Romans 5:12-21
I have been sick this past week and so have not had the mental energy to pull this sermon together as much as I would like. It will take more work on your part than usual to hear what it is God has to say to you. There are some good things here, listen hard and take what you can and I trust that you will benefit from your effort.
In What’s So Amazing about Grace? Philip Yancy tells of 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 rumpus 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.”
After some discussion, the conferees had to agree. 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 Muslim code of law – each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional.
John Newton called it amazing grace. Is it amazing? Think of the best person you know in the world. Someone who stands out in your experience as the most loving, wise, wonderfully accepting person. Put that person in a chair in front of you. Now think of the worst person in the world. The cruelest, most despicable, repulsive person you can imagine. Perhaps someone who hurt you deeply. Put that person in a second chair in front of you.
Now let me ask you, does God love each of those people? For the good person this is easy. Who could not love that person? You come to that conclusion with your head and your heart. For the bad person, although your heart says no one could love that person, your head tells you that God loves everyone and so even this miserable excuse for a person must be loved by
God.
Let me ask you another question, which one does God love more?
What is so amazing about grace is that God loves the miserable excuse for a person equally, which is to say totally, as the saint in human form.
Grace is unique to Christianity among all world religions and it is amazing because it becomes clear that this idea of grace did not come from human minds. And it is because it did not come from a human mind that we struggle so much with it.
In Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, grace entered his letter with the astounding news that although we all deserve the wrath of God, we received God’s grace. God gave us what we do not deserve. God gave us a way out. God gave us eternal life.
My last sermon referred to two countries: the land of Adam and the land of Jesus. The land of Adam is the land from which all of us have come. It is the land of sin where law dominates. It is a land whose crowning achievement is the grave with cemeteries as the temple.
The land of Jesus is the land where we have graciously been given a home and it is ruled by grace. In this section of Paul’s letter, he contrasts the two and because the land of Jesus is ruled by grace, grace features prominently.
The land of Jesus is the land that will move us into the future, past the cemetery of Adam’s land. When Paul contrasts the two, he makes the point that grace is more powerful than sin. When Jesus comes in to a person’s life, the land of Jesus takes over because grace is more powerful than sin.
But because grace is not a human invention, Grace is not easy. Sin is easier and comes more naturally than grace.
It’s easier to tear down than to build.
I have to admit that men love tearing down. We are fascinated by it. Take a building and get some experts who put explosives in the right places and set them off and an entire building comes down without damage to surrounding buildings. That’s fascinating to watch but we would prefer to take a wrecking ball and tear down the building blow by blow. I was in Maine with a printer when he received a new printing press. This thing was a monster perhaps 10 meters high and was delivered in a huge packing crate. The side of the building had to be taken down to get the press inside. There were perhaps 20 of us and each was given a hammer or crowbar and we went to work dismantling the crate. Pieces of wood were flying everywhere as we attacked the crate. There was no methodical analysis of what would be the best strategy, we attacked the crate like starving men. It is quite amazing no one was injured in the process.
Men also like building things. I have good memories of working with a group of men, putting on a roof of a house. On another occasion, friends came over to help us with our first house. We had to put in all new windows and we had three teams. The first took out the old window, the second prepared the space for the new window and the third put in the new window. We worked hard and accomplished a lot.
It took all day to put in a few windows. It took maybe 20 minutes to tear apart the crate. It takes years to build a building that can be torn down in a matter of minutes.
Can you guess which grace is like, tearing down or building up?
5:16
Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.
It does not take much energy to condemn. When I was feeling sick this past week and had no energy I tried to work on this sermon, but to no avail. I did not have the energy to construct a sermon that would edify and build up. On the other hand, I had enough energy to think of standing up and yelling at a couple people who are having a misunderstanding and telling them to grow up.
Grace is not easy because it takes more work than sin. Sin is the 99 pound weakling that runs down the beach kicking the sand castles of little children and destroying their hard work. Grace is the strong man who follows and works with the children to make their sand castle even more beautiful than it was.
Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.
Grace is not easy but has more power than sin because all sin can do is destroy but grace brings life.
There were men in the 1800s who took the first machine guns and went out on the plains of the west of the US to see how many buffalo they could kill and the pictures of them standing next to huge piles of dead buffalo that just rotted in the sun are some of the more discouraging pictures I have seen. They competed to see who could kill the most buffalo in one day and the great herds of buffalo disappeared from the plains of the US.
And then there is a character in US history named Johnny Appleseed who went around planting apple trees wherever he went. He left Massachusetts to start nurseries of apple trees in the expanding Midwest of the US and in the process planted thousands of apple trees. We sang songs about him as children but he was not just a legend. He was a man who created and brought life.
To kill a buffalo you simply pull the trigger of your gun. To plant an apple tree, you have to find first the apple seeds, then find a good spot for growing a tree, dig a hole, plant the seed, water it, put up a fence to protect it from wild animals and over time there will be a tree. It takes time to practice grace but when you do, the results are far more rewarding.
Are you an instrument of grace or of sin? When you walk down the beach, do you leave behind sand castles that have been kicked in or do you leave behind you, sand castles more beautiful because you have been there?
There are some people who leave in their wake disagreements and conflicts. Because of what they say and how they act, misunderstandings abound. A lot of emotional energy is spent trying to repair the damage some people create.
It may be you were not invited to a party. So what. Sin takes that intentional or unintentional snub and turns it into a big deal with one person calling another and people taking sides about who was not nice. Grace allows such a petty thing to slip past without comment so that relationships are not disturbed.
It may be that a change was made in the schedule and everyone was informed except you. Sin turns this into a personal rejection and creates a furor because you are not liked, “This is always the way it is with me,” and the community is in a turmoil.
Grace lets this slip by. Even if the snub was intentional, grace does not allow it to become a big deal.
There is a project on which I worked for a full year. It required a lot of time, meeting with some other people, asking questions of them and then writing down their responses. This was a project that is intended to help people from different countries get along with each other more easily. I am proud of this effort and then a guy from Casa spoke to me and belittled the project. He dismissed it as an amateur effort. He made it seem like it was nothing new. He made it seem as if I had wasted my effort and the effort of the others I had met and talked with.
So how do I react? Do I strike back at him and spread stories about how bad he is? Do I try to drum up support for my perspective and get people turned against him? That is the way of sin.
What is the way of grace? I will be speaking with him and I intend to tell him that his comments hurt me, that I was proud of what had been accomplished and he made it seem trivial. I will let him know how his comments made me feel. I will let him know that what he said hurt me. I would rather not speak with him, but grace require work. I will try to restore our relationship.
Just this week I heard three stories of people who are at odds with each other for rather trivial issues. Sin is taking the lead and these people are alienated from each other and separating from each other.
Can you imagine standing in heaven before Jesus, seeing the holes in his hands and the cut on his side and then explaining that the reason you broke the unity of the church was because someone did not appreciate the gift you gave them in the way you wanted? How pathetic do you think you will feel? “Yes, but you see Jesus, when they changed the time of the meeting, they did not tell me?” Is that going to seem terribly significant when you stand there looking at his wounds and he asks you why you disrupted the unity of his church?
Sin competes to see who can destroy the most but grace works to bring life.
But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!
Paul makes the point that the one sin of one man, Adam, brought death into the world. That sin was multiplied millions and billions of times over. It was not that Jesus had to die for one sin of one man. Jesus had to die for the sin of millions. How powerful is grace? When Jesus died for the sin of Adam, his grace overflowed to the many.
I met a man who was in prison for multiple counts of rape and murder. He would go out drinking and get it in his head that he should go to where couples would sit in their car and make out. He would kill the guy and rape the girl. He did this several times.
So there he sat in prison in his misery saying, “God would never be able to forgive me for what I’ve done.” What he did was despicable. He brought misery to many families because of his actions. But grace overflows to the many. He is not the first person in history who has done terrible things.
In fact, I don’t think it is possible for you to imagine a sin that could be committed that has not already been committed in history and been forgiven many times already. It is a form of arrogance to think you have been so creatively destructive that you present to God a new challenge.
Grace brings life to every situation. There is no darkness that cannot be overcome by the light of grace. There is no misery that cannot be brightened by grace. There is nothing you have done that cannot be forgiven by God. Grace is more powerful than any sin you can imagine and it will always bring light and life.
Disobedience kills but obedience brings life.
For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
You have a choice. We always have choices. You can work for sin or you can work for grace. If you desire to work for the constructive work of grace, seek the path of obedience. If you chose to work for the destructive work of sin, chose disobedience.
If, when you look back on the relationships you have left behind and you see wrecked relationships, do not despair. God is at work in you. As you grow in your faith, grace will more and more be evident in your life.
There is an increasing awareness of grace in our lives as we grow in Christ.
The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Let me show you what I mean. Paul wrote Galatians in 47 AD and in his introduction you can feel the sense of importance he has about himself.
Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father,
Eight years later when Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, there is a bit of a shift that tells me Paul has matured as a Christian.
54 I Corinthians
For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.
Do you hear the humility in Paul that was missing in his letter to the Galatians?
Thirteen years after his letter to the Galatians he describes himself as a prisoner of Jesus Christ in Philemon and a year later in Philippians
Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,
Seventeen years after he wrote the letter to the Galatians, at the end of his life he wrote to Timothy and in this letter we see the progression of Paul, the spiritual maturity of Paul, the process of sanctification at work in Paul’s life
Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. 16 But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life.
Paul moved from an apostle sent not from men nor by man to the least of the apostles and the greatest of all sinners.
In Walter Wangerin’s book, Paul, a Novel, he writes of Paul who overpowered people in the beginning of his Christian ministry with his brilliance and charisma. At the end of his life, there was a different Paul. Still brilliant but with a humility that allowed the power of God to shine about him. At the end of his life, the erosion of his rough edges had created a more powerful man of God.
In Paul’s life we see good news for us. The power of God that was at work in Paul transforming him is also at work in us transforming us. We are not stuck with who we are. God is at work in us and what we have been is not what we are. Who we are is not who we will be.. We are becoming what God wants us to be.
As you reflect on your life, are you building, creating life, seeking obedience? When you look down the beach where you have walked, what do you see? Do you see a number of wrecked sand castles or do you see sand castles you have helped to make more beautiful?
You need to practice grace with each other. If you give a gift, give the gift and let it go. If the gift is well received, wonderful. If the gift is not received the way you wish it were received, let it go. Practice grace. Allow your gift to build and create life.
If you are invited to a party, wonderful. If not, practice grace.
If someone tells you that someone does not like you, let it go. Practice grace.
Practice grace that overcomes petty differences and quarrels.
Practice grace that overlooks little incidences.
Practice grace that builds up the lives of people around you.
Practice grace.
