No Business as Usual. Bruce L. Taylor
sacrifice of his Son. Remarkable! And really living in peace with God means living in peace with everything that God has made and over which God has sovereignty—all of creation. We don’t have to make the peace—God has already done that. It has nothing to do with any efforts of our own. We just need to keep the peace God has given, to enjoy the peace God has created.
Paul also says that we exist in a state of grace. It’s not just God’s kindly attitude toward us. It is God’s active role in our lives—undeserved love, undeserved care, undeserved provision for what we need. And we can even boast that we are created in God’s image and destined for fellowship with God and therefore our firm hope is to be partakers in the glory of God—not sentenced to an eternity of shame, but free to exult forever in the fact that we are children and therefore heirs of the one who created the entire universe. And finally, we know the outcome of whatever suffering we may endure in this life; it cannot destroy us, it cannot defeat us, it cannot make us less in God’s sight or signal that God has abandoned us. So suffering can only make us more like Jesus Christ, who suffered unjustly at the hands of some weak, silly, scared people who worked awfully hard at denying love and rejecting grace and dooming themselves to the failure of trying to save themselves.
I confess that, as a person of Reformed background, it always amuses me to be approached by someone and be asked, “Are you saved?” The implication is that there is something I must do for myself or that they are going to do for me. Paul was quite convinced that no person can possibly justify her- or himself in God’s eyes, as Martin Luther and the other Reformers were also convinced fifteen centuries later. All we can do is to be open to the reconciliation that God has already achieved. Haven’t they heard? The salvation is already accomplished—God has already made me right, blameless, and acceptable through the death of Jesus Christ. That’s the good news. I need only trust the fact of what is already true. It is not a matter of jumping through any additional hoops. It is not a matter of discovering any additional truth.
But we mustn’t think that an answer of “Yes” to the question “Are you saved?” is all that matters. Justification—being regarded as right, blameless, and acceptable—is not the final goal of the Christian life or the end of Christian experience. Justification is only the beginning. To be a Christian—to be so grateful for God’s salvation in Jesus that we dedicate our lives to following and obeying Christ as his disciples—is to be always a work in progress. You and I can never assume that we have arrived at the fullness of what God intends for us to be. We should never think that we have become somehow worthy of Christ having died for us. We must never suppose that the Holy Spirit cannot bring us to a more perfect servanthood in the likeness of Jesus. That is what we declare our goal is when we say “Yes” to the accomplished fact of God’s salvation. It may well involve hardships. But what God has already done for us is the source of our confidence about what God will yet do. This God who has already given us so much, freely and purely from an abundance of love for us, surely will not abandon us or betray our trust.
“Justification” means that God regards us as righteous. That is our faith in something that happened thousands of years before we were even born. But that is only the beginning. We discover, as we grow from our justification into Christ-likeness, that we are surrounded by God’s mercy and supported by God’s care. God’s love becomes the central and determining motive in everything that we do, and we find ourselves in a new, deeper relationship with God who created us for that very purpose. We grow more “saintly,” if you will, more “holy.” And that process, which again is really no work of our own, but the inevitable work of the Holy Spirit, is known in the Bible by another technical word—“sanctification”. It comes from the Latin word meaning “holy” or “sacred.” It is the term that describes our living out the life that God has promised us who believe, of growing up into the freedom that God has given, of becoming more and more like Jesus every day of our lives as more and more we turn away from our own agenda, from self-love and from self-indulgence, to love for God that prompts us to serve others lovingly in the pattern of Christ.
I will not insult your intelligence by claiming that every Christian is growing steadily and effectively and devotedly into the likeness of Jesus Christ. Many of us have known people who, though they did not profess faith in Jesus Christ, were in fact more Christ-like than some every-Sunday worshipers. We have all known baptized people who have not moved beyond the “justification” stage, who, having heard of their salvation in Jesus Christ, failed to grow in love and hope, or other people who somehow think that they have arrived, fully and completely, and deserve specific privileges and claim certain prerogatives. And that is why, technical as they sound and boring as they may seem, these terms that Paul uses—“justification” and “sanctification”—are important to you and me. They keep us mindful that a Christian always should be, and, whether he or she realizes it, always is, a work in progress. The fact that we are not and never will be Jesus Christ does not keep us from striving to be obedient to all that Christ commands. The fact that Jesus Christ is uniquely the Son of God does not dissuade us from discovering all that it means for us to become children of God.
There came a time in Jesus’ earthly career that it was appropriate to pass on and share some of his power and authority to preach and to teach and to heal. Jesus had many followers in the sense of people who sought him out to hear what he had to say and to claim his mercy for their sins and to present their ailments for his cure. They believed he had power to speak truth and forgive transgressions and perform miracles to help people. But Jesus needed apostles who would go out and minister to others he did not have time to reach, disciples to carry on his ministry of preaching and teaching and healing after his death and resurrection. He gathered twelve of his followers “and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. . . . [He told them,] ‘[P]roclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons’” (Matt 10:1, 7–8a, NRSV). We can imagine that they were astonished and amazed that Jesus would give them such an authority and not a little apprehensive that Jesus would give them such an agenda. But we know from the testimony of the Bible that they found themselves able to do all that Jesus had commanded, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and to grow in their ability and their dedication, and, along the way, to grow in their understanding of God’s loving purpose in Jesus Christ. They were, each one of them, a work of God in progress (even Judas Iscariot, until he lost faith), growing into the likeness of Christ Jesus their Lord.
Are you growing, maturing, becoming? Justification is merely the door to the life for which and to which God has saved us in Jesus Christ. It is the threshold of a new relationship with God and with others in which we experience God’s love and God’s peace. If we are grateful for what God has done for us, we move beyond being “acceptable” in God’s sight to being an active agent of God’s redeeming love in the likeness of God’s Son Jesus Christ. Our “forgiveness” ripens from simply getting off of the legal hook for our sins into the serenity of the relationship of parent and children, and the dedication of master and disciples, and the blessings of eternal life here and now. All of these together make up the fullness of what the Bible means by “salvation.”
“Are you saved?” someone may someday ask you as you walk down the street or through an airport. I hope you respond, “Yes, of course; God did that two thousand years ago. Now, I am a work in progress.”
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Spanish Springs Presbyterian Church, Sparks, Nevada
June 22, 2008
Genesis 21:8–21
Romans 6:1b–11
Matthew 10:24–42
“God’s Other Life”
In November of 1961, my father delivered the keynote speech at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Section of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in El Paso, Texas. At the time, he was the exploration manager for El Paso Natural Gas Company. That year’s meeting was a special international gathering of geologists from Mexico and other Latin American countries as well as the United States. The other major speaker at the meeting was Guillermo Salas, an internationally-acclaimed geologist who