Experiencing The Righteousness of God
Pastor Mathew Magera – 10/25/15 – Sermon 123
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Are we able to experience
the righteousness of God? I'm asking you that question wondering what kind of
answers it might generate in your heads. Are we able to experience the
righteousness of God? Some may think yes, some may think no, others may have no
idea. I read somewhere earlier this month that sometimes the things we hear
most often are the things we understand the least. Righteousness comes up
fairly often in the church, but can we experience it? Well, let's think about
it for a second. Being righteous presupposes that we are in harmony with a
certain standard, we meet the standard. If we are righteous it would mean that
in our thinking, our willing, our desiring, our walking, our talking and our
acting, in everything we are in harmony with that standard (Hoeksema, Herman.
"Righteous by Faith Alone." Grandville, MI: Reformed Free
Publishing, 2002, PG. 121). So, the standard is God. Are we able to experience
the righteousness of God? More of you might be leaning to the no side of the
scale now. It's difficult to say yes to a question like that. I mean God is all
the way up there and we are all the way down here. God is holy, we are full of
holes. God is all knowing, we forget where we put our car keys and our cell
phones. How can we measure up to that?
498 years ago, Martin Luther
nailed the 95 theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany.
This event the catalyst needed to propel the church in a forward direction.
Martin Luther once asked, "how can I, a sinner, stand before a holy
God?" Good question, and it can base itself the question we ask. Are we
able to experience the righteousness of God? There are misconceptions about
experiencing God's righteousness and I want to address to of them this morning.
The less we understand about God's righteousness, the less likely we are to be
putting forth a good effort in sharing the Gospel with others. Conversely, the
more we understand about God's righteousness, the more we should want to share
about it.
Two
Misconceptions of God’s Righteousness
The first misconception
about the righteousness of God is that we must do something to experience it.
We must pay for it. The church before the Reformation taught that righteousness
is something that comes at cost. After all, we're sinners, somebody has to pay
for those sins, so why not let it be you. For a pretty penny, you could
experience the righteousness of God. Had this succeeded and never been changed,
we could go home and turn on the home shopping network and see them offering up
salvation for 5 monthly payments of only $29.95. The early church was pretty
good at making sure you knew you were a sinner. Paul writes in Romans 3
starting at verse 19, "Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to
those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole
world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in
God's sight by works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of
our sin." The early church was good at this. Luther intended to address
this and while the selling of indulgences has, for the most part, ceased, we
are still left asking ourselves about the cost.
One of the greatest
commercial airliners ever built was the Concorde. Back in 1969, it made history
by taking its first flight. Over its years of service, it made the journey
across the Atlantic Ocean in record time, able to cruise at twice the speed of
sound which is more than double the speed of any commercial airliner in service
today. It is said that if you took off from London just after sunset heading
toward New York, you could actually watch the sun come back up before you land
about 3 hours later. It went that fast. It was truly a remarkable aircraft. You
can imagine flying on something that went so high and so fast would cost plenty
of money. It was said that in its final year before retirement, a one way
ticket from New York to London cost somewhere in the ballpark of $6,000. Something
so good had to cost quite a bit, right?
This is what we understand
of God's righteousness too. It's so good, it must cost so much. We must have to
do something to get it. This is where the idea of salvation by works, or
"works righteousness" came in. We have to DO something in order to
receive God's righteousness. But that's a common misconception.
A second misconception of
the righteousness of God is that it is far off in the distant future. It's for
when we get to heaven, not right now. Becoming righteous is something that
appears unattainable, something we won't achieve until after we are welcomed
past those pearly gates. Are we able to experience the righteousness of God? We
might say, yes, when we get to heaven, when God brings us home, when we are
taken to that perfect paradise. But, when we say that we believe that
righteousness is something we can experience right here right now. Looking at
the world in which we live today we see sin in every direction, wars, hunger,
sickness, and while we may come here every week to receive the forgiveness of
God, sometimes it just doesn't feel like that forgiveness takes effect. For
when we walk outside into the rest of our week, what do we see? The same place
we saw when we walked in. God's righteousness doesn't seem to be something we
can experience, at least not right now. But, our minds don't think to that
portion of the future very often so for the most part, if we say experiencing
the righteousness of God is something that won't occur until after we die, it's
as if we are saying it is just not attainable in this world period.
I want to go back to the Concorde
again. While it was a pricy ticket, people were still able to pay it and
experience a whole new world of flight. Well, in the year 2000, the Concorde
was scheduled to attend the annual fly-in over in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I just
had to go see it. So, we planned the trip go to up and see it. In fact, not
only was it going to just be attending, it was going to offer three or four
opportunities for people to fly on it. And while I don't remember what the cost
was, my dad bought me a ticket. I was going to get to fly on the fastest
commercial airliner in the world.
However, on July 25th, three
days before I was scheduled for my flight, a chartered Concorde took off from
Paris and after running over a piece of metal on the runway, causing a series
of events that led to a fire. The aircraft couldn't recover and crashed. In the
few days following as they were determining the cause of the accident, all
Concordes were grounded. That meant the one that was coming to Oshkosh never
made the flight. The ticket was not worthless at that point because if it came
the next year, they would honor it. However, it never came back and in 2003 it
was retired. This ticket was never used. It represents for me something that I
can never do in this life, something that is just out of reach.
This is what God's
righteousness might mean to us, like something we can have an unrealistic hope
for attaining right here and now, but perhaps after we die. It's just out of
our reach. This is a misconception of God's righteousness and it is a false
hope. Ultimately, both of these misconceptions lead us to believe that we are
not worthy to receive God's righteousness. The cost is too high and we can't
fathom the day we even get to experience it. But this is where things change.
Two Truths
About God’s Righteousness
Paul writes in Romans 3
starting at verse 21, "But now apart from the law the righteousness of God
has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This
righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe."
Paul wants us to see that God's righteousness is not hidden from us. Our
salvation does not come with a veil, concealing God's presence with us until
the day of Jesus Christ. No, rather, God's righteousness has been made known,
Paul says. This is why I've called everything so far a misconception because
they really are. When it comes to the righteousness of God, there are two
truths that surface here that put to shame our misunderstanding.
The first truth is that God's
righteousness was purchased for us. Yes, there is a cost. And the cost is the
standard to which God holds us but when sin entered the world we could not pay
for it. We just cannot do it. But, God's righteousness was purchased for us and
we understand this was all done on the cross for us. But Jesus didn't purchase
God's righteousness because we deserved it. We're still sinners. But Paul says
that God's righteousness was revealed to us apart from the law. Jesus is
outside of the law and he came in and purchased it for us. It's not given based
on how well we do or how good we are. It is given to us because of Christ, who
took that yucky stuff away.
When we confess our sins and
receive that absolution, it's like a big sigh of relief. Whew, all that sin
comes out and all of that righteousness moves right in. And when we believe
that Jesus truly did die for us, that righteousness moves right in. It was
bought for us at great cost but it was bought for us because we are loved. Not
because of something we did, or ever could do. Don't ever say you aren't worthy
to receive God's righteousness. Nobody's worthy, but it doesn't mean it wasn't
paid for with nails on a cross. The truth about God's righteousness is not that
we have to do something ourselves to get it, but that God did something Himself
in order for us to receive it as a gift. God's righteousness was purchased for
us.
The second truth is that
God's righteousness is not far off in the distance. It is for here, it is for
now. God’s righteousness is not something that will be given to us in the
future when we leave this sinful world. It is for us now, we are experiencing
it now. The righteousness of God is within you. The more we look at God’s
righteousness as something in the future or as something that will never take
place, the more grounded our life is on what we call works righteousness, or
trying to merit salvation by what we do to make up for the bad things we have
done. God’s righteousness doesn’t work that way. It was already purchased for
us, it is given to us free of charge. It is for you. It is in you already even
as we hear the words ‘on account of Christ you are forgiven.’ You don’t have to
wait until heaven to experience God’s righteousness, you don’t have to wait to
experience God’s righteousness until Christ comes again. We can experience God’s
righteousness today. God, through Christ brought us up to the standard. It
changes our outlook on the world. Yes, it is still a sinful place but even when
we are out there, we know that within us is something that can help. Within us
is something that we didn’t have to do anything to get. We don’t have to wait
until a certain time to experience it. There is no waiting, there is no
anticipation of something yet to come, God’s righteousness has been made know
to us today. It has been given to us today. It’s not for the future, it’s for
today.
* * *
So, why does this matter,
and how can it change our lives? It matters because in every direction in our
world we have to pay for something we are unable to buy. We try to buy time, we
try to buy health, we try to buy knowledge, we try to buy relationships. We
save up to get a better car, a better house, we save up for a good retirement.
We can't buy these things. We buy concepts of these but even the best of us
can't buy a good relationship or perfect health. What our souls really need is
something we can get only through Christ who purchased it for us and that is
the righteousness of God. We receive it and we can live on it. It changes our
lives because in a world in which we are evaluated on what we have, no matter
our wealth or our health, God has given to us a treasure that we don't have to
wait to open. We don't have to worry about never being able to reach it because
it is here and now.
498 years ago Martin Luther
nailed the 95 theses on the doors of All Saints church in Wittenberg, Germany.
He did so to send a message. Of the many things he wrote, one thing can be said
for us today. Martin Luther believed what Paul said in these verses. "But
now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which
the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in
Jesus Christ to all who believe." The church was stressing the sin and the
need to buy our way out but Luther was offering pure Jesus freely and openly as
a gift. No wonder it made the church mad. Why order something when you can get
it for free right now. This is how the Gospel changes our lives. This is how we
can experience the righteousness of God today and every day. To God be the
glory, now and always. Amen.