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LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 81

Scan: The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

CONVENTION
SERMON • 5

Repentance—Not Life and Death,
but Death to Life!
LUKE 15:25–32
by t he R ev. Dr . Gregory P. Seltz, Sp e a k e r o f T h e L u t h e r a n H o u r
66th Regular Convention of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod • July 11, 2016 • Responsive Prayer 2

Grace, mercy, and peace to you in the power of the
words of the One who has rescued and redeemed us
all. Amen.
I don’t know about you, but I kind of wanted Jesus to
have the Father say, “We had to celebrate and be glad,
because this brother of yours was dead and is alive
again, was lost and is found—and SO ARE YOU!”
We get the truth that the partying, “eat, drink, and
be merry” life won’t last. We know that you can’t get
to abundant life by wasting life. What’s hard to hear
is that even our best efforts, even our religious inclinations and machinations, don’t amount to anything
either. This text is about two lost sons.

In fact, I’ve often noticed in our world that the seriousness that seems to come amidst a life-and-death issue
wears off pretty quickly, and we tend to go back to the
patterns that got us into trouble in the first place.
Remember 9/11? For a few weeks after the bombing,
we got serious, people went back to church, maybe
they prayed a bit more, they might have even taken
their freedoms seriously. But merely a decade later,
we’re less focused on what really matters than ever
before! Once the life-and-death challenge wears off,
we go back to being the same need-to-be-saved people we always were—maybe even thinking our actions
and activities have done enough to get God off of our
backs.

Repentance, forgiveness, life and salvation: it’s so
serious that it is more than a life-and-death issue.
Rather, it’s a death-to-life issue—one that can only
be restored by the work of God for us, on our behalf.
When someone says to you, “This is a life-and-death
issue,” we get serious, don’t we? I mean, we give that
question, that challenge, our undivided attention.
Life-and-death issues demand our attention, and
sometimes we do the right thing in response. But
very often, we fail the test.
Our lesson today doesn’t just expose our need for
forgiveness when we fail; we all think we need forgiveness then. It exposes our need for repentance and
forgiveness even when we are doing our best!

“Repentance—Not Life and Death, but Death to Life!”

U P O N T H I S R O C K • Sermon