Sermon on Lord’s Day 2⤒🔗

3.Q. From where do you know your sins and misery?
A. From the law of God.[1]
[1] Rom. 3: 20;

4. Q. What does God's law require of us? A. Christ teaches us this in a summary in Matthew 22: You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.[1] This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.[2]
[1] Deut. 6:5. [2] Lev. 19:18.

5. Q. Can you keep all this perfectly?
A. No,[1] I am inclined by nature to hate God and my neighbour.[2]
[1] Rom. 3:10, 23; I John 1:8, 10. [2] Gen. 6:5; 8:21; Jer. 17:9; Rom. 7:23; 8:7; Eph. 2:3; Tit. 3:3.

Scripture Reading: Romans 3:9-20; Matthew 22:34-40

Singing: (Psalms and Hymns are from the "Book of Praise" Anglo Genevan Psalter)
Psalm 36:1,2
Psalm 42:7
Psalm 53:2,5
Psalm 10:2,3,7
Hymn 24:2,3,4,5

Beloved Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ!

Printed in bold letters above our Lord’s Day for today are the words: "the First Part", and then the words: "Our Sin and Misery." That’s because the Catechism breaks down into three distinct parts, according to the threefold division mentioned in Question & Answer 2 of Lord’s Day 1. This First Part on Our Sin and Misery is brief –only three Lord’s Days- but its topic serious and (we find) depressing; we’d rather not talk about ‘Our Sin and Misery’, would rather talk about redemption. But here we are, with Lord’s Day 2 we have to plunge into this section on Our Sins and Misery, and so we brace ourselves for depressing, discouraging material….

Yet we are in error, my brothers and sisters, if we choose to see the material of the First Part as depressing and discouraging. Question & Answer 2 of Lord’s Day 1 had asked about how you can enjoy the comfort of Question & Answer 1, and told us that to enjoy this comfort we must "know" "first, how great my sins and misery are." You see, the Catechism puts a link between keen awareness of our sin and misery and delighting in the redemption God has given us in Christ. That, then, is the purpose of this First Part of the Catechism about "Our Sin and Misery": we take a good look at ‘Our Sin and Misery’ so that we may rejoice the more in the deliverance God has given us in Jesus Christ.

And Yes, that Sin and Misery is miserable indeed. And therefore our gratitude to God for the deliverance He gave is the greater. I summarize the sermon with this theme:

The depths of our sin and misery prompts us to delight the more in God’s redemption in Jesus Christ

1. The depths of our misery.
2. The redemption from this misery.

The depths of our misery←⤒🔗

The Lord God in the beginning created the human race and established with us His covenant of grace; in Paradise He was our caring and faithful Father so that life was only joy and satisfaction. We, however, threw that happiness and satisfaction away with our fall into sin, broke the covenant with God and established a bond with Satan. Well now, what’s it like on Satan’s side? How are we to characterize life-after-the-fall?

Over the years, people have supplied numerous answers to that question. Philosophers and artists over the generations have put into words and onto canvas what we all experience: life after the fall is broken, is painful. Sure, everyone experiences moments of happiness, but when all is said and done life is characterized by suffering, by sadness, by trouble – misery. Pain and death, war and sickness, bullying and abuse are part and parcel of this earthly life, whether we like it or not. The world’s big thinkers agree with the little man of the street…. And what to do about this brokenness? There’s those who have said that we should just laugh the brokenness and misery off, and make the most of the opportunities that be (Alexander Dumas), and there’s others have tried to be much more profound about it, but the long and short is that we just have to put up with life’s brokenness.

Now, there’s so very much truth in what the philosophers and authors and artists and musicians say about life. Yet when all is said and down, brothers and sisters, their analysis is inadequate because they operate from a closed worldview. They look at life without taking God into account, look at life as if there is no God. Then you end up with people talking about people, end up with people’s analysis about people. And we all know that nobody wants to be critical of self…. To get an objective analysis about life after the fall into sin, we need the opinion of someone outside our own circle, need input from the Creator Himself – perfect and holy as He is. So in our Lord’s Day we ask "from where do you know your sins and misery," and we answer: "from the law of God."

We understand: this starting point of our Lord’s Day is a statement of faith, implies that we take as our starting point the existence of God and the fact that He spoken to men in His Word. More, with this statement of faith comes an attitude of submission and humility; we accept from the start the authority of the Word of God, accept that God’s analysis of our circumstance is far more penetrating and accurate than any human analysis could ever be.

What, now, does God say about our sins and misery? To answer that question for us the Lord God does not place us in an Afghani refugee camp for some months so that we might learn to empathize with the misery of orphans and the homeless. He does not put us in the West Bank either for some weeks so that we might experience the terror that comes with suicide bombers walking the streets. Nor does He put us in an AIDS clinic or make us live with Perth’s street kids for some time either in order to spell out for us our Sins and Misery. Why not? That’s because a refugee camp or an AIDS clinic or being a street kid are all incidental circumstances that do not characterize the lives of all people – and certainly not ours in our quiet and prosperous corner of the globe. The Lord God does not confront us with the sins and misery of the Afghanis or the Israelis or the AIDS patient; He wants to confront us with our sins and misery. He would have us know that within our own homes, in the personal lives of each of us, there is such rot and such corruption that our circumstance is more miserable than we ourselves care to admit. To drive that point home to us the Lord asks our attention for His law – a law God has given to each of us.

The law. We hear the term, and our thoughts go to the Ten Commandments. But when the Catechism, brothers and sisters, uses the term ‘law of God’ in our Lord’s Day, the Catechism is not thinking of the Ten Commandments; it’s thinking instead of the whole Bible. That’s clear from the passage we read from Rom 3. In the vss 10-18 Paul quoted numerous texts from the Old Testament, notably from the Psalms and from Isaiah, and then says that "whatever the law says it says to those who are under the law" (vs 19). Paul’s sudden reference to ‘law’ here is not a change of topic (as if he’s moving from the books of Psalms and Isaiah to the Ten Commandments), but with the word ‘law’ Paul captures the whole Old Testament from which he drew his quotations in the vss 10-18.

Well now, the Catechism wants to know what God’s law requires of us. The reference is, then, to the whole Bible – a book we all have. In the whole of His revelation, then, what, at heart, does God say about us-after-our-fall? He created us; what is His analysis of His creatures – of you and me?

In answer to that question, the Catechism draws our attention to Jesus’ words in Mt 22. More, the Catechism says of Jesus’ words that herewith Jesus gives a "summary" of the law. To understand the word ‘summary’ here, I need to take you for a moment to that passage from Mt 22.

We read together the vss 34-40. But the ‘color’ of the passage is set back in vs 15. In envy of Jesus’ popularity the Pharisees "plotted how they might entangle [Jesus] in His talk" – says that verse. That is: they wanted to make a public fool of Jesus so that the crowds might desert Him. Their first question, about taxes to Caesar, did not entangle Jesus. Neither did the second question, about the woman who married seven husbands and who would her husband be in the resurrection. The passage we read is the Jews’ third attempt to make Jesus say something wrong. Their question (through the mouth of a lawyer): "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" Bear in mind: the purpose of the question is to make Jesus trip.

And yes, it’s a devious question. The thing is that the Pharisees had added up all the commandments God had given to Israel, and came to a total of 613 laws. They also thought they discovered conflicts between these laws. For example, God had prohibited any work on the Sabbath; that’s the fourth commandment. But God had also commanded that when you see your neighbor’s ox walking down the road, you are to bring that ox back to your neighbor. Suppose now that on a Sabbath your neighbor’s ox had escaped its paddock and was walking down the road in front of your place. What were you to do? Bring it back? But that would put you in violation of the Sabbath command…. You see the problem: obeying the one command meant you had to disobey the other…. So: which one do you obey? To answer that question, the Pharisees put the 613 commands into an order of more important and less important, and the point was that in the event of a conflict between two commands you had to keep the more important command and let the less important one go. We understand that putting these commands into some sort of order-of-importance would generate enormous discussion and disagreement. Which command should be No. 1? And which one No. 10? And which one number 98? They come to Jesus with that first question: which is the great commandment in the law? That is: which of God’s 613 commands do you think should be on the top of the list?

In the light of that question, congregation, Jesus’ answer is so very intriguing. For with His answer Jesus does not speak only about command No. 1, as in which command has the greatest priority. Rather, with His answer the Lord Jesus reaches underneath the surface of every command found in Scripture, reaches to the attitude God wants from people, the attitude that compels the fact of obedience as well as the manner of obedience to all God’s commands. That attitude, says Jesus, is love. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself." We understand: that attitude overcomes the dilemma the Pharisees had seen between the Sabbath command and the command about bringing the neighbor’s ox back. And therefore Jesus’ answer also overcame the question of which command should be No. 1. It’s not a question of which command is most important; it’s a question of what lives in your heart.

But with His answer, brothers and sisters, Jesus also pointed up how hopelessly warped the heart of every fallen person is, and so spelled out how great our sins and misery are. For: what is love? Our natural inclination is to define this word in terms of our experience. So we say that love is affection for another, or is the warm feeling you have for another. Love is the emotion that makes your heart go thump-thump-thump in that exciting way. Maybe more: ever since the rise of the hippie culture in the 60’s love is associated with sex, with passion. Just think of the phrase ‘make love’. So the word has come to include a strong element of selfishness. ‘I love you’ is one way of saying ‘I need you,’ of saying: ‘you’ve got something I want.’

We need to remember, though, that Jesus used the term ‘love’. We do wrong to load the word He used with the meaning the term has in our society. We need to ask instead what Jesus understood with the word love. That’s to say: what does God say love is? The answer to that question is given most plainly in John’s first letter. Let’s take our Bibles and read 1 John 4:7-11.

Notice first John’s inspired word in vs 8, that "God is love." Then John continues in vs 9 to describe what the love of God is. The love that characterizes God, says John, was demonstrated when "God sent His only son into the world that we might live through Him." He adds depth to that sentence in vs 10 when he says that "love" is not "that we loved God," but love is instead that God "loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." The term ‘propitiation’ is one of these gems that catch a glorious doctrine in one word. Propitiation: the word means literally ‘atoning sacrifice’, and the point is that we deserved God’s wrath on account of our sins but God put Christ between Himself and us so that God’s wrath landed on Christ instead of on us – with as result that He copped what we deserve, satisfied God’s justice, and we get to go free. That one word, then, catches the gospel in a nutshell.

What now is love? The Father and the Son had been together in the glory of heaven from all eternity, and delighted in each other’s company. But God’s love for sinners is that God sent His only Son out of the glories of heaven, sent Him to this sin-filled earth with the mandate to die on the cross of Calvary in order to pay for sin. That, says John, is love. Love is not simply an emotion, a tender feeling of affection to a special someone. Love is self-emptying for the benefit of the unworthy. "God is love," says John, and the point is that God has demonstrated for us what love is, demonstrated it by emptying Himself, giving up His dearest possession to be an atoning sacrifice for the salvation of the unworthy. Please have that fixed in your mind, beloved: love has no room for self! Love is not self-centered; love is rather self-emptying. That is the example of love that the Lord God Himself has given to us, an example of love from which we benefit so enormously – it’s the cause of our salvation!

Now the Son of God whom God in His love sent to earth is asked to tell which is the greatest commandment of the law, which command should be on top of the list. Jesus’ reaches behind God’s commandments to the attitude God demands of people, and says that this attitude must be love. Jesus can speak of this attitude, for He was Himself the living expression of God’s love. God loved, sent His Son, and that is to say that God emptied Himself, denied Himself the pleasure of the Son’s company, and did so for the benefit of the unworthy, the salvation of sinners. This Son says that the attitude God demands is love. What does Jesus mean with the term? Surely He means that people are to empty themselves for God and for each other even as God emptied Himself for the benefit of the unworthy.

Now we say in our Catechism that Jesus catches in Mt 22 the attitude, the heart, the essence of what God requires of us in His law, in His Word. We hear this summary from time to time in church after the reading of the Ten Commandments. Now what do you think, beloved? How well do you fare in showing love to God and neighbor? We understand that love is not kindness, and love is not being decent to each other, and love is not being polite to each other either; love is that you empty yourself for the benefit of the unworthy. Tell me: do you think that you show that love to your spouse? Do you think that you show that love to your children or to your parents? Do you think you show that radical self-emptying to your neighbor – be he the boss at work or the fellow student at school or the chap across the road or the brother sitting in the next pew?

Let me take the question further. God’s love involved self-emptying so that we might be filled. There’s action there, doing something concrete – at expense of self- to advantage the other. Concretely then: is your life characterized by actions of self-emptying resulting in benefits to those around you? Does you spouse see in you every day that you put yourself last to advantage your other half? Do your children or your parents see in you every day that you put yourself last in order to give benefit to your children, those parents – whether they are worthy or not? Does your boss, do your workmates, see you as a person who thinks last of self, who gives the self to do good to the other – whether believer or unbeliever? That is the essence of God’s whole revelation, it’s the fine point upon which Jesus lays His finger in Mt 22.

Again, we could answer that question on the basis of what we feel about our performance - and come away reasonably satisfied. But the question is not how people evaluate each other. For again, we are too involved to be objective; it’s just not in our fallen selves to give ourselves a failing mark. The question is how God evaluates us. And His evaluation is scathing! Recall that passage we read from Romans 3. Paul says in vs 9 that "both Jews and Greeks … are all under sin," and that’s to say that all are equally depraved and inclined to all evil. Obey the drift of God’s revelation, show the love that God has shown to men by seeking us out and giving us salvation? Not at all; all are under sin. How Paul knows that all are depraved and desperately evil? Paul has read through the Scripture God has given, and now in chap 3:10-18 gives a whole string of quotes from Old Testament Scripture to prove how loveless people are. Lord for God? Vs 11: "there is none who seeks after God," says Ps 53. Paul quotes from Ps 36 too: "there is no fear of God before their eyes " (vs 18). And love for the neighbor? Vs 13: "their throat is an open tomb; with their tongues they have practiced deceit," reads Paul in Ps 5. More, "the poison of asps is under their lips," says Ps 140. Is 59 agrees: "Their feet are swift to shed blood" (vs 15). People characterized by love, emptying of self for the benefit of the neighbor? Whole-hearted self-denial to pursue the neighbor’s well-being and the glory of God the Creator? None of it, says Paul, none of it! God has evaluated human life after the fall, and He declares that life is characterized by lies, by slander, by killing each other….

And No, brothers and sisters, do not now travel in your thoughts to the Middle East, as if the lies and slander and killing each other characterizes only that part of the world. God would have us know that this selfishness characterizes each one of us; our own midst, our own families, our own persons overflow with the selfishness that prompts lies, slander, killing of the neighbor. Love is what God wants, total self-emptying for the benefit of the unworthy, but what He wants we don’t give. So life is miserable and we experience it to be so. How many tears, how many sleepless nights, how many headaches have you experienced because you were on the receiving end of someone’s slander, someone’s hate?! How much misery there is! And then to recall that we see imperfectly! God sees the depth of our loveless-ness with infinitely far greater clarity than we could ever imagine.

God wants love, perfect love as He loved, wants us to love God and neighbor as He loved us in the face of our fall into sin, to love with all our heart and soul and strength. Now we realize something of the depths of our misery. For this is a love we simply cannot produce! With various rules in society we can make life more tolerable and even reasonably comfortable, but when we look in the eyes of God as to what He demands of us … our courage fails us, for we see something of the infinite depths of our sins and misery…. We can’t love God as He wants, we are so infinitely far removed from the perfection with which God made us. Our actions are characterized by self-love – and that’s called hate for God and neighbor…. Woe, woe is me…. How desperately I need a Savior!

And see: God supplies redemption from this misery!

The redemption from this misery←⤒🔗

Truly, that’s the glorious gospel of Lord’s Day 2! For who, tell me, who is the speaker in this Lord’s Day? Who is the ‘I’ of Question & Answer 5? No, it’s not just every Tom, Dick and Harry of town. Certainly, every Tom, Dick and Harry of town is inclined by nature to hate God and neighbor alike, and each ought to admit it. But not every Tom, Dick and Harry of town in fact admit this depravity, dare to take the words of this Lord’s Day on his lips. But here’s the marvelous work of God: you do take this confession on your lips! You do acknowledge your depravity, do acknowledge that by nature you cannot love in the Scriptural sense of the word. How come you acknowledge it? That, beloved, is because the Holy Spirit has worked that conviction in you. And He hasn’t worked in you only the conviction of sin and misery; He has worked in you also the faith by which you embrace that the Lord Jesus Christ has died to pay for your sins. That’s why you and I could take on our lips last week those wonderful words of Lord’s Day 1: I "belong with body and soul, both in life and death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil." As Christians, persons redeemed in Jesus’ blood, we look back at the miserable bondage-to-Satan from which God in Christ saved us, and we marvel not only at the fact of redemption but also at the wonders that God would give His Son to save people as lost as we were. Freedom is never so sweet as after you’ve spent some time locked away. Deliverance through Jesus’ blood doesn’t move to hearty gratitude unless you appreciate what you’ve been delivered from. God demands love, we could not love - how lost we were!- and yet God gave His Son for our redemption – what glorious love that is!

We live after the fall into sin, live after we’ve tasted God’s love in Jesus Christ. Is life better as a result of receiving this redemption? Or is the misery as real as it ever was, the loveless-ness as acute as Paul describes in Rom 3? Notice, brothers and sisters, what we say in Question & Answer 5: "I am inclined by nature to hate God and my neighbor." But by the grace of God the children of God do not live "by nature" anymore! Those redeemed through the blood of Christ on Calvary have also been renewed by the Holy Spirit so that we are "heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him" – as we confessed last week in Lord’s Day 1. And that is simply to say, beloved, that the selfishness that characterizes the person in Satan’s camp does not characterize us anymore; by God’s grace the redeemed are renewed so that we reflect the love that God has shown in Jesus Christ. Reflect it perfectly? Find total self-emptying in the lives of God’s people? No, beloved, not yet. Recall Lord’s Day 44: even the holiest have only a small beginning of the obedience God requires. But the beginning is real! So you can see in the Christian something of the love God has shown in Christ, can see a beginning of the self-emptying for the benefit of the other.

So the command is there, brothers and sisters, to go and show that love, to God and neighbor alike – be that neighbor in the home or outside, in the church or outside. The command is there to empty yourself in the strength of the Holy Spirit for the good of the other. And true, time and again you will be bitterly disappointed in yourself, frustrated because you do not obey the law of God as God demands. Then you see something again of the Sin and Misery that remains, and so you cry out your despair with Paul: "wretched man that I am; who will deliver me from this body of death?!" But tasting something of the depths of our abiding misery does not lead to total despair, for we confess with Paul too that God Most High has loved us, has given His Son to take away these ongoing sins and so give us salvation.

Shall we despair in the face of the sinfulness and selfishness that remains? No, beloved, we shall not! Instead, every time we see something of the depths of our misery – and that’s every day – we’ll delight the more at the glorious heights of the redemption God has freely given in Christ to such unworthy sinners as we are! And that’s incentive to keep showing the same love to others – worthy or not. Amen.

---