The Heart of The Matter, God’s Gracious Deliverance

September 18, 1994

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Darryl F. Zanuck, the famous movie mogul, producer of countless Hollywood films, and man of pronounced opinions, once said he knew exactly what he wanted in the story line of his next movie if he could just find it, if - someone would just write it for him. He wanted a plot, he said, that started off with an earthquake, and then built up to a climax.

That would, certainly be impressive, and yet what we’re talking about today is an even bigger story than that.

I hope you were here last week. You don’t have to leave if you weren’t, and please don’t, but we pick up today where we left off then, in a kind of Perils of Pauline sequence.[1] When last we met, you remember, we were stuck in gooey, clinging mud, up to our necks in SIN, unable to extricate ourselves from the consequences of our folly.

We got there, at least homiletically, because this month we’re trying to give some sort of restatement to the heart and core of John Wesley’s theological and evangelical proclamation. If we review too much we’ll have to leave out even more than we’re already going to have to leave out.  But very briefly, as we tried to say last week in launching this series, there were three irreducible elements in the essential Wesleyan message....

Three...what to call them...points, considerations, truths he felt had to be included for any comprehensive understanding of the Gospel. Other elements might be negotiable, but these were crucial.

LEAVE ANY OF THEM OUT AND THE CHRISTIAN STORY IS INCOMPLETE....You’re left without what you have to have, the very least you must have to get the full picture.

Remember the little boy in Sunday School who when the teacher asked what you had to do before you could be saved, raised his hand eagerly and said, “I know, teacher you have to sin.”

Well, that’s right. That’s where Wesley started, too. That’s the first point. He called it “original sin”, which we relabeled, maybe without much improvement, but with a stab at greater clarity.  “The Mess We’re In”, as human beings, as ordinary “homo sapiens”, as people, even the best of us.

Wesley drawing from the Bible—he was an assiduously disciplined Bible student...we don’t always remember that----drawing from the Bible, AND from the broad reservoir of human experience, he recognized that something is wrong down inside of us, something is clearly out of kilter.

Not only do you see it in others when you look around, you see it yourself when you look inside. We were made for intimate fellowship with our Maker; we were created for intimate communion with God...that was God’s original intention in creating us, that was the Garden plan, so beautifully depicted at the start of Genesis, yet somehow we’ve become estranged, we’ve become separated, we’ve become cut off from what we were meant to be, NOT as the result of God’s doing, but as the result of our own doing.

And now we find ourselves, if not wretched with guilt as some were in previous generations...now OUR generation tends to find itself more feeling empty, lifeless, drained, depressed...even with our glut of things...and unable to bring to our life situations the exuberance and joy of living we were created to experience.

Clearly something’s wrong. Wesley and classical theology called it original sin, a human malaise that induces us, even when we struggle against it, to prove ourselves unfaithful to God’s love.

Literature and art and drama are sometimes more graphic in depicting the reality of the human situation than we are in the Church...that’s not something to be proud of, but I think it’s so...and insofar as they tell it accurately, they are our allies. Some of the most penetrating and striking portrayals of the terror and emptiness of sin come from the novelist, the playwright, the artist...often without any religious vocabulary at all. BUT THEY TELL THE TRUTH.

Read Golding’s Lord of the Flies, or Night, by Elie Wiesel, his chilling account of the Auschwitz experience....

Don’t read them alone; they’ll turn your blood cold.

But they’re talking about life without God, the individual and society shorn of spiritual resources, the naked human animal, left to the hell of our own devices.

There’s no better picture of sin this side of the seventh chapter of Romans...and you ought to read that, too.

THAT’S WHO WE ARE APART FROM GOD, separated from our Creator. Herman Hagedorn, the poet,[2] has written:

“Lift up the curtain, for an hour, lift up

The veil that holds you prisoner in this world

Of coins and wires and motor horns, this world

Of figures and of men who trust in facts—

This pitiable, hypocritical world

Where men with blinkered eyes and hobbled feet

Grope down a narrow gorge and call it life.”

Well, I’m preaching last week’s sermon again, and I said I wouldn’t. We must move on. BUT KEEP THAT BACKGROUND IN MIND....Without it nothing else makes sense.

Wesley knew the ugly dilemma of sin is the arena, the setting, the stage on which the drama of human redemption is acted out. It’s the cosmic canvas against which the glorious Good News of Christianity is etched in unmistakable relief.

Christianity is a religion of rescue...not just reform, not just amelioration, but RESCUE, and there’s no point in even talking about rescue until you’re willing to admit that you’re caught, that you need help.

But if you are willing to admit that, if you will grant that much of your life, is, indeed, a “groping with blinkered eyes and hobbled feet”----and who with any semblance of honesty can deny it---then Christianity with its story of God’s incredible action, God’s doing something in our behalf to change all that, becomes the greatest plot that ever unfolded in the history of the world.

It took Wesley 35 years before it really hit him that he had been coming at his problem of spiritual malaise from the wrong direction...35 years. He was no kid at Aldersgate Street, the place he had his famous “heartwarming experience”, usually looked on as the turning point of his life, the moment the “old” Wesley became the “new” Wesley.

He didn’t even begin his true career until he was already older than Jesus was when he was crucified. All along, from birth, he’d been “religious”, ...indeed, unappealingly, over conscientiously religious...what someone has called “a good man in the worst sense of the word.” It was true; we probably wouldn’t have liked him.

He had scrupulously hewed the line of the disciplined moral life, obeying every precept,

crossing every “t”, and dotting every “i” ----he almost drove people crazy he was so zealous---yet his motivation was fueled by an obsessive sense of “oughtness”. There was no joy in his religion, no laughter. He knew the words, but he couldn’t sing the tune. There are people like that in the Church today.

A number of specific factors brought him to Aldersgate, no doubt—his failure to be effective as a missionary in Georgia, his mishandled and broken relationship with Miss Sophie Hopkey...if he’d married her, I don’t know what would have happened, but we probably wouldn’t be here today... his recognition of his own mortality...he was 35 and counting...the influence of the Moravians, maybe even a sense of burnout caused by his incessant drive to prove himself and the discovery that he couldn’t do it on his own.

No matter how hard he tried, his self-imposed expectations were never reached by his accomplishments. Some of us know about that. HE WAS RIPE FOR SOMETHING TO GIVE.

At any rate, it all came to a head one night in a little prayer meeting on a side street in London, while somebody was reading from the writings of Martin Luther. The same revelation that set Luther free came flooding into Wesley’s soul.

We can’t put ourselves in good standing before a pure and absolutely moral God. We can’t. It’s obvious in the case of blatantly evil, wicked people. But even morally upright people, even the brightest and best are so far short of earning God’s approval, through their incessant overreaching, through their pride, through their tendency to put themselves in the center instead of God, the very condition the Garden story laid out so graphically, that no one is in any position to boast about acceptability.

But here’s the shocker, the----what can you call it----the miracle, the totally unexpected and undeserved solution to our dead-end situation.

SOMEONE BELIEVES IN US ENOUGH AND LOVES US ENOUGH TO BRING US BACK INTO A RESTORED RELATIONSHIP ANYWAY.

In fact, Someone has already done it through His Son, who went to the Cross in our place. The full scope of it hit Wesley that evening with such a rush of liberation that he could only describe it by using the image of fire. He wrote in his Journal that he felt his heart burning inside.

It was the jolt of recognition that life, real life, the restoration of full humanity, inner peace, salvation, if you prefer the religious word...the blessed assurance that you’re all right with God, and with yourself, no matter what you’ve done or what you haven’t done, no matter how far you’ve strayed, or how uppity has been your attitude....

It was the jolt of recognition that the negation of sin and the restoration of wholeness is a gift from God...not something we achieve, or produce at all...but something God gives us, out of God’s unlimited and appalling GRACE, through the merits and death of His Son Jesus Christ.

Wesley wrote afterward: “I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sin, even mine (notice the pronouns; they’re all personal pronouns of personal experience!) .... He had taken away MY sin even MINE and saved ME from the law of sin and death.” It was a whole new world for Wesley.

Now, the name, the theological name for this wonder of God’s deliverance is JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE, the second part of Wesley’s tripartite emphasis, and the part that focuses on God’s rescuing role in the Christian drama and our response to it.

To justify means to make just, to treat as just, to restore again to wholeness a relationship that has been broken.

Wesley liked to say a good synonym for justification is PARDON. It runs through his sermons almost as an aphorism---“Justification is another word for pardon”.

He meant by it the glorious cleaning of the slate, the wiping away as if it had never existed, the sin that causes our separation from the Creator. Justification is FORGIVENESS, without any strings attached, without qualifying clauses, without exemptions, or exceptions, or loopholes....

Justification is the open arms of the Father, as in Jesus’ incomparable story, welcoming that lost boy, coming home from the pigpen. That’s the nature, Wesley said, of what lies at the center of the universe; that’s the magnificent truth about the heart of ultimate Reality. Think of the grandeur of that.

But wait a minute! Hold on! There’s something out of balance here. What’s wrong with

this picture?

If God just pardons, like THAT, with the snapping of the fingers, if God’s forgiveness, God’s justification is just automatically spread around, no questions asked, what does that do to any sense of God’s moral stringency?

What does it do to any sense of the righteousness and integrity of God? Wouldn’t it reduce God to the level of a kind of soft, doting, “aw shucks”, grandparent type deity, with even less ethical stature than we ourselves possess?

If the consequences of sin are simply blotted away by celestial fiat, then what’s so serious about it? What’s the big deal?

Wesley, like Luther before him, and Calvin, and Paul, and the Church at its best through the ages, realized that while God’s gracious justification is FREE, absolutely free to US, it doesn’t cost us anything...it does cost SOMEBODY.

That’s the meaning of the Cross. That’s what keeps us honest.

God comes to us in our sin in the person of God’s Son. Even as we nail Him up, He says, “Thy sins be forgiven thee.” Unbelievable! Free to us. BUT NOT INEXPENSIVE. AND CERTAINLY NOT CHEAP. The cost of justification is the life of Jesus Christ. As classical theology puts it, “there can be no redemption apart from the shedding of blood.”

Boy, that’s heavy.

Could Wesley explain what happened out there on the Cross. NO! He could not. Nobody else can, either. Nobody else has ever been able to.

H.R. Mackintosh[3] has said that the great reason we fail to understand Calvary is not merely because we are not profound enough; it is that we are not good enough. It is because we are such strangers to sacrifice ourselves that God’s sacrifice leaves us bewildered.

You can’t explain the Cross. All those theories of the atonement---most of which drive a wedge between the Son and the Father---that Jesus was a substitute to appease God’s offended honor....that He was a ransom paid by God to the Devil, that He was a bargaining chip, or that His death was merely a moving and heroic example----None of those adequately “explains” the Cross...the fullness of it is bigger than our little finite minds can ever wrap around.

At the very least, though, Wesley insisted, the Cross is where not only the grandeur and nobility of Jesus, but the infinite love of God---and are they not the same?----met in mortal, cosmic combat the power of sin to enslave....AND SIN LOST. It was a bloody battle, and a costly one, but SIN could not prevail.

There on that windswept, rocky hillside, once and for all, the cost of my reconciliation, my acceptability to God was paid in full.

HE DID IT FOR ME....I am justified, forgiven, pardoned, restored to a right relationship, AS IF I HAD NEVER SINNED, not by my doing, but by the act of the Divine Rescuer.

And what is my response to what has already been done in my behalf? What now must I do to appropriate for myself this incredible gift? How do I receive what the ritual calls “the benefits of His passion”?

Just take it, Wesley says...that’s all. Take it by faith. Just claim it. It’s right there, with your name on it. Grab it, believe it, hold on to it, and give thanks for it.

Sometime back, I don’t remember exactly how long, maybe a couple of years ago, an incident occurred downtown at ORMC, the Orlando Regional Medical Center, that resulted in some local notoriety. I only know about it from the account in the newspaper.

A little child, a baby, was clinging to life following a complex operation. She had lost blood and needed a transfusion of fresh blood from an outside donor. The blood was there, and available for her, fresh, whole, pure, clean, life-saving blood.

But the parents of the child, because of their beliefs, refused permission for the transfusion. For hours, which then stretched out to days, the child’s life hung in the balance. The precious gift of life was there, ready, and waiting...it was instantly available, but doing no good because it hadn’t been claimed.

Now, blow that story up, a hundred times, a thousand times. It’s still not big enough. There are people who have failed to receive the ultimate gift, the gift of life that far transcends mere biological life, simply because they’ve never accepted it.

Faith, in the Wesleyan sense, and the Lutheran sense, and the Pauline sense, and the New Testament sense.... Faith in the Christian sense means accepting with all the attendant implications attached thereunto, for both the present and the future, EVEN THOUGH YOU KNOW YOU DON’T DESERVE IT... God’s astounding verdict of NOT GUILTY...for Jesus’ sake. THINK OF IT!

It means nothing more, but nothing less, than saying YES, with all your heart and all your trust to God’s unbelievably generous offer of life---real life, abundant life, zestful life, eternal life in communion with God’s Son.

In Wesley’s own words, “Faith is not only a belief in God in Christ (after all, even the devils believe); it is rather a sure trust and confidence that Christ died for MY sins, that HE loved ME, and that He gave Himself for me.”

Nothing else is needed. Justification by faith alone. There is nothing you have to do. There is nothing you have to do.

There is nothing you have to do. There is nothing you have to do....in order to qualify. All that has been done. It was done long ago. There’s the symbol of it...rooted in history, and grounded in the infinite grace of God.

There it is. Now, as with any gift, extended to you with love and sincerity, you just take it, with the best manners you can muster, and say, “Thank you”.

In the words of the old Fanny Crosby hymn:

“Nothing in my hands I bring,

Simply to thy Cross I cling.”

I don’t suppose it’s deathless poetry, but it’s an expression of deathless, timeless, bottomless, and fathomless Good News.

From the time it all came together for him in that little prayer meeting until his death fifty-three years later, Wesley crisscrossed the British Isles almost ceaselessly “offering Christ” as he put it. It’s the phrase that probably occurs in his Journal more than any other. After jotting down his itinerary and what he did that day, invariably, he would add, “I offered them Christ.”

It’s still the invitation of his successors and of the Christian Church. You can be justified, brought into a new and living relationship with your Maker. You can live truly and profoundly as you were meant to love. You can start all over. You can escape from the bondage and gloom of sin’s grasp, the groping down a narrow gorge with “blinkered eyes and hobbled feet”.

You can do it by saying YES to what God has already done for you through His Son. You can receive Him in glorious, liberating pardon by faith. More than you can ever imagine, He wants you to receive that offer.

Jessica Tandy[4] died this past week. What a loss. She was 85 years old and some of her most memorable roles came toward the end of her distinguished career. When she and her husband, Hume Cronyn, were honored at Lincoln Center a year or so ago for lifetime achievements in theater, she responded to the accolades heaped on her by quoting some lines from one of the plays in which she had starred.

I don’t know the source of the lines. I don’t think they came from John Wesley’s Journal, but they almost could have. The lines go: “Come to the edge. It’s too high. Come to the edge. We might fall.

Come to the edge. So they came, and he pushed them. AND THEY FLEW.” Justification by faith alone...God’s glorious deliverance, stepping over the edge into the soaring wings of God. Will you let God push you to life?

--

[1] A very popular series of early US silent films telling a continuous story, released in 1914. At the end of each film the main character Pauline, played by Pearl White, was shown in great danger, so people went to see the next one to find out how she escaped.

[2] Hermann Hagedorn (18 July 1882 – 27 July 1964) was an American author, poet and biographer.

[3] Hugh Ross Mackintosh (31 October 1870 – 8 June 1936) was a Scottish theologian and parish minister who served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1932.

[4] Jessie Alice Tandy was an English actress. Tandy appeared in over 100 stage productions and had more than 60 roles in film and TV, receiving an Academy Award, four Tony Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. One of her best known roles was in “Driving Miss Daisy”.