What if Christmas Doesn’t Come from a Store?

Growing up, one of many favorite Christmas memories was watching the cartoon version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas at my Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We lived in Missouri and they lived in Iowa. It was always such a treat to make the five-hour drive to visit them for presents and sledding and hot chocolate and time with family and Christmas joy.

There’s that classic scene in the movie when the narrator says,

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore.

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.

I quoted that line in a recent sermon. It was my favorite sermon from all of 2019. The sermon comes from Romans 8 and mentions that—in the words of Dr. Seuss—Romans 8 offers more than a little bit more. Romans 8 offers Christians the deeper joy and more gritty triumph of the gospel.

As one year closes and another begins, I’d love to leave you with the encouragement to forsake your sin and live more fully rooted in God’s love for you in Christ. I titled the sermon “The Sons Who Slay Their Sin and Live.” You can read or listen below.

Happy New Year,
Benjamin

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The Sons Who Slay Their Sin and Live

Romans 8:12–17
Sermon Series: “Joyful and Triumphant: The Deeper Joy and More Gritty Triumph of Romans 8”
December 8, 2019

The song goes, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” My first pastorate was in Tucson, AZ, and my first day of work was June 1. It started really hot, and for three months it only got hotter. I loved it. But when December came, it never really began to look a lot like Christmas. I didn’t love that. No leaves on the ground, no need for flannel and parkas, no way to cut down your own Christmas tree. Everything that grows in Tucson has needles, but not pine needles. I missed having the signs that told me Christmas was coming.

I don’t know whether you love the Christmas season or not. A pastor named Eric Schumacher recently wrote, “My parents divorced when I was 12. I haven’t had a holiday gathering with both my parents and all my brothers present for 31 years. I probably never will again. It is still incredibly painful every year. And I think I’ll mourn that until the day I die” (Twitter). For some of us, celebrating Christmas is hard because of hard past memories or hard present realities; for others celebrating Christmas is wonderful because of wonderful past memories and wonderful present realities. For most of us, it’s some of both.

My hope during the Advent season here at church is not different than my hope at any other time during the year: to point us to the wonder of the good news of Jesus Christ. We printed a flyer with our Christmas service times on them. I don’t want you to hang it on your fridge. Please give it to a friend, coworker, family member, or neighbor so they can hang it on their fridge. I’ll be preaching the week before Christmas and Christmas Eve, and I’d love to see our church point people to Jesus who don’t often give him much attention.

Scripture Reading

Please turn with me in your Bible’s to the letter we call Romans. It’s in the New Testament, which is the part of the Bible written after Jesus came to earth. It’s a letter written to a church in the city of Rome, a church full of people trying to do what we’re trying to do: make sense of the good news of Jesus for our everyday lives.

We’ll be in chapter 8 right where Pastor Ben left off last week. Follow along with me as I read Romans 8:12–17, and then we’ll pray that God would be our teacher.

12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

Prayer

This is God’s Word. Thanks be to God. “Heavenly Father . . .”

Introduction

Pastor Ben and I have said to each other that if you’re a preacher who is going to preach through the letter of Romans, you need to be over fifty years old. That’s only sort of a joke. The theology and complexity of thought are too rich for otherwise. One of my pastor heroes calls Romans 8 the greatest chapter in the greatest letter in the greatest book ever written. In my opinion, that might not be an overstatement. I did add it up, however. Pastor Ben and I and Davis Younts (who is preaching next week) are not over fifty, but between the three of us, we have 106 years, so we thought this might qualify us to attempt to summit Romans 8.

Christians commonly call the season leading up to Christmas, Advent. The word advent means coming or arrival. The advent season allows for focused attention backward on the first advent of Jesus as the man born to die and attention forward to his second advent as the king come to reign. We celebrate Christmas between these two advents, the advent of the man born to die and the king come to reign. But during Advent, while all the faithful come to sing about being “joyful and triumphant” as we adore our savior, sometimes our understanding of Christmas being “joyful and triumphant” can seem merely sentimental and nostalgic—good food and family and friends and presents.

There’s that classic scene in the cartoon version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas when the narrator says, “And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

I believe Romans 8 offers more than a little bit more. In Romans 8, God calls the faithful to come to adore the deeper joy and the more gritty triumph of Jesus, which is the joy and triumph that will sustain the children of God in a world long in sin and error and pining until the second advent of Jesus. “[I]n all these things,” Paul writes near the end of the chapter, “we are more than conquerors through [Jesus] who loved us” (8:37). The “these things” that we are more than triumphant over include, Paul writes, tribulation and famine, distress and danger (v. 35), which means we have more joy and triumph than can be bought from a store.

As Pastor Ben opened the series last week with the first eleven verses, he held high the gospel of free, undeserved grace Christians receive in the gospel. The opening verse in the chapter and the great theme in his sermon came from v. 1, which reads,

1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

This means that everyone who is “in Christ” has no condemnation from God, not that we don’t deserve condemnation because of our sin but that we have no condemnation because God sent Jesus into the world to take our condemnation for us.

Some of you know that I went through the ordination process this fall. It involved a lengthy oral exam and the writing of a dense theological paper. One of the questions you’re required to answer in the paper asks, “What does it mean that you are in ‘union with Christ?’” This is the theme highlighted in verse one of Romans 8. For those “in Christ,” there is now no condemnation. So what does it mean to be “in Christ”? I wrote in my ordination paper,

Nearly one hundred times in the New Testament we read of believers being in Christ (e.g., 2 Cor 5:17; 1 Pet 5:14). Even more occurrences surface when we include variations of the phrase. In fact, sometimes the biblical authors even speak of Christ being in believers, not just believers being in Christ (Jn 15:4; Col 1:27). Union in Christ covers a range of aspects related to a believer’s salvation.

Simply put, to be in union with Christ is to have your life (now and into eternity) bound together with Christ in such a way that you receive all the saving benefits of the gospel (Col 3:3–4). To put it even more simply, union with Christ is like placing everything good about the gospel into a sack, labeling the sack “in Christ,” and handing it to a believer.

Last week Pastor Ben’s sermon took that sack of blessings, turned it upside down upon our heads, and shook for thirty-five minutes the glories of the gospel into our laps.

But the question hung out there, “What now?” If God has taken away all of our condemnation and corruption through Jesus because we are “in Christ,” do we have anything to do? Our passage this morning answers the question of “What now?” Because of the gospel reality that we are in union with Jesus and thus have no condemnation, in the power of the Spirit of God, Christians now begin to put our sin to death.

1. Put the flesh to death (by the power of the Spirit), vv. 12­­–14

Look with me at it in the words of our passage.

12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

Paul begins with, “so then.” In light of all the treasures of heaven promised to us in the gospel, what are we to do? Answer: We are to put our sin to death in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Paul proclaims that because Jesus has freed us from the prison of sin, we need to not stay in prison any longer. Jesus threw open the prison door, so walk out of prison. Don’t say in bondage. That’s what Paul is saying. And he uses violent language to do so. “For if you live according to the flesh,” he writes in v. 13, “you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” That’s violent language.

A pastor in the seventeenth century named John Owen wrote a book called The Mortification of Sin. I re-read it last year. The famous line in the book says, “Be killing sin or sin will be killing you.”

Jesus spoke often about this type of violence against our own sin, the war of the Christian life, the “be killing sin” part of Christianity. I’ll give one example from the gospel of Matthew. Jesus uses deliberate overstatement to make his point.

27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5:27–32)

Notice that the point of Jesus’s words in Matthew 5 and the words of Paul in Romans 8, do not command us to go on a “sin diet,” like we just sin less and then have some “cheat meals” here and there. God commands us to starve sin, not diet from sin. Christians don’t seek to limit our sin; we do whatever we have to do to eliminate our sin.

And the word “our” in “our sin” is key. Christian, be far more concerned about your greed than the greed of corporate America. Be far more concerned about the sex viewed on your smartphone than the sex filmed in Hollywood. Be far more concerned about the health of your marriage than the cheapening of marriage by our government. God’s view of sin is that of something dangerous, something that robs us of joy and God of his glory. We don’t have this view; sin is something we laugh at and coddle.

There a lot of young people at our church. I love that. I’m not old enough yet to be your father, I could be your older brother. By some accounts and depending on what chart you look at, I’m the oldest millennial, so I don’t like it when people pick on millennials, pick on us. So please hear this as a loving encouragement from a brother who cares: as much as we talk about authenticity, transparency, and brokenness, let us also show one another how much we hate our sin by the war we make against our sin.

When Paul uses the word flesh here doesn’t mean skin and meat and bones but that part of your nature that opposes God. The flesh is at war with God (v. 7). And in the power of the Spirit, we are to slay our sin. Don’t miss that connection with the Spirit. Romans 8 teaches that the Spirit of God in the life of the believer does more than one thing, more than simply telling you that God loves you. Yes, the Spirit of God works in Christians to remind us of all the good we have in the gospel—forgiven, reconciled, adopted. But the Spirit also points out the sinful places in your life that need to die. This isn’t about having a minimum level of holiness before God will love you. Look, I will always love my children. But for us to sit at the dinner table and fellowship with joy, my children can’t be cursing when they think I’m not listening.

The way Satan points out your sin and the way the Spirit of God points out your sin is different. I heard a preacher put it like this once. The condemnation of Satan is ambiguous and broad and hopeless. The conviction brought by the Spirit, however, is focused, narrow, and hopeful. Satan tells you that you’re a loser. That’s ambiguous, broad, and hopeless. If you take your finger and put it in your shoulder and press on it with increasing pressure, that’s like the work of the Spirit, that’s how the conviction of God works. “Do you feel that?” the Spirit asks us. “This particular thing needs to go. Let me help you” he says.

So, in last week’s sermon, Ben told us all the good things we have in the gospel when we are “in Christ.” And this week, we see that being in Christ leads us to run from sin. Let me illustrate last week’s passage and this week’s passage. Let’s just say, you lived in an apartment. A lousy, evil landlord runs the apartment complex, but at first you didn’t know he was evil because he promised you a great place to live. But when it came time to move in, things change. Your rent doubles. Your heat stops working. Your bathroom plumbing breaks. Your electricity cuts in and out. Rats scurry around at night.

So you say, “Mr. Landlord, you promised this, and you promised that, and now it’s different. I want you to fix it.” He says, “Tough.” And every month he proceeds to pound on your door demanding his rent. Oppressing. You can’t leave. You’re a captive.

And then one day, a new owner buys the apartment complex, and he himself becomes the landlord, and he throws the lousy, evil landlord off the property and begins to fix the plumbing and evict the rats and restore everything to its proper place. Thankfulness wells up inside you. However, after the initial euphoria is gone, the old landlord, keeps coming around. He keeps walking with his clipboard around the apartment complex. And he keeps pounding on your door every month. “Pay up. Your rent is due,” he says. “You’re mine. You’re a debtor to me.” Do you know what you say?

You say, “No, Mr. Evil Landlord. I have a new landlord who is kind and wise and powerful and loving and just as he has thrown you off before, so he will do again every time I come to him to ask for his help because he is the great liberator. Security, show this impostor the door.”

That’s last week’s sermon. This week, we’re pressed with the questions of why we would vandalize the newly renovated property, why we are not content with the apartment he gave us, why we get so angry with the other tenants, who, by the way, are all also recipients of his grace.

Church, what in your life needs to die? If that sounds hard to you, it should. But don’t miss the promise. Look again at vv. 13–14.

. . . if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

As you kill your sin, you don’t earn sonship, you display it.

In passing before we go to the next point. Let me mention something about the word “sons” in the phrase “sons of God.” Later in the passage, which I’ll read in a moment, Paul uses the more general “children of God” not just “sons of God.” Those more critical to the Bible might take this to be evidence of patriarchal influence on the Bible. It’s actually the exact opposite.

In the first century, only a son would inherit the full and biggest blessing from the father. So, if Paul had spoken of “daughters of God,” many would have gone, “Well, that’s great, but daughters don’t get it all.” This is why Paul says “sons of God”; it’s not to slight what it means to be a “daughter of God” but to say that if you are a “child of God”—whether a son or daughter—you get the full inheritance of the father. Paul speaks of sons of God to celebrate the beautiful reality of adoption into God’s family, namely, that as a daughter of God, you have equal standing in the father’s house. All the children are sons, even when they are daughters.

2. Live as sons (in the assurance of the Spirit), vv. 15–17

Look with me again at the rest of the verses in our passage.

15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

That word of Abba denotes tenderness and intimacy. I don’t think pastors have been wrong equating Abba with our name Daddy. One pastor said, “I don’t feel respected if my children call me Dr. Ortlund. I feel put off” (Ray Ortlund, “God’s Grace Is Better Than We Think” from Romans 8:12–16,” March 30, 2019). In the same way, my children don’t call me Reverend Vrbicek. They call me Daddy.

In the gospels we read of Jesus one time speaking to his Father as “Abba Father.” Do you know the context? Let me read it to you.

32 And they went to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” 33 And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed and troubled. 34 And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.” 35 And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. 36 And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark 14:32–36)

The word Abba was squeezed out of Jesus during his greatest moments of suffering. Think about that. When our savior suffered, that’s when he cries, “Daddy!” That context should inform what we read here in Romans.

In contemporary, western Christianity we often have the assumption that we know our sonship best when we feel the most blessed. That’s not what this passage says, though. I’ll put it like this. We often assume as we stand in some alpine meadow with the sun shining and our bellies full and our bodies strong, we confidently cry out, “I am a child of God.” We’re joyful and triumphant.

But this cry of Abba Father is more like the helpless cry of a scared child in the dark who, rather than trying to find his own way out of the pain and rather than giving up in utter despair, instinctively shouts out “Daddy! Daddy! Are you there?”

That instinctive cry for Dad is not actually according to this passage an instinct but the work of the Spirit within the child of God. This is the deeper joy and gritty triumph of Romans 8.

When I first received my driver’s license in high school I was a pretty bad driver. I admit it. The number of my accidents reached the double digits. Most were at low speed and in parking lots, but one was not. It was an early Saturday morning in the spring. The roads were wet, and before you exit the highway you round a huge curve. The tires on my minivan slipped, the van fishtailed and scraped the guardrail. I stopped in the grass and got out. The headlight on the passenger side dangled like a detached eyeball. It was like someone took a knife in the side of the van and slashed.

I got back in, drove to the exit, and the other two minutes it took to get to the high school parking lot. I parked as far away as I could so no one would see. I was on the way to a track meet and had to catch the bus. In the locker room I called home to tell my father. We didn’t have cell phones. I remember staring at the red brick wall wondering what he would say. “Dad, I messed up,” and told him what happened. His first words were not, “You stupid son. How many times have we told you?” Instead, he said, “Are you okay?”

You can’t manipulate your impulses; they just sort of get squeezed out. When I whispered Daddy, love and care and concern squeezed out. He told me to get on the bus and we’d deal with it later. So I did. On the way out of the school campus, the bus full of my teammates drove by my minivan, and everyone laughed at me. But I knew my father loved me.

Conclusion

After Jesus was resurrected, he had numerous conversations with his disciples. In Luke 24, we read of Jesus speaking about how suffering comes before glory.

44 Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead . . . (Luke 24:44–46)

For Jesus, the truest Son of God, suffering came before glory. This is what Paul says of us too.

16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

If children, then heirs, Paul says. I don’t know what suffering you’re experiencing. I don’t know if you’re in high school, and everyone is laughing at you. I don’t know if slaying your sin is more difficult than you ever could have imagined. I don’t know if your parents divorced when you were twelve, and you’ve never had a Christmas as a complete family since. But I do know, that if you are a child, you are an heir. His inheritance becomes your inheritance. And if you are a child with a full inheritance coming, you can call God, Abba Father whenever you need him.

Prayer

Pray with me as the music team returns to lead us in our final song. Let’s pray . . .

Prophetic Foreshortening: Advent According to Isaiah

Advent means coming or arrival. It’s the time Christians throughout the world focus on the arrival of the Messiah: his arrival as a baby, his arrival into our hearts by faith, and his future, glorious second arrival.

This Advent our church feasted on passages from the Old Testament book of Isaiah that speak of the Messiah. As I studied and preached through prophecies of Isaiah about the Messiah, I noticed more than ever before the interconnectedness of the various advents of the Messiah.  

What I mean is that in many passages where Isaiah speaks of the coming Messiah, he does not specify the timeline of when the Messiah will accomplish what is being described. Which thing the Messiah does during which advent is rarely differentiated. The three advents—the first advent of the Messiah as a baby to save his people; the second advent into the hearts of followers by faith; and the third, future advent in his physical and bodily return to judge the quick and the dead—are often presented as a single “mission-accomplished” message.

So, for example, one verse in Isaiah might describe something primarily true of the Incarnation, and then the next verse might speak of something true primarily in the Second Coming. This is like me telling my wife at breakfast on a Monday morning that I’m going to get to the office early to start on my sermon and then take a nap after I preach it. I left out the detail that the time between when I begin writing my sermon, and when I preach it and take my nap, is six days!

We see this in a passage like Isaiah 11. In verse 2 we read that “the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon [the Messiah].” And in Luke 4:21, we read of Jesus saying that the Spirit of the Lord rested upon him “today,” that is, in his first advent. Just two verses later in Isaiah 11, however, Isaiah says the Messiah “shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked” (11:4). The destruction of the wicked did not happen in the first advent of the Messiah, but it will happen in his second. We read about this destruction in 2 Thessalonians 2, where Paul writes that “the Lord Jesus will kill [the evil one] with the breath of his mouth and bring [him] to nothing by the appearance of his coming” (v. 8). So, in v. 2, Isaiah is speaking of the Incarnation and in v. 4 the Second Coming. To say it another way, in one breath he’s talking about writing a sermon on a Monday morning and, in the next breath, he’s already resting on a Sunday afternoon.

In a sermon on Isaiah 11, pastor and author John Piper said, “So repeatedly in the prophetic books you read of an imminent attack or deliverance from an enemy, and the next moment you read about an event in the distant future, with no indication of how much time is in between.” Piper continues:

[According to 1 Peter 1:10–11] when the Spirit moved the prophets to write, he did not answer all their questions about how the pieces fit together. Which means as we read the prophets, not all our questions may be answered either.

Piper is saying that the chronology of the distinct works of the Messiah (as well as the chronology of other events) often appear braided together, which is one of the things that makes Isaiah so glorious to read and, at the same time, so difficult.

The Catalina Mountains in Tucson, Arizona.

When I studied the prophets in seminary, my professors had a fancy phrase to describe this. They called it “prophetic foreshortening.” Foreshorten doesn’t even sound like a real word, but it is. It means to portray something as closer than it is or as having less depth or distance than it really does. You might never remember the phrase prophetic foreshortening or it’s definition, but you might remember the image often used to explain it: mountain ranges.

There was a good example of foreshortening where I used to live. When you land at the Tucson airport, you’re in the south part of the city. If you look to the north from the airport, you’ll see the Catalina Mountains. And if you get on I-10 and begin driving north to Phoenix, after about 45 minutes, you’ll notice something. You’ll notice that what looked like one giant mountain, is actually a whole range of mountains, with the highest mountain in the back. From the south—and from 45 miles away—we might say that the Catalina Mountains look foreshortened, that is, they look like a single mountain with several peaks. From another perspective, however, you see them for what they are: many mountains.

What does this have to do with Isaiah and Christmas? From where Isaiah stood in history—south of the Messiah, so to speak—his prophecies about the coming Messiah often appear as one giant, “mission-accomplished” mountain, but in reality, they are several mountains.

When we celebrate Christmas, we typically have only the first advent in mind. But this Christmas Day, I write to encourage you that when you eat a Christmas feast looking back on the advent of “the babe, the son of Mary,” also feast in anticipation of the next advent. Feast in anticipation of the great wedding supper at the end of time when the bride of Christ, the church, will enjoy the fullness of the groom in a world recreated to be as it should be, indeed, as it will be forever (Revelation 19:6–9).

In other words, may the joy of your Christmas feast be a prophetically foreshortened feast, that is, a feast that braids together all the joy and all the hope we have in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Give a toast to the one who once came to earth as a child, dwells now in your heart by faith, and also promises, “Behold, I am coming quickly” (Revelation 22:7).

* Photo by Dan Kiefer on Unsplash

When Sin is Serious, Salvation is Joyous

Last Sunday, Christians around the world began celebrating the season of Advent. The word “advent” is from the Latin word adventus, which means “coming.” Thus, the Advent season is a time to reflect upon the coming of Jesus, especially his coming to earth in the first Christmas story. It is a preparatory season, a time to prepare our hearts and minds to behold the beauty of Jesus.

Sometimes, however, the celebration in our hearts is only hum-drum. Our hearts do not explode with fireworks at the joy of the incarnation. Instead, they flicker by the light, as it were, of a single votive candle somewhere off in the distance.

Likely there are many reasons for this, but perhaps one reason is we do not see sin as serious, and thus our salvation is not as joyous as it could be, even should be.

Home by Marilynne Robinson

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I’ve been reading through a series of novels by Marilynne Robinson. She is a gifted author, and for many years has played various roles at the renowned creative writing program at the University of Iowa (currently Professor Emeritus). The series includes Gilead (2004), which won a Pulitzer Prize, Home (2008), and Lila (2014). Each novel tells a version of the same story through the eyes of a different character. The stories center around two pastors and their families in the small town of Gilead, Iowa in the middle of the twentieth century.

The second book, Home, tells the story from the perspective of Glory, the daughter of the Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton.

I’m mentioning all of this because of a fascinating description by Glory about the spiritual complacency of her town and her father’s preaching about sin. She says,

Complacency was consistent with the customs and manners of Presbyterian Gilead and was therefore assumed to be justified in every case. . . . Even her father’s sermons treated salvation as a thing for which they could be grateful as a body. . . . He did mention sin, but it was rarefied in his understanding of it, a matter of acts and omissions so common­place that no one could be wholly innocent of them or especially alarmed by them, either — the uncharitable thought, the neglected courtesy. . . (p. 111)

Taken in the context of the novel, it’s not entirely clear whether we should view Glory’s description of her father’s preaching as wholly reliable. Glory, while respectful of her father and her father’s faith, does not seem to have embraced Christianity herself. Regardless, the essence of what Glory says is that in the estimation of the town (and perhaps her father), sin isn’t so bad, and therefore complacency over sin is justified.

But is this really good preaching?

The reviewer of Home in the New York Times, A. O. Scott, seems to appreciate this charitable and tolerant approach toward sin. Scott writes,

There is real kindness and generosity in the town, and its theological disposition is accordingly tolerant and charitable. Reverend Boughton embodies this forgiving, welcoming spirit.

In the above quote, I’m not sure whether Scott has in mind the old meaning of tolerance, which indeed is a virtue, or the new meaning of tolerance, which is not. (“Old tolerance” means, though you do not agree with another person, you still believe he or she has the right to believe it, and therefore you tolerate the person and the view. “New tolerance” means all points of view, regardless of their merit, are equally laudable.)

Still, going back to the description by Glory, notice the specific wording she uses to describe her father’s preaching about sin. She says, according to her father, sins were mere “acts and omissions so common­place that no one could be wholly innocent of them or especially alarmed by them.”

What kind of sins might have been discussed in these sermons? Apparently, nothing too disturbing. Using the terminology of our own day, apparently he was preaching about the sins of failing to call your mother on her birthday; the sins of not returning emails fast enough; the sins of thinking mean thoughts about a homeless man and the misspelling on his cardboard sign; and the sins of not helping the neighbor kid with her fundraiser. Sins like this.

It would seem that Reverend Boughton preached about transgressions so innocent and un-alarming as to hardly require a savior at all. We’ve all made mistakes, dropped the ball, and fallen short of the glory of the good Samaritan. These kinds of sins happen to the best of us, and we’re sorry about it, but we’re certainly not alarmed.

What does the Bible say about sin and salvation?

Don’t misunderstand me, though. My negative comments about Reverend Boughton’s preaching are not reflective of my view of the whole novel and the series, which I’m rather enjoying. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive because it’s my profession that’s being discussed.

And please do not think that I am advocating the hellfire preaching of yesteryear. My point is simply that Boughton’s light-on-sin-preaching, wherever it does exist, is a shame. It’s a shame not because it’s wimpy preaching (“real men preach about sin”). Rather, this type of preaching is unbecoming to ministers because it’s not faithful to the Bible, which is the only true measure of preaching, not my personal preferences. And in the Bible, sin is certainly an ugly, fearsome, insidious thing which wars against the Creator and the ultimate flourishing of humanity.

Consider what Jesus says in Mark 7:21–23,

For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.

And look at this list of sins from Romans 1:29–31,

They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

In short, sin is alarming.

And if sin against a holy God is serious, then we should despair. Except, of course, Christians shouldn’t despair. We don’t despair because there is a Savior who drank the cup of God’s wrath, and therefore, there’s nothing left for Christians to drink (Mark 14:36; Romans 3:25–26).

It’s this good news that causes the Apostle Paul to burst into song in 1 Corinthians 15:55. Because of the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, Paul writes,

O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?

On this point—in the Bible sin is serious and therefore salvation is joyous—I could go on and on, but just consider the way this two-pronged theme so frequently occurs in our beloved Christmas hymns. Take, for example, the familiar lines in O Holy Night. Yes, of course, “long lay the world in sin and error pining.” But this is not the whole story. The verse continues, “[when the Savior appears] the weary world rejoices.”

Conclusion

It’s the times when I have seen my sin as deeply offensive to God—not as minor mistakes or foibles or idiosyncrasies of my personality—that the good-news story of Jesus has actually been to me good news, not a cliché.

But this kind of self-reflection requires courage. As pastor and author Timothy Keller writes in his recent book Hidden Christmas,

Are you willing to say, “I am a moral failure. I don’t love God with all my heart, soul, strength, and mind. I don’t love my neighbor as myself. And, therefore, I am guilty, and I need forgiveness and pardon . . .”?

It takes enormous courage to admit these things, because it means throwing your old self-image out and getting a new one through Jesus Christ.

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And yet that is the foundation for all the other things that Jesus can bring into your life—all the comfort, all the hope, all the joyful humility, and everything else. (60–61)

Let me return to where I began. This Christmas, my hope and prayer is that our hearts will explode with praise over the salvation that comes through Jesus. If this is to happen, first we need to reckon seriously with the darkness within us. If we do this, then we’ll appreciate that from outside of us “a light has dawned” (Matthew 4:16).

[Picture by Alessandro Viaro / Unsplash]

Timber! A Favorite Christmas Memory

The Christmas season is full of magic. As long as I can remember, it’s been this way for me.

A few years ago, for our church’s Christmas newsletter, the staff was asked to share our favorite Christmas memories. I have many favorites, so it was difficult to choose a favorite. But here is one of them.

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Picture of me with my sister when I was in high school.

“Almost there… just a few more… Timber!”

With great fondness I remember the yearly family adventure of cutting down a Christmas tree—hot chocolate in styrofoam on an overcast day; biting wind and thick mittens; throwing a nerf football with Dad and brothers; riding the tractor through forests of naked deciduous trees; the hunt for the perfect blue spruce or douglas fir; and, of course, taking my turn with the saw. 

When I moved out for college this tradition, and the memories of it, started to fade. But the winter of my final year in school, Brooke and I became engaged and the desire to plant these memories in my own family began to grow. 

At the time, I lived in a house with a vaulted living room ceiling, so naturally I theorized the only limiting factor on the size of the tree to buy was the price. With joy we conquered the perfect tree, returning to my car like victorious hunters with a trophy elk. But there was one big problem, a twelve foot problem: the tree didn’t fit in the trunk of my 4-door Altima.

In the end, it only “fit” across the back seats with the base out one window and the top two feet out the other. On the thirty minute drive home, passing cars looked at us with a mixture of annoyance and amusement.

It was a good tree, and a favorite Christmas memory.