Biblical Emphases: Means of Grace

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Midweek of Oculi – Lent 3

Romans 10:5-17  +  John 6:47-63

Original sin means that all people are corrupt by nature and incurable. Justification by faith alone means there’s hope for sinners, because our acceptance by God into eternal life doesn’t depend on our sinlessness, but on faith in Jesus Christ, the Sinless One, whom faith lays hold of, whose benefits faith receives. But where does this faith come from? If we’re truly corrupt and even dead by nature and hostile to God in spiritual things, if we have no true fear of God or true faith in God by nature, as the doctrine of original sin reveals, how can we ever believe in Christ Jesus so as to be justified by faith?

Our Augsburg Confession puts it beautifully: That we may obtain such faith, God has instituted the preaching office; He has given the Gospel and the Sacraments, through which, as through means, He gives the Holy Spirit, who works faith, where and when He wishes, in those who hear the Gospel—the Gospel that teaches that, through Christ’s merit, not through our own merit, we have a gracious God, if we believe this.

It’s so rare to find this basic teaching in modern Christian churches. The idea that God works through instruments, through means—what we call the Means of Grace—is completely foreign to American Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, who may speak very highly of the Bible as being the inspired Word of God, but then they come right out and deny that God uses preaching and the Sacraments as His chosen instruments to create faith in men’s hearts. And yet, this is an integral part of the doctrine of Christ. The Holy Ghost works through the instruments, the means of preaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments. This is how He stirs up faith in the hearts of men. This is how He nourishes and strengthens and sustains faith.  Everything depends on the Word.

This is the same thing Jesus taught His apostles when He told them the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. The seed that sprouts into faith in men’s hearts is the Word of God, according to Jesus. And what did He say in the lesson you heard tonight? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life. And when Jesus gave His apostles the great commission, He said, Go into all the world and preach the Gospel. Or, Go and make disciples of all nations. How?  By what means?  By reasoning with them? By doing miracles? By telling them to find God within themselves? No. Baptizing them…and teaching them.

Paul says to the Romans in chapter 1, For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.

And what did Paul say in our lesson from Romans 10? For “whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.” How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent? … So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

So let’s make sure we have a solid understanding of the Means of Grace. The phrase which we so commonly use in the Lutheran Church, the ‘means of grace,’ refers to the instrument or tool that God the Holy Spirit uses to bring people to faith, to preserve them in the faith, and thus to save people from sin, death, and the devil.

What is that tool? What is that instrument? It’s the Word of God, specifically the Gospel of Christ: God’s promise to be merciful and gracious, to forgive poor sinners their sins for Christ’s sake, through faith. The Gospel is preached to the ears with words alone. But the Gospel is also preached to the eyes and to the other senses when those words, when those promises are attached also to visible things, like water, bread and wine. That’s why we sometimes say that the Sacraments are “the visible Word.”

So the message of Christ is proclaimed in the world. That’s a tool of the Holy Spirit for applying grace to men, for bringing them to faith and, through faith, applying the merits of Christ to them.

Water is applied to a person in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, with the promise that “He who believes and is baptized will be saved,” or, “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins,” or, “Baptism now saves you,” or, “God saved us through—by means of—the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.” Those promises attached to Baptism make it a tool of the Holy Spirit, applying the promises of the Gospel to the individual who is baptized.

Bread and wine are consecrated with the Words of Christ’s institution, then distributed, eaten and drunk by communicants, with the promise that “This is My body; this is My blood of the New Testament, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” That promise, “for the forgiveness of sins,” attached to the bread and wine which each communicant receives, makes the Lord’s Supper a tool of the Holy Spirit, a means of applying grace to sinners, to each and every one, each and every time you receive it.

What things are not means of grace? For one, prayer. Prayer is good. Prayer is powerful. But prayer itself isn’t a tool of the Holy Spirit for conferring grace on sinners, for creating or preserving faith. You talking to God, you asking God for things doesn’t bring His grace and forgiveness to you. Only His appointed means do that.

For another, the heart of man. Your heart is not a means of grace. Neither are your feelings or emotions. If you’re feeling guilty for sins you’ve committed, don’t look inside yourself, don’t look to your feelings in order to find forgiveness or a gracious God. God doesn’t work directly on your heart. He doesn’t forgive you on the inside or communicate with you through your feelings. He communicates with you through His Word and works forgiveness through the appointed means of grace.

Another non-means of grace is things that happen in your life—success or failure, a good day or a bad day, sickness or health, good fortune or bad. God doesn’t tell you whether He accepts you or rejects you through any such things. He’s given you a better way, a dependable way to know His will with certainty, to receive His grace and favor, to be strengthened and confirmed in your faith and preserved in it till the end: His Word preached to you by the servant whom he specifically sent to do it, and His Sacraments administered according to His command.

Be thankful for this doctrine of the means of grace! Rejoice in it! Because it gives you a firm and dependable place to find God in the world, a channel to Christ that is open to all, intended for all, and powerful to work in all people the faith by which alone we must be justified. Amen.

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Stay close to the One who keeps the demons away

Posted on March 4, 2018 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Oculi – Lent 3

2 Samuel 22:1-7  +  Ephesians 5:1-9  +  Luke 11:14-28

Again in the Gospel today, as the last two weeks, you heard of Jesus dealing with demons. We have in our Gospel an important lesson about demons that you need to pay attention to, because even though we don’t encounter demon-possession in the same form that Jesus did, that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away or given up. People imagine that if a demon’s not twisting someone’s head around, it’s not that scary. But I tell you, the demons’ influence on false doctrine and on society is just as dangerous and worse, because an undercover enemy is able to do the more damage because he goes unnoticed. So listen to Jesus. And stay close to the One who keeps the demons away.

Maybe we should say a word about what demons are and what they do. Demons are fallen angels, spirit-creatures who rebelled against God soon after they were created and turned against both God and man. After they rebelled, God cast them out of heaven into the gloomy dungeons of hell, the everlasting fire which God prepared specifically “for the devil and his angels,” as we read in Matthew’s Gospel. But until the day of final judgment, God, for His own reasons, still allows the devil and his angels some freedom to tempt people, to influence human society, to promote false doctrine and lead people astray into false belief, and even to trouble some people mentally and physically.

How exactly these evil spirit-creatures exert their influence in the world is a mystery to us; God hasn’t revealed it. But that they do is certain.

At the same time, God hasn’t left His Church without protection. St. Paul sets out for believers the whole armor of God in Ephesians 6, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil, and having done all, to stand. We’ll look again at that whole armor another time. For now, let’s see what protection our Gospel provides.

After Jesus drove out the mute demon in the Gospel, some of the crowd that saw it marveled, as well they should. No one had ever seen such power over the demons. No one had ever seen a man able to successfully command the demons to stop carrying out their wicked purpose.

But others were upset that Jesus had cast out this demon. He casts out demons by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons. Why would they say such a thing? Because they assumed they were the ones on God’s side. They were the ones teaching that God accepts people based on their works of obedience to the Law of Moses. But Jesus’ doctrine was against their doctrine. He didn’t reject the Law of Moses. But He did reject the false notion that men could actually obey it so as to be saved by it. The Gospel of Jesus was that He had come to personally fulfill the Law of Moses in the place of sinners, to suffer and die in the place of sinners, and so to destroy the works of the devil and to bestow the forgiveness of sins, not on those who kept the Law, but on those who trusted in Him for mercy.

Others wanted a sign from Jesus. As if casting out a demon weren’t sign enough! No, these people were never satisfied with any sign, as we’ll see again next week in the Gospel of the feeding of the five thousand.

Jesus dismisses the accusation that He’s working together with the devil. If he’s casting out demons by the devil’s power, then it would be a sign of division in the devil’s kingdom, and the devil’s kingdom couldn’t long stand. The bad news is, the devil’s kingdom is not at all divided. It’s perfectly united in its hatred of God and man. It has been free to tempt, influence, mislead and trouble mankind since mankind first fell into sin, and it will continue raging against us until the last judgment, because that’s part of God’s curse on this sinful, God-hating world.

The good news is, God has finally stepped into human history to deal with the devil. As Jesus says, if I cast out demons with the finger of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.

To illustrate, Jesus compares the devil’s hold on mankind to a strong man, fully armed, who guards his own palace. As long as he guards it, his goods are in peace. The devil had won a great victory over mankind in leading our first parents into sin. He won the right to accuse and to trouble our race. We had no defense against his charges, no defender to fight against him, and so he wreaked havoc in the world. But God promised in the Garden of Eden that the Christ, the Seed of the woman, would bruise the serpent’s head. And here He was! Finally! The Seed of the woman, Jesus the Christ. As John writes, For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil. In the Gospel, Jesus compares Himself to the stronger man, who comes upon the strong man and overcomes him and takes from him all his armor in which he trusted, and divides his spoils.

There are only two sides in this conflict: the devil’s side, and Jesus’ side. If you would be victorious over the devil and all his temptations and all his influence and all his false doctrine and all his troubling, you must be on Jesus’ side. Because, as Jesus says, He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters. With Jesus there is forgiveness and reconciliation with God and grace and favor and providence and protection. But those who are against Jesus are the devil’s prisoners, and often, the devil’s instruments.

You Christians have been called to Christ’s side, baptized into Him, freed from the devil’s kingdom and brought into the kingdom of light, freed from the devil’s accusations through faith in the Righteous One and justified through faith, freed from the devil’s lies through the truth, through the Word of God. You’ve come close to the One who drives away the demons.

But listen to the stern warning Jesus issues: When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he finds it swept and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

It’s not enough to have been baptized. It’s not enough to believe for a while, to hear the Word of God for a while, to hear the Word without listening to it and taking it to heart. The demons are ever circling, surrounding the Church of God, like lions eager to pick off the stragglers from the herd. How does one become such a straggler? Through pride, imagining that you’re standing firm, you don’t need to gather around Word and Sacrament regularly. Through indifference, so that you may well come to church, but your heart isn’t in it, you’re no longer sincere about repentance, about putting the Word into practice. Through idolatry, when you knowingly give in to temptation or when someone or something becomes more important in your heart than the Word of Christ.

Do you see how vulnerable we are to being picked off by the demons, one by one? And when that happens, when they’re successful at separating a Christian from Christ, when a heart is swept clean of the Holy Spirit and the Word of Christ, it becomes even worse for that person than it was before, as Jesus says. Some of you have witnessed this, haven’t you?

Oh, God! Preserve Your Church from the devil’s attacks! Preserve us all from straying from Christ and the refuge of His protection!

What’s the hope? What’s the solution? Is it what that woman cried out to Jesus? Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts which nursed You! Are you protected from the devil by being the mother of Jesus? I hope not! Because there was only one of those. Are you protected from the devil by living close to Jesus for thirty years, as Jesus’ mother did? No, you’re not safe just because at some earlier point in your life you knew Jesus and were close to Him. What does He say? More than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it! That is, who keep hearing it and who keep guarding it, holding onto it as the only light in a dark place, as the only divinely-forged weapon against that ancient enemy, and walking according to it. As St. Paul wrote, You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth).

God has provided the Stronger Man to overpower the devil, yes, by casting him out, but even more, by suffering, dying, and rising from the dead. He is the same Jesus who now reigns at the right hand of God and defends His Church. But understand that this Jesus, who is the Conqueror of demons, has determined to defend His Church by means of His Word. He has sent down His Word into the world for men to hear it and to know it and to use it against the demons. This Jesus has sent down His Spirit into the world to work through the Word and to protect His people from the evil one. This Jesus has provided you with His body and blood here in the Sacrament, against which the demons are powerless. And this Jesus has bid you to pray to Him for divine protection and has promised to step in and be your Defender. You have the means to fight against the devil and to win, even as Jesus has won and stands victorious forever. Stay close to the One who keeps the demons away—Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.

 

 

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Sermon for midweek of Reminiscere – Lent 2

Posted on February 28, 2018 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Biblical Emphases: Justification by Faith Alone

Galatians 2:11-21  +  John 3:14-21

Last week we considered how doomed our race is because of original sin. The Scriptures are very clear that there is no one righteous before God, because all have sinned, whether those sins are gross outward offenses or the hidden offenses of the heart, where there isn’t true fear of God, true love for God, and true faith in God. If you get that, if you get original sin and how thoroughly it has damaged our race, then the next Biblical emphasis shouldn’t be hard to grasp: that the only way for sinners to be justified is by faith alone Christ Jesus.

Let’s define again the verb ‘justify’ and the noun ‘justification,’ as the Bible uses the terms. It’s a “forensic” term, a courtroom term. It’s the ruling of the judge who declares the defendant to be innocent of the charges against him and, therefore, free to go, free to live. In spiritual terms, it’s God’s act of declaring a person to be just, to be righteous, to be acceptable in His sight, a son of His kingdom. According to the Scripture, there are only two ways to be justified. There’s the Law way, and there’s the Gospel way.

The Law way is very simple, and at the same time, impossible. The one who does these things shall live by them. In other words, if you keep all of God’s Law, both outwardly and inwardly, with the hands and with the heart, with perfect love toward God and perfect love toward your neighbor, with your whole heart, soul, mind and strength, then you will live. You will be justified in God’s courtroom. But if you slip up even once, you will die. You will be condemned. Because there is no forgiveness under the Law, and no weighing of good vs. bad. If a person is judged by the Law, then he has to be sinless in order to be justified. Justification by works, justification by the Law, only works for sinless people.

But again, as we saw last week, we all start out life already sinful and unclean. And the Law offers no forgiveness. There is no justification available for sinners under the Law. For sinful people, only the Gospel will do.

Of course, that’s exactly what the Apostle Paul was saying in Galatians 2. Even he and the Apostle Peter, as Jews who had a good record of moral behavior compared to the Gentiles who didn’t have the Ten Commandments, had become convinced that their works weren’t good enough, that their works didn’t provide even the slightest reason for God to justify them. Instead, they had come to know Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, who offered them justification in a completely different way than the Law did. Not by obeying the Law well enough, but by faith in Him who was crucified for us, who loved us and gave Himself for us.

The justification of the Gospel is the free forgiveness of sins for the sake of Christ alone, which is applied to sinners through faith alone. As Paul wrote, a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ. He clearly sets the two methods of justification at odds with one another. Not a justification that takes place on the basis of works, but a justification that takes place on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ.

So faith can’t be considered a meritorious work, that is, a work that we do that earns God’s forgiveness. This is one of the greatest problems with Baptist theology, what we sometimes call “decision-theology,” which the now-departed Billy Graham popularized in his preaching and in his magazine entitled, “Decision.” First, it ignores original sin, which we considered last week, because it gives sinful man a power that the Scriptures don’t give him—not much power, but power, nonetheless, to be able to decide for himself whether or not to invite the Lord Jesus into his heart. It makes man responsible for his own conversion. It places the emphasis on man’s decision, like the children’s song, “I have decided to follow Jesus.” It turns faith into that one work that man has to do. Jesus did the suffering and dying. You have to do the deciding, the believing.

But that’s not how the Scriptures present faith and believing. Instead, the Holy Spirit, through the promise of the Gospel that God will be merciful to you in Christ, calls out to sinners, not, “Make your decision! It’s all up to you!”, but, “Repent and believe the good news! Look to Christ and be saved!” It’s that promise of the Gospel, the very power of God, that moves sinners to look to Him who was lifted up on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation, even as the snake-bitten Israelites were moved by Moses’ word to look up to the serpent on the pole and were healed. Faith isn’t a work that earns anything from God. Instead, faith lays hold of Christ. Faith is the means by which God credits us with Christ’s works and with Christ’s death, so that the divine Judge can turn to all who believe in Christ and pronounce them to be righteous, innocent, free to go, free to live in His kingdom forever, not as enemies, not as people whom He tolerates there, but as sons and beloved children.

This is the faith by which we are justified, not just a knowledge of who Jesus is, not just believing that God exists, but trusting and relying on Jesus as the One for whose sake alone God accepts us.

But justification by faith alone doesn’t mean and has never meant that love and good works are unnecessary for believers. Far from it! It doesn’t mean, go ahead and sin! Works of love, works in obedience to God’s commandments are certainly necessary. We don’t discount them from the Christian life. We discount them from the matter of justification, from the earning of God’s grace. We discount them as the reason for which God justifies or accepts anyone. In fact, it’s only because of justification by faith alone that anyone can begin that “new obedience,” as we call it, of starting to truly fear God, love God, and trust in God, of starting to care selflessly about our neighbor, of starting to take God’s commandments seriously as something that we want to obey, because we’ve received forgiveness from our Father for the sake of Jesus.

This is justification by faith alone, the heart of the Gospel, the teaching on which the Church stands or falls, the simple teaching of John 3:16. It’s constantly being attacked from the devil with false teachings, both big and small, whether it’s the Roman Church including works of love in its definition of faith, or the Baptists turning faith into a decision and work of man, or the “Lutheran” synods creating a third way to be justified—neither by works, nor by faith, but “objectively.” So give thanks for the simple teaching of John 3:16. Take comfort in it and guard it. Guard it with your life. Guard it throughout your life. And never let anyone move you from the simple but profound truth that you, a poor sinner, have been declared righteous and acceptable to God through faith alone in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

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Faith still looks to Christ for good

Posted on February 25, 2018 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Reminiscere – Lent 2

Isaiah 45:20-25  +  1 Thessalonians 4:1-7  +  Matthew 15:21-28

I would remind you of the words we chanted today in the Introit. Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses, for they are from of old. Let not my enemies triumph over me. God of Israel, deliver us out of all our troubles! To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in You; let me not be ashamed. Those words summarize beautifully the message in today’s Gospel, as we learn from Jesus’ interaction with the woman of Canaan. No matter what obstacles were placed before her faith—obstacles placed even by Jesus Himself—she overcame them all and was rewarded for it in the end. No matter how hopeless her situation seemed, she clung to her godly prayer, Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses, for they are from of old.

Not that the Lord forgets. He never forgets anything. He never gets distracted. He never sleeps. He never changes His mind. And yet He teaches us to pray with the Psalmist, Remember, O Lord! Remember Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses, for they are from of old. It’s the prayer of faith. True faith doesn’t view God as a vending machine, so that you put in a request and then expect the requested action to pop out within seconds. No, true faith comes to God in humility, with a pressing need, with a knowledge of God’s faithfulness, with confidence in God’s mercy, with the persistent prayer of a dear child to a dear father.

Matthew tells us that Jesus left the territory of Israel to make a little visit to the northern region of Tyre and Sidon, on the northern border of Galilee, where Jesus grew up and spent much of His ministry. Why step outside the borders of Israel? We have no idea, except that it shows clearly that Jesus had a saving purpose also for those who were not born of Jewish blood.

A woman from that region, a non-Jew, had a daughter who was being afflicted somehow by a demon. She heard that Jesus had come into her country, and she had obviously heard the good report about Jesus, probably because Galilee was right there on the border of her country. She had to go looking for Him; Mark tells us that Jesus was trying to keep a low profile. And then she presents her urgent plea to Jesus: Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! My daughter is severely demon-possessed.

What great things the Word alone had already accomplished in this Gentile woman! O Lord, Son of David! What had she—a Gentile woman, living outside of the land of Israel—to do with David, the great king of Israel who had been dead for a thousand years? What had she to do with David’s Son, the Christ, who was to sit on David’s throne as King of the Jews? Why does she believe He is merciful? And why does she believe He has power over the devil? The Word of God did it all.

The Word of God told of the coming Son of David who would destroy the devil’s power, who would be merciful and just, who would not reign over the physical descendants of Israel alone, but who would welcome all nations into a new Israel, a people of God made up of believers from every nation. You heard the Lord proclaim it today through the prophet Isaiah: There is no other God besides Me, A just God and a Savior; There is none besides Me. Look to Me, and be saved, All you ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. Somehow the woman from Canaan heard the Word about Jesus, the Son of David. And hearing, she believed. And believing, she cried out to Him for help against the devil’s hold on her daughter.

What follows in the Gospel is a testing of her faith that was as much for the apostles’ benefit and for our benefit as it was for hers. The devil, for his part, would have convinced the woman that God was not good or merciful, at least, not to her. For His part, Jesus would test the woman’s faith in order to hold it up as a shining example of His power over the devil.

Jesus answered her not a word. He doesn’t get annoyed with her. He doesn’t send her away. He allows her to keep crying out for help. He just doesn’t say anything. And the devil would have the woman think, Jesus isn’t good or merciful, at least, not to you.

The disciples didn’t know what to make of Jesus’ silence. They got tired of her crying out and assumed from Jesus’ silence that He didn’t want to help her. Send her away, for she cries out after us, they said. But some things should not be so easily assumed. Didn’t Jesus always help everyone who came to Him for help? Didn’t the Scripture bid all the ends of the earth to look to God and be saved, as Isaiah wrote? But at the first sign that maybe Jesus wouldn’t help the woman, the disciples gave up hope.

Again, Jesus didn’t send her away. Instead, He answered, I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It sounds like a rejection, and yet it’s just a simple statement which was generally true. Jesus was born in Israel. He conducted His entire ministry in Israel. As far as we know, this was the only time during His ministry that Jesus left the borders of Israel, and it wasn’t far beyond Israel’s borders. Of course, we know now that it was Jesus’ plan, after His death and resurrection, to send out His disciples into all the world, to preach the Gospel to every creature. But that plan was still unknown when the events of our Gospel took place. The devil would have the woman think, Jesus didn’t come for you. Just give up on Him already!

But instead of going away, she came and bowed down before Him and cried, “Lord, help me!” For as hopeless as her situation appears, the devil has been entirely unsuccessful at driving her away from Jesus. When He doesn’t seem willing to help, she just comes closer and cries out some more, as if to say, “Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses, for they are from of old!”

There’s one final test. Jesus said, It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs. He seems to say that the people of Israel are God’s children, and the Gentiles are not, and that for Him to help a Gentile would be robbing Israel of the help that was rightfully theirs. Again, the devil would have the woman think, Jesus is wicked to talk to you that way. You’re not a little dog. God is not good. Turn your back on Him!

Instead, the woman replies with childlike faith, Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table. Through the silence, through the apparent rejection, through what most would consider to be an insult, the woman’s faith remains firm like a boulder. She believes that Jesus is the Son of David, the Christ of God, and that means He doesn’t have a fixed number of times He can help people, so that if He helps one, He can’t help another. She believes that He’s the Christ, so there’s plenty of help and mercy to go around, and she’s content to be a little dog at her master’s table, because a crumb of His grace is more than enough to take care of her needs, and far more than she deserves.

By the power of God’s Word, she’s passed the trials of Jesus, which the devil wanted to use against her as temptations. He had been successful with Adam and Eve using a much lesser temptation. They lived in a beautiful garden, had no problems, needed nothing. God had openly shown nothing but grace and favor toward them. But at the slightest suggestion from the devil that God was not good, that He wanted to keep them from the forbidden fruit because He didn’t want them to be like Him, they believed him! They gave up on God’s goodness when there was nothing but goodness to see. This woman of Canaan, on the other hand, saw no sign of God’s goodness and many signs that He was against her. And yet her faith remained. That’s not a tribute to her greatness. It’s a tribute to the power of the Holy Spirit, working through the Word.

Jesus praises her faith: O woman, great is your faith! Let it be to you as you desire. And her daughter was healed from that very hour. In the end, we can look back and see what Jesus was doing and the good He intended, and it makes sense to us. But during the trial, when there was no grace to be seen, only faith could see through the outward appearance to find a good and loving God. Faith still looked to Jesus for good and stubbornly kept crying out, “Remember, O Lord!”

The devil’s oldest temptation is that God is not good, because He doesn’t want you to have something you deserve to have. Ever since Eden, our sinful nature exists at all times with that false belief, that God is not good, that God should behave differently than He does, that we deserve to be treated better than He treats us. The flesh doesn’t fear God, doesn’t give Him the honor of doing as He pleases as God, doesn’t love Him, doesn’t trust in Him for grace. And the devil uses every opportunity to reinforce the sinful nature’s way of thinking. Every hardship we endure in this world, every affliction, and especially those that last a while, becomes a weapon in the devil’s arsenal to convince us, God is not good. Stop believing in Him. Stop trusting in Him.

Through all that darkness, the Word of God calls out like a bright light: God is good! He loved the world! He gave His Son into death so that all men might live through faith in Him! He has brought you into His kingdom through Holy Baptism! But the Word of God also calls out: In this world, you will have troubles. You will not always see God’s plan, and it will sometimes appear that He won’t help. Don’t be fooled by appearances. Trust His Word. And in the end, you will see that He is always good, and that it was the devil who was lying to you all along. May the cry of faith never diminish: Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses, for they are from of old. To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in You; let me not be ashamed. Amen.

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Biblical emphases: Original Sin

Posted on February 21, 2018 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Midweek of Invocavit – Lent 1

Romans 5:12-14  +  Mark 7:14-23

This evening we begin a five-week catechetical series of sermons in which we’ll explore together five important emphases of the Bible, five teachings that run throughout the Holy Scriptures and that affect our lives as Christians every day, all the time. They’re all familiar to you, I’m sure, as Lutherans, but they’re so foreign to most people, and even to most Christians, that a little review will certainly do you good, and that’s a main purpose of the season of Lent: to ground you in your Baptism and in your baptismal faith.

The five emphases are: Original Sin, Justification by Faith, the Means of Grace, Vocation, and the Piety of the Cross. So we begin this evening with the first: Original Sin.

Did you know that Lutherans don’t have the same numbering of the Ten Commandments as the Reformed and Evangelicals do? They split our First Commandment into two—You shall have no other gods, and You shall make no graven image—and they combine our Ninth and Tenth Commandments into one—simply, You shall not covet, whereas we have, You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, and You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his servant, maid, cattle, or anything that is his. Without getting into all the reasons, there’s an important reason why we split up the two commandments not to covet.

The Ninth Commandment forbids an actual desire, a specific sinful desire for something that belongs to your neighbor. The Tenth forbids sinful desires in general, for all sorts of things. It’s that broad sinful desire or longing, sometimes called “concupiscence,” or “Original Desire,” which we include in our definition of Original Sin.

What is Original Sin? It’s a disease and corruption of human nature, passed down from parents to children, all the way back to Adam and Eve. There are two parts to this corruption of our nature. It includes “original desire,” that broad sinful desire for things that God considers evil; and it includes the general sluggishness or slowness to desire that which God considers good and righteous.

In the beginning, God made man (male and female) in His own image and likeness. People have gone crazy trying to define the image of God. But if they would just listen to St. Paul, they wouldn’t struggle so much. You have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him; and, having put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness. True knowledge of God, true righteousness and holiness. That was the essence of the image of God in which He originally made Adam and Eve. Like this piece of paper, perfectly smooth and straight.

When Adam and Eve sinned, they twisted and corrupted their very nature, like crumpling up a piece of paper. Once you do that, there’s no going back. There’s no fixing it or repairing it or undoing the damage. It’s done. Adam and Eve no longer naturally desired what God considered good and no longer naturally shunned what God considered evil. Now it was just the opposite. They wanted what God didn’t want and they didn’t want what God did want. And their newborn sinful desires gave birth immediately to sinful actions. The actual taking of the forbidden fruit, the actual lust for one another in their nakedness, the actual hiding from God because their knowledge of Him was now impaired, the actual refusal to confess their own guilt when God confronted them.

And the punishment for it was exactly the punishment God had warned Adam and Eve about ahead of time: death, both temporal and eternal. A death sentence that was passed down to all of Adam’s children born of a man and a woman, because the twisted nature passes down, like a genetic disease, except this disease is of the soul itself, causing all people to be born spiritually “dead in sins and trespasses,” “at enmity with God,” and “blind” to the things of God, as the New Testament describes. Behold, writes King David, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.

You were dead, Paul says, in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

Again, the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

And again, But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

The result of Original Sin—the corruption of the heart—is what Jesus described in the second lesson tonight: from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man. The sin against the Tenth Commandment—Original Sin, Original desire—is the wellspring of all other sins against all the other commandments—the contaminated wellspring of a contaminated human heart.

This is why no one can ever do enough good works to earn back God’s favor. This is why no one has the ability to make a decision for Jesus or to believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him by my own reason or strength. This is why no one has a free will by nature. This is why it isn’t surprising to see so much violence, godlessness and corruption in the world. Everyone’s born with an incurably diseased heart. And just as you can’t draw a cup of pure water out of a bucket of dirty water, so no one can produce even one pure and righteous work out of a person who is, by nature, sinful and unclean.

And the proof of all this, as St. Paul wrote to the Romans in tonight’s first lesson, is human death. Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned. The evolutionary theory would tell you that human death is a natural and necessary part of the evolutionary process. But according to the Bible, human death is not natural. It is the direct result of Adam’s sin—a sinfulness that has been passed down and spread to all of us. St. Paul shows that from Adam onward, even before God gave His holy law on Mount Sinai, everyone died. They hadn’t broken a single God-given law. But they had all inherited a sinful, diseased, corrupt nature—a sinful flesh—from their parents, going back to Adam and Eve. As Jesus said, That which is born of the flesh is flesh.

It’s not until we grasp just how depraved and doomed our race was that we can truly appreciate the need for a Savior, a Savior who was sinless, for a Savior who was born, not of man and woman, but of woman only, by the miraculous working of the Holy Spirit, so that He could be born without original sin and so be capable of leading a sinless life, which none of us could ever do.

The remedy for Original Sin is nothing less than rebirth. Unless one is born again—born of water and the Spirit—he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. The Gospel of Christ, the sinless God-Man, calls all sinners to repentance and faith in Him for the forgiveness of sins. That same Gospel is applied to us individually for the remission of sins in the waters of Holy Baptism. Baptism is the remedy for Original Sin.

But Baptism doesn’t erase Original Sin. It doesn’t heal our corrupt nature so that it’s no longer corrupt. What it does— it washes away sin in the sense of removing your guilt before God, sending your sins away from your legal record. Like having your criminal record expunged, both the guilt of having a corrupt nature and the guilt for the crimes that flowed from that corrupt nature. Faith in God’s promise made to you in Holy Baptism is what keeps Original Sin and actual sin from condemning you. It’s what makes you, who are, by nature, sinful and unclean, both sinless and clean in God’s sight.

Now, in the baptized, God has created a new man in His own image and likeness, a new man who dwells side by side with the Old Man in every Christian. Now the two—the New Man created by the Holy Spirit and the Old Man with which we are born—are at war with each other and must be at war. The New Man has holy desires. The New Man wants what God wants and shuns what God shuns. The New Man can actually do good works—not works that can save us, not works that can earn God’s favor, but works that are pleasing to God our Father. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians, For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

So understand Original Sin. It’s a main emphasis of the Bible and of the Lutheran faith, very poorly understood outside of our confession. It’s the “enemy within” that rules every unbeliever and that threatens every believer. Know your enemy! But know also your Savior, Jesus Christ. He has given you now the victory over your enemy in the form of forgiveness. And He will one day give you the final victory over your flesh, when He takes you from this world to the sinless life of heaven. Amen.

 

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