Texts: Isaiah 52:13–53:12; 2 Corinthians 5:14–21
For your love of money. For your miserliness. For your hoarding. For your “me-first” attitude.
For your adultery. For your pornography habit. For your sex outside of marriage. For your acceptance, even celebration, of all sorts of sexual immorality and depravity. For your defiling the marriage bed with all sorts of perversion.
For your anger. For your abortion. For your divorce. For your unkind words. For your dirty jokes. For your failure to be a friend.
For your slander of your pastor, your neighbor, your co-worker, your boss, your wife, your husband, your brother or sister in Christ. For your racism. For your murderous tongue.
For your hatred of children. For your despising of the good gifts God has given you in your marriage. For your laziness. For your boredom.
For your lawsuits. For your excuse of “it’s just business”. For the lengths you’ll go to get ahead.
For your Sunday morning sports leagues. For your doubting of God’s goodness and mercy. For your vacations which include everything except hearing God’s Word in the Divine Service. For your schedules which reflect a love of everything except the Word of God.
For your lackadaisical devotion to the Word. For your distracted smartphone browsing in the midst of the Divine Service. For your worship of entertainment. For your spiritual promiscuity.
For your rejoicing in wickedness and evil. For your thirst for vengeance. For your boundless pursuit of pleasure.
For your use of the Lord’s Holy Name in less-than-holy ways. For your trust in government, in the lottery, in the casino, in your own cleverness to provide your daily bread.
For your love of country over Christ. For your fear of confessing your faith. For your cowardice in the face of discomfort, let alone persecution.
For your prayerlessness.
For your lives which look no different than the world.
For your faithlessness.
For your sin.
For all of this, Christ Jesus gave Himself into death.
“What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered Was all for sinners’ gain;
Mine, mine was the transgression, But Thine the deadly pain.
Lo, here I fall, my Savior! ’Tis I deserve Thy place;
Look on me with Thy favor, and grant to me Thy grace.”
“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.”
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
For you. The Lord did this for you. Because of Christ’s death, your sins are forgiven. All of them. Forever.
Amen.
– Pastor Michael Schuermann
S.D.G.