The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity – Pr. Faugstad sermon
Text: Galatians 3:15-22

In Christ Jesus, who had compassion on us and came to do for us what we could not do for ourselves, dear fellow redeemed:

The Good Samaritan dressed the wounds of the Jewish man who had been beaten, brought him to an inn to take care of him, and provided funds for his ongoing care. Possibly all this happened without the beaten man’s knowledge as he slowly began to recover from his serious injuries. If he had been unaware about what had been done for him and was then informed about it, how do you think he would respond?

We would expect gratitude. He probably thought he would die on that road to Jericho when the robbers attacked him. Yet here he was getting the care he needed and regaining his strength. But suppose his attitude changed as soon as he heard who had helped him: “You say it was a Samaritan?!?” Generally speaking, the Jews and the Samaritans avoided each other. They didn’t like each other. There was a long history of animosity between them. As a rule, they would not go out of their way to help one another.

What if the Jewish man didn’t like the thought of being saved by a Samaritan? What might he do? Think about it in your own life. Imagine a person who has always rubbed you the wrong way, who has brought trouble to your life, who you might even think of as your enemy. Now imagine having a health crisis and waking up to learn that it was your enemy who called the ambulance, who sat by your hospital bed day after day until you finally woke up.

That might result in your enemy becoming your friend. Or you might be suspicious. Is he or she just trying to manipulate me somehow? What’s their angle? You might do what you could to try to cancel your debt with that person. You might say, “What did it cost you to travel to the hospital and eat in the cafeteria? I want to pay you back. Did you miss work? I can compensate you for that too.” But nothing you could do, no amount of money you could pay, would change the fact that your enemy had saved your life. What is the price tag on salvation?

This attempt to balance the scales when a great gift is received is the way many people try to level up with God. They think they can do this by the way they live their life. I expect you have talked with a number of Christians who tell you they hope to be saved because they have “tried to live a good life.” In today’s culture, “living a good life” is less and less tied to any objective standard, like God’s holy Law. It’s more of an internal calculation about what is right and wrong to me which often contradicts God’s Ten Commandments.

But even those who try to keep God’s Law to save themselves are fooling themselves if they think they have done it. God never says we should try our hardest, and that is good enough for Him. Or that as long as we generally do more good than bad, we are okay. Or that we just need to make sure we are better than the people around us.

The Law of God demands our perfection. God says that if you want to get yourself to heaven, the only way to do it is to perfectly do the right things, say the right things, and think the right things. He does not care about what the world cares about. He does not care how attractive you are, how popular you are, how successful you are. He cares about righteousness.

And you and I by our own efforts certainly are not righteous. We might be Good Samaritans in our own way, helping people in need, being generous with our time and money, lifting people up who have been beaten down. But none of these good deeds can open up the gates of heaven, so we can walk through them. Salvation cannot come by what we do because we have not perfectly kept the holy Law of God—not even close.

But St. Paul has some good news to share with us today. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he wrote that God’s gift of salvation is already ours. He explains this by taking us back to Abraham. God made a promise to Abraham. He said, “I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 22:17-18).

God made this promise not because Abraham had earned it, not because he had shown himself to be perfect. God made this promise because He is a good and merciful God who loves us, a God who promised to save sinners immediately after the first people He made fell into sin. The promise He made to Abraham was a continuation of that first promise. The gift He gives to you now stems from that first promise. “God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son” (Joh. 3:16).

It was only later, some 400 years after God made the promise to Abraham, that He delivered His holy Law to Moses to pass along to the people of Israel. The Law was not put in place as an alternate path to salvation, though some began to think of it this way as time went on. The Israelites later on thought they could please God by their outward behavior, even if there was no faith in their hearts. We see the same attitude in the Jewish religious leaders who actively opposed Jesus’ teaching and work. And we see the same thing today from the people who think God is pleased with them because of how well they have inwardly kept His Commandments.

But if keeping the Law is not an alternate path to salvation, then why did God give it? Paul explains that the Law of God “was added because of transgressions, until the Offspring should come to whom the promise had been made.” The LORD God gave the Law to show the people and remind them why they needed the promise.

If God had not given such a clear standard, etched in stone, what do you suppose would happen? As time passed, the understanding of His will would become weaker and weaker, and consciences would become duller and duller. Then we would have nothing to compare ourselves to but one another, and that is setting the bar pretty low.

God sets the bar high through His Law, very high—too high for us to possibly reach no matter how good we try to be. His Law shows us our sin. It condemns us. That is its chief purpose and function. The Law kills any hope we have of getting ourselves to heaven.

But God’s promise came before the Law. He promised man’s salvation apart from man’s work. He promised to provide an Offspring of Abraham, through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. That Offspring was Christ, true God and true Man. When He became Man, the holy Law applied to Him too. But the Law did not break Him like it has broken us. Jesus made His righteousness clear when He said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Mat. 5:17).

It was a bold claim, but Jesus backed it up with perfection, perfection in His actions, words, and thoughts. He stepped in to keep the Law in our place. He shouldered our burden. He is our Good Samaritan who saw us beaten and helpless because of our sin and had compassion on us. He came to do for each and every sinner in human history what not one of us had the strength to do for ourselves. Romans 10:4 says, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”

The righteousness we need to enter heaven is ours by faith in Jesus. Everything we need to be saved is supplied by Him. And He not only kept the Law for us. He also paid the consequences for our breaking of God’s Law. He suffered the wrath and punishment of God that we deserved. He endured the eternal flames of hell in our place. For every single wrong we have done, Jesus says, “I forgive you. I paid for that sin.”

Going back to the Law and relying on our own works after we have heard this, would be like the Jewish man trying to pay the Samaritan for his charity, or like trying to repay an enemy who showed us kindness as though we could undo or improve on the good that had been done. Jesus, the Son of God, perfectly lived, died, and rose again for all sinners. He is the fulfillment of that first and best promise. He is God’s gift for our fallen world and for our sinful hearts.

Of course God wants us to live according to His Commandments. He wants us to help anyone in need and show kindness to all our neighbors. But our salvation does not rely on any of that. Our salvation depends on Him. And that’s what makes us certain of it. I am saved, and you are saved because God tells us so. That’s His promise—His gift—and God’s Gift Has No Strings Attached.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, forevermore. Amen.

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(picture from the Outdoor Service on August 25, 2024)