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Romans 8:26-39 Sometimes I think that Christians are the most ignorant people in the world! You may say, "What do you mean!? We are not ignorant! We know the truth." Yes, we know the truth that Jesus is the Son of God. We know that he died and rose from the dead. We know that the Bible is God's Word. But I still say that we Christians are the most ignorant people in the world. I say that, because we don't seem to know that we have the victory! Most Christians act like they have been defeated. They have defeatist attitudes. They walk around with glum looks on their faces, not like people who have won the victory. You know that I am a Carolina fan and Melissa is a Clemson fan. Some years Clemson will beat Carolina real bad. As the score was being run up Melissa will turn to me and put her arm around me and said, "Oh, I am Sorry." I tried to do that to Melissa when Carolina was winning big and she almost slugged me. But most Christians act like that when really their team has already won the game and they should be celebrating. You know what is worse. Even if we know we have the victory, we don't know how. Once in a while a Christian realizes that we have the victory, but they don't understand how it was won. And they mistakenly attribute the victory to the kinds of things that world attributed it to. Our Scripture passage from Romans tells us in clear language that we have the victory, but it also explains how we have the victory. That is what I want us to look at today. How do we have the Victory? First of all we have victory through our weakness. Paul inspired by the Spirit wrote, "The Spirit helps us in our weakness." Did you know that God can't do a thing with a strong Christian? Because a strong Christian doesn't need any help. Perhaps more properly a strong Christian thinks they don't need any help. It's only the weak who need help and know it. And it is in our weakness that the Spirit helps us. We humans don't even know how to pray properly. You'd think that any Christian would know how to pray. But even the most dedicated Christian needs the Spirit's help to pray. We need God's help because only God knows our needs and the needs of those for whom we are praying. Paul himself is an example of this truth that God helps us in our weakness. He was not a physically strong man. He suffered constantly from a thorn in the flesh. And many think that he was short in stature and even that he had a speech impediment so that he was not a very effective public speaker. Yet God used him in a powerful way. God was helping him in his weakness. God can't do a thing with a strong Christian because they won't accept God's help. In the same way God can't do a thing with a strong church. A church who thinks they are strong will not seek the Lord's help and without God's help we can't do anything. But we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. Not through our own strength but through our weakness. We have victory through our weakness. First we have victory through our weakness, and secondly we have victory through all things. Paul knew what he was talking about when he said that "All things work together for good for those who love the Lord."(Romans 8:28) Now, one can see how some things can work for good. If a person is young and healthy and had a good spiritual base in the Word, we can understand how those things can work for good in that person's life. And if a church is large and has a good financial base and dedicated workers we can see how that works for good. That makes sense. But Paul said that all things work together for good! That includes the bad things. God uses our shortfalls and inabilities and failures. For instance where would we be without St. Peter's example of faith? If you remember Peter denied Christ three times. But Christ forgave him three times. And his witness was three times greater for the incident. God took his failure and gave him victory through it. Right after Paul says that all things work together for good, he starts talking about God calling us and justifying us. At first I wondered what the connection was. But now I realize that if we had not recognized our failure in sin, we would not be where we are today. God even used our sin for good. Our sin helped us realize that we needed God the only source of victory and our sin constantly reminds us of that need. So we have the victory through all things not just the good things. -e have victory through our weakness, we have victory through all things, but we only have that victory because of Christ. Christ was the one who died on the cross and rose again in victory to give all of us the victory. And it was Jesus that ascended to sit that the right hand of the Father. It was Jesus who sent the Holy Spirit to protect us. God, who made everything and runs the universe, did this for us. And if God is for us, who can be against us? Nothing can separate us from the love that God gave to us in Christ Jesus. Not life or death or things present or things to come; nothing! Does that mean that Christians can't choose to return to a life of sin and abandon Christ? No! I still believe in back sliding. You know the old saying, "Methodists preach backsliding but all churches practice it." A Christian can enter into habits of living that cause them to slide back into sin and abandon Christ. We have the freedom to abandon Christ, but he never abandons us. Even backsliding can't separate us from the love of God. God's love is always there waiting to accept us back into the fold. Through Christ we have victory! His death on the cross atones for our sins. His resurrection gives us eternal life. His Holy Spirit enables us to serve him and gives us authority over all powers and principalities. And nothing can separate us from that love. We Have the Victory! In all these things we are more than conquerors. We are victors not because we are strong, but because we are weak. We are victors not because everything is peaches and cream. We are victors because God uses even our shortcomings and failures for good. We are not victors because we won the victory, but because Jesus Christ won it for us. Accept the victory Christ is giving you. Stop trying to win the victory yourself! Admit your weakness. Then, and only then, Christ can work through you. This is a message for everyone from the non-believer to the most dedicated Christian. We can't have salvation and victory over sin without surrendering to Christ and asking him into our hearts. Likewise, Christ's disciples can't have victory over the forces of evil without surrendering to God's power. Once you have surrendered to Christ, then celebrate the victory. Don't be ignorant of your victory in Christ. Remember that you are the winners in this game we call life. Because you have come to Christ as a weak helpless person Christ has given you his strength. The world will try to tell you that you are small and weak and helpless and that because of that you are a loser. Don't believe them. God's Word tells us that we are more than conquerors. That is the truth. If you believe that then live like it. Don't act defeated, but act like a victor so all can see the strength of Christ living in you. Matthew 13:44-52 I imagine people got pretty upset about the way Jesus did things. To many people Jesus was this religious fanatic running around the holy land yelling "the Kingdom is at hand." He caused people to do crazy things. Once he led a group of hard working tax paying fishermen to leave there business. They just dropped their nets and followed him. And what did they do? They just wandered around in the Desert and slept under the stars. He even admitted one time that the foxes have holes and the birds have nests but he had no place to lay his head. And he still encouraged people to follow him. Either he was fasting or he was eating and drinking with sinners. To make matters worse Jesus didn't do things the way that people were used to them being done. In Jesus' day if someone wanted to be a religious leader the thing to do was to go study under a scribe of Pharisees. Then that person would teach the people by telling them exactly how to keep the Law of Moses. Giving them more laws to fill in the gray areas the original laws left. But Jesus was the son of a carpenter and he never studied under a great scribe in the temple. To make matters worse he didn't tell people in detail how to keep the laws. Instead he said things like "blessed are the poor." And he was always talking in parables. Sometimes they were hard for the people to understand. The people understood laws better. Jesus knew the laws of Moses but he always seemed to put a new twist on them with his parables. Jesus always seemed to add something new to the religion of their Mothers and Fathers. True he didn't say anything that couldn't be verified by the laws of Moses and the writings of the Prophets. But the way he said it. It was not what most people were used to. Because he was different many people criticized him. I imagine a lot of people were criticizing Jesus one day for all his new ways of doing things, especially the way he always talked in parables. So one day Jesus took his disciples aside and he said to them: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field. One day a man found out about that treasure and decided to buy the field so that he could legally claim the treasure as his own. So he went out and got a second mortgage on his house and cashed in his life insurance policy and closed out all his bank accounts just so that he could buy the land. That treasure was of such great value that he risked everything to get the land it was burned in. Along the same line Jesus said, "The kingdom of heaven was like a salesman who while on a buying trip found a very valuable pearl, and instead of just buying a few cheap pearls he decided to risk his entire business to buy that one valuable pearl. So he called up his banker and he took out a huge loan and bought that one pearl." He also told them, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like some fishermen with one of those large nets that catches every kind of fish imaginable. They just haul in all the fish and then they sort them out and throw away the ones that are no good. In the end the angels will come and they will gather all together and then separate the good and the evil, and the evil will be thrown into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Then Jesus said, "If you want to proclaim my good news and be a follower of me you have to be like a housekeeper who keeps both the old things and the new things, and you must bring both out of storage from time to time and use them. The scribes in the temple just teach the old stuff, but scribes of the Kingdom of Heaven need to teach both the old and the new." Sometimes we are like the people of Jesus' day. They rejected Jesus because much of what he said and did was different and new to them. Like them we resist new ideas and ways of doing things. And you can't blame people for resisting new things. Sometimes resistance to new ideas is good. All we need to do is look at the world around us and see that there are a lot of new ideas that are contrary to the Gospel. There are people who teach that the power to save us is within ourselves. They say that people can be their own savior. And some new ways of doing' things are based on those new ideas. Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven is a priceless treasure. It is a pearl of great value. Because it is valuable we need to be willing to give all we have to possess it. But we also need to protect it. We can't let these new ideas threaten our treasure of the Good News of God. Sometimes new ideas are opposed to the Kingdom of God. We need to resist those ideas and ways of doing things to preserve our treasure. We need to maintain that old time religion which proclaims that Jesus came and died for our sins. We need to maintain that old time zeal which allowed people to tell others what Jesus had done for them. The knowledge of our salvation through Jesus Christ is a treasure, handed down to us from our mothers and fathers in the faith, and it must be preserved and spread. We need to resist new ideas which are contrary to the Good News we have heard, but we don't need to resist all new ideas. Sometimes in an attempt to preserve our treasure we are resistant to any kind of change. If something new comes along we simply decide we don't like it. I am sure many of you remember when the only translation of the Bible in English was the King James Version. It is the one that most people grew up with. It was and still is a very good translation of the Bible. In the 1950's a group of Christian scholars got together and made a new translation called the Revised Standard Version. To allot of people this was something new and they rejected it. It was not what their mothers and fathers read so they decided it was no good. Yet the RSV and many of the other new translations which have followed have allowed people who had not read the Bible before to read it and understand it. These new translations have opened up the Bible for many people including myself. There are a number of new ways of doing things which people resist because they are new. Many denominations have been ordaining women for over half a century now. These are women who have been called by God and have the gifts to carry out the ministry of a preacher. Yet there are many who reject women preachers. They say "It's not what I grew up with." And because the idea of a woman being a preacher is new many people reject them. Yet these women called of God have been a tool to reach many people who might not have been reached with the Good News that Christ loved them and died for them to earn them eternal life. At times new ways of doing things are a tool that God uses to spread the same old good news. Jesus did things differently than the other religious leaders. Yet he was the one who was proclaiming the real Good News. His parables were different and hard to understand, but it was through them that the Word of God was proclaimed to many people. Despite the truth of what he said many people resisted Jesus' new style and way of doing things. The Kingdom of Heaven is a priceless treasure. We need to preserve it and protect it. We need to guard against practices and ideas which are contrary to the gospel. We need to preserve the essence of the religion passed down to us from our Mothers and Fathers. But Christ also tells all who follow him to be like householders who bring out both the old and the new. We need to be sure that we do not oppose new ideas because they are different from what we know. We need to ask ourselves if the new practices and ideas are God's tools to spread that same old message to the people who need to hear it. Some of the people of Jesus' day rejected him because his new ideas and new ways of talking about the kingdom were not what they were used to. We need to be sure we don't do the same thing.
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