[AI translation] From the beginning of the Church of Jesus Christ to this day and on to the end of the world, she has only one enemy, only one danger: the unbelief and infidelity of her own members. The danger of the Church is never to be shaken by a historical storm from outside, but to be dormant, to grow weary in its witness in the world, to become empty in the Spirit, to become disobedient to its Lord and to become untempered salt in its environment, to lose its essence, to abandon its vocation, to fail in its mission. It is at such times that the Lord of the Church, who is also Lord of the world, may well shake His people by worldly means, stirring up a storm around them, as He did around the little boat of the disciples on the Sea of Galilee. But this judgment of God in history is not yet the last judgment, not to destroy His people, but to awaken them from their slumber, to make them truly the Church, truly His holy people! His judgment is also a sign of grace, a sign of His love, a proof that He has not given up on Him, that He has not abandoned Him, that He has not rejected Him. He chastises the one He loves, we have just sung, and He does not chastise him to harden his heart, to make him doubt, to shake his faith and his confidence: but precisely to awaken him, to make him fit, to renew him!I am convinced that this is what God wants for our Church: to renew us from within, to draw our lives closer to Himself. There are countless signs, both external and internal, that the Lord of the Church wants to become alive, real, visible among us, that He is coming towards us on the waves, as He came towards the tossing cheese in the storm of Genesis. I feel so strongly that Jesus Christ is on the threshold! He knocks, He knocks, ready to appear among us with His renewing grace, His sanctifying power, and to make us, His people, truly and fully His people. Oh, let us not now block the way! That is why John the Baptist's call is so timely for us now: "Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." (Lk 3,9) And let us all take this now as a personal command from the Lord. For the church can only be refilled with Christ in one way: by its members being filled with Christ. The church is not the pastor, not the pastors, not the presbytery, not the presbyterate, not any other official - but the church is you, it is us, the people who believe and live in Christ personally, together! Therefore, it is to you, and to you, and to me, to prepare the way of the Lord...! The way of Christ into our own individual lives. For Jesus Christ is ready to enter, to possess, to use. It is never up to Him to redeem, to cleanse, to sanctify, to renew - it is always up to us! He has already come to us and is coming again, but something must happen on our part. God is doing everything for His people, but there is something we must do to be fully His people: to prepare the way for the redemptive power of Christ to penetrate our hearts, to permeate our lives!
Do you know what this Way is? Oh, how often we have heard it: repentance!!! Repentance is always necessary before Christ can enter a person's life with His forgiving, reconciling, renewing grace! I know that we don't like to hear this word, I know that it has been abused a lot lately, it is true; - but it is also true that without full repentance, without truly serious repentance, the redeeming grace and power of Jesus will never come to life in you, in anyone! I know from experience that it is very difficult to come this far, to humble yourself to this depth! We would rather do anything but face our sins! We cover it up, conceal it, deny it, or if we can't: we blame someone else for it, we explain it with our living conditions, but we shouldn't have to face the shame and disgrace of it, because we can't bear it! But we all have to face up to our sins, to our whole ruined life. Everything will be revealed, exposed! It happened in a school-leaving examination in the twenties that one of the candidates was given the task of deducing the cosine of a spherical triangle. He took the chalk in his hand, drew the figure and began the long, difficult deduction. He wrote the numbers and the letters one after the other, a lot of them, almost filling the whole board, but the result just wouldn't come out. In the meantime he noticed that he had not even drawn the diagram correctly, that there was already a mistake in the starting point, and that the correct result could not be obtained. Confident that the president of the school-leaving examination did not know mathematics, he took the sponge and erased the space on the full blackboard, saying: this deduction is so long that I will just write the final result. Fortunately, he knew that by heart and managed to get himself out of trouble. Yes, in a final exam, sometimes it helps to have a good performance, to be quick, to have presence of mind, to have the final sentence memorised in advance! But not in life! But many of us do the same with our Christianity! We know beforehand what the final formula, the final act is: eternity, salvation, because we have already learned it beforehand. We also know that we have missed the deduction somewhere, that there is a mistake somewhere, and yet we carry on with unheard-of recklessness under the illusion that the desired result will somehow come out in the end. Well, it doesn't! There, in the big final exam, good pseudo-smugness is of no help, there one cannot cleverly cut oneself out, everything will be revealed, no matter how well one has managed to cover up the mistake, the error, the sin!
God's law is a more solid law than mathematical rules. God's truth, God's law, is built into the foundations of the world, into the very constitution of our human being, and even into the very constitution of human society and the universe around us. This means that all of human life cannot get along otherwise than by fitting into God's will. Whether we want it or not, we ourselves, as human beings and the whole world, are made for God. So if at any point in our lives we come into conflict with God's law, with God's will, sooner or later we become orphans, strangers, at odds with ourselves and with the world. God's laws cannot be broken by man, but man breaks them! For example, if a person comes into conflict with the seventh commandment and wants to live out his life as he pleases, wants to break out of the moral order imposed by God, he will soon become sad and disappointed. He is ashamed and dismayed. I thought that marital fidelity was a hell to escape from, and it turned out to be the hell I ended up in!" said a disillusioned young woman who rebelled against God's law. She realised that she had rebelled not only against the moral law, but also against her own happiness, her own life. And she broke the laws of God's kingdom. And so it is with every kind of sin, with every manifestation of sin. When a man, a church, a society, goes against God's will, sooner or later it will be bankrupt, it will be crushed by it. I am not here to scourge our sins, since I do not know whose main sin, whose hidden sin, whose secret misery. I only want to say that we should take deadly seriously every sin we have. Even in its most insignificant form, sin is a mortal danger, it draws the wrath of God upon us!
Brethren, do not misunderstand God's forgiving love! It does not mean that He simply forgets or condones what we have done wrong! Sin has a terrible penalty! Either on us or on Jesus Christ! But the penalty for your sin is only on Jesus Christ - for you - when you lay down your sins under His cross in the humility of complete repentance, surrendering them to Him! If you do not repent, name it, put it out, hand it over to Jesus: then there is no forgiveness, no forgiveness for it! Beware, Brothers and Sisters, for Satan can deceive us even with repentance. Remorse, regret over a wrong done is not repentance. Nor is shedding tears of emotion at the mention of one's sins. In true repentance, one is overcome by a great determination: I don't want to go on like this! I am bankrupt! I surrender!
The sermon of John the Baptist calling for repentance was attended by many people, who confessed their sins. One could say to him: what a spiritual awakening there on the banks of the Jordan! He cries even more harshly, "Ye race of venomous serpents, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Many people want to flee from God's wrath, but they refuse to give up the very thing that draws it: their sin. Oh, when we are frightened, when the shadow of God's impending judgment looms over our lives, we do everything we can to escape the wrath to come: we pray more, we give double, we take communion - but we do not think of cleansing our hearts, our lives, from all sin, of confessing our sins honestly and laying down our burdens! Then, when the trouble is over: we pick up our old life where we left off. If someone were to ask: "Who has warned you to flee from the wrath of God?", we could not say God's paternal love of a father who welcomes us home, the desire to welcome Christ knocking at the door, the hatred of our sins, but only the fear, the terror of the storm, the terror of death and eternity! And this is not true repentance! True repentance is the sober willingness to finally come to terms with my sins, my pride, my impure thoughts, my selfish behavior, my vanity, my lies, my hypocrisy, my dishonesty, my resentment - to mercilessly come to terms with everything God calls sin in His Word! I will, but not by cleaning all these stains out of me, because I cannot! Not by exalting virtue and goodness in myself, because then I will fall into another hypocrisy. But by telling Jesus everything honestly, by denouncing myself to the heavenly Judge and by being ready to submit to His will! Here begins the renewal of a life. Here Christ enters into our lives with His renewing power and grace! Here begins the inner renewal of the Church!
If you are truly waiting for Him: so make a way for Him! Stand in the light of God's Word, ask God to lay His hand on the sins in your life that are blocking Christ's way to your heart. The specific sins that exclude you from the real presence of God and make you spiritually helpless, that make your life fruitless and your faith barren, that hinder the good, reconciling, comforting powers of God from flowing in! Just be willing to give it all: Christ will take it away. Only be willing to be cleansed of all these things: Christ will cleanse you. You only prepare the way before him: the way of penitent repentance. He will come and enter you and bless you!
Do we really want to be renewed?! Christ is ready to renew us! Only we can pray from the heart now:
Come, my King Jesus!
I open my heart.
Save me from the evil one,
Do not let it corrupt me.
With thy blood that has been shed,
Wash from me what stains;
Show me the way of life,
And I cannot find it.
Heal my many ills,
Ease the sorrow of my heart;
Doubt and sorrow, if they torment me,
Make my faith sure.
(Canto 464, verses 1-3)
Amen
Date: 10 February 1957.
Lesson
Lk 3,2-16