Sermon - Reformation Day 2022 - Romans 3:19-28

Crucifixion, Pietro Perugino, ~1506

The Righteousness of Faith

1. The world demands righteousness by works.

2. Christ reckons us righteous on account of His blood as a gift.

3. Therefore we receive Christ’s righteousness through faith.

A blessed festival of the Reformation to you dear friends in Christ! Sometimes Reformation Day gets equated with little more than a day to celebrate German culture, which is a fine thing to do; sometimes it gets equated with celebrating Martin Luther, which is okay. But today isn’t about anything so small as German culture or Martin Luther, rather today is about the gospel, it’s about justification, it’s about the righteousness of faith in Christ! In Luther’s day, and still today, the world demands righteousness by works. But today we rejoice that Christ reckons us righteous on account of His blood, as a gift. We therefore receive Christ’s righteousness not by works, but through faith.

Indeed, the world does in fact demand righteousness by works. We live in an age of Social Justice Warriors and Virtue Signaling, where your righteousness is exclusively by your works. If you’re to be righteous in the eyes of the world then you must live up to the standards of the world. 500 years ago they had their own set of worldly standards, and today we have our own. Today the world demands that you fly the rainbow gay pride flag, declare your pronouns, decry your white supremacy, and condemn Russia. It’ll probably be a new set of standards in 10 years, or 10 months, but it doesn’t really matter. The point is that according to the world your righteousness is by your works. 

Even if the world’s standards were perfectly lined up with God’s standards, which they’re not, the fact of the matter is that we are not righteous by our works. “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in His sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” Being righteous in the eyes of the world is impossible because it’s a constantly moving target, since the world’s laws are rather arbitrary. God’s eternal law never changes and always remains constant, yet, it’s impossible to be righteous according to God’s law because try as I might, I can’t keep it perfectly. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Since all are sinners, therefore, none are righteous. Through the law I learn to see that I am a sinner. Of course the law shows me what is good, and it directs my life for me, but it nevertheless reveals my sin. “Whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.” The law of God shuts our mouths because it stops us from boasting about ourselves. Those who are righteous by works are always running their mouths and talking themselves up, boasting of all of the hard work they’ve done, all of the success they’ve seen. But the law of God stops our mouths and shuts our lips, revealing our sin.

“The righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.” The righteousness of God is not through works, but through faith in Jesus Christ! We “are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood.” The law of God is good and perfect, and it is the standard by which all shall be judged. So in mercy, God laid down His life upon the cross in order to redeem us, to appease God’s wrath over sin and earn for us His favor, so that we might be accounted righteous for the sake of Jesus. For our sake Christ shed His blood and died upon calvary. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” 

So Jesus shed His blood upon the altar of the cross in order to atone for our transgressions of His law. We are righteous not because we have earned it, but because Christ paid the debt of sin that we owe and earned us God’s favor. He has justified us as a gift! Though we are guilty against God’s law and don’t deserve the reward of eternal life in paradise, God paid the debt on our behalf with His blood, forgiving us our debt, and accounting us righteous. 

Infant Baptism is a beautiful illustration of this. The little baby isn’t accounted righteous because they are perfectly innocent, since they were conceived in sin, rather the child is declared righteous solely on account of Christ’s righteousness delivered to them in baptism. What’s more, the little baby hasn’t done anything to earn righteousness; they’ve slept most of their life so far! The infant is justified obviously as a gift and all by grace, since they’ve done nothing to earn their righteousness. The child is born a little sinner, born with a death sentence, has nothing to offer God, and Jesus forgives them all by grace, by making the full payment for sin on their behalf.

This is how debts and forgiveness works: when a debt is forgiven, somebody is going to foot the bill. If I owe you a hundred dollars, and you forgive my debt, this means that you had to use your own hundred dollars which you worked for in order to forgive me. The forgiveness of the debt cost you something. Likewise, we all owe a terrible debt to God because of our sin, and in order for God to forgive us He has to pay the debt Himself. That payment is made on our behalf, not just with gold or silver, but with the precious blood of Jesus, God’s own Son.

That Jesus had to die for the forgiveness of our sins is shocking! One, it reveals God’s love for us so spectacularly! “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Second, it reveals how important God’s law is in this world. God couldn’t just ignore our transgressions and forget about them, but His law is so important that Jesus, God in the flesh, had to die in order to atone for our transgressions against His law!

That detail is worth focusing on for a moment. Sometimes we get the impression that since Jesus died for our sins, and since our righteousness is not by the law, that God’s law is unimportant. But that couldn’t be further from the truth! If God’s law doesn’t really matter that much, then Jesus needn’t have died.  Jesus’ death in order to atone for our sins actually highlights the significance and importance of God’s law. Because God’s eternal law is good and necessary, and because we have sinned against God’s law, Jesus therefore died in order to reckon us righteous and fulfill the law on our behalf.

So how is this righteousness received? We receive this righteousness by faith in Jesus. But what is meant by faith? Belief and faith get used a lot, but what do we mean by those words? It’s pretty common that those Christians who stopped going to church will say that they just stopped going to church, but they didn’t stop believing, they still have faith, they still pray. I’m not God, so I can’t judge whether or not anyone has faith or not. But what they call faith is not really how the Bible describes faith.

Faith is more than basic knowledge. Like James says, even demons know who God is and shudder at the fear of God! But demons aren’t going to be saved just because they have a knowledge of God. Likewise, no human is saved because they know who God is and have a basic knowledge of God. Rather “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” “Faith is the confidence that consoles and encourages the terrified mind.” Faith doesn’t just believe in the historicity or reality of God, but believes the effect of what God has done for us. In other words, it’s not enough to just know about God, but faith applies what God has done to the individual personally. I don’t just know that God exists, but I believe that Jesus died for me and promises to preserve me to life everlasting.

My faith therefore makes me cling to Jesus like a magnet! Since Jesus shed His blood for me on the altar of the cross and now offers His sacrificial body and blood on the altar here, my faith draws me here to the altar where I can personally receive His body and blood. Faith draws a Christian closer to Jesus so that the Christian can receive Jesus’ righteousness. Faith even leads Christians to delight in God’s law, not because their works save them, but because the law is God’s good will, and the Christian wants to live closer to God according to what He has said. 

Thus we Lutherans aren’t against the law and good works. Instead our focus is on receiving God’s righteousness as a gift, not through our merits, but solely on account of Christ’s sacrifice. So in a culture obsessed with wanting to be a good person according to today’s current standards, we have comfort in the Gospel. You are justified by faith in Jesus apart from works of the law. That’s the truth which will set you free.