Romans 5:6-8
When is the right time for someone to help you?
You are taking the train from Rabat to the Casa airport and are overloaded with bags. You get out of the taxi at the train station and can’t carry both bags at the same time so you carry one a few steps and then come back and bring the second a few steps ahead of the first and then come back to get that bag and carry it and in this way you make your way to the steps, down the steps and to the train.
When is the right time for someone to help you?
You have run out of money and need to pay the phone bill before they cut off your service and you need to buy some groceries and a bottle of gas to heat your house and cook. In two weeks you will receive money from your job.
When is the right time for someone to help you?
You set out to sea in a boat and the boat begins to leak and you can’t bail water fast enough to keep it afloat and you are about to lose all you have. You passed a rescue boat on the way out and you hope it will come by eventually.
When is the right time for someone to help you?
The right time to help you is when you step out of the taxi and a porter offers to carry your bags to the train and not when you get to your seat.
The right time for someone to help you is when you don’t have any money and are cold, with a phone bill to pay and food to buy and not after you received you paycheck.
The right time for someone to help is when you are sinking and a boat comes along and attaches a tow rope, gives you a pump to bail water out of the boat and pulls you to shore and not after you drowned.
The right time for someone to help you is when you are most in need.
We started again last week the series of sermons on Romans and talked about receiving two hugs from Romans 5:5-8. Last week we talked about the first of these hugs, an emotional, subjective hug from the Holy Spirit who pours out God’s love into our hearts. I hope that you took some time to open yourself to the Holy Spirit this last week and received a hug that deeply refreshed you and if not, that you will do so this week.
This morning we will pick up with the second hug, a factual, historical hug found in verses 6-8.
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
This second hug came at just the right time. What does this mean? It could be just an expression Paul used, but I think it means this hug came when we were most in need and that is just at the right time.
In what way were we most in need?
There are four descriptions of our need in these verses (and borrowing from verse 10). Paul says we were sinners, we were ungodly, we were God’s enemies and we were powerless.
While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
To sin is to miss the mark. A couple weeks ago I talked about Sir Ernest Shackleton who in 1915 set out in a 23′, 8 meter open boat from Elephant Island for South Georgia Island in Antarctica. That was an 800 mile, 1280 kilometer voyage through the Wedell Sea, the most dangerous sea in the world. In an amazing navigational feat, they made it to South Georgia Island and were able to send back a boat to rescue the other 23 men stranded on Elephant Island. If they had been off just a few points on the compass, they would have missed South Georgia Island and headed out to open sea and certain destruction for themselves and eventual destruction for the 23 men waiting to be rescued.
That’s what happens when you miss the mark, you miss an island of safety in a dangerous sea and sail on to certain destruction.
We were sinners, heading in a direction that would take us to our doom when Christ died for us, bringing us to safety.
Christ died for the ungodly
Who are the ungodly?
In II Peter the ungodly are the people of Noah’s day who were destroyed by the flood. In Revelation the ungodly are those who will be destroyed on the last day. The ungodly are those who worship the creation rather than the creator. They live for the world rather than for God. They live lives in opposition to the will of God, choose to follow the flesh, the world and the devil rather than God and they were destroyed in the flood and will be destroyed in the last judgement.
We were sinners and ungodly and Paul says
when we were God’s enemies
It is not simply that we rejected God and became God’s enemy but that God rejected us and we were his enemy.
The word translated enemies is a word used for hatred. Do you understand what this means? You don’t want to be on the wrong side of certain people. When the biggest and most powerful and wealthiest person on the block hates you, that is not good news. When the owner of the company for which you work hates you, that is not good news. If you are playing rugby and carrying the ball and the strongest, toughest, fastest player on the other team is coming towards you and he hates you, that is not good news.
This is what it means when Paul wrote that we were God’s enemies. The word he used speaks of an irreconcilable deep-rooted hatred. God, the creator of the world who is all powerful who speaks and the mountains melt … this is the one whose enemy we were. This is the one who hated us.
We were sinners. We missed the mark and were heading out into the open sea to a certain destruction. We were ungodly. We were on the list to be destroyed in the coming judgement. We were God’s enemies. The all-powerful creator hated us.
And, Paul wrote,
when we were still powerless
The invalid who lay by the pool hoping to have someone put him in the pool when the water was stirred so he could be healed, he was powerless. Lazarus who was dying was powerless to do anything that would prevent him from dying.
We were powerless. We were unable to do anything to change our situation. It is not like the skinny kid who sits on the beach and the big, strong bully comes along and kicks sand in his face, humiliating him in front of some pretty girls. The skinny kid goes to the gym and all fall and winter and spring he lifts weights and develops muscles and the next summer goes up to the bully and kicks him off the beach. If he was powerless to do anything when the bully kicked sand in his face, he was not powerless because he was able to do something over the next year to fix the situation.
That is not what Paul meant when he wrote that we were powerless. All our intelligence and all our wit and all our strength and all our willpower was insufficient to save us. We were on the beach, put in a deep hole and buried up to our neck in sand and the tide was rising and nothing we could do would prevent us from being drowned. That is a more appropriate picture of our powerlessness.
We were sinners, heading off to our certain destruction. We were ungodly, worshiping the creation rather than the creator and on the list to be destroyed. We were God’s enemies, rejected by God and hated by him. And we were powerless. There was nothing we could do to change the situation.
It was at this time when we were most in need, just at the right time, that Christ died for us and rescued us from eternal death.
How do you measure the love in a gift? Are all gifts the same? Of course not.
My father gave me this Christmas a small cheese board and a cheese spreader that he made himself. That gift means a lot more to me than if he had gone to the store to buy a cheese board and spreader because making it himself means he put more of himself into it.
The best gift I ever gave Annie is a weekend away. I arranged for our neighbor to take care of our daughters and picked up Annie at a health-food coop where she was taking our turn to work. I had her suitcase packed and in the trunk of the car. I brought a dress for her to wear and told her we were going out for our anniversary dinner. We pulled up to a lodge where there was a restaurant and when I opened the trunk to take out her suitcase, her eyes lit up as she understood we would be staying there for the night. What made that a good gift was that I worked at it, planned it and made it a good surprise.
There is a short story by O. Henry titled, The Gifts of the Magi. In this story, a newly married couple want to give a wonderful Christmas present to each other. The wife has long beautiful hair so the husband wants to buy some lovely combs for her hair. He has a silver pocket watch and she wants to buy a chain to put it on. The problem is neither of them have money to buy the present they want so she cuts off her hair and sells it to a wig maker so she can buy the silver chain. He sells the watch so he can buy her the combs.
It is a wonderful story and what makes the gifts they buy for each other so wonderful is the sacrifice they made to buy the gift.
The more the gift costs the giver, the greater is the love that is revealed by the gift.
How much did the gift of salvation cost God?
A friend of mine pointed out that in the Greek, verses 6, 7 and 8 end with the word death. Death is the refrain in these three verses.
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. DEATH! 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. DEATH! 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. DEATH!
How much did the gift cost the giver? This gift of a hug comes wrapped in death. We were hugged but the cost to the hugger was death. The giver sacrificed his son. Death was the price he paid for the gift he offered us.
The more the gift costs the giver, the greater is the love that is revealed by the gift. And the less the recipient deserves it, the greater the love that is revealed by the gift.
I love finding a good gift for my daughters, sons-in-law and Annie. When I find the right thing, I have to restrain myself from giving it ahead of time. I love finding a gift that my father will think is unusual. I enjoy giving things to people I like and I tend to give to people that I like. I remember one Christmas when I was about 13 years old. My youngest sister is nine years younger than I am so that made her about 4 years old. I wrapped up presents for her and then thought of something else I could give her and went and wrapped that up. And I kept doing this until I had twelve or thirteen presents for her including my train that would move along until it hit an object, would back off and then go forward in a different direction.
I love giving gifts to people I like but there are other people in my life who have hurt me, who have betrayed me, who have insulted me, who have belittled me and I am not inclined to give them a gift.
This is human nature. We like people who are likeable and we don’t like people who are unlikeable. We like people who are nice to us and dislike people who are mean to us.
There was a pastor, well-respected in his town. He was single and the women of the church talked about who were the eligible women in town he could marry. He was constantly being invited to teas and dinners where there was yet another single woman for him to meet. This went on and on and then one day the town really had something to talk about.
He announced that he was marrying a woman who was well-known in town but who had never been invited to tea with the pastor. Everyone knew her but they had never even suggested her as a possibility for this wonderful young pastor.
The woman the pastor announced he would marry was a woman who had created several divorces in town by sleeping with married men. She was the mother of three children and each of the children had a different father.
The scandal was enormous. How could he do such a thing?
Well he married her. The town didn’t know what to think. If he wasn’t such a good pastor, he would have been kicked out of the church. But he continued to be an excellent pastor and the people began to view him as a more marvelous person than they had thought. Here he had married a woman and turned her life around. He had given legitimacy to her children. Things settled down, they had three children together and then the phone lines began to burn once again. This woman had been discovered having an affair with yet another man. After all he had done for her, look at how she had repaid him. She cheated on him. Gave herself to another man.
She publically humiliated him, mocked him by rejecting his love and going off with another man.
And what did the pastor do? He went to her and brought her home to once again be his wife.
Did she deserve his love?
And yet he loved her.
This is a picture of God’s love for us. It is essentially the story of the prophet Hosea, the last prophet of the northern kingdom. God told Hosea to marry a prostitute and when she betrayed him and again began to prostitute herself, to go and bring her back to him again to be his wife. God did this to make clear to Israel that he was a God who loved even when those he loved did not deserve to be loved.
We received the gift of salvation from God. Did we deserve it?
We were sinners. We made choices that caused us to head off in the wrong direction towards our certain destruction. We were ungodly. We chose to ignore God who created all we see and hear and followed instead the world and the temporary pleasures it offered. Even when we had an awareness of God, we turned our back on him and pursued our pleasures and individual will. We were God’s enemies. We betrayed God’s love and we were rejected by him, hated by him. And we were powerless to do anything to change the situation.
The more the gift costs the giver and the less the recipient deserves it, the greater the love is seen to be.
The giver sacrificed his son to offer us the gift of eternal life and we who received the gift were sinners, ungodly, God’s enemy and powerless.
Has greater love ever been expressed?
How then can you doubt the love of God?
The Holy Spirit is continually pouring out God’s love into you heart and this has happened because when you were a sinner, Christ died for you.
When you most needed it, God gave you a two-fold hug. When you most need it, God reminds you of this and gives you a two-fold hug.
What does this mean for you and for me?
I don’t care what is your circumstance this morning and I do care what is your circumstance this morning. On the one hand when you suffer, I am called by God to suffer with you and care deeply for you in your suffering as God cares deeply for you in your suffering. On the other hand, there is nothing you will face that is more significant than your rescue from eternal death.
When you are bobbing in the waves, holding on to a plank of wood and a boat comes along and rescues you, pulls you out of the water and brings you to safety, does it make sense to be bitter that you lost your wallet and cd collection in the boat when you have been saved from drowning?
When you are buried up to your neck in the sand and you were at the point where you had to hold your breath when the wave came over you and then could barely catch a quick breath before the next one came and at that point, you were lifted up out of the sand and set on solid ground, does it matter that you lost your ring or necklace in the sand pit? Of course not, nothing matters except that you have been rescued.
You tell me you are discouraged because you have financial difficulties or you don’t want any longer to be single or you are frustrated because the job you want has been taken by someone else and I will pray with you and try to encourage you. But at the same time I want to help you put your situation in perspective. You were a sinner, ungodly, God’s enemy and powerless and just at the right time, you were rescued and have a certain hope for your eternal future.
You tell me you have no money or that your best friend betrayed you or that your parents are divorcing or that you don’t know who your father was or that your sister is dying or that your spouse died or your child died or that you have a terminal illness or that your entire family was killed in a tsunami and I will grieve with you. But at the same time I want to help you realize that there is nothing that can happen to you in this world that is as significant as the rescue that Jesus made when he pulled you out of the pit and placed your feet on a solid rock.
The fact that you are loved in the way your are loved by God is more powerful than anything that can happen to you in this world and for that reason a Christian can always have hope.
This is why a leper in a leper colony can testify that he is glad he became a leper because if he had not become a leper, he would not have found Jesus.
The leper knows the truth in this quote from Augustine
The one who has Christ has everything.
The one who has everything except for Christ really has nothing.
And the one who has Christ plus everything else
does not have any more than the one who has Christ alone.
I care about how you feel this morning but I want you to lift your eyes from your problems and discouragements and sufferings and sorrow and see the one who has rescued you because he loves you.
If you have opened your heart and mind to accept God’s gift of salvation, you have what is more precious, more costly, more valuable than all the riches of the universe. And it is so far better to have the love of God in your life than anything this world can offer you.
It is OK to grieve today if you have need to grieve. It is OK today to be sad if you have reason to be sorrowful. But I will remind you of what is printed in the bulletin most Sundays
Philippians 4
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
And the reason that your heart and mind will be guarded in Christ Jesus is because you received from God his hug when, just at the right time, he died for you and because you are receiving from the Holy Spirit his hug as he pours out in your heart the love of God.
Life is not easy. We are bruised, shaken, distressed and broken but the one-two hug from God still stands more powerfully than the tribulation we experience.
Take a moment this morning to reflect and then thank God for his rescue of you, for his two-fold hug of love.
