The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 25, 2013 - Pastor Adam Moline
Isaiah 66:18-23 Hebrews 12:4-29 Luke 13:22-30
Grace, mercy and
peace to you from God the Father through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,
Amen. Our text today is form the epistle
lesson just read, especially these words, “For the moment all discipline seems
painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of
righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” Thus far our text.
Dear friends in
Christ. Reading this weeks text reminded
me of an event from my childhood. We had
both horses, and a giant garden growing up.
Between the two was a sloping ground covered with thick tall grass about
100 yards in distance. That’s important
for the story. I can remember it
well. My brother Kyle was in
trouble. I don’t remember what he had
done or why. I don’t remember who was
involved, only that it wasn’t me… this time. All I remember was the punishment.
The punishment was
this: My brother was to hand shovel horse
manure, forty times, into a wheelbarrow, and push the wheelbarrow down to the
garden and deposit it into 40 neat piles.
Until that task was accomplished, he was grounded from everything else
except school work and sleep. It was a
dreadful punishment. It would take him a
long time to do it, it was hot like it is today, and our wheelbarrow had a
leaky wheel that would require pumping up with new air often.
So my brother
began. And after about the 4th
trip he began muttering under his breath.
The 7th trip. The
muttering became louder. About half way
through he was yelling about how unfair this was, and how he hated horse
manure. He even yelled at my dad one
time, “I’m not learning anything from this, why don’t you just spank me and get
this over with.” And with those words my
dad just smiled, because he knew that the task at hand was having the desired
effect. Out of the discipline came
respect, and with the respect was love.
You see, that’s
what our text is telling us today. That
our heavenly father teaches us discipline the same way our earthly fathers
do. Just as earthly father’s say, “Pay
attention in school, do your homework and chores,” so too does our heavenly
father say, “have no other Gods, Remember the Sabbath Day, Do not murder or steal
or covet and more.” And just as parents
discipline their child who doesn’t listen, so too does God discipline his
children who don’t listen.
The difference is,
the punishment of God is much more foreboding than we are with our children. God says, if you sin, you will die, if you
slip up even a little, you must die.
It’s not that God’s being mean, it’s not that he’s too harsh, it’s the
rule that he set up, and he explained it clearly, and he, as a good father
does, is following through with his promises.
He said to Adam and Eve, “You shall surely die,” and they did. He says to you, if you break the rules, you
too shall die, and it’s the truth.
And yet, God also
did another amazing thing for you and for me.
When the rules were broken, and one of God’s children needed the
discipline of death, God sent his own Son, born of the virgin, to pay the
penalty. He sent his own son to die, so
that we, his other children would not have to.
Our brother Jesus, paid the price for our transgression.
It would have been
like this, if when my brother received the dreaded verdict of 40 wheelbarrows
of manure, that I would have stepped up and grabbed the shovel for him. That’s what Jesus does, except our punishment
from God was much more severe than 40 wheelbarrows of horse manure. Our punishment with God was eternal death,
hell, and separation. And Jesus paid
that on the cross. He paid with his
blood, suffering and death. He
compensated for our wrong by laying in the tomb that we deserved.
And so because of
him, we are forgiven before God. Our
brother was punished in our place, so we receive eternity. We are forgiven because of Christ. We get heaven. We get peace.
We get comfort. The wrath of God
against our sins is taken away. Amen.
