Justification by faith alone is the central doctrine of the Christian faith, as articulated by Martin Luther and expounded in Romans 3:21-24. The sermon traces Martin Luther's personal struggle to understand how a sinner can be righteous before God, highlighting his attempts at works-based salvation through penance and confession, which ultimately failed to bring peace. The message emphasizes that true justification comes freely by God's grace through faith in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, not through human effort or merit. It concludes by warning against the modern erosion of this doctrine and urging believers to hold fast to the biblical truth of salvation by faith alone.
Restored with Diffio
Audio restored with Diffio. Diffio processed the original archive recording to reduce noise and produce a cleaner listening version; the original stays available.
Speech quality score (model-estimated, SCOREQ): before 2.40 → restored 4.74
It's been awfully good, too. So that's good news. And we trust that maybe in the will of the Lord won't be too long, so we'll be able to get our brother David back to preach for us once again. But for his message this evening, our brother David's done that. Thank you very much. It's good to be with you on this last night and enjoy the hospitality and the fellowship and the kindness of the saints. But I've missed my family awful much, and it's good to go see them. Thank you very much for all of your kindnesses to me this week. I'm going to ask you to turn your Bibles to Romans chapter three. We want to look at what Martin Luther called the chief and first article of the faith upon which he said the church stands or falls.
And that is the doctrine of justification by faith. And this is an important doctrine. It's one of the pillars. in cornerstones of our faith and I trust you know something about it and I trust that by the end of this evening you'll be able to defend it and stand for it. Verse twenty one of chapter three of Romans. But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is manifested being witnessed by the law and the prophets. Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe there is no difference.
For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God and being justified freely. I'm just saying that chorus. Justified freely without cost by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are passed through the forbearance of God, to declare, I say at this time, His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of him that believes in Jesus. Tonight we want to think about justification by faith.
And there's a verse in Proverbs. I think it's Proverbs twenty-three, twenty-three. It's easy to remember. And it goes like this. Buy the truth and sell it not. Also wisdom, instruction and understanding. And I think when it comes to doctrinal truth, that should be our motto. That should be our stand. buy the truth and sell it not. You know, when you work for something and you labor for something, it has great value to you. I'm not sure if anyone here works their way through college, pays for their own college tuition. If you've done that, even a portion of it, you value your education.
I don't know if anyone here worked hard and built their own house and saved and paid for all the various expenses. You know, when that happens, you value the house and you value those things you work in labor and work hard towards. And I think that is the idea behind many of the doctrines we have. The Lord Jesus purchased these doctrines with His own blood, purchased our justification, made it possible for the blood of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And I trust that these doctrines are important to you. I know this doctrine is important for one man in church history. I want to tell you a little bit about his life, and that's Martin Luther.
You know, it's hard for us to comprehend a day when probably very, very few people, probably no one in the public arena, probably no one in the seminary system of that day, not very many within the churches of that day knew anything about being saved by grace alone. through faith alone in the finished work of the Lord Jesus. And here comes a man who was speaking with all his heart about how a man could be right with God. The year was fifteen oh six. Martin Luther was a young law student desiring with his father's blessing to earn a lot of money in the area of law.
He was coming back to his hometown. And as he was coming back into the town, he passed an Augustinian church monastery that was there. and a bolt of lightning came out of the heaven. It struck very near where he was standing. He was forced to the ground or unconscious for a little bit. And when he came to, as he was going to the ground, he prayed a quick prayer and he prayed. He said, Saint Anne, save me. And when he was conscious again, he got on his knees and he made a prayer. He prayed to the Lord. He said, Lord, because you saved my life, I'm going to devote my life to you. I'm going to change the course of my life.
I'm going to give all my energies, all my strength to you. He went home that day and talked to his father and he said, I'm going to become an Augustinian monk. I'm going to leave law. I'm going to leave the business world. I'm going to leave all those studies behind. I'm going to become, I'm going to be a monk. I'm going to devote myself to the church. And very soon after that, he went and he joined himself to the Augustinian monastery right near his house and he began to study. But as he began to read through the scriptures for the first time, He came across a verse that haunted him, terribly haunted him. And here's what the verse was. It was in Job chapter two, chapter nine, verse two, that how can a man be righteous or be justified before God?
Martin Luther had a tremendous sense of his own sin. And he thought to himself, how could I ever be right with God? How could I ever be righteous before God? How could a person like myself, all the thoughts, all the actions, all the sins that he committed willingly, all the sins he committed without even knowing that they were sins, how could he ever be right with God? He knew nothing of justification by faith. He knew nothing. All he knew was salvation by works. And he knew he failed miserably. He went to his confessor in the monastery and he said, how can I be right with God?
He said to him, confessor, just pray more. He prayed more. He said, give alms, do acts of penance. And he did that. He began to wear rough clothing, burlap bag type clothing. He began to sleep on stone slams. He began to fast. He did everything he could to pay something back to God for all of his sins. And the more that he did that, the further he felt from God, he had no peace in his heart. He had no further knowledge that he was any more justified than he was before. He went to his confessor again. And he said to his confessor, said, well, confess your sins.
Confess every sin you could confess. And he began from that point on every day to go to a different priest and confess his sins. There are times that he confessed sins for five hours a day and still he had no peace. He came to his confessor one day. Johannes Staupitz was his name. And his confessor said, Martin Luther, he said, why are you confessing so much? Are you trying to get out of work? He had to work in the monastery. You're trying to get out of doing certain chores and duties. You're here for five hours a day. He said, you don't have to confess every single thought, every single deed, all those little things you've done. Just the big things. And he said to Johannes Saul, Peter, he says, all of my sins are big sins.
He said, I've got to confess all of them. He said, if there was one sin that I didn't confess, he said, and God would come and I would stand before his bar. He said, I'd be lost for eternity. All my sins are a big sin. Johannes Paul Pitt said to him, maybe it would help you if you went to Rome. If you went to where the great churchmen of the church were, the leading men and go to the masses that they would celebrate and that you would meet some of these men, maybe it would give you peace, he went to Rome. And he went to some of the masses. He sat under their teaching, their learning, and he saw their corruption. He saw how the church had become so thoroughly corrupt in Rome, how money had captured the church, and it wasn't a spiritual body, but it was a carnal, corrupt body.
But someone told him that if he would climb up the thirty-nine stairs of the Church of St. Labyrinth there in Rome, those stairs was believed were the very stairs that led up to Pilate's chamber where the Lord Jesus stood before Pilate in his interrogation and judgment. He said, if you would climb up those stairs and in every stair, pray five Hail Mary's. By the time you reach the top, you'll have peace. He did that. On his bare knees, he climbed up those stone stairs. When he got to his top of the stairs, his knees were bleeding. He had prayed all those prayers. And he says in his biography, he says, is it all true?
He had no peace. No peace at all. He went back to Germany and he said to Johannes Stauppitz, He said, I am in anguish. I am in soul misery and anguish. He said, there's two things that I can never forget. I can't wipe out of my mind. And it said, it's these two things that I've forgotten. I've forgotten to confess a sin that I've done today. There's one that I may have forgotten. And then he said, the other thing is that there's sins that I don't even know that I've committed. And I've forgotten to confess all of those. And there are probably hundreds and hundreds of those And when I die and stand before God, he'll bring up all of those sins. And I'll be lost for eternity.
I'll be lost forever. Johannes Staupitz, when Martin Luther came back to Germany, he said to him, I want you to study at the university. When you finish some study, I'd like you to teach at the university. Teach the Bible at the university. He was a man who wasn't even saved, wasn't even justified, didn't know the peace of his sins forgiven, and he was going to teach the Bible. He finished his studies and he was asked to teach and he said, I want you to teach two books. And those two books were one Old Testament book and one New Testament book. The Old Testament book was Psalm, the book of Psalms. The New Testament book was the book of Romans. As he went through the book of Psalms, something struck him for the first time he had never seen before.
He saw two words over and over again. Never heard them in the churches that he attended. Never heard them from Johannesburg. He's never heard them from the confessors. And they're the word grace and the word mercy. And David wrote over and over again of the grace of God and the mercy of God. As he was studying the Psalms, he came to Psalm twenty-two. And he read, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why are you so far from my crying? And he thought to himself, it's the Lord Jesus. And Calvary's cross was forsaken. for our sins. He said, what hope is there for me?
And he gripped his heart and he read through the Psalms, but he was gripped by those two words, grace and mercy, grace and mercy. And then he began to read in Romans. I'm going to ask you to turn to chapter one of Romans. And it came to verse seventeen of chapter one. For the first time in his life, the spiritual darkness was at his greatest pitch. He never heard of grace. He never heard of mercy. He never heard of salvation through faith alone. He never heard, he never knew a man who had peace with God. He never heard the gospel in his life. He never heard about those things. For the first time in his life, he read through Romans and he read verse seventeen.
And he read, For in it is the righteousness of God revealed. Here's how a man can be right with God. Here's how a man can be justified, as Job nine two said. How can a man be justified before God? Here he read for the first time, for is in the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith. Begin to read further. He came to chapter three. And he came to verse twenty-two of chapter three. And he says, and he read, even the righteousness of God, which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe.
When he read those words, he wrote in a diary. I'm going to read you what he wrote. When he read those words, that moment he believed and trusted Christ, his life was changed. He was a new man. He knew peace in his heart. He knew what it was to be saved through grace, by faith alone in the finished work of the Lord Jesus. He wrote this in his diary. He said, night and day, I pondered until I saw the connection between the righteousness of God and the statement, the just shall live by faith. When I grasp that justification is to grace and the sheer mercy of God through faith, thereupon I felt myself reborn and that I have gone through open doors into paradise itself you know I don't think we can fully understand what Martin Luther went through we can't understand a world that you never heard the word grace never heard the word mercy never heard the word faith alone never heard the words of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ never heard gospel preaching never heard gospel hymns It was a dark spiritual world.
It was a world of works and duties and labor and penance and sacraments and ceremonies which never brought any of those men closer to God. We're doing and doing and doing and never knowing peace with God. And here Martin Luther for the first time understood what that is. Today we hear it over and over again. But you know many years have passed and we're beginning to forget a little bit of what justification is. I'm going to tell you a couple of things that are happening currently in our world and the teaching that Martin Luther grasped. And he clung to that teaching for his whole life.
Though he was persecuted, though he fled for his life, though he was under tremendous pressure to give up this teaching, he clung to it all his life. He said, He said, here I stand, I can do nothing else. But you know, today, more and more of the teaching that we are justified by faith alone in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ is becoming more and more forgotten. You know, there was in nineteen ninety eight a national religious broadcasters convention in national Tennessee and a reporter from World Magazine did a survey in the halls of that conference And he asked this question, is justification a process by which I am made holy by God's Spirit?
Is justification the process by which I am made holy by God's Spirit? Ninety-two percent of the people he asked that question. And these are broadcasters. These are not your run-of-the-mill Christians. These are broadcasters. Those who study and those who prepare themselves to give Bible broadcasts. throughout the world, throughout the United States, ninety-two percent agreed with that statement. Justification is the process by which I am made holy by God's Spirit. That's not justification, that's sanctification. So the Roman Catholic Church teaches that we labor and work and work and work. And as we go through various steps, through the sacraments, through baptism, through many other duties that we do, then we are justified, the end of our lives.
Ninety-two percent did not believe that it was through faith alone, that it was through a decisive act where we placed our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, that the Lord Jesus Christ, that God would declare us righteous by virtue of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, ninety-two percent of religious broadcasters and those that work in that industry, now they believe it's a process. It takes over time for that to happen. If I was to ask you who you thought was one of the great defenders of the faith of the last twenty-five years or so, thirty years, probably Francis Schaefer would be one of those people. Francis Schaefer was a great defender of the Orthodox faith. He wrote, he taught, he spoke, he lectured.
But I think today he would probably roll over in his grave if he would learn what his son, Frank Schaefer, says about how a person is saved, how a person is justified. And it's amazing for me people, godly believers through the fifteen hundredths and the sixteen hundredths and the seventeen hundredths and even parts of the eighteen hundredth and certain parts of the world through the nineteen hundredth that have lost their lives and have sacrificed greatly for this doctrine. Frankie Schaefer says, to be born again a Protestant, meaningless, magical, instantaneous silver bullet solution to sin.
We are not saved by believing that Christ died on the cross for us, but by struggling to become like Christ. This struggle is to be fully achieved in this life and begins when we receive the forgiveness of sins in baptism. He's not a Roman Catholic, but he's in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Very close to it. Theology is so close. He said, we're not saved by faith alone in the finished work of the Lord Jesus. We're saved. We're become justified by struggling with our sin. You know, you wonder what the Protestant Reformation was all about.
You wonder about the doctrine that Martin Luther fought for and defended. And many of the reformers. Many today, this doctrine, this very important doctrine, is going by the wayside. A number of years ago, Catholics and Evangelicals got together and put together a document called Evangelicals and Catholics Together. It was called ETC, twelve Evangelicals, thirteen Catholics, Chuck Colson and Bill Bright and Jerry Packer put together this document. And in the document, they define justification like this. We are justified by grace through faith because of Christ.
You know, a Roman Catholic would not argue with that because they believe they're justified by faith. They believe in the Lord Jesus, but they don't believe they're justified by faith alone in the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ. Many today are taking this doctrine and setting it aside. The group in our country, it's not as popular as it once was, will promise keepers. Promise Keepers today, in the last number of years, they are trying very, very hard to draw many Roman Catholics into the Promise Keepers movement. And a number of years ago, they changed their doctrinal statement, changed their doctrinal statement from saying that justification is through faith alone.
And they took out that one word. They took out their word alone. After they did that, a Roman Catholic magazine called Our Sunday Visitor, in July twenty. Here's what they wrote. They wrote why promise keepers did that. I don't know if promise keepers told them why, but they wrote this. It was reported that promise keepers changed his statement. They did this to accommodate Catholics who wanted to adjoin but could not because they could not embrace faith alone. It would force them to reject their Catholic faith. Now those two words are very, very important.
The justification is through faith alone in the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ. And if we begin to say it's faith plus the sacraments or plus works or plus baptism or plus struggling against our sin or plus anything else, it denies the scripture and the teaching that what we have in verse But now righteousness or justification is apart from the law. It's not through works. It's not through self-effort. It's through faith in the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ. Martin Luther said it was the chief and first oracle of the faith. The pillar of our Christian church. If our salvation, if the basis of our salvation falls, the church falls.
The work of Christ falls. The foundation of all that scripture is also falls. Let's turn our thoughts to Romans chapter three and see what the Bible says about justification by faith. In verse one, and verse twenty one rather, we read, but now the righteousness of God is apart from the law. Not through the ceremonies, it's not through the sacrifices, it's not through the law. He says, being witnessed by the law and the prophets. He says it's apart from the law, but then he says it is manifested.
He's thinking back to the cross of Calvary. He says it's not through the law, it's without the law, without the keeping of the law. No man is justified by keeping the law. But he thinks back to where it was manifested, where the righteousness was manifested, where the basis was laid, where the provision for our salvation was laid, was on the cross. And then he says that work of the cross was witnessed by two things. It was witnessed by the law. We're not justified by the law, but it was witnessed by the law. It's witnessed by the sacrifices. When a man sinned in the Old Testament, there had to be a death, a blood sacrifice for his sins.
When we're to be justified, there had to be a blood sacrifice for our sins, the Lord Jesus Christ. And then he says also is witnessed by the prophets. Isaiah fifty-three, all we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned each one to his own way, and the Lord laid upon him the iniquity of us all. He was witnessed by the laws, witnessed by the prophets. But then he goes on to say in verse twenty-two, even the righteousness of God, which is by faith in Jesus Christ. And that provision is made for all. The Lord Jesus' atonement was an unlimited atonement. He made provision for all that would receive. All would place their faith.
There's a provision for all, but not all are saved. Who are saved? He says, upon all, the benefits of redemption, the benefits of the cross are upon all them that believe. There's no difference. Provision is made for all. The death of the Lord Jesus Christ is for every nation. Jew and Gentile. But then he says, it's those who place faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Martin Luther never knew that it was for him. Never knew that he had to place faith in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ. But then he saw it is unto all, even him, when he placed his faith on the Lord Jesus Christ.
He said, it is by faith. You know, I think there's a lot of people that maybe don't understand what faith is. Sometimes they think that faith is believing in a historical Jesus. And if you ask someone, do you believe in Jesus? They say, yes. Their lives are not any more changed than an unbeliever. You know, some, I don't think, are fully clear about what faith is. Let me just suggest this definition of faith. The faith has three parts. The first part of faith is a factual, believing facts about the Lord Jesus Christ, about his work on the cross. This faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
Faith comes by knowing facts. Without the scriptures, without the Bible, we can never have faith. We wouldn't have an object of faith. Our next part of faith is believing it's true. Many people believe facts. They acknowledge them, give a sense to them. And many believe it's true, but they're still not saved. I know people that send their kids to Sunday school, send their kids to Awana, because they believe in facts about the gospel. They believe they're true. But the last part, they've never done, the last part of faith, they've never applied. The last part of faith is to depend, to rest, to trust in that knowledge.
Now, many years ago, there's a story told about a man who walked across Niagara Falls on a cable, spanned a cable across the falls. And he got on, he was a tightrope walker, he got on this cable and went back and forth. And then he got a wheelbarrow, went back and forth across the falls. And lastly, he put someone in the wheelbarrow and went back and forth across the falls. And he came back. And he said, do you believe that I can take someone else from here and go back and forth across the falls? And they said, yes. Then he said, who wants to be a volunteer? And you know, no one raised their hand.
Because they saw it, they knew he could do it, they believed it was true. They didn't trust it. And I think when we come to verse twenty-two, and he says, it's by faith unto all and upon all them that believe, there's many that believe the facts of the gospel. There's many that believe it's true, but there's not many. that trust and rest. And that's what transforms a life. That's what gave Martin Luther peace in his heart. And then he came down to verse twenty-four, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ. And that phrase in verse twenty-four is so important. He says, being justified freely.
You know, that word freely has the idea of no cost. No cost to us, but all costs to the Lord Jesus Christ. You know, that same word there in verse twenty-four is used of the Lord Jesus Christ when it says that he hated him in John fifteen, where they hated the Lord Jesus without cause. You know, there was no cause for the Lord Jesus to die for us. There's nothing in us. There's no merit or no benefit in us that we deserve his death. He did it because he loved us. There is great cost involved, but we cannot give anything towards that cost. He says, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are passed through the forbearance of God.
To declare, I say, at this time His righteousness, that He might be just, and the justifier of Him that believe in Jesus. There's a verse in Proverbs that says this, He that justifies the wicked or condemns the just, both are an abomination to the Lord. The Lord Jesus doesn't justify the wicked. You know, if you were to ask someone, Does the Lord Jesus justify those who are ungodly? Does he justify those who are wicked? Does he justify those who are sinners? We would say, yes, he does. But he only does that after he first forgives them.
He only does that after he first wipes their sins away. And then he declares them to be righteous. As righteous as his son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Because we're justified, we can stand before a holy God and stand there with boldness in the day of judgment. You know, when I was first saved, I think I said last week or last night, that I would go to a park and hand out tracks. And one time I went to this same park, hand out tracks, and I came to a Roman Catholic priest. And I waited a little bit. I'm not sure what I should do, but I handed him a track. And we talked a little bit, and I told him I was saved. And I asked him if he was saved.
And he said, no one can know if you're saved or not. And I said this verse to him. I said, I know I have boldness. I have confidence in the day of judgment. That's a verse from First John, chapter four. We know because we're justified. We know because we're saved that we can have this confidence and this boldness. We stand before God in the day of judgment. That Roman Catholic priest didn't have that confidence. He wasn't saved. He didn't have peace with God. He didn't know his sins forgiven. You know, we can have that boldness and that confidence because of the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ, because of what he did for us in our place.
It doesn't justify the wicked. He wipes our sins away when we trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, and then he declares us to be righteous, and we receive the righteousness of God. receive that and we are in his sight clean and righteous as his own son. But you know, I think today, and I want to close with this, today Satan wants to blind our eyes, I think, about that doctrine. I think it's of all the doctrines he hates the most. It's interesting to go through Scripture, I think, and look at the things, the words that Satan uses in Scripture. There's not many places. in scripture that we hear the actual words of Satan.
I think it's only three places where we actually hear him speaking to someone. The first place is in the Garden of Eden with Eve. The first thing he does, he tries to destroy or tries to undermine, he tries to produce doubt in the word of God. He says to Eve, did not God say that you could not eat of any tree in the garden? Didn't say that, did he? He said he couldn't eat of one tree. But Satan says, did God, didn't he say he couldn't eat of any tree in the garden? The first thing I think that Satan wants to do in our lives, he wants to undermine our faith in the teachings of the Word of God and our faith in the Word of God.
This rock, this foundation that we have, this pillar, What the Word of God says about our justification, what the Word of God says about what we have in Christ, wants to produce lies about that. The second time we find him speaking is with Job. With Job, he tries to undermine that relationship, that faith that Job had, that confidence that Job had with his God. And he tried to do it through persecution and through disease. And he tried to get him to curse God. I think one of the things that Satan desires to do is to ruin our relationship and our confidence and our faith and our love for the Lord Jesus Christ.
The third time you find him speaking, he speaks to the Lord Jesus Christ. And he says three times in chapter four of Mark and chapter four of Matthew, have not gotten, if you are the Son of God, cast yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple or turn these stones into bread. And he tries to... tries to undermine our faith in the Son of God. It tries to produce doubt in our faith in the Son of God. Those three things are so crucial in our lives, and those are the areas that Satan desires to undermine. The Word of God, our relationship as a Son of God, our child of God, and our relationship and love and faith in the finished work and the work of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But I want you to turn with me as we close tonight, the Second Corinthians, There's three things, three tactics I want to leave you with that Satan tries to do, and he's doing it so effectively today with the doctrine of justification. In chapter eleven and verse two, or verse three rather, the first thing he desires to do is to beguile and deceive the believer. He says, But I fear, lest by any means, that the serpent beguiled Eve through his craftiness, so your mind should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
And that simplicity has a connection to the gospel. And then the very next verse, he says, For if he that cometh preaches another Jesus, which we have not preached, or you receive another spirit, which we have not received, or another gospel, which you have not accepted, you might well bear with him. He says he comes to beguile and to deceive the believer. And if there's any area he's seeking today to deceive the believer in, I think it's about this crucial doctrine of how we can be saved. You know, we hear the gospel all the time. We hear teaching of the scriptures all the time. But if we're not careful, we don't distinguish between what the doctrine truly teaches that we're saved by faith alone.
It's another gospel that, as Paul says in Galatians, is not a gospel at all. In chapter twelve, I have another tactic, I think, of Satan. He desires to beguile. In chapter twelve, in verse seven, he desires to buffet the believer. He tries to attack the believer in different ways. One of the ways he tries to attack them is sometimes physically attacks the body. He may attack us. when our body is weak in old age. I knew not real well, but in his later life, I knew T.E. Wilson lived in New Jersey where I lived. He heard him speak many times, a number of times.
We had dinner in a home after he preached. And one of the things he said one time, I never forgot. He said, I don't remember being tempted and buffeted more by Satan than in my old age, my weakness, my infirmities. He said even one time, remember this at a conference in Marple, he said, began to doubt my salvation. I don't know if you've ever heard, if you ever came down here, heard T. Ernest Wilson speak. Labored fifty years in Angola, I was a godly man. Anyone that would speak with him for even a short period of time knew he was a godly man.
And yet in his old age, Satan continued to buff it to attack his body and to attack his mind and attack his emotions that he would doubt his own eternal salvation. Satan desires to deceive us, Satan desires to buffet us. But lastly, in chapter four, in verse four, one of the things he's been trying to do since the days of Martin Luther is to blind our eyes. Blind your eyes to what the doctrine of justification is, to what the gospel is. Blind the eyes of unbelievers that they won't grasp this teaching.
Do you know how many Roman Catholics there are in the world? There's a billion. Billion Roman Catholics. Fifty million, fifty-two million Roman Catholics in America. The majority of those don't have any understanding, any understanding of what it means to be justified by faith. The largest denomination in this Protestant denomination is Southern Baptist, thirteen million. Fifty-two Roman Catholics, Roman Catholics in this country. Verse four says, In whom the God of this age has blinded the minds of them who believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, whose image of God should shine in unto him, for we preach not ourselves but Christ the Lord.
You know, I think he's blinded so many minds. Blinded my mind for twenty-three years. Wasn't saved, and I was in college. Maybe some of them here, some of you here, weren't saved until so much later. He desires to blind our eyes to what faith is, what justification is, to have peace with God. And so I trust tonight as we think of some of these things that your mind isn't blinded. And I say sometimes at camp to young people, as they're so busy at camp, They're so busy with their friends. They come and hear the messages. And I tell them sometimes, don't let Satan blind you. Don't allow him to blind your eyes and not let you see what the Lord Jesus Christ has done for you.
What he's accomplished for you. What provision he's made for your sins. Don't be so busy and so active in playing games and doing so many other things that he blinds your eyes. You never see. One time a young boy came and wanted to be saved and he said, I don't want, I don't want Satan to blind my eyes. Never really touched my heart. Because I think he blinded my eyes. There were so many years and I look around and I talk to neighbors and I talk to people and I just say to myself, there's so many blind, blind people in this world who don't know the joy of knowing the Lord Jesus Christ, don't know peace with God. Remember one time with Larry Dixon.
I know that he comes here. We went out for ice cream and coffee after a meeting one time in New Jersey. We went to the Tom Sawyer diner in Paramus there. And there was a young girl there. She had been a Roman Catholic. And some people knocked on her door. And there were Jehovah Witnesses. And so she went with the Jehovah Witnesses for a while. And then she joined. Somebody else knocked on her door and became a Mormon for a while. And you know what she said? Remembered her sitting there. It was five or six of us. And she said, I've gone to this group and to that group and to that group. And I said, I still don't have any peace. Still don't have any peace. You know, it was just great to talk to her a while.
She was a waitress, so we couldn't talk too long, but just to give her a track and talk to her and point her to the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who can give peace as we trust in him alone for our salvation. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for our time tonight. We thank you for this wonderful doctrine of justification through faith in the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for his great love towards us. We thank you for that sacrifice in Calvary's cross. We thank you, Father, that you've done that which we could never do. You paid a price, we could never pay. And so, Father, we give you thanks tonight. We pray that it's in Jesus' name. Just a verse or two, please, of number three-hundred-and-twenty-three, trusting Jesus.
David was twenty-three. I was twenty-four when I trusted the Lord. And I guess there was a sense in which I was blinded. But like David, I was raising a Christian home, and I knew the gospel up one side and down the other. Whatever reason, I do not know Satan just kept me from trusting the Lord. I hope you're not in that condition tonight. But if there's anybody here that doesn't know the Lord and would like to be saved, I'm sure David or any of us would find it a great joy and a thrill God, take the word of God and point you to the Lord Jesus Christ. Would you stand, please, and sing just the first verse only, Trusting Jesus,