Sermon for CATM – Thanksgiving 2007 – October 7, 2007 –“Grace and Worship”
An atheist once said, “If there really is a God, may He prove Himself by striking me dead right now.” Nothing happened. The atheist proudly announced, “You see, there is no God.” His friend responded, “You’ve only proved that He is a gracious God.”
I am so glad that God is a gracious God. I am so glad that he freely gives us all things. I’m glad, frankly, that God is NOT a tightwad. He does not skimp on His love. He does not hand out forgiveness sparingly.
God is lavish in His graciousness to us. He wants us to experience blessing. He wants us to be rich in friendships. He’s designed us to feel enriched when we give of ourselves to others.
This Thanksgiving, what are you thankful for? What is the source of your gratitude to God? There is real value to this time of the year when we have a clear opportunity to pause and reflect on the things we are thankful for.
You know what I’m most thankful for? Well, I’m thankful for my wife and my children and my extended family. I’m thankful for this church and this mission. I’m thankful for all of you and I’m thankful that we can gather to worship and celebrate today.
But when I really think about it, I’m most thankful that Someone saved my life. Someone reached down into my dark world and my hopeless state and lifted me.
I’m thankful for the hand of God that for no reason other than His love, has rescued me from myself. I’m thankful that He loved me before I even knew Him. When He was a stranger and I was an atheist and I would use His name in vain.
When I would echo the beliefs of my family and friends that there was no God. When I denied His very existence and would have vowed that I was right, He reached right through it all and got my attention.
Do you know how He got my attention? It wasn’t fear. I had no fear of God. It wasn’t big, dramatic miracles. I could explain away each one as a coincidence or fluke of nature. It wasn’t any kind of manipulation or coercion.
It was grace. Just grace. Nothing more, nothing less.
Ephesians 2:4-9 says this: But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God--9 not by works, so that no one can boast.
The incomparable riches of His grace. Wow. I think of all the riches and beauty that I know of on this earth. The joy in a baby’s eyes. The love of my wife.
All the gold upon a thousand hills. All the beauty hidden deep in humanity. Art, music, sculpture, dance, drama. None of it compares to the transcendent, matchless unparalleled riches of God’s grace.
And how did God show us, give us access to those riches of His grace? It was expressed in his kindness to us in a man. A first-century Palestinian Jew named Jesus Christ.
[Unannounced PPT] 1 John 1:17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
I think law is easier to understand than grace. The law referred to here of course is the Old Testament law. Keeping the law was the way to stay in right relationship with God.
Abiding by the Ten Commandments and a huge number of other laws and rituals was seen as the road to God. They were the conditions that had to be met in order to appease God.
[Unannounced PPT] Col 2:17 These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.
During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith.
They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? Other religions had different versions of gods appearing in human form. Resurrection? Again, other religions had accounts of return from death.
The debate went on for some time until C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the [commotion] about?” he asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions.
Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.”
The notion of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of Karma, the Jewish covenant, and the Muslim code of law—each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only in Christ is God’s love unconditional.
And of course the problem with keeping the law and with following the eight-fold path was and is that no one can do it. That’s a really big problem.
But there’s a problem with grace too. It’s important to be honest about it. In order to embrace grace, we have to let go of our notions of being able to save ourselves. We have to give up delusions of self-sufficiency.
“What…you mean all those slogans: “I’m a self-made man”, “Looking out for #1”, “Embrace the god or goddess within you”…You mean that’s all wrong after all?” Yup.
To embrace grace we need to accept that Jesus, in His great kindness, has done everything necessary for us to be near the Father. How did he do this?
He took our sins to the cross. He bore the penalty – and there is a penalty to be paid because God is just –He paid the price for our sin by His shed blood on the cross of Calvary.
What else do we hear from Scripture about God’s grace
Rom 3:23-26 “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished--he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
First we hear that no one here is better than anyone else. There is no hierarchy of holiness here. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. I used to sit in church and think that if anyone really knew me, they wouldn’t let me sit in church. They wouldn’t want to know me. “Everyone else around me is better than me”, I thought.
Sin flat-lines the distinctions we like to make between our selves. We have all sinned.
That said, we hear by the same token that all of us receive the same from God. God provides the same solution to all of us to the problem of sin. Sin separates us from God, period. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do.
Rick Tobias, YSM’s President and CEO, use to tell churches that he preached at that if they really knew him they’d never let him preach at their church. People would laugh and then pause. And then listen more intently.
The answer to your problem with sin is the same as the answer to my problem with sin. What is that answer? WE are JUSTIFIED…God’s justice is served. “The wages of sin is death” the Bible tells us. The consequence of sin is a broken relationship with God and an eternity without God.
There are consequences to every action. What we do in life really matters. Some would like to say that God can snap His fingers and deal with the problem of sin. That idea, of course, ignores the fact that justice really matters, and it really matters to God.
Alpha director Nicky Gumbel tells the story of two friends separated for many years who eventually meet one another in court. One is the defendant who has committed a crime for which a heavy fine has to be paid – so heavy that he cannot pay it.
The other is the judge, who must find him guilty according to the law. The judge does so, but then descends from his high chair and pays the fine, as a friend.
Justice is served – but the guilty man has been ’redeemed’ from the full price of his crime, which would have been imprisonment.
This is a way to help us understand the free gift of God’s grace…of His redemptive work on the cross. Jesus paid the debt…the consequence, the eternal consequence of our sin.
“When a person works an eight-hour day and receives a fair day’s pay for his time, that is a wage. When a person competes with an opponent and receives a trophy for his performance, that is a prize. When a person receives appropriate recognition for his long service or high achievements, that is an award.
“But when a person is not capable of earning a wage, can win no prize, and deserves no award - yet receives such a gift anyway - that is a good picture of God’s unmerited favour. This is what we mean when we talk about the grace of God”.
Nita Johnson
So we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice…”
God is just. He stands for justice. But He knows we cannot pay the price for our sin, so He sent Jesus to do just that. What does that say about God? God is a gracious God.
But what is my response to God’s grace? You know, there’s are a huge array of options for each of us when we hear of or when we are moved by God’s grace.
Our brothers and sisters in the first century church had a pretty broad response to God’s grace. Some of them took it as a license, “Double-O-8” if you will. License to sin. The ‘logic’ went that the more we sin, the more grace abounds.
We can cause there to be more grace in the world by sinning more. Really. I’m not kidding. That was one of the first problems the early church faced. Talk about missing the point. Paul’s response in Romans chapter 6:1 was “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2 By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”
The answer to the “Grace is a licence to sin” perspective is to go deeper. To recognize as Paul says 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--because anyone who has died has been freed from sin”. Romans 6:6-7
Shallow thinking leads to shallow and self-serving ideas.
“Grace is not a license to sin, but to walk in humility in the sight of God. Grace frees us to be active in the works of God. WE are not tied up with how much we have done, or not done, but we learn by the grace of God to rest in His love”. Curt McComis
Another response in the early church was to ADD things to grace. “You can be saved by grace, but first you need to spend some time with me and my scalpel”.
The Galatians and others, as they struggled to come to terms with the mystery of God’s grace, had ‘teachers’ who came along and said: “You can have all the benefits of the grace of God, but first you must enter the original covenant that God had with His people. The covenant of circumcision”.
We attached things to grace. Sometimes we attach tradition to grace. “You must attend this so and so church”, “In addition to trusting Christ for your salvation you must also believe this doctrine or practice this spiritual gift”.
Sometimes we add moralism to grace: “You must not go to movies”, “You must not dance”, “You must not drink”. In other words we say: “You must be good to earn God’s grace”.
But there is no need. There is also no possibility of earning God’s grace. Offered to you and to me as a free gift, there is no way that we can pay for something given freely.
So if we can’t really, with any integrity, respond to grace by using it as an excuse to sin. If we can’t add stuff to grace to make it easier to accept because we find ourselves doing something to earn that grace. Then what can we do with God’s grace? What possible option is left open to us as a response to the grace, the unmerited favour of the living God?
Worship.
Grace leaves me with no response other than to fall at His feet and worship the Giver of this marvellous gift of grace. To do what Thomas did when he stood face to face with Jesus after the resurrection, after he doubted the reports from the other disciples and stated that he would not believe unless he could stick his fingers into Jesus’ wounds.
What did Thomas say to Jesus when he was face to face to Him? “My Lord and my God!”
Worship, not striving to earn favour…is what God wants. [Pause]
Now for those of us for whom worship seems like too passive a thing, we are given clear insights from Scripture in worship.
While biblical worship includes quietly resting in God’s presence and enthusiastically celebrating His works in Christ, it is more than that. Biblical worship must include that of course. We do that every Sunday. But it also includes doing justice.
What does it mean to do justice? The Book of Isaiah says that it means “to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
“Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter-- when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” Isaiah 58:6-7
To do justice means to care for the things that God cares for. It means to be God’s hands and feet on earth. To be Christ’s body at work for good in the world.
Are you thankful for the grace of God this Thanksgiving? This grace that puts us all on the same page. This grace that reaches down to us and lavishly gives us all things…peace with God, purpose in doing justice and loving mercy.
The grace that rescues us from ourselves. That saves us from the delusion that we can do it all by ourselves. The grace that calls us into a loving and intimate relationship with our Creator. This grace that reaches down in order to pull us up.
Let’s pray. God, we are so thankful for your gracious provision in our lives. This Thanksgiving we offer our gratitude for the good things in our lives and the good things you have done for us. We praise you for your kindness to us in sending Jesus Christ to be a sacrifice for our sin.
For showing us what you are like in His words and actions. We thank you that You choose to be with us. To be near to Your people. Make us ever thankful, O God, for all Your good gifts. And may our worship be pleasing to You, our Creator and Redeemer. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
