This Message was preached by John MacArthur, All Rights Reserved
(A copy of this message on cassette tape may be obtained by calling
1-800-55-GRACE)
(Eternal Security,
chapter 3 of 4)
Romans 5:5b-11 Tape GC 45-42
Introduction
We live in a day of unfaithfulness. Man cannot be trusted--he
doesn't keep his promises. That's true
of both individuals and nations.
Husbands are unfaithful to the vows they made to their wives. Wives are
unfaithful to their husbands. Children
are unfaithful to the principles taught by their parents. Parents are often unfaithful to meet the
needs of their children. Employees are
unfaithful to the promises they make to their employers. And employers are often unfaithful to
fulfill their obligations and responsibilities to those in their employ. We also have to acknowledge that Christians
frequently are unfaithful to God, although God is never unfaithful to
them. Not one of us can claim immunity
from the sin of unfaithfulness.
Only God is always faithful and keeps every promise in
full. That fact is vital because
everything we believe in stands on the faithfulness of God. Our eternal destiny is at stake. In contrast to the unfaithfulness around us,
it is refreshing to lift our eyes to our beloved God, who is always faithful.
1. Promise
Scripture is replete with verses that declare God's
faithfulness.
a) Deuteronomy 7:9--"Know, therefore, that the Lord thy
God, he is God, the faithful God."
b) Isaiah 11:5--"Faithfulness [is] the belt about
[God's] waist" (NASB). Faithfulness
encompasses God and holds all His other attributes in place.
c) Psalm 36:5--"Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens,
and thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds."
d) Lamentations 3:23--"Great is thy faithfulness."
e) Hebrews 10:23--"He is faithful that promised."
2. Preservation
God's faithfulness stands out especially in His
preserving His people for glory. He
secures our salvation.
a) 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24--"The very God of peace
sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be
preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also
will do it."
b) Philippians 1:6--"[Be] confident of this very thing,
that he who hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of
Jesus Christ."
The security of the believer is premised on the
faithfulness of God. All the scriptures
we have looked at, including Romans 5, describe God's implementation of His
faithfulness. In Romans 5:1-11
Paul describes six links in an unbreakable chain that unite us to the
Savior. So far we have examined three
of them.
I. PEACE WITH GOD (v. 1; see pp. xx-xx)
"Being justified by faith, we have peace with God
through our Lord Jesus Christ."
II. STANDING IN GRACE (v. 2a;
see pp. xx-xx)
"By whom also we have access by faith into this
grace in which we stand."
III. HOPE OF GLORY (vv. 2b-5a;
see pp. xx-xx)
"[We] rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but we glory in
tribulations also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience,
experience; and experience, hope; and hope maketh not ashamed."
IV. POSSESSION OF LOVE (vv. 5b-8)
A. The Heart of Love (v. 5b)
"The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the
Holy Spirit who is given unto us."
God has begun a love relationship with us that stretches
throughout eternity.
1. The internal reality
a) Awareness
When you became a Christian, God deposited the Holy
Spirit within you. In Ephesians 1:14
the apostle Paul calls Him the down payment--the guarantee of our
salvation. We are guaranteed ultimate
glory and ultimate salvation in heaven.
The Holy Spirit then produces in us an awareness of God's love.
b) Assurance
The eighteenth-century hymn writer William Cowper
wrote in "There Is a Fountain":
E'er since by faith I saw
the stream
Thy flowing wounds supply,
Redeeming love has been my
theme
And shall be till I die.
The most overwhelming concept in all Christianity is that
God loves us. The personal, internal
ministry of God through the Holy Spirit takes the issue of security beyond
cognition to the deep recesses of the heart.
By pouring out His love on us, God is assuring our hearts in a
subjective manner that we belong to Him.
(1) The presence of the Spirit
Romans 8:14 says, "Foe as many as are led by the
Spirit of God, they are the sons of God."
If you've ever been led to do anything for the glory of God--such
as righteous behavior, faithful study of God's Word, prayer, or worship of the
Lord Jesus Christ--the Holy Spirit has led you. If you have sensed the Holy Spirit's
leading, you know you are a child of God.
If you have ever felt led to cry out to God, "Abba, Father"
(Rom. 8:15), you have sensed intimacy with God.
(2) The absence of the Spirit
The unregenerate individual senses no affinity, no
intimacy, no communion with God. For
those of us who know Jesus Christ, God has put His Spirit in us to draw us into
an intimate love relationship with Himself.
Romans 5:5 says, "The love of God is shed abroad in
our hearts." That doesn't refer to
our love for God, but to God's love for us.
Romans 5:8 says, "God commendeth His love toward us in that, while
we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."
God's love for us has been deposited in our hearts through the presence
of the Holy Spirit. That means the Holy
Spirit gives us the sense or feeling that God loves us.
c) Affection
We are emotional beings who respond to the Spirit of
God. That truth solidifies everything
we know intellectually about God. For
example, we can know intellectually that we have peace with God because a
divine transaction took place on the cross.
We can know intellectually that we stand in grace and have been redeemed
for future glory. But God goes beyond
the intellectual, wanting us to feel His truth in our hearts. So His love is shed abroad in our hearts
through the Holy Spirit.
Forfeiting Assurance
You can forfeit that subjective sense of assurance if you
disobey God. Galatians 5:22 says,
"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, [and] peace." Disobedience, unrighteousness, and
unconfessed sin grieves or quenches the Spirit of God and hinders Him from
bearing fruit through you. It is
important to recognize that although God has put His love in our hearts through
the Holy Spirit, we won't experience assurance unless we're walking in the
Spirit.
Christians who disobey God do not have a sense of security
in their salvation because they're leaning only on what is cognitive. They can say they have peace with God, stand
in grace, and have hope of glory, but they don't experience the internal,
subjective ministry of God's Spirit affirming that they belong to God. At that point they need to follow the
injunction of 2 Corinthians 13:5: "Examine yourselves to see whether you
are in the faith; test yourselves" (NIV).
I know I'm saved because of the transaction at the cross
that made peace and grace and hope a reality.
But I also know I belong to Jesus Christ because the Holy Spirit
reassures my spirit that I'm a child of God (Rom. 8:16).
2. The internal river
Romans 5:5 says that the love of God is "shed
abroad" in our hearts. The Greek
word translated "shed abroad" refers to something that is being
poured out profusely or lavishly. God
doesn't give us a little drop of love--He isn't stingy. John 7:38 says that when a man receives the
Holy Spirit, "out of his heart shall flow rivers of living
water." God never gives out
anything in drops; He gives it out in rivers!
3. The internal revealer
a) The agency of the Spirit
According to Romans 5:5 God's love for us is made
available through the Holy Spirit. He
is the agent through whom God works in the life of the believer. He is the gift
of God's love.
(1) The testimony of love
That the Holy Spirit lives within each believer is itself
a great testimony to the love of God.
Would God plant His Spirit--the third member of the Trinity--
within you if He didn't love that you?
(2) The guarantee of love
The Holy Spirit is the guarantee of our salvation,
proving once and for all that our final salvation will come to pass (2 Cor.
1:22).
(3) The seal of love
Ephesians 1:13 says we are sealed by the Spirit--sealed
with the stamp of God--never to be broken or opened by anyone else.
b) The assurance of the Spirit
(1) We are conquerors through Christ
In Romans 8:35, 37-39 Paul says, "What shall
separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness,
or peril, or sword?... Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors
through him that loved us. For I am
persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any
other creation, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in
Christ Jesus, our Lord." What can
separate us from the love of Christ?
Nothing!
(2) We are confirmed through the Spirit
The sense of that assurance is confirmed by the Holy
Spirit Himself, God's blessed gift to us.
Based on Romans 5:5, no one can truly know the love of God in his heart
unless he has the Holy Spirit living within him. Only those who have the Holy Spirit in them are Christians. So if a Christian experiences a time when he
loses the sense of God's love for him, he undoubtedly has quenched the ministry
of the Holy Spirit.
B. The Height of Love (vv. 6-8)
"When we were yet without strength, in due time
Christ died for the ungodly. For
scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man some
would even dare to die. But God
commendeth his love toward us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died
for us."
1. The pitiful people (v. 6a)
"When we were yet without strength."
Prior to our salvation, we were powerless, impotent, and
totally unable to do anything that pleased God. We were without strength to overcome sin, Satan, the world,
death, or hell. We couldn't live a
righteous life or save ourselves because we were paralyzed by our sin. Romans 8:7 says we were at "enmity
against God": We were the enemies of holy God.
2. The compassionate Christ (v. 6b)
"In due time Christ died for the ungodly."
When God looked at us before we were saved, all that He
saw in us filled Him with wrath and anger. Why? Because we were ungodly--the very opposite of
Himself. It is amazing to realize that
God, who is absolutely pure and holy, could still love beings who repulsed His
holy nature. And he loved them so much
that "in due time [at the time God prescribed] Christ died for the
ungodly."
a) Sovereign love
(1) Constancy
It would be easy to understand God's loving those who are
good, godly, and pure. But the mystery
of divine love is that He loves those who are anything but that. Charles Hodge said, "If he loved us
because we loved him, he would love us only so long as we love him, and on that
condition; and then our salvation would depend on the constancy of our
treacherous hearts. But as God loved us
as sinners, as Christ died for us as ungodly, our salvation depends, as the apostle
argues, not on our loveliness, but on the constancy of the love of God" (Commentary
on the Epistle to the Romans [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974], pp. 136-37).
God doesn't love you because you're worthy of His
love. Human love is like that--it
is attracted by the nature of the object.
But God's love is built into His nature, so if you happen to exist, you
get loved. There was nothing in us that
attracted Him.
(2) Consistency
Since nothing was in us to cause God to love us in the
first place, what could be in us to make Him stop loving us now? Nothing.
Since Christ died for us when we were ungodly, impotent, ugly sinners,
it isn't a problem for Him to love us now.
b) Substitutionary love
Romans 5:6 says that Christ died for the ungodly. The Greek word translated "for" (huper)
is better translated "on behalf of," "instead of," or
"for the sake of." Christ
became a curse on our behalf (Gal. 3:13).
At the proper moment in time, Christ put away sin through the sacrifice
of Himself. The marvel of it all is
that He lovingly died for such unlovely, godless people.
3. The supreme sacrifice (v. 7)
"Scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet
perhaps for a good man some would even dare to die."
The Greek words translated "righteous" and
"good" are synonyms. There
are times when someone might die for a good person. But the point of verse 7 is that no one would die for a bad
person--
no one, that is, except God.
4. The gracious God (v. 8)
"God commendeth his love toward us in that, while we
were yet sinners, Christ died for us."
Our infinitely holy God is "of purer eyes than to
behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity" (Hab. 1:13). The God who hates every sin--every
evil deed, thought, and word--is the same God who reaches out and
loves ungodly, impotent sinners. That is
the surpassing nature of divine love.
The Greek word translated "commendeth" means that God proved
the nature of His love by having Christ die for us while we were yet sinners. That is the security of our salvation.
Since God loved us when we were ungodly, wicked, impotent
sinners--since He loved us enough to let His Son die for us--
will He not love us enough to keep us after we have become His children? When we were saved, we were wretched
sinners. But we will never be that bad
again.
The love of God fills the heart of the believer. It's the kind of love that redeems an
impotent, godless sinner. Since His
love will do that, it will certainly hang onto a part-time sinning
saint! And His forgiving love is poured
into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. He
loved us when we were wretched, and He still loves us now that we know Him.
V. CERTAINTY OF DELIVERANCE (vv. 9-10)
A. The Permanence of Our Salvation (v.
9)
"Much more then, being now justified by his blood,
we shall be saved from wrath through him."
1. Its extent
In the past we were justified by Christ's blood, and in
the future we will be saved from wrath through Him. By definition salvation is past, present, and future. We will be saved from wrath because
biblically, there is no such thing as a part-time salvation. We were made right with God by the blood of
Jesus Christ, and will be saved from the wrath to come through Him as
well. The "wrath to come" is
the lake of fire that burns with fire and brimstone, which is where the godless
will be sent forever (Rev. 20:11-15).
2. Its essence
God is a God of wrath.
But the wrath due to be poured out on all mankind was intercepted by
Jesus. When we put our faith in Him,
God's wrath is set aside and we are no longer children of wrath (Eph.
2:3). We have been saved from
wrath. Paul reiterated that promise to
the Thessalonians: "[We] wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from
the dead, even Jesus, who delivered us from the wrath to come" (1 Thess.
1:10). No Christian will ever know the
wrath of God. The full fury of God's
wrath for your sin was poured out on Jesus Christ.
B. The Preservation of Our Salvation
(v. 10)
"If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God
by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his
life."
1. Friendship with God
Since God brought us to Himself when we were enemies, we
will be reconciled continually now that we are His friends. Sin can't prevent that from happening. When God first reconciled us, we were
wretched, rotten, vile, godless, impotent sinners. Since that was not a barrier to His reconciliation then, there is
nothing to keep Him from reconciling us now.
Since He redeemed us when we were His enemies, He certainly will keep us
now that we're His friends (John 15:15).
2. Fortification through Christ
Verse 10 says, "If, when we were enemies, we were
reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we
shall be saved by his life." Since
a dead Savior can redeem us, don't you think a living Savior can keep us? Through His death Jesus provided our
salvation. So just imagine what He can
do for us in His glorified resurrection life!
Since God has done the greater act--saving us when we were
wretched sinners--will He not do the lesser, which is to keep
us?
All Through Jesus Christ
All that God did for us was accomplished through Jesus
Christ. For example, verse 1 says,
"We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Verse 2 says, "By whom also we have
access." Verse 6 says, "In
due time Christ died for the ungodly."
Verse 8 says, "Christ died for us." Verse 9 says we are "justified by His blood" and
"saved from wrath through Him."
Verse 10 says we are "reconciled to God by the death of his
Son" and "shall be saved by his life." Verse 11 says, "We also joy in God through our Lord Jesus
Christ."
God never loved us because we were lovable; He saved us
while we were in the midst of our sin.
And He did it for His own glory--to show what a glorious,
gracious, merciful, and loving God He is (Eph. 1:5-6). What kind of God would He be if He turned
His back on us now? He would receive no
glory for that. But He reconciled us to
Himself through Christ (2 Cor. 5:20- 21).
Hebrews 7:25 says, "He is able also to save them to
the uttermost that come unto God by him."
When you come to God through Jesus Christ, He will save you to the
uttermost--to the fullest point of salvation. How can He do that? Verse 25 continues: "Seeing he ever
liveth to make intercession for them."
Christ can save us by His life because He is alive right now at the
right hand of the Father, interceding for us.
He takes our case before the Father and pleads it on our behalf. He tells God that He bore our sin and
received God's judgment and wrath. For
that reason we are to be forgiven. He continually
intercedes for us, and thus carries our salvation to its uttermost point, which
is our glorification (Rom. 8:30). When
Jesus said, "Because I live, ye shall live also" (John 14:19), He was
referring to His continual intercession on our behalf.
VI. JOY IN GOD (v. 11)
"We also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
by whom we have now received the reconciliation."
Another subjective reality of our belonging to God is a
heart filled with joy. Galatians 5:22
says, "The fruit of the Spirit is love [and] joy." Salvation is not merely a future hope, but a
present and abundant joy. Internal joy
is one of the great securities of salvation.
This is the third time Paul has referred to our rejoicing in God (cf.
Rom. 5:2-3). The Greek word
translated "joy" means "to exult," "to rejoice
jubilantly," or "to be thrilled." So our present sense of internal joy is an additional guarantee
of our future salvation.
The focus of the believer's joy is God Himself--not
your own righteousness, ability, or worthiness. That's why the psalmist said, "Oh, magnify the Lord with me,
and let us exalt his name together" (Ps. 34:3). In the midst of death or disaster, we don't lose our perspective
because we rejoice in a God who keeps His own.
The psalmist also said, "My soul shall be joyful in the Lord; it
shall rejoice in his salvation" (Ps. 35:9). Psalm 43:9 says, "Then will I go unto the altar of God, unto
God, my exceeding joy." We don't
boast or rejoice in ourselves--we joy in God.
The final link that anchors us to our blessed Savior, the
Lord Jesus Christ, is our joy in God.
It is through Christ that we have received reconciliation with God. And that makes us secure!
1. What
attribute of God is the foundation of everything the Christian believes in (see
p. 1)?
2. In what way
does God's faithfulness especially stand out (see p. 1)?
3. Why does
Paul refer to the Holy Spirit as the guarantee of our salvation (see pp. 2-3)?
4. Why does God
give us a subjective assurance of salvation (see p. 3)?
5. How does the
believer know that God loves him (see p. 3)?
6. How can a
believer forfeit the sense of his assurance?
Explain (see p. 4).
7. Why do we need an
internal, subjective assurance of salvation in addition to a cognitive assurance
(see p. 4)?
8. How much
does God love the believer (see p. 4)?
9. Why were we
without strength to please God (see p. 6)?
10. What is the
mystery of God's love? Why is it a
mystery (see p. 6)?
11. Why is God's
present love for us so secure (see p. 7)?
12. How did God
prove His love for us (Rom. 5:8; see p. 7)?
13. What does
the believer's salvation encompass (see p. 8)?
14. How do we
know that God keeps us in a constant state of reconciliation (see p. 8)?
15. Why did God
save us (see p. 9)?
1. Are you a faithful person? Do you tend to do the things you say you are going to do? Contrast God's faithfulness with your
own. List as many reasons as you can
for trusting God's faithfulness. Based
on your response, how can you best encourage people who are enduring trials?
2. Memorize Romans 5:8: "God demonstrates His own
love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us"
(NASB). Replace the words us and
we with your name. What does
that verse mean to you? Meditate on
your answer and thank God for His love.
3. Look up the following verses: John 5:26; 10:28-29; 14:19; Romans
8:34-39; Colossians 3:3-4; Revelation 1:18. List all the securities you can find. How does Christ save you by His life? What are the chances of your losing your
salvation? As a result of knowing how
secure you are, what kind of changes do you need to make in your life to bring
God the most glory? Prayerfully
consider the steps you need to make to implement those changes.
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