Faith Presbyterian Church - Birmingham
At Faith Presbyterian Church we are seeking to exalt Jesus Christ the King and to exhibit and extend his Kingdom through worship, community, and mission.
Faith Presbyterian Church - Birmingham
Romans 2:1-16; When Being Good Isn't Good Enough
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Jason Sterling February 1, 2026 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL Bulletin
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Why Study Romans For Our Future
The Human Condition From Romans 1
Turning To Religious People In Romans 2
Why Good People Still Need Jesus
Reading Romans 2:1–16 Aloud
The Trap Of Judging Others
Praying For Soft Hearts
Paul Closes Moral Escape Routes
Presuming On God’s Kindness
The Tape Recorder Test Of Hypocrisy
Warnings About A Hard Heart
Works Reveal What We Worship
No Partiality: Credentials Don’t Protect
Judged By What We Know
Secrets Revealed And The Only Hope
Christ’s Resume Replaces Ours
Invitation To Come To Jesus Now
Closing Prayer And Communion
SPEAKER_00If you have a copy of God's word, turn with me Romans chapter 2 this morning. Romans chapter 2. We've been studying Romans in a couple of months. We will be entering our new sanctuary, which in some ways you could say is 50 years in the making. And we started studying Romans because I want us to be very careful as we move into this next phase in the life of our church and finishing out the property. We've got a beautiful property. We've got a beautiful sanctuary and building, but that is not what gives us confidence for the future. What gives us confidence for the future is the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is the foundation of this church. And so we are studying Romans for the next several months because nowhere in the Bible is the gospel as comprehensively and powerfully and clearly proclaimed and laid out than in Paul's letter to the Romans. Last week we saw Paul gave us an unflinching diagnosis of the human condition, a devastating picture of those without God, saying that we suppress the truth, that we exchange worshiping the Creator for worshiping the creation, and then locking on to idols leads us into despair. And the pagans in Romans 1, the pagan Gentiles, they would have known that they were lost, that they were far from God. But what about the Jews? The church-going, Bible-believing, religious people. Well, that's chapter two. And they thought they were close to God because of their credentials, because of their goodness. And Paul shows them this morning that they are dead wrong. Another strong passage this morning. Remember the question Paul is answering. Simply put, why can't you earn eternal life? Or even simpler, why do we need Jesus so desperately? That's what Paul's answering. Last week, this week, he'll do it again next week. This morning we're going to discover why even good people aren't good enough and why good people need the gospel. Follow along with me. This is God's word, Romans 2, 1 through 16. It'll be on the screen. It's also in your bulletin. This is God's word. Therefore, you have no excuse, O man. Let me stop there. You'll see this phrase again. Paul is very confrontational here. If we wanted to translate this in everyday language instead of O man, hey you. That's what he's saying. Hey you, you who judge other people. Okay, keep going. Every one of you who judge. For in passing judgment on another, you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things. You know the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. Do you suppose, O man, there it is again, you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness, that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impentent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. He will render to each one according to his works, to those who by patience and well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first, and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek, for God shows no partiality. For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law, for it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. For when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. Let's pray. Let's ask for the Spirit to come be with us. Let's pray together. Father, this is another tough passage. Uh, we need your spirit to come. Paul doesn't soften the blow. And this passage is meant to silence us and drive us to the end of ourselves. And so I'm asking you to come through your spirit and through this preached word and silence us. I pray that we would leave here trusting only in Jesus and Him alone. Open our ears, soften our hearts to receive this. May every warning that we hear, may we receive it as invitation to stop trusting ourselves and trust Jesus. Wake up the numbers wake up the bored, expose the self-righteous, comfort the broken, draw sinners, especially self-righteous sinners, to the only righteousness that saves us, the Lord Jesus. May we encounter him through his spirit this morning. In Jesus' name. Amen. You're scrolling through social media and you see the post and it irritates you. You see something, maybe it's a political post that you find offensive, maybe it's a parenting advice that seems irresponsible, maybe it's a moral stance on something that you find very hypocritical, and you think to yourself, how can they post that? Or you say, don't they see how wrong they are? Someone needs to say something. Or maybe you're at a restaurant and the kids at the table next to you have a complete meltdown. They're screaming, they're throwing food, they're making quite the scene, and in your heart, where are their parents? How could they let this happen? That would never happen if it were my kids. And then the next week you're in the grocery store and your kid has a meltdown. But that's different, right? They're just tired and overwhelmed. The other kids, they were a discipline problem. You see it? I do that constantly. And I'm guessing that you do too. We are very, very good at seeing other people's faults with crystal clarity while excusing our own. We condemn in others what we very frequently tolerate in ourselves. We are outraged at other people's hypocrisy while ignoring and are completely blind to our own hypocrisy. Remember what Jesus says in Matthew chapter 7? He says, Why do you notice the speck of sawdust in someone else's eye? And then he says, You're ignor while you ignore the plank. Look at one of these beams up here. Jesus says, that's sticking out of our face. That's sticking out of our eye, and we are ignoring it while looking at the speck of sawdust in someone else's eye. Do you see where this is going? That's the trap. That is the trap that Paul is setting in Romans chapter 2. He gave this devastating critique to the pagan culture, and every religious person hearing Paul and reading Paul would be sitting in the pews and be saying, Yes, Paul, go get them. Preach, Paul. Those people need to repent. And then Paul says, Hey, you religious church-going people. You have no excuse. When you judge someone else, you're condemning yourself. Paul cuts off every escape route. In chapter two, or in chapter one, we run from Jesus in the gospel through immorality and through our rebellion and obvious sin. It's obvious for everyone to see. But in chapter two, he confronts us in running from God through religion and through morality. And both escapes lead to the exact same place: separation from God. And so this morning, Paul is going to close three escape routes that we uh often use to avoid the gospel. One, our moral comparison. Two, our religious credentials, three, our own excuses. Paul will close all three doors this morning. He is hammering away at our sin. Bringing, he wants to bring us to our knees. He is trying to get us to cry, uncle, so that we will give up hope in everything and say, Jesus, help me. You're my only hope. That's where we're headed. Let's look at our first point, our moral comparison. Look at verse one. Therefore, always ask what? What the therefore is therefore. It's connecting us to what happened in chapter one, but let's pull back. I want you to see the big picture here. Notice, again, I don't want to spend too much time. I just want you to see it. This is Luke chapter 15. Paul is just doing what Jesus did in the parable of the prodigal son. You remember you have the elder brother, that's chapter two of Romans. You have the younger brother, which is chapter one, the rebellious younger brother who is running away through rebellion and through obvious sin. The gospel, and this is what Paul is showing us, is for both people the self-righteous and the irreligious. And you see it, verse one, therefore you have no excuse. Keep reading. The logic is devastating. You who judge others, you are pronouncing judgment on yourself. Why? Because you do the exact same thing. Let's be clear, Paul isn't saying you commit the exact same sins. His point is actually much deeper. You violate your own moral standards just like they violate theirs. It just looks different. Now, does that mean we never confront one another on sin as brothers and sisters in Christ? Absolutely not. That's not what Paul is talking about here. Yes, that is true. We help each other in that way. What Paul is condemning is a spirit that happily pronounces doom and judgment on other people while excusing yourself, while saying they deserve judgment, but you don't. Look at verses two and three. God's judgment rightly falls on those who practice such things. God judges according to reality, not to perception. God judges what we actually do, not what we just claim to believe. Then comes the knockout punch. Hey, you right? Do you suppose that you will escape the judgment of God? You won't. Because the very standards you apply to others will be applied to you. We cannot meet our own standards. Let alone meet God's standards. And then verses four and five, buckle up. Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Some people mistake God's delay and judgment. The fact that they haven't been struck down, they see that as God's indifference and approval. That's not God's approval, that is God's grace in your life. That is God's kindness, giving you time, leading you to repentance. The delay is mercy. He is giving you time. And if you refuse, keep reading. But because of your hardness of heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath. You're storing up judgment like deposits in a deadly bank account if you refuse to repent and acknowledge your need for God. Picture it. Every unrepentant sin is a deposit. Every time you harden your heart against conviction, another deposit. Every time you presume upon God, well, he hasn't stopped me, my life is going just fine. Thank you very much. He must be okay with this. You're adding to the bank account. And Paul's saying that bill is coming due. And the patience of God, again, is not approval, it is grace giving you time to come to Jesus, come back to Jesus before the account closes. So what does that look like practically, this idea of the trap of moral comparison? Well, Francis Schaeffer, when talking about this passage, used this image of an invisible tape recorder around your neck. No one has a tape recorder anymore. Maybe you do. So let's update the illustration in 2026 in terms of your iPhone or your smartphone. Imagine that phone kept the receipts of every moral judgment that you make. Every text where you said, I can't believe they did that. Or every group chat where you said they should have known better, or every time you've looked at a social media post and rolled your eyes and said, seriously, every thought you've ever had recorded in your phone, every action that you've done in secret recorded in your phone. That's a scary thought. Now imagine standing before God on the final judgment, and God says, I'm gonna pull out all your screenshots, and I'm just gonna play it back to you. I'll judge you by your own standards, by what you have said people ought to do. There's not a single one of us, starting with me, that could stand. This is moral comparison. It's our favorite way to make ourselves feel better about ourselves and to make us feel right with God. We will not escape. God will judge us by our own standards, and we have violated them. And here's the thing: we don't even need God's laws, God's perfect law to condemn us. All we need is our words. All we need is our mouth. That is sufficient to condemn us. And when people realize this, often instead of repenting, we double down. And we say, Yeah, I've got some issues. But my life is going just fine, and God must not be that concerned about it. That is what Paul is warning us against. We will not get away with anything. Every delay in judgment is an invitation. Today is an invitation to repent. It is not permission for us to continue. So if you're hearing this and you're thinking this is terrifying, yes, that is a good response. That is the right response. The longer you pursue on God's patience, friends, the harder your heart becomes. And that's why when people say to me, Hey, how can I pray for you? One of the number one things I say is, please pray that my heart would stay soft. This is a dangerous book. The Bible can harden your heart or soften your heart. That's why it's dangerous to sit here and hear the word preached every single week. Because you can sit here every week and you can, it can go in one ear and out the other. You can become immune to the gospel. And so if you're hearing this right now and you feel nothing, you feel no conviction or concern, you are numb. Wake up. That is hardness of heart at work in your life. And this is Paul saying, the kindness of God is extended to you. You don't have to stay that way. God's patience is holding while you come to him in repentance and faith. You see, Paul's driving us to the end of ourselves so that we will lock on to Jesus with everything we've got and say, Jesus, help me. You are my only hope. That's where he's leading us in these first three chapters of Romans. Let's look at the second part, the other escape route are religious credentials. Look at verse six. Hang with me here. Got some teaching, and there's a lot of hard verses in these ver in this section of Romans. Look at verse six. He will render to each one of us according, each one according to his works. Wait a minute. Works. What are we talking about? Works. I thought we were saved by grace through faith, not works. This verse stops us dead in our tracks. Paul is not contradicting the gospel here. Let me be clear. He is not contradicting the gospel. Let's work it out. Paul is describing how God judges, not how God saves. It this way on judgment day, God is not going to ask and doesn't ask to see your membership card or your theological resume and doesn't say, Hey, how many times were you in church? Do you have the Westminster shorter catechism memorized? No. He examines your life, your actual works. Because your works are an x-ray of your heart. And they reveal what it is that you're trusting in, really trusting in, and what you're living for. Works do not save you. Let me say it this way, do not save you, but they do expose you. And if your heart has been changed by grace, your works will show it. Not perfectly, but by the direction of your heart and the direction of your life. And if you're using religion and coming to church as a cover, your works will expose that too. God will judge according to works, because works tell the truth about what is happening inside of you. They expose whether you're seeking your own glory or God's glory. Look at it in the text, verse 7 and 8. Those who by patience and well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. So notice these people are seeking not their glory, but God's glory and honor. The patient well-doing is flowing from a heart that has been captured by the gospel. Now look at the opposite, verse 8. But those who are self-seeking, that's the key. Self-seeking is the telltale sign. If you've been using religion to glorify yourself, seeking your own glory rather than God's glory. Paul's not contradicting the gospel. He's describing what the gospel produces. Something changes in you when the Lord Jesus enters your life and you stop living, again, not perfectly. You stop living for yourself and you start living for God's glory. The fundamental orientation of your heart shifts towards God and towards his glory. Verse 7 is not about earning eternal life. The patient well-doing is flowing in evidence that that change, gospel change, has already happened inside of you. Got it? Look at verses 9 through 11. He repeats the Jew first and also the Greek. He does that twice. Why does he do that twice? Because the Jews were uh they thought their pedigree and their resume actually protected them. We're God's covenant people. We've been circumcised. We have the law. We're good. They thought their credentials kept them from God's judgment. And God, and Paul says, No way. God shows no partiality. Being a Jew does not protect you. Being Presbyterian, being a Baptist, being baptized, being baptized as a child, having a long generation of Christians in your family, or coming to church every single week. God shows no partiality. Here's a picture. Think about going to the doctor, and you pull out this huge file of your medical history, and the first thing you tell the doctor is, Doc, my grandfather lived in '95. My dad had perfect cholesterol. We have three generations of healthy hearts in our family. Surely that counts for something. And what does the doctor do? Well, that's wonderful for them. But I want to talk about you. I want to look at your heart. I want to look at your blood work. I want to look at what's going on inside of you. Their health doesn't affect your diagnosis. That's what Paul's getting at. What is going on inside of you? God wants to examine that because we cannot stand on, I'm better than those people. We can't stand on, well, I'm I'm part of a church and I grew up in the church and in a Christian home. What does your heart reveal? Whose glory are you after? God shows no partiality. Your credentials do not protect you. You see how Paul is just closing every escape route. And he does the last one here with our own excuses. He anticipates the objection here. What about people who've never heard God's law? This sounds unfair. Well, listen, here's Paul's short answer. Everyone is judged by what they know, and everyone knows enough to be guilty. That's his point. If you wanted to summarize those verses, I know they get complicated there towards the end. Look at verses 12 and 13. Here's what Paul means there. If you grew up with the Bible, God will judge you by the Bible. If you never had access to the scriptures, well, God will judge you by what you did have access to. His point is different evidence, same verdict. Everyone is guilty. Everyone falls short. And here's the key. Knowing God's law doesn't save you, he says there in that second in verse 13, you must also do perfectly. Perfectly. Think about the confession of sin that Martin walked us through. We are called to do the law perfectly, and the problem is none of us have. And so then the question is: so what about the people who don't have the Bible? How are they still accountable? Look at verses 14 and 15. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts. Notice the conflicting thoughts there. Your conscience is both accusing and excusing you, and it's in constant negotiation. What he did was wrong, but we excuse it in ourselves and say, Well, I had good reason for this. Everyone has the internal moral law that testifies against them. The law is written on our hearts, and it's why, if you're waiting in a long line and about five people cut in front of you, what do you do? You think that's wrong, don't you? Why? A children has someone, a child has someone steal their toy. They instinctively know that's wrong. Why? Someone cuts you off in traffic. You get frustrated. The law is written on our hearts. And even those who do not have the Bible, they know right from wrong and they violate it. Paul is closing every escape route that we try to walk down. Verse 16 According to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. So it's not just your actions, it's all your secrets and the things that you have never told anyone, your motives, the things will at the judgment day be brought into the light. Jealous thoughts every time you've served in order to be seen rather than truly serve out of right motives, those things that in your life that no one else knows, God knows. Do you see what Paul is doing? He's taking us to our knees. And friends, if you do not know Jesus this morning, this idea of judgment and a judgment day should terrify you. You cannot hide. You won't be able to spin the story. All the escape routes will be closed. All the secrets will be exposed, and you will stand condemned. But God. That is all of us. Unless we have Jesus, but God, a righteousness from God that comes not from ourselves, but comes from God. If you have Jesus, you can stand on that day with no terror whatsoever. Why? Because Christ has faced that judgment day for you on the cross. The wrath that you have been storing up, he took it all. The secrets that condemn you, he's already paid for them. Friends, every religion in the world says do. Think about applying for a job. You got to be impressive. You got to present your resume. It's got to be perfect. It's got to be just right, better than the next person. It's got to be good enough. Every religion says present your own resume, not Christianity, not the gospel. You see, the question is whose resume are you going to present? If you present your own, we're all in trouble. We have no hope. Christianity says Jesus has done it all. Everything necessary to save you. His resume is perfect. And we present Jesus' resume instead of our own. You see, that's the good news of Christianity and the gospel. Yes, we're forgiven of our sins, but we get Jesus' perfect record that is given to our account. Not just forgiveness, actual righteousness. We are judged not by our tape recorder hanging around our neck, thank goodness, but by his. That's why the gospel's such good news. I don't know where you are today. Maybe you're hearing this and you're saying, What in the world do I do? Say help. Jesus, help me. I need a righteousness outside of myself. Your instinct might be, well, I got to clean myself up. You have no idea what's going on in my life when I get things turned around. No, no, no, no. Come today. That's the whole point. None of us can clean ourselves up enough to come to Jesus. That's why we need him. We need a righteousness from God that we do not have. Come and receive it this morning by faith in Christ. Amen. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the gospel. Thank you that we're saved by your grace and we desperately need it. And I pray if there's someone here that doesn't know you, that you would give them eyes to see, give them faith in their heart to accept the gift of your righteousness that you have won for us. Holy Spirit, we need your help to live in the freedom of your righteousness. I pray you would encourage us now as we come to the Lord's table. Thank you for this picture of what you've done for us. In Christ's name, amen.