Forgiveness: God's Power through means [Advent 2]

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READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Malachi 4:1-6

• Romans 15:4-13

• St. Luke 21:25-36

 

Mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you.
 
Who speaks to us on this second Sunday of the new Church Year, saying,
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
 
As we continue to ponder heroes this Advent season, I made mention last time that heroes are those who have stood up and have not renounced the faith. Though they were ordered, they did not say I renounce Christ.
 
Now I almost thought of daring all of you to say that, but I won’t trouble your consciences. The only reason I would dare you to say it is because I want you, trusting your baptism more than you trust even the words that come out of your mouth. Instead, we are to trust in the Words that will not pass away.
 
This is because sin is much greater and much more horrific than we have been led to realize these days. We think sin is just a surface thing something like saying, “I renounce Christ”. Indeed those are heavy words, however, does someone saying them mean that they’re automatically going to hell?
 
I would put this on par with statues in the house, and eating food offered to idols. No matter how many times you wear a head covering, no matter how many times you don’t get a tattoo, no matter how many times you forgive your brother. 
 
God is not mocked God cannot be tricked. He knows a true faith from a fake faith. Fake faith, wears Christ and his church like a hat, putting it on and off at convenience, and only being skin deep.
 
True faith is faith that has the hat, but who depends on God and can resist such things as words if they are forced upon you, signs of the beast forcibly engraved, or possibly even voluntarily! The power of God is the power of God after all, and not the power of men.
 
One example, you may think of, is the difference between King Saul and King David. Now, you would think, for as evil as King Saul became, even trying to kill David most of his life, that his sin that caused God’s rejection would be equally as horrid.
 
Our answer comes in chapters 10 and 13 of 1 Samuel. chapter 13 is where Saul is rejected by God, through Samuel (God works through means) as he said, “You have done foolishly. You have not kept the commandment of the Lord your God, which He commanded you…But now your kingdom shall not continue” (v.13-14).
 
But what did Saul do foolishly? He was told to “go down before me to Gilgal and behold I am coming to you to offer burnt offerings and to sacrifice peace offerings. Seven days you shall wait, until I shall come to you and show you what you shall do" (1 Samuel 10:8)
 
and apparently, he didn’t wait long enough, maybe an hour? Who knows. But he gets impatient, burns the offerings before Samuel gets there, and gets in trouble when Samuel arrives. Now, did he offer the sacrifice wrong? Was the ritual backwards? Did he not call on the Name of the Lord? No. All of that was there. All of the outward, and churchly, works were there. The problem was, Samuel was supposed to do it.
 
Seems pretty petty, on God’s part so far, to rejects Saul just because of something so tiny, right? On top of that, compare him to king David. Now David was a man after God’s own heart, right? Yet, his sins are more numerous than Saul’s and still retains the Lord’s favor. With murders, adulteries, thievery, and infidelity, How does David get out and not Saul?
 
Why do people go to hell? Why do bad things happen to good people? 
 
Repent. You have no answer. this is because you believe with all your heart, that as long as a person is “good” and “goes to church”, that person is saved. You don’t sweat the details, because God is love and love covers a multitude of sins. We don’t have to do everything exactly correctly, God just likes to make us sweat every now and then.
 
Tell that to Cain, who was rejected because of his offering. Tell that to Ham, Noah’s son, who was cursed for trying to help his father with his drunken nakedness. Tell that any one person who believes that he is receiving wrong from God, because he thinks he did it all right.
 
Though we have to depend on people to reveal to us who they are by their words, and have no other choice, God can see into the heart. Renouncing Christ is more than just being a punk and saying whatever is the opposite of what your dad wants. Renouncing Christ is to give up on Him.
 
That is the crucifixion. One of the reasons the world forsakes Christ to suffer and die alone is because He is a disappointment. We thought He would be the one to restore Israel. We thought He would be the one to free us from oppressive government. We thought He would be different, but when He starts bleeding and growing faint, then we see that His insides are just like ours.
 
On the cross, the inside (sin, death, and the power of the devil) looks like the outside. of Jesus, we weren’t too sure for a while there. He was forgiving sins, performing miracles, silencing religious oppression. He had to be different on the inside. I mean, the Transfiguration! We mistakenly see our sin in Jesus and attribute it to Him.
 
And this is part of our Lord’s work. That we see the sea being uncooperative, the celestial bodies not doing as we wish, and the trees withering away and think, “Does that seem right to you?” We look at the turmoil in the world and find that turmoil in us. Our Lord’s work convicts us of our sin.
 
And we hate it, because we don’t want our outside to look like our inside. However, it is only godly sincerity that wants the inside to look like the outside. We try so hard to put on a good show for everyone; to make them aware that we are likeable, trustworthy, and brave. But we know its just a show.
 
There is a thought that, if you act out how you want to be, then it will become habit and it will be you. But how many habits must we change or develop to complete a picture of ourselves that is not sinful?
 
So the forgiveness of sins comes without cost to you and is the power of God. Stronger than those tattoos, stronger than those slips of the tongue, and stronger than your rebellious spirit is the word of grace that covers you in Christ Jesus.
 
Another part of our Lord’s work is salvation. And if He is going to offer salvation to all, don’t you think it should be a little stronger than our weaknesses? Don’t you think it should be able to outshine music preferences and frivolous speech? 
 
It should and it does. In fact, whether you live or you die you are the Lord’s. As long as we treat every sin as if that sin will be the sin to knock us off the path, then that is conviction from the Holy Ghost and faith in Christ.
 
This is not an excuse to continue in sin. Eventually, sin will kill off faith, such that we believe that it doesn’t matter in the end and will see no problem with it. This is the path to hell and judgment, for God will see that love and trust in sin and say, “Thy will be done”.
 
One part of staying awake is to realize our sin and lack of faith and turn to the only Man Who can do something about it: Jesus. To fear and reverence His Work. To love His Bride, and to Trust His plan.
 
Here we may return to Saul’s sin. The size of the sin is not judged by our standards, but God’s. And God’s standard was not just that Saul wait 7 days and then sacrifice, but to let Samuel do it, because Samuel is the Called and Ordained man of God, sent to the people by God Himself. Saul lacked faith in Jesus’ work of giving gifts to men.
 
To Cain and Ham, they simply loved themselves more than God. That since God had already chosen them, there was no wrong they could do. Without faith, they displeased God by hating the order of His Church.
 
To us, we find all those things inside us and more. We could spend days in the confessional. that is all to say, without faith. But with Faith, our insides become like our outsides. With Faith, we receive life from God and in this life, hope. For, in the forgiveness of sins, there is hope for the worst of sinners.
 
Godliness is a gift from God and part of it is humility. The humility to accept that God’s salvation is being worked out in the world through His Church. If we want faith, we must turn to the Word, not the words of others. If we want clean insides, we must turn to the Sacraments. If we want forgiveness stronger than ourselves on our worst days of doubt, we must turn to Him Who comes to us saying, “do not disbelieve, but believe” and it happens.
 
Thus, we find in God’s treasure not just masks and hats for Church, but clean hearts and right spirits. We do not have to pretend we are saved, we are, at God’s Word. We don’t have to fear our rebellious years or any “welp I’m going to hell for that one”, because Christ is raised from the dead.
 
So that we can act on the outside what we believe on the inside so that our outsides can actually become conformed to our insides that, with Communion, now is conformed to Christ.