SERMON “Dead Meat?” Audio link http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23575548/110724Romans8.mp3
(Psalm 19.14) May the words of my lips and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, oh Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.
We once had a rather trying experience around our house. You may have had something like this happen to you. I expect even if you haven’t you can imagine this feeling easily. One day you smell something - it seems a mouse has died inside a wall somewhere. That isn’t a very pleasant smell. But it will pass away pretty shortly. The next day, however, it’s worse. You wake up in the morning and the kitchen smells kind of rank. Maybe there’s something in the trash that needed to go out earlier than it did? So you take the trash out. The smell gets worse. By mid-day it seems to fill the whole house. What’s going on? This is no mouse. Then you find that it is smelling outside as well. You do exactly what you didn’t want to do. You walk around the house, sniffing at the foundation, and find that the enclosed porch attached to the kitchen smells worse. There’s a little opening in the skirting that’s nailed to the porch to keep it really enclosed. So you remove some of the skirting and it smells awful. No, this is no mouse. Of course, it’s dark under the porch, but you know that’s the source of the smell. You can’t see anything with your flashlight. Crawling under the porch doesn’t seem like a nice thing to do, so you pull out the rake and see what you can fish out. After you find some broken bricks, bits of pipe, and some other odds and ends you pull out about two thirds of a decaying animal. There’s the culprit! You hunt around with the rake some more and don’t find any more of it, so you hope for the best, enclose the porch again, and dispose of the remains.
There are few things that are worse than encounters with dead, decaying meat. And we’re all familiar with the idea. What happens when the teacher puts something on the final exam that you haven’t studied? You’re dead meat. What happens when the other baseball team recruits your best player? You’re dead meat. What happens when the person you offended suddenly becomes your boss at work? You’re dead meat. What happens when we are pursued by “trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword” (Romans 8.35, NIV)? All our understanding, all our inclinations say that we are in deep deep trouble. Logic says we are dead meat. Intuition says we need to run and run fast. Reason says that no matter how hard we run we will never escape. Philosophy says that when these things happen God must be against us. We see the condition we are in, we see the condition our world is in, and we wonder if God is for us. As Paul says in Romans 8.36 (NIV), quoting from Psalm 44, “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” It looks pretty bad for us. If this life were an old Western movie, you know what the bad guy would be saying, right? “Say your prayers, buckaroo.”
There’s some wisdom in that. Maybe our culture has forgotten it. And maybe in those gunslinging dramas the motivation for praying was misplaced. I expect it was. After all, the only time you’d be expected to pray was in the face of impending death. Yet we see that the most appropriate response to a bad situation is to pray. We look to our Lord in hope. Why is this? Because all the riches of God are given to us in Christ Jesus. What did we hear in Romans 8? Listen to some of these rhetorical questions Paul asks. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” “How will he not also graciously give us all things?” “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?” “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”
When the going gets tough, maybe we need to be asking the questions God has given us to ask. Who can be against us? Nobody. How big is the redemption that our Lord has provided in Christ Jesus? It’s greater than any challenge Satan can dish out. What kind of spiritual criminal charges will overcome the perfect righteousness of Christ given to his people? None whatsoever. How far can the love of Jesus Christ reach? A whole lot farther than we can go. We may be facing attack, and it may be a serious attack. Yet in the final analysis it is like the criminal in a rowboat with a revolver attacking and trying to commandeer a battleship. It’s just not going to happen. Satan, the enemy of Christ’s Church, may be able to hurt us individually. In fact, he may be able to destroy some who have left the safety and protection of Jesus’ perfect righteousness. That’s quite serious. Yet his attacks will never be able to stop the ultimate victory of Christ and His Church. God’s will is going to conquer all opposition. Our Lord who is able to raise the dead, who can raise up the very rocks and stones to praise him, that same Lord is able to protect his people. What is our identity in Jesus? You see, we are not dead meat. Not at all. We may look like it. Our lives may be grim. We may be under attack. We may fear those attacks. But we have to look to our Lord and Savior. It is he who is the commander of our faith. He is the one who has won the victory. The battle is his. And he is the only one who has a clear view of reality.
What is the picture God paints of us? We continue looking at Romans 8, quoting verses 37-39 (NIV). “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” There’s our true identity. Far from being stinking, rotting, decaying dead meat, we are living and conquering in Christ. How can that be? It is not from our power, not from our ability, not from anything we can do or think. No, it’s all through him who loved us. It’s through Jesus Christ crucified for us, raised from the dead, and seated at the right hand of the Father on high that we conquer. And as we live this life which is empowered by our Lord and Savior, nothing can harm us. We are perfectly safe in the hands of our Savior. The battle is not ours. It belongs to our Lord. He is the one who lives on our behalf. He is the one who is living in us. And in Christ our Savior we are never ever dead meat. He has already carried that for us. We no longer have to worry about it. Rather, we live the life that he has prepared for us, in which nothing in the world can destroy us. We are wrapped in Jesus. We have put on Christ and his righteousness. Remember the acolyte’s robe? Remember the robe that I’m wearing? Jesus Christ puts his perfect righteousness onto each one of us as we receive him in faith. As we trust in his work on our behalf, we find that we are the righteousness of God in Christ. There is no condemnation. None whatsoever. We have no cause for fear. We have been dressed in Christ. We’re not dead meat. We’re conquerors.
Let’s rise to pray.
Our Lord, thank you that you have given yourself on our behalf. Remind us day by day to look to you for forgiveness, for strength, for cleansing. Show yourself to the the Lord our righteousness. Make us to walk as your servants in this world, no matter what may come against us, looking to you as our Lord and Master, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
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