A Fearless Love

 August 1 2021

Romans 4:13-25

         Today in our ninth segment of our summer series, called Confident, we at last come to the subject of faith. Now, it may seem that faith is coming in a little late to the game but there are several things to keep in mind. The first is that as we read in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, faith is the assurance of things hoped for. So, we have to know what it is that we are hoping for before we can ever be certain that what we have decided we want to happen is actually going to occur. The second thing to keep in mind is that faith is not the end all goal people make it out to be. Somehow, we have tried to simplify what this salvation Jesus has given to us is all about that we have made it out to be solely about having faith in Jesus. What we cannot forget is that while faith is important, as Paul tells us in the thirteenth chapter of first Corinthians, if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love I am nothing. All those who somehow think that they can say that they believe in Jesus with all their heart and then turn and spew out hatred toward the people around them might want to take note of what Paul is saying. Then the last thing that we have to remember is that as we work out just what salvation is about what we can not forget is that our salvation is like a chain which is only as strong as its weakest link. That weakest link unfortunately is going to be us and our faith whether we care to admit it or not. We need to not put so much importance on our faith that we forget that our salvation is more about God holding on to us, as Jesus tells us in the tenth chapter of the gospel of John, then it ever is about us holding on to God. We need to keep in mind that in the book of Hebrews when faith is written of there in the third chapter, it is spoken of as being a state of rest. In other words, if you’re straining to keep a hold of God as an act of faith then you might be doing something wrong.

         So, keeping all of that in mind, lets take a look at the ninth article of the articles of faith from the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene. Article 9: Justification, Regeneration, and Adoption. We believe that justification is the gracious and judicial act of God by which he grants full pardon of all guilt and complete release from the penalty of the sins committed, and acceptance as righteous, to all who believe on Jesus Christ and receive Him as Lord and Savior. 

We believe that regeneration, or the new birth, is the gracious work of God whereby the moral nature of the repentant believer is spiritually quickened and given a distinctively  spiritual life, capable of faith, love and obedience .

We believe that adoption is the gracious act of God by which the justified and regenerated believer is constituted a son of God.

We believe that justification, regeneration, and adoption are simultaneous in the experience of seekers after God, and are obtained under the condition of faith, preceded by repentance; and that to this work and state of grace the Holy Spirit bears witness.

Whew, was that a mouthful. So, many big churchy words to sort out and make sense of! We start with the word “justification” which is a word that comes to us from the courtroom, where after hearing all the facts, the judge declares the accused to be “not guilty”. As the article of faith states it, there is not only a pardon of all guilt but there is also a free release from the penalty of sins committed. As Paul writes in the first verse of the eighth chapter of the book of Romans, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.That is amazingly good news! The second word that might trip us up is the word “regeneration” and if  you look at the word, it has the partial phrase, “gen” in the middle of it. This is the same phrase which begins the first book of the Bible, Genesis, which as we know has to do with creation. So, what is meant by the word “regeneration” is simply this idea of the new creation. We hear of this new creation in the fifth chapter of second Corinthians where Paul writes, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation; the old has passed away, the new has come.” So, the importance of this idea is that something brand new has occurred and because of this the old version of who we were is gone.  This is also captured in the idea of the new birth, of being born again which is a theme in the primarily found in the writings of John. It just makes sense as well that the idea of being adopted into the family of God would follow after our new birth because babies quite rightly are born into families who can care for them until they can care for themselves.

As we have frequently done in this series, we will take what we previously talked about and build upon what we know. We have said that ones faith journey begins with Prevenient grace, the grace of God that has come before our awareness of that grace. We were chosen before the foundation of the world by Christ to be holy people. The way that we know this is that Christ, the Son of God, left his Father’s side in heaven and he came to us, to be born as one of us, through the power of the Holy Spirit. God, in the life of Jesus, took on our sinful and corrupt flesh but was without sin because his was a life filled with the Spirit of holiness.  It was through what Jesus has done for us by carrying his cross, to suffer, to shed his blood and die for us that he became for us a once for all offering for the sins of the whole world. Now, we who were weak, unholy sinners, the very enemies of God, we have peace with God because of the saving work of Jesus on our behalf. This means that Jesus has bound himself to us, from the very moment of our life to be with us as a constant and faithful friend. This grace, this favor shown to us by God in Jesus Christ is discovered when we hear the gospel message, the word of truth which lets us know that God has always loved us and has always desired to be united with us. This is why he gave his only Son to die for each of us. This love that God has for us will always be there for us even if we reject this love and condemn ourselves.

Then when we understand that Christ has always been where we have been we come to understand that we have the hope of being where Christ is, in glory. Yet this hope is not just for us but Christ has died for the whole world. This means that God has bound himself to every person on the planet whether they realize that amazing fact or not.  So, if we take this thought a little further that if every person is bound to Christ then it just stands that Christ, at the same time has bound all of humanity together. Christ then is not only our mediator between us and God but he is also the mediator between all people. Taking this thought one step further, we can also say that not only has Christ united all of humanity together but he has also united us with our Heavenly Father through the Holy Spirit so that as Paul writes in the first chapter of Ephesians, Christ is the fulfillment of the will, the plan and the purpose of God which is to unite all things in heaven and on earth.

The question then becomes that if we know that Jesus has shed his blood in order to unite everything in heaven and on earth what should be our response? The answer as to what we should do when we know that Christ is pulling everything together is that we should, first, stop tearing things apart. This means that we need to repent, or turn away from, change our mind and instead of putting our needs, wants, and desires first we should instead make the unity a priority. This is why Jesus calls us to forgive others as he has forgiven us because forgiveness is the way that a broken unity is restored. This same idea is also found in the teaching of Jesus in the fifth chapter of Matthew, where Jesus teaches us that blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God. As Jesus, the only begotten Son of God has made peace going so far as to even shed his blood in order to do so, we too are called to do the same making our life work the creation of peace, the healing of the unity Christ is bringing together.

Yet, while our ceasing to tear apart that which Christ is bringing together is important there is more yet that we must do. Repentance, is the turning from one way of being, a way marked by putting ourselves above the needs of the unity, and then turning to becoming people who love with self-sacrificing love. What then must be figured out is just what is it that must be addressed for us to be people who can love with a self-sacrificing love?  The answer is found in the fourth chapter of the first letter of John, where he simply puts the issue as this: there is no fear in love. This fear we experience comes from our sense of loss. As we can readily see wherever we turn in our world, it is not the lack of possessing stuff that destroys the happiness of people it is rather the security of the possessions one does have which is the real issue as to whether a person can truly be happy. You see, when we understand that losing what we have is what makes us fearful then we can also understand that it is death that is the ultimate loss. It is death that is the ultimate object of our dread and it is the possibility of death that makes our whole life become oriented toward the future. As Jesus teaches us in the sixth chapter of Matthew, anxiety always has its focus on tomorrow. This is why fear is such a problem when it comes to be people who are called to love each other with self-sacrificing love because love always happens in the present. I can regret not loving you in the past and I can promise to love you in the future but to actually love you I must love you in the here and now. So, what happens when I am fearful is that my thoughts, my heart, is on future events, what might happen, so much so that I am no longer actually present to anyone in the present and the opportunities to love people who need loving right now are for ever missed.

Into this dilemma of being people whose hearts are focused on the future while, at the same time being people who desire to love others as God first loved us, comes these three actions of Christ into our life, the actions of justification, new birth and adoption. What may not have been evident when you first heard of these ideas is that all three are connected to time. Justification deals with what we have done in the past because as we well know the past so often affects our future. The new birth concerns life in the present in the here and now and adoption has to do with our inheritance that is the promise of a future held firmly within the very life of God.

Of course as we speak about justification, new birth and adoption we cannot forget that these we are told are ours by faith. The question becomes just how is it that people consumed by fear can muster up the effort to bring forth a decision of faith? The answer as we have said many times before is that everything we believe must go back to what Christ has already done for us. This means that our justification must be built upon the justification of Christ.  This justification of Christ is what we read about in the third chapter of first Timothy where Paul recites a confession of his faith concerning Jesus; Jesus, Paul states, was manifested in the flesh, was justified by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. If you want all that Jesus accomplished in a nutshell, there it is. When Paul speaks about Jesus being justified by the Spirit, it is a little difficult to understand just what life event he is speaking about until we remember that Paul also states elsewhere that Jesus was raised by the Spirit of Holiness. What this is stating then is that it is the resurrection of Jesus that proves the righteousness of the cross. If Jesus is dead, then we would still be in sin but because of the resurrection we now know that the cross has canceled out our transgressions and we have the declaration of righteousness because of the righteousness of Christ. So, it is the faithfulness of Christ and not our own which is what is the source of our justification. It is Jesus who has through his obedience and death who has ended the reign of sin and death and in doing so has begun the reign of life. This new situation where life reigns is what Paul means by justification.

So, this unity Christ is bringing together is the new temple he began building the very moment when he stepped out of the grave on Easter morning. In this unity, death is in the past, it has been dealt with so that now we are free to live in resurrection power. This is what is meant by our being justified. As the resurrection of Jesus was done through the power of the Holy Spirit, so too we are raised to newness of life through that same Spirit. As Paul says in the fifteenth chapter of first Corinthians, what is sown a natural body is raised a spiritual body. Our new birth, then is when we begin to experience our spiritual body, a body whose life is sustained by the Holy Spirit, our resurrection life, right now in the present. This means that our life is now held secure within the very life of God. Through the Holy Spirit we have a living connection to our living Savior because as Jesus tells us, it is the Holy Spirit who will bear witness to him. In the power of the Holy Spirit, we are made certain of one thing about the future and that is that Jesus is already there. Jesus is there in the future because his faith and his obedience to do his Father’s will were vindicated by his resurrection from the dead. It is no longer death which waits ahead but instead there is Jesus and his perfect love for us which casts out all of our fear. So, in the absence of fear what can remain except for faith? At last, in the frame of mind free of anxiety, worry and fear, love is finally able to flourish. This is exactly what John records in his first letter where he writes about being born anew six times in five short chapters. John writes that those who practice righteousness are born of God; he writes that those who are born of God do not make a habit of sinning; he goes on to say that those who love have been born of God and thus they know God; and further John writes that everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. Then we come to the fifth chapter the fourth verse, where John writes that everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. This should, as people who have been following this sermon series, make a little bell go off in your head because Jesus told his disciples that in this world they would have afflictions but they were to be confident because Jesus tells them that he has overcome the world. How does Jesus overcome this world? Jesus wins the victory over this world through his sacrificial love, the power that secured the victory upon the cross. Now, because we have new life through the Spirit we, like Jesus, are empowered to to be more than conquerors. The last wisdom John gives about being born anew is that the one who was born of God, Jesus will protect them and the evil one will not harm them. So, do you see how what Christ has accomplished through his resurrection from the dead has brought us from being people fixated on our fear to being people who are over-comers assured of the very protection of the living Christ.

It is the same Spirit which raises us to new life that is the Spirit who gives us the assurance of our adoption into the family of God where we know God as our Abba, Father. To know God as our Father means that we are assured an inheritance beyond this life of which the Holy Spirit is but a down payment of our glorious future. While this is indeed a wondrous news, we can quite honestly have our faith shaken from time to time. The way to have absolute certainty about our future is to do as Jesus teaches us, be a peacemaker because then, and only then, do you have the certainty of knowing yourself as one adopted into sonship by your Heavenly Father. As Jesus, the only begotten Son of God, has made peace with our Heavenly Father for us through the shedding of his blood and as he made peace between all people through that same blood it should not be hard for us to understand that the way of all those who call God their Father is none other than the way of peace. The whole reason Jesus has taken the fear of death from us and has raised us to new life in the Spirit is so that we might know that every moment called the present is a moment for us to love, to heal, to bring peace either through our service or our sacrifice. To God be the glory! Amen!