11/26 Sermon - Grace: saved, enriched, and established

Grace: saved, enriched, and established

1 Corinthians 1:3-9 

If your house is on fire, you wouldn’t expect the mayor to come dressed up in fire gear to save you. If America were attacked, the President would not pick up a weapon, fight on the front lines, and save us from the enemy. Rulers govern, administer. They have other people do the dirty, hands-on work. There is probably some wisdom to that. That’s not what Jesus did. Jesus, our king, came to this world himself, became a human, charged the enemy lives, gave up his own life to save. Jesus himself, with his own arm and strength, no one else, saves us. That’s grace. What Jesus does for us. God’s love for us. 

We’ve all heard the word “grace” before. It’s one of those common church words that we say all the time. It means ‘love,’ but it’s deeper than that. It’s easy to forget. The word is kind of like an onion, or the ocean. It’s simple, but there are layers to it, different shades of meaning, the word is so rich and deep. Today, 1 Corinthians helps to give us more depth and meaning to this beautiful word, grace. We’ll ask ourselves, “What is grace?”

We are saved by grace

We are enriched by grace

We are established by grace

1. We are saved by grace

“I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.”

- What is grace? How can I best explain it?  

- Imagine a big equal sign: Grace = Jesus. Imagine you open up Mirriam Webster’s dictionary to the word “grace,” and in the following definition you would see one word: Jesus. When you think of the word ‘grace,’ I want you to think of Jesus.

- We are terrible sinners. We deserve hell. Our sin dooms us. Even our thoughts and words disgust God.

- But God showed us grace by sending Jesus, his only Son. Jesus lived a perfect life where we could not, suffered for our sin, and died in our place. We no longer are doomed to death and hell because of sin, because Jesus took our sin and suffered death and hell in our place.

- What does this mean?  

You will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ

- What is grace? How can I best explain it?

- Imagine a criminal whose record is wiped clean. A blank slate.  

- None of us have that, right? It doesn’t matter who we are, our past is full of envy, jealousy, biting words, selfish actions, pain and hurt that we’ve caused others, intentionally or not.

- But that’s not what God sees. Not only is our sin gone, not only are we not doomed to death and hell, but Jesus also actually gives us his perfect life. When God looks at you, at anyone who has faith in Jesus, he sees a perfect, holy child of God clothed in the holiness of Jesus. He looks at you as if you had a perfect record, a clean slate, a flawless history.

- How is any of this possible?

He has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

- What is grace? How can I best explain it?

- Imagine a family that lives in peace. Imagine a small town where everyone gets along. Imagine a workplace where all are friends. That same fellowship, union, community we see in others, we have with Jesus, in a much deeper, more personal sense.  

- How is that possible? This is the great mystery of Scripture. Paul wrote this in Colossian 1, “God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

- Brothers and sisters, Jesus lives in your heart. You have a fellowship with him that’s beyond understanding. This began with baptism, when God made a home in your heart. It continues when we hear God’s Word and take the Lord’s Supper, Jesus’ body and blood, in worship.

- Grace means that you have fellowship with Jesus. Jesus is always with you. He will never leave you or forsake you. Because he died and rose to life, we also will die and rise to eternal life.

- Summarize: What is grace? We are saved by grace. Jesus came to die for our sin, make us blameless before God, and live in our hearts.

2. We are enriched by grace

In Jesus you have been enriched in every way, with all kinds of speech and knowledge.

- What is grace? How can I explain it?

- Imagine a Christmas with family when you exchange gifts. But instead of exchanging gifts, every gift is given from God to you. That’s our reality!

- Grace means that God gives us not only spiritual blessings, but more earthly, physical blessings than we deserve or can even count.

- There is a warning in this reading for us. I’ll give you a little context.

- God richly blessed the Corinthians church. They had gifts of grace from God: they spoke in tongues, they prophesied, they encouraged.

- There was a lot of problems in the Corinthian church: they sued each other in public courts, committed disgusting sexual sins with each other, all their gifts made them arrogant and puffed up, and they were divided into factions.

- Here was their issue: They were focused on this world, on their own gifts, on their own accomplishments. Paul calls their spiritual gifts “gifts of grace,” but they saw those gifts as something they achieved or owned.   They were distracted from Jesus, from grace. They were not focused on Jesus’ return, but on milking as much as possible from this world.  

- God showed the Corinthians grace: he enriched their lives with gifts, but they used those gifts to be selfish and arrogant.

- This pushes us to ask ourselves some biting questions:

- How do I view my own gifts? Are my talents, my money, my possessions something I own, I earned, I control… or a gift of God, for his glory.

- How do I view my time in this world? Is it all about me, about having as much fun as possible… or serving God and others?

- How do I view the church? A place that’s just routine and comfortable, a place that’s boring and tedious… or the place I go to grow in Jesus?

- How do I view Jesus’ second coming, judgment day? A far thing that will never happen in my life, maybe even never, not a big deal… or something I should focus on and pay attention to and patiently.

> We say all the time that we look forward to the resurrection and the day when Jesus will come again. We tell ourselves that's all that matters. But don't I live so much of the time like this life right now is the more important one? Don't I so often live like it's all about this life? Like this world is my eternal home?"

- What is grace? It’s that God gives us so many gifts and blessings, spiritual and physical, already in this life to use and enjoy. But the point is not to focus on this life! Paul write, “Therefore, you do not lack any spiritual gift…as you eagerly await for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed.”

- We use our gifts and blessings to love and serve God, our family and friends, our neighbors, and everyone around us. Christians have a rich history of helping the poor and needy. But the whole time our hands help and serve those around us, the whole time our eyes look for ways to follow God and help others, our hearts long for Jesus to return, our eyes also look up to heaven and eagerly wait for Jesus to come back.

- We have some pretty awesome comfort as we wait.

3. We are established by grace

God will also keep us firm to the end.

- What is grace? How can I explain it?

- Imagine a sandbox, and a child who makes a sandcastle. He builds the walls, he establishes the towers and turrets, he even puts a stick in the center tower for his flag. That’s how God deals with you, but in a much more powerful way.  

- You are not a sandcastle. You are not a leaf blown here and there by the wind. You are not a house ready to fall. We have doubts sometimes, right? “Am I good enough? Do I measure up to other people’s standards?” 

- This is grace: God has established you. He has given you the gift of faith and knowledge of his Son. He strengthens you in his Word and Sacraments. He keeps you in the shadow of his wings, as a hen protects her young. As we wait for Jesus to return, to appear on the last day and take us to heaven, Jesus himself lives in our hearts and God keeps us firm in our faith in him. We’re not on our own! God is with us. And this gives us peace.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

- Because of God’s amazing grace, we have peace in him.  

- What is peace? How can I explain it?

- Imagine that you’re a child again, but you’re lost at a grocery store. You panic, run around, start crying. Suddenly, mom appears out of nowhere and you feel safe again, at peace, happy, and you smile.

- This world can be terrible. No matter how bad our circumstances are, it can always get worse.

- We can smile, we can feel safe, we can rejoice even in the worst suffering, no matter how bad things get because we know it gets better. Jesus will come back. He will take us and bring us to paradise, to eternal life, because we are blameless, saved, redeemed children of God.

- And so we can enjoy this life and all the ways God enriches us with gifts and blessings as wait, established by God.

- If you kept reading in the letter of first Corinthians, you’d see how bad it was. I talked about it before: sexual sins, divisions in the church, lawsuits in the family of believers, arrogance and pride. But this is how Paul starts the letter. He talks about grace, how the Corinthians have been saved by grace, enriched by grace, and established by grace.

- This week, this month, will be hard for us. We’ll fall into sin and disobey God. We’ll have anxiety, stress, and worry. We’ll run into problems. This is a great way to start our week, with grace. I encourage you to start every day with grace. You are saved by grace through Jesus. You are enriched by grace with every blessing. You are established by grace as God keeps you until the end.