A Transcription of Tim Keller's "Justified by Faith"

Transcription:

Now every single week we are looking at the story ark of the whole bible. We are understanding that the bible is not so much a set of disconnected stories each with a little lesson on how to live your life but the bible actually comprises a single story that tells us what’s wrong with the human race with the world, what God has done to put it right in Jesus Christ and then as a result how history is going to turn out in the end. And we are looking at Romans 1, 2, 3 and 4 because here we have Paul summarizing the story of the bible and here in chapter 3, the last half of chapter 3, and the beginning of chapter 4, we probably have the Paul’s most, best most essential summary of what he thinks the bible’s all about and what this salvation is that God has done to put the world right and there are three phrases that are, that actually are in a sense repeated and they’re brought in the relationships with each other in different ways throughout these few verses but those three phrases are, “we are justified freely by faith through the blood of Christ.” Free justification all by faith because of through the blood of Jesus. And for three weeks we are actually going to look at essentially these same verses, chapter 3, in the beginning of chapter 4, for three weeks to look at each of those phrases and during these, and the reason why is because actually as you know if you’ve ever been here before, we actually talk about these three things every week. But what I want to do for three weeks is I want to be as clear and as practical as about what these things are and how you have to relate to these three things. And I want to, I’m going to be practical and clear, more than inspirational. I’m going to aim for clarity and practicality more than being inspirational, I can’t promise not occasionally get excited. Though on the day you lost an hour of sleep, it’s a lot easier to not be excited but you never know because of the theme. So what we are going to look at tonight is the first of these three ideas, “free justification.” What is that? Why do we need it, what is it and how do we receive it. Why do we need it, what is it and how do we receive it. Now, why we need it. The top of this passage, the very famous beginning of the passage, “but now a righteousness of God apart from the law has been made known. This righteousness comes from God through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” Let me show you how absolutely radical that is. This word “righteousness” I know does not compute much, it doesn’t connect to us English speakers. It’s almost a negative word in our language so let me explain how it functions, what we are really talking about here. Righteousness is a validating performance record, which open doors, which opens doors. It is a validating performance record which opens doors. For example you want a job, you get out a resume. That resume is a vocational record. It should have all your accomplishments and your experiences. And if you want a job you take it to the employer or whoever you have to apply to and it’s your validating performance record and you say, this means I’m worthy of the position, accept me. And if your performance record is good enough, if you’re good enough, the door opens. Or let’s say you want a get an advanced degree, you know and you want to get into a degree program, what do you do? Well in that case, you bring out not your vocational record, you bring out your academic record, you bring out your grades! And these now function as your validating performance record and you say “look at this, because of these grades I am worthy of this position, accept me. Please accept me.” And if you’re good enough, you’re accepted. And because that’s the way this is in all of life, see. Everybody has these performance record, these validating performance record by which I get jobs, by which I get in school, by which I, you know, do all these various things, it’s, that’s the reason why every religion and every culture, everywhere in the world believes it’s the same with God. That if you’re going to, if there’s a God and if you’re going to have a spiritual connection, it’s the same, it’s not a vocation record or academic record, it’s a moral record but this is how you get connected to God, this is how you go to heaven, this is how you find enlightenment or whatever. Here’s how you connect to the divine. You get out your performance record, you develop a righteousness and offer it and if you’re good enough, you’re worthy and you’re accepted. And then Paul comes along and says “but now for the first the time in history and by the way may I add the last time in history, an absolutely unheard of spirituality, an absolutely totally unheard of approach to God has been revealed.” What? He says, there’s not just a good record or a great record but a divine righteousness. A perfect record. And it is available as a gift, it comes to us, it lights upon us. And when we have it, it’s the end of our struggle for validation for worthy, for worth and for acceptability. We don’t know anything, apart from the Christian gospel there is nobody else, no other place that offers anything like that. Because all anyone else knows, is a righteousness that we develop and that we offer to God or we offer to the power of that be, “ok now accept me” but the gospel is that God developed a perfect righteousness and he offers it to us and by it we are accepted. Paul says but now, it’s never been ever heard of before and it’s never been heard of since. The Christian gospel is absolutely and totally unique and the reverse of what anybody else, any other religion, any other culture, any other philosophy and any human heart actually believes. What now somebody says, listen I’m going to, I’m trying to be clear as practical as I can be. If you’re a thoughtful person, you may be out there saying, “yeah but I’m not a religious person, I’m not into righteousness and moral records, I’m a secular person or I’m not sure what I believe about God. This is nice for you religious people but this has nothing to say to me, no I beg to differ with you.” Because properly understood, everybody is seeking righteousness. Now here’s a way to understand that better is the word righteousness and the word justification in this text is actually the same greek word. You know in English, righteousness, to be justified is one thing to be, righteousness is a very another thing but it’s actually the same concept, so let’s look at that term. Let me show you that everybody is trying to find a way to be justified. In the Chariots of Fire, there one of the characters, he’s a runner, he’s an athlete, he’s an Olympic runner and he’s going for the gold in the hundred yard dash, remember it was that, and when somebody says, “why are you working so hard, why are you training so hard”, he actually says, “when that gun goes off, I have 10 seconds to justify my existence”, and here’s what he is saying. He says, “you know I want to know that I am justified being here, I want to know that my life is worth something, I want to know that what I’m, that my life counts, I want to know that I’m a person worthy to be known and accepted and the way I’m doing that, the way I’m convincing myself and other people that my existence is justified is that I’m going to be a runner”, and that means, and of course you know how the movie goes, the cheering of the crown and the gold medal he wins is his justification. It’s not just a gold medal, it’s not just cheering, it’s his justification. It makes him feel validated, worthy, accepted. Sydney Pollack was a, just died couple of years ago and he was a movie maker and he made a lot of movies I liked actually and a, but I found, he died in 2007, but I found a newspaper article about him not too long before he died and it said that he, though he was getting obviously old and he was sick and dying, he couldn’t stop working. Even when his family said please stop working, your shortening your life, we want more time with you, he couldn't stop working and here’s why, this is from the newspaper article. Movie Mogul Sydney Pollack says that although the the grueling film making process is wearing him down he can’t justify his existence if he stops. He explained “every time I finish a picture, I feel I’ve earned my stay for another year or so.” What’s he saying is the same thing is the runner in Chariots of Fire, he says you know, everybody needs to feel that there’s that they’re doing something that justifies their being here. I feel like I need to earn my stay. I feel I need to, need to say “here’s why my life counts, here’s why my life is worthwhile. Here’s why, here’s how I get a sense of validity and acceptability. I make movies.” And notice he says. “I have to keep doing it because I make a movie a for a while I have earned my stay and then I got to go back and earn another to keep up that sense of justification.” Which means movie-making isn’t enough actually and then he died. I was reading an article by a writer, a guy who felt his writing career was just not going anywhere, he wanted to be a writer, he wanted to make a difference and you know, nobody was buying his stuff and he said “occasionally I start to wonder, well then what I am really here for, what am I really living for?” and then he said in the article, “but then when I look at my two little daughters, my two little girls, then I know that my existence is justified.” “They justify my existence.” Now that, you know I don’t know the guy, I don’t know, it could’ve been hyperbole and it might just be a way of saying, “I just love my daughters” but I also know that there are parents, quite a lot of parents, that look at their children and say, “you know there’s really nothing else I do in life that really justified my being here, that makes me feel like a worthwhile person, that makes me feel like I am, you know my life is worthwhile and acceptable and valid but the fact is I’m a father, I’m a mother, my children are happy, my children are successful, I’m living for them”, well I want you to know if your children are the justification of your existence, if that’s how, you justify you being here, you’re going to destroy them. Parents who do this, never believe and therefore I don’t even try to tell them but their passion for their children happiness and success is utterly selfish. It’s not about the kids, it’s about them. It’s their justification, it’s their righteousness, it’s their validating performance record. If I’m a good parent and my kids are happy and successful then I have, but you know what if anything goes wrong with them, and gosh something will, you will melt down and not be in position to help them. You won’t really be the parent you really always thought you were. So you understand that everybody struggling for righteousness, everybody’s struggling to justify their existence. Everybody is wrestling and struggling for righteousness and validation and worth and acceptability and I, some of you are saying, “ok I see your point but actually these people you just gave me, do these people, what they really need is not righteousness, they need counseling!” You know, “they need a good therapist, you know, they’re just, they are making too much of their children, too much of their writing, too much of their movie making, they need counseling, it’s really a psychological problem.” And I beg to differ again, “it’s a psychological manifestation of an underlying condition.” There’s a man who lives near the York railway station in Northern England and he’s a secular man and he wrote an article about an interesting, some thoughts he had about this. He’s a secular man, he’s not a religious man but everyday he has to go by a billboard at the York railway station and somebody evidently put up a sign and on it is a bible verse. Romans 14:12. And everyday he has to go by this bible verse that says “so then everyone of us, shall give an account of himself to God.” And he writes, “irrespective of whether you’re religious or not, the longer you live, the idea of being able to justify your existence crops up more and more.” And he goes on to say, you know I’m not a religious person but when I go by that, I realize the older I get, that I really need to justify why I’m even here. And he says, and he goes on and he says, some of his secular friends and religious say that’s ridiculous, why do you need to justify your existence, why do you need to prove to you, to somebody else that you are worthy of being here. You are who you are, you live the way you live, who care what anybody else thinks and he says “you know, people who actually believe that, that they don’t care what anybody else thinks, they don’t need to justify themselves, they don’t need to prove themselves, those are sociopaths. Those are people who are eventually are capable of very bad things.” He says every single person, whether you are religious or not, really beings to know you need to justify your even being here. But he says the problem comes that, if you start to say “what does justify my being here, as you say, well if I have to, what justifies us is I’m living the kind of life that I think people should live. I’m the person that I think I should be. I’m the kind of person that other people should be and I’m not!” He actually says, “here’s the problem with justifying my existence: It’s very hard not because I’m a really bad person but because I could be, I know I should be far better than I am.” And he’s experiencing what I talked about two weeks ago you were here. In Romans chapter 2, we’re told that every single person, whether they believe in God or not, does understand that they have, they got a conscious and they do know that they ought to be living in a certain way and that justifies their being. And if you remember Romans 2 says that God is actually going to judge people by what they know in their conscious and illustration that somebody, some other minister once gave was a little, you know recorder, the little invisible tape recorder around their neck, that only picks up as it were, the things you say to other people about how they should live and then on judgement day, this minister once said, Romans 2 was saying that God will take that invisible tape recorder off, they’ll put it in front of you and say, “you know I’m going to be fair, I’m not going to judge you by the ten commandments if you didn’t believe in it. I’m not going to judge you by the bible if you’ve never read it. I’m going to judge you by what you say, your own standards are for people, let’s see how you do.” Play. And nobody will be able to stand on that judgement day because nobody can justify their existence even by their own standards and this guy know it on the way to the York railway station. So I’m not even religious and I realize as time goes on, how can I justify my being here, everybody is struggling for righteousness and nobody is getting there do you know why? Because Cindy Pollack kept knowing that he had to keep running, doing movies and one gold medals nevers enough and John D. Rockefeller said, “one more million dollars and I’ll feel I’m ok.”

So that’s why we need it and Paul says, there is a solution. It is possible through the gospel to end the struggle for righteousness, validation, worth and acceptability. What is it? It’s free justification. Now, what is free justification? Let’s break this down, free justification, I’ll put it this way. Justified freely, that’s in verse 24 and I like to say, show you that the gospel is talking about something that I have to say people can be around church or in church for years and years and not even understand. It’s almost like free justification is a piece of furniture in a living room that’s the main piece and people know a lot of things. Could you imagine coming into a big grand ball room and we’re going to have this incredible feast and there’s chairs and there’s you know, you know everything else and there’s a, you know there’s shelves and then there’s all these other pieces of furniture and there’s a rug but there’s no table! And what I’m about to tell you is the table. If you want to understand free justification you have to understand that on the one hand, it is far more than forgiveness and pardon but on the other hand, it is distinctly, distinctly different than moral goodness. It’s more than pardon and it’s distinct from being morally good person. It’s neither of those things. First; it’s more than pardon. When most people here, you’re justified by grace because of Jesus’ death on the cross, right away they say, “oh, we are forgiven!” And that’s true but that’s not what justification is, it’s more infinitely more. Forgiveness is basically a negative. It means that now you are free from the liability to punishment. But justification is a positive. It’s a bestowal of a status with all the rights and privileges and benefits pertaining their unto. So as one person once said, Marcus Loane years ago, “to speak of forgiveness is to say, you may go, you have been let off of your penalty but to speak of justification is to say, you may come. You are welcomed into all my love and my presence.” And therefore as great is forgiveness is, it’s basically a negative, justification is a positive. Forgiveness is “you may go, I’m not going to punish you”, but for justification is “you may come, and you are welcomed to all my presence”, why? Forgiveness is like getting a pardoned so you’re out of jail and now you have the freedom of not being afraid you know of somebody’s going to come around and arrest you and put you back in. But justification is so much more than that, it’s not just a pardon from jail it’s more like getting a congressional medal of honor. Bestowed upon you so that everyone salutes you and so every, so you have now access to circles and corridors of claim and honor. And therefore it’s possible to understand that justification is infinitely, infinitely more. In fact it’s more than that. When you see me say that the righteousness of God comes to us, you might look at this as abstractly a perfect record and it is a perfect record but it’s more than that because the righteousness of God has to be, the righteousness of Christ. The righteousness of God is a performance record. What did God ever do for us? He came to earth. And not only that, something happened even before. You know, one of the most amazing passages of the bible and I don’t understand it and that’s why I like it because there’s, it seems like there’s infinite depths behind it and I, it’s like a lozenge you know, you put it in there and you just, it just goes on and on and on and never goes away. And it’s a place in the book of Revelation where it says, “Jesus Christ was slain before the foundation of the world.” And it seems to be saying that outside of history on some of kind of cosmic battlefield, before it ever entered into history and acted it out, Jesus Christ already on some cosmic battlefield face down our enemies of sin and death and evil and he was slain in order to free us and that means what you’re getting, the justification is this perfect righteousness is not just a good, it’s not just a goody two-shoes record. Jesus Christ was not just a good person. Jesus Christ was brave. Jesus Christ was bold. Jesus Christ was a man of courage, of nobility, of lovely sacrifice for us. We’re talking about, we’re talking about bravery beyond, above and beyond the call of duty. We’re talking about self sacrificial noble bravery and He did all that for us on the battlefield of the cosmos. He won all this for us and it’s his medals, his decorations that now are all over us. And therefore when 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “God made him sin to be sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” What that has to mean is on the cross He was treated as if He done everything we had done, so that when we believe we are treated as if we’ve done everything He’s done and what has He done? On the battlefield, what does he deserve? And all that’s ours. And that’s the reason why old Richard Hooker, the 18th, that 17th century Anglican has this marvelous statement in which he says, “let it be counted as folly or frenzy or fury whatsoever. It is our comfort and our wisdom. We care for no knowledge in the world but this that God has made himself our sin and that we have been made his righteousness. Therefore we are in the sight of God the Father as is the very Son of God Himself.” Justification is infinitely more than pardon but on the other hand, the other thing that you have to know is this justification, this righteousness that comes upon us is not in any way a kind of moral goodness inside. Look we have low church and we have high church. We have liturgical smells, we have bible believing evangelicals, you know sawdust trail churches and we all have a problem with something. We actually don’t believe the gospel. Let me start with the evangelical types, alright. How do most people in these kinds of church’s beliefs salvation works, here’s what they think. I have to really give my life to Jesus, I have to really surrender to Jesus, I have to really, I just have to be open and just unconditionally committed to Jesus and I say, “oh Lord I’m open to you, I’m committed to you, I’m going to live for you, I’m surrendering to you, come into my life and save me and forgive me, fill my life.” You know what you just did? I clean up my heart a little bit, I make myself self righteous a bit and you know I purge myself and cleanse myself of these other kinds of feelings, feelings and I surrender myself and I put myself in a committed state and then God comes in and does the rest. In other words, I make myself a little righteous and God comes in and does the rest. And you know there’s the high church version of that, there’s a liturgical version of that is that I take the sacraments, I give myself to that and then you know, so I’m making myself available and I take the supper and I’m baptized and God comes in and does the rest. But in chapter 4, verse 5, we’ll get to in a couple weeks but it’s right near by here in this passage, Paul actually goes so far as to say that God justifies the ungodly and that means that when you are justified, when you’re absolutely righteous and loved, absolutely accepted, in yourself you're absolutely unworthy, absolutely sinful, you’re ungodly and therefore there’s absolutely nothing in you that is the basis for this justification. Nothing. Now people have a lot of problem with that and they say “oh my goodness, they say I’ve got to be good a little bit”, I mean I mean, I have somebody once said to me, “if I really believe what you say, that salvation is absolutely free grace and I don’t have to be good at all, I don’t have to screw up my heart into a good state at all”. If I believe what you believe, I have no incentive to live a good life. And by the way, there’s plenty of people that say, have said that that over the years, “if I really believe that I was totally saved, have nothing to do with with how I lived, it was completely free then I have no incentive to live a good life” and here’s the proper I think response, if when you lose all fear of punishment, you also lose your incentive for living a good life than the only incentive you have to live a good life was fear. See when you lose your fear, you lose your incentive to be good, then the only incentive you have to be good was the fear, and here’s the ironic thing, the fear is, the fear is selfish. Fear is always selfish because I might lose, I might, this might happen that might happen, I’d better be good! But what is goodness, goodness is unselfish living. Unselfish service to God, unselfish service to the poor, unselfish service to my neighbor. I’m scared that I might be lost unless I’m good and what is goodness, being unselfish but don’t you realize that incredibly selfish. When you live a good life so that God will bless you and take you to heaven, it’s by definition not good, because it’s all for you. All of it’s for you, you’re not helping the poor, your helping yourself, you’re not helping God, you’re helping yourself. This is the reason why the Belgic confession, an old reformation document from the 17th century puts it like this, “far from making people cold toward living in holy way, justifying faith so works within them that apart from it they will never do a thing out of love for God but only out of love for themselves and fear of being condemned.” Did you hear that? Let me tell you what that’s saying. Put on your thinking cap and don’t laugh too much when I tell you. If you think you’re good deeds are good, if you think you’re unselfish good deeds are good, they’re no good. In other words if you think they’re good and therefore God owes you something, then they’re not good by definition, they’re not good by your own definition. You’re selflessness is really selfishness but if you say, “all my good deeds are worthless, I need to be saved by grace, I am saved by grace, now I want to please God, I want to resemble God, I want to delight God, I want to get near God, how do I do that?” By serving Him? By serving other people? And here’s the weird, if you think your good deeds are good, they’re no good but if you think your good deeds are absolutely worthless, and you’re saved by grace, that makes your deeds good. So if you think they’re good, they’re no good, if you think they are no good, they start to get good because you see, when you realize they’re worthless and therefore you’re doing them just to please God, they’re actually for God. They’re actually for the person that you are helping. You see why C.S. Lewis said the reason he knew that Christianity must be true is when he actually looked at he realized that nobody could’ve ever thought this up. And you see the reason why Richard Hooker would say, “let it be counted as folly or frenzy or fury or whatsoever this is our comfort and wisdom, we care for no other knowledge in the world but this.”

Now let’s move the final point and here’s the final point. If you don’t understand this justification, this free justification is on the one hand, infinitely more than pardon, but separate and distinct from being morally good in yourself, if you don’t understand that, it’s like having a banquet without a table. And when I’ve seen people over the years come in and out of churches like this, they understand forgiveness and they understand moral goodness but they don’t understand free justification, they understand that if I confess my sins, I have a forgiving God, Jesus died on the cross and I’m getting forgiven. And now that I’m forgiven, I need to really live for him and that’s how most people think. So people come in and out of church, they cycle over the years. You know they come as kids and they cycle out as teenagers, they come in as young adults when they start to have problems and then they cycle out of it as little slightly older adults, they come in as they get old, what’s going on? They try hard to live like they should and something makes them feel where they sort of fade away and then things go wrong, they know they need God and then they come back in and they recommit and they ask for forgiveness, they ask for forgiveness and they try their best to live a moral life, a good life and then they sort of slip away and they have to ask for forgiveness again and that’s how they go on and on and they never get to this at all. They actually never become Christians. Because a Christian is someone who’s justified freely by faith through His blood. Here’s what I like you to do to help you break through and break out of that cycle. I want you to stop looking for a minute at your sins. Now don’t anybody go home and blog, Tim Keller says “your sins don’t matter”. Listen, if you’re sinning, I would like you to stop and get forgiveness but let the record show. But I want you to consider this, that Pharisee are very concerned about their sins. Pharisees are self justifying moral legalistic miserable people. Pharisees when they sin, they are very upset, they repent, they confess their sins and when they’re all done they’re still Pharisees. They’re not Christians. Here’s what will make you a Christian; don’t look at your sins, look at your boasting. Look at what you’re boasting. Look at the things that you are your justification. Look at the things that you look at and say, that justifies my existence, that validates me, that’s what makes me worthy. See Paul says, where is boasting, the justification by, free justification destroys it. Well then let’s find it. What makes you a Christian is not so much you repent of your sins, you should repent of your sins but that could just make you just another Pharisee or just another person that’s like you know, what makes you a Christians is your repent of your justification. Your false justification. Your false righteousness. Nathan Coles, seventeen thirties and forties, a Connecticut farmer tells a story about how he was converted listening to the great evangelist George Whitefield and he says, “my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound and by God’s blessing my old foundation was broken up and I saw that my righteousness could not save me.” “By God’s grace, my old foundation was broken up and I saw that my righteousness could not save me.” That’s what makes you a Christian, not just a person trying harder, confession, trying harder confession because free justification is infinitely more than just pardon but radically different than just trying harder. So for example this week, yesterday actually I was at a retreat and I heard a man get up and give a testimony and let me close with this testimony because this tells it all. He says three years ago I was at this retreat, this retreat is an annual and at that retreat, I became a Christian, I gave my life to Christ. But when you talk, he went through it and explained, he says he broke through and understood the gospel. In other words he had an identity, a justification based in his performance and because of the gospel, seeing what Jesus Christ done for Him, He shifted his trust, He repented of his old justification and He rooted his justification, He rooted his identity in the costly, infinitely costly grace of Christ and it changed his life. Now here’s what he said, that was three years ago. He says I want to give you this testimony this year because four years later I want you to know I’m in a job, I’m in field that we used to call “Wealth Management” but we not call “Wealth Preservation and Survival”. And he says I want you to know, and a lot of you do know because he was talking to a group of people who were mainly in that business, I have lost enormous amount of money this year. And he had lost an enormous amount of money and a lot of the other people hadn’t, so really what he’s saying was I had lost incredible amount of money and here’s what I want you to know, I’ve never been happier in my life. And he said because if this had happened four years ago, if this year, if the Great Recession happened four years ago, when my justification was still in my performance, he says I know where the vodka bottle is and I would’ve drink myself, I just would’ve driven myself right into the ground, but what has changed his wealth used to be his justification. His wealth used to be his righteousness and now it’s just wealth! It’s only wealth! And if you want to be a Christian, you got to say, “these aren’t just my children, these are my justification, this is not just my wealth, my career, it’s my justification. And therefore, you will not be impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but when he look to Jesus Christ not just as his forgiveness but as his crown and His glory and His righteousness, he was able to handle anything. Are you? Have you figured this out? Have you figured out what it means to be a Christian is not just to repent of your sins but repent of your false righteousness. To repent of your false justification. To transfer your trust in that Jesus has done and dear Christian friend, those of you who say, “well I do believe this and I do understand this and I know what free justification is,” if you really really believed in heart of hearts what you know with your head, would you really be anxious. See won’t you admit in many of your cases that you are Christian, your wealth is not just your wealth, your beauty isn’t just your beauty, your youth isn’t just your youth, your family is not just your family, they are your righteousness. But now a perfect righteousness is revealed apart from from the law, free performance, is a righteousness that comes upon you, it’s a righteousness that delights on you, it comes to you and it’s the end of your struggle.