I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for it is the power of God unto salvation.

— Romans 1:16

    We see that sin has bound the whole human race and even the whole creation moans for freedom from the bondage.  Satan has us exactly where he wants us and therefore it is necessary that we understand our position in life.  It is necessary that we not side with the chief priests and the lawyers saying, “We have Abraham as our father and we have never been in bondage to anyone!  How can you say ‘you shall be set free’?”  We are slaves and freedom is foreign to us.  “So Luther could say that unless one has the Spirit of God one does not perceive one iota of what is in the Scriptures.”  Our reality is so foreign that our bonds feel natural to us.  Therefore the Spirit of God brings us from bondage to freedom through the bondage, scourging, and death of Jesus Christ.  “If one starts from the premise and defense of freedom of the will one will end in bondage...If one starts from the premise of bondage and hears the Word and promise of the Gospel of Christ Jesus, salvation breaks, for bondage shall be broken.”

    The person who stands before God alone sees only terror.  “Luther could even say that apart from Jesus God is indistinguishable from the devil.”  Standing there alone is like standing before death itself.  Despair and darkness gird the loins and render the sinner defenseless.  He will squirm and fight to keep his own, but will fail.  And so he will create for himself gods out of dirt, clay, wood, money, possessions, etc.  They will look pretty for a time, but as Psalm 115 reminds us, “They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not: They have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not: They have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they walk not: neither speak they through their throat.”  He will therefore change what he can so that he is no longer terrified, but rather is comforted.

    Man is obedient to his sin, but finds an enemy in the Word of God.  We are called to be obedient.  Paul tells us that women should obey their husbands.  We could say then that it is the duty of the church as the royal bride of Christ to obey him.  The problem is that we always disobey.  We are never full of obedience because “whenever God’s Word meets us, it meets us as the enemy.”  We return to our own vomit like Gomer fleeing from Hosea.   

    Specifically, this paper started out being an interest in the phrase, “obedience is a Gospel word.”  It has grown from that now.  For Luther, the center of theology is justification.  Yet the imputing or handing over of Christ’s justifying work on the cross to our own bound will is what gives life, not to our obedience, but our being known as sons in the heavenly kingdom.  Our life before God can only move forward because of his absolution.  Unless God pours absolution on us from the cross, we are left bound to die on the side of the road.  Phrases like, “obedience is a Gospel word,” and “repentance is Gospel,” should make many a Lutheran scratch their head.  We will see that speaking in this way could be understood to be counter-productive because it leads Christians to “their own prayers and wrestlings with God in order that they may win their way into a state of grace; in other words, when they are told to keep on praying and struggling until they feel that God has received them into grace.”  Lutherans have always been good to not point inward to our own hearts, but rather to the cross of Jesus.  And it is the Gospel that makes it possible for us to be obedient from time to time, but we always fall.  The old Adam always rises to see a new day.  Our preaching cannot include the preaching of the Gospel that has been turned into a preaching of repentance.  Rightly divided, Law and Gospel, will bring the bound captives to freedom in Jesus’ blood.

    “In short, if the Law does not find its limits in Christ, then all is lost.”  Man is a master of twisting words and coming up with meanings to suit his needs.  Unfortunately, as man becomes comfortable in his sin, he establishes himself.  He becomes a master of interpretation and loses the very gift he is trying to reach.  “Therefore, those who interpret the term ‘Gospel’ as something else than the ‘good news’ do not understand the Gospel, just as those people do who have turned the Gospel into a law rather than grace and have made Christ a Moses for us.”  The Law shows us our need for Jesus but it is unable to free us from our own bondage.  It must bring us to a common playing field.  In other words, the Law tears us down to the lowest common denominator.  That is seen especially in American society.  “In our relativistic age, the validity of any concept is not in its truth by some objective standard, but in its meaning for the individual.”  Yet when it comes down to it in the end, man is terrified by this absolute.  He is left in pain and lost.

    The pastor’s task must be to comfort and rescue the lost.  He cannot do this with only with the Law and he cannot do it only with the Gospel.  The fundamental problem with saying that obedience is Gospel is that it takes God out of the narrative.  He no longer is the one in control of things.  “If it is going to deliver on such promises, the certainty of faith itself, then God must be in control of all related events and the unfolding of every moment.”  The God that died upon the cross to free everyone from the bondage of sin is the only one perfectly faithful to his task.  Gospel is always about God taking what is dead and lifeless and making it new again. 

    The bondage of the human will is at the center of it all.  We are wrapped in unbelief.  “The problem is not that we are forced but that we do not want to.  We are ‘bound and determined’ as we often say, to have our own will.”  We do not want to be obedient and therefore we rarely ever are.  We are so against the Gospel that we make alterations to our own reality because we will do anything to get out of the temporal pain belief in God causes us.  “The faith that gives God justice does not have to do only with God in and of himself, but it is connected at the same time with the ‘I’ of mankind in which his presence in the world is embodied.  Peace with God means in the same breath war with the self and strife in the world.”

    However, this is the very purpose of the Law and the Gospel.  By the Word of Truth, God is making peace with his people and creating havoc between the sons of God and the world.  The Old Adam in turn is creating his own havoc by digging his heels into the dirt from which he was made.  He feels empowered by his accomplishments and wants recognition for his work.  His time is spent on himself.  By nature humans look in toward themselves.  We are born as navel gazers.  “Unbelief, on the other hand, is to seek one’s own justice; to defend it over against God’s justice; to insist on one’s own achievements; to measure everything—both what is earthy and one’s life before God—by one’s own concept of good and evil.”  Ever since Adam and Eve took of the tree they were forbidden they have laid a claim on this good and evil distinction.  The only answer then is to preach to him a proper Law and Gospel distinction.  Otherwise man will continue to talk his way into justifying his sins and his ways. 

    “God, I must have some say about my eternal destiny.  You can have your necessity and your omnipotence and all that, but when it comes down to my destiny I must have at least that ‘little bit’ of freedom that sees the eventual outcome…”  Man will claw his way to any little bit he can receive.  In the midst of all his effort, he remains lost and unable to help himself in the end.  The sickness is unknown to him.  He will die a slow death in his sin and never know that it is upon him.  Only when the Good Physician diagnoses his disease is he confronted with the truth.  By the work of the Holy Spirit, the pastor preaches the Word of Truth, that like a mirror shows the true reality to him.  A pastor seeks to save the lost and by the help of the Spirit he rightly divides the Word of Truth that it may kill him.  “A person must first be destroyed because he is the person who holds out his own ideal of what is good, true, just, and godly.”  Only when the person is destroyed in the Law is faith allowed to grow and take hold in the very midst of the sinner’s life.

    Therefore by the preaching of the Word, the Old Adam is drowned and killed.  By the destruction of man, Christ is set up in the place of him, a new Adam for the old one.  It is therefore by the preaching of the Word that pastors truly reach the lost and care for the sheep of God.  “If the God preached in the biblical Word acts as declared in actual fact, then situational or characterological differences are, in the end irrelevant.  There is just one thing left: preaching.” 

The situations, the realities and the walls that men build up around themselves are penetrated in the preaching of God’s Word.  It is like the Lord walking through the locked doors of the upper room.  It is in this moment that the man knows his diagnosis and sees himself as he really is.  “Luther calls this recognition: becoming a sinner.”  So it here that the sinner knows that he is a sinner and “the recognition of sin is conveyed and defined through the confession of sin.”

    The failures of a man come to roost and to haunt him.  Therefore it is important that the preacher comfort the lost and accused.  In the preaching of the Word it comes out that sin and grace exist at the same time.  We are both sinner and saint.  One does not negate or destroy the other this side of heaven.  Preachers can lead a person to despair if this is ignored.  This was a great burden lifted off the shoulders of Luther, “What a terrific discovery it was then for Luther to have understood that sin and grace do not follow upon each other, but exist together because the person of faith in God learns two things at the very same time—that he is lost and that God is near.”  And what if the preacher keeps this from the sinner?  The sinner will despair.  There is a learning curve as the man realizes his nature and yet grasps his salvation.  But if the preacher directs the sheep to their own works they will see their own failures and be robbed of the article of justification. 

    Instead a preacher must use the Word of the Gospel to lead the sheep through the valley to the still waters.  “We learn under his healing hand to grasp, at first gradually, that sin is really a sickness unto death and we are already free of sin when we begin to recognize how deeply we were lost in it.”  If sin really is a sickness unto death, then the task of the pastor is so very important.  A pastor then takes the sinner saint by the hand and walks them through the rough and tumble to the blood of Jesus.  He must smear the blood upon the forehead and then he must wash that sheep in the blood in such a way to drown the old Adam.  This is a process that happens over and over again.  Leading the sinner saint to the water and then killing the Old Adam so that new life can spring forth.  The preacher does this by rightly dividing the Law and the Gospel. 

    The preacher must take all the care he can not to take the article of Justification out of the center of the Christian life.  It is easy to make Christ the teacher of obedience and to preach repentance, but ultimately, it must be remembered that only the blood of Christ can make a dead body alive again.  So the preacher flings the blood of Christ upon the sheep when he preaches that he might plant the Holy Spirit deep inside of the parish ears.  The tree may need to be pruned and fertilized and even watered, but the gardener cannot force the fruit to come forth.  The Holy Spirit does that.  “Giving God justice therefore means receiving this God who seeks us through his Word, so that his Word may become in us what it already is in him; that we may conform ourselves to it and remain steadfast in it.”  Immediately I am brought to the explanation of the third article of the Creed, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel…”  We cannot give God justice, obey him, or keep any of his commandments apart from the Holy Spirit.  “At the center of faith, for Luther, stands the revealed God who meets us in his Word.”

    Teaching that obedience is a Gospel word or that repentance is Gospel may create more harm than good.  Too much time needs to be wasted to explain away these terms as the cross inches off from the center of our focus.  “Not to be cautious about the terms he uses is a great and serious fault even in a preacher whose personal faith may be correct.”  These words may be a sign of larger problems in teaching and care.  “Therefore faith must be taught correctly so that it is clear that through it a new person is shaped and in it a new person comes into being that cannot be separated from Christ, but clings to him steadfastly as if to say ‘I am like Christ’ and likewise, Christ will say, ‘I am like the sinner that clings to me’...so that this faith is forged inwardly in Christ the way a man and wife are forged together.  Thus, faith is not a passive quality, but rather an unspeakable power.”

    Finally it all comes down to preaching.  Here the preacher must find and comfort the lost and dying sheep of Christ’s flock.  He must care for them and feed them.  By the Word of Truth he must bind up their wounds and with the pulpit he must prepare and point them to eat the bread of heaven.  He cannot do that if he confuses Law and Gospel.  He must not lead them to a pasture where the article of justification is taken out of the center.  A preacher that does that will soon find that the sheep “will not know why [they] are evangelical Christians or should remain so.”  To say that justification of the cross is the center of our faith, we must preach that the cross is Gospel and that Jesus’ love for sinners is a Gospel Word.  We must use Gospel Words like: Jesus died for your sins, and your sins have been destroyed, and you are now free from sin, death and the devil.  These are comfort to the sinner.  Let us walk and lead the sheep to Calvary so they can wash themselves in the blood of the Lamb.