1. "Absolutes slump into personal preferences or vanish altogether. Soon desires are taken to be ontological identities accompanied by morally respectable needs. That which conscience and God's word taught the culture at large and us as individuals to loathe, we are now taught to love and to celebrate."

2. "The culture conspires with our flesh to lead us to admire sin, to be attracted to sin, to consider sin, to listen to sin, to like sin, and to celebrate sin. And so one more disorienting relationship I have with sin is that I underestimate sin."

3. "If I think lightly of sin, I'll think lightly of the Savior. If I think rightly of sin, then I can think rightly of the Savior. If sin to you is no big deal, neither is the forgiveness of that sin."

4. "Neither the pursuit of virtue nor the pursuit of sin will give you what you really want and need. Neither hedonism nor moralism can answer our real needs for forgiveness of our sins past, nor peace for troubled conscience today, let alone settle our anxieties about the future."

5. "Sin is so destructive, so aimed at God, that only God in his grace could overcome it. Left to dig ourselves out of this pit, we could never do it. And so Paul knew that if we're going to be saved, we're going to have to be saved through the gracious action of God."

6. "Our sins are counted not to us, but to Christ, and Christ's righteousness and his living and dying are accounted to us. This is our status of having God's own righteousness imputed to us."

7. "My friend, you will never climb into the boat of Christ's righteousness for safe passage to God until you abandon that sinking tub of your own righteousness. Just get out of it. It is not seaworthy. It will not work. It's going to sink."

8. "You don't work in order to be saved, but because you have been saved. Your faith is not the reason or the basis of your salvation; it's not another kind of work. Your faith is a channel through which God saves you."

9. "Here is the good life, because we rejoice in this news. We are deeply secure and content and happy in God. The circumstances of our week vary, and yet there is a blessedness here that transcends every year, every decade, every circumstance."

10. "Temptation can appear lovely, but then Christ has to appear more lovely to our hearts. How can we help Christ appear more lovely to our hearts? That is some of your most fundamental spiritual work."

Observation Questions

1. Read Romans 4:1–3. What question does Paul ask about Abraham in verse 1, and how does he answer it in verses 2–3?
2. In Romans 4:4–5, how does Paul contrast “wages” and “gift,” and what is the difference between “works” and “faith” in these verses?
3. According to Romans 4:6, how does David “speak of the blessing” and what specifically is God said to do for the person He blesses?
4. In Romans 4:7, what two things are said about the person who is blessed, and what two descriptions of sin are used?
5. In Romans 4:8, what makes the man “blessed,” and what does Paul say the Lord “will not” do?
6. Read Psalm 32:1–2 (which Paul quotes). What different words are used for sin and for God’s saving action, and how many times is the idea of being “blessed” mentioned?

Interpretation Questions

1. Why do you think Paul chooses both Abraham (Romans 4:1–3) and David (Romans 4:6–8) as examples, and how do these two figures together support his teaching that justification is apart from works?
2. What does Paul mean by the repeated word “count” or “credit” (Romans 4:3, 5, 6, 8), and how did the sermon explain this in terms of “imputation”?
3. How do the three expressions in Romans 4:7–8 (“forgiven,” “covered,” “will not count”) together give a fuller picture of what God does with our sin—past, present, and future?
4. According to the sermon, why is it impossible to appreciate the blessing of Romans 4:7–8 if we underestimate the seriousness of sin, and how does that relate to the world’s tendency to celebrate or minimize sin?
5. How does Romans 4 challenge both the “hedonist” (who looks for happiness in indulging desires) and the “moralist” (who looks for happiness in good behavior), and instead define where true happiness is found?

Application Questions

1. Where do you see our culture inviting you to “admire,” “consider,” or “like” sin, as the sermon described, and how has that influenced your own view of what a “happy life” looks like?
2. Think of one specific sin in your own life. What would it look like this week to respond to Romans 4:7–8 by confessing it honestly to God—and, if appropriate, to a trusted Christian—rather than concealing or excusing it?
3. In what areas are you tempted to “count” your own religious activity, morality, or achievement as the reason God should accept you, and how could you practically shift your trust from your works to Christ’s righteousness this week?
4. When your “joy tank” is low, how could you use the truth of being “blessed” (forgiven, covered, and not counted guilty) to fuel ongoing repentance and perseverance in a particular struggle you’re facing right now?
5. As a church or small group, what specific practices (in teaching, prayer, or fellowship) could help keep justification by faith alone—rather than self-improvement or rule-keeping—at the center of your shared life?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Psalm 32:1–11 — The original psalm Paul quotes, showing David’s experience of hiding sin, confessing sin, and finding the joy of God’s forgiveness.
2. Romans 3:21–26 — Paul’s foundational explanation of how God remains just while justifying sinners through the atoning blood of Jesus.
3. Exodus 34:5–9 — God reveals Himself to Moses as both merciful and just, forgiving iniquity yet not “clearing the guilty,” setting up the need for a true atonement.
4. Isaiah 53:4–12 — A prophetic picture of the Suffering Servant who bears our sins, is “numbered with the transgressors,” and makes many to be accounted righteous.
5. Hebrews 12:1–3 — An encouragement to run the race with endurance, looking to Jesus who endured the cross “for the joy set before him,” connecting joy, suffering, and faith.

Sermon Main Topics

I. The Culture's Conspiracy to Make Us Love Sin

II. The World's Understanding of Happiness

III. True Happiness Through Forgiveness: Three Verbs About Sin (Romans 4:7-8)

IV. The Blessedness of Those Whose Sins Are Forgiven

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Detailed Sermon Outline

I admire sin.

I am attracted to sin.

I consider sin.

I listen to sin.

I like sin.

I remember reading a book by a South African in which he was describing traditional polygamous marriage and the families that would result, and exulting in a more relaxed attitude to sexual activity. And in a side comment, he lamented the colonializing missionaries, as he put it, who had polluted their culture with their teachings of chastity. And monogamy.

Reading that book reminded me what an entire worldview shift of the dominant moral imagination occurred under the influence of Christianity in the first few centuries after Christ's crucifixion and resurrection and ascension. Abortion, sexual liaisons outside of marriage, how one regards poverty and weakness. All of this and more was changed almost beyond recognition. With the exiting of the vast panorama of pagan gods and their being replaced by the one true God who had spoken in His Word with clear commands for His glory and our good, a revolution in the thoughts and hearts of the people occurred. That revolution endured for years and decades, for centuries, for nearly two millennia.

But now in our lifetimes, we have seen that moral consensus of centuries disintegrate. Norms of chastity and faithfulness, expectations of marriage and children, Assumptions about lying and drunkenness and responsibility and duty and theft, all of these and more have been abandoned or turned on their heads.

A century before our historians were exploring this great moral revolution that had been accomplished by Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about it and called for its end. He understood Christianity.

As having inserted pity, a care for the weak, into our idea of virtue. And he considered such ideas of love flawed and ultimately self-destructive. And now what the Bible calls lawless deeds, offenses, actions outside the law, law-breaking, covenant-breaking, wrongs, iniquities, Disobedience, unrighteousnesses, wickednesses, transgressions, sin are dismissed in humor and laughter. In our own actions and actions of others that we affirm and approve of, they are diminished or minimized in our public culture. Molehills are made out of moral mountains.

Absolutes slump into personal preferences or vanish altogether. Soon desires are taken to be ontological identities accompanied by morally respectable needs. That which conscience and God's Word taught the culture at large and us as individuals to loathe, we are now taught to love. And to celebrate. The surrounding moralities of our schools, employers, even family members, which used to reinforce at least an appearance of conformity to God's laws now selectively and increasingly shames those who try to deny themselves to live according to God's standards.

The culture conspires with our flesh to lead us to admire sin. To be attracted to sin, to consider sin, to listen to sin, to like sin, and to celebrate sin.

And so one more disorienting relationships I have with sin is that I underestimate sin.

I think of matters which God takes with the greatest of seriousness, kindness, purity, truthfulness, fairness, charity, compassion, self-denial. I think of them as optional, depending on the circumstances, perhaps even trifling in the grand scheme of things. Consequently, the world conspires with my own flesh to make the teachings of Christ unbelievable, almost incomprehensibly alien. So when Jesus in Matthew chapter 18 teaches that we should prefer being horrifically drowned in the depths of the sea with a weight tied around our neck to teaching someone to sin, we can hardly believe our ears.

When He teaches us that private feelings like lust and envy and hate are morally repugnant like adultery and theft and murder.

In order for us to love God and others as we should, we must also recover our hatred of sin, which by nature dishonors God and destroys ourselves and others. Entire cemeteries of unnumbered thousands in Russia and Ukraine and Poland and Germany and Cambodia and China and Mexico and even in the United States bear silent conclusive evidence to the horror of lynching hatred. Of Marxist greed, of anti-Semitic lies, of the prideful lust for personal power of family or ruler.

Friends, if I am to have a happy life, I must take sin seriously. If I am to know and experience the joy of life, I must know what life is really about and what it isn't about. If I am to understand the claims of Christ about His own work, I must understand the enormity of the foe He faced in sin and death. If I think lightly of sin, I'll think lightly of the Savior. If I think rightly of sin, then I can think rightly of the Savior.

If sin to you is no big deal, neither is the forgiveness of that sin. But if you've begun to understand what sin is and how it frustrates your life at every level, from moment to moment, to daily, to even into eternity, forever shaping your final destiny everlastingly. If you've begun to understand that, left to ourselves, sin is an insoluble problem because it's most fundamentally against God, and if we leave Him out of the equation in considering it, then we've left out the most important element. Only I say when we've begun to rightly understand the weightiness of sin, will we be in a position to understand the serious problem that sin is and the amazing prospect not only of learning to avoid it, but of being released from its power.

And even of being forgiven for those sins that we've already committed. And that brings us back to Paul's argument in Romans chapter 4, Paul's argument in Romans chapter 4 of how we can have a happy life. And it's not to ignore sin as our world tells us, or on the other hand, to trust in our own imperfect obediences, which Paul has unmasked in the first three chapters of Romans.

As wholly inadequate, just sort of pretend playing religion. Paul tells us that the happy life will only come to us through a living and active faith in Jesus Christ, which will fundamentally reorient our relationship with sin and righteousness. He's used the example of Abraham by means of his faith in God and God's promises in Genesis 15 to show that righteousness was accounted to him, and now Paul reaches for another example, the example of David, and David's appreciation of the reality of sins being not only forsaken by us, but forgiven by God. So let's think first about the world's understanding of happiness, and then what Paul presents here in Romans chapter 4, verses 7 and 8. You'll find them on page 941 in the Bibles provided.

Romans chapter 4 verses 7 and 8. Look with me at our verses. Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. Friend, I pray that as we consider these verses, you'll really find yourself happy when you leave here today in the sense of Blessed.

Come to know that your sins are forgiven because you've turned from them to trust in Christ and the atoning sacrifice that He has provided for giving us forgiveness now and certainly that the last day our sins will not be accounted to us. So let me just explain how this sermon is going to go because you're the kind of congregation you are. This sermon has three parts. It may not appear that way, but it has three parts. In the first part, we will consider the world's idea of happiness.

We've already kind of done that. We'll do that a little bit more. The second point is the main part of the sermon. I'm going to go through the three verbs that he uses about sin. Forgiven, covered, not counted against.

All right? So that's the main part. If you're taking an outline, that'd be three subpoints of point two. But that's really going to be, that's the burden of the sermon. But then there's a third point at the end.

I do want us to note that word blessed. That's how I want us to finish. That's a good way to finish, by noting that word blessed. All right, so you'll think I'm done when I'm done with that third verb, but do not be deceived. Lunch wait yet a little longer.

Blessed is how we wanna go out. All right? So, first, let me just consider a little bit more the world's idea of happiness, because I think we've got to get that in mind. I say a little more because that's basically what we've already been doing.

And of course there can be as many varieties of this as there are people. But so often it seems our pursuing of what we see called here lawless deeds or sins, actually pursuing them are what the hedonists of our day tell us to do. If you want to have a good life, they would say, unapologetically, guiltlessly, pursue whatever your passions are.

This is that idea of our desires being our identity, our needs, our rights. For many today, this is actually the baseline of psychological health. If you can't understand what your own desires are and as it were morally baptize them, then you're messed up in yourself and you'll become messed up in your interactions with others. That's the simple way that many in the secular world would read basic health. So Gnostic have parts of our world become, including many large establishments of education and entertainment and commerce, that we take someone's inner feelings and reasonings to be more significant than their very bodies.

Have you reached a long-held goal and found yourself asking, Is this all there is? Friends, our own inner motivations and thoughts are not sufficiently reliable guides to define ourselves. Different desires will involve different evidences. This relationship or that vocational goal will have more varied outcomes than simply consumed calories or days at the gym. But whether through the lawless deeds or sins referenced here or through the works that Paul...

the good works that Paul has been writing of earlier, avoiding such sins and lawless deeds, we too naturally assume that reality is us making our own destiny with our own materials, that we don't need anyone else. We are self-sufficient. And I'm guessing that for every hedonist trying to find happiness by indulging, there's a moralist who's trying to find their own version of happiness by stoically abstaining from pleasures. Perhaps you've thought of your own actions. And that you've thought through them you could create your own satisfaction and happiness.

But friends, whatever way you've been trying to pursue the good life, my simple question to you is, how's it going?

You don't have to answer publicly or fill out a form, just in your own brain, answer the question, how's it going? How is Islam treating you? How's your Hinduism working out? How is Buddhism serving you? Is yoga satisfying you?

How about your fitness goals? Are they giving you what you wanted out of life?

How about your material results? Success at work? Or maybe in your own family.

These are all ways that can appeal to people, especially those with the less experience of the world, calling them to follow them and invest their lives in them. If you feel the pull of these things, grab the book of Proverbs this afternoon and start reading through it in the Old Testament. There's a lot of wisdom for us there on the outcome of these various ways of life.

I just wonder if anyone here, frankly, is miserable. I'm not asking you to stand up and confess it, but are you in yourself miserable? I just want to say to you that God's mercy can overcome the very things in your life that you feel are trapping and dooming you. You don't have to leave here today trapped and hopeless, even under the circumstances you find yourself in. Neither the pursuit of virtue nor the pursuit of sin will give you what you really want and need.

Neither hedonism nor moralism can answer our real needs for forgiveness of our sins past, nor peace for troubled conscience today, let alone settle our anxieties about the future. Nevertheless, this is the world's answer to the what is the good life and how do you get it? It's to be found, we're told, by what we do or what we don't do, by our own exertions and experiences. It's either the hard work of the self-made millionaire or the easy going avoidance of it by Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer. But friend, if you've tried this world's ways and found that they don't work, I've got good news for you today.

The world's answer is not the answer we find laid out in God's Word. The Bible's basic message throughout is really summarized in these two little verses that we're looking at this morning. Right here in Romans 4:78 we find what true happiness is and how we can have it. So let me turn number two to true happiness. And friends, true happiness involves forgiveness.

Now here in Romans 4 in typical rabbinical style, Paul supports an example from the book of Moses, Abraham, that he's given with a later example, David. Paul clearly turns to the example of David in Psalm 32 because he uses that word count there in verse 8. And that's the same word that Moses used of Abraham's faith being counted as righteousness, as Paul had quoted up there in Romans chapter 4, verse 3. And that's why Paul introduces this here in verse 6 saying, Just as David also speaks of the blessings of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works. So if we simply look at the three verbs in these verses 7 and 8, we can see that what is at the heart of this happy life is this accounting, this imputation that Paul mentions here in verse 6.

And that includes the forgiveness now in verse 7, and sins covered already, and then in verse 8, assurance for the future. So I want us to look at each one of those three in turn. Forgiveness now, sins covered already, and then assurance for the future that our sins will not be counted against us. First, the forgiveness in verse 7. Sounds like the God who had introduced himself to Moses in Exodus 34 is the God who forgives iniquity and transgression and sin.

But then to make it clear that there was no misunderstanding, he continued on, But who will by no means clear the guilty? Alright, if that's how God has identified himself, how could God forgive these sins now?

That Paul quotes David confessing. It must not be by simply clearing the guilty. That is by erasing the ledger and saying these sins don't matter. We know this because of what the Bible reveals about God. We find that the God of the Bible is holy and loving, that He is completely good, that He expresses goodness in His desires.

God is full in Himself. He was never lonely, always experiencing love. He's given... He's always been giving and receiving a fullness of love. It's the very nature of God and His love to be a love which never morally compromises in order to love someone.

So in His revelation of Himself to Moses, His assurance that this forgiveness would come about not by an unholy ignoring of the wrong, clearing the guilty, but by some as yet unspecified way which would really deal with the sins committed. The whole history of the Bible can be viewed from watching the assembling of that story of the atonement for our sins that Paul had spoken of already before in chapter 3.

So if you're here today and you're not normally in church, I wonder what you have done that you know has separated you from God. What's laying there in your memory? Are there things that come to mind, actions that cause you a sense of shame or even guilt? That helps you to make yourself aware of your need to be forgiven. I want you to realize from these verses originally written by David who had sinned seriously against Uriah, murdering him and against his wife, Bathsheba, as Nathan the prophet put it, taking her, David came to know two things that I hope you come to know today.

One, he needed forgiveness, and two, he could have forgiveness immediately. And it was that knowledge that David evidences here that underscores the argument that Paul is making in Romans 4, that our being forgiven of our sins and so saved by God comes not from our works, our deeds, but from our believing God's promises in Christ. Friend, do you understand that? God sent His only Son who lived a perfect life of trust in His heavenly Father, and He died on the cross bearing the penalty for the sins of all of us that would ever turn and trust in Him. He raised Him from the dead.

He ascended to heaven and He accepted that sacrifice on behalf of all of us who would turn from our sins and trust in Christ alone. That's the good news of how you can know forgiveness today. Children who are here, do you understand this idea of forgiveness? It means to acknowledge something is wrong, to know it's wrong, and to continue to love the person who did it. Sometimes what's done to you is so bad that you should tell other adults about it.

If you have questions about it, talk to your Sunday school teacher. Talk to an adult here at church and talk to me or one of the other pastors. But very often questions of forgiveness will involve things they do to make it up to you if you're the one against whom they've sinned. Sometimes it doesn't. I mean, you just pardon the other person, you overlook their wrong.

You treat them as if they hadn't done it. Have you ever been forgiven by your brothers or sisters? Have you ever done anything that needed forgiving? Why don't you ask your parents about that over lunch today? Be a good conversation.

Being forgiven by God for your sins is basic. To having a blessed life, a happy life. But it's that second half of verse 7 that David goes on to in Psalm 32 that alludes to how it must have been that God could forgive our sins. It must have been by having covered them. That's the verb he uses there.

You see in the second half of verse 7. Blessed are those whose sins are covered. And this covering brings to mind the work of the sprinkled blood on the mercy seat in the tabernacle and later in the temple, which Paul had mentioned just before in chapter 3. We are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be revealed by faith. So the sins had been covered by Christ's blood.

This is what the prophet Nathan was saying to David after he confessed his sin in 2 Samuel 12. Then Samuel said to David... David rather said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said to David, the Lord has also put away your sin. In some way we may not fully understand, even God's righteousness is displayed in the fact that He does.

And in the ways that he does deliver his people and forgive their sin. Thus David can say in Psalm 103, As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. It's not that those minutes or hours or actions cease to exist, but the fullest effects of them have been absorbed by God and their gravest consequences have been removed from those of us who have committed the sins, but who have honestly and sorrowfully confessed them. And repented of them, trusting in God's promises. That forgiveness that can be enjoyed today for which we've already thanked God in our songs is because of the work of God in years past.

As God the Father sent His Son and the Son gave Himself for us and the Spirit enlightened our hearts to come to know Him in love. God is the one who saves us. He's the one who's paid our debts, who's pitied us in our desperation. He is the one who's won us over and turned us from strangers to sons and daughters. Sin is so destructive, so aimed at God, that only God and His grace could overcome it.

Left to dig ourselves out of this pit, we could never do it. And so Paul knew that if we're going to be saved, we're going to have to be saved through the gracious action of God. And that's what Jesus had taught as He expounded the Hebrew Scriptures before Him. And this is the message that Paul too was teaching these Roman Christians from the example of Abraham and now from the example of David as well. So brothers and sisters, understand and relish this truth, that we can be forgiven right now for our sins because of what God has already done in Christ.

Our sins have been covered by Christ's atoning death. And if we turn from our sins and trust in Him alone, we can know that forgiveness. That's what David's word covered here was pointing to. This action of God to cover over was held out to David when he confessed his sin. We read in Proverbs 28:13, Whoever conceals his transgression will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain that's exactly what David did here.

It's being referenced in this Psalm 32 that Paul is quoting. And that's what we too should do. That's what we can do. Friend, think of somebody that you respect spiritually that you can confess your sin to, that can help you understand how God can cover that sin in Christ. Take a moment right now and think of some sin.

I'm guessing this is not a hugely difficult exercise. Not a sin of somebody else against you, but some sin you've committed.

And think of someone you could confess it to.

That's the way forward to this kind of blessed life that Paul writes of here. If you can't think of anyone else, come to the pastors of the church.

This is the way to a happy life, to have sins covered. That's a blessed life.

The third verb that we find here in verse 8 is in reference to something that's to happen in the future. So look at verse 8, Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count His sin. So you see, there's a little shift between verses 7 and 8. It goes from the plural in verse 7, which feels kind of general, to the singular in verse 8, which feels more specific.

It's kind of like you have a whole group pictured in verse 7, and then the camera kind of zooms in on one exemplary person in verse 8. But it's this word count in Psalm 32:2 which has drawn Paul's attention to these verses to be used here. It doesn't say, Blessed is the man who has no sin, but Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. So this verse 8 is said in view of that future and final accounting in which the blessed man not only will have the righteousness of another accounted to him, through his trust in God and his promises, as we see through Abraham's example. But also here negatively, this blessed man, the happy man, will not have his sin accounted against him.

The Lord would have every right to do that. And yet because of the Father's electing love and the Son's substitutionary death and the Spirit's application of regenerating spiritual life, the Christian can now be certain that on that last day, the atoning effects of the Son's death will show themselves with our sins not being counted against us. The Lamb of God, as John the Baptist bore witness, takes away the sins of the world. That is not every last individual sin, but all of those the Father has elected and the Son has redeemed. God is always just.

He is never forgiven and will never forgive a sin without having somehow extracted the just punishment. For His sin. And that's where Jesus Christ's role as the Lamb of God comes in. And our sins are counted but to Him, and His righteousness is credited to us. This is our status of having God's own righteousness imputed to us.

Friends, this is the Bible doctrine of imputation. Our sins accounted not to us but to Christ.

And Christ's righteousness in His living and dying accounted to us. That's why Paul seizes on this word counter credit there in verse 8. He's saying, Abraham's case is an example for us there earlier in the chapter. So Abraham, a pagan sinner when that promise came to him, and David, the king of Israel, both agree that this righteousness is not our own righteousness, it comes from God. It's not by our works, it's ours by faith.

So David's is an example of our being declared innocent, of our sins guilt having been wiped out, even as Abraham had been an example of our being declared righteous, of Christ's righteousness being accounted to us by means of our faith in Him. So Abraham and David, both Genesis and the Psalms, agree with what Paul is teaching in chapter 3 about salvation. If we are to be counted righteous by God, it will not be by works, but by faith. This is what Paul is teaching, and this chapter shows that it's consistent with what the Old Testament Scriptures teach. Now, I wonder if this surprises you.

If this is not what you expected. Maybe you came here even feeling kind of proud that maybe you'd come to church today. Maybe you're not normally at church, you feel it's a good thing to do. This should make God happy. I mean, in your own mind, do you ever boast like that?

Oh, I think I'm going to go to the evening service tonight.

I mean, not out loud, but just down in your own heart, where only God and you can really hear you.

Friend, the clear message of this book of Romans so far is that the holy God before him You have nothing to boast about in the way you've lived or in what you've done. Chapter 1 makes it clear that there's the sinfulness of the entire Gentile world. And then chapter 2 lays out clearly the sin that flourishes even among those who thought themselves religious insiders and who possessed God's law. Chapter 3 concludes that all of us are unrighteous in ourselves and that, as Paul said in Romans 3:20, no one will be declared righteous in God's sight by observing the laws rather through the law we become conscious of sin. And it's at this point, at that point where we despair of ourselves and our own self-manipulated righteousness with all of its flaws and incompletenesses and inconsistencies and failures, it's at that point that Paul puts in this hope of another righteousness.

Just when we have exhausted any hope of our own righteousness, I mean, he's played out all the possibilities in those first three chapters and we are left bankrupt before God. It's at that point that he puts in a righteousness that is ours by faith in Jesus Christ. God in His grace strikes out the record of our sins and substitutes for it positively the record of Christ's righteousness. My friend, you will never climb into the boat of Christ's righteousness for safe passage to God until you abandon that sinking tub of your own righteousness. Just get out of it.

It is not seaworthy. It will not work. It's going to sink. How many more days have to pass until you see the truth about yourself and your own need that God presents here in this book? That others around you can see that sometimes you yourself see when you're quiet and tired and honest, you realize you need something outside yourself to save you.

You can't save yourself. And that something is someone, and that someone is Jesus Christ. That's who you need to save you. Jesus Christ is the only one who has lived a perfectly righteous life, never needing to be forgiven, never having any sins to be covered over, never needing the righteousness of another, and it is His righteousness that can be yours. Today by faith.

Theology matters, doesn't it? Theology makes a big difference in how you're gonna live your life, whether you're gonna know yourself to be blessed, happy today or not. Understanding that it is by faith alone and not by our works makes a difference. Understanding this gives God glory. Free grace tends to God's glory.

It is uncluttered by misunderstandings that our own actions have been good or deserving of the good that we know. And so God is glorified. Understanding this humbles us. Brothers and sisters, we need to know that we can be saved by nothing that we do, but only by our faith in what God has done. We need to know this for the sake of our own humility.

And the last place you should see pride is in a Christian church. To admit to be a Christian is to admit to be someone who's not worthy. We must know that, as Paul says of Abraham here, we have nothing to boast of before God. Understanding this helps you to grow as a Christian. If you've been saved by God's gracious action and you know that, can you see how understanding that will only encourage you to rely upon Him at every point along the way?

He alone is is sufficient. Understanding this doesn't mean you don't work, but you don't work as a Christian in order to earn God's favor, but rather as an expression of your faith. You don't work in order to be saved, but because you have been saved. Your faith is not the reason or the basis of your salvation, it's not another kind of work, your faith is a channel through which God saves you. What does it mean for us as a church?

Well, brothers and sisters, it means that we must be committed to continuing to teach the Bible. We must hold out the promises of God because they are the only promises that are of eternal value. They alone will hold currency in this life and the next. Just as Paul turns to the Bible here to confirm what he was saying, going to Abraham, going to David. So we are clear in our statement of faith, as we were thinking about this morning in our new members class, that we believe the Bible is true.

We turn to it and believe the promise is there. Our practice of public teaching in our own lives, we understand the Bible to be God's Word. And if we're wrong on this point, then all of our hope falls to the ground and is lost. We must be committed as a church to teaching the Bible. Not only that, but we must be committed to teaching the Bible clearly.

We must hold out the clear, even sharp contrast that there are in the Bible, just like they are here in Romans chapter 4. We see the contrast here between faith and works, between attempting to have a righteousness of our own, actions that Paul has dismissed in chapters 1 to 3, and having the righteousness that comes by faith in God's promises in Christ. We see too implied the important contrast between justification and sanctification. If you look here in Romans chapter 4 in verse 5, we read that God is the God who justifies the wicked. He doesn't sanctify them first, make them holy in fact, and then declare them to be so, but God declares the wicked righteous by faith in the righteous Christ, their substitute, and then makes them so.

Friends, this makes all the difference in the world about how we structure our church. What should be at the center of the church? Programs to improve ourselves morally? Or the gospel of Jesus Christ? We must hold on to the truth of justification preceding sanctification.

It matters. And we must teach the Bible as a whole, realizing that the Old and New Testaments both hold out this same hope, the justification that we need only by God's grace through faith alone in Christ alone. Either you and me and Abraham and David here all have the same hope, or we have no hope at all. Abraham believed God and had faith in Him, and it was credited, imputed, accounted to him as righteousness. Saving faith is distinct from works.

It does work. But it's not work. This is true for Abraham, it's true for any of us who will be accounted righteous before God, and any one of us who, like David here, will not have our sins accounted to us by the Lord, we can know that now. We can have assurance of that today. That's how we're given a blessed life.

That's why we're called blessed or happy. By the way, on that word count there, in verse eight, it's interesting in on the last night Jesus was with his disciples in Luke 2237 Jesus uses that word count and he uses it in quoting Isaiah 5312 about himself. He says the Messiah will be counted among the transgressors.

How would this take place, our being forgiven, Christ being numbered among the transgressors for us. The Lord must be part of reckoning someone guiltless by removing their guilt and having it assigned to Christ. And He would bear the guilt of our sins away so that it would be answered fully and forever. Friends, this provides a happiness that is impossible without God. Because without God, there's no one to affect and offer such a forgiveness as this.

What a pardon we've been granted, a pardon that can never be revoked. I mean, once we've been pardoned like this, we can never be unpardoned. The expression is very strong in verse 8. It's a very strange kind of double negative in the original. It's ooh and may together.

It's not. It's like you can render it, We'll never ever Count his sin against him. It's a strong word. So Psalm 32 concludes, Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

Which brings me to my third point, and I warned you earlier so you wouldn't be confused. I thought we were just on point three. Ah, we were in the three verbs. So we did forgiven and covered and now not counted. Now we're on the main third point, which is the final point, which is that word blessed.

That's how I want us to finish our meditation on this. I simply want us to note that repeated word blessed. Friends, that word makarios, that means happy. Here is the good life because we rejoice in this news, we are deeply secure and content and happy in God. The circumstances of our week vary.

The circumstances of our lives are different from one person to another and different at different points in our lives. And yet there is a blessedness here that transcends every year, every decade, every circumstance. Friends, this is the place in the chapter where Paul Even through the mouth of David in Psalm 32 gives us not just the doctrine, but a bit of commentary on it in experience. The wonder and amazement of this truth of justification by faith alone. Thus he calls those who know this salvation blessed, happy, in an enviably joyous state of satisfaction in God, whatever other earthly circumstances may be.

That's why Paul could write over in Philippians, Chapter 4, that beautiful statement, not that I have already, sorry, in Chapter 4, I know how to be brought low and I know how to abound in any and every circumstances. I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.

Friends, if you go back and you read all of Psalm 32, which you should do this afternoon, you'll see that sin is the problem that David is talking about in Psalm 32. That's why so many people relate to Psalm 32. It was Augustine's favorite Psalm. Let's just go back and turn there now. Come on, open your Bibles.

We're doing fine on time. Psalm 32, here we go. Children's workers, we'll wait. Okay, here we go. Psalm 32.

It's a short psalm. It's such a good psalm.

Look down at the last verse, verse 11.

Look who David is talking to. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

So David's talking to the righteous, the upright in heart. Of course, that's what the psalm is really about. I mean, you go back to the first psalm, you know, how does it begin in Psalm 1? It begins with a Beatitude. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.

Day and night. Friends, here in verse 1 of our Psalm, Psalm 32, he says, Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, whose sins are covered. And yet, King David gives us another lens here to understand who the righteous are that the Psalm addresses. And we see from these verses that the righteous are clearly not the perfectly sinless ones, because David has clearly confessed his sin. David was not such a perfectly righteous one, and he wasn't writing to people like that.

He says here that the truly blessed are in fact transgressors and sinners, but only a certain set of transgressors and sinners. The blessed, the happy, are those transgressors and sinners who have confessed their sins and who are trusting in the righteousness of another to cover their sins.

But if you're not used to reading the Bible, you'll find it's like a good doctor. It always begins with an accurate diagnosis. This Psalm, Psalm 32, is one of a set of seven Psalms that deal especially with our sins. They're called the penitential Psalms.

If you want to write down these seven numbers, I'll tell you real quickly what the penitential Psalms are. You can check them out in a series this week. Read one in the morning and your devotions maybe. Psalm 6, this one, Psalm 32, 38, the very famous 51, Psalm 102, Psalm 130, and Psalm 143. And like Psalm 51 and Psalm 38, we think Psalm 32 would have followed the confession of Psalm 51.

It's long been treasured because of its honesty. One reason that this psalm is so beloved is that all of us face guilt about the past and anxiety about the future. And this psalm deals with both. Our past is weighted with transgression and sins and iniquities with disobedience to God. And so Paul here in Romans 4, if you go back to Romans 4, he quotes this Psalm, Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him. See what's being said here? He's saying, this is blessed. This is being blessed. This is happiness.

The joys of being forgiven. And, friend, when you know this joy, this joy is fuel for your repenting. It's fuel for your persevering in repenting day after day. Do you remember the Lord Jesus Himself? For the joy set before Him endured the cross.

Joy, contentment, satisfaction in what God has done for us in Christ. Is what brings us life and energy spiritually. So I wonder what your joy is looking like today. How is your joy tank? I didn't mean on passing circumstances, oh, I found out she really likes me.

Oh, I'm going to get a raise. The doctor's report was good. Because all those reports will turn bad one day. No, no, I just mean, now your joy meter about this kind of stuff. Because these are the matters that will allow you, like the Lord Jesus, to persevere through the most difficult of times.

You know, temptation can appear lovely, but then Christ has to appear more lovely to our hearts. How can we help Christ appear more lovely to our hearts? That is some of your most fundamental spiritual work. How can you help Christ appear more lovely to your heart? Let's consider carefully those desires that would call us to reshape ourselves in their image.

Can they deliver us from guilt? Can they fully, if we fulfill them, can they remove our shame? Can giving in to them bring us freedom and liberty? Friends, the happiness being held out to us here is a happiness that exceeds our circumstances and gives us joy to get through the pains of aging and the discouragement of unemployment, the loneliness of life. This happiness is not our circumstances in this world, but our confident hopes and the satisfaction we have in God that we can come to know even today and know forever.

However we can do it, we want to harness the joy we find in the forgiveness for our sins that Christ provides, like we experience in singing here or in fellowship in order to thank God and praise God in order to encourage each other and be encouraged by each other. Coming into this state of blessedness and joy, there is such relief. This reconciliation that he effects with us makes us want to tell others about it too, so that they can know this reconciliation.

So, my friends, brothers and sisters, this doctrine that Paul teaches us here, this is the basis for truly good life, a truly blessed life, happy, full of the joy of life through ups and downs. Now I know since I'm back in the pulpit after not having been here for a while, you'll feel robbed if you don't get some little historical droplet from me. Before I leave. And so I'll tell you this. In England, in the decades after the Reformation had begun, John Calvin was not as well known as you would have thought.

If you think of the best Reformed witness from the continent, you know who you're going to think of, not John Calvin. You're going to think of anybody want to guess? Heinrich Bullinger. He's the dude you're going to think of. Who, you say, is the well-named Heinrich Bullinger?

He is the son-in-law of Zwingli. And because Zwingli in Zurich was killed early in battle, he starts early in his ministry preaching at the big church in Zurich and he preaches there 45 years. So Bullinger is the man who He wrote an important collection of sermons called the Decades, which were translated and widely circulated in England. And in that 45-year ministry, he wrote more than Calvin. He wrote more than Luther.

He wrote more than Luther and Calvin combined. He wrote a lot. And yet it was this one book he wrote from 1549 to 1551 of of collections of sermons, I'm not sure he ever even preached them, they were written in sermon form, that really went through the basic way that Christians discipled each other at the time, in the same way that Calvin's Institutes originally did, went over the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and baptism and the Lord's Supper.

The Dutch translated into Dutch and for years they required a copy of the book to be kept on all Dutch trading vessels by law. And that's how Bollinger first got to Asia and here to North America, because it was seen as such an important book to have. And we actually have one of our interns right now reading Heinrich Bollinger's Decades. Wyatt, you want to stand? You have any questions about this book?

Talk to this man. Thank you, Wyatt.

I bring this all up because at one point in the decades, Bollinger writes, For now I must prove that God the Father hath in His Son given us all things that are necessary to a happy life and eternal salvation. A happy life and everlasting salvation. I name here two things, a happy life and everlasting salvation. By a happy life I understand a holy and godly life which we live and lead quietly and honestly in this present world.

Eternal salvation is that felicity of the life to come which we with assured hope do verily look for. Or as John Gill would later say, such who have this righteousness imputed to them are happy persons. They are justified from all sin, freed from all condemnation. Their persons and services are acceptable to God. It will be always well with them.

They are heirs of glory.

Is that your hope this morning?

Is that your confidence?

It can be.

That can be your hope and confidence today.

Let's pray.

Lord God, we pray that yout would make this hope truly the hope of each one here this morning. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.