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When God says, “Charge it to Me!”
Romans 4:5
May 24, 2009
A man had his credit card stolen. He decided though not to report it because the thief, well, the thief was spending less than his wife did.
How many of you have credit cards? How many of you have good credit? How many of you have bad credit? What does your credit report look like? Do you have debt…lots of debt? Are you wondering if you’ll ever get of your hole? Have you basically concluded that you never will? But what if you learned that someone was willing to pay off ALL your debts? Your house, your car, all of your credit cards, even your Sear’s charge account? They know everything you owe and they said, “Put it on my tab. Charge it all to me. I’m good for it. I’ll take care of it all.” What would you say?
In our New Testaments we have just such a story. This really happened. But what was owed was not just debt for a house or a car, but the person’s life was literally on the line. Our Monday evening men’s Bible study recently completed a three session study of that small New Testament book, sandwiched in between Titus and Hebrews – the book of Philemon. If you’ve never read the book of Philemon, let me encourage you to take five minutes and read it later today. It’s only 25 verses. The letter to Philemon is the shortest of all Paul's writings.
Though the letter is addressed to Philemon, a 1st century Christian who’d been converted under Paul’s preaching, it’s primarily about his runaway slave named Onesimus. Philemon is a committed Christian who even hosts a church in his home. His slave, Onesimus, ripped him off and ran away, eventually making his way to Rome. The letter suggests that Paul was in prison in Rome at the time of the writing.
Now this morning I don’t want to get into slavery and all of its dynamics. Slavery was a major factor in that culture. It was as much a part of that culture as cars and computers are in ours. So as a slave, Onesimus, was still the property of Philemon. He’d also stolen from Philemon. As you read this book, it’s very apparent that Philemon was a kind and godly master. He’d really been taken advantage of. Perhaps Onesimus had been captured as a runaway but he runs into Paul in prison…and Paul leads him to the Lord, and what a wondrous conversion it was!
But Onesimus is still a slave. Not only that he’s ripped off his Master but he’s now a Christian. He needs to go back and make it right. Philemon would have been well within his rights to punish Onesimus for stealing from him and running away. The text seems to indicate too that Philemon could have had him executed.
Onesimus owes a huge debt, an unpayable, impossible debt. He’s a slave, he doesn’t have anything. But he needs to go back and fix things, so what does Paul do. Join me in Philemon, verses 17-21 (p. 845). Did you catch verse 18? I love that verse, “If he has done you any wrong or owes you anything, charge it to me.” Charge that to my account!
What we have here is a beautiful picture of the gospel, a picture of what our Heavenly Father has done for every repentant soul. As we continue our series, Lost…we all start on the same island, in Philemon we find a flesh and blood picture of one of the most wonderful doctrines in all of Scripture – Justification. Justification is where God the Father sees you and me, and sees all of our unpayable, impossible sin debt…and God Himself says, “Charge that to My account! It’s When God says, “Charge it to Me!”
All the doctrines of the Bible are important, but none is more vital to the peace and rest of the child of God than the Biblical truth of Justification. The believer does not ascend to the peak of Christian joy until he appreciates and appropriates this aspect of the grace of God. Forgiveness is wonderful; pardon is wonderful; cleansing is wonderful; but Justification is more wonderful. In Paul's day, and later in the days of the Reformation, and in our own day, it would be difficult to find a truth more foundational to our historic Christian faith than the doctrine of Justification.
In our New Testaments the Apostle Paul, the chief exponent of the doctrine of Justification, developed it more fully. During his visit to Antioch Paul said, “Therefore, my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through Him everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses” (Acts 13:38-39).
Forgiveness and justification are only made possible through Jesus Christ, but Paul makes it clear that the two are not identical. If a criminal is found guilty and convicted of crime, he may be forgiven by the offended party and even pardoned by the governor, but he still remains guilty of his offense. His guilt was established and the court records carry it as such. He has been forgiven but he has not been justified.
The salvation that we have in Jesus Christ is a judicial miracle. It’s also a real accounting miracle. In Romans 4 the Apostle Paul asks us to consider how much credit we have with God. Turn to Romans 4:5 (p. 798).
How’s our credit rating in heaven? The biblical answer is that we are all born spiritually bankrupt and spend our lives overdrawing on an account that is already far gone "in the red." Romans 4:5 tells us how we can get our lives out of spiritual debt and end up on the plus side of the ledger. This verse brings us to the very heart of the gospel. Here we learn God justifies wicked people who trust in Him. He credits their account in heaven with the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Thus, the guilty are acquitted on the basis of what Jesus Christ did when He died on the cross and rose from the dead.
John Piper rightly points to a major problem with the concept that God acquits the guilty. Even though that’s the gospel, it just doesn’t square with how we do things in this life. How can God acquit the guilty when on earth we put judges in jail for doing the same thing? What God does by grace, we call a miscarriage of justice. How can it be right for God to do that? On what basis does God acquit the guilty? In Romans 4:5 we discover the answer to that question. In Romans 4:5 God says, “Charge it to Me!” This morning if you’re taking notes, Justification means…
1. Justification means that you must first be guilty. “Do you have you any thing that you did not receive from God?" inquired a teacher of his pupils. "No," said all the students but one. He replied, "Yes." "What’s that?" asked the teacher. "Sin," replied the boy.
You and I are, in police terms, people with a record of actual sins. We are both culpable and powerless. Sin has defeated us. In wrestling terms, sin pins us down and we’re without strength to defeat it and unable to please God (Rom. 8:8).
We Americans have very little patience for losers. A team starts having a losing season, ticket sales plummet. A certain sports star who, has a reputation for excelling, when he hits a drought, or difficult time, the fans turn into fault-finders. There’s a famous American expression: “When you’re hot you’re hot, and when you’re not, you’re not.” In America, we hate losers and love winners. Failure is considered the unpardonable sin. We canonize champions, we adore achievers. We worship winners, and we sanctify the successful. Everybody wants to succeed. I’ve never met anybody in life who’s said, “My life goal is to fail.” But when it comes to sin, we’re all failures. Let me paraphrase that familiar verse in Romans 3, “All of us have failed, falling way short of fulfilling the beauty of God‘s plan, that which God intended us to be” (Rom. 3:23).
You and I can do nothing to earn acceptance with God. We can do nothing to even catch His eye. We can’t spruce up our character so that God will come over to us. It’s impossible for us to strike some bargain with Him because to bargain we must be in some sort of bargaining position…and we’re not. We have no leverage with God. When it comes to our sin and guilt, we’re guilty as charged.
2. Justification means that you cannot do and must not attempt to do anything about your guilt. When God acquits the guilty, He first finds a person who isn’t working for his acquittal. God looks for people who don’t want to work for what they get. That’s a very un-American outlook. Most of us have been raised to believe that nothing is truly free in life. You get what you work for. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded at the end of the day. If you don’t work, you won’t get ahead. True as that may be in everyday life, it’s not true when salvation is in view. In order for God to save you, you’ve got to stop working for it.
Most people follow the Smith-Barney Religion—"We get our salvation the old-fashioned way. We earn it." Or we’re like the man who says, "I’ll do my best and carry a rabbit’s foot for the rest." Why you would want a rabbit’s foot is beyond me. After all, the rabbit’s foot wasn’t so lucky for the rabbit or else it would still be attached to him! What we mean though is that we’ll do our best and trust that God will take care of the rest, as if salvation is simply hoping that God will "fill in the gaps" for you.
Someone has foolishly suggested that being saved is like the frog in a pail of milk. He kept kicking until he churned a pat of butter. He hopped on the butter and then jumped out of the pail. The moral was: Just keep on paddling and everything will turn out okay. That may be good advice for everyday life but it’s terrible and wrong advice when it comes to going to heaven. God’s salvation is not a do-it-yourself kit. If you want to go to heaven, the first step is to stop trying to earn your way there. You have to "stop working" and "start trusting" if you want to be saved. Write it in big letters, when it comes to saving your soul, WORKS DON’T WORK!
Spurgeon, the great English preacher, said it this way: "If some of you plume yourselves with the notion that you are righteous, I pray God to pluck those fine feathers off you and make you see yourselves, for if you never see your own nothingness, you will never understand Christ’s all-sufficiency. Unless you are pulled down, Christ will never lift you up."
This may shock you and it certainly goes against what most people think, but Paul makes it very clear in Romans 4:5 – God justifies the one who does not work, and who in fact is ungodly! God does not justify pretty good people who go to church and try to live a decent life. He doesn’t justify those who give money to the church and volunteer their time. God doesn’t justify Catholics or Protestants, Episcopalians or Lutherans, Methodists or even Baptists! God justifies only one sort of person: the ungodly, and among the ungodly, specifically those who do not work for their justification, but instead believe in Him!
3. Justification means that you completely trust God for your salvation. So if God doesn’t want our "works," what does He want from us? He wants us to trust Him. That’s all. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. In the New Testament, faith, trust, and belief all come from the same general root word meaning "to lean wholly upon," like when you lie down on a bed, resting your whole weight upon it. We are to trust God so completely that we take Him at His Word regarding our salvation.
One crucial distinction must be made. To say that we must trust God does not mean that our faith is something we ourselves do. Faith is not a work that "merits" salvation. Faith is the condition, not the ground of salvation. Faith cannot save us unless our faith is based upon the Person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ who died for our sins.
So what is faith? Here are some answers: Faith is our empty hands reaching out to God. Faith is the channel for God’s grace to come to me. Faith is like the wire bringing the electricity to us that causes the light to shine. Faith is the open window that lets the sunlight in. Where did the light come from? From the sun, not from the window. The window simply allows it to enter. By faith we open the windows of our heart to let the light of the gospel shine on us.
There are three things I must do to be saved: 1) I must acknowledge that even my faith to believe comes from God. 2) I must abandon all lingering notions of my own goodness. 3) I must cling only to the cross of Christ. Those three things are not "works," but simply constituent parts of what it means to "trust God" for my salvation. Faith is the hinge that joins the sinner to God. Faith looks to the cross and says, "That man died for me." Faith cries out to God, "Be merciful to me, a sinner, for Jesus’ sake." And God hears that prayer every time.
If you were being held captive by a band of terrorists and I organized a commando raid, where we swept into the camp by helicopter and brought you out to safety, it would be ridiculous for you later to say that it was your faith that saved you. No, the commandos saved you. Your faith was merely the means that allowed you to climb aboard the helicopter. In the same way, it’s not your faith that saves you from your sin, much less any good deeds. God justifies the guilty sinner through Christ. Faith is simply the means by which His justification is applied to us.
The reason God can justify you, the reason God can declare you righteous is because someone took your punishment. All you have to do is believe. Augustine expressed it this way, “O Lord, demand what you will, but supply what You demand.” God demands perfection from us but we’ll never have it. So He Himself supplied it with the sacrifice of His Son on the cross.
Look again at Romans 4:5. “But trusts God who justifies the wicked…” We use that word trust for everything and anything. A husband says to his wife, "Trust me, I’ll be in from golfing by 3:00." She doesn’t realize he means a.m. not p.m. A wife says to her husband, "Trust me, the dress was on sale." However even though on sale, the price doesn’t comfort him at all. A teenager says to his parents, "Trust me, I did my homework." But apparently afterwards he made an airplane out of it and someone must have hijacked it. We use that word trust for everything and anything. But in the Bible trust means two things. It means to accept something as being true and it means to rest your whole weight upon it.
Of all the people who’ve ever crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope the most spectacular has to be that man known as the “Great Blondin.” He first crossed over the falls on June 30, 1859, walking on a tightrope stretched over a quarter of a mile across the mighty Niagara Falls. He walked across at 160 feet above the falls several times, each time with a different daring feat - once in a sack, on stilts, on a bicycle, in the dark, and once he even carried a stove and cooked an omelet!
On one occasion though, he asked for the participation of a volunteer. A large crowd was gathered and a buzz of excitement ran along both sides of the river bank. The crowd “Oooohed!” and “Aaaaahed!” as the Great Blondin carefully walked across one dangerous step after another, blindfolded and pushing a wheelbarrow. Upon reaching the other side, the crowd's applause was louder than the roar of the falls! Blondin suddenly stopped and addressed his audience: "Do you believe I can carry a person across in this wheelbarrow?"The crowd enthusiastically shouted, "Yes, yes, yes. You are the greatest tightrope walker in the world. You can do anything!" "Okay," said Blondin, "Come get in the wheelbarrow!" But no one did!
Now those people may have accepted it as true that the Great Blondin could do it, but they did not really trust him to do it. And when the Bible uses the word believe it means to accept it as true that Christ died and arose and trust in Him alone, not your good works, not your church attendance, not your baptism, but trust in Christ alone as your only way to heaven. It is a matter of believing…it’s not a matter of behaving.
4. Justification means that God justifies you immediately at conversion. The word "justify" means to declare righteous. It comes from the courtroom and refers to the final verdict by which a judge declares that an accused person is "not guilty" and are "innocent" of all charges. Applied to the spiritual realm, it means that God as Judge declares the believing sinner righteous on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s an immediate event, not a process.
Since Christ paid the penalty for the sinner, he is now righteous in the eyes of the Lord. Though he himself is truly guilty, through faith he receives the benefit of Christ’s death on his behalf. Jesus pays the penalty and the sinner goes free.
If you’re justified, it means that in the record book by your name there are no black marks. It means the charges are dropped. There’s no guilt, no penalty, no condemnation. Every demand of the law has been met in full.
It should be added that justification refers to a judicial declaration in heaven, not to an experience on earth. I may or may not "feel" justified, just as a pardoned criminal may or may not "feel" pardoned. But feelings have nothing to do with it. When God says "Not Guilty," I’m not guilty no matter how I feel.
Here are four words that describe justification: It is A) Complete—covers all we have done. There are no "half-pardons" with God, B) Divine—because it comes from God, C) Irreversible—because it is divine, and D) Free—received by grace through faith. Look again at Romans 4:5. See that – God justifies the "wicked," or as the KJV renders it, the "ungodly." God justifies the ungodly! God justifies the wicked! Several decades ago someone wrote a very popular gospel tract with this intriguing title: Ungodly People: The Only Kind God Saves. That’s the very essence of Romans 4:5. God saves the ungodly while they’re still ungodly!
Oh, how we fight against this fact. Many people think God wants good people in heaven, so they spend their lives trying to be good enough to go there when they die. Wrong! God doesn’t want good people in heaven. He wants bad people in heaven so that by saving bad people He can demonstrate the greatness of His grace.
So many of us are mixed up on this point. We think God is saying, "Clean up your act and then I’ll save you." Or we think God is saying, "I’ll clean up your act and then I’ll save you." God never says any such thing! He says something entirely different: "I’ll save you while you’re still dirty and then I’ll help you clean up your act." God says, "While you are still dirty, I’ll give you the righteousness of Jesus Christ." Mark it down. God saves the ungodly while they are still ungodly. That’s the miracle of justification.
And when you come to Christ—still dirty and unclean—not only does He save you, He also begins an inner process of cleansing that changes you from the inside out. But He saves you first, then He cleans you up!
This is the heart of Christianity, that our God justifies the wicked. Many people don’t come to Christ because they feel they aren’t good enough. They feel they’re too lost in sin. They feel as if they’re lost in sexual sin, lost in addiction to alcohol and drugs, trapped in anger or bitterness, chained forever to a terrible, destructive way of life. "You don’t know how I have been living." No, I don’t, but let me tell you this: Our God is not in the business of justifying the good. He’s in the business of justifying the bad. He doesn’t justify the righteous. He justifies the wicked, because that’s the only category of people God has on earth to deal with. He justifies the wicked while they are still wicked. If you want to go to heaven, you’ve got to be bad. Good people need not even apply.
God comes to wicked people, in free grace and rich mercy, and offers them a relationship with Him through faith that will completely transform them from the inside out. He does this in spite of what they are, not even in consideration of what they will become. This is the miracle of the gospel. It’s the heart of the "Good News" we preach to the world.
The verdict is in from heaven and the bad news is, you’re guilty. The good news is, Christ is entirely righteous. If you will accept those two verdicts, an amazing miracle will take place. Christ will take your guilt and you will receive his righteousness.
As John Stott writes, “Justification is not a synonym for amnesty, which strictly is pardon without principle, a forgiveness which overlooks—even forgets—wrongdoing and declines to bring it to justice. No, justification is an act of justice, of gracious justice…When God justifies sinners, He is not declaring bad people to be good, or saying that they are not sinners after all; He is pronouncing them legally righteous, free from any liability to the broken law, because He himself in His Son has borne the penalty of their law-breaking…In other words, we are ‘justified by His blood’.”
5. Justification means that God credits Christ’s righteousness to your account. Look at that last phrase in verse 5, “his faith is credited as righteousness.” The word "credited" comes from the Greek word logizomai. It’s related to our English word "logic." Logizomai is a bookkeeping term. It means "to credit to one’s account." It’s what happens when you deposit money in the bank. If you bring a $1000 check, the teller credits your account with one thousand dollars. In the same way, if you write a check for $250, the teller debits your account by that amount. In this context, the word means to "credit one’s account and to treat accordingly." You treat a person like a millionaire because they have a million dollars in their account. And you treat a person like a debtor who is overdrawn to the tune of one million dollars.
Suppose that God keeps a record of the entire human race—one page for each person. On the left side of the divine ledger, He writes down the sins we commit. On the right side, He notes the good things we do. Most people hope that by the time they die, the good will outweigh the bad and God will allow them into heaven on that basis. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. The good column will never surpass the bad column. We’re always more sinful than we are good. And just about the time we think we’ve been good enough to catch up with our sins, we start sinning again and fall even farther behind (actually, we never really stopped sinning even while we thought we were catching up. The harder we try, the behinder we get. The truth is, we’ll never catch up. If God grades the human race on that basis, no one will ever make it to heaven.
Let me paraphrase Spurgeon at this point: If you believe in Jesus, if you have saving faith in Him, all that Jesus accomplished in his death and resurrection is now credited to your account. You stand before God as if you were Christ because Christ stood before God as if He were you—He in your place, you in His place. Substitution! That is the word! Christ the Substitute for sinners: Christ standing for you and bearing the punishment for your sin, and you standing in Christ’s place, receiving all that belongs to Him.
Conclusion: Fiorello LaGuardia, for whom New York City’s airport is named, was mayor of New York City during the worst days of the Great Depression. He was adored by many New Yorkers who took to calling him the "Little Flower," because he was so short and always wore a carnation in his lapel. He was a colorful character – he rode the New York City fire trucks, raided city "speak easies" with the police department, took entire orphanages to baseball games, and when the New York newspapers went on strike, he got on the radio and read the Sunday funnies to the kids.
One bitterly cold night in January of 1935, the mayor turned up at a night court that served the poorest ward of the city. LaGuardia dismissed the judge for the evening and took over the bench himself. Within a few minutes, a tattered old woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. She told LaGuardia that her daughter's husband had deserted her, her daughter was sick, and her two grandchildren were starving. But the shopkeeper, from whom the bread was stolen, refused to drop the charges. "It's a real bad neighborhood, your Honor," the man told the mayor. "She's got to be punished to teach other people around here a lesson."
LaGuardia sighed. He turned to the woman and said, "I've got to punish you. The law makes no exceptions. Ten dollars or ten days in jail." But even as he pronounced sentence, the mayor was already reaching into his own pocket. He extracted a ten dollar bill and tossed it into his famous fedora, saying, "Here is the ten dollar fine which I now remit; and furthermore I am going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat. Mr.Bailiff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant."
The following day, New York City newspapers reported that $47.50 was turned over to a bewildered woman who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed her starving grandchildren. Fifty cents of that amount was contributed by the grocery store owner himself, while some seventy petty criminals, people with traffic violations, and New York City policemen, each of whom had just paid fifty cents for the privilege of doing so, gave the Mayor a standing ovation.
My friend, that’s exactly what God did. By Law and as our Judge, God pronounces all of us here this morning, "Guilty as charged!" And deservedly so, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." We are all guilty as charged! But God laid aside His heavenly garments, His heavenly glory, His heavenly prerogatives, and He came to us in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. And God, in Christ Jesus, paid our fine with His own blood on the Cross. Because of Christ, we can be forgiven; He treats us as "not guilty." We've been "redeemed" by the blood of Jesus Christ; --we're emancipated." We can be justified.
The lesson is simple. If God gave you a report card on your life without Jesus Christ, it would be covered with black marks for all the sin you committed. Indeed, God gives you and me and the whole human race an F. We’ve flunked every test. But when you come to Jesus, your F is washed away and your sins are gone. So now what grade would God give you? You get the grade Christ earned because He finished His course as valedictorian of the class. You don’t squeak by with God. You make the honor roll. You go to the head of the class. Why? Because you are so good? No. Left to yourself you’d still flunk every course. You get an A because you are united with Jesus Christ.
God has a simple proposition for you. If you admit you’re wicked, He offers to declare you righteous. All you have to do is lay hold of Jesus. Only believe in him. Only trust in Him. My friend, “Run to the Cross!” Let me say it clearly. If you want to be saved, run to the Cross! If you want to be forgiven, run to the Cross! If you want a new life, run to the Cross! If you want to be right with God, run to the Cross! O friend, have you come to Jesus – if not – come today! Run to the Cross!!
