I want a church where real need can find real help; I believe that you want that, too.  When I preach, I aim to make the heart of my message real help for real need.  Do I always succeed?  Probably not, but this remains my aim.  This church and this preaching won’t do much good where there is no sense of real need or no desire for real help.  Everyone has needs.  Not everyone has come to a point when they understand—suddenly, miraculously—that their truest, deepest need is for God, peace with God.  No, what they need is more time, more money, more fun or more friends, more health, more vacation, more work, more stuff.  Maybe more happiness.  They want more: life for them is a matter of lack, deficiency.  We want to fill the void: nature abhors a vacuum.  More people than we may realize suffer from a happiness problem.  The world has something for that!  We medicate our happiness problem with one thing or another: the results are rarely happy.

What if the fundamental problem is that people do not have peace with God because God is not at peace with them?  There is real help for that.  God Himself provides it.  Only, people must first come to the awareness that this is the basic problem, the one from which all other problems emerge, like weeds in the garden, thorns and thistles.  They are not at peace with God because they have not wanted that peace, they have not wanted God.  God is not at peace with them because they have not wanted that peace, have not wanted God.

In what I just read to you from Romans, we hear that peace with God is available, ready, being held out to us by God Himself in Jesus Christ.  Jesus is God’s peace for us.  When we have faith in Jesus, that faith justifies us.  When we are justified, we have peace with God, who says be holy, for I am holy; be righteous, for I am righteous.  He wants to see His handiwork in you, He wants to see His image and likeness in you, too.  He gives real help for our real need.  That’s what church is for.  That’s what this preaching is for.  But people have to know their real need.  They have to want real help for it.

Justified.  Maybe we have a sense of what Paul means.  Being justified must have something to do with faith, peace, Jesus.  Maybe we’ve used the word before, “Well, I was justified when I said what I said, because you . . .”  “I was justified in what I did, because he . . .”  Justified.  Right, not wrong.  Well, we’re usually the most innocent person in the room, in our own eyes—or at least no more guilty than anyone else—until God touches our eyes, gives us sight for blindness, light for darkness, a heart that is tender towards him and not hard and cold.

Paul is reminding us that we are not able to justify ourselves.  We are not in a position to judge ourselves.  There is nothing we can say or do, no excuses, alibis, explanations, rationalizations, or arguments we can use to prove our innocence, not even to ourselves: born guilty.  There’s nothing we can point to by way of exonerating circumstances, nothing we can point to in our actions or words that might possibly mitigate God’s sentence of Guilty.  Well, sure, God, I’m guilty . . . but not that guilty!

Justification is God’s free choice to regard us as righteous, pardoning all our sins, not just those we’ve already committed, in act or thought, but even those we have yet to commit.  God knows that even those whom He is pleased to save, pleased to spare, will not walk perfectly through all this life.  We’re too weak; there is no strength in us.  God must supply the strength, just as He must supply the will.  He does, in Jesus Christ.  Christ in us is our will and our strength.  By his will, which is God’s will, by his strength, which is God’s strength, by his righteousness, which is God’s righteousness, we are counted as righteous, not because of any intrinsic worth in us but for the limitless worth of Christ.  Christ is where we meet God and where God meets us.  Christ in us is our righteousness.  No Christ, no righteousness, no justification, no peace.  People seek and seek, yet peace is everywhere held out to them, freely.

Because of Jesus, who paid it all.  All to him I owe.  So we never rely upon any supposed, separate, personal righteousness of our own, no goodness or kindness we might be tempted to claim as our own.  Although these may count for something in the eyes of others, God sees past it all, sees what in our hearts is of Christ and what is not.  So much there, still, that is not!  We do not and cannot impress God.  Only Jesus Christ impresses God; we must have Jesus in us, with us.  He is the real help for our real need.

Justified through faith, we now, by faith, “have gained access [. . .] into this grace in which we now stand” (5:2).  As Baptist pastor Adrian Rogers put it, judgment is getting what we deserve; mercy is not getting what we deserve, and grace is getting what we don’t deserve.  Not our merit, our worth, but God’s grace, not our stumbling, stammering efforts at obedience, faithfulness, but God’s love.  In this love we stand, we can stand, stable and safe.  God’s sure love for us in Jesus Christ is sure life for us.  The sure way to this life, as to this love, is Jesus Christ, which means faith.

People won’t come until they begin to know their true need.  They won’t begin to come until they begin to know where and what true help is.  The way to Christ is twined, like the rope we hold that pulls us out, pulls us up: Spirit and proclamation.  Jesus must be proclaimed, made known, brought to people.  The Spirit opens ears, eyes, minds, hearts; the Spirit touches hearts of stone; they become hearts of flesh.  The Spirit causes the words of the good book to become wonderful words of Life.  When Paul writes that “we boast in the hope of the glory of God” (5:2), he is boasting in the work of the Spirit, who makes both the will of the Father and the work of the Son effective in human lives.

Hope.  Not seen, but trusted, like a promise.  Many people make promises.  If we have any wisdom by now, we don’t put much stock in such promises.  We do attach our hearts to some promises, though: promises of love, faithfulness, of commitment, and exclusivity.  When God makes a promise, this is one to which we can attach our hearts with total self-giving, full confidence, entire trust.  God’s promise is real help for our real need, but it takes the Spirit for us to realize it, and desire it.

Hope of the glory of God.  What is the glory?  We have a notion of what the glory is: brilliant, beautiful light—John talks about light; Jesus says he is the light of the world.  Surely that means he is the hope of the world: Christ, the last, best hope of earth.  Thus, glory has to do with hope as well as light.  The glory has to do with presence: Moses said to God, if you won’t go with us, then don’t bother sending us on the journey (Ex 33:15).  The glory is also a reminder of the power of God, of the destination to which God leads us in Christ by the Spirit.  Glory—light, hope, presence, power.

Through His prophet Zechariah, God tells us something more, something remarkable: when He comes to His people, He will come with compassion (Zech 1:16).  The sign of God’s presence with His people: we call this His glory.  The glory of the Lord was upon the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness: He was with His people.  The glory of the Lord came upon the Temple at its dedication in the days of Solomon: God with us.  At the nadir of the people giving lip service to God and to godly living, Ezekiel beheld the glory leave the Temple.  And to Zechariah, one of the last prophets, God says He will be among His people with compassion.  It seems, beloved, that another aspect of this glory in which we hope, this powerful, sure, guiding, protecting presence, is God’s compassion.  God glories in compassion, compassion for His own.  Truly, the joy of the Lord is our strength.

What causes us to see just how worthy God is of praise, honor, love, obedience is that He gives the hope, He gives the love, gives the Spirit, gives the Son, gives Himself, for us, for His glory.  His glory is His effective, compassionate presence among us, with us, in us: real help for real need.

Today we observe Trinity Sunday, which began in the ninth century.  Over the last hundred years or so, the observance has made its way into Protestant churches.  Perhaps this is a work of the Spirit.  We’re called today to be especially mindful, especially heartful, of one of the most abstract spiritual realities: God is Trinity, one God in three Persons.  On the face of it, it is absurd, which tells us right away it is holy and true.  Theologians make book-length forays into understanding what it means for God to be Trinity.  What it means for us that our one God is in three Persons—about that, I have been speaking today.  About that, Paul has been speaking in Romans: through faith, by grace, hope, the glory of God.  All for us, for Him.  Compassion for us, for Him.  Salvation for us, for Him.

When God says I, it isn’t the same as when we say it.  When you or I say I, we are marking a distinction, a separation between myself and yourself.  I want.  I think.  I don’t want.  I don’t think.  I not you.  For God, it seems to me it is quite different.  For our one God in three Persons, to say I is always already to be including: acknowledging distinction and overcoming distinction, smudging the bold, hard, clear lines of separation between one and the other.  Not community but communion: the glory of God.  We hope as those justified by God for the glory of God.  The glory of our God who is Trinity is the glorious hope of inclusion, connection, compassion, belonging: room for me, too.  Our one God in Three Persons beckons us into belonging, assuring us there is room for us, too—He will make room for us, too.  He wants to.  He can.  God’s I is lived as a we.  In the church, each I of us comes into the fulness of who I am as we come into the fullness of who we are, and whose.

God is love.  God’s love is effective.  God’s love accomplishes perfection: life perfectly with God.  Life perfected by God, in God, for God, for us.  If we don’t want that life, we don’t yet know our deepest need.  If people don’t know their deepest need, they won’t know where to find help for it.  They won’t look and won’t want to.  They won’t feel there’s any reason to.  Though they see, they remain blind.  Though they feel, their hearts remain hard.

Jesus demonstrates and reminds us that the perfection of love is through trial, resistance, opposition.  That’s why we hold onto the promise, hold onto the hope, hold onto the glory and the grace!  These sustain us, here.  The perfection of love is through trial, resistance, opposition.  The course of true love never did run smooth—oh, it’s rough, and we get hurt; there are many doleful losses, along the way.  That’s why we need the faith only God can give, and does, delights to give: real help for our real need—light, presence, power, compassion, communion.

Our hope of the glory of God is what enables us to “glory in our sufferings” (5:3).  Now that’s a strange thing to say let alone do, and some might think Paul is talking only about his own, personal faith in the face of his own, personal difficulties.  There’s more to it than that.  Suffering comes.  Everyone experiences it.  No one is immune.  We’re all wounded, here!  We’re reminded more than we want to be.  What can redeem it all?  What could possibly make it worthwhile to endure?  Not just endure, but even glory in the sufferings that come to us?  That sounds crazy!

Well, Paul doesn’t prefer suffering, nor does he go out seeking suffering.  Glory in this case doesn’t quite mean rejoice!  To get to God, we must first endure the wilderness.  Here, glory means to know the presence—the effective, compassionate, saving presence—of God with us in the wilderness.  We want, we need God most in our seasons of suffering.  Paul knows this presence of God is with him inseparably: Christ in him and he in Christ—Communion!  Paul can glory in his sufferings because he has faith that Christ is with him, God is with him, for him, in him, and all that happens here is preparatory for what he, and we, will enjoy eternally there.  Life drains us, oh yes, but God fills us.  Degree by degree, God is re-turning our eyes, our hearts, our souls, to Him: praise His name!  That is real help for our real need.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.