Jesus' Unprecedented and Unparalleled Grace Produces Peace in Us

Jesus' Unprecedented and Unparalleled Grace Produces Peace in Us

Pastor Pete Metzger

Download

Romans 5:1-11

1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our  Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11 Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Jesus' Unprecedented and Unparalleled Grace Produces Peace in Us

How many of you recognize this picture? It’s from a fresco called The Creation of Adam and it was painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the early sixteenth century. There’s a lot to love about this piece but it’s the fingers that capture my attention. What’s the difference between God’s posture and Adam’s? God is at full extension, reaching out as far as he can. Whereas Adam is reclining backward, while his arm and his wrist and even his fingers are all kind of just limply hanging there. God is making all the effort and Adam could barely be bothered to lift his arm.

Of course, that all makes sense when you think about the title of the piece. It’s The Creation of Adam. Creatures don’t participate in their creation. Their creators do all the work, which is exactly what Michelangelo is portraying, and that’s exactly why we’ve chosen to use it as the artwork for the worship series we started today.

Over the next four weeks – both in worship and in Bible study afterward – we want to talk about our devotional life, i.e. how we can be devoted to the Lord, through things like reading our Bibles and spending time in prayer. But a quick survey of Scripture is going to remind you that, left to our own devices, we’re just like Adam. We don’t have the power – we don’t have the interest in reaching out to God, let alone being devoted to him, without God first devoting himself to us. And that’s exactly what we heard in the passages we read today, especially our Second Reading from Romans 5: we have a God who demonstrates unprecedented and unparalleled devotion to us so that we can live at peace and in grace with him.

Unprecedented and unparalleled devotion.

Paul paints a hypothetical situation for us: Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die.[1] He’s not saying it’s not possible or that it never happens. It does, but it’s incredibly rare. It’s the stuff of legend. People who do this get immortalized with statues and songs because it is so rare. But even in these rare occasions, it’s only for good or righteous people – or at the very least innocent people who shouldn’t be in the line of fire.

Our neighbours to the south just commemorated the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Think about the firefighters and the first responders who risked or lost their lives to save the victims of a terrorist attack. That’s the kind of thing Jesus is talking about. It’s special because it’s rare.

But do you know what’s rarer? Making that same, ultimate sacrifice for someone who objectively doesn’t deserve it, e.g. for the neighbour who’s been nothing but a pain in your neck, for the rival who is actively trying to frustrate you, for the hijacker dead-set on killing hundreds of people. No one lays down their lives for wicked, unwelcome enemies.

Except for Jesus.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.[2]

Actually, Paul says this same thing three different ways:

When we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.[3]

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.[4]

While we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son.[5]

Do you catch the escalation here? Paul goes from describing us as powerless to being ungodly to sinners to God’s enemies.

Powerless. It’s like Adam before God animated his lifeless body. Without God giving us his Holy Spirit, we’d just be a bag of bones. Without God working in our hearts by faith, we are powerless to do anything pleasing in his eyes. We couldn’t, even if we wanted to.

Which is a pretty big “if.” Because, by nature, we don’t want to do things that are pleasing in God’s eyes. By nature, we are “ungodly.” And before you dismiss this as something that applies to someone else and not to you who are sitting in church today, I think it’s important to point out that “ungodly” doesn’t mean “godless;” it’s much closer to irreverent, or lacking proper awe in the presence of our holy God, which has been true of every one of us.

There have been times – and not just in our distant past –when we couldn’t care less what God would say or think if he saw what we were doing or knew what we were thinking. There have been times when he hasn’t mattered to us at all, let alone has his perfect justice frightened us into obedience. A term like “ungodly” isn’t reserved for unchristian. It’s inclusive of Christians.

And it gets worse. Paul calls us sinners. There’s a difference between saying someone sinned and that someone is a sinner. One is incidental; the other is characteristic. One can happen occasionally; the other happens habitually. We were defined by what we did, and all we did before God broke into our lives was sin.

And that made us his enemies. Repeated behaviour can’t be called accidental anymore. It becomes part of who you are – whether you consciously reject God when you choose to sin, or you subconsciously reject God because all you know to do is sin, you’re at odds with God.

There was a time when we were in bad shape, i.e. when we were truly hopeless, when we couldn’t get out of our own way, when we were on the fast track to eternal death apart from God forever in hell. But as devastating as Paul’s description of our escalating unworthiness is, his repeated reminder of Jesus is all the more comforting.

It doesn’t take a Bible scholar to read these words in Romans and catch how often Jesus is at work:

Since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.[6]

Despite our inborn enmity against God – despite the fact that our sinful human nature is hostile to God – we nevertheless have peace with him through our Lord Jesus Christ, because Jesus did something unprecedented and unparalleled:

When we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.[7]

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.[8]

While we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son.[9]

It’s already incredibly rare for anyone to die for a worthy person. It’s unheard of for someone to die for powerlessly hostile enemies. But that’s exactly what Jesus did for you.

He didn’t wait for you to take the first step to come to him. You didn’t have the power to. So he came to you, while you were still powerless. He didn’t wait for you to have the right attitude. So he assumed a posture of love that wasn’t rooted in what you’ve done for him, but in his conscious, deliberate decision to die for you. He didn’t wait for you to make up for the ways you’ve gone astray. He didn’t wait for you to surrender or draw up terms of peace. He made peace through the sacrifice of his life, because someone deserved to die, and he wasn’t about to let it be you, because he loved you.

Your God was so devoted to you that was willing to overcome your sinfulness and sacrifice his Son to save you. And as a result, you are now justified. You benefit from having the official, forensic designation of being not guilty in his eyes. It’s not because you haven’t sinned. It’s because he forgave your sin through the death of his Son. And that means you’re not his enemy anymore. You’re at peace with him. You’ve been reconciled to him. You live in his grace with the sure hope of a future full of his love. No fear of the threat of death or hell, because heaven is yours. No hopeless resignation to a meaningless life or an empty eternity, but the promise of the glory of God waiting for you in the heaven he has prepared for you.

God has done it all, because he’s devoted to you. His posture of love is one of full extension, reaching out with every available ligament and tendon to demonstrate his unprecedented and unparalleled commitment to you. God has done it all.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for you to do. Paul started and ended our passage with the same direction for sinners who benefit from God’s devotion to us:

We boast in the hope of the glory of God.[10]

We also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ.[11]

You’ve been justified. You’ve been reconciled. You’ve been saved. So boast about it! Don’t boast about yourself, of course, as if you’ve done something to be worthy of his love. Boast in the Lord, i.e. in what God has done for you, both in the sacrifice of his Son in the past, and in the pouring out his Holy Spirit in the present so that you can glory in your suffering, as Paul says.

Kind of odd to glory in suffering, don’t you think? It seems like the opposite of salvation. It seems like the kind of thing we would normally complain about. Why would we glory in suffering? Because that’s how God transforms limp and lifeless sinners into devoted disciples.

Suffering produces perseverance.[12]

The only way to overcome adversity is to stand up under it. And the more a Christian endures hardship the stronger their faith becomes – not because you’ve developed these supernatural skills, but because as you witness the faithfulness and devotion of your God to you through tragedy and trouble, your confidence in him to continue to be with you in the future grows and solidifies.

It’s that perseverance, then, that produces character. It seeps into who you are as a person. So that, when new adversity comes, you don’t immediately crumble or complain. You don’t throw up your hands in despair or start doubting the goodness of God. Your battle-hardened Christian character shines through in your willingness to endure more because of your confidence in God’s continued devotion to you.

Which is just another way to say that you have hope, i.e. real Christian hope. Not wishful thinking or groundless optimism. Confidence that God will keep his promises, i.e. that you will see his glory. That our present sufferings aren’t worth comparing to the future has prepared for us. That God continues to work all things for our good even now. That God is with us every step of every day.

God is devoted to you. And while we could never match the full extension and complete commitment of the love he has demonstrated to us in Christ, it still inspires us to lift our formerly limp and lifeless limbs in responsive devotion to him.

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Boast in him. Amen.  

[1] Romans 5:7

[2] Romans 5:8

[3] Romans 5:6

[4] Romans 5:8

[5] Romans 5:10

[6] Romans 5:1

[7] Romans 5:6

[8] Romans 5:8

[9] Romans 5:10

[10] Romans 5:2

[11] Romans 5:11

[12] Romans 5:3

St. Pete's on Repeat RSS

Christians Take Forgiveness Personally

Christians Take Forgiveness Personally

Pastor Pete Metzger

Download

Matthew 18:15-20

15 “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. 16 But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ 17 If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

18 “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

19 “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

Christians Take Forgiveness Personally

About 6 years ago, a documentary was released on Netflix called The Last Dance. It followed the Chicago Bulls during the 1997-98 NBA season, with a focus on Michael Jordan’s role in bringing a sixth championship to the city of Chicago in eight years. There aren’t many stories in any sport that detail such sustained success. It’s hard enough to get to the finals at all, let alone 2 years in a row, let alone win 6 of 8.

But as amazing as the success was, it was the character of Michael Jordan that captured viewers’ attention. He told a story about sitting down at a fancy restaurant the night before a game, and the coach of the team he was about to play was sitting two or three tables away. That coach finished his meal before Jordan did and walked out of the restaurant without going out of his way to greet him, and infamously, in the documentary, Jordan explained, “And I took that personally.” Michael Jordan viewed that coach’s actions as an intentional snub, and he used it as motivation to win, which, to his credit, he did.

You and I might sit on our couches and watch a 60-year-old Jordan hold a 30-year-old grudge and think him petty and small – and I think rightfully so – but it was exactly that pettiness that inspired greatness in a competitor of Jordan’s calibre. Spite motivated him to championship-level success. And many athletes in many sports have attempted to channel that same energy in order to experience the same success.

I’m not breaking any news when I tell you that you are not Michael Jordan. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise when I say that you’re not vying for a national championship. So, why are you taking it personally?

Jesus began our Gospel for today by proposing a hypothetical scenario: If your brother or sister sins…[1] That’s probably the least iffy “if” you’ll find in Scripture. This is the world we live in. It’s the air we breathe. Everyone sins all the time, and often against us. It can be malicious, e.g. your rival spreading lies about you, or it can be completely unintentional and yet just as painful, e.g. when the person you thought cared about you, forgot you in your moment of need, which makes you justifiably question their level of love for you at all.

Your brother and sister will sin, and often at your expense. But you are not Michael Jordan and you’re not trying to win your 6th national championship. Taking it personally will do nobody any good. In fact, it will do everybody considerable spiritual harm, and you will lose the one thing God wants you to win.

If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.[2]

This is the first of a simple 4-step method Jesus lays out for us to win our sinful brother or sister over. Step 1: Go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. Proactive and private. You don’t publish it on the first page of the newspaper. You don’t wait for them to make the first move. You go and talk to them privately.

If that doesn’t work – if they’re not sorry for how they’ve sinned – Jesus gives a second step: If they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’[3] If proactive and private doesn’t work, don’t give up, bring backup. Bring someone with another perspective to overcome personality clashes, provide clarity of communication, and to express the seriousness of the situation.

If that doesn’t work – if they’re still not sorry – Jesus gives a third step: If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church.[4] Bring out the big guns. Get the pastor and faith community involved. Now it’s not a matter of he-said-she-said, and it’s not something they can dismiss as unserious. This is a big deal.

And if that still doesn’t work, if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.[5] In other words, expel them from your fellowship. Treat them as if they are currently – but not irrevocably – outside the kingdom of God, because they are. That’s what impenitent sin will do, i.e. it will disqualify you from heaven. And that’s why God is so clear about what we’re trying to win – not the argument, not the court of public opinion, but our fellow believer’s soul and life.

For such a complex issue like a fellow believer sinning, the process is relatively simple – just 4 steps. It’s easy! That’s why you’re so good at it. You don’t hold grudges. You don’t get frustrated when people fail their responsibilities. You don’t take it personally when someone looks you in the eye and lies to you or betrays you or undermines you. You live a perfectly conflict-free, peaceful life because you follow Jesus’ simple, 4-step process for how to handle other people’s sin.

Or, maybe, like the rest of us, you live in the real world. Forget 6 championships. Forget the 4th step. How many times have you stumbled over the first one? Proactive and private, remember? That’s not our human nature. To be proactive, I’d have to be willing to let go, i.e. I’d have to not take it personally when someone else sins against me. To be proactive, you can’t play the victim, i.e. you can’t wait for them to make the first step and come to you. You have to go.

And you have to keep it just between the two of you, which means the first step you take can’t be to your spouse or your best friend to tell them about how this other person did you wrong. It means you swallow the words you know are true but will nevertheless harm that person’s reputation – even if they deserve it – because, despite the fact that they’ve sinned against you, you’re still supposed to love them like a brother or sister.

That first step is a doozy. The others aren’t any easier. Persisting. Bringing backup. Involving the church, only after the first two steps have been taken, but still doing it and not avoiding it because it’ll be hard.

And finally, there’s the whole pagan and tax collector of it all. That’s probably the hardest line to walk – making it clear that the sinner is outside the kingdom, while at the same time making it clear that you still love them and want them to be inside God’s family.

It may be relatively straightforward on the page. It rarely plays out that way in life. Instead of winning our brother or sister over, we try to win the argument and end up losing a member of the family of Christ. But as I read this text, that’s the beauty of Jesus’ message: If your brother or sister sins…[6] We are all sinners, but we’re all family, because Jesus loved sinners so much that he took it personally.

Jesus loved even those who were once outside his kingdom, i.e. pagans and tax collectors. Who wrote the Gospel we’re reading today? It was Matthew. Do you know what Matthew’s job was? He was a tax collector. In chapter 9, Matthew tells us about that day – that Jesus proactively approached Matthew at his tax collector’s booth and said, “Follow me,” and then Jesus followed Matthew to his home, where he sat down and ate a meal with many other tax collectors and sinners.

The Pharisees didn’t understand. “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”[7] To which Jesus responded, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick… I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”[8]

Jesus came to call sinners. He came to call you to repentance for all the sins you’ve committed – whether you pridefully refuse to forgive those who’ve sinned against you or you fail to even try. Jesus came for you. He didn’t play the victim or take your sin personally. He didn’t walk away or give up on you. He didn’t wait for you to make up for what you’ve done wrong. He proactively left heaven to come to earth to forgive you.

He went to the cross to die for you, and he made the world his witness. Even his enemies were there to attest to the truth. Jesus was a man of his word. When he said he loved you, he meant it to the point of death. When he promised to redeem you, he did it at the expense of his life. He called on his Father to forgive your sin, and it is as true today as it will be in heaven.

Because now you are his brother. By his death and resurrection, by your belief in the proclamation of this gospel, he has adopted you into his family. His Father is your Father. And we are all spiritual brothers and sisters, bought by his blood and bound to spend an eternity together in heaven, because he took our forgiveness personally.

Which is why he wants you to take forgiveness personally too. There’s more at stake than a national championship. The souls of our brothers and sisters are on the line. And God has entrusted to you this precious privilege of announcing the forgiveness of their sins – even and especially when those sins are against you.

It boggles the mind. It’s the last thing we’d expect – that of all people, God would want to involve us; and that of all the things that could possibly make a difference, it’s our words that are as effective in heaven as they are on earth. But it’s exactly as it should be, because as sinners ourselves, there’s no high horse for us to mount. We know the value of forgiveness, because we need it and have received it in Jesus. And it really should come as no surprise that our words would be as effective in heaven as they are on earth, because they’re not our words – they’re Jesus’ words that we relay to our brothers and sisters, i.e. our spiritual family in Christ.

You are not Michael Jordan, and you’re not vying for a championship. So, don’t be petty and small. Don’t take sin personally. Take forgiveness personally, because that’s exactly what Jesus did for you. He died for you 2,000 years ago and then he sent some sinner to tell you about it, so that you could know that it’s as true in heaven as it is here and now. Now go and win – not championships, but souls – knowing that Christ, your Saviour, goes with you wherever you and your spiritual siblings go. Amen.

[1] Matthew 18:15

[2] Ibid

[3] Matthew 18:16

[4] Matthew 18:17

[5] Ibid

[6] Matthew 18:15

[7] Matthew 9:11

[8] Matthew 9:12,13

St. Pete's on Repeat RSS