A university student was seen with a large "K" printed on his T- shirt. When someone asked him what the "K" stood for, he said, "Confused." "But," the questioner replied, "you don't spell "confused" with a "K." The student answered, "You would if you were as confused as I am."
And Harry Truman the former President of the
And this is a point that Paul seems to be addressing in his letter to the Romans (10:8b-13), where he cuts through all of the potential confusion and wordiness of our faith with the simple words, ‘If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in
your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved…’ And a little later he addresses any further questions by stating just as simply, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’
The Church seems to spend an awful lot of time in discussions over all kinds of issues, such as baptism, women priests, and other things that you’ll hear about on the news, but I think Paul is reminding us here that our priority as Christians must be to shout about the wonderful God that we have.
And this morning I just wanted to think briefly of some of the things that Paul would perhaps be telling us to share… The first is of the grace and mercy of God – unfashionable words perhaps, but words which encapsulate God. He is full of grace and mercy. Whatever we have done, whatever we have said or thought, or failed to do, God is ready to forgive – God is eager to forgive.
In the act of baptism God is reminding us that his arms are wide open, just as they were on the cross, as he welcomes new members into his family of the Church… The author Philip Yancey in his book ‘What’s so amazing about grace’, wrote, ‘there is nothing we can do to make God love us more, and nothing that we can do to make God love us less.’
Paul, as he was writing this letter to the Romans, must have been remembering his life before he became a Christian, a life of hatred and persecution of any Christians, in fact anyone who didn’t agree totally with him – and he recognised the grace and the mercy of a God who could call even him away from that life of hatred to serve in his Church.
That is the same grace and mercy that he shows to everyone who is prepared to turn to him.
And secondly we think of the love of God. On Wednesday we entered the season of Lent, the time in the year when Christians look forward to Easter. In that period we reflect on the torture, the betrayal, the journey in to Jerusalem, a journey taken by Jesus with the full knowledge that he was going to die, and then we have Holy Week and the trial and crucifixion of Jesus.
Yet through all of these things we are constantly reminded that this is the same Jesus who accepted this punishment on behalf of everyone, the same Jesus who forgave his killers as he hung dying on the cross, and the same Jesus who rose from the dead and made a promise to all of his followers that he would never leave us.
This is the same Jesus who loves us today, and who loves with no conditions and no limits… A child psychologist moved into a new neighbourhood. He had a particularly irritating habit of correcting parents in the estate for their bad parenting. If he saw something he didn’t like, he’d come out of his house and say to the parent, ‘That’s not the way, love is the way, love is the way.’
After a few months of this, the local residents were getting rather annoyed, and one day the child psychologist was laying a new path in front of his house. A teenager came careering down the street on his bike but lost control and went ploughing through the wet cement. The child psychologist, in a fit of rage, clipped the boy around the ear. The boy’s mother who was watching from her kitchen window jumped for joy. She dashed out of the house, looked the psychologist in the eye, and said, ‘that’s not the way; love is the way, love is the way’, to which the psychologist replied, ‘ah yes, but I was talking about love in the abstract, not in the concrete.’
Jesus’ love is not abstract, it is very real, it is concrete – it changes lives and it changes people.
And that brings us on to the third point as we think of the power of God – the power that enables him to be with us as a constant presence throughout our lives, the power that governs creation and eternity, and the power that helps people to fight against evil and injustice in the world. There was a song some years ago called ‘The Power of Love’, and the power of God’s love is the power that transforms and brings new life, new hope and new joy.
The message that Jesus came to bring was not one of confusion – it may have been confused by so many of us as his followers over the years, but the message is very simple – we have a God who is full of grace and mercy, always ready to offer a way back to him; we have a God who loves us unconditionally, with a love that is greater than any human love; and we have a God of power, who changes lives, and will constantly change us to be more like him if we let him.
Lent is a solemn time of reflection, but as we begin lent let’s also make time to give thanks to God as we reflect on all of his gifts, his grace and mercy, his unbreakable love and his power, and let’s invite him to share a little more of our lives, as we meet him in prayer, in Bible reading, and in the experiences of our lives from day to day. AMEN
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