Easily Excitable

A few things I want to establish for you this morning, right out of the gate: 

• God adores you in a way you’ve always longed to be loved.
• Your biggest problem in this life is sin and the consequence- death. 
• God longs to bring you home to an eternal life with Himself.
• God’s required sacrifice for the sin of humanity was paid by Jesus Christ, the Son of God and God Incarnate.
• God conquered your mortal enemy- death- and thereby can give you eternal life.

I write this up front because, sometimes in the process of writing, I can get in the weeds or go down a rabbit hole or four. 

These five aforementioned non-negotiables are the things I want to make sure you get, if you get nothing else. 

There is nothing else in this life worth knowing if we don’t know this. 

A few weeks ago, I started reading the Book of Romans. 

After you’ve been to Rome, honestly, reading Paul’s letter to the Christians there is almost like a rite of passage or something.

Now, here is the thing about Romans: it’s probably one of the most important books of the Bible when it comes to understanding our need for a Savior, as well as understanding that Jesus is that Savior. 

Romans is, at times, hard to understand for me. 

However, Romans understands me perfectly. There are a few times where Paul lays into the idea that, just because we have grace doesn’t mean we get that as a license to sin- that human thought of “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

That’s been my heart often. 

Also, Paul looks at how, even after salvation, as we are doing our best to walk with Christ, we continue to get stuck in sin, and we do what we know we shouldn’t, as well as avoid doing what we know we should.  

One thing I’ve gotten stuck on in this book is this:

Romans really lays into the idea of salvation as a gift. 

We all love gifts. But, as with all things, there are rules to gifts: 

1. You must accept the gift to get the gift. 
2. You didn’t do anything special to receive the gift. 
3. There is no taking back a gift. 
4. The best gift is a needed or desired gift. 

I’ve been rolling around these ideas while I’ve been reading Romans, specifically in Romans 5:15-17:

15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

To understand this passage, gifts, and all that jazz, I have to work a little bit. 

Me personally? I like charts: I’m a visual learner. So, after I read this passage, I got to drawing out some charts, specifically to help me understand verse 16. 

Here’s what I drew out to understand that

1. From Adam, the one who introduced sin: Sin → judgement → condemnation
2. From Jesus, the One who conquered sin: Trespasses → the gift → justification 

Now, the first ‘equation’ makes sense to us.

We may not like it to be applied to us personally, but it squares with our ideas about justice. 

Here is the base of those thoughts: when someone does something wrong, they should be judged, and they should be punished. 

If someone were to hurt my husband, I would want that person judged and punished to the full extent of the law (in my mind, the more aggressive the punishment, the better). 

That’s because I want justice. And that ultimately is what justice is, right? 

It’s righting the wrongs and equaling the scales. 

Let’s apply that to ourselves. 

We can’t immediately jump into it with us as the starting point, though: 

Why is there a need for justice? Well, because there is sin. 

Well, what actually is sin? 

For a long time, I just thought of sin as ‘doing something bad.’

That doesn’t tell the whole story. 

Because if we approach sin as just ‘something bad,’ then God ultimately becomes a supernatural, eternal police officer, just waiting to pull us over and strike us for just something bad (and where does ‘bad’ even come from in the first place? Who decides these things?). 

I watched a clip online the other day that said that, if we start the gospel at the fall of man, we get it wrong.

The Gospel begins with God.

If it doesn’t begin with God, then really what does it matter? Sin doesn’t exist without God in that sin isn’t sin if there is no one to judge it up against. 

We need to see the plumb line in order to understand our error. 

God- Almighty and righteous. He has never been wrong, nor will He ever err. 

There is no evil in Him: there are no bad intentions. There is only purity of deed and intent. We see that, and then we see ourselves in light of that. 

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. 

God designed us for relationship with Him. 

He designed us to live perfectly with Him. 

He designed us in His own Image with a propensity and ability to give Him all the glory. 

Glory is the due admiration, respect, and focus owed to the Creator.

Now, here is the most incredible thing: God created no two of us the same. We all have different loves, desires, quirks, skills, and gifts. 

We were made with a desire to do those things with God in mind and in our hearts. 

God created you and delighted in that creation when He inlaid your abilities: your ability to paint, garden, hunt, fish, play pickleball, sing, cook, love others, do math- all of this was to reveal who He is- to show how incredible He is. 

And yet, we’ve all fallen short of that glory. 

At first glance, Sin doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. 

However, God takes sin seriously and with good reason: look at how it’s metastasized across time, since the garden.

 What began with defiance morphed into genocide, chaos, and the utter depravity of man. 

All that from a ‘little’ rebellion.

Sin may start as a small divergence from God’s way, but expand that out, and you’ll be entirely apart from God by the end of it. And that is the truth of the human experience. 

The wages of sin is death. Why? 

Because when we go our own foolish way, we strike out apart from God. In the wake of one bad decision, we’ll give way to another, until we’re cascading down a mountainside, rolling away from Him. 

This is the slippery slope in its fullest.

And when we go one step away from God, we go one step away from life. God is Life in His essence. So when we take even a one degree step away from Him, we choose death.

To walk away from God is to walk away from Life, and it is to walk toward death. 

There is no in-between.

That’s all under the first equation: it’s depressing. 

It’s disastrous, but it’s ultimately what we deserve for our rebellion against God. 

The good news, though, is that there is a better way- a way paved in the flowing blood of Jesus Christ. 

This equation is different because it makes no sense to us: it’s not within our human capacity to really understand how this can be, but here goes. 

The second equation is such: 

Trespasses → the gift → justification 

Because God is just– such as we established in the first section- there must be punishment for the trespasses committed. 

We also looked at our sins in the first section, so I won’t rehash. 

However, the wonder of this scenario is that God Himself pays for the trespasses.

This is the gift: that God so loved the world and so intimately knew our issue and what it would take to bring us home that He paid for us to get there. 

This gift was the most expensive in all of eternity, as it was Jesus’ blood- God Himself’s lifeblood!- spilled on our behalf. 

Jesus touched down on this earth in a manger with one main mission: 

To save humanity. He lived a perfect life because He was God, yet He felt every temptation because He was man. Still, He lived the perfect life, and He was the perfect substitute for us. 

A spotless Lamb for the sacrifice our sin required. 

To save mankind, you need a man for a substitute. Because the wages of sin is death, to fulfill God’s requirement, death was required: blood was needed to cleanse us. 

But that death had to be that of a perfect substitute.

And praise God Almighty, Jesus was that for us.

The only One who has the power to give life is the One who conquered death. He defeated it: He overcame it. He is life in its essence, and Jesus alone has the power to give it to us. 

As a result? 

When we are united with Jesus- when we choose to put our faith in Him and accept that gift- we are justified before God. 

We didn’t circumvent the process of justice. Instead, justice was carried out when God poured His wrath out on Jesus Christ. 

Jesus gives us that righteousness when we take Him up on His offer of salvation, and from now until eternity, we are seen by God as spotless. 

We are justified and made right before God. 

We are given the gift of Jesus’ righteousness because He paid for our wickedness. 

We are given the gift of being loved, accepted, and welcomed as children of God. 

This is a gift because there is nothing we can do to earn it. 

This is a gift because salvation cannot be revoked. 

This is a gift because it comes from the pure love and mercy and grace of our good, good Creator. 

This is a gift because we must accept it for it to be ours. 

And this gift? There is none more perfect. 

The best kinds of gifts are those we need or want. 

If you never want the gift of salvation and never reach out for it, God still offers it. 

He still provided the body of His Son, broken, to pay for your rebellion, as well as mine. 

This is the biggest need any of us have: the need for the perfect sacrifice for our own wickedness. 

Salvation isn’t a word I talk much about. 

And yet, the only reason I’m here, where I am, is because of the salvation God gave me through the finished work of Jesus Christ. 

Salvation is a simple concept, yet it’s deep. 

To some degree, it’s as simple as a door: you can choose to walk through it or not. The choice is simple. 

Yet, what’s hiding behind that door is the fullness of what we crave: mercy, grace, hope, goodness, and a love our hearts long for. And all of us do long for that. 

How full, too, would be the loss of walking past the door. It would be a dangerous thing to do so, but the biggest loss would be walking past the One who longs for you to come in.

Praise God for this simple, yet unsearchable, unexplainable, unimaginable gift. Thank You, Jesus, for this salvation.