Word of Salvation – July 2010

 

OUR ONLY COMFORT, John de Jongh

 

A Sermon on Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 1

Reading – 2 Corinthians 1:3-7

Songs – BOW 146, 409, 193, 243

 

Outline (Could be used for the Bulletin)

 

1: The problem (Romans 1:18-3:20)

Our sin & misery

Original sin (Genesis 3)

Our own sin, (Romans 1:18-3:20)

God’s condemnation

 

2: The solution (part 1) ( Romans 3:21-5:21)

Jesus bought me with his precious blood

I am not my own, I belong to Jesus

He has set me free from the tyranny of the devil

Our sins are forgiven, we have eternal life

 

3: The solution (part 2)

He watches over me

I can tackle life confidently

 

4: How to live and die in the joy of this comfort

Understand and believe that this is the problem, the solution, the response

 

And so: Look to Jesus for true and lasting comfort

 

Dear Congregation

 

Kids love riding bikes in an empty car park don’t they? If you live on a busy road they possibly can’t ride much at home. Take them to an empty car park and try to stop them.

One problem with riding your bike in the car park though, is that when you come off you lose skin. And you know what they want most when they do that? Not the Dettol, believe it or not – but comfort. They’re looking for a hug, an arm around the shoulders, an adult who will tell them that it’s going to be OK, someone who knows what to do next.

 

And as adults, it doesn’t change all that much, does it? Maybe by degree – our problems and spills might get bigger. But we all walk away from some situations licking our wounds. We all get a sense from our own struggles, or the struggles of the world generally, that things aren’t as they could be. We all look for comfort in one way or another.

 

And where do we look for comfort as adults? Well, often from our family and friends.

Many of us who are women are probably regularly around your mum’s, or some of your friends – you say you’re going for a coffee, but often you’re going for comfort – off-loading with other people is the thing that gets you through.

And many of us who are men do the same thing with our mates, we go fishing, we go ‘round for a beer, and again we’re looking for a little comfort – it’s been a hard week, we’ve been emotionally scarred, and they’ll understand.

 

For those of us who are married, we often look to our spouse.

Unfortunately, some people don’t look in the healthiest places. They end up on drugs, or alcoholic. Maybe as an escape, maybe because the only time they feel confident about life is when they’re high. Some people look to other people they shouldn’t be – like someone else’s wife or husband, maybe a prostitute.

 

And some people just don’t cope very well full stop, and join the growing group in our society of the burnt out, or broken down, or mentally ill, or suicidal.

 

In a life that leaves us hurt and scarred, where can we look for comfort and healing?

 

Point 1

 

First of all, life is only like this because we have a big problem. It’s just not the easiest problem to pinpoint for many people.

 

When the kids run inside crying, with scuffed patches on arms and legs and blood dripping on the carpet, it’s obvious to everyone that there’s a problem – it’s obvious to everyone what the problem is.

 

But what about when I’m living life the way Australian society tells me to – making enough money during the day so that I can party at night and spend the weekend on the beach – and I still feel unhappy, still feel something is missing, still feel unfulfilled? There’s no obvious problem as far as I can tell, but I still feel that there is. What then?

 

Or what about when things are going fine for me but I know that there are so many other people in the world who are suffering and struggling in different ways – from AIDS, poverty, oppression from other countries, oppression from their own governments – there are obvious problems, but are they the real problem, or are they just symptoms of the real problem?

 

Different religions and worldviews pin the problem down to different things. But the Heidelberg Catechism reminds us where problem really lies when it takes us back to our sin and misery. It summarises what we know from Genesis 3. Our basic problem – the basic problem for all of creation – is the original fall into sin by Adam and Eve. They chose to disobey God – effectively to rebel against him. The consequence of that was suffering and death for all – the breaking of our relationships with God, each other, and creation.

 

The basic problem not only involves their sin, but our own sin ever since. We’ve followed in their footsteps. And so the early chapters of Romans remind us that ‘there is no one righteous, not even one.’ ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’.

And because of that all of humanity comes under God’s curse and condemnation. ‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.’ Humanity as a whole faces eternal death and destruction for its sin.

 

This is humanity’s basic problem. And so many people are trying desperately to solve our problems but are largely wasting their time because they don’t understand or accept our basic problem. Many people are trying to rediscover our spiritual side after decades of atheism. Many people are trying to rebuild connections with others in our individualistic society. Many people are trying to save our world before we destroy it with greenhouse emissions. But many of these people don’t acknowledge our basic problem – they’re trying to fix a bullet wound through the head with a bandaid.

 

Point 2

 

If that is the way things really are, what is the solution? When the kids come in from the car park with their scraped arms and legs, a bandaid isn’t a bad solution while their body heals. But creation is decaying, dying – humanity is dying – under God’s condemnation for sin. What’s the solution?

 

Thankfully there is a solution. If you move on in those early chapters of Romans you discover that even though our basic problem is sin, a righteousness from God has been made known which comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

 

As the catechism says, ‘[Jesus] has fully paid for all my sin with his precious blood’. Because humanity sinned and faces eternal death, Jesus came to earth as one of us to die in the place of those who trust in him. And so, what the catechism says is only true for believers. If you have put your faith in Jesus, if you’re committed to him as your King and Saviour, committed to living your life for him in every way, then Jesus has fully paid for your sin with his precious blood. You can read the catechism as true for you.

 

But if you haven’t yet come to that point, then you can’t read this as true for you. The most important thing you can do is turn to Jesus in faith and trust him as your King and your Saviour, so that these things will be true for you as well.

 

The result for believers then is that we’re not our own but belong to him.

 

If you take something to Cash Converters because you need the money, and you aren’t able to come back later to redeem it, you risk losing it. But if someone else decides to redeem it for you so that’s it’s not lost altogether, and pays for it, then it belongs to them. And they can give it back to you if they want.

 

We couldn’t pay the price to redeem ourselves from our sin, but Jesus could, and he did. But even as we receive the gift of our life back from him, he has a claim on us, we belong to him.

 

The great benefit is that the devil no longer has any claim on us. As Romans 6 says, apart from Jesus we’re slaves of sin, under the power of Satan. But if Jesus has bought me, I don’t belong to anyone anymore, except him. Satan no longer has any claim on me. If my friend redeems whatever it is from Cash Converters, I no longer have a claim to it.

 

And the outworking of that is that we can be sure that our sins are forgiven – we have been justified freely by God’s grace through the redemption of Jesus Christ. And we can be sure of eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

 

Point 3

 

The other half of the solution is that Jesus continues to watch over me. It’s not as if he came to earth, paid for sin, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven again, only to leave us to our own devices. He continues to look after us day by day, moment by moment. You’ll remember that in the gospel of John he said to his disciples, ‘I won’t leave you as orphans’.

 

And so, in a world that continues to struggle with a million different symptoms of the same basic problem, God watches over us, cares for us, protects us, looks after us, in everything, every moment of every day.

 

The catechism describes how closely God watches over us when it says that not a hair can fall from our heads without the will of our father in heaven. Did you know that on average we have 100 000 hairs on our head – some of us obviously more than others? And we lose 70 to 100 hairs each day? But not one of those hairs can fall without the will of our Father in heaven.

 

That’s just one little thing that happens to us every day. Think of all of the things that we go through every day, from the big to the small. From making life changing decisions like who to marry and which job to take. From things outside our control like tsunamis and terrorist strikes. To the smallest processes of our bodies – things we’re completely unconscious of and take for granted, like heart beating, brain functioning – down to the smallest chemical reactions in our bodies that we haven’t even discovered, to the movement of particles within atoms.

 

God is aware of all these things. None of these things can happen against his will. This is what God being sovereign is all about. He is King of all creation.

 

And knowing that means that I can approach life with a confidence that otherwise I simply couldn’t.

 

Some people are fatalists. They believe their god allows no room for their own decision making, and so they become fatalists – they don’t approach life confidently but simply resign themselves to whatever comes.

Some people believe in a god that is completely permissive, anything goes, chaos reigns. They can’t approach life with confidence either, because there is no guarantee where things might go. Their god isn’t even in control.

 

But we can approach life with confidence because God is in complete control, of everything. As the circumstances of life come our way – whether good or bad – we can face them confidently because God controls them, using them for our ultimate good. As we seek to serve God with the abilities he’s given us, according to the opportunities he sends us, we can do that confidently, because even when things don’t go exactly as we hoped, God is still using that for our ultimate good.

 

We all have our health scares, and those difficult life-shaping decisions to do with work or kingdom involvement. We’ve struggled over who to marry, or whether we should marry at all, job issues, children issues. And even though we get anxious about these things, because we know the possible consequences of making a wrong choice humanly speaking, as we seek to live God’s way we can take these steps confidently, knowing that God does use all things for the good of those who love him. In his plan, all things work together for our salvation.

 

Point 4

 

And so where do we find comfort in all of this?

As we figuratively fall off our bike from time to time in the car park of life, as we find our knees and elbows skinned and bleeding, as we run inside, sore, tail between our legs, pride hurt, where do we find our comfort?

 

We increasingly realise that these things are only a symptom of the far deeper problem of sin – Adam’s sin and our own sin. We increasingly feel the impact of that problem in the world we live in, as well as our own lives. Where do we find comfort in all of this?

 

And the only place we can find real and lasting comfort is in accepting these truths at the deepest level, at the core of our being, so that they change the way we think, and change the way we understand God, ourselves, and life. When this understanding of things takes hold of us from the inside out, shapes us, shapes the way we live – when this goes beyond just being ideas in our heads – then we find a comfort that can’t be shaken.

 

People have found comfort in terrible, terrible places because they knew without doubt in their heart of hearts that these things were true. Corrie Ten Boom found comfort in a concentration camp. Joni Erickson found comfort as a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair after a spinal injury. People have found comfort in the trenches, on operating tables, after stock market crashes, during depressions. People have found comfort on their deathbeds because they have understood that these things are true, and true for them.

 

All you need to be able to live and die in the joy of this comfort, is to know the problem – how great your sin and misery are, the solution – how you are set free from your sin and misery, and the way to respond – how you can thank God for such deliverance. Which then becomes the outline for the catechism – sin, salvation, service, or as others remember it – guilt, grace, gratitude.

 

Conclusion

 

Do you know this comfort? Are you and your life so shaped by this understanding of things that you know God’s peace that passes understanding? Maybe the storms of life still shake you from time to time, but they can’t flatten you. Like Job, you might lose your house, your possessions, your job, even your family – and these things can shake you to the core – but you still find comfort in the storm because you know that your Redeemer lives.

 

At the end of the day, everything else is a side issue. The only true and lasting comfort that we can find, in life and in death, is that we belong to our faithful Saviour, Jesus Christ.

 

Amen