Brent Kuhlman

+ Jesu Juva +

If you’d quit living like Anna Nicole Smith, God would like you more.  If you’d quit dancing and playing cards, God wouldn’t be so angry at you.  Clean up your messy lives.    Give Jesus your life.  Make Him your Master and then He’ll put you on a trail run.  Stop sinning for God’s sake.  Give Jesus your heart.  Obey.  Then after a probationary period of getting your act together, a testing period to see if you’re really a Christian, Jesus might ask you for a second interview.  “Oh, please Jesus, I’ll try harder.  I promise to be better.”

We’re addicted to these grim pills of religion.  Spirituality pills.  Morality pills.  Druggies when it comes to calling the salvation shots with God.  Strung out on believing that we, like the prodigal son last week, can somehow reconcile our situation with God our Father.  Fudge the bookkeeping in our favor by our good behavior.  By our promises.  By our sorrow.  We’re always putting in some kind of high-powered religious works additive to the low octane gasoline of God’s grace.

The apostle puts us in rehab.  And unlike Brittany Spears, he’s going to keep us there.  To lose our religion.  Come to our rescue.  It’s time to go cold turkey on “having a righteousness of our own.”  All our doing and all our not doing amounts to nothing before God.  Zilch.  Zero.  Zippo.  Nada.

Knocked off doing your favorite sin?  Or at least you want to quit your favorite sin?  Haven’t cursed in weeks?  Haven’t let alcohol or nicotine touch your lips in years?  Try to live by the Golden Rule?  Tithe?  You love?  You really read your Bible?  Perfect attendance or almost perfect attendance in Sunday School?  Been an active member of the congregation as long as you can remember?  That should at least count for something before our heavenly Father shouldn’t it?

If you think all that or some of it gives you an in with God the Father, you’re a works righteousness drug addict.  You’re high on the religion of works. Stoned out of your mind on a dope that makes you believe that God likes you because of what you do or don’t do.  A self-righteous junkie. 

Paul likens all such righteousness-of-our-own-stuff as skeebala: the waste that you flush down the toilet after you’ve sat there for a while.  That’s what the apostle says you can do with all your trying to call the shots with God the Father.

So here’s Paul to the rescue.  A dramatic one.  He says:  “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.  I consider them, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own   . . . but that which is through faith in Christ -- the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.”

It’s time to give up all the religion pills.  The spirituality pills.  The morality pills.  In their place comes Jesus.  There’s nothing like a bigger dose of Jesus for our salvation-by-what-we-do-addiction. There’s His perfection.  His holiness.  His righteousness.  His forgiveness.  For you.  Pure gift.

Christ’s death is for you.  His resurrection is for you.  Jesus is everything.  We are nothing.

So Jesus dies for us.  He bolts out of His grave for us.  Then He baptizes us.  Put His Name on us.  Buried us into His death.  Raises us to a new life.

There’s nothing like Baptism to show us that there’s a whole different kind of righteousness going on.  The Lord’s.  Not ours.

So we like Paul share in Christ’s sufferings, death and resurrection.  Jesus didn’t do all that for Himself.  He did it all to share with us.  His suffering counts for us.  His death and resurrection count for us.  And He says it’s ours even now in His Word and Sacraments.  What’s His is ours.  Even for you.  For you are baptized.

We don’t see it.  It’s all hidden.  We still look imperfect.  We still sin.  Big time.  And yet the Lord’s forgiving death is always there for us.  All gift.  A righteousness not of our own making.  A righteousness that God gives in His Son.  The antidote to the drug -overdosing-righteousness-of-our-own.

In this life we press on.  We strain toward what is ahead.  And when we die -- when God calls us heavenward – we’ll see exactly what we’ve had all along:  The righteousness of Christ!

And that’s all that matters.  Jesus our inheritance.  Jesus our foundation.  Jesus our cornerstone.  Jesus our death.  Jesus our life.  Just Jesus.  Here in time.  There in eternity.  Thank you Jesus.

In the Name of Jesus.  Amen