Freedom That Can't Be Taken Away

 [This sermon has been prepared for the opening worship of the biennial Lutheran Family Reunion, an event that brings together the congregations of the Southwest Ohio Mission District of the North American Lutheran Church. The theme of this year’s reunion is Lutherans in the Land of Liberty.]

Galatians 5:13-23
If you ask the average American to give you a definition of “liberty” or “freedom,” polling through the years says that among the first things they will cite is “personal autonomy.” We Americans tend to define liberty as the freedom to do what we want to do with our lives. And that’s a reasonable definition of one kind of freedom, anyway.

But this usual American definition of freedom has more to do with what Martin Luther called the outward man or woman, not the freedom (or the slavery) of the person on the inside, the inner man or the inner woman.

Under a Christian definition of freedom, a person can be outwardly free, someone enjoying things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, the right to vote–all things we cherish–and still be a slave on the inside.

Conversely, a person may live in a place where such outward freedoms are limited or denied–places like China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea–and still be free, unshackled, and living in liberty with God and neighbor, on the inside.

The ultimate example of this kind of inward freedom is Jesus. Even on the cross, no one was ever freer than Jesus, true God and true man. He refused to allow His freedom to be defined by the outward freedom the world confers.

Instead, acting on the inner freedom that God gives to all who live in His kingdom, Jesus offered up His sinless life for us so that all who receive His gifts of repentance and saving faith in Him might have forgiveness, justification, and eternal life with God.

This freedom of the inward person isn’t a freedom dependent on a fallen world.

And this freedom of the inner person isn’t a freedom that ends at the grave.

Our second Bible lesson for today comes to us from the New Testament book of Galatians. Galatia was a Roman colony in what is today Turkey. The apostle Paul had planted a number of churches there. In Word and Sacrament, Paul had given the Galatians the good news–the gospel–that in the crucified and risen Jesus, God freely forgives the sins and overcomes the death of all who, by the power of that Gospel Word, are turned to Jesus for the gifts of repentance and faith.

Today, as back then, Jesus Christ frees all of us inborn sinners, who are incapable of saving ourselves, from our bondage to sin.

I remember how, after a decade of atheism, I came to believe, by the power of God’s Word, not only that God is real, but that He has come into our world in Jesus to set all who believe in Him free from sin, death, and condemnation. I was overwhelmed by this gift of freedom! I was free to be the person God designed me to be, free to be a Jesus man even in the earthly arenas of my church life, my family life, and my life in the community and nation.

What I began to experience was joy. Joy isn’t mere happiness. Joy is the freedom of knowing we are eternally God’s children, a freedom that can never be taken from us, even when we die.

Christians are the only people in the world who have reason for joy in the face of grief. Jesus tells us, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” That promise is the source of our freedom…and of our joy!

The Galatians must have experienced this same joy when they received the Gospel of Jesus through Paul.

Yet not long after Paul left them, preachers we now call Judaizers came to them. Their message was basically this: “Jesus is your Lord. He did die and rise for you. But if you really want to be righteous and right with God, if you really want to be free from sin and death, you also need to observe the Old Testament laws. Your boys need to be circumcised. You have to eat kosher. You have to offer sacrifices. You have to keep sabbaths and holy days the way they were kept by the Jews. You have to work at it.”

At least some of the Galatians bought into this nonsense.

Because of our inward sinful impulse to be our own gods, you and I will always be susceptible to those who tell us, “Take charge of your own eternal destiny. Get busy being a good person who, by your outward acts, prove to God that you’re worthy of God. Make a decision to follow Jesus. Get to work.”

The problem with these false gospels is that if you and I were capable of making ourselves righteous or of improving our righteousness by our own outward deeds or actions, Jesus would never have needed to go to a cross.

Only Jesus can set us free from ourselves: from sin, death, condemnation, and fear of a dying, condemned world. Jesus is the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world–your sin and mine–and there is nothing we can add to what He has done for us to make us more forgiven, favored, or righteous.

When Paul got wind of what was happening in Galatia, he wrote the letter from which our second lesson comes. In it, Paul makes three main points we need to surface and take to heart this morning.

First, Paul writes: “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.”

God commands us to love our neighbors, no matter how annoying or even evil those neighbors may be. This command is beyond our ability to fulfill. Failure to obey it brings damnation. And, if you want to be even more depressed by God’s Law, 1 John 4:20 says, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar…” The bottom line is that God’s Law commands us to love others. But we don’t. God’s Law condemns our lovelessness.

Second, Paul says that Jesus Christ frees us to walk by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by our flesh, our sinful nature. Jesus forgives our failure to love others and gives us the Spirit to enable us to love them with Christ’s perfect love. This internal freedom from sin and God’s damnation means that our love for others isn’t a “have-to,” but a “get-to.”

In his treatise on Christian freedom, Luther famously says, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

Christ has set us free to love others, not as a means of winning God’s favor or gaining the approval of others, but simply as an expression of God’s love for us. An expression of Jesus Christ living in us. As Saint John also says, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

Dear Friends: In Christ, your sins are forgiven, you are justified before God, and you have eternal life with God. This freedom also sets you free to dare to love others because you know that nothing in all creation can separate you from the love of God that is yours, friends, in Christ Jesus our Lord!

This leads to Paul’s third point: True liberty is the Holy Spirit-powered freedom to love others joyfully. As we follow Jesus in daily repentance and renewal, He will free us from the world’s idea of freedom that results in things like “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.” And living in us, as we daily turn to Jesus, the Holy Spirit will show up in our lives in things like “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…”

This isn’t a call to adopt certain behaviors. Paul isn’t laying down a new law, telling us we have to be loving, joyous, peaceful, and so on. These are the fruits of the Spirit that God manifests in those who turn to Jesus in repentance and faith. These are the fruits that appear in those who regularly worship, confess their sins in Jesus’ name, receive Christ’s Word of forgiveness, partake of His body and blood, and then go into the world with the power given to us every Sunday as we leave our times of worship together, the power to, “Go in peace. Serve the Lord.”

Our land of liberty, our communities, our families, and sometimes, our churches, can often be marked by deep divisions. Many of these divisions result from people seeing freedom as a license to act in selfish and ungodly ways. What a refreshing, renewing presence the Christian living in the freedom of Christ can be when we love our neighbors–even those with whom we disagree–with the love of Christ. It’s like the man to whom I handed a bottle of cold water on a hot summer’s day. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Because God loves you,” I said. I could have added, “And because he frees forgiven sinners like me to show you and tell you that’s true.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ: In Christ, you are free of sin, death, and condemnation. You are free to love as you have been loved. We value the freedoms we have as Americans. But that outward freedom pales in comparison with the eternal freedom we have in Christ. Follow Jesus. He alone can set you truly free. Amen

The Shrewdness of the Saints

 Luke 16:1-15

Few passages of Scripture have more confused Christians through the centuries than the verses of our Gospel lesson. So, let’s clear some of the confusion from the outset: Jesus isn’t here telling us to steal or lie like the dishonest business manager in His parable. But Jesus is telling us to be like the business manager in one way. We are to be shrewd–wise–not in the ways of the world like the manager was, but shrewd about our need for God.

One day, every human being, whether they want life with God while living on this earth or not, will see how much they need God at that moment when they die and, for the first time ever, see God face to face. The Bible tells us that, “each of us will give an account of himself to God.” (Romans 14:12) And Jesus tells us today that we must, before that moment arrives like “a thief in the night,” be shrewd about life with God and how it can be received. But what does it mean to be shrewd or wise in our relationship with God?

First, we must be shrewd about the gap that exists between God in His holiness, and us in our sin. It’s a gap we can’t bridge by our good works, offerings, prayers, friendliness, or piety. To see the gap between God and us is to admit, with King David, “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me…” (Psalm 51:5) Or, with the apostle Paul, we need to admit, “I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.” (Romans 7:18) By nature, we are unrighteous, born sinners. If righteousness, which means to be innocent of sin and right with God, were a bank account, you and I would be born with an infinite deficit from the beginning. And by the wrong we do and the right we fail to do, we would only add to the tons of red ink in our accounts from the moment we’re born until the day we die.

This is like the wise insight of the dishonest manager in Jesus’ parable. Evidently, irrefutable evidence is given to his boss that he has been stealing, embezzling money. The master calls him in and tells the manager that he’s fired. “Turn in your books.” The manager doesn’t waste breath trying to convince the master that he isn’t guilty. Both he and the master know he’s guilty. The master was right, and he was wrong. This is precisely what wise people, shrewd people, understand in their relationship with God. God is right, and we are wrong. After being called out by the prophet Nathan for committing adultery and murder, King David didn’t try to excuse himself before God. Instead, he cried out to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.” (Psalm 51:4) When we are wise, we see that David’s prayer must be our prayer too.

But there was another element to the shrewdness, the wisdom, of the dishonest manager in Jesus’ parable. In that culture, a wealthy master had the power to execute or make miserable the life of someone like the manager on the spot. Instead, the master only fires the manager. Knowing that he has a short amount of time to act, the manager hits on plan. Before the word gets around that he has been fired, and why, the manager calls in all his master’s debtors. He has them write new IOUs to the master, telling them to reduce what they owe his master by massive amounts. Folks, this would be like a bank officer calling in a farmer and saying, “Reduce what you owe this year for feed, seed, and machinery by $150,000,” or telling a homeowner, “Knock 80% off of the mortgage on your house.” Because the debtors don’t know the dishonest manager has already been fired, each of them walks away from having their debts dramatically reduced thinking what a fine man the master is and what a great guy the manager is. This way, though he no longer has a job with the master, the manager knows dozens of other people in the neighborhood willing to welcome him and hire him. Pretty shrewd, huh? And when the master finds out what his manager has done, costing him the ancient equivalent of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of dollars, he doesn’t blow up, kill the manager, or call the sheriff to have the manager arrested. Instead, Jesus concludes His story by saying, “The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness.” (Luke 16:8) Now, why did the manager know his ploy would work? Because he knew the master was merciful.

And this brings us to the second way you and I must be shrewd, or wise, in our relationship with God. Our sin, the sin of us all, is serious business. God’s Word is clear: “the wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23) We are bound to agree with The Small Catechism, when it says, “we sin every day and deserve nothing but punishment.” But in the face of the reality of our sin and the condemnation we deserve for it, here is the second bit of shrewdness we must have in our relationship with God: In Jesus Christ, God has forgiven you all your sins and opened up eternity with God for all who believe. No exceptions. Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:15) We can repent and believe in Jesus because we know our Master, the Lord we meet in Jesus, is merciful. The psalmist says, “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” (Psalm 145:8) Jesus says, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” (John 3:17)

The shrewd person knows that the God Who sent His Son Jesus to take the death sentence for sin we deserve and raised Him up to tear open eternity to all who repent and believe in Jesus, also knows something else. We have no idea about how long we have to repent and trust in Christ. Not a moment of this life, the life in which Christ calls us to repent and believe in Him, is guaranteed to us. The manager acted when he could. And we too, must act when we can, living in “daily repentance and renewal,” daily turning from sin and death, and daily falling into the forgiving embrace of Jesus Christ, God the Son.

In another one of his parables, Jesus tells the story of a man who focused on making lots of money, building bigger and bigger barns to hold his crops. He does this only thinking about life in this world. Finally, Jesus says, God came to the man, and said, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (Luke 12:20) That man was shrewd about the ways of the world, but he had no shrewdness about God. He had no repentance, and he had no saving faith. He met death naked in sin, not covered by the forgiveness and righteousness of Jesus. He condemned himself by His foolishness toward God.

Friends, the God we know in Jesus Christ loves you with an everlasting love. He wants you to be with Him forever. He wants to forgive your debts, your sins–whatever they may be: idolatry, covetousness, lying, adultery, thievery, murder by thought, word, or deed. Jesus died on the cross and rose from the tomb to erase sin’s power to condemn you. To all who are shrewd enough to know they are sinners and need help from outside themselves–from God through our Savior Jesus–and shrewd enough to see how merciful, and forgiving, and kind, and loving, God is, there is a welcome to God’s “eternal tents” now, even in this fallen world, and, one day, in the new heaven and the new earth Jesus will bring on the last day when He returns to set all things right, and in which we will live with God and His people for all eternity. This is the shrewdness of the saints of God, sinners covered by the forgiveness God gives through Jesus Christ alone. Again today, Jesus tells you, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” (John 11:25-26)

Because of His death and resurrection for you, friends, you can believe that ALL of that is true and that it is true now and for all eternity for you. Amen