Romans 3:1-20 - Just Stop!

Romans 3:9-20

I was completely lost, well not really. I knew where I was. I could see the place that I was on the map. I could see the place I wanted to be on the map, but I could not see a clear way to get from where I was to where I wanted to be. So as I came to a corner, I saw a man standing there about to cross the street. I rolled down my window and said,”Hey can you help me?” The man smiled at me said, “Sure,” and came over to my window. I showed him my map and asked him how to get to Salis Crossing. He thought for a moment, cocked his head to the side, looked down at my map, turned the corner of his mouth up a little and then looked me straight in the face and said, “Well, ma’am you can’t get there from here.” I was aghast, what do you mean you can’t get there from here. I could see it on the map. It could not be more than 5-10 miles from where we were, but you couldn’t get there from here? I asked him what he meant. And he said, “well the bridge over in Gratton was out, so unless you wanted to go 15 miles back down highway 29 to Stoutan, and take route west 9 over to Old Barrytown and then come back south on Old Barrytown road and that could take you to Salis Crossing, but otherwise there was no way to get there from here.” I looked at the roads he had indicated on my map. I would seriously have to go nearly 30 miles out of my way to go to a place I could clearly see on my map, was only 5 miles away. I thanked the man, rolled up my window and the man headed on his way down the street shaking his head. As I made a right onto the road which would take me to highway 29 I too shook my head, there really was no way to get there from here.
“You can’t get there from here,” is at the heart of what Paul is saying to the people at the church in Rome, here in this passage. He begins with a question “Are we any better off?” And Paul answers by explaining that nobody is better off, both Jews and Greeks, i.e. non-Jews are under the power of sin. You may remember last week that Paul spent a good portion of Chapter two establishing that Jews did not have a privileged position simply because they had been given the law by God. The law could do nothing in and of itself. In essence it was not “free pass.” You all may notice that sometimes when I am preaching I ask the question I think you all are asking. I have to admit it is one of the oldest rhetorical tricks in the book, Paul uses it here. Paul asks on behalf of the people in the church Roman church, “Are we better off?’’ Paul then answers the question he had just asked on their behalf. “No, not at all.” Everyone is under sin. Nothing, not even the law of God frees you from being under sin.

Paul then goes on to elaborate, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside.” Sin affects all of our lives. No one is immune, no one is free, no one’s life if lived apart from sinful actions. There is nothing we can do.

Nothing can separate us, nothing can stop us, and nothing can inhibit us from our sinful actions. We can work, we can strive, we can attempt to beat ourselves, our bodies, our wills into submission but it won’t work. And to many of us kill our selves attempting and those of us who strive in this manner will die trying and we will die failing.

We simply and truthfully are not righteous and nothing we are in and of ourselves makes us righteous. Being a Jew won’t do it, being a gentile won’t do it, being Christian won’t do. We are not born righteous. Righteous is not something we just are, nor it is something we can create in ourselves. There is nothing we can do, nothing. We can not live right enough. We can not go to enough church services; we can not read the Bible enough. We could live our whole lives without drinking one drop of alcohol, inhaling a single breath of tobacco, or letting even a single solitary unwholesome word pass through our lips or even enter our brain, but we would still remain completely and wholly unrighteous. You can’t train yourself to always react in a kind loving manner to everyone you meet, there are not enough cups of cold water you can give, you won’t speak kind words to everyone 100% of the time, you will not do all the right things at all the right times. You could sell everything you own, you could give up your house, your job and your life here and move to some remote region of the world and live completely selflessly, giving of yourself for them, helping to make their lives better, empowering them to rise above the limits of their situations. You could strive to break the backs of the oppressors. You could spend your whole life living to route out all the broken, hurtful, oppressive systems at play in our world. You could do all that and succeed in truly making this world a better place to work, and live but none of that would make you righteous. There is absolutely no way to live, act, speak in all the ways one would need to live, act and speak to make yourself righteous. There is nothing you can do, nothing you can say, nothing you can change on your own to make you worthy to stand before God.

Paul tells us that we are all silenced before God. We may strive and work to live our lives in a worthy righteous manner. We may look at what we have done, and how we have succeeded to live good lives but, “no human being will be justified,” will be seen as righteous or good, “in God’s sight.” Even knowing all the right things to do and say, all the right ways to live, to give to act, knowing all that does nothing more than to throw in stark relief how painfully and woefully we fail at even attempting to come close to being righteous. We may be able to convince people at work that we are good people, we may be able to appear righteous before the other members at church, we may even be able to fake it enough that our closest friends and family members come to believe that we have succeeded. It is possible that we may convince ourselves that we are doing right by God, by our loved ones and by all those around us, but when the rubber meets the road, when push comes to shove we know that we fail time and time again.

But we think we can do it. We think we can try. And we think that if we try, we just might succeed or perhaps that trying is good enough. It seems that is what most people tend to think after all. “I try to be a good person, and that is all that really matters, right?” “I’m a good person, I don’t murder or steal.” “I to my best and that should be good enough.” But our best is still failing. We might not murder or steal, but we cheat, or lie, or speak words we know are not kind or caring. Seriously in the grand scale of things I have very little more self control than my five year old, I am just more socially adept at knowing when it is socially acceptable to exhibit my failings.

When it comes to being righteous, to being even just “good,” the fact of the matter is that you can’t get there from here. Fallen human beings are just that, fallen, and being fallen means that we are fall far short of what it means to live right lives, we fall short of being kind, loving, and compassionate. We fail at what it means to be righteous any sense of the word. All of us are unrighteous, not just all the bad people, not just the drug dealers, murderers, adulterers and those who talk in at the theater, every last one of us is unrighteous. Paul wants us to be very certain of this fact. We are all in the same boat here. None of us can say we are better off. Not one of us can say there is something intrinsic to who we are or the particular way we live our life which makes us any better than any other person whom we might stand next to here on this earth, no matter who they are. And there is nothing we can do to make ourselves righteous. We can not be good enough. We can not try hard enough. It won’t work. We will still fail, we will still fall short. Our efforts, our strivings, will never get us where we want to be. None of us can get from where we are right now to being righteous. I can’t get there from here. You can’t there from here. There is simply no way that you or I can get ourselves from here to there.

This may sound like a pretty big bummer. This sermon may sound pretty much like a huge downer but it really is a freeing thing to figure out. You can’t try hard enough, you can’t strive long enough, you can’t do it. So stop trying. Stop working so hard. Stop worrying that you will be good enough, stop attempting to measure up. Just stop. Stop working yourself to the bone, stop killing yourself, stop beating yourself up when you realize you are failing. Stop and accept that your work, your effort, your tireless labor is not and will never be good enough and let it go, give in and let yourself off the hook. You are not good enough. You are not righteous. And your efforts to be so are and will always be sub-par.

Take a deep breath and breathe in the freedom of knowing that when you wake up tomorrow you don’t have to try, you can just look at God and admit what God already knows, that you can’t do it, and you give up trying. You can wake up tomorrow and see that God does not require you to run a race you are forever loosing. You can stop trying. And when you do so, don’t panic. You will not be failing at being a “good person” any more or less than you were when you were running as fast as you could in that hamster wheel of making yourself righteous trying get somewhere that the wheel simply could not get you.

Stopping is not easy. Letting go of trying is hard. It is a lesson which does not come naturally to us. We are breed, nurtured, raised and programmed at every turn of our life to believe that we can try hard enough, that we can be good enough, that we can do all the right things, say all the right things and live in the right way and doing so will make us the people we need to be, that doing so will make us the people God wants us to be. But doing, trying, striving, to be righteous is not something WE can do.

I remember the moment that this truth came to me. I was a religion major. I had striven to be a Godly person since I was 6. I had known since I was 13 that God had called me to be a pastor. I had spent all of my memorable life, trying to live right. I did everything I could do to be a good Christian. I was always afraid that I was doing was not good enough, that there would be something in my life which would be seen as less than holy in the eyes of other Christians or worse the eyes of God. I worked, I prayed, I strived, I read my Bible, I did all the things I was told to do. I had personal catalogues of how many times I had read through the Bible, as well as each book of the Bible. I had book where I kept track of when I did my devotions. I knew how many times in the last three years I had skipped them. I kept records of all sorts of things about my spiritual life, so I could somehow quantify and qualify how righteous I was, how holy I was, but no matter how much I worked, no matter how hard I strived, now matter how good I thought I was, I knew that I failed, in fact because of my lists I knew exactly how often I failed. I was a Christian, I loved God, I wanted to be the person God wanted me to be and I was going to do EVERYTHING within my power to make myself that person.

And here I was, I was a sophomore at ENC, I was in Dr. Braaten’s Old Testament class. I don’t remember what we were talking about, I don’t remember the context of the revelation at all other than the classroom and that it was bitter cold outside, but I remember the bright dawn that broke into my life when I realized, that I COULD NOT be good enough. My efforts were truly in vain. I was failing because there was nothing I could do but fail. No matter how hard I tried, I would always fail. If there was nothing to do but fail, then there was nothing I could do. It was this bright freeing moment, when I realized that I did not need to try because in trying I would always fail. I could not make myself righteous. Nothing I did would work. No matter how many times I banged my head on that wall, I would not find myself on the other side. All I would ever do was give myself a headache. Stopping trying, stopping the striving, stopping attempting to make myself something I am not, was and continues to be one of the hardest things I have ever done as a Christian, but it seriously was the best thing I have ever done as well.

Paul tells us that we are all under the power of sin. Paul tells us that none of us are better off. And Paul tells us there is nothing that WE can do about it. So there is nothing to do but give up. There is nothing we can do but throw the towel in and stop trying.

My guess is that for many of you this is perhaps the strangest thing you have ever heard in a sermon in your life. Stop trying to be righteous. Isn’t being a Christian about being righteous? Isn’t being a child of God about living the way that God calls us to live? Isn’t being in relationship with God about loving God and neighbor? And my answer is Yes. But, you can’t do it. You simply can’t. Give up at attempting to be a good person. Yes. Stop trying, stop working. And come back next week and hear how you can be what you can’t make yourself be.