# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1986_S82
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

CONVENTION SERMON 81

it is axiomatic that we should be alive in Christ. After all,
we have this heritage. We grew up on Walther’s Law and
Gospel. Even before that, Dr. Luther trumpeted the three
great solas of the Reformation: faith alone, Scripture alone,
grace alone—and Christ alone.

Why is it that we preach to each other this evening the
simple truth that we were dead in trespasses and sins but
are made alive in Christ by faith in the Son of God, who
loved us and gave Himself for us? The reason is that life
in Christ, which is ours, is constantly under attack. Like
physical life itself, it needs nurturing, it needs defending,
it needs care and training and a great deal of prayer if we
would remain alive in this precious freedom of the Gospel
that Jesus Christ has won for us and for all people. It’s
threatened whenever we turn life into license. The Gala-
tians knew what that was all about. St. Paul had to remind
them that the tendency even for us who are alive in Christ
is to continue to follow the acts of the sinful nature. He
says in chapter 5—they are pretty obvious—“sexual im-
morality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witch-
craft.” That sounds kind of remote for most of us. But listen
to how he goes on: “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage,
selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunken-
ness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before,” you
who are alive in Christ, don’t let the life in Christ turn
into license. “Those who live like this will not inherit the
kindgom of God” (Gal. 5:19-21). These are temptations for
all of us because the old flesh, the old nature, still tries,

even though it knows that in Christ we live. It still goes
back to the old ways of turning life into license.

There is a second problem, too. That’s turning the life
that is ours in Christ into Law and legalism. You might
remember, as you recall reading this epistle which is the
favorite of so many of us, that these words of St. Paul to
the Galatians occur in the context of what must have been
a very difficult and hard time for the church of Galatia.
Paul had come there and had found that the prince of the
apostles, St. Peter himself, really had not been handling
things very well. He had been encouraging Gentiles, in
fact, to put themselves back under the Law, as though this
message—that God in Christ loves us and gave Himself
for us, just pure unmitigated grace—as though that wasn’t
enough.

When Paul saw that they were not acting in line with
the truth of the Gospel, he said to Peter in front of them
of all: You are a Jew, and yet you live like a Gentile and
not like a Jew. How is it that you do this? He just couldn’t
understand it (Gal. 2:14). “You foolish Galatians! Who has
bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was
clearly portrayed as crucified,” and yet you are back into
the old habits of preferring Law to Gospel (Gal. 3:1).

Is that a problem for us in The Lutheran Church—Mis-
souri Synod? Of course it is! It’s a problem for each of us
in our own personal lives. We constantly want to prove
that we are good, that we have done something special.
And that happens in our church body, too, as we sometimes