Justified by Grace not Race

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. So today we are going to be in Romans 8 on chapter 9 and 10. It's a little change from what some of you might have thought, because we've added an extra weekend to the series. It's not 12 weeks now, it's going to be 13. Next week we'll get on to Romans 12, partly so that it kind of fits, because our next series after this will be the first Sunday after Thanksgiving. It starts a series called, in the church, Advent for a lot of people. We're going to do a series called Ugly Christmas and Ugly Christmas, because it could be this year. So start breaking out your ugly sweaters. And that series is really going to be focusing on the idea that it was some ugly times that the prophets of old spoke God's word and promises of the Messiah in. If you look at Isaiah's prophecies of the beauty of the Messiah coming, it was at a very dark period in Israel, an ugly time. And that's true for Ezekiel, it's true for Jeremiah. These prophecies were spoken in wonderful, peaceful times, but in very difficult ones. And so I think God has a good word for us in the midst of some tough times that we're going through now, too. And I think preparing us for the real, and the first Christmas itself, just consider the manger itself, the manure, the hay. You understand what I mean? Not real pretty. So I think this is going to be exciting to go into that season and into that time. So for that sake, this one was added, and I'm glad we added these texts in today, in Romans chapter 9 and chapter 10, as we get into it. Now, this text is really dealing with, as we are going to be looking at it, two huge issues all the way through, privilege and power and how they were used by different groups in the Roman Empire in that world. There was a division between Gentiles and Jews, between slave and free, between the weak and the strong, between men and women, between the rich and the poor, between those who were citizens of Rome and those who were slaves in Rome. It was amazing how their society was as divided, if not more so, than ours today. And Paul said, in the Christian church, it is the one institution that God has established to unite all people in Jesus Christ. Where all of these divisions go away. The realities of those things, the differences between us should not divide us because we are united in the grace of God. We are all justified by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. And so that's why he wrote the book of Romans, to deal with those divisions and to deal with the things that the Roman Christians were handling at the time. Now, here's the reality. Not everyone likes this doctrine or teaching that people are saved by grace through faith. A lot of people are still looking for another method, another way, another way to control it themselves, like to set themselves up to kind of justify themselves in one form or another. They want it based on either their efforts, their willpower, their sincerity, their clan, their lineage, their race, their nation. Because when you feel like you're in a position of power, you want to stay there. Jesus saw this in his own life. He came to his own people among the poorest of the poor, but some of the richest of the rich and the people with power and the people who thought their acts were together tended to turn him away. They rejected him. And that's why it was fascinating. Again and again, Jesus says, as he said in Matthew 20, so the last will be first and the first will be last. Seems like when he came into this world, though he united many people together, others didn't like it because then they lost their position. And tragically, Paul found out in the book of Romans, and he found out just historically what was happening, that he was bringing the gospel to all people, that he would start first in the synagogue, wherever he went, and then he went to the Gentiles, that often, tragically, it was the people you would expect the most to accept this wonderful message of Jesus being the Messiah were the ones that largely rejected it. It was his own fellow Jews, so often, that turned away, that rejected Jesus and said, no, it doesn't quite fit. And it was the Gentiles who had no clue at all about God's word, God's oracles, God's laws, God's truth, that welcomed Jesus as their savior. So the question comes up in Romans 9 and 10, what went wrong? Because shouldn't the religious people be the ones that are getting in? Shouldn't they, the ones who've had God's word, who got God's law, had all of these things that God had prophesied, shouldn't they have accepted and welcomed what went wrong? And so Paul says it's not God's word that went wrong. So we're going to start reading in Romans 9, verses 6 to 8, then 9, verses 30 to 10, verse 4, okay? So this is what Paul says, but it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Isr...