Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2005 : February 20, 2005
The Job of a Lifetime
Lent 2
Pretend that you are about 18 years old with your whole life ahead of you. You aren't quite sure what you want to do for a living, so you check out some different occupations. You could be a pro basketball player and earn millions of dollars a year, but that seems unlikely because you don't like basketball, you're only 5'5" and you can't shoot to save your life. Maybe you'd like to be a doctor because you've heard that they are paid very well, but you don't like being around sick people. And then you hear about some billionaire who has made all his money on the stock market by the time he was 40, and now he just sits back and doesn't have to work a day in his life, but just looks at all of his money grow and grow and grow. Now that would be a nice job! What would be your idea of the perfect job, the job of a lifetime? That's really what Paul is talking about -- it's called being a Christian. Being a Christian is The Job of a Lifetime -- you don't do any work for it, yet you get all the benefits, including eternal life. Let's see how that works.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul goes through God's plan of salvation like nowhere else throughout Scripture. He very clearly shows that all people are worthy of only death before God's judgment seat because all alike are sinners: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." But then he also proclaims the gospel: "and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." (Romans 3:23-24)
For Jews, that would have been a difficult idea to swallow, not only because they weren't expecting God's Messiah to die on a cross, but also because now they were being told that all the rules and regulations that God had demanded of his people in the Old Testament were no longer required because they had found their fulfillment in Christ.
Does any you know what a diploma mill is? It's a bogus university, usually online, where you send in a few thousand dollars, read a few books, if that, and you can get a bachelor's, master's or even doctorate degree -- sometimes in less a month. One of the most notorious was Harrington University. The operator of that scam was an American who lived in Romania. Until the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and British authorities exposed it and shut it down in 2003, Harrington University gave out 70,000 diplomas that weren't worth the paper they were printed on. All told, the scam artist had accumulated $100 million. He was feeding off the idea that everyone wants a free lunch. Why should you work for something when you get it for free and don't have to do a thing?
The Jews in Paul's day were looking at Christians like that -- like people who got their credentials of being righteous in God's eyes illegitimately -- through faith alone -- which meant that getting to heaven was a free lunch. And you can understand where they're coming from. If you were the most qualified person for a high-paying job, if you had three or four impressive degrees in that field and a rèsumè second to none, do you think you'd be upset if somebody with no experience and no background in that field came along and got the job instead of you? You bet you would. Jews thought they were the only legitimate ones who could claim to be children of God because of the hard work they had put into following God's laws. But Paul had a different message: their credentials and their rèsumès were worthless. And to prove it, he went back to Abraham and showed that Abraham's own rèsumè was worthless before God when it came to being forgiven and going to heaven.
Why would Paul use Abraham as an example? Because if anyone had a chance of getting to heaven by his own works, it was Abraham. Abraham wasn't just a good man, he was practically perfect. Everything God told him to do, no matter how strange or difficult it might be to do, Abraham did. God told him to leave his people and go to some land far away. Abraham did it. God told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham was ready to do it. Only God himself kept Abraham from carrying it out. Yes, Abraham was practically perfect.
But that wasn't perfect enough -- not before God. Paul says, "If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about -- but not before God." Abraham was a good man, practically perfect, but he wasn't perfectly perfect. God demands perfection. "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law." (Galatians 3:10) In other words, if we don't do everything God tells us to do perfectly, every second of every day of our lives, in thought, word and action, we are under God's curse. That curse is separation from him forever. Abraham wasn't able to do it. We have one example when he tried to pass his wife off as his sister to save his own life. Although this might seem like a small lack of trust in God, it was still lack of trust, and therefore a sin. As good as Abraham was, he wasn't good enough.
What kind of diplomas of righteousness do you have hanging on your walls? The I-Go-To-Church-Every Sunday major with a minor in Sacrificial Giving; the Sunday School Teacher or Pastor diploma; the Volunteer diploma; the I'm-Better-than-Most Diploma; the Good Husband/Good Wife diploma. All of those are good, and even God-pleasing, but they are simply evidence of your relationship with God, and in fact, God tells us that if we don't see those things, then there's a problem. But none of those things earns us anything before God or makes us anything before God.
Why not? Because that doesn't tell the whole story. It doesn't tell the dark side of the story like when we flunked that exam or just did enough to get by. And it's happened more often than we'd like to admit. God knows all of that. What we deserve is for God to say to us: "You're fired," even before we begin to work, and he's talking about an eternity of fire in hell.
That's where the Job of a Lifetime comes in that God is offering to you. Paul tells us how this Job of a Lifetime works. You do no work; yet you get all the benefits.
"Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness." In other words, we don't get all the benefits of what Jesus did for us by what we do. We get it all simply though faith in what God did for us. God gave us the credentials. God gave us the diploma that says, "Sins Forgiven, Child of God, Heir of Heaven through Faith in Jesus." How do we get that diploma? How much work do we have to do to earn it? None. You can't get it that way. You get it the same way Abraham got it. It says, "Abraham believed God." Abraham simply believed God when he promised him a child and that he would be the father of many nations and that he would be the ancestor of the coming Savior, who is Jesus. What did Abraham do in all this? Nothing. Not a thing. God chose Abraham. God called Abraham. God blessed Abraham. God promised many things to Abraham, including that his sins would be forgiven through the coming Savior. Abraham did nothing but take God at his word, which was the work of the Holy Spirit in his heart anyway to have him believe. Then through that faith, God's righteousness was credited to Abraham's account. Only one thing makes us look good in God's eyes -- Faith.
How is that possible? Because before our eyes rises the cross. And in the shadow of that cross, where Jesus shed his lifeblood for all our failings as children of God, I see an amazing thing happen. God dips his finger in that blood of Christ and writes a big 'X' over all our failures, all our sins, all the times we've shown ourselves to be certainly less than perfect. And then he writes a big plus sign instead. My sins are taken away by Jesus. His righteousness is credited to my account. Simply by believing that, I have eternal life. And not just eternal life, but every other blessing God has in store for me as well.
I read the story of a man in England who wanted to drive his Rolls-Royce around Europe, so he put it on a boat and went across to the Continent to go on a holiday. While he was driving around Europe, something happened to the motor of his car. He cabled the Rolls-Royce people back in England and asked, "I'm having trouble with my car; what do you suggest I do?" Well, the Rolls-Royce people flew a mechanic over who repaired the car and left the man to continue his holiday. He wondered, "How much is this going to cost me?" So when he got back to England, he wrote the people a letter and asked how much he owed them. He received a letter from the office that read, "Dear Sir: There is no record anywhere in our files that anything ever went wrong with a Rolls-Royce." That's justification. When God says we are righteous through faith in Jesus who died for our sins and gave us his righteousness in its place, then that's exactly what we are. If God says we're righteous through faith alone, that's what we are. Our works or payment have nothing to do with it. God doesn't have any record of your sins, only Jesus' righteousness. When we're justified, it's "just-if-I'd" never sinned.
That gets us back to our jobs as Christians. Paul concludes, "Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness." In any regular job, a person works, and then they are paid for it. The money they earned isn't a gift -- it is owed to them by their boss. But it's just the opposite with the 'job' of being a Christian. It's like someone coming to you and saying, "I've deposited $100 trillion in your account. You'll never need or even want anything you can't have -- you have it all. Now I ask that you go to work for me." That's how it is with Christians. Even before we start work, God gives us everything -- eternal life, forgiveness, hope, comfort, everything we want or need. It has nothing to do with us. God did it all. Then he simply invites you to believe it, and when you believe it, then he gives you the privilege of saying thank you by living for him and others instead of for yourself. That's where our work comes in. The good works we do come after heaven and everything else is already ours.
Have you ever thought of yourself as being a philanthropist -- you know, being one of those rich people who have so much money that they go around building public buildings at their own cost or giving millions to charity or helping those who are less fortunate. Basically, after they have their billions, they give it away to others. That's the job you have as a Christian: you have forgiveness and heaven already. Now we want to work for God by living for him, by living for others, by giving others that free gift of eternal life also. That is the "job" of a lifetime, which is really no job at all, but a privilege. Amen.
