Download Dan Walters - Our Savior

Pastor Dan Walters
Preached: 10/14/07 at Our Savior Lutheran Church, Springville, NY
Text: Ephesians 2:8-10 (NIV)
8For
it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the
gift of God— 9not by works, so that no one can boast. 10For we are God’s workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Let This Task be Lived for You, Jesus
“Let’s get to work!” How does that phrase sound in your ears? Does it get you pumped up and
ready to roll up your sleeves and really accomplish something? Or does it make you squirm in
your seat as you think, “Oh no, not more work to do. I’m tired of work.” I think that the second
reaction might be a bit more common. When we think of “work” we don’t tend to get
glamorous, fun pictures in our head. Because work is work! It’s tiring; it requires effort. It’s
rarely ever easy. Most people don’t think it’s fun. Even some of the other words associated with
work don’t sound too pleasant to us. Yard-work. Housework. Homework. And, the favorite of
confirmation students everywhere, memory work.
Well, even though it doesn’t always sound pleasant to us, we can’t escape work. Work of some
sort will in some way be with us at every stage of our life. Think of it, when you’re in school
you have homework or chores or a practice for sports or for a musical instrument. When you get
a little older you still have homework to do but then you’ve got to maybe throw a job in the mix.
Then there’s the work involved in your full time career, or the work of being a mother or a
father. And just when you think retirement will put an end to your work, I’ve heard a lot of
retired people say they’re busier now that they’re retired than they were when they were
working.
It’s inescapable. Work is a part of every day of our lives. And if you break the work that we do
down into the little pieces of work that we all have to do every day, you get our daily tasks. You
get down to the little tasks that we spend most of our time doing in this world. I’m not talking
about the big, glamorous tasks like climbing Mount Everest or curing cancer, or even running a
marathon. No, the tasks that make up most of our lives are much simpler than that, much more
mundane. Mowing the lawn. Buying groceries. Fixing your lunch. Getting dressed. Putting
gas in the car. Going to the doctor’s office. Getting out of bed. And I could go on and on. And
those little tasks are there for each one of us. Every day of our lives, all the work that we do, can
be broken down into hundreds of these little daily tasks, these little things to be checked off of
our to-do lists.
As we start our three week series called “for me to live is Christ,” we’re going to take a look at
these daily tasks in our life. And as we do this morning, I won’t so much be trying to tell you
from God’s Word which daily tasks we should be doing. I’m not going to pretend to give you
advice on how to do your daily tasks more effectively. No, this morning using God’s Word
we’re going to look at why we do all our daily tasks. We’re going to look at the attitude behind
those little things we do every day. And as we do that, I hope it’s going to show us that as
Christians, our little daily tasks are a big deal, because they have a lot to do with our life of faith.
And it’s my prayer that when we’re done, we’ll be able to say with everything we do, let this
task be lived for you, Jesus.
So let’s just get the question out there, why do we do all those little tasks in our everyday lives?
What attitude do we have when we do them? What’s our motivation? Well, to start with, let’s
go to the extreme. Let’s say that with all our work and all the tasks that we have to do, let’s say
we take the attitude that work is something to be avoided at all costs. Let’s say that we want
nothing to do with work and if we can get out of it, we will.
Where would that attitude get us? Probably not very far. It’s probably impossible to get through
life without doing any work, and if you really try to avoid work at all costs, you’ll just end up
being lazy and feeding off the work of others. And of course that’s not the way that God wants
us to live our lives, that would be sinful. As the Bible says, If a man will not work, he shall not
eat.
So, that’s not the attitude that we should have with our daily tasks. But here’s another idea: what
if we went about our work and our tasks with the attitude that they were something that we had
to do, something we were being forced to do. Sure, we would do the work, we would get it all
done, but we’d be dragging our feet and grinding our teeth all the way.
Maybe that would be a better attitude to take to the work we have to do, right? Of course not.
That attitude would be awful. Can you imagine how depressed you would be, being forced to do
everything in your life? You’d probably go through every day so angry at everything, angry at
the world for making you do all this horrible work. Again, this attitude would end up being
sinful as that anger grew worse and worse. Later on in the book of Ephesians, Paul says Get rid
of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.
So, I guess that attitude is out, too.
But maybe you don’t feel forced to do your work. Maybe work is something you want to do.
And when is work something we want to do? When we get something out of it! We want to go
to work so we can get our paycheck and buy things for ourselves. We want to do something nice
for someone else in hopes that we will get something even better out of it. Sure I’ll scratch your
back, but only if you promise to scratch mine. What if we treated all the tasks in our life that
way? I’m sure we’d get a lot of work done, and I’m sure we’d get some pretty good stuff out of
it for ourselves. But would we really be better off? No! Then we would be just like the
Pharisees who Jesus once said looked clean on the outside but on the inside were full of greed
and self-indulgence. No, this would be another attitude that God hates, another way of doing
your work that is full of sin.
Ahh, so then maybe this is the answer. If it’s not good to do your work with a sinful attitude, in
a way that goes against God’s will, maybe you could do the exact opposite. Maybe you could do
all your daily tasks to please God. Maybe you could use everything you do as a way of getting
on God’s good side. Maybe then he’d accept you. Maybe then he’d really love you. Maybe
then you’d really deserve a reward from him.
But again, we know that’s just not true. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Using
our daily tasks, our works, to please God, to deserve good things from him, is always a dead end
street. Because we’ll always fall short of really pleasing God on our own. No, on our own, all
our righteous acts are like filthy rags. When we try to please God ourselves, we hear from
God’s Word that all who rely on observing the law are under a curse. Relying on ourselves
only puts us under a curse, the curse of death, the curse of hell.
How wonderful it is, then, how beautiful, how comforting, like a drink of cool water when
you’re dying of thirst are the words we hear in our text this morning. Because right there in the
book of Ephesians any hope we put in our own works is shattered forever. There we see that no
matter what attitude we’ve had as we go about our daily tasks, none of them have anything to do
with God accepting us. No, God’s acceptance, God’s patience, God’s forgiveness, God’s love—
they all have nothing to do with us. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith –
and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.
It’s all about God’s grace. It’s all about God’s undeserved love for us. It’s all about God’s
Riches At Christ’s Expense. It was Jesus’ works, not mine, not yours that really pleased God. It
was Jesus’ perfection, not mine, not yours that satisfied God’s holiness. And it was Jesus’ death,
not mine, not yours, that our heavenly Father accepted on our behalf, that forgave us our sins,
that won us eternal life. That’s what grace is; it’s a gift. It’s the forgiveness, life and salvation
that God gives us through faith in Jesus.
And it’s that grace that we need to remember as we go about our daily tasks, our every-day work.
They’re not really popular anymore, but maybe some of you remember seeing a 3-d movie.
Those are the movies that you have to wear special 3-d glasses to watch. When you watch those
movies without the special glasses on, the color and the picture looks very strange and distorted,
and it almost gives you a headache to look at. But when you put the 3-d glasses on, it looks like
the pictures are coming right off the screen at you.
That’s kind of like living our Christian lives. God wants us to view everything in our lives with
the special glasses of his grace. He wants us to see all things through the light of our Savior’s
love. And when we do that, that’s when our daily tasks take on a whole new meaning. Our text
goes on, For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which
God prepared in advance for us to do. Why do we do our daily tasks? Because of what Jesus
did for us. Every task we do is a way for us to thank our Savior, to thank our God for his grace.
You probably noticed that all those different bad attitudes for doing our tasks that I talked about
earlier were all a bit exaggerated. After all none, of us here have any of those attitudes at all
times. But I’m sure that all of us have had a little bit of all of those attitudes at some time. So let
me just encourage you one more time to put those attitudes aside.
And instead, focus on God’s grace. Focus on how God’s Son paid the price for sin that you
couldn’t pay. Focus on how your salvation was bought and paid for in Jesus’ blood. Focus on
how heaven is yours as a gift of God. And when you focus on that, you will see what to do with
all your daily tasks. You will see the attitude to have with all your work. You will see it’s all a
way to say thank you to your Savior. So let’s do that. Let’s thank our Savior in all that we do.
Let’s live for him who lived and died for us. Let’s have the attitude that always says, “Let this
task be lived for you, Jesus.” Yes, for us to live is Christ. So now, let’s get to work!