Sermon Sampler: June 26, 2005

Poor Paul! God had given him this wonderful message of free grace and forgiven sin, but instead of receiving it with joy, the people wanted to turn it into a license to sin, or a new kind of works righteousness!

Paul was trying to make clear the road that John the Baptist had begun, the road that leads us home to eternal peace with God. But on either side of this road, it turns out, there are rather deep ditches. Swerve to the left and you tumble into the murky slough of cheap grace. Veer off to the right and you'll crash headlong into stony, unyielding legalism. We know where we want to go – heaven! – and we know what the two ditches are. What’s hard to see is the rather narrow strip that leads between them, the road that points us true. If God’s grace is neither free license nor a new law, what sense can we make of it?

The answer can be found in four little words: 'already, but not yet.' On the face of it, they make no sense. How can something already be true, but at the same time not yet have come to pass? It doesn’t make sense. Yet we live our Christian lives in the puzzle of those four words, in the tension between them. 'Already, but not yet.' They are the road down the middle, the one that points us straight and true toward heaven.

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