The Night is Almost Gone

 Romans 13:11-14

And this do, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed.  The night is almost gone, and the day is at hand.  Let us therefore lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.  Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy.  But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts.

Sermon for 1st Sunday in Advent                                                       12/01/24

The Night Is Almost Gone

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

Have you ever tried anything really difficult?  Some of the most common and most difficult things to do are quitting smoking and dieting.  People struggle against smoking and eating and very often fail to achieve what they desired – or what they said that they desired.  Many times, the problem is that they can see the advantage of doing the thing they are aiming at, but when push comes to shove, they really do not want to do it all that badly.  They are clearly not willing to endure what they need to endure to reach their goal.  I am very familiar with struggles of that sort myself.

A noteworthy fact is, when the motivation is powerful enough, the temptation to do that thing you seem powerless to resist suddenly loses all of its power.  For example, a writer who had tried and failed to quit smoking for decades wrote that when the doctor told him that he had cancer and was going to die soon from it, he lost all desire to smoke, and had no difficulty never picking up another cigarette.  He wrote about it, in the last article he ever wrote, in Reader's Digest when I was a teen-ager.  It was actually published after he died.  People who could never discipline themselves to lose weight have often found that health problems, a brush with death, or severe pain caused by their weight gave them the ability to do what they formerly did not possess the discipline to accomplish.  These events are simply illustrations of human nature.

Our text, this morning, lays out the only genuine motivation for Christian holiness.  The task of actually being holy is beyond our abilities - our holiness is from God.  But the holiness which adorns our conduct is a cooperative endeavor.  God gives us the power, and guides us in the doing - even gives to us the will to do it, but the actual doing of it is ours.  And still it is incredibly difficult - and so we need the proper motivation to enable us to do anything at all and to endure the terrible lure to do that which is sinful - and our text tells us that motivation.  The only way we can do it is to keep in mind that the night is almost gone - and that is our theme this morning: The Night Is Almost Gone.

Before I talk about that holiness, however, I need to make one thing clear: Jesus Christ is our true holiness.  What this text talks about is our conduct by which we confess Christ and show forth His glory, and live as His children, but our true holiness is Jesus Christ.  He pours our forgiveness and give us His holiness.  That is a part of the Gospel.  We are holy in Christ by imputation – He counts us righteous with His righteousness.  In and of ourselves, even the good things we do are corrupted with sin and unholy aside from Christ's cleansing and gift of righteousness.  With that truth in mind, we continue with the text.

The first thing that impresses me from the text – as you might have surmised – is the urgency of the message.  The Apostle Paul is pressing the importance of the holiness of the Christian's conduct on the basis of the realization that its almost over.  The time of this world is almost done.  Jesus is coming back any time now.  Whatever is going to be done needs to be done now and we need to have a sense of urgency about it.  It is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep!  The night of sin and darkness is almost gone, and the day of salvation and life eternal is at hand.  You can see the sky brightening in the east already.

That is especially important because we don't want to be found unprepared, living as though we are not Christians.  One reason, of course, to not want to be found living as though you are not a Christian is that if you live in such a manner, without concern for being God's holy child in all that you do, you probably are not a Christian in reality.

Living for this world and in the values and attitudes of the world around us is the sleep from which we need to awaken.  The hard part of the instructions Paul gives us is making no provision for the flesh in regards to its lusts.  To do otherwise is to be asleep.  Paul described such a man in First Corinthians, and delivered him to Satan for the destruction of His body in order to rescue his soul.  What that means, precisely, is debated, but obviously this was a man who needed to wake up!  He who dies with the most toys does not win - he just dies.  Life is not about accumulating possessions, or having a good time, or even watching your grandchildren grow.  Those things may be part of life, but your life is about Christ, the hope of salvation, and rescuing the lost and confused around us.

Paul gets pretty specific.  Life is not about partying.  That is what carousing and drunkenness refer to.  God wants us to enjoy life, but all things in moderation.  

Life is not about taking the most pleasure out of it that you can.  That is what words about sexual promiscuity and sensuality are about.  Promiscuity distorts life and makes it all about one particular pleasure, and misses or deliberately rejects God's plan for our happiness and well-being in life.  Sensuality, on the other hand, simply lives for the pleasure and delightful, sensual experiences of it.  The life of a Christian is not about how it feels.

Our lives are not about who is first or who is greater – strife and jealousy arise out of such a misunderstanding of the purpose of life.  In fact, strife and jealousy in the church always demonstrates that we have forgotten who is first and who is greatest – Jesus Christ.  These mistaken behaviors and focuses are the sorts of things that Paul refers to when he instructs us to lay aside the deeds of darkness.

Our alternate course is to put on the armor of light.  That expression is used in parallel with the expression, put on the Lord Jesus Christ.  Our alternatives are to sleep in sin and do the deeds of darkness or put on the Lord Jesus Christ –  which means faith and laying aside the sorts of evils that Paul has named.  You put on Jesus when you live as though your sins are forgiven, when you walk as a child of light and as one who has eternal life as a certainty, and when your life reflects the conviction that God is your loving heavenly Father, and He is always on your side.

Putting on the Lord Jesus Christ means a change in you and a change in how you relate to the world around you.  The change in you is trust in the forgiveness that Christ won for you on the cross and a humble dependence on God.  Such trust looks back on sin with repentance and the joy of forgiveness — and it looks forward on sin as something alien and deadly and earnestly to be avoided.  The change in your relationship to the world - or how you relate to it - is that you see the world for what it is.

The world is passing away.  It is temporary.  It is not worth your time and devotion.  This life, and the pleasures of it, are not the focus of the life of a child of God in Jesus Christ.  This is not to say that we ignore taking care of the environment, or we deliberately turn away from others in need.  We serve the good of the people around us out of love - but the world does not determine our lives - the love of God for us does.  We cannot panic because someone thinks that the world is falling apart.  God is in control, and although things can look grim at times, and real problems arise around us, we know that God, who loves us and will always care for us, is in absolute control.  That is what I described a moment ago as "humble dependence on God".  We children of God never need to fear what is coming upon the earth.  Our Father can handle it, and will handle it for our sakes.

So, in everything we do, we live out our faith.  We may well work at preserving the world around us – but we do it as an act of faith – not as though we are desperate and frightened about what would happen if we did not, but as those who are taking care of our fellow men and women out of the same sort of love for them that God has shown to us.  We serve our fellow men from a heart of compassion, as God has had compassion on us, and as those whom God has abundantly blessed so that we can be a blessing to others.  Whatever we do, we do it to the glory of God, not because we expect that without our help, God will not also bless them.  All that we do is done as an expression of our faith and a confession of Christ.

The task of confessing Christ and sharing God's grace and salvation is all the more urgent today because we know that the time is short.  The words of Paul, inspired by God, are all the more meaningful today.  If salvation was nearer when Paul wrote to the Romans than when they first believed - imagine how much closer it is today, two thousand years later!  Of course, the hour is late personally - we never know how much time we have to do what God has given us to do.  Each of us knows just how short life is, and how quickly even forty or fifty years can slip by.  But the time left for the entire world has even grown short.  The last day is two thousand years closer – and we started the very last days on Good Friday, when Jesus died for our sins.  On Easter Sunday, when Jesus rose for our justification and showed us what He had in store for those who are in Christ Jesus, the end of this world had begun in earnest.

And we know what it is that God has given us to do.  Our twin tasks are bringing the gospel to others who do not know it yet, and taking care of one another in the faith.  Neither part has priority over the other - and neither part can be ignored due to some misplaced preference for one over the other.  Our lives, our times, and our riches are about the Gospel - telling it to those around us outside of the church, and encouraging our brothers and sisters in the household of God who are inside the church to stand firm, remain faithful, and hold fast to the hope which is ours in Jesus Christ.

And that hope is resurrection from the grave and life eternal beyond sin and death, beyond sorrow and sickness.  This isn't the idle, wishful thinking kind of hope.  This is the hope guaranteed to us by the death of Jesus on the cross in our place, and certified by the resurrection of Jesus from the grave on Easter morning.  This isn't a weak hope, but the certainty of that which is yet to be experienced in its fulness.  Your sins are forgiven, and you are the chosen of God Himself – beloved and precious to Him, and you experience the foretaste of that hope each Sunday in the Lord's Supper, and in the holy absolution, and even in the hearing of God's Word in our lessons and in the sermons.  God is saying, it is going to be like this, only fuller, and richer, and better!

It may seem like life is going on just like it always has.  It might seem at times like the urgency of the work of the people of God is not really all that urgent.  But time is running out.  Jesus told us that it would seem like this.   Paul, writing in First Thessalonians, wrote:  While they are saying, "Peace and safety!" then destruction will come upon them suddenly like birth pangs upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.  But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day should overtake you like a thief; for you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night nor of darkness; so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us be alert and sober.  For those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night.  But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation.   For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.

The message of our Epistle, on this First Sunday in Advent, is know the time.  Wake up!  Salvation - and the end of the world - is much closer today than when you first believed.  Get ready for it, and act the part of who you are – the redeemed of God in Jesus Christ.  It is important as an exercise against the temptations of the devil, of the world, and of our own flesh in these last days.  It is important as a confession of Christ before the world, a world that desperately needs to see Christ and know Christ now, before it is too late.  It is urgent today because the night is almost gone!

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

(Let the people say Amen)