Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ our Defense. Last Wednesday evening after church, I and a high school student drove down to St. Louis. We left at 9:30 P.M., drove through rain the entire way, and got to St. Louis at 8 A.M. I drove the whole way while Austin, the student, slept. I had to make several stops to get out and walk around, but we made it safely. We spent Thursday and Friday touring the seminary, going to chapel and a class, and hanging out with my friends. I think he got a pretty accurate taste of the sem life and the class we sat in on was an amazing one. Then Saturday I showed him around St. Louis. We ate at Pappy's BBQ, then walked around Busch Stadium and under the Arch. Then Saturday night we stayed at my friend's house who is doing his vicarage in Washington, Missouri. We had a fun evening with him and his wife playing board games and watching the basketball games. Then Sunday morning, my friend was preaching, so we attended church there and then drove back. We got back around 7 P.M. on Sunday evening. I was back just in time to go to Bible Study at 8.
Then I unpacked and had to immediately repack. Monday morning we left for Huron which is only an hour away and had District Pastor's Conference Monday and Tuesday. It was actually a really interesting presentation on catechizes. Always good to see the other pastors from the state as well. It is also unofficially official that Mt. Calvary will be getting another vicar next year from Fort Wayne. I was happy to hear they were getting another vicar to carry on the campus ministry, but I was hoping it would be from St. Louis purely for the fact that I would know him then. But I trust the Holy Spirit has the right guy.
Then Monday and Tuesday while I was gone, I got all new windows in my house. I love this because now they actually have screens and I can open my windows. However, the crew that put int he windows left a terrible mess under every window and throughout my whole house. So I spent five hours on Tuesday night after we got back from Pastor's conference Spring cleaning my whole house. It is nice to have a super clean house, but the five hours of cleaning was not fun. Tomorrow with my day off I plan to rake my yard really well and get all the leaves and dead grass off it so hopefully the new green stuff will start coming up. I also need to fold four loads of laundry from all my travels, take down Christmas lights, finish cleaning the basement, and then finishing sanding and routering my rocking chair pieces. Hopefully if I get them all sanded and routered, then after Easter I can stain and polyurethane them. Friday at 2 we leave for Pierre, which is three hours away for Bible Bowl on Saturday though so I will be gone Friday night and all day Saturday. Then I have three sermons next week for Holy Week! I am trying to enjoy how busy life is right now because after the first week of May, the college students will be gone, confirmation and Sunday school will be done, and I will have too much free time I am scared. So busy is crazy but it is still good.
Here is my sermon from last night on Psalm 130:
Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our text for tonight is Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD! O Lord, hear my voice! Let you ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy! If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you these is forgiveness, that you may be feared. I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than the watchmen for the morning, more than the watchmen for the morning. O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption. And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
I want you to imagine you are standing in a court room and now realize YOU ARE ON TRIAL! Yes, you heard me right, you are on trial. God the Father is the judge sitting on the bench, and the Devil is the prosecuting attorney. You are on trial for every sin you have ever committed in your life. So as you stand there, the Devil opens his briefcase and pulls out a stack of paper that seems three times as thick as his briefcase. He sets the stack down on the table in front of him and begins to read a list of every sin you have committed. He doesn’t just list general things like told a lie, said a cuss word, hit your sibling…. No, he reads the exact date and time and a very detailed description of each sin. “April 3rd, 7:46 in the morning, you were driving to work when you became very angry with driver in front of you for going ‘too slow’, broke fifth commandment by thinking hateful thoughts of your neighbor and therefore murdering him.” After hearing about three or four of these specific sins listed out in very formal fashion, with the Father the judge sitting there just listening the whole time, you finally decide to speak. You try to excuse or justify the last sin that the devil read with some weak pathetic attempt to make yourself look better, but before you can finish the devil not only yells out “Objection”, he flips to the last page of his stacks of paper and starts scribbling the new offense to use against you.
You see, in this trial you are going to lose, and you know it. Because every sin the devil reads off, you immediately know you are guilty of it. And in this court there is no jury of peers that you can plead to or try to play off of their emotions or hope they see it your way. In this court room you can’t spin the truth to look less offensive, you can’t use fancy words and an elaborate showing to make wrongs seems right. As you stand there you know that you are guilty and even worse you know the judge, the Father, knows you are guilty. You are guilty to the first degree a million times over. You by yourself have no defense campaign to stand on. You are guilty of being a sinner, 100% sinner, a first degree sinner. And you know that this guilty verdict comes with a sentence of being thrown to hell, cast out of God’s presence, and into the jailhouse of death for all of eternity. You have no defense to stand on. You are guilty, you deserve the sentencing, your only hope is to fall face down and beg and plead for the mercy of the judge. You know He has no reason to give you any mercy, you know you do not deserve your mercy, but your only hope, your only chance at all is if He gives you His mercy and sentences you as innocent.
This is what our psalmist tells us our God does for us. Our psalmist knows he is in this very circumstance; he is cast out of God’s presence and is begging and pleading for God to hear his cries for mercy. Then he says, “If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” He knows that if the devil really were to turn in Exhibit A, the list of all our sins, and God kept that long list, that official record, we truly would have no defense, no hope to stand on. God, being a just and fair God and judge, would have no choice but to find us guilty if He kept that record. However, as the psalmist tells us in the very next line, God does not keep that record. God does not keep that long list of all our sins in front of Him, adding to it every time we fail again. “With you there is forgiveness”. We do have a defense to stand on, but it is nothing we have done. The judge heard our cries for mercy, just as He heard the psalmist’s cries for mercy and He has answered our cries as we heard last week. God knew we would be found guilty, so He sent His Son to be our defense. Christ, took that long list of sins, that official record that has our name on the top of it, He crossed our name out and wrote His own on it. He made every one of our accusations and offenses His. He put Himself on the stand and pleaded guilty to every one of our sins. Jesus, the one who never sinned in His life, pleaded guilty to every sin of all mankind, including yours and mine alike. God being the just and fair judge sentenced His own Son with the sentence we deserved. Christ was sentenced to be put to death and feel the full wrath of God’s judgment. Christ took our sins, that long official list all the way to the cross with Him where the sentence was carried out. As He hung on the cross, bleeding, thirsting, dying, that record of sins was completely covered and stained the blood of our Lord so that it is no longer readable. It no longer is a list of sins we are guilty of, it is a blood stained certificate of our pardon.
So now as we stand before the Father in the court room, we do have a defense. When the Devil no longer has that list of our sins, he tries to accuse us of old sins that he can remember from the list. But this time it is Christ our defense lawyer who stands up and yells “objection”. Christ objects to the accusation, presenting the record that once listed all our sins, but now is the blood stained certificate that is proof our sentencing has been paid in full. Christ offers His hands and feet where the nail holes are, His side where the spear was thrust into Him as His “Exhibit A”. He is the living proof that all of those sins have been paid for and the sentence has been served in full. Christ claims us as His own, our hearts and our foreheads where the sign of the cross was made on us at our baptism and presents us to the judge, His Father, as completely blameless. The Father, who is a fair and just judge, pronounces us as innocent of all charges. We have a defense to stand on, it is our Lord Jesus Christ and His forgiveness.
We are freed and clear from the guilty sentence we deserve because of our defense, Jesus Christ. And Christ tells us in our Gospel reading from John 8, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” When we remain and abide in His word, coming to church every Sunday hearing His Word read aloud and proclaimed, when we read our Bibles and have our daily devotions, the Spirit strengthens our faith, ever reminding us of the truth. The truth that Jesus Christ is our sure defense, He is the one who came in steadfast love with plentiful redemption. He is the one who is our pardon from all sin. The truth that the Father heard us sinners who had no defense to stand on, heard our cries for His mercy, sent His Son to claim all sins as His own, to die on the cross to pay for the sin of all mankind, to stain our record of sins red with His blood to be our pardon, and to rise from the dead to be our redemption and new life. This is the truth that His Word teaches us and reminds us of, this is the truth that sets us free.
So we live our lives now in that pardon from sin, being claimed by Christ our defense, living in the forgiveness of sins. We live in this pardoned life, in His Word which is our hope, knowing one day we will stand in the presence of our Father, and hear Him pronounce over us, “In the name of my Son, Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior, I pronounce you as innocent.” Christ truly is our defense, our pardon, and our innocence.
In the name of our Defense and Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Amen.
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