The sermon titled 'Justification' by Phil George explores the topic of justification and its importance in the Christian faith. The speaker emphasizes the need for a proper biblical understanding of justification and highlights the differences between Rome's view of justification and biblical Christianity. The sermon explains that justification is not earned through works, but is received through faith in Christ's active and passive obedience. It also discusses how the ongoing fruit of justification is manifested in the life of a believer. Overall, the sermon emphasizes the central role of justification in the gospel and the need for a correct understanding of this doctrine.

If you're visiting with us today, we'd like to welcome you again and let you know you're joining with us in the midst of a series that's more topical in nature. We're going through the 1689 Confession of Faith as a church before we adopt that. So our norm here is to preach systematically through books. It's not that you have to do it that way, but we've found that that's the best way to make sure we're preaching through the whole council of God and making sure that we don't get to avoid some of those hard texts that maybe as pastors you might not want to preach on. And so I'm just just kind of to give you a heads up of what things usually look like here at grace life.

So today we're going to be talking about chapter 11 of the confession speaking on justification. So in the 1500s John Calvin said this, he says, justification by faith is the hinge on which all true religion turns. And go forward, oh probably 450 years or so to the late 1900s, John Murray said, justification is still the article of standing or falling church. And so this is not... There's some things that we talked about in the confession that are secondary issues.

Baptism, for example. This is not one of them. This is one of those things that if you have a wrong view of justification, you have a different gospel. You have a gospel that will not save. So this is something that as Christians we must be united in a proper biblical understanding of what it means to be justified.

So even in the songs that we sung this morning, we sung about faith being the source of that justification. Let's see what the Roman Catholic Church has to say about being justified by faith alone. And what I'm going to do as we go through this section of the confession, as we talked about in the introduction some number of months ago, we have to recognize, okay, this confession was written at a certain time addressing certain errors that were prevalent. And so what we're gonna see is the confession just hammers on the errors of the Roman Catholic Church. And so what I want to do is I'm gonna provide you the the words of Rome themselves.

And it's not gonna be, hey, this is what Pastor Phil says, Rome says, this is going to be here. I'm going to show you here, here is the official dogmatic teaching of the Roman Catholic church and one of the reasons I want to do that is there's there's a move even within reformed circles toward embracing things like Thomas Aquinas the Thomism and this is going in the direction of embracing Rome And so it's difficult for someone to say, for example, Thomas Aquinas is the greatest theologian ever in the history of the church, except for he got the gospel wrong. That's a pretty big deal, right? I struggle with a Christian actually saying something like that. And so, especially for you young people, I want to make it crystal clear that when we talk about the difference between Rome and biblical Christianity, we're not just talking about a difference between smells and bells.

We're not just talking about, hey, there's these guys over here that have funny hats and those things are true, but at the heart of that difference is the gospel. And so if you're ever in your life tempted to start heading that direction toward Rome you have to recognize where you're going is some place that has a different gospel, a gospel that will not save you. So here's, this is from the Council of Trent, Canon 9. So in the sermon notes, you're gonna have links to all these things should you wanna study these, should you ever wanna use these if you're talking to a Roman Catholic friend about you maybe they don't believe exactly what the official teaching of the church is but this is this is the dogmatic teaching of the church. So if anyone sayeth that by faith alone the impious is justified in such wise as to mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to the obtaining the grace of justification, and it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will, let him be anathema.

So there is the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. If you believe you're justified by faith alone, you're anathema. You're accursed. You're damned. There's the divide, brothers and sisters, right there.

This is 180 degrees different. This is not two flavors of the same Christianity. Paul says in Galatians chapter one, verses six through eight, we walk through this, I think a few years ago now as we walk through Galatians. Paul says, I'm astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and returning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

But even if we are an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you. Let him be accursed." And so here you have these two things. A gospel different than Paul's. Paul says that you're accursed. Rome says the gospel that Paul preached the gospel of faith alone in Christ alone that that gospel is accursed and so justification is at the very heart of the good news of the gospel get justification wrong you get the gospel wrong that's what Rome does That's what all the man-made false religions of the world do.

A different gospel cannot save you. A different gospel, in the words of Paul, leaves you a curse, leaves you anathema, leaves you devoted to destruction, given over to divine condemnation. It couldn't get any more serious than that. We talked about this in Galatians, where all the other letters, even to a church like Corinth, who had some serious issues, you know, Paul greets them, you know, the thanksgiving, all these things, but here the Galatians get the gospel wrong and Paul comes right in with the hammer No, you must not do this. This is the most serious of matters This is an area where we've talked about kind of the history of the confession the Westminster than the Savoy Then the 1689 This is an area where all these Puritan brothers and sisters were in unity.

Yes, there's some minor differences between this chapter and the confession, but the meat of it's all the same. The substance is the same. And so as we move through chapter 11 today, we're gonna see many denials aimed particularly at the heresies of the Roman Catholic Church, but we're also gonna see, touch on some other theological positions as well that are either heresies or errors. So here's the outline this morning just based again upon the paragraphs of the confession. First we're going to look at the nature of justification.

Secondly, the instrument of justification. Thirdly, the basis of justification. Fourthly, the application of justification. Fifthly, the ongoing fruit of justification, and sixth the unchanging uniformity of justification. So you can see even within those headings there's a lot that's gonna be here.

So again, this is gonna be one of those things that's a big overview. There's gonna be some areas that I do a deeper dive, just areas that pastorally I've determined that I think are more important for us. So let's pray and ask for God's help as we open his word. Father, we do come in the name of Christ. Lord, as we've already talked about, this is such a critical and important issue.

So Lord, I pray that you would give each person this morning ears to hear these truths, Lord, from the youngest to the oldest among us. Lord, help us to be attentive. Help us to be focused upon your word, and more than that, Lord help us to not be hearers, but help us to be doers. Where we've got this wrong, Lord grant us the grace to repent. Lord help us to be a people that are held captive to the truth of your word.

In Christ's name I pray, amen. So firstly, the nature of justification. Those God affectionately calls, he freely justifies. He does this not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins and accounting and accepting them as righteous. He does this for Christ's sake alone and not for anything produced in them or done by them.

He does not impute faith itself, the act of believing, or any other gospel obedience to them as their righteousness. Instead, he imputes Christ's active obedience to the whole law and passive obedience in his death as their whole and only righteousness by faith. This faith is not self-generated. It is the gift of God. So again, you have handouts with all the scriptures.

I won't get to all of them. So in each one of these points you can go home and study this further yourself. If you notice at the very beginning here, if you remember last week, we talked about the effectual call, God drawing a people to himself. The very beginning of this chapter just ties right back to that. That those who God effectually calls, He freely justifies.

It's right out of Romans chapter eight verse 30. Like those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. So it's the golden chain of redemption. All those things are connected.

There's no one that's called that's not justified. There's no one that's justified that's not one day gonna be glorified. It's so certain that it can be spoken of as it's already happened. So those who God regenerates by transforming their hearts, their minds, and their wills, these he also justifies. So as I mentioned, we're gonna see this series of affirmations and denials within this first paragraph of the chapter and so we're gonna just walk through those one at a time.

So it begins speaking of God, He does this not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins and accounting and accepting them as righteous. So if you're not familiar with Roman Catholic theology, you might not even know what does this mean, this infuse that we're talking about here versus impute? You know, maybe you've grown up in this church and all you've ever heard of this talking about Christ's righteousness imputed to you, but the word infuse in Webster's 1828, the first definition is just to pour into as is a liquid. The more modern definition would be like to be permeated with something and so you could speak of like a team being infused with confidence. Both of those give you the idea right of something being put in to something else.

So this thing being changed by what was put into it. So that's the that's the Roman Catholic understanding of what justification means. So this is again this is straight from the catechism of the Catholic church. This is their paragraph number 1813. As the theological virtues are the foundation of Christian moral activity, they animate it and give it special character.

They inform and give life to all moral virtue. They are infused by God into the souls of the faithful to make them capable of acting as his children and meriting eternal life. They are the pledge of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit and the faculties of the human being. These are three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, or love. And so what you see there is that faith is one of those things that's infused by God into the souls of people that then makes them act like his children so that they can merit eternal life by their action.

Can you see that we're talking about a totally different gospel here? What Rome believes is they baptize an infant, Holy Spirit infused, so they can live like a Christian and they can basically merit their righteousness before God. And so what they're saying is, hey this declaration of justification can be made because you're actually righteous. That's why you can be declared righteous because you are righteous. What is Romans 5 forward that we heard in our scripture reading say?

And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, His faith is counted as righteousness. So according to scripture, it's not God making us godly and then justifying us, it's just Him justifying the ungodly. There's nothing good in us, nothing worthy in us that would cause him to justify us. And so what this is not is, it's not a denial that people are changed when they're saved, But what it's doing is it's making proper categories of these different aspects of salvation. That being called is different than being justified, which is different than being sanctified, which is different than being glorified.

If you start mixing those things up, you get a mishmash of theology and even a false gospel. You remember we looked last week at that glorious reality of regeneration that God takes this wicked person, takes out their heart of stone, replaces it with the heart of flesh, writes his law upon their hearts so they actually desire to want to obey it. In a couple of weeks we're gonna look at sanctification. So the reality of change in the life of a Christian is a real thing, but regeneration and sanctification are not justification. Those are separate and distinct things.

When we look at scripture, what we'll see is that justification is a forensic term, it's a legal term, it's a courtroom type of term. As the confession note, It results in two things. First, the pardon of sins and then secondly, the accounting and accepting of the individual as righteous. So what you see is we're talking about not the individual's internal status, but we're talking about our legal status before God. If you look at Scripture, what you'll find is the justification is commonly set forth as the opposite of condemnation, which that helps you to see the judicial nature, right?

Okay, the opposite of being condemned is being justified. We're gonna look at one text in the Old Testament and one text in the New to see that. So Proverbs 17 15, he who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike in abomination to the Lord. So let's think about okay that word justification if it means what the Roman Catholics say it means it's someone has changed to be a righteous person. So how in the world could it be an abomination to the Lord for someone to be changed into a righteous person?

It couldn't! What it's saying is, for you to declare someone that's righteous, that's wicked, that's an abomination to God. That's the great dilemma of the Gospel. Romans 8, 33, and 34. Who shall bring any charge against God's elect?

It is God who justifies, who is to condemn. Jesus Christ is the one who died. More than that, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God who indeed is interceding for us." So again, what is justification, what is being justified set opposite of? In verse 33, bringing a charge against God's elect. In verse 34, to condemn.

So again, you see being justified is offset against these judicial, forensic terms, condemnation, bringing a charge against someone. And we could multiply those examples for a long time here. Again, when you look at Scripture, this is the consistent pattern you see of justification being set opposite of condemnation. As the Confession notes, this judicial declaration has two parts, pardon and acceptance. So we have two parts to what it means to be justified.

Let's look at what it means to be pardoned. Ephesians 1, seven. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of His grace. So we were guilty sinners deserving of eternal punishment before God, but through Christ's blood we have been declared not guilty. But not only were we pardoned, we have been accepted as righteous.

That should astound you, that not just have your sins been forgiven, but you have been declared as having kept God's law perfectly before him. So it's not just that we're counted as not having ever broken God's law, we're counted as having kept it perfectly. That's amazing. Second Corinthians 521. For our sake he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

That's the glorious truth of justification there in the gospel. To our next affirmation and denial. He, speaking of God again, He does this for Christ's sake alone, not for anything produced in them or done by them. So the truth is, if it was up to us to just add one little tiny bit to our justification, we would be lost and without hope. Isaiah 64, 6, we have all become like when it was unclean and all our righteous deeds are like what?

They're like a polluted garment, like filthy rags. We all fade like a leaf and our iniquities like the wind take us away. So you come outside of Christ with your very best in your hand bringing that to God and what does God see that has it's just the filthiest nastiest thing humanistically speaking that you could think of and first John 1 8 if we have knows If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. Not one person in this room can say they are without sin. But even if we could start to live a sinless life, which obviously we can't, that wouldn't deal with all the past sins that we've done.

Right, scripture says that all these things have been basically storing up wrath and condemnation for us. Romans 2 five, but because of your hardened and penitent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. That's why Martin Luther concluded that we need an alien righteousness. It doesn't mean like a weird space creature righteousness, it means a righteousness from outside of ourselves because nothing within us could be counted as righteous before God. Philippians 3 8 and 9.

Indeed I count everything as lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but that which comes through faith in Christ the righteousness from God that depends on faith. So you see, you must not look in yourself, one even inkling of righteousness to be justified before a just and holy God. We can only hope and trust in that righteousness that comes from God alone. So here is the next affirmation in denial.

He does not impute faith itself, the act of believing, or any other gospel obedience to them as their righteousness." So what it's saying is, it's not that faith is counted as righteousness, it's not that obedience is counted as righteousness, it's not believing that it's counted as righteousness. It continues, instead, he imputes Christ's active obedience to the whole law and passive obedience in his death as their whole and only righteousness by faith. So again here is the official Rome teaching. This is the Council of Trent again. If anyone sayeth that the justice received is not preserved and also increased before God through works, but that said works are merely the fruits and signs of justification obtained and not a cause of the increase thereof, let him be anathema." So again they're saying if you say that these things in your life are just the fruit of justification, just a result of it, and not actually bring an increase to it, adding to it, you're anathema, you're accursed, you're damned by God.

The distinction couldn't be more clear. And so Rome clearly teaches that our works add to our justification and are not merely a fruit of being justified. This also goes counter to some Armenians that believe that faith itself is what is imputed as righteousness. It's not somehow that God made the requirement easier for us in the new covenant that, oh, in the old you had to obey everything perfectly, now you just have to have faith, and so, boom, you're good. That's not what happened.

It's not that our faith is what is imputed to us. So according to this view faith would not be accepted because of its object which is Christ. It would be accepted because it's a virtue in and of itself. And so the only reason our faith is worth anything is because of the object of our faith, which is Christ and his finished work. B.B.

Warfield put it this way, says, justification is through faith, not on account of faith. We're gonna see that as we get to paragraph two about faith is an instrument of our justification. And so we're not justified because faith is credited to our account, we're justified because Christ's active and passive obedience is what's credited to our account. So you may or may not have heard those terms before. Basically, Christ's active obedience is, could be summarized this way, it's his full heartfelt obedience to God's law throughout his earthly life.

So it's him obeying all of God's laws perfectly in his life. When we speak of Christ's passive obedience, it's something that can be kind of easy for us Western ears to understand. Like what are we talking about passive? Is Christ not doing anything? But the reality is that even what we call Christ's passive obedience was in a sense active.

So James Rennihan, I think helpfully summarizes it this way. He says, the passive obedience of Christ is that which he willingly offers up to God in the midst of a lifetime of suffering. In one sense, this too is active obedience. Passive should be understood in relation to the Latin passion. It's the obedience and suffering, humiliation and death.

And so it's not really to be contrasted with active, like, hey I'm running and doing something versus passive, I'm just sitting here. It's just a different nature of Christ actively obeying and then Christ obeying in his suffering. And so that's a helpful distinction and it describes a biblical reality. We have to be careful to not like take the active and passive and kind of pull them apart. The reality is that they go together and we're not saved by just Christ's active obedience.

We're not saved by just his passive obedience. We're saved by both of those things together. It's not an either-or. It's a both-and. In paragraph one ends saying, this faith is not self-generated.

It is a gift of God. Ephesians 2 8 and 9, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is a gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. What I hope you see here is that these proof texts are so clear. I mean, like, could the apostle be even more clear to say that faith's a gift, not saved by works. Like, It's not hard to understand, it's not mysterious, it's really plain.

If you don't have some overarching theological system that you're placing upon the text, it's really easy to understand what the apostles saying in texts like this. So faith is not earned. Faith is not something you can just like work really hard and like gin up within yourself. I mean there's some work and pop. You know outcome is faith.

That's not how it works. Faith is a present given not wages earned. It's a gift of God. And so I just want you to think about, okay, what's your understanding today of faith? Have you been thinking of faith as something that you can earn or something that you can work for?

If you've been thinking that way, I want you to think about this. Let's fast forward to standing before Christ on the day of judgment. Do you want to stand there saying, okay God, here's my righteousness. You judge me in light of that. Or do you wanna stay in there clothed in the righteousness of Christ and have God judge you based upon that?

That's the two choices set before you. And so if you wanna seek to add anything to your justification, you better be ready to bring it all. And good luck with that. Scripture would say that that's not gonna happen. And the reality is you guys know that.

You know your own life, you know your own heart. To come to God and say, yes Lord, perfect. Judge me. So now let's move on to paragraph two and talk about faith as the instrument of our justification. So faith that receives and rests on Christ and his righteousness is the only instrument of justification.

Yet it does not occur by itself in the person justified, but is always accompanied by every other saving grace. It is not a dead faith but works through love." So again you see the the root of the matter is not saved by faith. Rome would agree with that. Mormons would agree with that. Many of the other cults would agree with that.

The line is, saved by faith alone in Christ alone. It's the sola. It's the alone where the divide happens. Romans 3, 28, again we heard this in our scripture reading. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

In other words, by faith alone. Faith here we see is the instrument. Again, faith is not one of the ways that we become justified. Faith is the only way that we can be justified. We see here that biblical truth, that faith involves receiving Christ.

That's why you often hear it spoken of as faith being a hand. So what is what does mankind want to do? Left to ourselves, we want to come like this to God, right? Here's my goodness. Here's my law keeping.

I'm a good person, God. Here's what I have to offer. That's how, left to our own, we want to come to God. But what is faith? Faith is, it's called the empty hand of faith.

And so what we have to do is we have to come with nothing, with that hand reaching out and grasping that hand of God seeking to rescue us out of the depths. I think it was R.C. Sproul that put it this way, when God comes and saves us, it's not, hey, you're stranded out in a boat and you get thrown a life preserver, it's, hey, you're dead, you sunk to the bottom of the ocean and God comes and plucks you out of the death. That's an analogy of what salvation would look like. To the clear biblical testimony is that we're saved by faith alone.

Then in the second and third sentences of the confession, they address the issue, okay, what kind of faith is it that saves us? So James 2, 14 through 17. What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works, Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to him, go in peace, be warmed and filled, without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also, faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

So, you can quickly go to a couple of texts in James and maybe get confused about, OK, what kind of faith is James talking about? What's he talking about, this justification versus works? When we look at it in the context, it seems to me, to be very clear, that James is talking about two different kinds of faith. He's talking about a living faith and he's talking about a dead faith. He's talking about a faith that's accompanied by works and a faith that's not accompanied by works.

It's not this faith over here that, oh there's these works that then produce the faith or save you, it's no. We already talked about this last week, right? That this faith is preceded by the effectual call of God which results in our regeneration. So if we're in Christ, we're a new person, we have new hearts, new desires, and so we're gonna have those things lived out in our lives. The faith of regeneration is the faith that produces justification.

The false faith doesn't have it at source regeneration, It has some kind of mental assent, some kind of worldly sorrow, and so no it doesn't produce any kind of works consistent with that faith. As Christ said in John 14 verse 15, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. And so, I think a lot of Christians say struggle with that, like what's Christ saying there? It's really clear. Love for Christ is supernatural.

It comes from a heart regenerated and saved by God. What does God do in that? He actually writes his law upon your heart. What does that mean? You actually love his commandments.

You want to obey them. First John says, his commandments are not burdensome to you. Yes, it doesn't mean that Christians don't still sin, but the desire of our heart is to obey what God has commanded us. And so that regeneration results in us turning to God in repentance and faith, and it also results in a transformed life. Calvin put it this way, he said, faith alone justifies, but not the faith that is alone.

So you see the distinction there. We're justified by faith alone, but the type of faith that results in justification is accompanied by a whole host of other things including a new heart and including regeneration where you actually want to walk in obedience to God. And so one that stands in opposition to Rome that says no if you want to say that these things are merely a fruit or a sign of justification, let you be anathema. But it also stands in opposition to the easy beliefism that's rampant in our day, which basically says, okay, sometime in the past you walked an aisle, repeated a prayer, then you're in the kingdom of God, and it doesn't matter what your life looks like. Basically, Jesus can be your Savior, but it doesn't have to be your Lord.

That ignores the reality that James speaks about a couple of verse later, verse 2 19. But this is the kind of faith that the demons have. There he says, you believe that God is one, you do well. Even the demons believe and shudder. The demons have a really good theology, probably better than most of us.

They understand who God is, but they hate Him. That's the problem. It's not just about mental assent and knowledge. It's about a heart and knee bowed before God. So now before we turn to paragraph three, again I want to make it really personal for each one of you to ask yourself, what kind of faith do you have?

For some of you the answer might be, pastor, it's none at all. And so I wanna tell you I love you enough to tell you that if that's the case with you, you at this moment stand condemned before a holy God and you need to repent and believe the gospel. Maybe you sit here and go, man pastor I never, maybe I've heard about this before, this whole dead faith thing. Maybe I haven't. Maybe I was sleeping when you preached about that before, but man I look at that and yeah I've named the name of Christ with my lips, but my life doesn't, it never really changed.

Like I kind of love sin. I don't really look like what you're talking about. Again, I have to love you enough to tell you that if that's you, you stand condemned before a holy God and you need to repent and you need to believe the gospel. So it's really simple. We talked about this and we talked about election and the effectual call.

Nowhere in Scripture does it tell you, examine yourself to see if you're the elect. Examine yourself to see if you've been called. What it says is it says, repent to turn from your sins and believe the gospel to put your trust in the finished work of Christ. What happens is His righteousness imputed to you, Your sin imputed to him. There's this double imputation that happens where you can not only be declared to be a level playing field, but you're declared to be perfectly righteous.

So you started out here with this infinitely deep bank account, the sin debt before God, and then Christ, your sin upon him. It's okay, you're back to here. That's not good enough. What you need to be reconciled to God and spend eternity with him is perfect righteousness. So not only Did you get back up to this level playing field?

But no, you've been brought up to perfectly righteous. You've been clothed in the righteousness of Christ. That's the glory of the true and biblical gospel. So now let's turn to paragraph three and the basis for our justification. So by his obedience and death Christ fully paid the debt of all those who were justified.

He endured in their place the penalty they deserve by the sacrifice of himself and blood sent on the cross he legitimately really and fully satisfied God's justice on their behalf yet their justification is based entirely on free grace because he was given by the Father for them and his obedience and satisfaction were accepted in their place. These things were done freely not because of anything in them so that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God would be glorified in the justification of sinners. So what we see here is that those Christ died for, he fully paid their sin debt. He endured the full penalty and justice for their sin. What does that mean?

That means Christ didn't die to make salvation possible. Christ died to save sinners. John Blanchard says this, he says, just as surely as there was an actual cross, an actual body, actual blood, an actual death, an actual tomb, an actual resurrection. So there was an actual atonement, not merely the possibility of one. Again, Christ didn't die for the possibility to save sinners.

He died to save sinners. He died for all of the sins of his people. So again, let's look at the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Through the ministry of the priest, the spiritual sacrifice of the faithful is completed in union with the sacrifice of Christ, the only mediator, which in the Eucharist, speaking of what we would call the Lord's Supper, is offered through the priests' hands in the name of the whole church in an unbloody and sacramental manner until the Lord himself returns. So again, that's from the catechism of the Catholic church.

Paragraph 1369. So what do we see there? Rome's belief is that every time the mass is performed, the priests have this supernatural ability to bring Christ down once again to the altar and an unbloody sacrifice is once again done for their sins. It was it's such an important part of Roman Catholic theology that I was looking around and there's actually a website called masstimes.org where literally you put in your area and it's going to tell you all the times the mass that day is going to be done. So I looked it up on Wednesday and the mass was being performed 25 times in the city of Dallas alone.

You have to ask yourself why would that be? I mean we don't gather you know on a Wednesday 25 times throughout the city Why would that be such a big deal? Why would that be necessary? It's because they believe that Christ didn't fully atone for the sins of his people on the cross. They believe that that further sacrifice is necessary for people to continue to remain in their justification.

The problem is that's diametrically opposed to the teaching of Scripture. Hebrews 10 14, by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. So Again, I read that. That seems really clear to me. Single offering for all time.

All of those who are being sanctified. So if you've been saved, if you're growing in Christ's likeness, then this is talking about you. For a single offering that happened 2, 000 years ago, you have been perfected. Not that right now, but that you are perfect, but Christ's perfect righteousness has been imputed to you. No more sacrifices are necessary.

That's why in 70 AD God came in judgment and wiped the temple off the face of the earth because the sacrificial system has ended. Christ fulfilled it. And so in Him, we have a perfect standing before God in His perfect righteousness. There's nothing we can do to add to it. There's nothing we can do to take away from it.

So now let's look at paragraph four and how this justification becomes applied to us. From all eternity God decreed to justify all the elect and in the fullness of time Christ died for their sins and rose again for their justification. Nevertheless they are not justified personally until the Holy Spirit actually applies Christ to them at the proper time. So here in these few short sentences we see the cooperation of the Triune God and the justification of sinners. There were some at the time of the writing of the confession and there's some today that see the reality that came before the foundation of the world.

God elected to save sinners. So what they take that to mean is at that point in time people were justified, their justification was complete at some point in eternity past. And if Our justification was actual and complete at some time in the past before we were born. I struggled to see how Apostle Paul could describe the Christians in Ephesus in this way. He says, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins in what you once walked following the course of this world following the prince of the power of the air the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among who we all once lived in the passions of our flesh carrying out the desires of the body and mind and we're by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

So to me I don't see how we could both be justified at some point in eternity past and also in time be considered children of wrath. It seems like those two things are mutually exclusive to me. So yes, it's true that our election was decreed before the foundation of the world, but our justification was accomplished in time. Christ came at a specific point in human history. Romans 4, 23 through 25.

But the words that was counted to him, speaking of Abraham, were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in Him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who is delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification." So Jesus was raised for our justification in time, in history. So we have the Father decreeing our justification before the foundation of the world. We have Christ coming in time to accomplish our justification, and then for us personally, we have the Holy Spirit coming and making application of that justification to our lives, to our hearts. So 1st Corinthians 6 11.

Again, what I'm hoping that you see is this is just what Scripture says. That's why there's so many Bible verses here. I want you to say, hey, this is not some system that Pastor Phil has cooked up that the particular Baptist in 1689 came together. This is the plain teaching of what Scripture says. And so what we see is that Father in eternity, Christ in time, and the Holy Spirit, 1st Corinthians 611, and since were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God so here you have the application of justification by the Spirit to the people of God.

Calvin summarizes it this way. He says, God did from all eternity decree to justify all the elect, and Christ did in the fullness of time die for their sins and rise again for their justification. Nevertheless, they are not justified until the Holy Spirit doth, in due time, actually apply Christ onto them. So now let's turn to paragraph five and the ongoing fruit of our justification. So God continues to forgive the sins of those who are justified even though they can never fall from a state of justification.

They may fall under God's fatherly displeasure because of their sins. In that condition they will not usually have the light of His face restored to them until they humble themselves, confess their sins, plead for pardon, and renew their faith and repentance. So this may help explain why we have a time of confession every Lord's Day and take the opportunity to examine our hearts and our lives before him. And so, yes, our justification was to create an eternity past, Christ came and accomplished it in time. In history, the Holy Spirit comes and applies it in our hearts, but what about the sins after that time?

Still dealt with by the blood of Christ. Christ paid for them all. God continues to forgive them all. First John 1 9, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So the fact that those sins are forgiven, that doesn't mean that God takes our sins lightly.

And neither should we. So it doesn't mean that our sins don't impact our relationship with God. Notice how the confession puts it, it's not that this relationship is in terms of judge, but the relationship is in terms of a father. So Hebrews 12, 6-8, For the Lord disciplines the one He loves and chastises every son whom He receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure.

God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom His father does not discipline? And if you are left without discipline in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. So think about this chastening that happens in the life of the Christian. Probably, unless you're like a really new Christian in this room, you've experienced that.

What should our attitude be toward that chastening? I think Robert Murray McShane hits the nail on the head. He says, if nothing else will do to sever me from my sins, Lord send me such sore and trying calamities as to awake me from earthly slumbers. That should be our hearts desire. We have this sin in our lives that we're just having this great struggle and battling.

Lord bring whatever it would take to rid me of that sin, whatever calamity it would take, wake me up from my apathy to this sin in my life. So We should rejoice at God's love for us and He would love us enough to chasten us, to make us more like Christ. We have to remember that in this we're not viewing God as this judge coming to us with condemnation and shrink back from Him, but rather we need to see this as fatherly love and run toward Him. One of the great promises of the Gospel, Romans 8, one. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

If you're in Christ, that is true for you. There is no condemnation for you. Again, just a moment for self-examination. What if you sit here today, you profess to be a Christian, but yet you've got ongoing and habitual sin in your life, but yet you don't see the chastening hand of God. I would just give you the exhortation from the writer of Hebrews.

You should be concerned that maybe you are an illegitimate child and not a son if that's the case with you. That if you can sit there as a professing Christian just kicking back in habitual sin, you should have grave concerns about the state of your soul before God. This chapter ends with looking at the unchanging uniformity of justification. I like that phrase, but what that's saying is, believers were saved in the same way in the Old and the New Testament. That's what we're talking about.

Justification is the same. So in all these ways, the justification to believers under the Old Testament was exactly the same as the justification to believers under the New Testament. Here's just a few texts. So Galatians 3, 9, So then those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham the man of faith. Galatians 3.29, If you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.

Romans 9, 6-8, But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel. Are not all the children of Abraham because they are his offspring but through Isaac shall your offspring be named. This means that is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God but the children of promise are counted as offspring. We talked about this several weeks ago when we were in chapter 7 dealing with the covenants that Abraham had physical descendants and Abraham had spiritual descendants within those physical descendants that were basically, hey, the starting of the New Testament church were these spiritual descendants that were also the physical descendants of Abraham.

But it was only the spiritual descendants who were the children of promise. Romans 4, 3, we heard this in our scripture reading as well. What does the scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. So from the beginning of time to the end of time, people are gonna be saved the same way.

They're going to believe in the promises of God. But as I went through this, I want us to think for a minute about this. Based on what we've heard so far, what was counted to Abraham? We've already said it can't be Abraham's faith, right? It's not Abraham's faith that's credited, but what was it?

The only thing that it could be was the passive and active obedience of Christ. That's the only thing that could justify you. And so, again, go back to our thinking of the covenants. Which covenant is the only covenant under which that righteousness could be found? I want to submit to you that it's the new covenant, not the old.

And so, there's a Shia Lin song that puts it this way, and I'll paraphrase. Basically, in the Old Testament, saved by credit, in the New Testament, we're saved by debit. And so that's what Paul is getting to right there was this God was overlooking this wrath that was being stored up because the means weren't there under the old covenant to satisfy that wrath. The means only became available at the inauguration of the new covenant at the coming of Christ. That's why I think it's a better understanding to see the old and the new not as two administrations of the same covenant but see basically the new covenant as the covenant of grace progressively unfolded and revealed throughout Scripture.

And so that's one of the reasons why I think my Presbyterian brothers are wrong when it comes to their view of the Covenant. I can't find one text related to any of the covenants in the Old Testament. The Mosaic, the Noahic, the Abrahamic, the Davidic. I can't find one text related to those that in any way provides the righteousness of Christ. I just can't.

And so, I do wanna end by saying, man, I rejoice that with our Presbyterian brothers and sisters that we're united on this glorious truth of justification. I rejoice that we're united with them, that You can't lose your justification. I rejoice that we're united with them in Rome's rejection of the gospel of justification by faith alone. We're united that Rome is in heresy over that issue. And also I rejoice with them that we're united in our understanding of the error of certain dispensationalists.

Like Louis Barry Schaeffer who said this, according to the Old Testament, men were just because they were true and faithful in keeping the Mosaic law. And we don't talk about dispensationalism much here, but I want you to understand that that's the traditional teaching of dispensationalism is that people in the Old Testament were saved by law keeping. And I rejoice that my Congregationalist and Presbyterian brothers stand in unity that know that that is a false teaching. And so I just wanted to end on the one hand, yes, there are some differences that we have with our pedobaptist brothers, but I think those things pale and compare us into the unity that we have in these glorious doctrines of the Reformation like justification by faith alone. So I don't want to say that those differences are insignificant, but I want to make sure that we frame them rightly within the unity that we have on so many other things.

So let's pray and then we'll have the privilege of celebrating the Lord's Supper. Heavenly Father, I come in the name of Christ. Lord, I come recognizing that Lord, not everybody in this room, not everyone within the hearing of my voice is justified before You. Lord, I pray that the truths from Your Word that were proclaimed today would weigh heavy upon them. Lord they wouldn't be able to get away from the fact that right now they stand eternally separated from You.

Lord that You would pursue them. You would save them as a result of the preaching of your word and the working, the effectual call of your spirit. Lord, I pray for those of us in Christ that we would be, Lord, stirred, that we would be overjoyed as we see, once again, these wonderful truths of what it means to be in right standing before you. Lord, just how gracious you've been to us in salvation. Pray that we would leave here, Lord, just with our faith inspired and renewed.

I pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.