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Abounding Grace

Romans 5:12-21

• God’s heart is ravished toward you! He offers abounding grace to you!

• He has given His most precious thing, His Son, because He is ravished in His love for you.

• And so, when you accepted His love you were justified because of our justification in Christ, because Christ has imparted into us His abounding grace.

• Paul is saying that when Adam sinned, he sinned for the whole human race:

• Just as Adam became a sinful creature, spiritually dead and separated from God, so did his children.

• We are Adam’s children.

• As C.S. Lewis calls the humans in The Chronicles of Narnia, we are “sons of Adam” and “daughters of Eve.”

• Adam and Eve could not pass on the deep fellowship they had had with God because they lost it.

• As John Milton aptly called it, “paradise lost.”

• Adam’s sin has spread to all of us.

• Before knowing Christ, we were in rebellion, powerless, and an enemy of God; some of us directly, others of us indirectly, and He loved us!

• All of us have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory!

• This is not comfortable to talk about, but until we understand just how lost we are, we cannot understand the wonder of God’s grace and salvation.

• Physical death came as a result of spiritual death. Even before the Law was given, sin was present in all men beginning with Adam.

• Ex. The Jehovah Witnesses have a doctrine that Adam only sinned for himself. This view takes away the truth that Paul is bringing out in this passage.

• The doctrine that sin was passed upon all of us is vitally important.

• I have heard people say that “man is a sinner because he has sinned.” Such a concept implies that man could possibly live and die without sinning, and not need Christ.

• This is very Buddhistic, Animistic, and Universalistic.

• The biblical revelation tells us that “we sin because we are sinners,” and thus, we must have Christ to be set free!

• If one man makes us guilty, how much more can one Man make us righteous?
• Christ died for the ungodly, sinners like you and me.
• Between Romans 5:15-21 the words “gift” and “grace” are used 6 times each.
• It is a free gift; we don’t have to earn it, pay for it, sacrifice for it, only truly receive it.
• But, it is not “cheap grace” because it cost God His Son.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it “costly grace.”
• This so difficult for people to grasp: He didn’t die for good people but for bad people. We were all bad compared to God.
• You certainly aren’t good enough to be a follower of Christ, but you are certainly bad enough! Jesus died for ungodly sinners!
• If Christ was willing to die for us as ungodly sinners, who are in rebellion to Him, how much more will He save us from the wrath to come?
• Ex. I was in Pueblo last week speaking to women in prison.  Over 150 women came out, which was the largest Christian gathering at this prison (almost half of the prison population). These women came forward weeping and longing for Jesus. They know they are sinners and they know Christ’s free gift.

• Death reigned through Adam, but life reigns from Christ.

• When Adam committed one sin, the sentence of condemnation was passed to all of us.

• God doesn’t take half measures toward sin like we do.

• God’s full displeasure and condemnation came down because of one sin.

• Ex. People have scales for sin. When someone goes to prison there are sentences or scales of punishment based upon the sin: two years for stealing a car, ten years for manslaughter, life for murder.

• Yet, for one act of disobedience, the whole human race has received the death penalty. God believes in the death penalty and all of us have been under that sentence.

• If you have not repented of your sin and believed in Christ and the cross at Calvary, you are still under a death sentence.

• God hates all sin because all sin is from disobedience!

• The dual nature of God was at war with itself. His love calls for mercy; His justice calls for condemnation.

• God did not have to send His Son. If He had not sent His Son, He would have been fully justified in letting us simply live and die in our sins.

• But, because of His extravagant, ravishing love, He came in spite of the “many offenses.”

• Ex. In spite of Dachau, BelsenHausen, and Aushwitz, in spite of the slaughter of 50 million babies through abortion, God still sent His Son and reaches out to us with His free gift.

• If Adam’s sin resulted in physical and spiritual death, how much more, through Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit have we have received “abundance of grace”?

• JB Phillips in his paraphrase of this text says, “For if one man’s offense meant that men should be slaves to death all their lives, it is a far greater thing that through another man, Jesus Christ, men by their acceptance of his more sufficient grace and righteousness should live all their lives like kings.”

• God is a great transformer of lives; He takes slaves and turns them into kings.

• Two men each performed an act that resulted in something.

• Both acts were based on lordship. Who was Lord of that life?

• Adam chose disobedience to God and it resulted in lordship to sin.

• Jesus chose obedience to His Father’s will, and the lordship of grace was the result.

• There are two choices of lordship: Death or Life? Which will it be in your life?

1. If we choose sin, disobedience, and rebellion to God, we are choosing death; we are choosing slavery.

2. If we choose obedience and love, we are choosing freedom and life.

• Your free will died in Adam. Before knowing Christ, you had no free will; it was in complete bondage to sin and death.

• Only when you get saved is your will set free by the grace of God.

• Donald Grey Barnhouse explains it this way:  “The freedom provided by Christ is so great and wonderful because He reverses the positions of master and slave. We were the slaves of the dread master death; now we are the masters of life, and death is the slave of the Lord of life.”

• We have studied several aspects of justification in the past month:

• On the one hand, we are justified from all sin (Romans 3).

• On the other hand, we are justified and, by faith, have received the impartation of God’s righteousness (Romans 4).

• Now we read that our justification results in justification of life.

• Because the righteousness of Christ has been credited to your account, you can enter into life.

• You can fully experience the life of Christ.

• We have real life now in Christ. We can worship the Creator of the universe with freedom and joy.

• As John Piper explains, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.”

• Ex. There are texts in the Bible that arouse great feelings similar to a traveler who has stepped upon the ground of some great and historic place.

• I have stood in the low ceiling prison where Paul died in Rome.

• I have stood in the great coliseum in Rome where the Christians were fed to the lions.

• I have stood in the Catacombs in Rome where the early church fled persecution.

• I have stood at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem where Christ rose on the 3^rd day.

• Romans 5:20 is the basis for John Bunyon’s classic work Pilgrims Progress, but he wrote another book, Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners.

• The great dams of the world: Hoover, Bonneville or Shasta, may hold back waters, but nothing can hold back God’s grace toward the sinner.

• The hound of heaven is on our trail, hunting us down.

• The prodigal son was drawn back to his father by grace.

• Adam hadn’t gone far before the Lord killed an animal and clothed him.

• Immediately after Adam’s sin, God promised a Messiah would come from the seed of a woman.

• Abraham was an idolater and God called him to be the father of our faith.

• Moses was a murderer and God called him by His grace.

• David committed adultery and murdered a man and he is remembered this way.

• This is 1000 years after David! Did Paul really understand God’s heart? David didn’t do all of God’s will, did he? Look at the sin in his life? Yet in God’s editing process, through His grace, He looks at the heart! A passionate heart is what God looks at.

• God looks at a passionate sincerity. God looks at the heart.

• Even after David’s sin and all the problems he had, God still says this about David! He didn’t do all of God’s will? Did God look at all of David’s life? The problem we have is that we don’t see things the way God does.

• God has an editing ability that we don’t have, because we don’t understand God’s heart and vision.

• In God’s editing He says David did all of the will of God.

• What? Abraham never wavered? Do you know what Abraham did?  He gave his wife to a king! He went into Hagar! In my house, that’s wavering.

• Ex. Amazing Grace is the most sung, most recorded, and most loved hymn in the world.

• No other song, secular or spiritual, even comes close. It is estimated that Amazing Grace is sung over 10 million times a year!

• But very few people know much about the author. The author of this great hymn was John Newton.

• John Newton, the notorious slave ship owner turned preacher, once said, “I am a great sinner and He is a great savior.”

• Newton wrote Amazing Grace because that is how he felt about his salvation. Never fully able to get out of his mind the thousands of slaves he captured, killed, and sold, he truly understood God’s amazing grace toward him.

• If you are in need of God’s amazing grace, I invite you to give your issues to Christ today.