GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
1 CORINTHIANS 1:9
9 God is faithful. He called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Moses says the same thing: “The LORD your God is God, the faithful God who maintains both his covenant and his mercy for those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations” (Deuteronomy 7:9). But where Moses told God’s people the fact that God does this, Paul declares how he did it, for both the “who” and the “how” are interconnected in every way. Jesus Christ is God’s Son. Jesus Christ is the Lord, our Lord. Jesus Christ is the faithful God who maintains both his covenant and his mercy. He did this with the sacrifice of his flesh on the cross.
God calls people to be in fellowship with him. The call comes by the means God has given to us. He could certainly call us to faith apart from such means, but does not. He works through the gospel in the word and the gospel in the sacrament. In either case, it is the gospel at work in man’s heart.
By himself, sinful man is unable even to conceive of salvation by the grace of God. This is because sin has corrupted our hearts, and in this depravity “there is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). The Bible is not lacking in descriptions of this depravity of ours. Man is blind (John 1:5), man has an unwillingness or hostile enmity against God (Romans 8:7), man’s sinful lusts and desires are dead-set against God’s will (Galatians 5:17), and man’s inability to believe is also described as death (Ephesians 2:1,5). By nature, sinful man opposes the gospel of free justification (Isaiah 53:1-3). Therefore, if Christ’s work of redeeming us is to be had by anyone at all, God himself needs to be the one to bring us to accept it and enjoy it.
So one October day, there came Jesus into Jerusalem, mocked by his own brothers, but determined to call out with an invitation. It was the last day of an important festival, the Day of Atonement, when the high priest would take a pair of goats, slaughter one, and release the other to depict the sending away of the sins of Israel. And on that day, “the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink! He who believes in me, as the Scriptures said, streams of living water will flow from within him’” (John 7:37-38).
Sometimes the actions of believers may cause a sinner to stop and think, and be drawn to hear the gospel more clearly and directly, such as when the Queen of Sheba was drawn to investigate rumors about Solomon (1 Kings 10:1) and after questioning him, could say, “Praise be to the Lord your God who has delighted in you” and could confess “the Lord’s eternal love for Israel” (1 Kings 10:9).
God is moved to call sinners both by his own grace, and also by human misery. He “remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14), and “the cry of the poor and needy come before him” (Job 34:28). So his call to believe in him comes to all. When a human being chooses to block God’s call by shielding his own family and children from God’s word, he becomes a special enemy of God; he is doing Satan’s work for him. When a tyrant attempts to block God’s call by trying to shield an entire nation from the gospel, his people will resist from within, as they have throughout history and throughout the present world, sharing the gospel in secret. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was no surprise that churches that had been closed for decades by the government were suddenly filled with believing Christians, free at last to worship Christ in the open and without fear.
God wants all people to be saved. “God our Savior wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4), or to state it the opposite way: “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live” (Ezekiel 33:11).
What a delight, what a humbling joy it is to praise God that he sent his call to believe in him to me, dead in my sins as I was. I was a newborn baby. Maybe I looked cute to some, at least to my mother and my grandmothers, but I was separate from God, dead to God in my sin inherited from those very people who looked down into my cradle at the newborn sinner and enemy of Christ. But God called me and caused the gospel to come to me in baptism to bring me to faith, and to make me his own dear child. He made his Son, Jesus, my brother, so that having put away all of my sins and having paid the penalty for them all, he has brought me into fellowship, perfect unity, with himself. Fellowship with God! No wonder our praise will continue through all eternity. He gave what we could not have had, and he gave it freely, willingly, and perfectly.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – 1 Corinthians 1:9 He called you