Romans 10 "Faith & God's Righteousness" Jimmy Draper

This summarizes the main points from chapter 10. Jimmy Draper emphasizes the importance of prayer and the concept of Jesus as Lord. The speaker also discusses the role of preaching and the significance of the gospel message. They encourage praying for the salvation of others and express the need to grieve over people's sinfulness while still loving them. Additionally, they emphasize the importance of praying for one's nation and leaders. Well, I have a new description for my life. I've been telling everybody that if my life was a football game, I'm in the two-minute trio. But after what happened last week in Phoenix, I believe I'd rather be in the top of the nine. Because we've got five runs at the top of the nine, so that's going to be a whole lot better than being in a two-minute trio, isn't it? So, anyway, great to see you all. The Book of Romans is so incredible, and I wish I could have heard what Jack, and I know it's available, but I haven't heard it yet. But I was wrapping up in Randy and Elizabeth's class, just finished Jeremiah, and they wanted me to wrap it up, kind of put a bow on it, they said. And of course, I told them, I said, you should have heard what I'm going to say today before you started this, because it's kind of a reflection of what the book is all about. We're in the tenth chapter of Romans, and I'm just a little bit different, so just get your Bibles out, if you've got them with you. And let me just point out some things to you in this chapter, then we'll come back and kind of walk through it. Chapter 10, of course in chapter 9, all bears down on the sovereignty of God and the sinfulness and rebellion of Israel. It's kind of interesting that the beginning of chapter 9 and the beginning of chapter 10 are almost the same. Because in chapter 9, the thing that comes through as we get to this point in the Book of Romans is that even though Israel has totally rejected Jesus, Paul still prays for them. Which ought to be a good lesson to us, that we don't need to stop praying for those that we ought to be praying for. And I thought the pastor's message this morning was just perfect on God wants us to pray, asks us to pray. And it's the most important thing we can do. So I've told you before, when I had meningitis about ten years ago, I got a card from someone that said, how can I do less for you than pray? Usually we'd say more. No, the point is you can't do any more than pray, but you can do less. And we ought to pray. And so he is praying. He begins this chapter talking about his heart's desire and his prayer that is for Israel. And in verse 4, I'm just going to point you some high points because it would take more than a week for us to do this carefully. But verse 4, Christ is the end of law for the righteousness. We'll look at that in a moment, but the end is the Greek word, telos, and any time you see that, it just means something's finished. Something's been consummated. Something is complete. And so Christ is the end of the law of righteousness, and we can know that now we don't have to go through any law or anything like it. Jesus Christ has come to us, and that's what faith is all about. The verses 9, 10, and 11 that we often just kind of pass by because those are the verses that we tell people how when they want to get saved, how to pray. You pray, confess with your mouth, believe in your heart, God raised you from the dead, and so on. But let me just kind of unpack that just a minute. He says a whole lot in there. Of course, when he talks about confessing with your mouth and believing in your heart, he's just reminding us there is an internal and an external part of salvation. Something has to happen inside before it happens outside. So if we confess what's in our heart, then we make a public confession and we make a certain internal commitment also. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But then he says, Jesus is Lord. Now we've heard that phrase so much that we don't kind of unpack it, but let me tell you what that means. The word Lord appears 6,000 times in the Septuagint. Now the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So 6,000 times Lord is mentioned in the Septuagint in the Old Testament. Here Jesus is called Lord. That is a very significant thing because it means He is God. Everything God is, Jesus is. Nothing is left out. I've told you many times that in the Trinity, we don't have three gods. We have one God in three expressions, three persons, however you want to do it, but they're just one God. Now that is beyond our ability to understand. That doesn't compute humanly. But that is the truth. So if God says something, Jesus and the Holy Spirit say it. Holy Spirit says something, Jesus and God say it. Jesus says something, the Holy Spirit and God say it. They never have a split decision. They cannot disagree. Perfect harmony, wrapped up in love with all the omnis that you can imagine, omniscience, omnipotent, omnipresent, all of these things belong to the God. When Jesus is called Lord, that means He is God Himself. I just think it's important in realizing that at the point when people get saved, when they say Jesus is Lord, they're doing something very special. They're affirming that Jesus is God and they're also affirming that they have committed themselves to Jesus as their Lord to do whatever He wants to do with them. So there's a lot in that word there, in that word Lord. When you come to verses 14, He basically says, you know, you hear the word, but somebody's got to preach the word. And so He deals with the call and people being sent to preach, even down to saying that the gospel that is preached by an individual has pretty feet. It doesn't excite me a whole lot, because I don't think that our feet are generally the prettiest part about us, but it says, how beautiful are the feet of those that preach the gospel of good news. So we have that. And then in verse 17, He wraps up a simple description about what He's talking about, for after He talks about the gospel, He says, for Isaiah says, now let me see, verse 16, let us all obey the gospel, for Isaiah says, Lord who has believed our message. So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the message about Christ. So the gospel basically is the message about Christ. That's what the gospel is, and that's a very significant thing. It's all about Him. Then He quotes Deuteronomy about, at least He kind of paraphrases Deuteronomy 30, about who's going to send up in heaven, bring Him down to us, or down in the deeps and bring Him up to us. The point is, that's not necessary now, because the gospel has come here. Jesus is here, and it's plain, and it's clear. And then He talks about the Gentiles later in this, when He talks about people who are not a nation, but they're Gentiles, and He talks about the Gentiles, and He describes them as people who weren't looking for God, but God found them. Now the Jews sought God, and they responded to God. The Gentiles didn't seek God, but found Him anyway, or were found by Him anyway. So that's kind of a wrap-up of the book, of this chapter itself. And let me just kind of start going through this. Verse 1 is amazing to me, in light of what chapter 9 got involved in, the unbelief of Israel and the resistance and rejection of Christ in Israel. It's amazing that He poured out His heart for people who were stubborn and rebellious and had rejected Christ. He still was praying for them. And I think it's just a good reminder for us that if we're not careful, we'll think, well, that person's just too far gone to respond to the gospel. And I think the truth is, we need to keep praying for people that need to be saved, and not stop praying for them. We can't make them get saved. God can't compel them to be saved. They have to respond. I don't understand all that that involves, but we know we need to keep praying for them. And it's amazing that Paul basically starts these two chapters of saying, in chapter 9, listen to what he says, I speak the truth in Christ, I am not lying. My conscience testifies to me through the Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the benefit of my brothers and sisters, my own flesh and blood. He says, I'd be willing not to be saved if it means that my Jewish brothers and sisters would be saved. And then he starts chapter 10, brothers and sisters, my heart's desire and prayer to God concerning them is for their salvation. I can testify about them, they have a zeal for God. Good synonym for zeal would be enthusiasm, enthusiasm for God. Not according to knowledge, since they are ignorant of the righteousness of God and attempted to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted to God's righteousness. So he really started both of these chapters just expressing his heart's desire and his prayer for his people. Now, we can't really love people if we don't first grieve over their sinfulness. Now, this is problematic for many of us, when people get real sinful, we kind of get mad at them. I don't like that person. I often say, I'm glad I'm not God, because that's the people I'd zap. God doesn't do that. So we can't really love people if we don't grieve over their sinfulness. We need to pray for America, because Israel is not a godly nation right now, it is not a religious nation right now, it is a secular nation, a totally secular nation right now. Neither is the United States a spiritual nation, it is a secular nation. The sinfulness, and I could write a lot of statistics about how bad things are, but they usually just kind of make us upset. But it ought to grieve us. Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem because of their unbelief. There's nothing wrong with our leaders in America that wouldn't be cured if they'd get saved. We ought to pray for them, and pray for them by name. Now, that's not always easy. I'd rather criticize somebody than pray for them, usually. It's a natural tendency. Now, I know all of y'all are past that, but I'm still struggling with that. But we ought to pray for our nation, pray for our leaders, and that's why we are told to pray for those in authority over us. And remember, that was said at a time when Caesar was the head guy. Things were pretty bad, but you should still pray for those who lead you. So grief and love belong together. We should never approve of someone's sin, but we should always grieve over their sin, and that always ought to be followed by love and prayer. Paul grieves and groans because of the sins of the people of Israel, but there's still hope. His very cry and his prayer indicates that there is hope. Now, Jewish leaders were in a terrible shape because of their rejection of Jesus Christ. They had enthusiasm, they had zeal, but without genuine knowledge. Now what does that mean? Well, I'll give you an illustration that I've used before, but at our age, who remembers? But when I was a teenage boy, do y'all remember Training Union? Okay, my people. Training Union. When I was a teenager, we had a Training Union convention in Beaumont, Texas. We lived in Jacksonville, Texas, and a carload of us decided we'd go to that convention. And we started with plenty of time to get there, and the further we went, the later it got. We were making good time, but at some point, we turned into Louisiana instead of into South Texas. And we were really going good, but we were going in the wrong direction. That's kind of what Paul is describing the Jews. One artist would put it like this, they didn't know what they should know, but they didn't know what they didn't know. They knew what they didn't know, but they didn't know what they didn't know. And I've always said the purpose of education is not to do the miracle that everybody expects out of education. Education ought to teach you what you don't know. You won't remember anything you've learned specifically, but you need to learn what you don't know. Well, the Jews never did that. The ignorance of God results in unchecked, unbridled rage and wrong actions. That's what destroyed Israel in Paul's day, and it's the same thing that destroys nations today. It causes men and nations to attempt to meet God's standards of righteousness, which is always different from man's standards. Man's standards of righteousness is always contrary to the righteousness of God, which is clearly found in Scripture. Now, Paul had just rehearsed the efforts of the Jews to secure acceptance before God by obeying the law. They had failed to accept before God what God required. They thought they could please God. They just knew they could please God through the law. And of course, we all know nobody can keep the law. Now, the rich young ruler said, well, Jesus was talking to him, and he talked about the law. And he said, well, I kept all that. Well, no, nobody. He didn't know what he didn't know. But nobody's kept the law. Something else had to happen. In fact, in this passage, Paul even says, those that know the law live by the law. They should live by the law. Well, they should, but they don't. Nobody lives by the law. That's why every day I say, Lord, I do not want justice. I want mercy, because I do not measure up in my own strength. I mean, Jesus said it simply, without me, you're nothing. I remember when I was in the fifth grade, I obviously was very intent on what the teacher would say. But I took my big chief tablet, and I wrote zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, on every line of the page. And then I added them up. And you know what? Zero plus zero is zero. Now, that's what nothing is. I mean, Jesus didn't say, you can do a little. No, he said, you can do nothing. Meaning, nothing significant, nothing that pleases me, without me. That's why I said, and some of you all kind of chuckled last week, that Christianity is not difficult. It's impossible. It really is. We cannot satisfy God's standard of righteousness in our own strength. And so that's what he is talking about. We try to obtain righteousness by our conduct. Just think about it. Have you ever heard someone say, well, I'm just as good as he is. Well, what's he talking about? Well, I don't do things any worse than he does. So, you know, it's not comparing conducts. None of us have enough conduct at our very best to please God. My dad told me the little poem, you know, there's so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us that it doesn't behoove any of us to talk about the rest of us. I mean, we can compare how we do, but God's keeping on, his scorecard is a little different. He expects more than we can do, but then he provides for us what we can't do. That's the miracle of salvation. When we become a Christian, our lives are transformed. Now, if any man be in Christ, he's a new creation, Paul said. Now, pause. Is that true? It's kind of scary, isn't it? We're so much like we used to be, but we're supposed to be a new creation. And we're not good at creating things. Do you realize every man who does anything is plagiarizing God? We don't create anything. We usually take what God created and mess it up. So, we don't create anything. But if any man's in Christ, he's a new creation. In writing a little book that I did, it's not rocket science, my favorite guy to write, to read about awakenings was J. Edward Knorr. And we had him at Ridgecrest a lot of times when I was at the Sunday School Board, and the last time I saw him was at Ridgecrest. He passed away. But he would talk about how in the awakenings that he described that the donkeys that pull the sleds and the wagons, when a guy got saved, he lost his vocabulary. They had to be retrained, because they were used to someone cussing at them and swearing at them, and a guy got saved and lost his vocabulary and couldn't get the mules to do anything or the donkeys to do anything. That's transformation. If God has saved us, it ought to make a difference. My dad used to say it, not directly for this, but he said if you could be saved and not know it, you could lose it and never miss it. I mean, when we get saved, things have changed. And we need to understand that God doesn't grade on the curve. I've been to school. I went through college. They graded on the curve. I graded papers for two years in Baylor in the religion department for Dr. Kyle Yates, who was one of the finest men I've ever met. He's the one Cecil B. DeMille hired to be his consultant in filming and producing the Ten Commandments. He's a great scholar and such a sweet man. And he wanted everybody to get an A. I mean, his attitude was if they answered all the questions, they ought to get an A. About once every two weeks, the chairman of the department called me and said, you've got to get these grades down. You know, back then, you've got to have so many A's and so many F's. You know, the curve's a terrible thing. And God doesn't grade on the curve. If we have been in Christ, we are a new creature. Now, if that's not true in your life, then you have some business you need to do with God because God says that you belong to me. You're not your own. You've been bought with a price. Now, you glorify me in your body and in your works and everything you do. It's the gospel of faith. We can't earn God's grace. We can't deserve it. God owes us nothing. We owe Him everything. And salvation is the free gift of God to those who will receive it. Now, this passage makes some very interesting statements. It talks about if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, you'll be saved. One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation. Now, something I should have said just a few moments ago. Those verses state that we believe. But they also state what we believe. Everybody believes in something. The important thing is not that you believe something. You practice belief every day. You come over a hill in your car and you have faith. There's not a tractor, trailer, truck that's stalled over the ridge that you're going to run into. You just drive on and you don't know until you get there and it's too late to stop. That's an act of faith. It is true that we know that we believe some things. But for believers, the heart and soul of Christian faith is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, that's the basic central teaching of the gospel. Without the resurrection, there is no gospel. Without the resurrection, Jesus was just a man who had great ethics and a beautiful life and ended a tragic death if there's no resurrection. If He didn't rise, Paul spent an entire chapter in chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians talking about, well actually through 1 Corinthians, it talked about if Christ has not been raised from the dead, what happens? Well, we're foolish. We're still in our sins. Our preaching is in vain. The resurrection is at the very... Now, let me just pause and give you a testimony. Most of you probably have little memory of what we call the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention. That was a time, some of you remember that. You should. Because we had reached a point where people who were paid by our cooperative program funds were denying basic biblical truths and in fact often ridiculing them and saying that they're not true. I preached at Southern Seminary when I was president of the convention and preached in chapel and went and stood before 150 professors and administrators in one of their stadium classrooms and answered questions for an hour. The first question that was asked me is, what is a liberal? Well, you've got to remember that at that time I was just pastor of this church. I wasn't a seminary professor. I didn't go around debating people. So I said, well, I guess a liberal would be anybody who did not believe any part of Scripture. Well, that would be a liberal. But on the way to the airport, the young man and his wife who took Carol Ann and me to the airport said, if you had said anyone who does not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, you would have nailed 85% of the faculty. That's what we were facing. One of the professors at Baylor always started his class of freshman students and bragged that he loved to see the faces of his students when he proved to them they couldn't trust their Bible. That was at Baylor University. I was a trustee at the time. That's another story. I'm still persona non grata at Baylor because I made an issue out of it. The only person that sided with me out of 48 trustees was a lawyer from Houston by the name of Paul Martin. Paul Martin was the trustee with me. The other three preachers in all voted against me. But he used to open his class. He bragged about it. One of our professors at Southwestern was a professor at Baylor at the time and heard about it and told me this is what I heard. He said that he would start his classes by saying, if you've been in Sunday School Church all your life, you're not going to like this class. Now, that's the kind of thing we were looking at. People said, oh, it's just a preacher's fight. No, it wasn't a preacher's fight. It was a fight over theology. I mean, it was not something we wanted to do. It was something we had to do. Did we do it right? Not necessarily. Nobody's ever trained in conflict. You respond, and surely we've made a lot of mistakes, but the bottom line for us was that we were not going to stand for people getting paid by Southern Baptist money to deny the veracity and the authority and the inerrancy of Scripture. We just weren't going to do it. And it was a hard battle. Many of us lost friends. In fact, just less than a week ago, I got a phone call from one of my dear friends that we split over the conservative resurgence. We've not spoken in 40 years. And he's not a liberal, by the way, but he went with a liberal group, and so we hadn't spoken in all these years, but we had a great visit. We're going to get together. Time does heal some things. And the truth is, he and I were put in situations, and we just reacted in different ways. For instance, I was put in a situation of being a trustee at Baylor and finding out that the soon-to-be, at that point, chairman of the religion department had written two books, People of the Covenant and Old Testament History, in which he basically said that the Bible was man's attempt to explain their view of God. And then it went downhill from there. And I was chairman of the academic affairs committee of the trustees. Well, I couldn't accept that. And I talked to all the preachers on the committee. Oh, yeah, we're with you. Well, they were with me. They were way back with me. I mean, I know what it's like to stand against 48 trustees on a board, to take a stand for truth. And the reason I say all this is when I wrote my book on authority, I made a proposal that we have five basic beliefs that we could all agree were true, and then we could cooperate if we could have five basic beliefs, salvation, justification by grace, truth, faith, and so on. I put two in there of the five that I knew the liberals would never accept. They would never accept if I put substitutionary atonement. They don't believe Jesus died as our substitute. He was not our substitute. And they don't believe that Jesus rose vitally from the grave. I mean, you are no – well, we don't want to go back there, but the point is these were things that we faced, and I was in a responsibility as a trustee of dealing with that at Baylor and had to do that. Well, my friend was not in that kind of situation, but he went with many of his friends, and he didn't agree with everything. He viewed it differently. And we just split up, one of my dearest friends. And we're going to have lunch together here before long, so I'm looking forward to that. But they were real battles. But when you read this innocent little phrase, in your heart believe that God was raised from the dead, understand that's not just a little thing. That is the heart of the gospel. And anybody who believes that Jesus did not vitally come out of the grave, believes some kind of a spiritual resurrection, that's just not acceptable. So that's what we wrestle with. Paul is wrestling with a lot of the same thing. Israel knew all of this. I mean, they knew better. It's not that they didn't know better. In fact, he addresses that in here. He says, is it possible they didn't understand? Is it possible they just didn't know? No. And the way he asked that, if we look at it here in a minute, if we get that far, he did it in a way that indicated he expected a negative response. No, they didn't. No, they did understand. And yes, they did know. And by the way, that's typical of the book of Romans, because in the first chapter he says, even people who have never heard the name of Jesus are without excuse, because God is known whether they recognize Him or not. And when they don't recognize Him as God, then they are separated from God. That's not inconsistent with what the Romans started with in the first chapter. So anyway, human efforts always fail to meet God's standard of righteousness. Man's standard of righteousness is of the DNA of Adam. Adam's sin. Since that time, the whole world has been turned upside down. On our own, without the Holy Spirit in our lives, without God's presence, we can never think right or understand correctly. In fact, Paul addresses this in 1 Corinthians 2.14. He says, The person without the Spirit does not receive what comes from God's Spirit, because it is foolishness to him. He is not able to understand since it is evaluated spiritually. Well, that's where Israel was at that time. And when we get saved, our lives should be transformed, because there is nothing in us that is good. Paul says that there is none righteous, no, not one. Listen, you just don't want to go to judgment, going to tell God that what you did was more important than what He wanted us to do. It's just not going to work out very well for you, so you don't want to do that. The righteousness of God, just as the DNA of our human nature is sin, the righteousness of God has its source in His very nature. It's derived from God Himself. God is righteous. God is love. God is merciful. God is grace. And there is no diminishing of who He is. In fact, James 1.17 describes God as one who does not change like shifting shadows. Well, today mankind, our world, people are basically ignorant of God's righteousness and still going about trying to figure out how to establish our own righteousness and trying to convince God that's okay. Well, God's righteousness is just completely different from man's righteousness. We want to build righteousness on our conduct, what we do. God builds His righteousness on who we are. God is more interested in who we are than what we do. We can't do enough to please Him, but we can be enough to know that we need Him and in a relationship of faith and trust, we can satisfy His demands of righteousness because it's not our righteousness. It's His righteousness. So we have nothing to brag about. We're so focused on our own ideas and we just set out to establish some other way to please God. One writer said they rejected Christ first because of what they saw in Him. Secondly, they rejected Him for what they did not see in Him. They just misunderstood the whole thing. And their ignorance was self-imposed. Periodically, we have breaking news in the Christian community about some leader that's messed up. And it happens more than we know, certainly more than we like. But the truth is most of the problems that people who are Christian leaders have are self-inflicted. We do it to ourselves. You ask any leader who has made mistakes that became public and became very prominent in his life, and he'll tell you, I never thought I'd do that. I knew better than that. I just knew that I'd never do that. But you did because God's not as interested in what you do as He is in who you are. And who you are, you're in Christ. And your strength is in Christ. Your hope is in Christ. And your life is guided by Christ, by the Holy Spirit. Paul's giving his testimony about the Jews here. Verse 2, he says, I can testify. He said, I know these Jews. He knew them firsthand. No nation in history has ever had a zeal for God like the Jews did. They were enthusiastic about it. But enthusiasm is good, but it can lead to undesirable traits if you're not careful. If it becomes presumption, we just assume we can do it. Now, that's basic to all of us. I mean, we all basically want to do it ourselves. You do not have to teach your child to say, mine. As soon as they learn to talk, they'll let you hear that a lot. You don't have to teach anybody that. We have an innate DNA disposition characteristic built into every one of us that we would really like to help God out. Surely there's something we can do. And one of the things that made Christianity so unique in the first century was their emphasis on the presence of God and the Holy Spirit and the incredible lives that they lived before their persecutors. Do you realize the early church through the first 400 years often persecuted? Lions' den in the arena, burnt at the stake, beheaded. They were hated and despised because they insisted that Jesus was the only way. God was the only way. The Romans had no problem with many gods. It's just like India today. There are a lot of people who are happy to pray the prayer because Jesus is just enjoying one of the gods they worship in their house. The thing that made Christianity so appealing and made its growth so astounding was they were an outlaw group who were forbidden to me who refused to burn incense to Caesar and demanded that they could say Jesus is Lord, but they would not say Caesar is Lord. And the best thing that early church could promise someone who was considering becoming a believer was that you're probably going to be persecuted. You're probably going to be visibly attacked. You may lose your own life. One thing that did is it assured a regenerate membership because who would want to join an organization like that? Who would want to join a place that now you can join here but you're probably going to lose your head because of it or you're going to end up being eaten by lions. That's what made Christianity different. And one historian said the Christians outlived and out died their critics. Someone said, I can kill you, I can take your life. And he said, yeah, but my greatest witness will be when you kill me. You know, Christianity has been running up current, running against the wind, running against the opinion ever since the beginning and yet within 400 years it was the official religion of the Roman Empire. How'd that happen? Well, it happened because they had transformed lives. They were different. Their critics often said we are amazed at how they love others and how they treat others and how they will not, they will not, we want them to do something and they don't believe their God wants them to do it. We are amazed at their courage that they wouldn't do what we demanded they do. Well, you can't please God by what you do. If you save, your life's going to be transformed and you can be guaranteed that you're going to be attacked by Satan when you get saved and you're going to have the struggle of Romans 7 inside with your own characteristics struggling with you about doing the right thing. So you're going to be in a battle either way you go. You're going to have fake Satan or you're going to be struggling within yourself in this life. Well, in verse 8 Paul talked about, he quoted from, he really is a paraphrase of Deuteronomy 30, 12 to 14 pointing out that no one is needed to ascend to heaven to bring Christ down bodily or to ascend into the deep to bring him up from the dead. Paul just says God's message is close to us. It's close to us. It's already in your mouth and in your heart. Faith does not ask where God is. It accepts that God is. That is a great confession. That God is. Faith accepts God knowing that He is. I've said to you many times, it's still a puzzle to me and I say with tongue and cheek but seriously too, I'm not smart enough to be a liberal. Here's what liberalism believes. Now follow me closely. This is going to be hard for you to catch. Nothing plus time equals everything. That's it. Nothing plus time equals everything. Now who's dumb enough to believe that? Nothing plus time equals everything? Well, it's important that we say God is and hey, in the beginning God created the heaven and earth. It makes a whole lot more sense than in the beginning nothing plus time equals everything. Our lives and our message is absolutely central in all of this. God brought His salvation near to us in Christ. That salvation is available to all. Christ ends the law and brings salvation to all who have faith. Anyone meeting faith of verse 9 can be saved. If you or any of you will confess with their mouths Jesus is Lord, believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, you'll be saved. And really what Paul's trying to do here, he's trying to say stop trying to earn what you can receive as a gift. That's his whole point. And pride stands in the way and so many will not receive the gift of grace because they'd rather do it themselves which is never acceptable to God. Notice verses 11 and 12. For the scripture says everyone who believes on Him will not be put to shame since there is no distinction between Jew and Greek because the same Lord richly blesses all who call on Him For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. All believers share that promise. They'll never be put to shame because they have been saved. Paul has emphasized the importance of faith as the one way to God and the implication of all that is that Jews and Gentiles all saved the same way. Well now he explicitly says that. He says because there were distinctions between Jews and Gentiles culturally, racially and religiously. But by faith all that's removed because he says God doesn't have any distinctives that he sees in these people. He has looked past that. And distinctions in human beings are irrelevant because God doesn't make any distinctions. Everyone comes by faith. Paul spoke of confessing with one's mouth and believing in one's heart. And again that just reveals there's an outward confession and an inward belief and both are required. He's not suggesting that you could have an inner belief without an outer belief. But if anyone really believes then God they will confess Christ. The believing and confessing go together. And anyone who really believes will be saved. And 2 Corinthians 5 talks about the transformation and the new creation that takes place. So again this not only refers to that we believe but refers to what we believe. It is the resurrection again. The law is brought to an end in Christ so that everyone may have access to God's grace through faith. The purpose of the law was to lead us to Christ. Paul himself later talks about it being a mirror that shows us what we were like. The law was never given for man to keep because man never could keep it. Only one man could keep it and that was Jesus. It was given to be a mirror for us to see who we are and that would bring us to Christ. And so that's where we are in Paul's teaching here that we are because of the resurrection of Christ we are the ones who no longer have to have any thought about pleasing God or pleasing the law because that can't be done. Jesus is there for anyone who will accept and will believe. And Jesus is Lord. I said that a moment ago. Let me just amplify it just a little bit. We're going to be through here in a second. Those who come to Christ in faith acknowledging that they have placed themselves completely and without reservation under the authority of Christ. In other words, whatever He wants us to do, whatever He chooses to have us say, we do it because He's our Lord. Let me put it this way. You can say no and you can say Lord, but you can't say no, Lord. If He's Lord, you can't say no to Him. And that means there's no salvation without Lordship. We may not always maintain that close relationship with Him, but we will never see our responsibilities as if they do not matter. The resurrection of Christ is the very center of the Christian faith. And remember, there is a war within us. Paul talked about it in chapter 7. And you need to go back and read it. That is a battle that's in every believer's heart. So again, as we come to the end, verses 14 and 15, everyone who calls on the Lord will be saved. It is important that everyone have the chance to hear the gospel. That's what we get into here about being called and being sent. Everyone has to preach the gospel, and the gospel must be heard and received. One other thing here quickly, in verse 17, it's an interesting verse, because so faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the message about Christ. Now following that, he makes the statement twice, but I ask. But I ask. He's asking a question. And he obviously is expecting a negative response, because the construction of the Greek language there is that he uses double negatives. So he obviously was not anticipating that anybody was going to say yes. No. And so he was looking for that. And that clearly describes Israel who went serenely on their way realizing the gospel of Christ meant the doors open to the Jews and to the Gentiles. In fact, verse 20 I think refers to the Gentiles. They didn't consciously look for God as the Jews did, but in the end they found Him because He revealed Himself to them. But Paul now ends the chapter by saying, to Israel he says, All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and defiant people. Israel's rebellion and rejection of Christ had nothing to do with their hearing the gospel or their ability to understand it. It was their national willful disobedience and rejection of Jesus Christ that sealed their doom. They insisted on personal merit and on their own works to gain God's approval. And all the while, they knew that God's requirement for righteousness is faith. So they are doomed by their own attitudes not because they didn't understand or they didn't know, didn't hear. This is their choice. It's just a good reminder to us that we do have choices. And choices do have consequences. To me, the amazing thing about the sovereignty of God is that we could be like puppets on a string. But He chose to give us the ability to make choices. He's never going to force His way into your heart. Never going to do that. But if you'll come, the way He described, confessing, believing, you'll be saved. It's all by grace. God's stubborn. He's not going to let us get credit for anything He does. And yet, He's also mysterious. Because how could He be sovereign and I still have a will of my own? I don't understand that. So I'm not going to debate you about it. I just know that if we hear and believe, God says we'll be saved. And that's what God said. It doesn't matter what someone else says. It's inexplicable. Charles Spurgeon, who would describe himself as a five-point Calvinist, said when you come to the eternity, over the door it says whosoever will may come. When you come in and look back over the door it says preordained before the foundation of the world. They said, well, how do you recognize sovereignty, God's sovereignty, and man's free will? Spurgeon's reply was classic. He said you do not have to reconcile good friends. So hear me today. We're never going to all agree on all the sovereignty of God and the free will of man means. Good news. That's not our job. It's not up to us to believe it. It's up to us to preach it. So I tell young preachers, preach the sovereignty of God. He is sovereign. Preach the responsibility of man to be saved because he has a responsibility. Preach them both. You don't have to understand them, but they're both in the Bible and God apparently has no problem with them because of what He said. So sovereignty and free will ought never to be contentious. We can have fun debating it. We can discuss it. God still gets the last word. He says both of them. If I did that, you'd say, well, you're double-tongued. You're speaking out both sides of your mouth. But God said it. He never does that. So I don't understand some things. But you know what? I'm going to preach the things I do know about and when I finally run out of that, then I'll struggle with that. I'll find out after I've gotten rid of preaching about everything I know and get into some things I don't know. Good news is God's in control. God has provided salvation by the grace of God to anyone who will believe. You have to hear the Gospel to be saved. That's how faith comes, by hearing. We could go on and on, couldn't we? We'll just stop. Thank You, Father, for Your Word. Thank You that it soothes our hearts. It calms our nerves. It stimulates our minds and always leads us to a mystery that we have to receive by faith. We thank You that we know You're worth trusting, so we trust You in Jesus' name. Amen.