"NO ROOM FOR BOASTING" Reformation Sunday October 27, 2019 Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church Glenshaw, Pennsylvania TEXT: What, then, becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from the works of the Law. Romans 3:27, 28 (ESV)
No matter what other factors may have been involved, there was only one real issue between the papal church and the reformers of the sixteenth century, and that was the issue of human works versus divine grace. On what basis do condemned sinners have any hope of being spared from divine judgment in hell and of spending eternity in the glory of heaven: on the basis of works performed by man or on the basis of the grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ--particularly in His suffering and death on the cross? Luther and others after him (as well as a few before him), claiming the Scriptures themselves as their authority, taught that human works accomplish nothing in the sight of God--indeed, that "all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment" (Isaiah 64:6)--that the only way a sinner could be acceptable to God was through the perfect merits of Christ--merits that are credited to the sinner through his faith in Christ. The Roman Church, at the Council of Trent, responded by declaring that if anyone taught such a thing, "let him be anathema"--eternally condemned--the strongest possible condemnation that the church can pronounce. That issue of grace versus works is still very much alive today, not only between Lutherans and Roman Catholics but also between Lutherans and a lot of other people who claim the Reformation as their heritage. I have heard and read many well-intentioned but misguided Protestants give a beautiful and powerful presentation of the Gospel of Christ, explaining in great detail how Jesus has taken away your sin by His innocent death on the cross and then ruin it all by adding: "All you have to do is . . . " take your pick: accept Him as your personal Savior or surrender yourself to Him or invite Him into your heart or whatever. It doesn't matter which because they are all the same poison. They are all saying that your salvation is ultimately dependent on something that you do. As soon as you say the words: "All you have to do is . . . ", you are no longer preaching a religion of divine grace but rather a religion of human works. And that has been a problem for the Church from the very beginning. It keeps resurfacing because human pride is a very strong force and leads us to boast when we have nothing to boast about. The problem with our boasting is that it raises the expectations that people have of us. A seminary classmate of mine always used to say: "I'm not too smart." When people would tell him that he had low self-esteem and that he shouldn't put himself down all the time, he would respond: "I'm not putting myself down; I'm just lowering the expectations. If people think I'm not too smart, they'll think I'm a real genius whenever I say or do something that is smart." There's a lot of wisdom in that. If a sports team boasts that it is the best in the league, it had better end up in first place or else people will say that it didn't live up to its expectations. When we boast of our works before God, God has every right to expect that our works are worth boasting about. But when the Perfect One does look at our works what does He see? When we boast of our works we are asking God to judge us on the basis of our works rather than on the basis of His grace in Christ, as Paul warned the Galatians: "You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by Law; you have fallen from grace" (Galatians 5:4). Boasting about our works is a very dangerous proposition because we cannot deliver on our boasting. Perhaps in this world everything is relative but that is not the case with God. His Law places before us a standard of perfection, for Jesus Himself says: "You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). Being generally a pretty good guy or being better than a lot of other people or somehow managing to avoid the most offensive sins isn't good enough. If we are going to take comfort in our works and boast of them, they had better be perfect. And, sad to say, that simply isn't the case. We all love the Ten Commandments, don't we? We even get all worked up when the secular courts ban them from being displayed on public property. But can any of us seriously claim that we obey them? We all love our Savior's Sermon on the Mount, but can we say that the way we live is even remotely similar to the ideal of the Christian life that Jesus presents in that sermon? I don't think we need to answer either of these questions. The fact of the matter is that when it comes to our works we have nothing to boast about. But just because our works are nothing to be proud of and just because we have no reason to boast about ourselves doesn't mean that we have no pride or nothing to boast about. We have a pride and a boast that are infinitely better than anything having to do with ourselves because our pride and our boast are in Christ--the God of heaven and earth who loved and valued us so much that He chose to become One of us and to submit to our miserable life of sin and death in order to save us from all that we have brought upon ourselves by our sin. The incarnation of Christ is a loud and clear declaration that God thinks we're worth something--not because of what we have done because He has created us in His own image, redeemed us with the blood of His One and Only Son, and called and sanctified us by the power of His Holy Spirit. In Christ we are righteous before God--even perfect--but our righteousness is not our own. It is what the theologians call an alien righteousness--the perfect righteousness of Christ given to us through His Holy Spirit's gift of faith, which enables us to trust in the merits of Christ alone to make us acceptable to God. There's an old saying that goes: "Why settle for hamburger when you can have steak?" Why would we want to boast of anything that we do (which serves no purpose other than to draw attention to our imperfection and sin) when we can boast with confidence of the love of God, which has redeemed us from sin and death and claimed us as His own? It is God's love in Christ and this alone that has established us in a loving relationship with our heavenly Father, not our good works or our pious thoughts or our personal decisions or our disciplined devotional life. And it is God's love in Christ and this alone that will carry us into the glorious presence of our Lord when our days on earth are ended. Are we "kicking a dead horse," as they say, by celebrating the Reformation every year and by constantly repeating the same message of salvation by God's grace in Christ through faith given to us by the Holy Spirit? I don't think so. The message of the Reformation is needed today every bit as much as it ever was because the message of the Reformation is nothing more or less than the message of the Gospel itself. In celebrating the Reformation and repeating its theme we are simply saying with the apostle: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost" (1 Timothy 1:15) and: "Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Galatians 6:14). Amen. May the Lord bless your hearing of His Word, using it to accomplish in you those things for which He gave it. May you be enriched and strengthened in faith that you may leave here today to go out into our world armed with the whole armor of God, prepared to be able ambassadors of your Savior Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen. ~