Romans 10. The Meaning of Salvation

Have you heard the term: Flogging a dead horse.  "Buy stronger whips.  Change riders.  Ask other organizations how they ride dead horses.  Hire consultants to ride dead horses.  Harness several dead horses together to increase speed. Provide added funding to increase dead horse's performance. Experiment to see if lighter riders would improve productivity.  Promote dead horses to supervisory positions."

Life without hope is unbearable. To function in life we have to be able to look forward to something pleasant that has a reasonable probability of happening. We need hope to deal with the unpleasant things of life. If there is nothing pleasant ahead of us, life is bleak. If there is nothing reasonably predictable before us, life is too uncertain and insecure to endure. That is why extended suffering in sickness can be so depressing. We do not know how bad it is going to get.  We do not know how long it will last. We do not see great good or pleasure coming out of it.  What we have in front of us lies between uncertainty and worse. And life without hope is unbearable. However some people live on false hope. Many hoped that the last decade's prosperity would continue unabated into the future. That is proving to be a very false hope.    Yet many in our society are not worried. "She'll be right" is the old fashioned Aussie way of saying it. They have not seen unemployment before and they are not personally experiencing it now. It is still too remote from them to worry them or still too far in the future to think about.  Hope has to be more than optimism. For optimists are notoriously irrational. Optimism can keep us going in the face of overwhelming odds. But eventually it will disappoint us. 

Christians live in hope. But ours' is not a false hope that will disappoint us. Ours' is not the irrationality of optimism. Our hope is based in understanding of God's plans revealed to us in history.

Christianity hinges on the message of forgiveness. Other religions may offer moralism. They may offer methods that will help us tidy up our lives or make us feel that we are good people. Christianity, however, is for the unworthy, the lost, the beleaguered, and the sinful. It's for people who need to hear that they can be forgiven. In other words, it's for everyone.

From first to last, the gospel is about what God does, not about what we must do. It is God, by His mercy, who gives us the desire to even want to be forgiven—and it is only when we put our faith in Jesus that we are fully pardoned. When we turn to Him in repentance and faith, we are able to look back and say we have been saved from sin's penalty. All that was against us, all that kept us from knowing God, all that kept us from discovering His love and His goodness—all of the penalty that we deserve—has been eradicated, erased through the saving work of God's Son on the cross.

CONSIDER THE MEANING OF SALVATION

We see the freeness of salvation.  Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.2 For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.3 For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness.4 For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

Many think salvation is a reward for the righteous, but really it is a gift for the guilty.

We see the nearness of salvation.  For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them.6 But the righteousness based on faith says, "Do not say in your heart, 'Who will ascend into heaven?'" (that is, to bring Christ down)7 or "'Who will descend into the abyss?'" (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).8 But what does it say? "The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart" (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim);

We don't have to go on a pilgrimage to find salvation, because Jesus Christ stepped out of Heaven to find us. He already paid the price with His life, already bore the weight of our sins on the cross, and rose to life to give us hope. We only need to be bold and unashamed as we confess Jesus as Savior and Lord.

Salvation is not an intellectual belief that we tack on along with other ideas; it is trusting and committing everything to Jesus, claiming Him as Saviour and Lord.

We see the richness of salvation. 12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him.

There is the richness of Forgiveness

There is the richness of Fellowship with God

There is the richness of a Family of faith

CONSIDER THE MAN OF SALVATION

9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

The Person  -Jesus is LORD.. Yahweh.. God.. The Jews regarded this name of God as being so wonderful, so glorious, that they were afraid to use it and they avoided doing so by substituting other words. When they came to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek (called the Septuagint translation), they translated YHWH by a Greek word meaning "Lord". "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth that Jesus is Jehovah [YHWH]\ Jesus is the Lord God Jehovah!"This means from the rest of the New Testament, that he is asserting in the strongest manner possible the unique deity of our Lord and Saviour. 

The Apostle is saying that those who confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord, Jehovah, God, and believe that Christ, this Jehovah, has been raised from the dead, they are the men and women who are saved. This is to make a statement about His Person. You are here stating what you believe concerning who He is. You say, "My faith rests upon Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, but I say that He is God, He is Jehovah."This is the Christian confession. And it is a big statement!  You are saying Jesus is God and all the universe revolves around Him.  In His essence He is the eternal Son of God. In relationship with the entire universe: "By him were all things created. . ." Colossians 1:16 "For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him."There is nothing in existence that was not created by Him - not a single thing. "Without him was not any thing made that was made." Everything has been created by Him, and, still more interesting, "for him". This universe, the whole cosmos, is the Father's gift to His only begotten Son. It was created for Him, for His pleasure, that He might be Lord over it all. "Jesus is Lord!"  And "By him all things consist"[Col. 1:17], which means that He holds everything together. Now Hebrews 1:3  "upholding all things by the word of his power."Here Paul uses the word consist, it means that everything coheres, everything hangs together. Quantum physics has discovered that there is something, a power, that holds all things together. It links things throughout the universe. Sometime ago folks were talking about the butterfly effect. How is it that something on one side of the world can directly affect something else on the other side of the world? It is only that there is Someone holding it all together.  It indicates order and arrangement. What makes this universe a cosmos, rather than a chaos, is that the Lord Jesus Christ is holding it all together. 

The Power   -Jesus is Risen 

Our whole position depends upon this one Person, this historic Person, Jesus of Nazareth, and what He has done on our behalf. Our faith is centred on Him. The whole content of the early Christian church's message was about Him. The Apostles preached  "Jesus and the resurrection". They did not just go round the world telling people their experiences. They preached that Jesus is Lord and they preached the great fact of the resurrection. These are the two elements in the content of saving faith. 

Now saying "Jesus is Lord" goes even further. It is saying something about His birth, His life and His purpose for being.

What if a person claimed to be God, and that person entered this world, what would he be like? That is a valid question. If God entered the world, what would you expect? I think you'd expect an unusual entrance into human life. His birth would be dramatic and different. And you would expect a perfect life, someone who would live without sin. And you would expect this individual to perform miracles. You would expect that this God-man could do as he desired, including the miraculous. You would expect Him to speak the truth, and to answer the spiritual hunger in the hearts of men and women. And you would expect that he would have power over death. And that is what we see in the eyewitness records of the life of Jesus. The Christian believes that this Jesus is the Lord! 

What the New Testament teaches is that our Lord came out of the grave literally, in the body, and that the tomb was empty.  The New Testament takes great trouble to tell us this. That is why we have those Gospel accounts of people going to the tomb and finding it empty, and two of the disciples even going into it. We are told also that the grave clothes were in one place and the napkin around His head in another. The body had been there but was not any longer. The Gospels go out of their way to emphasise the physical aspect, the literal account, the historical fact of the resurrection. And this is not confined to the Gospels. You find exactly the same thing stated in the Acts of the Apostles. The Apostles claimed to be witnesses of these things; they saw Him dying on the cross; they saw His body taken down; they saw it laid in the tomb; and then they saw the empty tomb. They were witnesses of the fact of the physical resurrection; of the fact that the Lord came up out of the tomb in the body, the same body, though changed, in which He went into it. Matthew's Gospel even takes the trouble to tell us that the Jewish authorities were so annoyed that they bribed the Roman soldiers to say that the body had been stolen - they even went as far as that.  The disciples who were then called Apostles were primarily witnesses to the resurrection. It was pivotal, absolutely crucial. There would never have been a Christian church but for the resurrection. So the first thing that Christians proclaim when they say they believe that God raised Jesus from the dead is a fact of history - that there was an empty tomb because the Son of God, who had died on the cross, had risen. And that this is the main fact of history.

Well, why? Why go to all this trouble about the resurrection of Jesus? Why say that if you want to be saved, be forgiven, have eternal life you must believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead?  Why should you believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead? And here is the answer. First, it proves who He is.  The resurrection of Christ is a proclamation of the fact that He is the Lord, the eternal Son of God.  And secondly, Jesus' resurrection points to His whole purpose in coming into our world.

The Purpose –Jesus is Saviour

It explains to us why Jesus died. Anselm, to use John's words, was a dude who lived in England in the eleventh century. He wrote in Latin and gave a very interesting title to his book. It was Cur Deus Homo? which means "Why [did] God [become] man?" His book was about the atoning death of the Lord. "Why did He die if He is the Lord of glory?"  Our Lord Himself answered this question. He said quite deliberately and plainly that if He had wanted to, He could have avoided death, commanding more than twelve legions of angels to deliver Him [Matt. 26:53]. Nevertheless, we are told that "he set his face stedfastly to go to Jerusalem"[Luke 9:51]. He knew exactly what was going to happen. Those followers of His, and others, tried to dissuade Him on more than one occasion. He said once "it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem"[Luke 13:31-33]. Our Lord gave His own answer. Why did He set His face steadfastly? In His own words, it was because: "The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."He said that quite explicitly, and it is recorded very carefully for us in Matthew 20:28 and in Mark 10:45 "The son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many." 

The essence of the gospel therefore is those two things: that Christ died for our sins and that He rose again from the dead. And all of this is a fulfilment of all the prophecies of the Old Testament. In other words, if we do not believe that Jesus is the Lord, if we do not believe that He had to die before we could be saved, we are not Christians. If we do not believe in the resurrection we cannot be Christians. Anselm's question, "Cur Deus Homo?"This is why God became man, and this is why the God-Man died. It is the fulfilment of everything that God had promised throughout the whole of the Old Testament period. It was so you and I could be saved

CONSIDER THE METHOD OF SALVATION

10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.11 For the Scripture says, "Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame."12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him.13 For "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."

In 2012, Timothy Gray, age 60 was found dead of hypothermia under a railway bridge in Evanston, Wyoming. He was homeless and penniless. Lawyers and private investigators had been searching for him for over a year. His great aunt had died in New York and had left him with an inheritance of $19 million. For eighteen months Timothy Gray had been a millionaire and didn't know it. He never claimed his millions. How sad. But I'll tell you something even sadder: For you to live like a spiritual pauper when you are an heir of God and joint-heir with Christ.

It would be a shame to have access to ll of these spiritual riches that that the God man Jesus came to bring you for your life, and not get to claim it. You claim it by Believing in Jesus as your Saviour. John 3:16 says

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. Whosoever believes.  Anyone who believes. Nothing to do. Nothing to prepare. Simply believe on Him as your Saviour. Believe He came for you. Believe He died for you. Believe He was raised again so you could know He is the Christ the Saviour the Messiah the only Saviour.

Call on Him.  Ever got in trouble in the surf? I once taught swimming at a Holiday Kids Club in summer.  We went to the pool.  All the kids jumped in. One was in front of me. He said, "I forgot I can't swim!" He went under. He popped back up! "help me!" and he went under again! I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and hauled his head out of the water and dragged him across the water and out at the ladder! All he had to do was call out.  All you got to do is call out for the Lord Jesus to be your Saviour!

Confess Him. If you called on Him and found Him a Saviour rich in mercy and grace and love and forgiveness and fellowship, you will want to confess him to others.  Can you imagine a beggar not telling other beggars where to get free bread?  That's what confessing Him is. It is owning Him before others that He is your Saviour! Are you prepared to do that?