JUSTIFYING
THE MARGINS OF
Life
has limits. If we are wise, we live within our financial limits. If we stay
true to what we believe, our ethics put constraints and limits on our behavior.
Moreover, we live within the limits of our intellectual capacity. We live, as
well, with the physical limits our bodies allow us; some of us can walk, others
cannot. Some can run fast, others more slowly. Some can play golf well, others
such as myself cannot.
Without
question, then, whether we acknowledge the margins and limits we live with or
not, our lives are filled with boundaries and limitations. Today, I want us to
examine the margin, or boundary, of our faith. Stated more precisely, “What are the margins of a biblical faith
and how do we live within those margins?”
The title of this sermon
is “Justifying the Margins of Life”. It is an appropriate title because what I
want us to think about this morning is how we live within the limits of our
faith in order that our lives may be acceptable to God.
For, we do want to be
accepted by God. We want to be loved by God. We want God to claim us as God’s
own. We want to be counted among those who are, as Paul reminded us through our
scripture reading this morning, the descendants of Abraham - the great father
of biblical faith.
As protestant and
Reformed Christians, we have a very specific understanding of our relationship
with God: We stand in right relationship with God only through God’s Grace.
This is the margin.
The rallying cry of the
Reformation first uttered by Martin Luther, and then adopted by many others
including our own John Calvin, was “Justification By Grace, Through Faith”. As
Protestants and as Presbyterians this is what different from our brothers and
sisters in the faith who worship in the Roman Catholic tradition.
The meaning behind this
rallying cry is really quite simple: We have a right (or justified)
relationship with God not because we have lived upright moral lives, or because
we have “played by the rules” as society has set those rules, or even because
we have stayed within the bounds of what the church has decreed as appropriate
belief or action. Nor is it because we have somehow avoided every sin under the
sun. We are righteous only through our faith in Christ Jesus (in his life,
death, and resurrection). In Jesus, God simply accepts us as God’s very own
children.
Let me say this again. We
have a right relationship with God in so far as we accept and believe in Jesus
Christ. That’s it! Period. We are loved by God in and through Jesus
Christ. It is our faith in him and his
vision of God’s Kingdom that defines us. The margins are not found in our good
behavior or impeccable morality. The margins are not found in our private or
public piety. Nor are the margins set even by our ability to be faithful - to
actually live as Christ has taught us to live. It is our faith in Christ Jesus
- that, and that alone, is our margin of faith.
What does this mean for
us? What does this justified margin of faith look like in our lives as we live
everyday? Does this mean that we are freed to live however we want to live? Are
we free to ignore all of the ethical instructions God has given us in the
Bible? Can we simply live for ourselves without regard for those who are less
fortunate than we are?
What about the 10
Commandments? What about the moral code Jesus taught us in the Sermon on the
Mount? Are these things meaningless? Do they no longer apply? Is this the
message the Apostle Paul intended as he wrote to the church in Rome?
Absolutely not! In fact
the message is the exact opposite. God’s grace does not relieve us of our call
to obey God’s commands. God’s grace does not erase or even expand the margins
of a faithful life in God’s sight. God’s grace calls us to even greater faithfulness.
Grace calls us to the level of obedience revealed in Jesus Christ.
Indeed, we remain
accountable for living by the 10 Commandments. We are still called to live a
moral and upright life as Jesus described in the Sermon on the Mount. But
something has changed with the coming of Christ; with his teaching, with how he
died, with how God raised him to new life for our benefit. What has changed is
our understanding of what God truly wants from us. What God wants is for us to
trust in God, and for our lives to reflect that trust.
In the OT we learn of God
giving the Law, the 10 Commandments, to the people of Israel. The OT is a
record of how Israel responded to this gift. Israel came to see observing the
Law, the 10 Commandments, through the Levitical code, as the goal or purpose of
faithful living.
This was a fundamental
error and misunderstanding of what God intended. God did not give the 10
Commandments as a legal code to justify us if we followed it to the letter,
crossing all of our t’s and dotting our i’s. The Law of God was never intended
to serve in such a way. What happened is that Israel misunderstood God’s
intention. God appeared to Abraham and offered him mercy and life through the
gift of great progeny. All this if Abraham would only believe God would do what
God promised to do. God promised to create a great nation from Abraham’s
offspring, even though Abraham and Sarah were childless and close to a hundred
years old. The only question before Abraham was would he believe God could
bring life from a situation that seemed hopeless?
Abraham believed that God
not only could do this, but would do it. It is for that reason that God
reckoned him as righteous, or justified him. Abraham put his trust in God, and
was blessed. All this even though according to every reasonable human expectation
Abraham should have laughed the whole thing off as wishful thinking.
This is the model of
faith that Paul lifts up for us to follow. We are called to live with our trust
in the God who can and will bring light from darkness and life from death.
Looking again at the OT
and the gift of the Law, Moses brought the 10 Commandments to the people not as
a legal code circumscribing how they should live, but as a way for them to live
in order to live within God’s mercy. The 10 Commandments were designed as a way
for Israel to live within the margins of God’s mercy; God would be their God,
and Israel would be His people. The Law was intended as a way for Israel to
come to know God’s love and mercy, not to earn God’s favor. They already had
that, God had chosen them.
God choose Israel as
God’s covenant people simply and purely out of grace. They among all the
peoples of the earth were chosen, not because of their ability to obey and
follow the rules, but simply because God wanted to extend God’s mercy and grace
to them. The 10 Commandments were intended to help the Israelites live within
the mercy and grace God had chosen to freely extend.
Yet it is our human
propensity to overlook and even devalue that which is given to us freely. We
think that we must earn whatever we get. If something comes to us freely we
think it has no value. The ancient Israelites were no different.
So, over time, they lost
sight of God’s freely given blessing. Instead they came to see the Law as a way
to earn God’s mercy. They had a terrible time accepting the simple truth that
God loved them, and so do we! We just don’t know what to do with that notion.
It makes no sense to us.
Rather than just accept
God’s grace, we want to spend our time figuring out the rules. We want to earn
our way into God’s favor. But we cannot, it is just not possible. How can we
earn something God has already freely, and with great love, given to us?
However, all of this does
not mean that we are free to live without regard for God’s will. We still live under the moral and theological
margins of the 10 Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. But, with the coming
of Christ, how we understand those margins has changed. If we accept God’s
grace extended to us, if we see God’s grace as justifying the margins of our
faith, then God’s moral and theological claims upon us no longer function as a
legal code, rather they become something very different. They become
prescriptions for how to live, and cease to function as margin setters.
John Calvin called this
understanding of God’s will the “Third Use of the Law”. For Calvin, the first
use of the Law is to show us as Christians that we are sinners and fall short
of God’s intentions. The second use is for society in general, if society could
be organized along the lines of the 10 Commandments then evil and sinfulness
could be contained and margins set. This would put limits and constraints on
even the apostate and unregenerate people, thereby improving the world for all
of us. The Third use of the Law is as a guide for how we Christians are to
actually live as the faithful people of God.
Once we have actually
accepted that we are forgiven and that we are truly the accepted and justified
children of God, then obedience and faithfulness to God’s Law becomes a
reasonable goal, not just some pie-in-the-sky moral ideal. It becomes the way
we can actually live.
Accepting that God really
and truly loves us, is perhaps, the most difficult and challenging part of the
gospel. I’m not sure we can ever really believe it, at least not totally. In a
way, this may be our greatest sin.
Think for a moment about
the worst sin you have committed in your life. Maybe it happened a long time
ago, maybe it happened only recently. If you still feel pain from it, if it
still causes you anxiety, then you have not let go of it.
The promise of the gospel
is that God forgives us, even before we ask for forgiveness. But can we forgive
ourselves? Are willing to trust in God’s forgiving grace, or do we hold onto
that sin and its pain hoping we will somehow be able to atone for it ourselves.
Or, are we willing to trust that we are forgiven, and move on with life. Are
willing to trust that there will be a new day in the Lord!
We are called to trust in
God. Yes, we do horrible things to each other. Yes, we are sinful people. Yes,
we are self-centered, self-indulgent, and consumed by our own wants and desires
far too often in life. Yet, God loves us as his own. God loves you, and through
your faith in Christ Jesus, God has redeemed you and justified you. Accepting
this is at the very heart of the gospel.
Let us stop trying to
justify ourselves. It cannot be done. Instead, let us accept God’s grace into
our hearts and allow that to be the margin by which we live our life. Let us
allow God to Justify the margins of life through our faith in Christ Jesus.
Reverend Marc V. Mason
Trinity Presbyterian
Church