...now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.
- Let's talk about the reality of the world.
- Here's one view of the world: in this world, you get what you pay for and you get what you work for and you get what you deserve and that's the bottom line. With suspect grammar, one science-fiction writer put it this way: “There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!”
- This is the world we live in. Value for your dollar and let the punishment fit the crime. We call this justice and we pursue it vigorously. It is what we want in all our dealings with each other on every level.
- This is why achievement and the desire for rewards and honours is so important. We love our trophies, our medals, and our certificates. This is how people are motivated, or so I've been told.
- When things go against our concept and understanding of justice, we claim that things are unfair.
- Yet we have “hints” that the world God created and God's dealing with creation does not work that way. For example, my wife has a coffee cup with a saying based on the wisdom of the First Nations peoples printed on the side. It says “When the Great Spirit sends the dawn, he sends it for all.” The dawn is everyone's without regard to good or evil, deserving or undeserving.
- In a similar way, the dog is an amazing animal. In most cases, they are loyal to their people despite their people's unworthiness. Let's face it; do any of us deserve the love and loyalty of such an animal?
- These two poor, limping examples show us that justice is not the only thing there is in this world. These two examples also lead us to the real topic of the sermon – the Reformation.
- The Reformation brought to light a teaching of the church that had never really been lost, but that had been buried very deep under a host of other things. This teaching is nothing less than the primacy of grace.
- There was a time in the church's life when grace (or the presence of God, which is another way of explaining grace) was seen as a reward for good deeds or a good life. Saying it rather simplistically, if you were good enough, you would know grace. The Reformation confronted this idea. In fact, the idea that grace cannot be deserved or achieved or earned remains the cornerstone of the Lutheran understanding of theology and interpretation of Scripture.
- There was a time in the church's life and history when grace was seen as something given in response to the profession of faith or a decision to follow Jesus. A true Reformation understanding of grace hold that the grace of God comes before any of those things. As Paul put it: “For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.” Saying that we must profess something or proclaim something to deserve grace turns faith into another work. Faith is reduced to a check-list or a proof of your worthiness rather than an expression of trust in a loving God. I think we can all see that the Reformers wouldn't stand for that.
- When Luther heard the words “...a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.” , he received such a tremendous sense of freedom that he felt he had been “born again and ...have entered paradise itself”
- It is grace – God's free give received in trusting faith – that is our heritage as Christians and our particular proclamation as Christians in the Reformation tradition. This remains our special gift to the church; to continue to proclaim, remind, and uphold, in the face of a world that treasures accomplishment and self-justification, the value, centrality, and power of God's grace in our whole lives.
- No matter what we look like, what we've earned, what we've gained or lost, who we are, or who we think we are “... there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus...”
- In the face of the reality of the world and the reality of God's action in the world, it has to be asked: do we want justice or do we want grace?
- As Christians, the answer is always “grace.”
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