Sermon for Trinity 11, August 28, 2022
Grace, mercy, and peace to all of you who are in Christ Jesus. Amen.
God’s
grace is confirmed by eyewitnesses.
Dear brothers and sisters in the grace of God,
How do you
turn a murderer into one of the world’s greatest evangelists and apostles? How do you turn timid, scared fishermen and
outcasts into bold missionaries who trust in Christ for forgiveness, life, and
salvation? How do we work out peace between
ourselves and a just and righteous God? The
answer to all these questions is we don’t.
We couldn’t even bring ourselves to believe. We couldn’t do anything to come to the Lord
or receive the salvation Jesus won for all.
All of that is done only by God’s grace and the work of the Holy
Spirit.
At the same time, we can be confident that our
hope in Christ is not just an earthly comfort in times of trouble. It is the real answer to all the world’s
problems, for it is the surety of peace with God and the guarantee of a home in
heaven after we are called out of this broken world. Furthermore, we have certainty about the
truth of God’s Word, because God’s grace is confirmed by eyewitnesses.
On the night Jesus was betrayed, every one of
His disciples abandoned Him, from the closest twelve to the thousands that had
benefited from His healing miracles. One
of the closest had betrayed Jesus, and the most bold and outspoken of them
denied three times that he knew Jesus.
The crowds that welcomed God’s Son into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday turned
against the Christ by Friday and called with unanimous consent for Jesus’
crucifixion. So, what hope could any of
those people have for forgiveness and salvation?
The Pharisees and Sadducees were Israel’s
teachers, entrusted with the words of the prophets to teach the people to
welcome the promised Savior into the world.
Those priests were to share with sinners the forgiveness God was
promising to give through the Messiah, His holy Son in human flesh. Tragically, one of the most diligent and
highly trained young Pharisees made it his mission to hunt, arrest, and kill
anyone who pledged faith in Jesus as the Christ, the promised Son of
David. So, who would expect Saul, later
renamed Paul, to disregard great hardship and persecution to become the bold
proclaimer of Jesus to the masses of the Roman empire and consequently to the
world, including people like you and me?
You and I entered the picture after almost two
thousand years of religious wars, political upheaval, false teachers striving
under the devil’s influence to keep anyone from believing in Jesus as Savior
and Redeemer, and with our own inherited sinfulness fighting against us night
and day. Born as enemies of God who
hated Him even though we didn’t yet know Him or His merciful ways, who would
imagine any of us becoming believers in the One Savior of the world? Who could imagine a Savior from sin and death
when we see little but temptation, trouble, pain, and death in our daily lives?
When you consider the odds against anyone
coming to faith in Jesus, it all seems impossible. On the road to Damascus, Saul certainly assumed
that Jesus was nothing more than an imposter blaspheming the God he had been
taught to obey. Like Saul, no one else
in the history of the world could claim any better knowledge or faith on his
own. Even Abraham, the great hero of Jewish
faith didn’t find God. Rather, God found
Abram and called him out of his father’s idolatry into trusting in the one
Savior God would send through Abram’s descendants. Yet, by the power of the Holy Spirit in God’s
call, “Abram believed in the Lord, and the Lord credited it to him as
righteousness.” (Genesis 15:6)
Today, there are many people around us that
mock the Christian faith as “the opiate of the masses,” or something to help
weak people feel strong, or just the disillusions of uneducated fools. Many of these self-deluded, so-called “wise”
persons believe there is no god, that this world created itself out of nothing,
and that there is nothing after this life—neither punishment nor glory—just
nothing but a return to the dirt in the endlessness of time.
There are two chief problems with this ancient delusion. First, it offers no hope to anyone, neither
for this life nor any possible life to come.
Godlessness leads to selfishness and the destruction of all that is good
for society and pleasing to God. The
second problem is that it defies all the witnesses and evidence God has
provided to show us the truth. To reject
God as Creator and Jesus as Savior, a person must reject mountains of evidence
and scores of eyewitness testimony.
In his letter to the young Corinthian
congregation, St. Paul calls out those who had gone astray from the truth. This morning, the epistle lesson serves as
our sermon text. We read in Jesus’ name:
1 Corinthians 15:1-10 Brothers, I am
going to call your attention to the gospel that I preached to you. You received it, and you took your stand on
it. 2You are also being saved
by that gospel that was expressed in the words I preached to you, if you keep
your hold on it—unless you believed in
vain. 3For I delivered to you
as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in
accordance with the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was
raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5and that
he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.
6After that he appeared to over five hundred brothers at the
same time, most of whom are still alive, but some have fallen asleep. 7Then he appeared to James, and
then to all the apostles. 8Last
of all, he appeared also to me, the stillborn child, so to speak. 9For I am the least of the
apostles, and I am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted
God’s church. 10But by the
grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not ineffective. On the contrary, I worked more than all of
them (and yet it wasn’t my doing, but it was the grace of God, which was with
me, that did it). (EHV)
By these words, the
Holy Spirit assures us that God’s grace is confirmed by eyewitnesses.
Dear friends, Paul became a believer when Jesus
personally reached out to that persecutor on the road to Damascus. Out of love and kindness, Jesus called one of
His fiercest opponents out of darkness into the light of the truth, and
bringing Saul to faith in his Savior, our Savior empowered the newly named Paul
to be a faithful emissary to the pagan world.
In his former days, Paul had become well-versed in the Old Testament
scriptures. He knew God’s Word very
well. Now, by the power of the Spirit in
Jesus’ personal call, Paul finally learned the truth of what God had promised
in those Scriptures he knew so well.
The story is similar for all Jesus’
disciples. Though personally instructed
by Jesus for three years, they didn’t fully comprehend what Jesus came to do
for them and for the world until Jesus sent the Helper, the Holy Spirit, on the
day of Pentecost. Then, having their
hearts and eyes opened to the truth of Jesus’ mission, they willingly defied
rejection by ruler and hater alike in their devoted service to their Lord and
Savior, and to the people around them.
They began in Jerusalem then spread across the world sharing the Good
News of all Jesus has accomplished to reconcile us with God in heaven.
It is the same way for you and me. We didn’t find God. None of us made a decision to believe in
Jesus on our own. Instead, through
Baptism and the hearing of the Good News of salvation through faith in Christ
Jesus, the Holy Spirit granted life to those who had stone dead hearts and
worked faith in us to believe in Jesus.
As Paul wrote previously in this letter, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is
Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 12:3) And, to the congregation in Rome, he wrote, “Faith
comes from hearing the message, and the message comes through the word of
Christ.” (Romans 10:17)
Today, much of the world around us, still stuck
in dead unbelief and the sin caused by Satan’s deceptions, boldly pretends that
our faith lacks solid proof. However,
only blind followers of lies make that argument. As Paul noted here, the evidence of Jesus’
resurrection from the dead on the exact day He and the prophets had foretold
before Jesus was betrayed and nailed to a cross to die, verifies without any
doubt that Jesus is exactly who He claims to be, and God has fulfilled His
promise to send a Savior to reconcile sinners to Himself.
With over five hundred eyewitnesses who
together at one time witnessed Jesus alive, with the testimony of those who had
witnessed Jesus’ death and burial but then celebrated for the rest of their
lives His return to the living, with the transformation of timid, scared
disciples into bold preachers who would willingly give their own lives as
testimony to the truth of their message, with Christ’s enemies also producing
evidence that He rose from the grave, and with the complete change in Paul’s
life and his bold witness regardless of where God sent him and whatever
hardship his testimony brought against him, we have the most verifiable proof of
any historical event. Jesus not only
died for our sins, but He also rose victorious over sin, death, and the devil,
and today, He lives and reigns in heaven above ready and willing to welcome us
into His heavenly home.
Dear friends, even with all the evidence and
eyewitness testimony, we must admit that we couldn’t change on our own. It is only by God’s grace that any of us
believe in Jesus as our Savior. However,
that too is to our benefit, because God welcomes only those as dear children who
put no hope in themselves but trust only in Jesus as their Savior and the
Redeemer of the world. When His
disciples sought to elevate themselves before God, Jesus corrected them,
saying, “Amen I tell you: Unless you change and become like children, you
will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the
kingdom of heaven. And whoever receives
a little child like this one in my name receives me.” (Matthew 18:3-5)
When you reach the point in your Christian
faith where you despair of doing anything to save yourself, then rejoice! Rejoice, because you believe in Jesus only
because God in His grace caused the Holy Spirit to work that faith in you
without any contribution on your part, and that truly is God-given faith which
saves. The Holy Spirit guided St. Paul
to write to fellow believers,
It is by grace you have
been saved! He also raised us up with
Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. He did this so that, in the coming ages, he
might demonstrate the surpassing riches of his grace in kindness toward us in
Christ Jesus. Indeed, it is by grace you
have been saved, through faith—and this is not from
yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that
no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:5-9)
Christ Jesus died the death we all deserved for
our sins, but Jesus didn’t stay dead, because the Son of God has been given
authority over all things, even over death and the grave. Jesus’ resurrection on Easter morning is the
proof that trumps all doubt. No one else
in the history of the world could ever match Jesus’ holiness or power, nor His
divine wisdom and kindness. Neither do
we have to.
Though like St. Paul, we had no merit that
would have made God love us, His merciful love for us in Christ has opened the
gates of heaven to all who believe in Jesus.
The evidence of your salvation in Christ Jesus is overwhelming, and you
can be sure that you are forgiven of all sin and welcome in God’s heaven,
because God’s grace is confirmed by eyewitnesses. Amen.
Now
may the God of hope fill you with complete joy and peace as you continue to
believe, so that you overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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