Justified by Grace through Faith

Getting a Ticket in a Small Town

I grew up in a farming community in east-central Alberta and at the center of that farming community was a town named Provost.

Provost is not a large town. There are high schools in the Lower Mainland of BC that have more people than Provost did, but it was a big deal to us. And the thing about a small town like that is, on the positive side, you can have supportive relationships that last a lifetime. On the negative side, everybody knows everybody else’s business.

One evening, when I was a teenager, I was driving around with some friends in Provost, and I got stopped by the RCMP. They did a search of my truck, found a bottle of alcohol in the back, and gave me a ticket for illegal possession of alcohol—because I wasn’t old enough to have that in the back of my truck. One of my friends, who owned the alcohol, said, “Give the ticket to me, and I’ll pay for it.” So I gave the ticket to them and never thought about it again—until a few weeks later.

Now in Provost back then, court was held once a month, and some people would go to court just for the personal entertainment value. I was in high school, and one day when court was in session in the afternoon, some of my classmates came back and said, “Your name was read out in court today. There’s a ticket that you haven’t paid.” I don’t know if the words “warrant” or “arrest” were actually uttered, but I at least imagined that they were, and I got super anxious. I didn’t know what to do.

So that night, I told my dad.

Now, another thing that can be a benefit in a small town is that people know each other. My dad knew the local justice of the peace, and he made a phone call. I don’t know what happened, but I never heard about that ticket ever again.

Was I guilty? Absolutely. I was 100% guilty. But my friend paid my ticket, and my dad took my shame away.

The Burden of Our Sin

You may not have had an embarrassing entanglement with the law like I had, but all of us face a similar kind of situation—because every day, we either fail to do good things that we should do or we find ourselves doing bad things we shouldn’t.

Now imagine you received a ticket for each time you did something wrong or failed to do something good. At the end of the day, every one of us would have a stack of tickets. Now imagine that all of our tickets were put into books—kind of like this stack of books right here. There would be a huge pile of books full of tickets that each and every one of us would accumulate over the course of a lifetime. And we would be carrying the burden—the weight—of these ticket books around with us wherever we go.

And there is nothing we can do to relieve that burden. That burden weighs on us. It impacts our physical well-being, our mental well-being, and how we see the world.

So the question I’m inviting you to think about with me this morning is: Who will rescue us from our bondage to sin, guilt, and shame so that we can live in freedom, peace, and joy?

To help us explore that, we’re going to eventually get to Romans chapter 3, verses 19 to 31. So if you have a Bible or a Bible app, I invite you to go there now.

The Problem of God’s Righteousness

But along the way, we’re going to think about a very important word in the book of Romans—and that word is righteousness. And righteousness is a problem.

What does it mean? Well, righteousness is the quality or state of being morally correct—the quality of holiness, purity, and uprightness. Now, properly speaking, only God is righteous. But in the Old Testament, people would, at times, be called righteous because, you see, righteousness involves fulfilling the obligations of a relationship. Righteousness is relational.

So people in the Old Testament would be called righteous when they were deprived of what was due to them in a relationship, and yet they called out to God and trusted in Him for vindication.

For example, when the Israelites were in slavery in Egypt, they were righteous over and against the Egyptians. They were righteous in the sense that the Egyptians were not giving them what was due to them. They were also righteous in the sense that they were trusting in God to make them—and all things—right.

Now, righteousness is a problem. It’s a problem for God. And here’s why: when God created the world and all that exists—including the first human beings—everything was perfect. But at some point, the first human beings sinned, and all of creation fell into corruption as a result.

And from that moment on, God had a problem. His problem was this: He still loved His broken creation and the broken human beings who lived there. But how could He be both loving and righteous? How could He be both merciful and just?

We get a hint of how God is going to solve this problem in Genesis chapter 15. What’s happening here is Abraham asks God for some kind of affirmation—like, how will he know that God will keep His promises of giving him a large number of descendants and a land they could call their own? Because God had promised Abraham that He would do that. So Abraham asked, How will I know?

What God does is tell Abraham to take several animals, cut them in half, and set the halves apart from each other with a pathway in between.

Historians tell us that what this is—what’s happening here—is what’s called a lord-vassal (or lord-servant) covenant ceremony. What would happen is this: the vassal, the lesser noble, would promise the lord or king that he would provide soldiers for the king’s army and he promised to be loyal to the king. And the king, in turn, would promise the vassal freedom of movement, freedom of trade, and protection within the king’s realm.

Now, in these treaty ceremonies, these covenant ceremonies, the lesser person would walk between the severed animals as a way of saying, If I ever break this covenant, may what has happened to these animals happen to me.

But what is so unusual about the ceremony that God did with Abraham is that it wasn’t Abraham who walked between the animals—it was God, in the form of a smoking firepot and a blazing torch, who passed between them.

So God was, in effect, saying this to Abraham: Whenever you or one of your descendants break this covenant that I am making with you, may the consequences fall on Me. For I will keep My part of the agreement—and I will also fulfill your part as well.

Now, God’s righteousness is a problem for God. It’s also a problem for humanity—and it’s a problem for humanity because we can never meet the perfect standard that God’s righteousness requires.

That standard is made clear in God’s moral law.

Now remember from last Sunday—there’s that issue between Jews and Gentiles in the Roman church, and they’re having trouble getting along. And Paul makes the point that God’s moral law was given to the Jews in the Ten Commandments and elsewhere in the Old Testament, so they know it.

But God’s moral law, Paul says, is also revealed to the Gentiles—or non-Jewish people—through their conscience. He writes, “Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts.”

So what this means is that everyone is under the law. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Jew or a Gentile—we are all under the law.

God’s Righteousness Saves Us

So now let us turn to our passage for today, Romans 3, starting at verse 19. What we have here is that Paul is describing a law court scene. Humanity has gathered before God the Father as Judge, and all our books of tickets are presented as evidence—opened up to show all the things we did wrong or the good things we failed to do. And God’s verdict is absolutely clear.

Paul writes, “We know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God.”

When we stand before God with our sin, there is nothing we can say in our defense—nothing at all. We’re guilty as charged.

The law is like a mirror. A mirror can show us that we have a dirty face, but it can’t clean it.

So continuing on, Paul says, “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.”

And then we have, dear friends, two of the sweetest words in all of Scripture. Those two words are: But now.

Because those two words indicate a change has happened—a change that changes everything for us.

Now, God’s righteousness saves us.

We continue on with what Paul wrote to the church in Rome: “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.” So that’s the Old Testament. “This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

It’s a gift that God gives to us. He gives us His righteousness through His Son, Jesus Christ—and it’s a gift that none of us deserve. We read, “There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

We’re all on a level playing field here. Every human being is in the same boat. But every human being can also be lifted up by the good news of Jesus Christ, because Paul goes on to say, “And all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

You see, the cross is where God’s love and righteousness—God’s justice and His mercy—meet.

It was love that compelled God the Son to become fully human and live a perfect human life—for you and for me. It was love that moved that God-human, Jesus Christ, to go to a cross and offer up His one and only perfect human-divine life as a sacrifice to pay for all the sins of all humanity throughout all time.

Jesus more than paid for all the sins of all the people in the whole world. By doing so, He opened the gates of heaven for God’s righteousness to come pouring down upon you and upon me. We are now flooded—because of Jesus and what He’s done for us—you are flooded with the purity, holiness, and uprightness of God.

You see, God stayed true to His moral correctness—His righteousness—by dealing with our sin once and for all on the cross. He didn’t let it slide. He made sure the penalty was paid. But God also remained true to His love and to His mercy—by paying that penalty Himself.

How do We Respond to the Gift of God’s Righteousness?

Well, not by boasting, because we play no role in our salvation. There is nothing for us to boast about. And we don’t respond by trying to do some kind of good works to pay God back, because it’s impossible for us to pay God back for the infinite gift He has given to us. Attempting to do so only depreciates the gift, demeans the Giver, and derails us from a proper response.

So what is our proper response to the gift of God’s righteousness? To simply trust—that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone.

For as Paul puts it—his theme, as it’s recorded in The Message paraphrase: “The person in right standing before God, by trusting Him, really lives.”

Forgiveness Makes Us Whole

Years later, when I had kids of my own, I was moved to talk to my dad and ask for his forgiveness—for that and all the many other times I caused him gray hair as a teenager. And he said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Oh, I forgave you for that a long time ago. Wouldn’t you do the same for your kids?”

I said, “Well, yeah…” But the thing is—hearing my father tell me that he had forgiven me made me whole in a way I hadn’t been before.

And the encouragement I want to give to you, dear friends, is to hear the words of forgiveness that your heavenly Father wants to speak to you. Let them wash over you. Receive them. Grab hold of them. Trust in them. And let them make you whole like you’ve never been before.

And so, the challenge I wish to leave with you today is this: receive God’s saving righteousness, which Jesus won for you. Let it make you whole—and then pass it on, so that God can make others whole too.

Amen.