It’s a question that can be at the forefront of our minds, or one that can be found only in the deepest dark and musty recesses of the heart. It’s a question that some people spend their entire lives asking, while many others ask it only shortly before they die.
The question is, ‘am I good enough for God? Because I’ve done a lot of bad things. I might have done a lot of good things, too, but do those really cover up the bad things? How much trouble am I really in?’ People who believe in God instinctually know that God is all Good, with not a blemish of imperfection; so how can a person, tarnished by sin, appear before Him?
Now you might be thinking, ‘well, I think he’s wrong. I do do a lot of good things. I give money to the church. I volunteer. I love my family ferociously, and I helped at the church brat stand a couple of weeks ago. Besides, the sins that I do commit – they’re pretty minor. I only tell little lies to protect people. I only gossip a bit. I’ve never cheated on my wife or husband. Surely God only rejects other people who do great big sins, like fly planes into buildings, or cheat on spouses, or steal things, or …’. You can fill in the blank.
Or, you might be thinking, ‘well, I think human nature is basically good. And since God’s good too, He’s just going to shrug off our sins and say it doesn’t matter.’
I’m going to have you pull out your Bibles – if you don’t have one, we can make some use out of the pew Bibles in front of you. Go to Matthew’s Gospel, chapter five, verses 27 and 28. That’s page 1455 in the pew Bibles. This is Jesus talking.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
So Jesus is saying that the sin of adultery isn’t just the physical act – we also commit a sin when we just look at someone and want to sleep with them. That’s a pretty high bar that Jesus set!
Next, we’re going to look back on the Old Testament, to the Tenth Commandment that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai, in fact. Look at the Book of Exodus, Chapter 20, verse 17. That’s page 114.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
So God forbids looking at something that belongs to someone else and thinking, ‘I want that!’, or ‘I want something just like that, or something even better!’ Who hasn’t thought those thoughts?
Who hasn’t committed adultery in their heart, like Jesus said? For that matter, who hasn’t lied, or cheated, or gossiped, or cursed someone out, or succumbed to vanity, or broken some other Law of God? I know I’ve done all of those things, and more! And I strongly suspect that everyone here has broken one or another of God’s Laws and is in the same boat that I am.
Because in the third chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle Paul writes,
[A]ll have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
And later in this letter, in Chapter Six, we find Paul writing that
the wages of sin is death.
And he’s not talking just about death in this life; Paul’s writing about eternal death, an eternal death that’s caused by sin that everyone is guilty of. So I think we can understand why that question, ‘am I good enough for God?’ causes so much anxiety and so much worry.
The title of my sermon today is ‘Bad News, Good News.’ And here’s the bad news, and it’s really, really bad news. The answer to the question, ‘am I good enough for God?’ is that no, no you’re not. You’ve sinned. I’ve sinned, everybody’s sinned. And God hates sin.
We live in a culture, in a society, which glorifies supposedly self-made people. People who solve their own problems. So the solution to the sin-and-death problem seems simple enough: to get saved, what you need to do is pull yourself up by the bootstraps, adjust your bra, sort yourself out, and stop sinning and be holy.
That’s what Pelagius thought; Pelagius was a British monk during the time of the Roman Empire, in the fourth and fifth centuries. He thought, and taught, that men and women could find God without any help. He thought that since God wants holy people, what we’ve got to do is just stop sinning, and we’ll be saved. For Pelagius, we save ourselves.
How human a tendency is that. After all, adults tend to think that we can solve all our problems by ourselves, and since we realize that we’ve created the problem through our own sinful actions, it’s only natural to think that we can solve the problem too. Popular spirituality reinforces the idea: it’s not uncommon to hear sentiments along the lines of ‘well, so-and-so was such a good person, she or he must be in heaven.’
The Church, in its wisdom, condemned Pelagius’ teachings as heresy, and I’m going to tell you two reasons why his idea that we can save ourselves is very misleading.
If we were to seriously hold that idea, we have to ask the question, ‘why the Cross?’ Why was it necessary for Jesus to die? If the Cross was just an object lesson to show us how to pull our own selves up and get better, anyone could have done that. But Jesus was far from being anyone; we believe that he was true God cloaked in flesh. So it seems monstrous that he would be killed, unless his death was for something, affecting a real change in our legal status. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says that it’s not healthy people that need a physician, but those who are sick. ‘I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’
And during his time here, he didn’t hang out with the Pharisees, the people who tried to follow every law down to the letter. He spent his time with women of ill-repute, rebels, and agents of the occupying foreign enemy. So in the context of the Christian story, if we can sort ourselves out, that climatic part about Jesus’ and death, don’t really make any sense.
The other problem is the one that Paul is writing about in our New Testament lesson. I’m going to read the passage again.
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
‘I see in my members another law at war, […] making me captive to the law of sin.’ Can’t that be borne out of our own experience? We can try and try and try to give up sinning, but those very efforts are tainted by sinful motives. The law is so onerous, and we are so weak. Perhaps the best objection to Pelagius telling us to shape up and save yourself is that simply, we can’t. We see the ‘Good News’ in the last two sentences of this passage: ‘Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!’
We cannot save ourselves and the ‘Good News’ is that taking on flesh, Christ made common cause with us, in death washed away our sins, and in rising from the grave, he defeated them. Through God’s grace we are saved, and not by our own works. How then, shall we live? A couple of weeks ago I read Paul’s rhetorical question: ‘should we continue in sin so that grace may abound?’ Absolutely not!
Pelagius was right about one thing: God does want us to be a holy people. For that reason, God gave us Himself in the Holy Spirit to enable us to live lives more acceptable to Him, even if we cannot, in this life, take away the stain of original sin. When we grow in our spiritual lives as Christians by living in the light of our Baptisms and in Christ’s spiritual presence in Holy Communion, when we live our lives more in the light of the Cross, then sin loses its luster. We ourselves become dead to it. The first step, though, is to trust God for our salvation, and hand all our sins, and our anxieties over to Him. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
I invite you to take some time to pray to God and confess to Him your sins. We have the enormous privilege of being able to lay our guilt at the foot of the Cross. Put them there, thanking Jesus for the work he did there so that we would not be found guilty.
[…]
Lord, we confess that we are sinners in need of your grace. Forgive us our pride when we think that if we are just a little bit better, we won’t have need of Christ’s work on the Cross. Thank you for your work, your death, and your victory over death. Thank you for your Holy Spirit, and make us into a holy people which honors you. Amen.
