Text: Galatians 2:15-21
Focus: Grace
Function: To help the congregation see how sin grace helps us to stop sin.
Form: Bible Study
Intro:
As we are studying grace, I hinted at this last week. I hinted that we will look at how grace gives us the power to overcome the brokenness in our lives that the bible calls sin.
I want to do a teaching today. I am not merely trying to get deep to demonstrate what I know.
But I want to talk about how we present grace in this day and age, how we present the gospel in this culture. So, during the message there is going to be a little bit of history about the major influences that have guided our culture in the last 150 years.
The concept of grace starts with the idea of sin. Sin. That is an ugly word.
You have heard me complain about how there are many in this day and age that reject the concept of sin.
It is a modern psychological dynamic. Sin implies shame. Shame creates hopelessness. Shame can keep a person from attempting restoration, reconciliation, deliverance from addiction, forgiveness -of both self and others- and it leads to stress and many medical problems.
So, psychologists would say: “stop shaming yourselves and you will be free.” And a secularist would also say, “if you stop religion and you will not face any shame.”
Guess what. I agree.
But I want to qualify it from a Christian world view. I want to explain it from the view of God's amazing grace.
There have been times when I have wanted to respond to someone who tried to shame me with the words: “no thank, you, I don't think I will let you shame me today.”
People have the need to both shame themselves and or others. That is why gossip has always been a problem. Satan's lies lead us to shame and hopelessness. I believe that shame is demonic. I believe that it is a part of the spiritual warfare we are to contend with as Christians.
(first service) I love that tag line on Wonderful Grace of Jesus... “Sin and shame!”
So, let us look at sin and shame, the sin and shame that Jesus set us free from.
That term, “a sense of shame” and its companion question: “Have you no shame?” are references to what happened to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.
God said, why have you covered yourselves? They said, because we were naked and ashamed. God answered: “who told you the you were naked?”
Shame is from the Devil. The phrase “have you no shame?” is harmless enough because it involves a sense of personal pride.
But shame is different from being guilty.
If I come home from the office and I am stressed out and Kathy's day in inevitably worse and I react to her with a quick temper, then I am guilty of not loving, honoring and cherishing her, the vow I made to her over 33 years ago. I am guilty and I say, “honey, I was wrong, I am sorry, please forgive me.”
When she sees the sincerity of my words, she forgives. Sometimes, just by human nature, that forgiveness may take a little while, because it can be a teaching moment, a moment of intimacy, where we learn the fears and insecurities that we both have.
But the thing is this, I am guilty. I ask for forgiveness and she grants it. I have hope in her forgiveness. It isn't presumption that excuses my bad behavior. It's a mutual understanding of our common brokenness.
Shame is Satanic. Guilt can be self-inflicted, or it can be from God.
Don't confuse guilt with shame, or shame with guilt. When we are convicted by God, we know that God forgives, we know that by confession, God will deliver us from our sin.
We have that promise in 1 John 1:9: If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us and (THEN) to deliver us from the sin.
Repenting from sin is implied in that passage, but it is deliberately left out. Because the power of repentance does not come from us, this passage of scripture makes it clear that the power and strength for change does not come from our will, but from God's power.
Grace sets us free from our sin.
Confession is saying the same thing about sin that God does. Sin is indeed sin.
The word: “Confession” is homolegeo. It is a hybrid Greek word. Homo, the word we get homogenized milk, Homo -the same, genus -kind Homogenized milk is milk that all the same kind. Homo: “the same” and Legeo, “statement.” If we say the same thing about sin that God says, if we confess that we have sin, if we confess that we cannot overcome it ourselves, if we confess our need for a Savior by agreeing with God that we are broken people, then God will forgive us and HE, God, will set us free.
So, what is sin?
In this post-modern age, and as many agree that we are in a post-religious, the concept of sin is not politically correct.
There are many who would say that using the word sin always implies the concept of shame, not the concept that we made a mistake, we did something wrong, we made the wrong choice, we could have made a better choice and etc.
I consider all of those statements: “I made a mistake, I was wrong, I did something wrong...” as actual confessions of sin.
But the post-Christian world kind of rejects the whole concept sin, because they -and they are right in this – reject the concept of shame.
I use the term brokenness instead of sin. And I have been criticized by some of my theological peers because they say I am changing the message.
I am not. I tell them this: “my job is to communicate the good news, the gospel, to this culture. And if this culture can understand the concept better with a different word, then I am going to be more concerned with getting the message across than I am with wasting time debating the meaning of words with people who already know what it means.”
Personally, I like the term sin better, because the word “sin” reminds me that God is an absolutely just God, with definable standards of right and wrong. Sin speaks of God, and God is holy, and sin keeps us from experiencing the wonder of a relationship with Him.
But, I started out the sermon with the statement: “Sin is an ugly word.”
To the unbeliever, the word “sin,” in this day and age, does not have as much to do with the concept of God, as it does with perceived abuses of religion.
The concept of sin, they say, has been used by the church to keep people in subjection to an human institution.
Well guess what? It isn't new!
And this passage of scripture addresses that very question.
Remember last week? Paul, one of the world's leading scholars in the OT law, is now saying those rules don't work. They never did work. They don't help. In the Book of Romans, he goes as far as saying, all they really did was remind us of our guilt and our need for Jesus.
This sermon is about how Grace gives us the power to obey, without shame, but in loving response to God.
So, back to sin. The use of the term “sin” has become even more obscured since it is now 151 years after the publishing of the book by Charles Darwin “On the Origin of the Species.”
I am not going to get into the argument over evolution, except to reiterate what I said a few months ago that it appears to me that I see a lot of evidence for the concept of Theistic Evolution.
The problem is, morality was turned on its ears if God did not have His hand in creation. Morality is turned on its ears if after all, it wasn't a Creator who endowed every single human with certain unalienable rights such as the right for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It isn't the argument of Evolution, but the ethical theory of Social Darwinism.
It is basically this, If the human species evolved, and evolution is the survival of the fittest, and evolution created predatory species, species that live by killing others, then there is nothing immoral with the strong oppressing the weak.
The ethics of this first played a major role in the world with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi henchmen. Nazis, short for “National Socialism,” were first called “the Christian Social Party.” And no, this has nothing to do with Christian Social Justice. Christian Social Justice has always been the passion of Jesus Christ and the mission of the Church. The Great Commission, to go into all the world and preach the salvation of Jesus is a part of the Great Commandment to love one another. It isn't “either/or,” it's “both/and.”
Atheistic evolution, the concept that there is no Creator has no basis for morality, or any real concept of sin. Theistic Evolution, Intelligent design, or flat out Creationism all teach that someday, we will have to answer to God for the way we governed ourselves, for the way we treated our neighbors, our spouses, our children and even “the least of these.”
Sin is rejected in our modern culture because in the modern-mind, there is no such thing as a Creator we have to answer to.
And the reason for it is not so much because of the intellectual argument that no one can scientifically prove that God exists, but because the concept of sin, has been abused by religion to justify the real concepts of sin that they claim to support.
Ask a contemporary Jewish person what they think of Christians, and the first answer will be: “Your religion tried to exterminate us and yet your preach, `love each other.' We are not buying it”
The secularist will say, “almost every war fought has to do with religion.” It is similar to the secular psychologist who would say, “eliminate religion, and you will eliminate shame.”
But most wars were not fought for religion, almost every war is about money, power, domination and ethnic struggles. They have used religion to justify their ends, but it truly is about the money. Look at the American civil war, the wealthy ruling class in the South didn't want to give up the profit from the slave trade, so they coined the phrase “states rights” and 1.1 million boys died so they could keep maintain their greed. We hear states rights now, and I want to remind everyone of the similarity of the situation today, as well as then.
So here is our problem, we need to preach the gospel of grace to forgive sin to a culture that isn't sure sin really exists.
And I am going to say it this way, they know that sin, brokenness, human weakness, messiness of lives, and even evil exist. What they don't know, what they don't trust is that Christians have the answer.
And, I pointed out just a few instances that give genuine credibility to their suspicion.
But one more proof, Google the words “Christian Identity.” On Thursday, the 5th entry was “www.kingidentity.com.” You better be completely offended, these heretics claim that the true descendants of Abraham are the Caucasian and the blonder and taller they are, the purer they are.
There is nothing Christian about it. These people are merely Nazis with a new name.
So, the secular person has only seen a false form of religion.
How do we preach the gospel to them?
We are trying to preach grace, and at the same time we have to overcome the wrong, negative perceptions.
Let me read the scripture from “the Message.”
Galatians 2:15-21 (The Message)
15-16We Jews know that we have no advantage of birth over "non-Jewish sinners." We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ. How do we know? We tried it—and we had the best system of rules the world has ever seen! Convinced that no human being can please God by self-improvement, we believed in Jesus as the Messiah so that we might be set right before God by trusting in the Messiah, not by trying to be good.
17-18Have some of you noticed that we are not yet perfect? (No great surprise, right?) And are you ready to make the accusation that since people like me, who go through Christ in order to get things right with God, aren't perfectly virtuous, Christ must therefore be an accessory to sin? The accusation is frivolous. If I was "trying to be good," I would be rebuilding the same old barn that I tore down. I would be acting as a charlatan.
19-21What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work. So I quit being a "law man" so that I could be God's man. Christ's life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine," but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.
Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.
Paul is preaching, I'd rather have Jesus, I'd rather have grace than a national pride in this set of laws.
We have the answer, in Jesus Himself. We have the answer that God indeed is in the world in Jesus, and in us, Jesus' body, reconciling the world to Himself. We believe that Jesus has given to us the ministry of reconciliation.
I'd rather have Jesus than the code of rules that never worked.
I'd rather have Jesus than some Satanic concept of racial purity.
I'd rather have Jesus, and His love than all the things the world has to offer.
Jesus' love is eternal.
The grace, the forgiveness that He has given us does overcome our sin and shame.
It sets us free to actually live like Christians.
I remember a line from a Christian song in the late 70's, it said: “when at last you are tired of being a Christian, and you have come to the end of all you can see and do. Remember, He still loves you.”
You see, if the law works, if the concept that my effort makes me better, if the concept that my obedience singles me out as someone more special in God's eyes, then Jesus did not need to die to save me.
There is nothing I can do to save myself. I/we need Jesus as a Savior.
We can call it sin, we can call it brokenness, we can call it moral failure, we can call it a hiccup along the road of life, we can call it a momentary indiscretion, in all of those things we admit this: God, I need a savior.
But if we continue justifying ourselves by what we do or don't do, without reference to Jesus statement: “The whole law is summed up in the statement, Love one another.” then we have abandoned grace and sin and shame will dominate our sense of peace.
Love doesn't mean that we automatically tolerate every human behavior. It means that we aren't merely intolerant. (repeat last)
That, I am afraid, is the concept that non-believers have about believers.
Sometimes love demands that we tell the truth, even if it is difficult. I love someone when I kindly tell them, “if you keep drinking that much, your liver will fall out.” Or if I tell my grandchildren, “don't play in the middle of the highway.” They have have no concept of mass, kinetic energy, the hardness of steel or the finality of death. Saying the truth is loving.
But I don't tell my grandchildren to stay out of the middle of the highway because it makes me look spiritual because I took a stand for truth. I tell them that because I love them.
The brokenness of sin, the problems that we all face in the messiness of living lives are things for which we need grace.
Do you have that grace?
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