The Law and Gospel About Forgiveness

[Below you'll find live stream video of today's worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, as well as the text of the message for the day. Have a blessed week!]

Matthew 18:21-35

Today’s Gospel lesson unfolds before us like a play in three scenes.

The first scene takes place in a real life encounter: Peter asks Jesus a question about forgiveness and Jesus’ brief reply.

The second scene is the beginning of one of Jesus’ most famous parables; in this scene, Jesus shows us where forgiveness comes from.

The third scene shows us how forgiveness is often abused and the consequences for those who abuse it.

In the last verse of our lesson is an epilogue in which Jesus lays down the implacable Law of God that damns sinners to eternal punishment.

With that in the background, let’s consider our lesson.

On the heels of Jesus explaining the process by which those who sin against us can be restored to fellowship with Christ and the Church, Peter asks Jesus: “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” (Matthew 18:21)

I’m not sure that Peter is really asking Jesus anything here. I think that instead of actually seeking insight or information from Jesus, Peter is playing “star pupil”: “Look how liberally I’m willing to forgive those who have hurt me: up to seven times!”

But Jesus punctures Peter’s pomposity: “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (Matthew 18:22) Jesus’ words can also be translated, “seventy times seven times” and “seventy times seventy times.” However the words are rendered, the meaning is the same: “God commands that we forgive others. Period. Without condition. Without counting.”

Those who harm us or harm others may have to deal with the earthly consequences of their actions. This is why God has established governments. But we are to forgive everyone, always.

Now, this law of God–the commandment that we forgive others–is like all the rest of God’s Law: It gives a baseline requirement for anyone who wants life with God and, at the same time, it shows us that if we think we can be saved from sin and death on the basis of our perfect obedience of God’s Law, we are in trouble! We are incapable of obeying God’s Law in our own power. Who has ever heard of anyone who has walked on this earth other than Jesus who always forgave, all the time, no exceptions?

I am born into sin and that makes it impossible for me to resolve to love God or love my neighbor. I can’t resolve to perfectly obey any of God’s commands.

But if I’m incapable of forgiving as I’m required to forgive in order to have life with God, then the question arises: What’s to become of me? God commands righteousness and I’m not righteous. I can’t make myself righteous. What’s to become of me?

The second scene of our gospel lesson for today finds Jesus start the telling of a familiar parable. It’s about the interaction between a king and a man who owes his king, according to the Greek in which the New Testament was originally written, “ten thousand talents.” A talent is worth about twenty years’ worth of wages. You can do the math.

Because the man is unable to pay off the debt, the king orders that the man and his family be sold into slaves until the debt is repaid. But when the man falls at the feet of the king and begs for mercy, the king, with no hope of ever being repaid, forgives the debt–he writes it off–and releases the man and his family.

Friends, in this part of the parable, Jesus tells us what is to become of us who are incapable of forgiving as God commands us to forgive, who are incapable of obeying the Ten Commandments.

Jesus Christ takes the debt we owe for our sins and in Him, we are forgiven!

Peter would later write that Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:24)

In other words, Jesus, true God and true, sinless man, perfectly obeys all the Law of God we can’t begin to obey, then covers us in His righteous obedience.

In Jesus, our debt for sin–the sin for which we should be clapped into the prison of hell for all eternity–is forgiven.

God the Father hears Jesus’ prayer from the cross for us: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)

All who take refuge in Jesus by daily turning from sin and following Him, throwing themselves at Jesus’ feet the way the man in His parable threw himself at the feet of the king, are forgiven and so, freed from sin, death, and condemnation…and thereby have an eternal, bottomless supply of grace by which they can in turn forgive others, any time, any place.

This is why Jesus teaches us to pray, “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Martin Luther’s explanation of this fifth petition in The Small Catechism is worth remembering: “We pray in this petition that our heavenly Father would not hold our sins against us and deny our prayers because of them. We know we have not earned, nor do we deserve, those things for which we pray. But we ask that he would grant us all things through grace, even though we sin every day and deserve nothing but punishment. And so we, too, will heartily forgive, and gladly do good to those who sin against us.”

At the end of scene two of our gospel lesson for today, the man in Jesus’ parable walks away with his debts forgiven, freed to live with the same kind of forgiving grace he’d been given for anyone who may be indebted to him. It’s the same freedom Jesus gives to you when you hear words of absolution: “For Jesus’ sake, all your sins are forgiven!”

In scene three, the forgiven man walks away from the king who has forgiven him, like we walk away forgiven and made clean by Jesus at the end of worship on Sunday mornings. But you know, saints are also sinners. And we sinners tend to have long memories of the sins committed against us and short memories of our own need for forgiveness.

The forgiven man spots someone who owes him the equivalent of one-hundred days’ wages, a fraction of the huge debt he was just forgiven. He clutches the other man by the throat. “Pay me back!” he demands. When his debtor begs for mercy, just as he has begged a few moments before, the forgiven man will not forgive the debt. Then he has his debtor thrown into prison.

The king gets wind of this and calls the man to appear before him. He tells the man: “I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ [Then Jesus says] In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.” (Matthew 18:32-34)

By the standards of the Law, you and I deserve to die, everlastingly separated from God.

But Jesus has canceled our debt to God.

He saves us by grace, that is, by God’s charitable love for us.

All who repent and believe in Him are justified, made right with God, by that grace.

When we receive the gospel Word–in Jesus Christ, all your sins are forgiven, all your debts to God are gone–we are debt-free.

And when we are no longer indebted for our sin, while we will surely live in this world in mutually accountable relationships with husbands, wives, children, parents, and fellow members of Christ’s Church, we don’t have to keep score, we don’t have to hold grudges, and we don’t have to play God. We can trust God to sort things out in His way and live unencumbered by guilt or shame.

There are times when, even after we’ve forgiven others, we must not forget. It would be foolish, for example, for someone who has been in an abusive relationship to go back to live with their abuser after they’ve forgiven, that is, let go of their desire to make the abuser pay.

In what I call the epilogue to today’s lesson, Jesus says, “This–[eternal imprisonment and torture for our sin]–is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” (Matthew 18:35)

Clearly, Jesus means it when He tells us to forgive others. Failure to forgive is eternally fatal.

But what do we do when we can’t forgive? 

It happens to me. When that happens, I remember that Christ died for all my sins, including the sin of not forgiving others. So, I take refuge in Jesus.

This is what I think we can do. We can turn to Jesus and pray, “Help me to forgive that person as You forgive me, Lord. When I can’t feel forgiving, forgive them through me. You know I want to do Your will. You know also that I’m a sinner. Forgive them through me.” I have prayed that kind of prayer many times and as I turn to Jesus honestly, I find that he lifts the burden of my unforgiving attitude from me.

Jesus didn’t die for perfect people. Jesus died for imperfect people. And if you earnestly desire to do the will of God and follow Jesus, God will in no way pour contempt or condemnation on you. And He will make you an instrument of His forgiveness, even when you’re not “feelin’ it.”

The Greek New Testament word for forgive is aphiemi. It literally means release.

When I forgive you or you forgive me, we release each other from the debt we owe for our wrong. We also release ourselves from the strain on us when we pretend that we’re God.

It’s because God forgives us that we can forgive others. So, I tell you once more this morning: “Dear friends in Christ, in the name of Jesus, I forgive you all your sins. You are released by your Savior.”

Now, you can share that word of forgiveness and release with others. Amen

Loving Your Enemy?

[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio earlier today.]

Luke 6:27-38
A number of years ago, a friend of mine, a pastor, was visited by his parents for the first time at the first congregation he served as a pastor. His parents attended worship, then took my friend to lunch. 

“Did you meet John and Mary Smith?” my friend asked his parents. “They’ve been great to me.” “Oh,” his mother answered. “I met them but I wasn’t nice to them because I thought you didn’t like them.” 

My friend was mystified as to where his mom got the idea that he didn't like this couple and then asked her, “Why would you decide to not treat someone well even if I didn’t like them?” 

He said that his mother was stunned by his question, looking at him as though he was from another planet. People who seek to follow Jesus Christ often have that effect on others.

Last Sunday, we looked at the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. In it, Jesus described the blessed life that those who, because they’ve been saved by grace through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, are citizens of the kingdom of God.

Today, as He continues the sermon, Jesus tells us how we who are in His kingdom, but still in a fallen world, are to live. Jesus does so in a stunning command, unlike any that appears in any other religious or ethical system in the world. Jesus sets us free to live differently toward the Johns and Marys in our lives, whether their ill treatment toward us or the people we care about is real or imagined.

So, let’s take a look at today’s gospel lesson, Luke 6:27-38. Verse 27: “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

I love how Jesus begins “to you who are listening.” When I was a boy and a vacant look would cross my face as my mother was telling me something, she’d ask me, “Mark, are you listening?” It’s possible for us to hear someone without listening to them. Jesus is saying, “This is for you who are listening to what I’m saying about the kingdom of God.” 

And then, Jesus gives those of us blessed to know Him a single command, expressed in four different ways: Love your enemies. Do good to the people who can’t stand you. Be blessings to those who condemn you. Pray for the people who are cruel to you.

The word in Luke’s original Greek text that we translate as enemies is ἐχθροὺς. It describes someone who is openly hostile to us, someone animated by a deep-seated hatred for us. It’s these kinds of people that Jesus says we are to love. 

And, just in case we're inclined to look for an escape hatch, the word for love Jesus uses is Ἀγαπᾶτε, from the word you may be familiar with, agape. It’s a verb that means to take pleasure in, to wish well. Agape love wishes another person well even when that other person hates them. 

This is the kind of love that God has for us, a love that caused God the Father to send Jesus into the world for us. Paul says in Romans 5:8: “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” It’s with this kind of love that Jesus commands us to love the people who hate us!

And so He tells us, starting at verse 29: “If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

This is the point at which I (and maybe you) want to tell Jesus, “But, if you only knew what that person did to me, what this person said about me, how annoying so and so is…” 

It seems we all have people we think God will understand us loathing. 

But to our rationalizations and excuses, Jesus asks three questions, starting at verse 32: 

“[One] If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 

"And [two] if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 

"And [three] if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 

"But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

That last line of Jesus gets me every time: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” When other people hurt me or those I love, I find it so easy to write them off as forever damned and irredeemable. But, if God refuses to withhold His mercy from me, then who am I to withhold my mercy, my understanding, my love, or my willingness, in the words of The Small Catechism, “to put the most charitable construction” on what my neighbor does or who my neighbor is, from any human being? 

Even when the God I know in Jesus disapproves of what I do, He never stops loving me, never stops offering grace or the possibility of forgiveness. 

In gratitude for God’s grace, I owe my neighbor nothing less.

In seminary, I had a New Testament professor who made me crazy. In his lectures, he seemed to drone, then flit from subject to subject. I wrote off him and the textbooks he required us to read. I figured I would skate through the course and never have to mess with this prof again. 

The final was a set of essay questions and I always did well with essay questions. I was stunned when I saw my final grade: F!

I confess that at that moment and for a few years after that, I regarded that professor as my enemy. I was sure he was out to get me. I was sure that he didn’t like me, didn’t like my piety. I convinced myself that he probably wasn’t really a Christian and was trying to sabotage me from being ordained. 

A year later, I took the class again, this time with a different professor. I got a B. I felt vindicated and was tempted to go to the first professor's office and dance a victory jig. 

The next year, Ann, our baby son, and I were in Michigan for my internship. When I returned for my last year of classwork, I realized that I needed one more course on a New Testament epistle to graduate. There was one that worked with my other classes and my schedule: First Peter. Guess who taught it? My enemy, the professor who had it out for me. I gritted my teeth and signed up for the class.

I wondered what I would have to do to pass this class and what kind of grief this professor would give me. To my surprise, the class was fantastic. And the prof couldn’t have been fairer. 

Just before the end of the term, I got a note from him, asking me to meet with him. I braced myself. “Mark,” he told me when we connected, “I have a class I’m teaching next term, Theology of the New Testament. It’s done seminar-style. I know that you don't need the class to graduate, but you’re so good at engaging people in helpful discussion, I wonder if you’d do me a favor by enrolling in the class?” 

I could hardly believe it. I stammered that I’d be happy to take the course. I thoroughly enjoyed it too. The last two classes I took from that prof brought As, something I wouldn’t have imagined possible three years earlier. 

A few weeks before our last class, at the end of my Master of Divinity program, the same professor I thought had hated me told me that I should consider getting a doctorate in New Testament studies. “I think you could make very useful contributions,” he said. 

I never felt called to be a New Testament professor and have always believed that the parish is where I belong. 

But to this day, I’m moved when I remember that dear man’s vote of confidence. He had never been my enemy at all. I only thought so in my sinful, selfish mind. And even when he must have known how much I disdained him, he still showed me mercy. He still loved me.

Did my prof do that because he was such a great guy or because there was something loveable about me? You know the answer to the second question already. But I will tell you that the answer to both questions is the same: No! 

But the professor belonged to Jesus and Jesus works in the lives of those who belong to Him. 

The Savior Who loved the human race even when we tried to kill Him and put Him away, empowers believers in Christ to love others even when we would rather do something different. 

The first martyr in Christian history was a man named Stephen. The book of Acts tells us that when Stephen’s very real enemies were hurling the stones at him that would bring his death, he looked to heaven and prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And then, “When he had said this, he fell asleep.” (Acts 7:60) Stephen’s final words echo Jesus’ words on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34) It’s as though Jesus had taken up residence in Stephen. 

And so He had! Christ lives in everyone who turns to Him in repentance and faith. Like the apostle Paul, we who daily seek to live in our baptismal covenant can say, “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)

If I were to set out to love my enemies in my own power, first of all, I wouldn’t want to do it. Who but a person who knows that they’re a sinner saved by grace through the crucified and risen Jesus would choose to love an enemy? To the world, any talk of loving an enemy is insane!

And even if I wanted to love my enemy, I couldn’t do it in my own power. As often happens any time I set out to do the right thing, my sinful nature would get in the way.

But when Jesus is living inside of us, when we turn to Him each day and He fills us up again and again with His Holy Spirit, Jesus loves others through us. 

And when our enemies receive our love, all sorts of good things happen. 

Forgiveness happens. 

Grace happens. 

Life happens. 

We experience the kingdom of God that Jesus speaks of in the final part of our gospel lesson, a kingdom in which we “do not judge” the worthiness for salvation of any human being, knowing that Christ has saved us in spite of our unworthiness, and a kingdom in which God gives eternal blessings to us “a good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over...poured into" our lives, now and forever.

Let’s pray. Lord Jesus, fill us up with You, Your love, Your gospel, Your Holy Spirit and love others through us so that they too can live in Your kingdom. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Is love more important than faith and hope? Yes and no

Most people in western culture have probably heard the famous "love chapter" from the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13. Although not originally addressed by the apostle Paul to marriage, but rather to the relationships of disciples in Christ's Church to each other, it's often read at weddings. The "love chapter" ends in this way:

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13)

A friend recently mentioned this passage and opined that love trumps faith.

I responded:

I always have viewed [the verse as representing]...a progression: Without faith in Christ, there is no hope and you can't...love. On the other hand, it's God's love that makes it possible for us to have faith and hope.

The three attributes are related to one another. And love is the greatest because it's from His infinite storehouse of love for the human race that God sent His Son Jesus to die and rise for us (see John 3:16-18).

It's also God, acting in love through Christ, Who gives us hope. (Psalm 62:5)

And it's only through the power of the Holy Spirit, God acting in love, that we can have faith. (1 Corinthians 12:3)

In the "love chapter," Paul is upbraiding a group of Christians committing unrepentant sin, including the sins of some who thought they were better or more worthy of God's and the world's favor than others. They were loveless.

They were loveless because they had more faith in the world and in external things than they had in Christ. They lacked hope because there is no hope apart from Christ. As Paul reminds the Corinthian church a few chapters later: "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Corinthians 15:9).

Love then, is the greatest and highest expression of our faith and hope in Christ.

Without faith and hope in Christ, we may love in the way the world "loves." But Jesus commends a higher form of love.

According to the Bible, faith and hope in Christ are equivalent to what Jesus speaks of in the gospel of John as remaining or abiding in Him. To have faith and to derive our hope from Jesus Christ alone is to draw every bit of our lives, aspirations, self-worth, unique self-identities, and capacity to love in the same self-giving, eternity-changind way in which Christ loved us on the cross.

So Jesus says in John 15:5: "If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."

And it's why John himself confesses many years later: "This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins" (1 John 4:10).

God's love doesn't trump faith and hope. In His love, God creates love--true love, self-giving love--in those who put their faith and hope in Christ alone.

People will protest, of course, that they love their families and maybe their friends. Their love may be even more expansive, including countrymen or those with whom they agree politically. With all due respect, big deal! 

As Jesus puts it: "If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:46-48).

The word translated as perfect there is, literally, complete, a form of which word uses on the cross as He dies and says, "It is finished." More literally, "It is completion." But I'm not sure that being complete as Jesus was, complete in fulfilling the will of the Father that He love His enemies and pray for those who persecuted Him, even as they killed him.

Whether you take Jesus to be saying perfect or prefer the more literal rendering of complete in this passage from Matthew 5, both leave us with a daunting command. And it's only through our faith and hope in Christ that we are capable of loving, not just our families and friends, but everyone...not just in our sentiments, but in our actions.

Why do I say and believe that?

In Matthew 25, we find Jesus' famous parable of the final judgment. In the parable, the goats are condemned to hell, eternity apart from God. The sheep are told to enter into the eternal joy of God made possible through Christ's death and resurrection.

But the sheep are mystified by Christ the King's reason for allowing them entrance into perfect eternal fellowship with God. He tells them that it's because they lived in love toward others the world ignored, dismissed, or harmed. Do you remember how Jesus' parable goes?

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’"

The moment we think things like, "I'm being loving," "I'm being forgiving," or "I'm acting like Jesus," we know that God still has work to do on us. Real love never refers to itself. (By the way, God has a lot of work to do on me in this regard!)

The "righteous" in Jesus' parable were unaware of the love that they had shown to Christ through the love that they had shown to others. They lived (and loved) unselfconsciously because their faith and hope weren't in themselves or their actions, but only in Christ.

Their acts of love weren't spiritual merit badges that entitled them to entry into eternity with God; they evidenced the presence of Jesus in their lives.

They evidenced that God had constructed faith and hope in them.

Love like this proves the existence of a faith and hope in Christ. And it is the love--authentic, self-giving, godly love--that the world most needs today.

In Revelation 3:20, the risen and ascended Jesus speaks to a first century church that is going through the religious motions, but hasn't really let Christ into the centers of their lives. They aren't letting the Holy Spirit, Who leads and speaks on behalf of Jesus today, to take control of their lives, individually or collectively.

But Jesus hasn't given up on them! "Here I am!" Jesus says. "I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me."

More than anything, being a Christian--a disciple of Jesus Christ--is about daily letting Jesus in.

We let Him in to show us our sins and what we need to confess.

We let Him in so that, through the Bible, He can speak His words of love, truth, wisdom, and guidance to us.

We let Him in so that the Holy Spirit can empower us to be more loving and Christlike today than we were yesterday.

We let Him in, too, so that He can help us to work for justice and peace in the world, so that we can love others as Christ has loved us.

And, as we pray, we let Him and His love explode onto the world; we ask for healing of others, for workers to go into the harvest, Christians who will share the good news of new life for all who believe in Jesus, and for wisdom for leaders.

In short, as we let Christ in, Christ springs forth from our words, actions, and prayers. We love.

Love is "the greatest of these." 

But we can only love when we let Christ in, when we have faith and hope in Him. 

Trust in Christ. Let Him love the world through you.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Those Crucified with Christ, By Faith in Christ, Rise with Christ

[This was shared with the people and guests of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio during both worship services this morning.]

Galatians 2:15-21
Our second lesson for this morning, Galatians 2:15-21, is difficult, maybe too much so to tackle in a sermon on a Sunday in June. But I think it’s worth the effort.

To help understand this whole passage, it might make sense to first look at its conclusion. So, please turn to the next to last verse in our lesson, Galatians 2:20. Paul writes:

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

All who submit to Jesus Christ as their Savior and God submit to the crucifixion of their old sinful selves, so that we can rise with Jesus and live with God. No one, apart from Jesus living in their lives, can rise from the dead. And it’s only when we die with Jesus, dying to sin, dying to the selfish, self-concerned values of a world that is doomed for destruction, that we can rise with Jesus to a new life with God. That’s why Jesus says elsewhere, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

Fact is, we have no hope for this life or the one to come if we don’t submit to the death of our old selves and let Jesus Christ free us to be our true and best selves by taking up residence in our lives. That happens, Paul says, “by faith in the Son of God,” the One Who “loved me”--loves you--”and gave Himself for me”--and for you.

Is that Christianity 101?

Sure. But in what Paul writes in the rest of our lesson, he shows us just how deep and eternity-changing this truth is.

Go back to the beginning the lesson, Galatians 2:15. It helps us to understand this passage if we remember a few things.

First: After Paul founded the churches in Galatia and moved on to preach the Good News of new life for all who repent of sin and believe in the crucified and risen Jesus in other places, new preachers came in, teaching what Paul called a “false gospel.” Believing in Jesus is nice, they tell the non-Jews who make up the Galatian churches, but if they really wanted to be right with God, they needed to also become Jews and keep all the Old Testament ceremonial and dietary laws.

Now, as good confessional Lutherans, you know that there were three kinds of law in the Old Testament.

There was civil law, like the laws we pass at city hall or Congress. God laid down civil law in the Old Testament because ancient Israel was meant to be ruled directly by God. But the civil law of that old kingdom is no longer necessary; Jesus has established the kingdom of God, which we enter by His grace through faith in Him.

A second kind of Old Testament law was sacrificial, ceremonial law. These laws governed everything from the types of sacrifice made at the temple in Jerusalem to how people wore their hair. But Jesus has rendered this type of law unnecessary too, because He is the one and only sacrifice for sin. We trust in Him alone for freedom from sin, death, and the devil. John the Baptist recognized that Jesus spelled the end of sacrificial, ceremonial laws when he said of Jesus, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"

The third kind of Old Testament law is the one that remains valid to this day, the moral law, the ten commandments and the laws that flow from them. Jesus summarized this law with the great commandment: love God with your whole selves, love your neighbor as you love yourselves.

The moral law, which God has written on every human heart, can act as a bridle on the inborn sinful impulse of human beings to do whatever we want, no matter how we may hurt God or may hurt other people.

It can also be used by the Holy Spirit to drive us to repent and believe in Jesus as we come to understand that the demands of God’s moral law cannot be kept perfectly by any of us. This is our dilemma: The Ten Commandments remain in force. But we can’t keep them.

It’s when we realize this truth that we’re open to the Good News that the God we meet in Jesus Christ is willing to take us in, willing to cover our sin with His forgiveness, willing to grant us life with God, and willing to give us the power of the Holy Spirit to resist sin.

We are saved by God’s grace through our faith in the God we know in Jesus Christ, not by being “good” people, which not a single one of us can be anyway. As Jesus told a man who tried to suck up to Him one day: “No one is good but God alone.”

The teachers of the false gospel didn’t understand this. Paul writes to remind the Galatians (and us) of the true Gospel.

A second thing to remember when looking at this passage is that in the verses right before it, Paul talks about a run-in he’d had with Cephas, that is, Peter, in Antioch. When Peter first arrived in that city, he’d sat down for dinner with Gentile Christians, something the old ceremonial law had forbidden a Jew like him to do. Then, Peter stopped doing it, reverting to eating with only Jewish Christians for the rest of his stay in Antioch. There’s a lot of dispute about Peter’s motives for this. But whatever Peter’s reasons, Paul would have none of it. We are saved by grace through faith in the God we know in Christ alone, Paul told Peter, and you shouldn’t be shy about violating those parts of God’s Old Testament law that are no longer valid by eating with the Gentile Christians!

This is where our second lesson picks up. Paul writes, speaking for both he and Peter as Jews, starting at verse 15: “We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified.”

Even we Jews have been made right with God--justified--not by being good Jews, Paul says, but by surrendering faith in Jesus Christ.

So, how, Paul asks, could we, these false preachers, or, as he put it in our lesson from last Sunday, even an angel from heaven (Galatians 1:8), dare to lay new religious laws on the Gentiles?

Christ has done all that is necessary for a person to be right with God. A right relationship with God is ours when we acknowledge our sin and helplessness over it and trust in Christ to place us in the arms of God the Father!

Paul then speaks to those who might recoil at the notion of a God Who cares so much about sinners. He asks: “But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is Christ therefore a minister of sin? Certainly not!” I like the way The Message translation of the Bible puts this verse: “Have some of you noticed that we [followers of Jesus] are not yet perfect? (No great surprise, right?) And are you ready to make the accusation that since people like me, who go through Christ in order to get things right with God, aren’t perfectly virtuous, Christ must therefore be an accessory to sin? The accusation is frivolous.”

You sometimes hear people say, “I won’t go to church because all those people are hypocrites and sinners.” Because Christians aren’t perfect, they insinuate that Christ or the faith we confess in Christ is imperfect. But the only person who can be a Christian is the person who acknowledges that she or he is far from perfect and needs Christ to be made right with God. As the old hymn puts it: “Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me.”

Paul then warns the Church against turning the relationship with God they enjoy by faith in Christ into a religion. As a preacher of the Gospel, Paul was in the business of dismantling the religions of the world that tell us we have to behave in certain ways in order to achieve whatever blessings that stingy deities or a stingy universe might otherwise withhold from us.

The God we meet in Jesus doesn’t want our religion. He wants a relationship with us that lasts for eternity. So, Paul writes in verse 18: “For if I build again those things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor.”

Religion is about being nice, being kind, being virtuous, or being good...or else. That's not Christianity at all!

Why would I want to go back to that crumbling edifice of human-centered religion when Jesus Christ  sets me free from sin and death simply when I trustingly take His outstretched hand and let Him lead me through this life and the next? 

It’s stunning to me the amount of suffering people cause themselves when they hold onto religion rather than holding onto Jesus! You’ve heard me tell before about the woman in her eighties who repeatedly refused to take Holy Communion when we offered it at a nursing home because of a sin she’d committed as a seventeen year old. She was clinging to the wreckage of a religion that insisted that she wasn’t good enough for God when all she had to do was take Christ’s offered grace. She insisted on being a a self-accused and self-convicted transgressor rather than a sinner set free from her sin by Jesus.

In verse 19, Paul says that something very different happens in the life of the person who lets faith in Christ lead them: “For I through the law died to the law that I might live with God.”

The law showed me I am a sinner, Paul is saying. It killed me. And now that my old self has been destroyed, I’ve been set free to rise with Christ and live with God forever. This happens in the lives of believers not by obeying God’s laws, but by the power that resides in God’s charity--His grace--for sinners like you and me.

If we dare to trust in our own goodness or our own religion to save us from sin, death, the devil, and hopelessness, our sins remain, along with hopelessness and separation from God. That’s why Paul writes in verse 21: “I do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain."

Jesus Christ did not die in vain. Jesus Christ died for a reason. He died to set you free to be the very person God made you to be, for all eternity.

He died to give you grace. It’s the grace that wants the best for us and caused Jesus to cry from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Now, I feel that Jesus must have had me in mind when He prayed this prayer. I'm quite sure that 90% of the time in my life, I have no idea what I’m doing. And the older I get--I'll be sixty later this year, the more I realize all that I don’t know.

But I do know this: All the efforts we may put into being better people, more loving or understanding people, wiser people, will inevitably fail. Sinners cannot make themselves saints.

Now, we may be willing to accept that fact about ourselves if it weren’t for the haunting truth that only saints can live with God today or in eternity. “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

You and I would be totally out of hope if it weren’t for the truth about God that trumps all other truth: Christ died and rose to make sinners like us into saints and He does it for those with faith in Christ by His grace alone.

There will be times each day when, if we have any sensitivity to God and other human beings, we will recognize our sinfulness, our distance from God. And the closer we grow to Jesus Christ, the more sensitive to these realities will become.

But don’t let Satan use this realization to make you hopeless.

Turn instead to Christ.

Give your sins to Him.

Give your life to Him.

Let your old self be crucified and let your new self rise.

Jesus says in Revelation: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”

Let Jesus in.

Let His grace fill you.

Let Him claim you as His child every moment of every day.

Let Jesus in.

Amen

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UPDATE: Steve Martin, I think, did a nice job in tackling this text in his sermon for June 16. Check it out!