Gift of Grace #7 - The Great Exchange

Description

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund unpacks Romans 3:21-31, revealing that justification before God is a gift of grace—not something earned through performance or relationships. If you've been looking for validation in your career, appearance, or loved ones, this message will show you why the "great exchange" changes everything about how you live today.

The Great Exchange: Finding the Validation You've Been Searching For

What if the thing you've been searching for your whole life — the sense that you matter, that you're enough, that you're truly known and accepted — can't be found where you've been looking?

That's the question at the heart of Kurt's message from Romans 3:21-31, part of Orchard Hill Church's ongoing series through the book of Romans. And the answer he offers is both humbling and liberating.

We're Looking for God in All the Wrong Places

Kurt opens with a surprising cultural observation. Drawing from Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, he notes that as society has moved away from God, we haven't stopped needing what only God can provide — we've just started demanding it from other places.

Becker writes that when we elevate a romantic partner to the place of God, "we want redemption, nothing less... we want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain." The problem, as Kurt points out, is that no human being can carry that weight. We crush the people closest to us when we demand from them what only God can give.

And it's not just romance. Kurt broadens the picture considerably: "Instead of demanding it from a love partner, instead of demanding it from our vocation and saying, 'I have value because I've succeeded here,' or getting it from our finances and our net worth, or getting it from our appearance, or getting it from how our kids live..." we look everywhere except the one place the answer actually exists.

Romans 3:23 frames the problem plainly: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." No exceptions. No workarounds. Every person is in the same condition before God.

Three Words That Change Everything

Kurt walks through Romans 3:21-26 and highlights three theological words that, once understood, reframe how we see ourselves and how we live.

Justification. To be justified is not simply to have your sins forgiven — it goes further than that. As Kurt explains, "justification is a legal standing where God says, 'You are righteous.' Not because you are intrinsically righteous, but because Jesus' righteousness is given to you as a gift." Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians 5:21: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." When God looks at those who trust in Christ, he sees the righteousness of Christ covering them.

Redemption. This word carries the weight of the ancient slave market. To redeem someone was to pay the price that set them free. Kurt explains: "We were enslaved to sin, and Jesus Christ paid the redemption price to set us free. The redemption price was his life, his death on the cross." Romans 3:24 puts justification and redemption together: "all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus."

Propitiation. This is perhaps the most unfamiliar of the three words, but Kurt argues it's essential. Propitiation means to turn away wrath. Jesus' death on the cross absorbed the wrath of God that humanity deserved — not because God is cruel, but because, as Kurt notes, "God's wrath is actually an expression of his love. Because God loves what is good and right and true, he hates what is evil and wrong and false." Romans 3:25 describes Christ as the one God "presented as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood — to be received by faith."

Together, these three words describe what Kurt calls "the great exchange": our sin for Christ's righteousness, our deserved wrath absorbed by Jesus on our behalf.

Grace Isn't Just a Future Ticket

One of Kurt's sharpest observations is that many Christians mentally file justification away as a future benefit — a ticket to heaven — while continuing to seek day-to-day validation from their performance, appearance, relationships, and achievements.

He references the book Seculosity to name this tendency: "The law of enoughness is a bottomless pit. You can never be thin enough, successful enough, or good enough, or a good enough parent to finally feel safe." We've simply swapped out one religion for another.

The Parable of the Two Sons from Luke 15 illustrates both failure modes. The younger son tries to find life outside the father's house entirely, squandering everything. The older son stays home but keeps a running ledger of what he's earned — and grows bitter when grace is extended freely to his brother. Kurt observes: "The older brother had his moment of saying, 'I am resentful of the grace that you're giving to somebody else, because down deep I feel like I've earned a certain thing from you and you owe me.'"

Both sons missed the same thing: the father's grace was never something to be earned. It was always a gift.

Kurt's application is direct: "Every time you sit and recognize that you're justified by the God of Heaven, that you're redeemed by Jesus Christ, that Jesus has made the way, what it does is it takes the pressure off — demanding it from the person sitting next to you, from your job, from your boss, from your co-workers, from your appearance, from your kids' performances."

Grace, received fully, makes you free.

Questions for Reflection

As you reflect on this message, consider these two questions:

1. Where are you currently looking for the validation that only God can give? Is it your career, your relationships, your parenting, your appearance? What would it look like to consciously release that source and instead receive your standing as a gift from God?

2. Are you living as if justification is only a future reality, or does it change how you approach today? What would be different about your week if you genuinely believed that God has already declared you righteous through Christ — not because of what you've done, but because of what he has done?

• References

  Ernest Becker (from “The Denial of Death”)

  • "After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption, nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, of our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified to know that our creation has not been in vain. We turn to the love partner for the experience of the heroic, for perfect validation. We expect them to make us good through love."

  • "No human partner can offer this assurance because the partner is real. He or she inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection. And so by looking to the love partner for justification, we end up losing our own sense

  David Zahl (from “Seculosity”)

  • "We're all religious. It's just a matter of what we're religious about. Seculosity is the term I've coined for the capital R religious devotions that we pour into the non-religious areas of our lives."

  • "This busyness serves as a kind of shorthand for importance. If I'm busy, I'm needed. If I'm needed, I must matter. We live in a world of enoughness that is always just out of reach."

  • "The law of enoughness is a bottomless pit. You can never be thin enough, successful enough, or good enough, or a good enough parent to finally feel safe."

  • "We've traded a God who forgives for a world that never forgets."

• Transcript

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  Good morning. It's great to be together around Pittsburgh Online. Let's just take a moment and pray. God, as we are gathered today, I ask that you would speak. I ask that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis. We pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.

  Well, happy Valentine's Day weekend. How many of you were excited about Valentine's Day? So some, not that many is what I'm seeing. So Valentine's Day is not a liturgical holiday. And here's what I mean when I say liturgical. It's not part of the church year. It doesn't appear in the Bible anywhere. It is what I would call a Hallmark holiday. Now, some of you are young enough, you're like, Hallmark? What's that? It used to be the card store that you would go to and they would promote holidays like Sweetest Day, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, to get you to buy cards and give them, because it was a good business model.

  Now, you may say, come on, Kurt, that's really cynical. I'm not saying I don't do all of these holidays, but what I'm saying is this is not one of those days that's religious. And yet in church, especially when Valentine's Day falls on a Saturday or Sunday, there's probably a temptation to step away from a series and talk about things like how to find the love of your life, how to maximize love in your life, how to date somebody that you've dreamed about that turns into your spouse and still get kissed on the first date. You know, those kinds of things.

  Now, I'm being a little facetious here, but the reason I'm starting with this today is we've been in this series in Romans. And where we've been is Romans starts by talking about the righteousness of God. And then in chapter one, verse 18, through about chapter three, verse 20, the author, Paul, continues to try to convince everybody that they're sinful before God and that whatever their version of righteousness is, it's not enough. Now, you may say, okay, so we're going to continue in the series. How does this tie into Valentine's Day? I'm glad you asked.

  The Cultural Replacement of God

  It reminds me of something I read years ago. It was a book by a man named Ernest Becker. It won a Pulitzer Prize. It's called The Denial of Death. And in it, he argues this idea. He says that, in essence, in our society today, we've largely moved away from the idea of God. And as a result, what we've done is we've replaced God in our culture with the idealized romantic relationship.

  Here's how he writes about it. He says this: 'After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God?' And then notice his religious language here. He says, 'We want redemption, nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, of our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified to know that our creation has not been in vain. We turn to the love partner for the experience of the heroic, for perfect validation. We expect them to make us good through love.'

  And what happens if you elevate romance to your ultimate thing? When you have somebody in your life, you will often crush them with your demands for them to make you whole, for them to somehow give you the validation that you actually need from God.

  Here's again how he writes about what he calls the burden of perfection. He says, 'No human partner can offer this assurance because the partner is real. He or she inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection. And so by looking to the love partner for justification, we end up losing our own sense of validation.'

  The Gift of Grace in Romans 3

  Now you may say, okay, how does this tie in again to Romans? Because Romans, chapter three, verses 21 through 31, you just heard it read, gives us some vocabulary about really what it is to come into a right relationship with God. It starts out by saying that nobody's basically justified by the law, that we're made right or our righteousness comes apart from the law. So it comes by a gift of God. It's the gift of grace.

  And when you get this, when I get this, when we live in the reality of God giving us something that we don't deserve, what it means is, instead of demanding it from a love partner, instead of demanding it from our vocation and saying, 'I have value because I've succeeded here,' or getting it from our finances and our net worth, or getting it from our appearance, or getting it from how our kids live, or something like this, we become really free.

  In fact, I would go so far as to say that for many people of faith, people who have been around church, Christian people, they take this idea—and we're going to look at some of these words here in just a moment because they're in this passage—this idea of justification. And they see it as just merely a future thing. So I get Paul's message in Romans: I've sinned, and I need to be justified by God. Therefore, it punches a future ticket to some future salvation. And it seems detached from our everyday life now.

  But what I hope to show you today is that yes, there is a future element to what God does, but there's a present element that changes the way that you live in your romantic life, in your business and career life, in your home life, and just your self-perception of yourself.

  Three Key Words

  And so we're going to look at Romans 3, verses 21 through 26. And this is a passage that is really at the heart of Romans, and what we're going to see is there are three vocabulary words here—there's more that we could look at, but three that I want us to just learn. And in any discipline there are words that you need to learn. If you're going to become a football fan, you can just learn first down, touchdown, field goal, things like that. Or you can say, you know what, there's quarters coverage and there's a stick concept and you get what I'm talking about. There are certain levels that you can learn.

  And so some of this may feel to some of you like, okay, this is like words I don't need. And others of you will go, by getting this, you will have a greater appreciation for what is here.

  1. Justification

  And so here's the first word: the word justification. Verse 21 first: 'But now apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the law and the prophets testify.' Chapter 1, verses 16-17, the righteousness of God. He talks about it. He says, 'And the good news is something I'm not ashamed of because it's salvation to those who believe.' But his theme is the righteousness of God. How do you and I get this?

  And here he says it's apart from the law. Verse 22: 'The righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.' So this is what we've been talking about. We can't through our own version of the law, whether that be a self kind of moralistic law or a religious practice, we don't earn our way with God. It's given to us by Jesus Christ.

  And he says this: there is no difference between Jew and Gentile. And if you're just jumping in this weekend, the Jew-Gentile thing was big in chapter two where he talked about the different groups. Then verse 23 kind of sums it all up again: 'For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.' Doesn't matter your religious background, your social standing, your heritage, we all fall short of the glory of God.

  And then verse 24 says, 'And all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that comes by Christ Jesus.' And here's that word: justified. And just a note, that little word that says 'all' there doesn't really appear in the original text. The NIV, which is an excellent translation here, uses the word 'all' because the word that's used is saying 'the ones who are.' Charles Williams in his translation from the 1930s says 'anybody' here, probably to try to pick up the sense they're trying to say, 'those who believe.' It doesn't mean that all people everywhere as much as the ones who are believing. And that's what they're trying to pick up.

  And so justified here means to be declared righteous by God. So you've probably heard the little saying that justification is 'just as if I'd never sinned.' Now, that's a good little way to think about it, but it actually goes farther than that. What justification is, is it means that I'm given the righteousness of Jesus Christ. So Paul in another place in 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, 'God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.'

  So what he's saying is justification is a legal standing where God says, 'You are righteous.' Not because you are intrinsically righteous, but because Jesus' righteousness is given to you as a gift. So when God looks at you, if you've trusted Christ, he sees the righteousness of Christ covering you. And so you stand justified before God. Now, you may say, 'Okay, that sounds great, but how does that happen?'

  2. Redemption

  And so that brings us to the second word, and that's the word redemption. And he says here in verse 24, 'And are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.'

  Now, redemption is a word that was used in the ancient world for the freeing of a slave. So if you wanted to free a slave, you would pay a redemption price, and the slave would then be set free. And what Paul is saying here is that we were enslaved to sin, and Jesus Christ paid the redemption price to set us free. So the redemption price was his life, his death on the cross.

  And so when we talk about being redeemed, what we're saying is that Jesus has paid the price to set us free from our slavery to sin. Now, you may say, 'Okay, but how does that work? How does Jesus' death on the cross accomplish this?' And that brings us to the third word.

  3. Propitiation

  Verse 25: 'God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith.' Now, some translations use the word 'propitiation' here instead of 'sacrifice of atonement.' And propitiation is a word that means to turn away wrath.

  So what Paul is saying here is that Jesus' death on the cross turned away God's wrath. Now, you may say, 'Wait a minute, I thought God was love. Why would God have wrath?' And the answer is that God's wrath is actually an expression of his love. Because God loves what is good and right and true, he hates what is evil and wrong and false. And so when we sin, we're choosing evil over good, wrong over right, false over true. And God's wrath is his settled opposition to that.

  But here's the amazing thing: God doesn't just express his wrath toward us. Instead, Jesus takes our place. Jesus receives the wrath that we deserve. And so when we trust in Jesus, God's wrath is turned away from us, not because we don't deserve it, but because Jesus has already received it on our behalf.

  And this is what we call the great exchange. We give Jesus our sin, and he gives us his righteousness. We deserve God's wrath, but Jesus takes it in our place. And now we stand justified before God, redeemed from our slavery to sin, because Jesus is the propitiation for our sins.

  Common Objections

  Now, Paul anticipates some objections to this message. And we see them in verses 27 through 31. The first objection is that this message is too humbling. Verse 27: 'Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the law that requires faith.'

  So Paul is saying, if you get this message, you can't boast. You can't say, 'Look at what I've done. Look at how good I am. Look at how I've earned God's favor.' Because it's all a gift. It's all by grace through faith. And so this message is too humbling for some people because they want to be able to take credit for their standing with God.

  The second objection is that this message is too wide. Verse 29: 'Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith.'

  Again, he made a big deal about circumcision and uncircumcision and this whole religious practice. And if you weren't here, the idea is that circumcision was for those who practice their religion. Uncircumcised was those who did not. And here's what he's doing. He's saying, again, some of you will object and say, if this is true, that God justifies, Jesus redeems, Jesus is the propitiation to God the Father, and you don't have to perform, it's given to you, then it's too wide, because there are people outside who will get in on it without doing what I've done.

  And then he gives one more objection. And this is right at the end of chapter three. And this is the idea that it's too risky to be true. Verse 31: 'Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all. Rather, we uphold the law.' And this little 'not at all' is that little phrase in the original language, 'me genoito.' It means 'what an abhorrent idea.' It shows up in Romans over and over again. We talked a little bit about it last week. This idea that he's saying, 'That's a horrible idea.'

  And what he's doing here is he's not saying that it's a horrible idea that somebody would take seriously the commands of God. But he's saying when you count on that, you don't get that it is the law of faith ultimately.

  The Story of Two Sons

  But by the way, Jesus told a story about this. Luke 15, the story of the two sons. Jesus tells the story about how the son comes to the father and says, 'Dad, would you give me my share of the estate?' And in that text, the word that's used for 'estate' there is a word that basically means 'the land on which our estate sits.' And by selling it, he was giving away some of his very sustenance to give to the son. But he does it and the son takes it and he goes to the far country and he spends it all on riotous living, reckless living, the text says.

  And then one day when he doesn't have any more, he realizes it. And so he says, 'How many of my father's hired men have it better than I have it? I know what I'll do. I'll go home and I'll say to my father, I've sinned. Make me like one of your hired men.' And so he gets up and he heads to his home. And his father sees him when he's coming and he doesn't even get his whole speech out. And the father says, 'This is my son.' And he runs to him and he embraces him.

  And then he says, 'Put my finest robe on my son. Give him a ring, put it on his finger.' And the ring here probably was a ring that meant he had the power to make deals on behalf of the family. Again, this wasn't just a decorative ring. This was a signet ring. What he was doing was he was saying, 'I'm not just giving you decorations, but I'm giving you signs of standing once again.'

  And then he says, 'And kill the fattened calf.' And when he says this, the way that it reads in the original language is it says, 'the calf that was fattened.' And it kind of makes that point like it's the calf, the one that was fattened. So this was the one that they were saving for the big special occasion.

  And then the older brother hears about it because he hears the dancing, he hears the music. And he asks somebody who's there, he says, 'What's going on?' He says, 'Your younger brother's come home.' And the older brother's angry because the younger brother has a party thrown for him and he's squandered part of the estate, part of even his estate, probably on this wild living.

  And the father goes out to him and he says, in essence, 'Everything I have is yours. Why don't you come in and celebrate?' And the brother says, 'You've given...' And now the text changes. It says, 'the fattened calf,' where he moves the word order early. It's a way of saying, 'You've given him the best. And you've never even given me a small goat to celebrate with my friends.'

  And here's what was happening. The older brother had his moment of saying, 'I am resentful of the grace that you're giving to somebody else, because down deep I feel like I've earned a certain thing from you and you owe me.'

  Living in the Reality of Grace

  You see, the idea of grace being a gift, when you get it, when I get it, it means that instead of resenting other people's journeys, especially the journeys that maybe aren't as straight as ours have been, will go away, it'll fade away because we'll realize it is all grace, that we stand with God at all.

  And then what it will do is not just mean that we've somehow punched a ticket for our future, but it will mean that we're able to look and to say that God has given us something that we can't get from all of the other things that we try to get a feeling of well-being, rightness from.

  There's a book that was written several years ago called Seculosity. And the author says this: 'We're all religious. It's just a matter of what we're religious about. Seculosity is the term I've coined for the capital R religious devotions that we pour into the non-religious areas of our lives.' And then he says, 'This busyness serves as a kind of shorthand for importance. If I'm busy, I'm needed. If I'm needed, I must matter. We live in a world of enoughness that is always just out of reach.'

  Then he says this: 'The law of enoughness is a bottomless pit. You can never be thin enough, successful enough, or good enough, or a good enough parent to finally feel safe.' And at another point, he says, 'We've traded a God who forgives for a world that never forgets.'

  You see, grace is a gift that seeks us out when we have nothing to give. And when that is the way that we live, then instead of saying, 'Well, cool, if God is the one who justifies, Jesus redeems, Jesus is the propitiation, I can just kind of live however,' what happens instead is we say, 'Why would I want anything different than what this God asks of me in my life?'

  That's why Paul can say, 'Not at all. May it never be that you would think this way.' Because if you get grace, you will do nothing but want to run to that grace. Because every time you sit and recognize that you're justified by the God of Heaven, that you're redeemed by Jesus Christ, that Jesus has made the way, what it does is it takes the pressure off, demanding it from the person sitting next to you, from your job, from your boss, from your co-workers, from your appearance, from your kids' performances, and you start to say, 'I have a word from the God of the universe that makes me whole.'

  And you know what that does? It makes you free to say, 'However my kids do, whatever happens in my career, whether I'm well-loved or not well-loved, whether I have the aging appearance that I want to have or not, all of it is secondary, not unimportant, but it's secondary because I have a verdict that matters way more than that.'

  And that's why being justified, being redeemed is bigger than just a future ticket. It's a now thing that lets you live in the reality of the gift of grace.

  Closing Prayer

  Let's pray together.

  Some of us may be here and hearing this and say, 'Okay, I'm not sure I connect all of the dots, but it sounds kind of good.' The essence of the first few chapters of Romans is if you have sinned and you have, God makes a way through Jesus Christ when you believe. It's apart from the law. And you can turn to Jesus today and say, 'God, I trust you through Jesus Christ,' and these benefits become yours. And you can do it right now just by saying, 'God, I acknowledge my sin and I want Jesus to be my Savior.'

  For some, maybe you've believed that for a long time, but functionally you keep trying to be justified, be enough through the things that you do. Maybe today is just a reminder to say it isn't just a future salvation, but God has given me a word that changes how I live today. And you can step into that more fully by saying, 'God, I know that you have declared me to be justified, redeemed, and I want to live in that rather than apart from it.'

  God help us to live in the reality of what you've provided and to savor it and treat it like the gift that it is. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

  Thanks for being here. Have a great week.

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