[This is the second message in a series I'm doing on words that are only used or are used uniquely by Christians. It was given during the worship celebration at Friendship Lutheran Church, Amelia, Ohio earlier today.]
Genesis 15:1-6
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 16:4-14
A daredevil wanted to use a motorcycle to jump over a portion of the Grand Canyon. The place where he wanted to do this was so wide and the canyon below so deep that nobody--not even Evel Knievel--had ever tried jumping it before.
When he went to his engineer and mechanic, they both said it was a looney idea.
When he approached his usual financial backers and insurance company, they said that if he tried something so stupid, he’d be on his own.
His wife and kids were totally against it.
The TV networks, in spite of their apparent love of death and mayhem, wouldn’t pay to cover what they said was his certain death.
Even his pastor called him up and said, “Don’t do this!”
But the daredevil was intent on following through. He scraped together most of the money he’d earned from previous stunts and personally outfitted a bike for the jump.
The day for the jump came. The daredevil revved his engine, tore down the runway, hit the ramp at more than 200-mph, and began soaring through the void above the canyon. Everything went well until he got about halfway across. That’s when gravity took over. The daredevil plunged to his death.
God met him near the gates of heaven. The daredevil was steaming. “How could you have let this happen to me, Lord? My wife is now a widow who’ll be forced to raise our kids without me!” “Don’t I know it!” God said. “That’s why I sent the engineer, the mechanic, your financial backers, the insurance company, your wife, your kids, the network execs, and your pastor all with the word to not jump. But you wouldn’t listen to Me!”
Last week, in the first installment of this series on Funny Church Words, we talked about grace. Grace is God’s undeserved, unearned gifts of forgiveness and new life which become ours when we turn from sin--repent--and receive Jesus Christ as our Lord and our Savior.
But there’s something that gets in the way of our receiving God’s grace. We can be a lot like that daredevil. God may offer us grace repeatedly. But we can refuse His offers. Those who refuse the grace offered to all people through Jesus Christ are daredevils who inevitably plunge to their eternal deaths.
But why do people refuse God’s grace offered in Christ? God’s forgiveness, presence, and guidance in this life and the promise of everlasting life with God are such good things, why would anybody ever turn Christ down?
The Bible teaches that our sin causes us to refuse God.
The Bible has two main ways of picturing sin.
To understand the first way, imagine yourself in a carnival hall of mirrors. The distorted shapes and angles of the mirrors result in distorted reflections of your image. That’s largely how the Old Testament speaks of sin. It’s a distortion of our true selves. As you know, Genesis teaches that human beings were created in God’s image. But sin distorts us and how we look at the world.
To understand a second major way in which the Bible portrays sin, picture yourself standing before a target, bow and arrow in hand. Then, see yourself pulling the arrow back, taking aim, and firing. And missing. And firing again. And missing again. This is how the New Testament usually pictures sin. Deep down, each of us has a common target. We want to live our lives as fully human beings, in sync with God and His will. But the target is always elusive, always beyond our ability to hit.
Writing in the New Testament, the apostle Paul says, “I do not understand what I do; for I don’t do [the right] I would like to do, but instead I do what I hate.” If we’re honest, we may feel this same sort of frustration with ourselves and our actions. But it’s really no mystery. We actually inherit our sinfulness from our parents. As Israel’s King David wrote in Psalm 51: “In sin did my mother conceive me.”
Sin, then, is an inborn condition which we can’t overcome on our own. As one of the most venerated Christian confessions puts it, “We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”
Think of our motorcycle daredevil again. He didn’t refuse God’s rescue attempts because he was exercising a free will. He refused God's will because his will was imprisoned to his inborn sinfulness. Sin distorted his judgment, made him selfish and egotistical.*
You and I are likely to refuse God’s grace because we won't allow Jesus Christ to clear our heads and set us free to make wise decisions about this life and the one to come.
When your will is distorted by sin, grace seems too good to be true. But God has a strategy for overcoming the reign of sin over our lives. He always has! We see it in today’s Bible lesson. It recounts an incident from the life of Abram, later to be renamed Abraham by God. He lived some two-thousand years before the birth of Jesus. We know Abraham as the father of God’s chosen people, the Jews. But when we meet him in today's lesson, Abram is nobody's father!
Our lesson finds him, a man aged 99, in despair. God had promised him and his now-89 year old wife a son. But twenty-fours have passed since that promise was made. They’d traveled many miles, going to uncertain destinations, uprooted by God’s promise. But, as Abram despairs, God renews His promise. He takes Abraham out into the desert night and says, “Look at the sky...try to count the stars; you’ll have as many descendants as that.”
Then, the Bible tells us that Abraham did something very strange. He believed in God and in God’s promises. The Bible tells us that God looked at Abraham’s faith and counted Abraham’s trust in God as righteousness.
The antidote to Abraham’s sin was his faith, his trust, in God. Today, that same antidote is available to all who believe in God-in-the-flesh, Jesus Christ. God calls us to believe that our sin cannot destroy us because we trust that when Jesus died and rose two-thousand years ago, He crushed sin’s power over us for all eternity.
In our second lesson for today, Paul says that the message that Jesus’ death by crucifixion saves us from sin and death is, “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
Faith in God is easier for us than it was for Abraham. To uphold his faith, all Abraham had were some stars in the sky and a promise. You and I can point to Jesus on a cross and to His empty tomb. Those are accomplished facts which incited otherwise practical, down-to-earth people like Peter and Thomas to stake their lives on their faith in Christ.
Of course, we’ve never seen Jesus face to face. That can make it hard even for us to have faith sometimes.
But God overcomes that difficulty. A number of years ago, Ann and I attended the funeral of one of her childhood friends, a high school classmate of ours. He died after learning he had a brain tumor just two months before. As we sat in the same sanctuary where Ann and I were married, where Philip was baptized, and I was ordained, the thought crossed my mind, “This is where the rubber hits the road. This is where the promises of God are true or they aren't.”
Then I asked myself, “How can I know that God has conquered sin and death for me and for all who believe?”
Soon, I heard God’s Word read. It sounded like a love letter from God. I listened to and drew hope from the message by the pastor. I received Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine of the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Something happened to me: God filled me again with faith. God reminded me again that He’s here and that we can trust in Him. God used His Word, His Church, and the Sacraments to remind me of His presence, His promises, and His faithfulness!
Faith isn’t something that we convince ourselves about.
Faith isn’t an intellectual thing, although it should engage our minds.
It isn’t an emotional thing, although our hearts will be touched by it.
Faith is rooted in the empirical realities of Christ’s death and resurrection and in our willingness to believe.
In the end, faith is completely a construction of God, a tower of hope and strength that God builds when we allow Him to do it.
If we want faith, God will give us faith.
That’s really the point of some the letters of Mother Teresa that we’ve been hearing so much about this week. She saw and dealt with the worst in life and struggled to believe. But she laid it all at God’s feet and allowed Him to help her keep trustingly serving God and her neighbor. Sometimes a Christian’s faith is, as Jesus said, only as large as a mustard seed. But that’s all the faith we need. Little faith in a big God can still move the greatest mountain. Look at what Mother Teresa did for God and for the dying on the streets of India when she put her small faith into action!
In The Small Catechism, Martin Luther writes: “I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, and sanctified [that is, made me holy] and kept me in true faith.”
In our last lesson today, Jesus says, “When the [Holy] Spirit...comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” There's an old saying that tells us, "If you feel distant from God, guess who moved?" When we allow ourselves to get close enough to Jesus, the Holy Spirit will create and deepen faith within us.
Sin imprisons us.
Faith in Christ sets us free.
Give God the go-ahead and He will fill you with just the faith you need for today and for all eternity!
Next week, our funny church word will be discipleship.
*It might just as well have caused him to think himself completely unworthy because whether we think of ourselves as gods or as nobodies, the culprit is the distorion of our natures caused by sin.
No comments:
Post a Comment