“Big Words – Redemption” – Romans 3:19-24

How many of you remember the old S&H Green Stamps?  For those too young to remember back to the sixties and seventies, lots of grocery stores, gas stations and department stores would give out a certain number of these little green stamps with every purchase.  Then you would save up these stamps and put them in little books that they also gave out until you filled the book or books and then what would you do?

You would “redeem” those books of stamps, either at a Green Stamps store or by mail through their catalog and exchange the stamps for some product that you wanted; usually some kind of housewares or maybe a toy or something.  Now, each stamp was marked with some kind of numerical denomination (not like Baptist or Methodist) but a number like 10, 25 or 50 if I remember right.  But how much was each stamp actually worth?

If you were to try to use one of those stamps to purchase something at the grocery store, how much value did it have?  Absolutely nothing, right?  The stamps, in and of themselves, were completely worthless.  Their value was only realized when they were redeemed but when they were redeemed you could get some nice stuff.  Can I repeat that again for those who think I’m actually talking about stamps?  Their value was only realized when they were…redeemed.

We are starting a new sermon series today entitled, “Big Words” and we are looking at some verses that are at the very core of the Gospel in the book of Romans. Martin Luther labeled them as “the marrow of theology”.  Barnhouse called them “the heart of the Bible”.  Without having a grasp of some of these big words, one cannot grasp the Gospel.  We may not ever completely understand the full eternal significance of some of these words but it is vital to our relationship with God through His Son Jesus and it is vital to our eternities that we have some understanding of them.

Now, we could just look in the dictionary and that would be a good place to start but, again, to get a grasp of the full eternal significance we need to see what Paul said in the New Testament book of Romans, specifically for today’s study, the third chapter, verses 19-24, as we look at the word “redemption” or what it means to be redeemed.  The dictionary defines the word “redeem” as “to convert into something of value”.  Repeat.

Be looking for the word “redeem” or “redemption” and keep that definition in mind as we read these most important words in Romans 3:19-24.  Now 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. ²⁰ 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.  ²¹ But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. ²² This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, ²³ for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴ and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

Our last sermon series was about how God used common people to get His will accomplished and we saw lots of people who were nothing special and had no great gifts or talents and yet God chose them to be His mouthpiece or used them to save the world in which they lived in spite of not being talented or gifted.  Paul was not one of those kinds of people.

As I said, God specialized in using people who were common so that God got the glory and it is the same way today but sometimes God does choose to use highly intelligent and capable people and that is who Paul was.  We know Paul was well-educated and very experienced and influential and we would think that would be a good thing but I think that is exactly why, just after Paul was converted, God told Ananias in Acts chapter 9 to go get Paul so that God could show him just how much he must suffer for the name of God (Acts 9:16).  Paul had a lot to be proud of but God wrung all that out of him and in the process Paul was able to understand great truths and write about them as he does in this passage.

So, if when we read that it sounded like a smart guy talking it is because he was.  But with just a little bit of effort we will be able to fully appreciate Paul’s meaning and will be greatly rewarded as we study what “redemption” really means and what it will mean to us as we leave here and live our lives.

I think it is fascinating that all through the Bible we see the bad news first and then the good news.  If you think about it, the Old Testament was bad news.  It is full of laws and commandments that are impossible to keep.  Following the law involved sacrificing all kinds of animals.  It meant trying to live up to a standard of living that was literally impossible.

But then came the New Testament and it was full of grace, not law.  Jesus changed everything.  He didn’t abolish the law but He said He came to fulfill it and that was the Good News.  Well, Paul lays out this theology in the same way.  He starts with the bad news in verses 19-20.  In fact, most of the first three chapters of Romans up to verse 21 are bad news.

He talks all through here about God’s wrath and the righteous judgment of God is coming and he carries it through to verses 19-20.  In verse 19, Paul basically holds the Old Testament law up as a mirror and he says that every mouth will be silenced.  Nobody can say anything about how good they are or how their good deeds outweigh their bad deeds or how they deserve anything but death and Hell when compared to God’s standard.

We are going to be held accountable to God one of these days and when He judges us by the standard of the Law that Moses wrote so many years ago then we will be completely unable to answer Him.  No excuse, no reason, no fancy lawyer-speak or loop-hole will get any of us out of what we deserve and that’s bad news, right?  In verse 20 he goes on to say that nobody is righteous, an echo of what he says in verse 10 that is also a quotation of what is said in Ecclesiastes 7 that says, “Indeed, there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins.”

Well, if God’s standard is being sinless, then this is bad news!  It’s horrible news!  What are we going to do? In Isaiah chapter 6, Isaiah sees God in a vision.  He says, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. ² Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. ³ And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
    the whole earth is full of his glory.”

⁴ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

And what does Isaiah say when he sees all this?  Look at it!

⁵ “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Isaiah saw who God was and he saw who he was.  He saw the glory of God compared to himself and can’t you just hear the despair in his voice when he says, “I am ruined”?  That’s me, too!  That is how I feel when I realize the gulf, the chasm that is between me and holy God.  I am ruined!  I am no better, no more valuable, no less fragile than one of those green stamps.  I am a ruined man.

Here lately, it seems like everybody is offended by something.  People are all the sudden offended by things they were never offended by before.  They are offended by flags and words and phrases and people and groups and they want them all banned.  Get rid of them!  But these people aren’t truly offended.  Their feelings aren’t really hurt by these things.  I’ll tell you what the problem is.

God has put inside every one of us a desire to know Him and to seek Him and to be like Him.  It says in the very first chapter of the first book of the Bible in Genesis 1 that we were made in His image.  Like a little boy wants to grow up to be like his daddy we want to be like God.  But today, people look in the mirror and they don’t see God or anything like Him and it scares them. Deep down they know better.  They know something is wrong and instead of changing themselves, they want everybody else to change hoping that will make them feel better but they are ultimately and eternally ruined and there is nothing they can do about it.

Paul says in verse 20 that none will be declared righteous by looking at the mirror of the Law.  Nobody can keep even the 10 Commandments completely, much less all the other Mosaic laws.  According to a 3rd century rabbi, Moses gave 365 prohibitions and 248 positive commands. David reduced them to 11 in Psalm 15. Isaiah made them 6 (Isaiah 33:14, 15). Micah 6:8 binds them into 3 commands. Habbakuk reduces them all to one great statement: The just shall live by faith. 

That is the Old Covenant but then came Jesus Who didn’t abolish any of those laws but He fulfilled all of them including being the One in Whom we have our faith.  Do you see it in verse 21?  Look at the very first word of verse 21.  Underline that word “But”.  Put an exclamation mark next to it.  Do a little dance next to that word because it changes everything!

The word “But” right there means that, yes, everything before it is true and it is really bad news for everybody and yet there is good news and Paul is working his way toward it.  I get excited and I want to yell out the word “redemption” but Paul is getting there.  Read it again.  Verse 21 says, “But wait!  There’s more!  Look!  I found a way to be right with God and it is exactly what the Old Testament has been pointing to all along.”

I said before that the Old Testament or Mosaic Laws are like a mirror that shows us where we are dirty and where we have messed up.  When you look in the mirror and see a spot of dirt, you don’t take the mirror off the wall and rub it on your face trying to clean yourself up.  That’s not what mirrors are for.  In the same way, the Law was not meant to save us or make us clean.  It was just meant to show us our need for cleansing and Paul, here in verse 22, says, “Hey, y’all, look!  I found the cleanser!  I found the way to be righteous or right with God and it comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

Then we come to verse 23.  We are getting closer to our ‘Big Word” but first Paul goes back to the bad news for emphasis.  He closes verse 22 by saying that all of us are the same.  There is no difference between Jews and Gentiles when it comes to our need for cleansing in the sight of God.  Then he writes that famous sentence in verse 23 that says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Do you remember how Brian encouraged us to witness a couple of months ago when he preached?  If you are starting with your testimony you want to start with the bad news first.  It helps people to understand what kind of a person you were before you met Jesus.  Tell them briefly about the bad news of who you used to be and then get to the good news of who you are today. 

Or, if you start with scripture, Brian told us to start with the bad news as well and this verse is the verse he chose that says it best.  The bad news is that we are all sinners and then read Romans 6:23 that says that because of our sin we deserve death.  That’s the bad news.  That’s just what Paul is doing here.  He’s following Brian’s guideline!

Then Paul finally comes to verse 24.  Now, if this was me writing, I would have said, “Hey, now, y’all listen to this!  This is the most important thing in the history of the world!”  But Paul just calmly makes the statement that all of us are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.  Talk about big words!

“Justified”, “freely” and “grace” are all huge words that we could spend a lifetime of sermons on and we will talk more about “justification” in a few weeks although we will never do it justice.  “Justified” means to be declared not guilty.  “Freely” means there is nothing we can do to work for it or earn it.  “Grace” means we don’t deserve it and “redemption”…as we saw earlier, “redemption” means, “to convert into something of value”.

A story is told of a man who loved old books. He met an acquaintance who had just thrown away a Bible that had been stored in the attic of his ancestral home for generations. "I couldn't read it," the friend explained. "Somebody named Guten-something had printed it." "Not Gutenberg!" the book lover exclaimed in horror. "That Bible was one of the first books ever printed. Why, a copy just sold for over two million dollars!" His friend was unimpressed. "Mine wouldn't have brought a dollar. Some fellow named Martin Luther had scribbled all over it in German."  Our Daily Bread, June 7, 1994.



I love books and I can’t imagine what the value of a book like that might be if one were actually found.  I have a couple of books that are very valuable to me.  This one is a Jamieson, Fausset, Brown Bible Commentary that my dad gave me a few years ago.  My grandfather gave it to him in 1963 after he used it for years.  I love looking through it knowing the history and the helpfulness it has been for all these years.  It is very valuable to me.



But one of these days, this book is going to rot or be burned or lost and forgotten like everything else in this world and its value will be lost.  But when Paul talks about us being redeemed or being converted into something of value he means that we will have eternal value not just for today or for a few years and that – get this – we are valuable to Almighty, Holy God.  Can you believe that?  Now, that’s good news!



But what does this mean for us tomorrow?  What does it mean to be valuable to God and how should that affect us as we go about our lives when we leave here?  Well, when you have something of value, what do you do?  Do you throw it out in the yard and hope it’s there when you go look for it later?  Of course not.  You make a special place for it and you keep it separate.  You put it in a different place than all of your other common stuff, right?



That is exactly what God does with us.  He makes us holy.  That’s what it means to be holy – to be set apart or different and to be used for God.  We are not perfect but God sees us as something very valuable.  We are valuable because Jesus redeemed us and converted us into something of value and because we are valuable we should be set apart from the rest of the world who are trying to make everybody else look worse than they are so they can feel better about themselves.  But being better than the next guy is not going to get us to Heaven.  We get to Heaven by grace and through faith in Jesus Christ.



That should bring us great joy!  We should have great peace knowing that we don’t have to be good enough and we don’t have to worry about our good deeds being better than our bad deeds.  How should this affect us as we go about our daily lives?  People should be able to spot us a mile away because we are the ones who have peace and joy even in the bad times.  We are the ones who look different than the rest of the world.  What is offensive to them is not necessarily offensive to us but other things may be.



We are holy.  We are joyful.  We are peaceful.  I used to be a ruined man…BUT now I am a redeemed man!



How does one become redeemed?  How do we go from ruined to valuable?  Only by putting our faith and trust in Jesus and asking Him into our lives to rule over our lives forever and to change us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness, repenting or turning away from our sin and then confessing with your mouth that Jesus Christ is the risen Lord.  Do that today.