God Is Breaking In, To Save!

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 5^th, Anno Domini 2021
Our Savior´s and Our Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill City and Custer, SD
God Is Breaking In To Save 
Isaiah 35:1-10, James 2:1-18, Mark 7:31-37

    God is breaking in to save. 

“Be strong; fear not!  Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God.  He will come,... and save you.  Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped.”

    Jesus has recently come from verbal combat with the Pharisees, the holy men of the Jewish people, Jesus’ people.  He tried to break through their stony hearts and show them that their endless keeping of rules is a failure, that their religion of works cannot save.  Then Jesus leaves them and heads off to the boondocks, to the northern regions of Palestine, where Jew and Gentile live intermixed.  Where the purity of the people and their religion is low, but the hunger for God's salvation is strong.

    Here, out in the sticks, among the scruffy people, maybe to our surprise, God breaks in to save.  As Isaiah prophesied four centuries before, miraculous reversals for the poor and downtrodden are popping up like flowers after a spring rain.  Pure, living water is flowing all over the desert.

    What Isaiah prophesied, Jesus reveals: The Day has come.  Jesus brings sight to the blind, speech and hearing to the mute and deaf, He lifts up the fallen.  Jesus spits and touches, water from God, healing by the very hand of God.  Jesus is unconcerned with our sensibilities; He heals with divine spit.  If we saw it happen, we might call it gross.  But Jesus doesn’t care what people think.  Spitting and touching, our Lord gently makes whole what was broken.  "Ephphatha," be opened.  For everyone who finds living life to the world’s expectations simply too hard, Jesus’ disregard for human rules is wonderful.  For everyone who is struggling to just get by, right now, this Jesus, with spit on His finger and power in His voice, this Jesus gives hope, hope for reversal, hope for rescue.  God is breaking in to save.

    God is breaking in to save.  But He orders them not to tell anyone.  Why?  Why, when after so many centuries of suffering, when salvation unto us has come, why does the Savior of the world tell those who see His miracles, "Sshhh, don't tell anyone."  Why not shout it from the rooftops?  The blind see!  The lame walk!  The deaf and dumb receive hearing and speech!  Why does Jesus tell them to keep it quiet?             

    God is breaking in to save.  The signs are plain to see, like water bubbling up in the desert, like the praise and thanksgiving of a tongue long silent.  God is breaking in to save, but God’s salvation is not complete in the physical healing of the deaf and mute and blind.  As comforting and marvelous as these reversals are, they are not the whole story of salvation, not even the most important part. 

    So Jesus tells them to keep quiet.  He knows all too well, even this story can be twisted.  For all the pure thankfulness and joy that Jesus' miracles created in the hearts of people, still their remains the potential in us to twist the Gospel, the satanic tendency to make it something it is not.  We all have some pharisee in us.  We all want to twist God’s radical plan of salvation.  We especially want to smooth the sharp edges and water down the truth about our sinfulness.  We all want to hold on to the idea that we are part of the solution, and believe that God loves us because we are good people. 

    But whatever outward show of holiness and goodness that we put on is just that, a show.  We can only cover up and try to hide from others the sad truth about you and me.  We are sinners, and we can’t stop sinning.  We are not good.  Only God is good.  But, amazing grace, the good God still wants us.  So, in His goodness, our Heavenly Father has loved the world, including you and me, by breaking in to save.  By sending His Son to become sin for us, dying on a Roman cross, to take away the sins of the world, all of the sins of all people.  The Gospel is empty without the Cross.      

    If we only tell part of the story, we change the Gospel.  If we leave out the suffering through which Jesus saves us, we empty the Gospel of its power.  We must not skip over sin.   We must also avoid painting a false picture of the Christian life.  We must take care not to preach a false “prosperity now gospel”, that Jesus is here to take away all your pain, right now.  We know this is not true.  We know from the Bible, history and our own lives that Christians still face pain.  Suffering often seems the Christian's constant companion.  Even during the time that Jesus walked visibly on this earth, He did not heal every sick person.  He did not strengthen the legs of every cripple. 

    But He did suffer on the Cross, once for all.  If I were to preach that Jesus will take away all your physical problems today, that Jesus will soothe all your emotional pain, that Jesus will make your life rosy every day, right now, well, then I would be lying about our Lord, and setting you up for a fall.  For Jesus will not remove every problem in this life.  The souls we would gather with such preaching would end up getting hurt.  Such a twisted, false gospel could turn people away from Jesus altogether, running the risk of making them too deaf to ever again hear the real Gospel, the real Good News. 

    God is breaking in to save, forever.  Jesus orders those He heals not to tell others about their miracle because He wasn't finished.  We don't have the everlasting Gospel until we see the end.  For it is not the eternal Gospel until it is finished.

    God has finished His great break-in, salvation is complete.  The Good News of Jesus is eternal.  Now it’s time to shout it from the rooftops: Jesus the Savior has come.  Not just to make our todays better, but rather Jesus comes to make our forever perfect.  Not by curing every symptom of sin in this life, but rather by removing forever sin and the pain and death it brings.  The healing of the deaf-mute, the healing of the paralyzed, all the great reversals that Jesus did in His earthly ministry, these were most importantly a foretaste of heaven, a sign of the eternal promise that Jesus came to deliver. 

    The full Gospel changes everything.  Including you.  When the Holy Spirit sealed you in the faith, He changed you.  When He opened the eyes of your heart to see in Christ crucified the best news you’ve ever heard, God recreated you.  By giving you faith to believe that in the Cross you see His very purest and strongest love, the Lord took away your heart of stone, naturally fearful and selfish, and gave you a new heart of flesh that beats with the life of Christ.  You were spiritually poor and headed for eternal death, but God has now declared you the richest of all people, headed for eternal joy, by faith in Jesus.  Such true riches make you generous, because the One who gave you true riches is generous, and so you have nothing to lose. 

    This is why James in our Epistle reading reminds us that true faith always shines forth in good works, works of love for the brother or sister in need.  Good works flow naturally from the sinner who believes they have been forgiven and will live in glory forever, with God and all His angels and all His Holy believers, His saints.  Because God is love, we who have been united by faith in Christ’s forgiving love naturally forgive and love others. 

    When we fail to forgive and love one another, which to our shame we still do, it is fruit of the sinner that remains in us.  Lord help us!  The only solution is to run to Jesus, repenting and confessing your sins, and asking Him to forgive and restore you.  And He will.  Because He loves you.  And so He declares to you again and again the Gospel of His death on the Cross for all human sin.  Your Savior has reversed the effects of evil in His own body.  Having conquered our death by His death, Jesus then rose to new life, perfect, sinless, forever and ever life.  And because God is generous, this new life in Jesus is granted to all who believe in Him. 

    And we now have the privilege of telling this Good News.  We shout from the rooftops of the Great Break-In of God, by telling the story all the way through the Cross and Resurrection.  Because that was the ultimate break-in.   There Jesus robbed Satan of souls he thought he would be tormenting forever.  There God revealed the new life He has for all, poured out as living water to a parched and dying world.  There God broke in to save, once and for all.  The task of salvation is complete.   There is no more need of sacrifice for sin, no more debt to be paid.  Jesus has done it all.  All who trust in Jesus receive a share in His life, through the fruit of His sacrifice, that washes away all their sin. 

    But not all believe.  So many people, outside and inside the visible Christian Church, still believe that religion is fundamentally about living a good life, so that God will be pleased and accept us.  This is a terrible lie, because we can’t do it.  Good works flow from faith; salvation belongs to God alone.  Believing in salvation by human works, before or after conversion, is a lie that robs glory from the Savior, and steals away from the sinner the comfort of God’s forgiving love. 

    So God is still breaking in to save.  Jesus is still at work, delivering His salvation, one soul at a time, pouring living water into the desert of souls that is our world.  Jesus is doing it now, through His Word, now and every time that God's people gather around the Gospel.  The Father will do it again in a few minutes, feeding His faithful with the Bread of Life, the Body and Blood of Jesus, for the forgiveness of sins, and the strengthening of faith and love. 

    It would be cool to see a lame person receive strong legs in an instant, or a blind person regain their sight.  But don't miss the greater miracles that are happening.  Especially don’t miss the miracle of faith.  We live in a world that increasingly mocks Biblical faith.  The world trusts absolutely in the wisdom of mankind, and disregards the true wisdom found only in the Word of God.  And yet we see signs of faith, worked by the Holy Spirit.  We, whose ears were deaf to God's truth, now have heard and believed, and so we gather.  We, whose tongues were unable to sing the praise of Him we did not know, now have been given voice to sing of His great love.  And in yet another miracle, as we hear and speak, God works through us to save, using the words we say to open yet more ears and hearts to receive His forgiving love. 

 God is breaking in to save.  Come Lord Jesus, come.  Amen.