Coming To Terms (Romans 3:21-31) Series

Good morning! Please turn to Romans 3. We are going to pick up where we left off last week. Last week we talked about the Grand Finale of Paul’s argument that no one is righteous before God. And I realize that it’s a hard thing for people to accept, that there’s nothing we can do to earn our salvation.

Speaking of things that are hard to accept…

There’s a phrase that has been used in the Jackson household for several years now. It is uttered at the point at which our beloved Kentucky Wildcats get knocked out of March Madness. And that phrase is,

“It’s baseball season.”

Usually, we don’t utter that phrase quite this early. Most years, we can expect the Cats to make it at least to the second week of the tournament. Every once in a while, Kentucky will have a team that is projected to go deep in the tournament. Maybe the elite eight. Maybe the Final Four. Every so often, Kentucky will field a team that the Big Blue Nation thinks has what it takes to win it all.

This was going to be one of those years. But, guess what?

It’s baseball season.

And I know that many of you are baseball fans. Donna Parker is my fellow Braves fan. And Donna, this wasn’t an easy week to be a Braves fan either, was it? We lost our best player to our biggest rival.

Now, here’s the reason I am talking so much about baseball. In baseball, what is considered to be a good batting average? 300? 350? What if you had a player that was batting 400? Where would you put him in the lineup?

Here’s the strange thing: We think a player batting 400 would be awesome! But what does that number represent? It represents someone who gets a hit 40% of the time he comes to the plate.

Anyone know who had the best career batting average in the history major league baseball? It’s Ty Cobb. Anyone want to guess what his career batting average was?

.367. So a little more than every third time Ty Cobb came to the plate, he got a hit.

One out of three! There’s really no other sport where being successful one third of the time would be thought of as good. If a quarterback completed just a third of his passes, he wouldn’t be in the game very long.

What about life?

Let me ask you this: Would you trust an airline that landed one out of every three planes safely?

What would you say to a surgeon who, when he came to you in pre-op, said, “I’m feeling pretty good about this surgery. I’m one for three this week?”

There are areas in life where we require something much closer to perfection. Even 99% would be too low. What would you say to a spouse who promised to be faithful 99% of the time?

So maybe this makes it a little easier to come to terms with God’s standards of perfection. We would love God to judge us the way we would judge a hitter in baseball: I did the right thing one out of three times! I’m going to the hall of fame!

But God’s standard is much more like the standard we have for airline pilots, and surgeons, and police officers. We expect them to do the right thing 100% of the time, And when they don’t—if they mess up even once, we get righteously angry. Ready to sue someone.

We have to come to terms with the fact that we look at righteousness like baseball. We step up to the plate, and we try to do the right thing, and we most of the time we mess up, but we just keep trying to improve our batting average.

God views righteousness more like surgery. In medicine, there’s no margin for error. One mistake could be enough for a doctor to lose his license. In the same way, One sin is enough for God to reject us and not allow us into His heaven. And the truth is, no human being has ever done the right thing, every day, every single time, for their entire life time.

And that’s why “the turn” that we started talking about last week is so amazing. This week, as we look at Romans 3:21-26, we’re going to look at what some people have called the most important paragraph in the bible. This passage is dense, and it has lots of theological terms that can make your head spin. That’s why I’ve called this sermon “Coming to Terms.”

But if we can spend time on these terms and really understand them, we will understand why Paul calls the gospel the power of God for salvation.

So let’s dive in. And as we do, I want you to remember what we have said is the overall theme of Romans: The Righteousness of God. You see it four times in this paragraph: verse 21, 22, 25, and 26.