O freedom!
John 8:31-36
The Festival of the Reformation (Observed)
October 26, 2008
Dear friends in Christ: Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
"If you abide in my word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
So Jesus promises us. But what, finally, is freedom? The absence of constraint? A political condition characteristic of Western democracy? Licence, perhaps- the leave to do as you please? Or is Janis Joplin's despairing definition correct? Is freedom, after all, "just another word for nuthin' left to lose?"
If Googled the word "freedom," you'd probably find as many definitions for the word as there are sources. Most would probably have something to do with political freedom. Some might mention freedom of thought, or freedom of religion, or some other freedom our Constitution guarantees.
But Jesus wasn't talking politics when He spoke these words, and He certainly wasn't proposing a political theory. He didn't do mere theories! Jesus, after all is God- and God does not speak in mere theories! And when God says, "Let there be," worlds come into being. When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen. But when God speaks, what He declares to be is. He's the one, as the Author of Hebrews points out, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist. He's the one, as the Prophet Isaiah observes, whose word does not return to Him empty, but prospers in the thing for which it was sent forth, and always accomplishes its purpose.
And in speaking these words to His disciples- and to you, and to me, and to any other fallen human being who might have heard them then, or might here them now- He is speaking to people who lack freedom.
Any human being who is not a sociopath- one of those (fortunately) rare individuals the circumstances of whose upbringing are such that, in the relatively developmental stage in which it's possible, never develops a conscience- is by nature a moral creature. Even if he hasn't learned God's law in church or Sunday school, it's reflected in the demands of society- and written, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, on our own hearts. It may be possible to rationalize away. The writing may be blurred by sin. But we know what is expected of us- more or less- and by our own lights most of us try to meet the test.
There are those who add to the burden that which God never intended that we bear. As was true in Christ's day, so it is today: there are those who "teach for doctrines the precepts of men," and arrogate to themselves the authority to demand in God's Name that we jump through hoops that they themselves have constructed.
But Jesus sets us free from their slavery. If we continue in His Word, we know what is expected of us, and what is not. We need not be bound in the chains of purely human legalism. Politicians and ethicists and clergymen and commentators may all have their opinions. False churches may teach falsely; people may exercise their all-too-human capacity for inventing lies. But if we continue in Christ's Word, we are free from the bondage of their self-chosen rules and laws. We need own no master but Christ Himself, and allow ourselves to be held to nothing but that to which His Word holds us- if we continue in His Word.
We try. All decent people try. And we fail. All of us have the experience the apostle Paul relates when he writes, "The good that I would, I do not do, and the evil that I would not do, that is what I do." Anyone who has ever aspired to be a decent human being has been disgusted with himself at times. And left to our own devices, all we can do is rationalize; to tell ourselves that after all, we're really not so bad, and that God must make some distinctions, after all.
But God is not a schoolmaster who grades on the curve! His standard is absolute perfection. Were it less, He would not be holy. Some human poet- writing out of purely human insight- once observed that "Man's reach must exceed his grasp/Or what's a heaven for?"
Our reach was longer once. Once it encompased everything God demands of us. But after the Fall, no matter how high we stretch forth our hand and try to grasp what we know to be good and right, we finally end up grasping air. And so, since we can't ascend to God's level, we bring Him down to ours. We fool ourselves into believing that doing your best or being better than most people is good enough- and that a god who would be satisfied with that would be worth our worship in the first place.
But if we continue in the Word of Christ, our presumption is broken by the stern and unyielding character of God's Law. He demands that we love Him with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds, and our neighbors as ourselves. He will be satisfied with nothing less. If we continue in the Word of Christ, we are free from the lies we're so fond of telling ourselves, and the self-deception that prevents us from seeing ourselves as we are.
All have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God, the apostle tells us. All have failed. And the soul that sins will die. All the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve are mortal. The wages of sin is death- and sin meets its payroll every time. Each and every one of us owes God a death. None of us will be able to escape paying that debt.
We are slaves to death, and the fear of death- held in slavery to that fear, the author of Hebrews points out, all our lives. But if we continue in Christ's Word, we know that He has conquered death our behalf; that if, indeed, we continue in Christ's Word- if, indeed, we continue in the covenant of our baptism and trust His promise to the end- that dying, behold- we live.
If we continue in Christ's Word, then death has lost its sting, and grave its victory; that joined with Christ in His death, we will also share in His resurrection. We are freed from our lifelong slavery to the fear of death- if we continue in Christ's Word. And at the graveside of a friend or loved one who has died in the Lord, we need not despair. We have died with Christ in baptism, and raised with Him, too; on those who continue in Christ's Word, death has no more claim than it does on Him.
And every human being knows that we will be accountable some day. Rationalize as we will- try as we may to tell ourselves that God will be satisfied with a relative holiness, or with being as good as most people (or maybe a little better), we all face judgment on the other side of the grave, and we fear it.
And if we don't think we have cause to fear it, then we have even more reason to be afraid.
But if we continue in Christ's Word- that same Word which confronts us with our sin, and with how far we have fallen short of God's minimum standards- tells us precisely of Christ, and how He bore our sin on the cross. God the Son speaks- and the universe must be silent. God the Son speaks- and even sin, even death, and even the Law has nothing more it can say.
God the Son speaks, and declares those who trust in His promise- those who continue in His Word- to be righteous with His very own holiness; already perfect for the purposes of God's justice. And yet, there is more.
Our standing before God does not depend on this, mind you. The Son has made us free, those of us who continue in His Word, of the need to anxiously take our own spiritual temperature, and freed us to cast our eyes outward to God, and our neighbor. But what Jesus does when He declares us free from sin is much more than a cosmic game of make-believe, as I recently heard a commentator on our local Catholic radio station wrongly characterize the Lutheran and Pauline doctrine of forensic justification.
Remember- this is God. When He says "Let there be...," there is. And when God the Son declares that those who continue in His Word are free from sin and as holy as He is, His saying brings it to pass- and slowly, always beyond our own powers of observation (but not necessarily beyond the noticing of others) Christ Himself is formed in us, and we become in actual fact what the Son has declared us to be.
It's a process that takes our entire lives, and is never finally complete until the next life. But if we continue in Christ's Word, that same verdict of acquittal which frees us from the eternal consequences of sin makes us in actual fact everything that it declares us to be. This is no game of make-believe here. God's Word brings about that which it decrees- and there are a thousand impossible things more likely than that His decree that we are righteous through faith in Christ be a matter of mere pretense!
No, this is no game of make-believe we're talking about here. If the Son declares you free, you are free indeed.
Shocking, isn't it, how many still live in slavery? Sad, isn't it, how many spend their lives in bondage to their own standards, and can't raise their eyes to God's; how many spend their lives in bondage to the fear of death, and never know Christ's free gift of eternal life; spend their lives in bondage to sin, and cling to what they are rather than exult in the freedom and glory of what Christ promises all who continue in His Word that they will become- and here and now decrees, as He once decreed the very world into being, that in God's eyes they already are!
But Jesus does not promise freedom to everyone. True, He has earned it for everyone. True, He desires it for everyone. But He promises it only to those who continue in His Word.
And that, brothers and sisters, is why His Word is such a precious thing. That is why His Word is something we never dare allow to be adulterated with merely human notions and personal preferences. That is why we need to fight against the adulteration of that Word with every ounce of our being, and be willing to confess it- as Luther confessed it- even at the risk of everything we have.
For without the freedom that Word brings, everything we have is nothing. Without it we are lost sinners, doomed to die and stand alone and condemned forever before the throne of the One upon Whose face we dare not raise our eyes.
And denials of that Word are all around us. They are encountered wherever forgiveness and salvation are made into a matter of our own merit, be it to the slightest degree. They are encountered wherever what God declares in Scripture is made relative, and rendered a matter of opinion or- if the one who would enslave us again is less honest- "interpretation." They are encountered wherever the Son's declaration of freedom - whether in the words of the Gospel or the washing of baptism or the eating and drinking of the Supper- are made into anything allegorical, anything subjective, anything doubtful, anything involving an "if."
For there are no "ifs" in the declaration of God's Son that we are free. But there is an "if" when it comes to the question of our profiting from that freedom. Jesus says, "If you abide in my word, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
We cannot abide in that word and cherish lies, or even give them the time of day. And we will know the truth- we will be able to distinguish the truth that sets us free from the lies that would enslave us all over again- only if we continue in Christ's word.
Which means cherishing it- and cherishing the freedom it brings from sin and death and the burden of mere man-made rules- like exactly what it is: a treasure beyond price, a medicine we dare not allow to become adulterated or diluted into impotence.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, mere human words cannot express just how precious a thing this Word of Christ is- this Word which, if we but abide in it, enables us to know the truth that alone can set us free. And living as we do in an age which wants to treat the things of God as matters of opinion or "interpretation," and which frowns so fiercely upon those arrogant enough to presume that that they know the truth, and that those who disagree are wrong, Christ's words to his this morning bid us dare to be just that arrogant, and to cling to His Word in all its truth and purity the way a drowning man clings to a live preserver- because that is exactly what the word of Christ is to us!
It was the apostle Paul who said it. Luther echoed it. Faithful pastors have proclaimed it down through the ages. And now, when as never before we hear on all sides the voice of the devil telling us that there are many ways to God and that the truth is either unknowable or does not exist at all, the words speak with an even greater urgency than ever before. They bid us recognize the Word of Christ and His proclamation of our freedom as what they are: as our very lives.
"It is for freedom that Christ has set you free," the apostle writes. "Do not submit again to the yoke of slavery." And to resist that yoke one thing is necessary: that we continue in Christ's Word- for if we do, He promises that we shall know the truth, and that in that truth we will find the freedom which we will find nowhere else.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
The Festival of the Reformation (Observed)
October 26, 2008
31 Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. 32 And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
33 They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can You say, ‘You will be made free’?”
34 Jesus answered them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. 35 And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. 36 Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.
Dear friends in Christ: Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
"If you abide in my word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
So Jesus promises us. But what, finally, is freedom? The absence of constraint? A political condition characteristic of Western democracy? Licence, perhaps- the leave to do as you please? Or is Janis Joplin's despairing definition correct? Is freedom, after all, "just another word for nuthin' left to lose?"
If Googled the word "freedom," you'd probably find as many definitions for the word as there are sources. Most would probably have something to do with political freedom. Some might mention freedom of thought, or freedom of religion, or some other freedom our Constitution guarantees.
But Jesus wasn't talking politics when He spoke these words, and He certainly wasn't proposing a political theory. He didn't do mere theories! Jesus, after all is God- and God does not speak in mere theories! And when God says, "Let there be," worlds come into being. When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen. But when God speaks, what He declares to be is. He's the one, as the Author of Hebrews points out, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist. He's the one, as the Prophet Isaiah observes, whose word does not return to Him empty, but prospers in the thing for which it was sent forth, and always accomplishes its purpose.
And in speaking these words to His disciples- and to you, and to me, and to any other fallen human being who might have heard them then, or might here them now- He is speaking to people who lack freedom.
Any human being who is not a sociopath- one of those (fortunately) rare individuals the circumstances of whose upbringing are such that, in the relatively developmental stage in which it's possible, never develops a conscience- is by nature a moral creature. Even if he hasn't learned God's law in church or Sunday school, it's reflected in the demands of society- and written, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, on our own hearts. It may be possible to rationalize away. The writing may be blurred by sin. But we know what is expected of us- more or less- and by our own lights most of us try to meet the test.
There are those who add to the burden that which God never intended that we bear. As was true in Christ's day, so it is today: there are those who "teach for doctrines the precepts of men," and arrogate to themselves the authority to demand in God's Name that we jump through hoops that they themselves have constructed.
But Jesus sets us free from their slavery. If we continue in His Word, we know what is expected of us, and what is not. We need not be bound in the chains of purely human legalism. Politicians and ethicists and clergymen and commentators may all have their opinions. False churches may teach falsely; people may exercise their all-too-human capacity for inventing lies. But if we continue in Christ's Word, we are free from the bondage of their self-chosen rules and laws. We need own no master but Christ Himself, and allow ourselves to be held to nothing but that to which His Word holds us- if we continue in His Word.
We try. All decent people try. And we fail. All of us have the experience the apostle Paul relates when he writes, "The good that I would, I do not do, and the evil that I would not do, that is what I do." Anyone who has ever aspired to be a decent human being has been disgusted with himself at times. And left to our own devices, all we can do is rationalize; to tell ourselves that after all, we're really not so bad, and that God must make some distinctions, after all.
But God is not a schoolmaster who grades on the curve! His standard is absolute perfection. Were it less, He would not be holy. Some human poet- writing out of purely human insight- once observed that "Man's reach must exceed his grasp/Or what's a heaven for?"
Our reach was longer once. Once it encompased everything God demands of us. But after the Fall, no matter how high we stretch forth our hand and try to grasp what we know to be good and right, we finally end up grasping air. And so, since we can't ascend to God's level, we bring Him down to ours. We fool ourselves into believing that doing your best or being better than most people is good enough- and that a god who would be satisfied with that would be worth our worship in the first place.
But if we continue in the Word of Christ, our presumption is broken by the stern and unyielding character of God's Law. He demands that we love Him with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds, and our neighbors as ourselves. He will be satisfied with nothing less. If we continue in the Word of Christ, we are free from the lies we're so fond of telling ourselves, and the self-deception that prevents us from seeing ourselves as we are.
All have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God, the apostle tells us. All have failed. And the soul that sins will die. All the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve are mortal. The wages of sin is death- and sin meets its payroll every time. Each and every one of us owes God a death. None of us will be able to escape paying that debt.
We are slaves to death, and the fear of death- held in slavery to that fear, the author of Hebrews points out, all our lives. But if we continue in Christ's Word, we know that He has conquered death our behalf; that if, indeed, we continue in Christ's Word- if, indeed, we continue in the covenant of our baptism and trust His promise to the end- that dying, behold- we live.
If we continue in Christ's Word, then death has lost its sting, and grave its victory; that joined with Christ in His death, we will also share in His resurrection. We are freed from our lifelong slavery to the fear of death- if we continue in Christ's Word. And at the graveside of a friend or loved one who has died in the Lord, we need not despair. We have died with Christ in baptism, and raised with Him, too; on those who continue in Christ's Word, death has no more claim than it does on Him.
And every human being knows that we will be accountable some day. Rationalize as we will- try as we may to tell ourselves that God will be satisfied with a relative holiness, or with being as good as most people (or maybe a little better), we all face judgment on the other side of the grave, and we fear it.
And if we don't think we have cause to fear it, then we have even more reason to be afraid.
But if we continue in Christ's Word- that same Word which confronts us with our sin, and with how far we have fallen short of God's minimum standards- tells us precisely of Christ, and how He bore our sin on the cross. God the Son speaks- and the universe must be silent. God the Son speaks- and even sin, even death, and even the Law has nothing more it can say.
God the Son speaks, and declares those who trust in His promise- those who continue in His Word- to be righteous with His very own holiness; already perfect for the purposes of God's justice. And yet, there is more.
Our standing before God does not depend on this, mind you. The Son has made us free, those of us who continue in His Word, of the need to anxiously take our own spiritual temperature, and freed us to cast our eyes outward to God, and our neighbor. But what Jesus does when He declares us free from sin is much more than a cosmic game of make-believe, as I recently heard a commentator on our local Catholic radio station wrongly characterize the Lutheran and Pauline doctrine of forensic justification.
Remember- this is God. When He says "Let there be...," there is. And when God the Son declares that those who continue in His Word are free from sin and as holy as He is, His saying brings it to pass- and slowly, always beyond our own powers of observation (but not necessarily beyond the noticing of others) Christ Himself is formed in us, and we become in actual fact what the Son has declared us to be.
It's a process that takes our entire lives, and is never finally complete until the next life. But if we continue in Christ's Word, that same verdict of acquittal which frees us from the eternal consequences of sin makes us in actual fact everything that it declares us to be. This is no game of make-believe here. God's Word brings about that which it decrees- and there are a thousand impossible things more likely than that His decree that we are righteous through faith in Christ be a matter of mere pretense!
No, this is no game of make-believe we're talking about here. If the Son declares you free, you are free indeed.
Shocking, isn't it, how many still live in slavery? Sad, isn't it, how many spend their lives in bondage to their own standards, and can't raise their eyes to God's; how many spend their lives in bondage to the fear of death, and never know Christ's free gift of eternal life; spend their lives in bondage to sin, and cling to what they are rather than exult in the freedom and glory of what Christ promises all who continue in His Word that they will become- and here and now decrees, as He once decreed the very world into being, that in God's eyes they already are!
But Jesus does not promise freedom to everyone. True, He has earned it for everyone. True, He desires it for everyone. But He promises it only to those who continue in His Word.
And that, brothers and sisters, is why His Word is such a precious thing. That is why His Word is something we never dare allow to be adulterated with merely human notions and personal preferences. That is why we need to fight against the adulteration of that Word with every ounce of our being, and be willing to confess it- as Luther confessed it- even at the risk of everything we have.
For without the freedom that Word brings, everything we have is nothing. Without it we are lost sinners, doomed to die and stand alone and condemned forever before the throne of the One upon Whose face we dare not raise our eyes.
And denials of that Word are all around us. They are encountered wherever forgiveness and salvation are made into a matter of our own merit, be it to the slightest degree. They are encountered wherever what God declares in Scripture is made relative, and rendered a matter of opinion or- if the one who would enslave us again is less honest- "interpretation." They are encountered wherever the Son's declaration of freedom - whether in the words of the Gospel or the washing of baptism or the eating and drinking of the Supper- are made into anything allegorical, anything subjective, anything doubtful, anything involving an "if."
For there are no "ifs" in the declaration of God's Son that we are free. But there is an "if" when it comes to the question of our profiting from that freedom. Jesus says, "If you abide in my word, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
We cannot abide in that word and cherish lies, or even give them the time of day. And we will know the truth- we will be able to distinguish the truth that sets us free from the lies that would enslave us all over again- only if we continue in Christ's word.
Which means cherishing it- and cherishing the freedom it brings from sin and death and the burden of mere man-made rules- like exactly what it is: a treasure beyond price, a medicine we dare not allow to become adulterated or diluted into impotence.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, mere human words cannot express just how precious a thing this Word of Christ is- this Word which, if we but abide in it, enables us to know the truth that alone can set us free. And living as we do in an age which wants to treat the things of God as matters of opinion or "interpretation," and which frowns so fiercely upon those arrogant enough to presume that that they know the truth, and that those who disagree are wrong, Christ's words to his this morning bid us dare to be just that arrogant, and to cling to His Word in all its truth and purity the way a drowning man clings to a live preserver- because that is exactly what the word of Christ is to us!
It was the apostle Paul who said it. Luther echoed it. Faithful pastors have proclaimed it down through the ages. And now, when as never before we hear on all sides the voice of the devil telling us that there are many ways to God and that the truth is either unknowable or does not exist at all, the words speak with an even greater urgency than ever before. They bid us recognize the Word of Christ and His proclamation of our freedom as what they are: as our very lives.
"It is for freedom that Christ has set you free," the apostle writes. "Do not submit again to the yoke of slavery." And to resist that yoke one thing is necessary: that we continue in Christ's Word- for if we do, He promises that we shall know the truth, and that in that truth we will find the freedom which we will find nowhere else.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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