In Christ

 

Text: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Focus: Being Born again

Function: what it means to be new people in Christ

¹⁶From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. ¹⁷So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. ²⁰So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. ²¹For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This is one of the foundational scriptures for my life. It gives to us something to do. We are now ambassadors for Christ, which means that our first allegiance is to the Kingdom of God. When Jesus was before Pilate and Pilate asked Him if He could defend Himself since He was a king, Jesus answered that He is a king of a different kind of Kingdom. We are ambassadors of the Kingdom of God. That is why most of our Churches of the Brethren do not have any kind of flag denoting a national symbol, because we recognize that our Church buildings are sanctuaries away from the political forces of this world.

We are first and foremost, members of God’s family and then members of a particular nation. To place nations above the Kingdom of God seems to me to be a misalignment of our mission of ambassadors of God’s kingdom.

That as why I preach against the false religion of Christian nationalism that permits people to place borders over Jesus’ command to welcome the stranger as a neighbor.

God promises to bless us and keep us strong as a nation if we care for the least of these. We cannot out give God. And, we as believers live by faith in the fact that if we are generous to others, God will be generous to us.

At the beginning of our text, Paul speaks in a sort of mysterious way. He says that we no longer recognize people according to human standards, but we try to look at them from God’s point of view. He says it is a change that has happened to us since we have come to know Christ Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

It is a spiritual transformation that he is talking about. We are new creatures, he says, in Christ. We are new creations. Created by God. Loved by God. Given a purpose by God. We are here to be ambassadors of the Kingdom of God by demonstrating to people what it means to be reconciled to God.

More than anything today, I want to focus on the nature of what it means for us to be born again, or to be born from above by the Spirit of God.

But one of my favorite titles, one I thought was very clever, for a sermon that I preached on this passage is: “The biggest twit in the Bible.”

A twit is a person of substandard quality for whatever reason it is. Normally because they are obnoxious. That has nothing to do with this text.

If one reads it from the King James Version, one reads in verse 19 where the NRSV reads “that is” it says, “to wit.”

“To wit, God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself not counting their transgressions against them.”

In old English it meant, to wit ,meant appealing to your intellect. I played on words to get attention about a twit and then changed it to a subject that has always excited me to the point of tears and worship.

God was in Christ bringing us back to God. One deacon in a church that I pastored used to say: “The message of the Bible is that God wants everyone back.”

God is actively forgiving us. That is what the passage says. God forgave the past sins and God continues to wash us in His cleansing power through our relationship with Him expressed in the power of God’s Spirit that dwells inside of us.

God forgives.

I love the concept. God forgives me.

I, like most people, am proud and want to be self-sufficient. But God takes over where our self-sufficiency wears thin and continues to restore, heal and forgive us.

To Wit. Pause and Think about this, Paul says. God forgives you and is reconciling the entire world to God’s own self through us, His ambassadors.

All of this happens because when we confess Jesus as our Savior, His Spirit takes up residence inside of us.

In the early years of my Christian experience, one of the primary motivators of my experience was what happened to me during worship services where we just stopped and took time to focus on the love and grace of God given to us.

Almost always, it happens in song. You see pictures of believers with their hands raised in worship, you might have experienced it yourself at times.

I experience it here when we worship and I make sure that I take the time to actually think and reflect on the songs that I am singing.

Worship seems to draw us in to the presence of God as we experience the love and joy of God flowing through us.

I learned at some time or another that a lot of that experience was what happens when a group of people get together and are united in a common cause. I felt the same exhilaration in worship that I experienced at an exciting sports event where my team wins in a cliffhanger.

We have this need to be together, united in purpose. I believe it is evolutionary. And it can be tribal.

One of the things that turned me off was when they would get “the Spirit moving” in worship and then stop and take an offering. Or, what was worse was when that tribal excitement that we felt in worship was transferred to give us an excuse to hate others.

I heard a sermon once by a TV preacher that I used to respect where he started out with the gospel and ended up with how all Muslims are evil because a few of them have been radicalized into hatred.

He was doing the same thing and I wrote him a letter asking him to stop.

I am not digressing. But I wonder if a lot of the excitement we see in contemporary worship leads us astray from genuine service.

Don’t get me wrong, I used to be the worship leader in a Charismatic Church and I enjoy the closeness I feel with God in worship.

But Romans 12:1-2 tells us that genuine worship is service to God.

Jesus made it clear that out of our bellies would flow rivers of living water that bring life to a thirsty world.

We have the power inside of us to reconcile people to God.

And it happens, just as God keeps forgiving us, when we keep on forgiving others and inviting them into the love of God in the family of God.

So, it starts with being reconciled to God and then we respond to God in worship. We worship by gathering together and experiencing the joy of fellowship and Christian love because of our common purpose, to see Jesus’ love spread to others.

We also worship, as Romans says, in service to others. Jesus lead a life of worship as He served humanity since the Spirit of God was inside of Him.

Let us also serve through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Deliverance is promised

Text: 1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Focus: temptation

Function: to help people see that God will deliver them from temptation.

10:¹I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, ²and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, ³and all ate the same spiritual food, ⁴and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. ⁵Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.

⁶Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. ⁷Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.” ⁸We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. ⁹We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents. ¹⁰And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. ¹¹These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come. ¹²So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. ¹³No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

I hope that by the end of this message we may have some confidence in what it means for us to labeled the righteous people compared against those who do evil.

But more than that, I hope that we too can learn to rely on the power of God that is inside of us so that we do not fall into the distractions that keep us from serving faithfully in the Kingdom of God.

I wrestle with our definition and understanding of what it means to be righteous. Joseph, we mentioned, was a righteous person, so he did the right thing by Mary instead of having her put to death for being pregnant outside of marriage.

In Matthew 25, Jesus made it clear that at the end, the angels will separate the sheep from the goats, implying the righteous from the unrighteous, based on whether or not we cared for the least of these. He includes the sick, the naked, the homeless, the prisoners, and the refugee.

Throughout the scriptures, the righteous are not contrasted with the unrighteous, but the evil people.

The implication is that the righteous people are not evil.

In my understanding, the sin of doing evil is doing things that harm others. It can be either through direct action, or turning a blind eye to injustice. We are called to bring about the common cause of loving one’s neighbor to the entire world. We are called to influence those around us to eschew evil by caring for others.

But Paul gives us an idea of evil here in this passage by explaining the sin of the people of Israel as they were passing through the desert.

If you are familiar with the story, you might know that half the time God was telling Moses that He was going to wipe them out for their lack of faith.

It was frustrating, I believe, to both Moses and God that although the people had seen the 10 plagues against Egypt, had seen the Red Sea part and they crossed on dry land and then watched the Egyptian army be destroyed on their behalf. That although they had a pillar of fire and smoke guiding them and they heard the voice of God from the Mountain when God gave the 10 commandments that they would have learned to trust God to keep them safe.

Instead they constantly complained and turned away from trusting God even though they had evidence that God was with them every day, symbolized by the fact that every day food appeared on the ground in the midst of a desert to feed them. They were living a supernatural life and still did not trust God to care for them.

And Paul calls that lack of faith, evil.

Now, as I mentioned, I call evil acts that harm to others by action or inaction. But Paul calls a lack of faith: evil.

I heard a Mennonite Seminary professor tell us that there are three big sins in the OT. The Biggest is a lack of concern for the poor (that is why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed).

Not caring for the poor is committing evil, according to God. The other two sins had to do with our relationship with God. They were a lack of faith in God’s promises and idolatry.

God hates sin, and by that I mean evil. A lack of faith is not committing evil, but I believe that a lack of faith in God offends God because then we are not believing in His love for us and for humanity.

They were punished for not trusting in God.

Paul tells us in the passage that Christ was with them and apparently, they did not recognize Him.

When they were thirsty, Moses struck the rock and water flowed in the desert to nourish them. Paul says that the rock was Christ. And it fits with what Jesus says in the NT about how we are vessels of life giving water to the world through the Spirit of Christ that lives inside of us.

There was a difference between them and us, by the way. They were near the presence of Christ, but according to Jesus, the one who is least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater and all who came before. We assume the difference is that now that we have been cleansed by the Spirit of God and forgiven through faith in Christ, we have the Spirit of God inside of us enabling us to do the right thing. The Spirit of God leads us to love others. He will always lead us in the right path to care for even the least of these.

They were not like us. They did not have the chance to be born again by the Spirit of God.

Look at the promise of what the Spirit does for us in Ezekiel 16:²⁵I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. ²⁶A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. ²⁷I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.

He is speaking of the future when Christ Jesus sets us up as the family of God here on earth.

Even though they complained and couldn’t see what God was doing, God delivered the Israelites time and time again.

And it offended God that they would not trust God in the future when God was faithful in the past.

And that leads us the the point of the passage. We are all temped and tried. Sometimes the normal circumstances of living on planet earth gang up on us and we are overwhelmed. Sometimes we are tempted by our own desires and they get in the way of us living lives that reflect the power of God present in our lives.

And the promise is that by the power of the Spirit, we are sealed in God’s kingdom.

I mentioned last week how Abraham was considered righteous because he trusted God.

But he failed in several occasion and kept coming back to God. The scriptures show us story after story of men and women who believed or tried to believe and God was with them in both their success and in their failures.

God is loving and forgiving. And God knows the weakest parts of our minds and where we struggle the most. And it is in those places of weakness, I believe, that God comes to us and loves us the most.

Rest in God.

Having Faith

 

Text: Genesis 15:1-6

Focus: Faith

Function: Helping people to trust in God

15:¹After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” ²But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” ³And Abram said, “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” ⁴But the word of the Lord came to him, “This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” ⁵He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” ⁶And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

I titled this sermon, “Having faith.” I don’t want to make any promises here about how complete the lesson will be. Walking by faith in what God has done for us is a lifelong vocation, it is something that we grow into as we learn to trust God in the midst of circumstances, whether good or bad.

So, I can’t sum up for you, in one short lesson just exactly what it means for us to have faith in God. But, we are going to look a little bit at the life of Abraham and see what it meant for him to have faith in God.

The significant verse from the passage is is verse 6: “And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

In the book of Romans, brother Paul does a good job of explaining how we are justified by faith over justification by the deeds or works of the law.

He explains that Abraham was considered a righteous person because He trusted in God.

He trusted in God and God’s judgment. He trusted in God and relied on God’s word to him.

Now Abraham was unique compared to us. He had visions and God spoke to him from time to time. That is not a general occurrence for us.

Abraham lived up North in what was then a land called Ur of the Chaldeas. It was modern day Iraq. And the people who lived in that land believed that God, the creator of the world, would judge evil and they lived their lives in respect to the fact that they have to answer to God.

While living up North, God spoke to him and told him to take his family and move to the land of Canaan where God was eventually going to give the land to Abraham’s descendants.

Abraham believed God and left the security of his home and the people he trusted to be righteous and just and always treat the stranger with kindness and respect to go to a foreign land where he had no idea whether or not people feared God.

More than that. It was a great risk. There were no nations at the time. The Political structure was city states that were made up primarily of one family line. The whole system was Patriarchal and tribal based on family lineage. When Abraham left home, he became a foreigner in a strange land and therefore he did not have the civil protections accorded to him if he stayed in Iraq. Although he owned slaves, he didn’t have the civil protections accorded tribal members and he could have been enslaved himself.

But Abraham heard the voice of God call him to trust him and lead him safely into this new land that his family would eventually inherit.

And that leads us to the point in time of our text today. He is in the new land and God appears to him again and tells him that this is his land and that his descendants will be more numerous than can be counted.

He questions how that can happen since he has no natural children, only enslaved people that he owns.

And God promises him to have these descendants and the text says that since he believed God without evidence, no child yet, God called him a righteous person.

Righteous is a legal term in this place and it means that he is a justified person. God will save him in the end because he is a good and decent person.

Both the Old and the New Testaments make it clear that the righteous person does just acts. When Jesus said, I was naked and you clothed Me, hungry and you fed Me, sick and in prison and you visited Me when you did these things to the least of these.

Jesus makes it clear that only the just person, the person who does the just and right thing, the loving thing, is a believer.

Abraham trusted God to keep him safe in a land where the fear of God was waning.

We see that demonstrated in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

It was another time that God spoke to Abraham. This time, the text says the the Lord, in human form, (probably pre-incarnate Jesus) and two angels visited Abraham. They changed his name from Abram to Abraham, and told him and Sarah that they will be parents at this time next year.

And then they told Abraham that the two angels were going on ahead to Sodom and Gomorrah to destroy them for their wickedness.

You know the story, they tried to rape the angels, the angels struck the men with blindness, they led Abraham’s nephew Lot out of the town and destroyed the city.

Abraham was a righteous man. It means that he was also just.

He trained Lot.

Lot survived the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah simply by welcoming the stranger at the gates. He welcomed the foreigner and God saved his life. His welcoming of the strangers was his proof of his faith. He trusted God still and knew that it was the right thing to do to take care of strangers and aliens in your land.

Although the concept of the fear of God and God’s ultimate judgment was lost on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham’s righteousness spilled over to his nephew who demonstrated his faith by his works and took the angels in.

He believed God and did the right thing.

Abraham believes God and does the right thing.

It takes faith and trust, in God, at times, to do the right thing.

At times, the right thing is a sacrifice.

The right thing to do at times is to forgive an enemy even though we have no recourse for revenge. We trust God for our vengeance. And we ask God to be merciful to us, so we know that God’s vengeance will be merciful toward others.

I mentioned my own struggle with racism. God says, forgive our enemies and love them. Love covers a multitude of sins.

I am learning the process to forgive. When I was 13, on was a warm summer night we convinced our parents to let us walk home the 1.2 miles from church to our house. We bordered on a rougher neighborhood in the journey.

During the trip, a gang of young black men began to harass us. We tried to lose them in the alleyways, but they caught up with us in the median of a boulevard and beat us up pretty good. I got a broken rib and severely blackened eyes.

Racism is an ugly thing and I have experienced the worst of it in my own life’s experiences. But I look back at that moment and see the torment in the eyes of my own attackers. They were young and angry, looking for payback for the years of oppression that they had experienced. Even then, God told me, and taught me to forgive and love my enemies. It set me free from the bondage of that pain.

Abraham walked by faith, and it wasn’t easy for him. Sometimes he made terrible mistakes, but he kept coming back to God and God kept forgiving him because, I believe, he wanted to do the right thing in his heart.

Everyone

Text: Romans 10:8-13

Focus: Salvation

Function: the salvation is for everyone

⁸But what does it say?

“The word is near you,
    on your lips and in your heart”

(that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); ⁹because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. ¹¹The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” ¹²For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. ¹³For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

I have relied on verses 9 and 10 as a sort of “formula” for salvation for most of my ministry as an evangelical pastor. Let me re-read them: ⁹because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.

And although I have primarily used the verse as an assurance of salvation for those who have prayed the “sinners prayer,” I find that that those two verses, taken out of context, can describe either who is in, or who is out.

My conversations with people along the lines of those two verses went something like this:

“In order to be saved, you must do two things. First, you must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And of course, that involves believing in His Deity, His salvific mission of providing the atoning sacrifice as a substitution for us, and His power over death and the punishment for sins that might fall on us.

Second, you must say so with your mouth.

It is one of the reasons why baptism is so important to us as Brethren. We consider baptism to be our public confession of our faith. We see the importance of this practice by looking at Matthew 10:32, whoever confesses me before men, I will confess before my Father in heaven.

There is power in confession. When we confess Jesus before others, we are witnesses to the good news that Jesus has indeed saved us. But it might even go beyond that. There is power in our words. God spoke and the worlds were created. By the power of His Word. We believe that God has filled us with the power of the Holy Spirit and the same force that raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us and gives strength and power to our very lives.

I used to feel like:it was us confessing, and through the power of our confession, we created salvation for ourselves.

The problem with that understanding and preaching of the passage is that it does not include the significance of the last verse, “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”

In our text for this morning, Paul is doing something clever. He conflates our confession of faith with the importance of loving people that are different from us.

And, one can take the verse out of context, or in context, depending on how you want to look at it to mean that Paul was making sure in this passage that it didn’t make a difference if you claimed a Jewish heritage (that is the context of Romans Chapter 10). Faith in Christ is what saves us, not our lineage.

One might interpret it like this: It doesn’t make any difference what kind of person is calling on God, everyone who does will be saved.

“Don’t worry about Jewish heritage” comes from the context of Romans chapter 10 as Paul is trying to, as my Romans professor in Bible College put it: “settle the Jewish Question.”

It was the question of whether or not they were saved by their lineage, or did they have to have faith in Christ.

But when Paul talks about how “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved,” he is not asserting a new doctrine here, but he is quoting the Old Testament. Joel 2:32

The context of that passage has nothing to do with Paul adding in the importance of overcoming the barriers between races, but has to do with what it means to have faith in God.

Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

One translation, The Good News Translation says it like this: “But all who ask the Lord for help will be saved.”

So, I hope I am not getting to technical here, but the context of the passage is this. If you have a problem, ask God for Help. God will help you. The people who ask God for help are people who at some level or another have some sort of trust, or hope, or faith in God.

In times past, I used this passage to talk about doctrine and how important it is to have just the correct doctrine in order to be saved.

But Joel is saying something different here, and Brother Paul picks up on it. We learn that when people pray, God listens.

People who call upon the name of the Lord are people who live acknowledging that God is real and will judge the earth in a righteous and just way.

They live their lives knowing, or in the faith, that God is observing and that God cares about what is happening here on planet earth.

They are people who ask God for help.

I have often wondered just what kind of prayer qualifies as “calling upon the name of the Lord?”

Is it a formal prayer to Jehovah God like I used to preach with the right confession, the right doctrine and understanding behind it? Or is it a simple request for help from God?

The thief on the cross did not understand the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. The thief on the cross did not get baptized or pray the sinners prayer.

The extent of his life was one of sin. He acknowledged that he was guilty and accepted his fate. He was probably not the very nice, just and kind of person you would send your kids to after school.

He didn’t earn his salvation with godly clean living. And yet, at the end of his life, he simply said to God, “remember me…”

It wasn’t much of a prayer, but it was enough to save him.

He turned to God for help in his hour of need and that is the kind of faith that pleases God. What kind of prayer does God hear? Every prayer. I confess that sometimes during the Lord’s prayer in morning worship, I get a little bit lost in the liturgy and forget that I am actually praying.

I wondered at time if that was sincere. But I realize that even the ritual of calling on God in a formal, or informal way is enough.

I believe that the Kingdom of God is God’s family and that God wants everyone to join that family in a way to lovingly care for others.

If that happened, we would not have war, by the way. And God is seeking people to say even the tiniest prayer of faith with the hope that maybe God is listening. And everyone who does that will find the salvation of God.

I love the word everyone, I believe that it is the controlling word to the verse and it changes my understanding of what it means to trust God.

So, let us learn to call on God because God is near.