June 1, 2013

God’s Grace Is Blessing and Responsibility!

2nd Sunday after Pentecost, 6/2/13
Galatians 1:1-10


God’s Grace Is Blessing and Responsibility!
I. Here’s where his saving grace abounds.
II. Here’s where his saving grace is at stake.


Once you’ve attained a tremendous blessing, it often requires a great deal of effort to keep that blessing. Make a wrong move, become slightly complacent, let your attention get diverted, and it can be lost in an instant.

That’s true of many things in life. It often happens in the world of business especially as it pertains to the value of business stock. Do a little research into such well-known companies such as Groupon, Netflix and Facebook. The stock in all of these companies soared overnight, making their CEOs very wealthy men. But when the initial buying frenzy subsided, the value of the stock plummeted and billions of dollars were lost. Not that I feel sorry for a person like Mark Zuckerberg. He’s still worth billions of dollars. It just shows that so often it takes as much effort, if not more, to keep a blessing once you have it, than it took to get it in the first place.

Today’s worship theme announces that our God is worthy of our trust. Chiefly that regards our forgiveness, our salvation. He and he alone is able to accomplish our salvation and he gives it to us freely by faith in Jesus without any working on our part. That’s the central truth of our Christian faith. Tragically, Christianity abounds with people who have compromised that truth. But that shouldn’t surprise us. It happened already among the earliest of Christian congregations.

Paul wrote these words of our text to the churches in Galatia, present-day Turkey. He had shared the blessed truth of their salvation with them. But they had let it slip from their grasp. They had abandoned salvation by God’s grace when they added their own works to it.

May that never happen among us! It won’t when we realize that God’s saving grace is blessing and responsibility. Join me in seeing how true that is as we study those opening verses of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians.

Part I.

It’s easy to host a pity party, especially when your thoughts are consumed with what you don’t have. If only I had their job instead of mine…If only I drove that car instead of this one…If only I lived in that kind of house…If only I could take that kind of trip…If only I had that kind of income…If only I had those looks or that health. It’s miserable, isn’t it?

And we know what the solution is. Instead of focusing on what we don’t have, we should focus on what we do have. Instead of hosting a pity party, take an inventory of all that God has given you. And when you make that list, don’t forget the spiritual gifts.
Those same opposites apply to us as a congregation of Christians as well. We could take a look at what we are as a congregation and bemoan what we don’t have. I’m sure you could make a short list rather quickly of blessings you enjoyed as a member of a different congregation—schools, youth programs, day care, senior groups, singles groups, young adult groups, community service groups. All of these are blessings, great blessings to a congregation.

But they all pale in comparison to one blessing, and that’s having the truth of our salvation. Paul opens his letter with this greeting, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age.” Our congregation stands on the truth of our salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. That’s what we have.

But how is that different from any other Christian congregation? By God’s grace, we’re still holding firmly to the entire truth of God’s word. We’re counting on our God to rescue us from this present evil age, not to make concessions to it and compromises with it. It’s plenty difficult simply withstanding the attacks on Christian truth from outside the church. It’s devastating when those attacks come from within. It pains us to hear what some Christians will tolerate and even promote. Thank God that we haven’t slid down the slippery slope of such “feel-good” Christianity!

Instead, we listen to our God speak to us about sin. Sin is a violation. It crosses over the line that God has set. It misses the mark of the perfection he demands. And it’s not limited to our actions which harm others. It includes even the thought and the desire to do so. We demand the right to think and feel the way we want and then we justify our doing so. That’s our situation every day of our lives and we admit it’s true when we join our fellow believers in confessing it. We have the truth about our sin.

And we have the truth about God’s grace. That’s what Paul had shared with the congregations scattered here and there in Galatia. He announced to them that their sins had been forgiven by the life and death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He impressed on them that God took the punishment for our sins upon himself. He held before them the glorious truth that they had been washed clean by the blood of Jesus and, by faith in him, were holy or righteous in God’s sight.

And those are the same truths that our God has shared with us. By faith in Jesus we are forgiven of all our sins. Our guilt has been removed. Jesus has atoned for our sins. We’re now forgiven children of God by faith in Jesus and only by faith in Jesus. Our salvation is all God’s doing. That’s what is proclaimed and believed here. That means here’s where God’s grace abounds.

God’s saving grace is blessing and responsibility.

A few minutes ago we spoke about some blessings other congregations have that we don’t. I want you to know that I’m all in favor of establishing programs to share God’s truth with our members where the need and the interest in those programs are evident. We can always do a better job of sharing the truth of God’s grace with others. But if you contend that we need to teach something different, if you’re thinking that we need to change the truth, if you would like to teach that there’s something we need to add to God’s grace for our salvation, I couldn’t disagree with you more. Every time you and I get together for worship or Bible study, we share the truth about ourselves—namely, our sinfulness, the fact that we deserve nothing good from our God, that our sinful nature reveals itself every day in countless ways. We are discontented, disrespectful, unthankful, lustful, materialistic and self-centered. For that we rightly deserve God’s wrath and punishment. But we also declare and hold to this great truth—that our God has showered his saving grace on us in the gospel through word and sacrament. The gospel of Jesus states without reservation that Jesus has done everything so that God can bless us with forgiveness and eternal life. His work is finished. His resurrection guarantees it. That’s what’s proclaimed here. God’s saving grace is blessing!

Part II.

But it’s also responsibility.

I noted at the beginning of this sermon some examples of billions of dollars being lost in an instant. Great blessings are so easy to lose.
It happened in Galatia. Soon after Paul established these congregations and then moved on, false teachers wormed their way into them. The technical name for them is Judaizers. That sounds menacing, and it was. You see, some of what these false teachers proclaimed was true. They preached that Jesus is the Son of God and the Savior from sin. They proclaimed the holy life, sinless death and triumphant resurrection of Jesus. They said faith in Jesus was necessary for salvation. No problems there.

But then they added something to the work of Christ. They also said that obedience to certain Old Testament laws was also necessary, things such as circumcision and eating kosher and observing the Sabbath. Now, I realize that observing such laws don’t appeal to you and me as modern Christians, but such observances appealed to the early Christians who were only decades separated from the time when God demanded that the Jews observe them.

Paul could have taken the approach, “That’s not so bad. After all, it is in the Bible. Just leave them alone.” But he didn’t. Instead, this was his apostolic judgment, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are quickly turning to a different gospel—which is really no gospel at all.” No gospel at all? A little harsh, isn’t it? After all, they were proclaiming Jesus crucified and risen for our salvation. But Paul was absolutely correct. It is not good news—it is not gospel—to tell people they must do something to be saved. That’s a damnable teaching.

And that’s exactly what Paul told them. Let such a person be eternally condemned! There are no harsher words, no more terrible declaration than that. The Galatians had the gospel. Now they were in danger of losing it.

God’s saving grace is blessing and responsibility. Since we have that grace in abundance, here’s where that saving grace is at stake.

We get. We hear it. We believe it. We cherish it. We are saved by grace alone and not by works of the law. Nothing we can do will help save us. We get it.

But our sinful nature doesn’t. When we can let the confession of sins slip past our lips with hardly a thought because we aren’t all that convinced of our sinfulness…When we think our efforts to serve our Savior here and elsewhere earn us points with God…When we consider our attendance and activity here are an obligation that we have met…When we look down on other Christians who aren’t as committed or sanctified as we are…When we feel the right to be critical and judgmental…

Then God’s saving grace is at stake here. May God forbid it! May he ever impress us with his saving grace! God loves us and forgives us in spite of who we are or think we are. He forgives us for Jesus’ sake. By faith in Jesus alone we are his children. And the power of his love motivates us in Christian living. That’s grace. That’s what’s here. What a blessing! What a responsibility! Amen.