For quite some time, Christians didn’t need to think very much about their faith and beliefs.  Yes, sure, society and culture were fallen, but in impersonal ways that didn’t touch us, personally.  The issues were big and remote: poverty, war, famine.  In these last decades, that has changed.  The big, remote issues are still there, remote as ever.  Now, other issues are closer, closer to our lives, closer to our hearts.  We are touched, personally; society means to touch us, personally, with its fallenness, in order to force a decision from Christians.  And it’s high time we did decide.  We were accustomed not to think about our faith and beliefs—oh, we were used to having faith and beliefs, but not to thinking about them.  It was all taken for granted.

The result is that we have gone along with what society tells us, because we’re used to hearing what society tells us, it seems good, right, fair, and loving, and we’re used to hearing a Christianity that doesn’t tell us much more than God loves us, as though that was all we needed to know.  If all our theology were summed up in the first verse of “Jesus Loves Me” that would be sweet, and woefully incomplete.  We’re used to human standards: society teaches us what is good and bad, what is right and wrong, what is true and what is false.  It was these very standards that sent Jesus to the cross as a dangerous madman, but we Presbyterians don’t think about that, even when we’re made to sing hard, old songs about it during the weeks before Easter, at which point, hopefully, we can get back to the happy songs.

St. Paul says he is happy to be beside himself for God.  By human standards he, like Jesus, was regarded as a babbler of nonsense: oh, Jesus had some valuable things to say, a few nuggets of truth to share; he had concern for the poor and the hungry: all very commendable.  However, when he talks about being truth, being life, how no one can come to God apart from him, how our virtuous lives count as nothing in the sight of God, well . . . .

To those inside the Church, what Paul is saying, like what Jesus said, is anything but insanity, foolishness.  To those inside, these words are life and health.  That’s the root of this word sane, from a Latin word that means health.  Paul tells the believers in Corinth that the healthy words he speaks are for their sake, because God has a deep and eternal concern for the health of His people.  Not physical health (though I’m not ruling that out) but spiritual health: the health that is life, true life, that grows, watered by Spirit and Word, that bears fruit for eternal life.  This health comes to us in Spirit and truth.  The world can tolerate neither.  The only spirit the world condones is the spirit of the age; the world permits truths, but don’t speak these days about absolute, unchangeable, eternal truth.  You’ll be laughed to scorn by intelligent people.

And in Spirit and truth, God teaches His standard, gives and shows us His standard in Jesus Christ, who reaches us through the Holy Spirit, whom we embrace through the Holy Spirit, by grace, through faith.  It’s a humbling, staggering, amazing thought that Jesus came for our sake, for your sake.  It’s an amazing revelation: life-altering, earth-shattering, standard-overturning.  It breaks and fills our hearts in the same breath.

We’re all broken.  We want to do right but aren’t so clear about what is right.  We want to be kind, patient, yet our hearts aren’t always in it.  We can acknowledge our brokenness to anyone who asks, but we aren’t going to put our brokenness on full display to anyone—the shame!  The mortifying shame!  Jesus comes, for our sake, seeing all our brokenness, all the way down, every hidden nook and shadowed corner.  He sees it all, and comes to us for our sake, because God is love, and God is glory, and God is purity, and in His love, glory, and purity, God has determined to save us for Himself, to gather us back from exile, that we might affirm His glory, purity, and love, so that we might enjoy it, testify to it, and share with Him in it, always.

So, we must divorce ourselves from human standards, fickle, unfaithful, unfruitful human standards, and learn God’s standard.  Truth be told, we aren’t quite ready to do that, and we aren’t really eager students.  By human standards, God’s standard doesn’t seem quite fair.  God’s standard demands things from us that we aren’t ready to give, to give up.  We want to decide right and wrong, good and bad, true and false for ourselves; oh, we’re willing to accept some advice from God on these things, but, really, how can we seriously be expected to conform ourselves to some old words written by old men in olden times in some old book?

Yet we also know and somehow want to live up to the love of Christ.  St. Paul reminds us that this love is our standard now, what rules us.  In Christ, the love of Christ is our rule for life, showing us what is good and what is bad, what right and what wrong, true, and false.  The love of Christ is wonderful, beautiful, patient, merciful, and it is holy, demanding, and rigorous.

Paul says that this love of Christ (both our love for Christ and Christ’s love powerfully and actively at work in us and among us) this love of Christ now rules, drives us, animates our lives with purpose and knowledge, because we have recognized “that one man died for everyone, which means that they all share in his death.  He died for all, so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but only for him who died and was raised to life for their sake” (5:14-15).  In his death, we died to human standards; in his rising, we live to God’s standard.

Paul says this applies to everyone.  As John also says, Jesus died for the world.  His atoning death applies to everyone.  Not everyone knows this; not everyone responds: there must be a response, a Yes and an Amen to what Jesus does.  Millions know about Jesus.  Millions don’t care one way or the other.  Jesus doesn’t make a difference to them.  They know about him; they have not yet met him.  They haven’t encountered him.  They don’t know that they have.  They wake up in the morning and don’t know they have encountered God.  They eat and do not know they have encountered God.  They feel and share love with spouse and children, and do not know they have encountered God, through all the blessings God gives to all.  We’ll take the blessings; you keep your God.

Is there a difference between very lost and only a little lost?  If I need to go north but go west instead, that’s lost, but what if I go northwest, or north-northwest?  Even a little lost ends up being totally lost, the farther along a person goes.

Some human standards take people west, very far, way out west.  Some take others northwest, and other human standards—so many human standards!—take still others sort of north-northwest.  That’s almost north, right?  Is almost faith, is almost Christ, is almost Christianity going to avail?  “But God, my heart was in the right place!”  By whose standard?  Nice, kind, generous, and all the rest of the qualities by which human standards identify “good” people don’t begin to touch holy and righteous: what believers have in Jesus Christ.  Holy and righteous are what God expects of us, what He made us for in the first place.  Goodness that does not proceed from holiness and righteousness gets you nowhere with God.

We’re born good.  No, but okay, let’s go with that: how much good will you need to outweigh your bad?  How much truth balances out one lie?  How much kindness outweighs one unkindness?  How much wisdom, one foolish act?  And we continue, all of us, everyone continues to rack up lies, unkindness, and foolishness, even if they make a determined, conscientious effort to be virtuous.  And how many, really, devote themselves to that?

In Jesus, our sin encounters God’s righteousness, our bad God’s good, our falsehood God’s truth.  Jesus is our point of contact with God’s transforming power.  We hammered him onto that cross to be done with him once for all, not recognizing, unable to recognize the hand of God, taking our sin away, giving us righteousness from God, from the very heart, the sacred heart of God.  We took love and life and we crucified him: it wasn’t our love; it wasn’t our life, not the life we wanted; not the love we wanted.  God’s righteousness comes to us to reconcile, to be friends once more, finally—to gather us again, dispersed no longer, scattered no more, brought back from exile, brought back through prayer, through power, through blood, through the cross.

God has an accounting department.  Have you ever gotten a past due notice?  Have you ever gotten a collection call?  Has the IRS ever sent you a letter about a problem in your calculations—the answers you came up with?  The radio is full of ads offering help with the IRS: I wonder why?  One guy testified that he owed the IRS $37,000.  How much will you have earned over a lifetime?  Let’s try to average it out, generously, and say $2,000,000.  And at tax time you are informed that you owe $4,000,000.  You can’t pay.  You didn’t earn enough, even over a lifetime, to pay that debt.  The shock.  The dismay.  The indignation.  The injustice of it all!  Stop and think, now.  Yes, you earned $2,000,000 over a lifetime, but let’s be honest: you also borrowed $6,000,000.  You asked God to be patient with you, consciously or, more likely, unconsciously, and He was patient with you.  You enjoyed the life on loan that you lived.  The rules were set out long ago; you thought you could change them, or that you didn’t have to play by them; you learn you were wrong.

In Christ, by grace, by the Spirit, we have learned we were wrong.  And we have reached out for Jesus.  You and I have received him.  We’ve been ushered into another department, where accounts are sealed and permanently put away.  The sealed file has a cross stamped upon it, in red.  Before it is put away, Jesus will ask if you’d like to review the contents, just to make sure it’s all in there.  He will say it with gentleness, with love, and with seriousness.  In that moment, his words will call to mind just what is in there.  You may shudder.  You may weep.  I will.  Jesus puts it away, never to be seen again.  Then, he will hold his arms open to you, and you’ll notice the holes in his hands.  In Jesus, our sin encounters God’s righteousness.  He removes our terminal sin and fills us with vital grace.

We used to belong to the world.  We lived like it.  A few may have known they were terrible; most thought they weren’t so bad as all that.  Who gets to say?  Who gets to decide?  Whose standard is ultimate, final?  Now, we belong to Christ: he reached out to us; the Holy Spirit came to us.  We were changed and we are being changed.  Many people all around us out there belong to the world.  They aren’t so bad, in their own eyes.  Jesus is reaching out to them, too.  He means to use you to do that.  The Holy Spirit is with you, to do that.

You used to belong to the world; now you belong to Christ.  You can tell them.  You can invite them to come and see.  You can walk with them, awaiting the time when the Spirit will make that Christ-change happen in them.  It may be a long walk.  Don’t say you can’t be bothered.  Don’t say you’re too busy.  Don’t say you don’t know anybody.  Say it will be worth it.  Say salvation will be worth it.  Say Jesus is worth it.

Worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!