Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2004 : March 21, 2004
We Preach Christ Crucified
Lent 4
Dear Fools for Christ,
This morning I want each of you to imagine that you are a rock climber that has no safety equipment -- it's just you and the rock and your hands and your feet. You are climbing up a sheer cliff wall 200 feet high and you have just 20 feet to go to reach the top. But suddenly, you can't find any places near you that would allow you to go any further. Then as you are desperately trying to find anything that might help you out, you notice a strong, healthy-looking branch 3 inches in diameter that is hanging down over the top edge of the cliff, and it's just within your reach to one side. At the same time, you notice a small, scrawny-looking branch that is no thicker than a twig hanging over the edge to your other side -- it almost looks like it's dead. The strong, healthy-looking branch is within reach, so you could still use your own strength and power to help yourself get up to the top of the cliff, but to get to the scrawny-looking twig, you would have to jump from where you are and grab on to the twig, trusting that it would hold your entire weight. Which do you think you would choose? The strong, healthy-looking branch, right? Why? Because it makes sense. Based on all your experience and knowledge and wisdom that you have gained during your lifetime, you know that the stronger branch would hold better. To trust the scrawny twig completely would be foolish.
Unfortunately, you couldn't see that the strong-looking branch was connected to a tree whose roots were barely clinging to a spot of sandy soil at the top of the cliff. So once you put your whole weight on the branch, the whole tree is uprooted and you fall to your death. I guess it's a good thing we were just imagining it this morning. What you didn't know was that the scrawny-looking twig was attached to a tree that had its roots directly in the rock. It would have safely carried you to the top.
Even though this might sound like a very unlikely occurrence, it might be one way to describe God's plan of salvation. By everything we know and have experienced in this world, we certainly would want to grab that strong-looking branch and work our way to heaven by what we do. It seems that it is within our reach. But God's word speaks plainly about getting to heaven by works, which seems reasonable to us: "There is a way that seems right to a man; but in the end it leads to death." (Proverbs 16:25) That scrawny-looking branch represents Christ who died an inglorious death on a cross. Only through complete trust in him will we gain access to heaven. That is why We Preach Christ Crucified: because it is God's wisdom and because it is the only way to salvation.
The Apostle Paul was writing the words before us this morning to the Christians in Corinth which is in Greece. The Greeks loved wisdom. A man once said that you could find a wise man on every corner in Corinth who had his own solution to the world's problems. Many Greeks loved to just sit around and talk about philosophy, which actually means "the love of wisdom." But this worldly wisdom was getting in the way of some of the Christians in Corinth. They were beginning to doubt how something so "foolish" as Christ dying on the cross could save them. Paul told them, "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." Paul had to show the wisdom-loving Corinthians that he was preaching Christ crucified because it is God's wisdom for saving the world.
To prove his point, Paul first used words written by the Prophet Isaiah: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." Isaiah spoke these words as the dreaded Assyrian empire was about to attack Jerusalem. The Assyrians were ruthless and known for their cruelty. They had just destroyed the Kingdom of Israel to the north, and now they were on their way to Jerusalem with 185,000 soldiers. The wise men of Judah told the king of Judah to ask the Egyptians to be allies against the Assyrians because that seemed to be the only way to be able to beat the Assyrians. But Isaiah told the king to trust in God alone and he would deliver Judah. It seemed like terrible advice and very foolish to the people of Judah, but the king followed the word of the Lord. Then, as the Assyrians were besieging Jerusalem, the Lord sent his angel and annihilated the Assyrian army -- all 185,000 were dead when the people of Judah woke up one morning. The greatest foolishness in man's eyes turned out to be the height of true wisdom in God's eyes.
But the Greeks weren't so easily convinced. They prided themselves on civilizing the world with their wisdom. What about us today? With all that mankind has accomplished, we probably think that we can do anything. Medical researchers are talking about a possible cure for cancer; we can travel through space and build a space station (which is already old news) and even put spacecraft on Mars; we can clone animals and we already have reports about the first cloned human embryos. But where has all that gotten us? Cancer might eventually be curable, but human wisdom has never found a cure for death itself. We can travel through the heavens, but we can't figure out the most basic question in life: How do I get from earth to heaven when I die? We might eventually be able to clone superbeings with superior genes, but they are still born in sin and will go to hell when they die if someone else doesn't intervene.
Where has human wisdom gotten us? "Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age?" The obvious answer: they are nowhere to be seen when human wisdom is compared with God's wisdom. "Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" God's wisdom tells us that there is only one way to salvation, and that is why We preach Christ crucified.
To us, the only way of salvation sounds too good to be true. That's because it is made up of two components that make absolutely no sense to us. The first tells us that we do absolutely nothing for our salvation. Obviously, this part is going to be hard for us to swallow. Everyone by nature wants to be able to do something in order to earn eternal life. That way we can feel that we don't owe anyone anything -- it goes along with our sense of fairness and justice. We want the good guys to win and the bad guys to lose. If we hear about a terrible crime that was committed, we want that person, that "bad guy," punished, and rightly so. If a woman is always trying to help others and lives her life giving and giving and giving, we want that "good guy," or in this case, "good gal," to receive a reward of some kind. Most people think that people are "good guys." We usually think we're on the side of the "good guys." It makes sense. We're not looking to hurt people (at least not always). We probably haven't served time in prison, and even if we have, we've served our time and paid our debt back to society. But each of us owes a much greater debt than just to society. We might think we're one of the "good guys," but God demands that we be one of the "perfect guys." But we're not. And as a result, God tells us there is only one thing we've earned -- death. The wages of sin is death. It's hard for us to believe that we have no good thing in us, that we are so sinful through and through that we are completely at odds with God by nature. But we are. It's hard for us to realize that by nature we're one of the "bad guys." But we are. Even as Christians we commit numerous sins that show we deserve God's wrath -- anger, jealousy, discord, lust, greed -- every sin shows that there is something wrong with God's creation. You and I already committed those or other sins probably this morning already. We deserve eternal death.
That is why the second part of God's plan sounds even more foolish to us. Since we could do absolutely nothing to save ourselves, God himself had to do it for us. But the way in which he did it would have been the last thing that we would have chosen. Like the Jews, who wanted a political king and a powerful Messiah who would perform miracles, we would have wanted a great and powerful leader to be our savior. But God's plan called for his own Son to become human just like us -- except without sin. It called for Jesus to live a perfect life for us and then to die for all sin. That would be bad enough to understand for the Jews and us -- how could God himself die. God is all-powerful and immortal; he can't die. But that was God's plan.
But not only did he have to die, he died a humiliating death as a criminal. We preach Christ crucified. After seeing Jesus die on the cross, even his closest disciples thought that all was lost. But it was all part of God's plan. In his wisdom, God chose the low things to shame the mighty things; he chose the weak things to shame the strong. Jesus' suffering and death showed us what we deserved because of our sins, but Jesus took all God's awful wrath against sin on himself.
But how do we know that we are saved from those sins if we do nothing to save ourselves? Because Jesus cried, "It is finished!" and then he rose from the dead. To the Greeks, who love wisdom, this was the most ridiculous thing of all. A person who died coming back to life. But that is where God chose to give us all hope and assurance that our sins are forgiven. He tells us that his Son was raised to life for our justification. We did nothing to earn our salvation; Christ did everything for us. And now he gives it away to you and me as a free gift. How ridiculous! How ludicrous! The cross, an ancient torture device that inflicts a slow and painful death on the worst of criminals is the way God chose to save us. How foolish! But we preach Christ crucified. How glorious because we know that the crucified and risen Christ is our one and only Savior. Simply believe it, and heaven is yours.
Certainly the message that we preach, Christ crucified, will not make sense to the world and its wisdom. But in that cross we see the ultimate expression of God's hatred and wrath against sin which should have been poured out on us, but which was poured out on Jesus, God's Son. In that cross we therefore also see the ultimate expression of God's love for sinners. It makes absolutely no sense, but it gives us joy for eternity and the assurance of our salvation right now because we don't have any doubts whether we are saved or not, since God did it all for us.
Christ crucified, the wisdom of God, is also the reason why we will make wise decisions in our lives of serving our God and others. Every day we will have choices to make. We can choose the way the world chooses -— go the way you want, go with the crowd, serve yourself. Then you'll get ahead. Then you won't face ridicule as a Christian by being different. Then your life will be easy. That's like choosing to grab the strong, thick branch. Or you can choose to rely completely on the spindly little twig that represents Christ crucified. You can live for him and others, not yourself. That life won't be as glamorous. You'll face ridicule and not get as much ahead as others who don't follow Christ. But then you'll also show what your life is all about -— following and completely holding on to Jesus. You will do it all because Christ was crucified for you to take your sins away, and was raised again to assure you of heaven.
We preach and live Christ crucified because it's God's wisdom and because it's the only way to heaven. We preach and live Christ crucified because that's what Christians do. Amen.
