By The Rev. Dr. Paul A. Leggett
Sunday, October 5, 2008 · World Communion Sunday
Sermon Text: Romans 3:21-31
Sermon Theme
We are trapped in our sin. We are accountable for not having followed God. Our turning away from God has made our keeping of God’s law completely impossible. With nothing we can do for ourselves, God takes action. God turns his wrath on himself. On the cross, Jesus Christ takes the consequences of our brokenness on himself and, at the same time, destroys the power of law and death which would have destroyed us. Seeing that we have no righteousness in ourselves, God gives us his righteousness. All this is a gift received by faith. Faith is trust in God’s promises. Our failure is obliterated. God the Father, in Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, has justified us. That means we are free, forgiven and fully accepted by God. Our lives have been made not only whole, but joyful.
Sermon Outline
- Accountable. Paul says God has had enough of our excuses. We have been given God’s law. It’s written on our hearts and in our conscience. Yet we, like Adam and Eve, have followed the false promises of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. We have tried to do things in our own ways and failed miserably. We stand accountable before God, and we have nothing to say.
- Action. God’s law, the Ten Commandments, really doesn’t help us because we have turned away from God so much, we can’t even begin to keep his commandments. This is especially the case when we remember that keeping them is as much a matter of the heart as it is of our actions. “But now,” Paul says, God has done for us what we could not do for ourselves. God has sent Christ so that, in spite of our unrighteousness, we might receive the righteousness of God. No words can adequately express this.
- Accepted. Paul uses the language of the Old Testament to describe what Christ has done for us. On the Day of Atonement, the priest would bring a sacrifice for sin and place it on the mercy seat in the temple. Paul says Jesus is our mercy seat. In our place, he has taken upon himself all the guilt, injustice, abandonment, failure and rejection that belongs to us. In our place, he experiences the wrath of God and the full force of death and evil. He frees us from all this. We receive this as a gift through faith. Faith is trusting in God’s promises. We are no longer abandoned or rejected. We have been accepted by God and adopted into his family. Jesus has actually done all this for us on the cross. We can’t take credit for any of this. It is all God’s gift, from start to finish. Nothing can change that. Ever.
Questions for Us
- What are some of the subtle ways that we try to justify ourselves?
- How do we avoid seeing ourselves as helpless before God? How do we feel when Paul tells us that we need to be silent and acknowledge that we are accountable before God?
- How does receiving the gift of justification through faith change the way we live?
- How do we (or should we), as Christians, show the confidence of having been set free from the guilt, failure and rejection of sin?
