Experiencing God's Grace

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we were looking two weeks ago at the first four verses of Romans
chapter 10.
We saw at that time among other things that Christ is said to be the end of the law.
That is to say, he not only came to fulfill the law and all of his demands, he came to
remove the law.
My faith in Christ, we no longer relate to God on the basis of what we deserve, which
is always judgment and condemnation, but we relate on the basis of grace.
When by faith we've come to Christ, our sins are forgiven, God opens the windows of heaven,
gives us the power of His Holy Spirit and His Holy Spirit, living within our hearts,
now begins to renew our lives, that is the uniqueness of the gospel of grace.
The question still remains, however, so often, how do I experience God's grace?
Here's a man, a woman who was outside of Christ, they're laboring under condemnation,
under judgment, they need God's saving mercy, how do they experience the divine encounter
that opens up their hearts and that changes their lives and that makes the members of the
family of God, or hears the believer, struggling perhaps with the multitude of problems financial,
emotional, marital, relational, how do we lay hold of that touch from God, that shatters
the strongholds in our lives, that gives us victory and that replaces our sadness with
joy and our brokenness with healing.
Well, that's what Paul now begins to talk about in these next a number of verses that we've
read together in Romans chapter 10, the verses 5 through 13.
He begins to talk about how we experience God's grace within our lives, and as we look
this morning for some time at these verses, there are some three or four things that I want
to note in these verses, key ingredients to experiencing that touch from God, that gives
life to the dead, that gives hope to the hopeless, strength to the weary, and wisdom to
the foolish. Number one, first thing I'd like for us to note, is that experiencing God's
grace is not a difficult thing. Verse 6, "But the righteousness based on faith says, 'Do
not say in your heart who will ascend into heaven,' that is to bring Christ down, or
who will descend into the abyss that is to bring Christ up from the dead, but what does
it say the word is near you on your lips and in your heart?" That is the word of faith,
which we preach. The word he says is near you on your lips and in your heart the word
of faith, which we preach. Now when you first read these verses there, at least I find
somewhat confusing. What really is he talking about? Well, the confusion lessens somewhat
when you understand that these verses are by and large a quotation from the Old Testament
book of Deuteronomy chapter 30, the verses 11, 12, 13, and 14, let me take just a moment
and read those. This is Moses speaking. "For this commandment which I command you this
day is not too hard for you. Neither is it far off. It is not in heaven that you should
say who will go up for us to heaven and bring it to us that we may hear it and do it. Neither
is it beyond the sea that you should say who will go over the sea for us and bring it
to us that you may hear it that we may hear it and do it, but the word is very near you.
It is in your mouth and in your heart so that you can do it." You'll notice that phrase
is quoted almost word for word by Paul. The word is very near you. It is in your mouth
and in your heart so that you can do it. Now, if you read these verses in Deuteronomy
chapter 30 in their overall context, you discover that what Moses is talking about is that
it's not difficult for the children of Israel to keep the commandments of God. He says
the commandments of God are not way out there that you can't understand them and you can
find them and you don't know what it is that he wants. No, he says God's commandments
are near you. God has written them down for you. You ought to have no difficulty living
according to the commandments of God. An actual fact, of course, Israel didn't find
it to be that easy. Not because there was anything wrong with the commandments or because
they were too high and mighty, but because of the sinfulness of their own hearts. And
so when Paul quotes this passage here in Romans chapter 10, he puts it in the context
of being in Christ because we are in Christ, laying hold of God's grace and living the
way that God would have us live, is not that difficult because it is based on faith.
It's not like we have to climb up to heaven to get it. It's not like we have to go into
the bottoms of hell to bring it up. Christ has done it all. And by calling on the name
of Jesus, we are entitled to experiencing his salvation. The word is near you. It is
on your lips and it's in your heart. Now, why is that important? The reason it's important
is that there is always, I believe in the Christian life, the tendency to reduce the
things of God to a formula. Do it right and God will meet you. Read your Bible more.
Pray harder. Go to church more. Go through the proper motions and the correct Christian
disciplines. Push the right buttons. God will meet you and you will encounter and experience
the presence of God. We all have that tendency. Every religious tradition has that tendency.
The things that the fathers did many years ago to encounter God in the next generation
often become a technique to try to bring God down and then what it doesn't work. We
stand in amazement and we say, what's the matter? God doesn't want to hear me. That
home is understanding. It's important to read your Bible. It's a means of grace. It's
important to pray. It's important to gather together with all of God's people, but you
can do all of that and still not encounter God. Because you don't encounter God by what
you do, but by embracing Jesus. And that's why sometimes it's the most unlikely people
that meet Jesus because all you need to do to meet Jesus is to get down on your knees
with a broken heart. Crying out saying, Lord God, I need Jesus. It is not difficult
to experience grace. If we will but humble ourselves, seek His face because God is longing
to bless His people. Key number one to experiencing God's grace. It's not difficult. It is with
inner grasp because it is the word of faith. Number two, if we are to experience God's grace,
we need to understand by faith who we are in Christ. Notice He goes on now in verses nine
and ten. If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart
that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For man believes with his heart
and so is justified and he confesses with his lips and so is saved. Man believes with
his heart and so is justified. He confesses with his lips and so is saved. Two things
there that I think we need to note. Number one is the issue of faith. If we are to encounter
God in our lives and to experience His saving power, then we need to have what the Bible
calls saving faith. The Bible says in the book of Hebrews chapter 11 without faith, it
is impossible to please Him. Whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists
and that He rewards those that seek Him. Faith the Bible says is the assurance of things
hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Faith, our Catechism tells us is a deep rooted
assurance created in me by the Holy Spirit through the gospel that out of sheer grace
earned for us by Christ, not only others, but I too have had my sins forgiven and have
been forever made right with God and have been granted salvation. Faith is that conviction
that the Holy Spirit produces within our hearts. That because of Christ, I am righteous.
That because of Christ, I am a child of God and that because of Christ, I have the right
with courage and with boldness to draw near to God's throne of grace and He will give
me all that I need to be his child. Somebody says, "How do I get that kind of faith?"
Well interestingly enough on this passage it is connected with believing that Jesus has
been raised from the deadless and against the verse 9. If you confess with your lips that
Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, interesting
language, believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead. We would say believe
in your heart that Jesus died for you and that's of course very important. But throughout
the New Testament it not only talks about Jesus dying for us and having faith in his death
on the cross, but it talks about his resurrection from the dead and the importance of believing
in his resurrection. Why is that? What is it about the resurrection of Christ that is so
critical for the believer today? Well it's of course the fact that the resurrection
of Christ is the ultimate vindication of all that He is and all that He has come to do.
When I understand that Christ has been raised from the dead, I understand that He was truly
the Son of God, that He was truly righteous and that He is the one who was able to raise
me from the dead. And to make the confession that Jesus Christ has been raised from the
dead is to embrace Him with all of my heart and to know that He is the one who is capable
and able and ordained by God to present me before Him without spot or wrinkle or blemish
or any such thing. And so there needs to be in your heart and in my heart this kind of
understanding that because of Christ the same power that raised Him from the dead, God
will give to me in Christ I am righteous and Paul on this passage says that faith needs
to be within my heart, not just in my head. Historically we have often spoken about an intellectual
faith versus a saving faith. It's important to understand the gospel and it's important
to believe all the right things about God and about Jesus, but you can do all of that
and not have saving faith. And when God begins to work His salvation into your life and
into my life, one of the places where He begins is He produces within our heart this conviction
that there's nobody else who can save me. There's nobody else who can help me. Most often
I will have tried every other avenue to solve the problems of my life and God just keeps
the pressure on in my life until deep within my heart by His Spirit He generates a conviction
that my help comes from the Lord who made the heavens and the earth. We need to have
a saving faith within our hearts. We need to understand that Jesus Christ has been raised
from the dead and that therefore He is the one who can come into the chaos of my life.
He can speak the word of truth, He can break the shackles and the chains of my existence
and He can set me free. If you confess or if you believe in your heart that God raised
him from the dead and if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord, here's the other
side. It's important to believe within our hearts. It's important to have that God-given
conviction. But Paul says it's not enough to believe it within your heart. He says you
must also confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord. There's gotta be a heartfelt verbal
confession. Why is that? Well all through the scriptures there is an emphasis on speaking
the word of faith. Jesus says in Matthew chapter 10 to his disciples, "If you confess
me before man, I will confess you before the Father who was in heaven. But if you deny
me before man, I will deny you before my Father who was in heaven." And one of the reasons
for that I believe is that our verbal witness to biblical truth bears a manifold witness
to the universe that we are putting our faith to work and we are declaring publicly our
allegiance to Jesus Christ. I believe every time somebody confesses that Jesus is Lord,
there is a threefold witness that takes place. Number one, we bear witness to the spiritual
powers that we no longer belong to them, but we belong to Jesus. We don't often think
in those terms. But the Bible says that all around us, there are both the angels of God
and the demons of hell. And the Bible tells us that the spiritual powers are often mystified
by the process of salvation. And when you and I make a declaration that our help comes
from the Lord God who made the heavens and the earth and the Jesus Christ as our Lord
all hell takes notice. Because we've staked our claim. We've marked out our territory.
All said we're going to follow Jesus. I believe that's one reason why so often when somebody
stands up here makes public profession of faith, they get so tested immediately before or
afterwards. I believe that's also the reason you and I went when we make the bold statements
of faith we so often get tested on the statements that we've made. You've noticed that in
your own life, have you not? When you make the declaration, boy, nothing is going wrong
for a long time. What happens the next day? Bottom falls out. I remember having that
here just a Saturday before the 40th anniversary. I was up in the balcony looking over some
of the equipment saying to myself, boy, this stuff has been working good for a long time.
If you're here in the 40th anniversary, you'll know the sound system died that morning.
And you know, we kick ourselves, don't we? We say, well, I shouldn't say those kinds
of things, but we don't want to be superstitious, so we don't want to knock on wood, and we don't
want to cross our fingers either. But what happens is that when you make a declaration, the
spiritual hosts bear witness that you're making that declaration, they want to challenge
that declaration. That doesn't mean you got to let them get away with it. That just means
we need to understand who we are in Christ and we need to be bold and we need to declare
we are the people of God and we're going to follow God because Jesus Christ is Lord.
When we confess Jesus, we bear witness to a spiritual world. We also bear witness to
our neighbors. We mark out clearly the path that we are committed to following. That's
why sometimes we're so ashamed to stand up for Jesus with our neighbors because we know
that if they know what we profess to believe, they're going to hold us accountable. I'll
tell you a little secret, that's why I don't put Christian bumper stickers in the back
of my car because if I ever run a yellow light and I try not to do that, I don't want the
neighbor or the fellow behind me to say there goes another one of those Christians. I'll
repent but you know what I'm trying to say. When we confess Jesus is Lord, then we're committing
ourselves to a way of life that other people will hold us accountable by and sometimes
that's scary because truth, you know, in our heart of hearts we kind of want to be able
to have a little bit of this and we want to have a little bit of that. That's why it's
so important to stand up for Jesus because it forces you to walk the way of faith. So
we bear witness to the heavenly host, we bear witness to the world, but you know what,
there is another aspect to this, we also bear witness to our own hearts. There's something
very curious about this. When you speak the word of faith, when you verbalize what it is
that you believe there is something that happens in your own heart, your own convictions
grow stronger and you catch yourself believing things in your heart that formerly you believed
only in your head. Have you ever had it where you're in a situation and you're talking
to somebody about issues of faith, maybe teaching a class, maybe trying to explain to one
of your neighbors why it is that you believe what you believe. You may not even feel very
much like it and you may not even feel very spiritual. But in the process of verbalizing
and giving a defense for the hope that is within you, all of a sudden things begin to
click in your own heart and things that you only understood intellectually before, now
they come home with a power that says, wow, this is really true and it changes your own
life. That's why it's so important to speak the faith. God has made us not only to take
things in but to give things out because it's in the giving out, in the losing your life
and biblical language that you gain your life and God gives you strength. We need to know
who we are in Christ. We need to believe that with our hearts and we need to confess that
with our mouths. That's what Paul is talking about when he talks about the word of faith
is near you. It is within your own heart. There are whole churches that are built on this
principle of word of faith. I know just around the corner from where my in-laws live in
St. Catherine's. There is a brand new church building that has just gone out, tremendously
big building, a word of faith church community. And word of faith church communities can sometimes
be too radical and too extreme but they are trying to lay hold of an important biblical
truth. You and I need to proclaim who it is that we are in Jesus Christ. We need to confess
that he is Lord because what that means is that he's not only the boss but he's the Lord
over all of the universe. He has defeated all the hordes of hell and by faith in him I
am one of God's children. And so by faith in him I am righteous. By faith in him God is
my father. By faith in him God has promised me blessings and good things and all the grace
that I need to lay hold of his life and walk with him because you see so often you and
I and all of our lives we buy into the lie. We grow up in families where people call us
dumb or we go through life's experiences where everything goes wrong and deep within
our soul there the settles the lie that I'm just not much of anybody I'm not worthy to
be loved and I can do anything right. And we don't often verbalize that in those kind
of words in our minds but deep within our hearts there is that kind of defensiveness that
says well I don't know if God really loves me. I don't know if God's really interested
in my existence I call on him and I cry out to him and he doesn't seem to hear me anyway.
The antidote to that is the word of faith. The antidote to that is the confession that
Jesus is Lord. God's my father. God loves me. God has me in the palm of his hands. God
is going to make all things work together for my good. God has ordained me before the
foundation of the world to be one of his children. We need to confess it in our hearts. We
need to verbalize it with our mouths. So number one this morning obtaining the grace
of God is not hard. Number two I need to understand who I am in Christ. I need to understand
it within my heart but I need to confess it with my mouth. And the number three I need
to learn to call on the name of the Lord. Verse 11 12 and 13. The scripture says no one
who believes in him will be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and
Greek. The same Lord is Lord of all and he bestows his riches upon all who call on him.
For everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Notice in these passages
the emphasis on calling on the name of the Lord. Everyone who calls upon the name of the
Lord will be saved. We sometimes think in our tradition that you got to know everything
right and you got to believe everything right in order to experience God's power and God's
love. And it's good to believe it right and it's good to understand it right. But you
know salvation and the experience of God's grace is never simply a function of understanding
it all right or doing it all right. It flows out of a heart that is desperate for God
that knows there is help to be found in no other place and that calls on the name of the
Lord. To call on the name of the Lord means that you recognize what your need is. It means
that you know that you haven't got it yourself. It means that you know there isn't anybody
else in all of the universe that is going to provide the needs of your art in the way
they need to be provided and you cry out in desperation to God and you say oh God
have mercy. You plead the blood of Jesus, you stand on the truth of God's word and you'll
hold on God until God rends the heavens, comes to work into your life, shows you grace
and transforms your life for the praise of his glory. The Psalmist said many years ago
in Psalm 34 this poor man cried and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.
Many of you have heard me tell the story of the three preachers that were discussing the
best way to pray and one of them said the best way to pray is to get down I get down on my
knees and I fold my hands and I find that when I do that God really hears me. The other
one says well no when I pray he says I lie flat on the floor because I think that's the
symbol of my humility before God and I find that's when God really hears me. The other
preacher said well he said I believe that the best posture for prayers to stand up and
to raise your hands to the heaven and to lift up your eyes. Telephone repair man happened
over here and he said with all due respect to your respectable clergyman he says I discovered
the best praying that I ever did was the time when I hung upside down from the telephone
poll because you see it's not a matter of position or situation it's a matter of knowing
your need for God. Let me ask you this morning have you ever been in the situation where
you felt walled in on every side where you've run out of your own resources you've tried
desperately to make it all happen and everything you ever tried turned to dust before your
very eyes. Some of you perhaps are in that situation right now financially emotionally
economically maybe in your relationship you've looked at it from every side and you said
I don't see any answer I don't see any solution I don't understand how I'm ever going to
get out of this situation. The Bible says call on the name of the Lord I find often times
in counseling situations people want answers they want to try to figure out how everything
is supposed to fit together and then when we can't we get so terribly frustrated. Sometimes
it's not answers we need. Sometimes we just need to cry out to God and we need to say
God please show me the way everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
It doesn't only refer to unbelievers I believe. But also believe we refer to believers
because salvation in the Bible isn't just going to heaven one day when we die salvation
is experiencing God's presence and God's power in the nitty gritty needs of our everyday
life and our everyday existence. The world needs to know that there is a God in Jerusalem
to whom we can cry out and who will hear the cry of our hearts there some of us here
we struggle some of us emotionally some of us spiritually we don't know top from bottom
our whole life and worldview is being challenged by the working of God's Holy Spirit we don't
know which way to go. The Bible says cry out to God call on him while he is near because
in Christ he has promised to hear us but somebody says I've tried that you don't know how
much I've prayed and every time I pray that the heavens are like brass God hasn't done
anything about it and I just sort of give it out and that's why we need to understand
the fourth and final principle in this passage this morning God is not a respecter of
persons no one who believes in him will be put to shame there is no distinction between
Jew and Greek the same Lord is Lord of all and he bestows his riches upon all who call
upon him there is no distinction God says between Jew and Greek the Jews you will recall
were the good people the ones who lived according to the law try to do everything right the Greeks
they were the bad dudes no understanding of God no interest in his law Paul says there
is no distinction between Jew and Greek the same Lord is Lord of all and he bestows his
riches upon all who call upon him see sometimes when you're crying out to God and you're asking
for the salvation of your kids or you're asking for release from the impossibilities of financial
pressures or your whole heart and mind and turmoil you don't know who you are where you're
going and right from wrong and all the kind of stuff that flows out of it and you're calling
them God and the heavens seem like brass and nothing has happened for a week a month or
half a year or longer and it's pretty easy to throw in the towel pretty easy to say well
guess God doesn't like me guess I'm not good enough no sense in trying to pursue that avenue
because well there must be something wrong with me the antidote to that is to understand that
God is not a respecter of persons if it takes time for the prayers to be answered there
may be many many reasons for that but the answer is not that God is not interested in meeting
our needs oftentimes we're not desperate enough yet oftentimes there are historical
situations that need to be changed but the Bible says ask and we will receive seek
it we will find knock and it will be open for everyone who asks receives everyone who seeks
finds everyone who knocks it will be open to him everyone who calls on the name of the
Lord will be saved so knock don't take no for an answer look chapter 11 is that story
of the man who comes to his friend at midnight saying I've got unexpected company give me
bread Jesus says who of who among you will not get up and give him bread if not because
he is your friend because of his opportunity he keeps on knocking he keeps on pressing
seek and we will find knock it will be open you who are evil Jesus says in the same
passage you give good things to your children how much more will your father who is in heaven
give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him let me encourage you this morning whatever
the need whatever the situation the answer is not far off the answer is in Christ who
lives within your heart ask the Lord to give you understanding of who it is that you
are in Christ confess it declare it I'm a child of God I'm a child of the king God loves
me all things work for my good and take the pressures and the difficulties of life turn
them over to him and call on the name of the Lord with everything that is within you and
say Lord I need you I need your help and keep on pounding on the gates of heaven in the
assurance it in the faith that God doesn't wish that any should perish but that all should
retreat repentance God will bestow his riches upon all who call on him in faith.