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 as we observe the Festival of the Reformation is taken from Romans 3:19-28 and is entitled, “Justification-A Matter of Life & Death,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. Jesus is well-known. Certainly, throughout history no one has been as well-known as Jesus. Today among our contemporaries in the United States, the name Jesus is still recognized, but recognized as signifying quite different figures. For some, he was merely human, but became the source of a great myth. For some, Jesus was a great historical person, like Abraham Lincoln or Mother Teresa. For some, he’s a friend—not a friend as in “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” but more like the friend you see a couple times a year, maybe at Christmas and Easter. But when you read the Bible desperately, isn’t that the only way to read the Bible, desperately?, the Day of Judgment is coming, the day when not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord” will enter heaven. When you read the Bible looking for deliverance, you find that the way to look to Jesus is to look to him as justifier. Jesus the justifier.
3. Jesus is the only one who brings us justification. Someone has explained this theological word, justification, as “Just as if I had no sin.” When you believe Jesus is your justifier, in the sight of God it’s, “just as if you had no sin.” Jesus is busy doing that. Here’s one example. “After the birth of my son and my divorce, both at the age of sixteen, there was no room in my life for anything but the here and now. I filled my days with busy take-charge tasks, always on the move, always on a schedule, always following a list. I filled my nights with alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, and self-destruction. I filled my soul with empty promises and emptier pursuits. By the time I reached my late twenties, a time when many of us are just beginning our families and settling down, I had a teenaged son who had, in his turn, become the out-of-control rebel, causing me to slip further into an abyss of guilt and despair. The rapid succession of yet another marriage and divorce, several broken engagements, more than one abortion, and frequent extreme weight gains and losses left me even more emotionally crippled. (Allison G. Bottke, God Allows U-Turns [Uhrichsville, Ohio: Barbour Publishing, Inc., 2001], 12ff
4. This comes from Allison G. Bottke. She’s an author of “God Allows U-Turns.” Reading on Allison says, . . . It was the summer of 1989, and I wasn’t actively questioning my faith at the time. Frankly, I did not understand the depth of the spiritual void in my life the evening that I found myself taking a walk in my neighborhood. I was contemplating what steps I would need to take now that another engagement had been broken. Then I noticed people getting out of cars nearby, crossing the street in front of me. It was Wednesday night, about 6:45, and they were going into the neighborhood church. (Bottke, 12ff.)
5. Allison tells that she went into that church and slipped up into the balcony. When the pastor began to speak, it was as though his message was for her alone. A message of being lost, without direction, without hope, without faith—and how it didn’t have to be like that. He talked of . . . the Lord Jesus Christ. . . . He would be there—just like that. Allision literally couldn’t see for the tears flowing nonstop from somewhere deep within her soul. She began an ongoing discussion with the pastor. For the better part of a year she talked with the pastor, debated, and learned, but the upshot of it all was that she joined that Lutheran church. Isn’t it a wonderful story?
6. Justification matters so deeply, especially for people like Allison. St. Paul says in our Epistle lesson today from Romans 3:28: “For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.” No slogan summarizes biblical Reformation theology (and the teaching of Martin Luther) as well as the one drawn from this verse: Justification by faith apart from works, as Paul put it, and if apart from works, then the justification of the sinner is by faith alone. It was the motto upon which all the beliefs of the Reformation stood. It was the very foundation upon which nearly half of the Western world at that time staked their lives and upon which many lost their lives. Justification mattered so deeply. It was a matter of life and death, Heaven and Hell. It must be preached that way. Especially today.
7.
Because
today it seems irrelevant. Few care about or discuss or even preach
justification by free grace. It’s seen as dull, simple-minded, divisive dogma
that went out of style upon the triumph of sentimentalism and religious
subjectivism. Simply put, the doctrine of justification by faith alone is irrelevant
to American Christianity since believers no longer follow the Reformation
doctrines of the faith, but rather follow the sentiments of their heart. “Follow
your heart,” is the new gospel of spirituality not Reformation Christianity.
Faithful pastors much preach against this new spirituality, which is really a restoration
of the offerings of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. This is important
because the Prophet Jeremiah says, “The heart is deceitful
above all things and beyond cure. Who can
understand it? 10 “I the Lord search the
heart and
examine the mind,
to
reward each person according to their conduct, according to
what their deeds deserve.” (Jer. 17:9-10)
8. It doesn’t occur to people in this day and age that they need to be justified before God, much less how they might be justified. So, the Romans Paul was addressing in this verse, and all whom Luther was addressing in the 16th century, don’t seem to be the same people we encounter today, the same people that purchase Joel Osteen’s books by the millions, and who count Oprah a prophetess. But, we as the Church today will want to assert that, not only is Romans 3:28 the most Lutheran verse in Scripture, but it’s also the most relevant verse for today. Start with the word “justify,” a word that persistently appears on word processing programs. Place your cursor on the tool bar where it says “format,” and open the menu on the word “paragraph.” A dialog box will offer you the option of placing your text to the left, to the right, to the center, or having it justified.
9. What it means is the text in your document lines up precisely on both the left and right margins, because the word “justify” means to put right. The text is put right, set straight into a tidy shape, with nothing out of place. For a person to be justified it means that they too are put right. They too are set straight and nothing in that person’s life—as far as the judgment of God is concerned—is out of place. They are justified in God’s sight.
10. In the days of our Lord Jesus’ earthly life, people understood the need to be justified before God. “Justification” was the number one item on the agenda. It was the main concern of the Jewish people. All too aware that their lives were not right in the eyes of an all-seeing and holy God, they did everything to put themselves right, or to use the language of Paul and Microsoft®, to justify themselves.
11. No effort would be spared in trying to get there by keeping the Law. This is the point: They could try, but they could not get there; never did, never could, never would. They were law-breaking sinners. It was precisely on this point that Paul made to them the most profoundly relevant disclosure: “A man is justified by faith apart from works of law.” The standard is perfection. Jesus says, “Be ye perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48)
12. Perfection never comes from law because it is a mirror to those who are imperfect and a lot worse in every way. Faith however brings perfection — the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. Here is the Good News of the Gospel, the Good News of Paul to Jew and Gentile alike, the Good News of Martin Luther to sinners who must be justified before the Almighty Judge. God Himself was in Christ, not as a judge but as a Servant, accomplishing the work of putting us right. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) In other words, God had come to us as a loving Father making us justified by faith in what He has accomplished on our behalf through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus His Son. Jesus the justifier.
13. Are people so different today? Is justification really irrelevant now? Is our only point of contact with the life-giving Gospel a by-product of Microsoft’s word processor? Holy Scripture says, “No.” The word may not be on everyone’s lips, even though it appears as an icon on their computer screen, but still the concern of justification is in their hearts. Paul says, “A man is justified by faith in what God has done for us, apart from the works of law.” So it is that the religions of the world labor with half the truth. All seem to know the human life needs to be put right. The Buddhist tries to make it so through ascetic living, the Muslim by rigorous adherence to Shariah law, the Jew by obeying Torah Law, the Mormon by a legalistic sub-culture and the fundamentalists and charismatics by doing this, not doing that, having this gift and exercising it this way and that, and so on and so on. All know the human life needs to be put right. None seem to know how this can happen apart from works of their own laws, from their own new and improved techniques. It seems the Law is written on our hearts by nature and we crave the hidden techniques for self-enhancing, self-justification. But the Gospel of being freely justified by grace is totally foreign to us. This is why it must be preached, why someone must declare: “A man is justified by faith in Christ alone, apart from works of law.” There is no other way.
14. The quest for being right has never left us through all our modern, technological development. Still the answer remains unchanged, too. We can be right, apart from works of law. It is for Christ’s sake, not because our failure is trivial and does not matter, but because Jesus has dealt with it once and for all bearing our sins in His body and nailing them to the tree of the Cross. God did not let bygones be bygones. He dealt with our sins so we could be justified while yet sinners. And justification is through faith, by believing in Jesus. God’s way of righting us is the only thing that matters in His merciful sight. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting. Amen.
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