Everyone learns in slightly different ways, but in general, most learn in at least one of four major ways. Some are visual learners, auditory learners, reading learners, and kinesthetic (hands-on) learners. If you don’t know your learning style, there are some simple online tests you can take to help you understand how you learn. However, I have devised an easy 2-question test to help you determine your learning style. It no doubt has flaws but let’s try it. Question #1. You are lost and someone offers to give you directions. Do you prefer that they A- Show you a map or a picture. B- Explain out loud how to get there. C- Take you and have you follow them. D- Have the steps written out for you. If you said “Just put it into Google Maps”, then you have ruined my first question and can see why this test does have its problem. But let’s proceed to the second question. Questions #2. You are trying to memorize a Bible verse. Do you A- Highlight or color code it in your Bible. B- Read it out loud over and over. C- Connect the Bible verse to a movement to help you remember. D- Write it out repeatedly. If you have answered “I just won’t memorize Scripture” then you need to read Psalms 119:11 and repent. Like I said these aren’t perfect tests, but they do help you to understand how you learn. It’s extremely important in life because when you know how you learn you will learn faster. It will increase retention of what you have learned and you will find yourself less frustrated when you are learning. I think the frustrating part was the greatest benefit to me when I learned how I learn. When I was in Elementary school I did pretty well in all my classes, but there was one class that frustrated me and that was history. For some reason, I could memorize all the dates, people, and events, but it never made sense to me. It just didn’t “click” for some reason. That was until I went to a museum and they had this one large wall painted with a massive timeline of history. Now I can’t imagine that I hadn’t ever seen a timeline up to that point but for some reason this timeline really helped me to learn visually how all these dates, people, and events that I memorized actually fit together. I saw that Cleopatra died around 30 years before the birth of Jesus and that she lived closer to the building of the first automobile than she did the building of the pyramids. I saw that Oxford University is more than 200 years older than the Aztec Empire. I saw that Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte were alive at the same time, and that Barbra Walters was born the same year as Ann Franke and Martin Luther King Jr. This visual representation really helped me to understand how history all fit together. Since then history has become one of my favorite subjects. Now I want to mention timelines because timelines are a great tool (especially to visual learners) to help people understand. This morning I want to look at a timeline not to understand history in sequence, but to help us overcome a common fear.
If we were to try to come up with a list of the most common fears, I would say we could come up with most of them. The fear of public speaking, the fear of failure, fear of heights, fear of spiders, fear of flying, and fear of enclosed spaces, and all these are among the most common fears people experience. However there are three fears we usually don’t think of that are considered some of the most common. They are so common that most people struggle with two of the three and that is the fear of the past, fear of the present, and fear of the future. This morning I want to look at a timeline that Paul lays out for us in Romans to help combat the anxiety we feel when we think about our past, the anxiety we feel when we think about our present, and the anxiety that we feel about our future. No matter what your learning style I pray that you will take your Bibles, turn to Romans 5:1, read along with me, listen closely, and take notes. That way we hit every learning style and we will see what Paul says about the timeline of Grace in the life of a follower of Jesus.
Grace that Saved Us - Romans 5:1
Therefore, since we have been made right in God’s sight by faith, we have peace with God because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us
Even as a follower of Jesus our pasts are very wicked things. None of us were Christians since birth so we all have a past that is sinful, and all sin is wicked. Because of this, our past is a weapon our enemy loves to use against us time and time again. It’s very effective at making us less effective for the Kingdom of God. It’s so effective because when our enemy brings up our past. He brings it with regrets and regrets are a dangerous thing for believers. I’m not saying we don’t learn from our mistakes but our lessons learned are never what our enemy reminds us of when it comes to our past. He likes to tell us we are the same person now as we were back then, that we will never change, that we are not good enough to ever have anything good, and that we are not worthy of God’s love. Paul is very familiar with this attack so he starts this part of Romans by addressing our past as followers of Jesus. He begins with a word that we see many times in Scripture — “Therefore”. Like it has been said before any time we see the word “therefore” we need to find out what it is there for. What Paul is saying is in reference to all the arguments he has made up to this point in Romans, in order to understand what this “therefore” is there for, we can go back and study the previous 4 chapters. However, Paul does us a favor. He sums up his entire argument with this one statement in verse 1, “We have been made right in God’s sight by faith”. His entire argument to this point is our proving we are all sinners and what sinfulness looks like before a Holy God. It is God’s anger toward sin and how we are justified in God’s sight by faith in Jesus Christ alone. Justification is God, the perfect and righteous judge, looking upon us and finding us righteous despite our sinful past, justification is being made right in God’s sight just as Paul says here and this only comes through faith in Jesus Christ alone. According to Romans 10:9, faith in Jesus is trusting Him as your Lord and Savior and believing that God raised Him from the dead. It's faith according to Ephesians 2:8-9 that brings us into the grace of God that miraculously saves us not because of what we have done, but in spite of what we have done. Because we have been made right in God’s sight by His grace through faith, we now have peace with God. Notice this says peace with God not peace of God. Peace of God is talked about elsewhere in Scripture but this is peace with God because of the case Paul had built in the first 4 chapters of this book. Without having peace with God, we would suffer the wrath of God because of our sin. It is because of what Jesus did for us when He shed His blood as a sacrifice for our sins and bore the wrath of God Himself on the cross. 1 Thessalonians 1:10 tells us specifically that it is Jesus and Jesus alone that saves us from the coming wrath of God that will be poured out when Jesus returns. Therefore when our enemy brings up our past, we need to fight back because the grace of God has covered our past. We need to fight back using the same weapon that Jesus used against Satan when He was tempted in the wilderness. It’s the only weapon we are given when God provides us with His armor. We are going to have to pull out the sword of the spirit and go on the offensive. When the enemy tells us we will never change, we are still that old failure we knew ourselves to be in our past, we turn to 2 Corinthians 2:17 and say listen to what the Lord has to say about that — “anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” When you put your faith in Jesus Christ, you are brought from death into life, because you can tell the enemy the Lord says I’m not the same person I once was, that was the old me, but I’m made new and alive in Christ. When the enemy brings up all your past sins, you can open your Bible to Colossians 2:14 and say the Lord says all those sins were cancelled and nailed to the cross when Jesus died for me. I know according to Psalms 103:12 that they will never be brought up again. As far as the east is from the west, that is how far my sins have been removed from me. None of this is of myself, it is all because of what Jesus Christ has done for me the moment I trusted Him. My past has been forgiven by the grace of Jesus Christ alone.
Grace that Sustains Us - Romans 5:2-5
Because of our faith, Christ has brought us into this place of undeserved privilege where we now stand, and we confidently and joyfully look forward to sharing God’s glory. We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.
The grace of God doesn’t just save us and then leave us to our own devices. The grace of God is the reality in which we stand each and every moment in our lives as a Christian. This is seen in many different ways throughout our day. This undeserved privilege (as Paul puts it) is never more evident than in the fact we have a personal relationship with Jesus when we come to Him as Lord by faith. The moment we trust in Jesus, we are ushered into the throne room of heaven and can now boldly come to the throne of grace all because of the blood of Jesus Christ. There is another way Paul points out that grace sustains us in our present and is when we face problems and trials. Another time in our lives that the enemy loves to weaponize — when we face troubles. The enemy uses these times to try to convince us that Jesus has evidently left us because how could a good God let bad things happen to good people. When we go to God’s Word, we will quickly see we are never promised that bad things won’t happen, after all we live in a fallen world, full of fallen people. We are promised in Romans 8:28 that all of those things will work for good. Here in verse 3, Paul tells us how this is true in our lives and he starts off by telling us we rejoice in those hard times. It’s not the problems we are rejoicing in, but it’s the problems we are rejoicing through because we know what they will do in our lives. He starts to explain a chain of events that happen in the life of a believer when those bad times come and all these links in the chain are only possible because of the grace of God we experience each and every day. The first link in this chain of events is that these problems produce endurance. The word Paul uses for endurance here gives us a picture of being single-minded or focused. What he is saying is these trials and problems come along and God uses them to remove the things from our lives that are distractions and uses them to re-align our priorities. He creates an endurance within us that helps us focus on what really matters and what is lasting in our lives. In just this first link alone, we can see how God can make good from the seemingly bad and cause us to rejoice. Paul isn’t done yet. Once God uses these trials to bring us back to the one whom we must be focused on at all times. We are then told that endurance produces strength in our character. Strength of character here means someone who has been battle tested. Let me give you an example of what this looks like in the real world. We spoke about fears earlier and one of my biggest fears for a season was the fear of flying. In my job at the time, I was going to have to travel by plane more and more so I needed to get over my fear. What helped me most to do this was when someone told me that any time I start to feel anxiety, worry, or nervousness while I’m flying is to always look at the flight attendants and see how they are responding. It was because those were the ones who had (as Paul would call it) strength of character. They had been there before and they knew what to expect when things seemed dire for all the rest around. That is what Paul is saying happens in the life of a believer. When they are focused on Jesus through the trials and the storms they become battle hardened. When the enemy tries to trip them up, those trials make it easier and easier to walk with Jesus and not be distracted by anything that might come our way. Just like the great missionary Corrie Ten Boom said, “You won’t know that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.” Not only is this beneficial for your walk with Jesus, but others can look to you as younger followers and see how you are responding in crisis and will trust Jesus more just because of the testimony you are sharing through your endurance and strength of character. God’s grace is always enough no matter what we are facing. In this same passage Paul points to one last place that the grace of God finds us and that is in our futures.
Grace that Secures Us - Romans 5:2-5
Because of our faith, Christ has brought us into this place of undeserved privilege where we now stand, and we confidently and joyfully look forward to sharing God’s glory. We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.
Once we produce endurance and then strength of character, Paul says the troubles in our lives will then produce the confident hope of our Salvation. This is not a wish for our future, but is a hope that will never disappoint us. It is backed by the love of God and God’s love never fails, it never gives up, and it never runs out. Our hope is not only in the promises that God has given us of an eternity with Him, but it’s also in the fact that Jesus is already there preparing a way by His grace. It’s the same grace that went before the children of Israel to tell the fish in the Red Sea they might want to move because He was about to make a way through the waters for His chosen people. It was the same grace that first went into the lion's den to tell the lions that He was going to have to shut their mouths for just a little while because a friend of His was coming to visit, but promised they will eat well just a bit after that. It’s the same grace that shouted “It is finished” not “I am finished” and rose again three days later. It doesn’t matter what tomorrow holds for you, Jesus is already there and He is full of grace and truth and will lavish it upon all His children.
It doesn’t matter what type of learner you are, I hope you see what Paul is trying to communicate with this timeline of grace. By the grace of God alone through faith, we have been freed from our past. Our old rebellion and sin has been forgiven and we now have peace with God. We have been given the freedom to walk and enjoy a personal relationship with Jesus now even in the midst of our troubles, knowing they will always work for good and that no matter what tomorrow holds we can know that Jesus holds tomorrow. His grace is already there to meet us until the day He calls us home to glory and we will get to experience all the wonders of His grace forever.
