The Crucified Christ Alone!

[Below, you'll find live stream video of both of today's worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, and the text of the message shared during the services. Jesus Christ is all we need! Have a good week.]





1 Corinthians 1:18-31

This morning, I begin with a confession: I have sinned against God and others and violated my ordination vows, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

My sin started innocently enough. I looked at “seeker-sensitive” churches drawing huge numbers of people and commandeered their “secret sauce.” Its foremost ingredient was the preaching of its pastors.

The preachers who drew the crowds, whether they were ultraliberal, ultraconservative, or evangelical/Calvinist, focused on ethics, personal happiness, and how to get ahead in life. They preached messages people called “relevant.”

Some of them told people to be justice-seekers or peace-makers. They preached on passages of Scripture like our first lesson for today, Micah 6:1-8, and gave people step-by-step procedures to being peace-makers and justice-seekers.

Others looked at passages like our Gospel lesson, Matthew 5:1-12, and produce sermon series about nine things people could do to get God’s blessings. I heard one of these preachers give his formula for sermon creation: (1) Tell them what you want them to know; (2) Tell them what you want them to do.

God forgive me, folks, there was a time when I bought into this nonsense.

Only later did I realize that this formula was unchristian. “Do this and you’ll be right with God and others,” was my unspoken and false message.

I preached “sermons” on topics like How to Divorce-Proof Your Marriage, Eight Steps to Success, Raising Faithful Children, How to Foster Friendships. My sermon titles sounded like how-to books by motivational speakers.

But the crucified and risen Jesus was getting pushed to the side.

There are big problems with this approach.

One is that almost everyone would agree about how we’re supposed to live our lives; yet none of us does live fully as we’re supposed to live. How-to preaching will lead us either to despair over our failure to live up to religious dos and don'ts or to pride in how well we think we’re doing.

A second problem with this approach is that it causes people to take confidence in the works they do rather than in the God we know in Jesus Christ. Jesus says, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” (John 6:29) Our justification in the eyes of God and our hope for this life and the next have nothing to do with the things we do. Our hope is in Jesus Christ alone!

I never completely abandoned proclaiming or teaching the truth of Christ’s Gospel. But the Word of God is an all-or-nothing proposition for Christ and His Church. I was effectively preaching a “Christ and these how-to lists” message, as if Jesus Christ wasn’t enough of a Savior.

I was beginning to realize how much I needed to repent when a crisis developed in the Lutheran denominational body of which I was (and many of you were) formerly a part. That denomination was, in its way, turning away from the Word of God, including both the Law that condemns our sin and the Gospel about Jesus that sets us free from condemnation. I was appalled by what was happening.

But as I read God’s Word and prayed, I realized that I was part of the problem.

In the quest for “relevance” and crowds (which never materialized, by the way), I was making the people who heard my weekly versions of “what do I want them to know and what do I want them to do” sermons susceptible to false gospels that tell people to rely on their works, their thoughts, or their emotions rather than on Jesus Christ only! I repented before God and told Ann that I never wanted to preach another “cute” or worldly sermon for as long as I lived.

In today’s second lesson, the apostle Paul says, “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified…” (1 Corinthians 1:22-23)

What Paul is saying is that people in the world have things they demand from the Church in order for them to consider the Christian message “relevant” to their lives. In Paul’s day, his fellow Jews demanded miraculous signs before they would listen to the Church. And the Greeks, a term Paul here uses for non-Jews, Gentiles, demanded the Church be a dispenser of wisdom. Above all, the world of Paul’s time (and our own), wants the Church to tell it exactly what it wants to hear. “Tell us we’re right on our politics, our view of what’s true and what’s not, our take on personal morality, then we might pay attention to you.” But Paul says the Church and Christians must refuse to be “relevant” dispensers of how-to worldly wisdom. “We preach Christ crucified!”

When we hear or when we proclaim the message of Christ crucified, there are two things God reveals.

First, we see the depths of our sin and the deadly consequences of them. In the eyes of the holy, righteous God of the universe, the One Who made us, every sin we commit, whether in thought, word, or action, is a capital offense, making us worthy of death. A single lie, one misuse of God’s name, a solitary fantasy of sexual immorality, a passing word of gossip: These, along with sins like idolatry, greed, murder, or the refusal to honor those in authority, warrant the same punishment from God: death, eternal separation from God, everlasting condemnation in hell. We know all of this is true because on the cross, we see Jesus, God the Son, perfect in His sinlessness, dying for our sin. Christ crucified shows us that sin–our sin–is fatal and that, unless something is done for us, Jesus’ prayer from the cross, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” will be our constant cry from hell.

Second, in Christ crucified, we see what God has done to spare us the consequences of our sin. On the cross, Jesus does what we cannot do for ourselves: He offers Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. He takes the punishment we deserve. He does everything needed to make us right with God. We are born sinners with no right to live. But the God unwilling to easily part with us because of His love for us has gone to the cross for us. As Paul writes elsewhere: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

He goes on: “Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while 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! Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” (Romans 5:9-11) Dear friends in Christ, you are deeply loved by God. Christ crucified brings this love to you. Christ crucified and risen reconciles you to God now and forever!

Our call is simple then: To turn from our sin and turn to Christ.

So, what about passages like Micah 6?

Or Jesus’ Beatitudes in Matthew 5?

Aren’t these blueprints for our salvation, behaviors we can adopt that will make us acceptable to God and give us the good life.

No, that’s not what they are at all!

If you and I were capable of adopting them, capable of loving God and loving neighbor, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to go to the cross. But like Paul, we are bound to confess, “I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out…” (Romans 7:18)

God’s Law is meant to cause us to see that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves and assure us that we can turn to Jesus, the One Who sets us free from our bondage and then takes up residence in our lives so that, as we trust in Him, the goodness, love, and obedience to God that is foreign to our natures, begins to be manifest.

Jesus Christ sets us free from our sin and self-absorption and lives in those who are baptized in His name and who trust in Him!

The Christian can say with Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

The world doesn’t need wowing signs or worldly wisdom. Neither do we.

All we need is Jesus Who died and rose again.

Jesus doesn’t promise to make us popular or powerful.

He doesn’t promise to give us health or wealth in this world.

He doesn’t promise us that He’ll cause this life or this world to make sense.

He promises us forgiveness of sin, new and everlasting life with God, and the assurance that He is always with us.

No matter what a confused and dying world (or we ourselves sometimes) may think, the crucified and risen Jesus Christ–and Jesus Christ alone–is all we need.

You can trust in Him!

Amen

How Christian Are Our Churches?

Earlier today, my son Philip, observed on his Facebook account:

What we should truly find disconcerting in the church is that so many of us are cultural Christians. We are partisans to ideologies, political beliefs, or even advertisements. We remove Scripture from the Gospel and wrap it around our ideology of church, then declare, "Here I stand upon this idol that will fall."

What insightful and disturbing thoughts about American cultural religion served up with a veneer of Christian religiosity!

I responded: 

That says it all, Phil!

That's why the Lutheran movement has so much to offer to the whole Christian family and to a world in need of Christ.

The world needs the five "solas," the five alones:

• By Scripture alone!
• By faith alone!
• By grace alone!
• By Christ alone!
• To the glory of God alone!

Luther said, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God”

The one true, living, life-giving God is the only one revealed in Christ, Who inspired the only book from God, the Bible, Who saves people from sin and death not by their works or ideologies, but ony as an act of His charitable grace extended on His initiative and not any human beings', only to those who open themselves to the creation of faith in Jesus Christ within them!

"There is salvation in no one [and nothing] else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).

All other ground--ideologies, patriotism, family, sexual identity, ethnic identity, racial identity, money, prominence, the world's affirmation--is sinking sand. When we put our trust in the world's godlets, including ourselves, we die. When we put our trust in the God made plain to all in Christ, we live, now and in eternity.

Only Christ can make a person right with the One Who made us all.

Only Christ can set us free to be the people we were made to be by God.

Only Christ can set us free from the godlets that lie to us about where peace and hope are found, and set us free to live as children of God.

It's a sin that both in churches that call themselves liberal and those that call themselves conservative, they worship idol versions of God, versions in which the God they claim to follow is made in their image. He likes their politics. He likes their political parties. He likes their political policy preferences. He's even in accord with their preferences on how items in the federal budget ought to be expended. (We see this all the time in the ELCA, which is moving away from Christ by steady, alarming increments every day, it seems.)

I'm not part of a conservative Church or a liberal Church. I'm part of Christ's Church, one body that exists wherever Christ's Gospel is rightly proclaimed and His Sacraments are rightly administered.

Christ will not be pushed into the boxes we like. His task is not to let Him be a milquetoast we make over in our image, but to make us over in His image all those who dare to surrender to Him and dare to have their old selves killed so that their new selves can rise in the process of daily repentance and renewal in Christ's Name.

When we believe in Jesus, we submit to a kind of violent revolution that goes on in our lives--our minds, our wills, our emotions--every day. We give the inventor the right to retool us to function as we were made to function. We give the author the right to rewrite all the dreadful chapters we've come up with on our own. We let God restore us to our right minds, no longer functioning as zombies in a death march in which the tune is played by the gods that, first, we choose, and then call their tune to their devotees, robbing them of any real meaning for their lives, and then leave them writhing in eternal separation from God.

The Church needs to be about living for and pointing the world to Christ as our only hope.

If the Church cannot speak with clarity about the only Source for life and hope--Jesus Christ--the world is in trouble. And the failure of the body of Christ to live for Christ alone is an abomination, damnable. May God have mercy on us!

Great thoughts, Philip!

What's Wrong with Reading the Horoscope?

Julie started reading the daily horoscope a few months ago. She thought it was interesting that on some days, the guidance she found there seemed exactly relevant to her situation. She didn't really believe in it, mind you.

At least, she didn't believe in it at first. But as the days wore on and Julie continued to read her daily horoscope, she found that while she still didn't really believe in what she read, she still told friends, "It's amazing how often it seems to be true." Julie had become a horoscope "evangelist."

Julie also started wearing clothing using the horoscope's colors of the day. If the horoscope said that thirteen was her number for the day, she would order a baker's dozen of goodies at the pastry shop on her way to work.

The thing is that Julie is a Christian. She should know better. We all should know better.

In my daily devotional reading this morning, a passage from 1 Chronicles came up; it contains the Bible's epitaph for Israel's first king, Saul, a man who started out strong in faith, but who in his impatience, had come to depend not on God, but on himself....and other things. The passage says:

So Saul died for his unfaithfulness; he was unfaithful to the Lord in that he did not keep the command of the Lord; moreover, he had consulted a medium, seeking guidance, and did not seek guidance from the Lord...(1 Chronicles 10:13-14)

There's nothing innocent or harmless about reading horoscopes, messing with Ouija boards, playing with Tarot cards, or going to a spiritual "advisor" who claims to know your future.

As much as you tell yourself and others that you don't really believe in that stuff, consulting them will inevitably diminish your dependence on God for guidance and "daily bread." You will, as mentioned in last Sunday's sermon, "hedge your bets" when it comes to trusting wholly in the God revealed to all the world in Jesus Christ.

Martin Luther, pointing to Jesus as God in flesh, was fond of saying that any time our faith, the things in which we trust, can be termed as "Christ-and-somehing else," we have fallen out of relationship with Christ. Christ will not share His throne or His eminence with anyone or anything. Not horoscopes. Not Ouija boards. Nor, for that matter, with the wisdom of the world, your country, your political party, your life philosophy, piety, or good religious works.

Christ is the way and the truth and the life. Christ alone.

If I had the chance, I would tell Julie to throw out the horoscopes and simply pray, "Today, Lord, your will be done in my life."

UPDATE: I just found this prayer while re-reading Prayer Power Unlimited: Achieving Intimacy with God Through Prayer by J. Oswald Sanders. It's a prayer composed by Erasmus:

O Lord Jesus Christ, who hast said that Thou art the way, the truth, and the life; suffer us not at any time to stray from Thee, who art the way; nor to distrust the promises, who art the truth; nor to rest in any other thing but Thee, who art life; beyond which there is nothing to be desired, neither in heaven nor on earth; for Thy Name's sake.