Pastor DeeAnn
Dead and Alive sermon 12-7-08

Dead and Alive
Mark 1:1-8. Romans 6:1-11, 20-23

     Christmas is coming. People are shopping. Trees and wreaths are being hauled home. This is the season of preparations: Some of us have already retrieved the Christmas lights and decorations from the attic, the garage, the basement, the upstairs closet. Lights get strung on the house, candles placed in the windows, trees are festooned with glass ornaments and family treasure: life becomes bedecked with tradition. We know how to prepare for Christmas: planning for parties, children's programs, school concerts, and family dinners.
     In the early part of the nineteenth century, Benjamin Franklin one of the foremost founders of our nation said, “ How many observe Christ's Birthday, but how few His precepts. O, tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.” How true this is yet today. When we break a commandment it is called “sin”: The word sin is translated from the Greek as “miss the mark”, “a shortcoming”, “a failure”, “a lapse”, “a blunder”.
      It also means an inward badness, a disposition which falls short of what is good.
Friday afternoon I went shopping in Omaha with my dear friend Denise. In the city we saw a huge billboard, all black with white letters which read: “If you must curse, use your own name. God.”
     The word sin itself implies the existence of a moral standard. That moral standard is either an ideal which we fail to reach, or a law which we break. Today many people, sadly even Christians regard the Law, the Word of God as an ideal to be aimed for, approached, but not necessarily realized and kept. However, God did not give us 10 ideals, but commandments, laws. Jesus did not say a new ideal I give you... He said very specifically in John 13:34 “A new commandment I give unto you that you should love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” It is God's law that we love one another – we MUST love one another, and not just love one another, but love as Christ loves us! Unconditionally and sacrificially.
      No where does the Bible say or imply the Word of God is an ideal. Quite the contrary, in the Old Testament we see that the Law was to be a teacher, to show what is right and wrong, that which is right gives and sustains life. That which is wrong brings death. When the Children of Israel were brought out of bondage to slavery in Egypt through the wilderness journey to the promised land, Moses declared to them the Word of God: Deuteronomy 30:15-16: “ See I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.” Simply said, sin is disobedience. It is hard-core self-centeredness, the exercise of prideful self-will. No wonder the billboard read: “If you must swear, use your own name.” If we know what is right and fail to do it, that is sin. Anything that is not of faith is sin. Romans 14:23.
     Some one once said:
If our greatest need had been information, God would have sent us an educator.
If our greatest need had been technology, God would have sent us a scientist.
If our greatest need had been money, God would have sent us an economist.
If our greatest need had been pleasure, God would have sent us an entertainer.
But our greatest need was forgiveness, so God sent us a Savior.
     That Savior, Jesus did what we cannot do for ourselves. He took upon Himself the sin of the whole world, our sin included, that it would die with Him on the cross. This is a great mystery. The Apostle Paul writes in 2 Cor. 5:21 “God made Him who had no sin to b e sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” The perfect obedient Son, became sin so that we could be free of the power of sin, the guilt of sin, and the curse of sin: eternal death. In Jesus, we exchange the selfish I in sin to the awe of O! In SON.
     Once we are baptized into Christ, we are baptized in His death, the death that brought about the death of sin and thereby rendered sin powerless through Him. When we receive Him as our Lord into our hearts, we receive His love, His righteousness into our spirit. When we confess our sins, God looks upon Christ living in the heart, and for Christ's sake because of His sacrifice on our behalf, forgives us our sins.
     In the Old West, the picture of a notorious bad guy would be posted with large letters “Wanted Dead or Alive”. Life is either or, not both and, right? Not always. Paul tells us, that in God's eyes, it is a both/and proposition. We are to be dead to sin, because spiritually, sin was crucified, nailed on the cross, killed, dead with Jesus, buried dead in the tomb with Jesus. As believers, having the very life of Christ within us, we are to consider ourselves dead to sin. But just as Christ was raised victorious over sin and death, we too have the power to defeat sin in our lives. That does not mean we are unable to sin, no! But it does mean that in Christ, we have the power to overcome sin.
     How do we do that? John the Baptist cried out in the wilderness what we most need to do today: Repent. Turn. Make a U turn from sin and death to healing and life in Christ. Take seriously and deeply your salvation in Jesus. Confess to Him and let go of anything that is unbecoming of Him, unbecoming of a child of God, unbecoming of the love, purity, and holiness that is yours as a redeemed soul in Jesus Christ. You ! Be both dead and alive: dead to sin and alive in Christ.
     The next two weeks we are preparing to celebrate Christ's birth. But everyday he the believer prepares for Christ's return. We do that through turning from waywardness to intentional focus and attention upon our Lord in prayer, in study, in worship, in fellowship, in service and most importantly in our day, in witness. Amen.
  

EXIT to Sermons Page