(Sermon by Pastor Michael D. Schultz 05/20/07)

INTRODUCTION:

Another year of confirmation classes now draws to a close.  For a couple months that first hour each Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning in our Elementary School will be open, till we start back up in August.  For a few months parents won’t be driving in at 7pm on a Wednesday evening to leave their kids for an hour and a half of class, till it resumes in August.  Of the various traditions that have stuck around, youth confirmation class still seems to be one of the strongest.  For two years 7th and 8th graders get into their Bibles like they may have never done so before and they explore the main teachings of the Bible, focusing more than anything else on Jesus.

Having gone through the process once more, we’re again making use of the third Sunday in May to observe Confirmation Sunday.  It's a day that is not only a milestone for young people who are confirmed, but a day on which -

Once More We Contemplate The Grace Of God

There have been several young people over the past few years who have done me the favor of lying on a table, on their backs, perfectly flat and still, playing dead.  When told to get themselves into the Christian faith or get themselves right with God, they have typically tried to move or sit up or say something, only to be told, “Stop it!  You’re dead.” 

Apart from the laughing and the giggles, it’s supposed to make an impression.  Not only because of bad things we do, but because of the sinful condition we get from our parents from birth, we came into this life condemned.  There’s a show on Fox – if you don’t answer your way to the million dollars, you have to leave saying, “I am not smarter than a fifth grader.”  There are some things we have to say just for having entered the human race.  “I was born as a wicked person.  I was corrupted by sin.  I belonged to the devil.  Not even to mention what my evil actions have earned me, by nature I was due to be ripped apart by God’s wrath.  I am not a good person; I am not a member of God’s family.”

To make it worse if it can be worse, there was nothing we could do to change it.  That’s the dead on the table illustration – no desire and no ability whatsoever to approach God or believe in Jesus or choose to be a Christian.  This was our story and we were stuck with it.

When God saw us in that condition – conceived in sin and born in sin and filled with sin and dead in sin – his heart churned and burned with compassion.  At some point in your life, maybe very early through infant baptism or later through someone talking to you about Jesus in your living room or in a Bible Class, God did the impossible.  He brought you from being dead in sin to being alive with Christ.  In class, we simply spoke the words over the person on the table – Your sin separates you from God and condemns you, but God gave your sin to Jesus his Son, who was condemned and died as your substitute in your place – we spoke those words and the dead person sat up and got up, alive with faith in Jesus, a true miracle of God.

That is your story.  For that to have happened to you there is only one cause – God’s grace –  love for you that he shouldn’t show you but he showed it to you anyway, because that’s who he is.  It is grace that has brought you safe thus far.  Today we may well congratulate confirmands, but when spiritually dead people have been brought to life, there isn’t any bragging or boasting.  There’s praising God for his grace.  He’s given you the indispensable, undeserved gift of faith in Jesus.  It is by grace you have been saved, through faith.  

The confirmation students know that the pastor tends to go ballistic when people mistakenly talk about keeping the commandments as a way to get into heaven.  Jesus lived and died for us and we trust that he alone is our way into heaven.  Of all the concerns you could ever have, none is more important than knowing what places you in heaven forever with Jesus.  Once more I want to address that as clearly as I can.  One answer that could be given to the question of why I’m going to heaven would be, “Because I believe that Jesus is my Savior.”  But there’s a better way to say it.  “I’m going to heaven because Jesus died for me to save me.”

That second way of saying it is better because it focuses on your Savior and not your faith.  There will be times (there have been already) when you may wonder if you still have faith, but you’ll never need to wonder if Jesus died for you.  He did.  Hold onto that.

There’s a part of that lying dead on the table illustration that we don’t really explore during confirmation class, probably because we don’t ever want it to happen.  That would be the scenario where a person whom God brought to life with faith in Jesus went back to being spiritually dead without faith in Jesus.  In the last four minutes of a sermon, can we make sure that never happens for you?

I don’t know about the four minutes, but I know about a promise from God that never expires.  God, who began a good work in you, will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.  It’s nothing less than a miracle of God’s grace that you believe that Jesus died to save you.  It is nothing other than God’s grace in action that will keep you believing that Jesus died to save you. 

I mentioned before that during the two years of confirmation, our young people study God’s Word like they never have before.  Perhaps that implies “and like they never will again.”  I invite all of you to show that implication to be wrong, to go back to God’s Word more than you ever studied it in confirmation class, to know your catechism better than you ever did when you had to memorize it.  Dive into the water of your baptism day after day.  Dive into your Bible without missing a day.  Mark your calendar for communion Sundays.  Those are the ways that God keeps his promise of keeping you off the table and alive with faith in Jesus.  As we all go forward from another confirmation Sunday, sink your teeth into a strong promise from God – His grace will lead you home.

Congratulations to our confirmands, but more important than that, to them and to all of you, the statement that closed four of Paul’s letters: The grace of our Lord Jesus be with your spirit.

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