Letting God Work (Romans
3:21-26)
I__, what are you
working on there? Bring that up here.
(Preplanned:
my son I__ brings up on the platform a Lego house he has built. He hands it to me and I look at it. And then
I begin the Sermon.)
This is a good Lego house. For at least three years now, I__'s
abilities in Lego-construction have far surpassed my own.
Imagine this house represents a human being,
maybe you. Imagine a human created in
the image of God – not perfect, but good, very, very good. You and I are God’s image-bearers.
This week in our Ash Wednesday
service, we were invited to take up the Spiritual practices of confession and
acknowledgement. We confess that we,
God’s image-bearers, have sinned. We are
sinners. And we acknowledge that sin has
a destructive impact on us and on humanity.
Sin pollutes God’s good creation and there is nothing you or I can do to
overcome it. Sin is more powerful than
we are.
Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned”
(throw I__’s Lego house into the air), “and fall short of the glory of
God.” All we who are God’s image bearers
are nothing more than smashed Lego houses, pathetically small pieces of plastic
scattered about without purpose.
(It is important at this point that
I__ shows no emotional reaction. He
simply begins putting the house back together.
His only focus is reconstructing the house. It is as if no one else is present.)
All have sinned and fall short of
the glory of God. This belief about sin
is fundamental to the entire Jesus story.
God became human because humans, in their sins, were and are cut-off
from God. God detests evil. God wipes out that which rebels against
Him. Our sins put us in rebellion
against God. We are thus in the direct
path of God’s fierce wrath. In Genesis
the story of Sodom and Gomorrah depicts how God feels about sin. Those cities were full of perverted people
and corrupt practices. God annihilated
both cities in avalanche of consuming flames.
That picture of God’s wrath is also a predictor of the fate of anyone
who sins. We all sin.
On Ash Wednesday we heard two
things. First our grand spiritual goal is to live in relationship with
God. Second, Sin makes the achievement
of our goal impossible.
The good news is Jesus came to take
care of sin. So, we were invited and I
invited every one this morning to spend time in prayer contemplating sin. Think about your own specific sins. And think about the way sin, in the big
picture of your life and the even bigger picture of human history, has
distorted the beautiful relationship God wants with each one of us.
How you specifically enter this
spiritual practice of confession & acknowledgement will surely differ from how
your neighbor does it. Maybe you write
down mistakes you’ve made, thing you’ve done that fill you with shame. Then, you remember your forgiveness and you
light the piece paper and burn it up, knowing you are forgiven.
Maybe, thinking big picture, you
read a book about the holocaust. That
could be a Lenten discipline. You read
and you pray as your read. The reading
is informative, filling your mind with knowledge of a very dark chapter of
human history, but it also is a call to prayer.
You ask the Holy Spirit of God to be at work in the world, healing and
redeeming.
The spiritual practice of confession
of sin and acknowledgement of the sin problem can take many forms. My prayer is this work of confession and
acknowledgement will enter our minds and our hearts and our daily thinking
throughout Lent. In raising our
consciousness of sin, we become intensely aware of our need for Jesus.
Our spiritual goal is to be in
relationship with Jesus – a relationship that is present and real and felt and
even tangible in every part of our lives.
A new understanding of relationship with God: that’s the Lenten program
at HillSong in 2013.
A goal within that goal is to shed
the sin. We talked about confessing and
acknowledging on Wednesday and I hope you find in the rhythms of your life an
intentional process of prayer in which you confess and acknowledge. I strongly encourage you to do this
throughout Lent. But it can’t stop
there. That would not be good news –
ending the story saying, “Yep, we’re sinners, cut off from God.”
We want to be cleared. The problem is we can’t. We cannot on our own power erase our sins or
the damages of sin. We cannot make up
for sin. We cannot do away with it. We cannot make amends that will make it all
better. And worst of all, we cannot stop
sinning. We want to, but we don’t have
the power. Paul says, “I am of the
flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do
not understand my own actions. For I do
not do what I want, but the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:14b-15). Sin gets in the way. We long to walk with God, but we look at our
lives and see pain and mistakes repeated and hurt. It is not good.
For the goal of relationship with
God to be realized, sin has to be removed.
Thus innocence is a spiritual goal.
Every one of us needs to be able to stand before God and be declared
innocent of sin and cleared of all sin’s damages.
This is where Jesus goes to
work. In re-creating us so that we
become new creations, sons and daughters of God, Jesus has clean-up work to
do. In Romans 3, Paul illustrates this
through three metaphors. His writing
here, thanks to the influence of people like Martin Luther and John Calvin, is
at the very core of what we believe as Christ-followers. For the most part, we aren’t even aware of
how much Luther’s thought was shaped by Augustine and Augustine’s thought was
formed in his reading of Paul and specifically Romans.
I say that just to point out that
the metaphors in Romans 3 are extremely helpful in showing what Jesus has
done. But the story is not the terminology. The story is Jesus at work making a way for
us sinners to be declared innocent of sin and free of sin. The real spiritual work is accomplished by
Jesus. Paul’s metaphors illustrate
something Jesus is getting done.
McClendon, a theologian I referred to on Ash Wednesday describes Paul’s
use of metaphor. “Metaphors are not the
furniture of some fairyland of unreal or pretended existence; metaphor is not
an alternative to true utterance or a way of avoiding the (literal) truth. [Metaphor is]
a native device for speaking the truth in as plain and helpful as way as can
be” (Systematic Theology: Doctrine,
p.216).
Thus Paul offers a legal
metaphor. “Since all have sinned and
fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift”
(Rom. 3:24). Thousands of pages of ink
have been spilled by some of the greatest thinkers in Christian history
debating what ‘justification’ means. I
find value in the conversation, but for our purposes, striving after
relationship with God, the key truth is that justification renders us innocent
even though we are sinners. In this
courtroom metaphor, we stand trial, accused of sin. God sees what Jesus has done on the cross for
us, God looks at us, and declares, “Innocent.”
Remember all the awful things said about sin? They’re all true. But we are innocent because of Jesus.
Paul also offers a crass economic
metaphor. We are “justified by his grace
as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Redemption refers to slavery. A slave is freed when his freedom, his
manumission, is purchased. We’ve already
referred to Romans 7. Slavery is the
master and we are in chains forever. But
Jesus has crushed the cruel taskmaster.
Jesus has redeemed us. We are
slaves no more because what he has done.
We are innocent. We are free.
The third metaphor is a worship metaphor. We are “justified by his grace as a gift,
through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a
sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith” (3:24-25b). I am severely limited in explaining this
third metaphor. For me personally, this
sacrifice metaphor – the blood atonement – does not unveil truth in native
speech in a “plain and helpful way,” to use McClendon’s terms.
But it was very much in common
vernacular when Paul wrote it. In first
century Rome, pagan worship involved shedding of animal blood to cover human
sins. In Jewish worship in the temple,
the same thing happened. There is a
scene in the movie the Nativity,
about the birth of Jesus. Herod is in
the temple and the priest says, “Transfer your sins to the animal.” Herod leans over and touches his forehead to
the cow’s head. Then the cow is
slaughtered. Paul is saying that when
Jesus’ blood was shed, that was the last blood sacrifice ever needed for the
sins of all people of all time. And his
first century readers might be surprised by such an audacious claim. They certainly understood it.
Is there literally a courtroom where
we stand accused and God sits at the judge’s bench? Are we literally in chains on the auction
block and Jesus comes along and buys our freedom? Is Jesus literally the perfect blood
sacrifice? I am not even trying to
answer these question and I am not Paul was either. Paul was saying, we humans have this serious
sin problem. Jesus’ death on the cross
eliminates it completely, forever. We
believe in him and what he did become effective for us. Paul uses the legal, economic, and worship
metaphors to point to Jesus, his death on the cross, and our status before
God. That which would prevent us from
being sons and daughters of God is gone.
The path is clear.
In the debates about what exactly
justification means, one things is agreed upon.
Jesus is the one who accomplishes it, not us. So what then do we do? If the spiritual goal is innocence and the
means of achieving that goal are entirely in Jesus’ hands and he’s already done
it, where does that leave us?
A spiritual practice for us in Lent
in 2013 is to receive. Receive the grace
God gives. He’s working. We need to
receive what he’s doing for us and giving to us.
What I mentioned Wednesday related
to sin, confess and acknowledge, sounded a bit less than specific. It’s not a guided discipline like fasting
every Wednesday throughout Lent. Maybe
fasting helps us acknowledge and confess, but I wasn’t suggesting fasting. I was prescribing the work of acknowledging
and confessing. Now I am prescribing
even more strongly the work of receiving, paradoxical as they may sound. I had a brief conversation with someone this
week. She said she needed something more
concrete. I understand, but this is
where each of us has to take responsibility in our personal Lenten
practice.
To receive the grace God is giving
in Jesus Christ sounds vague. It is not
vague. It is abstract to an extent, and
it might be general, but not vague. Receiving
demands that we slow down. We take in
less input, less stimuli. We spend time
in quiet and solitude joyfully contemplating that no matter what has happened or
what will happen, we are innocent, free, and sin is covered forever. Jesus has done this and is doing this for us
and in us constantly.
I find it helpful to walk and pray. Prayer walking is a way to set ourselves to
receive God’s grace. Perhaps praying in
the early morning, before the world is awake when all else is quiet will help
us be quiet and hear from and receive from God.
Maybe in the middle of Lent a silent retreat is in order. These are a few suggestions. The key is recognizing that Jesus is the one
working. And God is at work. As Paul says, “He justifies the one who has
faith in Jesus” (3:26). This is hard for
highly successful, determined people to grasp.
It you have accomplished a lot in your life, you surely hear the faith
story at church and think, ‘what do I have to do.’ What you and I have to do is quiet down and
slow down and let God be at work in us, cleansing us, remaking us.
(Call I__ up and hold up the repaired
house). In his hands, with Him working
on us, we become the new creations God wants us to. So, we are in Lent. Find a way that works in your life that is
affective for you, to slow down and quiet down.
Set yourself to receive what God is giving. When it comes to sin, don’t strive to
overcome it. Rather we turn to God and
in faith, let Him be about His work in our lives.
AMEN
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