”The law says, 'Do this,' and it is never done. Grace says, 'Believe in this,' and everything is already done.”
With these words, Martin Luther describes the two ways in which God speaks and interacts with us.
First, God speaks His Law to condemn us in our sin.
God’s Law shows us that we are sinners who merit eternal condemnation for our sinful natures and sinful actions.
God’s Word says of us, “They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” (Romans 1:29-32)
Of course, we all know God’s Law. We’re to love God and neighbor, worship God alone, love God’s Word, do and think only good things about our parents, presidents, and neighbors, and build others up, not tear them down. We do know God’s Law, His will for us.
But people like us and everyone else who has ever walked on this planet–except for one–could be taught God’s Law continuously from dawn to dusk every single day of our lives and still not do God’s Law. In His Law, God says, “Do this” and because of who we are, it never gets done. And that’s a problem because, as the apostle Paul reminds us in God’s Word, “...wrongdoers [literally, he says here, “unrighteous ones”] will not inherit the kingdom of God…” (1 Corinthians 6:9)
To be righteous means to keep God’s Law perfectly. And righteousness is the baseline requirement for having life with God, now and in eternity. Yet, when God tells us to obey His righteous Law, it never gets done.
What are we to do? That was a question that occupied a man named Nicodemus a lot. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. The Pharisees lived under the misplaced confidence that they (and we) could behave righteously, do God’s Law, and so deserve life with God, life beyond the grave.
Part of the Pharisees’ misplaced confidence resided in how they twisted God’s Law. Jesus once condemned them, for example, for teaching that people could get around God’s command to honor their parents by telling their parents that whatever money they would otherwise spend on their parents, they would instead spend on God. No wonder Jesus told the Pharisees, “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” (Mark 7:8-13) The Pharisees, including Nicodemus, grew up believing that righteousness was about what human beings do. But they also gave themselves little escape clauses, humanly-created fine print to God’s Law meant to cover and deny the stench of human sin with the perfume of fake obedience.
When a Pharisee asked about God’s Law, “What are we to do?” they were really asking, “What is the bare minimum we can get away with doing and still be considered righteous?” When they hit the low threshold of their own preferred version of righteousness, they let all the world know how good they were!
Nicodemus, with his confidence in his own righteous capacity to obey God’s Law was, in some ways, no closer to God than the modern-day atheist who thinks he can be a good person. Anyone who thinks they can rise above their sinful nature or if they’re inclined to believe in God, make themselves acceptable to heaven, is deluding themselves. I believe this was just beginning to dawn on Nicodemus when he visited Jesus that night. He’d been living in darkness. In Jesus, he began to see a sliver of the One the Bible calls, “The true light that gives light to everyone…” (John 1:9) Because of Jesus, Nicodemus was starting to see that the Law hadn’t and never could make him righteous.
And so, this member of the Sanhedrin goes to see Jesus. But soon, the teacher of the Law becomes the student of the One he already calls rabbi. Jesus tells Nicodemus, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” (John 3:3) Now, Nicodemus should have heard these words of Jesus as the second of the two ways God speaks and interacts with us. Nicodemus should have heard that God saves us from sin, death, and darkness not by the things we do, but by what God does for us. Here, Jesus is telling Nicodemus, “There is a way to righteousness–to acceptability to God–that has nothing to do with rules or laws.” It’s about being born again–or born from above. The image of birth itself which Jesus uses should tell Nicodemus that being ‘born again” has nothing to do with what we do or what we decide.
Being right with God is nothing like what a high school classmate of mine described to decades ago when she told, “I decided to be born again.” Now, that's a silly statement on the face of it when you consider it!
When we are born is not a decision made by children when they are born. We are born when we are born.
Just so, we are born again when God’s Word comes to claim us and it’s only by the power of that Word that we come to saving faith in Jesus Christ.
Nicodemus hears Jesus’ words and wonders what he can do, what he must do, to be born again, as though he could be both the baby and the obstetrician at his rebirth.
Nicodemus wants Jesus to give him a guidebook so that he can get busy obeying a new law. “How can someone be born when they are old?” he asks. (John 3:4) Jesus clarifies matters for Nicodemus.
Referencing Baptism, the Christian sacrament that infants and children have undoubtedly undergone since the first Christian Pentecost ten days after the crucified and risen Jesus ascended into heaven, Jesus says, “...no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” (John 3:5)
Our lives with Christ are meant to be initiated in Baptism. That’s what’s what will happen to Sofia and Leo today and will happen to Alina in less than two weeks.
But even if, as sometimes happens, because our God is a big God out to free all of us from the condemnation of sin and death, God’s grace comes to us before we’re baptized, we’re still not saved by what we do or what we decide. Our salvation is still not our doing!
We apprehend Christ’s victory over sin and death for us by faith. And even our faith is His gift to us! It’s all God’s work.
As Paul tells us in Ephesians: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8)
Our call from day to day is to turn in trust away from our sin, including our sinful reliance on our own goodness or good deeds, and turn to Christ Who died and rose to shield us in His righteousness. Jesus’ words to Nicodemus are His words to you again today: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:16-17)
“The law says, 'Do this,' and it is never done. Grace says, 'Believe in this,' and everything is already done.”
God’s Law condemns us.
But God’s Gospel saves us.
Friends, you can trust in what Christ has already done for you to make you righteous, fit for life with God, now and forever. Amen
[Below are pictures from today's Baptisms at Living Water.]
On this Holy Trinity Sunday, a message, appropriately and only coincidentally, with three points.
Scholars speculate about what motives the Jewish teacher Nicodemus might have had for visiting Jesus under cover of darkness one night.
Was he trying to avoid bloodshed?
Was he beginning to believe in Jesus?
We don’t know for sure.
But, whatever his motives, I do think that Nicodemus felt that he was conferring a privilege on Jesus by visiting Him. After all, Nicodemus was a respected scholar, a renowned ruler of his faith. (In the original Greek in which John wrote his gospel, Nicodemus is referred to as the teacher of the Jews.)
But, when Nicodemus comes to converse with Jesus, the carpenter’s son from Nazareth delivers essentially the same message that He’s been delivering to all who hang on His every word. “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again,” Jesus says. “There are no privileged characters in the kingdom of God,” Jesus was telling Nicodemus. Or to put it another way, "Everyoneis a privileged character in the kingdom of God, all equally so."
So, the first point of today’s message: We all need the new life God gives through Jesus. Every single person is a sinner. And every Christian is a sinner given a new life by God. Whatever our status in the eyes of the world, we need to be born again. We need to be created all over again.
This message from Jesus had to have been jarring, maybe even a bit insulting, for Nicodemus. Jesus seemed to be telling him that he wasn’t such a privileged character, after all. Even he needed to exchange his old life of sin and selfishness and presumption, to embrace one simple title, the one that every Christian receives from God above in the waters of Holy Baptism: Child of God.
Nicodemus, this prominent, powerful teacher and ruler of the Jews, may not have been sure that he wanted to become a child of God, at least not on Jesus’ terms of unconditional surrender to Jesus. He may have been content, as all of us can be after we've gotten to a certain age, with being a grown-up who got to do whatever he wanted.
And Nicodemus couldn’t have been too keen on the notion that he, just like all the other sinners Jesus interacted with each day, needed to get a new life.
More than anything, probably, Nicodemus didn’t want to accept God’s new life as a free gift. It's human nature to try to attain things by our own efforts or even thievery rather than being humbled by having to accept a gift we didn't get by our own devices, brawn, brains, or shrewdness. It goes against our grain. We’d like to think that we deserve the riches of heaven, as well as the accolades of others.
But that's not the way it works in the Kingdom of God that Jesus came to bring to us through His death and resurrection! “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)
The kingdom of God that belongs not to those who earn it or deserve it, but to all with faith in Jesus!
Steve Taylor, a Christian rock singer, with a satirical wit, says, “Jesus is for losers.” And he’s right! Jesus belongs to those willing to lose control over their lives and lose their sin and lose death.
“Very truly I tell you,” Jesus tells Nicodemus, “no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”
Every time a person is baptized, whatever their age, born from above, and every time a person renews their faith through daily confession of sin and profession of faith in Jesus’ name, the Holy Trinity is at work to give them new life:
God the Father sends the Son.
The Son offers the benefits of His death and resurrection on the believer.
God the Holy Spirit preaches the Word about Jesus to us through the Bible, the Sacraments, fellow believers, and even preachers so that we can grasp the gifts of forgiveness and salvation God offers us for free.
This is all God’s doing, not ours.
So, point two: We can take no credit for the new and everlasting life that comes from God. We can’t take credit for our faith. It’s pure gift.
When, at the initiative of the Father, through the action of Jesus on the cross and at the tomb, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we believe and believe, again and again, God gives us new birth, new life.
This is part of what Jesus is getting at in the Bible’s most famous verse, which appears in our Gospel lesson, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
That word that we translate as believes can be more literally rendered as is believing. The tense in the Greek is more complicated than our present tense in English. It denotes continuous action. Belief isn't static but keeps being renewed.
The idea is that the believer is trusting God, not just because she or he was baptized or confirmed or had a warm. fuzzy feeling back in the day, but because they’re actively trusting Jesus Christ today, in this moment. Jesus is their Lord now and they are trusting Jesus moment to moment. They keep surrendering to Jesus every day and they know that they have to keep surrendering to Him, lest the devil, the world, or their sinful selves take control of their minds, hearts, and lives.
Of course, because new and renewing life from God is a gift over which we have no control, we can’t decide to be born again. But we can, like a child about to be born who has no control over the contractions that will happen in labor, respond to the promptings that position us to be born anew.
We can put down our dukes and let the Holy Spirit have His way with us.
We can let God love us.
We can bow to the authority of God’s Word as expressed by Jesus and the Ten Commandments and surrender our thoughts and actions and work and play and bodies and mouths and past, present, and future to Jesus Christ.
This leads to point three: We need to keep being born from above.
Some days, in times of Scripture reading and prayer, I come close to God and see the blazing light of God’s purity and I see my darkness.
I see my sin and I see His grace.
I see His power and see my weakness.
I can hardly believe that God, the maker of the universe, bothers with me, loves me, and gives me new life.
And often, in light of all this, I say, “Thank You, God, for not striking me dead as I deserve. It’s the judgment my sin has earned me. Thank You for the gift of life with You forever!”
The God we know in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit is truly the only One deserving of the adjective, awesome!
Three points then about the Three-in-One God on this Holy Trinity Sunday.
Point one: There are no privileged characters and everyone is a privileged character in the kingdom of God. We all need the new life God the Father gives through Jesus, God the Son.
Point two: We can take no credit for the new and everlasting life that comes from God the Holy Spirit. It is pure gift.
Point three: We need to keep being born above, letting the Savior Who put religious teachers in their places and Who accepted even prostitutes and extortionists, put us in our places in His kingdom.
We need to let Him accept us and make us His forever.
Let God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--give you new life every single day and in eternity. Trust in Him. Amen!
It was a Friday afternoon in the middle of the summer nearly thirty years ago. I was then the pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran Church near Okolona, Ohio. I was looking forward to going home, getting a bite to eat, and then doing some hospital visits before returning home to finish getting ready for Sunday morning.
The church telephone rang. “Hello,” the voice at the other end of the line said. “Is this the pastor?” After I told the enthusiastic-sounding man that I was, he began, “You don’t know me. But, my name is Joe Smith [not his real name]. I used to go to that church when I was a little boy and my ancestors were among the founding members there.” “I see,” I said, wondering what this guy had up his sleeve.
Joe Smith spoke these words as though he was announcing that Bethlehem and I had won the lottery! Just imagine it, he seemed to be saying, of all the churches and pastors in the world, you are the ones privileged to have our wedding.
When I explained to Joe that that wouldn’t be possible and that I didn’t know of any responsible pastor who would perform their wedding on such short notice, he was shocked. He, after all, was Joe Smith, descendant of a founding family of the parish!
He seemed to feel that he was conferring a privilege on the congregation and me because he had, at the last moment, picked us for his wedding day. He appeared to have no appreciation for the fact that a Christian marriage isn’t primarily about the couple or traditions or family ties or the places the marriage ceremony or the reception happens, but about God and the gift God gives to a man and a woman who marry.*
In today’s Gospel lesson, a man named Nicodemus visits Jesus. I think that Nicodemus felt that he was conferring a privilege on Jesus by visiting Him. After all, Nicodemus was a respected teacher of the Jews, a renowned ruler of his faith. (In the original Greek in which John wrote his gospel, Nicodemus is referred to as the teacher of the Jews.)
Nicodemus truly did enjoy the sort of high status among religious folks that Joe Smith thought he could expect from the pastor and people of Bethlehem Lutheran Church at Okolona, Ohio when he called me on that summer Friday afternoon.
But, when Nicodemus comes to converse with Jesus, amazingly seeming to treat Jesus as his equal, the carpenter’s son from Nazareth delivers essentially the same message that He’s been delivering to all who hang on His every word.
“Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again,” Jesus says.
The word translated from the original Greek here as again can also be translated as from above. Because of the richness of the word, I think that Jesus has both meanings in mind: “You must be born again. You must be born from above.”
“There are no privileged characters in the kingdom of God,” Jesus was saying. Or to put it another way, "Everyone is a privileged character in the kingdom of God, all equally so."
So, first point of this message: We all need the new life God gives through Jesus. Every single person is a sinner. And every Christian is a sinner given a new life by God.
This message from Jesus had to have been jarring, maybe even a bit insulting, for Nicodemus.
Jesus seemed to be telling him that he wasn’t such a privileged character, after all. Even he needed to exchange his old life of sin and selfishness and presumption, to embrace one simple title, the one that every Christian receives from God above in the waters of Holy Baptism: Child of God.
Nicodemus, this prominent, powerful teacher and ruler of the Jews, probably may not have been sure that he wanted to become a child of God.
He was probably content, as all of us can be after we've moved out of the house and started lives of our own, with being a grown-up who got to do whatever he wanted.
And he couldn’t have been too keen on the notion that he, just like all the other sinners Jesus interacted with each day, needed to get a new life.
More than anything, probably, Nicodemus didn’t want to accept God’s new life as a free gift. Years ago, when our son was about ten years old, we'd just had a worship service at the church in Cincinnati. There had been about forty people there. On the way home, Philip and I passed several restaurants whose parking lots were packed. "That's the problem, Dad," he said. "The restaurants are selling every thing and you're giving it away."
Fact is, it's human nature to try to attain things by our own efforts or even thievery rather than be humbled at having to accept a gift we didn't get by our own devices, brawn, brains, or shrewdness.
It goes against the grain for all of us. We’d like to think that we deserve the riches of heaven, as well as the accolades of others.
Back in our Bethlehem days, we had a five-week Bible and Catechism school for the eighty-five young people in the third through eighth grades. It was part of their Catechism training, which included weekly school-year Catechism classes for the sixth through eighth graders. We had the kids for chunks of whole days. So, we would have break period when we played kickball, softball, and other games.
Once, I divided the kids into teams. I set up tournament brackets. But in this tournament, the losers advanced to the next games. The two losingest teams were the last ones playing. (I didn’t do this because I thought it would crush the kids’ spirits to lose, but to make a point.)
One kid, who later played college football was frustrated by this system. "How will we know who the winner is?" he asked. "We won't," I told him. "Oh."
Under this topsy turvy bracketology, the losers wore the crown, the unworthy ones were the champions, and the kids who couldn’t run, jump, throw, or keep up with others were the winners, the ones who didn't earn the laurels got them.
Just like the kingdom of God that belongs not to those who earn it or deserve it, but to all with faith in Jesus!
Steve Taylor, a Christian rock singer, with a satirical wit, says, “Jesus is for losers.”
And he’s right. Jesus belongs to those willing to lose control over their lives and lose their sin and lose death.
If you’re like Joe Smith or Nicodemus, certain that God is privileged to have you on His team, certain that you’ve got a handle on righteousness, there’s no place for you in the kingdom of God.
And if you are part of Christ’s eternal Church, you know that you can’t take credit for it at all. It really is a gift!
“Very truly I tell you,” Jesus tells Nicodemus, “no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”
Every time a person is baptized, whatever their age, born from above, and every time a person renews their faith through daily confession of sin and profession of faith in Jesus’ name, the Holy Trinity is at work to give them new life.
God the Father sends the Son.
The Son offers the benefits of His death and resurrection on the believer.
God the Holy Spirit preaches the Word about Jesus to us through the Bible, fellow believers, and even preachers so that we can grasp the gifts of forgiveness and salvation God offers us for free. This is all God’s doing.
So, point two: We can take no credit for the new and everlasting life that comes from God. We can’t take credit for our faith. It’s pure gift.
When, at the initiative of the Father, through the action of Jesus on the cross and at the tomb, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we believe and believe again, God gives us new birth, new life.
This is part of what Jesus is getting at in the Bible’s most famous verse, which appears in our Gospel lesson, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
That word that we translate as believes can be more literally rendered as, is believing. The tense in the Greek is more complicated than our present tense in English. It denotes continuous action. Belief isn't static, but keeps being renewed.
The idea is that the believer is trusting God, not just because she or he was baptized or confirmed or had a warm. fuzzy feeling back in the day, but because they’re actively trusting Jesus Christ today, in this moment.
Jesus is their Lord now and they are trusting Jesus moment to moment.
They keep surrendering to Jesus every day and they know that they have to keep surrendering to Him, lest the devil, the world, or their sinful selves take control of their minds, hearts, and lives.
Of course, because new and renewing life from God is a gift over which we have no control, we can’t decide to be born again.
But we can, like a child about to be born who has no control over the contractions that will happen in labor, respond to the promptings that position us to be born anew.
We can put down our dukes and let the Holy Spirit have His way with us.
We can let God love us.
We can bow to the authority of God’s Word as expressed by Jesus and the Ten Commandments and surrender our thoughts and actions and work and play and bodies and mouths and past, present, and future to Jesus Christ.
Point three: We need to keep being born from above.
Some days, in times of Scripture reading and prayer, I come close to God and see the blazing light of God’s purity and I see my darkness.
I see my sin and I see His grace.
I see His power and see my weakness.
I can hardly believe that God, the maker of the universe, bothers with me, loves me, and gives me new life.
And often, in light of all this, I say, “Thank You, God, for not striking me dead as I deserve. It’s the judgment my sin has earned me. Thank You for the gift of life with You forever!”
The God we know in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit is truly the only One deserving of the adjective, awesome!
Three points about the Three-in-One God on this Holy Trinity Sunday.
Point one: There are no privileged characters in the kingdom of God. We all need the new life God the Father gives through Jesus, God the Son.
Point two: We can take no credit for the new and everlasting life that comes from God the Holy Spirit. It is pure gift.
Point three: We need to keep being born above, letting the Savior Who put religious teachers in their places and Who accepted even prostitutes and extortionists, put us in our places in His kingdom. We need to let Him accept us and make us His forever.
Let God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--give you new life every single day and in eternity. Amen!
*It’s when one or both marital partners lose this appreciation of the giftedness of marriage, when one or both take the other for granted, that pain happens in marriages and when they are ripe for trouble, by the way. But that's another sermon.
