"GIFT OR OBLIGATION?"
Second Sunday in Lent
March 8, 2020
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due. And to the one who does not work but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.
Romans 4:4, 5 (ESV)
The more theology that I read and the more human behavior that I observe, the more convinced I am that every sin and every false doctrine really boils down to essentially one central issue, and that is man's attempt to be God. Last week our Old Testament Reading was the story of our first parents' fall into sin in the garden of Eden. In that tragic story, what was the temptation that actually got Eve and her husband to go over the edge? It was this: "You will be like God" (Genesis 3:5). And what is it that we do over and over again every time that we sin? It is this: We try to be our own god, deciding for ourselves what is right and what is wrong, and choosing for ourselves which commandments we will obey and which we will not. In essence, we are saying that we know better than God. The history of Christianity is a history of the Church dealing with one heresy after another, the fallacy of each of them being man trying to do for himself what only God is able and entitled to do.
Nowhere is this more obvious or more serious than in the matter of our salvation. No matter how complicated the theological landscape of our world may appear to be, there are really only two religions in the world: On the one hand there are all the various religions of works and on the other there is Christianity, the only religion of grace. You can't have it both ways. You will be judged by one of two standards: either by your works or by God's grace in Christ. Salvation is there for every one of us, fully accomplished by the sacrificial life and death of the Son of God and delivered to us "on a silver platter," as it were, by the power of the Holy Spirit through the means of grace. But if we to any extent start relying on our own works as the basis on which God should accept us, we are negating His grace in Christ--rejecting it, claiming that we don't need it. If by appealing to our works we insist on being judged on the basis of God's Law, that's exactly how He will judge us, but not a one of us could survive such a judgment, since the Law demands that we be perfect. So the question that lies before us this morning is the ultimate question that confronts everyone: are the blessings of salvation our wages or are they God's free gift of grace?
A person's wages are nothing more than what that person has earned or deserved--nothing more than what that person is owed. When you receive your wages, it is not expected that you should send your employer a thank-you card for your pay or express your gratitude for it in any other way. You are only getting what you have coming to you in view of the work that you have done. In most occupations, if you work more than usual on a given week, you can reasonably expect that your wages for that week will be higher than usual; if you work less, you can expect less. What you receive as wages or salary is to be proportional to the amount of work that you have done during the pay period in question. Your employer doesn't pay you just because he's a nice guy or because he happens to like you; he pays you simply because he owes you.
I have been bothered for some time by the way the word "deserve" is being used in recent years, particularly in advertising and in political campaigns. If you watch or listen to these ads, you'd get the impression that you "deserve" everything from a good education at an affordable price to "spontaneous intimacy." The problem for us is that, when we start looking at our eternal destiny as something that we "deserve," we are heading for disaster, because the only thing that we deserve from God is His judgment and condemnation. We have disobeyed His commandments and thereby offended His holiness. We have not only failed to live up to the perfect standard of His Law; we have despised it and ridiculed it. We have attempted to determine for ourselves what is right and what is wrong, what we should do and what we should not do. We have attempted to decide for ourselves which commandments ought to apply to us and which ought not. We have questioned God's wisdom, arguing whether or not the commandments of God ought to apply to everyone in every situation. In all of this, we have tried to take the place of God. There is no worthy reward for that other than the righteous anger of the perfect God who created all things perfect in the beginning and willed that His creation remain perfect.
A gift, on the other hand, is something that is altogether different. It is not in any way earned or deserved; it is given freely, for no other reason than that the giver is generous and loving toward the recipient. Unlike wages, a gift is something over and above what is just and right. We may come to expect gifts on various occasions, but hopefully that's not because we think that we deserve them; it's because we have come to have trust and confidence in the generosity and love of the people who give them to us. Because gifts come to us by grace rather than because of our work or efforts, we are not to "look a gift horse in the mouth," as the saying goes. In other words, we are in no position to pass judgment on the value of a gift, since its value is determined not by what we did to attain it or by what we think about it, but rather by the grace and love of the one who gives it.
Our salvation is valuable because of what it cost the Giver. God forgives us not because He's forgotten about our sin or because He no longer considers it to be that bad or because He wasn't really serious when He condemned sin and said that it destroys fellowship with Him. And He doesn't forgive us because we try really hard or because we're not as bad as a lot of other people are. No, God forgives us for no other reason than that His Son Jesus Christ has taken our sin upon Himself and suffered its penalty in His own body, suffering and dying on the cross for us and for our salvation. God accepts us as His dear children in spite of our sin because in Baptism our sin has been washed away through the power of Jesus' death and in its place we have been clothed with the perfect righteousness of His life. We are saved because our Savior has offered to God in our place His perfect life to fulfill the Law for us and His innocent suffering and death to pay for our sin.
A lot of people have said and continue to say that John 3:16 is the Gospel in a nutshell. That may indeed be true, and I would certainly not want to disparage that beloved passage in any way, but for me there is another passage that I think better sums up the entire Christian message: both the Law and the Gospel. This passage is found in Paul's Letter to the Church at Rome and it says: "The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23). May God keep us from ever taking His precious gift for granted, as though it were an obligation--something that we "deserve." May He keep us also from committing spiritual suicide by thinking that our salvation has anything to do what we do. The gifts of salvation are ours because of God's redeeming love for us, manifested in Christ and given to us in the Gospel so that we may live forever in the grace of Christ, giving thanks to Him in everything.
Amen.
May the One who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, making us kings and priests before His God and Father, lead you to a life of repentance and trust. May He also be glorified in the lives of you, His people. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen.