Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. | Romans 5:1–8
On Sunday, we sang the hymn Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. Due to the words blessing and praise in the first verse, and the generally upbeat nature of the song, it feels light. As you get into the song it gets weighty. Towards the end, we are given a picture of how our sin and God’s grace work together to display His glory. I want to walk through the last verse and a half as a proper parallel to both the Romans 5 above and the sermon from Sunday.
First, we are given a picture of who we are:
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
This echoes Romans 5 above: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It provides us with the image of a shepherd chasing down a wandering sheep. We are actively running away from God, declaring ourselves free from our need for Him; when in reality, He is what we were created for. He loves us too much to let us go; He steps in and rescues us. This is not: ‘God meeting us halfway.’ This is God chasing us down to rescue us from our sinful selves.
The sone then goes on to tell us what this rescue requires:
He, to rescue me from danger,
bought me with his precious blood.
In order to rescue us from sin, God our shepherd, had to do more than simply pull us back from the cliff. Sin created a punishment that had to be paid, and a righteousness that had to be faithfully lived out. We receive both of these in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. As He gives His life to pay the penalty, He also sheds His blood to purify us of all unrighteousness. All that we undeservedly gain from Jesus is known as GRACE.
This song goes on to tell us how this grace changes our life:
Oh, to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be!
If Jesus has given us everything, then we now owe Him everything. There is nothing in this life that should not be aimed back in His direction as worship. Grace, then, compels us to live a life of obedience to God. Some may think of this as coercion, or a type of control, but the author of the hymn tells us why this is good:
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee:
The implication here is that the greatest danger to us is getting what we want; to fetter someone is to put chains around their ankles so that they cannot escape. The freedom to wander and pursue something other than God is an end that we need protection from. This is backwards from how we usually think, but if we were created to be in relationship with God, the worst thing that He could do is let us go. His loving grace not only saves us but binds us: protects us from ourselves. Which the song describes this way:
prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
When we sing this song, we often repeat this phrase, because it accurately reflects who we are. If left to ourselves, we would wander. If God did not continue to give us grace, we would fail to maintain faith. Even though God is who we were created for, and maintaining relationship with Him is what is best for us, we choose to walk away again and again. This is not just our tendency, it is our very nature.
The first response to this is to plead with God to keep us from wandering. The second is how the song ends:
here’s my heart, O take and seal it;
seal it for thy courts above.
We ended the sermon Sunday by saying that Jesus is the guarantor of the promises of God. In Him, we are sealed for eternity. His sacrifice is not just a step in the process, it is grace applied to us. If salvation were left to us, we would not earn it, or once given we would lose it. God maintains His sovereignty over the entire process so that we may: rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
The entire process of saving us to reveal God’s grace to undeserving sinners. A proper response to this is to marvel at what we have been given and to have our hearts tuned to sing His grace.
Now that I have one song stuck in your head, let me add another. This is a song based on the words of Romans 5 above, that declares the weight and joy of salvation together: