The Gospel

The New Revised Standard Version Results of Justification

5 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. 8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. 9 Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. 11 But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Introduction- And Then There Were Two

I can deeply remember one of the biggest failures I had in youth ministry.

We were teaching a Sunday School lesson one day at a previous church, and there were a pair of brothers who were present.

These brothers had been around, sporadically sure, but they were for sure church kids, you know?

And I was observing the class that my partner was teaching, and he started by saying “With Easter coming up...”

And the brothers stopped him and said “What’s Easter?”

How can this be?

How could it be that these two kids had been with us, however tangentially, and miss the central issue of our faiths?

And so I have two more sermons with you all, I need to spend one of them on this:

What is the central essence of the Christian story?

What does it mean to say we are followers of Jesus?

What is at the heart of what we believe?

It’s frequently called The Gospel, or the Good News, and a while back when working with Confirmation students I broke this message up into four parts that make it easy to keep a hold of:

Four Parts:

God Created a Perfect Universe

This world is built to be beautiful

When we read the first creation story in Genesis, we notice a few things right off the bat:

First, this is a poem.

It has rhythm.

It has structure.

And especially, it has a refrain.

There’s a line that keeps coming back over and over again.

There was evening, there was morning.

And God saw what he had made and said it is “good.”

In Hebrew, this word good means “it is well, it is good, it is beautiful, it is perfect.”

Perfection, in this case is everything as God intends it.

Last week I went on a vacation.

My vacation included 261 miles of pedaling, sleeping outside in a camping hammock, and frequently eating peanut butter tortillas when we weren’t enjoying burgers in dive bars.

My vacation was perfect…for me!

Had I invited Sarah to join me on that kind of vacation I would likely be google searching divorce lawyers as we speak.

Perfection, it turns out, is very much dependent on who’s defining it.

My perfect vacation is absolute torture to most of the population.

God’s world, the one that God created in Genesis 1, is perfect.

Everything is exactly as God wants it to be.

Everything in it’s proper context, everything in it’s proper place, everything working as God designed it to work.

Start in the right place

It is vital that we start here.

So many Christians want to start this story at the fall, but that’s not where our story begins.

We’re not trying to rid ourselves of our brokenness alone.

We’re trying to get back to where we started.

We’re trying to get back to the perfect world that God created.

But there’s a reason we have to get back...

Sin Separates Us From God

Sin defined-

Any time we have a choice between God’s way and our way, and we choose our way.

This makes sense with our understanding of perfection:

If God’s perfection is everything exactly as God wants it, then anything that we do that is against that is less than perfect.

So rather than understanding sin as “bad stuff,” we start to understand that sin is really just when we decide to do things on our own, rather than adhering to God’s way.

Examples:

Pornography isn’t wrong because it’s “naughty,” but because God’s way is to love people and use things. The opposite never works.

Racism is wrong because God’s way is that we would all know love for one another, regardless of what makes us different.

The more and more we sin, the further and further we get from God

The more we keep choosing our own way over and over again, the more we’re walking away from God and who God is.

You can almost see this physically right?

If God is the source of life, then getting further and further from God leads to death.

Paul will even write just a little bit later in Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

We have come to call eternal death…hell.

Again, our culture has taken this word all over the place to imagining places of fire and brimstone and dudes with pitchforks.

Really, hell is when we are eternally separated from our source of life and perfection, God himself.

And the reality of our situation is that we are pre-disposed to sin.

Give me 100 chances and I’ll choose my own way probably something like 125 of them.

We are incapable of solving this problem.

We’re doomed.

End of story!

Let’s take an offering!

Jesus Saves Us From Sin

Jesus could not sin

A vital piece of our theological understanding here is that Jesus is God.

John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

If sin is choosing our own way over God’s way, and Jesus was in fact God, then it stands to reason that Jesus could not sin.

2 Corinthians 5:21 “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Jesus always choose God’s way.

In fact, if you want to see what the way of God, the life of God perfected looks like, take a look at the life of Jesus.

But since Jesus could not sin...

Jesus did not have to die

If the wages of sin is death, and Jesus could not sin, then Jesus really didn’t need to die.

Death was something that Jesus should never have experienced.

The cross wasn’t something that Jesus should ever have had to deal with.

Jesus died by choice, out of love for us.

That’s where the power of this scripture we read this morning comes in:

Romans 5:6-8 “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

Jesus chose to die for us.

Jesus willingly went to the cross for us.

Jesus paid the wages that you and I could not.

Jesus bridged the gap between us and the source of life.

Jesus did it all and Jesus did it all out of love.

You. Can’t. Do. Anything. To. Earn. This.

Maybe the most important thing in all of this in Romans is that first line before the comma: While we were still weak.

You cannot earn your salvation.

You cannot attend Church enough to get God’s love.

You cannot do enough mission and good deeds to get on God’s good side.

You cannot quit cursing and earn God’s approval.

Nothing you can do can give you God’s love, Jesus’ salvation, or the eternal life that comes with it...

because you already have it!

It’s already yours.

Jesus already went to the cross for you.

Jesus already paid the price for you.

You are saved.

You are forgiven.

You are free.

Right here.

Right now.

Thanks be to God!

I used to, as recently as a weekend ago with the FROG youth group, say that the fourth point in this Gospel message was that “Jesus’ salvation gives us eternal life.”

And that’s still true, but I think there’s a better way to say this:

So We Can Live the Kind of Life We Were Meant To

Eternity has no ending, but also has no beginning.

For those of us who are really in to quantum physics...

If something is eternal, it means that it has no end

But it also means that it has no beginning!

There are some Christians out there who have what I call a Highlights Theology:

I’m alive.

I was a sinner.

Jesus saved me.

I get to go to heaven when I die.

So I guess before then I’ll just hang around and treat earth like a waiting room, reading Highlights for Children.

I can’t think of anything more boring in my entire life!

God created a perfect world, and I think God intended for us to use and enjoy it!

I think God intended for us to go on grand adventures.

I think God intended for us to see beautiful sights.

I think God intended for us to make meaningful, beautiful friendships.

I think God intended us to see how God wanted the world to be, and to do our best to live in to that ourselves.

But this raises a question:

What do I do that I’m saved, but I keep sinning? Is that ok?

And for that, obviously you saw this coming, we have to turn to Mario Brothers.

Mario Brothers

When I was a kid, I had a classic Nintendo.

And then I found out about this thing called Game Genie.

You attached this to the back of whatever game you were playing, and then it gave you a whole bunch of cheat codes so you could beat the game you were playing.

So when I played Mario Brothers with the Game Genie, I would frequently play with infinite life.

You run through the game, and if you got hit with a bad guy or fell off a cliff or whatever, you didn’t loose a life.

The game just picked you up, put you back right where you left off, and you kept on running, no harm no foul.

Imagine for a moment that armed with a game genie, I spent hours and hours in my room just jumping off the same cliff.

Would it hurt me? No!

Would it cost me anything? No!

But would it be fun? Absolutely not!

No, when you have a gift like infinite life, you play the game with reckless abandon.

You run full speed because you know that nothing can ultimately hurt you, and you can risk it all for a victory.

When we are armed with the grace of Jesus, we can live with reckless abandon too.

We can point ourselves in the direction of love.

And we can dedicate ourselves to an all out sprint in bringing God’s love to the world.

Will we mess it up? Absolutely!

Will we hurt people? Of course!

Will we fall off the occasional cliff? You bet.

But Grace is bigger.

Grace allows us to point our lives in the direction of love and run with reckless abandon.

But again, a word of caution:

Do not get this backwards.

So many bad Christian theologies I’ve come across have the same four steps, but get them wildly out of order.

We’re screwed up, so we’d better work to earn Christ’s love, so that he can save us, so that we can have that perfect world.

That’s not how this works.

You already have the love, grace, forgiveness, freedom, and life that Jesus has to offer.

Now go live it!

GROW

Get comfortable with weakness

I think so many of us have a hard time with the “weakness” part of what Paul had to say.

At a previous church I worked in, a member asked us once to get rid of the prayer of confession because it was, and I quote: “Such a bummer!”

The reality is, we need to understand where we start this story.

We need to understand that even though we already have Christ’s love, we are thoroughly and completely undeserving of it.

We are not perfect beings.

We don’t always get it right.

We stumble.

We fall.

Our friends in NA work 12 steps in their recovery, and step one is admitting that we’re powerless.

Because they know all too well that without that, it doesn’t really matter what the other 11 steps are, does it?

We need to acknowledge our brokenness.

So many people I know are always trying to make sure that we know that they’re not the worst person in the world.

Which doesn’t exactly come with a trophy in the first place...

But secondly…If we don’t have sin, then we really don’t need Jesus, do we?

Acknowledging our brokenness isn’t a “bummer,” it’s a reminder of the deep love and sacrifice of Christ.

When you realize that Christ feels like we’re worth it, it can actually be a shot of self-esteem.

Don’t dwell in weakness

There is another side of this too.

There are those who dwell too hard on their sin and their brokenness.

I have actually heard folks say “If you only knew what I’ve done, then you’d know God can’t forgive me.”

Listen to me:

The work on the cross is done.

Whatever creepy crawlies live in your past, whatever damage you’ve done, whatever sin lurks in the background, Christ has forgiven it.

Don’t slip back in to that darkness, sure.

But don’t let it hold you down either.

Live the life we were meant to

I used to have a youth group kid who confessed once to one of the weirdest phobias I’ve ever known.

She was afraid of the Kool-Aid Man.

I don’t know, maybe she thought that he could burst through any wall at any moment or something?

But strange as it sounds, when I think about the kind of life I want to live, I think about the Kool-Aid Man.

I want to live and love with reckless abandon.

I want to charge full speed ahead with love.

I want to run into the world to tell folks that they are loved.

I want to know that if I make a mistake, if I leave a “J” shaped hole in the wall, that grace is enough to cover that.

And I want to do it all with a big smile on my face.

Oh yeah.

I hope you’ll do the same.

I hope you live into this perfect world that God has made for our enjoyment.

I hope that you’ll run with reckless abandon in love.

I hope that you’ll know that whatever mistakes you’ve made in the past, and whatever mistakes lie in the future, are forgiven through the grace of Christ.

And I hope that you’ll do it all with a tremendous smile.