It’s a real joy and privilege for me to be here. I thank God so much for the friends that He has given me over these last 50 years that I’ve been in ministry. I’ve lived these years at the grace of my Friend, and there’s people like Lynne and others who make it possible for me to do the things that I’m doing in life. So I thank God for that.

I’m now 76 years old, and I’ve asked the Lord to give me 4 more years. You know, He can always take me at any time, but I’ve asked him to give me 4 more years.

A psalm that’s becoming so precious to me these days is Psalm 90, where it talks about God has given us 70 years and by reason of strength we’ll have 80, but we are then to number our days that we might give our heart to righteousness.

You might hear this again in my talk. What I’m finding today is that it’s hard to arouse people’s passion – their passion of gratitude. I think we have made Christianity so self-centered. We have over-personalized Christianity. It’s more like “God for me.” And we have lost the idea that we are His workmanship; that the church is the continuation of Christ’s body on earth in a community. We are united together with these gifts God has given us and we’re to be God’s presence. We’re here to do His will, not our own.

But I think that we have now pretty much have God as our therapist to help us do the things that we’ve already predetermined to do in life. And the things that He’s like done – like justice and mercy – are difficult for us to generate the passion to do.

And so I’ve sort of made up my mind that with these last days, as I finish my race, I’m trying to round it up. Round it up. And that feels kind of good, because it removes one a little bit from being responsible for what others think about what you do in life. And so I’m just so very honored to be here. My daughter, Elizabeth, is with me. And I’m glad to have her, because in these last days, I’m sort of finishing up. This has been one of the good things about being out here. I’ve sort of concluded now that I’m turning the work completely over to her and to support her – and our board of directors, of course. I really want to support her with the rest of the days of my life, and then I’m going to fade away.

And so it’s so good to be with you all here. And to be this church. This church was packed at the other sermon, and it’s packed here. That’s really a good sign.

Let me give you my talk this morning, from 2 Corinthians 5 - 6:2 Listen to this reading of the word.

“Receive not the grace of God in vain.”

This is one of the great warnings in the Scripture. There are several great warnings in the Scripture. One is in Hebrews. And I think they both sort of come out of that same idea of when the children of Israel were delivered from slavery in Egypt. And after a year or so out in the wilderness the Israelites saw God do remarkable things in their lives.

As they got to the Red Sea, God came down in His shekinah glory.

• And He blocked off the Egyptians and
  He opened the Red Sea.
• And they went through.
• And then he closed it back and the Egyptians drowned.

And for years out there in the wilderness He provided them with food and manna. They watched His glory.

But then when they came to Kadesh-barnea, where God had told them to obey Him, after had watched all of His miracles.

• He had given them water.
• He’d fed them.
• He’d taken care of them.
• He’d given them unique knowledge that they didn’t have before – how to work in silver and gold and all in precious filaments.

These had been slaves. These had been slaves.
Primarily they were building pyramids in Egypt.

But God gives all these miracles. They see all of these miracles. And then He tells them to go into the land, and - you remember - they refused to. And they turned back. And those who were 20 years and older died out in the wilderness.

There’s a verse in Hebrews that goes something like this – “There were some who were once enlightened. They tasted a heavenly gift. They were made partakers of the Spirit.” It says if they turned away, it’s impossible to renew them again to repentance…seeing they crucified the Son of God afresh and put him to open shame.

This passage here to us as Christians is one of the warnings that is similar to that. He’s saying now, “Receive not the grace of God in vain.”

How did Paul use the word grace?

God used the word grace as all of God’s goodness toward us - all of these theological and biblical terms like justification, sanctification, predestination and all of those. All of those terms are all wrapped up together into one, and Paul calls that the grace of God. All the goodness that comes from God is called His grace. It says, “The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” So all of God’s help toward us is called God’s grace.

Paul gets this thought of grace from his own experience. He sort of coined the word grace. And he gets this word grace from his own experience on the Damascus road. And you watch how he uses it…in Ephesians...when he says, “For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourself. It is a gift of God, not as a result of works, that no one should boast.”

Grace is God intervening in our lives with His love, apart from us. It’s not by works or righteousness which we have done, but according to His grace that He saves us.

Grace is God busting into our lives and giving us all of those heavenly blessings in life. And we are to respond to that love.

Grace is re-personified at the cross…It’s at the cross where Jesus dies, the just for the unjust. All of my sins. All of your sins. All of the sins of the world. All of Adolf Hitler’s sin, Idi Amin’s sin, Osamu Bin Ladin’s sin. All of the sins of the world. My sin. Your sin. It was all put on Jesus Christ. It was because of His grace.

For it is by grace…God’s grace…that you have saved.

When Paul is telling us here about receiving the grace of God in vain, what would it mean to receive God’s grace in vain? And Paul is thinking about himself. Here he was. He was a bigot of bigots. He wanted to remove any influence – especially Gentile influence – on Judaism. He wanted to smash it out because he was a Pharisee of the Pharisees. And the Pharisees’ job was to protect historical Judaism and make sure that everybody lived by the Mosaic law. That was their idea.

And here were these Christians who had received Jesus Christ, who had been empowered by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and who were doing the will of God.

Obeying God. And man, Paul saw that, and he wanted to get rid of it. You all know his story.

He began to kill Christians. I mean, this guy was a murderer. Murdered many times. Because we love Paul so much after he was converted, we don’t like to say that.

Every word you hear about Paul is so gracious. But here was a guy who was a murderer. He said of himself, he said “I persecuted them unto death.” And he talked about Stephen. He said, “they laid down their coats, and I persecuted him. I killed him.”

So this man was a murder. And he went into the synagogue…went into the temple…and got permission from the high priest that if he found any of these people who were infiltrating the synagogue, he was going to take them out. He was going to bind them, take them to Jerusalem and kill them. So he was a mad man.

But then God revealed His grace to him on that Damascus road. A light shone from heaven and he was struck down. And he heard a voice – the voice of Christ.

It could have sounded something like this, “Saul, Saul. I love you. I love you.”

Now you know that’s the central message. Where I come from in Mississippi, we don’t see that quite as the central message. We almost got to hate somebody first. We see that as the gospel.

• We’ve got to hate them liberals.
• We’ve go to hate them conservatives.
• We’ve got to hate them blacks.
• We’ve got to hate them Jews.

We’ve got to find us somebody to hate. And if we can hate long enough that sounds like it’s the gospel. That ain’t no good news. The good news is “I love you.” Yes, John 3:16 is the center of the Bible. It’s what it’s all about. “For God so loved the word that He gave his only begotten Son.”

The message, the gospel, is the message and the releasing of God’s grace into our lives. The way that grace is released is through the gospel. God himself breaks into our lives, and we are saved by His grace, not by your own works.

• Not by where you came from.
• Not by your race.
• Not from your ethnicity.
• Not from the family you’re from. That has nothing to do with it.

God breaks into your life and you are saved by His grace.

Paul’s there, laying in that dust, and Jesus said,

“Saul, Saul. I love you.”

“Who are you, Lord?”

“I’m Jesus. I’m Jesus, who loves you.”

Paul tried to explain that in Philippians. In that little book of Philippians he says, “I was apprehended. I was arrested on that road. God struck me down. But he took me in his arms. And He knew me. He loved me. He embraced me.” Then he said, “the rest of my life I want to try and embrace him.”

Paul begins to liken that experience to a marathon race, and that he got caught by Jesus. He was embraced and loved. And he said, “That I may know him. That I may embrace him the way he embraced me.” Paul felt absolutely loved by God.

That happened to me 50 years ago at a little Holiness church in Pasadena, CA. I grew up without a mother in my life. She died when I was 7 months old. I grew up without a father deep in my life. I grew up without the institution of love. And I think some of my ambitions…some of my work ethic…came from my desire to be loved. I thought if I would get things, if I would do this, if I would become successful, then people would like me or love me. But I hadn’t found love for 27 years.

One Sunday morning in that little Holiness church, I heard from Galatians 2, where Paul was explaining his own behavior again. He said, “I’ve been crucified with Christ. Nevertheless I live. Yet not I but Christ lives in me. And the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me.” Who loved me. That morning for the first time in my life, I felt like I was embraced by God.

• I felt sticky.
• I felt greasy.
• I felt nasty.
• And I felt sinful.
• And I felt like God didn’t know who he’d put His hand around.

But it felt good. I felt embraced by God. And I said, “If there is a God who could love me that much, who could forgive me my sins and embrace me…I want to love that God back.”

That’s almost what it means to be a Christian. If you discover that God loves you, then you want to love that God back in gratitude.

I can’t see. I go to churches and I don’t quite understand people begging people to do things for God. I don’t quite understand that at all. I really believe that when you have been embraced by God’s love, you ought to be looking for ways to express the gratitude to God.

And when you recognize all that He’s done for you…if people really understood the depths of what it means to be saved, or to have salvation….It means that you’ve been forgiven about your past (Adam’s sin), you’ve being forgiven for your sin now (there is a fountain filled with God, drawn from Emmanuel’s vein). And there’s that sin that’s taken care of. If we confess our sin, He’s faithful and just to forgive us our sin. And if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and that blood there. But if we confess it, he washes away our sin.

Last Sunday morning, I spoke 5 times at University Presbyterian Church and we talked about what can separate us from God’s love. When God embraces us by His grace, He loves us. All of the hardships of life are really working together for good for them who love God…for them who are called according to his righteousness; according to his purpose.

I remember I didn’t see that then. But in 1960, I was locked in a brand new jail. There I was tortured. They have a grave torture. That doesn’t move me. I understand that.

I understand what racism and bigotry and hatred can do. Not only do you see it in Bin Ladin, but you see it in our own boys. How they had to torture. How they had to torture people and try to destroy their sexual origin. We went through all of that. We watched that. Boy. Racial. Tribal. Ethnic hate. When you mix a little religion with that, you’ve got something. That’s what the Ku Klux Klan was. That’s what Islam is in our society. And so I understand that kind of torture. I understand twisted religion. And what we’ve got really…what America’s religion is really becoming… is sort of a greedy, selfish religion in our society.

How did I get there?

If we could understand a little of the grace of God. If we could understand a little of the extreme that Jesus went to, we would have to act with gratitude; act with gratitude to God for all He’s done for us.

I’m a little worried about our religion. And I question sometimes, “Is God going to use Islam as a purifying element for the church?” He used the Babylonians to do that. Is he going to use that? Have we so accommodated ourselves in the church?

You know we have created an apartheid church in direct rebellion against God. You know we have a white church and we have a black church. And we’re pretty proud of that. We have a Mexican church and an Asian church. And all of that is heresy. All of that is heresy.

Jesus told us that His kingdom was to come. We were to reflect that kingdom on earth as in heaven. And when He talks about heaven…he talks about all the ethnics, all the tribes, all the languages. And that’s where he sent us…into all the world to preach the gospel to every group on earth, and to bring them together and to reconcile them into one body, and to love each other. And all the wars of the world right now are ethnic and racial and tribal wars.

And I’m asking sometimes, “Where’s the church?” We’re the church. What are we concerned about?

You know I think about it economically in our society. We’ve got 47 million people in this country without health care. And we’ve convinced ourselves in America – the richest country and people that ever lived on earth – we have convinced ourselves that we can’t afford it. We can’t afford it for those 47 million.

Now who owns oil? Not Exxon.
Who owns the air?
Who owns the water?
Who owns the resources of this world?

Isn’t this world left here for our stewardship? Doesn’t God want us to be the managers of this earth? And we have convinced ourselves that we can’t provide that.

And just last year a head of a health care agency in New York retired…got his severance pay. And he got $2, 200,000,000 for his severance prayer. That’s worse than Enron. That’s worse than World Com in society. And you haven’t heard a voiced raised against it. We have legalized greed and exploitation.

And the church who is supposed to be God’s prophetic people and to hold justice and righteousness before society…we are sour and needy among the people in our society. And God wants you and I to be His stewards, to be his prophetic voice. To be salt and light in this world.

How do you receive God’s grace in vain?

Well, to receive God’s grace in vain is to understand all of God’s redemptive love and all of his concern for us…to understand that it is supposed to be the love of God that pushes us on. And we understand the fact that once we have come to know Jesus Christ we are members of a new family; our old identity based on race is gone because we used to know Jesus – it says here – after the flesh we know Him as a Jew. We don’t know him no more. And then he says to you and me, if any person be in Christ, they are now a new creature. The old has passed away. The new has come. And all of this is from God who has reconciled us to himself by his death on the cross. And now he has given to us the ministry of reconciliation. Then he says that we are His ambassadors and it is our work.

Reconciliation is not a side issue.

I keep going to these conferences. And they call it a conference on reconciliation. And they make that something big and separate. That ought to have been the A-B-C’s. That’s what Jesus died on the cross for...to reconcile us to God. And we know that we were reconciled to God when the Jews and the Samaritans could get along together. When the Jews and the Gentiles could get along together. When Black and white can get along together.

We are satisfied with our ethnicity. I reject all of these centrics.

Centric is another way of promoting our race in some kind of a beautiful way. Afro-centric. European-centric. Well, I’ve seen the end of that. I’ve seen that in Adolf Hitler. He was European-centric. And I’ve seen that in Idi Amin. He was Black-centric.

We are new creatures. We are new family. We’re in the family of God. And we’re supposed to represent God on earth. And the way we represent God on earth is that people can see that we love each other. That’s the essence. We have been loved. Now it becomes our responsibility to love others in the world.

And so, what does it mean? He wants us to be ambassadors. To be ambassadors for Him. That’s how it works.

Look what it says here. “He who made him who knew no sin to be made sin for us so that we might be made the righteousness of Christ.” Really the word righteousness means that we can be made God’s exemplary justice people in the world - that people can look at us and see how we get along as believers in Christ…concerned about the poor and the oppressed of the world, concerned about justice and righteousness in the world. They can look at us.

And so he says here, “He who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” And then he says in chapter 6:1, we then are workers together – the Church is a continuation of Christ’s body here on earth. And he enlists us to be His workers - to carry out His work, not our own. And so we are workers together with him. And then Paul says, “I beseech you, brethren, not to receive the grace of God in vain.”

So would it mean to mean the grace of God in vain? This is a strong word.

This means that you know something about God.
That He has forgiven your sin.
That He has blessed you in some way.
That you are enjoying His blessing.
And you heard what he said here.

To receive the grace of God in vain is to receive all of that, but not be a reconciler. God called you and me to be His reconciling force here on earth. That’s our task. And so I beg you. I beg you. Let’s make a better world.

As I talk to young folks since I’ve been here…and I’ve talked to a lot of high schoolers and junior highers…This is the most exciting time of my life. In these 76 years. I believe that we’ve got a group of young people now who have been (for whatever reason, and it’s good for them) somewhat separated from the past. Some of the mess we don’t need from the past. And we need to forgive each other for that.

And I think there’s a young generation that has developed that and who don’t see race first. I think that’s the thing I’ve seen here in Seattle, probably more than any place that I’ve ever been - that you don’t think of race first.

Where we come from in Mississippi, we think of race first. We think of race first. We are white and black. I don’t know about the whites down there. When we talk as black folk, we’re talking about race. I think most white folks are talking about race. I think all of our politics are based on race. I think that’s why we don’t take the initiative to solve the health problem, education problem. It’s because we’ve got this selfish feeling in America that if we’re do too much for anybody else, it’s taken from me.

And these poor people, these Mexicans, these immigrants and these people here…if it weren’t for the immigrants I wouldn’t have any berries every morning. I wouldn’t have any strawberries. Have you been in that field out there? I wouldn’t have any strawberries. I eat them every morning. I wouldn’t have any blueberries if it weren’t for those Mexicans. And then somehow or another we are going to hate them in our society. And think they are taking from us.

And our nation right now is wealthier than it has ever been in the history of the world. We are wasting billions and trillions over there in Iraq and our economy is still the best that it has ever been. Our unemployment is around 4%. That’s almost full employment in the world, in our society. And we’re not using these opportunities to deal with these deep issues.

We’re incarcerating right now as I speak, over 3 million people, and over 2 million of them are black in our society. I’m afraid there are going to be murderers in our country from the prisons. Prison is a great educational institution. Prison is a place where revolutions are born. If anybody here has any idea of history, revolutions are born in prisons. Fidel Castro, Paul, Mao Tse-Tung, Joi Lai, Mandela. All of those people who change society and culture come out of prison.

Prison is a great place because prisoners see themselves as victims of society. I go to prisons all the time and I can’t find anybody there who have done anything. Everybody in prison has been tricked by society…and have tricked them.

And I see that we are going to raise up from these prisons a generation of young folks who are going to ask the question, “How did the richest nation on earth do this to us?”

I think Bin Ladin is saying, “Why did the richest nation on earth use undressed ladies to sell their products all over the world?”

Why are all our issues in America sexual issues? All the big issues are sexual issues. This woman’s (Anna Nicole Smith’s) body has been on the top of the news. She’s dead. And her sexual expression dominates the news.

The big issues in our society are abortion (That’s sexual). AIDS (That’s sexual). Abortion (That’s sexual). Homosexuality (That’s sexual). In our society. How we are driven.

And selfishness is that sexuality can be the end of greed. It’s the most beautiful expression of God’s love. It is like the greatest expression of humanity. We have corrupted it in the world in our society. There’s your right.

We don’t protect life. We don’t protect life. We’ll never clear the abortion issue because today we can do what we want to with life. It belongs to me. It doesn’t belong to God.

And we’re the first generation that put its own will over life itself. And what we want.

That’s what we see in Afghanistan. That’s what we see in Iraq. And God has called us as the protectors, as the upholders and stewards of life.

God created this world and gave it to us and told us to manage this world so that life could have its best chance. Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly.”

To receive the grace of God in vain is to understand what we understand in the church and then do very little about it. Just to do enough to take care of our guilt. And religion today is basically a tip to God. And when we make that tip to God, and then we give him an hour – we don’t go much over that on a Sunday morning – we have done our thing for God.