Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2006 : November 5, 2006

Theme: The Desperate Understand Grace

Church year occasion: Reformation Sunday

Election Day is only two days away. Even though we aren't choosing our next President, important issues are being decided across the country. The U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate are up for grabs. South Dakota is trying to pass a law banning abortions except in cases where the mother's life is in danger. In Wisconsin, we are voting on whether a marriage should only be one man and one woman or open to any other interpretation someone might come up with, like gay marriage or polygamy. These are some huge issues with huge repercussions in the years ahead. And we pray that the decisions made in two days don't just reflect the majority opinion, but God's will.

Unfortunately, the majority opinion can be wrong.

That's why about 500 years ago, a man walked through town on a cool day much like today. He knew that his ideas weren't necessarily the majority opinion, but he didn't put a lot of stock in public opinion polls or the decisions of human rulers. He was concerned with what God wanted, and that meant things had to change.

The man was Martin Luther. When he nailed his 95 Theses, or sentences, to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany, I'm sure he had no idea about the repercussions of that act. But God knew. He was using Luther and other reformers to uncover the central truth of Scripture -- that we are saved by God's grace through faith alone in Jesus. We, as Lutheran Christians, are spiritual descendants of Martin Luther, and that is something that we need to praise our God for every day. For the first part of his life Luther was desperate to find a loving God who would forgive his sins. He found that God when he looked to the passage of Scripture that says, "The just shall live by faith.” The text we are looking at has the same message for desperate souls burdened with sin: "It is by grace you have been saved -- through faith." Let's see why we need to be desperate for that message and how only The Desperate Understand Grace.

Before we can be desperate enough to really understand what God's grace to us means, we need to give some thought to the opposite of grace. The opposite of grace is justice. God is just. That is his very nature. His justice has a standard, his own standard, by which he judges us. That standard is his law. And what does the law say? He declares from Mt. Sinai: "Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength (Deuteronomy 6:5) and love your neighbor as yourself. (Leviticus 19:18) That's not just a wish or a pious thought on God's part, something that, well...it really would be good if we at least tried to do it. No, it's an absolute standard: Do it or else! Not sometimes, not when you feel like it, not "Give it your best shot." No, he made that clear when he said, "Be perfect, even as the Lord your God is perfect!" (Leviticus 19:2)

What a standard! As perfect as God? Already we begin to cringe and cower at the sound of God's justice. He gave that law from the mountain that was on fire, that belched smoke, with the earth quaking beneath the feet of the people. And he declared his earnestness in the giving of the law when he declared, "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law." (Galatians 3:10) If you doubt how serious he is about that, just walk past a cemetery. It's full of dead people. Death is the penalty for breaking the law. And that's only the beginning. Think of the most miserable day of your life. Think of every moment of pain, of sickness, of loss, of disappointment. Multiply it a billion times and you will have reached just the entry gate leading into hell, where that torment will go on for all eternity. To say that we are in a desperate situation is an understatement.

What shall we do when God looks at us in his justice? Trying harder is useless. In fact, because we are conceived and born in sin, we have by nature not the mark of God upon us as John describes in Revelation, but we have the mark of the beast. When we look into the mirror of God's perfect law, we see that mark. It is as plain as day. We are children of Satan, and we want to do his will. And we can see that all too often in our lives when we fail to love our spouse perfectly or our children perfectly or our parents perfectly, or our boss or our neighbor. But we especially see that mark when we fail our God. In our utter despair, we are at the end of our ropes, desperate to escape God's justice.

Then comes this explosive sentence from our text: "It is by grace you have been saved!" There is our rescue! There is our hope! There is our salvation! Grace! And just what is grace? It is that unique love which only God has, a love that is caused not by the one loved, but by the one loving. It is so different from all human love. Ask a child whom he loves. He will say that he loves his mother. Then ask him why he loves his mother. "Because she feeds me and takes care of me, and bandages me up when I fall and hurt myself," he will reply. Ah, so he loves his mother because of something his mother does. Ask him then whom else he loves. He will tell that he loves or likes his friends. Ask him why, and he will say, "Because they play nice with me; they don't pick on me; they share their toys with me." Again we notice it: There is something in the friends that causes the love. Now ask him what food he likes. He will tell you that he likes this and that. Ask him why, and he will answer that he likes them because they taste good. Yet again the cause of the love is in the object, in the food.

Now turn the question to God. Why should God love us? Some might answer that he loves us because we're good people. But that just isn't true. (Remember last Sunday? Jesus said only God is good -- good enough to do what God demands.) That's because we have Satan's mark on us by nature. Well, maybe he loves us because we at least try to keep the law. No, that's not good enough either. God doesn't say to try; God says do -- or die! We can search to the ends of the universe for a reason why God should love us, and our search would only end in disappointment, and desperation.

What then is the cause of God's love if there is absolutely nothing in us that could cause his love? The answer: Grace! Grace, again is that unique love which has its cause not in the one loved but in the one loving. To put another way: God loves us not because we are lovable, but because he is loving. That's what the word grace means. And since the love of God has its cause solely and alone in God, it is perfect, it is sure, it is certain. God loves us surely and completely because of his own grace.

Nevertheless there remains the problem of his justice. What about the law? What about sin? God is just as much as he is gracious. He cannot ignore sin. No, it must be punished -- every bit of it. It must be paid for -- every single sin -- with a price of suffering and death.

Now we see how deep grace is, how far it goes. Since we could do nothing about sin, he does everything about it. He does for us what we would never do for another, even if we could. He becomes man; he keeps the law perfectly just for us. Then he suffers death and the torments of the damned -- just for you, just for me! He does it out of love, that love that the Bible calls grace. Can you see how desperate he was to save you? Even as Jesus prayed in Gethsemane the night before his death that this cup of ultimate pain and suffering pass from him, that there would be some way, any way, to save sinful man in another way, he was clearly at the end of his rope. Desperation filled his soul. And yet he submitted himself to his Father's will, which was his will, so that he could deliver on his promise of saving every last sinner.

And still he is not finished. St. Paul says in our text that we are saved by grace through faith. Faith is that trust which embraces the message of grace. But who can believe such a thing, that God would become man and satisfy his own justice by himself bearing the punishment and paying the terrible price for each our sins? So lost, so corrupt, so vile and doomed and damned are we in our nature that we would laugh at the message and reject it out of hand. And so, again it is an act of pure and free and perfect grace that the Holy Spirit carries the message of salvation into our hearts and there kindles the spark of trust in the message of God's grace in Christ. In that moment, the Spirit puts his name on our foreheads. We are no longer the children of the devil, all too eager and willing to follow him. Now we are children and servants of our loving and gracious God, and the wrath of God can no longer touch us. Now heaven is ours.

But still God is not done with the shower and the flood of his grace. The Apostle concludes our text by showing us that, as the result of grace, we now have lives that are infinitely worthwhile. "We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." We go back to that very same law that previously doomed and damned us. We go back to it find those things which please God because we belong to Christ. Since we are his, we want to do what pleases him. The little girl helps her mother with the dishes, and the little boy helps his father cut the grass. The husband and wife help and support each other. The worker goes to his job. And each one does the work before him as to the Lord, as a precious thank offering to God for all his grace and mercy. We don't shave our heads and enter a monastery or a convent; he never asked for that. We do those simple things that belong to our station in life, things commanded in the law. We love God and others as he has loved us. We are desperate to do this to show God how much his grace means to us, how much it has changed us. And every time we fail. We continually and desperately cling to his grace, and we are at peace with our God.

So it is the festival of the Reformation. We celebrate the Reformation because God's grace was restored to desperate sinners. We celebrate the Reformation because it showed how desperate God was and is to give us his grace. As Lutheran Christians, we are continually desperate for that grace and to live it, because it is by God's grace we are saved. Amen.