So What?  That is the question that every sermon must address at some point.  So, what difference does that make in my life?  So, what do I do in response to that good news?  What practical difference does that make?  This is a set of questions that I need to address more concretely in my sermons.  What is the payout?  What is the effect of that cause?  What difference does life in the Spirit really make?  I need to focus in on that question and speak clearly.  

If I had done that I might have talked about prayer, about expectation, about humility and recognizing limits.  But then again, that is all a bit abstract.  Maybe next week I can come up with something concrete.  

Grace on top of grace.  That is, according to John 1:16, what we receive out of God's fullness.  Paul puts it this way in Romans 5, being made righteous through faith we have peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have access to the grace in which we stand.  

We receive grace and we can take our stand in grace.  We can receive forgiveness and mercy, new life and peace even though we don't deserve it. We can receive all that as a gift from Jesus and we can take our stand with those gifts in the presence of Jesus.  The hard part is taking that stand without reaching out to secure our balance with good works, with perfect church attendance, or with little acts of kindness or ways of goodness.  The hard part is staying where you start, in a position of need, in a place of weakness, in a place where God's power and not our goodness is evident and sufficient.  That sense of naked dependence is the way of discovering the freedom of God that comes in grace.  I think that I could have highlighted that yesterday as the way we learn to live in Grace.  Paul says in Galatians, "i do not put aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died in vain."  Not putting aside grace, not holding onto anything else is hard, and yet the longer we trust, the more secure in Christ we come.  The longer we trust, the easier it is to beat back the monster of guilt and hear the word of grace that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  

Here is what I tried to say yesterday.

 Yesterday's sermon was dense and different.  Dense in the sense of being full of big and familiar words like justification, the cross, the sin, sacrifice and salvation. It was also dense because I tried to cover to much.  Really, I now realize I should have done three sermons to start this series.  How Jesus lived free, how he died to make us free, and then how we live into that freedom.  Oh, well.  I tried to cover alot and I hope that there we a few points that were engaging and different.  The different part was what I was trying to highlight.  Namely, that we were co-crucified with Jesus and so dead to sin and as a result free to be for and with God.  

What else could have been different?  I think that expounding on the false way of freedom by escape could have been helpful.  In particular, it might have been good to translate Steven Slater's escape into more common ways of escape.  How watching TV, numbing pain with alchohol, abandoning friends and family or simply ignoring others as you run out the door to play are forms of escape that simply don't make you free.  You will hear more of that over the next few weeks though.  So with that warning, here is what you heard yesterday.

 When I came in on Monday something happened.  What didn't happen was me posting my sermon.  Sorry I forget.  Here it is.