"not Good Enough?"

“Not Good Enough?”

Romans 5:1-11

This morning we are continuing our Sermon Series on Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

This letter to the early Church in Rome contains some of the Church’s most important theological writings.

At the same time, they can be challenging to understand and preach, so I will try and make them as accessible as possible.

It is essential to grasp Romans because much of our understanding of salvation by grace through faith alone is contained here.

(pause)

After I had my born again experience in college, I got in with a group of Christians who were very focused on “works righteousness.”

In other words, to stay in God’s good graces you had to do everything correctly.

It was, in a way, like going backward after I had been set free because there is no way human beings can do everything correctly or perfectly.

No matter how sincerely we try, we always fall short of fulfilling the requirements of the law, as in the law of the Ten Commandments and other laws found in the Bible.

There are always things we have done that we should not have done and things we should have done that we haven’t done.

Really, the very effort to be perfect leaves us isolated, focused on self, and often torn with feelings of guilt.

I’ve shared this story with you before, but it fits what Paul is trying to tell us.

One day I was walking across my college campus and feeling especially frustrated and down about myself.

I felt that I had missed the mark and wasn’t good enough to be saved.

I had tried and tried and tried to please God on my own terms, and it wasn’t working out.

In other words, I had forgotten about grace.

And as I was walking and feeling bad about myself--feeling as if God couldn’t possibly love me--I happened into a record store…

…for those who are under a certain age, there used to be stores that sold music on vinyl records, c-ds, and tapes.

They were called record stores.

I was walking through this record store, and the song on the speakers was Billy Joel’s “I Love You Just The Way You Are.”

And at that moment, it felt as if God were speaking to me through that song.

And God was saying, “Ken, get over yourself.

Stop being so hard on yourself.

I love you just the way you are.

I know you aren’t perfect.

I know everything about you.

I know your every weakness.

I know what you battle against.

And I love you just the way you are.

Now, I don’t want you to stay where you are, you have a long way to go on this journey, but I want you to know that I love you just the way you are.”

That brought me peace.

We cannot save ourselves.

We cannot bring ourselves into a right relationship with God.

There is nothing we can do on our own to secure our salvation.

If there were, why would Jesus Christ have needed to come and die for our sins?

“You see,” Paul writes, “at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.”

“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Love can go no further than that.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Through Jesus Christ, God reveals the extent of God’s love for us.

It’s a love that suffered death on the

cross for us, even though we do not deserve this love.

And through believing this, trusting in this love, which is a gift from God—we come to understand that we don’t have to be perfect for God to love us.

We do not need to justify ourselves, which of course, is impossible for us to do.

God loves us, and that is all the justification we need.

Can we believe this, even though we know ourselves and what we are capable of?

Can we believe this despite all the bad and hurtful things we have done?

Can we believe that God loves us that much?

It’s a life-changing experience when we come to believe this, when we do accept the love and grace of God, when we do accept that this love and grace is for us just as much as it is for anyone else.

Paul tells believers that “while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son.”

I remember when faith in God was more of a distant thing than a personal thing.

I remember when it was more something that other people were excited about and really, really into.