Faith Saves Us | Good Shepherd Lutheran Church (ELCA) Manchester MO

Pastor:

Pr. Tom Schoenherr

Sermon audio:

Pr. Tom Schoenherr

“Faith Saves Us”

June 13, 2010

What is the message that keeps playing in your head about yourself? Do you have a message that you hear whenever you say or do something that may have hurt someone else? For me it is a message that says that I am not good enough; that I don’t deserve anything from God or from other people. I hear a message that keeps beating me up, keeps repeating, and as much as I would like to silence this message it keeps playing until it is done.

God is trying to change the message that plays like a CD or a DVD in our heads. God’s message to us is a promise that faith believes and trusts; a promise that we are called innocent and forgiven through faith in Jesus Christ. There is nothing we can do to earn God’s love or to make God turn away from us. It is through faith in Christ that God is delighted with us and counts us as innocent.

The Galatian Christians hear a message in their heads that they have to conform to all of the Mosaic laws about what they should eat and how they should act. We may hear a message that in order to be a righteous or good Christian we need to behave in a certain way; thinking a acting in ways that qualify us to be followers of Christ.

But if gaining God’s favor is on the basis of how we act under God’s law then we don’t need Jesus Christ. We can’t be good enough and God’s law shows us how much we fall short of God’s expectation. If our righteousness depends on what we do and how good we are, then we don’t trust Jesus Christ. We trust ourselves and we have no hope.

There are many people in the Bible who can illustrate this for us. King David in the Old Testament wants Bathsheba for himself, even though she is Uriah’s wife. He has Uriah killed in order to have what he wants, because he has the power to do it. The woman who bathed Jesus feet with very expensive scented oil and wiped them with her hair was a sinner. She had a bad reputation in the city. The disciples of Jesus all ran away and deserted Jesus at the time of his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Peter denied he even knew Jesus when he was asked in the courtyard if he was a follower of Jesus.

Under God’s law each of them were sinners. God sent Nathan to David to show David’s sin to him. I wonder what message played in each of their heads

God wants to change the messages that they hear and that we hear. Faith trusts the promise that God still loves us and calls us innocent, forgiven, made righteous, justified.

Today our grandson, Nathan, will be baptized. In Baptism, Nathan and we are connected to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So now it is Christ who is living and loving through us. Nathan does not become a child of God because he is so good or so innocent or so cute. Nathan and we are God’s children through faith in Jesus Christ, which is God’s gift to him.

When we come to the Lord’s Table today, we bring nothing of our own except our sin and our need for healing. We confess our sin and give it all to Jesus Christ. Through the bread and the cup and words, “given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins,” our faith trusts Christ and believes the promise that we are people whom God loves and forgives. He wipes the slate clean.

Now filled with a new message in our heads and our hearts, we get to be children of God in action, not because we have to, but because we want to. Neither death nor life, nor angels, nor powers, nor height, nor depth nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Paul says in our text, “yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.”