stated is this: If the greatest and most costly and most sacrificial thing God could do for us was to send his Son to suffer and die on a cross, will he not also do the easier things for us that will help us in this life?
The cross is the most expensive part of our salvation. The cross is the most difficult part of God’s story of love. Surely the rest is easier. Through the cross, God’s wrath is satisfied. Through the cross, we are reconciled to God and made family. Through the cross, we have a new perspective that even in and through our suffering, God is at work (5:3-4).
God has done the hard part of reconciling us to himself. I love the story of the Ormands and the Kildares, and so I will share it again… In 1492, two Irish families, the Ormands and the Kildares, were in the midst of a bitter feud. The feud became an all-out fight, with the Kildares besieging the Ormands. The Earl of Ormand and his family finally took refuge in the chapter house of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But the Earl of Kildare realized that the fighting was getting out of control. These two families worshiped the same God, in the same church, but were trying to kill each other. Kildare called out to Ormand and promised not to seek revenge or try anything nasty. He wanted the feud to be over. But the Earl of Ormand thought it was a trick and refused to come out. So, Kildare used his spear and hacked a hole in the door and thrust his arm through. After a tense moment…another hand reached out from the other side. The door opened and the two men embraced, ending the feud.
God took the initiative and chopped a hole through the hostility that separated us from himself and offered his hand.
Do you struggle to believe God loves you? Do you think God’s love for you fades as you muck around in life?
Imagine that you are climbing a mountain and a sudden weather pattern dumps snow and freezing rain on the mountain. The storm is brutal. Your visibility is gone. But someone notices that you have been gone a long time and sends a rescue team to search for you. They fight through the wind, plow through the snow, and climb dangerous icy paths to get to you. You are half-frozen, so they put you in the sled and begin down the mountain.
Think about this: If they were willing to risk their lives to reach you when you were lost, do you think they will stop halfway down the mountain and leave you to the elements?
No, the hardest part was reaching you. This is what Paul is trying to say to us today. If God gave his Son to die for us when we were his enemies, when we were far from him, when we wanted nothing to do with God, then how much more will he finish the work of saving us and bringing us home now that we believe in him?
The cross of Christ was the hard part of reconciliation. You can be sure God is going to complete his work of making you his child. God loves you and there is no better proof of that than the cross of reconciliation.
AMEN
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