Jesus Alone |10.29.23| Reformation Sunday
Romans 3:19-28
Pastor Erik Anderson
(…) All right, all right, good morning everyone.(…) You can see all here, I knew the time for me to come out here was when I saw all the introverts done standing at their chairs waiting to be told to sit down. So the rest of you extroverts, you can say hello to each other after the service.(…) Well, we are going to continue our time together by looking at the scripture. So I’m going to invite you to grab the black seat back Bible and the little thing in front of you, or if you have it on your phone, or if you brought your own Bible, that’s fantastic. We’re going to be in Romans chapter three. That’s in the New Testament, Romans chapter three. It’s going to be toward the end of the Bible.
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Romans chapter three, I don’t have the page number. So when somebody gets there, holler out at me.(…) 117 is what I’m told, 117.
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Did you guys, okay, so did any of you grow up in the church doing those like sword drills? Do you know what I’m talking about? Where you have like the Bible at your like side, right? And then they’re like, they’re like, go to Jonah four. And you’re like, I’m just talking through. We get to do that every week now. Aren’t you super glad that that pressure is back on? All right, we’re going to be in Romans chapter three,(…) beginning in verse 19, Romans chapter three, beginning in verse 19 at or around page 117 in your seat back Bibles. This is what we hear this morning.(…) Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For no human being will be justified in his sight by deeds prescribed by the law. For through the law comes the knowledge of sin.(…) But now apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the law and the prophets. The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. They are now justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness because in his divine forbearance, he had passed over the sins previously committed. It was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.
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Then what becomes a boasting? It is excluded by what law? By what works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from the works prescribed by the law. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.(…) Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Eric. I’m one of the pastors here. If you’re working with us online this morning, I wanna offer you a special welcome as well. Today we are celebrating Reformation Sunday.(…) Reformation Sunday is the Sunday before October 31st, which is, a legend tells us, the day that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses against indulgences, which we won’t talk about indulgences this morning. We don’t have enough time. He nailed it to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany. And that is kind of the spark that lit the fire of the Reformation that occurred 500 years ago. Certainly, Martin Luther was an important part of that Reformation. He wasn’t the only person though. And also Lutherans aren’t the only Reformation church. There are lots of churches that all go back to this time in Europe, when all these Western churches were experiencing this great growth and renewal and revival because of one thing, the word of God.(…) Martin Luther’s conviction was that people should have the scriptures in their own language. So he set about and it cost him, like death threats and a death sentence even, to translate the Bible into German,(…) his language and the language of his people. And that, of course, set off this flood, this wave of the Bible being translated to lots of different languages. And really that’s what ignited the whole Western church. And it changed not only those Protestant churches, but it also changed the Roman Catholic church. And the Western world is different now because of this belief that the scriptures in the hand of God’s people is a good and right thing. So that’s really what we’re celebrating today. We are a Lutheran church, but I know that many of you in here aren’t Lutheran, and that’s okay. Martin Luther actually didn’t want the church to be called the Lutheran church. He did not like that. He didn’t want his name associated with it. He simply wanted it to be called the Evangelical church, which means the good news church, the church of the gospel. And so we find ourselves here now, 500 years later, and our church, New Life Lutheran, has people from all types of backgrounds. And I think that’s beautiful because all of us share the same conviction that the word of the Lord is good, and it’s right, and it’s powerful, and it’s effective, and it changes us, and that’s really what unites us.(…) I only became a Lutheran about five years ago. And what attracted me to the Lutheran church is that I was kind of looking around at other traditions to be part of. I was ordained in a different tradition, and I was kind of ready to exit. And so I was kind of doing some shopping, if you will, some church shopping to figure out where I wanted to transfer my ordination, what tradition I wanted to be a part of. And there are lots of great traditions. Almost all of them are really good. But there’s like the Anglican church, and they have what’s called the Book of Common Prayer. It’s this beautiful prayer book, probably one of the best ever written, and they’re all united by the Book of Common Prayer. Every Anglican or Episcopal church you go to has the same worship. It’s exactly the same everywhere you go. There are other churches that are Protestant or Evangelical, but they don’t hold what I think would be like biblical witnesses about baptism in the Lord’s Supper, so I didn’t really want to be part of them. And Lutheranism is where I landed, because what I was so impressed by Lutheranism was this dedication, this dogged reliance on the gospel of Jesus Christ. And everything goes back to that. In our tradition, in the Lutheran tradition, there are all kinds of Lutherans. There are Lutherans that have really liturgical services, kind of like our first one. There are some Lutheran churches that have never had liturgical services. They’d be called Pietist Lutherans. Depending on if you’re from Germany or Denmark or Sweden, and as our ancestors moved over here to the United States, every Lutheran church is a little bit different, but all of them hold this same conviction that the gospel is central to everything that we do. And I really think the Lutheran, if you will, discovery of the gospel is really what sparked the Reformation and why I think that we can have so many people from so many different backgrounds all brought together, because it’s not actually about Martin Luther, it’s about Jesus. Everything’s about Jesus. And that’s what we’re gonna see here in this passage today as we jump into Romans chapter three. This is what we read.
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Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law. We jump in here to Romans chapter three. This is written by a guy named Paul, and he wrote this letter to the Roman church. That’s what our best scholarship thinks, is that he was writing this to the Roman church. And the church in Rome was like a lot of Christian churches at this time early on in the history of the church where there were both Jews and Gentiles who were believers in Jesus Christ worshiping together. And if you’ve read through Acts, if you’ve read through some of Paul’s letters, you know that there was some tension, some disagreement(…) between some of the Jews and the Gentiles and other Jews about how much the Gentiles had to follow the Old Testament law. What they determined was that Gentiles don’t have to, and even Jews don’t have to, unless their conscience demands them to, in which case they are free to do so. But it was not a requirement for Gentiles to be brought into the law. It was not required for them to be circumcised or to go by the food laws or the ceremonial laws. They didn’t have to do that. So when Paul starts this phrase off, now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law. Everybody in that church probably would be like, okay, great, the Jews are under the law and even the Jewish believers are under the law, and that’s fine. They can be under the law.
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And everyone’s nodding in agreement so far.
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That’s not a surprise. But what is a surprise is how Paul continues,
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so that every mouth may be silenced(…) and the whole world may be held accountable to God.
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For no human being will be justified in his sight by deeds prescribed by the law. For through the law comes the knowledge of sin. Now, this statement would have been a surprise because every Jew would have thought for sure that the surefire way to please God, the surefire way to obey God was to follow the law.
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But Paul says something different here, that the law is not a manual for how to please God, but instead it is a magnifying glass showing what sin is. That’s a totally different way than these Christians and these Jews would have understood the law. I think maybe the Gentiles might have got this. They may have understood this because they didn’t grow up under the law, but certainly many of the believing Jews would have been shocked and appalled.(…) This seemed like an attack on God’s very word. But Paul’s saying here that God never intended the law to justify or to make us right. But instead it was always intended to show sin, to reveal sin. He talks about later how there is no distinction.(…) Those who are part of Israel are not part of Israel. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All have made mistakes. And in fact, what the law has done, it shows us that even God’s very people, the Jews, the Israelites, they themselves are sinners too. Maybe even more so than their neighbors because they have the law. It’s a magnifying glass showing how sin has creeped in even to God’s very people. You see the law was never intended to justify. No one is made right by the law. No one is made right by these rules.
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And so we read the whole earth is silenced.
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Jew and Gentile alike are silenced, both seen as what they are, people in need of a savior.
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In Colossians chapter two, Paul writes to the church in Colossians, which was several years before he wrote this letter to the Romans. He talks about what he calls the legal scheme.(…) And he says that Jesus actually took this legal scheme and he nailed it on the cross. And the legal scheme is how many people still read the Old Testament law and how certainly the church would and the Jews did at that time. Where the legal scheme is something that says that what we do impacts our acceptance and salvation by God.(…) That what we do changes our status. It changes the way God feels about us and acts toward us. And even people who don’t believe in God still hold this line of thinking. They still believe this. In fact, it’s everywhere in our world. The legal scheme says this, be good, be right, be smart, and then you will find acceptance.
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Have the right ideas, have enough money, be successful in your career, then you will be morally good and morally right. We treat those who are successful as having these character, these good characteristics and people who are not successful as having characteristic defects. That’s the legal scheme operating us. We see it in our political discourse where both the right and the left are running as fast as they can in opposite direction, trying to outdo the other people in their tribe to show that they have more of the right ideas. Well, I believe even more in this and more about that. It’s all the legal scheme. And if you step out of line, you get canceled.
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And we apply this legal scheme, by the way, which is everywhere in our lives.
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The last five years of me being Lutheran and kind of discovering this has been this like practice measured disrupting of how this idea of the legal scheme has warmed its way into everything that I do.(…) Everything that I do seems to show that I believe that first I have to do well and then I will be loved. First I have to do well, then I will be accepted. And we apply this to our view of God. We believe that God operates in this legal scheme. And sometimes we’re even taught by pastors and leaders and teachers that this is how God behaves.(…) That the Christian message is actually a get better or else message. And it is focused entirely on how we act.
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Now,(…) how is it that in our world today, we have more knowledge, more money, more access to all kinds of resources, more information, more communication than ever before.(…) And yet we haven’t actually made any progress toward goodness,(…) toward fullness, toward peace.
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The 20th century was the most violent century(…) in the history of the world.(…) And yet we had more technology, more information, more communication and more resources than ever before.
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The answer is this, the legal scheme of push and do more and grow more and be better. And then you will be good. This legal scheme was never meant to make us better.(…) And we cannot be better with the legal scheme.
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Even the law itself that was given by God was specifically designed for this reason, to get us to Jesus.
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It reveals more than it teaches. It shows more than it guides. And the answer is Jesus as we continue on in verse 21. But now apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the law in the prophets. Paul, he does not mince word here. He says that the righteousness of God, the goodness and the uprightness of God is shown not in the law, but in Jesus.(…) That apart from the law,(…) Jesus has revealed the righteousness of God. And so it is not the law that God shows his righteousness, but it is faith in Jesus. This is how God shows us himself.(…) What he offers us is an opportunity to trust and have faith(…) because he’s already done the work.
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God’s answer to the legal scheme is giving us Jesus.
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And Paul continues here.
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For there is no distinction since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There is no distinction.(…) Everyone, Jew and Gentile like has been found wanting, but God has shown us his judgment that all have fallen short, but now they are justified by his grace(…) as a gift through the redemption of Jesus Christ.(…) You see, God has in fact given us his judgment on us. And his judgment on us is mercy.
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It’s a gift.(…) It’s grace.(…) It’s forgiveness in Jesus Christ. Paul goes on to talk about how Jesus’s death is an atonement. It covers up and it hides our sin from God. And it allows us to enter into relationship with him. This is how God has turned his face from our sin and accepts us, not as a boss, not as a tyrant, not as an angry dad, but as a loving father.(…) And Jesus gave himself so that we may know God as he is, merciful, good, upright,(…) and ultimately as a father, a heavenly father for us.
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Now, many of us have mixed ideas or reactions to the idea of father,(…) because some dads are good. Some dads are not good. Some dads are lazy. Some dads are kind. And there seems to be dads everywhere in between. No dad is perfect, but our heavenly father is perfect. And so we let the scripture show us what it means to be a good father, a good parent, and what it means for God to be our father.(…) And this is what we see here, not only in this passage, but in another passage where we read that while we were still sinners,(…) Christ died for us. Is that for God, being a good and merciful father to us means that acceptance comes first.
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Acceptance comes first.
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Acceptance doesn’t come after transformation. It doesn’t come after change. The scriptures say, “While we were still sinners.” The scripture also says, “While we were dead “in our trespasses.”
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Dead people don’t do anything.
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God saved us. He sent his son to us. What we hear is that God first, fully, and unconditionally accepts us as sinners.
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And then after acceptance,
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transformation and growth are possible.
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But if we start with growth as a condition to acceptance,(…) we have it all mixed around.
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And we actually see this in our parenting, because sometimes when we have a two-year-old and they’re throwing a temper tantrum or whatever, sometimes our response is to scold the child for throwing a temper tantrum.(…) But they’re two, right? They don’t know any better.
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And so sometimes we try to make our two-year-olds act like 14-year-olds. We try to make our 14-year-olds act like 30-year-olds. And we show them that behavior has to happen first(…) before there can be acceptance. But God shows us that this is the other way around. And even if we want our child to be the best they can be, we have it turned around.(…) What God shows us in Christ is that acceptance is actually a prerequisite for transformation.(…) That transformation is promised.(…) The fruit of the spirit are promised.
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Change in our marriages and our work, in everything in our lives, those things are promised. What comes first though is full unconditional acceptance of us as sinners.
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C.S. Lewis said it this way, that God loves us too much to let us stay how we are.(…) But first comes the love, and then comes the transformation. And the Holy Spirit is given to us to empower us, to grow and to be transformed in every area of our lives. And this, this is what I think the Lutheran discovery is. Like this is what those early reformers found out. That this kind of Reformation ideal, this Lutheran ideal is nothing short of the full gospel.(…) God’s total and complete acceptance of us. Christ’s total and complete work for us, for our benefit. And the Holy Spirit’s total and complete transformation of our hearts and lives. To be full of love and full of good works for the good of others. This is the gospel. This is the discovery.(…) And so many times we try to switch it up.(…) We make that transformation and that growth and that change a prerequisite for acceptance.(…) But we can’t get there unless we start with acceptance first.(…) And this is how we respond to this here in verse 27.
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Then what becomes a boasting?
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It is excluded.(…) There is no boasting.
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By what works can we boast? By what law can we boast?
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We can’t. If God fully and unconditionally accepts us as sinners first(…) and then transforms us later, there is no boasting.
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There’s no right or wrong church tradition to be a part of. There’s no right or wrong way to come to the faith. There’s no right or wrong way for us to grow.
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There is no boasting.(…) Because the Lord has done everything.
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So our response to this is humility,(…) humbleness,
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recognizing who we are. By the way, humility doesn’t think that like we’re really low and everyone else is really high. That’s not humility. Humility is actually understanding exactly who we are, what we need and what we can give, all these kinds of things.(…) So humility recognizes this, that we are at the same time fully needy(…) in need of God’s help.(…) We are also fully accepted and loved unconditionally by God(…) and we are fully empowered by the Holy Spirit to lead a life of transformation for the good of others.(…) This is the gospel.
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This is why we baptize our babies because it doesn’t matter if you’re zero or if you’re 100 years old, when you come to God, you’re not doing anything anyway. There is no boasting. You are a spiritual baby, whether or not you are baptized as a physical baby or as an adult. You are brought into the faith not by your good works but by God’s love and acceptance of you first
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and then you grow in faith.
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And so our response is this, whether we’re zero or 100, whether we’ve just been confirmed or been confirmed 60 years ago or maybe we’ve never been confirmed in a Lutheran church, our response has to be the same no matter what, humility.
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I’m fully needy and I’m also fully accepted,(…) unconditionally fully accepted(…) and I’m also fully empowered to obey God,(…) to live a transformed life and to do good for others
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and this is the good news.(…) Amen.