Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1456
“Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Romans 5:1.
WONDERFUL is the power of faith. In the Epistle to the Hebrews our Apostle tells us of the marvelous exploits which it has worked in subduing kingdoms and obtaining promises, in quenching the violence of fire and stopping the mouths of lions, in braving perils and doing deeds of prowess. Still, to us personally, one of the most wonderful of its effects is that it brings us justification and consequent peace. “Being justified by faith, we have peace with God.” If we know the justifying power of faith and the way in which, like a hand, it puts upon us the matchless garment of the Savior’s righteousness, we shall value that faith as our first parents did the gracious hand of God which made coats of skins and covered their nakedness. The little faith we have will make us crave for more! And every need we feel will make us long to prove its virtue in our own souls to meet our own personal case by the operation of the Holy Spirit.
Now, faith brings to the soul, according to the text, two blessings. It is not the creator of these things, but the conveyance, the channel, the conduit pipe through which these favors come to us. First, it brings us a state of peace— “being justified by faith.” And, secondly, it bring us a sense of peace—“we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
I. Our first thoughts shall be about that most important of all matters—A STATE OF PEACE WITH GOD. In our natural state we have no peace. God is angry with us because we are sinful and we are at variance with God because He is holy. God cannot agree with us—“Can two walk together except they are agreed?” And we cannot agree with God, for “the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the Law of God, neither indeed can be.” There is a breach between the rebellious creature and the righteous Creator. Sad that it should be so, but such is the case by nature with every man that is born of woman. We are set against the Lord. We kick against His Providence, we rebel against His commands, we resist His Holy Spirit, we reject His love as manifested in the death of Christ and we would live and die in this hostility if it were not for His almighty Grace.
Before we can enjoy peace within our hearts there must be a state of peace established between us and God. We must submit ourselves to the Lord and He must forgive the past and make with us a Covenant of peace, or else there is no peace for us. “There is no peace, says my God, unto the wicked.” Let me briefly explain to you the way in which we come to possess peace with God. We are condemned criminals, though we do not consider ourselves to be in such a critical condition. We persist that we are righteous! We decline to acknowledge the jurisdiction of God’s Law and we refuse to acknowledge the justice of its sentence. Therefore, before we can have peace with God we must be brought into court, hear the indictment against us and be put on our trial.
When thus arraigned we must put in our plea. Do you plead, “Not guilty”? Then, Man, you challenge your Accuser to bring forward the evidence which will soon spoil your conceit and crush you with its weight! Before there can be peace between us and God we must, with all our hearts, plead “guilty.” We must confess the truth, for God will never agree with liars, nor with those who indulge self-deception. He is a God of Truth and dissemblers can have no communion with Him. Being guilty, we must take the place of the guilty—it is our proper position—and it is due to the Judge of all the earth that we take it. To refuse to do so is contempt of court! There is mercy for a sinner, but there is no mercy for the man who will not acknowledge himself a sinner. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” But if any man says that he has no sin he is a liar and the truth is not in him. And there cannot be peace between him and God while he is in that humor.
It seems a stern demand and very galling for our pride, to have to stand in the dock and in answer to the question, “Guilty or not guilty?” reply, “Guilty, Lord, guilty. Whatever the consequences may be, guilty.” But to some of us it no
longer seems to be difficult because we could not now plead otherwise! We are so conscious of our guilt that we cannot escape from a sense of it. “If I wash myself with snow water and make my hands ever so clean, yet shall You plunge me in the ditch and my own clothes shall abhor me.” We cannot look upon a single day without being convicted of sin and, in reviewing our past lives from our childhood, we are over and over constrained to blush at the memory of our waywardness and our willfulness, our perverseness and our provocation. The faults and the follies that have tracked our course haunt us till our very looks would tell the truth though our tongues were silent.