Just Desserts – Celebrating Surrender – 08/12/08
Date: 8/12/07
Sermon Series: Just Desserts
Sermon Title: Celebrating Surrender
Text: Romans 3:23-26
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. They are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. God presented Him as a propitiation through faith in His blood, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His restraint God passed over the sins previously committed. He presented Him to demonstrate His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be righteous and declare righteous the one who has faith in Jesus.”
Theme: This message will deal with our need to understand the depth of our sin. Without acknowledging our sin we cannot understand the need we have for God to bridge the gap that exists between us. It is only after we understand how ugly our sin is that we begin to see the awesome power of God’s love which gently calls us back into His presence through the “door” that He has provided. For the believer a joyous surrender happens when we finally give God our sin and step into His love.
Introduction: A brief overview of the first three chapters of Romans. Paul spends the first three chapters of this letter condemning both the Gentile culture and the Jewish culture.
I. Surrendering our Self-rightness
a. We cannot make ourselves right with God
i. I think that most of you would agree with that statement. The problem is that we generally don’t live as if it is true.
ii. Paul spends the better part of three chapters, in his letter to the Romans, talking about this fact. If you are a Jew you cannot make yourself holy enough to be in God’s presence. If you are a non-Jew you cannot make yourself holy enough to deserve the right to be in God’s presence.
iii. It is important to remember this because if we don’t then we spend a lot of time and energy trying to the right thing for the wrong reason. Or we might even do the wrong thing for the right reason.
1. Here is what I am trying to say. You recognize that there is a gap between you and God; I think that most of us instinctively feel that distance. The problem with a lot of people is that they then try to build a bridge to get themselves back to God. This is an incredibly dangerous construction job.
2. The Jewish people had been given incredible riches by God. He had chosen them to be the recipients of His covenant. He had separated them from the rest of the world and given them the law and the prophets.
3. With all of this wealth distributed upon them by God the Jewish people began to think of themselves as something of value just because of the gifts. They believed that the law that God had given them made them right in God’s eyes. This, Paul attests, is simply not the case.
4. If we could do things that made us right with God, if it was up to us to make ourselves holy, then we would be believing the same lie that satan told eve in the garden of Eden. That by our own actions we can become God-like.
5. Instead, Paul assures us it has always been only through faith in what God has done that we realize the holiness that God has designed for us.
6. Being made right is only available when we recognize that we are separated from God because of our in and understand that this is no way to live. God has got something much better for us and it is not something we can do. Christ did it, it only requires my surrender to accept that fact.
II. Surrendering our Self-worth
a. The second thing that we have to surrender is our own ideas of self-worth. One of the biggest problems with people in our day and age is that we suffer from all sorts of ideas about what it is that gives us value.
i. Some folks believe value is placed in things, and they spend all of their days and nights in pursuit of all of the things that are cool, or that the neighbors have.
1. They believe that the bigger house or the more expensive car or the right kind of clothes will somehow make us worth more.
ii. Others believe that self worth is tied up in what we look like. They spend all of their time worrying about being able to fit into that size four dress or making sure that the muscles are big in all of the right places.
iii. Some of us look at other people and decide that they are the ideal that we need to pattern ourselves after.
1. I don’t know how many young men have wished with all of their hearts that they were Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. How many tennis runners have been sold because they were the ones that Allen Iverson wore? And this is not a fad tat is isolated to the current generation. There have been all kinds of “idols” that people have tried to fashion themselves after.
iv. Our self-worth is not based on anything as transitory as today’s fashion plate or tomorrow’s savings account. It is no based on our ability to put any kind of ball in any kind of hole or to be able to knock it out of the ball park.
b. Our value, our worth can only be judged by Him who has fashioned us. If we think too highly of ourselves then we are taking away from the place that God has designed us for and if we take ourselves too lightly, then we have devalued the God who made us.
i. It s not until we understand our real value that we can have the abundance that God has stored up for us.
III. Surrendering our Self-centeredness
a. We also need to surrender our self centeredness.
i. When we are born we believe that we are the center of the universe. Our existence has been so limited up to this point that nothing else makes sense. Soon after our birth we encounter our first experience of others. It soon becomes apparent to us that everyone in our world has been placed here to take care of us and make our existence more pleasant. Unfortunately, some of us still operate under this misconception.
ii. We were designed to live and move within community.
iii. In the ethical world inhabited by the covenant believer we find out that we are not at the top of the list in importance at all. As a matter of fact Scripture indicates that covenant living is built around the principle that we decide that others are more important than ourselves.
1. Philippians 2:2-8
Conclusion: Bruce Larson tells how he helped people struggling to surrender their lives to Christ:
For many years I worked in New York City and counseled at my office any number of people who were wrestling with this yes-or-no decision. Often I would suggest they walk with me from my office down to the RCA Building on Fifth Avenue. In the entrance of that building is a gigantic statue of Atlas, a beautifully proportioned man who, with all his muscles straining, is holding the world upon his shoulders. There he is, the most powerfully built man in the world, and he can barely stand up under this burden. ‘Now that’s one way to live,’ I would point out to my companion, ‘trying to carry the world on your shoulders. But now come across the street with me.’
“On the other side of Fifth Avenue is Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and there behind the high altar is a little shrine of the boy Jesus, perhaps eight or nine years old, and with no effort he is holding the world in one hand. My point was illustrated graphically.
“We have a choice. We can carry the world on our shoulders, or we can say, ‘I give up, Lord; here’s my life. I give you my world, the whole world.’”
Bruce Larson, Believe and Belong.
