Welcome to another video in our series about justification. In the first video, we have seen that God has those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ justified. That means He has declared them to be just. We have been forgiven. Our sins are forgiven, all of them, and we have been declared just in the eyes of God and that is how we stand before Him now. And that has results and we have already seen in the last video that this has a tremendous result when it comes to our sinful past. We know we have peace towards God through our Lord Jesus Christ, peace with God and it is by the Lord Jesus Christ, the one that died on Carey’s cross for our sins. Today you would like to see another result and the verse in Romans chapter 5 continues by whom we have also access by faith into this favour in which we stand. That is a tremendous blessing that we possess. We have to do with God. We have to do with God in his grace and we stand before this God. We have access towards this God in his grace. And if you want to understand this properly, we need to understand what has been our position before that. And I would like to turn quickly to another by verse in Romans chapter 5, verse 19, actually. And there we read for us. Indeed, by the disobedience of the one man, the many have been constituted sinners. So also by the obedience of the one, the many will be constituted righteous. There are a few things that we need to explain here. And basically the Apostle Paul, or we can subdivide this by verse into two parts. And then the first part, the apostle Paul, he goes back to Adam and Eve and their disobedience. And the result of that is that we are now constituted sinners. The word constituted means to place someone into a particular position, right? The the Greek word means also like to a point to establish, to set somebody to place into a position, right? And that is what what is the case now as those who are descendants of Adam and Eve, we have or we, we are sinners before God. That is how we stood before him. Every man as we are born, we are sinners before God. But when we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that changes all together. And now we’re moving to the second-half of this Bible verse verse. And now the Apostle Paul, he goes away from Adam and Eve and he goes to the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s the one that he he speaks about races of the one, the obedience of the one, this obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ that let him go to the cross and suffer and die there. Because of that, many will be constituted righteous. They will be placed in a new position before God. It is about a new standing, a new position. I see one thing we need to understand very well. Sometimes you hear Christians and they say, they say I’m a safe tuner or I’m a Sinner saved by grace. I know what they want to say, but we are no sinners anymore before God. That is not our standing that we have before God. As children of God. We are no sinners anymore. We stand before God as those that have been constituted righteous. God Himself has given us the position, the standing of righteous ones before Him. That is the meaning of justification. So we stand before Him. That is the change that has happened. When we were sinners, how did we stand there before God? You see, this is what we need to understand because if we now have access by faith to God in His grace and we stand in His favour in order to value and appreciate that properly, we need to understand how did God look to on us how what was our standing before God when we were still sinners and and two Bible verses help us to understand this. The first one is from John chapter 3. At the end there it says the Lord Jesus Christ himself says he who believes in the Son has everlasting life, and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life. And now it comes, but the wrath of God comes upon him. No, it says, abides on him, abides on him. Some people think that only if we reject Jesus, then at this point when we really finally reject Jesus, then the wrath of God comes upon us. No, the wrath of God is upon us as we are born into this world because we are sinners. We are born sinners and so the wrath of God is upon us. It can move. If you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, then the wrath of God will move and God’s favour comes upon us. But we are born sinners and as such the wrath of God abides upon us. That means on those that reject the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour. And then the other by verse. Ephesians chapter 2 says that we were by nature children of wrath. Our sin can only provoke God’s wrath upon us. Now as those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, we know that they’re on Curry’s cross. In the three hours of darkness, God’s wrath came about. The Lord Jesus Christ, He bore it. He drank this cup. Remember what the Lord Jesus Christ prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. He prayed about this cup. And then he said, if this cup cannot pass without me drinking it, you will be done. And so in on the cross, in the three hours of darkness, He drank this cup. What? Which symbolizes the wrath of God. And because He did this, we now believe in Him, and because we believe in Him, we have been justified. And because we are justified, we now can say that by whom? By Jesus Christ, we have also access by faith into this favour in which we stand. That is the new standing that we have now before God, not as sinners anymore, but as those who are justified, as those who are constituted righteous. And I would like to look a little bit more in detail into this Bible, this phrase, this blessing that we are now talking about. The first one by whom? Yes, it points us again to the Lord Jesus Christ. Even with the other blessing that we have peace with God, it says it is through our Lord Jesus Christ. And so every blessing that we possess is by Him and through Him the one that died and suffered on Calvaries cross we that is of course, in the context of the letter. It is the believers in Rome and the apostle Paul also includes himself. But we can extend the group. It is all those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. They can say now I have, I am justified, and since I am justified, I have access to God in His grace. It is by faith that is the principle on which we have been justified, and this is also by the principle on which we have and enjoy this blessing by whom we have. It’s the same what we have seen when it came to the peace that we have now with God. We have peace, not we will have peace or maybe no, we have. We have this access into His favour to God in His grace. That is something we have and that we can enjoy right now and that is a wonderful thing. We have also access into this favour and this is what I use the phrase already, what this means these words also we have also access into this favour means we have access that is there’s nothing that hinders anymore. Sin separates us. The prophet of Isaiah says it is your sin that separates you from God. Our sin makes us takes every liberty, any access to God. But now this sin is taken away. It has been taken care of by the Lord Jesus Christ. We are forgiven, we are justified. So the access to God is free. And with liberty we can come. And there we see God. There we meet God. But what kind of God do we meet there? Well, it is the one before who we stand as those that have been constituted righteous, as those who have by this very God been justified. That is our standing, our position before him. And He doesn’t see us as sinners anymore. And so how this God thinks about us, how he meets us, is only in grace. But dear brother, by the sister, think about this. We have access to God and we can know that this God will meet us in grace, in undeserved love. He will never ever think other than in grace and in love about you and me. And even if we sin, that doesn’t change that fundamental way in which we stand before God. I don’t say that sin is not a problem. It is a problem and it will take, it is a disturbance and it will take our enjoyment of that relationship away. But there’s forgiveness even there and there’s restoration even there. But it never changes our fundamental way, how we stand before God. And that is something we need to understand. There’s a difference between position standing and our practical walk. We cannot equalise the two, but this is how we stand before God and this is how he thinks about you and me. And then the last one is in which we stand. Yes, we could say we keep standing there. That is how we stand before God and we will remain standing like that before God. Before we come to the end of this video, I would like to come to another Bible verse that we read in the letter to the Ephesians. And it’s it somehow goes in the same direction and once more makes clear how God sees us, how he thinks about us, and most of all, what kind of God we have to do with. As those who are children of God, who are born again, who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ who died for our sins. This is the kind of God we have to do with. Before I speak about this by the verses, let me just explain something. When we speak about justification, we are in the letter to the Romans. Now the letter of the Romans has a different approach than the letter to the Ephesians. The letter to the Romans sees man who is responsible before God, who is active in his sin, in his enmity to God. If you read the first 3 chapters of Romans, you will see that there’s no one who’s good, that there is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And then we see that we as sinners have a 2 fold problem. The first one is that we have sinned and hence we need forgiveness. But there’s a second problem. And the second problem is not only that we have sinned, that are that is the actions that we have committed, but that we are sinners. That is a problem that we many times forget we are sinners, or I have to say we were sinners for those who believe in the Lord Jesus. But you see, when somebody sins, when somebody commits a sin against me, let’s say somebody steals something from me, I can’t forgive that person what he did. I forgive you that you stole something from me. But what I can’t forgive is that he is a thief. And that’s the thing, that’s our second problem. God forgave us what we did, the actions. But the root of the problem, which is us, he couldn’t forgive. He needed to eradicate us. He needed to judge us thoroughly. And the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, that happened. So with our position as sinners before God, God dealt with that on the cross. And that second problem has found its answer also in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. But that is the approach Romans takes. Now when we go to Ephesians, the whole approach is a different one. First of all, Ephesians doesn’t see us active in our sins. It sees us dead in our sins and trespasses. That is something you can read in Ephesians chapter 2. And as those who are dead, we need life. And so God has given us His life, His nature. We are partakers of the divine nature. God is light, God is love, and He has given us His life. That is the eternal life that we’ve been talking about. But most of all, the approach is not so that God answers to our need or the problems that we have, but the way God deals with us is He himself. If you turn to Ephesians chapter 1, you can look into the heart of God. And God gives and he blesses, not because there’s anything that we have need of, because as sinners what we actually need is forgiveness. But we see that God had something, purpose, something in his heart which goes much wider than that. And then we see what kind of God we have to do with. A God that delights to give, a God that delights to bless, a God that wanted to turn us into something and draw us so close to himself. Yeah, even make us children of God. And that is what we see here. So if you understand, if you begin to understand Ephesians chapter 1, you look into the heart of God and you see what God delighted, whether he has purpose in his heart to give to you and me who believe now in the Lord Jesus Christ. And God wanted us to be with him. And that is what we see actually in this Bible verse now that we should be holy and with our blame before Him in love. That describes what we are now as children of God. That describes the life that we have received in the new birth, holy, without blame and love, and as such we stand before Him. It is the same life that the Lord Jesus Christ has, what He displayed in His life here and what He had in Himself forever, that has been given to us in the new birth, and that is how we stand before Him. That is our position again, when it comes to our practical work every day. We might not, it might not be the case that we act according our position, our standing before God, but that doesn’t change our position, our standing before God. But this is how we stand before him, holy, without blame and love. Little later on it says he has made us accepted in the beloved, in the beloved that is the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s the Son of his love. Yes. Verse 7 also tells us that there was that we had needs to be redeemed through his blood. That points us to the Lord Jesus Christ dying on Kevv’s cross where He gave his life, so that God has a righteous foundation on which he can bless us the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of His grace which He made to a bound towards us in all wisdom and prudence. My dear brother, my dear sister, who who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, my sincere prayer is that you may understand in this video message that we all may understand more how we stand before God. What has been the case constituted sinners by disobedience by by the sin. That is the result that sin has brought us into, as that is the way we stood before God. Sin is before God, and as such only the wrath of God was upon us. But now, believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the beloved, our position, our standing before God, has altogether changed. We are now constituted righteous, and as we have seen in Ephesians, we are holy, blameless in love. That is the way we stand before, and we have been made accepted in the Beloved. That is how God looks to you and me. That is how He thinks about you. We have access by faith into this favour in which we stand. There is nothing else but to God in His grace. And we can know that God will never, ever think other than in grace, in undeserved love, about you and me. What a magnificent result of justification. Thank you for watching this video. And until the next video, I say God bless. And until then, goodbye.