Your salvation hinges entirely on the Cross & Resurrection of Christ Jesus. For He has atoned for all of your sins and gotten victory over death and the grave by His death upon the Cross, and He has opened the way of righteousness and everlasting Life to you in His Resurrection from the dead. So, where and how you stand in the final Judgment depends on where you stand in relation to Him.
Are you on His right or His left? A sheep or a goat? Will you live with the Lord in His Kingdom in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness? Or will you be forever cursed and die eternally with the devil and his wicked angels?
The judgment has already been determined by the Cross of Christ Jesus, and the verdict has been openly declared in His Resurrection from the dead. And that has been accomplished for you and for all people, for the world, and for all the nations. In Christ Jesus, crucified and risen, there is no more condemnation, there is no more punishment. But, so too, apart from Him there is no life or salvation. Either you are righteous and alive in and with Him, or wicked and dead without Him.
That is what it means for Jesus the Christ to be “the Son of Man,” to whom all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to judge the living and the dead.
As He has come into the glory of His Kingdom and His Righteousness by the way of His Cross, His vicarious self-sacrifice of Atonement for all of your sins and for the sins of the whole world, so is His bodily Resurrection from the dead God’s open declaration of His Righteousness, and the justification of all those who belong to Him — of all who believe and are baptized in His Name.
So, then, because He desires all people to be saved, He calls all people to Himself by the Ministry of the Gospel. He sends His messengers — not only His Holy Apostles to begin with, but the pastors of His Church in every time and place, even to the ends of the earth and the close of the age — He sends His messengers to make disciples from all nations by the way and means of Holy Baptism and the ongoing catechesis of His Word. It is by this Apostolic Ministry that He gathers the lost and wandering sheep to Himself — unto Life everlasting with God in both body and soul.
The preaching of His Word is the Truth. It is the sure and certain verdict of the Lord your God, now and forever. By it you are crucified and put to death with Him, but so are you also raised up in and with Him to a brand new life. In Him, the old has passed away, and you are a new creation.
Repent of your sins, therefore. Repent of your unbelief, idolatry, and lack of love. Turn away from sin and death, and live unto righteousness in Christ Jesus. Receive and trust His Gospel, and live by that grace of God in Him. Fear Him as the Lord, your King. But so also trust in Him as your great Good Shepherd, as your merciful and great High Priest, as your Savior and Redeemer.
Love Him with all your heart, because He is your Savior and your God, your best and highest good. But love Him so, not as though to get something from Him in return, but because you are already receiving every good and perfect gift from Him freely by His grace, by His Love for you. Love Him, not to curry His favor, but because His favor and His righteousness are yours in His Holy Gospel. Love Him righteously by faith in His Word, because you are justified by His grace.
It is entirely by His grace, that is, by the charity of God, by His utter charity in Christ Jesus. It is entirely by His divine grace, because the truth is that He does not need anything at all from you. He doesn’t need your stuff, all of which came from Him in the first place. He does not need your work for His benefit. He does not need anything from you. But He gives you everything by grace.
So, too, there is nothing at all that you need which is not already yours in Him, freely given to be freely received, with no strings attached, no conditions or contingencies upon His tender mercy.
Love Him, therefore, because of who He is, and because He loves you faithfully and forever.
And in the confidence and courage of His Love for you, love Him by loving His Christians and all your neighbors in His Name and for His sake. Such love is the evidence of your faith and life in Christ Jesus. Indeed, that is how faith lives, without keeping score, and not at all self-conscious. It is the good fruit that your dear Lord Jesus bears in you by the tree of His Cross in your life. For by His Cross He brings you through repentance into the faith and life of His own Resurrection. He brings you to God the Father in and with Himself, and He gives to you His own relationship — His own Sonship — with the Father. So does He likewise give to you His own relationship of love with your neighbors. For as you live and abide in Him by faith, He lives and abides in you.
So it is that you live in love toward your neighbors, especially your brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus, who also bear His Name as you do, who are sons and daughters of the same God and Father. You live in love toward your neighbors because this is the life of Christ, which He also lives in love toward you. He feeds and quenches your hunger and thirst; He shelters you from the cold, from darkness, and from death; He covers your nakedness and shame; He cares for you in every adversity; He heals your diseases, and He releases you from the prison house of all your sins.
Thus do you know, in turn, what you should do for others. Feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the poor, visit the sick and imprisoned. Do it for Jesus’ sake. Do it in His Name, as He does it all for you. Do it all as unto Him. Not only the occasional extraordinary act of kindness, charity, and mercy toward someone you barely know or rarely encounter — someone to whom you can allot a certain portion of time and a certain percentage of stuff; and then after you have done your good deed, you can go your merry way, feeling good about yourself, and get on with your own life. But so also exercise a steady and consistent, persistent and patient love and care for the neighbors whom the Lord has set right alongside of you and all around you in your daily and ongoing life — for those neighbors it is hard to continue loving and hard to keep forgiving, over and over again, even seventy times seven, for the same hurts, the same insults, the same neglect, the same apathy.
Learn to see Christ Jesus in your neighbor, in the stranger you’ve never met, in the acquaintance you barely know, in your own wife or husband, and in your parents, children, and siblings — your brothers and sisters here on earth, and all the more so the brothers and sisters who sit with you here in church. Behold the Lord Jesus in them, and take it to heart that you love and serve Him in each and all of these people. For the Lord your God, the One who needs nothing from you, has given you this opportunity to return thanks to Him, to love and serve and care for Him — and thereby to demonstrate your faith and exercise your fear, love, and trust in Him — by caring for each other.
When your spouse is grumpy and nags at you; and your children disobey and disregard you; and your parents don’t understand, and they don’t listen, and they don’t keep their promises; and your siblings fight and argue with you — look at them the way your Father in heaven looks at you, and see Jesus in them. Don’t see their bad behavior, which He has covered with His righteousness. Don’t hold their sins against them, because He forgives them all their sins, as He forgives you. And don’t withhold your love from them, because He does not withhold His love from you.
It is precisely in His poor and needy ones, in those who are the most work — in those who have the biggest and seemingly never-ending needs — it is in the weak and lowly and despised — in those who smell funny, in those who look odd, in those who act strangely, in those whom nobody wants to be around — in the little ones of every age and kind — that is where you find your Lord Jesus, in order to love and serve Him, because that is how He has come to love and serve us all.
He has made Himself hungry, and He has thirsted. He has been the stranger and the outcast, the One whom even His own family thought weird, perhaps even sick in the head. And He has been abandoned by friends, left alone to bear the staggering burden of the Cross and Passion by Himself. He has been imprisoned, stripped naked, tortured, mocked, and cruelly punished — not for any sins of His own (He has none!), but for your sins. All the dirt, all the grime, all the crud in your life — He made it all His own, He bore that shame, and He suffered all its punishment. Indeed, He has been sick with the sickness of this whole dying world, unto His death upon the Cross.
Consequently, it is not only in your neighbor’s weakness and poverty and need that you find the Lord your God, your great Shepherd King. But He is also with you in your weakness and shame; He is with you in your nakedness and pain; He is with you in your hunger and fear; He is with you in your sickness and at the hour of your death. And He is with you as your Savior and Redeemer in the Judgment. It is as we sing in the Te Deum: “Lord, we believe that Thou shalt come to be our Judge; therefore, we pray Thee, help Thy servants, whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy precious Blood.” And assuredly He does. He does help you. He does have mercy upon you.
What is more, not only has He taken your place — in the midst of all your poverty, sickness, sin, and death — not only has He taken your place in His death upon the Cross — but so does He also give to you His place and His Righteousness in His Resurrection from the dead. He gave it to you in your Holy Baptism. For you know that in the waters of your Baptism, in and with His Word and Holy Spirit, you died with Him, and so have you also been raised up with Him to newness of life.
And here is what that means for you: His Righteousness is yours. His works of love are yours. Whereas all the sins that you have done He has made His own, all the works of love that He has done He has made yours. He credits them to you. He counts them as your works.
His whole Life, His Resurrection, His Salvation — all of that is yours. All because the Atonement, the forgiveness, the reconciliation, and the peace of His Cross are yours — given and bestowed upon you by His Word and Ministry of the Gospel. That is what the Gospel is and does.
It is the judgment of God that you are in Christ, that you are a Christian, by faith in His Gospel. And everything that belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ, the almighty and eternal Son of God who has become your Brother in the Flesh, who is your Strength and your Song because He has become your Salvation, who has died for you and risen again — everything that belongs to Him is yours.
Hear this Word of Christ and take it to heart, because it is already in this preaching of the Gospel that you truly hear and receive God’s verdict concerning you: You are forgiven all your sins. You are holy and righteous. You are beloved and well-pleasing to your God and Father in heaven. You are not guilty, but innocent in Christ Jesus. And so it is that you are set free from the prison house of sin and death. You are healed of every disease in both body and soul. You are not found naked, but you are fully clothed in Christ and His perfect righteousness. And you are fed, not only with meat and potatoes, vegetables, and even dessert, with turkey and gravy and stuffing and cranberries — because the Lord is generous to all of us poor sinners, even in this body and life — but you are fed with a far greater Feast than any of us will otherwise eat this week; because here you are fed with the very Body and the holy and precious Blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God. And as He gives you Himself to eat and to drink, you know the very heart of God toward you. You are blessed, and you are beloved of the God and Father of your Lord Jesus Christ — and you are welcomed into His Father’s Kingdom, because His God and Father is now also your God and your dear Father.
That is the purpose, reality, and significance of the Church on earth, and of this congregation. It is why the Lord has called and gathered us here this morning. For eternal judgments are declared and delivered here and now. Here the Son of Man exercises His authority to forgive sins, and with that forgiveness He gives to you His Life and His Salvation. Here at His Altar He sits upon His glorious throne and, just as we sing, all of the angels are round about Him. Here He gathers you to Himself, He enfolds you to His embrace, and He holds you in His strong arms. He calls you and draws you here to Himself, in order to feed you, to clothe you, to heal you, and to give you Life.
Come, then, blessed of the Lord! Enter into His Peace, and rest yourself in Him.
In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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