Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

Good morning everyone!

So nice to see all of you here today.

I hope you have all been blessed in Christ this week and have come ready to worship God in the recognition that God is always good.

I want to welcome our guests with open hearts.

We are very glad to have you with us to worship God.

Please stick around for a moment if you can after service so we can say hi.

And out in the hall there is a table with cards.

We would love it if you could your name and any info you’re comfortable sharing and drop it in the trays on the back table.

There are also other cards like our prayer request cards back there that you can fill out if there is any way you need us to stand with you in Christ.

As has been mentioned, we have our Spring church ministry meeting immediately after services.

I have timed this to less than 15 minutes.

And the purpose is to show you what’s on the horizon this spring for our church family.

Everyone is welcome to stay.

Assignments

Romans 5:6-11.

Challenge

Be accessible to the community

Every month we have a new challenge that is meant to help facilitate the work of our church.

In January it was “be unashamed of Christ.”

In February it was “be unashamed of the gospel”.

In March we were challenged to “internalize the Word”.

And last month was to “create a friendship prayer list”.

This month I think our challenge is suitable because we’re coming into springtime.

We could easily live in this day and age almost completely isolated from the world.

We could live in such a way that we don’t make ourselves available to the people around us.

But that isn’t compatible with our calling to “love our neighbors”.

So your challenge this month is to be accessible to your community.

Pray on this.

Apply your wisdom.

And look for ways to make yourselves open to the community.

Our church is going to help you in this by creating our community garden, which we see as just one small way in which we can connect to and love our community.

So let’s get ready to get into our message for today.

Pause to Go Live > > >

Hope in the Glory of God

Welcome again and thank you for joining us today to celebrate the hope we have in the glory of God!

Our message today brings the story of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome to one of its key turning points.

We don’t often pay attention to the story of Romans because Romans is not written in narrative form.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a story.

The story of Romans is that one of the most renowned apostles of the Christian Church is writing to a small band of disciples in one of the most powerful cities on earth.

Their Jewish leadership was exiled by Emperor Claudius, leaving the Gentile Christians to reform and carry on the mission of the Church by themselves.

Once the Jews were allowed to return to Rome, they found the Church they had left behind very much changed.

Paul is writing into this chaos to people he doesn’t know in order to call them forward in the Kingdom mission of their Lord.

In short, the story narrative illustrates how God takes diverse peoples and makes them one by transforming them into the image of his perfect Son through love.

And so we find the tragedy of our human story is redeemed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in which we now share through faith.

Exegesis

Now let’s take a moment to make a couple brief observations about today’s text.

First, we’re continuing in the middle of Paul’s thought about the results of our being set right with God by trusting the love that has been proven to us in Jesus Christ.

This is the first thought in his fourth argument (5:1-11).

I think this is quite significant because Jesus’ good news reveals the quite shocking twist in God’s redemptive story that our salvation will not ultimately stand or fall by our own strength, but is, instead, secured by God’s divine love.

And it is this love that has brought peace between God and humanity.

This continuity is stressed by the phrase “And not only that, but we also” (v.

3).

So we must endeavor to keep today’s message in sync with this thought.

Second, this thought is the cross-section of one of the major themes in Romans, which explores how fallen humanity can obtain the right to happily stand with confidence in God’s presence.

After-all, we have offended God by doing the things that are evil in his sight.

So how can we ever enjoy the bliss of being in his presence now that we have become his enemies?

Paul answers this question in quite an unexpected way: he explains how the means by which we are set right now only allows us to celebrate our right to stand confidently in God’s presence, but is also, itself, a “call-to-action” for the Christians in Rome.

“Yes”, he knows they are small in number and outcasts in Roman society.

But how can those who stand confidently in the very presence of God fear mere mortals (even Caesar himself)?

In other words, the evidence that they have come into God’s presence is seen in their confidence to carry out God’s mission for the Church irrespective of the troubles they face.

So now we’re ready to look closer at today’s message.

“And not only that” (v.

3): Since we’re picking up in the middle of this thought, we need to reorient ourselves by asking to what does this refer?

The “referent”, as scholars like to call it, is the Christian’s celebratory boast in the hope of God’s glory.

And you’ll notice that this hope in God’s glory is obtained through the grace of Christ’s peace by faith:

So Paul means, not only do we boast the hope of God’s glory, but because of this hope, we even boast in our tribulations!

So we not only have confidence to stand in the glory of God’s presence, but we also now have confidence to face all of life’s afflictions because we stand in God’s presence.

You can already hear the not so distant echoes of the new man:

“But we also boast in our afflictions” (v.

3): Immediately we start to recognize that the Christian idea of “hope” is not merely intellectual or even emotional.

For, if that were the case, our hope would be very fragile and could be shaken the moment life wakes us up from our daydreams and crushes our hopes.

But our hope is not composed of mere daydreams.

Instead, we have hope that is secured by our experience of God, who is daily at work in our life.

We’ll explore this thought in greater depth momentarily.

Now what kind of “boasting” is in mind here?

Well, first, we gain some valuable insights by reading other translations:

Romans 5:3 (NASB 2020)

3 And not only this, but we also celebrate in our tribulations...

Romans 5:3 (ESV)

3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings...

These translations bring out the functional nuance of these words in this context.

We celebrate or rejoice even in the face of our terrible trials on this earth because of our hope in the glory of God.

So this word, which formally refers to “boasting”, has the meaning in this context of celebrating in confidence.

This is why I recommend reading across the spectrum of translations.

Briefly give some recommendations > > >

In other words, we’ve been developing the Christian idea of how fallen people obtain confidence in God’s holy presence.

Paul began by challenging the idea that our confidence to enter God’s presence is obtained through our heritage or observance of the law.

One of the many problems with these ideas is that Abraham himself had no special heritage and did not possess the law.

So how was Abraham able to be right with God?

Even more than this, everyone violates the law and proves themselves guilty in God’s sight.

So how can guilty sinners obtain the joy of entering God’s holy presence in confidence when they violate the very thing in which they entrusted their confidence?

Since no one will be justified in God’s sight through the law because the law only exposes our guilt (3:20), and because the righteousness of God comes through faith (3:22), all boasting in ourselves is excluded by the law of faith since by this law our confidence to enter God’s presence with joy is established in Christ!

You see?

Even if our works gave us the right to boast before other fallen people, our guilt would still shame us before God.

So there must be another way for fallen people to be reconciled to God.

And there is!

The good news of Jesus Christ loudly proclaims that peace is made between us and God through the resurrection power of his love.

And by God’s grace we will unpack this last statement in far greater detail in chapters 6 and 8.

And this develops the theme of how sinners are transformed by the grace of God and secured by the power of his resurrection so that our reconciliation to God does not depend on our unreliable strength, but, instead, is established in the faithfulness of Christ.

So now we joyfully boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ!