Hoover Church of Christ Sermons

This week we enter a four-week stretch in the One Word devotional readings where we focus on the nature of salvation. These four themes are Justification, Propitiation, Redemption, and Atonement.

Tomorrow we’ll study the first of those–Justification–by using a story Jesus once told about two men who went to the temple to pray. One pleased God, and one didn’t.

The punch line is verse 14: “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other.” That would’ve been scandalous to Jesus’ audience, of course, because he was commending a despised tax collector and condemning a well-respected Pharisee. But it reflects an oft-repeated theme in Jesus’ ministry and teaching: being right with God is based first on our recognizing that we don’t deserve it and that we’re hopeless on our own to obtain it.

Lots of first-century religious folks had that confused, thinking that if they did and said the right things, they would secure right standing with God. Justification, Jesus said, depends instead on admitting your own sinfulness and throwing yourself down at God’s feet in submission.

This is a hard lesson, isn’t it? Maybe we fear that believing this view of justification will lead to moral laxity, creating an environment where obedience is denigrated. But Jesus never deemphasized obedience . . . he just wanted it to be clear that obedience comes from a grateful heart, not one that’s trying to earn God’s favor.

Next week our theme in our One Word devotional readings is Grief, so Sunday we’re going to study the story about Jesus’ weeping near the grave of his friend Lazarus.

Grief touches us all sooner or later, so there’s a good chance you’ve felt its burden. It’s real, it hurts, and to some extent it’s inevitable.

But it doesn’t have to be debilitating. One aspect of the Lord’s incarnation is that he experienced fully what it means to be human. While fully God, he was also fully man. He hurt, he got tired, thirsty, and hungry. And he grieved.

It’s hard to know everything that Jesus was feeling when he saw Mary and Martha and sensed their tremendous grief over losing their brother. The text simply says that Jesus cried. Maybe it was because he saw pain in the eyes of these two women, his good friends. Maybe it was because he felt the terrible burden of sin’s damaging influence in the world . . . after all, death wasn’t supposed to be part of the human experience.

Whatever the cause, Jesus experienced grief. Just as you have when you stood heartbroken at the grave of a mom or dad or spouse or child. Jesus cried.

Sunday we’ll explore what John 11 teaches us about grief. He doesn’t remove it entirely from our earthly experience, of course, but he changes the way we see it. He removes some of its sting.

hat do you say about baptism to a Church of Christ that hasn’t been said many, many times before? After all, we’re known in the religious world for being obsessed with baptism.

But of course, the point isn’t to say something new or different, but to emphasize once again the basic biblical truths about baptism . . .that beautiful moment when a person follows Jesus into the water in order to identify with his death, burial, and resurrection in a public way. With the baptism in Churches of Christ, there’s always the risk of over-emphasizing it–focusing on it to the exclusion of the faith and commitment that precede it–and under-emphasizing it–refusing to talk much about it because we feel like it’s been said so many times before.

So tomorrow–as the last three weeks have been–will be in many ways a return to the basics, and attempt to share with our church a faithful view of what Scripture teaches us about what it means to be “buried with [Christ] in baptism.” We’ll focus a little extra on the comparison with circumcision that Paul makes in the Colossians text.

In some ways, confession is quite simple. A person stands before a church or before his family and friends and states that he believes in Jesus as God’s Son. But of course, it’s not that simple, or at least it shouldn’t be. Imagine what that confession meant for the people who made it in the first century . . . they were publicly identifying themselves with Jesus Christ and a burgeoning movement that had no social capital. In fact, depending on where you were, it could lead to your being disconnected from your family, cast out of the synagogue, or even beaten or killed.

Imagine what confession means to someone today in North Korea, Iraq, Iran, or parts of China?

I think we need to consider seriously the implications of confession, not just as a “step” on the way to salvation but as a day-to-day way of living that identifies us with the risen Christ. At our baptism, we said it publicly, and every day we keep saying it–not only with words, but with attitudes, actions, and priorities.

Every day we wake up and make the decision to confess Christ and also to confess those things we do that are inconsistent with someone who claims to follow him.