When Al Smith was the governor of New York, he was invited to speak at Sing Sing prison. He was asked to address a gathering of the prisoners, and he wondered how he should begin. After they ate, he stood up and just automatically said "My fellow Democrats." Well that didn’t suit, because he felt that "no good Democrat should be in prison." So he backtracked and he started again. He said to them, "My fellow citizens." And then he realized that some of those fellows had lost many of the privileges of citizenship by being in jail, so he couldn’t say that. And so he finally settled on, "My dear friends." And I say to you, my dear friends, I’m glad to be with you.

I am a sinner saved by grace, and this week we’re going to think about the marvelous grace of our Lord, the fact that while we are sinners we have and can be saved by His grace, elevated to a new standard of life, to a new hope and new joy, a new expectancy as we live from day to day.

What a marvelous word Paul has given us here in this fifth chapter of Romans, one I’m sure is familiar to almost all of you, if not to all. Perhaps the best known and the best loved hymn in recent years has been that great hymn "Amazing Grace." You know the words:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost, but now am found

Was blind, but now I see.

It was written by John Newton. The music and the words to that hymn touch hidden depths in our hearts. We identify instinctively with the message it conveys, as it talks about the human condition--the despair, and the bondage, and the need for freedom from that bondage. We rejoice in the good news it tells, and if we do not know that good news yet, our hearts yearn for it as we hear his words.

You may not know this about John Newton, but he was a man who had turned his back on God in life. He was one of the most anti-God, anti-Christian, blasphemous men you could ever meet. He had done it all. Most of you know that at one time he had been a slave trader. Did you know that before that in Africa he had actually been a slave of slaves? He had done it all.

But one day out on that great wide sea he loved, a gigantic storm came up, perhaps the largest storm he’d ever seen, and the waves tossed that boat back and forth just like a tiny match stick. The waves rose many, many feet in the air. John Newton, out of fear and awe, began to see something of the greatness of God. He marveled at God’s power revealed in the created world. As he thought about how transient his own life was, John Newton saw how insignificant he was before this omnipotent God. John Newton realized what a vile creature he really was. He began to comprehend the blackness of sin in his heart, and he felt a desperate need for the Grace of God to overtake his heart and his life. He turned his life over to God and was made a completely new person.

His conversion was dramatic and complete. He became a minister, he wrote many hymns, and he influenced thousands of people to put their faith in Jesus Christ. He pastored a church outside of London, and at his death there was a plaque put in that church on which was written his epitaph. The words contained therein are those things which John Newton most wanted those people to remember about him. It says, "Sacred to the memory of John Newton, once a blasphemer and a libertine and slave of slaves in Africa, but renewed, purified, pardoned, and appointed to preach that gospel which once he had labored to destroy."

That’s grace. Paul sums up that amazing grace of God, the grace that he himself knew so intimately and so gloriously, here in this fifth chapter of Romans. No one before or since has been able to capture in words the essence of that grace as the Apostle Paul does here and throughout the book of Romans--that same grace which overtook John Newton and transformed his life and which has overtaken and transformed the lives of countless millions down through the ages. Paul writes, "While we were yet helpless, while we were yet weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man--though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die. But . . . while we were yet sinners Christ died for us."

The amazing grace of God. Do you understand what that means? Can any of us fully understand what stands behind that grace and what that grace really means for life today?

I can assure you it’s not what one young man said, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, when he was asked for a definition for grace. He said, "Grace is a blue-eyed blonde with a wiggle when she walks." I can assure you that is not what grace is. Someone else has tried to capture the meaning of grace in this acrostic: Grace is "God’s riches at Christ’s expense." And that’s about as good as we can get. That’s about as simple as we can make the grace of God. "God’s riches at Christ’s expense." Our greatest need is to understand that grace, to accept that grace for ourselves and to live our lives based on that grace.

Consider first the sin that makes such grace necessary. A quick review of any of the newspapers today, just a few minutes sitting before a television set or before the radio, and you will have no doubt as to the terrible tragedy of sin in life all about us. We are still trying to come to grips with that horrible situation that took place out in Oklahoma City. But that’s just one of the many, many things that happen across our world every day, whereby the hatred and the cruelty of human beings are dumped on others, and they experience the tragedy of the mean-spiritedness, the selfishness, the demonic evil that’s in the heart of many people.

You open your newspaper or you sit before your TV and you see example after example of fraud, of cheating, of theft and murder; you see every type of perversion and brutality imaginable to humanity--strife and enmity and hatred, visited upon individuals, visited upon groups of people all across our world. If you and I would look deep in our hearts, we could see that the source of that sin which we see out in the world is within us. Apart from Jesus Christ, we see in our own hearts fear and hatred and selfishness and a greedy and a grasping nature. We see a mean-spiritedness; we see in our own hearts temptations enticing us to do all that we know is against the will of God. If these problems were confined to the world outside, they would not trouble us so greatly. But they are within our own hearts and minds.

The comedian Jack Paar got to the heart of our problem one day when he said, in looking back and thinking about his life, "I see that my life is one big obstacle race; I have been its chief obstacle. I have even been the one who’s caused myself the great problems that I’ve known, the heartbreaking sorrow that I’ve known, no one else but me, I’m the one who has done that."

Go to Genesis, back in the first part of the Old Testament, and there you find the source of our problems. We human beings, from Adam and Eve down through the generations, generation after generation, have forgotten our Creator; we’ve forgotten our calling, the destiny which God intended for us. God created us to serve Him and love Him, created us to serve others and to love them. But instead we decided to cut ourselves off from God; we decided to ignore God’s purposes for us; we decided to go out on our own to be God in our own lives and do things our way, and therefore we have cut ourselves off from the grace and mercy of our Creator.

Paul, in the first chapter of Romans, gives a stinging indictment of sin and its consequences in our lives. It is the most horrendous description of sin that you’ll read anywhere, and it shows how we have refused to listen to God. We’ve been unappreciative toward God, we’ve turned our backs on God, because we want to live life our way, to do things the way we want to do them. We refuse to be the stewards over this world that God has called us to be; we refuse to be obedient unto Him. And as Paul lists the catalog of sins, he gives a description of a number of sins and then closes each section with these ringing words, "and God gave them up." And again the catalog of sins and again the words, "and God gave them up." And again, "and God gave them up." Five or six times those words ring out as Paul brings God’s indictment against us. Paul is saying here that we stand under the wrath of God, under His subtle anger against all that is evil and sinful within us and in this world.

Isaiah, chapter 64, verses 4 to 7, shows our standing before God apart from Jesus Christ and our need of that grace which only He can give. It says, "We sinned and in our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved? We’ve all become like one who is unclean and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like the leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is none that calls upon Thee or calls upon Thy name, that stirs himself to take hold upon Thee." And then it talks about the tragic consequences of our ignoring and rejecting God, for it says, "For Thou has hidden thy face from us and has delivered us into the hands of our iniquities."

That’s what Paul was talking about there so pointedly, with such devastation, in that first chapter of Romans. God has delivered us into the hands of our iniquities and we experience the consequences of that estrangement from God in our homes, in our relationships with our mates, with our children and other relatives, with our neighbors; we experience it in the community here; we experience it on out to the ends of the world whereby our iniquities are visiting their consequences upon us. That’s pretty depressing stuff, isn’t it? But it’s reality. What it says is that our unaided human nature, our unaided human condition, is hopeless before God. There’s nothing that we can do to bring ourselves up out of the muck and mire in which we live day by day. We really can’t do anything in the long run about it.

But you know our human nature is always to say, "Well, I can do it. Yes, I can. I don’t need God. I don’t need others. I’ll just make some adjustments here; I’ll do this, I’ll do that, I’ll do the other and I’ll come out right in the end."

It’s been said that you can go to school and get an education, but do you know what you’ll be? You’ll be an educated sinner. You can go to a psychiatrist for your messed up mind and you can get that straightened up somewhat, and you can get adjusted to the evil and wrong that you do, but you’ll just be an adjusted sinner. You can go to a medical doctor and he or she can give you some medicine to help you feel better, maybe to make you a bit more healthy, but you’ll still just be a healthy sinner. You can make a lot of money, you can become wealthy, rich as you could want to be, and yet in the end all you’ll be is a rich sinner.

Isaiah says, "In our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?" Apart from God’s help, apart from the mercy of Jesus Christ, the answer is a damning no. There is no salvation without him. But when we look to Him, when we understand His grace and mercy toward us, our hearts take hope and courage, and the answer to, "Shall we be saved?" is a resounding yes, a glorious yes, for God loves us so much that He would not leave us in our situation. God would not let us experience the just desserts that we brought upon ourselves. So sin--your sin, my sin, the sins of this world--that’s what makes grace necessary.

Let’s look next at how God makes His grace available. We find it here in verse 6 and verse 8. It says that, "While we were still helpless at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. . . God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us."

I want you to take notice of the three conditions that Paul says precede this grace. All of them are found in phrases that begin with the word "while." While we were still or yet weak or helpless, when we could not do anything for ourselves, God stepped in through Jesus Christ. Then he goes on to say that while we were yet sinners, while we were yet in the state of having turned our backs upon God, deliberately choosing to do wrong, deliberately choosing to take life into our own hands and live it our way and do it our way, Jesus Christ stepped in. And then it says that while we were still enemies, we were reconciled to God through His Son.

We tend to overlook the evil in our own lives and sometimes the lives of others. After all, we’re getting better and better and one day we’re going to arrive, we assure ourselves. There are many paths to Heaven; you take your way and I’ll take my way. We’re all going to get there in the end. Paul reminds us that without Christ we’re enemies of God.

A great preacher of this generation some years ago said we’re not poor, lost sheep who have wandered our way astray, but we are rebels caught with weapons in our hands. We have raised them against God, and we dare Him to do anything about it.

While we were yet helpless, while we were still sinners, while we were still enemies, God in his great love and mercy reached down in his grace to help us. God’s grace is made available to us through the shed blood of Christ on the cross.

This cross proclaims God’s perfect love for his creation and for you and me, but it also proclaims his perfect holiness and his perfect revulsion against the sin that He finds in us--the sin that caused the cross to be placed on this earth in the first place. He identified Himself with us through Christ when Christ came into this stained and sordid world, and he experienced personally sin’s destructive effects from you and me and all the other inhabitants of this planet. He let us betray him, he let us hate him, he felt our cruelty and rebellion, he felt that heart-wrenching agony of being separated from the Father. That experience of fellowship was broken between him and the Father, and he experienced the full misery of hell for you and me. He experienced the full extent, the full consequences of our sins in his own being. The scripture says, "He who knew no sin became sin for us," so that in his holiness, in his purity, in his power, as we turn to him, he can change our hearts and make us acceptable to him.

Paul uses two terms in this passage to show what Christ did for us on the cross. There are other ways to describe what he did, but these two ways are very significant. He uses the word "justified" and he uses the word "reconciled." From these, of course, we get our words "justification" and "reconciliation."

The word justification is a legal term; it comes from the courtroom. God has given us his laws so that we might have harmonious relationships with one another, peace with one another, and peace with Him. These laws stem from that first and foremost law which states that we shall love God with all our heart, mind, soul and love our neighbors as ourselves. He gives us these laws that we might have harmony in our relationships with Him and with others and that we might live a good and upright and godly life.

But we break those laws, we transgress them, we become guilty lawbreakers before Him. God is the God who ordained right and wrong; He is the God of justice, the God of righteousness, and He cannot let our sin pass, so we stand condemned before his bar of justice. Our penalty must somehow be paid.The scripture tells that Christ came to die on the cross. There he takes that penalty for us, the penalty not only for our sins and our lawbreaking, but also for the price we’d never pay in all eternity. Then God, that righteous judge, gives us remission for that penalty. He gives us pardon for our sin.

Now He does not suddenly declare that in our badness all of a sudden we are free from sin and that we are good. He does not say that we are no longer sinners, but he does say that we are free from the liability of our sin. We will never have to pay that again because Christ has paid that price. He’s paid that penalty.

A teacher of theology named Wayne Ward inspired his students because he had a great love for the scriptures and a love for the Lord Jesus Christ and a love for people. Wayne tells this experience that came out of his years as a child living in the hills of Arkansas.

He said his father was a very strict man. Wayne was one of several brothers and the people in that neighborhood would often say, "I’m sure glad I’m not one of Grant Ward’s sons." He was a man who had a quick temper, and you could feel the heat of his wrath at times.

All those boys were given chores to do, as is normal on the farm. They had to do these things in order to stay in their father’s good graces and to keep the farm running as it should.

One day the family decided they were going to take a trip to St. Louis. This was a once in a lifetime experience for those poor dirt farmers there in the hills of Arkansas to go to St. Louis, the big city, to see the lights and all. Wayne was so excited about it, as was all the family. The father assigned chores that had to be done before the family could leave for their trip.

The days passed by until it was the afternoon before the big excursion to St. Louis. And suddenly the horrible thought dawned upon Wayne that he had dilly-dallied around and had not done his chores. And now it was too late and there wasn’t enough time, even if he worked all night long to get those chores done. Even more horrible was the thought that he’d have to face his father and experience his anger and wrath.

The penalty the father had laid out early on was that if you did not do your chores you wouldn’t make the trip. So Wayne had to face his father, and his father looked at him with that stern look and said, "You know what the penalty is, son. You won’t make that trip. You’re not going to make the trip with us. That’s the penalty for being disobedient and not doing your work."

Wayne said he broke down and cried his heart out. Then he felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. His father did something to him then to show him the great compassion of the heavenly father. He took him by the hand and lifted him up and took him around behind the barn, and there he showed him that his chores had been done. His father himself had done those chores.

Wayne was so filled with relief and wondering gratitude, the only thing he could say over and over again was this: "You did this for me, you did this just for me, Father, you did this just for me." *

Dear friends, I want to tell you today that Jesus Christ died on that cross just for you, just for me and just for every individual on this planet. As someone said, if we had been the only one here he still would have done that for you and for me. Paul says since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. He has done that on the cross.

So one of the words Paul uses is the word justified, that legal word; and the other word he uses is the word reconciled or reconciliation. It’s a family word, it’s a warm word, a very personal word. It points to the deeper consequences of our sin against God and others. Sin corrodes and destroys, it puts a barrier in our relationships with others and a barrier between us and God. We become suspicious of God and of His goodness. We don’t believe His promises, we become hostile to His purposes for our lives, and we turn our backs on Him. We have a broken relationship, and that broken relationship cannot be overcome by what we do because it’s against the grace of the Creator and Redeemer. We cannot overcome it because of the magnitude of sin that causes that broken relationship to happen in the first place. It cannot be overlooked; it cannot be pardoned. Something has to happen from the outside for that relationship to be mended, for us to be brought back to peace with the Father and with others.

The only force on this earth that could do that was the death of Christ on the cross, for on the cross Christ came to show the magnitude of the love of God. He bore the penalty for our sin, and as we come to understand what he’s done to take away the penalty of our sin, as we come to understand the magnitude of his love for us, then our hearts are brought to the point of brokenness. We see our need for that restored relationship with him, and our desire is to respond to that love and be swept up in the arms of the Father and held close to His breast, because we know the loneliness of life apart from that restored relationship. We know the emptiness that life holds apart from the joy and blessedness of that experience.

Paul says here in that first verse: "Since therefore we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." As we put our faith and our hope in Christ, and do it from the heart, because of what He’s done for us, we have peace with God. God can adopt us then into His family. The quarrel with God has been settled. Christ has seen to that. By his death and through his death, Christ changes our objective standing with God so we are no longer accounted as guilty sinners condemned and unclean before Him. Now, God looks upon us as those who are forgiven, as those who are cleansed, and as those who stand in goodness before Him.

His death changes our objective standing with God, but it also changes our personal relationship with Him. The penalty for sin is removed, the hostility and indifference that we hold in our hearts has now vanished away; His love has taken it away. We put our faith in Him and He changes our nature so that we leave behind more and more this desire and this sinning, and more and more we are created in His image to become like Him.

Paul is pointing to that, I think, when he says: "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." He is saying that the risen Christ, the living Christ, living in our hearts, gives us strength against the pounding forces of life, gives us strength against the temptation, and helps us not to yield. He gives us victory in the troubles and the heartbreaks that we go through. He helps us truly to live in joy and hope day by day. God makes grace available to us through the shed blood of Christ. What a glorious, glorious truth that is!

But finally, a summary of the benefits of this amazing grace. Paul catalogs these in the first few verses of the chapter. There’s a right standing with God which leads to reconciliation and peace with God; there’s access to His grace, to that loving favor of His, so we can come to Him as children unafraid to a loving Father who hears our prayers and wants to bless us with blessings innumerable. There is our experience of His kindness moment by moment, day by day; there’s that hope of sharing in the glory of God; there’s that victory over our troubles and that growth through Him.

Paul catalogs these benefits, lays out the pattern for that growth, the troubles and the endurance, and then the character that’s produced. Out of that character the hope comes, and the hope comes because God’s love is shared abroad in the hearts through the Holy Spirit.

But perhaps best of all is that intimate communion, that sweet fellowship, with Him day by day so that our lives are nourished and built up, so that we know His presence in joy, in wonder and in love. What more could we ask as we think about life? What more could we want in life than these things?

Every year around the Lenten and Easter season, an old movie called Ben Hur is shown on television. There are several memorable scenes throughout that movie:a great sea battle, exciting chariot races, an exposure to one of the most repugnant leper colonies that you will ever see, but nothing makes a stronger impression upon the viewer as does the scene of the crucifixion of Jesus.

As you watch that movie, you hear the nails being pounded through flesh with a heavy hammer. Sound echoes through the air. As you continue to watch, you see them as they struggle to push that cross upright and finally to slam it down into its place, in a sickening thud as it falls. You know that the weight of Christ falls against those nails. You can imagine maybe just in a small way something of the pain He feels. Then slowly Jesus’ blood begins to drip on the cross, first one drop then another, and another, and pretty soon a small puddle is formed there at the foot of the cross. Then it begins to rain a gentle rain and the water and the blood get mixed together. They start down the hillside as just a trickle, and then it seems to rain harder, and the blood flows more freely and it washes all over creation.

That’s a testimony that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us and this world from all our sordidness and all of our sin and makes us clean and pure and holy in the eyes of God. Here God declares His peace with us, His reconciliation with us. Here He makes it possible for us to be restored to fellowship with Him and to be adopted into His family and become His beloved children.

Do you know how they used to catch monkeys in the jungle? They would take a clear glass bottle with long neck and tie a rope around it and hang it up in the green branches of a tree top. Then they’d take a little red rubber ball and put in the bottom of that jar and wait for monkeys to come along.

A monkey would eventually arrive and see the little ball there, just so attractive, that little red ball against the greenery of the trees and the leaves. He would reach his hand in and grasp that ball and hold on to it and he would try to get it out. Of course he couldn’t get it out, because he would make a fist and get his hand stuck. And then along would come the captors. The monkey would hear them, he would see them perhaps and he would struggle and struggle, but he could not get his hand out of that jar because he kept holding on to that ball. If he would just let it go, he could have been free, but he wouldn’t let it go. He kept hanging on to it.

If then you and I can hang onto our doubts, and our fears, and our selfish pride and our self-willed ways, we’ll go through this life unhappy and unfulfilled and we’ll die that way. Worst of all, if we hold on, we will enter into the misery of that terrible thing Jesus calls hell, from which no creature can escape, for all eternity.

I want to ask you today if you’re holding onto some fear in your life, some doubt, some self-willed habit, some pride in your life that’s keeping you from that right relationship with God and that sense of being at peace with Him, from knowing the cleansing from sin and the joy that He brings, and the eternal life He wants to give you. If that is your situation, would you let go today? Just open your heart, put yourself in His hands, let Him have all of yourself. Paul says that the experience of grace depends on us. Will you today make that response, receive God’s grace, and accept God’s blessing? Amen.