No images? Click here THAT YOUR JOY MAY BE FULL PT. IRomans 5:12-21 October 9th, 2022 Over the past few weeks, we have been studying Romans chapter 5 and the way that the early church was taught to pass on the baton of the gospel. We have been focusing on Paul’s encouragement to believers to glory and take joy in the God of their salvation. We saw the way Paul taught the church to understand the depth and breadth and height and width of their salvation. We also learned how we must be passing the baton forward to those who come behind. This week, we studied the fullness of joy we receive from our salvation in Romans 5:12-21.
We often feel great joy in our salvation early on in our spiritual journey. As we progress we begin to feel doubts about whether we are really worthy of finding joy in our salvation. Besetting sins can cause us to doubt whether Christ’s sacrifice should cover someone as disobedient and unworthy as we are. The other thing that can cause us to lose the joy of our salvation is great loss. As we lose people we love, face chronic illnesses, or other manifestations of the fallen-ness of the world we begin to lose the joy we initially found in our salvation. We can also lose sight of joy because we forget that joy does not come as a by-product of obedience to Christ, but rather as a motivation for obedience.
One of the greatest struggles in the Christian life is maintaining our joy. Regaining the joy in our salvation can seem nearly impossible on our own. We search and search for tangible ways to reinvigorate the joy in our life but we miss the fact that joy has a supernatural origin. We often try to create a false rubric that will manifest joy in our lives but that is not often true joy.
The definition of joy is a gladness of heart or an enlarging of our heart as mentioned in Psalms 119. That is easily experienced at the outset of our spiritual walk, but as we encounter difficulties we lose sight of the way we receive and achieve a joyful life. Paul reminds us in this section of Romans chapter 5, that we find our joy by being moored to the rock of Jesus Christ. The more you know about God’s character, promises, and will, the greater and more abundant your joy will be. Joy is produced when we understand the reality of our justification before God and reconciliation with God. A lack of understanding of these truths will cause a lack of joy in a believer’s life. If your spiritual walk seems to lifeless and lacking in energy look to where you are finding your joy and what your definition of joy really is.
One of the most wonderful spiritual truths is that our joy is anchored in the obedience of Christ and not our own obedience. We have joy because He was unwaveringly obedient, even to the cross (Philippians 2:8). Our joy comes from the truth of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to us from through the loving act of death on the cross. When Adam sinned, that sin was immediately credited to all of humanity, through his federal headship before God. Through Christ’s work on the cross and the doctrine of imputation, we no longer have Adam’s sin applied to our account but instead the obedience of Christ. That is grace and love, out of this our joy ought to flow.
Imputation of sin through Adam can be a tricky doctrine because it is easy to mishandle. We love to accept imputation in politics, sports, or other areas. We accept it when it is referring to Christ’s righteousness but we so deeply struggle to accept it when it is sin being charged to our account. It is important for us to guard our hearts against forgetting our nature before Christ. The life-energizing joy comes when we truly understand the wonderful grace in having Christ’s righteousness given to us.
Our journey of joy begins by mooring ourselves to the truth. It is most important for us to understand the truth about sin. We were once completely dead in our sin but now we can rejoice with exceeding great joy for the salvation that comes from Christ. The culmination of this came in Romans 5:10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life”. If you are looking for the exact moment in time where the sins of man were placed on to Christ and replaced with righteousness, that can be seen in Mark 15:33 when for three hours the world went dark. Christ, in that moment received the full weight of sin. The darkness represents the imputation. When Christ said, “It is finished” the transaction had been completed. He had born the fullness of the wrath of God for us. Paul continues to show us in Romans 5:12 how the way sin came into the world, first through the initial sin of Satan (1 John 3:8) and then it was imparted to us through the sin of Adam because, as the representative for all humanity, he broke the direct command from God not to eat the forbidden fruit. The single sin was enough to change the entire course for all humanity. At the formation of our souls, at the time of conception, we are born with a branding already on us. Psalms 51:5 illustrates how even at the very moment of conception, we are marked by sin. We are branded at our creation by our master, death, until Christ covers the mark of death with His mark of life. Paul puts forth two distinct representatives in this section of Romans 5, Adam and Jesus. Adam, who is the representative for all men. Any one who is ruled by his sin still, is in Adam. Anyone who has a new divine nature and has been redeemed is in Christ. An immediate death, or spiritual separation and a lack of joy, entered through the sin of Adam and the beginning of a physical death took place. The consequences for Adam’s sin began immediately. The desire from our human nature is to fix our sin problem, which ushers in the law. The law cannot save us, it robs us of our joy and exposes what is inside of us. We need to understand the reality of death. Only Adam had the opportunity to sin in the way he did. He was the only one who received direct revelation from God and he was the only one to begin with a clean slate. He was the best version of all created humanity. Death came from one man and even more specifically from one single man’s single sin. If the best representation of man fell, so would we and so have we. And yet, we choose to gloss over our sin and not feel the sorrow we ought to over it. Joy is stripped from our lives when we do not understand the depth of our sin and the even greater depth of the mercy of God. When we deny both the reality of our sin and the reality of its consequences we will miss out on the joy God has for us.
The way we can keep joy in our lives is by keeping ourselves moored to the truth that one sin was enough to condemn everyone to hell and to see our sin as deeply offense to God as it is. We must confess our sin and then live in the joy that comes from knowing our sins are forgiven and then go forth in obedience. Live in the joy of knowing your sins were paid for on the cross. “Where the sin increased, grace abounded so much more” Romans 5:21.
Selah: -What are the areas in which you have created a false rubric in your life? -What sins are you not viewing as God views them? -What does living with joy look like in the life of a believer? |