Romans 8:31-32 “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all–how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”

Have you ever heard of the “new atheists”? They aren’t content to let people believe what they want. They feel the need to proselytize, and to do so aggressively. Men like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris try to convince people that all religion is harmful, that there is no God, no spirits, no life beyond the grave. They write books, host seminars, organize debates to motivate their followers to make new converts.

We should take their movement seriously, because in many ways it is sync with the spirit of our age. But while they may succeed in picking off some Christians on the fringe, I don’t think they will ever become the dominant point of view.

The problem for most is not, “Is there a God?” The problem is: “Is God on our side?” If God is on our side, then why do we suffer so? Why is my health such a mess? Why do my relationships bring me so much grief? Why do I have to deal with issues for which other people seem to get a pass?

These are old, old questions. In Romans chapter 8 the Apostle Paul doesn’t attempt to tell us what God is thinking for every problem we might have with his decisions for our lives. But he does tell us all we need to know to be sure that God is on our side.

If God is on our side (and he is), then we are in a position of absolute safety. We are beyond harm. How can we be so sure? “He…did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all.” It’s not that he sent Jesus to be our other-worldly advice columnist. One religious group claiming to follow Jesus never refers to him as “Savior.” On their website they consistently call him their “Way-shower.” In other words, for them Jesus is nothing more than a source for solid advice.

Paul says that God did not spare his own Son. He was fully aware of the sacrifice Jesus was going to have to make. He knew about the suffering, the torture, and the death. It was part of the plan. Do you know how hard that must be? This was his one and only Son, the Son he loves. This was the ultimate demonstration of his love for you and me. This was the gift that has no equal.

Truly, if God would do that, “…how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” After that gift, what could he possibly withhold if he knew it would help us? At various times, he has made the earth turn backwards, sent the angel of death to wipe out invading armies, given life back to those who have died, and worked many other miracles to save his people. After sacrificing his Son to save you, he is not going to let you slip through his fingers over some smaller need. If you truly needed a billion dollars for the good of your soul, what is that compared to the gift of his Son? And if the billion dollars doesn’t show up, we can safely assume it’s not what we truly need.

Do you want to be sure that God is on our side? Look at the gift he gave us. The gift of his Son convinces us it is so.

1 Corinthians 1:22-24 “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

 God wraps himself in human flesh and lives among the Jews for 33 years. He stills storms, heals the sick, raises the dead. But his own people don’t know him. They want a sign. Which sign? Pick a sign. I mean, really, was Jesus stingy with the miracles? But they can’t see him. They crucify him instead.

God paints his wisdom all across creation. He plants the wisdom of his laws in human hearts and consciences. He writes the wisdom of his grace down on thousands of pages of history, poetry, and prophecy spread across a millennium and a half. And when Paul brings God’s word to the Greeks, for all their intellect and research and deep thought, they don’t get it.

We still live in this world between those who demand magic and those who want nothing but cold logic, the materialist and the magician as C.S. Lewis once described them. One side or the other appeals to our own hearts and minds. One side or the other is campaigning for our own souls, creeping into our own thinking. Neither side wants, or respects, or appreciates the cross. It is foolishness to our world.

The idea that there is a God who became one of us–not just put on a human disguise, but permanently united his very being to these things he made called “humans;” who then took the blame for all of their sins, which they had committed against him; and then let them torture him to death on a cross to serve their sentence, to endure the punishment they had earned by all their sins–that is just the one thing that prevents some people from believing the Christian faith. They could go along with all the rules and morals, even the ones that seem to restrict their personal freedoms, if only Christianity didn’t ask them to believe this.

The translation above calls it a “stumbling block.” More literally, the Greek says it is the trigger in the trap, the little lever on which you put the cheese or peanut butter in your mousetrap. You know, a mousetrap is just a harmless little collection of wood and wires until that trigger is disturbed. But touch the trigger, and “Snap!” the mouse is dead. Christ crucified, God in the flesh on a cross, is the thing that gets so many people to say, “Okay, that’s it. I was with you up to here. That’s just too much to ask a reasonable person to believe. I’m sorry, but I’m done.” It’s the trigger that springs the spiritual trap, and the soul is dead.

But that’s the Christ we preach, Paul says, Christ crucified–not super role model Jesus, or motivational speaker Jesus, or really wise advice Jesus, but the one who dies for us on a cross. Why? To those God has called to faith, Christ crucified is the power of God. It is the power that gives faith, the power that converts. Like Paul writes to the Romans, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to all who believe.”

This power of the cross is not the power of carefully reasoned logic. It is not an argument or case so indisputable, so airtight, that you are forced to agree. The gospel is not merely a mathematical principle, a proven formula that works every time your run the numbers. There is something warmer and dearer and friendlier working here.

The power of the cross is not brute force. It is not God taking your arm and twisting it behind your back, wrenching it higher and higher until you cry uncle. “Okay, Okay, I believe, I believe already. Let me go.”

“This is love,” the Apostle John writes in his first letter, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” That’s the cross, and the hidden power behind the cross. Dying on a cross is God at his weakest, weaker than anyone could ever have imagined possible. Still, “the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.”  What human achievement has ever accomplished as much?

The whole world’s debt to God has been settled, millions of hearts have been changed, the history of nations and empires has been altered–all because 2000 years ago God did something “foolish,” and he hid his loving power on a cross.

1 Corinthians 1:18 “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

I can tolerate many things. But I don’t like to be considered a fool. Since I was in high school–no, grade school–peer pressure has played on my pride and my desire to be accepted. It has gotten me to do some really dumb things. I will spare you the gory details.

Peer pressure doesn’t end when our school days are over. A 58-year-old single Christian woman with a page on a popular internet dating sight made it clear in her profile she had not lived a perfect life in the past. Going forward, however, she intended to avoid physical intimacy before marriage. She was surprised and saddened by how many people took time to mock and criticize her for her beliefs. Pressure to conform to the word’s ways hasn’t ended just because she is approaching 60.

Paul wasn’t talking about personal morality in these words to the Christians in Corinth. He was talking about the preaching of the gospel, the message of Jesus’ cross. Our world still thinks that is foolish. They pressure us to think the same. Maybe they don’t use the word “foolish.” Maybe they use words like “not relevant.” “Hey, I don’t need some dusty theology about something that happened 2000 years ago. I need something to help me live a better life tomorrow. I need information I can use every day.” The information they mean is not the message of the cross.

Early in my ministry I read about a conference in Minneapolis at which a “Christian” college professor told those gathered, “I don’t think we need people hanging from crosses, and blood dripping, and weird stuff.” I know of Christian parents who pulled their children from Sunday School classes because they didn’t want them exposed to the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. Why? “…the message of the cross is foolishness…” It doesn’t work for so many. It doesn’t make any more sense to them today than in Paul’s day.

Before we get with the times and throw out the foolishness of the cross in favor of a less offensive, less graphic message, consider where Paul says the world’s opinion is taking them. “The message of the cross is foolishness…to those who are perishing.” Remember the stock question that parents used to ask when their kids wanted permission to give in to the peer pressure, because “everybody else is doing it”? “Well, if everyone else was jumping off a bridge, would you want to jump, too?” Paul’s words have a bit of that flavor here. Those who think the cross is foolish are perishing. They are dying a slow, spiritual death. Do we want to end up like them?

I am reminded of the brave confession I once heard a pastor in Sweden give. When he was asked, “Why do you want to leave the Church of Sweden (the state church which makes little use of the Bible and hardly believes in Jesus’ saving work anymore) where a pastor can have a nice, comfortable life (as a sort of government bureaucrat)? Why do you want to join a little free church, with just a few people in it?” His answer: “The Titanic was a very luxurious ship. It was big. It was comfortable. But I would rather be sitting in one of the little life boats and live, than stay on that big ship and end up at the bottom of the sea!”

The message of the cross looks like little more than a humble life boat. It is foolishness to our world, but it is foolishness to those who are perishing. To those who are being saved, it is the power God uses to save our souls.

Colossians 3:17 “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

When you are convinced that God loves you no matter what, that every sin has been forgiven, that death is just a door opening to better things in heaven, that conviction invades and infects every corner of your life. It changes your point of view. Here Paul sees it changing every word and movement, too: “whatever you do, in word or deed.”

We could say it is the natural consequence of a heart full of the peace, a faith confident of God’s grace in Christ, but there is nothing natural about it at all. It is spiritual and supernatural in every way. Still, there is a certain logic to the difference this makes in our lives.

Let’s say that you are the poor unfortunate soul who has to work behind the customer service counter at some department store the day after Christmas. It’s going to be a long day. In front of you is a line that stretches to infinity. No one in line is particularly happy. It didn’t fit. It doesn’t work. It’s just plain ugly.

Now you didn’t manufacture any of this stuff. You weren’t the salesman who talked grandpa and grandma into buying it. But you know that maybe every fourth or fifth person in line is going to treat you like it’s your fault. If your heart is more or less spiritually empty, you may tolerate this for a little while. Maybe you can make it to the end of the day without snapping. It’s a job, after all, and you’ve been trained to make the customer happy. But maybe you’ll be a little snippy with the malcontents by the afternoon. Maybe you’ll bite someone’s head off when you get home.

Enter the peace of Christ. If your heart is full with the good news that God loves you unconditionally in spite of your faults and failings, you are secure in who you are as God’s child. What’s a little irritation from someone whose kid’s new iPad won’t work when you know that God turns everything for your good? You know that he is constantly smiling on you, and that you’ve got a place in the most exclusive neighborhood ever, called heaven. Everything is good.

You can look at the people coming to you like Jesus once looked at the crowds coming to him. He had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. That would be doing what you do “in the name of the Lord Jesus,” because now you are acting like him.

That’s the kind of life that gives “thanks to God the Father…” because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. That’s the kind of thing that happens when the God’s word changes our hearts, Jesus rules in them by faith, and we know his peace. That can change our words or deeds in a thousand different ways every day. That is life “in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

Colossians 3:15-16 “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.”

Faith and peace are relationship things. They have to do with how we relate to God. Relationships are like living organisms. When they are healthy, they are growing, and they need to be fed and nourished to keep them healthy and alive.

Faith and peace feed on the “word of Christ.” That’s why Paul tells us to let that word “dwell in you.” This isn’t merely tolerating an occasional visit from God’s word to our hearts. A sad cartoon I saw years ago was commenting on the attitude people sometimes take toward worship. A man is greeting the pastor after church, and he says, “That was nice. We should do it again sometime”–as if this were a little diversion to take in every now and then, like going to the movies.

God doesn’t want your heart to be a little pup tent for his word, a temporary shelter you take down as quickly as you set it up, then put it away for months between trips. He doesn’t want your heart to be the Holiday Inn for his word, giving his word a place to make a brief stop as it is passing through town. He wants his word to dwell in you richly. He wants your heart to be a fully furnished home for his word, a permanent address at which his word can live for the rest of your days.

This means more than Sunday worship, not less. This happens when we are teaching one another: not just the pastor teaching you in Bible class or a sermon, but you parents teaching your children by applying God’s word to their lives and gathering your family together for devotions in your homes. It happens when friends are talking about life together, and you apply God’s words to the situations your friend is wrestling with. This happens when we are admonishing or correcting one another. True friends don’t let bad behavior pass. They are gentle and loving, but they confront it. Like Solomon once said in the Proverbs, “Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.” Yes, it may hurt a little, but these are wounds from a friend, wounds like the doctor makes when he has to cut or stitch to make you better.

And God’s word dwells in us richly when Christian hymns and Christian music stir our faith. They stick in our hearts and heads throughout the week, taking God’s grace and love with us wherever we go. Then our faith is fed. Then the peace of Christ doesn’t make an occasional suggestion in our hearts. It doesn’t give a little input to our hearts. It rules, rules in our hearts because through the power of God’s word it’s presence is strong and healthy all the time.

Colossians 3:15 “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace.”

A variety of ways exist to establish and maintain the peace. It may sound contradictory, but sometimes peace requires war. If some nation or group won’t leave their neighbors alone, you might have to send in troops to keep the peace. We may even refer to soldiers as “peace-keepers.”

When people inside a nation can’t get along with each other, sometimes those that govern must rule with an iron hand. In other cases, peace is maintained by getting everyone to come to the table and compromise. Rarely, peace may be bought and paid for with bribery.

All of those roads to peace deal with peace on the outside, between nation and nation or man and man. The peace of Christ is different. It deals with changes on the inside. First, Jesus changed our spiritual circumstances. We were not God’s friends. We didn’t like his rules. Even after we become Christians we still struggle with some of the boundaries he has set.

None of this made God happy, either. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men,” Paul writes the Romans as he jumps into the main body of his letter. There was no peace between the ruler of heaven and the citizens of the earth.

God didn’t send in an army, call out the police, negotiate a new set of rules, or try to buy better behavior. He introduced the world to his Son. Jesus didn’t resent the rules his heavenly Father had set. He loved them and followed every detail. He was doing more than setting a good example. He was offering our heavenly Father the perfect love and selfless service he demanded on our behalf.

Then Jesus released us from the consequences of our lawbreaking. He didn’t leave us to figure out a solution for ourselves. He gave up his life for ours. He paid all our debt in the currency of his own blood. He took our place on the cross. Jesus left his Father with nothing more to hold against us. He secured forgiveness for a world at war with its Maker. He established peace in God’s heart toward men.

Then he went to work on our hearts. “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace.”

Cliff was mad at God for the kind of life that he has been dealt. His wife abandoned him for no good reason. Then she managed to take almost everything they built up together in divorce court. He lost a job he loved in another state. Then he was stuck with work he didn’t love so much. He didn’t become an atheist, but he’s sure someone is out to get him.

What if Cliff were convinced that God is on his side all the time? The truth is that God doesn’t live with a more-or-less constant grudge against him. Like all of us, he has been forgiven. God hasn’t singled him out for bad treatment. When God came to live as one of us on earth, Jesus suffered every bit as much as Cliff, and then so much more. He did it just because he loved him so much and wanted to save him, not hurt him.

However his life may go here on earth, it is just a drop in the bucket compared to eternity. Jesus holds out the promise of eternal pleasures, basking in God’s light and love in heaven. What if Cliff’s heart was convinced of this?

What if our hearts were convinced of this? Then we would have peace, wouldn’t we? Then we would interpret everything that happens to us differently. Suffering is a form of fellowship with Jesus. It is evidence of a loving Father’s helpful discipline. Losses are God’s way of making sure we hold on to earthly things loosely. They keep us from trading the real heaven for a counterfeit one. Death is God’s way of evacuating us from a dangerous and evil world to take us to a safe and holy one.

When we believe, when we know, when we remember that God is always on our side as a loving and forgiving Father, then we believe, then we know, then we remember that everything is working for our good. All is well in my life. We have peace, the peace of Christ that rules in our hearts.

Genesis 3:15 “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers.”

The Lord had some business to take care of, some issues to address, with his human caretakers in the Garden of Eden after their fall into sin. His first order of business was to create some new enemies. “Friends” may not be the right word for what happened between Eve and the devil. “Friendship” suggests a mutual concern. That is foreign to the devil’s thinking. Maybe we could say that they became allies in their rebellion. Adam and Eve had joined the wrong team, but not because anyone on that side was looking out for each other. It was every man, woman, and demon for himself.

“Enemies” fits exactly the relationship God came to establish between the first humans and the devil. The devil is a liar and a murderer. There is no middle ground to take here. You either support the devil in leading people to rebel against the only true God to their own damnation, or you fight him. God said, “I am going to make this woman (and by association, also her husband) your enemy.” That means God led Adam and Eve to repent, to have a change of heart.

God’s work of creating new enemies didn’t stop with them. He extended his promise to put enmity “between your (the devil’s) offspring and hers.” It’s frightening to think that the devil could have offspring. When God created spirits, he did not give them the ability to reproduce. But this is one of the terrible effects of the fall into sin. The devil could now increase his following, make more creatures who lived and thought like him. By nature, every human gets their start in unbelief.

But God keeps making enemies of the devil out of the devil’s offspring–sons and daughters who share the faith of Adam and Eve, not just their genes. We are those offspring. Like our first parents, God has led us to see our sin and repent of it. He has forgiven our sin and filled us with faith. He has made us enemies of the devil by converting us into the friends of God.

This description of the relationships in terms of “enmity,” or hostility, explains a lot about how we Christians experience life. First, it explains our struggle with ourselves. Spiritually, none of us have roots to be proud of. Our roots have their beginning in the spot we had on the wrong team. And those roots run deep. They are like the weeds you try to pull up in your lawn or garden. You get the top of the root. But the bottom is still stuck in the soil, producing weeds.

That’s why it is so hard for us, even now, to repent. We haven’t completely lost our taste for the devil’s point of view. In some ways he doesn’t seem so much like the enemy.

Second, this explains why we Christians get so much hatred from the world. Jesus once prayed, “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them for it.” Because God has filled us with faith and love, we do not hate the individuals on the unbelieving side. We pray, we witness, we work for them to receive the same conversion we received. But for those who will not convert, all our prayer, witness and work is regarded as an insult or attack. There is enmity, hostility toward us.

By turning people into the devil’s enemies, the Lord is doing more than waging a war. He is showing grace. “I will put enmity…” he says. He does all the work. He doesn’t wait for Adam and Eve to come crawling back to him. He goes looking for them. He doesn’t wait for them to apologize or make amends. You know the story, what came before God’s pronouncements. Adam and Eve weren’t repenting. They were hiding. They were defending themselves. They were blaming others. They do everything but repent.

So God steps in to fix this himself. He acts unilaterally. He could have wiped them out and started over. He could have shut the whole creation experiment down and lived in solitude throughout eternity. Instead, he changes them. He speaks to them here, and those words change them. They change their way of thinking about sin, about the devil, and most importantly, their way of thinking about God. They no longer run away to hide in fear. They trust him and know him as their loving Savior. Their story is also our story, for we are their offspring, and God has made us his friends by making us enemies of the devil.

Matthew 15:8 “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

The sainted John Jeske used to point out the beauty and pitfalls of our ability to do things by rote. When you put your shoes on this morning, you might have tied them while talking to your spouse or your children, or listening to the radio, and never even thought about what you were doing. This ability is a wonderful feature of the way God created us. When we do the same thing over and over again, eventually we can do it without even thinking about it. It becomes automatic. It frees our mind up for other, more important things.

That’s wonderful until it comes to our worship. Then this “automatic pilot” feature doesn’t serve us so well. We find ourselves mumbling through the Lord’s Prayer or the Apostle’s Creed or the Confession of Sins on Sunday morning automatically. We don’t even think about them. We become guilty of what Jesus warned about: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

What is the problem here?

We might be tempted to blame God for making us this way, but we know that it is wrong to accuse God of evil. God is good to us, and his gifts are good. We are the ones who sometimes misuse them.

People often blame the repetition that takes place in our worship. Maybe if we didn’t always use the same old order and the same old forms, we wouldn’t fall into the trap of not thinking about what we are saying.

But is the problem really with using the Lord’s Prayer? Aren’t these words that Jesus taught us to use in our prayers? And is there really something wrong with the Apostles Creed? Doesn’t it simply summarize the main truths of our Christian faith and confess the Gospel of salvation?

The words of Jesus’ warning place the blame where it belongs–on the human heart. When we come to worship genuinely sorry for our sins, convicted of offending God, convinced that we need Jesus, then these words will not seem boring or lifeless, no matter how many times we have used them. The words of our worship rites and rituals preach God’s grace, which is the antidote for death. And people desperate for the antidote to death are glad to hear them.

We can even learn to appreciate the repetition. C.S. Lewis once said that worship is a little like dancing. It helps to know the order, the form well to really enjoy it, to concentrate on the content without distraction. “As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not dancing, but only learning to dance.” Likewise, in worship, as long as you are always thinking about what is coming next, trying to figure out the tune, concentrating on saying the words right, you aren’t worshiping so much as you are learning how to use these words to worship.

From time to time there will be change in worship forms. God continues to bless his church with people who have the skills to write music and words that proclaim forgiveness and eternal life.  Even J.S. Bach, even David and the other psalmists, were introducing something new to worship when they first put pen to paper. But the real change in worship needs to come from our own hearts, and the Gospel of a God who died and rose to save us can lead us to “regard it as holy and gladly hear and learn it.”

Revelation 19:9 “Then an angel said to me, ‘Write: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!’ and he added, ‘These are the true words of God.’”

I’ve never been to a wedding that didn’t have some issue force a change of plans. I once attended a wedding at which the bride and groom didn’t show up until almost two hours after the ceremony was supposed to begin, and then they had to send someone back to the hotel to get the service folders they had forgotten. My sister’s wedding reception was interrupted by tornado sirens. Half an hour later the power went out and never came back on for the rest of the night. My wife’s bridesmaids got crossways with each other while they were getting dressed for our service. Later, when we walked into the reception hall, we found a teal blue cake with white trim, not the white cake with blue trim we had ordered. Even more stress can be had leading up to the big day.

The heavenly wedding to which we are invited is completely stress free. We will experience nothing but blessing. You may know that the Greek word behind the word “blessing” basically means “happy.” The wedding supper of the Lamb, and everything that follows, is a life of uninterrupted, completely satisfying happiness.

The Bible is admittedly short on the positive details, most likely because the things we will find there are so much better than anything we have experienced here that there is nothing to compare it to. It’s like trying to capture the Grand Canyon on a four-inch by six-inch snapshot. We know that all the negatives will be absent: crying or pain, death or danger, thirst or hunger, sin or sadness. We will live with an enormous, extended family in faithful love, and the Savior who loves us most will be our personal friend and companion for life without end. “Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb.”

How can we be sure? “These are the true words of God.” The God who promised to send you a Savior and did, the God who promised to sacrifice his Son for you and did, the God who promised to raise his Son from the dead and did, is the God who promises you blessings at the wedding supper of the Lamb. Your blessings are guaranteed by his own word.

An invitation to a wedding is always a privilege. Someone has placed you in his or her list of most- favored friends or relatives. But we aren’t mere guests at this wedding. We are the bride. This is our big day. And our marriage to Christ is better than a traditional wedding, a destination wedding, a celebrity wedding, or even a royal wedding. It’s a heavenly wedding, and this happy marriage will never end.