Today is the last week of our series an elemental church. Hopefully, you are starting to see more of what God is calling us to and what he wants to do among us and through us as we move forward as a church.
The past two weeks, we have been using 1 Corinthians 13:13 as our launching point. This is what it says, So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
This week, we are going to talk about being a voice of hope. Hope is an interesting thing isn’t it? We use that word a lot in our world, I hope she likes it. I hope that the Steelers will win this year, all of us our hoping that, even now with 5 months until the NFL season starts. Some of you might think, I hope the Cardinals have more than high school players this year. I hope I get that for Christmas, I hope this, I hope that. How about when things are going bad? We hope that our pain will end, that the hard times we are going through or a friend is going through, what do we say? I hope things get better for you. In all those instances, what did they have in common? They might not happen. She might not like you, the Steelers might not win, I might not get what I want, the hard time I am going through might continue.
So with that in mind, what does it mean to be a voice of hope? What about when we don’t feel very hopeful in our own life, how we can help others find hope?
There is a verse in the book of 1 Peter that I want to look at. It is 1 Peter 3:15. it says this, but in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for the reason for the hope that is within you.
So here is the question, as a Christian, what is the hope that we have within us? The short answer I think is Jesus. The more I thought about this during the week, I kept coming back to one word, grace. One author describes grace as “the completely undeserved, loving commitment of God to us.”
The past two weeks we talked about living by faith and being known by love. I talked with different people who said, “I don’t know that I can do those things. I don’t know that I can have that kind of faith or love like that.” On our discussion blog someone said, “We fail at A, B and C. Jesus was like such and such and we’re not. Try harder. I never had the sense that we should "live up to what we have already attained" or that we could actually DO what we’re called to. Instead I walked away with a sense of guilt and shame. Without a real sense of hope that we could change.”
The more I thought about that statement this past week, I thought, he is right. That is how I feel so often in my life. And then it hit me, that statement is right if we are the hero of the story. If I am the hero of the story, there is no way I can have that kind of faith that I would die for being a follower of Jesus, there is no way I can love others the way Jesus did, laying down his life, being a servant to all. If I am the hero, that is impossible. But, and this is where grace comes in, I am not the hero of the story. As cheesy as this sounds, Jesus is the hero of the story. I’m getting excited now, now I’m preaching, look out.
But we should look at that passage we looked at last week and feel a sense of the impossible. When we read Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:48: You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. We need to scratch our heads and not being able to figure that out. Because we are not the hero of the story, Jesus is.
If you have your bibles, you can turn to Ephesians 2. if you can’t remember the order, I use an acronym, go eat popcorn. Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians. That is how I find it.
In Ephesians 2, verse 1 it says: 1And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience-- 3among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved-- 6and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
I want to break this down into 3 parts. Verses 1 – 3 looks at what we were. We are all people with a past, a past marked by disobedience and failure, which demonstrates something that is very wrong with us. I think it is interesting that Paul uses the word walked in verse 2, that word also means living in. So we were living in the midst of our sins, or our trespasses. Living in the midst of running the show, of being the hero. Paul describes us as people who lived in the passions of the flesh, carrying out the desires of our body and mind. What is interesting is that he uses all past tense words. You were, you did, he doesn’t use present tense words. He is trying to get across, you are supposed to be different now. What made us different?
Verse 4 answers that: But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved.
In verses 4 – 6, Paul points out what we are now. What God wants us to be becoming, what being a child of God looks like.
Then in verse 7 & 10, Paul lays out what we will become, what we will ultimately be.
But what about grace? Grace is probably a big part of your journey to becoming a Christian. You took a look at your life and hoped there was something better. When you first become a Christian, you are blown away by the love that God has for you. You look at your life and discover that someone died so that you could live a life of purpose, a life of hope, a life that has meaning and think, who wouldn’t want that. We hear about the unconditional love of God and we want that as fast as possible. Many of us have been hurt by people; friends, parents, children, and we discover someone that will love us as we are and we want that. But then something happens after we become a Christian.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “He who is alone with his sins is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, not withstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final breakthrough to fellowship does not occur because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everyone must conceal his sin from himself and from their fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is, we are sinners!”
Brennan Manning who is one of my favorite authors describes it like this. He is a recovering alcoholic and he said, no matter how long I am sober, no matter what I do I will always be a recovering alcoholic. I will always lay that card down on the table, my past does not change. He says, when we become Christians, we lay the sin card down, we say, we are sinners in need of a Savior. Then we spend the rest of our Christian lives trying to hide that card. Not wanting anyone to see the real me, not wanting anyone to see the sin I live in, the addictions I fight, the pain I carry, the burdens I can’t let go.
Jesus is trying to say, there is grace for you. My love for you did not stop, it doesn’t have conditions.
C.S. Lewis said, “The gospel means we can stop lying to ourselves. The sweet sound of amazing grace saves us from the necessity of self-deception. It keeps us from denying that though Christ was victorious, the battle with lust, greed, and pride still rages within us. As a sinner who has been redeemed, I can acknowledge that I am often unloving, irritable, angry and resentful with those closest to me. When I go to church I can leave my white hat at home and admit I have failed. God not only loves me as I am, but also knows me as I am. Because of this I don’t need to apply spiritual cosmetics to make myself presentable to Him. I can accept ownership of my poverty and powerlessness and neediness.”
So what is the church supposed to look like, if that is how we should live with the knowledge of grace? Morton Kelsey said, “The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners.”
But we are so used to putting faces on. We are so used to knowing that there is something better out there, but settling for something else. This past week, I was feeding Ava breakfast, or trying to. She had fresh blueberries and eggs with cheese on them. There was also some mac and cheese left on her highchair from the night before. The mac and cheese wasn’t warm, it was probably a little crusty. What do you think she ate? The mac and cheese.
We do the same with God. As C.S. Lewis says, “We are content to play in the mud, when God wants to spend the day at the beach with us.” When we short sell the grace of God in our lives, we miss all that life could be. We miss what Jesus says in John 10 he came to give us, life to the fullest.
Here is how I think this works, when we become Christians we come to God and say, I need you, I need your grace, your love, I need you in my life. That doesn’t change, no matter how long you have been a Christian. It is easy to think it does.
I remember when I first became a Christian, I became friends with a guy who was in his 70’s, had been a Christian for more then 60 years. When I would talk with him, he would say things like, I am still amazed at how much God loves me.
When we accept that we are powerless and helpless, when we acknowledge that we are broken and in need of God’s mercy, then God can make something beautiful out of us.
In his book Mortal Lessons, Dr. Richard Selzer, writes, “I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be like this from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.
“Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks.
“Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “it will. It is because the nerve was cut.”
She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. “I like it,” he says, “it is kind of cute.”
“All at one I know who he is. I understand and lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”
I think God is the same way. He wants us to know that his love still works. We know the gospel is grace, we know God loves, inside we know that. That is one of the things that attracted us to God. Yet, even after we accept that, we reject it by working to get God to continue loving us. We work so hard, try to live up to a standard that God doesn’t have for us, something we have made up in our heads. And God is trying to say, I think you are beautiful, crooked mouth and all.
Brennan Manning speaks around the country and I will close with this. Many Christians have struggled with how he speaks on this topic. On this passage that we looked at today he said this, “Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless numbers of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands in Revelation 7:19, I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me she could find no other employment to support her two year old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last ‘trick,’ whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school; the deathbed convert who for decades had his cake and ate it, broke every law of God and man, wallowed in lust and raped the earth.
“But how?” we ask. Then the voice says, “They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
There they are. There we are – the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to the faith.
My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.
