Advent Midweek: December 8, 2021 jj
Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝
When you typically think about “your faith,” so to speak, you usually think of your own personal trust in God. What comes to mind typically is your own specific way in which you prevailed through all those trials and troubles of life. Many people told me when they were in the hospital or mourning the loss of loved ones over the years, they said, Pastor, I don’t think I could have made it half as well if I didn’t have my faith.
I knew what they meant. They were saying really that the Lord had strengthened them all along, even though they didn’t come right out and say precisely that. They credited it to their faith, or to people’s prayers, not to deny that God was doing all of it all along, but I suppose they just used a sort of spiritual shorthand in order for them to talk about it. I don’t want to come across as a persnickety hair-splitter at those sensitive moments, so I typically don’t say anything to correct them right then and there.
Yet correction needs to come sometime, so why not tonight, right? Your faith is not some inner ability that you have to see a positive spin on everything. If it were, then clinical depression wouldn’t afflict anyone who was a Christian. Sadly, it does. A relentless happy countenance or a dogged sense of positive thinking are not the unmistakable signs of a healthy faith, no matter how good these qualities may look to other people. Nothing is wrong with your faith if right now you are sad.
Once again, the Bible helps us out this Advent with the image of a tree. Jesus said, “Make the tree good, and its fruit will be good, or make the tree bad, and its fruit will result to be bad, for the tree is known by its fruit.” Perhaps that by itself doesn’t help all that much, so He adds some more: “Good people do the good things that are in them. But evil people do the evil things that are in them.” That’s the good treasure and evil treasure that our reading was talking about.
That may get us somewhere. Good deeds can be seen. They are what the Bible refers to as good fruit coming from a good tree. You can measure this kind of fruit. It has a standard to which you may compare them—you know good works and good fruit because you have the Ten Commandments telling you what is pleasing to God and what is an utter offense to Him. A Christian should start doing good works, so that their faith can reveal the good fruit from a good tree.
There’s no mystery to it, then: no tricky feelings to decipher inside, no secret knowledge or hidden code to reveal some dark truth. The Law of God can easily tell you whose tree is good and whose is bad. You just have to examine the fruits in light of the Commandments. Have you changed your tune? Have you dedicated your life to serving the Lord and Him alone? Have you effectively lived out the life of Christ in your every thought, word and deed?
Of course, then the Law leads you to a big problem. You don’t have any good fruit. When that kind of standard gets measured against you, then you don’t stand a chance of being a good tree. I know I don’t, either. I am a sinner, and sinners sin. I know you are, too. God’s Word tells me as much, and I’ll believe that every time, despite anything you may have to say to the contrary.
So the command of Christ, “Make the tree good,” cannot be fulfilled by our efforts to follow the Law. There is no way to good fruit by that route, and yet that’s the exclusive way our world attempts to achieve that goal for ourselves. All have sinned and fall short, Paul told us. The Law leaves us no option but to give up.
Yet, ironically, giving up- that’s our best and only hope! When we thought, with all that we have had to go through in life as Christians, as people stuck with a lot in life that nobody would ever envy, that all would be hopelessly lost for us, that’s when our Savior Jesus stepped in for our rescue! “Make the tree good,” was not your job to fulfill, but His!
Jesus made the tree good when He purified you from your sin. He inhabited your human flesh at every stage of life in order to make your human existence a blessed one. From the earliest stages in the womb to a body laid in a grave, your Lord went through it all in your place. He was assigned the sinful, bad fruit that you bore, and He suffered the penalty for disobeying God, even though He was innocent. When He rose from the dead on the third day, He declared you and all the world free from sin. You are a good tree, by grace!
The Holy Spirit has produced in you not just your own particular faith, your God-given ability to withstand the evils of this world. He has given you a fruit of faith that not even the Law can measure—He has given you the Faithful One, Christ your Savior, so that with your own mouth you may agree with the Word of faith that you have heard with your own ears, from the mouth of one who has been called and sent by Him to preach it.
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. To say, “Jesus is Lord,” is not to admit that He should be the one telling you what to do, that you should act more like Jesus. No, to say “Jesus is Lord,” means you know that you can expect no good thing to come to you except through Christ. That whatever blessing you may cherish and hang on to in this life, it is complete rubbish in comparison to knowing that your sins are forgiven. That you are even now a member of our Lord’s kingdom, you are His own. That you are purchased and won from all sins, from death and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with His holy precious blood and His innocent suffering and death.
Admitting that basic Scriptural truth is exactly the Word of faith that you proclaim, and that you don’t have all on your own. It is the one Word of faith that you share with your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. It is the Word that you believe, even though for now you cannot see it or experience it. You may even think that you are still producing bad fruit, the way that the Law measures it. But that does not matter, because in you, because He died and rose for you, Jesus made the tree good already. That has made your fruit good in Him.
You don’t need to call upon any inner strength that you might call “faith” for you to rely on. You call upon God Himself to step in for you. He has promised that He already would. Go ahead and pray for those around you. It’s not your prayer that will deliver them, to be precise. It’s our heavenly Father, to whom you pray, who will make good on His promise to save. Your fruit is good, starting with a good, sound confession, a public profession of the faith that then leads to the works that Jesus Christ is pleased to perform through you.
In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.