One of the core concepts of the Christian faith is justification. I’m sure we all know that, in general terms, being justified means to be proven right, or to show good cause for an action. So, for example, if we found out that the company we were working for was on the verge of bankruptcy, we’d be justified in looking for another job. But in Christian terms, justification is concerned with being right before God, it’s about being in a right relationship with God and it’s concerned with the process or the way that sinful human beings can enter that right relationship with God. It’s obvious then, that an understanding of justification is essential to the Christian faith.

And indeed, that’s what we find. All Christians have an understanding of justification and an idea about how human beings are justified. But, just as there are many different denominations of the Church, so there have been, and are, many different understandings of justification, different ideas about how we’re justified before God and enter into that right relationship with him. And, unsurprisingly, it’s something that Christians of different Churches and denominations have argued about over the years.

The arguments about justification are quite complicated and they all have their good points and bad points. But, essentially, certainly for the Western Church, they fall into two broad categories. Whilst virtually everyone agrees that God’s grace is essential to justification, the traditional Catholic understanding is that human beings must co-operate with God’s grace in order to be justified, sometimes spoken of as justification by works. The Reformed, or Protestant, understanding, on the other hand, is that justification comes by the grace of God alone, a gift which we receive by virtue of our faith, something known as justification by faith.

Both of these ideas have their merits, but they both have their drawbacks. If we go too far down the road of justification by works, for example, we might veer towards something called Pelagianism, the idea that we can achieve our own justification simply through living a good life. But that really makes Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross meaningless. It reduces Jesus to nothing more than a teacher who gave us instruction and an example to follow.

But if we go too far down the road of justification by faith, we might veer towards something called antinomianism, the idea that God’s grace frees human beings from any moral obligations or constraints, we’re free to do as we please, as long as we have faith. A milder form of this is something I’ve spoken about quite recently, that of people who think they’ve done enough and are right with God simply because they come to church on Sunday. But this kind of thinking, quite clearly, makes Christ’s teaching and example meaningless because, if we think like this, we don’t have to follow it.

So who’s right and who’s wrong about justification?

Well, really, both sides are right, up to a point, and both sides are wrong, up to a point. The truth is that we need both faith and works. We must have faith, that is we must believe in Jesus, so that we’ll follow his teaching and example. But we must follow his teaching and example, and that means that our faith must be accompanied by works. If we say we believe in Jesus, but we don’t follow him, then our faith is nothing but words that makes no difference whatsoever to the way we live, and where then, does that leave Jesus’ instruction that we must take up our cross and follow him? And we must have God’s grace too, so that we have the wisdom to know how to follow Jesus and the gifts, the strength and the courage to do it. We see this in the Scriptures.

This morning we heard about Abraham, a man who is revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike as our ‘father in faith’. When St Paul writes about Abraham, as he does in a number of his letters to the Churches, St Paul speaks about Abraham being ‘justified by faith’ rather than by works.

But St Paul speaks specifically about ‘works of the law’. so what he’s really driving at is that, because of Christ and through Christ, the promise that God gave to Abraham has now become available to all people, not just the Jews. In other words, non-Jews don’t have to follow the Jewish law to be justified, they have to have faith in Christ and follow his teaching and example.

And in fact, when we read Abraham’s story, we find that his faith was accompanied by works. Abraham went where God asked him to go, he did what God asked him to do, he was even prepared to sacrifice Isaac, his only son, if that’s what God asked of him. So when we speak of Abraham being justified by faith, we need to understand just what that means.

Abraham was justified by faith, he entered into a right relationship with God because of his faith, but that relationship with God was a covenant relationship. We read quite a lot about covenants in the Scriptures, but covenant relationships were common in biblical times, and they all had one thing in common; an overlord would promise to protect a smaller, weaker neighbour, in return for that neighbour’s loyalty. So, when God makes a covenant with someone, he offers to be their God, if they will be his people, and that places a responsibility of loyalty on those God makes covenants with. To be God’s people under the terms of the Mosaic covenant, for example, the people of Israel were expected to adhere to the Ten Commandments. And it was similar with Abrahamic covenant. God’s side of the covenant was the promise to make Abraham the father of many nations. Abraham’s side of the covenant was to have faith in God’s promise. So Abraham entered into a right relationship with God by faith, but it was the loyalty to God, and to doing what God asked of him, that his faith inspired, that enabled Abraham to stay in that right relationship with God and receive the reward God had promised him.

And so it is for us, as Christians. Through Christ, we’re offered the opportunity to enter into a covenant relation with God. God’s side of the covenant is the promise that he’ll raise us to eternal life. Our side of the covenant, our responsibility to God, is to have faith in his Son. But that faith can’t be in name alone, it must be accompanied by deeds or, in other words, by works. And we see this quite clearly in Jesus’ own words.

Jesus said,

““Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.””

We also know from the Scriptures, that the will of the Father is that we should listen to Jesus and believe in him. And if we listen to Jesus and believe in him then we’ll do what Jesus taught us to do and live as he lived and said that we should live. How else can we make sense of Jesus’ insistence that we need to take up our cross and follow him? And we know that following Jesus requires some concrete action on our part. How else could we make sense of these words that Jesus spoke;

 ^“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’  Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’  And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.’”

and that those who do not do these things,

“” …will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.””?

To enter into a covenant relationship with God always requires some action on our part. As part of our covenant with God we’re called to listen to Jesus and believe in him.  And if we listen to Jesus and believe in him and in what he says, we can’t be left in any doubt that there must be more to our faith than mere words. Our faith in Jesus must be accompanied by works if we’re going to be justified, if we’re going to be in and stay in that right relationship with God that’ll bring us the promised reward of our covenant relationship with him, the resurrection to eternal life.

So how can we understand justification and what we need to do to be justified? Justification, put simply, means to be right in God’s eyes. To be justified we need to be in a right relationship with God and to be in a right relationship with God means to be in a covenant relationship with him We’re offered that relationship through Christ and as his side of it God offers us the reward of eternal life. So let’s take our side of the relationship seriously by listening to Jesus and believing in him and his words and by putting his words into action through our good works. We’ll probably never be as good as we could be or do all that we could do. But, as long as we do try to follow Jesus, then in faith, we can leave the rest to God’s grace and loving mercy. 

Amen.

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The Propers for the 2nd Sunday of Lent can be found here.

One of the things that’s spoken about amongst Christians from time to time is what’s known as a ‘Wilderness Experience’. A Wilderness Experience is the way people often refer to a time when they struggle with their faith. Some people might refer to the same thing as a ‘Crisis of Faith’. It’s a time when people find faith difficult. A time when they perhaps find prayer difficult or think that God isn’t listening to their prayer. It’s a time when people struggle to make sense of their faith, a time perhaps when things about their faith that seemed quite straightforward to them, they suddenly start to question or have doubts about. It’s a time when people can seem lost in a sense, wandering in a wilderness of doubt and uncertainty, a time when they don’t know what to do or how to follow their faith. A time when they feel that God is very far away from them.

These Wilderness Experiences can happen to any of us, at any time, and they do. In fact, I’d be surprised if there are any amongst us who haven’t had a Wilderness Experience of some kind. But if you have had that kind of experience, there’s no need to worry about it too much because they’re simply part and parcel of a life of faith. In fact, these experiences can be seen as an essential part of a life of faith because, for many people, Wilderness Experiences are nothing other than times of trial that God sends in order to test and ultimately, strengthen our faith.

We see examples of Wilderness Experiences in the Scriptures. In the Scriptures, these experiences are God given times of testing. Perhaps the most well-known, or at least most easily recognisable Wilderness Experience in the Scriptures, is the time Israel spent in the wilderness between their Exodus from Egypt and their entry into the Promised Land. This was a time when Israel’s faith in God was tested. It was a test they failed, many times, so it also became a time of punishment for their unfaithfulness. But it was a time of testing and it was, quite literally, a Wilderness Experience.

Another well-known Wilderness Experience we read about in the Scriptures is the story of Job. We read that God deliberately sends all kinds of ill fortune on Job simply to test his faith. And Job’s faith is tested, it’s tested almost to breaking point. But when Job’s faith is restored, he has a deeper faith because he has more wisdom and a new found understanding of God.

So Wilderness Experiences do seem to be part and parcel of a life of faith. They’re not new and they can happen to anyone. And if and when they do happen to us it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us or with our commitment to our faith, because Jesus himself had a Wilderness Experience and we read about that, about his time of testing, in this morning’s Gospel.

One thing we always need to remember about Jesus is that, whilst we believe that he was the incarnate Son of God, he was also fully human; he was just as human as you and I and anyone and everyone else. So Jesus was susceptible to the same human problems and weaknesses that we’re all susceptible to. And in the story of Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness, we get a glimpse of the things that Jesus had to struggle with during his Wilderness Experience, the things that were perhaps a particular temptation to him because these were the aspects of his faith that he found most difficult.

St Mark, whose Gospel we read this morning, doesn’t give us any details of how Jesus was tempted but we know well enough from the other Gospels just what these temptations were. First there was the temptation to turn stones into bread. There are a good number of stories in the Gospels about Jesus dining with friends so that was something he probably enjoyed. On the surface then, this first temptation is a very simple one, Jesus enjoyed his food, and he was hungry. So why not use his divine power to satisfy his hunger? But the underlying temptation is to put our own comfort and convenience before doing God’s will. And we can be tempted to do that in so many ways.

For example, in one parish where I served on the PCC, a decision was made to move a PCC meeting forward from the usual time of 7:30pm to the earlier time of 6:30pm. For those of us who were working, as I was at the time because this was before I was ordained, that made it difficult to get to the meeting, at least in time for the start. And that was a problem because there was an important issue to discuss and a vote had to be taken on it that night. Nevertheless, the meeting went ahead at 6:30pm but, as the discussion went on, and so did the time, one person started looking at his watch and becoming more and more agitated. Eventually, he couldn’t take any more. He stood up and shouted,

‘Come on, come on. Get on with it. I want to be away by half past seven, United are on the tele!’

Then the reason for the early start then became quite apparent. Watching Manchester United play football on the TV was obviously more important to some people on the PCC than an issue that affected the future of the parish church they’d been called to represent and were responsible for.

But we can all, so easily, put our own comfort and convenience before God, our faith and the Church, and this was one temptation and test Jesus had to face and overcome.

The second temptation Jesus had to face was to throw himself from the top of the temple and allow God to save him, thereby proving that he was indeed the Son of God. The surface temptation here is that of turning the Wilderness Experience on its head and instead of Jesus using it to test his own faith, of using it to test God’s faithfulness. The underlying temptation though, is to try to use God for our own purposes. And again this is something that we can do in so many ways. I spoke about this problem in my sermon on Ash Wednesday, that of people who leave the Church because they’re not getting what they want out of it when usually what they want out of it is nothing more than a good feeling about themselves. We see people who’ve succumbed to this temptation too in the ‘empire builders’ we sometimes find in the Church, people who want and take over multiple jobs and roles in the Church and then make a great fuss about just how much they do for the Church. We’ve all met them. They say things like,

‘No one does as much for the church as I do.’ And ‘That church would be lost, or finished, without me.’ But the only person who could ever truly have said something like that is Jesus himself because without him there would be no Church, and only without him could there be no Church.

We all have more than our fair share of pride and it’s so easy for us to let that pride pump us up into thinking that we’re more important than others, even that we’re more important than God and the Church: which is really what’s happened when going to Church becomes all about us and what we want. This is another test Jesus had to face and overcome.

The third temptation Jesus was faced with was that of renouncing God and worshipping Satan in return for earthly power and riches. This is a really a straightforward choice that we all have to face and wrestle with on a daily basis because it’s a choice between choosing God and rejecting God; it’s a choice, for us as Christians, between being a disciple of Christ, or being a disciple of the world.

It’s a difficult choice to make at times too, especially if we’re going through a Wilderness Experience, because the rewards of following the way of the world can be very attractive and very tempting, whereas the rewards of following Christ are far less tangible. The reward for following Christ faithfully will far outlast any worldly rewards because the rewards for following Christ are eternal rewards. But we can’t see or touch those rewards now. And there’s no guarantee that we’ll ever have any tangible reward in this life for following Christ rather than the world.  But it was the same for Jesus. His reward for choosing God over the world would be the Resurrection, but in order to get that reward, he would first have to undergo the pain of rejection and betrayal, he’d have to undergo the pain of abuse and scourging, and he’d have to undergo the agony of the Cross. Jesus knew that and yet he chose God and God’s ways over the ways of the world. He chose the far more difficult to obtain eternal reward God offered over the easier to achieve but short-lived rewards the world offered.

I don’t think there are very many people who, having once come to faith in Jesus, really reject God completely but I think what we all do to some extent is fall into a grey area between God and the world. We try to find a compromise between God and the world. We follow God as long as it’s not too hard and as long as we don’t have to give up all hope of worldly rewards, and then we hope that will be good enough to gain our eternal reward from God. But that was not what Jesus did. As he struggled with his doubts, and fears, during his Wilderness Experience, he chose to persevere in faith, no matter what he had to give up in personal and worldly terms to do that and regardless of how long, hard and painful those choices made the road ahead for him.

At the end of this story of Jesus’ Wilderness Experience, we’re told that God sent angels to look after him, and then he went out to start his public ministry. So we can look on Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness, his Wilderness Experience, as something that was very necessary for him to go through in preparation for carrying out the task God had given him. And so when they come, we should try to treat our own Wilderness Experiences in the same way. They’re not easy times to go through but, rather than fear them, we should try to look at them as something we need to go through in readiness for what God has planned for us. And because that’s what they are, we need to have faith that God will help us to get through them and to emerge on the other side of the wilderness with a stronger faith in him and a clearer sense of his purpose for our lives, and in his grace to help us achieve it. 

Amen.

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The Propers for the First Sunday of Lent can be found here.

One of the sad realities of life in the Church is that, from time to time, we lose people from the Church. It is always sad when that happens, but it does happen, and when it does, it usually happens in one of three ways. We can lose people from the Church for unavoidable reasons, such as when people die. That’s always sad of course, but what’s even more sad, in a sense, is when we lose people for avoidable reasons. We know that happens too because we all know that we lose people from the Church because of disagreements and arguments between members of the Church. And the reason losing people for that reason is so sad is that, in effect, we’ve lost those people because we Christians have failed to do the very thing we’re called to do above all else; we’ve failed to love one another as we should. And the third way we tend to lose people from the Church is when they freely choose to be lost.

That happens when people decide that they simply don’t want to come to Church or be part of the Church any longer and, in one sense, people leaving the Church for this reason is perhaps the saddest reason of all to lose them. That’s because people usually decide to leave the Church in this way for one of two reasons, but whichever reason it is, it’s a freely taken decision that has eternal consequences for them.

People leave the Church in this way because they’ve lost or renounced their faith; they no longer believe in God or believe that Jesus is their Lord and Saviour. And people also make the decision to leave the Church simply because they’ve not really understood what being a member of the Church and being a Christian means or involves. People don’t actually say that’s why they’ve left the Church, I’ve never heard anyone say that, in fact, but what they do say is, and what tells us why they’ve really left the Church, is usually something along the lines of, ‘I just wasn’t getting anything out of it anymore.’ And I’m sure we’ve all heard people say that and give that as a reason for leaving the Church.

The obvious answer to that statement of course is to say that you get out what you put in and to ask, or wonder, what they were putting in, either to the Church, or their Christian discipleship, or either.

But I think we have to take a step back from that question before we ask it, and ask what people actually expect to get out of coming to Church and being a Christian.

The statement itself, that people aren’t getting anything out of it anymore, tells us that, whatever it is people expected to get from coming to Church and being a Christian is something they felt that they were getting at some time. And in my experience of talking to people about this issue, that’s true, they did. But what they were getting really amounts to not much more than a nice feeling.

However they’ve got these feelings, and there are lots of things about Church life and being a Christian that can and do give people these feelings, they’re usually about pleasure and enjoyment. People have told me that they like going to Church because their friends go or because they’ve made new friends there. They’ve told me going to Church is a nice way to spend Sunday morning. People have told me that going to Church has made them feel that the world isn’t such a bad place and life isn’t so bad after all. People have told me that they’ve gone to Church so that they can feel good about themselves, because going to Church made them feel that they were nice people. In fact, one person whom I knew once told me that he didn’t like my sermons because they asked too much of people.  He told me that that people didn’t go to Church to be taught that they needed to be better, but to be told that they were good enough already. That they wanted to go home feeling good about themselves, they didn’t want to have their consciences pricked and go home feeling that they’ve not been very good. But, as I pointed out to that chap, one of the main reasons we come to Church is to learn; to learn about Jesus and from Jesus so that we can be better Christians, so that we can be more like Jesus. We’re not going to do that if we try to hide our faults and failings, if we turn a deaf ear to what Jesus said, simply so that we can feel good about ourselves and about the way we are, regardless of the way we are.

In my experience, it’s people who have gone to Church to get these nice, warm, fuzzy feelings about themselves and to have those feelings in their lives, who are the same people who are likely to stop going to Church when those feelings stop, and who then say that they weren’t getting anything out of it anymore.

Now, I’m not saying by any means that going to Church shouldn’t be a nice experience, of course it should. Going to Church shouldn’t be all misery and doom and gloom; we’re a Resurrection people, and we should be joyful. But neither should going to Church, nor can going to Church, be all about having nice feelings about ourselves.

We come to Church to worship God and to praise the Lord for all that he’s done for us, and that is joyful, and should be joyful. But we also come to ask his forgiveness for our sins, for the times when we know that we’ve done wrong and been less than we know we should be as disciples of Christ. And we come to learn too, to learn about Jesus and from Jesus so that we can be better. So that we can be more like the people we’re called to be as his disciples. And in the Christian life, as in any other area of life, one of the very best ways to learn is through our mistakes; by looking at what we’ve done wrong and then learning how not to make those mistakes again in the future. But we can’t do that unless we’re open and honest about our mistakes. We can’t learn if we won’t or can’t accept that we need to learn. But we also have to accept that being open and honest about our mistakes, about our sins, means that, sometimes, we’re not going to be able to have those nice, warm, fuzzy feelings about ourselves. We have to accept that, in order to learn, we’re going to have to see ourselves as we really are, ‘warts and all’, and that isn’t going to be a particularly nice feeling. But, if we’re serious about coming to Church and about our Christian discipleship, that’s what we have to do. And so we have to accept that coming to Church isn’t simply about having nice feelings and that we shouldn’t expect it to be simply about that either.

Today, as we know, is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, and Lent is that time of the Church’s year when we’re called at more than any other time to be honest about our faults and failings and about our sins. It’s the time of the Church’s year when we’re called at more than any other time to look at ourselves honestly, not as we’d like to be or as we’d like to think we are, but as we really are, as wayward people who are need of teaching, and as sinners in need of forgiveness. It might not be nice, it won’t give us good or nice feelings about ourselves, but it’s very necessary if we’re going to grow in faith and discipleship. And it’s very important that we grow in faith and discipleship if we’re ever going to get anything worthwhile out of coming to Church and being Christians. 

We could well ask those who leave the Church because they’re not getting anything out of it anymore, what it is, or was, they put in. But what about us? What are we prepared to put in?

One thing that we all hope to get out of coming to Church and being a Christian is to share in Christ’s resurrection and when we have to leave the Church on earth when our earthly lives come to an end, to be raised to eternal life. But are we prepared to put in what Jesus tells us it takes to achieve that? Are we prepared to accept our faults and failings and learn from Jesus to achieve that? Are we prepared to see ourselves as sinners in need of forgiveness to achieve that? Are we prepared to go through the discomfort of doing those things for the sake of an eternal reward, or would we rather feel nice and good about ourselves now, at the risk of losing that eternal reward? Let’s think about these things as we go through this season of Lent, and make sure that we make the right choice, the one that will lead us to eternal happiness.

Amen.