Sermon Title: Surprised by Grace
Scripture Reading: Ephesians 3:14-21
The gospel has been described as a pool in which a toddler can wade and yet an elephant can swim. It is both simple enough to tell to a child and profound enough for the greatest minds to explore. Indeed, even angels never tire of looking into it (1 Peter 1:12).2
Joseph’s brothers didn’t understand grace. Joseph’s brothers give a threefold plea:
- Daddy said be nice to us
- We worship the same God
- We are your servants
- The elder brother in Luke 15:31 didn’t get it.
- The Galatians didn’t get it (Galatians 3:1).
- The Colossians didn’t get it (Colossians 2:16-23).
- The Corinthians didn’t get it.
True, Paul says, the law kills. He writes as if that is what the law is for. The law is designed to crush, to crush human pride and supposed self-sufficiency toward God. It is intended to kill, designed to kill.1
The Biblical connection is law/sin. What reveals sin is the law (my sentence). What gives sin its power is the law (strengthening the rebellious heart – parenthesis mine). And the law is designed to make the problem worse! It is to be gasoline on an already blazing fire! (Want to have sin run out of control? Go to a church in which the law is preached, then the law is preached again and more stringently and deeply, and then the law is preached even more!).1
It seems to me that in the four Gospels [roughly, the biographies of Jesus authored by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John], virtually every person who rejected Jesus’ claims to be God and Messiah, the Savior of the world, went away either sad or mad.1
The more the law absent of the Gospel is preached, the more gasoline on the fire. In the name of holiness, reverence, worship, and piety, the law is preached and divorces, Church discipline, and disillusioned college students abound. Who do you know that is a former member of this Church and are currently mad, sad, and disillusioned. The mad are angry because there is not enough law. The angry want to know how a Church “deals with sin.” I answer them by quoting Jesus, “It is Finished.” This is not to say that the Church does not lovingly pursue those in unrepentant sin and that we do not confront one another due to sin, but that is not what these people are referring to when they say, “deal with sin.” The sad despair because they’ve been crushed by the law. The sad despair because the law was preached in such a way as to lead them off a cliff rather than to Christ. This has also been true of the disillusioned. It is proven to be true in that the disillusioned are not indifferent, but are on a crusade to patronize and attack the very faith they once embraced.
In a Christian context, the mechanism of this can be, I think, a very simple one:
- You come to believe that you have been justified freely because of Christ’s shed blood.
- Freely, for the sake of Jesus’ innocent sufferings and death, God has forgiven your sin, adopted you as a son or daughter, reconciled you to Himself, given you the Holy Spirit, and so on. Scripture promises these things.
- Verses like “Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” seem now – at first read – to finally be possible, now that you are equipped for it. Or you hear St. Paul as he writes, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Same thing.
- You realize that you might have had some excuse for failure when you were a pagan. But that’s over. Now you have been made a part of God’s family, have become the recipient of a thousand of His free gifts.
- And then, the unexpected. Sin continues to be a part of my life, stubbornly won’t allow me to eliminate it the way I expected.
- Continuing sin on my part seems to be just evidence that I’m not really a believer at all.
We start to imagine that we need to be “born again, again.” (And often the counsel from non-Reformation churches is that this intuition of ours is true.) Try going again to some evangelistic meeting, accept Christ again, surrender your will to His will again, sign the card, when the pastor gives the “altar call,” walk the aisle again. Maybe it didn't “take” the first time, but it will the second time? And so forth. Of course, the Reformed have graduated from such elementary silliness! (joking to make my point)…
Think of the paradigm of “Guilt – Grace – Gratitude.” If I am elect and regenerate, why is it that my gratitude is so small, so lacking on a daily basis? Or, “If I really were elect, my life would certainly reflect that fact more than it does.” “Maybe I’m just fooling myself. Maybe I’m not really elect – because the peace, the joy, the confidence Paul says the Christian is to have (and that other Reformed believers seem to talk about) I don’t have. I’d be lying if I said I did. Maybe I never was part of the elect, and I’m still not?”1
For our purposes this morning, the upshot is always the same: broken, sad ex-Christians who finally despaired of ever being able to live the Christian life as the Bible describes it. So they did what is really a sane thing to do: they left! The way it looks to them is that “the message of Christianity has broken them on the rack.” To put it bluntly, it feels better to have some earthly happiness as a pagan and then be damned than it feels to be trying every day as a Christian to do something that is one continuous failure — and then be damned anyway. Trust me on this one. This is how things look.1
It seems to me that the key question here is a very basic one: Can the cross and blood of Christ save a Christian (failing as he or she is in living the Christian life) or no? I hope that most of us would say that the shed blood of Christ is sufficient to save a sinner? All by itself, just Christ’s blood, “nude faith” in it, “sola fide”, “faith without works”, “a righteousness from God apart from law,” a cross by which “God justifies wicked people,” etc. So far, so good, right?
But is the blood of Christ enough to save a still-sinful-Christian? Or isn’t it?
Does the Gospel still apply, even if you are a Christian? Or doesn’t it?
We don’t really understand unconditional grace.
As old beings we don’t know what to do with an unconditional gift or promise. Virtually our entire existence in this world is shaped, determined and controlled by conditional promises and calculations. We are brought up on conditional promises. We live by them. Our future is determined by them. Conditional promises always have an “if-then” form. If you eat your spinach, then you get your pudding. If you are a good girl, then you can go to the movies. If you do your schoolwork, then you will pass the course. If you do your job, then you will get your pay. If you prove yourself, then you will get a promotion. And so on and so on, endlessly until at last we die of it, wondering if we had only done this or that differently, perhaps then. . . . Though such conditional promises are often burdensome and even oppressive, they are nevertheless enticing and even comforting in their own way because they give life its structure and seem to grant us a measure of control. If we fulfill the conditions, then we have a claim on what is promised. We have what we call “rights,” and we can control our future, at least to a certain extent.3
So, as old beings, we hang rather tenaciously onto these conditional promises. As a matter of fact, that is what largely characterizes our being in this world as old. We hang desperately onto the conditional promises, hoping to control our own destiny.3
Sanctification is not progress as we define progress.
But this leads only to a further, more personal problem in the life of faith if one becomes honest before God. What if the scheme just doesn’t seem to work (the if-then scheme of conditional promise – my parenthesis)? This is the much celebrated problem of the “anxious conscience” that bothered Martin Luther. What if one is honest enough to see that one is not actually making the kind of progress the scheme proposes? I am told that grace gives the power to improve, to gain righteousness and overcome sin. I am told, furthermore, that grace is absolutely free. But what if I go to church to “get grace” (or pray, read, serve, etc. parenthesis mine) and then get up the next morning and see the same old sinner, perhaps even a little bit worse, staring back at me through the mirror? What then? I am told that grace is free, and that there is nothing wrong with the “delivery system.” Not even a bad pastor, minister or a faulty church can frustrate or limit the grace of God. But I don’t seem to get better. If I am in any way serious, I can only become more and more anxious.3
The wrong view of sanctification turns us against God and against ourselves.
I am told that grace gives one the power to love God. But as a matter of fact I only become more and more resentful of a God who sets up such systems and makes such demands. I don’t seem to grow in love of God. I begin to hate him! Now I face the really desperate question: Whose fault is it if the scheme doesn’t work? There are two possibilities. Either I have not properly responded to or cooperated with the free divine grace, or most frightening of all, the God of election who presides over such grace has decided, in my case, not to give it. The scheme leaves me either depending on my own abilities to respond, to remove all obstacles to grace, to “let myself go” and so forth, or it leaves me with the terrors of predestination. Usually, of course, we recoil in horror from the very thought of predestination. We piously wouldn’t want to lay the blame on “God” and besides, we would then lose all control of the matter!3
So all things considered, we would rather take the blame for the breakdown of the scheme on ourselves. If it didn’t work, it must be because we didn’t do something right. We didn’t repent sincerely enough; we didn’t really and truly seek him; we didn’t wholly give our hearts to Jesus; and so on. But in that case, the more we talk about “free grace” the worse it gets. When the system doesn’t work, “grace is free” turns out to mean that there is no way we can put the blame on grace. But then no matter how much we talk about the grace of God, absolutely everything then depends on us, on our sincerity, our truthfulness, the depth of our feeling, the wholeheartedness of our confession and so on. The system simply turns against us. While we live as old beings in this age, we simply cannot escape the law. So it is impossible to put God’s unconditional act of justifying sinners for Jesus’ sake alone together with our ideas of progress based on conditions.3
If sanctification is wrongly distinguished from justification, sanctification becomes merely another part of the old man’s self-defense against grace. Talk about sanctification can be dangerous in that it misleads and seduces the old being into thinking it is still in control. Just the sheer and unconditional announcement “You have “died!” is the uncompromising insistence that there is nothing to do now, that God has made his last “move” just that, and that alone, is what puts the old being to death, precisely because there is nothing for the old being to do.3
The old man is put to death, not by doing, but by concluding there is nothing to be done. Sanctification is a matter of being grasped by the unconditional grace of God and having now to live in that light. It is a matter of getting used to justification. The sin revealed is not just a misdeed, but it is precisely our lack of faith and trust over against the incredible goodness of God. The sin to be ultimately expelled is our lack of trust. Or perhaps justification is a kind of “temporary loan” granted until we actually earn our way. Sanctification according to this scheme takes over the center of the stage as the real and practical business of the Christian.
What do I mean by “Sanctification is not progress as we define it?”
What does God require? How could we indeed measure “progress” as we typically define it? “But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’ And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets’” (Matthew 22:34-40).
Tim Keller said, “You could have put Adam’s entire Bible inside a fortune cookie” (what does God really require) – God does not require you to do five thousand things in order to be pleasing to Him. No human has obeyed either one of those commandments for one millisecond. The only thing that I bring to the table of my salvation is the sin that makes it necessary.
To say “stop working to earn God’s favor” is not to say “don’t work.”
But is there not such a thing as growth in sanctification, progress in the Christian life? No doubt there is a sense in which we can and even should speak in such fashion. But when we do, we must take care, if everything we have been saying up to this point is true. If justification by faith alone rejects all ordinary schemes of progress and renders us simultaneously just and sinners, we have to look at growth and progress in quite a different light. Sanctification is the art of getting used to justification. There is a kind of growth and progress, it is to be hoped, but it is growth in “grace” a growth in coming to be captivated more and more, if we can so speak, by the totality, the unconditionality of the grace of God. It is a matter of getting used to the fact that if we are to be saved it will have to be by grace alone. We should make no mistake about it: sin is to be conquered and expelled. But if we see that sin is the total state of standing against the unconditional grace and goodness of God, if sin is our very incredulity, unbelief, mistrust, our insistence on falling back on our self and maintaining control, then it is only through the total grace of God that sin comes under attack, and only through faith in that total grace that sin is defeated.
True sanctification can only occur when the total sinner comes under the attack of the total gift. As Luther put it, “To progress is always to begin again.”
The art of sanctification is mastered by us when we are mastered by justification by grace alone.
When Jesus’ sister hit him in the head with a toy and stole his cookie and there was not envy, anger, jealousy, etc. He was earning your righteousness for you – stop it already (Elyse Fitzpatrick, Liberate 2012)! When Joseph was putting corn in the barn, it was their corn (his brothers).
The essence of sin is that it places us in the center of our universe, the one place we should never be. I believe what Forde means is that sanctification, if wrongly understood, puts us right back in the center of the universe – in control.
Genesis 50:20-21 How Can We Love Like Joseph?
Grace will decimate what you think of you, while it gives you a security of identity you’ve never had (Tripp). As Keller says, humble confidence which humbles me out of my pride and affirms me out of my despair is produced when I grasp the fact that I am more sinful than I ever could imagine, God is more Holy than I can comprehend. I am so sinful that Jesus had to die for me (if I was to be redeemed) and so loved by God that He voluntarily and gladly did so.
Paul’s prayer is for God to reveal to Christian people Christ’s love for them (Ephesians 3:14-21).
The people who come to our Churches need to see we are really the people who need Jesus. We are not used to be sinners and used to be idolaters (Scotty Smith at Liberate 2012).
How can you be continually be surprised by grace? Realize that you have spent the last 24 hours screwing up.
Bishop Berkeley (A.D. 1670.) wrote, “I cannot pray, but I sin; I cannot preach, but I sin; I cannot administer, nor receive the holy sacrament, but I sin. My very repentance needs to be repented of: and the tears I shed need washing in the blood of Christ.”
Here is what I believe Forde means:
Turn to 1 John 5:1-5; 1 John 2:15-17. We overcome the world by trusting in what Christ has done for us and said about us.
References:
2) http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2008/spring/9.74.html?paging=off
3) An essay by Gerhard Forde entitled “A Lutheran View of Sanctification”
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