Sermon Tone Analysis
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Hope in Pain?
There is a short story that I came across this past week.
It is about a man trying to get across a busy street.
“But when he steps off the curb a car comes screaming around the corner and heads straight for him.
The man walks faster, trying to hurry across the street, but the car changes lanes and is still coming at him.
So the guy turns around to go back, but the car changes lanes again and is still coming at him.
By now, the car is so close and the man so scared that he just stops in the middle of the road.
The car gets real close, then swerves at the last possible moment and stops next to the man.
The driver rolls down the window.
It's a squirrel.
He says, "See, it's not as easy as it looks."”(1)
Life is not easy.
It can be challenging to navigate life at times.
We go to the doctor because we’ve not been feeling quite right.
The doctor runs some tests and gives us that dreaded word, “you have cancer.”
We get a call in the middle of the night from a family member.
They tell us that someone important to us has died in a car accident.
With the cost of everything on the rise, we wonder how we are going to make it.
How am I going to put food on the table.
Paul in this section of scripture highlights two different themes.
He takes about hope and he talks about pain.
We like hope, it helps us keep moving forward.
No one wants to experience pain, at least no one that I know.
Have you ever been in a situation where you needed some hope?
I have a picture that I have hanging on my office wall at work.
It was a photo that I came across and had printed on a canvas print.
It is the picture of the side of a building.
On that building some one sprayed some paint and with the paint they wrote “Never lose hope.”
I like that, I need that reminder.
My patients need that reminder.
Throughout my office I have reminders of hope.
I believe we need to be reminded about hope.
Life at times can seem hopeless.
When we are going through those painful times it is easy to lose hope.
Some situations can seem totally hopeless.
In a broader sense, without Christ we were facing a hopeless situation.
Sin had so damaged the image of God that we were created with that we didn’t even realize that we were separated from God.
Once we became aware of God and His desire to have a relationship with us we discovered that we couldn’t get to God based on our own righteousness.
God’s solution was for Jesus to come and take our sin upon himself so that we could be reconciled to God.
Paul in our Scripture this morning is writing about the results of justification that Jesus has provided for us and he completes his thought by writing about the hope that is ours.
Paul writes there in verse 1:
We have been justified through faith.
Justified or justification is one of those $100 theological words that we don’t use in our everyday language.
A simple way of remembering what it means is the phrase “just as if I’d never sinned.”
When we come to faith in Jesus our relationship with God is totally changed.
We are justified, which is more than just being forgiven.
When we forgive someone we accept that they are sorry for what they did to us and we forgive them.
We are choosing to not hold against that person whatever it was that they did to us.
We can still recall what they did, but we choose not to hold it against them, we forgive them.
Before we come to faith in Jesus we are at a state of war with God because of sin.
Sin separated us from God and there is a war going on in our lives between us and God.
There is a constant battle going on in our lives for who is going to reign supreme, it is either self or God.
When we come to faith in Jesus, God not only forgives us, but He justifies us.
“The war is over.
Hostilities have ceased.
Through the work of Christ all causes of enmity between our souls and God have been removed.
We have been changed from foes to friends by a miracle of grace.”[1]
Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesian church:
This justification is a gift from God.
We can’t earn it, we can’t buy it, we can’t work for it, it is a free gift from God.
And because of that free gift the state of war that has been going on in our lives between us and God has been settled.
God looks at us just as if we had never sinned in the first place.
I don’t know about you, but that should get us just a little bit excited!
Paul continues in that first verse this line of thought by writing “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The war is over we have “peace with God.”
The Hebrew word used for peace is shalom.
When we think of peace we naturally think of the absence of conflict.
One writer put it this way:
It conveys the positive notion of wholeness, health, and well-being.
Completeness is at the heart of the meaning of šālôm—“peace.”
Debts that are paid are šālôm; vows that are fulfilled are šālôm.
Conflicts that are resolved result in šālôm.
We have peace with God because of the justification we received by Jesus.
In Christ we are complete, that is we are made whole.
Before Christ we were broken people.
When we come to faith in Christ we are at peace with God, we have shalom, completeness.
It is only because of what Jesus has done for us that we can enjoy this peace, this wholeness, this completeness.
This peace with God is not about some type of feeling that we have about God, it is a reality that we live out.
We are at peace because we’ve been reconciled to God.
That word reconciled means:
to cause people or groups to become friendly again after an argument or disagreement[2]
Reconciliation is about restored relationships.
It is peace with God.
We have been reconciled to our Creator.
We have no reason to fear death.
We can approach God with confidence.[3]
Sin is at the root cause of the broken relationship with God.
God took the initiative to the sin problem and through Jesus we can have that relationship restored.
“At incalculable personal expense, God sought to reconcile his rebellious creation to himself and to one another.
God’s dying love makes it possible for humans truly to love one another.”[4]
This peace that we receive from God is not just for me, it is for all of us.
This peace is meant to be experienced in community, in the Church.
The writer to the Hebrews wrote:
Holiness and peace go hand in hand when you look beyond the idea that peace is just the absence of conflict and see that it is also completeness or wholeness.
Our relationship with each other should be marked with peace, completeness and wholeness.
Paul doesn’t stop with justification and peace with God but he goes on in verse 2 to write about grace.
Paul writes:
Paul says that we have “access by faith.”
We didn’t gain access to grace because of who we are or what we’ve done.
We gain access because of Jesus.
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