Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2003 : July 6, 2003
Gospel Freedom Changes Everything
Pentecost 4
Did any of you have a hero when you were growing up? Some of you might even have had a favorite superhero. When I was five years old, most of my friends had superheroes like Superman who could fly and leap buildings in a single bound, or Batman who had all kinds of nifty gadgets like the Batmobile to catch the villains. But when I was five years old my superhero was LetterMan. LetterMan could take any letter of the alphabet from his supersuit and change a word into something completely different in a single bound. For instance, he could be walking through thick fog, but by taking the letter "R" from his chest, he would change the "fog" into "frog." Then the frog would just hop harmlessly away. When I was five years old, I wanted to be LetterMan. As you can see, things didn't work out as I had planned.
As Christians we have a real, live superhero in our Lord Jesus Christ. This morning he is going to act kind of like LetterMan by showing you how radically the Gospel Freedom that you have Changes Everything for you as a Christian. What letter is he going to be using to change words? The letter "E" because in Greek that's what the word for "gospel" starts with; it's where we get the word that is part of our church's name -- Evangelical, which means, "gospel-centered" and "gospel-preaching." Using the letter "E" for gospel, Jesus will change "fasting" into "feasting" and he will change "bitter" into "better."
The words before us take us back to the very beginning of Jesus' public ministry when most people didn't know who he was. John the Baptist was to get the people ready for Jesus, and he had gathered some followers. But when Jesus came, John had called him "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." The people knew the kind of lamb John was referring to -- a lamb meant for slaughter. Can you picture the sacrifices that happened every day at the temple? Put yourself back 2000 years. You are eight years old. You help your dad raise sheep. One day your dad tells you to pick the best of your lambs -- a one-year-old male -- and to bring it along to the temple. You pick your best lamb, your favorite. When you get to the temple, on one side of you is the huge altar of sacrifice; on the other side is the huge basin that holds hundred of gallons of water to wash away the blood of the sacrifices. Your dad tells you to give the lamb to the priest. The priest leads the lamb to the altar. He straddles the lamb and holds it between his knees. He then takes one hand to clamp over the lamb's mouth so he can't cry out. Then he takes the knife in his other hand and cuts a gash in the lamb's neck, severing the carotid artery. The lamb struggles only a little, soon it is dead, its blood splattered on the stone pavement. Some blood was caught by the priest in a bowl and sprinkled on the altar. The best parts of the lamb were removed from the carcass and burned on the altar. With the smell of burning flesh in your nostrils, you see Levites come with water to wash away the blood. Your parents tell you the lamb had to die in your place, reminding you that there is no forgiveness without the shedding of blood.
When John called Jesus "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world," what picture do you think the people saw? Some of John's disciples and others began to follow Jesus. But others doubted. One day John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. Some people came and asked Jesus, "How is it that John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?" John's disciples were fasting because John had just been thrown into Herod's dungeon; the Pharisees were fasting because they did it twice a week to make themselves look good and very religious to others, even though God only told them to fast once a year -- on the Day of Atonement. But Jesus and his disciples were feasting. They would have stuck out like sore thumbs.
Jesus answered their question with a question of his own: "How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them?" Why was Jesus speaking of a wedding? Because at a wedding, you have a great feast; it's a joyful time, not a time of sorrow. God was spreading the feast of salvation before the world when he sent his Son into the world. Soon Jesus would be that lamb of sacrifice, hung on Calvary's cross, shedding his blood to cover the sins of the world. Then it would be time to fast -- when the Bridegroom would be taken from them. But not yet. Now was the time to feast, rejoicing in what God would do for the world through Jesus. Jesus was changing fasting into feasting with his gospel.
This Sunday we celebrate the independence of our country and the freedoms that we enjoy because of our independence. That freedom came at a price. Today, men and women are still paying the ultimate price -- their own lives -- so that you and I can enjoy the blessings of this country. One of the greatest blessings is the ability to worship Jesus without fear and to proclaim the message of Jesus Christ without fear of persecution. The message of salvation came at a price too -- the ultimate sacrifice, as Jesus gave up his life for you and me. Because of Jesus, we have now been freed from sin, from Satan and his power; even freed from death itself, which Jesus has now turned into the gateway to eternal life for believers. Jesus' victory has changed our sorrow over sin into the joy of forgiveness -- he has changed our fasting into feasting. All it took was the letter "E" for evangel, gospel. But Jesus didn't stop there. He also showed how a Christian's life could be completely changed already on earth from a bitter existence into something infinitely better. Bitter to better. Let's see how the "E" of the evangel, the gospel, does that.
The Mosaic covenant that God had made with his people Israel in the Old Testament was a bitter pill to swallow. It was summarized in Deuteronomy 11:26-28: "See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse -- the blessing if you obey the commands of the LORD your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the LORD your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known." God lived up to his end of the agreement, but Israel time after time didn't live up to its end. They deserved God's curse.
Are we any different? You are so important to Jesus that he allowed himself to be slaughtered in your place. How much are you willing to give up for him? Do you always want to serve the Lord without counting the cost? If you spend a whole weekend serving your Lord by canvassing or doing other volunteer work, do you count the number of hours you've put in and compare it to someone who hasn't done as much as you have? Or do you look at what you've done and expect the praise of others, a pat on the back for spending such time for the Lord? Jesus tells us something else: "When you have done everything you were told to do, you should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.' " How many times wouldn't you and I rather do all kinds of other things instead of giving our lives over to the Lord, even after he has given us so much? Many times it comes down to "I have to" instead of "I want to" serve the Lord.
Does that make you feel guilty? It should. Does it make you feel unworthy of God's blessings and his goodness? It should. Then the Old Covenant did its work. Now you're ready for the New Covenant. The Old Covenant said, "Do! Don't do!" and it brought us nothing but misery because we see how often we've failed God time and time again. The New Covenant says, "Done! By Jesus!" Jesus was the Lamb, the perfect sacrifice. He laid down his life for the world to take every sin away. Every one of your sins has been covered by Jesus' blood. The New Covenant that Christ ushered in isn't a bitter pill to swallow as the Old Covenant was -- it is much better. The writer to the Hebrews says, (Hebrews 7:22) "Jesus has become the guarantee of a better covenant."
That better covenant is described by Jesus with two pictures. "No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse." Jesus' point was this. The Old Covenant was inferior to the New Covenant. The Old Covenant was based on God and us -- and we failed; the New Covenant is based solely on God and his promises -- and he succeeded. The Old Covenant could only reveal your slavery to sin and death. The New Covenant in Jesus' blood has freed us from sin, death and Satan, and given us new life -- a life we can live not to try to earn heaven, but a life lived out of thankfulness because heaven is ours simply through believing in Jesus as our Savior. The Old Covenant is bitter because it shows our sins; the New is infinitely better because it shows our Savior.
When living for your God becomes a chore, then you are tossing your gospel freedom away and going back to living under the Old Covenant. How foolish! Jesus compares that to putting a patch of new cloth on some old clothes to cover a tear. Since the patch hasn't been in the washing machine yet, it hasn't shrunk yet. So when you wash the old fabric with the new patch on it, the patch will shrink and make the tear even worse than before. Jesus used another illustration: "No one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins." To become wine, grape juice has to ferment. That was done in Jesus' time by pouring it into new wineskins, usually the hide of an animal. As the grape juice fermented into wine, it would expand, so it had to be in a new wineskin that could expand along with the new wine. If you put this new wine into an old wineskin that had already expanded to its limit, when the new wine would expand, it would burst the old wineskins, thus ruining both the old wineskin and the new wine. The same thing with the New Covenant. Trying to pour the overflowing freedom of God's gospel into the Old Testament laws could never work.
If you wear glasses, you know that your eyes change and your glasses get scratches so every few years you need to get new glasses. But now you can get LASIK surgery that uses a laser to cut your eye to make your vision perfect -- never needing glasses again. You've been given that laser surgery for your sinful heart through the gospel of the New Covenant. The faith that is yours grabs hold of Jesus' perfect righteousness and stands before God unashamed, saying, "Yes, I'm a sinner, but you saved me by your blood." Do we want to go back to living under the Old Covenant any longer, which is dominated by the shackles of the law? Never! That would be like having that laser surgery for our eyes and then putting on our old, scratched up glasses again! Ridiculous! Instead, we live by faith, dominated by the New Man of faith that always has Christ and his cross and his empty tomb in view. We don't live to please us -- we live to please our Savior God. Gospel freedom changes everything for us.
Jesus is our hero. His gospel has changed our fasting into feasting and our bitter life into something better -- a life with God now and forever. Amen.
