(The American community in London hosts a service of worship at St. Paul's Cathedral on Thanksgiving Day each year. It was my privilege and honor to give the sermon for the service today.)
First Thessalonians 5:12-22
Happy Thanksgiving!
For many Americans this is the favorite holiday of all: No presents to buy—it’s not a day that suffers from being too commercialized. It has all the best food and most of the best sports (if they would play just one baseball game on Thanksgiving Day it would be the most perfect holiday ever).
Now this is the part of the service where the preacher usually tells some kind of turkey-related joke. I confess that I started looking for a good joke months ago, but never found one that would work for today.
I did, though, discover that there are a lot of sayings or phrases out there that use the word turkey in them. In the States, when you’re having a serious conversation about something we say you’re ‘talking turkey’.
Here in Britain when someone chooses to accept a situation that isn’t going to go well for them we say it’s ‘like turkeys voting for an early Christmas’.
A ‘turkey shoot’ is a way to describe an easy victory, while going ‘cold turkey’ describes the very difficult process of shaking an addiction or habit.
For those of us who grew up watching American crime shows, we can all remember watching police officers chasing suspects through alleys and around corners—the officer would climb fences and jump over walls in pursuit of the suspect—we knew that in TV-speak he was called the ‘perp’—and the chase would end when the officer drew his pistol and aimed it at the perp and said: ‘Freeze, turkey.’
Well, there are a lot of frozen turkeys giving their all for us today, and we’ll all be thankful for that later on today. (I told you there weren’t any good turkey jokes this year.)
Last month an 81-year-old Australian man confirmed one of the classic stereotypes about men. He got up one morning and got into his car to go and buy himself a newspaper. Along the way he got turned around and ended up hopelessly lost, almost 400 miles out of his way. When he finally stopped, a policeman asked him how he’d allowed himself to get so far off course, and the man simply said that he liked driving, and that he had a full tank of gas.
Now we all know the real answer here, right? He didn’t want to stop and ask for directions—I’ll pause as the wives glare at the husbands here today. He didn’t ask for directions and in the end found himself almost 400 miles away from home—a long way from where he was supposed to be.
Our text today comes near the end of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. It reads:
Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. Do not put out the Spirit's fire; do not treat prophecies with contempt. Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil.
This passage is about a lot of things. It’s focused on the life of Christian churches—about how the early communities built around the Christian faith could grow and thrive and hold together. But the teachings in this passage aren’t limited to the house churches of the 1st century.
Our text has a lot to teach us today about learning to live and work together in healthy ways—about being productive and honorable and generous as we press on with the tasks that get us out of bed each morning. There’s a strong message here about what it means to live and work in community—about the ways we interact personally and professionally.
There’s also a lesson here about learning from challenges, or even mistakes—about being disciplined in the way that we work and serve and love. There’s some very practical advice in this passage that fits with what we’re celebrating today—that helps us see thankfulness as an important part of our lives.
Thanksgiving is one of those rare holidays that asks us to reflect on our own lives—to look around and take stock of what we can be thankful for. It’s a holiday that calls each one of us to do something that might not be a normal part of our lives, no matter what our faith tradition might be. Thanksgiving Day is a reminder to each one of us that thankfulness is important—being grateful to each other, and also being grateful to God for his blessings in our lives.
When George Washington declared the first National Day of Thanksgiving on this date in 1789, he said it was ‘the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits.’
That’s why we’re here today. That’s what we gather to remember and celebrate on this special day.
Well, no American holiday is complete without some reference to one of the most important American philosophers of all. Someone who each year manages to articulate our feelings and focus our attention on the true meanings behind most of our special days. Of course you all know that I’m talking about … Charlie Brown. In the States, for most of the last 50 years or so, there has been a Charlie Brown special produced and televised on each major holiday.
Who can forget ‘A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving’, with the classic menu of two slices of buttered toast, some pretzel sticks, a handful of popcorn, and some jelly beans.
There were more of these programs:
A Charlie Brown Christmas
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown
It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown
Or maybe the classic: It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown
There are others.
You’re in Love, Charlie Brown
You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown
And finally, for those of us nearing or looking back on middle age:
You Don’t Look 40, Charlie Brown
In 1983, the gang from Peanuts traveled to Europe and visited some of the battle sites from the First and Second World Wars. They saw and talked about the horrors of war and the sacrifices of those who had to fight. That story was told in one of the most reflective specials in the series. The title was: ‘What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?’
As we pause to be thankful and to reflect and celebrate this week—we can ask ourselves the same question that gave the title to that Charlie Brown special:
What have we learned in the past year?
It’s been quite a year. When we last saw each other there were many people in this gathering who were unsure—unsure about their jobs, unsure about their savings and families, even unsure of where they might be living in a few weeks or months. When we met here last year the banking crisis had gathered up so much momentum that all of us—and millions of others around the world—all of us were wondering just how far the collapse would take us.
Many of us saw friends move away too soon as casualties of the financial crisis. People in this room today took demotions or transfers they didn’t want—they had to scramble to live in the same houses or keep their kids in the same schools. Some people had to move back to the States and still haven’t found new jobs.
It’s been quite a year.
And so Charlie Brown’s question is a good one: What have we learned?
Maybe one thing we’ve learned is that every once in a while, it’s a good idea to stop and ask for directions. Otherwise we run the risk of ending up far from where we meant to go—we end up lost, with no clear way back home.
Certainly we’ve learned the hard way that we’re far more connected than we ever imagined, so Paul’s teaching on what it means to live in community can offer us some lessons as well. Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians can help us as we look back on the past year.
What can we learn from our passage of Scripture today?
Some of what we learn is personal—it’s about how we think and what we value and how we want to be. Some of what we learn is personal, and some of what we learn is more public—it’s about how we work and make decisions that impact other people.
On the personal side, Paul instructs his readers to keep their eyes fixed on God no matter what happens. Paul’s readers were people who had heard the Christian gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation through the Cross of Jesus and thrown their whole weight on it—given their whole lives to it. Now they were trying to figure out how they could demonstrate that faith as they lived each day.
‘Be joyful always’, Paul says. That doesn’t mean walking around with silly grins on our faces. Being joyful is being willing to trust that God is who he says he is, and that he’ll do what he said he would do.
Paul continues, saying: ‘Pray continually’. That’s about sharing our deepest thoughts with God—and also about waiting around to listen for an answer.
Then Paul says we should ‘Give thanks in all circumstances.’ Challenging times make it difficult to experience the joy that springs from feeling thankful, but forgetting to be thankful altogether doesn’t really work either. Challenging times, more than any other, remind us that thankfulness is a discipline and not a feeling—it’s something we have to remember to do, even when we don’t feel like it. Especially when we don’t feel like it.
Things over the last few years may or may not have gone differently if we’d practiced joy…or constant prayer…or if we’d disciplined ourselves to be thankful in all circumstances. Maybe we can debate whether or not the world would have been a better place if more of us spent more time being joyful and praying and being thankful. I can live with that.
What isn’t really up for debate is this: The world would be in much better shape—many of the people in this room today would have had a much better year if we’d followed the advice in the second part of our text.
Test everything.
Hold on to the good.
Avoid every kind of evil.
What do you think about that? Whether you think of yourself as a Christian or a person of faith or not, it’s good advice, isn’t it?
Whether you think Jesus was a crazy man or a wise teacher or the Lord and Savior of the universe, we can agree that learning to be joyful, to acknowledging a power beyond ourselves, and developing the discipline of thankfulness—we can agree that these are good things, right?
Beyond that though, and in light of what we’ve learned about business practices and banking strategies—and also about being borrowers and customers—in light of what we understand now about how we got into this mess—in light of all that, we can agree that there’s something important for all of us to take away from this ancient Christian text as we celebrate Thanksgiving.
Test everything.
Hold on to the good.
Avoid every kind of evil.
In our personal lives and professional behavior, this is more than just good advice. This is a call to faithful living. This is a challenge to be honorable and decent in every area of our lives. This is a call to integrity and discernment and wisdom, and if we answer that call it will quite simply change the way the world works.
On this Thanksgiving Day, as we consider just how much there is in our lives to make us truly thankful, this is an important lesson for us to remember.
As we celebrate a holiday that has become synonymous with overloaded tables and overstuffed guests, let’s not forget where we were a year ago today.
Maybe the question isn’t: ‘what have we learned?’ Maybe we just need to be reminded that it’s wise to stop sometimes and ask for direction. Maybe the best question for all of us to ask as we celebrate Thanksgiving is this:
‘What can we still learn?’
That’s where we come back to this strange little text, tucked away at the end of a letter in the Christian Bible.
Be joyful always.
Pray continually.
Give thanks in all circumstances.
Test everything.
Hold on to the good.
Avoid every kind of evil.
May God bless you and keep you…and have a very Happy Thanksgiving.
Amen.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
So What?
(This message is the last of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 12:1
As we wrap up our brief journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans, it’s helpful to be reminded of what he was trying to accomplish by writing to them:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
The substance of Paul’s case is that we were made to have a close relationship with God—that we were made for that kind of closeness and intimacy with him. We were meant to live that way, but it all got complicated by our sin. For our purposes today and in this series, sin is anything—anything at all—that gets in the way of the relationship we were meant to have with God.
But God doesn’t leave us hanging. If you trace the history of the human relationship to God you see that God has always provided a way—no matter what we do to mess it up—God has always provided a way for us to come back to him—that’s the point of the Old Testament Law and the prophets and the promise of a Messiah.
God always provides a way back to him, no matter what we’ve said or done or even believed before this moment.
Romans 12:1
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.
So what about our passage today?
This is another of Paul’s ‘greatest hits’ collection—a passage that we memorize and recite, sometimes without allowing it to speak to us in context. In preaching classes we use this passage as an example of something that should happen in every sermon—the shift from what our message is to what we should do about it—from the indicative to the imperative (for those of you who are taking notes). This is about the ‘So What?’ question.
This is a rich sentence—it’s a text we could have built a series around all on its own. Let’s look at it phrase by phrase.
‘Therefore I urge you’: Right there we have some actual proof that whatever Paul is about to say, it’s connected somehow to what has come before. You can’t start a something new with a ‘therefore’, because there’s nothing there to build on.
When Paul starts this new section, he’s building on some stories and teachings that he’s already shared with his Roman readers.
Creation, a way of forgiveness, keeping of his promises, the sacrifice of his son, and the invitation to life in the Spirit—life the way it was meant to be. It’s a good list.
But Paul doesn’t stop with just a list of things he’s already said. Those events—those acts of God—each one of them is an example of a quality in God’s character—they represent something about God that matters—that should matter to us. Listen to the next line:
‘In view of God’s mercy…’ In view of all these things God has done—in view of God’s overwhelming love, his mercy toward us.
It’s important here for us to explore the word ‘mercy’ for a moment. What is mercy? Maybe the best way to start to respond to that is to think about the counterpart to mercy—what’s the other side of the coin?
It would be easy to think that the opposite of mercy is cruelty, and in some ways that would be true. We talk about cruelty as the absence of mercy—of being merciless. I can see how we would think of cruelty as the opposite of mercy.
But that’s not what Paul means in this letter.
Paul has been working from a particular point of view from the very start of his letter to the Romans. God’s relationship to his Jewish covenant people is always a part of the evidence Paul is gathering to make his case—it’s never far from his mind as he tries to convince the Roman Christians that God can be trusted. In Paul’s understanding of who God is, the opposite of mercy isn’t cruelty.
The opposite of mercy is justice. That’s worth a little explaining.
The legal framework that holds biblical Judaism together is fairly simple. It’s about getting what you deserve. When Paul says: ‘In view of God’s mercy…’, what he’s really saying is this:
Since God loved you so much that he didn’t give you what you deserve—that he loved you so much that he gave you far more than you ever dreamed or imagined you could have…
And that’s when he moves to the next part of the text—when he makes the transition from the indicative to the imperative—the ‘So What?’ part of the text.
‘Present your bodies as living sacrifices.’ Well. That doesn’t sound very pleasant at all. Who in their right mind would choose to offer themselves to be a living sacrifice? Think about that for a moment.
Julie and I have been watching an American TV comedy called ‘How I Met Your Mother.’ The other night one of the characters, who’s a bit of a stickler for language, was trying to argue for the difference between the words ‘literally’ and ‘figuratively.’ This seemed perfectly reasonable to me, as a confirmed language geek—things that are literal should actually happen, and things that a figurative can simply be examples. Another character, who didn’t share our hero’s grammar values, responded, and I quote, saying: ‘I literally want to pull your head off right now.’
Paul isn’t literally saying that churches should start offering human sacrifices. Paul would have argued, as the Protestants did 1500 years later, that Christ’s sacrifice was a once and for all kind of thing. We don’t need to repeat that sacrifice, we just need to remember it and what it means. That’s a brief summary of literally thousands of pages of Reformation theology right there.
So what does it mean then, this business about presenting your bodies as living sacrifices?
To me this is one of the most important ‘So Whats’ in the entire New Testament.
This is a call to each of us to make our lives available to God for the purposes of spreading his Kingdom.
This is about taking all that we have and all that we are and bringing it before God to see what he might do with it and through it.
There’s no mystery here. It’s not a coincidence that we’re talking about this passage as we prepare to commit our pledges to God’s work. But it’s not just about money. This is about how much of our lives we’re willing to offer in response to God’s mercy toward us.
David Landsborough was a 2nd generation medical missionary in Taiwan. His father had started the first medical school in the region—it’s still there—and David went back to serve there when he’d been trained as a doctor. During his service there a young boy came in with an infection on his leg that was resistant to all the medicines they had. A skin graft was the only option, but no one was willing to be the donor. Dr Landsborough’s wife Jean, who was also a doctor, volunteered and gave enough of her own skin to provide several grafts for the boy. It was through her that this little boy’s life was saved. Incidentally, he grew up to be the minister of one of the largest churches in Taiwan, and served as the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church there.
‘Present your bodies as a living sacrifice…’
Paul ends this verse with an important description of what it means when we give our lives as an offering to God. He says: ‘This is your spiritual act of service/worship’
I love it that these two words can be interchangeable in the Bible—service and worship. One writer simply said that the person ‘who has been reconciled and renewed carries out the worship of God through the Spirit by presenting his or her whole being’ in service to God’s Kingdom…‘it leads to the surrender of the whole life, which is spiritual worship.’
So what are we supposed to do…really?
The point of Paul’s letter is that God can be trusted to keep his promises because he’s kept the promises he’s already made. Let’s be clear about exactly what Paul is saying here.
Because God never gave us what we deserved—because he loved us so much that he gave us far more than we could ever deserve on our own—because Jesus Christ offered himself as a living sacrifice for us…
In view of God’s mercy, the call is on us to commit our lives—everything about our lives—to God, as a thankful response for what he’s already done for us.
This faith of ours—part of it is a collection of beliefs we pass down from generation to generation. It’s a list of creeds that help us understand what it is we believe and who it is we believe in.
But this faith of ours is more than just what we believe—it’s really about the relationship we have with the one we believe in.
The point here is that we live in relationship to a God who has already held up his end of things. ‘In view of God’s mercy’ is a reminder to us that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has done something amazing already.
The call on us is to respond. We do that by making our lives available to the work of the Kingdom of God. We do that when we share our time and talent—we do that when we commit to the financial support of a local church.
As we move into a time of prayer and commitment as we receive your pledges, I invite you to reflect on God’s mercy in your own life—where God has shown you love in ways you never imagined—think on God’s mercy, and how you’ll respond to it.
In the very first message of this series on Romans we talked about our lives being based on a promise, and called for a purpose. That title for the series was always pointed at the text we read this morning. Our lives are built on a foundation of the promises of mercy that God has kept—that he’s fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
The purpose we’re called to is to share our lives in Christ’s name to glorify God and to share his message with the world. That’s our spiritual act of worship and service.
As we move into Thanksgiving this week and the Advent season next Sunday, I invite you to remember that Jesus Christ is the source of our thankfulness and holiday celebration—that he is the fulfillment of every promise, known and unknown—and that his call on our lives is simple: He simply asks for everything.
Let’s pray together.
Romans 12:1
As we wrap up our brief journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans, it’s helpful to be reminded of what he was trying to accomplish by writing to them:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
The substance of Paul’s case is that we were made to have a close relationship with God—that we were made for that kind of closeness and intimacy with him. We were meant to live that way, but it all got complicated by our sin. For our purposes today and in this series, sin is anything—anything at all—that gets in the way of the relationship we were meant to have with God.
But God doesn’t leave us hanging. If you trace the history of the human relationship to God you see that God has always provided a way—no matter what we do to mess it up—God has always provided a way for us to come back to him—that’s the point of the Old Testament Law and the prophets and the promise of a Messiah.
God always provides a way back to him, no matter what we’ve said or done or even believed before this moment.
Romans 12:1
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.
So what about our passage today?
This is another of Paul’s ‘greatest hits’ collection—a passage that we memorize and recite, sometimes without allowing it to speak to us in context. In preaching classes we use this passage as an example of something that should happen in every sermon—the shift from what our message is to what we should do about it—from the indicative to the imperative (for those of you who are taking notes). This is about the ‘So What?’ question.
This is a rich sentence—it’s a text we could have built a series around all on its own. Let’s look at it phrase by phrase.
‘Therefore I urge you’: Right there we have some actual proof that whatever Paul is about to say, it’s connected somehow to what has come before. You can’t start a something new with a ‘therefore’, because there’s nothing there to build on.
When Paul starts this new section, he’s building on some stories and teachings that he’s already shared with his Roman readers.
Creation, a way of forgiveness, keeping of his promises, the sacrifice of his son, and the invitation to life in the Spirit—life the way it was meant to be. It’s a good list.
But Paul doesn’t stop with just a list of things he’s already said. Those events—those acts of God—each one of them is an example of a quality in God’s character—they represent something about God that matters—that should matter to us. Listen to the next line:
‘In view of God’s mercy…’ In view of all these things God has done—in view of God’s overwhelming love, his mercy toward us.
It’s important here for us to explore the word ‘mercy’ for a moment. What is mercy? Maybe the best way to start to respond to that is to think about the counterpart to mercy—what’s the other side of the coin?
It would be easy to think that the opposite of mercy is cruelty, and in some ways that would be true. We talk about cruelty as the absence of mercy—of being merciless. I can see how we would think of cruelty as the opposite of mercy.
But that’s not what Paul means in this letter.
Paul has been working from a particular point of view from the very start of his letter to the Romans. God’s relationship to his Jewish covenant people is always a part of the evidence Paul is gathering to make his case—it’s never far from his mind as he tries to convince the Roman Christians that God can be trusted. In Paul’s understanding of who God is, the opposite of mercy isn’t cruelty.
The opposite of mercy is justice. That’s worth a little explaining.
The legal framework that holds biblical Judaism together is fairly simple. It’s about getting what you deserve. When Paul says: ‘In view of God’s mercy…’, what he’s really saying is this:
Since God loved you so much that he didn’t give you what you deserve—that he loved you so much that he gave you far more than you ever dreamed or imagined you could have…
And that’s when he moves to the next part of the text—when he makes the transition from the indicative to the imperative—the ‘So What?’ part of the text.
‘Present your bodies as living sacrifices.’ Well. That doesn’t sound very pleasant at all. Who in their right mind would choose to offer themselves to be a living sacrifice? Think about that for a moment.
Julie and I have been watching an American TV comedy called ‘How I Met Your Mother.’ The other night one of the characters, who’s a bit of a stickler for language, was trying to argue for the difference between the words ‘literally’ and ‘figuratively.’ This seemed perfectly reasonable to me, as a confirmed language geek—things that are literal should actually happen, and things that a figurative can simply be examples. Another character, who didn’t share our hero’s grammar values, responded, and I quote, saying: ‘I literally want to pull your head off right now.’
Paul isn’t literally saying that churches should start offering human sacrifices. Paul would have argued, as the Protestants did 1500 years later, that Christ’s sacrifice was a once and for all kind of thing. We don’t need to repeat that sacrifice, we just need to remember it and what it means. That’s a brief summary of literally thousands of pages of Reformation theology right there.
So what does it mean then, this business about presenting your bodies as living sacrifices?
To me this is one of the most important ‘So Whats’ in the entire New Testament.
This is a call to each of us to make our lives available to God for the purposes of spreading his Kingdom.
This is about taking all that we have and all that we are and bringing it before God to see what he might do with it and through it.
There’s no mystery here. It’s not a coincidence that we’re talking about this passage as we prepare to commit our pledges to God’s work. But it’s not just about money. This is about how much of our lives we’re willing to offer in response to God’s mercy toward us.
David Landsborough was a 2nd generation medical missionary in Taiwan. His father had started the first medical school in the region—it’s still there—and David went back to serve there when he’d been trained as a doctor. During his service there a young boy came in with an infection on his leg that was resistant to all the medicines they had. A skin graft was the only option, but no one was willing to be the donor. Dr Landsborough’s wife Jean, who was also a doctor, volunteered and gave enough of her own skin to provide several grafts for the boy. It was through her that this little boy’s life was saved. Incidentally, he grew up to be the minister of one of the largest churches in Taiwan, and served as the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church there.
‘Present your bodies as a living sacrifice…’
Paul ends this verse with an important description of what it means when we give our lives as an offering to God. He says: ‘This is your spiritual act of service/worship’
I love it that these two words can be interchangeable in the Bible—service and worship. One writer simply said that the person ‘who has been reconciled and renewed carries out the worship of God through the Spirit by presenting his or her whole being’ in service to God’s Kingdom…‘it leads to the surrender of the whole life, which is spiritual worship.’
So what are we supposed to do…really?
The point of Paul’s letter is that God can be trusted to keep his promises because he’s kept the promises he’s already made. Let’s be clear about exactly what Paul is saying here.
Because God never gave us what we deserved—because he loved us so much that he gave us far more than we could ever deserve on our own—because Jesus Christ offered himself as a living sacrifice for us…
In view of God’s mercy, the call is on us to commit our lives—everything about our lives—to God, as a thankful response for what he’s already done for us.
This faith of ours—part of it is a collection of beliefs we pass down from generation to generation. It’s a list of creeds that help us understand what it is we believe and who it is we believe in.
But this faith of ours is more than just what we believe—it’s really about the relationship we have with the one we believe in.
The point here is that we live in relationship to a God who has already held up his end of things. ‘In view of God’s mercy’ is a reminder to us that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has done something amazing already.
The call on us is to respond. We do that by making our lives available to the work of the Kingdom of God. We do that when we share our time and talent—we do that when we commit to the financial support of a local church.
As we move into a time of prayer and commitment as we receive your pledges, I invite you to reflect on God’s mercy in your own life—where God has shown you love in ways you never imagined—think on God’s mercy, and how you’ll respond to it.
In the very first message of this series on Romans we talked about our lives being based on a promise, and called for a purpose. That title for the series was always pointed at the text we read this morning. Our lives are built on a foundation of the promises of mercy that God has kept—that he’s fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
The purpose we’re called to is to share our lives in Christ’s name to glorify God and to share his message with the world. That’s our spiritual act of worship and service.
As we move into Thanksgiving this week and the Advent season next Sunday, I invite you to remember that Jesus Christ is the source of our thankfulness and holiday celebration—that he is the fulfillment of every promise, known and unknown—and that his call on our lives is simple: He simply asks for everything.
Let’s pray together.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Better than Conquest
(This message is part of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 8:31-39
I saw in the news that Ellis Island closed 55 years ago this past week, on Nov 12 1954. Ellis Island was the main gateway for immigrants to the US for more than 60 years, and during that time more than 20 million people entered America through its gates. One of them was my grandmother. She moved here from Italy with two young sons to rejoin my grandfather who was working here. They were just one family in the waves of immigration from Europe and other places in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Immigration is controversial both here and in the US, I know, but on balance I think it’s had an enormously positive impact on American culture. If we’re honest we know that few if any of us come from Native American families, and of course now a lot of us are living and working in still another country not our own.
How we enter a new place—how we make a life in a new culture—is important for us not only in relation to our nationality, but also to our identity as Christians.
31What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36As it is written:
"For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."
37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
As we continue our journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans, it’s helpful to be reminded of what he was trying to accomplish:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
The substance of Paul’s case is that we were made to have a close relationship with God—that we were made for that kind of closeness and intimacy with him. We were meant to live that way, but it all got complicated by our sin. For our purposes today and in this series, sin is anything—anything at all—that gets in the way of the relationship we were meant to have with God.
But God doesn’t leave us hanging. If you trace the history of the human relationship to God you see that God has always provided a way—no matter what we do to mess it up—God has always provided a way for us to come back to him—that’s the point of the Old Testament Law and the prophets and the promise of a Messiah.
God always provides a way back to him, no matter what we’ve said or done or even believed before this moment.
So what about our passage today?
Paul starts with a list of rhetorical questions—we looked at the first one of these last week. After his radical statement: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.” After that, Paul asks some questions:
What do we say in response to all that God has done?
If God is for us, who can be against us?
If God didn’t spare his own son, is there any limit to his generosity and love toward us?
If that’s true, then who can accuse God of anything?
If God is God and we’re not, then who is in a position to judge us?
And if that’s true, and Christ died for us and continues to pray for us, then we see this amazing promise:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
This is like those situations where we go in with a lot of questions, but someone has thought of them already and provided us with answers.
We’re called to engage the culture as redeemed people with a message of good news. If you think about that you’ll come up with a ton of questions, but in this passage Paul offers us answers that work about what we’re called to do—about who we’re supposed to be.
Paul asks: “Shall trouble or hardship or nakedness or danger or sword keep us from the love of Christ?”
That’s a pretty comprehensive list, isn’t it? Hardship, trouble, any form of shame (that’s what ‘nakedness’ would have meant to Paul’s readers), or even violence.
Will any of those keep us from experiencing the blessings of being in the presence of God?
Paul answers with a flat “NO.” Why? Because we’re ‘more than conquerors through him who loved us.’
When we come to Christ in faith we re-enter our own world, our own culture, but not as an invading army. This time we come more as immigrants, coming in to make new lives for ourselves and influence the lives of our neighbors.
That may seem like we’re being a lot less than conquerors, but in the values of Christ’s kingdom it’s a lot more than that.
Being a Christian in this world is more than just moving into a new territory and settling in. It’s about bringing change to the culture in Christ’s name. It’s more than coming in as an occupying force, like the Germans in France or Holland during WWII.
Acting as conquering invaders is clearly not what Paul is suggesting for us as Christians in the world.
Here’s the point: We aren’t called to conquer or even to win—this isn’t about having power or authority or privilege. This is about the call Christ makes on our lives to live differently because of what he’s done for us.
We’re called to be more than conquerors—we’re called to be agents of transformation.
That’s something entirely different—something sacrificial and life-changing. In the end the call to be more than conquerors is the call to be Christ-like—to live as models of the reconciling renewing restoring work of Christ himself.
How do we reshape ourselves into that kind of church? How do we become people like that, both individually and as a community of faith?
It’s risky, just as it is for immigrants to a new nation and culture—we won’t always be accepted—we might not even be accepted very often at all.
But whether or not people accept the message of the gospel is really God’s business. Most of us wouldn’t dream of taking the credit for the way the gospel spreads and takes root. Why would we take the blame if we’ve been faithful in living it and sharing it?
The real fear is that somehow God won’t be with us as we do his work—that we’ll be abandoned as we face a hostile culture and even friends and family who don’t want to hear us talking about God, or about Jesus, or just try bringing up the Holy Spirit in some places.
The fear is that we’ll be left alone in our work as disciples of Jesus Christ.
That’s where that final, wonderful, amazing, life-changing promise comes in:
Paul says: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.”
That promise is one of the great excuse-killers in the entire Bible. It doesn’t just appear there, disconnected from anything else. It comes as a part of the call to all of us to be living models of the gospel—to be agents of reconciliation—to live our lives as forgiven sinners who’ve been adopted into God’s family and given full inheritance rights.
This last promise is Paul’s way of cutting the legs out from all the excuses we use to avoid being the people God calls us to be.
Let’s see, “death nor life”: so even dying is no excuse, and neither is how busy we are in our lives.
Angels and demons can’t stop us—neither can pretending that angels and demons don’t exist.
“Present or future?” All the stuff we’re doing—and this church has some of the busiest people I’ve ever known—all the stuff we’re doing and all the plans we’ve made for next week and next summer and next year. None of that is an excuse.
“Nor any powers”, Paul says. That means that terrorism can’t stop us—neither can Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or evolution or someone who smirks or rolls their eyes at you when they see you reading a Bible.
The rest of the list covers just about everything else we might use as excuses for giving up. “Height nor depth nor anything else in all creation…” None of it can separate us from God’s love as we live out the message he gave to us. Nothing.
OK, now that’s a long string of tough talk, but it’s important for us to remember what it means. God will never leave us, no power can prevent us, nothing can stop us, from being the people God made us to be: more than just conquerors and bullies—but people who live the gospel and share it in meaningful ways with their families and friends and neighbors and strangers.
This is better than conquest. It’s better than looking good or feeling important. It’s better than acting like we’re better than other people or piling up possessions for ourselves.
It’s better than throwing our weight and money around and calling it mission work.
This is about being a part of a relationship that will change everyone and everything and every place in the world. Being more than conquerors means learning new ways to interact with people who haven’t heard or don’t believe the good news of Jesus Christ.
In the new Presbyterian study catechism that we’ll be using in our confirmation class, one of the questions reads:
How should I treat non-Christians and people of other religions?
Listen to this response:
“As much as I can, I should meet friendship with friendship, hostility with kindness, generosity with gratitude, persecution with forbearance, truth with agreement, and error with truth. I should express my faith with humility and devotion as the occasion requires, whether silently or openly, boldly or meekly, by word or by deed. I should avoid compromising the truth on the one hand and being narrow-minded on the other.”
Now catch this part…
“In short, I should always welcome and accept these others in a way that honors and reflects the Lord’s welcome and acceptance of me.”
Friends that’s what it looks like to be "more than conquerors," and that’s my prayer not only for our commitment to missions in this church, but also for the way we live each day as disciples of Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Romans 8:31-39
I saw in the news that Ellis Island closed 55 years ago this past week, on Nov 12 1954. Ellis Island was the main gateway for immigrants to the US for more than 60 years, and during that time more than 20 million people entered America through its gates. One of them was my grandmother. She moved here from Italy with two young sons to rejoin my grandfather who was working here. They were just one family in the waves of immigration from Europe and other places in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Immigration is controversial both here and in the US, I know, but on balance I think it’s had an enormously positive impact on American culture. If we’re honest we know that few if any of us come from Native American families, and of course now a lot of us are living and working in still another country not our own.
How we enter a new place—how we make a life in a new culture—is important for us not only in relation to our nationality, but also to our identity as Christians.
31What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36As it is written:
"For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."
37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
As we continue our journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans, it’s helpful to be reminded of what he was trying to accomplish:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
The substance of Paul’s case is that we were made to have a close relationship with God—that we were made for that kind of closeness and intimacy with him. We were meant to live that way, but it all got complicated by our sin. For our purposes today and in this series, sin is anything—anything at all—that gets in the way of the relationship we were meant to have with God.
But God doesn’t leave us hanging. If you trace the history of the human relationship to God you see that God has always provided a way—no matter what we do to mess it up—God has always provided a way for us to come back to him—that’s the point of the Old Testament Law and the prophets and the promise of a Messiah.
God always provides a way back to him, no matter what we’ve said or done or even believed before this moment.
So what about our passage today?
Paul starts with a list of rhetorical questions—we looked at the first one of these last week. After his radical statement: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.” After that, Paul asks some questions:
What do we say in response to all that God has done?
If God is for us, who can be against us?
If God didn’t spare his own son, is there any limit to his generosity and love toward us?
If that’s true, then who can accuse God of anything?
If God is God and we’re not, then who is in a position to judge us?
And if that’s true, and Christ died for us and continues to pray for us, then we see this amazing promise:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
This is like those situations where we go in with a lot of questions, but someone has thought of them already and provided us with answers.
We’re called to engage the culture as redeemed people with a message of good news. If you think about that you’ll come up with a ton of questions, but in this passage Paul offers us answers that work about what we’re called to do—about who we’re supposed to be.
Paul asks: “Shall trouble or hardship or nakedness or danger or sword keep us from the love of Christ?”
That’s a pretty comprehensive list, isn’t it? Hardship, trouble, any form of shame (that’s what ‘nakedness’ would have meant to Paul’s readers), or even violence.
Will any of those keep us from experiencing the blessings of being in the presence of God?
Paul answers with a flat “NO.” Why? Because we’re ‘more than conquerors through him who loved us.’
When we come to Christ in faith we re-enter our own world, our own culture, but not as an invading army. This time we come more as immigrants, coming in to make new lives for ourselves and influence the lives of our neighbors.
That may seem like we’re being a lot less than conquerors, but in the values of Christ’s kingdom it’s a lot more than that.
Being a Christian in this world is more than just moving into a new territory and settling in. It’s about bringing change to the culture in Christ’s name. It’s more than coming in as an occupying force, like the Germans in France or Holland during WWII.
Acting as conquering invaders is clearly not what Paul is suggesting for us as Christians in the world.
Here’s the point: We aren’t called to conquer or even to win—this isn’t about having power or authority or privilege. This is about the call Christ makes on our lives to live differently because of what he’s done for us.
We’re called to be more than conquerors—we’re called to be agents of transformation.
That’s something entirely different—something sacrificial and life-changing. In the end the call to be more than conquerors is the call to be Christ-like—to live as models of the reconciling renewing restoring work of Christ himself.
How do we reshape ourselves into that kind of church? How do we become people like that, both individually and as a community of faith?
It’s risky, just as it is for immigrants to a new nation and culture—we won’t always be accepted—we might not even be accepted very often at all.
But whether or not people accept the message of the gospel is really God’s business. Most of us wouldn’t dream of taking the credit for the way the gospel spreads and takes root. Why would we take the blame if we’ve been faithful in living it and sharing it?
The real fear is that somehow God won’t be with us as we do his work—that we’ll be abandoned as we face a hostile culture and even friends and family who don’t want to hear us talking about God, or about Jesus, or just try bringing up the Holy Spirit in some places.
The fear is that we’ll be left alone in our work as disciples of Jesus Christ.
That’s where that final, wonderful, amazing, life-changing promise comes in:
Paul says: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.”
That promise is one of the great excuse-killers in the entire Bible. It doesn’t just appear there, disconnected from anything else. It comes as a part of the call to all of us to be living models of the gospel—to be agents of reconciliation—to live our lives as forgiven sinners who’ve been adopted into God’s family and given full inheritance rights.
This last promise is Paul’s way of cutting the legs out from all the excuses we use to avoid being the people God calls us to be.
Let’s see, “death nor life”: so even dying is no excuse, and neither is how busy we are in our lives.
Angels and demons can’t stop us—neither can pretending that angels and demons don’t exist.
“Present or future?” All the stuff we’re doing—and this church has some of the busiest people I’ve ever known—all the stuff we’re doing and all the plans we’ve made for next week and next summer and next year. None of that is an excuse.
“Nor any powers”, Paul says. That means that terrorism can’t stop us—neither can Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or evolution or someone who smirks or rolls their eyes at you when they see you reading a Bible.
The rest of the list covers just about everything else we might use as excuses for giving up. “Height nor depth nor anything else in all creation…” None of it can separate us from God’s love as we live out the message he gave to us. Nothing.
OK, now that’s a long string of tough talk, but it’s important for us to remember what it means. God will never leave us, no power can prevent us, nothing can stop us, from being the people God made us to be: more than just conquerors and bullies—but people who live the gospel and share it in meaningful ways with their families and friends and neighbors and strangers.
This is better than conquest. It’s better than looking good or feeling important. It’s better than acting like we’re better than other people or piling up possessions for ourselves.
It’s better than throwing our weight and money around and calling it mission work.
This is about being a part of a relationship that will change everyone and everything and every place in the world. Being more than conquerors means learning new ways to interact with people who haven’t heard or don’t believe the good news of Jesus Christ.
In the new Presbyterian study catechism that we’ll be using in our confirmation class, one of the questions reads:
How should I treat non-Christians and people of other religions?
Listen to this response:
“As much as I can, I should meet friendship with friendship, hostility with kindness, generosity with gratitude, persecution with forbearance, truth with agreement, and error with truth. I should express my faith with humility and devotion as the occasion requires, whether silently or openly, boldly or meekly, by word or by deed. I should avoid compromising the truth on the one hand and being narrow-minded on the other.”
Now catch this part…
“In short, I should always welcome and accept these others in a way that honors and reflects the Lord’s welcome and acceptance of me.”
Friends that’s what it looks like to be "more than conquerors," and that’s my prayer not only for our commitment to missions in this church, but also for the way we live each day as disciples of Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
A Different Perspective
(This message is part of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 8:28-32
In a conversation recently someone said to me ‘the exception proves the rule’, and that got me thinking… That saying makes absolutely no sense at all. If it’s a rule there aren’t exceptions, and if there are exceptions there really can’t be a rule. So I looked up the saying and here’s what I found out.
The origin of the phrase is actually from 16th-century English law. It was originally written ‘Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis’, which of course we all know means ‘Exception confirms the rule in cases without exceptions.’ In clear English it means that posting an exception to a rule is a reminder that at other times the rule exists.
There are all kinds of sayings or quotes that have come down to us that either don’t make sense or aren’t exactly faithful to the way they were originally written.
‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ comes to mind. Has that ever actually happened? Not really, so we can’t take it at face value. Where did that one come from? The most likely origin, according to one source, is that in London in the 17th century, heavy rain used to fill the streets and carry along dead animals—mostly cats and dogs—and so the saying came out of that.
There’s ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’, ‘Make no bones about it’, and ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’ (I think that people who make up sayings don’t like cats all that much.)
How about this one: ‘That’s the best thing since sliced bread.’ Really? Better than airplanes or computers or iPods or even Pop-Tarts? Better than heart transplants or antibiotics or the cure for polio? Would we really give up all those things if it meant we had to run a knife through a loaf of bread for ourselves? For Pete’s sake. There’s another one—who’s Pete?
It’s also common sometimes to hear misquoted Bible verses, or sayings that people think are Bible verses but really aren’t.
‘God works in mysterious ways’ is one of the most common. People cite it as a Bible verse, but it’s actually from an 18th century English poet named William Cowper.
A more damaging one is this: ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ Really? What about the rest of us? Does God ignore the needs of those who find themselves powerless sometimes? What does that mean for the millions of people in 12-step programs? The first step is the admission that we’re powerless in the face of our addictions.
You can tell these make me a little cranky.
Our text this morning includes a passage that has been misread and misquoted for centuries.
28And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
31What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?
As we continue our journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans, it’s helpful to be reminded of what he was trying to accomplish:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
The substance of Paul’s case is that we were made to have a close relationship with God—that we were made for that kind of closeness—we were meant to live that way, but it all got complicated by our sin. For our purposes today and in this series, sin is anything—anything at all—that gets in the way of the relationship we were meant to have with God.
But God doesn’t leave us hanging. If you trace the history of the human relationship to God you see that God has always provided a way—no matter what we do to mess it up—God has always provided a way for us to come back to him—that’s the point of the Old Testament Law and the prophets and the promise of a Messiah.
God always provides a way back to him, no matter what we’ve said or done or even believed before this moment.
So what about our passage today? How has it been misunderstood?
I have to say that when we started this series on Paul’s letter to the Romans, I was looking forward to this precise passage, but I’m not now—it’s really one of Paul’s ‘greatest hits’ in Scripture—most people who have read this letter will know Romans 8:28 and quote it often.
And maybe that’s where the problem is.
So many people know this passage that it feels pretty daunting to say anything new about it. How do we make this text come alive one more time as we work our way through this important letter?
But the real reason this text is hard is that it’s been twisted and abused over the years—it’s been made to mean something that God or Paul never intended, and so that’s why it’s so important that we look at it again.
How has this passage been abused? Let me ask that a different way: How many of us have had this verse recited to us when we’ve suffered a tragedy or some other kind of loss? How many of us have had someone share this text with us as a way of trying to get us to stop feeling something genuine like grief or anger or sadness.
You know how this happens. Someone suffers a loss and a friend comes up and says: ‘All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.’
I have to tell you that that drives me crazy.
First, it makes it sound as though we should be glad or happy or free of sadness no matter what happens. If it’s all going to work out for good then why be a killjoy? Why spoil the party by actually having authentic feelings about something? ‘All things work together for good,’ don’t they?
The second problem with that quote is that it makes it sound as though our ability to squelch our feelings is directly related somehow to how much we love God. Do you see that in there? ‘All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.’ The logic there means that if things don’t seem to be working out for good in your life, then you must not love the Lord—or love the Lord enough.
That just makes me nauseous.
Most importantly, though, the way this passage too often gets quoted is a corruption of the way it was actually written. Please, tell me you can hear the difference between these two:
‘All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.’
And…
‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.’
One of these is a lie—a simpering, shorthand, cheeseball way of reducing Scripture to a lame version of ‘All’s well that ends well.’
One of these is a lie, but the other is a revolutionary expression of hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ himself.
Hearing the difference between these two is the difference between seeing the Christian faith as a wimpy, unrealistic escape —the real definition of the ‘opium of the people’.
Hearing the difference between these two is the difference between seeing Jesus Christ as a nice guy we can model our lives around, and seeing him as the one true transformational source of hope for every person and place in the world.
One of these is a waste of time. The other is a call to a deeper level of discipleship than we ever thought was possible.
‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.’
Romans 8:28 isn’t a call to some Pollyanna refusal to acknowledge problems or evil in the world. It’s an expression of faith that no matter what happens, God is working to find some redemptive purpose in it—in other words, we are not alone. One writer described it as the belief that ‘our confidence is sure precisely because our future is not in our hands and does not depend on our own faithfulness or ability’ to be perfect. As with every argument in this entire letter, the point is found in coming to God in faith, struggles and all, brokenness and all.
But Paul doesn’t leave it there. In the next section he asks a rhetorical question and then answers it with a reminder of what God has done to bring us back to him—he answers the
question by telling us the lengths God has gone—and will go to—to place us back into his family.
What do we say about this?
What do we say to a God who doesn’t promise us a pain-free life, but promises to work for good within everything that happens.
What do we say to a God who doesn’t just say things.
What do we say to a God who goes so far to demonstrate his love for us that he doesn’t even spare his own son?
We say three things:
We say we want to know this God. That’s why we offer opportunities for people at all ages to grow and learn and become mature in their faith.
We say we want to worship this God. That’s why we don’t stop at just knowing about God—we come together to offer our praises and prayers—to sing and listen and challenge ourselves to draw near to God himself.
We say we want to serve in this God’s name. If our faith stays inward then it hasn’t grown into maturity yet. Knowing about God and worshipping faithfully are the starting place for serving each other and strangers and the whole world in the name of Jesus Christ.
Notice that none of this is about putting our faith in a list of doctrines and then forgetting all about them. This is a different perspective on what it means to be a Christian.
This is about building a relationship with God and with each other and with the rest of the world. Remember that through the entire letter to the Romans Paul has been saying that all of this comes to us when we come to God in faith.
John Ortberg describes it this way:
‘Faith is not simply holding beliefs. Many people, when they consider faith, think ‘I believe that God exists,’ or ‘Scripture is accurate,’ or ‘love is the greatest virtue.’ But at its core, faith is not simply the belief in a statement; it puts trust in a person. We think we want certainty, but we don’t. What we really want is trust. Trust is better than certainty because it honors the freedom of persons and makes possible the kind of growth and intimacy that certainty alone could never produce.’
That trust is the key. Believing that God wants the best for us and that he’ll work to bring it about no matter what else happens to us—believing that is the beginning of trust, and the beginning of an amazing, life-changing, world-altering relationship.
And the best part is that there are no exceptions to God’s rule—we’re all included. The good news for us this morning is this: God helps those—he offers himself to those—who come to him in faith.
Let’s pray.
Romans 8:28-32
In a conversation recently someone said to me ‘the exception proves the rule’, and that got me thinking… That saying makes absolutely no sense at all. If it’s a rule there aren’t exceptions, and if there are exceptions there really can’t be a rule. So I looked up the saying and here’s what I found out.
The origin of the phrase is actually from 16th-century English law. It was originally written ‘Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis’, which of course we all know means ‘Exception confirms the rule in cases without exceptions.’ In clear English it means that posting an exception to a rule is a reminder that at other times the rule exists.
There are all kinds of sayings or quotes that have come down to us that either don’t make sense or aren’t exactly faithful to the way they were originally written.
‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ comes to mind. Has that ever actually happened? Not really, so we can’t take it at face value. Where did that one come from? The most likely origin, according to one source, is that in London in the 17th century, heavy rain used to fill the streets and carry along dead animals—mostly cats and dogs—and so the saying came out of that.
There’s ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’, ‘Make no bones about it’, and ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’ (I think that people who make up sayings don’t like cats all that much.)
How about this one: ‘That’s the best thing since sliced bread.’ Really? Better than airplanes or computers or iPods or even Pop-Tarts? Better than heart transplants or antibiotics or the cure for polio? Would we really give up all those things if it meant we had to run a knife through a loaf of bread for ourselves? For Pete’s sake. There’s another one—who’s Pete?
It’s also common sometimes to hear misquoted Bible verses, or sayings that people think are Bible verses but really aren’t.
‘God works in mysterious ways’ is one of the most common. People cite it as a Bible verse, but it’s actually from an 18th century English poet named William Cowper.
A more damaging one is this: ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ Really? What about the rest of us? Does God ignore the needs of those who find themselves powerless sometimes? What does that mean for the millions of people in 12-step programs? The first step is the admission that we’re powerless in the face of our addictions.
You can tell these make me a little cranky.
Our text this morning includes a passage that has been misread and misquoted for centuries.
28And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
31What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?
As we continue our journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans, it’s helpful to be reminded of what he was trying to accomplish:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
The substance of Paul’s case is that we were made to have a close relationship with God—that we were made for that kind of closeness—we were meant to live that way, but it all got complicated by our sin. For our purposes today and in this series, sin is anything—anything at all—that gets in the way of the relationship we were meant to have with God.
But God doesn’t leave us hanging. If you trace the history of the human relationship to God you see that God has always provided a way—no matter what we do to mess it up—God has always provided a way for us to come back to him—that’s the point of the Old Testament Law and the prophets and the promise of a Messiah.
God always provides a way back to him, no matter what we’ve said or done or even believed before this moment.
So what about our passage today? How has it been misunderstood?
I have to say that when we started this series on Paul’s letter to the Romans, I was looking forward to this precise passage, but I’m not now—it’s really one of Paul’s ‘greatest hits’ in Scripture—most people who have read this letter will know Romans 8:28 and quote it often.
And maybe that’s where the problem is.
So many people know this passage that it feels pretty daunting to say anything new about it. How do we make this text come alive one more time as we work our way through this important letter?
But the real reason this text is hard is that it’s been twisted and abused over the years—it’s been made to mean something that God or Paul never intended, and so that’s why it’s so important that we look at it again.
How has this passage been abused? Let me ask that a different way: How many of us have had this verse recited to us when we’ve suffered a tragedy or some other kind of loss? How many of us have had someone share this text with us as a way of trying to get us to stop feeling something genuine like grief or anger or sadness.
You know how this happens. Someone suffers a loss and a friend comes up and says: ‘All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.’
I have to tell you that that drives me crazy.
First, it makes it sound as though we should be glad or happy or free of sadness no matter what happens. If it’s all going to work out for good then why be a killjoy? Why spoil the party by actually having authentic feelings about something? ‘All things work together for good,’ don’t they?
The second problem with that quote is that it makes it sound as though our ability to squelch our feelings is directly related somehow to how much we love God. Do you see that in there? ‘All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.’ The logic there means that if things don’t seem to be working out for good in your life, then you must not love the Lord—or love the Lord enough.
That just makes me nauseous.
Most importantly, though, the way this passage too often gets quoted is a corruption of the way it was actually written. Please, tell me you can hear the difference between these two:
‘All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.’
And…
‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.’
One of these is a lie—a simpering, shorthand, cheeseball way of reducing Scripture to a lame version of ‘All’s well that ends well.’
One of these is a lie, but the other is a revolutionary expression of hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ himself.
Hearing the difference between these two is the difference between seeing the Christian faith as a wimpy, unrealistic escape —the real definition of the ‘opium of the people’.
Hearing the difference between these two is the difference between seeing Jesus Christ as a nice guy we can model our lives around, and seeing him as the one true transformational source of hope for every person and place in the world.
One of these is a waste of time. The other is a call to a deeper level of discipleship than we ever thought was possible.
‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.’
Romans 8:28 isn’t a call to some Pollyanna refusal to acknowledge problems or evil in the world. It’s an expression of faith that no matter what happens, God is working to find some redemptive purpose in it—in other words, we are not alone. One writer described it as the belief that ‘our confidence is sure precisely because our future is not in our hands and does not depend on our own faithfulness or ability’ to be perfect. As with every argument in this entire letter, the point is found in coming to God in faith, struggles and all, brokenness and all.
But Paul doesn’t leave it there. In the next section he asks a rhetorical question and then answers it with a reminder of what God has done to bring us back to him—he answers the
question by telling us the lengths God has gone—and will go to—to place us back into his family.
What do we say about this?
What do we say to a God who doesn’t promise us a pain-free life, but promises to work for good within everything that happens.
What do we say to a God who doesn’t just say things.
What do we say to a God who goes so far to demonstrate his love for us that he doesn’t even spare his own son?
We say three things:
We say we want to know this God. That’s why we offer opportunities for people at all ages to grow and learn and become mature in their faith.
We say we want to worship this God. That’s why we don’t stop at just knowing about God—we come together to offer our praises and prayers—to sing and listen and challenge ourselves to draw near to God himself.
We say we want to serve in this God’s name. If our faith stays inward then it hasn’t grown into maturity yet. Knowing about God and worshipping faithfully are the starting place for serving each other and strangers and the whole world in the name of Jesus Christ.
Notice that none of this is about putting our faith in a list of doctrines and then forgetting all about them. This is a different perspective on what it means to be a Christian.
This is about building a relationship with God and with each other and with the rest of the world. Remember that through the entire letter to the Romans Paul has been saying that all of this comes to us when we come to God in faith.
John Ortberg describes it this way:
‘Faith is not simply holding beliefs. Many people, when they consider faith, think ‘I believe that God exists,’ or ‘Scripture is accurate,’ or ‘love is the greatest virtue.’ But at its core, faith is not simply the belief in a statement; it puts trust in a person. We think we want certainty, but we don’t. What we really want is trust. Trust is better than certainty because it honors the freedom of persons and makes possible the kind of growth and intimacy that certainty alone could never produce.’
That trust is the key. Believing that God wants the best for us and that he’ll work to bring it about no matter what else happens to us—believing that is the beginning of trust, and the beginning of an amazing, life-changing, world-altering relationship.
And the best part is that there are no exceptions to God’s rule—we’re all included. The good news for us this morning is this: God helps those—he offers himself to those—who come to him in faith.
Let’s pray.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Saints and Other Failures
(This message is part of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 8:12-17
In honor of All Saints’ Day…
This holiday dates back to the 7th century as a celebration of all saints, known and unknown, so I thought we’d talk about saints for a moment.
Over the centuries saints have been seen as helpers or assistants in the Christian life of average believers. They were seen as close to God because of any miracles they might have done, but still human and worthy of following as examples.
The requirements for becoming a saint were exemplary lives and the performing of miracles. The Catholic Church takes nominations, then sends a commission out to research the life of the candidate. The commission builds a case for sainthood and presents it to the Vatican. That’s where the fun begins.
The last stage is a trial, where the commission presents its case, and someone called a promotor justitiae argues the other side. We know that person better as the Devil’s Advocate. The Devil’s Advocate (or, the DA) tries to oppose every aspect of the case for sainthood by every lawful tactic. If the candidate survives, then eventually they’re canonized as a saint.
Catholic or not, most of us are aware of the idea of a patron saint. That’s a saint who has some historical connection with a group or type of person.
There are patron saints for actors, animals and archers. For cab drivers, clothworkers and cooks. For fathers, firefighters and fishermen. For lawyers and leatherworkers and lovers.
There are patron saints for headache sufferers, heart patients, and those who suffer from intestinal ailments (Erasmus, a 3rd century Italian bishop, who earned the honor because of the gruesome way he was martyred.).
Gabriel, the angel with the loud horn, is the patron saint of broadcasters.
Benedict is the patron saint of speleologists, which I had to look up. Speleologists are people who study caves—I’m not sure why they need their own saint… You won’t get this kind of information anywhere else.
Joseph of Copertino was said to rise up off the ground and even fly when the Spirit moved him, so now he’s the patron saint of astronauts.
Matthew, who was a tax collector before becoming one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, is the patron saint of bankers and accountants.
Every one of these women and men became saints because they had demonstrated some extreme level of faithfulness. They’d accomplished some great task, or done some great miracle. They came to represent the ideal for what we should do and how we should live.
But at some point each one of these saints had to earn their way into sainthood. They had to meet some standard and be judged by their brothers and sisters to see if they were worthy.
I hope you can see how different that is from what we’ve been learning in Paul’s letter to the Romans. The whole point of this for Paul—the thing that drove the growth of the Christian faith and even inspired the Reformation 1500 years later—the point of the gospel is that we don’t have to earn it at all.
Forgiveness for our sins, and restoration to life in the presence of God—all of that is a free gift that we receive when we come before Christ in faith.
12Therefore, we have an obligation—but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it. 13For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, 14because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, "Abba, Father." 16The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. 17Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
Just to recap the theme of our journey through Romans:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
The substance of Paul’s case is the relationship we were made to have with God, and the way that relationship is complicated by sin.
If you trace the history of the human relationship to God you see that God has always provided a way for us to come back to him—that’s the point of the Old Testament Law.
Paul talks about the difference between life in the flesh and life led by the Spirit. One writer describes it like this:
“Life pursued according to the flesh is the life influenced by rebellion and idolatry, in which the entire perspective of the person is turned on him- or herself, and the person becomes the center of all values.
Life in the Spirit, on the other hand, is life set free from bondage to self and sin…It is life in bondage to God, which freely acknowledges his lordship through Jesus Christ. The power of Christ’s lordship has broken the enslaving power of self-worship and sin, and set the person free to enjoy a new relationship with God—that new relationship is as a child—a son or daughter—rather than a rebel.”
I love the part of our text that talks about being God’s children—being made heirs—being made to feel part of the family. It’s still more than I can comprehend that God calls us into a relationship with him where we can be close to him—where we can rest in his presence—where we can call out to him, Abba, Father.
The real translation of Abba is ‘Daddy’, a term of closeness and affection and safety.
What does it mean to be welcomed into God’s family?
“To be led by God’s Spirit means to have changed our future from life to death, to have changed our relationship to God from rebellion to obedience, and to have changed our status from enemy to beloved child.”
Another way of looking at this, and in honor of All Saints’ Day, is that we’re all saints now, just by coming to Christ in faith.
We’re all saints now, not by anything we’ve done to earn it, but through the grace of God only.
That’s the gospel of Jesus Christ—that’s the essence of the Christian faith.
That’s what we remember as we come to the Table in Communion.
Christ’s sacrifice on the cross means that we’re forgiven, that we’re welcomed into God’s family with full inheritance privileges, and that wherever we are or wherever we go, we have a home where we’re loved and where we belong.
Our ‘hymn out of season’ today is a usually sung on Good Friday, as we reflect on the pain and suffering of Christ’s sacrifice for us. We sing it now as a way of preparing our hearts to celebrate Communion today.
Please stand and let’s sing together: ‘O Sacred Head, Now Wounded’
Romans 8:12-17
In honor of All Saints’ Day…
This holiday dates back to the 7th century as a celebration of all saints, known and unknown, so I thought we’d talk about saints for a moment.
Over the centuries saints have been seen as helpers or assistants in the Christian life of average believers. They were seen as close to God because of any miracles they might have done, but still human and worthy of following as examples.
The requirements for becoming a saint were exemplary lives and the performing of miracles. The Catholic Church takes nominations, then sends a commission out to research the life of the candidate. The commission builds a case for sainthood and presents it to the Vatican. That’s where the fun begins.
The last stage is a trial, where the commission presents its case, and someone called a promotor justitiae argues the other side. We know that person better as the Devil’s Advocate. The Devil’s Advocate (or, the DA) tries to oppose every aspect of the case for sainthood by every lawful tactic. If the candidate survives, then eventually they’re canonized as a saint.
Catholic or not, most of us are aware of the idea of a patron saint. That’s a saint who has some historical connection with a group or type of person.
There are patron saints for actors, animals and archers. For cab drivers, clothworkers and cooks. For fathers, firefighters and fishermen. For lawyers and leatherworkers and lovers.
There are patron saints for headache sufferers, heart patients, and those who suffer from intestinal ailments (Erasmus, a 3rd century Italian bishop, who earned the honor because of the gruesome way he was martyred.).
Gabriel, the angel with the loud horn, is the patron saint of broadcasters.
Benedict is the patron saint of speleologists, which I had to look up. Speleologists are people who study caves—I’m not sure why they need their own saint… You won’t get this kind of information anywhere else.
Joseph of Copertino was said to rise up off the ground and even fly when the Spirit moved him, so now he’s the patron saint of astronauts.
Matthew, who was a tax collector before becoming one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, is the patron saint of bankers and accountants.
Every one of these women and men became saints because they had demonstrated some extreme level of faithfulness. They’d accomplished some great task, or done some great miracle. They came to represent the ideal for what we should do and how we should live.
But at some point each one of these saints had to earn their way into sainthood. They had to meet some standard and be judged by their brothers and sisters to see if they were worthy.
I hope you can see how different that is from what we’ve been learning in Paul’s letter to the Romans. The whole point of this for Paul—the thing that drove the growth of the Christian faith and even inspired the Reformation 1500 years later—the point of the gospel is that we don’t have to earn it at all.
Forgiveness for our sins, and restoration to life in the presence of God—all of that is a free gift that we receive when we come before Christ in faith.
12Therefore, we have an obligation—but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it. 13For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, 14because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, "Abba, Father." 16The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. 17Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
Just to recap the theme of our journey through Romans:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
The substance of Paul’s case is the relationship we were made to have with God, and the way that relationship is complicated by sin.
If you trace the history of the human relationship to God you see that God has always provided a way for us to come back to him—that’s the point of the Old Testament Law.
Paul talks about the difference between life in the flesh and life led by the Spirit. One writer describes it like this:
“Life pursued according to the flesh is the life influenced by rebellion and idolatry, in which the entire perspective of the person is turned on him- or herself, and the person becomes the center of all values.
Life in the Spirit, on the other hand, is life set free from bondage to self and sin…It is life in bondage to God, which freely acknowledges his lordship through Jesus Christ. The power of Christ’s lordship has broken the enslaving power of self-worship and sin, and set the person free to enjoy a new relationship with God—that new relationship is as a child—a son or daughter—rather than a rebel.”
I love the part of our text that talks about being God’s children—being made heirs—being made to feel part of the family. It’s still more than I can comprehend that God calls us into a relationship with him where we can be close to him—where we can rest in his presence—where we can call out to him, Abba, Father.
The real translation of Abba is ‘Daddy’, a term of closeness and affection and safety.
What does it mean to be welcomed into God’s family?
“To be led by God’s Spirit means to have changed our future from life to death, to have changed our relationship to God from rebellion to obedience, and to have changed our status from enemy to beloved child.”
Another way of looking at this, and in honor of All Saints’ Day, is that we’re all saints now, just by coming to Christ in faith.
We’re all saints now, not by anything we’ve done to earn it, but through the grace of God only.
That’s the gospel of Jesus Christ—that’s the essence of the Christian faith.
That’s what we remember as we come to the Table in Communion.
Christ’s sacrifice on the cross means that we’re forgiven, that we’re welcomed into God’s family with full inheritance privileges, and that wherever we are or wherever we go, we have a home where we’re loved and where we belong.
Our ‘hymn out of season’ today is a usually sung on Good Friday, as we reflect on the pain and suffering of Christ’s sacrifice for us. We sing it now as a way of preparing our hearts to celebrate Communion today.
Please stand and let’s sing together: ‘O Sacred Head, Now Wounded’
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Thankful?
(The piece below was published in the current issue of American in Britain, a magazine for the American expat community. The series on Romans continues next week)
The calendar tells me that this is the season to be thankful. Kids are back in school, the air is a bit crisper, and the leaves are clogging up the drains near our flat. That can only mean one thing: Thanksgiving is coming. ‘Tis the season to be thankful.
Really?
So much has happened in the last year or so. The economy (in a stunning understatement) has struggled, conflicts around the world have dragged on with tragic losses, and we’ve seen the ways that partisanship in both Britain and America can stifle progress across a wide range of issues.
Sometimes it’s hard to feel thankful.
First off, before I write anything else about this, let me be very clear. Being thankful doesn’t mean we close our eyes to the problems around us that need solving. Being thankful doesn’t mean that we fail to hear the cries for help and mercy in our midst and around the world. I say that because too many people equate faith with a lack of awareness or realism. Too many people will assume that to believe in a God with a plan, or a world with a purpose, is to be ignorant somehow of what is really happening around us.
I don’t think that’s true.
Challenging times make it difficult to experience the joy that springs from feeling thankful, but rejecting thankfulness altogether isn’t exactly a helpful response. Challenging times, more than any other, remind us that thankfulness is a discipline and not a feeling. Uh-oh. I know I’ve said a bad word there, so since it’s out of the bag already I’ll say it again.
Thankfulness is a discipline.
Thankfulness is a discipline that takes practice to fully enjoy. It’s not dependent upon a feeling that blows through us whenever it wants to, like some Romantic inspiration, only to go away until it magically reappears. Thankfulness is something that we practice—something we train ourselves to do as a regular part of healthy, hopeful living. In other words, thankfulness is our responsibility to learn and to develop and to share.
John Calvin may be the least popular theologian of the Protestant Reformation, but 2009 is the 500th anniversary of his birth and so I’ve been reading more of his writing. He wrote:
“The contemplation of God’s goodness in his creation will lead us to thankfulness and trust.”
Now that statement has one major leap of faith in it—the belief that God’s goodness is something we can see around us. It’s a leap of faith, I know, but I believe it to be true. Say what you will about the bad news we hear every day—on balance this life still offers far more beauty and wonder than anything on the other side of the ledger. As much as it might pain us to say it, Calvin is 100% right here. When we allow ourselves to think—to contemplate—on the parts of our lives we know to be good, the end result is thankfulness and trust.
Calvin’s point is that thankfulness is the product of knowing—or struggling to believe—that God loves the world and everything in it. Calvin would boldly say that faith like that makes it possible for us to live through our times of struggle:
“Gratitude of mind for the favorable outcome of things, patience in adversity, and also incredible freedom from worry about the future all necessarily follow upon this knowledge.”
What are you thankful for this season?
As we prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, with all the food and fellowship (and sports) that it represents, how can we discipline ourselves to think about God’s goodness in our lives? Believing that takes practice—it requires us to take some big and small steps of faith to connect the blessings in our lives to their source. It takes practice, but it makes all the difference in the way that we approach every single day.
My prayer for you—and for me—this season is that our awareness of God will lead to gratitude of mind, patience in adversity, and as much freedom from worry about the future as we can muster.
From our church to all of you, may God bless you with a tangible sense of gratitude during this holiday season.
Happy Thanksgiving!
The calendar tells me that this is the season to be thankful. Kids are back in school, the air is a bit crisper, and the leaves are clogging up the drains near our flat. That can only mean one thing: Thanksgiving is coming. ‘Tis the season to be thankful.
Really?
So much has happened in the last year or so. The economy (in a stunning understatement) has struggled, conflicts around the world have dragged on with tragic losses, and we’ve seen the ways that partisanship in both Britain and America can stifle progress across a wide range of issues.
Sometimes it’s hard to feel thankful.
First off, before I write anything else about this, let me be very clear. Being thankful doesn’t mean we close our eyes to the problems around us that need solving. Being thankful doesn’t mean that we fail to hear the cries for help and mercy in our midst and around the world. I say that because too many people equate faith with a lack of awareness or realism. Too many people will assume that to believe in a God with a plan, or a world with a purpose, is to be ignorant somehow of what is really happening around us.
I don’t think that’s true.
Challenging times make it difficult to experience the joy that springs from feeling thankful, but rejecting thankfulness altogether isn’t exactly a helpful response. Challenging times, more than any other, remind us that thankfulness is a discipline and not a feeling. Uh-oh. I know I’ve said a bad word there, so since it’s out of the bag already I’ll say it again.
Thankfulness is a discipline.
Thankfulness is a discipline that takes practice to fully enjoy. It’s not dependent upon a feeling that blows through us whenever it wants to, like some Romantic inspiration, only to go away until it magically reappears. Thankfulness is something that we practice—something we train ourselves to do as a regular part of healthy, hopeful living. In other words, thankfulness is our responsibility to learn and to develop and to share.
John Calvin may be the least popular theologian of the Protestant Reformation, but 2009 is the 500th anniversary of his birth and so I’ve been reading more of his writing. He wrote:
“The contemplation of God’s goodness in his creation will lead us to thankfulness and trust.”
Now that statement has one major leap of faith in it—the belief that God’s goodness is something we can see around us. It’s a leap of faith, I know, but I believe it to be true. Say what you will about the bad news we hear every day—on balance this life still offers far more beauty and wonder than anything on the other side of the ledger. As much as it might pain us to say it, Calvin is 100% right here. When we allow ourselves to think—to contemplate—on the parts of our lives we know to be good, the end result is thankfulness and trust.
Calvin’s point is that thankfulness is the product of knowing—or struggling to believe—that God loves the world and everything in it. Calvin would boldly say that faith like that makes it possible for us to live through our times of struggle:
“Gratitude of mind for the favorable outcome of things, patience in adversity, and also incredible freedom from worry about the future all necessarily follow upon this knowledge.”
What are you thankful for this season?
As we prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, with all the food and fellowship (and sports) that it represents, how can we discipline ourselves to think about God’s goodness in our lives? Believing that takes practice—it requires us to take some big and small steps of faith to connect the blessings in our lives to their source. It takes practice, but it makes all the difference in the way that we approach every single day.
My prayer for you—and for me—this season is that our awareness of God will lead to gratitude of mind, patience in adversity, and as much freedom from worry about the future as we can muster.
From our church to all of you, may God bless you with a tangible sense of gratitude during this holiday season.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Monday, October 19, 2009
Just in Time
(This message is part of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 5:1-11
On Monday night Ian and I watched the new BBC series called ‘Life’. It’s the latest from David Attenborough—it took 4 years to shoot all the footage and edit it into 10 episodes. The show was amazing. The focus was on the different ways animals survive in their environments. There were penguins and cheetahs and monkeys—all of the staples of a good nature program.
There was a great sequence where some bottleneck dolphins showed how they catch fish that swim faster than they do. They herd them into shallow water, then one dolphin swims a circle around the fish, kicking up a circle of mud in the water. The fish panic and start to jump out of the circle, only to jump right into the mouths of the hungry dolphins.
We were inspired by the Strawberry Poison Dart Frog of Costa Rica. This tiny little creature, about the size of a thumbnail, produces a litter of 5 or 6 tadpoles. But in their part of the forest, the ponds dry up before the tadpoles grow into frogs, so the mother will put a tadpole on her back and start to climb one of the trees where bromeliad plants store pools of water.
She carries the tadpoles up one at a time—each into their own little pool. It’s the equivalent of a human mother carrying a baby to the top of the Empire State Building. She does it six times, then revisits each tadpole to bring it food until it’s ready to face the world on its own. For each litter, this tiny frog climbs more than a half of a mile—barely an inch at a time.
But the mother of the year award goes to The Giant Octopus. She lays thousands of eggs, then covers them for protection and to pass on nutrition. She never moves during the entire time the eggs are getting ready to hatch. She doesn’t eat or take on anything for herself. By the time the eggs begin to hatch, the Giant Octopus dies—she gives her life to make it possible for her children to live.
It’s a truly amazing example of the lengths a loving parent will go to in order to ensure life—to protect and nurture her children.
1Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. 3Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
6You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
9Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him! 10For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
As we begin it will help to remember the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
Over the past few weeks we’ve talked about the meaning of the Christian life. We’ve seen in Paul’s letter to the Romans that our faith is based on a promise, and that in our discipleship we’ve been called for a purpose—to live in close relationship to God, and to share the message of the gospel with the world around us.
The next week we talked about our need for forgiveness, and the way we learn to live the message of the gospel with boldness and passion. We stop being ashamed of the gospel when we accept the fact that the gospel isn’t ashamed of us.
On Communion Sunday we learned that God offers signs of his presence and love all around us—that he’ll never lose sight of us or stop loving us. There is no shortage of ways we can find ourselves lost, but nothing we’ve ever said or done or even believed before this moment can separate us from the one who made us and loves us.
And then last week we were reminded that we are people who’ve been bought with a price, and that learning to live that way changes everything, from our earning and spending to our parenting and the way we live in relationships—from how we value others to how we define what our own lives mean.
Living as people who’ve been redeemed through Christ’s sacrifice changes everything about us.
And so that brings us to our text this morning. I said on our first Sunday in Romans that a lot of people have favorite parts of this letter. Our text is one of the more popular passages—I remember learning it in my youth group about 30 years ago. Paul is still making his argument here that God can be trusted because he’s already proven himself to be faithful to his promises.
What he’s really describing are the lengths God will go to in order to give us life—how far he’ll go to protect and nurture each one of us.
Paul begins with a reminder that our reconciliation to God is based on faith alone, and not on anything we’ve done to earn it. ‘Since we have been justified through faith,’ Paul says, ‘we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’
I’ve said before that I think this is one of the hardest things for us to grasp. We have to earn just about every other thing that matters to us, and when we come to God and he offers us this amazing free gift, it’s as if we don’t speak the language.
In the Reformation this was one of the key sticking points between Martin Luther and the Roman Church. In Luther’s eyes the established church had created a false sense for individual believers—a sense that they had to earn their forgiveness—to earn their salvation. But that didn’t mean he thought that people didn’t need forgiveness. Luther’s views grew out of a pretty clear understanding of human brokenness, something we can see clearly in our passage this morning.
Paul has three words to describe the state of humanity in this part of his letter, and none of them are very pretty. He calls us:
‘Powerless’: Weak, incapacitated by illness, impotent, paralyzed by the inability to act.
‘Ungodly: Guilty of outrage, giving divine honors to the creature instead of the creator, distorting the relationship between God and his people.
‘Sinners’: Sin in this sense is what we do and also who or what we choose to serve. This is Paul’s catch-all term for people who have allowed something to get in the way of their link with God.
But all this ‘bad news’ of our condition is followed by the ‘good news’ of Christ’s work on the cross—what Paul calls a demonstration of God’s own love for us.
Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. The good news comes after Paul’s description of our need for it, but the point if you read it carefully is that God accomplished his redeeming work before we even knew we needed it. God didn’t schedule a meeting to talk about the problem of sin—he did something amazing—something sacrificial—to solve the problem.
In the musical ‘My Fair Lady’, Eliza Doolittle is tired of listening to her young suitor talk about all the things he wants to do. One of the classic songs in the play is called ‘Show Me’, where Eliza sings:
"Don't talk of stars, burning above; If you're in love, Show me! Tell me not dreams, filled with desire. If you're on fire, Show me!"
Maybe the point of all this is that God isn’t just talk. The God we worship is a God of action—the one who has acted decisively to bring all of his creation back to himself.
There’s no need for us to look up at God and demand a sign—to say ‘show me’—because he’s already shown us how far he will go to bring us close again. What Paul’s really describing are the lengths God will go to in order to give us life—how far he’ll go to protect and nurture each one of us.
While we were still sinners Christ died for us.
Before we even knew we had a problem, God was already working to provide a solution through Jesus Messiah.
God demonstrated his own love for us, just in time.
What does that mean for us? How do we respond to this gift of forgiveness and reconciliation and restoration?
We celebrate our forgiveness together in fellowship. That may be the single most important difference between Christian fellowship and any other gathering of people. We come together knowing we’ve been forgiven and restored and reconciled.
We worship as a community. As we sing these songs and offer these prayers—even the ones that might not be as familiar to us—we join with people across boundaries and cultures and even across time, as we praise God for the ways he loves us.
We welcome the Holy Spirit into our lives to shape us into the people God made us to be. This is really the key of discipleship—the ways we grow in our personal knowledge and experience of Jesus Christ, and also the ways we grow together here and in Bible studies and in meaningful conversation.
Finally, we reach out in mission to a world that is desperate for this message, whether it knows it or not. We reach out in service to our neighbors not as people who are superior in any way, but as powerless, ungodly sinners who have been forgiven through God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice.
We reach out because God first reached out to us. What God asks of us is that we let go of anything that holds us back.
John Ortberg, in his book Faith & Doubt (which is on your reading list in the bulletin)—Ortberg describes God’s call to faith like this:
“What are you to let go of? Anything that will keep you from God.
Let go of relationships if they dishonor God.
Let go of your attachment to money.
Let go of your power; be a servant.
Let go of your addiction. Admit it. Get help.
Let go of that habit.
Let go of that grudge.
Let go of your ego, your pride, your possessions, your reputation, your disobedience.
God comes, and he asks us to let go.”
What do you have to let go of today?
What keeps you from experiencing the gift of God’s grace and forgiveness this morning?
What prevents you from getting to know the one who was willing to die to get to know you?
What keeps you from accepting the one who was willing to put you on his back and climb a tree and take you to a place where you can thrive?
The good news is that it’s never too late. The good news is that the one who made us and redeemed us and loves us in spite of ourselves, even Jesus Christ himself, wants to live in you and through you.
He took the first step, before we even knew we needed him, but the next step is up to us.
Let’s pray together.
Romans 5:1-11
On Monday night Ian and I watched the new BBC series called ‘Life’. It’s the latest from David Attenborough—it took 4 years to shoot all the footage and edit it into 10 episodes. The show was amazing. The focus was on the different ways animals survive in their environments. There were penguins and cheetahs and monkeys—all of the staples of a good nature program.
There was a great sequence where some bottleneck dolphins showed how they catch fish that swim faster than they do. They herd them into shallow water, then one dolphin swims a circle around the fish, kicking up a circle of mud in the water. The fish panic and start to jump out of the circle, only to jump right into the mouths of the hungry dolphins.
We were inspired by the Strawberry Poison Dart Frog of Costa Rica. This tiny little creature, about the size of a thumbnail, produces a litter of 5 or 6 tadpoles. But in their part of the forest, the ponds dry up before the tadpoles grow into frogs, so the mother will put a tadpole on her back and start to climb one of the trees where bromeliad plants store pools of water.
She carries the tadpoles up one at a time—each into their own little pool. It’s the equivalent of a human mother carrying a baby to the top of the Empire State Building. She does it six times, then revisits each tadpole to bring it food until it’s ready to face the world on its own. For each litter, this tiny frog climbs more than a half of a mile—barely an inch at a time.
But the mother of the year award goes to The Giant Octopus. She lays thousands of eggs, then covers them for protection and to pass on nutrition. She never moves during the entire time the eggs are getting ready to hatch. She doesn’t eat or take on anything for herself. By the time the eggs begin to hatch, the Giant Octopus dies—she gives her life to make it possible for her children to live.
It’s a truly amazing example of the lengths a loving parent will go to in order to ensure life—to protect and nurture her children.
1Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. 3Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
6You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
9Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him! 10For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
As we begin it will help to remember the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
Over the past few weeks we’ve talked about the meaning of the Christian life. We’ve seen in Paul’s letter to the Romans that our faith is based on a promise, and that in our discipleship we’ve been called for a purpose—to live in close relationship to God, and to share the message of the gospel with the world around us.
The next week we talked about our need for forgiveness, and the way we learn to live the message of the gospel with boldness and passion. We stop being ashamed of the gospel when we accept the fact that the gospel isn’t ashamed of us.
On Communion Sunday we learned that God offers signs of his presence and love all around us—that he’ll never lose sight of us or stop loving us. There is no shortage of ways we can find ourselves lost, but nothing we’ve ever said or done or even believed before this moment can separate us from the one who made us and loves us.
And then last week we were reminded that we are people who’ve been bought with a price, and that learning to live that way changes everything, from our earning and spending to our parenting and the way we live in relationships—from how we value others to how we define what our own lives mean.
Living as people who’ve been redeemed through Christ’s sacrifice changes everything about us.
And so that brings us to our text this morning. I said on our first Sunday in Romans that a lot of people have favorite parts of this letter. Our text is one of the more popular passages—I remember learning it in my youth group about 30 years ago. Paul is still making his argument here that God can be trusted because he’s already proven himself to be faithful to his promises.
What he’s really describing are the lengths God will go to in order to give us life—how far he’ll go to protect and nurture each one of us.
Paul begins with a reminder that our reconciliation to God is based on faith alone, and not on anything we’ve done to earn it. ‘Since we have been justified through faith,’ Paul says, ‘we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’
I’ve said before that I think this is one of the hardest things for us to grasp. We have to earn just about every other thing that matters to us, and when we come to God and he offers us this amazing free gift, it’s as if we don’t speak the language.
In the Reformation this was one of the key sticking points between Martin Luther and the Roman Church. In Luther’s eyes the established church had created a false sense for individual believers—a sense that they had to earn their forgiveness—to earn their salvation. But that didn’t mean he thought that people didn’t need forgiveness. Luther’s views grew out of a pretty clear understanding of human brokenness, something we can see clearly in our passage this morning.
Paul has three words to describe the state of humanity in this part of his letter, and none of them are very pretty. He calls us:
‘Powerless’: Weak, incapacitated by illness, impotent, paralyzed by the inability to act.
‘Ungodly: Guilty of outrage, giving divine honors to the creature instead of the creator, distorting the relationship between God and his people.
‘Sinners’: Sin in this sense is what we do and also who or what we choose to serve. This is Paul’s catch-all term for people who have allowed something to get in the way of their link with God.
But all this ‘bad news’ of our condition is followed by the ‘good news’ of Christ’s work on the cross—what Paul calls a demonstration of God’s own love for us.
Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. The good news comes after Paul’s description of our need for it, but the point if you read it carefully is that God accomplished his redeeming work before we even knew we needed it. God didn’t schedule a meeting to talk about the problem of sin—he did something amazing—something sacrificial—to solve the problem.
In the musical ‘My Fair Lady’, Eliza Doolittle is tired of listening to her young suitor talk about all the things he wants to do. One of the classic songs in the play is called ‘Show Me’, where Eliza sings:
"Don't talk of stars, burning above; If you're in love, Show me! Tell me not dreams, filled with desire. If you're on fire, Show me!"
Maybe the point of all this is that God isn’t just talk. The God we worship is a God of action—the one who has acted decisively to bring all of his creation back to himself.
There’s no need for us to look up at God and demand a sign—to say ‘show me’—because he’s already shown us how far he will go to bring us close again. What Paul’s really describing are the lengths God will go to in order to give us life—how far he’ll go to protect and nurture each one of us.
While we were still sinners Christ died for us.
Before we even knew we had a problem, God was already working to provide a solution through Jesus Messiah.
God demonstrated his own love for us, just in time.
What does that mean for us? How do we respond to this gift of forgiveness and reconciliation and restoration?
We celebrate our forgiveness together in fellowship. That may be the single most important difference between Christian fellowship and any other gathering of people. We come together knowing we’ve been forgiven and restored and reconciled.
We worship as a community. As we sing these songs and offer these prayers—even the ones that might not be as familiar to us—we join with people across boundaries and cultures and even across time, as we praise God for the ways he loves us.
We welcome the Holy Spirit into our lives to shape us into the people God made us to be. This is really the key of discipleship—the ways we grow in our personal knowledge and experience of Jesus Christ, and also the ways we grow together here and in Bible studies and in meaningful conversation.
Finally, we reach out in mission to a world that is desperate for this message, whether it knows it or not. We reach out in service to our neighbors not as people who are superior in any way, but as powerless, ungodly sinners who have been forgiven through God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice.
We reach out because God first reached out to us. What God asks of us is that we let go of anything that holds us back.
John Ortberg, in his book Faith & Doubt (which is on your reading list in the bulletin)—Ortberg describes God’s call to faith like this:
“What are you to let go of? Anything that will keep you from God.
Let go of relationships if they dishonor God.
Let go of your attachment to money.
Let go of your power; be a servant.
Let go of your addiction. Admit it. Get help.
Let go of that habit.
Let go of that grudge.
Let go of your ego, your pride, your possessions, your reputation, your disobedience.
God comes, and he asks us to let go.”
What do you have to let go of today?
What keeps you from experiencing the gift of God’s grace and forgiveness this morning?
What prevents you from getting to know the one who was willing to die to get to know you?
What keeps you from accepting the one who was willing to put you on his back and climb a tree and take you to a place where you can thrive?
The good news is that it’s never too late. The good news is that the one who made us and redeemed us and loves us in spite of ourselves, even Jesus Christ himself, wants to live in you and through you.
He took the first step, before we even knew we needed him, but the next step is up to us.
Let’s pray together.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Too Good Not to be True
(This message is part of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 3:21-26
John Bradshaw is a psychologist who wrote some important books about families and relationships back in the 1980s. His lectures were broadcast on PBS for a while, and I remember how he used to talk about troubled families in those programs. He used a large mobile—you know, an oversized version of what might hang over a baby’s crib. He would add a piece for each member of the family, but when he start to add extra pieces representing things like addiction or abuse, you could see the mobile twist and contort as it was thrown out of balance. In the end that was precisely Bradshaw’s point: these problems or dysfunctions could throw families completely out of balance.
Think about that as we continue our journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul’s main point is that the world has been infected by sin—that the human family had been thrown out of balance—and that only Jesus Christ could make things right again.
21But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
As we begin it will help to remember the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Our text comes right after an extended discussion of God’s faithfulness, and just before a familiar passage about Abraham’s faith. Note the ‘Jewishness’ of the context within Romans—it’s all about the Law and Abraham’s faithfulness.
What should we notice in our text?
“Righteousness by faith alone.”
There is nothing here that is earned by human effort. A lot of times this is the hardest part for people to accept about the Christian faith. We live in a world where we have to earn everything—our pay, our security, even our love sometimes. All of that gets turned on its head here. The greatest gift we can ever imagine—by a long way—comes to us free of charge—free from measuring up—it comes by faith alone.
This is NOT like the end of the movie ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ where Tom Hanks’ character’s dying words to Private Ryan are: ‘Earn this!’ Christ doesn’t ask us to earn anything—he just asks us to believe.
“There is no difference.”
Part of this is about the ancient division between Jew and Gentile—this is Paul consistently making the world-changing case that God has entered the world for the entire world—no one has the inside lane on this. The differences that separate us from each other have been set aside.
Paul’s teaching here points to our shared identity as people who go running after other gods. ‘There is no difference’ becomes ‘we’re all in the same boat,’ or maybe ‘misery loves company.’
What it means is that when we talk about what the gospel means and what it requires, no one is excluded, but no one is exempt, either. This is for everyone.
Proof that God is faithful to his promises.
Remember that the promises God made to the people he chose were simple: Be faithful and I will bless you and make you into a blessing for the whole world. That’s what’s happening in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Through Christ we see not only the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel, but also the keeping of the promise to bless the entire world through them.
This is one of those moments when we have to step back and consider just what it meant for God to come, to become human with all its weaknesses and problems, to suffer pain and torment and to die.
How does Christ’s death mean that was God faithful?
All of this is part of a bigger story called the Atonement. We spent some time on that earlier this year: The Atonement is a drama in three acts—the Cross, the Resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The point of this drama is that we’ve been offered reconciliation to God, to ourselves, to each other and to the earth.
But it all begins with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross.
What we learn through the Cross is that there is a common plight and a common solution for all of humanity.
Our common plight is what the Scriptures call sin: anything that separates us from living and loving and serving in the presence of God.
The common solution is Christ’s atoning work. Listen to how Scot McKnight describes the meaning of Christ’s death in his book on the Atonement.
McKnight suggests that “we see the achievement of the cross in three expressions: Jesus dies ‘with us’—entering our evil and our sin and our suffering to subvert it and create a new way; Jesus dies ‘instead of us’—he enters into our sin, our wrath, and our death; and Jesus dies ‘for us’—his death forgives our sin, ‘declares us right’, absorbs the wrath of God against us and creates new life where there was once only death…A life shaped by the cross is a life bent on dying daily to self in order to love God, self, others and the world”
The Cross changes everything.
This passage is nothing less than a radical redefinition of what it means to be the people of God. What does this mean for us?
The human family is out of balance—like in that mobile John Bradshaw used to talk about the family. But the atonement puts us back into balance with God—literally, justified by him, through him, and for him.
So what do we do now? Two things:
First, live as people who have been bought with a price. Live as people who are trying to understand the gift we’ve been given in Jesus Christ.
Living that way changes everything—from the way we earn and spend, to the way we love and serve. From our parenting to our business practices—from what we look for in relationships to our treatment of the poor.
Living as people who’ve been purchased with a price becomes the way we define our lives. It replaces our education and careers, the achievements of our kids and the coolness of our cars.
Living as people who’ve been bought with a price transforms the way we fellowship with each other, the way we worship together—it changes the way we focus on growing into mature disciples and eventually the way we reach out to others.
Second, the call is on us to share that good news with the people in our lives. That looks different for each of us, but the principle is the same for everyone:
Experiencing God’s forgiveness in our lives in a real way leads naturally—inevitably—to sharing that forgiveness with the people around us. We do that individually, but we also do it as a community of faith—as this church family.
In ‘Deep Church, the book I mentioned last week, the author talks about the central role the gospel of Jesus Christ has in their church. He writes:
“The gospel is at the center of all we do. The 'gospel' is the good news that through Jesus, the Messiah, the power of God's kingdom has entered history to renew the whole world. Through the Savior God has established his reign. When we believe and rely on Jesus' work and record (rather than ours) for our relationship to God, that kingdom power comes upon us and begins to work through us. We witness this radical new way of living by our renewed lives, beautiful community, social justice, and cultural transformation. This good news brings new life. The gospel motivates, guides, and empowers every aspect of our living and worship.”
Just to close: If the story ended with the pronouncement that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’ then we would live lives of hopelessness and despair.
But that’s not the end of the story. The promise God makes to all of us is that no matter who we are or what we’ve done—no matter what we’ve said or even what we’ve believed before this moment.
No matter who we think we are, God sees us as the people he made and loves and gave himself up to save.
Whatever else you think about yourself, the good news is that when you come to him in faith, God sees you as perfect and spotless and shiny and new.
That’s the good news—that’s the gospel of Jesus Christ offered to each one of us, every day.
What’s left for us is to accept it—to live it—and to share it with the world Christ came to save.
Amen.
Romans 3:21-26
John Bradshaw is a psychologist who wrote some important books about families and relationships back in the 1980s. His lectures were broadcast on PBS for a while, and I remember how he used to talk about troubled families in those programs. He used a large mobile—you know, an oversized version of what might hang over a baby’s crib. He would add a piece for each member of the family, but when he start to add extra pieces representing things like addiction or abuse, you could see the mobile twist and contort as it was thrown out of balance. In the end that was precisely Bradshaw’s point: these problems or dysfunctions could throw families completely out of balance.
Think about that as we continue our journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul’s main point is that the world has been infected by sin—that the human family had been thrown out of balance—and that only Jesus Christ could make things right again.
21But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
As we begin it will help to remember the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Our text comes right after an extended discussion of God’s faithfulness, and just before a familiar passage about Abraham’s faith. Note the ‘Jewishness’ of the context within Romans—it’s all about the Law and Abraham’s faithfulness.
What should we notice in our text?
“Righteousness by faith alone.”
There is nothing here that is earned by human effort. A lot of times this is the hardest part for people to accept about the Christian faith. We live in a world where we have to earn everything—our pay, our security, even our love sometimes. All of that gets turned on its head here. The greatest gift we can ever imagine—by a long way—comes to us free of charge—free from measuring up—it comes by faith alone.
This is NOT like the end of the movie ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ where Tom Hanks’ character’s dying words to Private Ryan are: ‘Earn this!’ Christ doesn’t ask us to earn anything—he just asks us to believe.
“There is no difference.”
Part of this is about the ancient division between Jew and Gentile—this is Paul consistently making the world-changing case that God has entered the world for the entire world—no one has the inside lane on this. The differences that separate us from each other have been set aside.
Paul’s teaching here points to our shared identity as people who go running after other gods. ‘There is no difference’ becomes ‘we’re all in the same boat,’ or maybe ‘misery loves company.’
What it means is that when we talk about what the gospel means and what it requires, no one is excluded, but no one is exempt, either. This is for everyone.
Proof that God is faithful to his promises.
Remember that the promises God made to the people he chose were simple: Be faithful and I will bless you and make you into a blessing for the whole world. That’s what’s happening in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Through Christ we see not only the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel, but also the keeping of the promise to bless the entire world through them.
This is one of those moments when we have to step back and consider just what it meant for God to come, to become human with all its weaknesses and problems, to suffer pain and torment and to die.
How does Christ’s death mean that was God faithful?
All of this is part of a bigger story called the Atonement. We spent some time on that earlier this year: The Atonement is a drama in three acts—the Cross, the Resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The point of this drama is that we’ve been offered reconciliation to God, to ourselves, to each other and to the earth.
But it all begins with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross.
What we learn through the Cross is that there is a common plight and a common solution for all of humanity.
Our common plight is what the Scriptures call sin: anything that separates us from living and loving and serving in the presence of God.
The common solution is Christ’s atoning work. Listen to how Scot McKnight describes the meaning of Christ’s death in his book on the Atonement.
McKnight suggests that “we see the achievement of the cross in three expressions: Jesus dies ‘with us’—entering our evil and our sin and our suffering to subvert it and create a new way; Jesus dies ‘instead of us’—he enters into our sin, our wrath, and our death; and Jesus dies ‘for us’—his death forgives our sin, ‘declares us right’, absorbs the wrath of God against us and creates new life where there was once only death…A life shaped by the cross is a life bent on dying daily to self in order to love God, self, others and the world”
The Cross changes everything.
This passage is nothing less than a radical redefinition of what it means to be the people of God. What does this mean for us?
The human family is out of balance—like in that mobile John Bradshaw used to talk about the family. But the atonement puts us back into balance with God—literally, justified by him, through him, and for him.
So what do we do now? Two things:
First, live as people who have been bought with a price. Live as people who are trying to understand the gift we’ve been given in Jesus Christ.
Living that way changes everything—from the way we earn and spend, to the way we love and serve. From our parenting to our business practices—from what we look for in relationships to our treatment of the poor.
Living as people who’ve been purchased with a price becomes the way we define our lives. It replaces our education and careers, the achievements of our kids and the coolness of our cars.
Living as people who’ve been bought with a price transforms the way we fellowship with each other, the way we worship together—it changes the way we focus on growing into mature disciples and eventually the way we reach out to others.
Second, the call is on us to share that good news with the people in our lives. That looks different for each of us, but the principle is the same for everyone:
Experiencing God’s forgiveness in our lives in a real way leads naturally—inevitably—to sharing that forgiveness with the people around us. We do that individually, but we also do it as a community of faith—as this church family.
In ‘Deep Church, the book I mentioned last week, the author talks about the central role the gospel of Jesus Christ has in their church. He writes:
“The gospel is at the center of all we do. The 'gospel' is the good news that through Jesus, the Messiah, the power of God's kingdom has entered history to renew the whole world. Through the Savior God has established his reign. When we believe and rely on Jesus' work and record (rather than ours) for our relationship to God, that kingdom power comes upon us and begins to work through us. We witness this radical new way of living by our renewed lives, beautiful community, social justice, and cultural transformation. This good news brings new life. The gospel motivates, guides, and empowers every aspect of our living and worship.”
Just to close: If the story ended with the pronouncement that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’ then we would live lives of hopelessness and despair.
But that’s not the end of the story. The promise God makes to all of us is that no matter who we are or what we’ve done—no matter what we’ve said or even what we’ve believed before this moment.
No matter who we think we are, God sees us as the people he made and loves and gave himself up to save.
Whatever else you think about yourself, the good news is that when you come to him in faith, God sees you as perfect and spotless and shiny and new.
That’s the good news—that’s the gospel of Jesus Christ offered to each one of us, every day.
What’s left for us is to accept it—to live it—and to share it with the world Christ came to save.
Amen.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Clear Enough?
(This message is part of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 1:18-20
It’s one of the great, often true stereotypes about men in our culture. Here’s the stereotype: men usually don’t like to ask for directions or even read maps. I know, I know, some guys aren’t like this, but they just stick out and prove the rule most of the time. Is there a more iconic beginning to a fight in books or movies or TV? The wife says: We’re lost. The husband says: No we’re not. The wife asks the husband to stop for directions. The husband refuses and we’re off to the races…
Julie and I went to Normandy last year, and even though neither of us speaks French, we always knew where we were because the signs were so clear. Everywhere we looked there were arrows pointing to exactly what we wanted to see, and at the very least there was always one large sign that said ‘OVERLORD,’ the operational name for the D-Day invasion. Seriously, I remember thinking to myself that you’d have to be blind to get lost along that northern Normandy coast.
18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Before we get into that it’s worth a reminder of the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Last week we heard Paul say ‘I am not ashamed of the Gospel,’ and the point of that for us as we move deeper into this important letter is that we stop being ashamed of the Gospel when we accept the fact that the Gospel isn’t ashamed of us.
So what about our text this morning?
It introduces a section on the state of things when the world rejects God. It starts with an ominous sentence: ‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against godlessness and wickedness’…let’s come back to that one.
Then there’s a section listing a broad range of examples of what happens when people lose sight of God, followed by an explanation of God and people and sin and judgment that is rooted in the Jewish tradition—in the Jewish world view.
So let’s talk about how Paul addresses some of these things in our text this morning.
The first thing that jumps of the page is this business about the ‘Wrath of God’. We all have an image in our minds of what that might be. Lightning, plagues, hail, floods—there are all kinds of images we conjure up when someone mentions God’s wrath. For some people it confirms the worst about what they think about God and the Bible and Christians. Why give your life to a faith that’s rooted in fear of the wrath of a God you can’t even see?
But as you read through the rest of this chapter you’ll find that what Paul is actually describing is scarier than that. He says that when people choose to reject God…God lets them do it. Paul says: ‘Therefore God gave them over’ to whatever it is they wanted to do instead of worshipping and serving God. What? No fire…no brimstone? That doesn’t sound very wrathful.
But it does sound strangely loving. It’s the tough love that people talk about sometimes—when a parent has to make the painful choice to let a child make their own mess…and take the consequences. It’s when we stop enabling someone to keep on living in any form of self-destructive behavior—when we stop shielding them from the consequences—in the hopes that they’ll be shaken back into their senses.
God’s wrath is simply that he allows his people to go their own way—the way they choose for themselves.
That leaves a pretty comprehensive list covering everything from slander and gossip, questions of sexuality, and even arrogance and boastfulness. Let’s be clear about this part: none of the individual sins here are worse than any of the others. It’s the idea of sin itself—the things we do that separate us from God and from God’s ways—that’s what Paul is teaching us in this section of his letter.
But then we’re left with what God tries to do to bring us back to him—this idea of the ‘Visibility of God’. Through it all God tries to make himself plain—even obvious—to the world he made. The call to notice and follow: God’s ‘eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen’, Paul says, ‘being understood from what has been made.’
Most of us at some point or another, as we have struggled to know God and to believe that he really exists—most of us have said something like: ‘O God, I’d believe in you if you just showed me a sign.
That’s what’s behind those stories we see every so often about someone seeing Jesus or the Virgin Mary in a piece of fruit or a ham sandwich. It was the foundation of the controversy over the Shroud of Turin. It’s that moment that everyone has experienced where we’re sure we would be the people God called us to be if he would just show himself to us.
Does that ring true for you? Wouldn’t we all love to see a sign that proved beyond any doubt that God existed? What sign would be good enough?
Frederick Buechner imagines a story in his book, The Magnificent Defeat. After hearing the collective cries of his people for a sign, God reaches into the heavens and rearranges the stars so that they spell out ‘I EXIST’ in every language. The response is dramatic: Stadiums and arenas can’t contain local churches; elderly Christians weep at the confirmation that their faith has not been in vain; doubters and scoffers turn to God in passionate faith. After a period where the the Gospel spreads to every corner of the earth, a man walks with his young son to look at the night sky. As they stand together, hand-in-hand, reading God’s unmistakable self-revelation, the boy turns to his father and says,
‘So what?’
The signs that pointed to God’s existence had become so commonplace that those who had not known life without them failed to understand their message.
The point here is that the real question isn’t about whether or not we get to see a sign. The real point comes in the form of a question: Will we see the signs for what they truly are? Remember where our passage comes from—it’s a part of the introduction to an argument—to Paul making the case that God could be trusted in Rome and beyond because he had been faithful to his promises to Israel.
But even that’s not the heart of the matter. At the very core of this section of Paul’s letter is something that’s true for every person whether we admit it or not, and here it is:
Something or someone is going to be lord in our lives.
Bob Dylan said it a different way, of course: ‘You’re gonna serve somebody.’ Either way it’s true—each of us will make something lord in our life. The question that each of us has to answer is ‘who or what will it be?’
There’s no shortage of choices. People turn all kinds of things into gods for themselves: wealth, power, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, even safety. Money as a god has taken a beating in this past year, but even that one is always going to make a comeback.
We’re all going to choose something to be the lord of our life—it’s the way we’re wired. Remember that Paul has a goal in this letter—he’s trying to get Roman Christians to trust God because God has been faithful to his promises in the past.
He knows that God gives us all the freedom to choose whatever we want to follow as lord. Paul’s goal is to convince as many people as possible to choose Christ for that important job.
But first we have to notice him. First we have to see the signs.
The call on us in this passage is to see the indications of God in the world around us—not just in nature but in the beauty and creativity we see in the culture, too.
The call is to see all of that—to see the way that God communicates says ‘I EXIST' through the world around us—to see all of that and not respond by saying ‘So what?’
The call on us is to seek out what we can learn and experience and even know about God through our interactions with Creation, with each other and with the culture.
But even that isn’t enough. Today especially, as we remember World Communion Sunday, it’s important for us to remember that the practice of the Sacraments in worship is one critical way we experience God—experience the sacred—in our regular lives.
In the book that guides the worship in my own Presbyterian tradition, this is what it says about Communion—about the Lord’s Supper.
“The Lord’s Supper is the sign and seal of eating and drinking in communion with the crucified and risen Lord…On the day of his resurrection, the risen Jesus made himself known to his followers in the breaking of bread. He continued to show himself to believers, by blessing and breaking bread, by preparing, serving and sharing common meals…The New Testament describes the meal as a participation in Christ and with one another in the expectation of the Kingdom and as a foretaste of the messianic banquet.”
Communion is just one of many ways God makes himself known to us. We’re going to talk about more of those in the coming weeks and months.
But for now, maybe we have to train our eyes to see—maybe the signs have been there all along and we’ve gotten out of the habit of seeing them. Maybe we’ve chosen other gods and we don’t know how to get out from under those decisions and change our lives.
Whatever might be holding you back, the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it’s never too late—there’s no place you can go that’s too far.
There is no shortage of ways we can find ourselves lost, but nothing we’ve ever said or done or even believed before this moment can separate us from the one who made us and loves us.
As we come to the Table today my invitation to you is to experience the presence of the Risen Christ in a real way. To see this meal as a ‘participation in Christ and with one another’ in the expectation of the Kingdom, and as a foretaste of the Great Banquet God promised.
The invitation to all of us who are coming in faith is to see God in the bread, in the cup, and in each other as we share this small feast.
It’s only appropriate that as we come to the Table we remember the one whose Table it is. We come as faithful people to worship and adore Christ the King. As we prepare our hearts today, let’s stand and sing another hymn out of season: 'O Come All Ye Faithful'
Romans 1:18-20
It’s one of the great, often true stereotypes about men in our culture. Here’s the stereotype: men usually don’t like to ask for directions or even read maps. I know, I know, some guys aren’t like this, but they just stick out and prove the rule most of the time. Is there a more iconic beginning to a fight in books or movies or TV? The wife says: We’re lost. The husband says: No we’re not. The wife asks the husband to stop for directions. The husband refuses and we’re off to the races…
Julie and I went to Normandy last year, and even though neither of us speaks French, we always knew where we were because the signs were so clear. Everywhere we looked there were arrows pointing to exactly what we wanted to see, and at the very least there was always one large sign that said ‘OVERLORD,’ the operational name for the D-Day invasion. Seriously, I remember thinking to myself that you’d have to be blind to get lost along that northern Normandy coast.
18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Before we get into that it’s worth a reminder of the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Last week we heard Paul say ‘I am not ashamed of the Gospel,’ and the point of that for us as we move deeper into this important letter is that we stop being ashamed of the Gospel when we accept the fact that the Gospel isn’t ashamed of us.
So what about our text this morning?
It introduces a section on the state of things when the world rejects God. It starts with an ominous sentence: ‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against godlessness and wickedness’…let’s come back to that one.
Then there’s a section listing a broad range of examples of what happens when people lose sight of God, followed by an explanation of God and people and sin and judgment that is rooted in the Jewish tradition—in the Jewish world view.
So let’s talk about how Paul addresses some of these things in our text this morning.
The first thing that jumps of the page is this business about the ‘Wrath of God’. We all have an image in our minds of what that might be. Lightning, plagues, hail, floods—there are all kinds of images we conjure up when someone mentions God’s wrath. For some people it confirms the worst about what they think about God and the Bible and Christians. Why give your life to a faith that’s rooted in fear of the wrath of a God you can’t even see?
But as you read through the rest of this chapter you’ll find that what Paul is actually describing is scarier than that. He says that when people choose to reject God…God lets them do it. Paul says: ‘Therefore God gave them over’ to whatever it is they wanted to do instead of worshipping and serving God. What? No fire…no brimstone? That doesn’t sound very wrathful.
But it does sound strangely loving. It’s the tough love that people talk about sometimes—when a parent has to make the painful choice to let a child make their own mess…and take the consequences. It’s when we stop enabling someone to keep on living in any form of self-destructive behavior—when we stop shielding them from the consequences—in the hopes that they’ll be shaken back into their senses.
God’s wrath is simply that he allows his people to go their own way—the way they choose for themselves.
That leaves a pretty comprehensive list covering everything from slander and gossip, questions of sexuality, and even arrogance and boastfulness. Let’s be clear about this part: none of the individual sins here are worse than any of the others. It’s the idea of sin itself—the things we do that separate us from God and from God’s ways—that’s what Paul is teaching us in this section of his letter.
But then we’re left with what God tries to do to bring us back to him—this idea of the ‘Visibility of God’. Through it all God tries to make himself plain—even obvious—to the world he made. The call to notice and follow: God’s ‘eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen’, Paul says, ‘being understood from what has been made.’
Most of us at some point or another, as we have struggled to know God and to believe that he really exists—most of us have said something like: ‘O God, I’d believe in you if you just showed me a sign.
That’s what’s behind those stories we see every so often about someone seeing Jesus or the Virgin Mary in a piece of fruit or a ham sandwich. It was the foundation of the controversy over the Shroud of Turin. It’s that moment that everyone has experienced where we’re sure we would be the people God called us to be if he would just show himself to us.
Does that ring true for you? Wouldn’t we all love to see a sign that proved beyond any doubt that God existed? What sign would be good enough?
Frederick Buechner imagines a story in his book, The Magnificent Defeat. After hearing the collective cries of his people for a sign, God reaches into the heavens and rearranges the stars so that they spell out ‘I EXIST’ in every language. The response is dramatic: Stadiums and arenas can’t contain local churches; elderly Christians weep at the confirmation that their faith has not been in vain; doubters and scoffers turn to God in passionate faith. After a period where the the Gospel spreads to every corner of the earth, a man walks with his young son to look at the night sky. As they stand together, hand-in-hand, reading God’s unmistakable self-revelation, the boy turns to his father and says,
‘So what?’
The signs that pointed to God’s existence had become so commonplace that those who had not known life without them failed to understand their message.
The point here is that the real question isn’t about whether or not we get to see a sign. The real point comes in the form of a question: Will we see the signs for what they truly are? Remember where our passage comes from—it’s a part of the introduction to an argument—to Paul making the case that God could be trusted in Rome and beyond because he had been faithful to his promises to Israel.
But even that’s not the heart of the matter. At the very core of this section of Paul’s letter is something that’s true for every person whether we admit it or not, and here it is:
Something or someone is going to be lord in our lives.
Bob Dylan said it a different way, of course: ‘You’re gonna serve somebody.’ Either way it’s true—each of us will make something lord in our life. The question that each of us has to answer is ‘who or what will it be?’
There’s no shortage of choices. People turn all kinds of things into gods for themselves: wealth, power, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, even safety. Money as a god has taken a beating in this past year, but even that one is always going to make a comeback.
We’re all going to choose something to be the lord of our life—it’s the way we’re wired. Remember that Paul has a goal in this letter—he’s trying to get Roman Christians to trust God because God has been faithful to his promises in the past.
He knows that God gives us all the freedom to choose whatever we want to follow as lord. Paul’s goal is to convince as many people as possible to choose Christ for that important job.
But first we have to notice him. First we have to see the signs.
The call on us in this passage is to see the indications of God in the world around us—not just in nature but in the beauty and creativity we see in the culture, too.
The call is to see all of that—to see the way that God communicates says ‘I EXIST' through the world around us—to see all of that and not respond by saying ‘So what?’
The call on us is to seek out what we can learn and experience and even know about God through our interactions with Creation, with each other and with the culture.
But even that isn’t enough. Today especially, as we remember World Communion Sunday, it’s important for us to remember that the practice of the Sacraments in worship is one critical way we experience God—experience the sacred—in our regular lives.
In the book that guides the worship in my own Presbyterian tradition, this is what it says about Communion—about the Lord’s Supper.
“The Lord’s Supper is the sign and seal of eating and drinking in communion with the crucified and risen Lord…On the day of his resurrection, the risen Jesus made himself known to his followers in the breaking of bread. He continued to show himself to believers, by blessing and breaking bread, by preparing, serving and sharing common meals…The New Testament describes the meal as a participation in Christ and with one another in the expectation of the Kingdom and as a foretaste of the messianic banquet.”
Communion is just one of many ways God makes himself known to us. We’re going to talk about more of those in the coming weeks and months.
But for now, maybe we have to train our eyes to see—maybe the signs have been there all along and we’ve gotten out of the habit of seeing them. Maybe we’ve chosen other gods and we don’t know how to get out from under those decisions and change our lives.
Whatever might be holding you back, the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it’s never too late—there’s no place you can go that’s too far.
There is no shortage of ways we can find ourselves lost, but nothing we’ve ever said or done or even believed before this moment can separate us from the one who made us and loves us.
As we come to the Table today my invitation to you is to experience the presence of the Risen Christ in a real way. To see this meal as a ‘participation in Christ and with one another’ in the expectation of the Kingdom, and as a foretaste of the Great Banquet God promised.
The invitation to all of us who are coming in faith is to see God in the bread, in the cup, and in each other as we share this small feast.
It’s only appropriate that as we come to the Table we remember the one whose Table it is. We come as faithful people to worship and adore Christ the King. As we prepare our hearts today, let’s stand and sing another hymn out of season: 'O Come All Ye Faithful'
Monday, September 28, 2009
Nothing To Be Ashamed Of
(This message is part of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 1:16-17
16I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 17For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
We’re at the beginning of a journey through parts of Paul’s letter to the Christians in 1st-century Rome. As I said last week, there are a few things for us to know as we try to understand this complicated letter.
The Roman church was really a network of homes and converted synagogues where people gathered to worship and learn and serve in Christ’s name. Remember that there were more than 50,000 Jews in Rome at that time, and that a significant number of them had converted to Christianity and were worshipping side-by-side with Gentile Christians from Rome and other parts of the Empire.
Paul was the ideal person to write this pastoral letter. Paul had been a devout Jew for most of his life. He was trained as a Pharisee under the most famous Pharisee scholar of them all, a man named Gamaliel, which I said last week was the equivalent of getting an Ivy League PhD in Jewish law. Saul calls himself a ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’, and even leads some of the early persecution of the Christian church.
But Saul becomes Paul when he meets Jesus on the road to Damascus, and everything changes for him. He takes his academic training, his ability to earn and raise money, and his passionate faith in Jesus Christ—he takes all of those into his new job—his new calling as one of the founders of the Christian church. It’s in that new role that Paul writes this crucial letter.
And so what was the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans?
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Simple, right?
It’s not really simple at all, but as we make our way through our text this morning, there are some things to notice about what Paul is teaching here.
First, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in the promises God made to the Jewish people.
Paul says in our text that the Gospel is “first for the Jew, then for the Gentile,” and the text ends with a quote from the prophet Habakkuk: “The righteous will live by faith.” Even in this short passage Paul is making the link between the Gospel of Jesus and the history of God’s relationship with the Jewish people.
Second, that Gospel, wherever it came from, is available to all people.
The Gospel is God’s “salvation for everyone who believes.” This is a key part of Paul’s ministry, and it also shapes the early history of the church. The Christian faith was born out of Judaism, but it was meant for everyone. Remember the promises we read last week and this morning that God made to Abram—that he would make him into a great nation with more descendants than he could count. All of that was meant for a purpose: “…and all the nations will be blessed through you.”
It’s the ministry of Jesus that becomes that blessing—it’s a blessing that comes through Jesus—through Judaism—and offers God’s redemption and reconciliation to the whole world
Finally we experience the full gift of the Gospel by faith alone.
“For in the Gospel a righteousness is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.”
This is a tricky one, because it’s in this single sentence that Paul is trying to change the entire world view of his Jewish convert readers. They would have believed from birth that “righteousness”—being reconciled to God, came from following the Law and offering the right sacrifices. Here Paul is saying that the gift of connection to God is just that. It’s a gift that comes by faith alone, and not by anything we can do to earn it.
It’s this theme that pushed Martin Luther into the movement that became the Reformation. So many things had been added by the church to the list of what people had to do to draw near to God. So many layers of religious stuff had been placed between the individual believer and God. When Luther read Paul’s letter to the Romans with fresh eyes, he learned that God had cleared out all of those obstructions—when Luther realized that what God wanted was for people to come to him by faith alone, it changed everything.
In the Jewish tradition tomorrow is Yom Kippur. It’s a day of solemn reflection and confession for sins against God and against other people—it’s also a day of repentance for both individual and corporate sins. The purpose of the day is to be cleansed—to be released from the guilt and shame that come from those things we do that separate us from God (not God from us, by the way).
The message of Romans, and the point that Paul is trying to communicate to his Gentile readers and Jewish converts at the same time, is that we’re not driven or controlled anymore by our guilt and shame. Because God has been faithful to his promises, we can come to him by faith alone.
But that doesn’t mean that ‘shame’ isn’t a real part of our lives.
John Bradshaw is a psychologist who specializes in dealing with the impact of shame on individuals and families. He wrote: “To have shame as an identity is to believe that one’s being is somehow flawed—that one is defective as a human being. Once shame is transformed into an identity, it becomes toxic and dehumanizing.” That’s what the Gospel is designed to transform in our lives—that feeling of being not quite fully human because of our sin and shame.
That brings us back to Paul’s bold claim: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel.” What was he saying?
Paul was making the point that he wasn’t ashamed of the gospel, because the point of the Gospel was to take away his shame. But mostly he’s saying that as strange as this story sounds, he knew that it was rooted in the history and promises and character of God himself, so there was no need to be embarrassed about it.
Paul said to the Romans: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.”
What does that mean for us? The first two things we’ve said already:
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in God’s promises and relationship with Israel.
The Gospel is available to all people.
But there’s more.
The Gospel is something we grasp through faith, not science, not blind leap, but through our struggle to trust the God who has demonstrated his trustworthiness through the Cross and Resurrection.
As we grasp the Gospel we find that it takes away the shame we carry with us in our lives. That’s part of the point. As hard as it might be for us to fully comprehend, the Gospel restores us and remakes us into the people that God made us to be in the first place. Part of that process is helping us to acknowledge our sin and ask for forgiveness. The rest of that process is like a deep cleansing that the Scriptures tell us will make us ‘whiter than snow.’
Mostly this text is a reminder that just as he did with Paul, God invites us to stop being ashamed of the gospel. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in history and available to everyone. It has the power to build community and spark reconciliation and give hope to every single person on earth.
But mostly we stop being ashamed of the Gospel when we accept the fact that the Gospel isn’t ashamed of us.
No matter what we done or said or thought or believed in the past, the gospel—the good news that Jesus Christ has come and lived and served and died and rose again—that Gospel takes us where we are, it cleanses us and restores us, and in the end it makes all things new.
When Yom Kippur was celebrated in the ancient world, it was the only day of the year when the high priest would enter the ‘Holy of Holies,’ the most important room in the Temple at Jerusalem. The gift of the gospel—the reason we’re all here today—is that through Jesus Christ we can approach God wherever we are and whenever we want. The call on us to come in faith, to trust in God’s promises, and to share that message with a hungry world.
That desire to share the message of the Gospel is what’s behind our closing hymn today. When Charles Wesley would have one of those moments where he realized the depth of God’s love for him, he would wish for a thousand voices to offer his love and praises to God.
Let’s stand together and ask for the same thing: “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”
Romans 1:16-17
16I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 17For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
We’re at the beginning of a journey through parts of Paul’s letter to the Christians in 1st-century Rome. As I said last week, there are a few things for us to know as we try to understand this complicated letter.
The Roman church was really a network of homes and converted synagogues where people gathered to worship and learn and serve in Christ’s name. Remember that there were more than 50,000 Jews in Rome at that time, and that a significant number of them had converted to Christianity and were worshipping side-by-side with Gentile Christians from Rome and other parts of the Empire.
Paul was the ideal person to write this pastoral letter. Paul had been a devout Jew for most of his life. He was trained as a Pharisee under the most famous Pharisee scholar of them all, a man named Gamaliel, which I said last week was the equivalent of getting an Ivy League PhD in Jewish law. Saul calls himself a ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’, and even leads some of the early persecution of the Christian church.
But Saul becomes Paul when he meets Jesus on the road to Damascus, and everything changes for him. He takes his academic training, his ability to earn and raise money, and his passionate faith in Jesus Christ—he takes all of those into his new job—his new calling as one of the founders of the Christian church. It’s in that new role that Paul writes this crucial letter.
And so what was the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans?
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Simple, right?
It’s not really simple at all, but as we make our way through our text this morning, there are some things to notice about what Paul is teaching here.
First, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in the promises God made to the Jewish people.
Paul says in our text that the Gospel is “first for the Jew, then for the Gentile,” and the text ends with a quote from the prophet Habakkuk: “The righteous will live by faith.” Even in this short passage Paul is making the link between the Gospel of Jesus and the history of God’s relationship with the Jewish people.
Second, that Gospel, wherever it came from, is available to all people.
The Gospel is God’s “salvation for everyone who believes.” This is a key part of Paul’s ministry, and it also shapes the early history of the church. The Christian faith was born out of Judaism, but it was meant for everyone. Remember the promises we read last week and this morning that God made to Abram—that he would make him into a great nation with more descendants than he could count. All of that was meant for a purpose: “…and all the nations will be blessed through you.”
It’s the ministry of Jesus that becomes that blessing—it’s a blessing that comes through Jesus—through Judaism—and offers God’s redemption and reconciliation to the whole world
Finally we experience the full gift of the Gospel by faith alone.
“For in the Gospel a righteousness is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.”
This is a tricky one, because it’s in this single sentence that Paul is trying to change the entire world view of his Jewish convert readers. They would have believed from birth that “righteousness”—being reconciled to God, came from following the Law and offering the right sacrifices. Here Paul is saying that the gift of connection to God is just that. It’s a gift that comes by faith alone, and not by anything we can do to earn it.
It’s this theme that pushed Martin Luther into the movement that became the Reformation. So many things had been added by the church to the list of what people had to do to draw near to God. So many layers of religious stuff had been placed between the individual believer and God. When Luther read Paul’s letter to the Romans with fresh eyes, he learned that God had cleared out all of those obstructions—when Luther realized that what God wanted was for people to come to him by faith alone, it changed everything.
In the Jewish tradition tomorrow is Yom Kippur. It’s a day of solemn reflection and confession for sins against God and against other people—it’s also a day of repentance for both individual and corporate sins. The purpose of the day is to be cleansed—to be released from the guilt and shame that come from those things we do that separate us from God (not God from us, by the way).
The message of Romans, and the point that Paul is trying to communicate to his Gentile readers and Jewish converts at the same time, is that we’re not driven or controlled anymore by our guilt and shame. Because God has been faithful to his promises, we can come to him by faith alone.
But that doesn’t mean that ‘shame’ isn’t a real part of our lives.
John Bradshaw is a psychologist who specializes in dealing with the impact of shame on individuals and families. He wrote: “To have shame as an identity is to believe that one’s being is somehow flawed—that one is defective as a human being. Once shame is transformed into an identity, it becomes toxic and dehumanizing.” That’s what the Gospel is designed to transform in our lives—that feeling of being not quite fully human because of our sin and shame.
That brings us back to Paul’s bold claim: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel.” What was he saying?
Paul was making the point that he wasn’t ashamed of the gospel, because the point of the Gospel was to take away his shame. But mostly he’s saying that as strange as this story sounds, he knew that it was rooted in the history and promises and character of God himself, so there was no need to be embarrassed about it.
Paul said to the Romans: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.”
What does that mean for us? The first two things we’ve said already:
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in God’s promises and relationship with Israel.
The Gospel is available to all people.
But there’s more.
The Gospel is something we grasp through faith, not science, not blind leap, but through our struggle to trust the God who has demonstrated his trustworthiness through the Cross and Resurrection.
As we grasp the Gospel we find that it takes away the shame we carry with us in our lives. That’s part of the point. As hard as it might be for us to fully comprehend, the Gospel restores us and remakes us into the people that God made us to be in the first place. Part of that process is helping us to acknowledge our sin and ask for forgiveness. The rest of that process is like a deep cleansing that the Scriptures tell us will make us ‘whiter than snow.’
Mostly this text is a reminder that just as he did with Paul, God invites us to stop being ashamed of the gospel. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in history and available to everyone. It has the power to build community and spark reconciliation and give hope to every single person on earth.
But mostly we stop being ashamed of the Gospel when we accept the fact that the Gospel isn’t ashamed of us.
No matter what we done or said or thought or believed in the past, the gospel—the good news that Jesus Christ has come and lived and served and died and rose again—that Gospel takes us where we are, it cleanses us and restores us, and in the end it makes all things new.
When Yom Kippur was celebrated in the ancient world, it was the only day of the year when the high priest would enter the ‘Holy of Holies,’ the most important room in the Temple at Jerusalem. The gift of the gospel—the reason we’re all here today—is that through Jesus Christ we can approach God wherever we are and whenever we want. The call on us to come in faith, to trust in God’s promises, and to share that message with a hungry world.
That desire to share the message of the Gospel is what’s behind our closing hymn today. When Charles Wesley would have one of those moments where he realized the depth of God’s love for him, he would wish for a thousand voices to offer his love and praises to God.
Let’s stand together and ask for the same thing: “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”
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