God, The Peacemaker

This is the official text of my sermon given on 15th March, 2020

Romans 5:1-11

John 4:5-26,39-42

On this Earth, people can do terrible things to each other. Just one example of many: In 1994, a terrible thing happened in one country. A genocide turned neighbours into enemies. Neighbours killed neighbours. One tribe mostly slaughtered another. 800,000 were killed in three months. (That’s the population of Manchester and Nottingham together.) Can people get over that? Forgive and forget? Can there be real peace? A four year old girl watched her mother shot in the back of the head. Her father was also murdered. She went to live with an aunt and grandmother. She came into contact with a church project which offered support. As a teenager, she accepted Christ and chose to forgive her parents’ murderers. She let go of hatred; gave it to God. She went on to excel in education, later to work in parliament. Now she’s a child protection officer for a charity. She loves helping people and wants to be a servant leader like Jesus.

Romans 5 is an intense part of a remarkable letter. I have two points this morning. Firstly, what God does for His enemies and secondly, what God expects from us.

What God does for His enemies

Who are God’s enemies? That word implies an intense, deep-seated hatred. An irreconcilable, open hostility. It’s that bad. Paul uses other words to build up a bleak picture. Ungodly. Those who fail to show proper reverence for God; who don’t honour what is sacred. Powerless. That is, weak and frail. What an insult! God thinks I’m a weakling, eh? Lemme at Him (shakes fist at the sky)! Sinners. Those who never make the grade - just not good enough. It was used in ancient times to describe an archer who failed to hit the target. This makes up a grim picture of those who don’t know God. Was Paul looking down on others and sneering? Absolutely not. We think of Paul as a most remarkable Christian. That’s not how Paul saw himself. He called himself “the worst of sinners”, “less than the least of all the Lord’s people”. He wasn’t pretending to be worse than he was. This isn’t for dramatic effect. He’d persecuted the church (and therefore Jesus Himself) in the past and was very aware of God’s grace towards him. He’d been openly hostile to Jesus, failed to show proper reverence to God by rejecting Jesus, had “faultlessly” kept the law but failed to impress God, showing himself to be powerless. Even his amazing religious pedigree wasn’t good enough. 

What about us? Or those we meet in daily life? Are we, or were we, enemies of God? Is that a tag we’d apply to ourselves when we didn’t know Jesus? Surely not? Let me be personal. I wasn’t that bad. I didn’t sin with reckless abandon, unlike others. I never killed anyone, never committed adultery, unlike others. I only stole once as a child under the influence of an older boy - and that was only a chocolate bar. Oh, I did steal a stamp from a friend’s collection - no one else to blame for that. But lots of people were worse than me. I believed there was a God. Did God consider me an evil enemy? Paul would say yes. I had everyday sins and attitudes which I wouldn’t have considered wrong, but which I now know are. God is a God of love, a God who is love, a God who so loved the world. But He’s also a God who hates sin; who has to save us from His own just, righteous anger. This doesn’t make God nasty. It makes His love all the more incredible! We can be fairly gracious to people we like. Only a superior love is gracious to enemies - that’s God’s kinda love. 

Christ died for sinners. And so it’s possible for a holy God to be merciful to us. THIS is how God shows He loves His enemies. Yet many have no interest in this gospel. Some hear it and think, “oh, this doesn’t apply to me. God’s not mad at me. I never hurt anyone. Look at all the bad people in the world. I’m alright.” C H Spurgeon wrote: "Our Lord Jesus Christ makes it clear that however good you are, you must come to him the same way as the vilest of the vile. You must come as guilty; you cannot come as righteous." Not everyone’s as bad as bad can be and some are more good than others. But all have sinned and keep falling short of God’s glory. A small sinner or a big sinner is still a sinner. We must come to Christ, believe, tell Him we’re sorry, want to be forgiven and want to change.

Paul repeatedly tells how God reconciled us to Himself. God took the initiative because of love. We’ve been reconciled through the blood (the death) of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Want the peace the world cannot give? This is it - peace with God through Jesus Christ. The world can give you peace of a sort - you can meditate and have some fuzzy, warm, peacy feelings; you can get a feeling of peace through drugs, legal or illegal; the world can make a kind of peace between people; but it can’t give peace with God. Only Jesus Christ does that.

Not only do we have peace with God through Christ. We enemies, we ungodly, powerless sinners are declared innocent of our ungodliness because Jesus took the punishment for our sins upon Himself. No good works of ours can cancel our sins. A thief won’t be declared innocent because he wasn’t a murderer; neither will he be acquitted because he did some good things. We can’t be declared innocent by God because there are worse people than us, or because we did good things, too. We needed and we need Jesus; to have faith in what He did for us. “What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus!”

How does “God reaching out to His enemies” play out in our reading from John 4? Jesus reaching out to a Samaritan woman of dubious morals is a great example of God reaching out. Jews and Samaritans essentially hated each other. They didn’t associate with one another. Pious Jews took a long route rather than go through Samaria. But Jesus deliberately goes there. Jesus deliberately speaks to a Samaritan woman. This shocked His disciples. Not only a woman, but a seemingly loose one. The fact that she goes to the well on her own, at noon, when nobody went to fetch water, is seen as a sign that she was an outcast. She was spiritually dull. She didn’t get what Jesus was saying to her, but she was hardly unique in that! Inasmuch as she had a religion, it was a dodgy one, combining bits from different religions and butchering the Old Testament, dismissing all but the first five books. This woman was an enemy of the Jews and an enemy to God, yet through Jesus God reaches out to her. She believes, goes into town and tells people about Jesus. The people get Jesus to stay with them for two days and the outcome is salvation. “Now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Saviour of the world.” They became believers. 

What God expects from His Children

What does God expect from those who were His enemies but are now His redeemed loved ones? Can we believe in Jesus and carry on as we were? No. Children of God through faith in Jesus Christ cannot live as if they were still God’s enemies. 

God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. This has big implications. If we hated God before, we cannot go on hating Him. We must love Him by serving no other gods, worshipping no idols, not misusing His name, but rather worshipping Him in Spirit and in truth. If we hated other people, that too must change. Like the girl I mentioned in the introduction, who forgave those who killed her parents, we too must forgive those who sin against us. Nobody said that would be easy. To pray “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” acts as a reminder. Freely we’ve received, freely give. And we must love other Christians rather than hate them or harbour grudges. This can also be tough. But it’s an actual test of our faith. 1 John 4:20: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” All Christians are part of God’s family - brothers and sisters. What we cannot do is hate one another. There are two ways of expressing love. There’s passive love and active love. Passive love wishes no ill to another - doesn’t kill, steal, commit adultery, lie or envy. Active love goes out and does something positive for Jesus’ brothers and sisters - feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, tending the sick, giving to the poor. Neither list is exhaustive.

Also, God expects us to boast. Really? We’ve all met people who are full of themselves. “Look at me! I did this, I did that, I am great!” They tell of their achievements with pride. That doesn’t sound like something Christians should do. However, the focus of our boasting is different. Our kind of boasting is about living with a God-given confidence. This confidence isn’t something we earned - it’s because of Jesus. Our faith is in Him. Our peace is through Him. The grace in which we stand is because of Him. This gives us reason for confidence. Salvation isn’t based on my performance, but on the death of Christ. We boast in God, telling how wonderful He is, how He saved us and reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ. This is our hope. This is our confidence. Not how great we are, but how great He is. This is humble boasting indeed! 

CONCLUSION

I’ll end by looking at what Jesus told the Samaritan woman about Himself. This is the Jesus we worship and believe in, who reconciled us to God and lives in us.

“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” And: “whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Later in John’s gospel (John 7:38-39), Jesus says: “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” John explains: “By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.”

Jesus gives the Holy Spirit to those who believe in Him. If you believe, the Spirit has been given to you and is within you. God is within you. Eternal life is within you. Your thirst has been quenched. The Spirit flows through you and from you, demonstrated by producing the fruit of the Spirit. In Galatians 5:22-25, Paul writes:  “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” 

The woman said, “I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.” There had been prophecies that Messiah, the Anointed One, would come. Prophets of the Old Testament longed to see Him. His coming was a massively significant event. And here He was. Standing in front of a Samaritan woman. A king asking for a drink. This would be mind blowing! She was going about her daily business and suddenly she’s having a conversation with the hope of Israel and the light for the Gentiles! 

Despite a general hatred between Jews and Samaritans, Jesus went out of His way to tell Samaritans the good news. Before ascending to heaven, Jesus told His disciples: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Samaritans were very much on Jesus’ gospel agenda. 

Here’s my takeaway thought: making peace between man and man is great. Making peace between God and man is greater. The only way to do the second is through the gospel, because, as Peter said of Jesus, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). And the best (though not the only) way of making peace between people is to preach the gospel, because when enemies believe in Jesus, they become brothers and sisters, children of God.

Image by Niek Verlaan from Pixabay

https://pixabay.com/photos/fist-rebellion-rebel-arm-arms-424500/