In 2003, a man named Michael Breissenbecame a dad for the first time, and he wanted to do something really special for his wife’s first Mother’s Day. Miriam, his wife, was a nurse and had to work at the hospital on Mother’s Day. So Michael strapped his new son, Jason, in the car seat, drove to the hospital and in front of all her patients and co-workers surprised Miriam with candy, flowers and balloons that said, “World’s Greatest Mom.”
Miriam loved it. It was a really great Mother’s Day. But, eventually, Miriam had to go back to work, and so Jason and Michael went back home. Michael packed up the gifts he brought with him so that Miriam wouldn’t have to worry about them after her shift, grabbed his son, who had slept in his car seat the whole time, and started walking out to the car. He threw the candy box on the seat, set the flowers on the floor, pulled the balloons in out of the wind and headed home.
On the way home, people began to honk their horns and flash their lights at him. He didn’t realize what was going on until he hit 55 miles per hour on the highway. He heard a long scraping noise on the roof, followed by a loud thump. In his rearview mirror he saw the baby’s car seat, with the baby in it, slide off the roof, bounce off the trunk and tumble down the highway.
Michael slammed on the brakes, ran down the highway to his son as fast as he could and discovered that it was ok. Jason was just fine. No damage done. Michael wasn’t so fortunate. He was a mess of emotions. He collapsed on the road as tears of guilt, fear and relief poured out over the highway, which didn’t stop the policeman from writing him a ticket.
Michael’s not the only one to ever struggle with conflicting emotions. It’s really a pretty daily occurrence for most Christians. In Romans 7, Paul wrote, “We know that the law is spiritual, but I am [not] ... I don’t understand what I do. What I want to do, I don’t do. Instead, I do the things that I hate … I know that nothing good lives in me … I have the desire to do what is good, but I can’t carry it out.
And this isn’t Paul talking about the way he used to be or the things that used to control him. It’s Paul saying, “Just this morning, I gave in again.” Do you know that feeling? How many times every week do you kick yourself for failing? You try to be patient with your kids and loving toward your spouse or your parents, but in a flash you snap and the words do their damage before you even knew what happened. You thought you had broken the grip of a nasty sin, but you had another weak moment when you listened to the little whisper that told you, “It’ll be ok just this once,” and now you feel like a failure again. You knew you should have stayed away from that temptation, but you thought you could handle it. Before you knew it, you found out the hard way that you were weaker than you thought. A thousand times a thousand different ways you tried to do what you know is right, but like MichaelBreissen, even though you knew better, you shocked yourself and did the unthinkable. And now, you feel dumb, filthy, stupid, wretched, and unlovable; even though … it’s all ok. It really is. God doesn’t love you any different. His grace isn’t for everyone except you. It’s not insufficient.
And the reason we know is because God still gives us passages like we have this morning, passages that remind us what it really means to live every day knowing that God is our gracious Father and we are his children.
(4) But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, (5) he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, (6) whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, (7) so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.
Do you know who CandyLightneris? In 1980, her 13-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver while she was out for a walk one day. The guy who did it got off without any prison time. Candy Lightner is also the woman who founded MothersAgainst Drunk Driving. She founded the organization after her daughter died because, she thought,if she was going to be in pain, she might as well do something meaningful with it.
God knows that’sbasically what the average person wants – their life to mean something. You want to feel significant. You don’t need a lot of money or fame. You just want people to look at you and your life and be … encouraged. That’s it. But that’s hard – for many people, it’s hard to feel that anyone ever will. There’s always someone doing something just a little bit better, and that’s just the plain truth.
In Malaysia on New Year’s Eve 104 single Muslim men and women were arrested by the authorities and will all likely spend the next two years in prison. Do you know what their crime was? They were each caught in a hotel room with someone they were not married to. 52 different unmarried couples were caught sharing rooms, which, according to the law in Malaysia, is illegal. Who is better at carrying out God’s will for sex and marriage, this unbelieving Muslim government or the average American Christian? Maybe we can’t definitively say, but the fact that we even have to ask the question doesn’t look good for God’s children.
Muslim extremists give their lives for their god. So many Christians have friends who don’t even know they believe in God. Tiger Woods, who is not a Christian and who has some now very public short-comings still gives away a high percentage of all his money to help feed the poor and educate underprivileged children. The average Christian, according to surveys, comes to church planning to give away nothing. And you might say, “Well, he’s doing that for all the wrong reasons.” To which God could reply, “I know. That’s sad, isn’t it?” Shouldn’t we expect a little bit more from the people on whom, like Paul says, God has “generously” poured out his Spirit?
What’s that supposed to look like? Is that how you would describe your life – full of the Spirit? Is that what you see when you look in the mirror? I mean, the good we know he wants us to do … how often do we really do it, with pure motives, the way he wants us to? The bible says that “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God.” What does God see when he looks at you, the God who’s better at identifying sin than any of us ever either try or imagine?
We look at a little newborn baby, and we think that’s one of the most beautiful sights you can see. The births of each of my five children are some of my most powerful and emotional memories. We look at the birth of a baby and we see something precious. God looks at that child and sees something so different. “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” And that’s a heart, according to the bible, that looks nothing like his.
“Surely I was sinful from birth,” King David says, “sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” In the book of Romans, Paul writes, “[Their] sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s will, nor can it do so,” which means that when a child is born, in their little beating hearts, they have already felt very real, inexpressible, sinful pain; the pain of knowing that there’s something just not right with themselves or this world they’re in. And even at their baptism, in which God promises that they have now been “born again” and “brought over from death to life,” what does the average baby do? So full of the Spirit, they cry. They scream. Maybe you think that means something. But it does when it happens to you.
All grown up, even for life-long Christians, the same thing happens. You know. Like Paul, an honest Christian will cry inside every day. And your shortcomings are just the beginning. You pour more hours into your job than anyone will ever know. It’s time for the yearly review, and the person giving it can’t stand you. You get cancer, and the next year your wife does too. You beat yours, but it doesn’t look as good for hers. You’ve always been close to your mom, but now she’s so far away. And you don’t know if it’s you or if this is just a painful part of growing up that’s supposed to happen. Your daughter won’t let you see your grandchildren, who love coming over, partly because they’re able to get away from their overly aggressive father. Your daughter doesn’t see it. She wants to be loved by a man so badly that she lies to herself just to preserve the relationship.
And why do you have these pains? Maybe you don’t pray hard enough. Maybe you don’t believe enough. If only your faith were a little stronger; your dedication a bit higher, your focus on God a bit clearer. I mean,God wants to bless you. You know he does. There isn’t a moment in your life when God isn’t trying to make you happy. And, if you’re not, that can only mean one thing – you’re not full of his Spirit. You’ve got a lot of room to grow before you get it. If only you were different. Isn’t that right? Is that what you tell yourself? It’s not easy, is it?
You know what wasn’t easy? The day a mom named SavoeunKeo cried over her son. In 2006, her 20-year-old son Sopheawas killed by a young man named Dmitri. At the trial, Dmitri admitted to the judge and everyone in the courtroom that he did, in fact, shoot and kill her son. That was hard for Savoeun because the judge, who accepted his guilty plea, let Dmitri go, crediting him for time already served. “How would you feel if it was your son that was killed?” Saveoun exploded at the judge. “I want my son to be alive like him,” she said, pointing to Dmitir, who was now free.
“That’s not right,” our hearts tell us, which is why, like Paul, we so easily struggle with how to feel when, after admitting the good we haven’t done and regretting the bad we have, God lets us go. He gives us heaven. No-questions-asked. No strings attached. And it was his son that was killed by the sins of these hands. God doesn’t take into account a single righteous thing you have or have not done when deciding whether or not you’re worth saving. He saves us because that’s what our God just does.
When Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, he didn’t tell the man beaten on the side of the road to clean himself up a bit and make himself more presentable before he helped him. Jesus figured the man was already in enough pain. He didn’t ask him how strong his faith was. He didn’t ask him to rate his Christian life on a scale of 1-10. He didn’t tell him to ask himself a single question. So maybe you should stop doing the same thing. The next time you doubt your place in God’s kingdom, stop asking yourself what’s in your heart and see if you can tell what’s in his.
Does a clean God entering your dirty world mean that he hates you or loves you; that he wants to keep his distance for a while or immediately wrap his strong arms around his fearfully and wonderfully made child? Do the nail marks that will forever scar his hands mean that he’s turned off by your sins or that he wants to save you from them? What does it mean that he chose to be castigated by God for every one of them? When he promised heaven to the criminal hanging next to him, was he kidding, or was he really following through on a promise to give all sorts of good things to all sorts of people who deserve something so different?
You know, because he gave the same grace to you at a place where babies scream and children cry – at your baptism. He saved you “through a washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he (already) poured out generously. Maybe you don’t feel that. But that’s exactly the point. God doesn’t give his greatest gifts to those who feel they’re worth it. He gives them to those who know they’re not. He doesn’t say it’ll end well only for those who prove they deserve it. He doesn’t promise enough strength to the fight only for those who have earned it. If that were true, we’d all still be waiting.
But we’re not. “The kindness and love of God has already appeared” so that you can know that, no matter how you feel on any day, no matter how your life looks in any way, no matter how others judge you tomorrow, yesterday, or today; your God, who hears your heart confess everything you are and have been, has already pouredhis cleansing Spirit out on you so generously that God can’t find a single record of any dirty thing you’ve ever done. That’s straight from your Judge. That’s your God. That’s his grace, and that’s what we have to live with every day.