St. John's Lutheran Church - Sermon: The things we say about our faith need to be supported by the things that we do in faith.

William Shakespeare observed in one of his plays, “People who talk much don’t do much.” There are many people who would agree with that. It seems that some of the people who are the least reliable for getting things done also seem to be the most gifted at talking themselves out of responsibility. There simply is no shortage of people who would rather talk about things than actually do anything!

How important it is for actions to support your words! In our text today, Paul wrote, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved, for it is with your heart that you believe and are justified and with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” Your mouth is all about words and your heart is about the things that move you to do the things that you do. Faith is about motives, motives so strong that you can’t help put into practise the things that confess and the things that you believe. Thank God that He moves us not just to speak the words of faith, but to live our faith in gratitude to Christ!

Our Old Testament lesson gives the most straight forward example of how to make words mean something. That lesson is taken out of the book of Deuteronomy. It is a book of the Bible written by Moses. Almost the entire book talks about the laws God gave Israel so that the people could keep up their part of the covenant, or faith-deal, that God had made with them through their ancestor, Abraham.

In these verses of Deuteronomy Moses is talking to the second generation of Israelites. These people had been born and raised in the desert. They had never seen Egypt. The years of slavery and the parting of the Red Sea were only known through the stories that the parents told their children. They were stories that they heard when they worshipped, and Moses and Aaron and all the other original leaders of that great escape from Egypt preached to them and taught them and explained to them why things happened the way that they did. They were the words that the children and their own children in turn had to hear and accept not on the basis of what they had seen with their own eyes, but on the basis of faith.

Moses told the people to remember their history so they would never forget what God had done for them in the past. He told them to take those stories to heart so that they would always have the confidence to trust that God would help them in the present and the future just like He had helped them before. He told them to remember that God had done great things for them, and our God, who had invested so much in them, was not going to forget them.

Then Moses told the people to back up those words in such a way that they would be much more than just words. He said, "Say this to God: God brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; and now I bring the first fruits of the soil, that You, O Lord have given me."

The interesting thing here is that God demanded more than just an afterthought. He wanted His people to be more than that person who receives a generous gift from someone who loves them dearly, and then, on the way out of the door remembers to thank Mom and Dad or Grandma and Grandpa with a half-hearted hug and some mumbled words along the line of “you’re the greatest.” Moses told the people to bring the first and the best of their gratitude to God. Moses reminded them that if you really appreciate something, no one has to coax the right response out of you, but you immediately do the best you can to show how happy you are. More specifically, it was only by giving something back to God that the people could prove they meant it when they spoke their words of thanks! Real thanks connected the words of faith to action!

This is so basic that it should make sense right away. Do you have a school friend who talks about how wonderful you are but avoids you in the hallways? You’d be foolish to insist such a person is really your friend. Do you have a grown son or daughter who will phone to tell you how much they care about you, but hasn’t found any reason to visit you or to invite you to his or her home for years and years? That would make most people question if their children really care. Have you ever worked for someone who promised you a good wage but then didn’t pay you for weeks on end? Doesn’t that make you question whether or not you should be leaving that job? Most normal people know that words need actions to make those words truly mean something. You would feel very sorry indeed for anyone who clearly was avoiding reality by refusing to see that people who talk about doing something will actually do it if they are being honest.

Yet, this basic wisdom of connecting talking with doing seems to go out of the window when it comes to church. There are simply too many people who seem to believe that the only doing that has to be attached to the talking about faith is personally believing. It is like saying to your friend or your parents or your employees, “If I say that I care about you or that I am concerned with fulfilling my responsibilities toward you and I believe what I am saying, then I don’t have to do anything else.”

Moses essentially told the people that it is not enough to say that you believe in God and then insist that you believe what you are saying. If you believe in something, such a belief inspires you to act on it. Such a belief inspires you so strongly that acting on your belief becomes a priority to you. James put it very simply in the New Testament, “What good is it, brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?” (James 2:14) Those deeds, though, are not just any kind of deeds. They are deeds that are in keeping with God’s Will. They are the deeds that flow out of faith.

Moses puts the requirement right up there where a normal, honest person can’t help but to understand it. "If you really mean it when you talk about how wonderful God is, then show you mean it. Give your first fruits to God. Give your best to the Lord!"

The way to answer that is to look at what means the most to you in your life. Do you love your spouse so deeply that you can’t even imagine what you would do without him or her? If so, if you want to give God from your very best blessing, then, you would be committed to serving God together. You would be committed to worshipping together as husband and wife. You would be committed to raising your children to know their Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. You would be dedicated to truly giving your spouse the love, honour and respect that you promised God you would give one another. You would also willingly share your spouse with God in the sense that you would not prevent your spouse from taking time away from you in order to serve as a Sunday school teacher, or an elder, on some other church board. You would encourage one another as husband and wife to seek out opportunities to serve Christ by showing compassion to others in the community and the world beyond instead of selfishly demanding all of the time and the attention of your spouse for yourself.

It could be that you yourself mean the most to you. You could be the type of person who likes to manipulate people, or is only happy when people keep you as the centre of attention. You could be the type who is easily offended by other people, even as you reserve the right to express exactly what you think about other people without any regard to their own feelings.

If that is the case, God is calling you to give yourself to God as evidence that you believe in Him! He is calling you to give yourself in a way that is beyond what He is calling other people to do. He is calling you to volunteer your time in a way that may mean quitting your job and working as a volunteer missionary in some less advantaged part of the world. He is challenging you to serve Him in such a way where you have to put your own needs after those of others. He is challenging you to take very personally God’s call to Christians in general to “offer your body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” (Romans 12:1)

Maybe it is not so much your spouse that actually means the most to you, or even your own opinion of yourself. Maybe what means most to you is your ability to earn a good income. Maybe you enjoy the sense of independence and power you have by being able to look after yourself and your friends or family financially. If this is the case, God is specifically calling you to give out of your wealth.

This means giving out of the first, not the last of what you earn. This means budgeting in such a way that if you run out at the end of the month, it is not your church offerings or your charity commitments that get cut out, but your entertainment budget or something else instead. If money means most to you, then you would even consider giving offerings to the point where you truly miss the money on some level, where you can actually feel that you have given something else up in order to support the work of the Lord. Or, you might plan your giving like some families I have known, so that when the mortgage payments on the house were finished, they just kept up setting that same amount aside and gave it to the Lord’s Work instead.

The irony here is that the more important money is to you to give you a sense of security or of a quality of life, the more important it is for you to give your money generously for the work of God’s kingdom. Yet, the more important money is to you, the more you would be offended to hear that just tossing in the leftovers is not enough. You can try to excuse yourself by saying that the congregation should simply cut back on its spending if it doesn’t have enough to work with. You can try to excuse yourself by saying that there would be plenty to go around if it didn’t cost so much to keep a pastor. You can tell yourself that people who are destitute and struggling at home an around the world should just work to solve their own problems and not expect you to help them.

By all of that, however, what you are really saying is that you don’t trust in God. You don’t trust that God will bless you so that you don’t miss those generous contributions that mean you can’t have a new car every second year. You don’t trust that God will provide for you so that you don’t have to finance your retirement entirely by what you save up today. You don’t trust that God has chosen to work through people in order to bring His Word of grace and the actions of Christian kindness and compassion to the people of this world, and you don’t trust the people who have given their lives over to work among the poor, the sick, the lonely and the oppressed in the name of Jesus Christ.

Paul reminds us in our lesson from the Book of Romans this morning that “anyone who trusts in Jesus will never be put to shame.” You will not be put to shame if the Holy Spirit moves you to believe in Jesus as your Lord and Saviour. You will not be proven to be foolish for confessing Jesus as Lord. You will also not be proven foolish by putting that spiritual trust into direct action by sharing in the name of Christ a generous portion of the time or the treasure that you otherwise would have showered upon your spouse or your children or yourself. That is because when you share with God and with the people of God those things that mean the most to you personally, you are showing that you understand that faith is more than words!

Are you hiding behind words? Are you cursing yourself by the way that you accuse the congregation of greed for making it clear it takes money to do the work a congregation is called to do, or calling sincere Christians hypocrites when you don’t even know them personally to know if that is true? Are you revealing more about yourself than you realize when you tell people that the call to show kindness and compassion and to offer the support of your time and your resources to strangers does not apply to you personally? Are you hiding your arrogance and your pride behind pious words as you tell God that no one is honest enough to do any good with the offerings that you would make more generously if you could trust those people?

It takes words to release you from the ways you use your words in order to turn your back on your responsibility toward people who need you and the gifts God has given to you. It takes words that are supported by action and held up with a power that is beyond any power you have to free yourself! It takes the Word of God!

Paul reminds us in our text this morning, “The Word is near to you.” (Romans 10:8) The Word of God is near to you, and it is a word of action. It is a word that takes you and shakes you until that hollow shell of words without actions fractures and crumbles all around you. The Word of God that is near to you is the Word of God’s own Son, who Himself confronted the vain promises and the hollow words of Satan, and ended that struggle with the warning, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” (Luke 4:12)

Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 6:16 with these words, referring to the time when the people complained to Moses that they were dying of thirst in the desert. They had just seen miracle after miracle that should have made it plain to anyone alive that God was powerful in His activity and mighty to save, but they muttered and complained bitterly as soon as things were not going as they had hoped. They tested the Lord by asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” (Exodus 17:7), when in reality, they were the ones running away from God!

God provided water for the people at that time, even when they were ready to stone Moses, who had done so much for them to that point. In the same way, God provides for you, even when you are at the point where you are ready to crucify Jesus because you cannot see just how much it means to have God’s Word so near to you!

God’s Word is near to you to put your own words into the right place. God’s Word is near to you to change all those negative words that hide your sins behind your complaints. God’s Word is near to you to pop that balloon you blow up when you hide your disappointment with God and inability to really trust Him by hiding behind religious language and pious cliches and faithful sounding words. God’s Word is near to you to move you and to change your words to the only words that will help you. Those are the words of a broken heart. They are the words of grief and shame that say, “Lord, forgive me for hiding behind hollow Words. Forgive me, Lord, and have mercy on me, a poor, miserable sinner!”

The Word of God is near to you to move you to the only activity that fits when it comes to support words with actions. It is the activity by which you see your sins and confess your sins and sincerely desire to make the changes that you know you need in your life. True repentance is that activity by which you face up to the fact that have sinned with your words every time you have not cared to follow up the talk with action that actually means something.

Paul said in our epistle lesson this morning, "If you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved." This puts words and actions back together in the right sort of way. The action is believing. The action is the movement that happens with the Holy Spirit Himself working in your heart. Then, out of this genuine action of faith, comes the genuine words of your mouth. With faith in the Lord who has forgiven us our sins, we are truly able to tie words and deeds together. Then we have the desire to take God's Word seriously and our words seriously. Then we have the desire to really want to do what we say we are going to do for Jesus! The action of believing shows itself in words and the words of real faith will show themselves in real actions!

When Jesus was tempted in the desert, this was the great thing that helped Him through. Jesus always answered the devil by referring to God's Word. Jesus always responded by trusting that God's Word does what God's Word says. When Jesus answered, "It is written, 'Man does not live on bread alone'", He trusted that God would provide Him with the ability to look beyond simple material things for happiness and support. When Jesus answered, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only'", that very Word of God enabled Jesus do resist the devil and truly worship and serve God only. When Jesus said, "It says,'Do not put the Lord your God to the test'", God's Word had the power to help Jesus resist that temptation, too. Jesus trusted in the Word of God and Jesus was blessed by trusting in that. That is how it works with us as well!

Paul wrote in our epistle lesson, "The same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on Him, for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." If you doubt yourself and your sincerity, God offers you these comforting words. If you doubt the repentance of someone who has sinned against you and you wonder if that person is really sincere because you simply can’t trust that person, God offers you these words. God sent His Son to die for you. He sent His Son and took a great risk with you and all your hollow words. He died so that the leap of faith Jesus took for you would be behind your own leap of faith in accepting your repentance and the repentance of others who have brought their sins before you.

If you are disturbed because you feel you just can’t do enough to put the words of your faith into action, remember this: Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved! Everyone who calls on Jesus' name will be helped. They will be blessed. They will be enabled to put words and actions together and bless others because God has moved them; God has blessed them; God’s own activity is behind that activity that makes those words real!

May God move your sorrow over your sins to be a genuine sorrow before God. May God move you so that the words of gratitude and hope you express in being forgiven by God will be more than just words. May God make your words sincere and your actions sincere in the name of your Redeemer! May He lead you to really live your words and mean your words with that saving faith that comes only from God’s Word. He will do it, because that is what He has promised to do as He Himself has led you to confess Jesus Christ as Lord, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.