Proper 10 (Wednesday 2023)

GOD’S WORD IS EFFECTIVE

Planting seed by hand seems magical when it works. In your palm the seed looks insignificant, dry, lifeless. You sew it into the earth, hoping for growth from what seems dead. But in the womb of the soil, the natural process of life begins. Out of darkness, seemingly all by itself, the seed germinates and sprouts and reaches out to the sun. When you plant seed by hand and it works, it's almost magical.

The last couple week, along with the next few, we are asking the question: “What is a Christian?” If you survey people you will receive a variety of answers. But Christians want the real answer. Therefore, we go to the source who is Jesus Christ. His opinion is the only one that matters. Only Jesus can answer the question, “What is a Christian?” And this evening we’ll see, “The Christian is Planted by the Word.”

And so, Jesus takes the experience of nature and explains the supernatural process by which God calls people to faith through the gospel; because God promises that it always accomplishes its purpose. That is, it is efficacious on its own.

God’s Word is effective because:

It is Divine.

The church has been shrinking throughout America for a few decades now and demographic trends suggest that it is going to get worse.  The so called millennials – people who became adults about at the turn of the millennium – go to church less than the so called generation X-ers who go to church less than the so called baby boomers.  It looks bad.  And it’s getting worse.  The church is getting older and smaller.

More and more people – especially among the younger generation – decided that they didn’t want what the church has to offer, some within the church respond by coming up with ways to make its message more attractive.  Marketing strategies are adopted, and the focus moves them away from the preaching of the preacher to the spiritual gifts of the laity.  The result is usually a brief increase in church attendance followed by decline after the novelty wears off.

Why this decline?  Is it because congregations have abandoned God’s word?  Many have, but even in Bible-believing, Catechism confessing Lutheran churches that teach the pure doctrine of God’s word have suffered loss.  The sad fact is that God’s Word is unpalatable to many people.  They don’t like it.  It makes them angry.  It turns them off.  God says things that folks just don’t want to hear.  Why is that?

Isaiah 55:8–9 ESV

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

It is foolish to package the TRUTH of who God is in such a way as to make it attractive to those whose thoughts and ways are as far removed from God’s thoughts and ways; as earth is removed from the stars in the sky.  God and sinful humanity don’t think alike.  This is one reason why people don’t want to go to church.  They don’t want to listen to what God has to say!

God teaches repentance and the forgiveness of sins.  After Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead, he said to his disciples, as recorded by St. Luke 24:46-47

Luke 24:46–47 NKJV

Then He said to them, “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.

Why aren’t folks running to church?  Perhaps it is because they don’t want forgiveness.  The suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus mean nothing to those whose consciences are not burdened with their sins. But the LORD speaking through the prophet said:

Seek the Lord while He may be found,

Call upon Him while He is near.

Let the wicked forsake his way,

And the unrighteous man his thoughts;

Let him return to the Lord,

And He will have mercy on him;

And to our God,

For He will abundantly pardon.

While sin damages us in every respect, it is rarely recognized for what it is.  People who are not burdened with the knowledge of their sins nevertheless bear the burden of their sins.  But they do so in ignorance.  They don’t know what sin is.  The prophet says, “Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts.”  Sin is not just violating a list of do’s and don’ts.  It is a way of being, living, and thinking.

People are enamored with themselves.  They think they know better than God.  They consider human strength and accomplishments better than God’s strength and accomplishments.  This is why they are bored with the gospel of Jesus Christ.  The gospel is all about God’s power and our weakness.  God confronts sin and death and the devil and defeats them all by the blood shed on the cross.  That’s power.  That’s an accomplishment.  That is impressive.  But if you value your own notions — your own truth — more than One who is The Truth, you won’t be very impressed with the crucifixion of Jesus. 

The Word is Effective Because it

Creates and Sustains Faith

Listen to the words of St. Paul explain what divine wisdom is all about.  He writes in 1 Corinthians, chapter 1:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.”  Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.  For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

This runs counter to everything we think and feel.  But this word from God does its work.  It does its work even as the rain and the snow do their work.  But if the Word of God is absent, like when people pursue their own truth, ignorance and confusion will prevail.

Christians think they can learn the faith, get it right, file it away in the back of their minds somewhere, and it will remain within them even if they neglect going to church to hear it. Like this package of seeds. But they don’t understand that they are their own worst enemy.  What will prevail when they neglect God’s Word:

their thoughts or God’s thoughts? 

Their ways or God’s ways? 

And when they ignore God’s Word they will lose the Christian understanding of sin, repentance, forgiveness, and faith.  People seek God where he cannot be found.  They look within themselves and whatever they feel they assume is what God feels, as if God is as fickle as they.  Listen again to the prophet:

Seek the Lord while He may be found,

Call upon Him while He is near.

Let the wicked forsake his way,

And the unrighteous man his thoughts;

Let him return to the Lord,

And He will have mercy on him;

And to our God,

For He will abundantly pardon.

Seek him in his Word.  That is where and when he may be found.  It is where he comes to us in his gospel and sacraments.  That’s where he is located and that’s where we must seek him. “Thy strong Word bespeaks us righteous...”

The church does not look like much.  Neither did Jesus.  As Isaiah wrote of him,

He has no form or comeliness;

And when we see Him,

There is no beauty that we should desire Him.

He is despised and rejected by men,

A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;

He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Isaiah 53:2-3

Neither the church nor her Lord Jesus — who is The Truth — will ever have the status this world bestows upon respectable religions.  That’s because neither the church nor her Lord will shun the scandal of the cross.  The cross is where Jesus was despised that God laid on him the iniquity of us all and took away all our sin.  It is in what the world sees as foolishness that we are saved, not only from the guilt we bear because we have broken God’s commandments, but also from the foolishness within that would have us preferring our wisdom to God’s.

Just because it feels good doesn’t make it good.  Just because it feels right doesn’t make it right.  We have words from God that bring us pardon and mercy.  These words will produce fruit: faith, good deeds, a new heart and a new life – eternal life.  We hold to the almighty Word of God and rely on its power.  Then we are safe in the hands of the true God who has mercy on us and pardons us all our sins.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.