Who Are The People Of God? (Romans Week 8) by Michael Williams

The text for this week is Romans 4:1-5. In a world fractured by rivalry, identity, and endless reasons to draw lines between “us” and “them,” Romans 4 offers stunningly good news: God’s family is not built by performance, pedigree, or pride, but by grace. In this message, we explore how Abraham’s story reveals the heart of the gospel, that God justifies the ungodly, silences our boasting, and creates one new people through faith in Christ. If you’ve ever wrestled with insecurity, comparison, division, or the need to prove yourself, this sermon will point you back to the cross, where your true worth is settled and the applause of heaven is given as a gift.

Transcript

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We're gonna be in the Book of Romans and we are in chapter four. Before I dive in, I just I want to start by saying I know we live in a really divided world. We live in a world that it seems like we are split over everything. Like you hear that somebody thinks hot dogs are a sandwich, and you immediately think, I'm not one of those people. We divide over everything. We hear maybe where somebody goes to church and we think like, eh, they're not really my people. That says a lot about them. Or somebody grew up in northern Ohio and we're not really sure. Are they a Buckeyes fan or are they a Michigan fan? Like, can we be friends? Are we close? Like, like we're just we're divided. Um, it might feel like we're more divided than ever before, and I don't know, that might be true. Um, but I do think media and technology have maybe amplified or put the light on the differences that we have, but I do think that sometimes how divided we are, it's kind of just like background noise. We don't realize how maybe strange it would be. I was reading uh an article the other day, it was kind of funny. It was like if an alien species came to Earth and visited, what would stick out to them? And there was a whole bunch of different things, but probably the most prominent thing this sociologist was suggesting that would stand out to them is like these people, this species, they they divide over everything. Everything. Like you probably could not put together six billion people and come up with more divisions than we've come up with. It is like human nature. Like we write down to what foods we like, what restaurants we go to, what the color of our skin is, like all the different shades, like everything is a reason to make somebody else the other. And I think one of the things that causes that is in the West, we've we're the product of the Enlightenment. We have had the ideals of the Enlightenment and romanticism, they've they've sort of played themselves out, and and we've ended up in this place where the most important thing is the individual. The most important thing is me. That I'm true to myself, that I'm true to who I'm made to be, that I discover who I am, that I am fulfilled. Modern psychology has sort of reinforced this, and and we live in a world that some call a world of radical individualism. And this, of course, has created a lonely world. A world where we're we're isolated from each other. A world where we, despite having technology that ought to connect us more than ever before, we are more lonely than ever before. The previous Surgeon General of the United States actually said that the number one pathology they see in the United States today is not heart disease or cancer, it's loneliness. Thomas Friedman, kind of famously in the New York Times, once wrote that loneliness is the pathology of our age. And loneliness, interestingly, loneliness leads to tribalism. When people are lonely, they want belonging, they want to connect. And tribalism is a is a quick way to identify with somebody else. It's usually marked by who we're against. Tribalism is a quick fix to community. David Brooks calls it the dark twin of community. One author says if if you think of God as putting the solitary in families, then individualism puts the lonely in tribes. And of course, religion is not immune. In the United States alone, we have thousands and thousands of denominations. We divide over everything imaginable, right down from the color of the carpet to whether Jesus is God. And anything in between. We divide and we have our camps. And I think one of the questions in religious tribalism, particularly, that's sort of behind it, is who are the people of God? Who are God's people? Who are the ones that God likes? We know that God's loving and he tolerates them all, but who is the favorite kid? Who's the one that has the truth with all these competing truth claims? And how do we get along? And today in Romans, we're gonna we're gonna come to a passage where Paul is answering some big questions about the gospel, and he he's really wrestling with this question: who is the family of God, and how does God pick his family? So that's where we're gonna be today. Let's pray, and then we'll get into God's word. Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for Romanness. We thank you for how beautiful it is. How full of life, how relevant it's we ask that you would open it to us today, Holy Spirit. And that you would speak to us. We welcome your presence, Lord. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen. Amen. So we've been in the book of Romans. If you've been with us, you know we've been going through it from the beginning, and if you don't remember, Romans is about the gospel. It's a book written by the letter Paul, and it's written to the church in Rome in the 60s A.D. And he's writing to a group of Jews and Christians, and he's sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. He's sharing the gospel to these people because people need the gospel. We as a new church, we need the gospel. We need the gospel not just in our brains, but to saturate our hearts and our lives. We need the gospel and all of its implications. Paul begins by summarizing the gospel. He says he's not ashamed of the gospel, for it's the power of God to all those who believe or have faith. He says, first to the Jew and then to the Greek, the righteousness of God's revealed. And then he begins to show us why the gospel is necessary. Maybe you remember it, maybe you've blocked it out. It's those weeks in February where it seemed like every sermon was just about sin and it was depressing. And now we've kind of turned this page. But for Paul, and he didn't have chapters, we added those later, but for Paul, the beginning of Romans is really about showing us why this gospel is necessary. From 118 to 320, he's gonna make this case. It's like he's in a courtroom and he's showing that we're all guilty. He says that the wrath of God is revealed against injustice. That is, God who is love is angry at the injustice in this world. You might remember in the beginning of your Bible, there's a story of Cain and Abel. And Abel, who is innocent, gets killed, and it says his blood cries out to God. I mean, imagine one person dies, one innocent person dies, and it's like a cry in God's ear. Can you imagine what he hears this morning? Can you imagine what it's like to hear that? And love burns at injustice. And then Paul goes on to show that all of us, all of us, are unjust. We're all guilty. He brings these witnesses to the courtroom. First, he brings creation and he shows how we have turned creation upside down and we've not acknowledged God. He brings before it our conscience and our conscience condemns us. He brings before us our own words, and our own words and our own judgments condemn us, and he brings, of course, the law that was given to the Jews, and the law condemns us, and then he ends with this crescendo, which is that no one is righteous. No one wants God for God. The trajectory of our heart is to get out from under his hand. That there's like this rebel in us. That when we sing in our car or at a funeral, Frank Sinatra's, my way, that's the anthem of humanity. That's the anthem of humanity. When we hear a poem like Invictus, where it says, I am the master of my fate and the captain of our soul, what resonates with that isn't the Holy Spirit, it's the rebel in us. That we are that we are wanting independence from God. And Paul's conclusion is that we are guilty. That we are all guilty. That the problems in this world aren't out there, they're an extension of what's in here, of what's in the heart. And he ends his courtroom scene with silence. And it's interesting, in modern America, we, of course, we have it flipped. We evaluate spiritualities, we have a buffet of options. We put God on trial. We decide if God will fit in our life. We decide if he'll be a character in our story. We decide if we want and how much we want of this God. And Paul is saying, no, reality is completely different. God is not on trial. You are. You are. God is not at fault. We are. God is not the one who is guilty. We are. There are hungry people because of us. There are people dying in wars because of us. There are people suffering in Columbus because of us. We have perpetrated injustice, and God's wrath isn't revealed against those people over there. It's revealed against all of us. And then there's this amazing intervention. Pastor Rich preached about it a couple weeks ago, but now. And he pops in with this good news, this great news that God has done something that we could never have done. His righteousness has been revealed. His righteousness is his covenant love, his faithfulness, him keeping his promises. God has done it, and what has happened is we have been justified freely. If you remember, we talked about justification. It's not just that we've been forgiven or it's just as if we've never sinned. It's that we've been credited something. We've gone from owing money to having the corporate credit card. We've gone from being the student who was failing all his classes to being on the honor roll. We were given something we did not deserve. The righteousness of God is revealed. And then last week Pastor Sarah shared that this changes everything. The gospel changes our identity. It changes who we are, our relationships, it changes how we relate to God's law. And Paul this week, he's not going to let up, he's going to continue. He's going to talk about how the gospel is not a new thing. That this way of relating to people by justifying them is the way God has always related to people. That it's always been grace. And that this has profound implications for how we get along together in a divided world. So we're going to read in Romans, I'm actually going to read a couple verses from last week just to set some of the context. But I'll pick up in 27 and then read our verses in chapter four. So what's become of boasting? It's excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. For behold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one, and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith, and the uncircumcised through the same faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means. On the contrary we uphold the law. And then our verses for this week. Romans four. What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him righteousness. Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift, but something due. But the one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. And we're going to stop right there. Now he he pivots, he says, Now what about Abraham? And I know that's exactly where we all thought the argument would naturally go next, right? Like we have the most glorious paragraph about justification, and then I just know in the back of your minds we're thinking, like, what about Father Abraham? I remember that song. He has to have a role in this, like, this is important. And so Paul pivots to Abraham. And I know not all of us grew up in church or with the song Father Abraham, so I do want to review a little bit about Abraham to those of us who are unfamiliar with Abe. And we're going to do that by looking just at two quick passages in Genesis, Genesis 12 and Genesis 15. But Genesis 12 tells the story of Abraham. Now the Lord said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land I'll show you, and I'll make of you a great nation, and I'll bless you, and make your name great, so that you'll be a blessing. I'll bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you all curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. I know we're just popping into Genesis, but this is actually one of the most monumentous addresses in human history. This is a but now kind of moment. For those who aren't familiar, Genesis is the book of beginnings, and it's the very first book in your Bible, and it opens with this garden of Eden. God creates the world, He makes man, it's beautiful, it's good, and man and women were in the garden and we sin. And it's really then the rest of the Bible is the story of like what is God going to do to deal with sin, to make it right, to restore it. Sin spreads and it's it's all over the world. Paul might say, no one is righteous. Sin or evil, it's always been a problem. Fascinatingly enough, even as we live in our culture today, it's often acknowledged that evil is a problem. One of the most popular reasons people give in the last couple centuries for why they don't believe in God is because evil exists. And the problem of evil is often referred to as this idea. How could a good God allow evil and suffering in our world? Just as a brief aside, we're not going to spend a lot of time there today, but the Bible deals with the problem of evil. It deals with how a good God and suffering might go together. And the problem of evil is actually discussed in Genesis, just six chapters in. Just like before, though, it's completely reversed. We ask, how could God exist if there's evil? But in Genesis 6, we find God discussing the problem of evil. But God's viewing the problem of evil a little different. He's discussing how we should exist if there's evil, whether or not he's going to have to destroy us. It's the exact problem. We're on earth saying, look at all this evil. Is there a God? And God's in heaven. Look at all this evil. Should there be people? And it's the problem of evil being discussed. And God decides that he's going to reveal his justice and he saves one man, Noah. And it's kind of a picture of the Garden of Eden again. All the animals come to Noah. It's a floating garden. And then at the end of the story of Noah in Genesis, he's in a garden and mankind sins again. The virus has infected even Noah. And then the rest of Genesis, from chapter 8 all the way to where we just had chapter 12, is the world dividing, dividing into nations, dividing into languages, dividing into peoples. And once again we're left hopeless. And then there's this intervention. But now in God, he speaks to Abram from this encounter over half of the people in the world today. They draw their faith back to this. Islam comes from this story. Christianity, Judaism, all from this story. And I know some of us were uncomfortable with that. We're uncomfortable with the idea of God speaking. For us, faith is about good morals. God doesn't talk. That's just our perception. That's just us, you know, projecting out into the world. But clearly something happened. God spoke and the world changed again. God interrupted. And he spoke to Abram. And he gave him an absolutely crazy command. He told him to leave. Leave your land. Now at that time, you didn't just leave your land. Not only were there no planes, trains, or automobiles, but but your identity was tied to your land. It's who you were. To be a wanderer, to be, was to be cursed. And Abram is given this impossible command. He's told to leave. But he's also given promises, if you noticed. He's promised land, he's promised descendants, and he's promised that his people will be a blessing to the nations. And so God speaks to Abram, and this is the beginning of a new way God relates to people. And Paul, in Romans 4, here, he's going to interpret the story of Abram differently through the eyes of Christ. And that's how all of us should read the Old Testament, by the way. We do want to understand what the original authors meant, but we also want to come to it and read it through the eyes of Jesus. And that's what Paul's going to do. He's going to find the gospel in this story of Abram. So if we go ahead, just a couple chapters, in Genesis 15, God's having a conversation with Abram again about having a descendant. It seemed like the promise was impossible. If somebody tells you, I promise you you're going to have lots of descendants, and then you don't have any kids, it seems like somebody's wrong. And so in verse 5, I'm just going to pick up the story a little bit, but in verse 5, he brings Abram outside, he says, look towards the heaven, count the stars if you're able to count them. And he says, So shall your descendants be. And he believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. That's what Paul is quoting. He's quoting Genesis 15, and he's saying, This is the story, guys. This is the story. What Paul doesn't quote is what happens immediately after the story. Abram has some doubts after the story. He has some doubts and he wonders like, how is this going to happen? How, Lord, are you going to fulfill this promise? How am I going to possess the land? And then there's this really strange story that happens to Abram. It's strange to us because this isn't how we do things in the United States, but back in the day, back in Abram's day in the ancient Near East, whenever people made promises, they would often enact their promise. They would live it out. They would sort of do a demonstration. And so what God does with Abram is he doesn't just say the same thing he said before, which was you're going to have a lot of kids. He doesn't just say it again. He does say it again, but then he puts Abram to the sleep and he cuts these animals in half, which would have been a common way to enact a covenant. And what you're saying is, if I don't keep my word, I'm going to be cut in half like these animals. And they'd walk through these animals. And so what you would expect in this story is that they would make an agreement. You might think of agreements you made as a kid, like Pinky Promise, or spit in your hand and shake, and they're sacred, and this is something sacred. And what would normally happen is you would have the Lord walk through, and then Abram would walk through, and they'd be making this mutual pact. But that's not what happens. Abraham is put to sleep, and he sees the Lord walk through. And then it's over. Abram, he doesn't walk through. It's not a conditional covenant. It's not a if you obey me, I will love you kind of deal. It's God saying to Abram, I've made you this promise, and I will keep it. Whether you're faithful or unfaithful, I will keep it. Now for the Jews, Abraham was the hero of the faith. Abraham believed and he he continued to persevere with this. Promise, he saw its fulfillment, and to the Jews it was Abraham's perseverance and his overcoming that was credited to him as righteousness. In fact, they believed that Abraham's faith is what got righteousness for all the Jews that would follow after him. And so they had this view of Abram, and Paul is interrupting this. He's saying, actually, there's a different way to look at the story. There's a different way to see Abram. You see him as like this model of faith, and he does become that. But let me tell you what I see, Paul says. I see Abram getting credited righteousness he didn't deserve. Abram is the first included one. You see him as the model of faith. I see him as the first Gentile brought in. I see him as the first justified sinner. Because before Abram did anything, while he was just a guy in the city of Ur, like everybody else, God chose him. And in doing so, God chose and started a new way of relating to people. Relating to people not on an assessment of who they are or how good they are, but by choosing to freely justify them. He brought them in despite who they were, apart from their works. This has profound implications. It means that Abram can't boast about being the first Jew. He can't boast about being in the family of God. It was a gift. It was pure grace. And the promises that God makes to Abram are fulfilled in Abram's descendants, namely in his descendant Jesus. In Christ. He in the darkness went through and he was divided. He was cut up. The consequences of God's unconditional promise were that God was cut up, that he bore our brokenness upon himself. And because of what he has done, he, the descendant of Abraham, Jesus Christ, inherits the land, the descendants, and the blessing to all the nations. See, everything God does with a few is always a sign of what he intends to do with the many. The holy land that was promised to Abraham and his descendants was a picture of a day when the entire earth would be a holy land. When every knee and every tongue would confess Jesus as Lord. The descendants he was promised was a picture of a day when all the peoples of the earth would know and have a knowledge of the glory of the Lord. The blessing to the nations that's fulfilled in Christ is the good news of Jesus that will go to every nation. And then the picture the prophets have of the end when the nations are bringing their gifts to the holy city of Jerusalem and all the nations of the earth are blessed. See, the covenant, the promise from God was fulfilled by God, so that no one could boast. So how does this connect to us? How does this connect to how divided we are? I think it's really fascinating that the implication Paul goes to first, after saying we're justified, the implication he goes to first is that it brings together two people. That the consequence of the cross is that one people of God might form. For Paul, the cross, it has two beams. It doesn't just go up and down reconciling us to God. It stretches out and it reconciles us to each other. For Paul, the plan, the dream of God, was always for one people of God. A people that could not boast, a community that is freely justified. And when we get this, when this sinks in, when this gospel really gets down in our gut, this changes how we relate to each other. And I want to spend just the back half of the sermon explaining really, really explicitly how this breaks down our divides. We talked last week a little bit because it was in the end of chapter 3, but it's brought up again in Romans 4 about boasting. And in this section, Paul is contrasting boasting with faith. He has boasting on one side and he has faith on the other. We see he starts the section, what then is boasting, and then he talks about Abraham having nothing to boast in. And I just want to do a little bit of a deep dive in boasting because I think it actually is going to get to the core about how the gospel reconciles us. Now, if you remember, before we get to boasting, if you remember in Romans in chapter 2, Paul gives us sort of the first knockout punch for having distinctions. It occurred, if you remember, in the doctrine of sin. He has this great line where he says, Are we better than anybody else? And the answer is no. If you have a correct doctrine of sin, if you understand that we're all fallen, if you understand that we're all broken, that's going to right away be the first knockout punch to distinctions we make against each other. I mean, think about it for a second. If you are no better than anybody else, how could we boast? If we truly believed that the people we look down on, the people that we think we're better than, if we truly believed that we're all sinners before a holy God, then we wouldn't make distinctions. But now Paul's gonna give us the other side. That's the first punch. The second punch, though, is justification. And he's gonna show how boasting and faith, actually, faith is gonna eliminate distinctions. But boasting was actually a pretty common theme throughout the scriptures. It's in a bunch of Paul's letters, it's in the Old Testament as well, and just a little bit of the history. Boasting is something people did before battle. What you would do, it's kind of like some of us played high school or college sports. It's like the pregame speech. The other team is trash, they suck, we're better, we're faster, we're stronger, they can't do X, Y, Z, right? It's it's boasting, and it's meant to like work you up. If you were a battlefield commander, you had to be good at boasting because you're trying to convince a bunch of young men to go die, right? And usually for a rich person. And so you had to be good at getting them worked up. You had to get them confidence. And so boasting was this battle time ritual. We see boasting throughout the Old Testament. Maybe one of a couple of the most famous places is Gideon, when he's whittling down Gideon's army. The reason he gives is so that they don't have boasting. Maybe one of the most famous ones I'll just read is in Jeremiah. Some of you probably know this one, but in Jeremiah chapter 9, verses 23 and 24, he says, Thus says the Lord, do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth, but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord. I act with steadfast love, justice, righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord. And so Paul, he's he's carrying on a similar vein, he's telling us to not boast, but interesting, I think, the connection Paul's making, that every human heart boasts. That every human heart, we we put our confidence, our self-worth, in certain things. We boast, we and we do it for a reason. We do it because life is a lot like a battle. And so we reassure ourselves. I am a good parent. I am in the right political party. I'm in the right church. Uh I boast, I'm in the church that majors on the majors and minors on the minors, we're not those fundamentals over there, right? We we boast, we put confidence in it, we we put confidence in our wealth. I I have financial resources. And all of these, they're they're ways of grounding our identity. And every human does it. We ground our identity in certain things. You know, a lot of things could happen to me, but at least I can fall back on I'm smart. I read books, I know things, I'm not like the dumb people over there. And of course, some of you, you're already picking it up, every boast is a taunt. And whatever you boast in, you're naturally going to divide yourself from the opposite. If I boast in being a hard worker, I'm going to be annoyed by lazy people. If I boast in having good grades, I'm going to be annoyed and think less of people who have poor grades. If I boast in having wealth, I'm going to have certain opinions about the poor. If I boast in being a good parent, I'm going to see that bad parent at the grocery store and have secret thoughts about them. If I boast in being consistent, I'm going to think those inconsistent people. If I boast in legalism and being moral, I'm going to judge those infidels and people that are doing all sorts of crazy things like getting tattoos and all kinds of nonsense, right? If I boast in being grace-filled, then I'm going to think those legalists are just the worst. Thank God I'm not like them. I remember leading a middle school camp, uh, this was a number of years ago, and around the campfire, it was like the third night, it was just guys. Uh, we do this thing, people start to confess. And about halfway through, I had this sort of sense that like they're messing with me a little bit, because every testimony got like a little bit worse. And like pretty soon a kid is like confessing to trying to kill his adopted brother, kind of thing. Like, every testimony got a little worse. And I realized they were like trying to outdo each other's testimonies, you know, as 13-year-old boys do. And and even with grace, we can we can boast in it. I'm actually worse and saved from more. And all of these things, they're ways of grounding our identity, and they're ways of being distinct from others, their ways of being different, their ways of feeling like you're worth something, their ways of feeling like you're loved. We can boast in the love of somebody else. I have a person that when they look at me, they love me so much and it gives me joy. And we can boast that we have love. We can boast in anything, we can boast in everything. And it's not, he's not talking about being proud, or he's not talking about liking certain things. Boasting is when we put our identity into it. It's when if it got pulled out of us, we would feel like dying. We've put our weight on it, it's it's defined us, and and boasting divides humans. Think about why there are so many differences in the world. It's based on what we boast in. I am from Columbus, I boast in the buckeyes, I have to hate Michigan. That's a silly example, but but whatever we boast in, whatever we boast in, it divides us. It divides us. Paul, in Romans 2, if you remember, he uses the Jews actually as an example of boasting. He uses as an example. They've been boasting in their circumcision. And I think he actually gives us a little bit of a key to how faith overcomes boasting. In the end of chapter 2, he says this. He says in Romans, the end of chapter 2, that for a person is not a Jew who's one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who's one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart. It's spiritual and not literal. Such a person receives praise not from others but from God. Such a person receives praise not from others but from God. And so he's connecting boasting with praise. And if you think about it, what we boast in is what brings us praise. It's what makes us feel good about ourselves, it's what affirms us. And Paul, he's not a stoic. He's not saying, don't live your life for applause. That's impossible. You and I, we crave affirmation like a person in the desert dying without water. You need affirmation. He's not saying, get rid of it. And in fact, if there's people in your life saying, stop seeking the praise of others, usually what they mean is just have your own self-approval. And that's just as bad. That's just as bad. He's not saying, get rid of the need. I think what he's saying is he's given us a window into justification. We've thought of justification legally and morally, like we are morally bankrupt, and God puts a bunch of moral credits into our life. And I think Paul is, he's doing something really, really beautiful here. He's saying that when we are in Christ, when we receive freely or justified freely, we get the praise of God. The praise of heaven. Now think about it. We'll just think of a really simple example. Some people actually want the applause, literally. They want to be in the horseshoe, cross the goal line, and have a hundred thousand people cheer their name. They want to play the solo with the violin and have thunderous applause. That's super obvious. But what Paul is saying is that in Christ you get the applause of God. Think about Jesus for a moment. Jesus, who was perfectly obedient unto death, who obeyed God in everything. He ascends into heaven after his resurrection. Imagine the greeting, the applause, the praise, the honor, the blessing, the thunder of salvation for what he's done. Paul is saying if you are in Christ, that thunder of salvation is yours. To be justified is to have his reward as yours, his approval as yours. And when you have that, it changes you. See, God, he justifies freely. Not because he intends to leave them ungodly. He accepts the ungodly in order to unmake them. He is intending to unmake the ungodly. And when we see that we have the thunderous ovation of heaven, that when he looks at you, he praises you because you are in Christ. It changes how you see others. I do not need to boast because God sees me in Christ, and he boasts of my righteousness because it is Christ's righteousness. When he sees me, he sees Jesus, the obedient one. That we, as the people of God, have been justified freely. This changes us. You can't have an inferiority complex and understand the gospel like this. How can you be inferior if the roar of heaven is in your heart? How can you be inferior if the applause of God Almighty rings in your ears? Not only can you not be inferior, how can you boast if this was freely given to you because of what Christ has done? How can you distinguish and make distinctions with other people? Paul is saying God's intention on the cross is to make one family, and he's going to do it by eliminating all boasting, eliminating all taunting, eliminating all the ways that we divide. And it's not that our differences don't matter, it's that they are going to become subordinate under a new and truer identity. That you have been justified freely, included in the people of God. So I want to end by giving us some handles for this. How do we see this? How do we get this into our life? How do we get changed by this? Because it's one thing to know it in our head. It's something completely different to know it in our hearts. I met a guy in Dubai actually a number of years ago, incredibly wealthy man. And he became a follower of Jesus before he met me. And he had been following Jesus for a number of years, about six or seven, and he felt like in the process of following Jesus, he went through this transformation or his identity, this identity marker, what he was boasting in, was no longer his wealth. He said, after about like five years of this transformation, something happened in his life and he lost everything. So when I'm talking to him, he's a poor man. And he he's telling me his experience of losing everything. And he told me something that really stuck with me. He said, if this had happened to me before I met Christ, I would have killed myself. But my identity, it's not in this thing anymore. I'm not boasting in this thing anymore. Because I have the approval, the love of God. The righteousness credited to me is the applause of heaven. C.S. Lewis writes about this in Weight of Glory. He talks about daring to believe that part of this righteousness of God that's given to us freely is the fame of heaven. That when we properly see ourselves, we should take delight in pleasing the one who made us. And we should receive his delight in us. And so I want to give you two ways that this sinks in, two ways that this really changes. One, we have to look again and again to the cross. On the cross, Jesus became of no reputation that we might have reputation with God. On the cross, Jesus was humiliated that we might be clothed in honor. He was derobed that we might have robes. He was given a crown of thorns that we might have a crown of gold. He took our place. He was divided. When we see Him, when we look at the cross, we know our love and our worth. And when we know our love and our worth, we do not have to define ourselves and how we're different from others. See, when you know your love and your worth, when you see what Christ has done on the cross, you can't remain a racist. You can't boast in the color of your skin anymore. You can't say, this is what makes me different or better. You're left humbled. One, the doctrine of sin, I am no better, but then two, the righteousness of Christ. This is my glory. And I don't glory in anything else. When I see what Christ has done, when I see my worth, I no longer have to find it in these other things. And it is finding our worth and all these other things that are dividing the human race. The second handle, though, is actually a parallel passage we see in Galatians. In Galatians, Paul writes about boasting. And he says in Galatians 6, 14, May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. He gives an exception. In Romans, he just says, no boasting, but in Galatians he builds on it. He's like, actually, I do kind of boast in something. I boast in the cross. I boast in the cross. And it's interesting what he says, and in boasting in the cross, the world becomes crucified to me. Now, this idea of the world being crucified to me means the world loses its power, it's diminished.

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So how

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How do we boast in the cross? Maybe I'm tempted to boast in my morality. I'm a good person. I'm not, you know, racist. I'm not those people over there. I'm a decent person. I'm tempted to boast in that. If I boast in the cross, it's intentionally setting aside what I would have boasted in. And instead it's saying, no, I'm only justified freely. It's because of what Christ has done. And when I do that, it diminishes the power that the world had over me. The world becomes crucified to me. Maybe I boast in my wealth, and the wealth means everything to me. To boast in the cross instead is to say, no. It is to speak to wealth and say, no, you're crucified to me. You're dead to me. You don't have power over me anymore. I can have you, but you can't have me. I'm no longer boasting in it. I'm no longer letting my identity be in it. It's asking this question: where have we put our identity? And how is it dividing us from the people around us? Who am I looking down upon? In the handle, Paul's solution, boast in the cross. Boast in that you have done nothing, that you have been freely justified, that it is a gift of God, that you have been included in the family of God, not because of what you've done, because what He has done. Hear the thunderous approval of heaven. No longer doubt your identity or your worth. Look at the cross again and again until the fact that you are loved has sunk in so deep that you are not constantly trying to prove that you're lovable. And then take those things in your life and they need to become crucified to you. The world needs to be crucified to you. Boast in the cross and watch the power these things have in your life diminish. Paul here is explaining how the gospel brings us together. What divides us? It's our boast. What divides us? It's the things that we've replaced God with. What is the answer? To boast in nothing but the cross. I wonder this morning do you hear heaven's approval? Or are you looking for approval and affirmation in every place but the cross?