We are now talking about salvation. We speak about salvation, or redemption, all the time. If you are around the people of God, or if you read Scripture, or if you come to church, you know this is central to everything we believe and everything we hope in. It is very important that we see salvation from the lens of Scripture as God has revealed. It is the only possible lens because nobody could understand salvation except through what God reveals to us in the Word and what He has done for us through His Son.
Today I am looking at a beautiful passage of Scripture that talks about the fact that the Lord has done much for us to save us. What I want to look at in this passage is four words that I think are very important to understanding what the Lord has done. These four words I have circled in my Bible. If you have been following our broadcast, you know that I like to mark my Bible and circle things to remind me of what is there. This passage is very interesting because it gives a description of our condition before Christ, and before salvation. It gives four different descriptions, and these really map out our problem, and the fact that we are hopelessly lost. Let’s look at those four words together.
Romans 5:6-10, says, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.”
We begin with the word helpless. As long as we think there is something we can do to earn salvation (or even that we can do something to help the Lord save us and we can come alongside Him and help Him in that process) we will continue in our sins because the biblical teaching of salvation is that the Lord is going to save us while we are helpless. That is hard for us to handle. We are independent people. We believe we are self-sufficient and can take care of ourselves. That is the American way, right? Yet if we look in the Scriptures, we must recognize first and foremost that we are helpless.
Secondly, we are told we are ungodly. This simply means we are not like God. We do not want to do things God’s way. We want to do everything except be godly. By nature, we are ungodly. Yet at that right time, Christ died for the ungodly, which is you and me. There again, before we can actually be saved, we have to recognize our ungodliness. Not only are we helpless, but we are not like Him, and we desperately need His help . . .
