Download The Odds of Winning

February 22, 2015 | First Sunday in Lent – Romans 8:31-39
The Odds of Winning
1 I need someone not to be spared for me
2 I need something not to be separated from me
A few years ago I mentioned to some of you in a different connection that, when my wife and I lived in
the state of Michigan, we had a phone number that was one digit off from the call-in number of the
lottery of that state for people who wanted to find out what the winning numbers were for that day or
that week for Michigan LOTTO. Our phone number was 793-5688. On the keyboard those numbers
represent 793-LOTT (5688), the first four letters of the word Lotto. The number for the lottery ticket
winner information for some reason was 793-LOTO, or 793-5686. Every once in a while someone would
dial LOTT and end up talking to me, asking me what the winning lottery numbers were. What do you
think the odds of winning were for anyone who ended up talking to me on the phone like that?
The odds of winning by calling our phone number back then are the same odds any of us would have if
we dial the wrong number for God when it comes to knowing that he loves us or about us being able to
live in heaven after we die, no matter how much we may think we have done or said the right things
along the way in our everyday life. That’s why we want to make very sure that we clearly understand
what our Lord is telling us today, when, through these words of the apostle Paul, he assures us that we
are not just winners, but that we are “more than conquerors through him who loved us.” On this first
Sunday in the season of Lent, when we especially see so dramatically how much our Lord loves us, let’s
also see why you cannot possibly get better odds of winning in the only contest of life that really counts.
Do you feel like a winner in your life right now? I hope that things are going pretty well for you at this
moment, but it is no secret that many people do not feel like winners much of the time in their lives, and
no one feels like a winner all of the time in their lives. There are just so many things in our lives that
work against us, number one of which is our constant displays of what spiritual losers we are before our
holy God every time we arrogantly think we are better than someone else or every time we prove how
just as bad as everyone else we really are. The fact of the matter is that the odds of winning are zero
from the moment we are born, because we are born unable to know the love of God, because we are
born spiritually apart from God. There simply cannot be any chance for joy in life unless we admit that
there can be no joy in life apart from God.
Ironically, that is one of the main ways the devil tries to get at us, once we come to faith in Jesus as our
Savior. He tries to get us to think that we really shouldn’t have any days where we feel like losers any
more, once we know the victory of Jesus. You and I feel that in our lives all the time. Something bad
happens to us that either frustrates us or depresses us or makes us angry, and we are tempted to think
that either God isn’t able to help us or that he doesn’t want to help us or that we have done something
to him to make that so.
How do you think Abraham felt in our First Lesson for today? He certainly had to be tempted, at least,
to think that being faithful to God didn’t pay, if one thing he needed to do was to sacrifice the son he
had finally received by God’s promise and whom he so dearly loved. But the Bible tells us that Abraham
trusted God’s promise that a Savior would be born from the descendants of his son Isaac, so he knew
that somehow, someway his dear Lord God would work that out, no matter how lost the situation
looked at the moment. And God won the victory by sparing Isaac and in his place providing a lamb to be
the sacrifice that he was looking for.
That really is the exact same thing Paul is saying in the opening verses of our lesson. We have a promise
from God that he cannot break. “If God is for us,” Paul said, “who can be against us?” He who did not
spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all
things?” If I don’t know that God is for me and that God did not spare his Son for me, then I cannot
make any sense of the things that happen in my life that make me sad or make me wonder sometimes if
it’s all worth it. To have any odds of winning I need someone not to be spared for me, and that is
exactly what St. Paul here promises us that God has done – he did not spare his own Son, but gave him
up for us all. So if we will for sure win eternal life because of Jesus, we will also be winners during our
earthly life, even though the victories of God’s people look very different than do the victories people so
often want.
What I mean is this: If I am sick, but have been healed of my sins, I am more than a conqueror through
him who loves me. If I am poor, but have been made wealthy in my heart and soul because Jesus has
made his home there, I am more than a conqueror through him who loves me. And if I have few friends
or if those who were my friends have left me, but I have God’s promise that I will someday sing with the
angels, I am more than a conqueror through him who loves me. Those are odds of winning that are one
hundred percent guaranteed, because they depend not on me, but on the one who allowed himself not
to be spared for me – my Lord Jesus. His priceless blood paid what for my wrongs I could not pay, and
his precious love therefore will never change even when so many wrong things come my way.
And that is why the apostle Paul speaks with such confidence when he talks about what he is talking
about in the second part of our lesson, beginning in verse 35, where he says: “Who shall separate us
from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or
sword? As it is written ‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be
slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
Again, one of the devil’s basic temptations is to have us think that we have been separated from the
love of Christ. It might be something so simple as not being to find something that we are looking for to
something as important as finding a medicine to make us healthy again to something that is a matter of
life and death, like the Christians in Egypt and elsewhere who in the past two weeks have been put to
death by those who hate the gospel of Jesus. In all these cases, it can be so easy to think that God’s
love must be someplace else, because it’s certainly not with me, but in all those places we have God’s
promise that we are winners. We are winners because “I am convinced,” as Paul says, “I am convinced
that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor anything
else in God’s creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Just as I need to someone not to be spared for me in order to have perfect odds of winning, so I need
something not to be separated from me – and I have God’s promise that because Jesus Christ is my
Lord, nothing can ever separate me from his love.
Our Gospel for the day briefly referred to the period of time at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry when he
endured the temptations of Satan in the wilderness. The temptation of Jesus is something that God’s
people often think about at the beginning of the Lenten season because it is a reminder that Jesus did
not only die for us, as we of course particularly emphasize during the season of Lent, but he also lived
for us. He died because we needed to be cleansed before God. He lived because we needed to be holy
and therefore be able to stand before God. When Jesus defeated the devil’s temptations, he just didn’t
win a victory for himself; he won the victory for us. Because of what Jesus did in never sinning, God
looks at us as if we had never sinned. So, when the devil says to us when bad things happen, “You must
be a loser,” we can say to Satan, “God my Lord has justified me – he has said that I am perfect and
innocent and holy in his sight, so you are deeply disturbed, devil. The only loser there is is the one who
had to get lost when he was told by the conqueror, ‘Depart from me, Satan. Go away.’”
Until the day we finally close our eyes, the devil will not stop trying to lie to us about God and about
how we can truly be happy, but his odds of winning are absolutely none when we remember that what
we need, we have. We need someone not to be spared for us, and we need something not to be
separated from us. We have God’s promise that he did not spare his Son, but gave him up for us all.
And we have God’s promise that, because of that, nothing can separate us from the love of God that is
in Christ Jesus, our Lord. That’s why we are more than conquerors – and that is why dialing that right
number in faith means that we never have to worry one bit about the odds of winning with God. Amen.