Your Chains Are Broken
God's Law condemns you. His Gospel does something else entirely.
[This is a sermon for Sunday, June 22, 2025, the Second Sunday after Pentecost on this year’s Church calendar. Congregations without pastors, pastors whose other duties have prevented them from attending to study and preparation during the week, Bible study leaders, and others should feel free to use it. Please let me know if you have used it and how. Thanks and God bless you.]
The categories of Law and Gospel are well known to most Lutheran Christians. We say that in God’s Word, these are the two ways God speaks to us.
God’s Law can’t make us righteous, because none of us can perfectly obey God’s Law. That Law can only show us that we have no hope of receiving God’s blessings in this life or the next based on our own goodness or good deeds. Romans 3:22 says: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
The righteousness that allows human beings the privilege of calling the God of the universe, “our God, our Lord, or our Father,” isn’t something we can earn by our effort.
Or even by our efforts assisted by God.
We’ll never make ourselves righteous, acceptable in God’s kingdom, by resolving to be righteous. We could never do enough good deeds. That’s what God’s Law, succinctly summarized by the Ten Commandments, tells us. All you have to do is read them and realize that if our eternal life depends on obeying these commands, we’re in trouble.
Our only hope for righteousness is the Gospel, the good news. This is the other Word God speaks to us. We find the Gospel throughout the Bible, including the Old Testament, where those who believed in God anticipated the coming of the Savior Jesus, Who would crush the head of evil and the evil one underfoot. (Genesis 3:15) Even Abraham and Sarah, who lived long centuries before the birth of Jesus, knew that God, the promise-keeper, was already conquering sin, death, and damnation in the Messiah He promised.
A Lutheran theologian of the last century described the Gospel like this: “The Gospel is the forgiveness of sins, nothing else. It is not a theory about the possibility of forgiveness, not a [mere] religious message... The Gospel of Jesus Christ is something quite different. [It tells us, ‘Your sins are forgiven you.’ (Luke 7:48)] That is His Gospel.” [Hermann Sasse]
The Gospel is that Jesus, God the Son, has done for us what we could never do for ourselves. He has perfectly obeyed God’s Law for human beings, then, sinless Himself, bore condemnation and death for our sin that we deserve so that our separation from God is ended eternally! Forgiveness, reconciliation, and all the other benefits of the Gospel happen to us when the Holy Spirit, through the Gospel Word about Jesus, gives us faith in Jesus.
The Gospel declares to you today that Jesus has already died and risen to make you righteous. Faith that that is true for you is the gift of God that allows you to share in Jesus’ victory and say, “Jesus is my Lord!” (1 Corinthians 12:3)
So if we can’t be made righteous in the eyes of God by our performance of God’s Law, what purpose does the Law serve? The apostle Paul talks about that question and about he power of the Gospel in today’s second lesson, Galatians 3:23-4:7.
He starts our lesson with a one-verse history of the human race before the coming of faith: “Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.”
Before anyone knew it was possible to believe in the God Who reveals Himself to us in the crucified and risen Jesus, the whole human race was held in check by God’s law. This was true even of people who had never heard of God’s law, which the Bible says, is written on every human heart [Romans 2:15].
C.S. Lewis explains how this is so in Mere Christianity. Some cultures may say that you should only have one wife and others say you can have many, Lewis notes. But the moral code of no culture says that you can have your neighbor’s wife. And while different cultures may have different ideas of what constitutes murder, no culture says that murder is OK.
The Law of God had an important role before saving faith in the Gospel was made available to any of us. Before God gave the gift of faith in God to Abraham, God’s Law was our guardian. That word, in the original Greek, is paidagogos, or pedagogue, a word that means leader of a child. In the first-century Roman world, a pedagogue was a household slave whose job it was to oversee the life and upbringing of wealthy men’s children. The pedagogue was there to keep the heirs safe and out of trouble, to preserve and prepare them for adulthood and their inheritance.
That, Paul says, is like the function of God’s Law in the lives of those who don’t yet have faith in Jesus. The law paints a picture of what righteousness that is pleasing to God is like. The Law describes the righteousness that makes a person fit for life. In it, there is no idolatry, murder, lying, adultery, sexual promiscuity, false witness, gossiping, or covetousness. A righteous life is one of absolute selflessness and love for God and love for others. The Law presents a way of life that is both God’s will for every human being and the minimum and non-negotiable standard for entry into heaven, every bit of which is impossible for us sinners to live by.
I hope this makes you a bit uncomfortable. Because while God’s Law may be a good teacher, our pedagogue about what’s right and wrong, and may sometimes constrain us from being totally selfish, it’s clear that NONE OF US MEASURES UP TO THE STANDARDS FOR ENTRY INTO GOD”S KINGDOM.
The good news is that once the gift of faith in Jesus has come to us, we no longer need the pedagogy of the Law. We’re spiritual grown-ups, no matter our age, baptized believers who have received a heavenly inheritance from Jesus. By faith in Christ, the Savior Who perfectly obeyed God’s Law and offered His sinless life as a sacrifice for us sinners, we live in the kingdom of God.
Following Jesus then, isn’t about adding another good deed to your to-do list. Following Jesus is about believing in Him and His undying love for you. “This is the work of God,” Jesus says in John 6:29, “that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
Paul says in Galatians 3:26-29: “...in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” When this happens, Paul goes on to say, God sends “the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’ So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.”
These are important words. They show us that through Jesus, everything has changed for you and me! In only a handful of verses in the Old Testament is God called Father. But faith in Jesus entitles us to know God as precisely that. That’s why Jesus teaches us to pray, “Our Father, Who art in heaven…” When we are set free by the Gospel to approach God in this way, the Holy Spirit is telling us that we no longer live under the Law, but are heirs who have an eternal inheritance in God’s Kingdom!
To be sure, God’s Law will still call the person saved by God’s grace in Christ to seek to live in accordance with the will of God. That law will keep calling us to love God and love neighbor, be kind to those hated by others, keep sexual intimacy within the bounds of marriage between a man and woman, refrain from covetousness and stealing, and so on. We will be called to daily take up our crosses and follow Jesus (Luke 9:23).
But the Gospel completely changes our motivation for seeking to do God’s will on earth as it’s done in heaven, though. We won’t do good stuff in a futile effort to be saved. We will do the good God sets before us to do because, in Christ, we are already saved.
In Jesus’ famous parable of the Prodigal Son, you remember, we meet two sons.
One son thinks he must earn his inheritance from his dad and is sure that he’s behaved so well that he deserves that inheritance. This older son doesn’t really trust his father–or believe in him–despite outward appearances of being a good son. This is the son who lives under the Law because he views his relationship with his dad as a deal: He’ll be good, however begrudgingly, and his dad will have to give him the inheritance.
The other son, at the end of the story, realizes that he’s done nothing and can do nothing to earn his inheritance. But, unlike his older brother, he trusts his dad to be gracious to him—to at least allow him to be a servant in his dad’s house, he thinks—even when, after many sins, he returns. And, of course, when he does return, the father doesn’t make the boy a servant, but welcomes the prodigal home with greater forgiveness than the younger son deserved or could ever have imagined. This is what it’s like to be given the gift of faith in Jesus that assures us of our eternal inheritance! This is what life is like when we live under the gracious forgiveness and new life God gives to us in the Gospel.
Dear friends, Christ has died and risen for you so that you CAN turn to Jesus daily and embrace the forgiveness you don’t deserve and the faith in Him that the Holy Spirit has given to you in Baptism, in the Word preached, taught, read, and heard, and in Holy Communion and that saves you for all eternity!
Turn to Jesus, knowing that He has already done everything necessary to make you right with God, to let you live in the freedom of the Gospel, and to ensure that neither the Law, the devil, the world, nor our sinful selves which otherwise leave us damned and separated from God, can prevent you from living in the joy and peace of God’s Kingdom even now in this imperfect world.
The two ways God speaks to us are Law and Gospel. The Law shows us our sin and our need for the Savior. It cannot save us from condemnation and hell because we cannot obey God’s Law. But the Gospel, the good news that Jesus Christ, true God and true man, sinless God in the flesh, has offered Himself on the cross to pay the price for our sin that we owe to God so that we are saved from death, despair, and condemnation and have forgiveness and eternity with God, along with joy amid the imperfections of this world and perfect joy one day in eternity. Jesus tells us, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life…” (John 3:36) Jesus has broken the chains of sin, death, and condemnation, from life under the Law, and set you free to live with faith in Him and His saving Gospel!
Friends, even if you only want to believe that promise from Jesus is true (and Jesus’ promises are ALWAYS true) or even if your faith is the size of a little mustard seed, you can be sure that your want or your little faith is saving faith in Jesus. You belong to Him forever. You can trust that in Jesus, you have everlasting life with Him and that nothing and nobody can take it away. Amen
Thank you! Good sermon.