“We have also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In the last generation, thanks to a number of different cultural trends, it became common to think of Christianity as providing a kind of fire insurance. Many preachers adopted what is often caricatured today as a “turn or burn” approach to their preaching, putting incredible rhetorical pressure on their congregations to follow Jesus in order to escape the horrors of Hell. Most of this thinking followed from an impoverished understanding of a much older sermon by Jonathan Edwards. Because of this, salvation began to be thought of as a mostly past tense affair. As long as you had been saved, how you lived going forward was up to you. But Paul spoke of salvation as something much greater than that. Let’s talk about salvation as something that encompasses past, present, and future.

As we come into the fifth chapter of Romans, we find Paul celebrating some of the incredible benefits of salvation. What exactly does salvation do for us? As we talked about yesterday, one of the first things salvation accomplishes for us is bringing us peace with God. It takes a relationship that was once in open conflict and reconciles it entirely. This happens because Jesus paid the price our sins demanded. He returned His life to God on our behalf and so that we no longer had to. As a reward for this exchange, God granted Him His life back by raising Him from the dead. With God’s wrath and justice now satisfied, we can simply live at peace with Him.

So, what else is there? Paul tells us about another benefit here. We have obtained access to Him by this same faith into grace. Faith brings grace. The thing about salvation and having a right relationship with God is that we don’t deserve it. We didn’t do the work for it. We certainly haven’t earned it by any stretch of the imagination. Now, this isn’t necessarily a popular message to preach. People don’t like being told they’re wrong when they don’t think they are. But that doesn’t change reality. It doesn’t change the reality of impending judgment, but it also doesn’t change the realty of God’s amazing grace.

When we place our faith in Jesus, we receive the grace of God. We receive His grace that covers our sin. We receive the grace of His Spirit living in us, make us over into His image – the image He designed us to bear in the beginning. We receive the grace of eternal life in His eternal kingdom. With God in Christ it is nothing but grace upon grace.

This allows us, Paul says, to “boast in the hope of the glory of God.” Now, that word “boast” there is tricky. In English the word doesn’t have very good connotations. We don’t like it when someone is boastful and rightly so. That kind of smug pridefulness is extraordinarily off-putting. Fortunately, that’s not what Paul is talking about here. The Greek word speaks of rejoicing in something. The word also contains the sense of boasting, but this is not the kind of prideful boasting that comes to mind for us. Our boasting is not in what we have accomplished for we haven’t accomplished anything. Rather, our boasting is in what God has done for us in Christ. We boast, or rejoice, in what Christ has accomplished for us by His death and resurrection.

More specifically and again, Paul says that we “boast in the hope of the glory of God.” Yet what does this mean, the “hope of the glory of God”? As we have talked about at other times, God’s glory is often portrayed as a kind of luminosity, but it is really just the sum total of all of the things that make Him God in one overwhelming package. God’s glory is something we only ever experience in part right now. We couldn’t handle more than that. But there is a day coming when we will be made finally and entirely new. We will be cleansed once and for all from our sin. We will be able to stand and bathe in the wonder of God’s full and unmitigated glory. That will be a very good day. It is a day whose coming we can have hope in because of our faith in Christ and the salvation that brings us.

For now, we hope in that glory. That is, we look expectantly forward to a future reality that will be better than our present circumstances. That is something the Christian faith so uniquely offers the world that many other worldviews and especially secularism simply doesn’t have the substance to produce. The promise of the Gospel is that tomorrow will be better than today with the understanding that tomorrow may refer to the calendar day after today, but it may also refer to a date much further into the future than that. In Christ, because of our faith, we have hope for the future.

Hope is a powerful thing. It has the power to bring us peace in the here and now. If we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that tomorrow is going to be better than today, then we don’t have to worry about today any longer. We certainly don’t have to worry about tomorrow. We can simply enjoy the experiences we are currently facing even if they are hard. We can focus our attention on finding things for which to be grateful rather than complaining about what we wished we had. We can love others freely and without worrying about the direct outcome of it or what might happen to us for pursuing it. And in Christ, because of our faith, we have hope. May you know and live in this hope today.