Accomplished by His Anguish
God Gives Hope to the Hopeless
Romans 5:1-11

†  I.H.S. †

May the grace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you hope, as you consider what Jesus accomplished as He endured the agony and anguish of His sacrifice

• Spirituality- a priority

When I originally thought through this sermon, I came up with a parable of sorts. Of sorts because it isn’t primarily about the kingdom of God, as a good Biblical parable should be.

Instead, it is about our lack of recognizing the need, and staying focused on the presence of God, and without thinking about that presence, and what it means for God to be our God, and for what it means to be His people, we are going to be incomplete, walking through the wilderness, encountering temptation and sin, and the guilt and shame that accompanies it.

So here is the semi-parable. A life without a regular focus on God, without hearing and reading His word and without the sacraments is like the box containing a half-finished project, that is buried in your garage, or your storage closet!

You all know what I mean – that project you started, and you were putting together until you realized you might have looked at the directions first? And then you realized you had to undo what you had done and start from scratch.

We often do that, we walk through our lives knowing God is there, but we forget the reason He is there. And so when life gets a bit complicated, when we are dealing with situations that make us question God, or when temptation and sin rearranges our lives, we often set aside our spiritual health. We think once we get our lives straight, we will find the time to pick up that Bible, or talk with God, or find the time to commune with God and His people. Burying our faith like that long-forgotten project becomes the norm, and let’s be honest – sometimes we live like we did before we knew God.

When we do live life, realizing God’s presence, even in the midst of stress, trauma and grief we know the hope of God’s rescue, for as we heard from Romans,

³ We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. ⁴ And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. ⁵ And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.

What a wonder it is, in the midst of problems and trials, to know how dearly God loves us!

• Utterly Helpless?

Often, it is when we run into problems and trials, that we realize our spiritual life has be placed very carefully up on a shelf, and then other things get piled in front of it. Those may be distractions, we hit a busy season in life, or there are wounds caused by others words or actions that we don’t want to deal with, right now.

The problem is the weight of the world, including the weight of our own sin crushes us, when we are ignoring our spiritual health, and the relationship which provides and restores it. That is what Paul talking about when he says,

⁶ When we were utterly helpless…

Those are strong words, utterly helpless.

But that is what the world does, it breaks us, and what we do to ourselves is often far worse. We basically disassemble ourselves and try to put ourselves back together in a way we think is right, ignoring how God tells us to live.

That is what every sin does, whether it is trying to find a god who isn’t god, who gives us what we think we want, or whether it is murder, adultery or gossip.

And then, having set God aside, we look at our lives and just put the brokenness on the shelf, and then bury it behind other things we don’t know how to fix…. and the broken and incompleteness of life fills up everything….

We need to hear the rest of what Paul writes…

When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. ⁷ Now, most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, though someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good. ⁸ But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.

There is our hope of salvation, that Jesus comes along, looks at our brokenness, and the love of God for us means that the Father and the Son have to do something about it.

• Our friend

Lent is that time, to open the garage door, to start to uncover all the stuff, and then to let a friend or relative, you know, the one who can fix anything, come in, and complete all the projects, clearing out the junk but getting the most out of your life—a life with Him that will go into eternity.

That is who Jesus is, that friend.  Hear the rest of the passage,

For since our friendship with God was restored by the death of his Son while we were still his enemies, we will certainly be saved through the life of his Son. ¹¹ So now we can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God.

I don’t care how full the “garage” of your life is, how broken it is, how incomplete. This is who God is, the one who loves you, who comes along and fixes and heals, restores, and promises to complete our lives. This is why we talk to Him, listening to how He reveals Himself to us, and how He heals us, as He cleanses us in baptism, heals us as we confess our sins, and nourishes and put us back together, as we eat and drink His body and blood and completes us.

So let’s spend this time, until Easter, giving Him our brokenness, the parts of our lives that are incomplete, and celebrate the love of God for us. AMEN!