Clayton Presbyterian Church
August 6, 2006
Last week we baptized two children. In doing so, we talked about how in a baptism we are taking a stand for what we believe and what we hold to be true.
There was another baptism at a different church. After the baptism of his baby brother in church, little Johnny sobbed all the way home in the back seat of the car. His father asked him three times what was wrong.
Finally, the boy replied, "That pastor said he wanted us brought up in a Christian home, and I want to stay with you guys!"
Which is to say, we don’t always life up to our highest ideals.
Last week we began a series of sermons in which we are looking at the six articles of the Barmen Declaration. This document was written for the purpose of taking a standing and announcing the truth in the face of lies. This declaration was composed in Nazi Germany to protest the rise of Nazi teachings in the church. This new teaching focused on the German nation as the centerpiece. In other words, they believed that God’s plan for them was to prosper them and save them as a German, or Arryan people. Adolf Hitler was cast as the “savior of the German nation.”
When these new church leaders had their first meeting, they responded with enthusiastic "Heils" to the words of the brown-shirted Dean Grell, who expressed the need for a German faith and a German God. Eventually, even words like "Amen" and "Hallelujah" would be eliminated from the liturgy because of their Jewish etymology.
The Barmen Declaration stood against their efforts to distort the Gospel and to stem the tide of false teachings that were poisoning the church.
The main feature of the whole declaration is reclaiming the central place for Jesus Christ, at the head and center of the church that was being claimed by Hitler or the Aryan race. I would like you to listen for this as I read again the passage that we read together earlier in the service.
2. "Jesus Christ has been made wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption for us by God." 1 Cor. 1:30
As Jesus Christ is God's comforting pronouncement of the forgiveness of all our sins, so, with equal seriousness, he is also God's vigorous announcement of his claim upon our whole life. Through him there comes to us joyful liberation from the godless ties of this world for free, grateful service to his creatures.
We reject the false doctrine that there could be areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords, areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.
This second article of the Barmen Declaration begins by quoting this verse from First Corinthians which acknowledges that Jesus is the source of our life. When God became human in Jesus Christ, he became for us the fountain of new life. How?
As it says in the first paragraph, by forgiving our sins. Jesus is God’s Word of forgiveness to us. See, the Bible is very clear that we are fallen creatures. We have rebelled against God’s rule. We have, each one of us, set up our own rule and way of life. Unfortunately, it is not a way of life at all, it is a way that ultimately leads to death, because it leads away from the God who created us and gave us life.
For all who are in Jesus, God’s Word of forgiveness rescues us from our sinful lives. But, God doesn’t just want to free us from the sins that we have committed in the past by forgiving them—which he surely does. He also wants to free us from those sinful paths that we might be walking now and in the future. This is what the Declaration means when it says: Through him there comes to us joyful liberation from the godless ties of this world for free, grateful service to his creatures. We are freed from our sinful ways of life, both in the past and in the present and in the future. So, instead of having to continue to walk sinful paths, where we are constantly serving ourselves, where we lie to other people to keep ourselves our of trouble, where we try to put the blame on our spouses or friends so that we don’t have to take the blame ourselves, we are instead freed from our blind self-interest, and we are freed to serve God with grateful hearts. We are freed to be able to love other people. So, God claims our whole lives, all of the good parts and all of the bad parts. They are all his.
One of the reasons why it is worthy paying attention to the Barmen Declaration, and other confessions, is not because they replace Scripture, but because they help us to understand Scripture better. This is a great case in point.
For it helps us to understand these two big words from the Bible: justification and sanctification. In simple terms, justification is very close to forgiveness, where God sets us in a right relationship with him. He takes care of our past sins.
Sanctification is the process by which God continues to make us more and more like him. He frees us from the sinful parts of our lives more and more.
Receiving justification is like receiving a pardon. Imagine that you have been found guilty of treason and sedition, resulting in a death sentence. But, before the sentence can be carried out, you are pardoned. You can walk free with no fear of being punished for your wrongdoing. However, this would not stop you from going out and committing more crimes. You could, in fact, go out and commit the same crimes all over again. What you need is to be reformed. Justification is like the pardon. Sanctification is the action by which God slowly makes us more and more into his image and keeps us away from our old sinful paths.
Both of them are his work. It is wrong to say, as some people are inclined to do, that God forgives us and then it is up to us. No, God is a work in both getting us on the right ground—justification, and setting us on the right paths—sanctification.
While this is great theology, it is not immediately apparent how this would stand against the Nazi influence in the church.
Consider this. One the Nazi-inclined churchmen wrote this in 1932, "We want a vital national Church that will express all the spiritual forces of our people.” What was so big for them was this idea of the people, or the Volk. The German people and culture was held to be this divinely created thing. It stood on its own as a self-evidently good thing. That is was so good, in fact, that it could be used held alongside, and even over, Scripture. And so, they redefined many things in the Scriptures. For instance, sanctification, one of the words that we have been talking about, was defined as keeping Germany "racially pure," and was to be a duty of the church.
What they did was to set up this idea of the “people”, the Volk, alongside of Jesus. And so because it was alongside of Jesus, it was not under his authority. And so to this the Barmen Declaration responds,
We reject the false doctrine that there could be areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords, areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.
Every area of life belongs to Jesus Christ, and not to other lords. Why? Because all areas have been given to Jesus by the Father.
The first way that this applies to our lives is that every area of our life belongs to Jesus. We might split it up for our own convenience, so that we have our church life, and our work life, and our family life, and our bug collecting life, or whatever. But all of it belongs to Christ. We can’t be who God wants us to be if we try to obey him in only part of our lives.
But there is a second part to this that also applies to our lives. And this is just as important of a point. Every area in our lives needs to be justified and sanctified through him.
What I mean by this is that every area in our life is tainted by our sin. No area is naturally good. Even the areas where we think that we are doing good still need to be purified by him. Let me give you an example.
Recently, my Kari told me a story of an event that happened in our house earlier that day. Kari is always attempting to teach the faith to our children and to help them live it out. Well, she heard the girls arguing loudly upstairs and went up to find out what was going on. As she enters the room she sees our draw her hand back ready to strike her sister as she is yelling at the top of her lungs, “Jesus wants us to share!” And then she hits her sister. Needless to say, we don’t feel that what we have been trying to teach her has really sunk in at this point.
However, she has offered us a perfect illustration of our penchant to get things wrong, even when we are using the right words. Even when we are doing the right things, like gathering to worship God, even these actions need to be purified. They need to be justified. They need to be sanctified.
To get more concrete and down to earth, let’s take a highly visible issue from our culture: sex. Sexual drama pervades our culture. Sex sells clothes, cosmetics, boats, books, cars, movies, and music. Sexual expression is a highly coveted and hotly contested freedom. In our permissive society, God's good purposes for sex are distorted and misunderstood in myriad ways.
And many people reason about sex the way that the Nazi-influenced church reasoned about the Volk religion: if God created it, then its good. And so many Christians, embrace sex outside of marriage. Sex is just another part of life. It is not that big of a deal. In fact, many people view sex as inevitable.
The Christian parents of a girl in one church tried to convince her to go on the pill. She sat them down and told them in no uncertain terms that she had no intention of having sex until she was married. They told her that was unrealistic, and she should go on it anyhow.
There is plenty of evidence that far too many Christians view their sex life as being outside of Christ’s claim on their life. And so we just go about it, doing whatever the society around us does. And so we look more like desperate housewives, than we do devoted followers of Jesus. Jesus Christ is the Lord of our life and he not only forgives us but calls us to walk his way.
The good news of justification is that if we have not honored God with our sex lives, there is forgiveness. Our pasts can be redeemed. Past wounds can be mended and broken hearts can be healed.
The good news of sanctification is that God gives us his power so that we can live lives marked by purity, instead of by mere passion. We can avoid that ways of life that are hurtful and destructive. People will be honest about the dangerous of promiscuous sex if you are talking about physical consequences, like infectious diseases. But, they are too quiet about the emotional consequences of treating sex as if it is only physical and not emotional.
God created sex as good. But we are fallen and so when we misuse that good gift, it can hurt people and destroy trust and damage relationships. But within the God-given boundaries it can be such an amazing and wonderful thing, once it is sanctified.
Standing up to our culture on this issue might seem like trying to trap a hurricane is a bucket, but we are not trying to do it ourselves. We are merely witnesses to the authority and power of Jesus Christ. And surely, our task is no more daunting than that of these faithful German pastors who stood up against the brutal, totalitarian regime of the Nazis. They were successful not because of their wisdom or power or anything else, but because of their commitment to profess Christ no matter the cost.
I don’t think that it was by accident that they chose 1 Corinthians 1:31. In closing, I would like to read the verse leading up to verse 31 as it fits perfectly and shows the source of their confidence.
26 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, 29 so that no one might boast in the presence of God. 30 He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 in order that, as it is written, "Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord." (NRSV)