Worthy
Worthy by Rev. L. John Gable
April 7, 2023 (Good Friday)
My guess is each of us has a favorite verse of Scripture that we have committed to memory; that we can call to mind when we lie awake at 2:00am fretting over something that happened during the day or anxiously await what may happen tomorrow; a passage we can consciously train our minds to turn to which reminds us of the promises of God; which gives us grounding and comfort rather than tossing and turning over the sundry interruptions and distractions of our lives.
“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.”
“Nothing can separate us from the love of God which is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
“Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you, not as the world gives give I to you, let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”
“Be still and know that I am God.”
The list goes on and on. Many refer to those favorite “go to” passages as “life verses” and I will confess that I have many. But if I were to be asked to choose just one, I would say it is a shortened version of Philippians 1:27, where Paul writes to the believers there, “Only, live your life in a manner worthy of the Gospel of Christ.” I hear in that verse both challenge and promise, and it seems fitting for our service of remembrance this evening.
It begins by saying “only”. In a very similar verse in Ephesians 4:1, Paul writes, “I beg you”. There is a sense of urgency, importance, priority and passion here. “Only, I urge you to live a life worthy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ”, which then begs the question, “What does that mean? What is the “worth” of the Gospel?”
Most simply put, the Gospel is the Good News of God sending His one and only Son to die for us and our salvation, the very reason we’ve gathered here on this Good Friday evening to remember and give thanks for His sacrificial death. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “I determined to know nothing among you except Christ crucified.” Not Christ teaching, not Christ healing, not Christ performing miracles, not even Christ resurrected, but Christ crucified. The crucifixion, the sacrifice of Christ, is the crux of the Gospel message. While we may love what Jesus said to us, we are saved and made right with God by what He did for us; namely He died for us and our salvation.
John Stott, in his classic book The Cross of Christ writes, “The essence of sin is we human beings substituting ourselves for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting Himself for us. We put ourselves where only God deserves to be; God puts Himself where we deserve to be.”
So in answer to the question, what is the “worth” of the Gospel? What is its value? What price tag did God put on our salvation? The answer would be: the sacrifice of His own Son. Difficult as that is for us to put our heads around, Dallas Willard writes, “No one can have an adequate view of the heart and purposes of the God of the universe who does not understand that He permitted His Son to die on the cross to reach out to all people, even people who hated Him. That is who God is.” As a parent myself, the thought of that is almost unimaginable, and it certainly doesn’t make sense from any worldly perspective, but, as Willard says, “That is who God is”. This is what God has done for us.
During our Lenten small group study this year when we got to the chapter on the cross my wife Kristin reminded me of an experience I had during seminary when I was a student chaplain in a maximum security prison in Philadelphia. I got in to a deep conversation with a young inmate who was arguing with me about the claims of Christianity. I started asking him, “So, what is it about Jesus that you can’t accept? That He was God in human flesh?” No, he liked that idea. “That He performed miracles?” No, he thought any god should be able to do that. “Something that He said or taught?” No, he liked the teachings of Jesus. “Then what is it”, I asked, “that you can’t accept about Him?” He thought for a moment, then said, “No god I could ever worship would ever die on a cross.” That’s it! The cross became a stumbling block for him. It made God out to be too weak, too vulnerable, too human; yet we believe it to be the central truth of our faith, the only way God could have secured our salvation, and Jesus believed it too and so willingly submitted to this torturous means of death.
Earlier in his letter to the Philippians Paul writes these words of encouragement:
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.” Do you hear it? There is a double humiliation which Jesus endured for us here. First, He humbled Himself by surrendering the glories of heaven in order to take on human flesh, to become like one of us. He took off His royal robes of heaven and took on the role of a servant. And then, being found in human form, He humbled Himself further by willingly submitting Himself to the point of death – death on a cross – the most inhumane and torturous death imaginable. Why? For us and our salvation.
Jesus was a willing victim here, the sacrificial Lamb of God. Reflecting on this passage Catherine Marshall writes, “Jesus went to His cross as the willing agent of the divine plan. Nevertheless, His agony in Gethsemane shows us that humanly He shrank from the torturing hours ahead. All His growing-up years in Nazareth He had seen crucifixions…He could scarcely have helped seeing the crucifixion of 2000 rioters by Varus, Prefect of Syria, after the death of Herod the Great. The field full of 2000 crosses would have made an indelible impression on any sensitive boy. How well He knew that the nails used in crucifixion were real enough, as real as the pain and the agonizing thirst, the cramps, and the ultimate asphyxiation. Even so, He considered that “for this cause I was born” (John 18:37). Therefore, He absorbed the punishment of our sins in agreement with the will of His Heavenly Father. He was obedient unto death, even death on a cross. He did for us what we could not do for ourselves. He suffered and died that we might live!” As John Calvin plainly put it, “Our salvation is dearer to the Son than His own life.” Friends, that is the worth of the Gospel!
And because of that willing act of self-sacrificing obedience, Paul goes on to write, “Therefore God also highly exalted Him and gave Him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” His humiliation became the means of His exultation and ultimately of our salvation! Thanks be to God!
The cross of Christ, His suffering and death for our sakes, is the “worth”, the value, the cost of the Gospel. Since this is what He has done for us how can we, who bear the name of Jesus, respond? How can we then live our lives in a manner worthy of the Gospel? Are we not called, compelled, commanded to live a life of worship and gratitude to God for what He has done for us and our salvation; a life of humility knowing that we had nothing to do to earn His grace and mercy; a life of love reflecting the love which we have been freely given; a life of forgiveness as we have been freely forgiven; a life of reconciliation with others as Christ has reconciled us to God; a life of hope trusting in the promises of God; a life of daily dying more and more to ourselves so that we might live more and more to Christ?
To those who are not moved and changed by what Christ has done for us, perhaps it is because they do not yet understand what Christ has done for us, the cost of what God has done for us, the worth of the Gospel, so I urge you to pause, reflect, consider and respond to this, the greatest gift you will ever be given, the offered gift of your salvation. And to those who have heard, who have received and do believe the Good Friday message of the cross, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “I urge you to live a life worthy of the Gospel.”
To the honor and glory of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Rev. L. John Gable
Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
Indianapolis, IN