The Cross has Power Over Our Guilt - Romans 3:9-6

I was a pretty good kid growing up. I went to church every time the doors were open, and sometimes, since I was the pastor's kid, I went when the doors weren't open. because we had the key. I knew all the hymns by heart, was baptized in a concrete baptismal pool at the age of eight in an old church that boasted stained glass windows, red carpet and creaking pews. And for most of my life, I lived with a set of internal good kid checkboxes, making sure to stay on the right side of God with more good deeds than even I could count. I heard a lot of people say, when they told their own faith stories, that the parable of the prodigal sun was one of their favorites, but from my vantage point, I just couldn't relate The prodigal son was for the reckless and the disobedient, not me. Another verse that frequently got stuck in my mind were Jesus' words to the Pharisees, after he encouraged the woman who poured out her precious oil on Jesus' feet, Jesus said to the Pharisees, he who forgives little loves little. It was such a nonsensical phrase to me, but I couldn't get it out of my mind. Then I was reading through the two chapter prophetic book of Hagey. The Lord, who loves to ask his people questions for us to consider our own hearts, asked his people through Hagai to consider something if a priest was carrying holy meat in his garments, and then his garment touched something ordinary, would the unholy thing it now become holy? No, of course not. one can't accidentally become clean. Then the Lord said pointedly, so it is with my people. God's people with all their laws and performances and rituals, remained unclean, full of their guilt. They had neglected rebuilding the temple. They had neglected their access point to a relationship with the god of life. No amount of their self made righteousness could undo their guilt. and that's when I really began to hit home for me. My goodness was still filth. I was relying on my own access point to God instead of Christ's righteousness for me. My self- justification made me just as guilty as the prodigal, and then I started to consider the prodigal's older brother, you know, the good son, one who stayed home and did everything his dad asked, but all the while he had no room in his heart for love, only bitterness and anger that exploded when his wayward brother came home. The older brother had little love because he hadn't been forgiven. He missed the access point of the father's love that was ready for him at any point, because he was too busy building his own righteousness. The older brother was no closer to the father's love than the prodigal when he was out living rebelliously. I to serve death for my love for myself, which only grew the fruit of selfishness, arrogance, pride, and bitterness in my life, but Christ looked at my putrid sin and saw how impossible it was for me to pay my own sin deb of guilt. And Jesus said, I want her. I will take her place in debt, and I'll give her my victory instead. because Christ took my death, the cross has power over all of me, all of my sin, all of my ugliness, all of my shame. I can drop it all at the foot of the cross, and I can run free in the vast immeasurable love of God. I am free to love much because I have been forgiven all because of Jesus, the cross has power over my guilt. In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders, these are their stories. Who knows that opening? That's long in order, one of my wife's favorite shows. She would watch it all the time back when it was on it's still on in reruns, but at the end of that you had the dun and then you settle in to watch this hour long show about someone who committed a crime normally. The police capture them. They then go to trial in the second half and the district attorney his job is to convince the jury and the judge that the person is guilty. and then you wait after the commercial break back when they used to have those. We would wait for the judge to show up and he would render the verdict, right? He would have his gavel out. You know, the person had committed the crime, we know what we felt deep down. We wanted that verdict to be. We wanted the judge to bring the gavel down and say, guilty as charged. Sometimes, though, the person was guilty and they got off. And we feel the sense of like, that's not right. That's not fair. That's not the way justice should be. And there were other times in the show where someone was not guilty and they were convicted, or they got let free, and we thought has justice has been served. But this tension of a person on trial and wondering if they're guilty or not, and then seeing a judge's decision come down, makes us think about that process of guilt. In Rebecca's video, one of our children's directors, she was telling you about how she felt growing up that I'm not really guilty. That in fact, I was pretty good. I did more good things than bad. I had done enough to be on the innocent side of the judge's verdict in life. And then she realized that, in fact, she hadn't been, that her own self-righteousness, her own desires to please God, which really weren't about him, but about herself, ended up showing that she was convicted. Imagine yourself today sitting as the defendant at a trial, and you're waiting for the verdict to come down. You're waiting for the judge's gavel to land, to determine if you're guilty or not guilty. Imagine that you in that spot as we unpack today, how the cross has power over our guilty verdict and our guilty feelings. If you take nothing away from today's message, take that away. The cross has power over our guilty verdict and our guilty feelings. Over the next five weeks, we're doing a sermon series heading into Easter, dealing with how the cross has power over various aspects of our life. Today it's over our guilt. Next week, it's gonna be over sin itself that keeps us entrapped. Then we're gonna talk about despair and broenness and then finally death on Easter itself. But today we want to look at what does the Bible say about the verdict of guilt that hangs over us? To understand that, we want to start at the beginning of scripture, by the way, just to know when we think of sin, when we think of our guiltiness, we think, what was it that we were intended for? When when God created this world, if you've read through the Bible, Genesis one and two, he creates the world, and he creates humanity, and he says, I want you to be in charge of this thing, this beautiful creation that I've made. I want you to have dominion over it. And Adam and Eve then rebel against God and turn against God and plunge this beautiful creation into corruption into death, to destruction. We're a part of that. God doesn't abandon his creation, though he doesn't say, well, you have betrayed your calling. You have rebelled against me, so we're done. He in fact, tells a serpent Satan who had come into the garden to tempt Adam and Eve that a son of Eve would crush his head. He then calls a man some 4,000 years ago named Abraham, and he says, Abraham, I'll make you into a great nation, and from that nation, we will bless all the other nations. Some 500 years after Abraham lived, a man named Moses came along. Abraham had grown to a nation of hundreds of thousands of people who were enslaved in Egypt, and God brings them out of Egypt out of their bondage into their own land. and with Moses, he says, here's the promise I'm making with you, Moses. If you and the people will follow me, I'll bless them. If they don't follow me, though, I'll cut them off. I'll curse them. And we begin to follow the Jewish people thinking they're gonna be the ones that bring salvation to the world, and yet we find that they're as entrapped and ensnared and sinned, they're as guilty as everyone else in the story of the Bible and we go, how is God ever going to overcome humanity's sinfulness, humanity's guilt in order to keep his word, to be faithful to what he had promised, Satan back in the garden, Abraham some 4,000 years ago. And we find that accomplished in Christ, this Jewish man some two thousand years ago, who lived and who died on a cross and his is dying on the cross, bore the weight of the world sin. The guilt of the world sin he took upon himself, the guilt of his nation, Israel, so that God can be faithful to his promises to Moses and the nation and to Abraham, all the way back to the garden, all the way back to the command to be fruitful and multiply and take care of my creation. Today, though, we want to look at this issue of our guilt, where we stand. If you have your Bibles, turn to Romans chapter 3 as you're turning there, give you a little background, Paul, who is a apostle of Jesus, he's a messenger of Jesus. Jesus has sent him out to explain his death and resurrection to people. He's writing a letter to the church in Rome, and he's convincing them. He's like a prosecuting attorney, and he's charging a case against them to say that everybody is guilty of rebelling against God. And he's building up this case, and in Romans chapter 3, starting in verse nine, he's going to show us that we are in fact guilty as charged. He says, what then are we Jews any better off? No, not at all, for we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks are under sin, as it is written. That under sin's important, by the way, because Paul's about to give a list of things that we do. But he's saying it's not just that we do things that are wrong. It's that we are trapped under this power throughout the book of Romans, he explains this, that we are trapped under this power called sin, that we need to be set free from. He says, we've charged that everyone's under sin. And then he goes on to show why he says that he takes this Old Testament quote and he says, none is righteous, no, not one. Now he's this word no one. As I'm reading, put your name in the place of all the no ones and hymns no one understands no one seeks for God. Rustin doesn't understand. Ruston doesn't seek for God. All have turned aside together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grade. They use their tongues to deceive the venom of asps as under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood in their paths are ruin and misery in the way of peace they have not known. there is no fear of God before their eyes. Paul says everybody is guilty. Every one of us, no one in this room, Paul says, can stand and say, well, I haven't done those things. I haven't been that way. That's not who I am. As Rebecca was singing in a video, I said, I thought it was good enough. I thought I was living a life that was pleasing enough to God, and Paul is telling us we're all guilty of these things, that we are trapped under sin. Now we may think, well, I'm not that bad. I mean, you read that list and go, that's, oh, those people are horrible. I'm not that bad. Having done all of those horrible things haven't murdered someone. I've told some all lies. I haven't told massive lies, but it's interesting because what scripture teaches us is that it's not just the things I do that God cares about, but the motivations I have that then lead to those actions, what's going on in my heart, Mark 7, 20 to 23, Jesus said this, what comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts and sexual immorality theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness, all these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. We may think we're pretty good. Rebecca in the video thought she was pretty good. Most of us probably think we're pretty good, and we tend to think that way, at least I do when things are going pretty well for me. But if we get squeezed enough, right, things start going wrong, pressure starts mounting. People start doing things against us, and we get squeezed. We may find that other things come out about 12, 13 years ago. And I was a believer at this when I got saved around 1, so I'm a believer, and this this happens. 12 13 years ago, we had had some friends who gave us their used massage chair. It's one of those small kind of floor ones that they I joy massage. I was so excited. It was like, I'm gonna sit down and have my back get rubbed by this chair. So I bring it in the house and I walk in the front door and I'm holding it. It's a little heavy. I'm not the strongest guy in the world, but I' you know, I'm here holding this thing and I asked my wife, hey, where do where do you want me to put this? And she goes, well, you know where I want it to go. And I said, well, I don't. And then this turned into like this crazy fight we had. I'm holding this chair. And she says, well, you know where I want. I said, I don't know where you want this chair. And she says, well, I already told you. I said, well, I don't know where it goes. And I dropped this chair and I was so mad. And I left the the house and just went walking up the street. such a petty thing. We asked our girls a few weeks ago, like, what fights do you remember from mom and dad and joined me and said, the massage chair. I remember that one. It's just so weird. It's like nothing. Who cares? It's a massage, and just put it somewhere. But there was something to me, and I thought, if you would have asked me that day before this happened, hey, how's your anger control is? You'm pretty good. You gotta do a lot to get me angry. Like, not tell me where to put a chair. You just get squeezed a little bit. And then we realize I don't think we're as good as we think we are, that we tend to behave well because everything's going well, right? And then a little pressure gets upied and we realize I'm not as good as I think, especially in my heart. because Jesus had said, you've heard it said, don't murder. And we all go, yes, I haven't done that. But Jesus said, but I'm telling you, if you're angry in your heart at someone, you've already done it. And Jesus ups kind of the standard so high that we all go, well, I can't match that. If you're going to wrestle with my heart, if you're going to get into my thoughts, then I'm definitely guilty, right? We don't like the idea of thought crimes. If you've read the book 1984 by George Orwell with Big Brother, and they will charge you for thought crimes in that book that they can say, well, we think you're thinking bad things, so now we're going to convict you of a thought crime. And we go, we don't like that idea in our culture in our world, because we don't think humans can actually determine our thoughts and what we're thinking and what my motivation is. But Jesus is now saying we can be guilty of thought crimes. But we see that God is the judge of those thought crimes. Look what Paul says in verse 19. Now, we know that 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, for by works of the law, no human being will be justified in its sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. He says that the whole world may be held accountable to God. God's interesting, right? In this regard, because we read in Job 42 to one of many places, that God is all powerful. Job says this. I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. He has all power, which, if you're here for the first time and you don't know the whole Bible story, you may think, I don't like that, because you may remember a quote from a guy named Lord Acton, who said power tends to corrupt an absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority. that we know I think humanity, the more power someone gets, the more likely bad things are going to happen. And if you put all power in one human, you can expect bad things to happen. And yet God is saying he's all powerful. Luckily, God's not human with our fallenness and our brokenness. Hebac, a prophet in the Old Testament in chapter 1 verse 13 says this, you who are of pure eyes than to see evil and cannot look it wrong. Why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicker swallows up the man more righteous than he, you who are so pure that you can't even look upon evil? God is all powerful and all holy. He's the judge that is judging whether we're guilty or not, not just with outward actions, but inward thoughts, the things that we can't even determine in our own heart that we believe, because we haven't been squeezed hard enough to see what comes out. But what happens when you squeeze humans with our brokenness hard enough and long enough, what comes out tends to be rebellion in anger in bitterness, and guilt. Paul says in this place that no one is going to be justified in God's sight or declared right by keeping the law. If you think you can be good enough like Rebecca was saying, that I'm just going to be good enough and I'll be okay. Paul says no one is going to be justified in that way. We love trying to justify ourselves, right? We do something wrong and we make all these excuses. The Bible's aware of that Proverbs 212 says this, every way of a man is right in his own eyes. but the Lord weighs the heart. Jesus said in Luke 16, 15, and he said to them, you are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your heart. Paul's telling us that the verdict against us, as we're waiting for the judge's gavel to come down, what he says is unequivocally, without any shadowder of a doubt, there is more than enough evidence to convict every one of us that we are guilty as charged. And if that was the end of the story, there would be no hope. There would be no Easter service in five weeks. There would be nothing except judgment and punishment off we go to prison. But that's not where Paul ends. Look where he moves in verses 21 to 26. He tells us that we can be not guilty, having been charged as guilty says this. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there is no distinction for all of sin and fall short of the glory of God, and 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 to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in its divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that it might be just in the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. What is Paul saying here? He says under the law, under this Mosaic law that God has set up with his people, he said, no one's going to be justified. No one's going to be justified on the basis of morality. Just if I'm good enough, we're not good enough is what Paul says. says. But now the righteousness of God has been revealed has been shown apart from the law. What does he mean by that? Go back to Abraham. God had promised Abraham, I'm going to bless the world through you. And you promised Moses, if my people follow this law, I will bless them if they don't, I'll curse them. And we found that by following the law, no one was righteous, no one was living up to it. The Jewish people who were meant to bring a blessing to the world were trapped in the sin of the world, just like everyone else. So how can God's righteousness, his faithfulness to his promises to to to Abraham to the serpent ways that I'm going to crush your head. A son of Eve is going to crush your head. How can he keep his promises? How can he be faithful? How can he be righteous? And he says, now our righteousness has been revealed apart from the law. So it's not by the way the law was working, but it's revealed in it. When you read the Old Testament, it tells us the story of Jesus. It's pointing to him and says, it's a righteousness that comes through faith in Christ that Jesus is the one who is faithful. If you look back at Romans 3, three, Paul asked his question, if they were faithless, talking about the Jewish people, does that nullify God's faithfulness? If they're not going to follow him and bring a blessing to the world as God just go, well, I can't keep my word now, no, because all along he had intended to send his son, a Jewish man, God the son becomes human as a Jewish man to fulfill all the things that God promised to deal with the sin that enveloped us, not just our actions, but this power that was over us. He says, now this righteousness comes through faith in Christ, who has put forward as a redemption. The idea of redemption is this idea of buying something back, that it took a cost to buy back broken, fallen, sinful humanity, because God's righteous and holy. He's not the type of judge who's going to simply wink at our sin. and we don't want him to be that judge. We want him to for us, right? Like for me, if I'm in the court and I did something wrong, if the judge is a little crooked and he lets me off the hook, I may go, well, that's that's okay for me. You all would be upset, right? You watch law and order and if you have a crooked judge who lets a guilty person go, you're like, I don't like that. Something feels wrong. If you're the guilty person, you may go, you know, it's probably wrong, but it's okay. I got off the hook. Everything's good. That we have in God, though, a god who's not crooked like that, but who's righteous, which means he can't just go, you know, you messed up. You've done all these horrible things. You're utterly unworthy. You fall in short of my glory, but no big deal. It doesn't matter. Who cares? Come on in. We don't want a god like that. Even if you think you do, you don't. You want a god who in injustice happens, he does something about it. How do I know that? Sometime this week, next week, you'll probably watch the news and there's going to be some horrible thing that's happened. And something in you is going to say, that needs to be made right. That person who did it needs to be punished. They need to be convicted and put away. That atrocity needs to be fixed. And something in you wells up an anger, a righteous anger that says, when things that are wrong happen, it bothers you, it troubles you, and you want to see it made right. Our God is the same way. He says, I will make it right, but he makes it right by sending his own son as a redemption through his death. Romans 9, 15 says it this way. Therefore, he is the mediator of a new covenant so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. The transgressions that we've committed that were guilty for call for death, and Jesus dies on a cross to take our death upon himself, and when we trust in him, we get that. we get his death for us. He redeems us from the law. He has become, as Paul says, a propitiation. It's a fancy word. I I imagine no one used the word propitiation this week unless for some reason you were reading this passage or a few others. It doesn't show up an everyday conversation. What does propitiation mean? It's a fancy word that means an offering that turns aside the wrath of God. It's a propitiation in its blood. Jesus becomes an offering that turns aside the wrath of God at sin, and God is wrathful. He's angry at sin, and rightly so, sin is anything that brings destruction, harm, death into his good creation. He should be angry at that. We should be angry at that. And God doesn't just wink at it. He said there's a price to be paid for it. So he pays the price himself and his son, this propitiation. the underlying Greek word points to in the Old Testament, the mercy seat, and the ark of the Covenant, if you ever saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, that's the ark of the covenant. It's that in the holy of holies in the temple, and it was the place where once a year the high priest would go in sprinkle blood on the ark of the covent on the mercy seat. That word mercy seat in Greek isilisterion, and that's what Paul says here, that Jesus is the mercy seat, the place where God accepts the sacrifice for his people and gives mercy. And Jesus is that sacrifice, because God is a righteous judge, because it could have seemed like right that God was unrighteous. If he just looked through history in the Old Testament, even before Jesus, you go, there was a lot of bad things happening. There's a lot of sin happening. Why does God allow this to go on and on? It's what Hbekek was asking, God, you can't even look on evil, yet I'm seeing a lot of evil in the world. Maybe you're just an unjust judge. Maybe you don't care. Maybe you're crooked, God, impulsing, no, he's not at all. In fact, he's been patient in his forbearance he overlooked the former sins. He had passed over them, not to just ignore them, but knowing that he was going to take care of them and their judgment on the cross. And then he says today it shows that his righteous at the present time so that he might be just. God keeps his justice. He doesn't just wink at sin and say don't worry about it. It doesn't matter. It doesn't deeply matters. It matters to death and God takes that death for us and the justifier of the one who has faith in him that God justifies us by faith in Christ, not our own works, but because of what he did that the verdict of guilty was true, but then in Christ, when you put your faith in Christ, when you trust Christ, there's another verdict that comes down from the judge and the gavel comes down and he says not guilty you are free to go, but the free to go isn't just free to go do whatever you want. Flip over the Romans eight one real quick, that we are set free to go serve Christ. Paul says this in Romans 81 after talking about how we are set free in Christ and how the spirit empowers us, God himself empowering us. He says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. in Christ we are set free from our guilty verdict. We are set free to go serve in freedom. But I imagine if you're like me, there are times where you can say, okay, I'm objectively free. I heard the gavel come down. The judge said you're free to go, you leave, but you're going, okay, I did do those things. Christ has taken care of my guilt, but I still feel guilty. Paul, who wrote the led to the Romans that we were reading, wrote this in Philippians three. He says, not that I have already obtained this, that this this that he has obtained is kind of perfectly being with Jesus, kind of the final state we're going to be in, or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do forgetting what lies behind is straining forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Now if you don't know Paul's story very well, you may think, ah, he's Paul's awesome. He's he wrote a large part of the New Testament. Paul, when he says, I forget what lies behind, he probably still hears on occasion, the gavel come down that says guilty. And what he's guilty of was not just thinking in his heart, which Jesus said is the same thing. I sure would like to kill you, but doing it. He had killed Christians. He said I tried to make them blaspheme, which would be to curse Jesus. When Paul looked back, he had every reason to have these feelings of guilt. shackle him and chain him to go, I know you've forgiven me, God, but I can't do anything about it. My guilty feelings are so powerful. He says, but I don't look back. I'm always straining forward to grab hold of Christ to be closer to him because he's taken hold of Paul. He says, I'm not going to let my past that I've been forgiven for. He doesn't deny it, by the way. He doesn't say, I never really did those bad things. He says I'm the chief of sinners. He fully admits it, but I have been forgiven in Christ. I have been declared not guilty in Christ, so now I can go and serve him. He has been set free to serve. The cross has power over our guilty verdict and our guilty feelings. So as we go from this place today, this coming weeks over the next five weeks as we talk about the power of the cross, what can we take from this sermon? Two things I've already said them first, the cross sets you free from your objective guilt. If you're here today and you're a follower of Christ, your sins have been forgiven, not because you're amazing, not because you're wonderful or I'm wonderful, but because Jesus is amazing and Jesus is wonderful. And when the gavel came down of guilty, he took our sin upon himself, not because he had sinned, he did not, but because we did. And when we put our trust in him, our objective guilt that we are guilty before God goes away. If you're here and you've never put your trust in Christ, you're guilty. You know that. I imagine no one sitting here would go, I've never done anything wrong in my actions or my thoughts or even deep down in the things that you don't even know are there, but if you got squeezed enough, if you got pushed enough, if you got beaten enough, what would come out? I imagine for us even as followers of Christ, what would come out at times would be things who' go, that's not from God. When Jesus was squeezed, when he was beaten, when he was crucified, what came out of his mouth was father forgive them. They don't know what they're doing that we're guilty, and the cross can set you free from that guilt. The cross can also set you free from your guilty feelings to serve Jesus. If you're a believer here, and you feel trapped by your feelings, you feel trapped by your path before you met Jesus and the things you had done, he sets you free from those. Maybe you feel trapped from the things you've done after being a believer. That's why the Bible tells us to confess our sins one to another, and from doing that we can find freedom, say, how can I move forward, not doing those things anymore, putting those behind me and straining forward to Christ. Don't let your guilty feelings control your life. Now, the spirit will convict us when we're doing things that are wrong, he'll convict us and say, quit doing that because we're bringing pain and suffering and death and darkness into the world as followers of the light. And he says, don't do that. He wants us more and more year over year to reflect who Christ is and to the world more and more to bring more love into the world, more light into the world, and less darkness into the world. And he will convict us of that, but don't let that conviction so shackle you that you go, I can't serve God. I can't worship God. I'm not going to show up with his people. I'm not going to gather with his people. Paul says, forgetting what lies behind, I strain ahead to grab hold of Christ who has already grabbed a hold of Paul. If you're his follower, he's already grabbed a hold of you and he's calling you to say, just come, keep chasing after me. Keep your eye on Christ. Keep your eye on his cross and on his resurrection. The cross has power over your guilty verdict and your guilty feelings. Will you join me in prayer. Father, we thank you for today for your grace and mercy. Father, we pray that you will strengthen us to be faithful to you, bother if there's someone here that doesn't know you that today they would put their trust in your son and have their guilt taken care of. And father, if there's someone who knows you, but is struggling with guilt, is struggling with feelings of guilt that you would deal with those, you would help them to keep their eyes on you, empowered by your spirit to faithfully follow you to serve you, how that your name would be made much of in this world, that you would be glorified, and that your cross would be seen as the beautiful thing that it is the place where our sins were forgiven, where our guilt was erased, and your name was magnified. It's in the name of Jesus we pray. Amen