Sermon on “The New Life in Christ”

“Is the life of a Christian in any way different from the life of one who is not Christian? If I become a Christian, will my life, my outlook, my way of viewing things be changed and altered?” (7/21/63)

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Scripture: Romans 5:1-11 (especially vs. 1-5)

For Lenten service, July 21, 1963

Let us pray: Almighty God, grant us, we beseech thee, so to speak, so to hear and so to learn that our fears may be banished, our minds enlightened, our faith confirmed, and our steps directed unto thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

            Lent is that period during the Christian year when we attempt to deepen our understanding of the Christian faith and our commitment to Christ. An essential part of this deepening process is to ask ourselves searching questions. One important area where we can ask probing questions is the area of the inner life of the Christian, the New Life in Christ which we participate in when we accept him as Lord of our existence. One such question is: Does being a Christian make any real difference in my personal life? Or we might ask: If I have faith, will my life in any way be altered? Is there anything distinctive about being a Christian? Is the life of a Christian in any way different from the life of one who is not Christian? If I become a Christian, will my life, my outlook, my way of viewing things be changed and altered?

            In his letter to the Romans, Paul deals rather extensively with these questions concerning the inner life of the Christian. In chapters five through eight he talks about the New Life in Christ. That is, he talks about how our acceptance of Christ, our acceptance of the gospel of love, our acceptance of the fact that God’s love for us is constant that being a Christian through accepting the good news of God’s inalterable love makes a real and decided difference in our own personal lives.

            In the first few verses of chapter five, Paul gives an overview of what the New Life in Christ is all about. We read this as part of our Scripture lesson this evening. Let us reread the first five verses of this fifth chapter, and then let us look rather closely at what this passage tells us about the New Life in Christ.

            Perhaps you notice that Paul begins this passage with the words “since we are justified by faith.” This for Paul is the key to the New Life in Christ. It is crucial and absolutely necessary. Without being justified by faith, we cannot enter into this New Life in Christ, we cannot share in this distinctive life of the Christian. We can belong to the church, we can enter into the worship services on Sunday morning, we can do all these, Paul would say, and still would not enter into the New Life in Christ unless we have met one basic condition, namely, unless we have been justified by faith. Therefore, if we are going to understand what Paul means by the New Life in Christ we have to first make sure that we understand what he means by justification by faith.

            Let us look briefly then at the meaning of justification by faith. To understand the meaning of this, we need to know Paul’s thinking on three points: first, we need to know the true condition of man. Second, we need to know what actions God has been taking toward man; and third, we need to know how man responds to God’s action in order to truly be justified by faith.

            According to Paul, every man is in a state of sin and needs to bathe in God’s loving forgiveness. “All have sinned,” he tells us in the third chapter of Romans, and “(all) fall short of the glory of God.” Now sin can be described in a number of ways. One way to look at sin is to see it as man’s turning away from God, who is what is most ultimate in the universe. It is man’s refusal to see the divine love of God as the most central part of his life, and it is the turning to other less important things and attempting to give them a position of central importance. As man turns from God and centers upon some lesser thing, man thus separates himself from God and creates a rift in his relationship with God and sets up a chasm or a barrier between himself and God. When he does this, he becomes anxious. And his anxiety drives him into performing evil acts. Thus by turning from God he becomes an unlovely creature – a creature quite different from what God intends him to be. Man may attempt by himself to remedy this pitiful situation he has got himself into – for example, he may try to set things right again with God by obeying the commandments that God has given him. But he is unable to obey these completely: he always falls short. So he finds he cannot by his own efforts set things right with God.

            So man has put himself into a situation which he himself cannot remedy. Let us now look to see what action God takes in order to alleviate man’s situation. According to Paul, God knows that the only thing which can set things right between man and God is for God to forgive man. God does this out of a deep love for man – not because man has in any way earned this but because God has a deep love for man. In order that man might know in an unmistakable way that God loves him, God took concrete action in history. He sent Jesus into the world to reveal the deep love that God has for man. He sent Jesus to reveal God’s love through living a life of love and obedience. He sent Jesus to reveal that God loves man enough to suffer and to die for him. And he sent Jesus to reveal through the resurrection that God’s love cannot be defeated.

            So God’s action to meet and heal the relationship that man has broken – God’s healing actions has been to love man so thoroughly that he is willing to forgive man for man’s disobedience, for man’s turning from God, for man’s centering on secondary things as if they were ultimate, for man’s falling short of what God would have him be. But for this forgiving love to be effective in man’s life, man has to accept it. Man has to believe that God really does love him to the point of dying for him. When man does believe in this way, he has what Paul describes as faith. But by faith Paul does not mean just a cold intellectual belief, an intellectual belief that lacks color and emotion and vitality. No, faith is no such partial response. Faith is a total response of the whole person – mind, heart, and will. Faith is a deep trust that runs through the very life-blood of one’s being – a deep trust that God really does love and accept us no matter what. Faith means that the trust is so all-pervading that the totality of the person turns back toward God, so that God and man are again back in the right relationship. This is the meaning of justification by faith. God acts to forgive man, and man trusts with his whole being that God has acted and is acting in this way. Through this action by God and response by man, man is thereby justified – or to use other words, man is made right again, or put back in a right relationship with God, or saved, or made whole, or turned back on the path toward what he is meant to be.

            Justification by faith then is according to Paul at the very center of the New Life in Christ, is the basic requirement without which this New Life cannot come into being. Man sins by turning from God. God loves man to such an extent that he is willing to forgive man, and he has proved his forgiving love by sending his son into the world. Man can respond to this action of love and forgiveness through the kind of total trust that permits him to turn back toward God and live in a new relationship with God. This is what Paul means by justification by faith.

            Let us now turn to what Paul has to say about this New Live in Christ. In this brief passage at the beginning of the fifth chapter of Romans he points out three characteristics of this New Life which results from our responding to God in complete trust. These three characteristics are peace, hope, and joy. Peace, hope, and joy: these are the three characteristics of the New Life in Christ. The peace and the hope and the joy that are part of the New Life in Christ all spring from that utter trust in God that Paul terms faith. And in a certain sense these three characteristics spring one from the other, so they are not completely independent from one another. But for purposes of discussion, let us speak of each of them separately.

           The first characteristics of the New Life in Christ that Paul mentions is peace. “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul tells us.

           What is the meaning of this peace that Paul talks about? One meaning is “cessation of hostility.” When man turns from God and separates himself from God, he is in a sense in a state of war with God. He is fighting God. But God offers to end this hostility by presenting man with his loving forgiveness. He does this by sending his Son into the world to show man God’s love. In this sense, Jesus can be seen as a peace-maker. For he is the means whereby man comes to terms with God and stops fighting God. That is Jesus acts to reconcile man to God. Through Jesus Christ God shows us that he loves us, and by responding to this loving action and accepting the concern that God shows to us we are able to be reconciled to God and to reach a peace with him. It is Jesus who acts as the intermediary or the go-between. That is why Paul states that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

           But the peace which Paul speaks about is more than just peace with God, for when we come to peace with God through turning back toward him in basic trust, then other parts of our lives begin to fall into place also; and we find that when we come into some kind of harmony with God, we also gain a sense of wholesomeness and harmony within ourselves (for up until this point, various parts of ourselves have been at war with one another). Similarly, we find also that we achieve a new level of harmony with others and with all creation. Gerald R. Cragg states the matter this way:

            The peace that Paul is talking about then can be seen first as a cessation of hostilities between man and God, and second as a new state of harmony between ourselves and others, between ourselves and the rest of creation, and even between warring parts of our own selves. This points to a third meaning of the word peace in this context. We can think of peace here as an inner serenity which comes when we are at one with God, with other persons, and with ourselves. When through our trusting response to God’s love things are put right between ourselves and God, ourselves and others, and between hostile parts of ourselves (in other words, when we are justified by faith), then part of the New Life into which we enter is an overwhelming feeling of serenity.

           “Since we are justified by faith,” Paul tells us, “we have peace.” So peace is one of the characteristics of the New Life in Christ. The second characteristic of which he speaks is hope: “the hope of sharing the glory of God,” as he puts it. Our trust in God gives us not only peace in the here and now, but also hope in what is to come. This points out a curious thing about the Christian Life in Christ, that there is also a “not-yet” quality. When we live a life of trust in God then we have the assurance that all we need has already been accomplished for us; God has already come into the world in Jesus Christ; God has already taken the action necessary to save and renew us; God has already proved that the kind of loving concern he has for us is undying and unable to be defeated. And when we live trusting in this, then we live in the kind of peace we have already been talking about. But when we live with this kind of trust we also live with hope. We believe that we are already living in the new age of Christ, but we also believe that there is more to come and that we shall share in this. What God has done in Christ shows us that the new age has been born, but that it still has to grow and mature. John Knox compares the “already – but not yet” quality of the New Life in Christ to the first streaks of dawn. When the eastern sky begins to show a faint sign of color, the world is still as black as at midnight, and in this sense the new day has not yet come. Yet, there is a trace of light in the East, and in this sense the new day truly has been born, for the hints of light and color in the sky give us complete assurance that a new day is here and will soon fill the world with light. Just so the hope of the Christian who shares the New Life in Christ. He has already seen the signs of God’s love, for these have been revealed in Jesus Christ; and he is sure to see these signs blossom forth into the fullness of God’s glory. And therein lies his hope. “We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God,” Paul tells us.

           Our hope lies also in the very web of our existence right in the here and now, and this comes about through an unexpected channel: through our suffering. For by undergoing suffering, Paul tells us, we find that we can endure. That is, when we share in the New Life in Christ, we are buoyed up so that even sufferings do not defeat us; instead by surviving under adversity, we find that we can take it. This endurance, this ability to exist even under conditions of pain and suffering, strengthens our character, for we take on the quality of tempered steel. With God’s help we have been through the fires of adversity and we find we have not been consumed in the fire, but instead have been made stronger and more useful. And this gives us renewed grounds for hope. For if God’s guiding hand has been there to undergird us in every difficult situation that we have come up against in the past and present, will he not also continue to support us as we launch out into the unknown future? And therein is our hope strengthened. Therein is our hope made more real to us.

           Our hope then does not depend only on looking back at an event two thousand years ago – to the event of God’s coming into the world in the flesh in order to demonstrate his love for each one of us. Our hope can rest also in the here and now – even in our sufferings which (without our knowledge of God’s love) would threaten to destroy us. But our hope can rest on something else also which exists in the here and now. It rests in the presence of the Holy Spirit among us. Paul tells us that God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. The Holy Spirit is right in the midst of us. It is at work in the fellowship of persons in the church. It is at work when we receive the strength to forgive one another for hurts that seem unforgivable. Yes, when the Spirit is at work among us encouraging us to live as Christ would have us live, then we feel that God’s love is being poured into our hearts, and we receive renewed hope that his Kingdom will come and that we shall share in his glory.

           All this lends us to the third characteristic of the New Life in Christ, which is joy, or rejoicing. This is no flat joy, but it produces the kind of rejoicing that makes you want to bubble over or to boast or to exult. Moffatt translates the word triumph, and Godspeed renders it glory.

           What is the source of this expanding kind of joy that we experience in the New Life in Christ? It is all that we have been talking about. Peace is the source of this joy: the peace of being reconciled to God, the peace that comes with the harmony we experience within ourselves and with other persons and other parts of creation, the peace that accompanies the inner serenity we feel when we know we are accepted in spite of what we are.

           Hope too is the source of our joy. The hope of sharing ever more fully in the glory of God makes us rejoice. The hope that comes from present suffering makes us rejoice. For in the New Life in Christ our sufferings no longer need be meaningless or lead to despair. For even in our pain we can see God’s sustaining power at work to uphold us and strengthen us and help us to endure. And the hope that comes from the Holy Spirit at work right in the midst of our Christian community – this too gives us joy.

           Peace, hope, joy: these are the characteristics of the New Life in Christ.

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Sermon copyright © 1963 by Marjorie D. Palmer and
the direct descendants of William E. Palmer

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