By Jared Warner
Willow Creek Friends Church
June 14, 2026
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Romans 5:1–8 (ESV)
1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Last Sunday we spoke about the wrath of God. Most of us look at that word and our mind tends to wander to something akin to rage. The problem with that is rage is often uncontrollable, it is fraught with unanchored emotions, and is often unmeasured. When we rage as humans we have lost all control. The person has cut us off in traffic, rage enters, and now there is a story on the evening news speaking about the incident. We can go from a calm and collected citizen of the community to a monster in a manner of seconds. This is rage, and this is typically what we see when we see the word wrath.
Wrath is not rage. And that wrath of God is not God going into a fit of rage, to smite everyone. God is patient. God is merciful, and filled with grace. God’s greatest desire is not driven by vengeful emotions instead God is driven to restore creation to the order created in the beginning.
Paul continues along this line as we go into today’s passage. Last week’s passage said that the law brings wrath, but righteousness comes through faith. The law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression. If wrath is not vengeful rage, what is it? Annoyance. The law brings annoyance. And when we know the law, we push as close to the law as we can until the annoyance flares.
Imagine you are on a long road trip with children. There is a rule or law in the car to keep your hands to yourself, and one of the siblings gets as close to touching without touching until their sibling begins to complain. The parent looks in the rearview mirror staring down the guilty party as they fain innocence saying, “I wasn’t touching them.” The parent asks them to stop. And all is calm, but eventually the annoyance returns. And now the response from the parent is a bit more stern. This cycle continues until the parent finally slams on the brakes and pulls to the side of the road and turns around. You know what comes next. The law was not broken, but it was pushed until an intervention was required. This would have happened with or without the law, because that is our sinful nature. We like to know just how far we can push.
Which brings us to righteousness, or right relationship. The law does not bring about the right relationship, no law can. If we think of law as legislation or as teaching. All the law can do is to provide a boundary or set up a sign post. It gives us guidelines that point us toward righteousness. The law teaches us where the lines are drawn, but we still push and challenge.
“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The concept of justification comes from legal concepts. It points to the declaration of righteousness. It is a declaration. It does not mean that you are righteous, or in a right relationship, it simply means that from a legal standpoint, you are declared as such.
Who makes this declaration?
We have been justified, declared as being righteous by faith. Again faith is this process of trust, from belief to entrusting every aspect of our being to God. Just like with every broken relationship building trust is a process, we slowly become more intimate. Each step of the way we gain just a bit more trust. As that trust builds we might question why, but we know that the one we have entrusted ourselves to is trustworthy. We are declared righteous by this relationship, we are declared righteous because we have entrusted our lives to one that is trustworthy. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
As a pastor within a faith movement known for their peace testimony, you might think I would be a scholar on peace. I once thought that myself. I have struggled with peace most of my adult life. Shortly after I graduated from college our nation entered into a war that continued until a few years ago. We say we were at peace, and yet for some reason helicopters are being shot down and drones and missiles are finding targets. This word peace, if looked at from a secular perspective, designates a political and social phenomenon where the state of a nation is not at war, or the absence of conflict. While I was reading about peace in the Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, they mentioned that treaties of alliance and of peace almost always link peace and philia (brotherly love or friendship). So in the secular world, peace, requires a caseation of violent conflict and a movement toward mutual profit. According to the Hellenistic philosophers a king who is philanthropic will be interested in restoring order and guaranteeing the peace, because it is recognized that peace is better than war. This philosophy applied to the relationships between nations, and they also applied the same concepts within a nation. A nation at peace is a nation without war, and has a population that is also without discord.
These are the teaching of the Gentile philosophers speaking of peace. This same Greek word that we translate to peace, was used by the Jewish scholars that translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. They used this word for Shalom. This Hebrew word holds all the concepts that the Greek philosophers held, but there is more. The concept of Shalom is derived from a root word meaning to be well, complete, and safe. To live in shalom means that we lack nothing and have no fear. The Hebrew idea of peace is for humanity to be restored into that state of being before the fall. We as humanity should strive to live at peace, but ultimately peace is a gift from God.
To the people of Israel peace became not only a means to the end of conflict and economic stability, peace became the religious ideal. It is our goal to be well, to have safety and security, and completeness. The life of Shalom was the goal, the ultimate life.
Adam and Eve once had Shalom, but that was lost. From the fall until today humanity has not obtained shalom because we are constantly attempting to define what is good and evil through our own means and purposes. We want to define what well-being is. We want to determine our safety and security. We, as individual humans, want to decide what will make us complete.
Think about the results of this? Right away in the stories of scripture we meet the sons of Adam and Eve. Cain was a farmer and Abel tended the flocks. Each of these boys brought an offering to give to God. God was pleased with what Abel brought but was not impressed with the offering of Cain. Cain despised his brother for this. This response grabbed God’s attention, and he spoke to Cain. He told him, “If you do well will you not also be accepted?”
Cain thought he was doing well, yet he was rejected. But why was he rejected? I have heard many sermons on the topic saying that Abel’s sacrifice was accepted because it was from the flocks. And only an offering of blood was acceptable in the eyes of God. Cain only brought produce from the fields. As a former wheat farmer, I do not accept that interpretation. The grain produced in my family’s fields has great value, it provided for my life. But I find that interpretation unacceptable. I am determining what is of value from my own position. I do not fully know if it was the type of sacrifice or not, or if it was just the attitude of the one offering the sacrifice. What I can say is, Cain was not looking to God. He was looking to himself, and he was looking toward his brother. Sin was crouching at his door, and God urged Cain to resist. But Cain did not resist. He did not allow God to determine Shalom for him, he took matters into his own hands and removed the annoyance himself. And the blood of Abel cried out to God about the injustice.
When we determine the value, when we define our own peace, it tends favor ourselves. We make the determination, the justification, and at times our well-being comes at the expense of others. This injustice often leads to greater conflict instead of peace.
“Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” God knows our struggle. God is aware that we have a tenancy to favor ourselves and those closest to us more than we value the well-being of those less closely associated with us. God knows, so God took it upon himself. He made himself just a little lower than the angels for a little while, and took on human flesh. Jesus lived an entire human existence from the gestation within his mother’s womb to death and burial. Through that entire life, he experienced every form of temptation we face and remained righteous. Jesus lived within a community, he taught, he worshiped, through his entire life he showed us what life with God was truly intended to be. Through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace.
We are justified not because of anything we have done. No, we are declared righteous because Jesus has stood in our place. We are declared righteous because Jesus stands with us.
I want to again speak about Red the bull. This massive beast loved us, but he was not a tame bull. If he felt threatened he would snort, his nose would become hot, and if you did not respond appropriately he would charge. This was if he sensed something was off. For the most part I did not have to worry, Red and I had a relationship, he knew who I was and would act like a giant dog when I was near. But that was not always the case. When I was a child I did not have that relationship. If I entered the pasture he would treat me as if I was an invader, unless my grandpa was with me. Red would come to my grandpa and love him. My grandpa would laugh with Red and tell him how good of a bull he was, and once he had Red’s attention I could join in. Red accepted me because my grandpa provided the justification. My grandpa declared to Red that I was safe, and Red remembered this.
Did this mean that I could just jump into the pasture and do whatever I wanted. No. Red was not tame. I did annoy the beast, but he knew that my grandpa was ok with me. There were times when Red did challenge my presence, and I had to learn what was and was not acceptable with Red. But as I spent more time with this animal the relationship grew, soon Red responded to me just as he responded to my grandpa.
Eventually I had to leave the farm, and someone else came in to fill my position. Someone that Red did not know. The process of introductions had to begin again. I had to justify my replacement to Red, and he had to become accustom to someone new.
God is not like Red. But God is also not tame. When I was in school my theology professor once illustrated justification as Jesus taming the Spirit. He pointed out that prior to Jesus the spirit was something to fear, like the tenth plague of Egypt. There were very few people that were said to interact with the Spirit of God. But after Christ the Spirit was tamed and dwelt within each believer. Jesus tamed the bull. The bull is still not safe, but the bull is good.
Through Jesus, we are justified. We are declared righteous. We have obtained this access by faith, we have this by entrusting our lives to Jesus, and Jesus then speaks and stand with and for us. Jesus provided this access through his life, death, and resurrection. And in this grace, we can stand and rejoice in hope of God’s glory.
We have been declared righteous. Jesus will and is standing with us, but does this mean that everything in life will be perfect? No, we must grow. We have justification, we have grace, we have a starting point, but we must learn to live in the presence of the spirit.
Paul says, “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
We must grow. You all know by now that I am a bit of a nerd. I like to learn about things, and there are times when something attracts my attention and I cannot let go of it until I know everything about it. I have a crop science degree, so much of what attracted my attention in college revolved around plants. Somewhere along the line I read about the trees in the Biosphere. If you do not know what the Biosphere is, Pauly Shore has an excellent documentary. Actually, his movie is a comedy, and it is actually pretty terrible, but the idea of the Biosphere was to create a perfect ecosystem so that we could study the effects of various factors upon the environment. They made this biosphere with various plants and climates, and inside it was supposed to be completely self-sufficient. The original experiment, however, failed miserably. The reason it failed was because the trees grew tall and fast, but eventually they would just fall over.
The reason the trees fell was because in the biosphere they forgot to include a very important factor, the world has wind, where the biosphere did not. Trees need the wind, because the wind provides stresses the plant in such a way that the plant must build resistance to it. Without the wind the tree will grow straight and tall, but will eventually be unable to support itself. This is what suffering does for us.
We do not like suffering, we often think of suffering as something evil. But suffering is part of life, it is what makes us stronger. The spirit of God does not remove suffering because God knows that we need to grow, not merely tall, but in strength. As we endure the various sufferings of life we gain endurance. We begin to understand not merely the rules of God’s teaching but why those rules are there, and it gives us character, and hope as we face more struggles in the future. We struggle, we suffer, but we do not suffer alone. Jesus is there standing with us. “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” While we were weak Jesus was there. He endured with us, and he provides the strength for our own endurance.
Jesus stand with us while we were still weak. While we were without knowledge of what a godly life is. While we were immoral, sinful, vengeful, and living within the self-justification of Cain. We were weak, unable to understand what the peace of God truly was, and while we were still sinners Christ died for us.
I want us to think about that for a moment. We were weak. He is strong for us. We seek to make our own justifications, but even at our best we are often incapable to set aside our own interests for others, we even struggle to sacrifice ourselves for people we regard as good. We do sacrifice though, do not misunderstand me. We sacrifice for our children, we will sacrifice for our nation. We will be capable of doing many good things from our personal justifications, but will we sacrifice for the good of humanity?
“But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
And if we were to continue to read in this passage Paul says later, “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.”
Jesus stands for us. He stands even when we reject. He stands even when we are weak. He stands to help as we struggle, and he declares that we are with him. Jesus tames the bull, and provides the way for the spirit to write the teachings on our hearts. Jesus stands, and we can rejoice that through him we have shalom, because he has brought us into completeness. And he has called us to stand with him as he calls out to others.
Previous Messages:
Wrath or Love
By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church June 07, 2026 Click here to join our meeting for worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili Romans 4:13–25 (ESV) 13 For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through…
Live In Peace
By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church May 31, 2026 Click here to join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili 2 Corinthians 13:11–14 (ESV) 11 Finally, brothers, rejoice. Aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace…
Gifted for Good
By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church May 24, 2026 Click here to Join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili 1 Corinthians 12:3–13 (ESV) 3 Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus is accursed!” and no one…
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