Pardoned or Paroled?

Rev. Robert D. Shofner, Jr.

St John's UCC Boonville

We’ve all seen that bumper sticker: “Christians aren’t perfect … just forgiven.” I like that. Do we really understand it? Or do we ask ourselves: “Are Christians paroled … or pardoned?” Let’s think about that for a minute. What does it mean?

When a prisoner is pardoned, he is free unconditionally. No strings attached. But when one is paroled, there are conditions to one’s freedom.

We still have to report to the parole officer.

We are restricted in our travels … we can’t go here or there.

We are restricted in our actions … we can’t do this or that.

A lot of Christians live like they are on parole. They act like they’re on parole. They even talk like they’re on parole. But has God put us on parole? That’s a serious question.

Paul’s next few lines bring us to the heart of the Gospel. He writes:

“Since we've compiled this long and sorry record as sinners (both us and them) and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we're in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ.

“God sacrificed Jesus on the altar of the world to clear that world of sin. Having faith in him sets us in the clear. God decided on this course of action in full view of the public — to set the world in the clear with himself through the sacrifice of Jesus, finally taking care of the sins he had so patiently endured. This is not only clear, but it's now — this is current history! God sets things right. He also makes it possible for us to live in his rightness.

“So where does that leave our proud Jewish insider claims and counterclaims? Canceled? Yes, canceled. What we've learned is this: God does not respond to what we do; we respond to what God does. We've finally figured it out. Our lives get in step with God and all others by letting him set the pace, not by proudly or anxiously trying to run the parade.

“And where does that leave our proud Jewish claim of having a corner on God? Also canceled. God is the God of outsider non-Jews as well as insider Jews. How could it be otherwise since there is only one God? God sets right all who welcome his action and enter into it, both those who follow our religious system and those who have never heard of our religion.

“But by shifting our focus from what we do to what God does, don't we cancel out all our careful keeping of the rules and ways God commanded? Not at all. What happens, in fact, is that by putting that entire way of life in its proper place, we confirm it.” (Romans 3:23-31 The Message)

Paul brings us to the vital answer that Christianity offers to all who have sinned and fallen short … and that’s all of us. God has provided for our salvation. God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ and suffered for our sins on a bloody and terrible cross. God allowed His only Son to take our sin upon Himself so that we could be justified. Can we really understand that?

The key statement in that passage is verse 24. In the Revised Standard Version it reads; “Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus …” (Romans 3:24). Let’s unpack that.

To be justified before God means that God’s justice has been satisfied through the substitution of His perfectly sinless Son for us sinners. God accepted Christ’s death as the payment we deserved for our sin. So Christ paid the penalty for us. Christ also removed the guilt from our sin. And this last point – about guilt – is an important fact that many Christians overlook or never fully understand.

Let’s say you get a traffic ticket … doing 70 in a 50 mile an hour zone. You go to court knowing you’re going to get fined, because you were speeding, breaking the law. But when you get there, you find out that good old Uncle Bud had come along and paid the fine already. You’re off the hook, at least for the bucks. Getting that fine paid by someone else partially explains justification. But God goes one important step further. While getting the fine paid for is cool, it doesn’t alter the fact that you’re guilty. But when the sinner turns to God through Christ, the guilt is wiped out along with the penalty.

In God’s eyes, the Christian is completely pardoned for all past sins. Paul declares; “Out of sheer generosity [God] put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we're in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be.” And where did God always want us to be? His child. A member of His family; brother or sister of His Son.

Look at it this way. Our lives are like a dirty, torn, wrinkled piece of paper. On that paper is listed every single thing we’ve ever done wrong … all the lies … the hatred … the jealousies … the cheating … the harsh words spoken in anger … all of it. When God looks at that piece of paper, He hates it! Because He is a holy and just God. But when we trust in Christ, when we put our lives in Him, it’s like taking that piece of paper and putting it into this Bible. Now what does God see? He sees, not the paper, but the Word. And that Word is Christ. When we are in Christ, all God sees is the perfect righteousness of His Son. He doesn’t see our sin any more.

That’s what justified means. “Just of I’d” never sinned! And that’s really good news.

But how can that be? The next key word tells us. Grace. We are justified freely by God’s grace … His unmerited favor, mercy and love. Grace is like getting two more days to complete that assignment even though we’ve goofed off for six weeks and missed the deadline. Grace is like getting a warning from the traffic cop instead of a $200 fine and a suspended license. Grace is getting another chance, even though we haven’t earned it or deserve it … we may not even want it!

But no earthly analogy explains God’s grace. God’s unmerited love and mercy are available to all persons, even those who hate Him. When a person is truly sorry about his or her sin, and when that person trusts Christ as personal Lord and Savior from sin, God freely forgives and accepts that person, no matter what has been done. Only God could offer grace like that!

There is one more important point.

We are justified by God’s grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Redemption involves payment. Redemption means “releasing from bondage by payment of a price.” The idea of ransom is involved.

The Lindberghs paid $50,000 in the effort to save their son. The Weyerhaeusers paid $200,000 for the release of their 9 year old child. Frank Sinatra paid $240,000 for the return of Frank Junior.

But Christ did far more than just pay a sum of money for our lives. He gave His own life as a ransom to deliver us from the bondage of sin (Mark 10:45).

People are separated from God … lost to Him. People are sinners … captive in the hands of Satan. Jesus came and died to pay the maximum price to buy us back. The price was His own life, given on the cross. He ransomed us not with silver or gold, but with His own precious blood.

So, what is there left for us to do? Nothing.

Nothing except to believe it, this Good News, to have faith in it. “Because our salvation,” as Paul writes, “is not based on our good deeds; it is based on what Christ has done and our faith in Him” (Romans 3:27). Faith, as Martin Luther defines it, “ … is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a man would stake his life on it a thousand times.”

There is no magic in faith. Faith is simply our response to the salvation Christ has obtained for us. We can now face God unafraid. The penalty and guilt of sin is gone, paid for by God Himself. Religious rites and works don’t make us right with God … and God doesn’t expect them after we come to Him in Christ either. We are fully pardoned, even the guilt is gone. We are not on parole, earning our freedom by our good behavior, continuing to pay the debt for our crimes.

But wait a minute! Does that mean I can live any old way I want to and not be concerned about obeying God’s laws? Certainly not, as verse 31 puts it; “That’s what it does not mean!” Being pardoned by God makes us new persons. We trust Christ for the power to live as we should each day. “In fact,” as it says in that verse, “only when we trust Jesus can we truly obey Him.” We can’t trust Christ by being religious. Trusting and religious self-efforts are contradictory. To trust Christ is being a Christian without being religious.

God has always saved people by faith. Before the Law was given through Moses, God called a man named Abraham. Abraham became the father of the Jewish nation. God sought out this Abraham, who lived almost 2,000 years before Christ, and Abraham responded by faith. Paul tells us …

“What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather, discovered in this matter? If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about — but not before God. What does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.’

“Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness. David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:

“‘Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him.’

Skipping to verse 18.

“Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’ Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead — since he was about a hundred years old — and that Sarah's womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. This is why ‘it was credited to him as righteousness.’ The words ‘it was credited to him’ were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness — for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” (Romans 4:1-8; 18-25 NIV)

Why does Paul stop to talk about Abraham? He has good reason. Paul is writing to Jews and Gentiles who have become Christians. He has made the claim in chapter 3 that faith is central to being justified before God. But what if this faith idea is not in harmony with God’s revealed will in the Old Testament? If there is no biblical foundation for the importance of faith, the Jews could claim that Paul is a heretic. If it is possible for the Jews, the children of Abraham, to be justified by works, to be saved by keeping God’s Law, Christianity, and Paul, is all wet!

Paul doesn’t choose Abraham as an example by accident. Abraham was the father of the Israelites. If Paul can show that Abraham, of all people, was justified by faith, and not by his works, he has made his point … that faith is firmly rooted in the Old Testament.

And Paul does make his point. Abraham believed God and that is why God cancelled his sins and declared him just and righteous.

In Romans 4:13-16, Paul clarified his main thrust:

“That famous promise God gave Abraham — that he and his children would possess the earth — was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God's decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed. If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That's not a holy promise; that's a business deal. A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise — and God's promise at that — you can't break it.

“This is why the fulfillment of God's promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God's promise arrives as pure gift. That's the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father — that's reading the story backwards. He is our faith father.” (Romans 4:13-16 THE MESSAGE)

So Paul is saying, “Read Abraham’s story and decide for yourself.” Abraham was called by God to leave his home and go to a new land. He went. Abraham was promised by God that he and his wife would be the parents of a great multitude, even though he and his wife were well past the age for child bearing. He believed. Abraham heard God’s promise that through Abraham all nations would be blessed …. by the coming of a Savior. He believed God. And his belief, his faith, was counted as righteousness. His faith justified him in the sight of God.

With Abraham it was all faith. He believed God. He obeyed God. He acted on his faith. Faith is response, action. Belief, pure mental assent, may be fine when we’re sitting safe and sound in the pew on Sunday morning … but faith is for the rough road of everyday life.

Supposedly a true story …

Many years ago, a tightrope walker by the name of George Blondin announced that he was going to walk a tightrope across the Niagara Falls. So they stretched that rope across the Horseshoe Falls . . . and there were hundreds of people, on both sides, just cheering and carrying on. Blondin stepped up to the rope . . . put one foot on, then the next, and he walked across that rope one step at a time. The crowd was silent. They knew just one misstep and old George would fall to his death. He got half-way across . . . then he got all the way across, finally stepping on firm ground. The crowd went wild! He raised his hands for silence, and then announced, “Wait a minute! I’m going back!”

So he stepped back out on the tightrope and made his way back. He got to the middle and kind of jiggled the rope. (Made all the ladies go “Ah!”) And then he finally made it to firm ground. The crowd went wild again! And again he raised his hands for silence, and said, “Wait a minute! I’m going to do it again. Only this time I’m going to push a wheelbarrow full of dirt!” So they got him a wheelbarrow, filled it full of dirt, and he pushed it across that tightrope.

Well, to make a long story shorter, he did that nine of ten times. And the crowd went wild each time. And after the last time he crossed, he set that wheelbarrow down right in front of one of the spectators. Blondin asked the man, “Well, what did you think of that?” The guy answered, “Mr. Blondin, that’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. I’m really proud to be a witness to such a feat.” Blondin asked him, “How many more times do you think I can do it?” The guy said, “I believe you could do it for the rest of the day.” Blondin asked, “You really believe that I can do it for the rest of the day?” The guy said, “Yes, I believe you can do it for the rest of the day. In fact, I have faith you can do it for as long you want. In fact, I have faith you could do it with your eyes closed!” Blondin took the wheelbarrow, dumped out the dirt, and said, “Okay, buddy. Get in the wheelbarrow!”

The faith we have will lead us to get in that wheelbarrow if that’s God’s will for us. Faith is not merely head belief. Faith is life lived a new way … in response to God’s revealed will. But faith also is risky.

Astronauts have a kind of scientific faith. Careful calculations make them believe that things will work out and they blast off into space. But Abraham had even greater faith. He had no way of calculating how things might work out. He simply accepted God’s word. He stepped out in trust and obedience. He went out, obeying God’s command, not even knowing where he was going.

When we have the same kind of faith, it will show. We’ll learn how in the next chapter.

Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, thank You for revealing Your Word and will to Paul, that he would write it down for us to read two thousand years later. Thank You that You call us to faith, and grant us the Spirit that we may respond. Thank You that You have cancelled our debt of sin, and have wiped out the guilt that comes with that, by accepting the perfect sacrifice of Your Son Jesus on our behalf. In faith we accept that, we believe that, we rejoice in that gracious act! Strengthen us to show with our lives that we truly believe what You have revealed, not striving to earn our salvation, but out of simple and heartfelt gratitude for what You have already given us.

And the people said, “Amen.”

Rev. Robert D. Shofner, Jr. attended California State University at Northridge followed by Yale Divinity School. Pastor Bob has served churches in New York, Washington, California, and Nebraska. He has been serving St. John's UCC Boonville since December 2001.He preaches a message that is contemporary in style, but grounded in the unchanging authority of God's Word.