There is nothing more important than how we can be right with God. Sometimes that is called reconciliation. We are estranged from God as we saw in the last broadcast. We are even the enemies of God. As a result of that, we are not right with God. We are separated from Him. We are not His friends. We are His enemies. How can the enemies of God be made right with Him? How can the enemies of God become friends of Him? How can we be reconciled? It involves what the Bible calls justification.
Romans 5:1 says, “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Justified. That word means to declare righteous. It is very important that we understand the meaning of the word. If we get the meaning of the word wrong, we will misunderstand the whole concept. Justification is not a way whereby we work for our salvation or make ourselves right with God. It is a declaration. It is a legal term. We have been declared by God as justified, set free from our sins, and made right with Him. That is the meaning of justification in this passage of Scripture.
Romans 3:24 says, “being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.” There is so much in that little verse, but justification is a gift by the grace of God. So, we are given something, we are given this justification. Someone has said it this way. “It was not God’s aim simply to release slaves, but to make sons.” I think that is a beautiful statement. I’m not sure who said it, but it is a beautiful statement. God doesn’t simply want to release us from our bondage to sin, in that we are no longer slaves to sin, He wants to do more than that. He wants to make us His very children and His sons. So, justification involves not only the forgiveness of sin, but the very righteousness of God so that we are now righteous before Him, and He looks at us through the lens of the Christ Himself and sees us as righteous in Him.
Several places in Scripture talk about this, and we want to talk about something that takes place at the moment of this justification. When He saves us from our sin, He not only saves us, but He changes us. He not only forgives us, but He makes us His sons. By making us His sons, He does not simply say that we are in His family, He makes a radical change in our lives that is a spiritual change by nature. Jesus talked about this to Nicodemus. Nicodemus was one of the great teachers of Israel and he should have known at least something about the salvation and regeneration process. The Old Testament is not nearly as clear as the New Testament, but things were there and this man was an expert in the Old Testament, but he had missed the big picture. John 3:7 says, “Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’” Most of us are familiar with the phrase “born again.” It means to be born from above. It is the idea that something is radically changed. There is a second birth. Our first birth is our physical birth where we are physically born, but this is a spiritual birth. It is a birth in which we are radically changed and now we are the children of God . . .
