* The following is a sermon, the second in a series that I wrote as Lenten reflections. I don't usually post sermons here, because (at least in my practice) they work better as a spoken medium, and this blog is devoted to the written medium. But they do give a good look at the significance of Christ's death on the cross, so I offer them here as a fitting follow-up to our recent celebration of Holy Week.
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Our passage this morning starts in
Romans chapter 5, so please feel free to turn there now, and we’ll dig into the
text in a few minutes. Today we continue with our series looking at the meaning
of the Cross. Last week, if you remember, we talked about how Scripture
describes our sin as a crime against God—a crime that deserves punishment. And
one of the things that Christ did on the Cross was to pay the penalty for those
sins. But that’s not the only picture of the Cross that the Bible gives us. Jesus
did win forgiveness for our sins on the Cross, but that’s not the only thing he
accomplished. And to understand how far the effects of the atonement run, we
need to take another look at the nature of sin.
And to lay the framework for that,
let me tell you about how I came to put my faith in Jesus. I grew up in a
Christian family, so I heard the story of the Gospel right from the get-go. And
I was very young when I accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior—about five years
old. I was told that Jesus would forgive my sins. But I also had this
expectation that something miraculous would happen inside me—that once I became
a Christian, I would stop sinning. I was expecting a lightning-bolt from God to
turn me holy. Well, it didn’t happen. I kept sinning (and yes, even five year
olds can understand what sin is). And I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to
do with that. I thought, “Well, maybe my salvation didn’t ‘take’ on the first
try.” So I would pray for salvation, over and over again. But as time went on,
I began to realize that the problem of sin wasn’t just the problem of my
outward, sinful actions. There was something fundamentally wrong, deep inside
of me—and that was where the sin was coming from. I knew that my sinful actions
were forgiven, but I also knew that sin was still with me, living inside me.
And that’s where I want to focus
our attention today. We tend to look at sin as individual events—discrete
choices, each a crime against God. If I have a prideful thought, that’s a sin.
If I steal something from a store, that’s a sin. If I gossip about my
neighbors, that’s a sin. But sin actually runs much deeper than the actions
themselves. Sin begins in the heart. Theologians have always talked not only
about individual sins as crimes against God, but of the “sin nature”—something
deep within us that is twisted away from God, driving us to do those sinful
actions. So sin isn’t just reducible to the acts themselves; it’s like a
disease that each of us carries around, and the sinful actions we do are really
the symptoms of that disease.
While it’s true that our sins are
crimes against God—making us criminals—it’s also true that we’re victims in a
sense. We’re enslaved to this power of sin that we can’t get away from. Have
you ever struggled with a sin that you just can’t seem to get away with? Maybe
an addiction—or a habit that’s been formed over many years. And although you
know you should stop, and something inside you desperately wants to stop…you can’t.
You try and you try, and you can’t get free. It happens to Christians just the
same as it does to nonbelievers, and it happens because we are all victims of
the disease of sin.
Well, you may ask, what does that
have to do with the Cross? If our crimes of sin are forgiven and paid for, why
do we need to talk about anything else? Because the Bible tells us that not
only did Jesus pay the penalty for our sins, he also set in motion a process of
healing in our souls. He died not only to absolve us from guilt, but to set us
free from the enslaving power of sin altogether. He’s not just interested in
getting you out of hell; he’s interested in making you holy and bringing you
into close fellowship with himself. And that can only happen if the sin nature,
deep inside of us, is being carefully rooted out.
1.) The Disease of Sin (Original Sin) – Rom. 5:12
Let’s look at the text—Romans 5,
verse 12 (on page 977 of your pew Bible). [Read
text] Who is the “one man” that Paul refers to here? If you remember the story
from the beginning of Genesis, you’ll recognize that he’s talking about Adam
here. Adam—the first man, the representative of our whole race—he sinned in the
Garden of Eden and was cast out. And that’s how sin entered the world. And then
he goes on to say, “death came to all men, because all sinned.” He’s not saying
that every human eventually commits a sin, even though that’s also true—he’s
saying that somehow, we were involved in Adam’s sin, because we—the whole human
race—were a part of Adam. We share in his sin, and now that sin nature—the
fundamental disposition of our hearts that turns away from God—that gets passed
down to each and every person, just as if it were written into our genetic
code. You can imagine it as an inherited disease, and every human being in the
world has it. If you ever hear theologians talking about “original sin,” that’s
what they’re referring to.
So sin is actually a part of us
now, hardwired into our nature. That’s where our sinful actions come from. And
you can see it even in the youngest of children. Every human being has a
fundamental selfish tendency, right from birth, and an instinct toward
rebellion. What’s the favorite word of so many young kids? “No!” Now, there’s a
lot of good that remains in human nature, but some of those aspects are the
effects of the disease of sin that lives in each of us.
But it wasn’t meant to be this way.
God didn’t originally create humans with a sin nature. Adam didn’t start off
with a sin nature; he was free from sin. It was only after his freely-chosen
act of sin that the human race caught the disease. And that’s what we need to
remember about sin—all the brokenness we see around us, and all the brokenness
in our own lives—this is not the way it’s supposed to be. And God is in the
business, through what Jesus did on the Cross, of setting things back into
their original intent.
Genesis 1 tells us that in the
beginning, we were created in the image of God. We were created to reflect his
character and his glory. We were created to be men and women who are on fire
with virtue and honor and holiness and truth. But sin changed all that. We’re
still made in the image of God, but now it’s a little harder to see God’s
character and holiness reflected in us.
I read a news article this week
about a church in Italy
where they’ve been working on a new technique to uncover some frescos and
murals that were painted by the great artist Giotto. A few hundred years ago,
the owners of the church decided to paint over the Giotto murals, and so they
whitewashed the whole thing and hid the old paintings under a layer of white
paint. Eventually they decided to take the white paint off, so they attacked
the walls with harsh chemicals and steel wool. And they got down to the old
Giotto paintings again, but now they were faded and defaced. They were hard to
make out, because the white paint and the harsh scrubbing had seriously hurt
the paintings.
That’s what we’re like. The Eastern
Orthodox tradition of Christianity talks about human beings as paintings, and
we were originally painted to look like God himself. But sin came in and
defaced the paintings. It tried to paint over the image of God, and it attacked
the painting with chemicals and steel wool. And now the image is still there,
but it’s defaced. It’s not quite how it was meant to be. But Jesus came and
died in order to re-paint that original image in us. The message of the Cross
isn’t merely that God forgives sins and leaves us morally neutral; it’s that
he’s working in us to make us holy and righteous. He died on the Cross to open
a way for us to become what we were meant to be. He’s working in us to heal the
disease of sin that has plagued us for so long. He died to break the power of
that disease, and he is the only thing in the world that offers healing from its
effects.
2.) Jesus is the Antidote – Rom. 5:18-19
If sin is a disease, then Jesus is
the antidote. Scroll down the passage a little bit to verse 18. [Read text] Here Paul is describing how
this works. He describes Jesus as “the second Adam,” and if you’re interested
in that comparison, you can also find it in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul brings
it up again. Just as Adam was the representative of the whole human race, so
Jesus is the representative of the whole human race as it was meant to be. He
is our picture of what humanity without sin looks like. And in Jesus, God has
begun the re-creation of the human race. He is now the head of a new humanity,
the redeemed people of God, and in them he is doing his work of healing the sin
nature. If we’re following Christ as our Lord, then we are “in him,” as Paul so
often says—we’re “in him” spiritually, in the same sort of way that we were all
“in Adam,” physically and spiritually. So while we inherit the disease of sin
from Adam; if we’re Christians then we also inherit the antidote to sin from
Jesus.
How did he do it? How did he break
the curse and cure the disease of sin? These verses tell us how. It was
disobedience on Adam’s part that turned us all into sinners. And it was
obedience on Christ’s part that makes us righteous. Jesus undid the sin of
Adam. And what was his act of obedience? It was the Cross. Do you remember the
story of Jesus praying in the Garden
of Gethsemane Garden of Gethsemane
It says here that those who are in
Jesus “will be made righteous”—future tense. It’s already begun in our hearts,
but it’s a slow process of beating this disease. Here in this earthly life,
we’ll always still have some hint of sin in our hearts—but the healing has
begun, and if we let him, Christ will be carrying out his purifying work in us.
[Illustration
with prop] Look at this glass. It’s full to the brim of water that has some
black coffee mixed in. The whole glass of water is dark. But now, if I start
dripping in, drop by drop, clear water into the glass, what happens? It starts
to dilute the coffee and overflow the cup. With every drop of pure water I put
in, more of the coffee gets pushed out of the cup. Now imagine that I keep
dropping water, drop by drop, into this cup. Will it ever be completely free of
all the coffee particles? No. But if I do it long enough, the coffee will be so
diluted that the glass will become almost all clear again. [Hold up a glass of clear water] That’s how Christ works against
the disease of sin in our lives. It’s a long, slow process of letting him give
us his holiness and his righteousness and his love. And if we let him do that,
our sin will be pushed out of our lives, little by little. Until eventually, if
we keep at it—people will be able to look at our lives and say, “He’s just like
Jesus; she’s just like Jesus.”
3.) Be who you are! (Rom.
So if we all have this disease of
sin, and if Jesus’ death on the Cross provides the antidote that will work to
heal us, then where does that leave us? Scroll down a little farther, into
chapter 6, and find verse 6. [Read text] What
is Paul saying? He’s saying that even though the process of healing the disease
of sin is a long one, our fundamental identity has changed along the way.
Because of what Jesus did on the Cross, we are different than we used to be, in
the deepest parts of our being. Our old self was crucified with him. We shared
in Jesus’ death. We shared in his act of obedience. Because of that, we are now
free from sin.
I’ve been using the image of
disease to talk about sin, but here Paul brings in another metaphor. He talks
about it in terms of slavery. Previously we were slaves to sin—we couldn’t get
away from it; we couldn’t not sin.
But now, because of what Jesus did on the Cross, we are free. We are now in a radically different position than we were
before. Without Jesus, sin enslaved us. It ruled our lives. But now we can
actually say no to sin, just as Jesus did. We’re not locked into our old
patterns of behavior. We might still struggle with sin, because the effects of
the disease are still at work there, but it doesn’t need to be our master
anymore.
So with that truth in mind, Paul
says to us, “Be who you are!” You are free from sin, so don’t choose to go back
to sin now! You’re not a slave, so don’t be a slave. Be who you are. When
slaves are set free, they don’t choose to walk around with manacles and chains
on their wrists anymore. They leave all of that behind, and they choose to live
in the freedom of their new identity. And that’s true of us too. We can choose
to live in the freedom of our identity. We can choose to leave our patterns of
sin behind, because Jesus has set us free from sin and given us the antidote
for its disease. It may take a long time, and a lot of work, but the glorious
truth of the Gospel is that because of the Cross, you can be free of the addictions
and sinful habits that have plagued you for so long.
Conclusion
I hope the point here was clear.
This is a little different way of looking at the Gospel and at the problem of
sin, but it’s here in the Bible. Forgiveness of sins is part of the story of
the Cross, but it’s not the whole story. And we can come to a richer
understanding of the Cross if we look at some of those other meanings, because
they all go hand in hand. As we said last week, our sinful actions are crimes
against God, and Jesus paid the penalty for those crimes and won our
forgiveness. But that’s not all he did. We’re also the victims of a
deeper-running disease of sin. And Jesus doesn’t just forgive our sinful
actions, he offers us freedom from the power of sin altogether through his act
of obedience on the Cross. Our salvation doesn’t end with the forgiveness of
sins. It continues on, giving us more blessings along the way. And even after
we have our sins forgiven, we still have the wonderful adventure of working
side by side with the Spirit of God to let him do his healing work in our
sinful hearts. Because of the Cross, we have the amazing adventure of letting
Jesus make us holy and righteous. It’s a long road, but it’s worth it all. If
we let him, he will make us what we were always meant to be. Think about
it—what would your life look like if you were purified and triumphant? What
would your life look like if you could regularly walk in victory over your
sins? The author of 2 Peter tells us that we have been given everything we need
for life and godliness, and that we can participate in the divine nature. It’s
an amazing picture, an amazing adventure that Jesus calls us to take part in.
He is re-creating humanity through the Cross, and if you let him, he can make
you truly extraordinary. He can make you a reflection of himself.