Text:  1 Corinthians 10:1-13 (Luke 13:1-9)                                                          W Oculi (3^rd Sunday in Lent)

Eyes on Jesus from Start to Finish

            In the name of him who set the captives free and now leads them on the path of eternal life, dear friends in Christ:  This morning I’d like to spend some time with you considering the question of the assurance of your salvation.  Think for a moment how you might respond to this question: Are you going to make it to heaven one day?  … Think about it … okay, now, if your answer is something along the lines of, “Gosh, I don’t know; but I sure hope so” then please stay tuned because what follows is important.  (Now that I think of it, if your answer is, “No, I’m pretty sure I won’t make it” then you’ll want to pay especially close attention to what follows.)  But if your answer is more positive, something like, “Yes, I will definitely end up in heaven” then you have an extra assignment.  You have to answer this question too:  What makes you so sure?   … Alright, got an answer?  Then keep it in the back of your mind as we proceed.

            No doubt in your association with other Christians, or when listening to Christian radio or doing some devotional reading, you have heard a similar question phrased like this:  “Are you saved?”  Or maybe you’ve heard it cast in the past tense:  “Have you been saved?”  Or maybe someone was looking for a specific point in time and asked, “When were you saved?”  Or perhaps you heard it expressed not so much as a question, but rather as a statement.  Someone will speak of a time in his life “before I was saved”, or how things are different “since I have been saved”.  It’s a way of speaking that is not normally heard in our Lutheran circles because the phrasing itself often implies a theological perspective that we do not entirely share.

            Usually when a Christian from a different denomination asks the question, “Are you saved?” the basic idea behind the inquiry is “Do you have saving faith in Christ?”  That is:  “Do you acknowledge that you are a sinner who deserves God’s wrath and judgment, realize the hopelessness of your condition before God, and believe in the good news of Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross for your sin?”  With that understanding, I suppose all of you would say, “Yes, I’m saved”.  And with that same understanding of the question, if I pressed you to tell me when you were saved, since most of you are lifelong Lutherans, I expect that most of you would say, “When I was baptized – that’s when, by the water and the power of the Word, the Holy Spirit of God first brought me to repentance and faith in Christ”.

            Now, you probably know that in most Protestant churches, that wouldn’t be thought of as a good answer; but I would give you full credit.  In fact, for an answer like that I’d even let you sit in the front pew on Sundays. Now, I know some of you came to faith in Christ when you were older.  You can remember when it happened.  But those of us who grew up in the church really can’t remember a time when we didn’t believe in Jesus.  For us, it’s like David prayed to the Lord in the Psalm, “I trusted in you from my mother’s breast.”  Sure, the faith we have has grown and deepened in us since then (at least I hope it has); but it’s been there all along.

            And this is why it gets a bit confusing when we’re speaking with other Christians because most Protestants don’t believe that an infant can have saving faith in Christ.  So, if they asked you, “When were you saved?” they’d be thinking of a specific time after you had attained a certain level of reasoning ability so that you could understand certain biblical facts about Jesus and the Gospel, and then based on that knowledge you had some sort of significant conversion experience.  Depending on the questioner, the conversion experience he would be thinking of might have involved a decision to accept and follow Jesus, or maybe a powerful feeling of peace sweeping over you, or perhaps even an ecstatic episode in which you began to speak in a strange language.  But either way, and here is the danger and why we don’t speak these terms, usually implied in the questions “Are you saved?” and “When were you saved?” is the thought that if you have once come to saving faith in the Gospel, your final salvation is guaranteed.  It is sometimes expressed this way:  “Once saved, always saved”.  The idea is that there is certain milestone event in the life of a Christian (in this case it’s the starting line) that once having passed there’s no possibility of ever turning back.  If you began the course of faith, then it’s guaranteed:  you will finish it.  Now, it happens that many Lutherans, though they wouldn’t necessarily employ the same language, hold a similar view of some kind of milestone event in the life of a Christian that once having been achieved guarantees you’ll cross the finish line in the end.  For some it’s Baptism, others might say Confirmation, and still others might be less specific, but generally hold an idea that there comes a point along the path when you’ve “paid your dues”, so to speak, and you’ve satisfied the minimum requirements, whatever they are, so that from this point on it doesn’t make much difference – you’ve got enough momentum to carry you safely to the final goal.

            It is this sort of notion exactly that St. Paul is addressing in today’s Epistle lesson which is part of his letter of guidance and correction to the Christian church at Corinth.  So we ask that the Holy Spirit will enlighten our minds as we consider what he has to say about this idea that is so widespread in the church.

            Paul spent not quite two years preaching the Gospel and teaching at Corinth as part of his second mission journey.  He founded the church there, and under his direction it became a major center for the spread of the Gospel throughout Greece.  The members of its congregation were especially known for their thorough knowledge of the Scripture and for their exercise of spiritual gifts.  But unfortunately, after Paul’s departure to take the Gospel to new places, it became a deeply divided church.  It was plagued by a number of false doctrines that arose among the believers.  In addition, there was a lot of factional infighting and struggles for control of the church.  And over all the conflicts and divisions there was a general sense of moral apathy. Many at the Corinthian church thought that the Gospel of Jesus Christ, with its emphasis on the forgiveness of sins, meant that sin was no longer a problem for believers.  You could go out and sin as much as you please:  you could worship at the temples of idols with your non-Christian friends and family members, you could hire prostitutes, engage in fornication – even incest, cheat at business, file lawsuits against fellow believers, whatever suited you … it didn’t matter because for Christ’s sake God forgave you all your sins.  It seemed the prevailing attitude was “I believe in Jesus, I’ve been baptized, I go to church, I come to the Lord’s Table, I have the Holy Spirit – so, my place in heaven is ready and waiting:  I’ve been saved; now all I have to do is make myself as comfortable as possible until I get there”.  And again, before we start casting stones at the Corinthians, I think we should ask ourselves if don’t sometimes also fall into the same attitude of moral indifference.

            In response to this, to the church at Corinth – and to us – Paul gives a little history lesson. He says, “You remember our forefathers, don’t you, the ones God led out of slavery in Egypt and promised to take to the Holy Land?  They had their “baptism” in water when the Spirit of God hovered over them while they passed through the Red Sea and the Lord delivered them from their enslavers. And if you had asked any one of them as they stood on the edge of the sea that just swallowed up the Pharaoh’s army, ‘Are you saved?’ they would have answered, “Sure I am!  Didn’t you see what God just did for me?”  And then, on their way, they had God’s Word hand delivered to them from heaven at Mount Sinai and taught to them by Moses, the greatest prophet of the Old Testament.  You think you know the Bible from reading it?  Well, they lived it.  It’s safe to say that they knew it better than you ever will.  And they had their own kind of sacramental meal – spiritual food:  bread that came down from heaven every day and water that flowed from a Rock which Paul tells us was Christ himself.  And all throughout their journey, God lived with them in the Tabernacle and led them on their way in the cloud and pillar of fire.  And if you had stopped any one of them and said, ‘Where are you going?’ they would have answered, ‘I’m going to the land God has promised to give me’. ‘Are you sure you’re going to get there?’  ‘Of course I’m sure:  I’m one of God’s chosen people – I’ve been saved’.

            “But”, Paul continues, “how many of them actually made it to the Promised Land?  Of those that started, very few indeed.  Most perished in the desert – the place is littered with their bodies.  Why?  Moral indifference.  They set their hearts on evil desires and on satisfying their need to find pleasure and entertainment in things God had prohibited.  They fell into sexual immorality.  They figured that as long as they were marching along with God everything was okay. If they sinned, they could sacrifice a goat or something and everything would be all right again – ‘After all, isn’t that why God directed us to offer sacrifices, to cover up sin?’”

            Well, yes, that’s exactly why God gave the people the Old Testament sacrificial system:  to atone for sin.  But the problem was the way they thought about the sacrifices.  They figured as long as they had goats, they could go on sinning, because in the end God would get what he wanted:  dead goats.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t dead goats that God was after, what he wanted was people with repentant hearts, people who were sorry for their sins and who wanted to stop sinning.  God wanted people who brought goats for sacrifice so that they could see death that they knew they deserved.  But when the people lost sight of that, and didn’t feel any kind of sorrow for their sin, it became necessary for God to apply death and trouble directly to the people to make them feel it more personally.  And so Paul runs down a list of disasters that God sent to the Israelites to get them to turn back to him with repentant hearts.

            And then he says, “These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us”.  Those stories are not just historical curiosities about how God used to deal with people in ancient times:  the stories are about us.  Their casual attitude toward sin and sacrifice are illustrations of our own attitudes about sin and the sacrifice Jesus made for us.  In fact, we may be at higher risk than they were.  At least they had to handle the sacrificial goats and lambs, see the blood, and smell the smoke:  they were confronted by death.  We figure “Hey, the sacrifice for my sin was paid two thousand years ago, I’m saved, and I can’t contribute anything to my salvation, so I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and collect the reward at the end.  And sometimes when we hear about those terrible judgments God sent to the Israelites in the desert when they fell into all kinds of sin we think, “How could those people have been so stupid and faithless that they kept falling away into temptation?  They sure deserved what they got.”  In today’s Gospel lesson Jesus asks, “Do you think those people upon whom disaster fell were worse sinners than you?  I tell you, no!  But unless you repent, you too will perish.”

            And that’s the key:  Repentance – repentance every day because you sin every day.  It consists of the recognition of our sin, an attitude of shame for it, the genuine desire to change, and the realization that we cannot change on our own nor atone for the sins of the past.  It is repentance that drives us every day to the cross of Christ where sin is atoned for, and where we receive the power to change. And herein lies the problem:  we tend to see repentance as a past or an only once in a blue moon event in our lives.  It happened when we became Christians, when we left the sinful world and started walking with God in faith.  Now we are walking with God, so we are his chosen people, part of the saved community of faith.  And then it’s so easy to make the subtle shift from relying on the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross for us to relying on something else:  our membership in a particular church, our thorough Christian education, our Baptism or Confirmation, our “decision to follow Jesus”, or maybe it’s God’s eternal decree of election, whatever.  We get to the point where we can say “I’ve been saved. I’m as good as standing in the Promised Land right now.”  And when we get to that point, Paul tells us that we are in fact teetering on the edge of disaster:  “Let him who thinks he stands take heed, lest he fall.”

            To be sure, when we start relying on any event or condition in our own past for salvation we have already begun to fall, because we are shifting our trust from the atonement Jesus made for us on the cross to something else.  It’s like Peter walking on the water.  He only stood as long as he was looking at Jesus.  As soon as he took his eyes off Jesus, he started to sink.  It’s the same for us.  Our problem is sin:  that’s what makes us sink.  And the solution to our sin problem is on the cross where our Savior died.  And it is repentance that keeps us looking at the cross. So the Christian life is one of continuous repentance.  Every day, every hour, we think on the repulsiveness of our sin in the eyes of God, and his righteous anger against us because of it.  We feel the need to change and our desire to leave sin behind; and we hold before us the image of the death of God’s Son to save us from it. As long as we do that, we continue to stand – because he’s holding us up.  It’s his strength we’re relying on.

            At this point you may wondering if there’s any way then to be sure that you’ll make it to the end..  Perhaps I can best answer it this way.  Every day the Christian repents.  I ask him, “Are you saved?”  He thinks, “Yes, I am relying on Jesus for salvation from my sin”, and answers “Yes, I am saved”.  But, knowing his internal tendency to sin and neglect repentance, to downplay his need for it, to become morally indifferent, he wonders, “Will I be saved tomorrow?  Tomorrow will I fall into sin and unrepentance? It is exactly that question, that anxiety, that feeling of “I’m losing my balance and may fall” that brings us back to the cross tomorrow.  It is that question that prevents us from standing on our own and keeps us relying on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And lest we fall into a panic of uncertainty, Paul assures us, “God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.”

            The way out God has provided for us is daily repentance because that keeps our focus on Jesus and what he did for us.  It’s keeping our eyes on him that enables us to stand up under all temptation and adversity until we reach the end and goal of our faith.  So, come, with ever repentant hearts, Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith; who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.  In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!