✠ One Message: Christ crucified and risen for you ✠
The Word of the Lord Endures Forever
Verbum Domini Manet in Aeternum
Galatians 5,16-24 4516
14. Sn. n. Trinitatis 059
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius, Algeria, ✠ 430
28. August 2016
1. О Lord God, Heavenly Father, who by Your Blessed Word and Your Holy Baptism has mercifully cleansed all who believe from the fearful leprosy of sin, and daily does grant us Your gracious help in all our need: We beseech You so to enlighten our hearts by Your Holy Spirit, so that we may never forget these Your blessings, but ever live in Your fear, and, trusting fully in Your grace, with thankful hearts continually praise and glorify You; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, One True God, world without end. Amen. (Veit Dietrich for 14. Sn. n. Trinitatis).
2. But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery [1], hatred, strife, jealousy, wrath, rivalries, sedition, heresies, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the reign of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
3. The great Western theologian, St. Augustine, said: Pride is the mother of all heresies that gives birth to the discord of envy, but humility is the cure for the social conflict sown by the sin of pride (McInerney 105). Pride was the sin that first befell Lucifer [2], and it was pride that he later stoked within Adam and Eve to become like God by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Thus Solomon in his wisdom contemplates: »Pride goeth before destruction, and an arrogant spirit before a fall« (Proverbs 16,18).
4. Saint Paul tells us that pride leads to a host of sins: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, strife, jealousy, wrath, rivalries, sedition, heresies, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things like these. Solomon tells us that there is no new sin under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1,9) [3], for the particular sins of fallen mankind are the same from generation to generation. These lusts of the flesh are just a small sampling of the wicked desires that boil just beneath our corrupted fleshly surface. Therefore Paul rightly diagnoses the human condition: »None is righteous, no, not one; none does what is good, no, not one« (Romans 3,10.12).
5. The cure for proud vices is not an excess of virtuous actions to tip the scale in favor of good deeds. Good works cannot balance the scale where sins are on the other side. Only the gospel is the cure for proud sinfulness. The Apostle Paul proclaims this gospel earlier in his Epistle to the Galatians: »The Lord Jesus Christ gave Himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age. Thus we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but rather is justified through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because no one will be justified by works of the law. We have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. And the life we now live in the flesh we live by faith in the Son of God, who loved us and gave Himself for us. Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for The righteous will live by faith [Habakkuk 2,4] (Galatians 1,3-4; 2,16.20; 3,11).
6. Justification then flows into sanctification, and thus the veracity of St. Augustine: humility is the cure for the social conflict sown by the sin of pride (McInerney 105). Paul lists some of these sanctified deeds: »love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control; against such things there is no law.» Paul then says that this is possible because »those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.« May the Holy Spirit so work in us to produce the fruit of the Spirit so that by the power of the gospel our faith bears good works and we become the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5,13.14). For the gospel of Christ crucified and risen is able to »Shine our light before others, so that they may see our good works and give glory to our Father who is in heaven« (Matthew 5,16). Amen.
7. Let us pray. O Christ Jesus, Thou showest compassion to those who are lost in sin, proclaiming that their sins are forgiven so that they may thus proclaim this gospel to others blinded by the darkness of their sin. Amen.
To God alone be the Glory
Soli Deo Gloria
✠
All Scriptural quotations are translations done by The Rev. Peter A. Bauernfeind using the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 4th Edition © 1990 by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, and the Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland 27th Edition © 1993 by Deutsch Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart.
All quotations from the Book of Concord are translations done by The Rev. Peter A. Bauernfeind using Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, 12. Edition © 1998 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
McInerney, Joseph J. The Greatness of Humility: St. Augustine on Moral Excellence. © 2016 by Pickwick Publications.
[1] φαρμακεία: this refers to a number of pharmaceutical practices in Paul's day which included drugs used to induce hallucinations in connection with idol worshipping, induce an abortion or other uses.
[2] »How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low» (Isaiah 14,12)!
»quomodo cecidisti de caelo lucifer qui mane oriebaris corruisti in terram qui vulnerabas gentes« (Vulgate).
See also Ezekiel 28,11-19.
[3] »What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.«
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