Rom. 3:22-24 Faith In Christ Is God’s Miracle In You

SPEAKER 01 : 0:05

Now, some listening yesterday may have inquiries or confusions about what I said in regard to the mind. Don’t trust the mind, because faith and the mind are opposites, and they conflict with each other. Well, let me explain that further. Yes, the mind is the way we think, the mind is the way we reason and understand reality and see the world, and the mind is a gift from God. But the mind is fallen. It is a broken part of our humanity, just like our body is and our emotions. When we hear Paul saying this, what I talked about yesterday and several days previously, Romans 3, verses 22, 23, 24, that the righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ to all and on all who believe has been revealed. For there is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, continually fall short, while they are being justified, declared innocent freely, by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. When you read that, your mind will understand it one way, but faith alone will understand it another way. Faith is a miracle. It does not come from the human mind. This is a tremendous mistake that is rather embraced by most of Christianity. We think of faith as something that we conjure up, as a logical conclusion to what God has said to us in Jesus Christ. But no, there’s nothing logical about it. Faith meets us in crisis. Why do I say this? Why do I have to emphasize this? Because you will be thrown off kilter when crises come if you don’t believe that faith is a miracle. If you think that faith is something that must be conjured up, must be, well, certainly exercised by us, but comes from humanity, then you will simply not understand how God can be present with us when he seems to be absolutely absent. Because faith generated from logic and the human mind will find that statement, well, completely illogical. If God is present with us when everything seems to show that he’s absent, then that is illogical, and therefore our faith cannot be sustained from a human point of view, because it just doesn’t make sense. But we are Christians who believe in what is foolish. We are Christians, and we believe in what doesn’t make sense. For the truth of the matter is that faith comes from God. You remember I told you the other day, I reminded you the other day of Jesus’ question of Peter. Who do you think, who, Peter, do you say that I am? He said, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus said, blessed are you, Peter, for flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven. People saw Jesus in the flesh in Jesus’ day. But what do you think? Most of them didn’t believe him. So, you see, sight and mind and logic and what we see with our eyes simply doesn’t make sense. But who did believe? those who were in crisis. The centurion whose servant was sick, the woman whose son had died, the widow. All of these illustrations show that God comes to the soul in crisis. And so we have the law, which Paul has spoken about in chapter 3 onward, telling us that there is an unrighteous, no, not one. We have the law revealing to us that every mouth must be stopped and make no more excuses because all the world is guilty before God. That’s Romans 3, verse 19. That’s a crisis, don’t you see? This is not simply a biblical doctrine. For the world to become aware that it is guilty before God when the full revelation of God is known in the judgment, that is a crisis. It means the extinction of the human race unless some super-interceding is done. Therefore, Paul says in verse 20, by the deeds of the law, no flesh will be justified in his sight. Why are Christians comfortable today? Well, because they think the law does justify them. Remember, the law, by that, it means our human performance, our human behavior, our morality. That most of the Christian world can be comfortable before God because they simply say, well, God loves us and we’re lovable creatures. I mean, that’s sort of presumed. We’re lovable. There’s no crisis. But if you read the Word of God properly, and if you read your own experience properly, you will know that God met you in crisis. Now you say, well, God hasn’t met me. I’ve had all the crises in the world. I’ve had a drug addiction. I’ve had an alcohol addiction. I’ve had a sex addiction. I’ve had a food addiction, or whatever it may be. And God didn’t come through for me. Hello, hello. Do you understand that the crisis of your addiction is the very moment God meets you? That is what we need to understand. And so, there is a wrestle. There is a battle. I know that faith is thought of by so many as bringing peace. It does, yes, no question about it. Trusting in Jesus, trusting in God who has given us Jesus to be an atonement for our sins, to substitute for us, that’s a wonderful revelation of peace. But it does not sit well in the mind, such peace, because the mind is endlessly worried. endlessly depressed, endlessly anxious, endlessly driven by addictions. The mind is broken. And for faith to come in and tell us that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ is like setting the cat among the pigeons. There’s fur flying and feathers all over the place because there’s a war on and a battle. Now, it’s not going to kill you, it’s not going to exhaust you, but it is going to create a crisis. We believe in the ridiculous. We believe when we feel we have no right to believe. When you’re in the midst of addiction, When you are in the throes of alcoholism or drug addiction or whatever other addiction it may be, and God tells you that Christ has atoned for your sins and there is no judgment upon you, that sounds absurd. It sounds as though you’re fooling yourself and that you have a false confidence in God. But you look at Romans 4, verse 5, and you say there, and you see what it says there, but to him who does not work, that is, has no works of morality to his credit, but believes on him who justifies the ungodly. Hey, wait a minute, what? Declares innocent the ungodly who trust in him? Do you see what that says? It’s an utterly… irrational, impossible statement. God declares innocent the ungodly. How can he do that? How can you possibly embrace it? You can’t by your mind, but you can by looking at the cross of Jesus Christ and seeing in him a substitute for your judgment. People, modern Christians, like to deny the judgment, the substitutionary work of Christ. They say, well, why did God have to have a sacrifice to forgive us? We don’t have to have a sacrifice if we forgive our neighbor or forgive our friend who has wronged us. Why does God have to have one? Well, I’m not going to answer that right now and here, but I can tell you this, that it is replete throughout Scripture. that the substitutionary sacrifices in Israel, all through their history, were a harbinger of Christ’s coming and of what he would do for the human race. God, in the person of his Son, substituted for us. Now, this is going to become even more blaringly obvious in the next verses that we’ll study in the future, well, tomorrow or the next day. But I can tell you this. You must not accept the sophisticated intellectual elitism of modern Christianity that says, we don’t need the sacrifice of Christ. God is loving and forgives us anyway. It’s not true. God declares that he will make an atonement for Israel for all that they have done. That’s in Ezekiel. And it is a shock. because the truth of Israel, the truth is that Israel utterly failed God and worshipped more idols than any of the nations around them. They were idolaters, even to the extent of sacrificing their own babies and young children in the fires of Molech and Baal. And so when you see that, and then you see the shock of the atonement, you begin to realize, oh my goodness, this is something way beyond what we think in regard to forgiveness. God has introduced a righteousness which brought about great sacrifice in himself. the loss of his own son, the aching pain and sorrow of the separation of the son from the father. We’ll be studying more of this as we go through the book of Romans. Jesus, you know, did not die of crucifixion. Oh yes, he was on the cross, and he was crucified. But it takes three to five days for a human being to die on the cross. It is a slow suffering. He died in six hours. Was it any less of a suffering? No, it wasn’t. It was more than any kind of suffering that any person on the cross could have felt. What was it then? It was separation from the heart of God. God the Father separated from God the Son at the cross. abandoned his own son for the sake of us that we might never be abandoned. This is an expression, the cross, of the nature of sin. Not simply our individual sins. We get wrapped up so much in our individual sins that we can’t see the big picture. The fact is Adam ruined the human race. And thus we enter the world already ruined. And God cannot take that ruined humanity into the kingdom of heaven. He must renew it. He must cleanse it. He must recreate it. He must resurrect it. And he does that by first of all taking the judgment of the world upon himself, that we might be freed and trust him in all kinds of circumstances. So, if you find faith a conflict, then you’re in good company. That is exactly what it’s meant to be. When you are down and out and troubled and believe that God has forsaken you and yet you’re trying to believe, no, I won’t believe that God, I believe you’re with me, don’t think you’re a fool. Yes, you’re a fool for Christ’s sake, but the truth is you have more rationality from the kingdom of heaven through faith than the world could ever produce in a midnight of rational thinking. Thank you for joining me today. Colin Cook here. And you’re listening, I might remind you, to a listener-supported broadcast. In other words, it keeps going. It’s now in its 28th year by your support, your donations. Would you please consider a donation? This ministry needs it seriously and badly. So if you’d like to make a donation, you can make it online at faithquestradio.com Or you can send your donation to Faith Quest, P.O. Box 366, Littleton, Colorado, 80160. Thank you so very much for all your support. I do appreciate it, those of you who’ve donated for many years, and those of you who are just donating one time. I’ll see you next time. Cheerio and God bless.