Sermon manuscript:
There are two main teachings that we have from God. He has
given us his Law and his Gospel.
God’s Law spells out everything that we must do in order to
be judged as good, righteous, and just. The Ten Commandments are God’s Law. The
great summation of God’s Law is that we should love him with our whole heart,
soul, strength and mind, and that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. So
the Law is always saying, “Do this, and don’t do that.”
God’s Gospel is his message of good news. The word “Gospel”
means “good news.” The good news is that God has acted on our behalf. He has
not abandoned us to our slavery to sin and our slavery to the devil, but he has
redeemed us in the death of Jesus Christ. The good news, the Gospel, is God’s
gift of forgiveness and salvation in Jesus.
Our Gospel reading today is especially illustrative of God’s
good news. A sheep that has gotten lost is as good as dead. It’s just a matter
of time. But the shepherd goes and looks for the sheep. When the sheep is found
it is placed on the shepherd’s shoulders, and he goes back to the flock
rejoicing. The sheep didn’t do anything to bring about its own salvation. The
sheep didn’t follow commands like “Do this, and don’t do that.” In fact, if
anything, the sheep didn’t do what it was supposed to do. It wandered off. The
shepherd saves the sheep despite the sheep’s behavior.
The parable of the lost coin is similar. The coin’s
contribution to what happened is that it got lost. It fell. It couldn’t jump
back up into the woman’s purse. The woman goes to work, takes the trouble. So
it is with our salvation. Having fallen into sin we cannot work our way back
into God’s favor. God goes out searching for us to find us.
He does this by the preaching of his Word. He does this
through Christians speaking the Gospel. The only way that anyone can know about
the Gospel, can know of God’s will to save sinners in Jesus is by being told it.
There are no experiments or math problems that will ever bring about this
knowledge.
So we have two teachings that we are stewards of as
Christians. We have the Law, which tells us how to live well and be good, and
the Gospel, which tells us what God has done for us. These are the two things
that we have to share with the world. God’s Law diagnoses our abominable
condition. It tells us who we are. Who are we? We are sinners. The Gospel tells
us about God. Who is he? His most outstanding feature is that he is the
justifier of sinners. He makes sinners right and good by the holy life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus.
Keeping this in mind, let’s turn to a surprising detail that
has been recorded at the beginning of our Gospel reading. It says: “All the
tax collectors and sinners were coming to Jesus to hear him.” Tax
collectors were mean and greedy. They would threaten and extort to obtain
whatever they could get away with. The Roman officials didn’t care so long as
they got their cut.
It mentions that sinners were coming to Jesus. There’s a
pretty admirable list of sinners in our Epistle reading: Sinners are “lawless
and rebellious people, godless people, unholy and worldly people, those who
kill their fathers and those who kill their mothers, murderers, sexually
immoral people, homosexuals, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and so on.” More
concretely you might think of people who are unacceptable according to our moral,
social code. You can think of people who have done things that you consider
shameful. But you also might remember things that you’ve done in secret. So far
as other people know you are respectable, but you probably know something different.
Tax collectors and sinners were coming to Jesus. They were not
just coming to watch him perform miracles, but, as it says, “to hear him.”
What would Jesus be telling them? We are not told exactly, but, generally
speaking, he would be telling them God’s Law and God’s Gospel. God’s Law would
have identified them as sinners. God’s Gospel would have announced that they
are forgiven sinners. These are not teachings that came out of somebody’s
cracked brain. These are teachings that come from God. They are as true as true
can be. These tax collectors and sinners were getting hooked on the truth. They
wanted to hear it.
This is a wonderful thing whenever it happens. Jesus says
that the angels rejoice when just one sinner repents. It doesn’t always happen.
In fact, we are quite accustomed to and feel more comfortable with lies and
deception to the truth.
We prefer lies to the truth when it comes to the Law because
we do not want to be humbled. We want to believe that every bad thing we do is
understandable, comprehensible, not a bit reprehensible, but perfectly
defensible. This, of course, is ridiculously untrue, but it’s what we want to
believe. When the truth of God’s Law comes along, it exposes our justifications
of ourselves as the fig leaves that they really are.
Or we might lie to ourselves like this: We’ve done our fair
share of wandering, of course, just like everybody else, but we can always come
back to the flock if we want to. We’re not lost. We’re not damned. We can stop whenever
we want to. We can get better—just like we can always theoretically get in
shape. Let’s not start today, of course. We’ve already blown it for today. Tomorrow
we’ll be motivated. Always tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll whip ourselves into shape. The
truth, however, that we should gain from this is that we are liars. Oh, how we
lie! We lie to others and we lie to ourselves. The Bible says that all men are
liars.
The truth is that you have no hope of ever wandering back
into the fold. Your wandering will only take you further and further away, even
if you look like you’re getting into shape. The further and further you wander
away the closer you are to death. The purpose and end of the Law is to reveal
this approaching inevitable death. The Law has not been given for
self-improvement. The Law is ferocious and untamable. It ruthlessly points out
the inevitability of our death and damnation for those who do not keep it.
The only way that God’s Law can be made somewhat palatable
for people is when it is not used correctly, when lies are told about it, when
people pick and choose which laws they feel they would like to keep and which
laws they can safely ignore as if they had this right. Of course, we can lie
and pretend about God’s Law until we die and until Judgement Day, but that will
be the end of the lying and pretending.
So the thing that we need the most is being saved from God’s
Law. God’s Law speaks the truth. It tosses us altogether into the one bucket
called “sinners.” This isn’t God’s fault and it isn’t the Law’s fault. It’s our
fault. Sinners and tax collectors can rage against that verdict all they want,
but the truth is still the truth.
There is another truth, however, that swallows up, you might
say, this truth of the Law. God’s truth according to the Law is that you are a
sinner and unrighteous. But, as Paul says in Romans 3, “a righteousness
apart from the Law has been revealed. It is God’s own righteousness. So it’s
not a fake or pretend righteousness. It is the righteousness of God through
faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” This is the righteousness of
the Gospel.
If it weren’t for this righteousness of God in Jesus Christ
that is freely given apart from the Law, if it weren’t from this Gospel righteousness
that swallows up the lack of righteousness that the Law reveals, then people
would be better off if they never heard the Law at all. They’d be better off
pretending that they are not lost, they’re fine, they can stop whenever they
want, they can get better if only the try better, they’ve lived a decent enough
life when compared to other people—these truly give people comfort.
The only problem is that they are lies. They aren’t
perfectly comfortable—people can sense that they are lies in their heart of
hearts. They sense the horror of the truth that the Law reveals—how evil we
are, our death and damnation—this is what overcame Judas Iscariot so that he
went and hung himself.
This horrible truth of the Law must be followed by the truth
of the Gospel, which is superior in a sense. Both God’s Law and God’s Gospel
are as true and true can be. But God sent his Son in order to save us from his
Law. God sent his Son to find the lost sheep and the lost coin. Once the sheep
has been found and the coin has been put back in the purse the wandering and
the getting lost lose all the power it ever had. The sinner who is forgiven
isn’t reckoned as a sinner anymore. Christians do not hold on to and love the
Law with their whole heart. Christians love Jesus who suffered and died to set
them free from the Law. The ferocious and divine beast of the Law is precisely
what brought about Jesus’s deepest suffering on our behalf when he became sin
for us.
So the reason why the tax collectors and sinners were coming
to Jesus in order to hear him was because they had tasted the truth. The truth
is scary, but it is also wonderful. They got hooked on the truth. This
ironically put them much further along than the Pharisees who otherwise lived
very respectable lives.
In fact, the Pharisees’ lies about themselves were perhaps
more persuasive than the sinners’ and tax collectors’ lies to themselves. The
Pharisees could more easily convince themselves that they were not lost. They
certainly weren’t as lost as those losers whom Jesus was eating with. This also
meant that they felt very little need for a shepherd to take them upon his
shoulders and bring them back to the flock.
Often the Christian Church gets depicted as being
pharisaical. A lot of times that depiction is accurate, because not everybody
understands the two great teachings of Christianity very well and how they
relate. This depiction of the Christian Church is that Christians love to judge
other people—homosexuals, for example, to take a hot button issue today. No,
that is not our endpoint, just as it was not Jesus’ endpoint either. God’s Law,
indeed, condemns homosexual lust and activities just as it condemns other evil
things. It does no good to tell lies about God’s Law.
But the endpoint is to live in the righteousness of God that
is apart from the Law—the righteousness of God that comes through faith in
Jesus Christ. No matter what sins anybody might be afflicted with, the endpoint
is confidence, comfort, joy, and thankfulness to Jesus for suffering and
atoning for all those sins. The goal is not that everyone should be sad and
sullen, being tortured by the ferocious Law and by their own guilt. That’s a
surefire way to end up like Judas either physically or spiritually. The goal is
a good conscience coming from God’s own powerful divine truth in the Gospel.
Live in Jesus and his righteousness. He takes away all shame
and guilt. He destroys death. He closes hell. He opens heaven. He does all of
these things for sinners like you. He wants to be with you and to eat with you.
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