August 2, 2009 Sermon

Putting On Christ
Galatians 3:23-29

My wife Linda and I had just finished running the five-kilometer race in the Cherry Festival. We were tired. We had left our car at the start line, so we got in line to take the shuttle bus back. We stood behind a woman whose t-shirt said something about southwestern Indiana. We said hello. As she turned around to speak to us we saw she was pregnant. Very pregnant. Seven months pregnant, she told us, and she had just finished running the same race we had. Two years ago she had run a half marathon while eight months pregnant. Suddenly I did not have the right to feel tired.

Often, when we think we cannot keep going, we encounter a person who inspires us not to quit. This is one of the most important works of the church. God has put us together—in part—so we can encourage each other to keep moving toward Christ. I received a call this week from a member of this congregation who has not attended in years. I thought he had completely left us. He did not see it that way. But life has dealt him two staggering blows in recent months. He called to talk about that, but with a twist. He had read in the newsletter of our brainstorming to grow the church efforts. And he had an idea. “Mike,” he told me, “somehow we have just got to get the word across to people that even in the hardest times God can give us the strength to keep going.” His idea dovetails nicely with the message from today's passage in Galatians. Together, they tell us to: Put on Christ. Keep moving.
The first of those two staggering blows my caller has received is that a terrible, wasting disease has struck a loved one. The second results from the first. Now he calculates he must somehow come up with $4,000 a month to deal with the medical crisis. He falls into that classic position of having enough wealth not to qualify for Medicaid, but nowhere near enough to plug the monthly drain. As he put it, “How long can I keep that up? Am I supposed not to do everything I can for (his loved one)? I can't just walk away.”

Note, however, that my caller's message was not a plea for pity, nor a shaking of his fist at God. No, he wants me to preach the claim that even in the toughest of times God can give us the strength to keep moving toward Christ. It was a moving testimony, one I gladly pass along. God can keep us moving. Our passage from Galatians gets at this idea from a different angle. “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ,” the Apostle Paul writes. Later he tells us, “And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.” If this does not quite seem to add up to, “Put on Christ. Keep moving,” hang in there. As we work through these verses you will understand.

We start with the background. Years before writing Paul had walked around the region of Galatia, teaching and encouraging in the Christian churches. One issue dominated then and later, when he wrote what we know as Galatians. That issue was legalism. Legalism in religion is the idea that we can earn a god's favor through obedience to whatever laws that god seems to have enacted. But legalism has a fatal flaw. Human nature does not permit consistent obedience. We are sinners. We cannot obey God well enough to deserve the rewards God wishes to give us. As Paul wrote to the Roman Christians, “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.” He added that he delighted in God's law but could not obey it.

To those who protest that human nature is not that sinful I would ask, was Paul not an exemplary man? He knew the law of God inside-out and longed to obey it. Yet he could not. Consider the greatest of men and women. In this, the age of the Internet, we know more about them than we might prefer. We know they are, at the deepest level, no better than us. Like us, they sin. Without naming names we can think of politicians, celebrities, neighbors, relatives, athletes, and others whose sins we know. Paul opens our passage with the statement that we are imprisoned by the law. He means God's law as revealed in our Old Testament. And he means that because our sin prevents us from obeying it, our sin has a grip on us.

Yet we need not despair. In the next verse Paul calls the law our “disciplinarian until Christ came.” Though our sinful nature causes us to break God's law, that law still works to save us. God's laws, God's rules hold us accountable. They teach us how we ought to behave and they keep us honest about our misbehavior. Through the law God acts as our loving parent. In the second grade I somehow developed the notion that my classmates might enjoy it if I threw rocks at them on the playground. During recess I joined a group of boys who gathered gravel from a service road, walked across the field to the outer fence, and threw rocks toward the swing set, just to see if we could hit anybody from that far away.

The first loving act of discipline throwing rocks earned me came from my teacher, Mrs. Slypher, a kindly older woman, who grabbed my ear between her long nails and towed me into the principal's office. The second act of discipline this earned me was a series of visits to my bottom from the principal's wooden fraternity paddle. The third act of discipline this earned me was a lecture from my mom, accompanied by additional spanking with her hair brush. The fourth act of discipline I earned came from my father, who repeated the lecture and addressed, with his belt, any areas on my bottom the others may have missed. For those who oppose spanking allow me to add that my wife and I did not spank our own children more than once or twice apiece. Yet we believe in the importance of discipline in the form of punishment for breaking the rules. You can bet I never again threw a rock at a human being. More importantly, I learned at seven years of age that even if I could not yet see others as beloved children of God, people I loved and respected did. If I wanted to satisfy them, I needed to change my ways.

The law cannot save us. It can, however, guide us. It can function as our disciplinarian. And it can teach us of our total dependence on faith for salvation. As Paul puts it, “now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.” God does not accept us because we obey but because we believe. When we believe in Jesus as the crucified and resurrected son of God we have “put on Christ”. We have become “clothed” with Christ. Inside, under the clothing, our natures have not completely changed. We still sin. Yet we have become identified with Christ. We have become Christlike on the surface. We can begin to work on becoming Christlike under the surface, too.

But our relationship with God does not depend on our inner nature. It depends, rather, on our acceptance of the gift of faith. As Paul puts it, we have become heirs, heirs to the promise. When my grandmother died it hurt. I had lost my other three grandparents one right after the other some twenty years earlier, when I was thirteen. Grandma Riggins lived on long enough to meet and befriend my wife, to know our children, and for me to know her as an adult. I only wish now that I had taken more time just to sit and listen to her. At any rate, when my father called some weeks after her death to tell me how much I would receive from her will it surprised me. The amount did not shock me. I had given no thought to that. No, the mere fact of the inheritance surprised me. I was an heir and I did not even know it.

When we believe in Christ, when we “put him on” like a new coat, we become heirs of God. Paul tells us we become Abraham's offspring. He does not mean this literally. This has nothing to do with being a blood relative and thereby expecting a little something when they read the will. No, it means that when we believe—as Abraham believed—we receive blessings from God. In his case he received a land and a people. In our case, we receive salvation. We are freed from sin. We become part of the Body of Christ, where we find we have many brothers and sisters. The light of Christ changes our experience of this life, and it illumines our path to the next.

Put on Christ. Keep moving. This week I had to make another phone call. I needed advice on an extraordinarily difficult matter involving a third party. I knew the man I called had hard-won experience. He told me what he knew—and it was valuable—then concluded with the promise to pray for me and for the person needing the help. He quoted the slogan of a group to which he belongs: One day at a time. And he added that without prayer, he would not have lived to talk to me that day.

Put on Christ. Keep moving. Do you doubt that putting on Christ has real power to change your real life? We are surrounded by people who can testify that their faith in Christ has freed them from the consequences of their sins. Make no mistake: this in not some kind of cosmic Get Out of Jail Free card. We still sin. Yet when we believe in Jesus Christ as our crucified Savior, as the one who died to take away the sins of the world, we receive blessings from God. Those blessings include the grace and mercy that make forgiveness possible. Those blessings include the joy that comes from knowing we have been freed from the penalty we would otherwise have to pay for our sin. Those blessings include the Holy Spirit, which gives us faith and makes us able to minister in the name of Christ. Those blessings empowered one man to lead me toward preaching the message that God will get us through the worst of times. They empowered another man to give me excellent advice on a life-or-death issue.

Believe. Believe in Jesus. Put on Christ. Keep moving.