A Sermon by Pastor Okine

Editor’s Note: Please find an important sermon about the gospel message preached by Pastor Michael Okine of Messiah Lutheran Church. Pastor Okine currently resides as CFNA’s Board Secretary.

We praise and thank God for his mercy and love for us and all people revealed to us in the gospel. It is the great good news of God that we can never get tired of hearing. It has always been, and will continue to be the necessary and sufficient power of God to save all who believe from the coming judgment.

The gospel has always been that God sent his only son Jesus Christ to come and die for the sins of the world, the breaking of his law. And this should not sound as if it is about those outside the community of the church, but also for us who are insiders. Yes, there was a price to pay, but which human being could pay that price? Which human being was completely innocent to accomplish it? None! Only the Son of God could do that. The Bible itself says it best: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

At the time of Martin Luther, the church was teaching that this good news from God was not good enough. Somehow the church believed that when God said he sent his one and only Son to save the world, he left something out. The leaders of the church thought perhaps they could help God make a more complete statement. …They might have found the gospel statement more complete if God had said: “I’ve done my part; Now you do your part. Remember every sin you’ve committed and come confess them to my priests. Keep a diary of your daily sins. In addition you must pray to some people who were especially holy so some of their holiness might rub off on you. And don’t forget, you must pay some money to the church since that would certainly speed up the process whereby you can obtain forgiveness from me.”

The priests taught this to the people and the people believed them. Martin Luther believed that way too. Although he was a monk and a priest, and highly educated, he believed like everybody else that he had to do something special to obtain God’s favor (to be fully righteous). He knew he needed forgiveness of sins from God; but he also believed he had to earn it. So he studied the Bible, taught the Bible, and preached the Bible; yet that peace from God which passes all understanding still eluded him…Until that one day when the words from the Bible practically jumped out at him: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes; first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.”

What a relief that God himself does the saving—alone—without any help from anyone! Even though the Reformation has been associated with the person of Martin Luther, it was not because he himself was especially holy. We do not celebrate because he was an especially likeable person either. He was sinful like every human being then, and like every human being now. He said some regrettable things and not in a nice way either!

We celebrate because when he rediscovered this gospel of God, he did not keep it to himself, but pushed to make it heard again in the church. He wanted to be sure that the righteousness of God in declaring people righteous did not become an auction item! He wanted to make sure that God’s saving work in Jesus remained a free gift to all people, no matter their age or gender or color of their skin or the language they spoke. We celebrate because out of that rediscovery of the gospel many people have come to believe that God really loves them. God has declared them righteous.

That same gospel, that same good news. is yours today. It is yours in your baptism because God himself took action and drenched you in his love, as it were, through water and his word. He made you his own. Like everything else God has done on our behalf, that may sound too simple and too easy; but that is how God has decided to work. And who better to do it than God himself?

God very much wants us to believe his good news, so he gives us his saving gift in a way we can hear, in a way we can smell, in a way we can see, in a way we can touch, and in a way we can taste. That is what he does in his word, in baptism and in the Lord’s Supper. He uses all of our five senses so we will be in no doubt that he means what he says.