Sermons
“The Great Tension"
ROMANS 7: 21-25
21So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, 23 but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin. †
Double-Minded
Why is it we can want what is good but fail to do it? Why is it that stuff we don’t want to do, we do? What is wrong with humanity that makes us so double-minded?
We have salvation in Christ and our sins have been forgiven, so therefore we are no longer slaves to sin. . . but we continue to sin! No matter how pure we feel inside, we can’t get our act perfectly together on the outside—not even close to perfect.
The human predicament affects all of humanity—that includes born again, saved and sanctified in the blood Christians as well as everyone else. Paul speaks for us all when he says:
So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.
Paul clearly acknowledges that to be a human being is to have two minds about everything. Mind 1 loves The Lord and wants above all to please Him and serve Him with all we have. Mind 1 knows good from evil, right from wrong, and regularly, willfully commits itself to the good up and against the bad. Mind 2 is dedicated to ignoring Mind 1. Mind 2 says Mind 1 is too bossy and should lighten up. Mind 1 he calls the mind and Mind 2 he calls the flesh. And they each seem to have a will of their own.
It’s possible to talk of our moral life—our perpetual quandary over ethics—as this battle between the mind and the flesh, Mind 1 and Mind 2.
“Brother Donkey”
So in our very nature we live with a divided will. Though in our right minds we seek virtue, beauty, truth, and obedience to God; our flesh has drives and appetites of its own that up end, end run, and otherwise surprise our righteous minds.
St. Francis referred to his body as “Brother Donkey” (actually, it’s ‘Brother Ass,’ but I don’t want to make the junior highers giggle). As if his spirit were his true self riding on a donkey which is his body. The body has needs: must be fed, cleaned, taken care of, and otherwise disciplined.
C.S. Lewis comments:
Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now a stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body.
The season of Lent has been the time for Christians to take pains to subdue the flesh and keep it in its proper place, because if allowed, that donkey will take over.
We seem to be helplessly double-minded. How did we get this way? We’ve been this way since the fall of Adam. With original sin came a brokenness that affects not only our relationship with God, with the world, and with one another, but also with ourselves. That brokenness goes right to the heart of how we see ourselves and what we can know about ourselves.
In writing to the Corinthians, Paul says we see things wrongly—only in part and not the whole. He speaks of seeing in a mirror “dimly,” but “dimly” is a poor translation. The word for “dimly” is literally “enigma,” so we see in a mirror enigmatically, only to remain puzzled, mystified, or amazed at what we behold.
It might be better to think of that mirror as one of those distorted, fun house mirrors you see at the fair. The image—not only of ourselves, but of our Maker—we perceive only through the distortions of our fallenness. The image is tainted out of recognition by the reality of sin.
The good news is that the day is coming when we shall see face-to-face and know ourselves even as God knows us. Until then, we remain a mystery—an enigma—even to ourselves.
Road to Hell pavers
One result of the Fall is that we do not perceive ourselves perfectly. We are a mystery to ourselves. Our motives and intentions are all mixed and largely indecipherable to us.
You might think you know what your motives are, but there is no real certainty because of that distorted mirror. It is that brokenness that gives us all world literature. The novel itself seems to be humankind’s attempt to answer one or two simple questions:
What is a human being?
Why do people do what they do?
Every system of explanations is useful, but all are incomplete. With a little attention, we can shoot holes through most of them, but they’ve given us Freudian psychoanalysis, educational theory, and every book or movie you’ve ever enjoyed. We have art and literature because we don’t really know what makes people do what they do. We cannot know what motivates someone 100%. Our good intentions are always mixed with self-serving ones. We sort them out only by oversimplifying them.
Human beings remain a mystery. We do see in a distorted mirror, despite what many in the world would try to tell us.
Do you really know your own intentions? Do you really know what motivates you right down in the core? Not really. The Bible upholds this mystery and Paul is explicit about it. We can illustrate the problem with a simple question:
What is more important: right action or good intentions?
Let’s start by saying intentions are more important. The problem is immediate: people of good intentions are guilty of all kinds of high crimes. Samuel Johnson told us:“Hell is paved with good intentions.” How much of the world’s evils have been done by people who truly believed they were doing the right thing? Too many to count. Hear T.S. Eliot:
“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
Okay, so let’s back off the intentions side of the balance; it must be our actions that count. Forget all the good intention jazz; it’s what we do that matters. Actions are all that really count, so we ought to put our focus and emphasis there. Good actions don’t depend on good intentions—to do what is right is all that matters. Have we decided it, then? Actions are more important than intentions? No.
Let’s go back to 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul says:
If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
All the good, proper, and righteous action—even self-sacrificial dedication(!)—that is not grounded in the good intention of agapé love is vain, empty, pointless, and gainless. So here, Paul seems to say that good intentions mean everything!
We don’t—and won’t—get to the bottom of this.
Who Will Save Me?
Paul states our human dilemma quite clearly in verse 24:
Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
We are lost to ourselves, knowing neither motives nor intentions with any depth or certainty; nor can we trust in our actions themselves to deliver us from evil.
Brothers and sisters, there is no easy out to this situation. We are in the flesh, which means we suffer the pangs of the flesh. Don’t imagine that there is an easy out—a simple resolution or easy dismissal—there is not. We live in the already and the not yet. Christ has won the war, but we are marching on toward its final conclusion. We—the member of the Church and the Body of Christ—walk this life across a bridge from promise toward fulfillment.
We are not dedicated to all fulfillment here and now—that is the offer of the flesh—but we live for the promises of Christ. We live toward their fulfillment and in service to those promises’ implications.
We, like Moses, may not see ourselves arrive there in this lifetime. Or like the earliest—perhaps best—saints, who, knowing less about Jesus than you or I, willingly went to the crosses and wild beasts of the Roman coliseum rather than serve the flesh. Hebrews 11 references them:
All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth. —Hebrews 11: 13
We, too, are strangers on this Earth, but Christ gives us the Holy Spirit as our guide for the journey. We live, move, and serve with a partial awareness at best, but we do so—like a man walking a balance beam between twin towers—trusting in Christ for the final fulfillment of all things. That trust is enough. That trust is the Christian faith. †
“Slaves to Freedom"
ROMANS 6: 12-18
12 12 Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. 13 No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. 15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, 18 and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. †
The Law is a Bad Diet
How should Christians think about sin?
I’ve used the analogy of WWII soldiers making way from Normandy toward Berlin—D-day to V-day—and it seems appropriate to the Church as well. We live in between the triumph of Christ on the cross and the final consummation of His kingdom. Sin is still very much in evidence all around us. We have been forgiven and we celebrate the grace of God through Christ, but we still walk in sin, like soldiers wading ankle-deep through mud and grime.
Paul addresses this directly, telling us that we should not allow to let sin have dominion over our bodies. How does sin have dominion over our bodies?
I think we all know. As we prepare ourselves for Lent 2020, it is right that we should seek to increase our self-awareness as to what moves and motivates us from day to day. We can proclaim high ideals and commit ourselves to biblical morality, but at the level of immediacy—where we live, minute by minute—we find ourselves not only susceptible to sin but prone to it.
Why does dieting not work? I mean patently does not work? Okay, it might work a little. I have lost weight on almost every diet I’ve tried, so I should say that dieting works quite well. But it’s sticking with the diet that’s out of our nature.
Of the top 200 diets in America, none work, according to the AMA. What? How can they not work? What’s wrong? Dieting is like moralism—it doesn’t work because the diets themselves are not the real solution to the problem. The real problem is self-control or the lack thereof.
Sin has a kind of natural dominion over us—our bodies have needs and drives of their own which serve our survival—including our fears, anxieties, and our imagination of the future. We live in this world competing against nature for our survival.
What? Mother Nature is not our friend?
To some degree, yes, but unless we labor for food, shelter, and the feeding and sheltering of others, we all end up sleeping on the streets in the cold. Nature doesn’t care for us in that way. Mother Nature is indifferent to your survival and mine. She would be just as happy for a consuming, deadly virus to thrive as you or me. So yes, to a major degree, we survive up and against nature.
It is this basic competition against the elements that is our source of fear, anxiety, and over-eating. Psychologically, at levels beneath our good intentions, our bodies are driven to maximize calorie density and secure self against danger and want. And to reproduce, which gives us our sexuality issues.
But this is not what Paul is talking about. When Paul speaks of sin having dominion over us, he is speaking of something deeper. He tells us not to “present our members” to sin as instruments of wickedness. How is this different? It is different as we willingly commit ourselves to something greater than mere survival.
Paul, like Jesus, discourages the Children of God from making the things of this world the focus of their service. In other words, we are not to settle with materialism—the life of worrying about what we shall eat, what shall we wear, and what shall happen to me.
We do not present our bodies to our fears, anxieties, and appetites. Rather, we present our bodies to serve God’s Kingdom. We trust in God’s promises and thereby renounce our natural obsession with self-preservation.
We are to live “as those who have been brought from death to life,” meaning that we commit ourselves to the fulfillment of God’s promises and not to the fears, anxieties, and appetites of the body.
We have a new life and a new identity in Christ. Therefore we have a new diet with new hungers and different gratifications than the life committed to this world alone.
The Law Creates Sin?
The problem is that the Law reveals sin, but you could almost say it creates sin. When God tells Adam not to touch the forbidden fruit, He has made that fruit the most interesting thing in the world. Or maybe it wasn’t before the fall, but since the fall, it is clearly the center of our interest.
When my nephew Eric was a toddler, he had pretty much free run of the house, but at Christmastime, there came a hard and fast rule: You shall not touch the ornaments on the Christmas tree! Guess what? What was the center of his little world? The ornaments. A whole house to play in, and there he is, quietly gazing at the shiny, red bulb at eye-level.
There was an iPhone app in the early days called “Do not press the red button.” That was it—a nice, shiny, red button with the commandment “Do not press.” Really, who could resist? We were made to push that button.
There is no such thing as a psychological negative. If I were to say, “Whatever else you do, do not think about your left eyebrow!” or “Do not imagine a pink elephant!” You see the point.
But Paul says we are under grace, not under the Law.
Under Grace, Not Law
The New RULER—grace, not the Law. The new ruler is the new means of measuring righteousness. How do we measure who is righteous and who is not? Merely by grace. By grace, Christ has put sin and death into the grave. We are freed from death and therefore free from the wages of sin.
Grace is the new rule, so sin will have no dominion over those who are in Christ because we under grace, not under the law. There is no judgment to be had for those united in Christ’s death and resurrection. We need to quit using the law to measure others and instead use Grace. Grace for sin is the gospel—grace accomplished by Christ and given to us as a free gift.
The New Kingdom—the kingdom of Christ’s reign—is one ruled by grace, not the law. We begin to live out that new reality here and now. We are called to live as Christ’s kingdom would demand, and that means living by grace and not by law.
To serve Grace means we are through measuring sin and righteousness. We should no longer be counting sins and good deeds as part of our religious duty. We are called to use a different lens.
That lens is viewing the world through grace—seeing and proclaiming that the righteousness of Christ is reaching all people.
Mercy abounds where sin once abounded.
What should we say of sin?
•It is the remnant of the old life.
•It is the lingering stink of a fire that has been put out.
•Sin has no future. Only God’s future will endure.
But sin is in evidence! It’s everywhere! Wars abound. The greedy prosper and sexual confusion is the norm. Injustice, anger, and the passions of the flesh dominate today as much as ever; so how can we not see sin?
That is the worldly view, the worldly proclamation.
Our proclamation is that no matter how broad and prevalent sin may be, grace in Jesus Christ is broader, wider, deeper, and the higher power. The world is moving toward greater grace, not greater sin.
Sin no longer has dominion. Sin will not win. Grace will win.
Christ is the evidence, and we are here to proclaim it, to point to it, and to call all people to free from sin and place their trust in Jesus who is the source of all grace.
We are under grace.
Freed from/Freed For
We are freed from sin which means we are freed for a new kind of life. Freed from equal freed for.
We must quit seeing ourselves and our moral lives as strategies to win God’s favor, and must see that God has accomplished it all! Our moral life is nothing but a grateful response. The lives we live now stand on higher ground, new territory, the level of the redeemed and no longer the level of those seeking to get themselves into God’s good favor.
It is done. We are His children and inheritors of His Kingdom. There is nothing for us to do to accomplish it; it is accomplished. The burden is lifted.
Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” but it seems our human penchant for idolatry keeps us turning His grace into new burdens—Now that you’re a Christian, ya gotta do this or that…” In our sinfulness, we re-create the Law, albeit very modern and church-flavored. We must abandon all the false props and pillars that we are prone to create in order to make us feel good about ourselves and our faith—abandon them all with ruthless efficiency in order that we would remain in that place where we must simply trust in Jesus, trust in Jesus, trust in Jesus.
The Bible uses a special word for this departure from obligation to the old law: Freedom.
We are freed from bondage and thereby free to serve. It is because we are free that we can serve.
The one who is bound MUST serve.
The one who is free MAY serve.
Our service is given in freedom, for we are not bound.
This is obedience from the heart.
Obedience from the Heart
Henri Nouwen gives us the example of the the Balance Beam. Imagine a balance beam that is extended between what were the twin towers of New York City. Impossibly high and terrifying. Imagine you have to walk that beam. How would you walk? With terror, not doubt, and your body would be wracked with anxiety as you fought yourself at every precarious step. Nouwen says what we need is someone (like a preacher, perhaps, wink wink) to come push you off that beam.
Once pushed, what you find is that all that space beneath you has been filled. The work of Christ upon the cross as filled the fall so that your beam is just like a practice beam, a mere 8 inches from the floor. Christ has filled the gap.
How then, would you walk now? With utter confidence! Time to try the cartwheel, right? This is how Christ completes the Law. We are freed to practice the Law, but all the danger has been removed.
It’s like one of my old seminary friends, who played high school football in Washington, D.C. “Hell week” took place in August, so it was brutal and grueling—hot and humid. The players worked out all week in the heat and prepped themselves for the new season.
The coach, to make Hell week a bit more Hellish, constructed a difficult obstacle course for his team. They had to scale walls, crawl on their bellies, leap, jump, lift, and roll their way through these torments.
At the end of the week, the players were splayed out on the grass, wet with sweat, listening to their coach, who told them they were the best team he had ever seen—their attitude and persistence were unprecedented. He said, “Even if we were to lose every game of this season, I couldn’t be more proud of you! You are the best group I’ve ever worked with!” Then he dismissed them to the showers and a much needed meal. The players trotted off to the showers with as much hustle as they could muster, except for my friend, who stood there—inspired by the coach’s speech—and looked him in the eye with pride and esteem.
“Jamie?” said the coach, “You okay?”
Without a word, Jamie, with the coach watching, went back to the obstacle course and went through the whole thing in reverse, just to please the coach.
Can you imagine how that coach felt? “That’s my boy! That’s my Jamie!”
That is you and me when it comes to the law. The job is done; it has been fulfilled by Christ. We are not obligated to fulfill righteousness, but we are free to practice it simply because we love, honor, and respect our Coach and want to please Him. Our sole motivation is gratitude. This is obedience from the heart, and we ought never to return to mere behavior of the hands—merely behavioral obedience.
We have the Holy Spirit in us. That Spirit is author of the Law. We must trust the Spirit to lead us in our obedience rather than seizing it for ourselves and succumbing to our predilection for idolatry—which is re-creating the law.
What do we HAVE to do? Nothing.
Those who are called and justified have been brought from death to life.
Our lives are now shaped by our witness to God’s good news of the free gift of grace through Jesus.
The New Life is Like…
What does the life look like that is given to witnessing to Grace?
It does NOT look like a life given to sin. Sin no longer gratifies the heart that is filled with the Holy Spirit. We walk amidst sin and slip into it regularly, but it is neither the goal of our hearts nor a terror to our salvation.
It does NOT look like a life given to the Law. Moralism is also idolatry, because it is a wheel upon which we keep our own hands fixed and steering, rather than trusting in God’s grace through Christ. The law is idolatry.
It does NOT look like a life given to the flesh. We live in this world, but nor for the ends of this world. We live for the Kingdom and reign of Christ. This world cannot satisfy the hunger of our hearts as they are continuously shaped and formed by the Holy Spirit.
It does NOT look like a life unaware of Grace. Without Christ, there is only shallowness, hedonism, and ultimately the absolute despair of death. The life that is grace-aware lives above and beyond all materialism.
We are freed from death, Hell, and the pointlessness of nihilism. We are freed for life—life eternal—which shapes our present witness. Our witness is the new life:
—The self-emptied life
—The dangerous, risky life
—The life of the irrational:
not fearing death
willfully surrendering advantage
forgiving
loving enemies. †
“The New Inheritance"
ROMANS 5: 8-21
18 Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. 19 For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. 20 But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, 21 so that, just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. †
Adam Wrecks It all
A pastor friend of mine out east tells me the story of competing high school basketball teams. What we’ll call the home team was having an amazing year. As they approached the end of season tournament, they were 10-1. They were in top position by a large margin; something they had never done.
As they approached the playoffs and the high school state tournament, the team submitted their application—everyone expected them to sweep the board and they had every reason to, but, as it happens, one guy on the team made a difference for everyone. He wasn’t even much of a player, he barely hung on to the bottom of the roster and sat at the far end of the bench, but he was, formally, part of the team.
As the teams prepared for the state tournament, our home team coach received a disturbing phone call. Player Z from the end of the bench had not only failed a class, but had failed to report that he had failed that class. State rules specified disqualification.
Oh well, too bad—one player down, right? Wrong. The entire team faced disqualification. Unfair as it sounds, this one player’s oversight cost the whole team—players, coaches, school and community—total disqualification and the forfeit of their entire record. The team would enter the tournament with a record of 0 wins and 11 losses.
One guy’s goof cost the entire team everything. The entire school suffered for it. Sad, but them’s the rules.
Adam, stupidly, disobeys the Lord in Eden. Oh well, too bad—one player down, right? Wrong. The sin of Adam drives humankind permanently out of Paradise and robs them all of life.
“Wait—who? Just his family? Just the Jews? Just the unbelievers?” No, all humankind is fallen into disqualification with a sinful score of 0 wins. What’s more, even nature falls with Adam. Genesis 3: 17-18a:
cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it
all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles i
t shall bring forth for you;
Adam is driven from Paradise and robbed of life. Our inheritance is that, by extension, Adam drives us from Paradise and robs us of life. And so we live in a world—as cosmos, a universe—dominated by decay, erosion, entropy, and death. All of us—all of humankind—inherit the curse of sin and death. It is guaranteed for us all, and it’s a rotten deal, thank you, Adam.
God Into the Entropy
Into this bleak horizon of total fallenness, God reaches out to us nonetheless, which is grace in and of itself. He plans to save us in spite of ourselves, and begins by revealing Himself to Abraham, as we read last week. God promises Abraham children upon children—a great nation from him and his barren wife Sarah. Abraham’s faithfulness consists of waiting against all reason—trusting against all odds—that God will most certainly follow-through on His promises. Abraham lived by trusting God’s promise. And so do we.
In today’s text, we read how Christ’s resurrection gives us a new promise. There is a new inheritance on the way: not decay and death, but life everlasting in communion with God. And just as the natural world fell with Adam, so the new inheritance promises a new cosmos—a new Heaven and Earth—according to Revelation 21: 1:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
Christ Himself is the evidence of the new life and promise. He is the New Adam—the first of the new human race—the immortal human race. He is the New Abraham—the Father of the faithful Chosen.
Moreover, He is the initiator of the New Creation:
•the new cosmos in which death is no more,
•the new Earth that is slave to neither decay nor death,
•the new cosmos no longer subject to entropy,
•the new universe without the curse of death.
EARTH version 1.0
We can think of this life—this world—as the demo version of reality, but not merely a study that is to be totally abandoned. We ought not to think that this world will be burnt up or trashed by God for the sake of the new. We must not think this because of what happened to Jesus.
As Jesus’ body was not discarded or left buried in a tomb and subjected to decay, so ours will not be, and neither will the Earth. Just as Jesus’ body was used in resurrection—its raw material all taken up and into His resurrected body—transformed into eternal, resurrected Lordship, so we can expect our cosmos to be used in the same way.
This means that this dying body of Earth, like a human body, will be used and transformed to its new life, just as you and shall.
And here’s what strikes me as so wild about this. In the new Earth and new Heaven, there may be an Upland, albeit a transformed one. And perhaps also:
•a Los Angeles, minus grime, poverty, and corruption;
•a California, minus politicians;
• oceans and mountains, fish, trees, and animals—all minus the curse of death. Can you begin to imagine it?
Resurrected Cosmos
A new world means a new cosmos—one with stars that do not burn out, and planets that neither erode or decay. That means a physical cosmos that is truly eternal.
The promise is a new inheritance instead of the old one: Life instead of Death. The new promise is the reverse of the curse of death into a cosmos that is absolutely eternal.
There, we will see resurrected bodies that neither age nor decay, never grow weaker through age or illness, and every soul will have total, perfect access to God’s power and presence.
We will see His face.
We will know—completely—how to glorify Him and live out the perfect joy of doing so.
All of that Inheritance is the Promise of God’s Coming Kingdom. Christ’s resurrection both announces it and demonstrates it. Christ’s resurrection initiates that New World and we live in it and for it even now.
Our faith is exactly like that of Abraham—waiting and trusting—being fully convinced that God will bring it to completion. The Holy Spirit is our gift—only the Holy Spirit can fully convince us to trust, believe, and follow, just as it convinced Abraham. And as Abraham trusted against all reason—hoping against hope in its fulfillment—so should we.
Hope = Foreknowing
It is our foreknowledge of Christ’s coming kingdom and what he shall yet fulfill that shapes the way we live our lives here and now—in this demo Upland. Think of it: we are even now practicing and being prepared for our inheritance in the resurrected, eternal Upland.
“But I want to live in Laguna! or Paris! or Portland!”
That’s fine—I expect you’ll be able to live wherever you like (and travel there at the speed of thought), but ask yourself, “Why does God have me in Upland here and now?” Certainly it is for some purpose of His. Are you and I being shaped, prepared, and trained for our life in His Kingdom? Of course we are! So why does God have you here now? If you’re wondering, then you should ask Him. Today. This hour.
Seeking the Kingdom
The Kingdom of God—in the form of God’s Holy Spirit—is presently in our midst, here and now, as the foretaste of our eternal life in resurrection.
Are we seeking it? Do you look for it? Do you accept every day as another step of God’s provision for your training? Well, why not?
Take a look around—at your family, neighborhood, and community. If you were looking at God’s eternal Upland—the Upland after resurrection—what would be different? Were you and I perfected in Christ’s love, living in immortality, but looking around at our exact same landscape, what might we be wanting to do to please and glorify God?
• Seeking His will for us in every moment of every day
• Eager to involve ourselves in whatever God is doing next.
• Gathering to sing God’s praise and glory with thanks.
That’s exactly what we need to do here and now:
• Help little ones to know, love, and serve The Lord.
• Healing the weak and helping the lost to find their way.
• Gathering to sing God’s praise and glory with thanks.
God may inspire us differently, but the motivation is one and the same—God’s Holy Spirit—motivating and moving us into action.
Faith, hope, love, healing, helping, teaching, encouraging, affirming, building up one another in love, and out-doing one another is showing honor—we start that work not after Jesus returns, but here and now. Today. This very hour.
As the First Adam drove us all into death and decay, Christ, the Second Adam, rescues us from death for life—eternal life—abundance and everlasting joy.
Look at your world today—your home, family, friends and neighbors, your community—and seek the kingdom of God’s will there.
SEE that eternal, resurrected, and perfected form.
SEE the redeemed souls of every person,
SEE the redeemed Earth and cosmos—the life that is beyond pain and every tear.
SEE all people living in peace, justice, and harmony because everyone sees and knows Jesus as Lord.
That is our goal-line. It is our endzone—the purpose of our every effort.
Jesus has won the war and finished the game.
Jesus has completed the work that needs to be done.
We, like Patton’s 3rd Army, are making our way from Normandy to Berlin. We know we’ve won.
We, like the Kansas City Chiefs, push toward the endzone again and again—but unlike them, we do so having had a glimpse of the final score.
We, the hometown basketball team, have been reinstated for the tournament—the disqualifications and forfeits have been reversed. We enter the tournament with our full record and every chance of success.
Brothers and Sisters, the New World is on its way. It has been promised to us by an Almighty God who never fails to keep every promise. We can be fully convinced, and like Abraham trust in God t fulfill His promise!
This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it! †
“Reckoning"
ROMANS 4: 18-25
18 Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” 23 Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25 who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. †
For Love of the Law
Israel loved the Law. They loved the fact that God had given it to them and they loved the Law because it made them special. Even more, it gave them something to do—something practical and measurable. They could count the days, watch the sunrise & sunset, line up the animals (knowing which to choose and which to avoid—both for sacrifices and for food). The Law was rules and structure for living. It wasn’t all mystical, immaterial, and spiritual; it was real and in the flesh, practical and measurable. It gives you a kind of security to be able to say, “I ate no pork, I made my temple sacrifice right on time, and we kept the sabbath—mission accomplished!”
We love this kind of thing—a religion that isn’t all misty and ghostly—we so prefer to be able to get our mitts onto things and set our minds at ease with tasks and observances that are observable and doable. We like to be able to count our successes and failures in simple columns, whereby we can tally our spiritual score.
It’s too bad that Jesus—and also Paul—throw all that right out the window.
Israel loved the Law and measured its righteousness based upon the people’s adherence or departure from what the Law called them to do. The prophets only too often had to dress them down for their failure to abide in faith. It seems something about idolatry remained a constant temptation and a perpetual draw. Forget trying to obey ten commandments; they couldn’t keep number one. If God had only given the one great commandment—to love the Lord Your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength—I don’t think their history would have been any different.
We Love Idolatry
We are idolators by nature. We don’t like having to trust God; we’d much rather trust our own devices (and by devices I mean whatever idols we put together for ourselves).
It’s hard to simply trust. Ever had a family member or a friend try to lure you into an activity—perhaps a movie or tasting a new recipe—and all they say is “Come on, trust me.” Sometimes we might be comfortable enough to say yes, but I’d wager that most of the time we dislike the arrangement.
Now I have always loved my big brother, but when he said, “C’mon, Noel, trust me!” I have to say all the red flags went up. He may well have said, “Whatever you do, Noel, do not trust me.” My sisters had a saying: Open your mouth and close your eyes and I’ll give you something to make you grow wise. Me: nope!Know anyone like that? Siblings? “Friends”?
Whenever we are invited to trust, we are likely to engage all of our cautionary mechanisms. What are saying in our heads but, “Watch out, you’re about to be taken for a ride.” We don’t like surrendering that much control to anyone. And that’s trust, and it is what faith is all about.
It isn’t too unfair to say that Israel’s faith had become trusting more in the Law and its observances than in The Lord Who gave them the Law. Jesus called the Pharisees on this time and again, and so does Paul, the ex-Pharisee.
Untrustworthy Works
One of the big New Testament themes is that we shouldn’t put our trust in our works. All of this talk about circumcision—which is the ancient version of identity politics—said that the Jews were special because they were chosen by God. God’s Chosen People—and this is true—but being one of God’s chosen is no substitute for faith. Faith even takes the place of that Chosen People status.
Paul looks to Father Abraham, who was the original chosen person. Abraham was respected—even revered—by all of Israel. He was considered righteous, but we need to consider what that means.
In short, righteousness means “right standing” with God. To be righteous is to be in right relationship with God. This is true of both Old and New Testaments, though another idea of righteousness keeps creeping into the place of faith; namely, good behavior and good works.
Most commonly, when we think of a righteous person, we think of someone who is very well behaved, someone possessing outstanding self-control. This is a problem because it makes us the producers of righteousness. We are in control. We are righteous to the degree we steer our way true. But this is not righteousness; it is works righteousness. It is what happens when we look to ourselves rather than God as the source of righteousness.
Abraham’s righteousness (again: rightness with God) had nothing to do with the Law since the Law was hundreds of years away with Moses. What then constituted Abraham’s righteousness? Just faith. Trust that God would follow through with His promises. That’s it.
That is all faith is for us as well: trusting God to fulfill His promises. But we make it a lot more than that, don’t we? We, like all of God’s Chosen People, add things to it. We, too, like things measurable. We like to get our mitts on things and to be able to say with some certainty that we have accomplished the faith—that we’ve got it right and we’re all okay with God—but that is precisely what we must not do. We must not make idols that minimize the business of trusting.
Trusting is Hard
So yes, trusting can be hard, but that hardly matters.
Question: Did Abraham have good reasons to trust God or did he have good reasons not to trust God? Now if you give me the Sunday School answer, you’ll say, “Oh no—Abraham had every reason to trust God because God’s promises are reliable!” But this doesn’t answer the question.
Did Abraham have good reasons to trust God? I’d say no. If Abraham and Sarah were in their twenties with three or four sons already, then the idea of having offspring like stars in the sky would be reasonable, for there would be a reasonable chance that he and Sarah might have 5, 7, or even 10 more children to begin that great nation. But Abraham and Sarah were in their 90s. NINETIES! They would have even had a reasonable shot in their forties even, but twice that? No, Abraham had little to no reason to trust. Reasonable trust was right out. What is reasonable is for Abraham and Sarah to distrust such a promise.
But when it comes to matters of faith, our trust does not need to be reasonable in our eyes; it only needs to come from the Lord, because we know with the Lord, all things are possible. In fact, it is so much better that Abraham trusts when what he is expected to trust and hope for is so completely beyond reasonable expectations. As the text says, Abraham “hopes against hope,” which is a way of saying that he trusted God to bring what nothing in this world could possibly deliver. So Abraham had good reasons to distrust, but he trusted nonetheless.
How are we—you and I—about trusting what is less than reasonable?
“Fully convinced”
Still, we would like to be “fully convinced,” as Abraham was. Trusting is certainly much easier if we truly believe. But here’s the thing: you can’t tell someone what to believe. I hear you thinking, “What else has the Church taught us to do for 2,000 years?” Yes, the Church has always defined a set of beliefs which constitute orthodoxy—consistency with the tradition of the Apostles—but this is not what I mean. I mean we can’t demand belief from anyone. It doesn’t work that way.
If I were to tell you “You must believe in UFOs!” You might agree to “believe” either because you trust me or in order to belong to the group, but neither of those are the same thing as actually believing. I don’t think we can choose what to believe. We either believe something or we don’t by processes beyond mere choice. I can, however, choose to subscribe to a set of beliefs because I trust in the community that produced them or I trust that their ultimate source is worthy of my commitment, but I can’t throw a switch in my own head from disbelief to belief.
If we say we believe something we don’t truly believe, then we are undermined by our self-delusion. That has no credibility. So how do we become “fully convinced”? Only by the work of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the convincer/convict-er of all authentic faith. Unless the Holy Spirit act and open our eyes, we remain blind. As such, we need to acknowledge that every conversion is a miracle of God. God acts—belief happens. If God does not act, there can be no belief.
The good news is that we can trust even if we have a hard time with the belief .We can trust Jesus even as we wrestle with the particular set of beliefs we’ve inherited. Even someone with lots of disbelief can step forward and say they are willing to trust nonetheless.
In Mark 9, a man with a possessed son comes to Jesus and asks Him to heal the boy “if He can.” Jesus replies, “IF?!” to which the man says something wonderful:
“I do believe; help my unbelief!”
We can trust even before we believe. This, too, is good news. Belief or unbelief never stands in the way of the opportunity to follow Jesus and become His disciple.
As we come to the table, I invite you to the Christian faith by saying, “Put your trust in Jesus.” You don’t have to have it all worked out. You certainly don’t have to be any kind of saint. Just trust and follow. Bring your unbelief with you.
We have no altar calls (we have no altars!) but hear this “table call.” We gather in Jesus’ name in remembrance of an event 2000 years ago, but also in remembrance of a promised meal yet to come. We remember forward as well as back. We trust in the Lord to fulfill His every promise, and we’ll wait as long as it takes in trust. †