Sermon on Lord’s Day 1

1.Q. What is your only comfort in life and death?
A. That I am not my own,[1] but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death,[2] to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.[3] He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil.[5] He also preserves me in such a way[6] that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head;[7] indeed, all things must work together for my salvation.[8] Therefore, by His Holy Spirit He also assures me of eternal life[9] and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him.[10]
[1] I Cor. 6:19, 20 [2] Rom. 14:7-9. [3] I Cor. 3:23; Tit. 2:14. [4] I Pet. 1:18, 19; I John 1:7; 2:2. [5] John 8:34-36; Heb. 2:14, 15; I John 3:8. [6] John 6:39, 40; 10:27-30; II Thess. 3:3; I Pet. 1:5. [7] Matt. 10:29-31; Luke 21:16-18. [8] Rom. 8:28. [9] Rom. 8:15, 16; II Cor. 1:21, 22; 5:5; Eph. 1:13, 14. [10] Rom. 8:14.

2. Q. What do you need to know in order to live and die in the joy of this comfort?
A. First, how great my sins and misery are;[1] second, how I am delivered from all my sins and misery;[2] third, how I am to be thankful to God for such deliverance.[3]
[1] Rom. 3:9, 10; I John 1:10. [2] John 17:3; Acts 4:12; 10:43. [3] Matt. 5:16; Rom. 6:13; Eph. 5:8-10; I Pet. 2:9, 10.

(Also Article 17 Belgic Confession of Faith)

Scripture Reading:
Genesis 3:1-19

Singing:  (Psalms and Hymns are from the "Book of Praise" Anglo Genevan Psalter)
Psalm 131:1,2,3
Hymn 11:1,2,3
Psalm 62:1,4
Psalm 30:2,3,7
Hymn 49:1,2

Beloved Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ!

As humans together we all share certain experiences. For example, we all experience that life is broken; we all experience frustration, disappointment, sadness. In the face of these frustrations, disappointments and grief we want comfort, consolation, relief. That is human nature.

In the first Lord’s Day of the Catechism you and I confess that we have only one comfort, and the comfort is that we belong to Jesus Christ. We confess this comfort with words first written down more than 400 years ago, but we repeat them as true for ourselves (despite the changes the world has seen in those 400 years) because these words speak of an Unchanging God. It is this God who alone supplies comfort in the midst of the frustrations and disappointments of a rapidly changing society.

I preach to you the Word of God about your only comfort in life and death. I summarize the sermon with this theme:

OUR ONLY COMFORT COMES FROM GOD’S MERCY IN CHRIST.

1. The need for this comfort.
2. The content of this comfort.
3. The condition to this comfort.

The need for this comfort⤒🔗

We need, brothers and sisters, to consider first what comfort is. It will help us most, I think, if we can describe the word in terms of our daily lives. We all realize that we all want comfort, but the comfort we want changes with our circumstances and our age. A restless infant becomes quiet at mother’s breast, we sang from Ps 131, and we appreciate the picture; at mother’s breast the infant feels comfort. As the infant grows, the child receives comfort in different ways. Some moments curled up on mother’s lap soothes an unrest in the child, comforts the child. She takes to bed a flannel clothe and clutches it tightly as she sucks her thumb; the feel of the cloth is a source of comfort to the child. The teenager seeks comfort as the toddler did, but wants it in a different way; instead of a moment on Mom’s lap or that flannel cloth to bed, the teenager wants that secret hug from Mom, wants Dad to bring that good-night kiss and linger for a little talk. Comfort: an inner disquiet needs to be calmed, we want soothing in the face of turmoil.

That desire characterizes all people, of any age and every place. The people of our town are no different than we who sit in church this afternoon; like we, our neighbors too want comfort. So the people of our community go searching, experimenting with this and that and something else in an effort to find comfort. In our modern society, the one person seeks relief for a disquieted soul in love. Another seeks to drown his inner unrest in alcohol. Another seeks to escape his troubles by fleeing – be it through a trip courtesy of a drug or a trip courtesy of an airline. Again another seeks to find peace for his soul in what is commonly called religion, trying the beliefs and practices of Hindu meditation or Muslim strictness or Roman Catholic ritual. Still another goes to counseling, thinks to find answers from psychology. The list goes on; so many different techniques are pushed as effective means to receiving comfort in the face of turmoil.

One needs to understand, though, that all human efforts to quiet one’s soul are bound to fail. They’re all bound to fail because none of these human efforts reach down to the root cause of the disquiet and unrest we sense in our soul. For the cause of the misery inside is nothing else than sin. And the minute you speak of sin you speak of God, for sin at heart is not a misdeed against a neighbor; sin at heart is transgression against God. And God is not a figment of human imagination, a crutch for sanity in the midst of affliction; God is the Eternal One, the Almighty by whose will we exist. Step One to receiving comfort is to take God seriously. This is the God who created us in the beginning, and established with the whole human race His covenant of love. This is the God whom we spurned in Paradise, the God we offended by our decision to disobey His command and follow our own head instead. With that decision on our part in Paradise we not only snubbed God but also formed an unholy alliance with God’s enemy the devil. So we provoked our Creator to holy anger. And that holy anger expresses itself in the troubles characterizing this fallen world.

You want comfort, then, in the face of life’s troubles? Here, congregation, is the reality you must contend with. Pretend that the Almighty is not there, decide in your mind that God is small and has to satisfy our wishes, believe that the transgression of Paradise was limited to Adam and Eve alone so that there is no wrath from God against you, and you simply will not find comfort. Fundamental to receiving comfort, fundamental to appreciating the comfort God supplies, is the reality of God’s existence and the reality that we have rebelled against Him; we have offended none less than God Almighty! That is why you cannot find comfort in drink or in drugs or in traveling or in lottery or in love or in psychology or in wealth; none of these take seriously the hard reality that "the cause of our … hunger and misery is sin." And that’s why in turn none of these take seriously the God against whom we have sinned, nor what He says about comfort.

You want, says the Catechism, to live and die in the joy of this comfort? Then you must, says Question & Answer 2, you must know first of all how great your sins and misery are. To find the right cure you first have to make the right diagnosis of the problem. And the problem is sin, the problem is that we have offended God.

Sin. We’ve offended God. As soon as our parents in Paradise disobeyed God’s command and ate of the forbidden fruit, the peace and quiet-of-soul they’d enjoyed since the day of their creation was gone. They felt vulnerable, knew they were naked, and when God came they sought to hide themselves from the offended Almighty. See there, in pointed form, congregation, the connection between sin and inner unrest! And notice the consequences God imposed on their sin; God drove them out of the Garden-of-Plenty into a world of thorns and sweat. Instead of the peace that comes with abundance, they’d have anxiety to make ends meet. Instead of the joy that comes with the promise of new life, they’d fret about the pain of childbirth and the struggles of raising the child. In a word: restlessness, nervousness, anxiety, tension would characterize their lives.

We feel the results today. How we cry inside when a personal relationship is broken – be it marriage or friendship; it hurts and we want comfort. We cry inside on account of the anxieties and cares that come with raising children, and we feel inadequate to the task, failures; we want comfort, soothing. Deep in our heart of hearts we’re frustrated that things at work don’t go the way they should go, and again we want comfort. So the list of pains and concerns characterizing our personal lives goes on, the bits and pieces that give us disquiet-of-soul, unrest…. Life, death, and everything in between: real life is hard….

What, now, has God done? The almighty, eternal Creator we snubbed in Paradise, beloved, saw our misery, saw our restlessness-of-soul, and reached out with the balm of comfort! It’s our second point:

The content of this comfort←⤒🔗

We think in terms of: we need to reach out to God to receive comfort. In so doing, we put the onus on ourselves, as in: we need to find comfort. But the Scriptures, brothers and sisters, put the matter the other way around! The God of the Bible does not send us on a search to look for comfort; no, the almighty, eternal Creator of heaven and earth portrays Himself in Scripture as reaching out to people trapped in misery and disquiet, and giving comfort. Gen 3:8 does not show us people looking for God; it shows us instead people fleeing from God – for "Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden." Over against that is vs 9: "Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, ‘Where are you?’" In the words of the Belgic Confession: "Our gracious God in His marvelous wisdom and goodness set out to seek man when he trembling fled from Him." And what message did God have for people? It’s summarized in the protevangel of Gen 3:15: while we deserved damnation, when we deserved the full load of God’s eternal wrath against our sin, God promised to send His only Son to bear that wrath in our place. The Seed of the woman would battle the seed of the serpent, and yes, that battle would involve injury to the Seed of the woman but death to the seed of the serpent. It all boils down to this: Christ Jesus on Good Friday would take the place of sinners so that God’s wrath against us would fall on Him. More, on Good Friday Christ Jesus would still the wrath of God, with as blessed result that there is no wrath left from God against His people. That is the comfort God gave to Adam and Eve directly after the fall, a comfort true for all whom the Father has given to the Son. It’s of this comfort that we speak in Article 17: God came to man after the fall, we confess, and "He comforted him with the promise that He would give him His Son, born of woman, to bruise the head of the serpent and to make man blessed."

What, then, is the comfort that God gives to sinners in the midst of life’s turmoil? His comfort, congregation, is this: His wrath against us is poured out on Another so that we get no wrath!

It’s material with which most of us are very familiar. And exactly because we’re familiar with it is the danger great that we put this gospel on the shelf and fail to work with it in the dirt and dust of our daily lives. Things don’t go they way we wish, and we say in ourselves: God must be angry with me, otherwise these calamities wouldn’t happen. And we forget to apply God’s comfort to our souls in the midst of life’s troubles. Think: if on the cross God poured out on Jesus Christ the wrath that ought to fall on us on account of our sins, and if Christ was successful in bearing that wrath so that He quieted God’s anger against us, what is the result for you? Surely, beloved, it is this: there is no wrath from God left for you. But why, then, do we conclude when we lose our job, or a friendship falls apart, or a loved one dies, or the business fails, or the children won’t listen, why do we conclude that ‘God must be angry with me’? If Christ died to pay for our sins, why do we let ourselves think that others are better than I, for they experience God’s grace while I cop God’s anger…. And with that thought the restlessness-of-soul inside grows bigger, and we become more and more anxious…. And as the restlessness grows, the temptation increases too to find calm for ourselves in the solutions of this world – be it the bottle or medicine or a trip away or a new relation God doesn’t want, etc. And the comfort confessed in Lord’s Day 1 stays at a distance…, remote, unreal, a dream….

No, beloved, in the midst of our trials and tears we need to take God seriously. I mean: we need to work with His promise to send Christ into this world to take away His wrath on your sin. You say Christ was successful on Good Friday? Then draw the consequence! If Christ was successful, then there is no anger from God on you anymore! But if there is no anger from God upon you, then the trials characterizing your life are not expressions of God’s wrath upon you! What they are instead? Remember: the God who sent His Son to pay for your sin has made you His child-by-covenant, and so made Himself your Father. As a Father, His care for His children is perfect, 100% perfect. If He in wisdom determines that you need a period of difficulty –be it longer or shorter- then who are you to criticize that?! No, congregation, the adversity He gives you is trouble-given-in-love! Then certainly, we may have so many questions about the ins and outs of God’s decision to deal with us in the way things went this past week, but when all is said and done no human mind –not ours either- can fathom the heights and depths of God’s wisdom. He gave His Son to take away God’s wrath against my sin, and so there is no wrath from God left for me – let that be enough! More, the Almighty has made Himself my Father, and now supplies for my needs perfectly – let that be more than enough! In the words of our Lord’s Day: "He … preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation." Glorious is the promise, how comforting!

And even that’s not all. For this same God I offended with the fall in Paradise gives me His Holy Spirit to dwell in my heart, and through this Spirit He "assures me of eternal life." My life today may include all kinds of trials and disappointments, but tomorrow, when Christ comes back, the tears will be replaced with laughter, sorrow with joy! Today already I may be sure: Christ paid for my sins, and therefore my future shall be an eternity of God’s gracious blessing. There need be no disquiet in my soul on the point; today my Father in Jesus Christ assures me of life everlasting.

Comfort? Life has so much unrest, so many things happen day by day that make us uneasy inside. But God, brothers and sisters, has come to you with words of consolation so that you may have peace in your heart. Such is His love for you that He would hug you with His Word, enfold you in His everlasting arms so that your soul may be at peace, quieted as a child at its mother’s breast – today and always.

Now a question remains: is this comfort for everybody? Can I freely say to you that the glorious comfort God provided in Jesus Christ is really true for you in your circumstances? That’s our third point:

The condition to this comfort←⤒🔗

The correct solution to a problem, we said, requires that one first make the correct diagnosis. The Lord God tells us in His Word that the correct diagnosis to the problem of our inner restlessness is the reality of our sin and so our having offended Him. He tells us further that the correct solution to this problem is His gift of His Son; Christ died to pay for our sins and so still the wrath of God against us. But now the question is: do you agree with God? That is, do you agree with His diagnosis of the problem, and do you agree with His solution?

The point, brothers and sisters, is this. You can find the material we confess in Lord’s Day 1 very interesting, and so put it on yonder shelf to admire. But that way it all stays distant from your life. You need to respond to this material. God says that the cause of the miseries you experience in this life is sin. Well now, what do you think of that? God says that your sin –be it of the beginning with Adam and Eve in Paradise or your sins of today- provoke the anger of your eternal Creator. OK, what do you think of that? Will you take God for real, as the almighty who in fact is able –and does!- reach into your life to express His anger on your sin? Or will you choose to ignore God, or belittle His hatred of sin – and so conclude that the troubles of this life are simply the cold reality we can drown with alcohol or escape with trips or polish out of existence with psychology?

You wonder why I ask you these questions? I ask you, congregation, because the glorious comfort of Lord’s Day 1 does not belong to each and every person willy-nilly. When the Catechism in Question & Answer 2 asks what "you need to know in order to live and die in the joy of this comfort," the Catechism uses the word ‘know’ to mean much more than head knowledge. Knowledge properly used leads to action. That’s the point here too. To know your sin and misery leads to action, action of humility and acknowledging your sins. To enjoy the comfort God gives, there is a condition you need to fulfill, and that condition is that you acknowledge your sins and your sinfulness, acknowledge that you have offended none less than the almighty Creator. This is material that you need to make very personal, material you need to embrace as true-for-yourself.

That’s true not only of God’s diagnosis of the problem; we need to make personal and embrace as true also God’s solution to the problem. That He sent His Son to bear our sins in our place cannot be simply an interesting conversation piece, but has to be our own personal conviction - as in: though I provoked God’s wrath through my sin, He sent His Son so pay the penalty I deserve so that there is no wrath from God for me anymore. You need to acknowledge not just that God came with a word of salvation, but you need to acknowledge that God came with this word for you. That is why, my brother and sister, I put the matter to each of you personally: what is your personal response to God’s diagnosis of the problem and God’s solution to the problem? Do you find it interesting, intriguing, but ultimately something that belongs on the shelf, at a safe distance from your daily struggles? Or do you find God’s diagnosis and God’s solution thoroughly exciting so that you delight in what God has done for you? The question is so important because receiving God’s embrace in Christ is the only way to find comfort in the midst of life’s trials and tears.

You will say that you want some assurance that God really meant His comfort for you? You will say that Yes, you agree with the diagnosis, but No, you don’t dare to claim the solution as true for yourself?

But has God, beloved, not promised this comfort to you? Make here no mistake, beloved, He has! I refer now to the fact that He established His covenant of grace with you in your baptism long ago. There He promised to be your Father and so supply you with all good and avert all evil. There He promised to wash yours sins away in the blood of His Son so that there would be no wrath for you; you’d instead be righteous before Him. There He promised to give you His Holy Spirit so that on the last day you’d appear with spot or wrinkle before the Judge of all the world. You would say that the diagnosis is true for you, but the solution is for others? I tell you, beloved, you are wrong! God claimed you for Himself in His covenant with you, and so laid His solution to your misery on the table for you to enjoy. Because He did that, do not, do not set this gospel at a distance from yourself as interesting and maybe true for someone else but not for you. That is unbelief! Such is God’s love for you that He would give you comfort in the trials of life, such is His love that He would quiet your soul in the midst of all the disquiet that comes from the brokenness of this life. But it’s a reality you have to believe; that’s the condition to enjoying this comfort.

We all want comfort, want it so much. The eternal God against whom we sinned in the beginning and sin every day, has come to us in Jesus Christ with His glorious comfort. He’s claimed us for Himself so that we belong to Jesus Christ our faithful Savior. He’s claimed us for Himself so that the Almighty has become our caring Father who supplies our every need perfectly. He’s claimed us for Himself so that through His Holy Spirit we’re assured, in the midst of today’s sorrows, of life eternal in the presence of God Most High. Comfort? There it is, beloved, in all its glory. Believe it, work with it, enjoy it! Amen.

---