We are still
in the Church’s season of Easter when we not only celebrate but also need to do
some serious thinking about the meaning and significance of Jesus’ death and
resurrection. Good Friday and Easter Day go together because together they
demonstrate God our Creator’s perfect love for his creation. If love is to be perfect, then it must
hold justice and mercy in equal measure. And so on Good Friday God himself pays
the debt to his perfect justice which our sins – the sins indeed of the whole
world – required (because his justice is perfect); but he also offers mercy to
anyone – anyone at all and whatever their track record to date - through their
humble faith in that redemptive or saving work of Jesus on the cross. And
Easter Day is the proof that all that Jesus taught and promised and claimed
could indeed be believed; proof, as our reading from Luke’s book of ‘Acts’
makes very clear, was more than sufficient to convince (though it will never be
sufficient for those who choose not to be convinced), and of which the Lord Chief
Justice of England, Lord Darling, so graciously said, ’No ‘sensible’ jury in
the world could do other than return a verdict that Jesus did indeed rise
again.’
Now as a
result of the resurrection many things changed – and you’ve already been thinking
about some of those around your tables. There are in fact so many things! But what
I want this morning to give you is just three of those changes for the world (As
a result of the resurrection of Jesus the world became a very different place);
and three changes that distinguish or ought to distinguish Christians from
other people...though of course those changes are always open, always available,
to anyone who puts his or her faith in the resurrected, the ‘risen’, Lord Jesus
Christ. Christ died for the sins of the whole world therefore his offer of
reconciliation with God is for the whole world....whether they know it, or like
it, or want it, or not. (In both cases, one change is or ought to be pretty
obvious, one not so obvious, and one may not even have occurred to you – or
maybe you preferred not to think about it. We’ll see!
The first change was the new existence of a sure hope and the offer of it to all
people everywhere and with everything it entailed: confidence about the afterlife and a person’s place in it; confidence about the true origin,
meaning, purpose, and destiny of human life; and confidence to live life as God our Creator intended us to live it.
The second change (the uncomfortable one!) as a result
of the resurrection is that the world
now has no excuse for not believing in Jesus Christ, for rejecting him, or
for rebelling against him. (See why it’s uncomfortable!) Ok, let’s be perfectly
reasonable about this: if a person has not heard about Jesus and his
resurrection, they have some excuse and God will take this into consideration
because his love is perfect. But once a person has been presented with the
facts about Jesus and about his sacrificial death and resurrection for them, to reject God is to rebel.
And Jesus was quite adamant about
that, ‘He who is not for me is against me.’ (Anagram guess by Sunday
School Child: ‘He who is against me is for it!’) That person is in exactly the
same position as the one who takes no notice of the sign ‘Danger: No Bathing!’
The third change is the existence of the Church whose
primary purpose and mission in life is to proclaim the ‘good news’ of the first
change and the ‘foolishness’ in the second of continued rejection of and
rebellion against God. The church that is not faithfully and lovingly
proclaiming both is not being
faithful to its Founder. Good News then; but tough news!
So what about Christians themselves? What changes do we need to make in
our own lives? Over Easter the media offered various excuses for not having to
believe in the resurrection of Jesus yet still considering oneself a
‘Christian’. I noted especially the peculiarly English
heresy that being a good bloke, being sincere in your doubts, or keeping your
faith private is perfectly ok. I simply want to remind us, as Jesus said, that
it is better to build our house on rock than on sand; the rock of him and his
words – which included his clear promise of being resurrected and which then
turned into an historical fact. Attitudes
such as those popular ones I’ve just mentioned contradict Jesus himself. In
short – I’m sorry to say it and I realise some people will be offended - but
they are self-promoting nonsense. In his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6: 8)
Jesus calls us to be different: ‘Do not be like them’, he says, echoing the Old
Testament command, ’You shall not do as they do.’ ‘Different’ is essentially a
synonym for ‘holy’: someone who is holy is someone set apart from the world for God but very much in the world as God’s ‘salt and light’ for the world.
So I offer three
changes, then, that define or characterise the Christian and distinguish him or
her from others. There are or ought to be many: but here are just three to get
you thinking ........and acting on them!
The first change as a result of the resurrection is to
have complete assurance about our hope. The ground of our assurance is based not on the strength of our faith, nor on our obedience, nor on any good works we do but upon
the finished work of Christ, on what
he achieved for us on the cross. There are those who accuse Christians of being
presumptuous about such assurance and
who assert that no certainty is
possible on this side of death: but certainty and humility do not exclude one
another. If God’s revealed purpose
is that we should know that we are
‘saved’, presumptuousness lies in doubting
his word, not in trusting it. Try that answer the next time someone raises
it and see how they react! There is a false comfort about doubt and self-deceit
that Christians have a calling to dispel with the sure hope of the Gospel.
The second change is the need to develop humility and
the practice of obedience. Humility is really a synonym for honesty - honesty
about ourselves: and the special and essential way of personal Christian humility is the willingness
to hear and receive God’s word, to believe it and to obey it...however humiliating of us its challenge to our pride, our preferences, and our prejudices. And just
as a child is dependent on its
parents for what it is taught and what it has, so it is for the Christian with
God: this is what Jesus had in mind when he taught that ‘unless we become like
children, we cannot see the kingdom of God.’ And again, when he said (Matt
11:25) ‘God hides himself from the wise and clever but reveals himself to ‘babes’’,
he was not denigrating our minds but indicating how we are to use them. Our very limited and uninformed minds are
not to stand in judgement on God’s word but to sit in humility under it, eagerly desiring to hear it, grasp it, and apply
it...like a child with an ice-cream or like some of those here I know with a
glass of wine!
The third change concerns in fact the forming or cultivating of a ‘Christian mind’.
Yes, our hearts need to change; but our minds do too. Why? because if they
don’t, then our ideas about what love is, about who God is, about how life
should be lived, and about almost everything else in the world will be prone to
sometimes very grave error. And this
is where we will find ourselves often clashing both with the world and even those
who call themselves Christians yet who do not allow the word of God to dwell in
them and guide them.
The world is
very clever, very astute and talented, at modifying or deliberately changing
what God has revealed to be his will. And it can be hard when our non-Christian
friends and even some Christians try to convince us that, for example, ‘God’s
word is past its sell-by date’, or that ‘humanity no longer needs God because
we have grown beyond the need for religion’, or that Christians are
old-fashioned, kill joys, or just plain weak and boring. But no person can claim to be
converted to Christ who is not intellectually
converted. And nobody can claim to be intellectually converted who has not
humbly, obediently, and willingly brought his or her mind into submission to
the authority of Jesus as ‘Lord’ of their lives. This is why we need to feed,
to cultivate, the forming of a ‘Christian mind’, one that rationally reveres
God’s revelation and refuses to give in to the uninformed false humility of fashionable
doubt or the paralysing pressure of our non-believing peers and popular
culture.
These are
just some of the ways in which the world and Christians have changed or need to
change as a result of the resurrection of Jesus. The world is a different place and we are called to be different.
But we are not on our own in this: we have our fellow Christians and, above
all, we have Jesus who promised to be with us every step of the way. Let’s not
spurn such a wonderful life-saving and life-enhancing offer: and the more we
get to know him and allow the risen Christ to direct and rule our hearts and
minds, the more willing and the more effective disciples of his we will be.
Campbell
Paget 7 May 2017
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