Sermon

April 29, 2001
Confirmation Sunday
1 Corinthians 1:4-9

Our God is Faithful in His Grace!

(1 Corinthians 1:4-9) I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.5 For in him you have been enriched in every way--in all your speaking and in all your knowledge-6 because our testimony about Christ was confirmed in you.7 Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed.8 He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.9 God, who has called you into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful.

In Christ Jesus, whose Word has been confirmed in you, dear fellow redeemed,

Have you ever noticed that sometimes people tend to put more emphasis on sincerity than on certainty? Someone might say, "As long as a person is sincere, that's what really matters." But such thinking can lead to tragic results. I'm reminded of an accident that took place a good number of years ago in a New York State hospital where carbon dioxide rather than oxygen was administered to a surgical patient. The patient died almost immediately. An investigation revealed that what was sincerely believed to be an oxygen tank had been mislabeled as such long before it reached the hospital. So you see, the patient died not because of a lack of sincerity-not at all! The surgeon and his staff were sincere, so were the anesthesiologist and the hospital administrators. They were all very sincere in the care they wished to provide their patient. But they were all mistaken about the "oxygen," reminding us that sincerity alone is not enough. For sincerity to mean anything at all, it must be based on certainty.

This is a good reminder for all of us on this Confirmation Sunday as we give thought not only to the vows that our confirmands will make today, but to the vows that all of us made at the time of our confirmation. We, of course, hope that all who make their confirmation vows before the Lord's altar do so with great sincerity, but sincerity itself is not nearly enough. For even more important than the confirmand's sincere promise to be faithful, is God's certain promise that he is faithful.

Here is the truth with which the Lord's Apostle comforts and encourages all of us today, especially our confirmands: Our God is Faithful in His Grace-the grace by which he has called us; the grace by which he enriches us; and the grace by which he will keep us strong.

The other day one of the confirmands said to me, "Pastor, you don't have to preach a sermon this Sunday. We confirmands are the sermon." He was right. Paul says the same thing about the Corinthian Christians when he writes: "I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus" (v. 4). Every Christian is a living sermon, proclaiming the effectiveness of God's grace. Every Christian is a reminder of how thankful we can be for the grace God shows us and those around us. Remember, grace is love, a very special love that says something both about the One doing the loving and those being loved. You see, grace is undeserved love which means that our God is a most kind and generous God. It also means that the people God loves are not deserving of his rich kindness and generosity. Those who receive grace are unlovable sinners that God has chosen to love not because of who they are, but because of who God is. And who is God? The Bible says, "God is love" (1 John 4:16). Think about it this way: If we deserved God's love then his love would not be called grace. So every time we praise and thank God for the grace he's showing us, we are confessing that we are sinners, undeserving of all that God has done and all that he continues to do for us.

But this isn't a confession that we sinners came up with on our own. By nature, we didn't care about God or his love. In fact, by nature we unlovable sinners hated God. Paul says to us in Colossians 1:21: "Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.." This raises an interesting question. How did we God-haters become people who can now praise and thank God for his grace? Paul says in verse 9 of our text that this is all God's doing. It is..."God, who has called you into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord..."

We can't and don't want to take credit for the good confession we make about God and his grace. Because if we had been left to ourselves, everyone of us would have chosen to go right on hating God forever, even though our hatred would have made us forever miserable. It was God who came after us when we wanted nothing to do with him. It was God who called us into fellowship with his Son Jesus our Lord.

Our confirmands studied this word "fellowship" this year. It's a word that means "communion," a word that describes the closest and most intimate of all relationships. When we sinners thought happiness meant hating God, God came to us through his powerful word in baptism and let us taste true happiness, the happiness that comes from being one with Jesus Christ. It was at the baptismal font that God called us to trust in his grace and it was there that God pledged to remain faithful in his grace toward us, promising that he would keep loving us undeserving sinners in Christ Jesus.

"In Christ Jesus" - have you noticed that Jesus is referred to in every verse of our text. God's grace toward sinners is always connected to Jesus. The grace by which God called us, was grace given us in Christ Jesus. God didn't love us in connection with our sin. He didn't say, "I really love what sin has done for these people." He loves us in Christ. He loves us in connection with Jesus and all that Jesus has done for us. Paul says in Colossians 1:22, "God has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation..."

With these words, Paul teaches us that God's grace is grace by which God enriches us. That's good news because we were poor, worthless sinners before God's grace found us. We didn't have any of the holiness we needed to live at peace with God. All that we could call our own was our huge debt of sin, a debt we were going to have to work off in hell for all eternity. But our God of faithful grace has changed all that. Paul says in our text: "For in Jesus you have been enriched in every way-in all your speaking and in all your knowledge-6 because our testimony about Christ was confirmed in you" (vv. 5-6). God has enriched us in Jesus Christ. How? God has taken the holiness that came from his Son's perfect life on earth and he's put that holiness in our spiritual bank account. And more than that, God took our debt of sin and made Jesus pay for it with his death in hell on the cross and, then, God raised his dead Son to life to show the debt of sin has been canceled once and for all. Now there is no longer any sin charged to us. We stand free from accusation in God's sight.

And the best part of all, God has told us so. Think of what this means for us. What good would it do you if someone died and left you a million dollars, but you never found out about it? You wouldn't have the money to save or spend. All that wealth and it would do nothing for you. God has told us about our riches in Christ. He's taken the Bible's testimony about Jesus and has confirmed it in us. To confirm means to strengthen, to firmly establish.

God has taken the good news about everything that Jesus has done to save the world from sin, and with that news God has convinced us that Jesus is our personal Savior from sin. Thanks to God's Testimony at work in us we live with the knowledge that we are always at peace with God. He's never angry with us. We know that he's always forgiving us for Jesus' sake. And we have the security that comes from knowing that he's going to take us to heaven when our life here is over.

Oh, and think of what all this knowledge does for our conversation. God has given us so many wonderful things to say to each other, things like, "You are forgiven in Christ; or "You are dearly loved by God." Our Lord has put in our mouths tremendous promises that calm and comfort people when they think their world is coming to an end, like God's promise, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you,"(Hebrews 13:5) or his promise in Romans, chapter eight to work all things for our good. You know so many of God's promises, and all of them are yours to cherish in the quiet thoughts of your mind and all of them yours to speak out loud to one another. When I think of all that you know from God and his Word, I cannot help but thank him for the grace he's given you in Christ, the grace by which he has called you, the grace by which he enriches you and the grace by which he will keep you strong!

You and I have all the riches of God's grace today, but will they remain ours till our dying day? Will be still be able to claim those riches on Judgment Day? Today you confirmands will stand before the Lord and promise that you will never walk away from all the good things you have in Christ. I trust that you will make your promises in all sincerity, just as all of us who are already confirmed made our sincere promises on our Confirmation Day. But our sincerity is not enough. We sinners break our promises all the time.

On our Confirmation Day we Christians promise to remain faithful to God's Word, saying that we are willing to suffer even death rather than fall away from it. But, then, before you know it the Bible passages we worked so hard to learn for examination are all forgotten and the Bible that we received from our parents or grandparents is soon collecting dust on some forgotten shelf. And God's truth that we said was so important to us, we soon betray by caving in to sin's temptation or by trading that truth for the world's way of thinking and living.

Let's face it, if it were left to us to hold onto everything Jesus has accomplished for us with his life and death and resurrection, if after doing everything for us, all we had to do was hold onto it by ourselves, we would still ruin everything and quickly return to the lost condition in which we were born. If our hopes for the future rest on our sincerity alone, then, the future will bring us nothing but the never-ending miseries of hell.

But what our sincerity cannot do for us, the sure and certain promises of our God can and will do for us! Left to ourselves we are helpless, but we are not left to ourselves. Paul says, "...You do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed.8 He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ" (vv.8-9). God gives us everything we need as we wait for the day when we will see Jesus face to face. He gives us the gift of his law and gives fellow Christians the right and responsibility to speak it to us so that we may be convicted of our sins and see their damning nature and our ongoing need for a Savior. God gives us prayer so that we may bring the burden of our sins to him in repentance. And God removes the guilt of our sins and all our feelings of despair and failure by proclaiming to us his gospel of full and free forgiveness in Christ as often as we study his Word, hear it preached and receive his Son's body and blood in the Lord's Supper.

Our faith and our future is founded not on sincerity but on certainty, the certainty that in his grace God has done, is doing and will continue to do everything to keep us strong in Christ so that we may stand on the last day in the courtroom of our Judge and be pronounced just as holy and just as blameless as the Lord Jesus himself. To this end, my young friends, I commend your souls and those of your fellow believers to the keeping of our gracious God in the sure and certain hope that you and I will spend eternity together in heaven, for God who has called us into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful. Amen.