1 Corinthians 9:27 “I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.”

Our country is becoming a more casual place. Etiquette, formality, and seriousness are out. “Do what feels comfortable” is in. We dress casual, almost everywhere. We interact casual, on a first-name basis with everyone.

Whether you find this trend towards the casual refreshing or regressive, there is one place we must agree it does not belong: A casual approach to Christianity will not do. You can no more be casual about your Christian faith and life than you can be casual on a battlefield. But we are all tempted to try.

Paul was taking his faith and life seriously when he confessed, “I beat my body and make it my slave.” He understood the serious consequences for failing to do so: “so that…I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” He recognized a basis for his concern in Israel’s history: “For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:1-4).

Look at the advantages God gave to the people who came out of Egypt. They all traveled under the shadow of the cloud of God’s special presence. You remember that cloud that led them, that appeared as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. They themselves had walked on dry ground through the middle of the Red Sea. They personally experienced the most important act of deliverance and demonstration of God’s saving love for his people in world history before the coming of Christ!

God’s special graces didn’t stop on the eastern shore of the Red Sea. They all ate the same spiritual food, the manna God gave them in the wilderness. It’s not hard to understand how the manna took care of their bodies. But in what sense did it feed them spiritually? Moses gives us the answer in Deuteronomy 8:3, “He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your forefathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” The gift of manna taught Israel a lesson in faith: Every day they must trust God to take care of their needs. They could not save manna for a month ahead, or a week ahead, or even a day ahead. If they tried it turned rotten. And every day God kept his promise, confirming that he was still thinking about them and loved them. This message behind the manna became food for their souls.

And then what happened? “They served God wholeheartedly as his obedient children and marched through the wilderness from victory to victory until they all reached the promised land.” No. “Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert” (1 Corinthians 10:5). Israel took a casual approach to all the good things God had done. They overlooked God’s gracious gifts, turned against the Lord, and they died in the desert for their sin.

It shouldn’t be difficult to see the point of Paul’s little historical review: Beware of casual approach to God’s grace! We haven’t walked between walls of water, but we have seen God himself die on a cross to free us from sin. We know how he broke through the walls of his own tomb when he rose on the third day. Do you think those Israelites who walked through the Red Sea ever forgot the experience? But somehow it lost its impact on their souls. I don’t believe any of us will forget that Jesus sacrificed himself for us on a cross and took his life back three days later. But somehow we lose our sense of wonder at it. We stop marveling. It doesn’t seem so important anymore.

Israel got used to the idea that the miracle of manna would be there day after day. They even got tired of it. We get used to the idea that there is church this week, and next week, and every Sunday after that as far as we can tell. And dare I say it–sometimes we even get tired of it? Such a loss of appreciation for God’s saving grace, such a casual disinterest in the sacrifices God has made to rescue from the eternal night of death, is death to our faith. It is dangerous to overlook God’s gracious gifts!

James 2:12-13 “Speak and act as those who are to be judged by the law of freedom. For judgment is without mercy to the one who has not shown mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.”

Favoritism misrepresents and misunderstands the God to whose family we belong. The church is a place where everyone is a sinner saved by God’s grace and mercy–no exceptions. No one starts ahead of anyone else. No one has special access. There are no V.I.P.’s, no backstage passes handed out because of how much you pay or who you know.

We were all spiritually poor at the beginning, dressed in the rags of our own sins. “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Paul writes to the Romans. Nothing to make God want us there! He had every reason to judge us and condemn us. But he goes on, “…and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” All have sinned. All are justified freely by his grace. God’s mercy triumphed over his judgment when he sent Jesus to redeem us, and then he set us free from our sins and claimed us as his own in spite of them.

It is important for our own faith that we understand ourselves to be sinners who have received God’s mercy. It’s also important for how we treat others. Do you remember Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful servant? A servant owes his master an insurmountable debt–ten thousand talents, two hundred thousand years of wages for the typical worker. When the man pleads with his master for more time, the master simply forgives the whole debt and lets him go.

Then this man, forgiven so much, goes out and finds a fellow servant who owes him about three months of wages–not a small debt, but perhaps manageable over time. The man who was forgiven so much forgets the mercy he was shown. He has his fellow servant thrown into prison until he pays the debt. He is all full of judgment. He knows no mercy.

When the master hears of it, he calls the first man in and demands that he explain himself. He had been forgiven so much. Shouldn’t he be merciful to others, too.

The issue of favoritism isn’t exactly the same, but it is similar. Before God, didn’t we all start out like the poor man James says walks into your church? Don’t we have nothing to offer God? Yet didn’t he show mercy, and treat us with dignity and love anyway, and wasn’t this the same for everyone of us?

Realizing this, can we justify judging some people as beneath our respect and kindness because they look and smell a little ragged and have so little? Would God approve? “For judgment without mercy to the one who has not shown mercy.” But God still expects his mercy to have its way and change our hearts towards them. “Mercy triumphs over judgment.” God keep us from ignoring his mercy when the time comes!

James 2:10-11 “Whoever keeps the entire law, and yet stumbles at one point, is guilty of breaking it all. For he who said, Do not commit adultery, also said, Do not murder. So if you do not commit adultery, but you murder, you are a lawbreaker.”

As people deal with each other not all sins or crimes are the same, and it is proper that we recognize that. Driving over the speed limit, shoplifting, and murder are all against the law. But they don’t affect my neighbor the same.

Speeding creates risk. It may put my neighbor’s life in danger. But until there has been a collision, no one is actually harmed, so the penalty is relatively mild, usually just a fine.

Shoplifting takes money out of other people’s pockets–the store owner, perhaps the employees he may struggle to pay, even the other customers who have to pay more for their purchases to make up for what has been stolen. It interferes with my neighbor’s daily bread. The impact is greater, so the punishment is more severe: bigger fines and perhaps time in jail.

Murder, of course, makes the ultimate impact on the victim’s life. Society responds by taking the murderer’s life away, either literally with the death penalty, or practically by sending them to prison for life. We agree with these distinctions between crimes and their punishments. They intuitively feel right to us.

As we deal with God, all our sins or crimes are the same. There is no difference in their impact on him. If we steal, God has lost nothing. If we murder, it’s not his life we take. James compares murder and adultery. The Lord isn’t losing anything personally either way.

Or perhaps we should say he is losing the same thing in each case. The creatures he made for himself are showing him disrespect. They are replacing him in their lives with their own desires and choices. They are living in defiance of his law. That is why to God every sin is the same, from selfish thoughts to vulgar slips of the tongue to great crimes and atrocities.

That is what James wants us to remember about the problem with playing favorites. We might be tempted to downplay this sort of thing. No one is physically hurt, after all, just their feelings. No one goes hungry as a result. No one’s life is shortened.

But the Lord is fully offended just the same. His children have been mistreated. His law has been defied. His honor has been disregarded. It creates the same wedge between us and him as every other sin. Whether we think of playing favorites as a big sin or a little one, it is a problem for our relationship with him, a problem calling for our repentance and requiring his grace.

Thankfully, God applies his grace to us with the same equal consideration with which he applies his law. No one is favored or excluded over the nature or number of their sins. As lawbreakers we all have equal access to his pardon. Take it.

James 2:8-9 “Indeed, if you fulfill the royal law prescribed in Scripture, Love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well. If, however, you show favoritism, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.”

Let’s take a minute to consider James’s describing the law as “the royal law.” Some of you remember when CNN founder Ted Turner proposed replacing the Ten Commandments with his “Ten Voluntary Initiatives.” That’s how some see determining moral behavior. There is no one to whom we must answer above. Our choices and actions are just voluntary. There are no real laws or demands outside of us, just initiatives, plans and directions arising from within us to address the problems we perceive. It sounds so much less authoritarian, so much more free–how nice!

Sometimes even Christian teaching and preaching can sound more like advice, less like God’s holy, unchanging law. Here is a list of suggestions for improving your life. Little to no mention is made that failing to follow them endangers your soul and invites God’s judgment.

Though James is pointing us to the “law of love,” he begins by reminding us this is God’s “royal law.” We may make some use of democratic forms in the church, like voting and elections. But God’s church isn’t a democracy. It’s a monarchy. There are no legislators drafting the laws, no system of judges interpreting and enforcing them. There is only our one Great Chief Executive, who gives the law, demands that we obey it, and imposes consequences if we fail.

We need, then, to take the issue of playing favorites as Christians seriously, and not just for how it affects our neighbor. But it does affect our neighbor. Playing favorites undermines “love your neighbor as yourself.” It automatically means that some get treated as second class citizens. It raises questions about their value and dignity. This cannot end well for God’s people.

In some cases, it will drive people from the church, and not only those who are mistreated. You can hardly fault those who receive a cold shoulder for leaving. They have been all but invited to go.

But others are watching–rank and file members who still have a conscience and a sense of decency, children and young people who often have a stronger sense of fair play. In our time of shrinking churches, it is not hard to find examples of people who left–not because of the way they were treated themselves, but because they saw how someone else was marginalized for reasons that had nothing to do with defending sin or false teaching.

Favoritism may raise doubts in those who receive the less-favored treatment. Some tender hearts may begin to question their desirability to God. Their faith is shaken. They begin to believe there is something particularly wrong with them, something that disqualifies them for God’s grace and acceptance.

James doesn’t deny that some individuals may develop closer friendships within the church than others. Common interests, common experiences, common problems may draw them close together and make it easier to relate. But that is a matter of their private lives, not the public life of the whole church. Even then, God’s people will be careful not to let their private relationships get in the way of loving the whole family of believers, where “love your neighbor as yourself” is still the royal law, and playing favorites will only create problems.

Luke 13:28-30 “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth in that place when you see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but yourselves thrown out. They will come from east and west, from north and south, to share the banquet in the kingdom of God. Note this: Some who are last will be first, and some who are first will be last.”

The surprise at the end is not that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the prophets make it in to heaven. The Bible pretty much assured us they would, though none of them got there on good behavior. Their stories reveal they were constantly making a mess of their lives. Bad parenting, bad marriages, and dysfunctional families were pretty much the standard by which they lived. But the one thing they held onto was God’s promise. They listened when God spoke. They embraced his grace and lived by faith. And now they find themselves in the kingdom of God.

The surprise comes from the people who were Jesus’ contemporaries. They had all the examples from the lives of the patriarchs and the prophets. They had the same promises, now fulfilled. The Savior stood among them. God’s Son walked in their streets and taught them God’s word. They had all the advantages, but most of them would end up on the outside looking in.

The surprise comes from the great masses who have turned to Jesus from every point of the compass. They have given up their ancestral gods and religions, beliefs that were woven into the fabric of their culture for generations, to embrace the Jewish man who was executed on a cross at the eastern end of the Mediterranean 2000 years ago as their Lord and God. They have given up on their own best accomplishments, considered themselves broken failures, just to own Jesus’ life of love as their own, his sacrifice for sin as their cleansing and redemption.

Think of how exotic this Christian faith should seem to them, how strange and foreign to their experience, and even scary. Yet such people will come “to share the banquet in the kingdom of God.” You and I need to take care of our own faith if we want to be one of them.

For the past 1000 years Christianity has seemed to be a white European thing to many. The rise of Islam, the fall of the Byzantine Empire, all but ended Christianity among the people of color across the Middle East and North Africa. Today, only a remnant of the faith remains in those places.

Today, perhaps, people of European heritage stand in a place similar to those who were listening to Jesus when he first spoke these words. The Bible faith is passing from such people to those of other colors and languages in distant countries. The nations where Christianity once dominated now have only a tiny percentage of practicing Christians. Already more Christians live south of the equator than north of it. Asian Christians are sending missionaries to the United States. Leaders of African Churches confront the heresies that are constantly rising in the European and American churches that planted Christianity in Africa one or two centuries ago. Christians in these places now are faithfully following Jesus while those who had every spiritual advantage for so long are letting him go.

You and I don’t have to lose him. While we have life and breath, “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door.”

Luke 13:24-27 “ ‘Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because I tell you, many will try to enter and won’t be able once the homeowner gets up and shuts the door. Then you will stand outside and knock on the door saying, ‘Lord, open up for us!’ He will answer you, ‘I don’t know you or where you’re from.’ Then you will say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will say, ‘I tell you, I don’t know you or where you’re from. Get away from me, all you evildoers!’”

Like us all, the people to whom Jesus was speaking had the door open to them so long as they were alive. But after death, the door is shut. It is no longer possible to go through in faith and find salvation with God. Twice the Lord says to them, “I don’t know you or where you’re from.”

That would be especially painful for a Jewish person to hear. They were God’s chosen people. He had singled them out from all the nations to receive his word, to be the people of the promise, to be the family of the world’s Savior. Now the God who has all the hairs on every head numbered, who knows every sparrow that falls to the ground, couldn’t recall who any of these people were. They were proud to be from Israel, the land of promise, as proud as anyone who wears one of these t-shirts with an outline of your home state and the word “home” inside it. But the Lord tells them, “I don’t know where you are from.” They were utterly, completely disowned. They wanted nothing to do with Jesus in life. He would be just as happy to have nothing to do with them for eternity.

The Jews are no longer God’s chosen people, at least not as an entire nation or race. We are. Peter says to Christians in his first letter, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God…” Don’t take that privilege for granted! We have it only so long as we have faith.

You may know that American Christians have been abandoning Christianity in record numbers. Half the Presbyterians are gone. Vanished! Half the Methodists have disappeared as well. It is estimated that there are 3.7 million evangelical Christians between the age of 18 and 29. About 2.6 million of them will leave the church by their 29^th birthday. Over 1.7 million of them will never return. These are the people who attend the big mega-churches that look so successful. Trends in my own church body suggest that we could be half to one-third our current size by 2060.

Not everyone makes a conscious choice to reject Bible teaching and cut Jesus out of their lives. Some are slowly distracted away from him by all the other things competing for their attention–education, careers, families, hobbies, health. They feel less need, less attraction, until Jesus is just a memory. Don’t let it happen to you! Take care of your own spiritual business. Feed your faith. Hear his word, because in this world your soul and mine are still in spiritual danger.

Luke 13:23-25 “ ‘Lord,’ someone asked him, ‘are only a few people going to be saved?’ He said to them, ‘Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because I tell you, many will try to enter and won’t be able once the homeowner gets up and shuts the door.’”

Many people came to Jesus with spiritual questions. “What is the greatest commandment? Who is my neighbor? How often do I have to forgive my brother? Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar? Can a man divorce his wife for any reason? Sometimes he gives a simple, straight up answer. Sometimes his answers don’t seem to fit the question very well. It’s not that the question was stupid. But the person was asking the wrong one. It is as though Jesus is saying, “Here is the question you should have asked, and here is the answer to it.”

We have a case like that in our Gospel lesson this morning. A man asks Jesus, “Are only a few people going to be saved?” That’s sort of a theoretical football to toss around, but what difference does it make? Will answering it change anything for anyone? The better question, Jesus seems to imply, is this: “Should I be concerned whether I will be among those who are saved?”

Notice how Jesus has turned the conversation from mere statistics, to the living, breathing humans in front of him at that moment. “You people, the ones listening to me, don’t make any assumptions for yourselves. You make every effort.” And here is why that is important.

The way into salvation–eternal life with God lived in his good graces–is a narrow door. It is as narrow as Jesus himself, who told his disciples, “No one comes to the Father except through me;” who warned his enemies, “I am from above…Unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sins;” who used this very picture for himself, “I am the gate. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved.”

Jesus’ picture of the way into salvation only though him is so tight, so narrow, that it makes us feel cramped and uncomfortable. Everyone knows someone, it seems, who isn’t interested in Jesus’ way. They have found a different path, or invented one themselves, that “let’s me be me.” There is no call to change, no sin to repent, no need to be forgiven. Perhaps they simply regard their eternal fate as uninteresting or unimportant. They sense no danger to their souls, so they live for today.

We may react by hoping Jesus wasn’t so serious about the “narrow door.” But do you know him to be in the habit of kidding about this sort of thing? What’s the use of pretending there’s no danger or ignoring it when it’s near? Why make no use of the solution when it’s easily available and free to use?

We have a tornado shelter in our garage. If the sirens are sounding, if the weather radar says it is practically on top of our neighborhood, if we can hear that roaring sound like a locomotive bearing down on our house, is that the time to get a snack out of refrigerator and start watching a movie in the living room? Is that the time to try a little anti-rain dance to turn the storm? Isn’t it time to get into the shelter, and hope your neighbors have the good sense to do the same? And if they don’t, does it help to pretend that they are just as safe eating popcorn and watching a movie while you are hunkered down in your shelter, and your homes are being scraped from their foundations?

Maybe there are more ways of escaping the tornado. There is only one way of being saved from sin and making it to heaven. Jesus is the narrow door. Outside of faith in his grace, his sacrifice, his forgiveness, there is no other way. But his way works perfectly well. The door may be narrow, but it isn’t locked. It isn’t stuck. It isn’t hard to fit through. He has opened the door. He even carries you through it, if you don’t squirm out of his arms. So let him take your through that door while it is open.

Hebrews 11:13-16 “These all died in faith, although they had not received the things that were promised. But they saw them from a distance and greeted them, and confessed that they were foreigners and temporary residents on the earth. Now those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they were thinking about where they came from, they would have had an opportunity to return. But now they desire a better place–a heavenly one.”

I once spent a day with a man visiting the United States from China. We talked a little about our countries and their differences. “Here is one difference between Chinese people and Americans,” he said. “You Americans love your country.” He wasn’t saying that he hated his own country. But he recognized in Americans a pride and patriotism that citizens of China didn’t have for their own.

Maybe we should be careful of how attached we become. When the writer of Hebrews says, “these all died in faith,” he is not speaking only of Abraham and his family, who traveled around like people who had no country. He also means the earlier believers he mentioned, like Noah, whose entire world was destroyed by a flood, or Abel, who was killed by his own brother for offering God a sincere and heartfelt sacrifice. These all “confessed that they were foreigners and temporary residents on earth.” Faith teaches us not to put too much value on the place where we live now. We need to remember that “God and country” doesn’t put those things on equal footing. God comes first, first by a longshot. “Country” only limps along, and only for a time.

Faith values the homeland to come. “Now those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they were thinking about where they came from, they would have had an opportunity to return. But now they desire a better place–a heavenly one.” If you consider yourself a foreigner here, that implies a citizenship somewhere else. There is another place where the culture suits you better. There is another country where the people are all your own kind of people. There is a better homeland that truly feels like home. It goes by the name of “heaven.”

We should take a moment to note that this is where Abraham and Sarah’s journey was truly leading all along. This is why the Lord was moving them around. He was leading them away from families that practiced idolatry to keep them away from false religion in them. He kept moving them around as nomads in Canaan, the “Promised Land,” so that they wouldn’t get comfortable with the false faiths practiced there as well. He brought them to this place, however, because it would be the land in which the Savior lived and died, the Savior who descended from the miracle baby God had given them. In ways they could not fully understand, all these changes and experiences in life were God’s way of preparing the heavenly homeland they desired and making sure they made it there themselves. “Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

Somehow, someway, that’s the story behind our lives, too. We may look like simple people living simple lives. But by faith each twist and turn, every new chapter or strange episode, takes us further down the path that leads us home. Believe it.

Hebrews 11:11-12 “By faith even Sarah herself, when she was unable to have children, received power to conceive offspring, even though she was past the age, since she considered that the who one had promised was faithful. Therefore from one man–in fact, from one as good as dead–came offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and as innumerable as the grains of sand along the seashore.”

At the ages of 99 and 89 respectively, Abraham and Sarah still had no children. Throughout their lives, they needed reassurances that they would have a child. Neither Abraham nor Sarah were physically capable of becoming parents by the time they reached this age. The natural effects of aging had ended that hope by all appearances.

But God had given them a promise. And by faith they held onto that promise. And their faith received God’s gift. When Abraham was 100, ninety-year-old Sarah gave birth to Isaac. Through him, their family eventually became an entire nation.

Imagine that you were a royal child, born into wealth, and power, and privilege. Literally nothing was beyond your reach if you needed it. How would your life change?

Imagine that you lived under the constant watch and protection of a person with unmatched super powers. Super-strength, speed, intelligence, ability to bend and suspend the laws of nature–Your unbeatable body guard had no equal on earth. Might you worry less and venture more?

Imagine that you were one end of a relationship in which you were loved with an infinite love. This love knew no limits, no conditions, no end. It was so deep, so intense that nothing you did could make it stop, and no request was too much to ask of it. Would you feel more secure, and perhaps live more graciously and generously yourself?

Stop imagining. Start believing. It may not always be obvious to see, but this is your life, your situation, under the love and power of the God who gave up his only Son to save you. By faith in this God Abraham and Sarah received extraordinary gifts and lived extraordinary lives, though they themselves were very ordinary people. By faith we can do the same.

You see, faith not only changes our way of life. It changes the content of our lives as God pours his gifts into them. By faith you receive answers to your prayers. By faith you receive your daily bread. By faith he gives you wisdom for life’s challenges. By faith you continue to cling to the forgiveness of your sins, and the cross from which it comes, and the confidence that death is now a gateway to life that never ends. Faith may not bring you a miracle like Abraham and Sarah’s baby, but it still changes your life with gifts that bless us, body and soul.