​11th Sunday after Trinity                                                           LSB #’s 744, 555:1, 4, 8-9; 556:1-5
Text – Ephesians 2:1-3
 
And you were dead in the trespasses & sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience – among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body & the mind, & were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
 
WHAT’S A DEAD MAN SUPPOSED TO DO?
 
 
The city of Chicago is infamous   for allowing dead people to vote.  Other than that dead people can’t do much.  They can’t move or eat.  They can’t talk or sing.   That leaves them with rotting, & in the famous words of Martha, the sister of Lazarus, they can & they will stink.  That takes us to this morning’s question, “What’s a dead man supposed to do?” 
A lot of people, who’ve been Christians a long time, end up in this kind of rut.  They live as though God raised them from the dead spiritually so they can be religious zombies.  They believe in Jesus & yet there is no   noticeable effect.   They stash their faith away in a very tiny, private compartment of their life so that no one will notice. 
The end result of that kind of living is far less than it could be.  Paul writes about that in a letter to the Corinthian church:
Because of God’s grace to me, I have laid the foundation like an expert builder.  Now others are building on it.  But whoever is building on this foundation must be very careful.  For no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have – Jesus Christ.  Anyone who builds on that foundation may use a variety of materials – gold, silver, jewels,   wood, hay, or straw.  But on the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done.  …If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer great loss.  The builder will be saved, but like someone barely escaping through a wall of flames.  (1 Corinthians 3:10-13, 15) 
 
Everything you tried to build in this life will be burned up if built on a foundation other than Jesus Christ.  Stashing your faith away in a private compartment of your life will cause you to suffer great loss on Judgment Day even if you are saved.  That doesn’t mean you have to go through life carrying a sign board that says, “Repent or burn!”  What Paul is writing about is that our faith in Jesus should affect every decision we make in this life.  It should not be stored away for use only at church.  Our faith in Jesus is meant to affect every aspect of our being   & our doing: “…anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person.  The old life is gone; a new life has begun!”  (2 Corinthians 5:17 NLT) 
“…you were dead in the trespasses & sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.”  (Ephesians 2:1-2 ESV)    The old life is gone; a new life has begun!”  (2 Corinthians 5:17b NLT) 
Those are amazing words   that speak of incredible power, & yet, the life Jesus lived here on earth was one of incredible restraint.   At any moment He could have called on His heavenly Father who would have sent down legions of angels.  Instead, Jesus allowed Judas to betray Him so that Messiah would be crucified while you & I were yet sinners. 
Jesus died for dead men like you & me.   So now, “What’s a dead man supposed to do?”  To answer that, we need to think of what any particular person is dead to.  Are they dead to sin, or, are they dead to God?  The moment one becomes a child of God they are dead to sin, even though sin still torments them.  Unbelievers though, are dead to God & are following the Devil. 
That may sound harsh to any modern ear, but it is a reality that God’s Word confirms from beginning to end.  Refusing to accept that warning, motivated by God’s life-giving love for us, separates people from His eternal love.   Satan is an expert at blinding people to that truth & what comes naturally to us aligns with the will of the “prince of the power of the air.” 
Hope cannot be found in us.  Paul paints the direst picture, “…we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body & the mind, & were by nature children of wrath...”  (Ephesians 2:3 ESV)    Turning inward to find our true self only solidifies us in death, chained to our sins & eternally cut off from the love of Jesus.  “What is a dead man supposed to do?”   The answer is simple = keep on dying!   If you feel like your Christian walk isn’t accomplishing a whole lot, neither working harder nor working smarter will be the answer.  You need to die more if you want to accomplish more – die to yourself, die to your desires, die to your will.  In the Gospel reading, Jesus gave us a picture of that through a very broken man:
“The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God,   I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’  But the tax collector, standing far off,  would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God,  be merciful to me,  a sinner!’” 
Our desires & our will come from our sinful nature.  It needs to die so that our saintly nature can take over.  The tax collector was killing his desires, his will, his sinful nature through repentance.  His prayer was not just a one-time thing because of one really bad decision.  He realized that everything about himself was wrong & he needed God’s mercy. 
Likewise, you & I are so messed up by sin that our Christian walk will always be a struggle in this life.  That is the nature of being a child of God in the here & now.  As he begins writing this 2nd chapter of Ephesians, Paul is encouraging us & exhorting us to keep on dying every day – keep on dying to our old self so that the Holy Spirit may daily raise up the new self. 
Through the law of the ten commandments, we can see our failures & our need for God’s mercy.  In verse 4, Paul tells us, “But God, being rich in mercy,   because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ...”  (Ephesians 2:4 ESV)     In baptism, God takes dead people & makes them alive. 
But God doesn’t just raise us from the dead so we can live a life of self-fulfillment, & like the Pharisee, brag about our religious accomplishments.  Paul began the chapter & ends verse ten with the same word.  It brings together this whole section: “And you were dead in the trespasses & sins in which you once walked…  For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”  (Ephesians 2:1-2, 10 ESV)  In Greek, to walk means to live.  How you walk describes how you live. 
Instead of walking in trespasses & sins, Paul encourages you to walk in good works, which God prepared beforehand just for you.  Christianity is no one size fits all operation.  Our Creator creates good works for each of us, customized to the unique gifts that each of us has been given.   None of our Christian lives will look the same, but they are all in Christ. 
For now our lives are a constant struggle as God is shaping & molding us, against our sinful will, into the image of His Son.   In the big picture, that we now can see only dimly, God has made us alive together with Christ, “So that in the coming ages   He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”  (Ephesians 2:7 ESV) 
You know where that is & your soul longs to be there.  The coming ages are the eternal life in heaven.  There we will see & experience perfectly the immeasurable riches of the heavenly Father’s grace.   This life, this walk, is a tremendous struggle though it’s not without blessing.  In heaven, all the struggle will be gone.  No more dying to self will be needed. 
“What’s a dead man supposed to do?”  Keep dying, & remember that, in Christ, you are no longer dead, but alive.   Remember that you don’t need to dream up the good works which God wants you to do.  He’s already chosen them & prepared them, in advance, so that you just live them out, & that also by the grace of God. 
In the OT reading, Cain is a picture of the sons of disobedience.  He was a corpse in the trespasses & sins in which he still walked.  He refused the life that God offered him & thus remained dead.  The good works that God prepared in advance for Cain to do all went for naught.   Even as children of God we can refuse to walk in the good works that He prepared for us.  That’s what the tax collector was recognizing in the Gospel reading.  The Holy Spirit empowered him to repent of sin & seek God’s mercy.  So he died to self instead of dying to God as the Pharisee was doing.  As God’s children, we are no longer dead to God, but we aren’t in heaven either.  We live in the “in between” state, alive in Christ but still struggling with Satan. 
That’s why Jesus promised to be with us even to the end of this age.  His victory is guaranteed, yet the battle continues.  We can fight those battles with joyful hope because we know the outcome, & because if we turn back to Jesus in our failures He will forgive our sins. 
Jesus will erase the evil we have done & He will, in some other way, accomplish the good we have left undone.  God is faithful, & perfect & almighty.  When we take our faith out of the tiny, private compartment in which we’re tempted to hide it, Yahweh will do amazing things.  If we leave it there, yet turn to Him for mercy, He will still do amazing things. 
“What’s a dead man supposed to do?”    Keep dying to yourself & God will make you alive in Christ.  In the name of Jesus.  Amen. 
 
Salvation unto us has come by God’s free grace & favor; good works cannot avert our doom, they help & save us never.   Faith looks to Jesus Christ alone, who did for all the world atone; He is our one Redeemer.      Faith clings to Jesus’ cross alone & rests in Him unceasing; & by its fruits true faith is known, with love & hope increasing.   For faith alone can justify, works serve our neighbor & supply the proof that faith is living.  Amen.  LSB 555:1 & 9.  

11th Sunday after Pentecost – A (Proper 14)                                                 LSB #’s 584, 830, 582
Text – Romans 10:16a
 
But they have not all obeyed the gospel. 
 
OBEYING THE GOSPEL
  
“We should fear & love God so that we do not despise preaching & His Word, but hold it sacred & gladly hear & learn it.”   I truly hope that you recognize those words.  Sadly I’m not optimistic that many of you would be able to accurately site exactly   from where they come.  Literacy is not a hallmark of our culture nor of the church here in America. 
On Mt. Sinai, the Lord God gave the 3rd commandment to Moses.  Roughly 3,000 years later, Martin Luther wrote an explanation for “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.”  To keep the Sabbath day holy, Luther called us to hold the Word of God sacred & to gladly hear & learn that Word.  Roughly in the middle, between Moses & Luther, St. Paul writes:
“But they have not all obeyed the gospel.”  (Romans 10:16a ESV)  Those words are still true today, & have been throughout history.  Many people do not hold sacred or gladly hear & learn the Word of God.  Those who do obey the gospel are the ones who listen & respond with gratitude to the heavenly Father as their Creator & to Jesus Christ as their Savior. 
When God’s children hear The Good News their saintly nature, created by that Good News, automatically holds it sacred & gladly hears & learns it.  This morning I ask, “Do you recognize that activity, that kind of response, in your own life?”      What Paul recognizes in the reading from Romans 10 is this, “But they have not all obeyed the gospel.”  (10:16a ESV) 
Our sinful nature always disobeys, so warfare goes on within us, between the saintly & the sinful nature.  Paul recognizes & addresses that.  The preceding verses set the stage: “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’  How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed?  And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard?  And how are they to hear   without someone preaching?   And how are they to preach unless they are sent?”  (Romans 10:13-15a ESV)   Almighty God sends forth His Word to relay the Good News of His Son’s payment for our sins.   The Gospel is entirely God   reaching out to all of us   with the Good News about Jesus.  The Father has done everything to rescue His creation. 
Then, Paul introduces the matter of human response: “But they have not all obeyed the gospel.”  (10:16a ESV)   With verse 17, Paul sums up this entire Epistle reading from Romans 10: “So faith comes from hearing, & hearing through the word of Christ.”        In other words, the only way to end up in hell is to intentionally refuse to let the Good News do its work. 
All of us know from experience, from actual heartbreak, that the world we live in is broken.  You may not often admit it, but you know that you are a broken human being.  It’s not pretty to look at ourselves in the glaring light of God’s holy & perfect Law.  Thousands of churches across the U. S. refuse to confess sin during worship services because it’s depressing. 
Could the apostle be writing about churches like those, “But they have not all obeyed the gospel.”?  (Romans 10:16a ESV)    The very 1st sermon Jesus preached in His public ministry was this, “The time is fulfilled, & the kingdom of God is at hand;   repent   & believe   in the gospel.”  (Mark 1:15 ESV)   Some people simply refuse in spite of all that God has done. 
That refusal is at the root of everything God Himself defines as evil.  It’s the only independent choice that human beings can make, & that choice always involves worshipping ourselves rather than worshipping our Creator.  It’s a choice that despises preaching & the Word of God.  Even as children of God we recognize that sort of response in our own lives. 
Unbelievers have only a sinful nature, but God’s children have both.  We are saints & sinners.  Those two natures are constantly at war within us.  The good that we want to do we don’t, & the evil that don’t want to do that we keep on doing.   Confession & repentance are certainly depressing if we do not believe the Good News as Jesus encouraged us to.  In the Gospel reading, the moment Peter stopped believing the Good News, what happened?    “But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, & beginning to sink…”  (Matthew 14:30 ESV)    Yes, the moment he stopped believing Peter sank into the waves.  But it doesn’t end there:
“…beginning to sink he cried out, ‘Lord, save me.’  Jesus immediately reached out His hand & took hold of him…”  (Matthew 14:30-31 ESV)    The struggle between Peter’s saintly & sinful natures was put on vivid display.  He stopped believing & sank into the waves, but he also cried out in repentance & Jesus saved him. 
Peter did not allow the depressing aspect of repentance to turn him away from calling for salvation.  There is only One Savior & He is calling the entire world to Himself even now.  To turn to Jesus is to confront the truth of both realities, “…repent   & believe in the gospel.”  (Mark 1:15 ESV)    Do you recognize that activity, that kind of response, in your own life? 
In 1961, a visitor walked into the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum in Glasgow carrying a brick.  He found a painting of the crucifixion & began to destroy it.  His anger . . . his violence . . . his desecration of Christian art was not done out of hatred for Christianity but out of love for Christ.  He objected to the way the artist had portrayed the crucifixion of Jesus. 
Salvador Dali was the artist.  The painting was Christ of St. John of the Cross.  In it, one sees Jesus, hanging on the cross, over the world.  The problem, for the visitor, however, was one of perspective.  Dali had changed the traditional perspective people have on the crucifixion. 
Rather than standing below the cross, looking up into the face of Jesus, Dali asks the viewer to be situated above the cross, looking down upon Jesus, who Himself is looking down upon the world.  For that visitor, this stance was sacrilegious.  You are placed above Jesus.  For others, however, this stance is divine.  Some people see what this visitor did not – they see an artist inviting you to have God’s view of the world.  Our heavenly Father looks down upon the fallen world & sees it through the eyes of His Son Jesus, dying on the cross, for all mankind.  The vision is hard, even for Christians to see.  As we look at the world, we often see things we want to run away from rather than run in to.   
We see the social fabric of God’s creation tearing apart at the seams.  Same sex marriage, divorce, & couples living together outside of marriage have altered God’s plan of one man & one woman for life.  The complacent killing of children in the womb & the ardent fight to preserve the nesting places of an endangered species tells of a world that has lost its moral compass.  
Rather than valuing all of life, our culture encourages us to value only some of life, particularly if it is not human.  Seeing poverty walking our streets looking for a place to sleep while others are buying their 2nd vacation home makes us want to leave this world behind, to enter into a Christian cocoon & wait for the Day of Resurrection, the recreation of everything. 
How easy for us to enter church & turn our eyes upward to the cross while leaving the world behind.  We can forget where we are or what He would have us be doing.  We can simply gaze at the cross, remembering what Jesus did for us  & then forget that we live in the world & that God has chosen you & me to be involved in His mission.  Here.  In time. 
How hard it is, how terribly hard, to look at Dali’s crucifixion.  There, we cannot escape the world by looking at Jesus.  No, we find that Jesus asks us to see the world through Him.  Jesus hangs there, below us, offering His life for the world.   He invites us to see the world, through the cross.  He invites us to live God’s mission of love! 
That’s the perspective the apostle Paul had of the world.   It’s the vision St. Paul was inviting Christians in Rome & Christians today to see.  God has called us to be part of His people for His purpose, reaching out to broken human beings with Christ’s saving love.  This morning, reflecting on this text from Romans, & our response, we remember that we are people saved by grace in order to be involved in God’s mission. 
Another unique aspect of Dali’s depiction of the crucifixion is that Jesus hangs on the cross with no nails piercing His hands.  There are no nails piercing His feet.  His body hangs from the cross but there is nothing that holds Him to it.  For some, this detail is disturbing, as if it denies the pain & suffering of the Son of God. 
For others, however, there is a deep spiritual insight.  When Jesus was crucified, we indeed nailed Him to the cross.  There is no doubt that God Himself was rejected by His people & was hung upon the cross to die.  Yet, Jesus could have delivered Himself if He wanted to. 
As Jesus hung upon the cross, the religious leaders mocked Him.  They called for Him to come down from the cross & save Himself if He were truly God.  But Jesus stayed on the cross, not because He was only human & couldn’t get down but because He was truly God & would not get down.  Jesus stayed on the cross because He didn’t come into this world to save Himself. 
Jesus came to save you.  It was the pure love of God that led Jesus to that cross & it was the pure love of God that held Jesus there – offering His sinless life for the sins of the whole world.  Jesus hanging on the cross without nails is not a realistic picture of what happened at the crucifixion, but it is a true picture of what happened on that Good Friday. 
Jesus calls us to repent & believe the Good News & that is Good News because salvation comes to us purely by grace.  It is only by the love of God, poured out for you & me in Jesus Christ, that we are saved. 
When we hear a word like obey, we normally think of the Law.  What is Paul telling us here in Romans 10?   Obeying the Gospel is simply to believe in its power & to submit to its power such that we proclaim its message, God’s message.  Obeying the Gospel is to believe in its power & to submit to its power such that we hold it sacred & gladly hear & learn it.  Obeying the Gospel is a whole hearted selling out to the love of Jesus, but its power is often like the still small voice that Elijah heard on the mountaintop. 
This ‘obeying’ can happen in times of despair when there is clearly no other option than trusting in God.  Fear plays a large part in that & is not a solid foundation for change.  Once the fear is gone, there’s a natural temptation to revert back to old habits.  That’s not the preferred option, though God can make it work. 
The better reason to sell out to Jesus is recognizing that His love has rescued us from the hell that we deserve.  This is a selling out to the love of Christ due to gratitude instead of fear.  Obeying the Gospel is making time to hear the Word of God just because you love to do so.  God already knows that we will often fail in that & loves us anyway. 
After the visitor attacked Dali’s painting it was removed from the art museum & through careful work, the painting was restored & brought back to the museum.   Today, thousands of visitors to Glasgow see this painting.  They stand there & marvel at the beauty of Dali’s work.  Paul, however, knows of another restoration that causes God’s people to stand in wonder.  
Paul sees that in Christ God has fulfilled His promises to Abraham.  Through that one nation, God has brought salvation to all the nations of the earth.  Through one person, His Son Jesus, God offers a love that encompasses all people.  He kept the Law perfectly on our behalf that He might offer us Good News instead.  To obey the Gospel is simply to repent & believe. 
In the name of Jesus.  Amen. 
 
 
Tell how God the Father’s will  made the world, upholds it still,  how His own dear Son He gave  us from sin & death to save.    Tell of our Redeemer’s grace, Who, to save our human race & to pay rebellion’s price, gave Himself as sacrifice.    Tell of God the Spirit given now to guide us on to heaven, strong & holy, just & true, working both to will & do.  Amen.  LSB 830:2-4.  

​10th Sunday after Pentecost – A (Proper 13)                            LSB #’s 615:1, 3, 5-6; 570:1-5; 648
Text – Romans 9:8
 
This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. 
 
CHILDREN OF THE PROMISE
 
 
Years ago, someone was going door to door soliciting contributions for a Christian orphanage.  The solicitor approached a house where an exasperated woman answered the door.  She was asked if she would like to give a donation to the orphanage.  The solicitor was surprised when the woman replied, “Yes, just a minute, I’ll get them.   They are ages two & three.” 
Christian parents certainly have moments of exasperation with their children.   Still, they recognize them as precious gifts from the heavenly Father.   And they are such precious gifts only because of the fact that the heavenly Father also gave His only begotten Son to us as a gift. 
For those who love their children that last statement may be hard to swallow.  Your child is only precious because Jesus, in His suffering, death & resurrection, took the place that your child, & you yourself deserve.  When Abraham was called to sacrifice his son Isaac, whom he loved, God substituted a ram at the last moment.  That ram pointed ahead to Jesus. 
Jesus, as our high priest, sacrificed His own life in place of ours.   He exchanged His perfection for our sin.  In receiving that gift we gain immeasurable value.  In receiving that gift you & I become children of the promise.  There is a thread of promises that runs all the way through the Bible back to the 3rd chapter of Genesis. 
Ironically, that 1st promise is spoken to the great Deceiver: “I will put enmity between you & the woman, & between your offspring & her Seed; He shall bruise your head, & you shall bruise His heel.”  (3:15)   As Christians, we tend to think of the Word of God as being written for us.  We look to it in times of trouble to find strength.  We look to it in times of sorrow to find comfort.  In times of despair we turn to Holy Scripture to hear of our Lord’s promise to lift us up.  There are helpful lists of Bible verses to look up when you need a specific word from God: “When you worry . . . when you feel alone . . . when you struggle with temptation . . . when you have financial problems.” 
The last thing we want, when a person is worried, is for her to open the Bible & read about God striking Ananias & Sapphira dead in their tracks, for lying to the Apostle Peter.  It’s much safer to open the Bible to a single, pre-selected verse & begin reading there.    Yet, as with all blessings from God, sinful human beings have a knack for getting off track. 
A list of passages can be comforting & has brought many people a word from God, who otherwise would be lost when opening the Bible.    The danger is that some people never get beyond this kind of reading.  They open the Bible, find a comforting word & then set The Book aside.  They never enter through this door into the deeper, richer life of the Holy Scriptures. 
Christianity becomes something it was never intended to be – a private, personal religion.  You turn to it not when you enter the world but when you retreat from it.  It’s something you read in your private devotional time & look forward to that moment when it is just “me & Jesus.”  We reduce God to our best friend, a person who supports us when times get tough.
We view Yahweh as someone who helps us accomplish our plans & fulfill our dreams. Getting off track in this way, we reverse roles with God.  Rather than us being servants in Jesus’ kingdom, we see Him as a servant in ours.   Rather than us being brought into our Creator’s greater & eternal picture, we bring God into our limited & very not eternal mortal life. 
Now, we do need God   in our limited & very not eternal mortal life, but we need Him there as the Great I Am, not as our servant.   We need the Word of God not simply as a self-help guide,  not simply as a Word that transforms every aspect of how we live,    but as a Word  that transports us  to the greater & eternal picture of the perfect existence of heaven.  As children of the promise, God Himself is giving each of you a story, but it’s the nature of sinful creatures to focus   mostly on our own story.  God is the One who was there at the beginning, creating all of the cosmos.  God will be there at the end, bringing about a new & glorious re-creation. 
Between the beginning & the end, God is here – Father, Son & Holy Spirit, working in love & ruling over everything that you & I have ruined.  Remember that 1st promise, the one spoken to the Great Deceiver?  Jesus is still speaking His promises to us who are also deceivers.  His promises call us out of the darkness of our self-centered lives into the light of Jesus Christ. 
And that is where we encounter the Apostle Paul in the reading from Romans 9.  God literally called him out of the darkness of his self-centered life into the light of Jesus Christ, knocking Paul to the ground on the road to Damascus.  Now, the Apostle is agonizing over his fellow Jews who were left behind because they refused to receive the light of Messiah. 
Paul even wishes he was accursed & cut off from Christ for the sake of his brothers, his kinsmen according to the flesh.  (Romans 9:3)   I don’t know if you’ve ever come before God on behalf of someone you love, someone you care about, yet someone who will have nothing to do with the faith.  
You love that person.  You know that God loves them.  You know God desires that they be saved, yet that person wants nothing to do with God.  That leaves you alone, not because you don’t believe in God, but you’re alone because you’re without your friend, your mother, your son whomever has walked away from the faith.  
God certainly is present for every individual person, able to be found in a single Bible verse a person reads in a lonely hotel room.  Yet, God’s vision is much greater than that.  He has come in Jesus Christ not only to save you, & each person in the entire creation, but also to join you to a people, a people who live by His promise & for His purpose in His kingdom.  Speaking of the nation of Israel, Paul writes, “…to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, & the promises.  To them belong the patriarchs, & from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever...” [1]
As spiritual descendants of Abraham, as children of the promise, that is now our history.   It is God’s desire that each of us be joined to the entire history of salvation, not just to our own little tiny piece of it, not just to a couple of different Bible verses here & there.   Because Jesus died for you, & joined you to all of salvation, your value went from zero to infinite at Baptism. 
To be a child of the promise is to have value beyond gold or silver or diamonds.  It is to have value beyond all the world’s wealth.  As we live our lives, we can easily lose sight of this larger story.  Faith can become a personal matter, reduced to a private experience that helps us get through the week.  That kind of faith loses much of the power that God intends for us. 
In spite of all the arrogance & self-righteousness we see in our culture, behind it is often individual human beings who feel worthless & unloved.  They recognize that on their own they have no value & thus find it difficult to respect themselves or to respect others.  Though they were not there, they still feel the curse of being banished from the Garden of Eden. 
In truth, they are far from being unloved or undervalued.  The lifeblood of Christ is the treasury which defines personal worth; your worth, my worth.   It’s a good thing that a parent’s love for their child is not what defines that child’s worth, because no sinful parent can ever love enough to overcome the inborn sinfulness of any child. 
Adam & Eve, Abraham, Isaac & Jacob, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Malachi, Mary & Joseph, all of them were children of the promise, right down to each of you here today.  The Holy Spirit is constantly at work bringing people out of darkness & into the eternal story of His people.  If you come to the altar today, for the body & blood of Christ, know that He died in order to bring you into all the company of heaven, along with the angels & archangels, to bring glory to God’s name for rescuing you from sin. 
Paul’s goal in his letter to the church at Rome is to encourage our obedience & by that he means to put our faith into action.  Disobedience is unbelief.  Belief during suffering is true faith.  Jesus demonstrates that true faith on the cross, not as an example to follow, but as the One to exchange His righteousness for our sins.  That is what gives infinite value to each of us. 
As children of the promise, those who believe & cling to the promises of God, our lives have infinite value regardless of anything we have done or left undone.  Because of that value that God has bestowed upon us, we trust that our Lord can work through us to accomplish good even during those times of life when we do not see results.  As St. Peter wrote:
“You know you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable things  such as silver or gold,  but with the precious blood of Christ,  like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.”  (1 Peter 1:19)   That is what makes any human being a precious gift from God above, & it’s what gives every human life its value.  In the name of Jesus.  Amen. 
 
 
 
Just as I am,  though tossed about  with many a conflict,  many a doubt,  fightings & fears within,  without,  O Lamb of God,  I come,  I come.   Just as I am,  Thou wilt receive,  wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;  because Thy promise I believe,  O Lamb of God,  I come,  I come.  Amen.  LSB 570:3, 5. 


[1] Romans 9:4-5 ESV