Spurgeon told a story about an artist in the years before photography who wanted to paint a picture of part of the city where he lived. For historic purposes, the artist wanted to include certain characters who were well known in the town.
There was one well-known street sweeper who was always dressed in rags and very filthy and he was known to everyone and the artist really wanted him in the picture. So, he found him and said that he would pay him whatever he wanted if he would come down to the studio and sit for part of this painting.
The street sweeper came to the studio the next day, but the artist sent him away, you see, he had washed his face, combed his hair, and put on a suit of clean clothes. The artist needed him to appear as he always did as a poor beggar. He wasn’t invited for his good looks.
Spurgeon said, “God invites sinners to come for salvation, just as you are. Come with all of your sin. Come to Jesus, who was crucified for sinners! If God justifies the ungodly and you’re ungodly, then there’s hope for you!” Or as Jesus said in Luke 5:32, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”
This is the same hope that’s talked about in Romans 5:6-11.
6 For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him.
10 For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. 11 And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.
I Paul begins in this passage by speaking about our weakness.
None of us like to be called weak because it conveys the idea that somehow, we’re less than we should be. Other synonyms for weak are frail, fragile, delicate and sickly; but in this passage and others like it, the word weakness relates to our spiritual condition. When any of us came to Jesus for salvation it was because we knew we were incapable of doing anything to save ourselves. If someone were to give a testimony about how good they were when they were saved, they’re really confessing they’re still lost.
Other scriptural versions use the phrase, "without strength" and this carries the idea of our being "powerless" and speaks of those who are "utterly helpless and have no means of escape." It conveys the idea of a lost sinner standing before God with absolutely no ability to do anything about his condition; because none of us with the ability, nor even the will to respond to God.
Our inherited sin nature has made us spiritually sick and left to ourselves we’d be lost for eternity. In other words, we were all born up a creek without a paddle and the worst part is, none of us even knew how bad our situation was. That’s why when we’re talking to an unbeliever and mention sin, they’ll say, “Oh, I know I’m not perfect but I’m not really all that bad if you compare me to others.” But listen, verse 6 tells us our sin has left us completely morally depleted. We were without strength to help ourselves.
The problem today is that sin has disappeared because we’ve legalized everything.
It’s so easy to get used to sin. It’s like when your first child swallows a coin, you rush the child to the hospital and demand that they do x-rays. But when the second child swallows one you watch carefully to make sure the coin passes but when the third child swallows one, you simply deduct it from their allowance.
We live in a time when everything that was considered sinful by the previous generation is now considered a right. A person’s immorality is their right, drugs are not only legal in many places but they’re becoming a substantial boost for our tax system and a source of employment for hundreds of people. It’s not only your right to either have an abortion or commit suicide but in some hospitals doctors who refuse to help you can be barred from working there.
When I was saved back in the seventies almost every pastor would rail against the evils of alcohol and they would warn how it could destroy your testimony, your family and your health; but today, I’ve heard so many pastors say, “I don’t drink but this is something you have to decide for yourself.”
Listen, I don’t drink and if you do, you’re either destroying your testimony or you didn’t have one to begin with. Listen, the unsaved are not going to take you seriously when you’re living for the world.
As Spurgeon said: “An unchanged life is the mark of an unchanged heart, and an unchanged heart is a sign of an unregenerate life.”
But here’s the good news in 1 Corinthians 1:27 Paul said that God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise.
I can think of a few this world would write off because of their disabilities but God has used them mightily. For instance:
J.B. Philips wrote the Philips translation of the New Testament as well as several other great books; and yet, Philips was someone who suffered with extreme depression his entire life. His widow wrote, “While he was ministering to others, he was himself powerfully afflicted by dark thoughts and mental pains. He knew anxiety and depression from which there was only temporary release. And while he never lost his faith in God, he never ceased to struggle against mental pain.”
And then there was Fanny Crosby who was blinded at the age of five by a wrong prescription given by a doctor. But, in her 90 years of darkness she wrote 8,000 hymns and her suffering brought more glory to God than she or anyone else could have ever imagined!
And then there’s Joni Erickson who was crippled in a diving accident as a teen ager and yet, God has used her to encourage both the able bodied and the disabled throughout the world.
God has used people with emotional problems, people with physical problems and people who have been the victims of accidents and those who have been the victims of other people’s sinfulness. But listen, God saw our situation long before we were born and by His grace, He has a plan and purpose for all of us.
We tend to think of the great people of this world as the wealthy, the accomplished and those who are praised by others but God says those who are first are often considered last.
I think one of the best examples we have of this is John the Baptist. He’s introduced for us in Luke 3 verses 1 and 2.
“Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, 2 while Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.”
Luke begins by describing the movers and shakers of his world. They were the rich and powerful and each and every one of them very oppressive rulers. These men occupied thrones and lived in castles and then he also mentions the religious leaders of Israel and they proved themselves to be just as cruel and selfish as the others. All these were wealthy men who exercised power over thousands and had more money than anyone could ever count, but Luke says, “the Word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.”
And listen, both their world as well as ours would consider John to be a nobody. Not only was he penniless but he didn’t seem to care how much he or anyone else had or even how they dressed. As a matter of fact, John didn’t seem to care what he had for supper and we know this because the scripture says he simply ate wild honey and locusts.
On top of that, he wasn’t even interested in his popularity and we know this because he didn’t preach where the crowds were spent all of his time in the northern end of the region, where the Jordan flowed into the Dead Sea. This was a full day’s journey from Jerusalem and it seemed to be a rather odd location to announce the arrival of the Messiah. If you wanted to hear his message you had to go to him.
The area he preached in wasn’t what we might imagine with green grass and a large body of water for his baptisms but this was a very desolate area which would be similar to the desert. The term wilderness describes somewhere that was abandoned, desolate, and unpopulated.
The Gospel writers go out of their way to describe John’s unusual clothing because it was the same thing the prophet Elijah wore. His coarse clothing of camel’s hair symbolized his mission to preach repentance because it was also similar to sackcloth in the Old Testament which was something someone would wear when they were in mourning or as a public demonstration of their repentance and for others to follow their example.
John’s lifestyle may have been a rebuke to the extravagance of his time. Jesus referred to the “soft raiment” which was worn “in kings’ houses.” John’s clothing like his food was a radical statement against the worldly materialism that permeated every level of society.
So, compared to the political greats John would be considered a social loser but when Jesus looked at him, He saw the best this world had to offer. He was considered foolish in the eyes of the world but his life and message shamed those who thought they were so wise.
And then there was Lazarus who sat at the rich man’s gate and hoped to be fed from his leftovers.
John MacArthur captures the extreme contrast between the rich man and Lazarus. “In life, one was enormously wealthy, the other an impoverished beggar. The rich man was inside the house, the poor man outside. The poor man had no food, the rich man had all the food he could eat. The poor man had needs, but the rich man had none. The poor man desired everything, but the rich man desired nothing. The poor man suffered, while the rich man was satisfied. The poor man was tormented, while the rich man was happy. The poor man was humiliated, while the rich man was honored. The poor man sought crumbs, while the rich man feasted. The poor man needed help, but the rich man gave him none. The poor man was a nobody, the rich man was well-known.
And in death, the poor man was probably treated like garbage and his body would have been taken to the dump while the rich man went out the way he lived with an expensive casket, rooms full of flowers and hundreds of his friends paying their respects and praising his success.
Freddy Fritz wrote, “After death, however, the situations of the two were completely reversed. The rich man became poorer than the poor man had ever been, while the poor man became richer than the rich man could have ever imagined. The poor man was on the inside of heaven, while the rich man was on the outside in hell. The poor man was enjoying the great heavenly banquet, while the rich man was begging for a drop of water. The poor man needed nothing, while the rich man lacked everything. The poor man had all his desires fulfilled, while the rich man’s desires would go eternally unfulfilled. The poor man was satisfied, while the rich man suffered. The poor man was happy, while the rich man was tormented. The poor man was honored, while the rich man was humiliated. The rich man desperately sought help, while the poor man was unable to provide it. The poor man had a name, while the rich man did not. The poor man had dignity, while the rich man had none. All of the poor man’s hopes were realized beyond what he could have imagined, while the rich man’s hopes vanished forever.”
So, Paul speaks about our weakness and their weakness has become their strength.
When I pastored on the east coast, every year my wife and I would receive an invitation to attend a very formal banquet that was held at the local university. We would go because not only did they serve great food but they brought in well known speakers and we got the chance to rub shoulders with both local and regional celebrities.
We only knew a few people who worked at the university and the seating was all arranged and when you arrived one of the hostesses would direct you to your table. One year we were seated with one of the professors and his wife and she was very pleasant and had come from a Baptist background but her husband who was a professor made it very obvious that he was not pleased at all. Not only was he hoping to rub shoulders with the elite of the university world but he found himself stuck at a table with a Baptist minister and worse than that; he also felt obligated to answer all my stupid questions. (Of which I had many.)
You see, he came to meet someone important while I was just there for the free food and fellowship. I didn’t know it but I was the poor man sitting at the rich man’s table.
And then verse 6 says, “For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” So, we were not only weak but we were also born ungodly.
II We all were born ungodly.
The word ungodly means "without reverence for or fear of God." It literally means to "live your life as if God did not exist." And this describes the world in which we live. There are many who have a shallow faith and say they believe, but they also have the idea that they can live anyway they want and repent at the eleventh hour. The problem as one man put it is, “Many who intend to repent at the eleventh hour die at ten-thirty.”
The eleventh hour describes the last possible moment. We never recommend waiting but it does happen. There’s the thief on the cross and many more who have received the Lord in the final moments of their lives. I remember preaching a funeral for a man I had visited in the hospital and led to the Lord just a few days before he died.
I was invited by his family to perform the funeral and in my sermon, I mentioned how “he had received the Lord Jesus as his Savior and if he was sincere, he is in heaven today” and when I said that, there was a loud sound of people inhaling and it made me think, “What kind of life did this man live?”
I remember a pastor from a little town not far from us telling me how he had led a man to Christ who had spent his life running down the church he pastored and everyone who had belonged to it. And when he got saved, he was too sick to leave the hospital so he asked to be baptised in a large tub the hospital used for burn victims and then he wrote a letter to the Baptist church asking the believers for forgiveness for his sinful ways. That was real conversion.
So, there are many who are saved at the last minute but I wouldn’t recommend anyone waiting because none of us know when our last minute would be. Besides, we’ll miss out on all the rewards of serving the Lord both here and when we arrive in heaven.
When the Bible calls us “ungodly” this means we were content to remain as we were and had no desire to change. We were not only helpless, but we were also vile and obnoxious in the sight of God. All this adds to the question, “Why did God save us in the first place?”
I have met a few non-Christians who told me they couldn’t wait to stand before God and tell Him a thing or two about the home they were born into or the world they lived in. They gave me the impression that judgement day was a time to call God to account.
The word “ungodly” explains their attitude because it indicates that we were both irreverent and impious, and have deliberately withheld from God what is rightfully His. Ungodliness is the condition of our being polluted with sin.
The good news in Romans 5:6 and 8 says, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.”
We accept this as fact, but in reality, we wrestle with this idea. We’ve all seen those who’ve spent their lives feeding the poor and helping the homeless and yet, the scripture says when they arrive at the judgement God will say, “Why should I let you in they’ll say, “Look at all I’ve done.” As though their good works could save them from judgement.
On the other hand, many of those who have spent their lives receiving from the hands of those who helped, might have been saved and they’ll be welcomed into heaven not because of what they’ve done but because of who they believed in. As I’ve said before, it’s not what we’ve done for God but what He has done for us.
As we read the New Testament, we tend to see the religious leadership of Israel as the bad guys but we need to remember that the average person thought they were the good guys while those who lived outside their circle were the evil crowd.
So, if you see yourself as a basically good person, you can’t be saved. If you see yourself as being better than the lower end of society and more deserving of salvation, you can’t be saved. To be saved, you must see ourself as being sinful, ungodly and deserving of God’s righteous judgment.
Listen, our faith is expressed in the words of the Christmas carol "O Holy Night." One of the lines goes, "Long lay the world in sin and error pining." The word "pining" is an old English way of saying, "wasting away." So, the song tells us that we and the rest of this world were wasting away in sin when Christ came to pay for and remove it.
The apostle Paul described three basic kinds of sin in his epistles. The first kind is personal sin and the first sin was committed in the garden of Eden where Eve intentionally took the fruit of the forbidden tree and then she shared it with her husband who obviously had watched her take it. They both sinned and by introducing sin to the world they polluted not only their own nature but their act of sin has affected the entirety of the human race.
Most of us hear this and say, “Well, that’s not fair, why am I being punished for something they did?” But the fact is, each and every one of us in the same situation would have done what they did.
Paul says in Romans 3:22-23, “For there is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” All, means everyone without exception. Our sin may be the things we do that are wrong or simply when we fail to do what's right. Sin can be an action or simply an attitude. It's because of sin that none of us were born in fellowship with God; but when we confess our sin and put our trust in Jesus’ death to save us, our fellowship with God is restored the way it should have been before Adam’s sin and it's as though we never sinned in the first place.
The second kind of sin described in Scripture is simply referred to as our sin nature and this has been part of who we were since the moment we were conceived. Ps. 51:5 says, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.” In other words, we inherited it.
The third way sin is described is imputed sin. Romans 5:12 says, “As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so, death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” Adam's sin and consequently his sinful nature was “imputed” or applied to the account of everyone of us. That’s the bad news but God not only charges us with Adam’s sin but He also offers to apply Christ’s righteousness to all who believe. Paul says in Romans 5:21-22, “But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, 21 so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The biblical remedy for imputed sin is the imputed righteousness of Christ.
So, Paul describes us as weak, and then he says we were ungodly as well and because of who and what we were, we were also content to go our own way.
III We were content to go our own way.
I remember speaking to a man who had grown up in one of the churches I pastored but he turned his back on the things of the Lord. He left town and became very successful and yet, there was still a desire to attend church. So, he found a very liberal church that ignored the scriptures and put more faith in good works than in God.
He was bragging about his church one day and he said, “You know our pastor plays on our softball team and when he strikes out he curses and swears just like the rest of us; and not only that but he stays after the game and shares a beer with the rest of us. He summed him up by saying, “He’s just one of the guys.” And what he was really saying was, he’s just as unsaved as the rest of us.
I read from a biography of poet Heinrich Heine: “My nature is the most peaceful in the world. All I ask is a simple cottage, a decent bed, good food, some flowers in front of my window, and a few trees beside my door. Then, if God wanted to make me completely happy, he would let me enjoy the spectacle of six or seven of my enemies dangling from those trees. I would forgive them all the wrongs they have done me from the bottom of my heart, for we must forgive our enemies. But not until they are hanged.”
We can be like that can’t we? When someone does something wrong, we want to see them punished, we want to see them to pay for the damage they’ve done to us. We want to see them experience our pain. One writer said, “There are two kinds of church members. Those that are serving and those that think they are deserving.”
As much as we try to make ourselves appear better than we are, apart from Christ we are helpless, hopeless and horrible; undeserving and uninterested and as ungodly sinners we are repulsive in the sight of a Holy God. And yet, in spite of our terrible condition, God loves losers just like you and I.
Listen, if God loved you only when you were lovable, then when you stopped being lovable, God would have to stop loving you! God loves the unlovely so much that He sent His Son to die for us and we can count on His love because His love doesn’t depend on what we say or do.
Jerry Bridges said, “Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace but your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.”
Conclusion
One of the oddest stories about dying is the story of Aeschylus. He was a veteran of some great battles and he had helped the Greeks fend off the Persians. He had been the leader of the Greek navy and after his service, he became a great orator. One day while he was giving a speech an eagle dropped a turtle on his bald head and killed him instantly.
Listen, you can die from a car accident on the way home but you can just as easily have something fall on your head and kill you. The fact is, we’re all going to die sometime and the question is, what happens then? What will happen when the books that contain our life’s history are opened and we find ourselves standing in the presence of God Himself.
When D. L. Moody made his first trip to Britain, he heard some words that set him hungering and thirsting for a deeper Christian experience. As he sat listening to the evangelist Henry Varley, he was challenged with this statement:
The world has yet to see what God will do with, and for, and through, and in, and by, the man who is fully consecrated to Him.” Moody thought to himself, “He said ‘a man,” not a great man, nor a learned man, nor a smart man, but simply ‘a man.’ I am a man…I will try my utmost to be that man.”
