Alienation, Reconciliation

We’re going to read this evening from 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Two Corinthians chapter 5, and we’re going to read from the eleventh verse:

“Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience. We[’re] not trying to commend ourselves to you again, but are giving you an opportunity to take pride in us, so that you can answer those who take pride in what is seen rather than in what is in the heart. If we[’re] out of our mind, it is for the sake of God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

“So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Amen.

Our God and Father, with our Bibles open before us, we pray that the Spirit of God will be our teacher. Come to us as we seek to wait upon you, and help us in our weakness, and touch and change our lives so that as we step out on the threshold of another week, that we may be those who go with this wonderful message of reconciliation. Hear our prayers, O God, and let our cry come unto you. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Some years ago, I began a series which I don’t think anyone will remember. It was an abortive series. I think I called it, on the first evening, Great Texts of the Bible. I should actually have called it Great Text of the Bible, because we never, ever got beyond the first one. I remember Mike Stokke remarking to me after a few weeks, “What happened to the Great Texts of the Bible?” And I said, “Well, they’re still in the Bible, but they’re not going to be coming out just anytime in the foreseeable future.” I’m not just quite sure why it went away, but it went away just as quickly as it came, right along with another abortive series we had on the 119th Psalm. Few, if any of you, will remember that. We did one section. That was enough for us all, and then we put that one to bed as well.

I was thinking about that just during the day, because having taken you to 1 Peter 3:18 and said that it was a very helpful cross-reference, I thought that if I had sustained the Great Texts of the Bible series, then almost inevitably, 1 Peter 3:18 would have found its way into the program. This morning, we made reference to it, because we said that it was important to understand the Gospels in light of the Epistles, and the narrative that we were considering between verses 13 and 25 of Luke 23 demanded our standing back from the text far enough to see what preceded it and then to see the explanations that followed it.

This afternoon, in rummaging around in notes, I was quite intrigued to find written on a piece of paper from a hotel in Edinburgh that I had on some previous occasion said the following: Do the Gospels suffice to give us the whole story? No. We cannot build up a doctrine of the atonement from any one of the Gospels or from all four of them put together. Why? Because the Lord apparently did not will to disclose fully the nature of his saving work until that work had been accomplished. For example, Jesus said in John 16 to his apostles, “I have many things to say to you, but you can’t receive them now. When the Spirit of truth has come, he will guide you into all truth.”[1] It required the cross, the resurrection, and Pentecost to shed the necessary illumination on his mission. And so his life and death become understandable and purposeful in light of the doctrine of the atonement as articulated by Peter, Paul, James, and John.

Now, what it did was it reminded me of how much I repeat myself. But at least in the repetition there is purpose. And I want, this evening, simply to remind you of the truth that is absolutely central and is the underpinning of all that we were considering this morning. I essentially want to return with you to 1 Peter 3:18 and say just a couple of things concerning it.

It is here that we discover that the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ was actually an amazing act of divine intervention. It took place, the Bible tells us, according to the plan and purpose of the counsels of God. In Romans, it says that “at just the right time”—I think in the Living Bible—“at just the right time,” when we were “helpless, … Christ … died for us.”[2] Well, there’s a sense in which it would always be the right time for Christ to die for us, but people often come with the intriguing thought, “Isn’t it interesting that Jesus died when he died? I wonder why he chose to die then? Is there anything in the circumstances that would point to that?”

Well, you know, if you think about that, it isn’t without significance. The events that we considered today, the juxtaposition between the Jewish authorities and the Roman authorities—the Jewish authorities with a measure of power and influence but subservient to the Romans, and the Romans held in check in part by what the Jews were able to say—was actually unique to a certain period in history.

Sixty years before the events as we read them this morning, the Jews still sustained sufficient political power in their own country and zone to be able to try and sentence someone and carry out the sentence—sixty years prior to this—so that if they had then tried and sentenced Christ for the charge of blasphemy which they brought, then Christ would have been stoned to death, for that was the penalty for blasphemy.

If these events had taken place sixty years after the time that they did, then that would be after AD 70, when the fall of Jerusalem had taken place—the destruction of the Jewish people, the eradication of their influence. Then the Romans would have been in complete power in Palestine. Therefore, they would have had no interest in permitting the Jewish council, remnant as it was, to come and bring charges against anyone. They certainly wouldn’t have been interested in them passing a sentence. And even if they had wanted to pass a sentence, the Roman authorities would have kicked it out immediately. They would never have executed it. There was no reason for them to. And Jesus wouldn’t have died.

See, what you have in the historical record of the Gospels—and we need to allow this to settle on our hearts and minds—is this: essentially, it is a divine tapestry, and all of the events of life and the people that are involved in the events are real people making real choices and ordinary decisions. And yet, in this immense mystery, this ultimate paradox of human responsibility and divine sovereignty, even the strategies of hell are part of the eternal counsel of God, and that Barabbas and Pilate and the Jewish authorities are all part of the divine tapestry that God has been weaving from all of eternity in order to accomplish his purpose to redeem a people that are his very own.

Now, I mention this to you not to intrigue you but to remind you when you feel unsettled, when you read your newspapers, when you look at the news, when you feel that life is overwhelming; it is apparently taking you down; that somehow or another, God has left the phone off the hook; that he knew about the past, and maybe he knows about the future, but he can’t possibly know about me and know about now—listen: he knows when a sparrow falls to the ground, and the very hairs of your head are numbered,[3] and he has graven your name on the palms of his hands,[4] and he is working everything out according to the counsel of his will.[5] I didn’t bring it with me, but I love that little poem—grandmothers have it all the time, you know—about “not till the loom is silent.” You know, that one about “then we’ll understand all the dark threads in the back of the tapestry of our lives.” And, of course, so we will, but not until then.

Now, I love this stuff. “I love to tell the story … of Jesus and his love.”[6] I love talking about the wonder of the gospel. In fact, it’s my favorite thing to do. And so, I have three points for you. They’re very simple, they’re not new, and I’m telling you them because I want to and because I think it’s always good for us to be reminded: “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”

The Problem: Alienation

That little phrase reminds us of the problem. That’s my first point. That little phase at the end reminds us of the problem that faces men and women. It is the problem, in one word, of alienation. Alienation.

By our nature, we are unworthy of God, we are unfit for heaven, and we’re unable to rectify our circumstances.

Now, it’s not difficult to find material on alienation. You can read about in sociological textbooks. You can read about it in all kinds of psychological literature. You can read about alienation all over the place. You can hardly open a newspaper or a magazine of worth without having the notion of alienation addressed. Because people know that socially, materially, personally, psychologically, they are alienated.

What is left out of most of the material is the explanation which the Bible gives for all of that alienation, which it grounds in the fact that men and women by nature are alienated from God—that by our nature, we are unworthy of God, we are unfit for heaven, and we’re unable to rectify our circumstances.

Incidentally, that little trilogy will help you when you’re talking to somebody and explaining to them what the problem is. You might not just want to say it like that. They might think you memorized it. But if you remember it as I have remembered it, it helps me. Somebody says, “Well, what’s the problem, really?” Well, I tell them—I may change it around—but I tell them those three things: “We’re unworthy of God, we’re unfit for heaven, and we’re unable to fix the problem.”

Now, at that point, alienation dawns on us with real clarity, doesn’t it? And that alienation, that separation from God, is on account of the fact that our iniquities have separated us from God. We’ve turned our backs on God. We are… In the words of the old Campus Crusade Four Spiritual Laws, it is either on the basis of our passive indifference or our active disobedience that we recognize this to be the case.

Yesterday, in the afternoon, when I had the wonderful opportunity of addressing all of the ladies dressed in their finery and looking all very Christmassy, I impressed them for a moment—about a nanosecond—with my knowledge of art history. My knowledge of art history can be written on a thirty-seven-cent stamp, and it amounts to very little at all. But I told them that I was intrigued—because it is true, and I am intrigued—by the French Postimpressionist Gauguin. I like his name, Paul—Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin, actually—and I’ve been intrigued by him as I’ve run across him in different places. And I have been looking to find what he painted and so on and made my own little discoveries.

An interesting man. (I pointed this out. Sorry, ladies, those of you who are here, but the men weren’t.) Gauguin was born in the mid-nineteenth century to a prosperous family. His father was a journalist. His mother was Creole. She was a combination of races. And he enjoyed the privileges of a bourgeois life. He married as a young man. He married a lady from Denmark. He had five children with this lady, and he went into the world of banking, and eventually, he became a successful stockbroker in France. Seeing paintings, he became intrigued by the thought that he might also be able to paint. And he began to paint, and he painted so much that he stopped going to work. And because he stopped going to work, he stopped making money. And because he stopped making money, then his wife got ticked with him, and eventually, his family life disintegrated, and his wife and children went off to Denmark. And he, by the early stages of his life, was penniless and was without hope in the world. And he decided he’d run away from Europe and go to the South Seas and get away from all the artificiality of the European continent and go down into the South Sea islands. And he settled in Tahiti, and there he painted some of these amazing bright and vibrant paintings that you’ve seen in galleries.

He didn’t know what was up with him, but it was that he needed to be brought near to God. He was alienated from his family. He was alienated from the surrounding culture. He became increasingly preoccupied with sex. He became, really, just a dissolute figure. His two masterpieces are one entitled Vision after the Sermon and the other, the longest of his titles for any picture that he painted, with the threefold title Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? And he said that the painting should be viewed from right to left, so that people would look at it and see the elderly lady and say, “Where are we going?” to look at the center part of the painting and say, “What are we?” and then to look at the beginning and say, “Where do we come from?” And he painted that painting just before his failed suicide attempt. And within a few years, he was dead in his early fifties—a tragic, classic illustration of the problem that faces man outside of Christ tonight, alienated from God.

Now, I tell you that so that when we return to our friends and neighbors tomorrow—nice people and prosperous folks, many of them, and intelligent—that we would remember that we know something about them that they’ve never faced about themselves, and this we know because the Bible tells us.

The Solution: Reconciliation

So, the last little phrase deals with the problem, which is the problem of alienation. The rest of the verse actually deals with the solution. And we might, in a word, make the solution reconciliation. Or we could choose a number of words—you know that—but we will just use reconciliation. That’s why I read from 2 Corinthians 5. There are all kinds of words that end in a-t-i-o-n that get to the business—justification and substitution and so on—but we’ll just use reconciliation. Because actually, reconciliation is the removal of the cause of alienation. So it actually works. I didn’t choose it arbitrarily.

Can I tell you the three points in case I get lost? All right. Okay. So, point one is alienation, point two is reconciliation, and point three is no condemnation. Okay? So it goes alienation, reconciliation, no condemnation—the problem, the solution, and the effect.

Now, the reconciliation is effected by what Jesus does on the cross. He is the propitiation. Sorry; there’s another of those words. But in the NIV, it translates it, or paraphrases, the word propitiation. It’s a difficult word. In 1 John 4:10, for example, it says that “this is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as”—in the NIV—“an atoning sacrifice for our sins,” or, in the King James Version, “the propitiation [of] our sins.” And this is the Godward aspect of what has been done upon the cross. The anger of God is revealed against all the ungodliness and wickedness of men[7]—and unless somebody steps into the gap, then the alienation which is now immediate will become eternal in its dimensions. Therefore, the propitiation is given.

What is Christ doing on the cross? He is reconciling those who are alienated to God.

Now, sometimes you’ll run across an individual in conversation who’s read a little bit, and they’ll say to you, “Well, I think that’s a dreadful thing, that idea of propitiation. I don’t like it, because what it sounds like is that you have this very diligent Son who is trying somehow or another to appease his very angry Father, so that the Son is the atoning sacrifice, is the propitiation, for the Father, who is alienated from the sinner.” Well, there’s a sense in which that’s true, but the analogy is important, and it is ultimately an analogy. Because if you look carefully—and incidentally, in the other two verses in the New Testament where “propitiation” is used, you’ll find the same thing to be true—notice who is the one who brings the propitiation into effect: God. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and [he] sent his Son [to be the] atoning sacrifice.”

Now, for some of you, this is an honors course. That’s okay. It’s only going to last for a moment. But let me give it to you in a phrase: the one who propitiates is himself the one who is propitiated. Now, if you waken up in the middle of the night and you’ve written that on the back of an envelope, you can think about it. Trust me: it is important—not vital, I recognize, for many of you this evening, but it is important. The one who is the author of propitiation is the one himself who is propitiated—divine love meeting the demands of divine righteousness, aptly summarized, as almost always for me, in a verse of a hymn: “O safe and happy shelter!” This is “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” referring to the cross. “O safe and happy shelter! O refuge tried and sweet!”—tested and good—“O trysting place where heaven’s love and heaven’s justice meet!”[8] What is Christ doing on the cross? He is reconciling those who are alienated to God.

Sometimes there’s somebody we want to meet. And we find ourselves in their company, and we’ve said, you know, “If I ever could be in his or her company, I’d love just to go up and say hello to them.” And then you find yourself in their company, and then you lose it. You say, “Oh, I don’t think I can go up. I don’t know what I’ll say when I go.” And then somebody says, “Come on! I’ll introduce you.” And so, snuggling up, as it were, to their shirtsleeve, you make your way along, and this person, whom we have never had contact with, is made accessible to us as a result of the intervention of a very kind friend. Well, that is, in simple language, the work of Jesus.

People are out in the street tonight. God is a notion, God is a power, God is a cosmic event, God is whatever you want him to be, but God is unknown to them. They are, in the words of Paul, without God and without hope in the world.[9] And Christ died for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, and came up to the unrighteous and said, “Come on. I’ll introduce you.”

The Effect: No Condemnation

So, the problem is alienation, the solution is found in reconciliation, and the effect is that there is no condemnation. In other words, Jesus brings us there, and he keeps us there.

Now, I want to say this to you tonight. In fact, this may be my main point. It’s my last point—so, you say, “Well, finally you hit on one that you like.” But it’s important for me to tell you this tonight.

You will notice it says that “Christ died for sins once for all.” He did it “once for all.” He didn’t do it once and then did it again and did it again and so on. He just did it “once for all.” And when he brings us near to God, when he reconciles us to God, he does the exact same: he does it “once for all.” All right? So when he brings a person near to God, when he brings them to an understanding of his death on their behalf, when he opens their eyes to the truth and he reconciles them to God and he deals with their alienation, he brings them there, and he keeps us there.

Now, this is a vitally important point. Because some of us seem to live our lives as if Jesus brought us there, but we’re supposed to keep ourselves there—that by our own endeavors, by how well we’re doing, by our own feelings… And so we meet with one another, and we say that, well, we feel particularly close to Christ, or we don’t feel close to Christ, or we don’t know where we are in relationship to Christ, and we’re wondering if we’re in Christ, and so on. Well, you need to have a solid dose of the Bible. You need to remind yourself: On what basis did God reconcile us to himself? On the basis not of our goodness or our righteousness, because “Christ died for sins …, the righteous for the unrighteous.” No, we were ungodly, we were liable, death was the right response for us, he knew the absolute worst about us, and yet he accepted us for Jesus’ sake.

Now, I think that’s the gospel. In other words, he imports the judgment of the final day into a moment in time, reconciles us to himself, dies in our place, bears our punishment, settles our score, credits us with the righteousness of Christ, and he does it once for all. And on the basis of that, we then go forward to live our lives.

And when Paul addresses it in Romans 8, he almost can’t wait to get it—the beginning of Romans 8—and he launches into that fantastic chapter: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them [that] are in Christ Jesus.”[10] And the chapter begins with no condemnation, and it ends with no separation: “What will separate us from the love of God? Shall nakedness or peril or the sword or the accusations of the Evil One or the nudges of our friends?”[11] What will separate us? Nothing will separate us from God! Why? Because there’s “no condemnation to them [that] are in Christ Jesus.”

The verdict which he passed is final and is not… The case is never going to be retried. His declaration of our justification is irrevocable. And it is on that that we rest.

You see, what is most true about you, believer, tonight is not your feelings and your moods and your ebbs and your flows and your ups and your downs. You may think that that’s what you’re really about, but what you are really about is what Jesus says you’re really about. What you’re really about is where you are in relationship to God and that God views you in his Son, and he holds no charge against you, and he has accepted you on the basis of his Son—“the righteous for the unrighteous”—to close with this great offer, to deal with this alienation, to bring you to himself.

Why are there so many gloomy Christians roaming the universe? Because we haven’t settled this matter in our minds. We’re up in the morning taking our pulses, feeling to see if we’re alive: “I wonder if I’m a Christian today. I wonder if I’m close to Christ today. I wonder if I’m doing everything right today.” Listen, you get this clear in your mind: of course you’re not doing everything right today, and you didn’t do everything right yesterday, and you’re not going to do everything right tomorrow. So on what basis is your alienation dealt with? My dear friend, if you are trusting in anything other than the fact that “Christ died for sins …, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God,” then you’re trusting on a false hope. Indeed, you have no hope. You’re hopeless! But in Christ, the record is settled.

There’s a hymn coming through here from my past. Sorry; that’s if you wonder what’s going on. It goes… I’ll start it; I don’t know if I can finish it. But we used to sing this in Scotland:

There was a time on earth
When in the books of heaven
An old account was standing
Of sins yet unforgiven;
My name was at the top
And many deeds below.

Help me out. (I’m too deaf.)

My name was at the top
And many deeds below.
I went unto the…

Something. “Keeper.” Yeah, “the Keeper,” of the books, right?

So I went unto the Keeper
And settled it long ago.

Long ago, I settled it all;
Long ago, down on my knees, I settled it all;
And the record’s clear today,
For he washed my sins away,
’Cause that old account was settled long ago.[12]

Now, I wouldn’t be so bold as to suggest that all of our stumblings and bumblings and our psychological hiccups may be addressed with one devout musing on this issue. But twenty-eight years of pastoral ministry suggests to me that many of the superficial attempts to deal with the peripheral alienations are being constantly addressed and readdressed and reopened and tried to be refixed, and the missing link is a solid, experiential grasp of the gospel.

You see, what is it that makes you fearful? What is it that takes your joy? What is it that unsettles you before the prospect of eternity? Is it not the accusations of the Evil One? Is it not the insinuations of your own mind: “Well, maybe I haven’t done enough. Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe that thing from my past or that event in my past is going to come up and eat me, and swallow me, and at the end of it…”? You see? No, you need to take all of that and get that song that I can’t remember and play it on your stereo until it finally dawns on you, and you can remember the words.

You see, I don’t know how you pay your bills, but I am a maniacal bill payer. I don’t know why it is, but I never write as fast as when I’m writing my bills. Some of you have found me doing it in Starbucks, and there I am, outside the men’s toilets, just writing all my bills, just doing the bills, doing the bills, doing the bills. I sweat when I write the bills—not because of the bills themselves, but just, I don’t know! I… Get this settled! Done! Out of here! Done, done, done, done, done, done, done. Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. In the box. Beautiful! Done! I love that! And every so often I think, “Did I?” And I say, “Oh, yeah, I did.” “What about?” “Dealt with.” That’s it.

I wish I’d been around to hear Martyn Lloyd-Jones preach on this. Let me give you a little bit of Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s preaching, can I? You need to imagine a Welsh accent:

‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them [who] are in Christ Jesus’. There is not, there never will be, there[fore] never can be condemnation. There is nothing more foolish than the notion that you can be ‘in Christ’ at one moment; then when you sin you[’re] ‘out of’ Christ, then when you repent you[’re] ‘in Christ’ again? How can that be reconciled with the illustration of the body? The very idea is ludicrous. No, if you[’re] in Him, you[’re] in Him for ever, you’re in Him for all eternity. It is God who has put you ‘in him’, and no one and nothing can take you out—neither hell, nor Satan, nor any other power. If you are in, you are in. It is absolute.

I love that. I can just hear him: “[My dear friends], if you are in, you are in. It is absolute. There is no condemnation, there never will be; it is impossible.”[13]

We must cease to think of ourselves merely as forgiven, merely as believers, merely as holding on to Christ. The truth about us as Christians is that God, by the Holy Spirit, has put us into Christ, planted together. So you do not go in and out. You do not cease to be a Christian when you sin. You do not come under condemnation when you sin. You are not cast out of Christ when you sin. No, you remain in Christ—and there is still no condemnation. You have sinned—of course! But you have sinned against love and not against law. You may and you should feel ashamed, but you should not feel condemnation, because to do so is to put yourself back under the law. If we are in this position in Christ, we’re there forever. There is no condemnation—past, present, or future.

If you have got hold of this idea, you will have discovered the most glorious truth you will ever know in your life. Most Christian people are miserable. Most Christian people fail and fall into sin because they’re depressed, because they allow the devil to depress them. “Ah!” they say. “I have sinned. So how can I make these great statements?” Have you never heard of the word faith? This verse is the answer of faith to all our troubles. This is what God tells us about ourselves. And he puts it in this absolute, complete, and certain manner.

You do not cease to be a Christian when you sin. You do not come under condemnation when you sin. You are not cast out of Christ when you sin. No, you remain in Christ.

What’s the problem? Alienation. What’s the solution? Reconciliation. What’s the effect? No condemnation.

Now, let me give you two quotes from hymns—which I can do, because I have the words in front of me—and then we’re done. These are two of my favorite texts. And you know that, ’cause I quote them all the time.

“From whence”—from where—“this fear and unbelief?” Why am I fearful? Why am I unbelieving?

Hasn’t the Father put to grief
His spotless Son for me?
So will the righteous judge of men
Condemn me for that debt of sin
Which, Lord, was charged on you?

Complete atonement you have made
And to the utmost farthing paid
Whatever your people owed;
Nor can his wrath on me take place
If sheltered in your righteousness
And sprinkled with your blood.

If you have my discharge procured…

“Not guilty.”

And freely in my place endured
The whole of wrath divine,
Payment God cannot twice demand,
First at my bleeding Savior’s hand
And then again at mine.[14]

If he charged it to Christ’s account, he’s not going to charge it to yours.

And then Augustus Toplady:

The work which his goodness began
The arm of his strength will complete;
His promise is [yes] and amen
And never was forfeited yet.
Things future, nor things that are now,
Nor all things below [nor] above
Can make him his purpose forgo,
Or sever my soul from his love.

My name from the palms of his hands
Eternity will not erase;
Impressed on his heart it remains
In marks of indelible grace.
Yes, I to the end [will] endure,
As sure as the earnest is giv’n;
More happy, but not more secure,
The glorified spirits in heav’n.[15]

The people who have already entered into the gates of heaven are no more secure tonight than you, believer. What a wonderful thought! And, of course, you understand why. I won’t make you say the verse again.

Father, I pray that you will use these stumbling words and this central thought to draw those who are yet alienated from you into a glorious sense of your forgiveness and into the wonderful reality of reconciliation. And I pray that you will use these words also for some of us who have been for a period of time now just stumbling and bumbling our way along—just exactly like those described by Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his sermon. So come to us by the Holy Spirit and assure us of the reality of the truth we have pondered. Turn our gaze afresh to the cross when we’re tempted to look in on ourselves to find grounds for our assurance. Hear us as we pray to you in Jesus’ name. Amen.

[1] John 16:12–13 (paraphrased).

[2] Romans 5:6 (TLB).

[3] See Matthew 10:29–30; Luke 12:6–7.

[4] See Isaiah 49:16.

[5] See Ephesians 1:11.

[6] Katherine Hankey, “I Love to Tell the Story” (1866).

[7] See Romans 1:18.

[8] Elizabeth Cecelia Clephane, “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” (1868).

[9] See Ephesians 2:12.

[10] Romans 8:1 (KJV).

[11] Romans 8:35 (paraphrased).

[12] Frank Monford Graham, “The Old Account Was Settled Long Ago” (1902). Lyrics lightly altered.

[13] D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Romans: An Exposition of Chapters 7.1–8.4; The Law: It’s Functions and Limits (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), 276–77.

[14] Augustus Montague Toplady, “From Whence This Fear and Unbelief?” (1772). Lyrics lightly altered.

[15] Toplady, “A Debtor to Mercy Alone” (1771).