A Correction to Step Three

John 3:1-17

Rev. Michael A. Trask

March 20, 2011

Albertville, MN

 

When finally I got out of school and found myself in my first parish. I lived in a house provided by the congregations I served. There was a house, but not any furniture. I had a few old pieces of which I had relieved my mother; someone lent me an old dining room table. But I still needed some shelving for my Television and some books and so forth.

So I bought one of those inexpensive shelving units that looks like it’s made out of wood, but it’s really made out of sawdust and glue. You know the kind? They’re great up until the time that you try to move them.

I bought a big one. But it came with the wrong directions! The parts I had did not match the parts described! And the pictures weren’t exactly as they were supposed to be. And then there was that moment of fright when it was all finished, and looked in the bottom of the box only to discover that there were quite a few left over parts! Most unsettling!

Now in a manner of speaking, people are delivered into this world with the wrong set of directions. And the heading at the top of the page is Good. It says: “How to have a lasting relationship with God” That is actually what we were designed for, to be in a relationship to God. So the heading is correct, but the directions are incorrect. Here’s the standard set of directions that all people start out with as they seek a relationship with God.

 

Step 1: Acknowledge that there is a God. Most people do that. Scientific research has shown that human beings are hard-wired to believe there is a God.

Step 2: Understand that you will be held accountable to God Most people understand and believe that too.

Step 3: Work Hard to earn God’s approval.

 

These directions are truly universal. All people will gravitate towards them. But they are not correct.

How do I know that? Because people who follow these directions, truly follow them without hedging in any way always seem to be a bit tweaky. Their relationship with God is like my relationship to that shelving unit: tentative; I knew that it was somehow incomplete and I never felt good about it.

In the same way, anybody who follows these instructions will only come to despair. Because they don’t truly do what is required to win God’s approval and they know it. They try to live in peace but they look within their hearts and they see much strife. They try to love, to truly love, but they look within their hearts and they know that they often hate or are filled with anger towards others. They can never really trust the “shelving unit” they have built to support their hopes for eternity.

So how can our directions be so off? If it’s natural for all people to this this way, isn’t it right? Isn’t doing what comes naturally always the correct thing to do? Well, we have prisons that are bursting at the seams, bursting with people who did that which came natural to them. They followed their desires and urges and they were deemed unfit for

human society. Or an example from the news, Muammar Qaddafi, attacking and killing his own people is doing what comes natural to him. Even a cursory look at humanity and how it naturally behaves should quickly put to rest any notion that what is natural is necessarily good. Natural is good when it comes to granola bars and fruit juice, but not people, not anymore.

For the Bible teaches that our nature has been corrupted. Because of Adam, we are born sinful. And we take after him. His original sin which is now part of us was couched in these terms by Satan “You will be like God.”. “you will be like God.” In other words, you will be in charge of stuff. And it is that particular sin which has altered those directions that all people are born with. but only on last step. The first two steps are actually quite good

Step 1. Acknowledge that there is God. That’s a good and right and true! God has given all people this knowledge

Step 2 Understand that you will be held accountable. This too is good too and also comes from God. He has written the law on all of our hearts

But then we come to the problem

Step 3 Work hard to Win God’s approval

 

So who is in charge of saving your sorry self according to this? You are! That’s the proud original sin you were born with putting in an appearance. “Hey I can do it! I’m not that bad! I can give myself eternity! And I don’t really need God to do it either...because I’m in charge” Of course it sounds good at first, but in practice, it’s really a Wile Coyote moment. It’s running off the edge of a cliff and suddenly realizing that you are off a cliff and plunging downward. We truly cannot span the infinite chasm between our sinfulness and his holiness. We simply can’t.

By our birth into the family of Adam our directions have been corrupted. This is why Jesus says to Nicodemus “I tell you the truth, no can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again” (John 3:3)... Something has to happen to change this way in which we were born.

Nicodemus was a pharisee, a group of religious folks who had really read these directions and followed them to the letter. The errant step 3 was their specialty. They had reduced their relationship with God down to a number of doable tasks. They did them and they were oh so proud that they did them. They were certain that they, more than anyone else, had correctly done step three.

And yet, something wasn’t quite right. Nicodemus had assembled his shelf, but he notices a bag of extra parts. He wasn’t quite sure about what he believes. He had heard of Jesus and comes to him under the cover of darkness. And here is Jesus talking to this member of the loyal order of the step three-ers and says “I tell you the truth, no can see the kingdom of God (that is, complete step three) unless he is born of the water and the Spirit”

What is this? It’s a correction to step three! A correction that is most surprising What’s surprising is, it’s not about us and what we do that restores the human relationship to God. It’s not about doing at all! it’s about believing! His Spirit causes us to believe and by faith he gives us we come into God’s kingdom!

Belief in what? Jesus gets to that as well: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever BELIEVES in him shall not Perish, but have eternal life.” What does it mean to believe in him? It means that you understand that he did step three for you. That he, by his life and by his death worked hard to win God’s approval for you. His perfect keeping of the commandments, as well as his suffering and death completes step three for you! By believing in him, his righteousness becomes your righteousness. And you are restored completely by God.

And just in case we are still confused by the whole idea that God saves us out of mercy by faith alone, God sent us not only Jesus to declare this truth to us, but also the Apostle Paul. In The Epistle lesson for today. He says “What does the scripture say: “Abraham believed in God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” and again “It was not through the law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith.” (Romans 4: 1-8) Paul points out that even in the Old testament the truth that we are saved by grace through faith was there....its nothing new. It simply made more clear by the Coming of Christ into the world.

When I left my first parish and came to this church, I took that shelving unit of mine and loaded it into the pickup. I drove to the town dump, and with no small amount of satisfaction, I pushed down and over the edge and into the abyss. As it smashed to bits, I started laughing. I laughed because I never really liked it. I laughed because I was glad to see it go. The old man with the rake whose job it was to watch the dump and manage it’s fires thought me impertinent. But I didn’t care. I was free of that thing.

If you have been living with the idea that it is you and you alone who makes yourself right with God, You might want to take a trip to the dump too. Dump the idea that you make God like you by what you do. And you may laugh if you wish. Of course the one who manages the fires of the abyss will find you rude. But pay him no mind. Laugh because you are sending a false teaching back to where it belongs; laugh out of the joy of knowing that you are saved purely by grace through faith in Christ Jesus. AMEN