Confession is good for the soul

Romans chapter 10, we're going to be reading the whole chapter. Romans chapter 10. Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved, for I can testify about them that they are zealous for knowledge.

Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. Christ is the end of the law, so that there may be righteousness from everyone who believes. Moses describes in this way the righteousness that is by the law.

The man who does these things will live by them. But the righteousness that is by faith says, do not say in your heart who will ascend into heaven, that is to bring Christ down, or who will ascend into the deep, that is to bring Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? The word is near you, it is on your mouth and in your heart.

That is the word of faith we are proclaiming all together. That if we confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.

As the scripture says, anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame, for there is no difference between Jew and Gentile. The same Lord is Lord of all, and richly blesses all who call on him, for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then can they call on the one who they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.

But not all the Israelites accepted the good news, for Isaiah says, Lord, who has believed our message? Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of God, through the word of Christ. But I ask, did they not hear? Of course they did. Their voice has gone out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

Again I ask, did Israel not understand? First, Moses says, I will make you envious by those who are not a nation. I will make you angry by a nation that has no understanding. And Isaiah boldly says, I was found by those who did not seek me.

I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me. But concerning Israel, he says, all day long, I have held out my hands to a disobedient and obstinate people. May the Lord bless his word, as it is faithfully preached tonight by our servant Tony.

Alleluia, alleluia, be praise to this day. Alleluia, alleluia, be praise to the risen Lord. Alleluia, alleluia, be praise to this day.

Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was sad as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity.

I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Well, let's go to that passage of scripture which was read to us earlier. The 10th chapter of Romans.

We're going to be looking into the ninth verse. It's lovely to hear the rustle of the pages as I make reference to scripture because we want what is checked, what is spoken from the pulpit always to be checked by the congregation. What is important is what this book says, not what the preacher says.

If the preacher is explaining the book, that's fine. Otherwise, forget what he says. It's so important that we latch on to what the Lord is saying in the book that he has inspired.

That if you confess with your mouth, Romans 10 9, if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. I happen to patronize the Royal Bank of Scotland simply because at one stage their bank charges were cheaper than anyone else. And if I go down to the machine on Montague Precinct there and put in my card and press a few buttons, I will get a mini statement of my account.

The bank will indicate whether hopefully I am in credit or whether I am in the red. Being a Yorkshireman, I rarely if ever go into the red because I refuse to pay the exorbitant prices that banks delight imposing on folks who transgress. Month by month, the bank manager in his kindness sends me a full-blown statement.

But any time of the day or night, assuming the machine is working, I can go along, press the buttons and abracadabra out comes my mini statement. You know the epistle that Paul wrote to the Romans, which is one of the greatest letters in the New Testament, is if you like the complete statement. It's got a wonderful explanation of the Christian faith.

It was magnificent that the Apostle Paul was so used by the Holy Spirit to give us these 16 doctrinally packed chapters. But there are mini statements like the ones that you were quoting in our time of prayerful meditation a few moments ago. And here is a magnificent summary of the gospel, that ninth verse, which speaks about how you and I can know that we are Christians.

Indeed the Apostle Paul, who has in mind, if you look at the first verse, particularly the salvation of his own country, is very concerned to urge Jewish people to come to faith in Jesus Christ. And the last part of this succinct statement states, yes, you will be saved. Why do people need to be saved? Some years ago when Green Shield stamps were very much the enticing project that shops used to invade customers to come into them, there was a cartoon in an evangelical paper and there was this enthusiastic street evangelist and he went up to some unsuspecting passerby and said, are you saved? The caption that came out of the head, you know how cartoonists sometimes put their act together, the cartoonist caption read, what does he think I am? A Green Shield stamp.

Why do we need to be saved? Or put the question another way, as I try to expand this mini statement, why did the Lord Jesus come into this world? Well, Ben, who as you've heard, will soon be on his way to India and I do hope you'll be praying for him. Ben's been with me on a couple of trips to Europe especially. He quoted when he was reading in our time of praise and worship an earlier verse in Romans that speaks about the wrath of God.

Has it ever struck you as being strange that God should get angry? But that's exactly what Paul says, not just in the fifth chapter of Romans but also in the first chapter of Romans. Look at the 18th verse of chapter one, the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness. You see, I thought that God was a loving God.

I was talking to someone over the Easter period who gave me a projection of the God of their own image and it really was the God of their fancy, the God that they would like to believe in. He struck me as being a sort of benevolent Santa Claus who was always there to drop the goodies when you made a request. Now God is good, we sing and shout it, but God is holy and God demands from all those who would have fellowship with him a holiness so that when God and they are together, God will not be embarrassed.

God is angry at sin and the Bible says that God will pour out his anger against all manifestation of human wickedness in our world. Why is it if Jesus came into the world to deal with sin by taking upon himself its consequences that everybody therefore is not saved? But why is it that thronging our galleries and down below in the main arena here in our lovely sanctuary, Sunday by Sunday, I am guaranteed as a preacher there will be those who are not Christian. Well look at the fifth verse of the second chapter.

We're staying in Romans epistle almost the whole of the way through in terms of quotations this evening. Because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, I don't think I'm a stubborn husband. I think I'm absolutely reasonable.

I mean my problem is that people don't realize how reasonable I am. Probably you all have the same difficulty. If all the world was just like you.

But when we start joking, we know that that isn't the case. There is a stubborn element in our nature. And it's this that the apostle Paul singles out as being the reason why people do not respond to the offer of forgiveness that God directs towards them, be they Jewish people or Gentile people.

Because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God's wrath. When his righteous judgment will be revealed, God will give to each man according to what he has done. Did you not know that this world will terminate in judgment? There will be an end to the human cycle as we now know it.

Ben spoke with the wisdom beyond his years, when a little while ago he said, you only have one run at life. And that was the reason why he was prepared to invest one year, two years or who knows however many years in the subcontinent of Asia. That is true.

You only have one run. And at the end of life, you are judged for the way that you live. And the Christian faith does not guarantee heaven for everyone.

If it doesn't, I completely have failed to understand the Bible during all the years that I've been reading it. The Bible speaks about heaven. It also speaks about hell.

The Bible speaks about the love of God. It also speaks about the wrath of God. And when Paul, in that mini statement of the gospel, talks about being saved, he has in his mind delivered from the anger of God.

Jesus is going to come back to this earth. That's a wonderful thought. Let me just make an exception to the promise that I made a moment or two ago.

I said that I'd stick to the epistle to the Romans for quotations. But one's just flowing into my mind, which is outside Romans. It's in the second book of Thessalonians.

And again, it speaks of that great day when our beloved Lord Jesus shall return to this world. And Paul leads off in the sixth verse of second Thessalonians by saying this, God is just. He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to those who are troubled and to us as well.

This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He, the Lord Jesus, will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power.

I have been in many homes and I have seen many scripture texts hung up on walls, but I've never seen that one. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a great theologian of the Germans. One of the last men to be butchered by the Nazis.

Do you know what he said about the Bible? Listen, this is, this really hurts. He says the problem with the trouble with most Christians or with most people is that they only believe the Bible for themselves. They only read the Bible for themselves.

They never read it against themselves. What he means is they miss out bits. And when the apostle Paul says you must be saved, he has in mind this awful concept of what it would be like to fall into the hands of God in an unforgiven condition.

This morning I was talking about our beloved Lord and the way that he was so cruelly done to death. You know our Lord Jesus in one sense, his death is anticipated in the Old Testament remarkably by a man called Jonah who was born in the, at least brought up in the same area as our Lord in Galilee. You know what happened to Jonah one day? Well he went down to Thomas Cooks and got himself a ticket on a Mediterranean cruise and they chucked him overboard.

I mean it's not generally the anticipation of a passenger going on a ship that he'll finish up in the briny. The reason why he was thrown overboard, well to go into that would take too long, but the summary statement is this. He had so disobeyed God that the Gentile sailors who were manning the ship came to the conclusion with information supplied by Jonah that the reason for the storm was his disobedience.

And the only way that calm would come would be by Jonah being evicted from the ship and thrown into the ocean. Now you know in the providence of God a fish comes along and Jonah in a little while is beached on the seashore of the Mediterranean and he goes back into the purposes of God. But the point of my illustration is this.

When Jonah was thrown overboard into that angry sea, the sea be calmed and there was no more tempest. You know what happened to Jesus when he died on the cross? He was our Jonah. He was thrown into the sea of the wrath of God.

For three hours those billows broke over him. He's dragged further and further down into the depths of hell itself. It seems as though all the fears that there are are against the Lord Jesus.

It seems as though darkness has enveloped the whole universe. But in those remarkable indescribable hours Jesus is taking upon himself the foulness of your sin. Bosnia, Serbia, Somalia, name it in the 20th century, name it in the 19th century.

All the immorality and the bestiality of men all compressed together that deserve the wrath of God. Jesus takes the consequence to shift the illustration. He's like the lightning conductor of some Cornish farmhouse when there's an electric storm and the current is so strong that in deflecting it from the house down into the safety of mother earth, the conductor melts under the voltage.

So, our Lord Jesus dies on the cross of Calvary for your sin and my sin. And the apostle says this, if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved. And this salvation says the apostle who is a Hebrew, it's not just for the Jewish nation.

Verse 12, there is no difference between Jew and Gentile. The same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. You've got to be real.

We have been in the process of moving house for two months. I mean, I'm not suggesting that we've been sort of on the streets of Worthing roaming around like Bedouin tribes people, but it's taken a little while to get the house into which we've moved into some semblance of order. I never thought that some of the jobs that we've had to do, helped by John Fruher from a Maybridge fellowship, I'd ever tackle, but I've had to by force of circumstances.

I mean, if you need your house repairing and I've got a few hours and you just call me or got more wisdom, call John. You know, I have done more trips to pay less, B and Q. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that BD after my name stands for Black and Decker. And yesterday as I went on the rounds, hoping that I wouldn't bump into any tabernacle person because I looked so scruffy, as I was sizing up some ladders for purchase, a man came up to me and he said, you're obviously in the building trade.

Can you help me? He said, what composition do you need for building a patio? Relation of the correlation between sand and cement. I was glad to air my knowledge. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

If you confess with your mouth, reality, not something masquerading, not something that's superficial. If you confess with your mouth, vocal, that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in your heart, vital, that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Why the confession with your mouth? Why can't the Apostle Paul, under the inspiration of the Spirit, be satisfied with just a sort of internal assent? You know, our beloved Lord, he went public, didn't he? Very early on in his mature life, he starts to preach the gospel.

The incognito to a large extent is dropped. He's no more just a carpenter from Nazareth. He goes along the highways and byways of Palestine and people, they know that something extraordinary is happening.

A man is making a confession. A confession that he has a message from God, which is absolutely necessary for all who will come under his hearing. And when he comes across a man who's fishing and wants to shift him from the fishing industry to being one of his disciples, he says, now come along, Peter, and follow me.

And Peter drops what he's doing, and he follows Jesus. And in the very act of the language and the demeanor of Peter, he shows that he is a disciple of Jesus. Here's a man who's a tax collector, a civil servant, doing quite well, and on the side making an unfair buck as he charges more tax than is absolutely necessary.

And Jesus says, Matthew, come along, follow me. And whenever Jesus spoke and men followed, they showed by their way of life, by their demeanor, by their conversation, that they were associating with Jesus. And Jesus puts down a principle.

He says, speaking to them and all who listen to him, because it's not just the eleven, sometimes there are thousands of people clinging on to the words of Jesus, if you confess me before men, I will confess you before my Father who is in heaven. You are to confess that Jesus is Lord. The early disciples, they did this by baptism.

Baptism is the public declaration of what has happened to you internally. These days it's easy to be baptized. Don't misunderstand me.

I'm not trying to make something that may seem to be difficult for some sound as though it's of no consequence. I realize that there is a price to be paid, but relative to what they were doing in the first century, it's easy. In those days, it was a threat of life if they were making a public confession for religion, the Christian religion was the illegal religion.

And so many of these early Christians, all of these early Christians, according to the writings in the Acts of the Apostles, having confessed that Jesus was Lord, they were baptized to publicly declare this. And this is what the Apostle Paul is here saying. He's not binding baptism into the salvation commitment as though the two are inseparable, as though you won't go to heaven because you've not been baptized.

But what he is saying is this, that the declaration, the public declaration that Jesus is Lord, is one of the things that attests to those who sympathetically look on, that you do indeed confess Jesus Christ as Savior. Bottom line, you are a Christian. If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, Jesus is the Greek word for Savior.

You shall call his name Iesus, Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sin. Do you confess that? Jonah that you saw, so to speak, at Calvary, drowning in those three hours in utter anguish, did you realize that Jonah, Jesus, was dying for you? Do you appreciate the salvation that Jesus has brought into the world? Can you say, Jesus, my Savior? But not just Jesus, but Lord, curious, the Old Testament equivalent is Jehovah. Jesus speaks of his humanity.

Lord speaks of his deity. This same Jesus who goes into the bowels of hell itself is raised in the power of an endless life. How do we know Jesus is unique? On the third day, the tomb is not rifled, it's been blown apart, the stone is moved by the power of the resurrection forces that are at play, and our Lord walks into the garden in the early hours in the power of an endless life.

If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, vocal, and believe in your heart, vital, that he has been raised from the dead, then you will be saved. You see, the Christian faith affects not just the mind. It hits the mind first.

It also affects the heart. Nick was quite right in his introductory comments. You can't talk about the resurrection without smuggled into the meaning of resurrection is crucifixion.

You can't have someone raised who wasn't dead. Jesus was dead. It was a dead man that they took from the cross, so carefully handled by Joseph and Nicodemus and those womenfolk, but he was dead.

But on the third day, he's no longer dead. He's alive, alive forevermore, and this is the uniqueness of Christianity. No, you cannot find the body of Jesus.

It does not lie a moldering in the grave somewhere in the Palestinian sand. It's not like the body of Mohammed in Mecca. It's not like the body of Mao Tse Tung in Peking, nor the shrinking body of Lenin in Moscow.

There is no body. There are no remains of our beloved Lord on planet earth, for he was raised from the dead. And the Bible says here that if you confess this with your mouth, and if you respond to this with your emotions in your heart, then you will be saved.

You see, when you make this verbal confession, and the Holy Spirit is at work within you, there is also an emotional assurance given you that this Jesus Christ is indeed your Savior. It's hard to express it. It's like trying to explain sight to a blind man.

In one sense, the analogy of love is the best one. You can analyze love. You can in some way get a definition of love, but when you experience love, it goes beyond the mind.

It hits the heart as well. And that's the same with being Christians. It's part of this blessed assurance of which the hymn writer sings, or gets us to sing.

And the Bible gives you this bottom line that anyone who calls on the name of Jesus will be saved. We used to sing a hymn back in the church where I was brought up in Sheffield, whosoever really meaneth me, whosoever really meaneth me, if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart, then you shall be saved. Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.

So I come to my conclusion. Have you made the confession? Jesus made a great confession before Pontius Pilate. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus made a confession also, that they were associates of the Lord Jesus.

The early church, the noble band of martyrs, the heroes of the Christian church down the centuries, they've made their confession. Out in Uganda, down in Southwest Africa, throughout South Asia, more martyrs for Jesus Christ in this century than all the other centuries added up. Did you know that? People who've confessed Christ.

Have you made that confession? Do you declare that Jesus is the Son of God with your mouth? Is that witness of the Spirit in your heart? Do you know? So that if all the world rejected and laughed, you'd remain true, because you have this inner witness as to the reality of the death and the resurrection of the Savior. Be a man, be a woman, be a thinking boy or girl this evening, and make that commitment. Let's pray.

Father, we're so grateful that although in one sense the emblem of Christianity is the old rugged cross, the other side of the cross is the empty tomb. I serve a living Savior. You ask me how I know He lives.

He lives within my heart. Lord, we praise you for the preciousness of Jesus. We thank you for a salvation that's tailor-made for Jew and for Gentile.

We thank you that the wrath of God has been deflected, and He's taken upon Himself the punishment for our sins, and there is the possibility of absolution and a new start and a new life in Christ. Lord, help us to enter into that right now. If you'd like to make that commitment, say something like this in your mind.

Lord God, I thank you for sending your Son into the world. I confess my sins and my need of Jesus Christ. Forgive me for the wrong that I have done.

Fill me with the Spirit, and enable me to live out my life as a confessional statement that I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. Amen. Father, we thank you again for another Sunday night in which we've been able to hear something of the old, old story.

We praise you that it's ever new, however, in the experience of many, and we bless you, Father, for all your goodness and your faithfulness. Send us out into this week knowing your hand upon us, seeing you more clearly, loving you more dearly, following you more nearly all our lives, and the people of God's hand. Amen.

Good night. God bless you. Thank you for coming.