Sermon for CATM - June 24, 2007 - The All-Sufficient Christ
“What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all--how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died--more than that, who was raised to life--is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? Romans 8:31-35
To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 2 Corinthians 12:7-8
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Did you know that everyone in this room shares something...in common. We have all experienced very difficult times. Very, very low moments.
I am so blessed by the range of emotions that are expressed in the worship that we find in the Bible. The Psalms are songs of worship. And if you’ve ever read them you know they range from joyful, triumphant celebration songs to words that express the depths of despair. The full range of human emotion is uncovered in the Word of God, and gives us some insights perhaps into what it means to be fully alive,. Fully human. Sinful and broken, yet redeemed and healing.
Well, it was the phone call that I had dreaded for a long time. My sister-in-law was weeping on the other end of the line. “Please come. He is not well. Please come. This is it.”
Craig, my brother, had just had his first good sleep in a month, and had woken at around 11 AM, having slept on a portable hospital bed that was brought a day earlier into the family living room because he could no longer climb the stairs. His wife Karen had slept on the floor beside him.
Craig woke up, sat up, and said that he felt better after a good sleep. Things were looking up, he said. So Karen got up and went upstairs and had a shower. Fifteen minutes later she came downstairs to the living room and found Craig in the throws of death. His lungs had collapsed. The cancer had brought him to his final hours.
So she called me and she said: “Please come. He is not well. Please come. This is it.”
I got off the phone with Karen and stared at the wall in my office. I couldn’t think. I grabbed my keys and my coat and ran to my car. I drove from here to Scarborough to pick up Barbara from the school where she teaches and I picked up my parents and we drove to Acton.
Both my sisters also drove, but because of the stress and intensity of what was happening, they were so disoriented one found themself driving toward Ottawa and the other toward Niagara Falls before they realized and turned around.
We arrived at Craig’s house at 2:40 in the afternoon. My sisters showed up within the next 20 minutes. Craig was hanging by a thread. By 3:05 we were all around him, sensing he was in his last seconds. The last words he heard were: “We love you, Craig. We are with you. We love you. We love you. You are not alone. We love you”. By 3:10, he was gone.
The next weeks passed in a blur. The funeral arrangements. The very sad family gathering where we met to join our grief together. The funeral itself. I was numb. Over the next few weeks I was pretty raw. At times I was overcome with grief and would lose control of my breathing. I would have to balance against a wall or sit down quickly. The profound sadness had an uncontrollable effect on my body. Sometimes I was angry. Angry at cancer. Angry at death. Angry at God. I was confused. I found it difficult to pray in the normal way. I found it easy to pray very honestly, bluntly. I poured out my grief to God.
And somewhere in the midst of a lot of raw emotion I somehow, heard Jesus say: “I love you. I’m with you. I’ll never leave you”. And some how...it was enough. Jesus was enough. His voice and his understanding and his love and his comfort.
It was enough, despite my grief, despite my anger, despite my confusion, despite the empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. Despite all of that, Jesus met my need, which at that point was vast and confused and pretty much bottomless.
And I have to tell you...I discovered in ways that I’d never experienced that He is truly more than sufficient. And I want to describe the ways that Jesus is more than sufficient, Why he is the All-Sufficient Christ.
I want to talk about why His love is sufficient, why it is as much as we need.
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
Sometimes we think that if we’re in trouble, God has abandoned us. So on top of the calamity we’re facing, we can struggle with feeling forsaken. Sometimes Christians make the mistake of judging someone who is going through hard times, assuming the hardships are punishment from God. I have to ask, when I hear that sort of thing, “Do we really understand God’s love that little?” If it’s true that hardship is punishment from God, then humanity is just being pummelled by heaven and has been since day one.
Hardship is not punishment from God. We will all face hardship. Some here today are facing terrible hardship right now. Please dismiss any notion that you are being punished by God. And instead realize that what matters, of course, is how we handle adversity. When the face of Christ comes to us, as it always will, in the midst of our darkest sorrow, how will we respond to Him?
How do we handle hardship, the unexpected, the unwanted turn of events that will unavoidably come our way. What will we learn about ourselves through hardship. Through adversity we learn that we are not enough. Our thoughts are not enough. Our philosophies are not enough. Recently my family met in Acton to bury Craig’s ashes. A half hour after the hillside service in the cemetery, my family was at my sister-in-law’s and my father, Lewis, said: “When we were at the grave side, I really wished I could believe.” He is an atheist who in his moment of deepest sorrow could not rely on a philosophy that says: “There is nothing but dark emptiness and nothingness after the grave”.
Participating in a Christian burial, hearing words of faith and comfort, and images of a new kind of living that goes on beyond the grave, he longed for the hope that you and I share in the resurrection of the dead. We learn through adversity what we really feel about life.
You see, the love of Christ is enough for us because it cannot be altered or changed by circumstance, by trouble...or even by nakedness danger or war, as the scripture says. His love for us is not dependant our love for him. That one fact alone is what separates divine love from human love. Even when we seriously try to love others unconditionally, if we’re honest, we know we fall short. God’s love is the only love that cannot fail.
Christ’s love that was poured out for you and for me on the brutal cross is a redeeming love. Christ’s love teaches us that mercy triumphs over judgment. And so we are free. That’s what holy love does. It makes us free. And...God is Love. Which is why our ultimate freedom is discovered not in indulgence or our society’s licence to do whatever feels good. It is found in God. If we want freedom, we must come to know God.
What about the grace of Jesus? Why is Christ’s grace sufficient? Paul describes a problem that he had that was really rough on his ego. But not in the way we might think. God gave Paul more than his share of revelation.
Without knowing Jesus while he lived, Paul learned by His encounter with the risen Christ and by unique revelation, incredibly deep and wondrous mysteries about the nature of life, the power of Jesus and the amazing finished work of the cross.
And he describes in the passage read earlier today by Jan another awesome revelation that left him flabbergasted, but also a bit puffed up. So in response to this puffed-up-ed-ness, this rush of ego or pride for being on the receiving end of such mystery that left Paul feeling pretty darn special, God gives him a thorn in his flesh. Something that reminded him of his brokenness, his wickedness, his weakness...and that reminded him at the same time of his complete need for Jesus. His dependence on the Almighty.
I love the way the Message paraphrase of scripture puts Paul’s struggle with the great mysteries he was privy to: “Because of the extravagance of those revelations, and so I wouldn’t get a big head, I was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations. “Satan’s angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty! At first I didn’t think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that, and then he told me, My grace is enough; it’s all you need”.
Why is God’s grace enough? The most important thing about grace and the biggest problem a lot of people have with grace is that it is unearned. Why is the freely given, unmerited favour and love of God, enough?
Grace releases us from the vanity of needing to earn our own way, from the presumption that we can do anything that puts God is a position of having to repay us with kindness.
You’ve heard the scripture "For it is by grace you have been saved". (Ephesians 2:8) That’s a doozey. It shows us that the basis for our salvation, our relationship with God, is grace. And grace releases us from the damaging assumption that we are chosen because we are better than the next person. Or that we are saved by being good. Nothing could be further from the truth.
God’s grace is enough because, honestly, it is far, far better to rely on God’s mercy than to live in fear of God’s judgment. As Paul learned, grace keeps us necessarily humble. Humans have the capacity get super big heads. People with low self-esteem are as prone as people who are very confident to get a swelled head. When we’re puffed up in our own eyes, we enter a false space, a superior space.
A frame of mind that puts us on a different level than the rest of humanity, so we can feel detached, better than. Instead of, as we need to be, deeply aware of our connection to every other person and the dependence on God that we share with the rest of humankind.
We’ve talked about Christ’s love and Christ’s grace. Perhaps a picture is becoming clear as to why Christ is all-sufficient for us. But what about His power? Paul wrote this in Ephesians:
“I pray...that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms. Ephesians 1:18-20
Christ’s power is resurrection power. It is power to take what is dead and make it alive. It is the power to take, for example, hope which a person has lost and restore it tenfold. It is the power to take faith which has been weakened to the point of being barely alive, and turn it into overcoming faith. It is the power to take bitter disappointments and turn them into powerful life lessons and transformed character. It is the power to take a seventeen year-old atheist from a long-line of atheists [raise hand], and eventually turn him into a pastor.
More importantly, Christ’s power means that you and I can live for God, free from guilt, free from addiction, free from the crippling entanglements of regret.
I talked about the struggle of coming to terms with my brother’s death. I am still, of course, along with my entire family, in the midst of grieving his loss. We are all struggling to come to terms with his absence. But do you know what is helping me to have peace about Craig?
The thing that is so maddening about losing someone you love is the complete end of communication. There is no more connection to the other person. You are full of memories of conversations but you can experience nothing with that person anymore. That’s what made it such a bitter loss for me.
But then something dawned on me like it hadn’t before. Craig was a Christian. A follower of Christ. Despite the fact that he like me had been raised to not believe in God, he had been found by God and had given his life to Christ. That means, I realized, that Craig died in faith.
Which means that he is with Jesus in the presence of the Father. And in the presence of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, a big part of what Craig is doing right now is worshipping God. The same God that I worship.
So I realized that my connection to Craig is through Jesus, who both from eternity and from our present receives the worship of His beloved.
The power of God extends even to death. Through our Saviour’s victory over the cross, you and I are spared eternal separation from God. And we are also spared permanent separation from each other.
The All-Sufficient Christ. He is more than you will ever need for every imaginable area of your life. His love. His grace. His power. I want to encourage you to make the choice to invite Jesus into every moment you face, and include Jesus in your struggles.
Offer Jesus your emptiness, your tears, your weakness, your temptation, your doubts. When you’re at home staring at the ceiling, feeling listless, pointless, faithless and just plain gross, offer all those feelings to him. Consciously invite Him into all of those common human feelings. You might be surprised at the result.
If Jesus Christ is the All-Sufficient Christ...and He is, then each of us needs to reach out to Him and apprehend Him. We need to choose to say to ourselves when we are afraid, when we feel tempted, when we feel under attack, “Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father”.
Can you say that with me now? “Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father”. Again: “Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father”, and one more time: “Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father!!!” Amen. Let’s pray.
Wow God. You are amazing. What is this we hear of a love that comes to us from the very heart of the Almighty? What is this transforming love? Would you show us, God? Would you open our eyes to such a mighty love? Such a healing and forgiving grace? Such gently wielded but life-altering power? O God, if we could catch but a glimpse of the All-Sufficient Christ, we would never need to doubt again. We would never question that we are fundamentally lovable because the King of Glory calls us His beloved. We would be an altered people. A community pregnant with hope and possibility and consumed with love for you and love for our neighbour. Would you show us God? And open our eyes to behold your glory. In the perfect name of our Saviour Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.
