“Sons of God Through Faith in Christ” Gal. 3.23-4.7, Pentecost5C, '16

1.                   Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  The message from God’s Word this morning is taken from Galatians 3:23-4:7.  Happy Father’s Day! We give thanks for the earthly fathers who have been a blessing in our lives. We give even greater thanks today for our heavenly Father, who has called us all His sons and daughters. In the Word, we are reminded of our beginning in Baptism, when He called us by name and adopted and welcomed us into His family, where we receive lasting blessings that can’t be found in any other place. As His children and heirs, we’re favored, forgiven, and free, that we may live in His grace and respond in our lives to His glory and honor. Happy Father’s Day today! Happy “God the Father Day” today and everyday living as His children united in His Son!  The message today is entitled, “Sons of God Through Faith in Christ.”  Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

2.                   Imagine this: everything you do is under the watchful eye of “the authority.” He claims you as his own. He tells you what to do—gives you your daily work, your responsibilities and tasks—from morning to night. And he pays you nothing at all. No check, no IOU, nothing. He chooses what you’ll eat and when you’ll eat. You own nothing; he owns it all, everything from food to clothes to whatever kind of roof he puts over your head. You are under his thumb in every single way, from morning to night, every day.  No, I’m not talking about your relationship to your dad growing up.  I’m describing the identity of a  slave. But, it so happens I’m also describing a child. Of course, the two situations are different. The slave is truly oppressed by such circumstances; the child, on the other hand, is being protected.  The two circumstances are different, but they do have important parallels, and recognizing that will help us to follow what Paul wants to tell us in Galatians 3 and 4.

3.                   Today, St. Paul reminds us that we’re the children of God through faith in Christ, and this didn’t come about by our keeping of God’s law.  In the book of Romans, St. Paul reminds us that there’s no one who is righteous, no not one, that we’re all sinners who can’t keep the law perfectly as God our Heavenly Father requires. And yet, surveys conducted indicate that more than 60 percent of Lutherans believe that if a person lives a good life and does good things for others, he or she will earn a place in heaven. In our national religious pluralism, people, many of them our own members, believe that all religions lead to the same God and to eternal life. This is due to the deceptiveness of sin, which uses the Law as an agent to keep people in bondage.  St. Paul reminds us that the Law binds us to our sins and to the consequence and destiny determined by sin—eternal death and separation from God. But, thanks be to God that in Jesus we have been set free and become children of God and heirs together with him. Through Jesus we can now call God our Heavenly Father, our Daddy. Jesus was made to be a curse on our behalf; so the curse has been lifted from us, and we receive our inheritance together with him. 

4.                   St. Paul reminds us in Galatians 3 & 4 that the Law can’t make us children and heirs of God.  The Law tells us what we are to do and not to do, what sort of persons we are to be. “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev 19:2). Summarized in the Ten Commandments—not 10 suggestions—love God with all your heart, mind, and strength. Love others as you love yourself.

5.                   That we’re commanded doesn’t mean we’re able to be or to do what the Law requires. The deceptiveness of sin actually uses the Law as its agent to increase sin. When we can’t do what we want, we become angry. The religious pluralism in our country, the natural religion, teaches that you earn your way into heaven. If you trust that your good life and love for others will earn you a place in heaven—you are under a curse (Gal 3:10). Tell God, “I want what is coming to me,” and that is what you will receive.  As the hymns says, “It was a false, misleading dream That God his Law had given That sinners could themselves redeem And by their works gain heaven. The Law is but a mirror bright To bring the inbred sin to light That lurks within our nature” (TLH 377:3).

6.                   St. Paul reminds us here in Galatians that the Law serves only as a “tutor” to lead us to Christ.  Galatians 3:22-23 says, “23Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. 24So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.”  A babysitter is necessary when you’re young, but not when you’re an adult. This is Paul’s argument to the Galatians concerning their relationship to the Law of Moses. It seems as though some within the Galatian church were seeking to “graduate” into spiritual maturity by rigidly following all sorts of the Law of Moses concerning, “days and months and seasons and years” (Galatians 4:10). They thought that spiritual maturity is to be found in the works of the Law that a person performs rather than in the faith in Christ that a person holds.

7.                   Paul argues exactly the opposite: “The law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian” (3:24–25). The Greek word for “guardian” is paidagogos , a word for “babysitter.” Paul says that a person who believes he can follow the Law unto salvation is “enslaved” (4:3) to a babysitter.

8.                   A fascinating use of paidagogos comes in a dialogue between the great Greek philosopher Socrates and a son named Lysis. Socrates notes that this son has a pedagogue who watches over him. He finds it strange that a man who is a slave to the family, as was a pedagogue, would exert control over a son who is member of the family. So Socrates asks the son how this pedagogue controls him, to which the son answers, “He leads me to my teachers.”

9.                   According to Paul, this is precisely the function of the law. It was “our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith” (3:24). The Law, then, isn’t an end in itself nor is adhering to it a sign of spiritual maturity. The Law is only a babysitter to lead us to Christ.  The purpose of the Law, in other words, was to prepare us for the justification through faith God had in mind. When we understand that the Law demands of us that which we can’t do, we realize our helplessness and need for a Savior.

10.               We’re the children of God through faith in Christ.  The hymn says, “Yet as the Law must be fulfilled Or we must die despairing, Christ came and hath God’s anger stilled, Our human nature sharing. He hath for us the Law obeyed And thus the Father’s vengeance stayed Which over us impended” (TLH 377:5). This speaks of Christ’s pure and holy obedience to all the Law of God—for us, in our place, on our behalf.

11.               Our Savior Jesus has “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (3:13; 2 Cor 5:21; Zech 12:10; Rom 8:3). He died our death under the Law. We are children of God through faith in Christ. And so, we become God’s heirs together with Jesus.  The promise to Abraham (Rom 4:13) that he should inherit the world was based on his descendant Jesus (3:16; Heb 1:2). He’s God’s Son and God’s heir, heir of everything (Heb 2:5–9).

12.               We are heirs together with Christ (Rom 8:17; Heb 1:2; Gal. 4:7). God’s meek who inherit the earth are those who believe in Jesus (Mt 5:5; 1 Cor 3:21–23). We, therefore, are heirs of God together with Christ—inheriting all that God can give. Our sins became his; his glory becomes ours. Imagine what this means!

13.               Seeking salvation by the Law isn’t a sign of spiritual maturity, but a sign of spiritual immaturity, as Paul says when he labels such an attempt as part of “the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world” (4:9). What, then, is the hallmark of spiritual maturity? In a word, it is “faith.” Not our own works. And so, as maturing sons of God, we bid goodbye to the babysitter of the Law and gladly welcome our Savior in faith. For we can never outgrow or out-mature Him.  Amen.

“Your Son Lives!” 1 Kings 17.17–24, Pentecost 3C, June ’16

1.  Please pray with me.  May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer.  Amen.  The message from God’s Word today comes to us from 1 Kings 17:17-24 and is entitled, “Your Son Lives!” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

2. Joseph Bayly knew what the loss of a child was like. In fact, he and his wife lost three sons—one at eighteen days, after surgery; another at five years, with leukemia; the third at eighteen years, after a sledding accident. So when Joe Bayly wrote about the death of a child, people listened. Here is part of what he had to say:  “Of all deaths, that of a child is most unnatural and hardest to bear. In Carl Jung’s words, it is “a period placed before the end of the sentence,” sometimes when the sentence has hardly begun. We expect the old to die. The separation is always difficult, but it comes as no surprise. But the child, the youth? Life lies ahead, with its beauty, its wonder, its potential. Death is a cruel thief when it strikes down the young. The suffering that usually precedes death is another reason childhood death is so hard for parents to bear. Children were made for fun and laughter, for sunshine, not for pain. And they have a child’s heightened consciousness rather than the ability to cope with suffering that comes with maturity. They also lack the “kind amnesia of senility.” In a way that is different from any other human relationship, a child is bone of his parents’ bone, flesh of their flesh. When a child dies, part of the parents is buried.… I met a man who was in his seventies. During our first ten minutes together, he brought the faded photograph of a child out of his wallet—his child, who had died almost fifty years before.” 

3. The death of a child is certainly one of the greatest agonies possible in this life—a burying of a part of oneself, a period before the end of a sentence, the death of a future. It’s a burden that all parents fear. Such pain was the emotional context of Jesus’ ministry here in Luke 7, with His raising of the Widow of Nain’s son from the dead, and Elijah raising the Widow of Zerephath’s son from the dead in 1 Kings 17.

4. How can we trust a God who lets something like the death of a child happen? Such things like this happen all the time. Something similar occurred in our text from 1 Kings 17.  With idolatry running wild in Israel under King Ahab, the Lord announced through the prophet Elijah that there would be no rain until further notice. The idolaters may have snickered when they heard these words, but they wouldn’t have the last laugh. None of their unbelieving cynicism could change the fact that the Lord remained in charge, and there was no rain.

5. Elijah was affected by the drought too. At first he lived by a brook. When it dried up, the Lord sent him to the region of Sidon. This was the homeland of King Ahab’s wife Jezebel. There God directed Elijah to the home of a widow. When the prophet first met her, he asked her for food and drink. She told him that she was down to her last provisions. After making one more meal for herself and her son, she didn’t know where the next could possibly come from. She considered herself as good as dead. Still, when Elijah spoke the Lord’s word of promise to her, she had faith. She made Elijah a loaf of bread. And for many days after there was always just enough flour and oil left for another meal, as the Lord had said.

6. This woman took Elijah in. The prophet lived through the rest of the drought in the company of this woman and her son. No doubt, he proclaimed to her the Lord God of Israel. Things seemed to be working. The jar of flour didn’t run out, nor did the jug of oil. You might say that this widow was going with the program, playing by the rules, as it were.  Then one day her son died.  Put yourself in the widow’s shoes. All of a sudden it didn’t look like such a great thing to have the Lord’s prophet so close by. This God was now costing her. In her grief, she lashed out at Elijah, saying, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!” (1 Kings 17:18). Have you ever felt this way toward God?

7. New converts to Christ often find their first few months or years in the faith pretty easy and trouble-free, but in time the Lord sends them more difficult things to handle. One of the realizations that comes to all Christians as we mature in the Lord is the depth of our sin. The widow in the text was feeling her sin as very real. She knew the Lord must punish sin, and she assumed that the death of her son was his punishment upon her. How could she trust such a God? If anything, she wanted to run away from him.

8. There’s no denying that God lets terrible things happen in this world for which we don’t know why. In fact, Martin Luther points out, “God must therefore be left to himself in his own majesty, for in this regard we have nothing to do with him. . . . God hidden in his majesty neither deplores nor takes away death, but works life, death, and all in all.” Let the postmodern world mock as much as it wants. God remains in complete charge, and we remain totally answerable to him.

9. God isn’t answerable to us. In the text, Elijah made no attempt to apologize for God or explain his ways. Elijah knew that the only answer to God is God. We can have nothing to do with God in his own majesty. “But we have something to do with him insofar as he is clothed and set forth in his Word, through which he offers himself to us.”  Elijah took the dead boy into his room, laid the body on his own bed, and prayed the Lord to grant that this child live again. The prophet stretched himself upon the body three times as he prayed that life come back into it. In death, “the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7), but Elijah knew that this same God can give it back.  Elijah was asking the Lord to give the widow life in a situation of death, comfort in fear, and assurance of his love and salvation amid all her doubts. No amount of explaining could have been better than the moment when the prophet went downstairs not carrying a dead corpse but rather with his arm around a live child. “See,” Elijah told the widow, “your son lives” (1 Kings 17:23).

10.                     This event forms a little Old Testament “Easter.” The son was dead, but then he lived. So far as we know, he eventually died again in this world. God did so much better with his own Son. See, Jesus lives! Yes, God had punished sin. He punished it fully when he laid it all upon the back of Christ. Yet he raised Jesus from the dead and now “death no longer has dominion over Him” (Romans 6:9). Jesus lives.

11.                     And God the Father has planted this new life in you by giving you the Word of life, the Good News of Christ. “For without God’s sure Word about His will, a person has no power to claim, especially when terrified by sin, that God ceases to be angry.”  (Apology of the Augsburg Confession V (III) 141 [IV 262] (Concordia, 121). So here’s a sure Word of God for you, as sure as the resurrection of Christ is sure: God forgives you. He’s not angry with you. He’s not stringing you along, only to spring some punishment for sin on you when you least expect it. The Lord God of the universe forgives you all your sins on account of Jesus who nailed them to his cross and left them there when he rose from the dead. With this forgiveness comes assurance, comfort, and life, all through God’s powerful Word.

12.                     The woman in the text told Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth” (1 Kings 17:24). In faith she received God’s assurance, comfort, and life through Elijah. She was alive.  You and I live too. We live by faith. When tragedy strikes, don’t dwell on how unfair it is. Don’t tell yourself that you were playing by the rules, or wrack your brain trying to figure out how you slipped up. Above all, don’t run away from God. Instead, run to the God who has clothed himself in his Word. Run to the Lord who is more than able to take care of his people through His Son Jesus Christ.

13.                     Like the widow in the text, this Lord has given you new birth in the faith through his Word. He’s sustained you every step along life’s way.  Beloved, we have no need to fear death.  The poet put it this way, "No longer must the mourners weep, nor call departed children dead.  For death is transformed into sleep, and every grave becomes a bed."...As a young man, D. L. Moody was called upon to preach a funeral sermon.  He decided that he would search through the Gospels to try to find one of Christ's funeral sermons, but he searched in vain.  He found that every time Jesus attended a funeral, He broke it up by raising the person from the dead; and so He never gave a funeral sermon.  When the dead heard His voice, they immediately sprang to life. 

14.                     Dear friends Jesus will not let you see corruption.  He will show you the path of life.  In His presence is fullness of joy, and at His right hand are treasures forevermore.  Arthur Brisbane captured it for me when I look at a funeral.  Arthur Brisbane wanted to demonstrate what a funeral was like, so he pictured a crowd of grieving caterpillars, all wearing black suits; and all these caterpillars are crawling along mourning; and they're carrying the corpse of a cocoon to its final resting place.  The poor distressed caterpillars, weeping; and above them is fluttering around this incredibly beautiful butterfly, looking down in utter disbelief...Christ gives us hope.  Amen.