A Journey of Repentance: Part 3 – Through Death
Rom 6:2-14 Feb 27, 2005
Intro:
“Jock, the painter, often would thin his paint so it would go further. So when the Church decided to do some deferred maintenance, Jock was able to put in the low bid, and got the job. As always, he thinned his paint way down with turpentine.
One day while he was up on the scaffolding -- the job almost finished -- he heard a horrendous clap of thunder, and the sky opened.
The downpour washed the thinned paint off the church and knocked Jock off his scaffold and onto the lawn among the gravestones and puddles of thinned and worthless paint.
Jock knew this was a warning from the Almighty, so he got on his knees and cried: “Oh, God! Forgive me! What should I do?”
And from the thunder, a mighty voice: “REPAINT! REPAINT! AND THIN NO MORE!”
Context:
Today is the 3rd Sunday in the season called “Lent”, a season of preparation for the next and greatest season for Christians, Easter. We take these weeks before Easter to prepare to celebrate the most central part of our faith – the cross of Jesus and the empty tomb of Jesus. How do we prepare? We take this time to look deep into our hearts, and check which areas of our lives are out of step with God, and then let God forgive us and change us and give us the gift and ability to repent. It is the season where we hear, and heed, God’s call to repentance.
A few weeks ago I invited you to come along on this journey of repentance. I promised you it would not be easy, but that it would lead to life and to freedom. We provided a guidebook full of readings, and I have been sharing various reflections from my journey and from other’s journey through an email list. You can access both through our church website, www.lhbc.ca. Once we join the journey, the first step is of admitting our need for God – of surrendering our lives into His all-powerful and all-loving care. Of kneeling before our God, and making Him our Lord. In just a moment, I’m going to talk about the next step.
God’s Part and Our Part:
But first, there is a pretty critical part that applies to the whole of our spiritual lives that I’m not quite sure we have fully grasped, summed up in the question: “What is God’s job, and what is my job?” Through the fall, I preached on the fruits of the Spirit – “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” With each, I emphasized that these were the things God produces in us. Through this journey of repentance I have said it again, only God can change us, only God can make the old new, only God can forgive us and fill us with new life.
So what are we supposed to do? What is our part?? Let me give you three pictures.
If my car breaks down, I can’t fix it. I can phone the mechanic, make the appointment, sit around in the waiting room, and pay the bill, but I can’t fix it. I really am helpless, as you would have noticed if you were in the Canadian Tire parking lot just after Christmas when it was -30 and I was trying to get a dead battery out of my car. But I can’t just keep driving around hectically, hoping that it will magically fix itself. I have to make the space in my life to get my car fixed.
Or think of it this way. Your spirit is a blank canvas, on which God wants to paint a beautiful picture. You can’t paint it, you can’t make it beautiful, only God can. But you have to stand still. God won’t paint if you turn your back on Him, and He can’t paint if you come running in for 30seconds and then run right back out again. We have to sit still with Him, and let Him paint.
1 more image. If your physical heart isn’t working properly, you need to see the doctor. You can’t do the surgery on yourself, but the doctor won’t operate until you give her permission. I don’t know of any doctor who will come to your house, tackle you, drag you into the operating room and force the anesthesia into you, even though they know it is what you need. You can’t do the operation, just like you can’t make yourself Christ-like, but you can and must give permission, and then go to the hospital at the right time and allow the doctor to perform the surgery.
Do you see? It is not our work, it is God’s work, but we must make the space for God to do the work. We must choose to spend time in His Word, in prayer, in worship, in service to God, and in the company of others who are striving after the same things.
Speaking of doctors and mechanics, “A young mechanic was repairing the engine of a cardiac surgeon’s BMW while the owner waited. The mechanic yelled across the floor to the
doctor, "Hey Doc, can I ask you something?"
The surgeon was a bit surprised but he walked over to the mechanic. The mechanic straightened himself up and wiped his hands with a rag. "Look at this engine doc," he said. "I open hearts, take out valves, fix ’em and put ’em back in. When I’m done they’ll work just like new. So how come you get the big bucks when I barely have enough to get by?" The doctor leaned in close to the young man, smiled, and said, "Try it with the engine running.”
The Next Step: Through Death
On the journey of repentance, we begin then with surrendering to God, by which I mean we truly allow Jesus to be the Lord of our lives. We kneel to Jesus as our King, and we enlist in His service and give Him both permission and opportunity to replace what is broken and evil and sinful, and then to paint beauty in our lives.
What is the next step? It is death. It is dying to self, dying to sin, being united with Jesus’ in His death, being “crucified with Christ”, and then passing through death into the next step. Repentance is first an inward change, which then results in an outward change, and we get there as God puts to death all that is broken and sinful and evil, and then leads us through that death into what is next.
That is really what Rom 6:2-14 is really all about. “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 3Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
5If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. 6For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin– 7because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
8Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
11In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. 13Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. 14For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.”
Death as Release
Before we all start feeling morbid and depressed by the thought of death, let me frame it this way: this step of repentance that is death is not about loss, but rather about release. It is not about something that we need and that brings us joy and life being ripped away from us, - so in that sense it is not at all like when a loved one dies – rather it is more like a cancerous tumor being killed by being removed or attacked by radiation or medication. It is more like a virus that has been making us miserable and that is now being killed off by our bodies. That is the death of which I speak.
Because, you see, the death we are talking about is the death of sin.
And here is the best news. That has already been done. For all of us who have turned from sin towards God and cried to Him, in whatever words or circumstances you used, “Please Lord! I believe, and I am yours,” the death has already been accomplished. That is why Rom 6 is all in the past tense – “we died”, we “were buried”, “our old self was crucified”. And that is why verse 11 is so important, “count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
Repentance is about living out the reality of our new selves, about recognizing that we are dead to sin because of Jesus’ death on the cross and because of our “being united with him in his death”.
This is not only true in Romans. Listen to Gal 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Listen also to Gal 5:24: “24Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” Or Col 3: “1Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. 2Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”
Jesus taught the same thing: “24I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 25The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12). In Luke 9, “23Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
Not An Easy Road
This step in the journey of repentance is not an easy step, and that is why I’ve called this step “through” death. Once we really allow Jesus to be our Lord, we must next allow Jesus to put to death our old self, we must unite ourselves with Jesus in His death, so that we can walk through death into the greatest life. That is next week’s step – into new life – but for this week I want to be very clear that this step is through death. Death for the Christian is not a destination, but rather a threshold. It is not the end of a journey, it is, as Gandalf the wizard has said, “just another path, one we all must take.” And it leads to life.
What is your part? Once again, like the car and the painting and the heart surgery, it is creating the space for God to work. We choose God, and then we create space in our lives for God to put to death these things, and we cooperate with Him as He leads.
Baptism and Death
Just before I conclude, I need to highlight one other part of Rom 6. The whole imagery and truth there about death to sin and being united with Jesus in His death is explained by the image of baptism. That is verse 3 and 4: “3Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death”. Baptism is our act of obedience – it is something we can do – which again creates space wherein God can work.
As we walk this Lenten road of repentance and obedience, let me challenge those of you who have not been baptized to really consider taking that step. It is not about being in some “super-spiritual” place, or about being on a “spiritual high”, it is simply about being obedient and publicly declaring your love for God, which allows God to continue the process of killing off all the sin in us. I’d love to talk to you in person about baptism.
Conclusion
Let me end by sharing with you some of my journey of repentance through death from this week. I wrote this and sent it to our email group on Wed evening. It is kind of like a diary:
My computer clock says 11:42pm. But I know I won’t fall asleep anytime soon, so instead I have a question: “Lord, what are you doing?” Maybe a second question: “Lord, what do you want me to do?”
I think I already know the answer, but that isn’t the journey. The journey is getting to the answer.
I know that the journey of repentance is a journey of death. But is my hope supposed to die? Is my feeling of life supposed to die? Is my desire to carry on in ministry supposed to die? Is the part of me that I have “poured out like a drink offering” supposed to die? Isn’t is supposed to blossom, grow, bear fruit, change the world? Isn’t it supposed to bring God’s Kingdom in a greater way, whether that is big or small or whatever (I really don’t care)? Isn’t it supposed to make a difference?
The lent readings from Jeremiah whacked me over the head. God is vicious, ruthless, direct. God calls His people prostitutes. He says they (we? me??) have looked to other things rather than Him for life, and have sold themselves in idolatry. No, I don’t have a golden calf, or a Buddha, or an altar to my ancestors, but I certainly have things that replace the priority of God in my life. Like pleasure. Like ease. Like control. Like my skills. Like my desire to please people. I worship those, I look to those for life instead of God, and so I am just as guilty as Israel and Judah.
Yet God wants me back. That amazes me. In Jeremiah – even after God presents His case against His people, He still wants me back. That is all of chapter 3, especially; verse 14: "Return, faithless people," declares the LORD , "for I am your husband.”
That hope is hard to hear. I have failed. Many times. Several even today. I don’t deserve mercy, or acceptance, or love. I don’t deserve a second chance. It is hard, and sometimes I want to quit.
And then Jesus comes along and says “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24). He said that on Palm Sunday, when everything looked great.
So, Lord, there is the answer. I must die. “I must decrease, You must increase.” Less of me, more of God, whatever the result. “while I am waiting, yielded and still.” “Take my life, and let it be consecrated Lord to thee.” “Lay me down, let this death be complete.”
“Lay me down, so I can rise in the morning, while the grave clothes lay down at my feet”
“take all I am, and all that I have. Lay me bear to the bone. Destroy my resistance between you and me, till it is just You alone.”
So, God what are you doing? I think I know the answer: Calling me to die to everything but You. What am I supposed to do? Love you, and love others. And let go of the rest – the hurt, the problems, the desire to carry on and the desire to quit, the reliance on myself.
Ummm, can I say I don’t like that? I wouldn’t want to die, except for today that doesn’t look too bad. Especially when the promise is “that if we are united with Him like this in His death, we will certainly also be united with Him in His resurrection”.
Lord, may I pray? “you are God alone. You are mighty and powerful and faithful and Holy. And I am nothing, except for Your child. I acknowledge my guilt. I have been faithless. I have looked elsewhere for life and love, instead of from You, and I accept Your “charge” of unfaithfulness. I deserve to die. You desire death to self. I yield to you. You are my Lord. Amen.”
Next week I’ll tell you what happened after I wrote that on Wednesday night…
