Audio Transcript:

This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches or donate to this ministry, please visit Mosaicboston.com.

God, we thank you for these words that we just sang. Not just that we can sing them but that we can know that they are true. We see death and decay all around us. We need resurrection in our world, in our country, in our church, in our hearts, Lord. Jesus Christ, you are our living hope, you are the resurrection and the life. We just marvel at what a great and awesome and merciful God that you are. So Lord, we pray for those who are suffering. And we pray for those who are lost, that we are reminded then for many of us, this is the closest to hell that we will ever be. And yet, for some, this is the closest to heaven they could ever hope for. But you Lord have made a way to change that through your Son, through the gospel.

So we just cry out for peace but we also out for revival, Lord. That we want to see you raise the dead, bring new life to those who are lost and dead in their sins, Lord. And we know that you can do it, you've done it and we praise you for that. God, right now I just ask for grace as we preach your word this morning, we pray that you would speak to us through this amazing text written by the Apostle Paul and we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

All right. So if you are just joining us, we have been working our way through the Book of Romans. We're in chapter 2 and I'm going to be just looking at a small passage today. It's a small passage but it has a really big idea and that's one of those ideas you just kind of have to chew on. And it's a simple idea, it's simple but the implications of it are massive, they're huge. And the big idea is just simply this, that things are not as they ought to be. Now that statement isn't very shocking or profound, most of us would say, "Yeah, obviously things are not as they ought to be." I mean, how many of us, when we turn on the news, we think, "Wow. Things are so great, I can't even imagine them getting any better." Where you turn on the news and you think, "Wow, ..." I'm moving my mic pack. So cringe, this is worse than that episode of the Ringer... What's going on here? I'm going to move this down. There we go.

Obviously, things are not as they ought to be. And Paul's big idea, the case that he's been trying to make for these first couple of chapters is just simply that, that creation is not blessed, it is cursed, that people are under God's wrath, that the world is not filled with the glory of God as it ought to be, it is filled with sin and death and decay. And it's not just that, that is it's that we all know it intuitively, we just know. We know this is true and yet we deny it, we suppress it and at the same time we don't want to face the truth so we suppress the truth because as much as we know that things are not as they ought to be, we also know that we ourselves are not as we ought to be and that scares us.

And so we ignore it, we deny it, we rationalize it away and just try to pretend that this is normal. Quick example from this week, Thursday morning, I was having one of those days where I just couldn't wake up, right? You get out of bed and you're not fully awake, you're not really asleep, eyes are just kind of halfway open. Groggy, that's the word for it. I was groggy. And I get up, every morning we make the kids breakfast, I don't eat breakfast, I'm one of those intermittent fasting type people. So I make breakfast, we sit down and Kelly and the kids, they eat breakfast and as they're eating, I read scripture, we read through books of the Bible together. So they eat, I read and then we pray together.

And then it's time to like, "Okay, hurry up. You've got to go get dressed, we've got to get ready for school." And so the kids run off, they get ready, go to get dressed and as they're getting dressed, I usually pack their bags. So every day they take a lunch, they take a water bottle and they take a snack to school with them. I pack them up a little snack in one of those Ziploc bags. And so I did that. I packed their bags, we walk them to school, we both work from home so we walk back home and go about our day. Later that day, I go into the kitchen, I open the pantry and I see laying there on the shelf is our son Owen's snack in his Ziploc bag. I was so out of it, I packed it up and then I just set it down and left it there and didn't put it in his bag.

And I felt terrible, he's probably hangry, we're going to get a call from the principal, he's going to get in trouble and I felt terrible. But there's nothing really I could do about it so I just went back to work, forgot about it, put it out of my mind. Anyways, later that night we're sitting at dinner, we're talking, we're eating and all of a sudden Owen pipes up and he says, "Oh, hey dad, I wanted to say thank you so much for that boatload of Oreos you gave me and my snack today." I was like, "Wait, back that boat up. What are you talking about?" Here's the backstory. Tuesday night, we had community group, my wife and our daughter, Nora baked a cake and they crumbled Oreos all over the top and they took the rest of them, and there was a lot of them, and they put him in one of those big oversize Ziploc bags... You know where this is going?

So that day 20, 25 of them, I don't know, it was this big and it was packed full. He opens up his backpack at snack time and he eats them all. Actually he said he saved a couple for lunch because he started to get a stomach ache, he couldn't quite power through those last few. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, "What were you thinking?" We don't do sugar in our house very much and I was like, "What would make you think that I would intentionally give you a massive bag of Oreos for your snack?" He's like, "I know, right? It didn't seem right but I jus ate them anyway." And the point is, things are not as they ought to be, we just go with it. This is us. That truth is obvious but it's also inconvenient. And so we know things are wrong, we do them anyway, we just go with it, we go with the flow and that's the problem.

But the bigger problem is that the consequences of our wrongness and of the wrongness around us is a lot bigger than the consequences of a 10 year old eating 25 Oreos in one sitting. That had some pretty big consequences as well, I'm sure. But as truly as there are laws of gravity and physics governing the tangible things around us, there are laws of truth and justice and morality governing our hearts and souls and we all know it intuitively. We also know that we are in violation of those laws. We don't want to face the reality of those laws, we don't want to face the reality that we know that what goes up must come down. So instead of facing the truth, we suppress the truth because deep down we're terrified of the truth. We know what's gone up, our sin, our iniquity, our rebellion and we know what is coming down is judgment.

If you have your Bibles open up to Romans, Chapter Two, we're going to be looking at verses 11 through 16 today. And the three points that we're going to be talking about during the sermon is number one, we need to face the reality of the law and its giver. Number two, we need to face the reality of our guilt and shame. And then three, we need to face the reality of our judge and our defender. So if you have your Bibles, Romans Chapter Two, starting in Verse 11, the words are also going to be up here on the screen.

The Apostle Paul writes this, "For God shows no partiality. For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God but the doers of the law who will be justified. For when Gentiles, who do not have the law by nature do with the requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

This is the reading of God's word for us this morning. Point number one is that we need to face the reality of the law and its givers. So real quick, Paul's train of thought here is that number one, there is a divine and impartial judge. Number two, everyone knows what is right. Number three, no one has done what is right. And number four, therefore we are all going to stand justly condemned and without excuse, that's his basic argument. But within this argument lies the proof that this argument is true. The Jews knew it was true and even he says the Gentiles who did not have the law, that's everyone else, they know it is true as well.

And so first of all, Paul was writing to Jews in Rome. And the Jews knew the reality of the law and its giver personally, right? Because their entire history as a people had been wrapped up in this God who had clearly and miraculously revealed him self to them. Now you see that all throughout all the Old Testament, that Israel's God revealed himself as the God of truth and grace, law and order, justice and mercy. That Israel's God is the one who had delivered them out of slavery in Egypt with undeniable signs and wonders. He gave them his word, he gave them his law, he had written it on tablets of stone and brought them into the Promised Land. The Jews knew the law and the Jews knew the giver of the law personally.

And the problem was they didn't keep the law or obey the giver, they didn't love the Lord, their God with all of their heart, soul, mind and strength, they didn't love their neighbor as their self. And so Paul says in the second half of Verse 12 that, "All who have sinned under the law," that's the Jewish people, "Will be judged by the law. For it is not just the hearers of the law who are righteous before God but the doers of the law who will be justified." That the Jews, they knew the reality of the law, they knew God the giver of the law, the problem was that, that law couldn't save them because they couldn't keep it. All they could do was reveal how guilty they were, reveal how desperately they needed mercy from God.

And so Paul was writing to Jews but at the same time, Paul was writing to Gentiles in Rome. And the Gentiles, they did not have the law, they didn't have the history, the culture, they didn't have the miracles, they didn't have the personal relationship, the first hand encounters with God that the Jewish people had. And so the question that some might wonder then is, "Okay, on account of their ignorance, is God just going to let them off the hook? How can God judge them according to a law that they don't have, that they don't know?"

And this is where things get really trippy and deep. The Gentiles did not have the advantage of having the law written in tablets of stone but Paul says, "Hold on. That's true. But their actions prove that they'll along with every other human being on the planet actually have the work of that law written on their hearts." That everyone, even if a person never reads the Hebrew scriptures, never hears the 10 Commandments, is never told of Israel's God, they still have the work of that law written on their hearts, their actions, their consciences, they bear witness to what the law requires, that deep down they all know how they ought to live but they don't. And so Paul says of the Gentiles in Verse 14, "For when the Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they don't have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears a witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them."

If you've never read CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, read it. Get it, read it, that's your homework, chew on it, it's a dense book, you've got to take the time to process through what he's writing. But Lewis takes the theology of Romans 2:15, this idea that the law is written on every human heart. He takes that theology and he presents a case, a full fledged, philosophical apologetic for why this is just undeniably true. I was trying to think of a good illustration to give here and I couldn't think of anything better than just say what he says in his book. And so I'm just going to read a couple paragraphs, you can go read the rest of it on your own. But the premise is just this, God's moral law is written on our hearts, everyone intuitively knows it and we prove this every time we instinctively appeal to it.

And so this is what Lewis writes in his first chapter of Mere Christianity he says, "Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say because they say things like this. 'Well, how would you like it if anyone did the same to you?' 'That's my seat, I was there first.' 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm.' 'Why should you shove in first?' 'Hey, give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine.' 'Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated and children as well as grownups."

"Now what interests me about all of these remarks is that the man who makes diem is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies, 'Well, to hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what has been doing does not really go against the standard or that if it does there's some special excuse. He pretends there's some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat for should not keep it or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise."

"It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of law or rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you want to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals but they cannot quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you had some sort of agreement as to what right and wrong are just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer has committed to foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football."

And so the big idea is that there is this law, we all know it, we all appeal to it but more than that, we didn't make it, this is not something we came up with ourselves, it transcends us. It's a law that transcends individuals and cultures and time, that it's not just true for you or true for me, it's just simply true, transcendently true. And if this is true, we get to ask if there's this transcendent truth, where did that come from? If there's a transcendent moral law, there has to be a transcendent moral law giver. This is why Psalm 14 Verse One, the Psalmist writes that, "It is the fool who says in his heart that there is no God." That it is irrational to deny the reality of a moral God if we just sit down and think about it. If we're afraid to face that reality, if we're afraid to face the of the law and its giver, it's not because the idea is untrue, it's because the idea is uncomfortable. That facing the reality of God, that forces us to face the uncomfortable reality of our own guilt and shame.

And that brings us to point number two, that we're all guilty. Verse 12, he says, "For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law and those who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. But it's not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God but the doers of the law who will be justified." And there's none who have done, who have perfectly upheld the law. People in general, they don't object to the idea of a good and just God, we understand that without that existence would be hell. We want justice, we want God to be good and bring justice to stop evil, we want those things and we instinctively cry out for justice every time we are personally wronged.

See the problem people have is not with that so much as we want God to be just, we just don't want him to be just towards us. We want justice for others but deep down we know that we're deserving of judgment ourselves. Lewis mentioned this briefly in the passage but have you ever noticed, then you get caught in moral violation, violation of this law that we're talking about, that the impulse is not to deny the law, the impulse is to pass the blame. And this began at the very beginning with Adam and Eve in the garden, right? God comes to Adam and calls Adam to give an account and Adam didn't say, "Well, yeah. But God your rules weren't fair." No, he says, "Yeah, but it wasn't my fault. It was that woman that you gave me, it was her fault and you gave her to me so it's kind of your fault. But it's definitely not my fault."

And we do this, right? "Yeah, I lied but everybody lies." "Yeah, I stole but not as much as that person over there." "Yeah, I'm bad but you're no better." "Yeah, I did X, Y and Z but I'm only human." I see how foolish that is, in what human courtroom would that defense stand up? "Okay judge, let me just say, I totally murdered that guy. Yep. My bad. I'm only human. Also, it's just one guy, he was kind of annoying, it's not like I'm Hitler." Why do we always go there? Where do we get this idea that the best standard for judgment should be comparing ourselves to the worst person in history, right? The measuring stick of morality is not Hitler's wickedness, the measuring stick of morality is God's holiness.

And we acknowledge that. We see that no one even comes close to measuring up. We all fall short. Take a moment here to brag about some glory days, remember Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite? "Back in '82, I could throw a pig skin a quarter of a mile. I bet I could throw a football over the mountains." That's where we're going to go right now. Back in '82, I was born in '82, but back in '98, believe this or don't, I could dunk a volleyball. On a good day, with no one guarding me, at the right angle, give me a few tries, I could even dunk a girl's basketball. I could never quite dunk a men's basketball. The reason this is a big deal, I'm five foot seven and a half. That was a big deal for me for those couple years that I could accomplish it.

I was always living in the shadow of Spud Webb, remember him? He was five foot seven and not a half and he won the '86 NBA Dunk Competition, that was always looming over my head. And then you had Muggsy Bogues, he was five foot three in the NBA and he could dunk. But at least for me, small town, Midwest Dutch boy, that was a big deal. I could dunk a girl's basketball, I could dunk a volleyball, I could jump. We're all jumping and some of us can jump higher than others. And we're looking this way and we're looking that way and we're thinking, "Hey, as long as I can jump higher than some of these other chumps around me, then I'm must be doing okay." We measure ourself against the standard of our peers and then we feel justified so long as we're at least somewhat average.

And I know some of you and I know that you can jump and from a human perspective, your vertical is impressive but from God's perspective, looking down on earth, he's not impressed with any of our attempts to jump up to the heavens. I'm not talking about adding a few inches or even a few feet to our vertical jump, even the best of us, even those of us who can dunk a girl's basketball at five foot seven and a half, it's like, "Yeah, you've got light years to go before you hit the mark." Romans 3:23 says, "For there's no distinction for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." See the standard is not to see who can just do the least amount of evil, the goal is not even to see who can do the most amount of good, the goal is perfection, the goal is holiness, the goal is the glory of God. This is what we were created for and anything less falls short.

And now I know what some of you might be thinking, you might be thinking like, "I can't believe that, that standard is just too high." And I get that. And so for the sake of the argument, then I would just ask you to ask yourself, if that is not the standard, then what is the standard? We know there's a standard. If you're going to be a law to yourself, as Paul talks about the Gentiles being a law to themself, are you even able to measure up to your own expectations of yourself or to the people around you for that matter? If you believe that honesty is better than deception, have you ever told a lie? If you believe that fidelity is better than betrayal, have you ever broken a promise? Have you ever let down your friends, your family, your spouse? If you believe that love is better than hate, have you ever been angry with a person in your heart? Can you really say that you are as you believe that you ought to be, without guilt and without shame? There's none of us who can.

Just to put it into perspective, what if I told you... I sent this meme out in the newsletter yesterday? What if I told you that Morpheus never actually says the words, "What if I told you," in The Matrix? That's not the point but the point is this, what if I told you that all of your life you've been hooked up to The Matrix or the metaverse? How about that? And what if I told you that our good old friend Mark Zuckerberg, he has been secretly recording every moment of your life, your actions, what you do in private, your thoughts, your inner dialogue, all of it? I know this sermon's going to get shadowbanned under Facebook for this but whatever. And what if I told you that we've got your life on tape right now, up here on the screens, we're all going to pop some popcorn and we're going to just at least watch the highlight reel of all of the darkest moments of your life together?

Could one confidently say, "Go ahead. I've got nothing to hide, I'm not ashamed, I am guiltless, I am fully as I ought to be." Or would you say, "Why on earth did I ever open a Facebook account?" We know. And we're not going to watch the tape of your life, don't worry, but Jesus has and he's seen it all. I'm going to hit pause and we're going to come back to that in just a moment because there's something else here that I want to deal with in this text. Because sometimes you maybe have heard, some people will use this text to suggest that Paul is teaching that people who have never heard the gospel can still be saved by their good deeds by keeping the law that is written on their hearts. And that might sound comforting at first, it's actually the opposite of what Paul is teaching here.

What Paul is saying is that even those who never hear the gospel, never read the Bible, they have the law of God written on their hearts but instead of keeping it, they break it, none can keep it and so all of us, whether Jews Gentiles alike, we're all guilty, we're all without excuse. That's the big idea. Now, can a sovereign God intervene and save a person? Yeah. That happened with the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. He wasn't sitting in a church service, God just beamed him and said, "You're mine, I'm saving you, get up and go, I'm going to tell you what to do." And we've had, it's not common but we've had people come to Mosaic, they're like, "I grew up Muslim and Jesus came to me in a dream and said, you need to become a Christian and go to church." And they listened and they obeyed, they got baptized, they got saved.

God can do that. Yeah. But scripture shows us that, that is the exception, that is not the rule. The rule, the application and where we're going to see Paul go with this train of thought as we move through the book is that the gospel is the power of God to salvation, that the name of Jesus Christ, there is no other name given under heaven by which men must be saved and so therefore there is an urgency to preach the gospel to anyone, to everyone who will listen and to take this message to the ends of the Earth. That's the application. Now, the reason that some might want to twist this text to say otherwise is because on the surface that doesn't seem fair, right? From a human perspective, it doesn't seem fair that some would never get the chance to hear the gospel.

Now here's the problem. Where did we get this idea that the gospel was fair if the gospel is not fair? It is not fair that the holy, innocent, pure, spotless lamb of God, Jesus Christ would suffer and die for the wicked, depraved, sinful, rebellious enemies of God, that is not fair. So questioning the fairness of salvation is not where you want to start. Of course, it's not fair and praise God it's not fair, if it was fair that would mean that we all just go straight to hell right now, that would be fair. The question we should ask is not, why doesn't God just save everyone? The question we should ask is, why would God choose to save anyone at all and do so at such a tremendous cost to himself? He had to sacrifice everything that which he most loved and cherished in order to save us. And it wasn't because of anything good in us that deserved it, it was only because of him. It was because of his divine goodness, patience, kindness, mercy, compassion and love.

And so this theme will probably come up some more as we work through Romans, we'll be it into it more detailed as we go. But for now we just see that the big idea is this, that everyone has the law written on their hearts and so therefore we are all guilty and without excuse because none of us have kept that law, none of us have measured up to that mark, none of us has lived up to that standard. Except for one person and that person was Jesus Christ, that God the law giver took on flesh, entered human history to become the law keeper so he could stand in the place of us who were the law breakers.

And this brings us to the final point that we must face the reality of the law and its giver, we must face the reality of our guilt and our shame but the only way that we can do this with any sense of confidence and hope is by facing the reality of our judge and our defender and that's Jesus Christ. And so let me just start by saying Jesus is coming soon, maybe in our lifetime, but if not, I mean, the most any of us have is 70 years or so, soon we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. And this should either be our greatest source of hope and joy in this life or our greatest source of misery and terror because you will either stand before the judge alone and without defense or you will stand there with Jesus Christ, who is your defense.

And Jesus will judge the world in righteousness and praise God for that because without that heaven would become hell. The promise of Christ's return is the promise that even though things are not as they ought to be right now, a day is coming when that will no longer be true. The promise of Christ's return is that a day is coming when everything that is done in secret will be brought into the light. And it doesn't matter who you are, man, woman, Jew, Gentile, rich, poor, slave, free, you will give an account and when the judge sits on his throne, he will show no partiality. That's where Paul began. That Jesus will judge the world in his righteousness but he will also defend the church with his righteousness as well. And now whether that is true for you personally, then it depends on what you do with Jesus Christ right now. And before we talk about what you need to do with Jesus right now, I want to remind you about what Jesus did for us back then.

And Paul writing to the church in Ephesus in the first chapter of Ephesians. He says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved."

Before the creation of the world and God saw everything that would to ever be, not just the metaverse, the entire universe, all of human history, he saw it all. And Jesus watched the movie of your life, past, present, future, every word, every thought, every action he saw it all. He saw the avatar, the facade, the shell of your outer life, he saw beyond your attempts to cover your guilt and your shame and he peered deep into the darkness of your soul. He watched that movie and as the credits began to roll, he stood up and he said, "I still love you and I have chosen you and you are my beloved. And though you have not been faithful and you fully deserve to die, I will not leave you or forsake you. I will make you mine."

And Jesus looked at his bride, the church and he said, "I will take the nails of her iniquity into my own hands and feet. I will carry her sorrows and wash away her tears. I will be raised up on her cross to publicly bear the nakedness of her shame. I will pay her debt with my blood. I will take her punishment with my body. I will go through hell to give her heaven. I will die and she will live. I will bear her sin so that she can wear my righteousness. I will be wrapped in the linens of her death and buried in her tomb so that she can be born anew of my spirit and wrapped in the love of my father. And I will rise from the grave and ascend to the hand of my father and prepare a place for her where she will never be separated from my love and where everything will always be exactly as it ought to be."

That is the hope of the gospel and what have we done to deserve this? Absolutely nothing. What do we do to receive this? We simply repent, turn from our sin, our idolatry, from constantly trying to justify ourselves, surrender and believe. Find our justification in the Lord Jesus Christ, trust him with everything and know that he will be our judge but he can also be our defender. Cry out to God, put your faith in Christ and the promise of scripture is that you will be saved. I'm going to close by reading a couple passages from scripture and then we're going to respond and worship together.

Hebrew 4:14 says this, "Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. And let us confidence drawn near a throne of grace that we may receive the mercy and find grace to help in time of need."

And Romans 5:1-2 says, "Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God."

If you would like to learn more about what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ or if you've made a decision to surrender your life to him today, we would love to talk with you and pray with you. Please come up, talk to us after the service. If you mark on your connection card, we'll follow up with you this week but we would love to follow up and just pray with you and just celebrate that decision. Right now, I'm going to pray and then we're going to rejoice in the hope of the glory of God and worship him together. Let's pray.

Father I ask that you would just stir our hearts to be just speechless and amazed by your mercy. God, give us a vision of your glory, of your majesty that allows us to grasp the glimpse, the depth of our depravity, not to crush us but to open our eyes to the gravity of the sacrifice that you made, of the blessing that has been offered to us through your son, Jesus Christ. God, teach us to live in a manner worthy of this good news, humble, joyful, confident, bold and always grateful for who you are and for all that you have done for us. God, I pray that your gospel would not return void but that even now that if there are any here today who walked in as strangers and enemies of God, that they would walk out in a newness of life, adopted by your grace, regenerated by your holy spirit, united with your son and help them to find their place in the body of your church. We thank you for Jesus, we pray all of this in his beautiful and powerful name and we worship you now together. Amen.