Celebrate Your Heritage! (Philippians 3:7-14)

Dear friends in Christ.

What was the last big event that you and your family celebrated? Was it a wedding, where you had the opportunity to celebrate the joining of a new couple in wedded bliss? Was it maybe a family reunion, where you had the opportunity to connect with any number of relatives that you hadn’t seen for a long time. Was it maybe a baby shower, where you had the fun of celebrating with the new and expecting mother to be? Was it perhaps a birthday, where you got a chance to shower one of your children with a few gifts and make him or her special for the day? No matter what it was, it seems that we need very little reason to celebrate events no matter how big or small they might be. Well, this morning as we celebrate the Festival of the Reformation, we will have the opportunity to celebrate with each other as we celebrate the heritage that we have together.

But what, some of you may be asking, is our heritage? Well, our heritage is a solid adherence to the teachings of the Bible. Our heritage is the time we spent unified with the Missouri Synod growing more and more conservative in our understanding of God’s Word until the time came when our paths split in the early 60’s. Our heritage goes back to 1850, almost 160 years ago when 3 German-American Pastors got together in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and formed the Wisconsin Synod. And yet, our heritage goes back even farther than that, because we can trace it back to October 31st, 1517, the night on which Martin Luther stealthily approached the doors of the castle church in Wittenberg and nailed his 95 theses—his 95 points for discussion or debate—to the door and set into motion the events that we celebrate as the Reformation. But that isn’t even the beginning of our heritage because we can trace our heritage all the way back to the first promise of a Savior delivered to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, just shortly after they had fallen into sin. It is that promise, fulfilled in the birth of our Savior, some 2000 years ago, that is the root and the source of the heritage that we are celebrating today! Today we are celebrating the fact that Jesus is our heritage, because Jesus is the one who freed us from our sins by his perfect life, his innocent death, and his glorious resurrection. We are celebrating the fact that when Jesus gave his life in our place and took it back again on the third day, by his actions he declared that you and I were completely innocent of any of the sins that satan had leveled against us. By his actions Jesus declared that we were completely righteous in his sight through the faith that he himself had created in our hearts. In fact, it is that very heritage of righteousness that the Apostle Paul is celebrating in our text as he writes, “But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.” (Philippians 3:7-9).

Though there had been a time in Paul’s life that he actually though he could earn his own salvation, once he had been called to faith in Jesus Christ, he realized that the righteousness he had was not of his own making, rather it was the heritage that Jesus himself had bestowed upon him as a gift through the faith created in Paul’s heart by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Well, the same thing is true for each and every one of us today! Though there may have been a time when we counted our good deeds as something that we could lay at Jesus’ feet and somehow gain eternal life by our own efforts, now that we have been declared righteous by our Savior’s death and resurrection, we consider all that stuff as loss. We consider it to be completely worthless; as useless to us as the garbage that we put out at the curb each week so that the garbage men can haul it away. In fact, when we compare all our own efforts to the surpassing greatness of our Christian Heritage of faith in Jesus Christ, our own works are no useful than that of burned up newspaper. In fact, when we are reminded how Jesus completed the transaction of our salvation with the payment of his blood, it makes all the more clear how our righteousness is his declaration to us—not as a result of our own actions, but as his gift to us through the heritage of faith. A gift which he himself bestowed upon us as he declared to be innocent and now, through faith, makes us perfect.

What an incredible heritage we have! For, today, as we celebrate the heritage that we have in Jesus Christ our Savior, we find that it is Christ our Savior who makes us perfect. It is Christ our Savior who makes us perfect in the eyes of our God—not merely acceptable, passing, good enough, sufficient, or even above average! It is Christ our Savior who makes us perfect in the eyes of the Lord our God through the faith he created in our hearts; the faith through which he applied to us the power of his resurrection and the righteousness that he won for us in the World Series of Calvary. This, in fact, is the very heritage that the Apostle Paul was celebrating as he wrote in our text, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:10-14).

As Christians, this is the goal to which we are pressing. This is the heritage we celebrate in Jesus Christ our Savior—the perfection that will be ours when God our Savior calls us heaven ward in Christ Jesus. We are looking forward to the day when our Lord Jesus will finally and forever make us perfect when he calls us out of this world of sin to our lives by his side in his heavenly kingdom. Though we have not yet achieved it, we know that through faith the day is coming when we will never again experience sin. We will never again deal with frustration. We will never again face suffering or pain. We will never again face any of these things because on the day when we are made perfect by our Savior’s side in heaven, we will have escaped the sorrows of this life. On the day when we are made perfect in our Savior’s kingdom, we will gather around the throne of our God and serve him day and night in his holy temple. On that day when we are called to live in perfection with our Savior, we will rest from all our labors and we will enjoy the gift of eternal life that our Savior longs to bestow upon us.

This is the Christian heritage we are celebrating today; the heritage that has been passed down to us since the days of Adam and Eve. It is the heritage of the forgiveness of sins won for us by Christ our Savior through which we have been declared completely innocent and will one day be made perfect in eternal life. Though the celebration may not be the same as a Birthday party, wedding, or even baby shower, it many ways our celebration today is like that of a great family reunion—a family reunion to which we have all been invited though faith in our brother, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Pastor David M. Shilling
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church -Le Sueur, MN