How We Know God Loves Us (Romans Week 11) by Michael Williams

In a world that feels increasingly unstable, this message explores where true hope can be found and how we can know, without doubt, that God loves us. Walking through Romans 5:6–11, it shows that God’s love is proven in history through Jesus’ death for us while we were still weak, sinful, and far from Him.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I want to start with actually a a statistic I was reading in an article this week. 85% of Americans agree, and by the way, that alone, like 85% of Americans agree on something, uh caught my attention. Um there's a few of you right now I can tell you're like, I'm gonna disagree on principle to whatever he says. Some contrarians in the room, and we are a new church. If you're married to a contrarian, we'll probably start support groups next fall. Um but sorry, we don't have that yet. But 85% of Americans believe that the world will be worse five years from now than it is now. Um which if you think about it, kind of makes sense. It doesn't seem like if if things were trending, we wouldn't most people don't feel like we're trending up. Uh things are great, things are good, we're we're on the upswing. Uh we live in a world that feels incredibly unstable. There's wars and rumors of wars, there's all sorts of polarization, conflict, political violence. We seem more divided than ever. We seem like life is is just hard. It's a struggle, it's it's difficult. There's increasing gaps between those who have and those who don't have. And and in the midst of an unstable world, I think it's it's fair to ask, like, what are we hoping for? Like, what are we hoping for? Do we think in two and a half years that there's gonna be this great political candidate for either party? And then in three years, only 10% of Americans will think the future is gonna be bad. That the rather than 90%, they've they've rallied behind this person and and things are good. Do we think that that's the future? Do we hope in government? Do we hope in peace? I think a lot of us in this room who are more religious-oriented, we would we'd say we hope in God. We hope that that God will take care of our future, that he'll care for us. And and it's kind of interesting, you know, people from the beginning of recorded human history have all believed that, pretty much all have believed that there's something more. That we are not alone here. They've believed in gods. They've believed that we're not left to our own devices, but but interestingly, until Christianity came along and really Judaism, there was not a belief that the gods were good. There was no belief that like the gods were gonna help the problem. They were gonna take our unstable world and make it stable. If anything, they thought the gods would make our world more chaotic. If our world's chaotic, the gods must be chaotic. It's kind of interesting how that idea has completely gone away. I meet people all the time who don't believe in God, and I meet people all the time who believe in a God of love, but I've never actually met anybody who believes in a bad God. Like, I really think there's a God up there, and I think he's just mean. Or I think he's just like a bitter person up there. Like, I believe in a God who's bad, or I believe in a trifecta of gods who are bad. No, people people are generally in this camp of like, God is good and loving, or there can't be a God. And this idea that God is love is is a revolutionary idea. It actually kind of has taken over Western culture. If you ask the person, does God exist, and they say yes, they probably think that God should be loving. This has permeated everything in the West. Whether it's ministries of mercy, social justice, whether it's the idea that humans have dignity, all of it's it's founded on this radical idea that God is love, that God is not indifferent, but that he cares and that he loves us. Since the Enlightenment, as we as a Western culture have sort of gotten rid of God, as we've gone through modernism and postmodernism and romanticism, as the individual self has become sort of our own little gods, we we've kept love, but we've detached it from God. The average American by far thinks that the highest good is love. That was not true a thousand years ago. A thousand years ago, if you looked across our planet, almost nobody would have been like love is the highest good. That's something Christianity brought into the world. Of course, we've divorced it from God, and we've moved from God is love to love is God. We've removed the spirituality from it, and we we look for love in romantic ways, and we look for love personally and other people. But at the core, as Westerners and as people in the United States of America, we we value and we treasure love. In fact, I can tell you, I know in a room this size, no doubt, there are some people here who don't really believe in God. You got dragged here. I know you're a good fit, you're good at faking it. We couldn't pick you out, so don't worry, we're not calling you out. But but I know there's people here who have their doubts. And as many doubts as we might have about whether there is a God or there's not a God, we will spend our life looking for love. We will. Even if you believe the world is explained through numbers, you will not spend your life looking for numbers. You'll spend your life looking for that special someone to love you. You'll spend your life craving. It's like love is oxygen for humans, that we were we're made for love. And as a culture, as we've become sort of practical atheists, that love it's attached to other people. The sociologist Charles Taylor calls this replacement transcendence. It's this idea that that other people have have taken the place in these relationships, this love, it's it's meant to carry us. We can't get away from love. So we separate love and God. And and I believe that every person needs and has love available to them. That there is a love that will always be faithful to you, that will care for you, whether you're doing well or doing poor, that will be there for you, whether you go through something horrible like dementia, or whether you have a great life, that there is a love available. I can't promise it'll be your spouse if you have a spouse. I hope so. I can't promise that it'll be your parents. But I believe that that God offers this love to all of us and that this is what we were made for. And so as we continue on in Romans this morning, I've titled the message, How We Know That God Loves Us. And I just want to look at a few verses, our next few verses in Romans, and ask the question, how do we know that we are loved? Let's pray together. Lord, we welcome your presence. Lord, we acknowledge that for many of us we've been singing about and talking about how you love us since we were kids. For others, your love is a radical idea that shaped our life and adulthood. But regardless, Lord, of where we are, we ask that you would reveal your love to us this morning. I pray that each person in here would know that they're loved. Know that they're loved by you. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen. Amen. So we're gonna continue on. We're in Romans 5. Um, if you've been with us, we've been going through the book of Romans from the beginning. And and Romans 1 through 4 is really this cathedral, if you want to call it that, of justification, of how God is dealing with the human problem of sin. And and then when we get to Romans 5 through 8, we're in this next section of Romans. It's it's really going to be about how this salvation that he talks about in Romans 1 through 4, how it is assured or how it's going to carry us through to the end. How it's not a one-time thing, it's not like you're declared righteous, and then you have to wonder like, will I ever be declared anything else? Um, it's it's about how the whole plan of salvation is sure. It's assured. Some people call this section like the plan of cosmic salvation. It's this step back of how God has a plan for all of history. And so we're gonna be in Romans 5 through 8 for the next couple months. And today we're just gonna be in Romans 5, verses 6 through 11. And in Romans 5, really 1 through 12, is or 1 through 11, is a little interlude or a prelude to the whole section. He's gonna introduce some ideas and words that he's gonna unpack over the next couple chapters, but it's all about the love of God. Um, Paul introduces the idea of the love of God and he he explains it, he unpacks it, and it's gonna be the foundation for why we can be certain about life. You might think of it like this: we live in an unstable world, tragedy comes, life happens, pain happens. How can we know that we're gonna be okay? Paul's answering that question. How can we know that we're gonna be okay if we've put our faith in Jesus? How can we know that that He has us in His hands? And so I'm gonna pick up a reading in verses six through eleven. For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good one person somebody might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God? For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, how much more surely have we been reconciled in being saved by his life? But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. So he begins with a four, which means he's connecting it to what we talked about last week. Last week, Pastor Rich preached on why what we believe matters. And by the way, just as a brief aside, if you would like to hear these messages, you can search New Albany Fellowship. And anywhere you listen to podcasts, we have our New Albany Fellowship podcast up, so you can actually go back and listen to Pastor Rich's message last week. But but last week, Pastor Rich unpacked verses one through five, and and he looked at this idea that what we believe really matters, that if we've been justified, that means if God has declared us right with him, then we have these certain things they follow. We have peace with God, we stand in grace, we have access to him. His love is even poured into our heart, this experience of God. And so he's gonna continue on from verse 5, 4, and he's gonna begin to talk about how we can know God loves us, and now he's shifting from this subjective experience to something we can know factually, something we can know in our heads and our hearts, and we can actually hang our hat on, we can take it to the bank. Some people call this passage the proofs of God's love. And if you're here this morning and you you're wondering, does God love me? Does he care? Does he see what I'm going through? I want to invite you to hang on to these verses. These are incredible verses. In fact, Romans 5.6 that I just read is kind of like the John 3.16 for Paul. It's like the verses about the love of God. And as we unpack them, if that's you this morning, I want to encourage you, take these deep into your heart, memorize them, wrestle with them, read them throughout the week, Monday through Friday. You're allowed to read your Bible Monday through Friday. It's okay. Take them and read them, study them. Because these, for Paul, these are the evidences, the proofs. This is how you can know, no matter what circumstance you're in, that God loves you. And by the way, knowing that God loves you is what allows us to grow in the spiritual life. The saints of history are all people who simply knew in a deeper way than we do that God loves them. That there is no like calculus-level Christianity. There's just this question, this thing that I know on the surface that God loves me. Is it possible to know it deeper? You might think of like a corkser going down a spiral. It's not that we need new information, it's that we need the information we have to become new to our heart. And so, how do we know that God loves us? We're going to look first in point one. Our salvation is entirely of God. Our salvation is entirely of God. This is how we know that God loves us. He says that at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. At the right time. If you want to underline right time in your Bible, you can, but one of the points Paul makes in all of his letters almost is this idea of an appointed time, a right time. It's simply this it's it's that there was not an accident. That this was the premeditated plan that God himself always intended to come in the person of Jesus. That there was an appointed time. This has profound implications. You are not an accident. God knew you, your name, your location, your life, every single thing you would go through, every single thing you would do right and wrong, the day you would be born and the day you would die, He knew all of it before the foundations of the world. That your life and your salvation is in his hands. That at the right time, meaning history has appointed times, you have appointed times, Christ came at the right time. You have been loved with an everlasting love. A love that is from the beginning or before the beginning of time. The Lord knows you, He knew about you, He cared about you. You were on His mind. You, your salvation, it wasn't an accident. See, life appears to us as surprises. We don't know what's around the next corner, and so we're constantly reacting to the unknown of life. But God doesn't have that experience. God is the author of your salvation from the beginning of time. He watches you and he cares for you. I used to, as a teenager, teach swimming instructions at the Heath Pool. And one of the things when we had the littlest classes we would do is we'd help them take this big step. They've already gone out of life jackets, and now they're clinging to the side of the pool wall, like their life depends on it. They're all shivering, white knuckling the wall. And the question is, will I sink if I let go of this wall? And gradually, the more courageous ones, the better swimmers, they begin to let go of the wall and realize they can float first and swim second. And to them, the experience of that whole thing, it's very traumatic. It's life and death. Will I make it? Or will my life end here at five? Could be, could be. This could be my story. I drowned it at the Heath Pool in my first swimming lessons. What they don't know is the water that's over their head is up to my waist. That my hands are six inches away, ready to catch them. My experience is you're completely safe. Let go. Their experience is I'm going to die if I let go. And that is life. God has his hands right around us. Your experience is I can't let go. I'm not sure. This was all unexpected. This wasn't my plan for my life. This isn't how I would have written the story. There's angst, there's anxiety, there's bitterness, there's letting go of how it could have been. And and God, he's there the whole time. There's no surprises to him. He knew you from the beginning, and he knows you to the end. Salvation is entirely from him. His love produces this salvation at the right time. There's a quote I love from David Brenner. He says this. The embracing love of God sustains our existence. The inextinguishable love of God is the only hope for our fulfillment. Love is our identity and our calling, for we are children of love. Created from love, of love, and for love, our existence makes no sense apart from divine love. You are here because of love. God will keep us because of love. Look, look what Paul writes. He gives a couple contrasts in verse 9 and 10. He says, How much more surely then, now that we've been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God? For if while we were enemies we are reconciled to God through the death of his Son, so much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. Just as there was an appointed time for Christ to come and die, it is also appointed or foreseen and known by God that you will keep your salvation. The contrast he makes is this then and now idea. See, for us, we we think of the present. We are in time, but but justification, Paul says, is the future crashing into the present. For us, we think we're gonna live our life and then be judged. If we believe in God, we believe in the scriptures, we think when we die, there's gonna be this judgment of what we've done. And then there's gonna be this verdict on our life. There's this now and then then. But justification is saying that verdict at the end of your timeline has already been given now. You've been declared right now. And so your salvation between then and now, that timeline which we are living, to God it's not a mystery. He holds your entire salvation in his hands. Paul proves this point by using two contrasts. He says, How much more? Look, if you are worried about where you're gonna end up, look at what Christ has done now. When you were an enemy of God, Christ saved you, he reconciled you to God. Now that you love Jesus, how much more? Of course he's gonna carry on or keep your salvation. He uses a second contrast. He says, look, look, look, if if Jesus, as he died, crucified, naked, powerless, nailed to a tree, if he saved you in that state, how much more can he save you? Resurrected, risen with all power and authority. Your salvation is entirely of God. And this is how you know that he loves you. Because it's not up to chance. It's not something that has to be proven, it's something already proven. You can know that God loves you because your salvation is entirely from him. It's produced by love. The second way we can know God loves us is because of what God has done and who God has sent. What God has done and who God has sent. We read that Christ came. Christ died for the ungodly. That idea that Christ, the Son of God, that Christ came and he died. We live in a culture that we we still acknowledge that ultimate sacrifice. We we now I mean, we watch a movie like United Flight 93 about September 11th, and that story of those passengers who heroically crashed the plane so that the plane would not crash into a building of people. And we hear stories like that, and we we instinctively we know that it's powerful when somebody sacrifices their life, when somebody dies for us. Probably one of the most powerful stories I've ever heard, and some of you I'm sure know it, is of a man named Maximilian Kolby. Maximilian was a Polish priest, and he helped hide Jews and rescue Jews during the Holocaust, and because of that was sent to Auschwitz. And in Auschwitz, they had this policy when somebody tried to escape, that ten people would be put to death. And somebody tried to escape. It turned out later that they were actually dead, but they thought somebody had tried to escape, and ten people were picked to die. And Maximilian saw one of the people picked was a father with kids, and he offered to take his place, to die for this stranger. And he amazingly they let him do it. They preferred to have a younger man in the camp, I guess, than this older priest. And he died in the place of somebody else. And we all know the power of that sacrifice, but but here we can know God loves us based on who died. Who died? God sent his only son. Jesus told a parable of this person who had a farm, and he he left and he set it all up so that he could get some of the fruits from this farm. And he sent servants to get the fruits, and they beat up the servants. He sent more servants to get the fruit, higher up servants to get the fruit from this farm, and and they killed the servants. And so the owner of the vineyard thought, I will send my only son. And so he sends his son to get the fruits from this vineyard. And as Jesus tells the story, they they crucify the son. But the idea is simply this that God himself came. How can I know that God loves me? Because God came himself. He didn't send a messenger. He came personally. He came himself to rescue you and me. How can I know Christ came? But also Christ died for us. It's interesting, Paul doesn't say we can know the love of God because of Jesus' teachings or his miracles, as great as those are. He says you can know the love of Christ because Christ died, that the cross reveals this love, that more than his teachings, more than his life, more than his miracles, you can know that you're loved because Christ died for you, that he gave up his life, that you might be reconciled to God. Lest we fall into the trap of thinking that Christ just did this to appease his father, Paul clearly teaches in multiple places that the Father sent the Son, that God in Christ reconciled us to himself. The fundamental idea is that you can know that you're loved because of who God sent. He sent his son. And that his son, what did he do? He died. Jesus came to die. What is this appointed time? There was a moment in history where it was clear that everything we had tried was not going to work. We had had empires, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians. We had had the Greeks exploring the depths of philosophy, the Romans writing laws, the Jews had had the law for over a thousand years. When it was clear that there was nothing we could do, then Christ came to die. How do I know that God loves me? Paul, he points us to this fact that God has died. The third thing we can tell and know that God loves us by who God has died for. Who God has died for. Paul doesn't pull any punches. He isn't like you all were pretty good, and so God died for you. In fact, he gives four descriptions of who Christ died for. Some translations say powerless, for the ungodly, for sinners, and for enemies of God. First, Christ came to die for the weak or the powerless. This idea here is that we were unable to rescue ourselves. The word means like physically ill to the point of like deathbed weakness. Like you aren't fixing this. You're not rescuing yourself. Some of us we know this from personal experience. We're dealing with things in our life where we we constantly bump up to our inability. We say we're gonna be like more patient with our kids, and and we just find ourselves over and over being less patient. We say we're gonna do this, and we we don't actually do it. And we are we're weak. There's a gap between what we intend and what we do. And he says Christ came to die for the weak. He came to die for the ungodly. Ungodly is pretty simple to understand. It's not like God. We were made in the image of God, it says in Genesis 1. We were made to reflect him, to look like him, and we don't. We've become twisted, we've become selfish, we we don't look like God. We have become ungodly, and the love of God is not in us. If you feel like, you know, I'm not really weak or ungodly, I would encourage you to go back and read Romans 1 through 4. Paul has been making this point over and over that that the people he's talking about, these poor people who are weak and ungodly and sinners, they're you and me. That there are no exceptions. He also talks about sinners, people who have missed the mark, people whose lives are not pointing to the glory of God, people who have attempted to serve God perhaps, but they've gone astray. People who are enemies of God are rebels, people who have opposed what God's doing in their life. And Paul's argument is it's pretty simple to understand. He says, you know, people might die for a good person. We all know stories like that. The soldier who dies for his country, or the parent who dies for their child. But who would die for an enemy? I mean, can you imagine for a second? United States several years ago, we sent in a SEAL team to eliminate Osama bin Laden. Can you imagine if one of those Navy SEALs, right as his teammate was about to shoot Osama bin Laden, jumped in front of the bullet and died for Osama? That's ridiculous, right? Who would die for their enemy? Who would die for somebody like that? Who would die for their enemy? And the simple answer is God would. That is what God is like. While you were yet sinners, not after you've shown remorse, not after you've beaten your chest, not after you've tried to reform, while you were yet sinners, Christ died for you and for me while we are enemies of God. Who would die for a person who picked people out based on their ethnicity, sent them to gas camps, and systematically slaughtered them? Christ would. Who would die for the husband currently having an affair that nobody knows about while he's still in the affair? Christ died for him. An enemy of God.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

The young lady who's had an abortion while you were still a sinner, Christ died for you.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

See, at its core, Christianity is far too scandalous to be religious. This doesn't make sense. In fact, Paul, one of the first people to even write about what the cross meant, he called it a scandal. This is a scandal. Who would die for a white person who just participated in the lynching of a black person? Who would die for somebody like that? Who would give their life for the person who is a serial cheater? Who would die for that lazy man who comes home and beats his wife? Who would die for a sinner? Who would die for an enemy of God? The cross says Jesus would. Jesus has. Religion is all about the rituals, the things we do for God, the ways we worship, the ways we attempt to please and get God's love. But the Bible tells a very different story. From the first time in the book of Genesis, when we betray God, God comes asking, Where are you? He comes seeking us. He comes to die that we might have life. This is a love that you won't find anywhere else. This is a love that's more profound than any love you've ever known. Paul is he's hanging his hat on this, he's putting his stake in the ground. This is the bottom line. There's nothing deeper, there's nothing more profound, there's nothing else that can change you but this reality that God has died for you. That you matter to him, that he cares about you, that he loves you with an everlasting love. In a couple weeks, seven or eight, Hannah and I are getting ready to have our first kid. And as I have been thinking a lot about that moment and how much I'm going to love our little son and what it'll be like to look at him, it's made me think like, wow, this is like a pale reflection of God's love that he has, how he looks at me.

SPEAKER_01 33:31

I wonder this morning, are you aware how God looks at you? Are you aware of how far he has gone or you? See, the bottom line is you are loved. You're loved. You're loved. Not when you reform. Not when you get rid of that bad habit. You're loved as you are. You're loved as you are.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

This week is the holy week. Today is Palm Sunday, and Monday Thursday is coming up where we remember Christ washing the disciples' feet, serving them. And there's this communion table. And at the table are people who are going to betray him. People who are going to deny him. People that misunderstand him. People who in a few hours after the table are going to fall asleep on him, as some of you have done in church. Just kidding. Right? People who are going to see the resurrection and still doubt him. It's a table of messed up people. A table with enemies of God at it. And he's going to wash their feet and serve them.

SPEAKER_01 35:08

On Good Friday, He's going to die for them. And they will not understand it. But to get this love, to receive it, it changes everything. You will not progress past the love of God. And the only question is, are you available for his love? Will you let him love you?

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Or will you put up walls around your heart? There's no amount of money you can give. There's no amount of church you can attend. There's no amount of mission trips you can go on that is a substitute for receiving his love.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

He loves you. And he proved his love by what he did. He showed up. He died. He was there. And he did it before you or I did anything at all to deserve it.

SPEAKER_00 36:18

That's prayer.