Ascension Day Sermon - Luke 24.44-end + Daniel 7.9-14 + Ephesians 1.15-end

Ascension Day - Luke 24.44-end; Daniel 7.9-14; Ephesians .15-end (9/5/13)

            The Ascension of King Jesus is often overlooked by Christians because we are so uncomfortable with it.  It seems so strange and comical, hard to imagine.  I remember sitting in the chapel of The Queen's College in Oxford many times and looking at the stained glass windows reflecting sincerely on the life of Christ before coming to the picture of the Ascension and trying hard not to laugh - there were the disciples below on the hill looking up with sadness and above them in the top right hand corner was a grey could with two large sandled feet popping out at odd angles! It looked ridiculous! Even more ridiculous I am sure is the chapel of the Ascension at Walsingham which has two wooden feet coming down from the ceiling.  The only thing that could make such representations more horrific is if the feet were also wearing socks!

            Because of this absurdity we often try to either minimalise the Ascension of Christ or to 'spiritualise' it.  But the fact that it was a real, historical, physical event is of great importance.  We know that it is important as Luke is at such pains to emphasise that it was a physical event.  Just before the account of the Ascension he has the disciples both see and touch Jesus to prove that He is real and even tells of Jesus eating fish to prove He is in a real, physical body.

            But what is important to remember, and where such ludicrous artistic images fall flat, is that the 'cloud' was no normal cloud as you might see in the sky on a rainy day (or every day when you live in England) - it was the glory of God.  When Moses ascended Mount Sinai to converse with God a huge cloud descended and covered them ("I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that people will hear when I speak with you and will always believe you." Exodus 19.9 - see also Exodus 24.16; 34.5), likewise God personally led His people through the wilderness in the cloud (Exodus 14).  The cloud also descended on the Tabernacle when Moses went to speak to Jesus there (Exodus 33.9-10; 40.34-38 see also Numbers 9) and at the blessing of the Temple in 1 Kings 8 (2 Chronicles 5) the cloud physically descended to symbolise the falling presence of God upon that place. Again in Ezekiel 1.4 when Jesus approaches him in the vision of God's glory He comes in a whirlwind from the North - a great cloud with fire and lightening.  Even in the New Testament we find the cloud of God's glory descending upon Jesus at His transfiguration (Matthew 17; Mark 9; Luke 9) and we are told that Jesus will come again to judge the earth with power and glory in a cloud (Luke 21.27;  Revelation 14). Just as Jesus "descended in the cloud" in Numbers 11 and 12 so He now ascended in the cloud to heaven - the cloud being the heavy and weighty presence of the glory of God.

            We must not overlook the saving significance of the Ascension of Jesus Christ - the Ascension it the linchpin of Christ's work.  On the one side it is the confirmation and vindication of Jesus as the Messiah, all that He said and did is proved to be right and true as He ascends to heaven to sit at the right hand of His Father.  The Ascension proves the past.  But the Ascension also guarantees the future.  Jesus said in John 16.7 that "I am telling you the truth. It is to your benefit that I go away, because if I don't go away the Counsellor will not come to you.  If I go, I will send Him to you."  Because of the Ascension we know this must be true as Jesus is confirmed as God - thus we also know that the Ascension is vital to God's plan as without it the Holy Spirit will not come.  The Ascension opened to us the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

            When we say the creed we find that it is all in the past tense.  "Who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man.  For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried. On the third day He rose again in accordance with the Scriptures and He ascended into Heaven." The creed to this point is all past tense - but then it changes, subtly yet vitally! "He ascended into Heaven (past tense), and is seated at the right hand of the Father (present tense), and He will come again to judge the living and the dead (future tense)."  The ascension is thus seen to be crucial to the ministry of Christ and the plan of salvation - it takes the past and brings His ministry into the present and ensures the certain outcome of the future.

            The Ascension was also foretold in the Old Testament in Daniel 7.  Here we have a real scary picture of God.  Indeed it is from this reading we often get that image of God as an old man with a long white beard sat on a throne.  But what is important is that in this passage the Son ascends to His Father surrounded by the clouds of glory. Then the Son is given all authority to rule in glory over the Kingdom that every people and language and tribe and race and nation should serve Him.  He is given charge over the eternal dominion, over the Kingdom that cannot be destroyed - the Kingdom of God. 

[[It can be hard to understand Daniel 7 in light of Jesus saying that “no one has seen the Father except [the Son]” as it seems that Daniel did.  This is not, however, the case.  What we see in Daniel is a twofold prophecy like so many of the prophecies in the Old Testament. If one continues reading the interpretation that the angel gives of the rest of the chapter it is clear that ‘the one like a Son of Man’  is Israel, the people of God, personified in an individual, coming before the Throne of God – Jesus – and being invited into the Kingdom to reign from Jerusalem as kings (Daniel 9.22, 26-27).  But the People of God are only ‘kings’ and invited to reign because they are one in Jesus Christ the true and greater King of Kings and Lord of Lord, and the only Ruler of Princes.  Thus the person who comes before the throne is also rightly understood as representing Jesus, the Son, coming before the Father at the end of time and receiving all authority and power – even though the Father Himself is not the one seen on the throne.]]

            What this tells us is of great importance.  It assures us that Christ is now Lord and King over everything and everyone (whether they like it or acknowledge it!).  Satan and sin has lost, their destruction is assured and the reign of the Kingdom of Heaven is certain.  We who believe can rest assured of this and place our hope in Jesus knowing He ascended to His Father and received the Kingdom.

            It is also worth noting that just before Jesus ascends and leaves His disciples He blesses them (Luke 24.50-51).  This is important as that same blessing is given to us.  The Ascension means that we know that Christ has won the victory over sin, the flesh, and the Devil, and that the Holy Spirit has been sent to empower us with God's blessing.  But what is the Holy Spirit there to empower us to do?

            In verses 46-47 Jesus says "This is what is written: the Messiah would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations beginning at Jerusalem." Jesus then speaks of sending the Holy Spirit to help them do this proclaiming and blesses them.  We are empowered by the same Holy Spirit and the blessing of God to proclaim repentance and forgiveness in (and only in) the name of Jesus.  That is to say we are called to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ that people might believe, repent, and be saved.

            J.C. Ryle possibly the second greatest Anglican in all of history (after George Whitfield) said concerning the doctrines of repentance and forgiveness "No Christian teaching, be it remembered, is scriptural and sound, which does not give the principle place to these two great doctrines."

            This is THE message - repentance and forgiveness in Christ - this is the Gospel, this is our life, this is our task, this is our mission.  The Ascension is the linchpin of our ministry as disciples of Christ proclaiming the Good News, it is the assurance of our victory, our Saviour, our power, the Holy Spirit and the future glory.

Galatians 1.1-5

Galatians 1.1-5

1 Paul, an apostle-not from men or by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead- 2 and all the brothers who are with me: To the churches of Galatia. 3 Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, 4 who gave Himself for our sins to rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 5 to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Today we begin our new sermon series on Paul’s letter to the Galatians. 

But why Galatians?  Of all the books of the Bible why are we preaching through Galatians?

The answer is simple – Galatians is all about the Gospel, it is all pure, unadulterated good news about freedom and where true joy comes from.  Above everything, it is all about Jesus.  Galatians has been described as “The Christians declaration of independence” “the great charter of religious freedom” and importantly “the battle-cry of the Reformation!”  Martin Luther, who began the Reformation in 1552 by nailing his 95 theses – his arguments against the corrupt and doctrinally compromised mediaeval Catholic church – to the church door in Wittenberg called Galatians “my epistles, to it I am as it were in wedlock.  It is my Katherine.”

Obviously Galatians is very important, but what is its big idea?  What is the big idea behind all of Galatians?  It is this:  That we are all Pharisees and even if we believe in ‘grace’ and ‘Jesus’, still we feel we need to keep God happy with good works and nice deeds so that we are not punished.  The issue is that we are by nature, from the moment we are conceived, legalists and not people of grace.  We are all born with ‘cause and effect’ wired into our brains and souls.  But God is above that, God is so much greater.

Often when you read about Galatians people you will come across people who think that Martin Luther read Galatians wrong, that it was not about legalism and he was just projecting his issues with the Catholic Church onto Paul.  This is called “the New Perspective” – and like so many new-fangled ideas, it is not only wrong but dangerous.  It goes against the plain meaning of the text and against the traditions and understanding handed down by the apostles themselves.  The truth of the matter is that Galatians applied perfectly to the Catholic Church in Luther’s time because the real issue is not the church in one time and place but human nature itself.  That it applied just as well in the 1500’s as it did in the first century is a great proof and testimony that we are all fallen legalists with ‘religious’ tendencies that remove us from communion with God.

Marius Victorinus, whose name should go down in history as one of the most epic of all time, in 303AD wrote the first ever commentary on Galatians in Latin and he said this about the big idea behind Galatians: “the Galatians are going astray because they are adding Judaism to the Gospel of faith in Christ, disturbed by these tendencies Paul writes this letter in order that they may preserve faith in Christ alone.”  The mixing of Judaism with Christianity, the mixing of legalism and works based salvation with freedom and salvation by faith alone is as relevant today as it was then. 

But what of these first five verses? What do we learn from these?  These sentences introduce us to many key things in the letter. To an extent it begins with a fairly standard ancient letter opening:

•                    The authors name
•                    The recipients
•                    A blessing

Yet how Paul expands and phrases these three sections opens up the whole letter for plain viewing.  So let’s take a walk through our text.

Verse 1: “Paul, an apostle-not from men or by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead, and all the brothers who are with me.”  Notice that the name given is Paul and not Saul his Jewish name.  Some speculate that following his conversion Saul changed his name to Paul, but Acts does not support this as he continued to be called Saul for some time afterwards – if anything the use of Paul seems linked to his mission to non-Jews, his being Apostles to the Gentiles.  The fact is that Paul was from Tarsus, a place full of Jews and non-Jews. Not only was Paul a Jew but he was also a Roman Citizen (a rare and great honour!).  Because of this he likely had both names from birth, one to use in Jewish circles and one in Roman circles and Paul and Saul were chosen because they sound similar.  We shouldn’t read too much into the name he uses, but it is worth noting that Galatians is written primarily to gentile, non-Jewish Christians, and Paul uses his non-Jewish name with them. 

Paul then declares that he is “an apostle-not from men or by man.”  He feels the need to defend his ‘apostleship’ and authority as a teacher of the faith.  People in Galatia have been stirring up trouble and trying to discredit Paul and all He does and teachers.  Paul wants to make clear from the outset that he IS an apostles, just as the twelve disciples were.  Paul reflects here on his Damascus Road incident.  On his way to kill and persecute Christians in Damascus, backed by the Jewish authorities, Paul was a man to be feared by any who would say “Jesus is Lord.”  But on the road Jesus stops him and asks “why are you persecuting me” and reveals that He is Jesus and Paul is doing a grave sin, something so bad he should be considered the “chief of all sinners.” 

Here we see an amazing example of the grace and mercy of God – a picture of what Galatians is all about.  You have a Pharisee named Saul who was all about tithing everything, even spices and herbs, all about rules and regulations, whose religion was all legal and regal, who stood by as Stephen was martyred.  But this man is forgiven, though he certainly deserves nothing but eternity in the fires and darkness of Hell, he is forgiven, even though he doesn’t seek and ask and repent, still God meets with him and calls him.  He goes from being a Pharisee, a man feared like an SS soldier, to a slave of Jesus Christ, who proclaims His message from Jerusalem to Rome and everywhere in-between – and to people who before he would not even stand to be in the same room as!

Never underestimate the power and grace of God to change the worst of sinners, the most lost, into the found and saved.

Notice also how in this verse Paul makes clear that Jesus is divine, that He is God and not just another human as were the prophets of old and Paul himself.  Jesus has God as His Father, Jesus is the promised Messiah – the Christ – Jesus was raised by the Father from the dead to prove that all Jesus said was true (including that De was God).  It was this same Jesus who called and appointed Paul an Apostle, to argue with Paul’s authority is to argue with the God who called Him.

“And all the brothers who are with me.”  Paul makes clear that he does not stand alone, Paul and the Gospel he preaches is not a one man show – Paul did not invent Christianity whilst all the other Apostles disagreed with him!  Paul was not an isolated voice, his Good News is shared and supported by others, as he will later explain in more detail.  We also see here, and elsewhere in his letters, that Paul and his mission are not a ‘one man show’ – he needs friend around him to support him. Even the greatest need their brothers and sisters in Christ, you cannot be a true Christian, you cannot be part of the Body of Christ, and be alone.   Salvation is a one man job – but it is not our job – Jesus is the man and the only man and He did the job on the Cross for us.  We are not our own saviours, Jesus is. 

Paul continues in verse two “To the Churches in Galatia.”  There is much debate over just what Paul is referring to here, was it the whole Roman Province of ‘Galatia’ which took up much of central Turkey just North of Cyprus – or was it just the Southern part, often called Phrygia?  Or was it the North of the larger area?  The problem is that around the time of the writing of Galatians what ‘Galatia’ referred to depended on who you were talking to and what the context was.  It is, however, most likely that Paul is referring to Phrygia, to South Galatia, which is where he planted churches during his first missionary journey as recorded in Acts. 

Galatians is likely Paul’s earliest epistle written around 48 AD – just 15-18 years after Jesus was crucified.  This means it was written BEFORE the Jerusalem Council we hear of in Acts 15 and what Paul goes on to speak about, his meeting with the ‘Pillars’ in Jerusalem is a different and private meeting. But more of that in a later week.

Who were the people in Galatia the letter was written to?  It was mainly to non-Jews, that is to say ‘Gentiles’, who felt they needed to keep the Law of the Old Testament and get circumcised, do the Passover, keep the Sabbath, eat only kosher food etc.  It also seems that there were some Jews who had become Christians who we backsliding away from freedom in Christ and returning to observing the Torah – the Old Testament Law.

Paul carries on with the blessing in verse 3 “Grace to you and peace.”  This is Paul’s unique blessing, he begins and ends every single letter he wrote with “grace and peace.”  He uses it to replace the usual letter opening of “carien” or ‘greetings’ that we find in other Greek letters with “cariV” or ‘grace.’  Just as ‘greetings’ is the most common term found in the opening of Greek letters, so ‘peace’ or ‘shalom’ is the usual term in Jewish letters.  Paul mixes the usual Greek blessing with the Jewish one in a unique way. 

Of course, ‘grace’ is hugely important, arguably the most important theme in Galatians. But what does ‘grace’ actually mean?  Christians use it all the time but I fear we often don’t understand its true nature.  Grace is not just a name given to girls; it is the centre of God’s relationship with us and underpins all that He has ever done.

Grace is quite simply the free gift of love, salvation, and forgiveness to people who are not only completely undeserving of it but actually totally ill-deserving of it.  You cannot earn grace, you cannot merit grace, you cannot buy grace, and you cannot bargain for grace.  It is a freely given gift that nothing you do will ever warrant.  It is because of this that ‘peace’ follows ‘grace’ – there is no peace in works based salvation, there is no peace in trying to earn God’s love, there is only peace in the sure and certain knowledge that He loves you because He has chosen to – not because of anything you have or will do.

“Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins to rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father” 

Paul tells us that Jesus ‘gave’ Himself for our sins.  Here is the proof of grace, the living then dying then living again proof of God’s grace.  Whilst we were still enemies of God, the King of the Universe died for us sinners.  Sin is serious, that can never be understood enough, sin is so serious that it cost Jesus His life to take away our sin and the righteous wrath of God that we deserved because of it.  Grace is never, ever, an excuse of continuing in sin, there is no such thing as cheap grace – the price of grace is steeping than we could ever imagine.   In John 3.16 we see this too – God ‘gave’ His only begotten Son, He didn’t just ‘send’ Him.  The Father gave His Son over to us knowing that He would die to pay the price we could never afford.

Jesus was given according to this passage to “rescue us from this present evil age.” Jesus came to rescue and deliver us like He did the slaves in Egypt, from the evil age, from Sin, the Flesh, and the Devil.  In Christ we are made new creations, we die to sin and are made righteous by grace.  But this will not be fully realised till Jesus returns at the end of time and all are judged and he looks at Christians as says “good and faithful servant, come into my kingdom and joy.”  In the meantime we must fight evil, both the evil within us who are by nature evil, and the evil from outside us both demonic and very human.  This is why we pray in the Lord’s Prayer that God would “deliver us from evil” or more precisely “deliver us from the Evil One.”  Never forget that Satan and his armies of evil angels are very, very, real and they love nothing more than provoking and bringing down those who pose them the greatest thread – Christians who believe in grace and refuse to believe their lies of guilt and condemnation.

All that Jesus did and does is “according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.” Jesus dying on the cross was the Father’s will, it was ‘plan A’ from before the world existed, Jesus from eternity was “the lamb slain before the foundations of the world.”  When the eternal Trinity made mankind they knew what it would cost and they knew what would happen.  Jesus’ death was the ONLY way to deal with sin in love, holiness, and perfect justice.

We see here also that the Christian life is doing the will of the Father in all things – “not my will but yours be done” should be the mantra of every decision and action in our lives alongside “Yours be the glory.”  We must kill the pride and arrogance of our hard stone hearts and live radically as we are called by His will.  God is, well, God, His WILL is ALL that matters.  Likewise His glory is all that matters and all we do should be to His glory and never to our own.  All glory belongs to Him, everything including our being saved are to God’s glory – to the glory of God alone.

Thus, in conclusion, we see in these five short verses many key Christians teaching, all of which are dealt with in more detail through the letter to the Galatians.

• Jesus is God and was raised from dead after dying for sin
•  Grace leads to peace and not to burnout through ‘works’
• Everything is to be to God’s glory alone
• Evil and opposition to the Gospel is very real
• We must not buckle, but keep the faith, supporting one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.

King Jesus I pray that all those here would be filled by your Holy Spirit and given new hearts and new minds, that they would live by grace and not by works, that they would find peace and shalom in your arms, that you would strengthen them to fight sin, the flesh, and the Devil, that they would support one another in love and charity and everything they do from their work to their conversations, right down to the beating of their hearts would all be for Your glory and Yours alone.

Matthew 23.23-26

Matthew 23.23-26

23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You pay a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, yet you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy, and faith. These things should have been done without neglecting the others.  24 Blind guides! You strain out a gnat, yet gulp down a camel! 25 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self- indulgence!? 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so the outside of it may also become clean. 

Perhaps the most powerful word in this passage is HYPOCRITE.  It is a word that none of us want to hear, it is charged with accusation, it is a word that ends careers and breaks apart friendships.  The interesting thing is that the word in Greek means 'one who wears a mask' - like in a play where the actor puts on the mask of a demon or an angel, a monster or a prince.  The real person is the one hiding behind the mask, behind the facade.  But we see and hear the fake, the charade.  I must confess that I am a hypocrite, I often put up a mask, many different masks in fact.  I play along with things I find tedious, I smile when really I want to explode.  I am a sinner, and the pressure of society of course forces me to wear the mask of a saint.  The question is where in your life do you wear a mask? To whom do you wear them? Have you worn them so long that when you look in the mirror at yourself you actually see the mask, the fake, the lie?

The apostle John writes in his first epistle chapter 1 verse 7 "But if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. ?"  This is pretty much my life verse, it was at the core of the East African Revival and it contains pretty much the entirety of the Christian Good News.  The challenge is that it calls on us to walk in the light - not in darkness, not in the shade of a mask or in the shadow of a lie.  That horrible two letter word appears at the start of this verse - IF - if we walk in the light, and only if we walk in the light, can we be forgiven and washed clean by God and thus have true fellowship not only with Him but with each other.  You see you cannot truly be friends with someone if they don't know you, you can't have a real relationship with someone if you are always pretending to be someone you are not, if you are living a lie when you speak and living behind a personal facade.  Real relationships only exist between people who are real.

Now Jesus, He was real.  But we often don't know Him as we should because we only look surface deep and we only see what we want to see, we only look at the sanitised Jesus. Jesus was not a handsome man with blonde hair perfectly done and blue eyes who walked around holding little lambs and smiling at everyone.  No where in the Bible will you find that Jesus.  Jesus had no beauty that we would look twice at Him. He was a man of sorrows, yet he told jokes.  He was strong and well built not scrawny and androgenous - He was a carpenter and stonemason for over 20 years! He had rough calloused hands and dirty clothes.  He was pretty much homeless for three years so likely smelt a bit. 

G.K. Chesterton, the great Christian writer, made one serious mistake when it came to Jesus.  Chesterton claimed that the one thing God could not bring Himself to do on earth was be humourous.  Chesterton believed in the stone faced stoic philosopher Jesus who wear a perpetual poker face.  But Jesus spent three years with a group of twelve working class manly men, if He didn't tell jokes it is hard to imagine such friendship.  Last week we heard about passing through the eye of needle - something that can only be understood as a joke, there was no little hole in the wall of Jerusalem that a camel could only fit through when crawling - can you picture in your minds a huge stinking camel spitting on the ground chewing the cud trying to squeeze through the tiny hole on the end of needle?  Can you imagine it's body squishing like jelly to seep through and like a cartoon come out on the other side or even get stuck?  It is funny, Jesus was telling jokes! 

But Jesus wasn't only funny, He was also angry, at times very, very angry.  Twice in the Gospels He gets so full of rage that the only word they writers could use to describe it was one which refers to the image of an angry warhorse snorting in rage.  Even I haven't been that angry, but Jesus, Jesus was passionate! When He saw what was bring done in the Temple he snorted like a warhorse, He made a whip from cords of leather and He went in there tossing over tables, kicking over crates and cages and shouting and whipping people till they got out running away in terror!  In Revelation we again see Jesus angry, He appear on a warhorse in robe with a sword coming out of His mouth and He is 'treading the winepress of the wrath of God' He then cuts people apart with His words, with the sword.  Jesus is a warrior, He leads and army, He treads the winepress of the anger of God against sinners.  Jesus is no push over, no choir boy and no sissy.

And this is how Jesus is in the passage today.  It is impossible to seriously read this passage and not imagine Jesus being angry when He says it.  Jesus is rude, He insults the nice religious types who love going to church and keeping lots of rules and telling others to.  He calls them liars, hypocrites, a brood of vipers and He publically condemns them to Hell.  Powerful and emotional stuff.  The real Jesus - not the mask we like to make Him wear.  Jesus first rips into the Pharisees and Scribes by calling them the real hypocrites of society - they appear all good and pure and religious and obedient but really they are fakes and phonies, they are dead inside and heartless.  He mocks them by pointing out how the meticulously spend time weighing out a tenth of every spice on their spice rack so they keep the Law (or their own interpretation of it) and yet whilst getting all OCD on spices they ignore Justice and mercy and humble faith with repentance.  We see the call for Justice in Isaiah and the need for mercy in Hosea and the humble faith with broken heart in the Psalms.  But the Scribes and Pharisees were too busy making up extra laws to read those.

He then calls them blind, as if they were idiots who can't see the truth in front of their faces.  He makes a joke of how they sieve out the flies and gnats and insects from their spices and foods so as not to break the food laws but whilst concentrating on that they open up their mouths so impossibly wide that a whole camel, equally unclean and against the Law, jumps down their throat! Again here we see the humour and passion of Jesus - it is a hilarious image.  Sometime we say we are so hungry we could eat a horse, but eating a camel, that is a bit too far!  Jesus continues His attack by making clear how dirty and filthy the Pharisees are on the inside - Jesus can see right through their masks and charades.  They hide behind the Law and use it to appear pious and good and righteous but really they are sinners like everyone else, probably greater sinners because of their misplaced pride.

The Pharisees tried to make themselves righteous and good through works, but doing good things and keeping on the right side of the line and keeping everything in order.  But people are saved by faith not Law.  In fact the Law is a curse, Saint Paul tells us in Galatians that "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law."  We no longer need to lie and be fakes and appear all good and holy.  We have confidence in Jesus not in ourselves.  We are free to be vulnerable and broken - because only broken people can be used by God.

In the letter to Sardis from Jesus in Revelation Jesus tells the people "I know your works - you have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead... be alert and strengthen what remains... remember what you have received and heard; keep it and repent."  Jesus sees through our reputations for being alive and knows how dead we really are - He knows our real works which we try to hide.  He calls us to strengthen ourselves and remember what we have received from Jesus - forgiveness and real righteousness, the righteousness of God.  That is why Jesus calls on them to repent, so they can be honest and be washed clean.

We need to live in the light, no more masks and no more lies, we get things wrong in life, we are sinners, we are broken, we are as far from perfect as the East is from the West.  We know this is true, and Jesus Christ knows this is true, but we need to let others know it is true so that we can truly have fellowship with one another.  We all have a little attorney on our shoulder who tells us that we have an excuse for the things we do wrong, or it was OK because someone else has done worse or it was only once or God doesn't love you so you should be able to do it.  But this is Satan, and he wants you to make excuses, to lie to yourself , to God and to each other about who we really are and what we really do.  There is only one way to defeat Satan, to move into the light, to have true fellowship and be washed clean - we need to recognise that we do not deserve forgiveness from God, but that in Jesus Christ He gives it to us out of love, we need to recognise this grace and come to the Cross on our knees to be washed in His most precious blood which flows freely from His side for you and me.  Then we will be clean, then we can be honest, then we can start again, then we can have fellowship with God, with each other, and then we can finally own ourselves and look in the mirror and see not a mask but the face of a forgiven child of God.

Amen.