Christ, God’s Yes

Welcome to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. Check us out online at www.sharonrpc.org. We pray that this message will be a blessing to you and that the Lord will use it to transform your faith and your life. Our New Testament reading and our sermon text this morning is 2 Corinthians chapter 1. verses 12-22. 2 Corinthians 1 verses 12-22. Let's give attention to God's Word this morning. For our boast is this, the testimony of our conscience that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom, but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you. For we are not writing to you anything other than what you read and understand, and I hope you will fully understand, just as you did partially understand us. that on the day of the Lord Jesus you will boast of us as we will boast of you.

I am sure of this. I wanted to come to you first so that you might have a second experience of grace. I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia. to come back to you from Macedonia and have you send me on my way to Judea? Was I vacillating when I wanted to do this? Did I make my plans according to the flesh, ready to say yes, yes, and no, no at the same time?

As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been yes and no. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus, and Timothy, and I, was not yes and no, but in Him it is always yes. For all the promises of God find their yes in Him.

Prayer for Illumination

That is why it is through him that we utter our amen to God for his glory. And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us and who has also put his seal on us and given us his spirit in our hearts as a guarantee. Let's pray. Gracious Lord, we come to you today recognizing this is your word. authoritative, infallible, inerrant, sufficient. And we come under its authority today and pray that we would hear what it has to say, that we would live by it, that you would give me clarity as I proclaim it, that I would stand aside and it would be your word that we're hearing today. From Christ's name we pray, amen. We are people who live by promises. All of us has had promises ever since we were children.

Sermon

Whenever parents or as we, as grandparents now, promise something to our kids or grandkids, they always remember those promises. Think about that, you kids. If your parents or your grandparents promise you something, you remember it, don't you? And you come back to them and you say, Grandma, you promised. That's something natural for us as human beings, whether it's a birthday party or a trip for ice cream or any other number of things that your parents or your grandparents promise you, we remember them. It's been said sometimes that for a parent or grandparents, a promise is something we strive to fulfill, but for a child, it's just a statement of fact.

And if we renege to them, it's a feeling that they have been betrayed. lied to. But as adults we live by promises, normal promises. We sign promissory notes that say we will pay a certain amount of money that we borrow. We depend on promises, those of us who work for a living. for someone else. We get paychecks. And what is a paycheck? When we take a job, they make a promise.

Every week or two weeks or month, whatever your pay schedule is, there will be in the bank. Now they don't get that check anymore. Now they just put, most people get an indirect deposit. But if all of a sudden you look at your bank account, and three, two, and three, and four pay periods go by and you don't get that deposit in your bank, not too happy are you?

Because those promises have not come through. But we live in a world in which there are broken promises. Promises that don't come to fruition or promises that are we realize we've been lied to. I think most, we just had an election and most of us know politicians make a lot of promises. And if every politician could come through on those promises, you'd say, oh, this world would be wonderful, but they make promises and they don't fulfill them.

Well, the Christian faith is full of promises because the scriptures, the Bible is full of promises. From the very beginning, God made promises and you know, he could have reneged on them. because we're not very faithful people as human beings. God could have reneged on those promises, but he didn't. He didn't in spite of our fickle unbelief and disobedience, because he doesn't lie. And he doesn't renege on his promises.

For him to do so would be to change his whole character. We read in some of our scripture reading today, in some of our Psalms we've sung about the faithfulness of God. The Hebrew word for faithfulness is related to the word for truth. Because God speaks, he's true. And because he's true, he's faithful.

In our Reformed theology, we talk about God's covenant, but at the heart of the covenant are promises. And it's been summarized by many theologians that the heart of God's covenant promises are this, I will be your God, and you will be my people. One of my own seminary professors did his retooling of covenant theology, and he called it promise theology, because he liked to emphasize the promise aspect of God's covenant.

And in the scriptures, all the way from that first promise, Genesis 3.15, about the bruising of the head of the serpent, all the way to those final promises, where God says he will wipe away every tear, including those promises, for example, made to Abraham, we find that the scripture is full of promises. Abraham, for example, was given promises. Think about it.

Here's a guy that's not what we would call extraordinary. Doesn't seem to have any particular extraordinary features about him. After all, he was raised in a family of idolaters, the scripture tells us. But he receives promises, and he's told, pick up and move, and I make these promises to you.

And the promises of God that are given to Abraham, if you think about it, are promises that are undoing the damage and the lack of faithfulness of human beings to the commands that God has made. Think about this. Human beings in the garden were told to be fruitful and multiply. Some wag has said that's the one promise that human beings have tried to keep somewhat to be fruitful and multiply. But do you notice one of the promises, key promises to Abraham is I'm going to multiply your seed. In the garden, we were told as human beings to fill the earth. And what does God say to Abraham? I'm going to fill the earth with your descendants.

Abraham will undo the disaster of the Tower of Babel. or Babel, depending on how you pronounce it, because those people said, we're going to make a great name for ourselves. When you read that text, did you notice that? Why did they want to build that big tower? They wanted to make a name for themselves. And what does God say to Abraham? I'm going to make a great name for you.

In other words, God is making promises to Abraham to undo the downward spiral of sin, judgment, and curse that began in Genesis 2. And three, when Adam and Eve sinned, and to put it in the street language, messed everything up big time, because that's what they did. Abraham would be the first, though, others who would receive wonderful promises, not the first, but the most prominent, shall we say, of those who would receive wonderful promises from God. And the New Testament clearly links these to Christ.

Abraham was, Jesus is in John 8, saw my day and rejoiced. The Apostle Paul in Galatians chapter two says, all the promises of God, he says to Abraham, find their fruition in Christ. But in this text we read today and that we're going to explore here, the Apostle Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, takes it a bit further. Because he says that all of God's promises find their yes in Jesus Christ. And that's a pretty astounding statement. Paul says no matter what promises God has made, in Christ you find the yes. In other words, through Christ all of God's promises will be fulfilled.

Now there are five facets of this that we want to focus on today, but let's give a little bit of background because this is important to see the background out of which Paul makes this rather stupendous claim. The Book of Second Corinthians is a book in which the Apostle Paul defends his ministry, the legitimacy of his ministry, against some people he calls the super apostles. In other words, people that were saying, you're an apostle, Paul, but we're the super duper apostles. You're just a rank and file ordinary apostle, and we've got gifts and other things that can outdo you.

And they were trying to schmooze the people there, and even seeming to try to pull wool over their eyes. Now the Corinthian church is an interesting church because if you read 1 Corinthians you realize it was a problematic church. I had a professor in seminary who used to joke about his particular denomination. He said he knew that his denominational tradition, he said he knew that his tradition had to be the original church because he said, we've been splitting and fighting ever since the beginning of time. He said, and look at read 1 Corinthians and you'll see that's what they were doing. So we must be the original church, he claimed, Dr. Perry claimed. But the point is, is that the Corinthian church was a problem.

And Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to try to adjust some of it. And it seems like there was an intermediary letter, which has not been canonized in scripture. And it's sometimes called the painful letter or the sorrowful letter, Paul talks about it. And he's had scolded them apparently pretty badly. And now he writes the second epistle, the one that's in our scripture, the second epistle to the Corinthians.

If 1 Corinthians had been focused on outsiders who had challenged the gospel, this one seems to be on people who are challenging Paul as an apostle. And they have different modes of ministry. And they were given to boasting. As I said, they call themselves, as Paul said, the super apostles. And they looked at Paul's humble style as one of weakness and authority. We've got the power. We're the real, real preachers. We're the real super-duper apostles. You're just a sort of a nobody, Paul.

Paul had intended to visit them, and that's part of the text that we see today. He talks about the fact that he wanted to come for a visit, but he'd been hindered. And apparently, the fact that he hadn't gotten there was being used against him. And they were saying, you're vacillating, Paul. Our text talks about that. You're not following through on your word.

But what's fascinating about this particular portion of scripture, in a narrative, in a passage in which Paul emphasizes the trustworthiness of God's promises, he focuses on the message rather than on himself as the messenger. He will talk about how he's trying to be faithful to God's message, but he's saying is what we need to primarily talk about, he says, is the faithfulness of God's promises in Christ, the trustworthiness of that message. His model was that of the gospel and the grace of God.

And he said that, he explains in here that the reason he said I delayed is I wanted to visit you, actually visit you twice. Now, here I just have to, I read the English Standard Version. Most of you probably have the New King James Version, and there's some slight difference in translation on whether it's a second experience of grace or a second benefit. I actually think the New King James is probably a little bit better here. because we don't want to get confused as if Paul was teaching a kind of a second blessing theology. You know, some of our friends, especially in the Pentecostal tradition, will talk about, you know, sort of a second blessing, a second experience of grace. I don't think that's what Paul is talking about here. He's really saying, as one translation puts it, so I may benefit you twice.

So you can get teaching from me on two different occasions. you know, it's not just second experience. I remember when I was in seminary and I worked in the summer in a factory and there was a guy there who went to an inner city Pentecostal church and he asked me one time if I had received the baptism of dynamite and I had no idea what he was talking about and he started ticking off all the different baptisms that he believed you could get. There was a baptism of the Holy Spirit, the baptism of sanctification, and when he brought out the baptism of dynamite, I wasn't quite sure what Willie was talking about, but it was apparently something in his mind. There were lots of different whiz-bang experiences, you might call them, where you really got whipped up.

But I don't think that's what Paul's talking about here at all. He's saying is I wanted to come visit you because I have more teaching to do to you. He's talked about the test. He wanted to give them further knowledge. He wanted him to understand the grace of God. He wanted to be an instrument of God's grace to them by allowing him two opportunities to also to contribute to the important collection, which he's going to talk.

He talks about that for about three chapters. If you don't think giving isn't important, read those three chapters, 8, 9, and 10 in 2 Corinthians, where Paul gives three chapters in one of his epistles on the grace of giving. That's where he has that famous statement, you know, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, though he was rich for your sakes, he became poor so that you through his poverty might become rich, right in a context of giving. But having that background, let's look now at what Paul says in this passage.

These five facets of what it means that God's, yes, all of God's promises are found in Jesus Christ. The first thing we need to see is that Paul wants us to make very clear that when God says yes in his promises, he is faithful, verse 18. He gives this foundational statement, as surely as God is faithful. Paul says, I want you to understand when we talk about all the promises of God are yes and amen in Christ. Underlying this is the reality that God is faithful. He never lies. He is faithful in all that he does. Because he is faithful, Paul is saying all of his promises will be faithful.

In other words, he says the message that we proclaimed, and here he's coming back to the message. He'd been accused of being vacillating, but he wants to come back again to the message. He said, you think because we had to make a delay in our plans, that we're not trustworthy people. He says, I'd rather focus on the message we're bringing, the trustworthiness of the message of Jesus Christ. He's saying that the message he and his companions preached wasn't yes and no, but was completely yes as far as Jesus Christ. Did you see what verse 19 says here? He says, After he says, surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been yes and no. For the Son of God, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not yes and no, but in Him is always yes.

Now, he's saying it superficially, it looked like I had to change my plans. And you thought that I wasn't being faithful. And there's an implication here that sometimes God's plans to us are confusing and sometimes there's a temptation for us to think God isn't being faithful because his plans are baffling to us sometimes. That's the truth. Let's be honest.

Don't we sometimes think God's plans look baffling to us? I don't think there's a one of us hasn't because our tendency is to is to say well Lord I've got this nice little plan here now let me hand it to you and all we need is your check on the bottom and everything comes comes right let's face it how many of us haven't been tempted to do that Lord I've analyzed the situation and according to my human wisdom and planning especially if you're a planner the more we're planners, the more we're likely to do this. To say, Lord, I've assessed the situation, and it looks like this will be the best way for you to do it, but I can't make all the details work out. Lord, just check the box on the bottom, and you do all the details to work out.

But that's not the way God's plans are. His promises are always yes, but they're worked out in a broken and bent human world. Now, if you want to see the ultimate biblical example of that, look at the cross. Think of the women, and Jesus' mother, Mary, and they're at the foot of the cross, and they're thinking, and the other disciples as well, but I'm particularly thinking of the women here, the ones who go to the tomb on Easter morning, they're thinking, our world has just been shattered.

We had trusted in this Jesus. Mary was his biological mother. We had trusted in him, the Messiah, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. When he rode in a week earlier on that donkey, we were among the crowd singing, Hosanna, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

And look at, He was executed as a common criminal between two thieves, two rebels on crosses. The promises of God had been shattered. Let's be honest, isn't that the case what had happened there? But think of Easter morning. Some of those same women went to the tomb. They came to bring the spices and they heard the word of the angels. Who are we looking for? Jesus of Nazareth? He's not here. He's risen.

God's ways are different than our ways. But his promises, to fulfill his promises, are always true. They're always faithful. That's why, as we might say, Good Friday without Easter becomes unthinkable to us. This means that the trustworthiness of God's promises always has to be the foundation of all that we think or do.

If you really think about your own life, isn't it true that doubting the faithfulness and trustworthiness of God ultimately becomes the foundation, the source of many of your struggles in life? Isn't that true? Why, Lord, am I in this trouble? Are you really here? Why do I have this sickness? Why do I have this struggle? Why do I have this? And you can go down the list of all the struggles that we have in life.

Isn't it a temptation to say, Lord, are you really there? Are you really faithful? Is Psalm 23 really true? Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because I'm feeling pretty fearful right now. Isn't that what we do?

Undergirding all of this for us has to be God is faithful. He's trustworthy. Paul says that very clearly here, as surely as God is faithful. That's the foundation of our life. Sometimes though, we try to then manipulate the situations. If there's ever been a good example of that man we mentioned earlier, Abraham, you know, God has said, I'm gonna give you an heir.

And Sarah comes to him and says, you know, this isn't working out too well. I'm getting to be a pretty old lady. What do you think we're going to have any kids yet? How about this servant girl? Hagar here, she'll do for me, won't you? And look at the mess that comes out to him.

Abraham's saying, I can make God's promises work, but not in God's way. That's our temptation. The temptation is to take matters into our own hands, to manipulate the situation, Instead, we have to come back to this foundation. God is faithful. He will work out his promises. That's what Paul is telling them. Trust me. He's saying to them, trust me as I work these, we'll look at this a little bit more, but as we work these details out, because I trust an absolutely trustworthy God.

But the second facet that we want to look at is that Christ indeed is the focal point of God's yes. In verses 19 and 20, that gets to the heart of what Paul is saying. He's saying that every promise of God finds its yes in Christ. One translation, it's a little bit paraphrased, but I like it, puts it this way. Yes is his nature. Yes is his nature. There's a seminary professor of mine who wrote commentary on 2 Corinthians said, Christ is the climax and summation of all of God's self-revelation.

This means that when you go down from the promises in scripture, whether it's that promise, that first called the mother promise of the crushing of the devil's head, all the way to that last promise, where scripture says, I will wipe away every tear. These all find their focus, scripture says, and that's what Paul is saying here, in the gospel of Jesus Christ. It's through Christ that all of these promises are realized. That's what gives our faith its radical Christ-centeredness, and that's why we as Christians, Bible-believing Christians, say, when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father through me, what's our response? Yes. That's what scripture teaches. That's what Paul is saying here. In a hymn, all of God's promises are yes. That is the foundation.

Now that rubs lots of people the wrong way. If there's anything that if you go out and start going up and down this road or go over to Mediapolis or Morning Sun and knock on a few doors and ask people, do you think there are many ways to God? Probably about 90% of the people who are not believing Christians, even some who are believing Christians would tell you, of course there has to be many ways to God. It wouldn't be fair if there weren't many ways to God.

God is a nice guy. He has to have many ways for us to find him. And yet the scripture comes back with a resounding in Christ, all the promises of God are yes. That Jesus Christ is the one that we place our trust in. To look for the promises of God in any other place is a serious problem. There was an old country song about looking for love in all the wrong places. We're looking for the promises of God in any other place, but Christ is looking for those in all the wrong places. That's why the sacraments.

I know Pastor Brian has been preaching on that interesting passage out of 1 Peter about baptism. And that passage talks about statements that it was I when we Had an email back and forth and talked a little bit about that about what he was was preaching on I'm reminded of Sinclair Ferguson I know some of you are familiar with Sinclair Ferguson from Ligonier. He kind of joked one time He said about that passage. He said well, he said if you want to really get drive a lot of people crazy, he said, a Bible-believing church could put on its marquee its sermon title right straight from Scripture, Baptism Does Now Save You, and see what all the other Bible-believing Christians would say if they saw that on your marquee. That's true. It's right out of Scripture, and yet it bothers a lot of people.

Understanding that all the promises of God are yes in Christ helps us to understand this, because the sacraments are all about the promises of God and not primarily about our response. This is one of the key points of the Reformation which people who are not in the Reformed tradition often miss. They think the sacraments are about their response. They're not. They're about the promises of God.

Because we are baptized into Christ. The Lord's Supper is proclaiming his death until he comes. It's about Christ. We'll talk a little bit more about that in another of our points, but these promises of God found in Christ are expressed in a variety of ways, for example, in the Old Testament, leading up to the New Testament.

Sometimes there's explicit fulfillments, such as Daniel 2, leading to John 5, where Daniel talks about the resurrection and Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life. I'm the first, or as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, I'm the first fruits of the resurrection. I'm the one that makes the resurrection possible. He fulfills some by extending them.

We read Isaiah 42 today, where Jesus was called a covenant to the people. And it's fascinating if you read the so-called servant songs in Isaiah 40 through 60, they kind of go back and forth. I call, like to say, oscillate back and forth between a singular and a plural.

And that's because Jesus there is the epitome of Israel, because sometimes it says Israel is the servant, and sometimes it says the servant seems to be somebody besides Israel, somebody outside of Israel, because Israel is in bad shape. That's because what Jesus is doing when he comes is he is coming as the perfect Israelite that exemplifies and fulfills all that Israel was supposed to be, which is why, as Isaiah 53 says, he can die for the people. He extends those promises by being the true Israel and fulfilling the promises by being the true and faithful Israel in light of Israel's repeated failures. Sometimes there are direct predictions such as Micah 5 in the text in Luke or being wiser than Solomon in Matthew chapter 12. Sometimes he transforms those Old Testament promises, those given in types and shadows.

For example, Abraham was given a promise of land and yet In Matthew 5 and Romans 4.13, the land promise getting expanded or blown up to become the whole earth.

Paul explicitly says in Romans 4.13 that that promise of God that says you will receive a land, that Abraham had the implication that it would be the whole earth. That's why in the book of Revelation, when Christ comes back, it says, the kingdoms of the world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. Romans 11 says we are grafted in to the stock of the people of Israel, that olive tree.

There's just a few ways in which examples and how Christ fulfills all of those Old Testament promises, making it clear that it's through him that those promises are fulfilled. So the key issue for all of us today is whether we are seeing any of God's promises outside of Christ. That any attempt to connect with the promises of God end up being futile. Now we're going to talk a little bit still about the Amen, because this text says we give our Amen, but we realize that all of these promises of God are promises of grace. And I think this is very important for us to understand the biblical notion of God's covenant, because sometimes we get the mistaken idea that a covenant is contractual in nature, and that's a misunderstanding.

As a matter of fact, I think back to my first church. I had a wonderful man. He's been an elder for many, many years, and he moved on in the church. He was an elder in our church, and then in the church he moved on to. Wonderful Christian man, but somehow he'd gotten the idea that he'd been raised in a very sound Reformed church, but that covenant was a contract.

I know about contracts. Some of you were in business, and you signed contracts. My dad was in business, and people signed contracts. He was the sales manager of a car dealership, and people signed contracts to buy, I'm gonna buy that Chevy Impala, and I'm gonna put this much down, and I'm gonna make these payments, and it's a contract with obligations.

Well, God's covenant is not like a contract. And a contract is something that's equal-sided. We both stand on the same side. God's covenant is really one-sided. Yes, we respond, but it's a covenant of grace. They are promises of grace. To see God's covenant in terms of a contract where we bargain with God is to misunderstand. God is gracious in his promises.

Yes, we respond and trust, but he is the one who initiates. He is the one who is faithful. We are often unfaithful. He is always faithful. The text also goes on to say that the Holy Spirit is the personal witness to that yes. While this passage is focused heavily on Christ, the passage is also Trinitarian, because it says he's given us his spirit as a seal. And it's interesting, while God's covenant with us is not contractual, Paul does use some languages from the commercial world here. He uses the term seal and guarantee or deposit. which some translations put as down payment.

We've all kind of have an idea. If you've ever bought a house or a plot of land or a new tractor or a new car or anything, and you don't have all that money to put down for that. I know I've talked to you guys who are farmers something about the price of those new combines. There's probably not too many of you that have cash on the barrel that you can walk into the dealership up the road here and lay your cash on the barrel and say, Okay, I want that new combine. Here it is, couple hundred thousand bucks right on the top. You don't have that kind of cash. So you put a down payment and you say, yeah, I'm going to pay that. When we talk about contracts, you sign a contract and say, I'm gonna pay that.

Well, scripture here, Paul says, the Holy Spirit is like that down payment to us. God gives us the spirit to tell us and remind us I'm going to be faithful, and I'm not done with you yet. There's a time coming when you're going to be perfected, when you're not going to have to struggle with sin anymore, when you will be in that land where I will wipe away every tear. And I'm giving you the Holy Spirit as that down payment, that deposit, to assure you that I am faithful. and I will bring to completion. Paul says this in Philippians 2, he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.

He even uses the term anointed here, which is kind of an unusual word. It's the same word that's used for Christ, who was the anointed one, who had the Holy Spirit without measure. And it says, therefore, he would baptize us with his Holy Spirit. In other words, those who have Christ and all of his promised blessings are given the Holy Spirit as the pledge that we really are in Christ, and that all that Christ has will be one day ours.

Now, back to the sacraments, which we alluded to earlier. Sacraments are signs and seals, and that may have a secondary reference here, we can't be sure, but what we do know is that it's the Spirit of God who makes those sacraments effective. They don't work, the technical theological term is ex operato, which is a way of saying magically and by themselves. The sacraments don't work that way. When you're baptized, when you receive the Lord's Supper, they don't work automatically.

But the Spirit takes what's promised, just like he takes what's promised in the word. And he says, just as we received water on you, and just as you receive the elements and the sacraments, I will take those and use those to reassure you that God's promises are there.

The other Great Reformed Catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, puts it this way about baptism. It says, just as the water washes away the dirt, so, just so certainly, our sins are washed away. You know, you wash your hands. You come in, you've been out doing something in the garden, and you got dirty hands, and you go to the water, get the soap and water out, you wash it, the water washes it away, and you look, lo and behold, your hands are clean. That's what the Catechism is saying, in the same way the Holy Spirit assures us that just as the water washes away the dirt, so I make you clean.

Our assurance is oftentimes a three-legged stool. If you want to read this, read 1 John sometimes, because that little epistle talks about all three legs of the stool. A right confession, we confess that we believe in Jesus, changed life good works and love to the brother brethren as evidence but it also talks about the witness of the Spirit it says the Spirit bears witness to us that we are children of God we never must underestimate the witness of the Spirit our confession going all the way back to Calvin, who first really explored this theological idea, that the witness of the Holy Spirit is the ultimate final assurance that we are children of God.

Yet he doesn't work apart from the Word and the sacraments. There was an old term that the old writers used to talk about, enthusiasm. You read old writers, that means somebody who says that they get promises from God totally disconnected from the Word. promises of God, you don't know what the promises of God are unless you read them in the Word. You don't know what the promises of God are unless you receive the sacraments and the Word tells you what the sacraments mean. But the Spirit takes the Word and the sacraments and reassures us. Luther, when he struggled with assurance, now this is foreign to a lot of us, but you know when Luther struggled with assurance, you know what he would say to himself? I've been baptized. I've been baptized. Ask yourself, have you ever, when you struggle with assurance, said, I've been baptized? It's just not natural for us, because in the traditions most of us have been raised in, we don't tend to do that.

But there's something good about what Luther said there. He's saying, I received the sign of baptism. That was God saying, I promise you that just as surely as the water washes away the dirt, so your sins are washed away in Christ. That's a promise of God. So Luther would remind himself, I've been baptized. I believe that promise. I believe just as surely as the water washes away the dirt, my sins have been washed away. He said, I received that sacrament, that baptism, which is one reason why in our reformed tradition, we don't want to rebaptize because it's basically saying, I didn't believe that. That's really what it's saying. I didn't believe that the first time, Lord. You could almost say it's like saying, run that one by me again, please, if you get rebaptized. Run that one by me again. We don't say that.

In the Nicene Creed, the earliest creed of the church, it said, one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. You get baptized once because that's all you need, because God's promises don't go away. You don't need to get baptized 18 times. Because God's, no, we receive the Lord's Supper because Jesus said we need that regularly. It's the Lord's Supper that we receive regularly. But baptism, the Spirit assures us, is once one Lord, one faith, one baptism. He's promised though to never cast us out.

But another facet that we need to look at is that we are indeed called to respond, yes, to Christ. When we focus on the promises of God guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, the temptation is sometimes to assume that these just come, we go on autopilot. These come on automatically or just by saying the correct words. There've been a lot of people who've said the correct words and admit later, you know, I made a profession of faith of some sort.

Various traditions have different ways. In our reformed tradition, we stand up, you go before the elders, you stand up in front of the congregation, you profess your faith. We hope it's genuine all the time. As elders and as a congregation, you can't see in their hearts, you don't know, you hope they're genuine. But sometimes people will make professions of faith that aren't genuine. We hope they're genuine. So it's not the words. It's the reality of trusting in those promises.

Because the text says, we say our amen. We utter our amen. And this is an interesting mix of languages. perhaps giving us a little window on how the early church worshiped. You know, we've worshiped in churches pretty regularly, that where after the benediction or after a prayer at a certain time, the minister will say, and all God's people said, and the congregation responds with amen. Because amen has become a kind of universal word. It's actually from a Hebrew word, amen. That means, so be it. That's reality. I stake my life on it. It's a strong agreement.

It's been regularly used in worship services and liturgies so far removed from their Old Testament roots, yet they're valid in emphasizing the covenantal continuity of the scriptures. It stresses that we are trusting in the stability and security of the divine covenant promises that run from beginning to end throughout the Bible. we are saying our amen to God's promises.

As I said, our response to God is always through Christ. And in one sense, we can never move beyond simple trust that in Christ, everything we need is found there. Whether you're a little child or a new believer, or like myself, a seasoned citizen who's been a believer for many years, We never get beyond that. God's promises are in Christ. Amen. I believe it.

Our faith matures, but it always is rooted in trust, complete trust in him and looking away from ourselves. This is important because in one sense, while there's application all over the place, the basic idea of this is, you might say, what is faith? And a good illustration of this is saying our amen, saying, so be it. That is the rock, that's the anchor of what I do. I place my confidence in Jesus Christ, and that's the foundation of my life. So we said it keeps the sacraments from becoming magic.

But it's interesting, the larger catechism uses this other interesting phrase, baptism and it talks about improving our baptism and if you read that for the first time you might be willing to say, huh? Improving my baptism? You know, there are always these guys on TV that go, the new and improved model. Get this new detergent. It's new and improved. It does better than X, Y, Z, what it did before. Get the new and improved. And we always, we have a tendency to go, I've heard that before. And sometimes we even say, I like the old better.

But so when you read in the catechism where it says about improving your baptism, you might say, what in the world is it talking about? How in the world do I make my baptism better? Well, this is kind of an old English way of speaking. It's basically saying, the promises of God are there, now what in the world are you doing with them? That's basically what it's saying. Are you trusting them every day? Are you going back to those promises and are you saying, God, when I was baptized, you made promises. You said, just as the water washes away the dirt, so are my sins washed away.

I'm going to live out of that. I'm going to live and believe. I'm going to stake my life on the fact that I belong to you and your promises are trustworthy, which is why we go to our last facet this morning. That is, God's yes in Christ has to become the foundation for all of our living. This brings us back to the historical setting of the text.

What has Paul been accused of? Being a vacillator, someone who goes back and forth, back and forth, yes one time, no another time, yes, no, yes, no. That's what they said about him. We can't trust you, Paul. You told us you're gonna come, yes or no? Is it yes or is it no? What's Paul's argument?

He says, because I believe in a God of complete veracity, a God who's completely faithful, who's concentrated all his promises of Christ, this means that I'm gonna stake my life on that. He says, that doesn't mean that my plans didn't have to change.

They did. Why did I have to change my plans? Because I wanted you to know more about the gospel of Jesus Christ. I wanted you to spend more time with you so that you could be rooted and grounded in the good news about Christ. He says, it's because I was the bearer of such gracious promises that he said, I sought to bring you greater opportunities for blessing. That's what he's talking about, the second benefit or the second blessing or the second opportunity, depending on how you translate that.

So that brings us back for each of us to ask ourselves, does this affect you? Does this become the foundation of your life that God is trustworthy? Now, When you think about us being trustworthy, there are lots of reasons why we should be trustworthy.

First of all, God commands it. Practically, it works. But we need to fortify ourselves, as Paul did here, that we serve a trustworthy God. And therefore, our lives need to be lives that are lives of yes. Because Christ is yes, we become people whose word is yes. We become people that should be noted for being trustworthy. Yes, the situations change sometimes, as Paul's did here.

But our lives should not be seen as lives that are yes and no. This has implications for our businesses, our marriage relationships, the vows we made as members of the Church, and all sorts of ways. You know, there was a famous Puritan that one of the non-Puritans in English asked him, England one time back in the 17th century, why in the world are you Puritans so precise, try to be so precise about everything? And he said, well, sir, I serve a very precise God. How in the world can I not be trying to be precise about everything the way I live?

In the same way, we serve a trustworthy God. How can we not be trustworthy people? Whatever vows we've made should always be approached from the perspective that God is faithful and has demonstrated his faithfulness to the greatest degree possible in Christ. How can we who bear his name be anything else but faithful to the promises we've made? Even when we have to change plans sometimes, Just changes should always be consistent with our amen to God's faithfulness and not a means of self-fulfillment, which is sometimes all too often why people change their minds or change their, but how many people haven't you run into that say, well, I had to get out of my marriage because I couldn't be faithful because I couldn't be fulfilled in that marriage. No, that's not what we're called to be. We're called to be faithful. We must come to grips with the truth that a person who has a self-centered focus is likely to be mainly undependable if it means to his or her advantage. Only a focus on Jesus Christ can help us to become and be and remain dependable people.

Closing Prayer

Well, to summarize, Christ is God's yes. And the key question for each of us today is whether or not we believe that. Do we believe all of God's promises are yes in Christ? Do we trust the Holy Spirit who testifies to that truth? Is that the foundation of your life? And do you testify that by boldly proclaiming to the world that in Christ all of God's promises are yes? to a world that mostly knows the disappointment of broken promises. Indeed, as the old King James used to say on this passage, in him, all the promises of God are yea and amen. And that's what this passage is telling us. Well, let's pray. Father, we stand here recognizing we are often unfaithful and yet you are completely faithful and all of your promises are yes in Christ. We ask and pray that we would truly live out of that reality. For in Christ's name we pray.

Thanks for listening to this week's message from God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in rural southeast Iowa. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith in your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue, Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.