Sermon text: Romans 10:8–13
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
We know the Bible verse well: “I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.” It’s become part of our opening liturgy for centuries, and it has that key word in it: “I will confess.” And we know what that means in this particular passage, in this particular sentence: we confess, that is, we tell the truth about who we are and what we have said and what we have done. That’s what we do when we confess.
But in verses 9 and 10 of the Epistle reading this morning, we have a technical, theological, specialized use of the word “confess”: “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” Here the word “confess” is used in a theological sense, and it includes much, much more than mere knowledge of, admission of doing something, either good or bad.
This use of the word concerns itself with doctrine: Christian doctrine, with teaching, with speaking the truths of God’s word, be they written, spoken, or enfleshed — as in “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Greek word for confess is homologeo. It’s a really neat word. It’s a cool word. In Romans 10:8 through 13, this word is used two to three times. The New Testament uses the word. It means to confess, to admit to — and this is the important one — to profess, to make a profession of faith: that is, to say back to God about Christ what God has said to us about His Christ. It is built upon everything that Jesus Christ taught, said, did for us and for our salvation. That is God’s truth.
In this sense, to confess means to speak back to God and before others what God has spoken to us. Notice there’s two — excuse me — aspects of the Christian life at play in this confession: faith in the heart and speaking Christian doctrine. That is, this trust — some people equate it to an emotion; that’s wrong — but nonetheless it’s a trust. This is a particular kind of faith. It’s not the kind of faith you have that the person driving down the road coming at you is in the proper lane. It’s not that kind of trust. It’s not that kind of confidence and faith. This is a divine kind of faith. It takes hold, contrary to all that it sees and experiences, to the very words and truths of God’s Holy Scripture.
Paul would write a little later: “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” That’s verse 17. In verse 14, the verse after our assigned reading, Paul drives the point home that the word has to be spoken. It has to be communicated for there to be the creation of true Christian faith.
I once bumped into a classmate — well, years ago in seminary, in the midst of a controversy on campus about conservatives and traditional Lutheran doctrine — who had fallen silent in his classes. He was a classmate. I had several classes with him. One day I’m walking the sidewalk one direction, he’s coming the other, and he came up and he thanked me for speaking the word of truth. And I asked him why he hadn’t, and he said, “I’m a silent witness.” I don’t know what good a silent witness does to anybody or for anybody. This text makes it absolutely clear that we are to have faith in the heart and confess with the mouth that Jesus is Lord: that is, His whole doctrine and teaching.
In Romans 10:14, Paul says, “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” Thus the primary reason to come to church: to hear the preaching and teaching of God’s word. You hear what it is God has to say to you, and you reply with your heart in faith and with your mouth by speaking.
When the word of God comes to us through the means of grace — through the speaking of absolution, and His words that are put in, with, and under the water of Holy Baptism, and the words of institution that join His body and blood to the elements of bread and wine — in, with, and under, faith is created and/or sustained, and sins are forgiven. “With the heart one believes and with the mouth one confesses,” Paul writes. And remember, to confess is always to speak back God’s gospel truth: the truth of the law and the gospel. Or to put it another way: faith always takes hold of something. Faith in faith is abstract. It’s contentless. It conveys nothing. It does nothing. But faith in the words of the biblical text — faith in the law and the gospel, properly understood and properly applied — is what it clings to: the actual words and deeds of the Holy Trinity, particularly Christ’s words and deeds.
Christ Himself said, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Jesus set more than one sinner free with words. On more than one occasion, He said something to the effect of, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.” And Jesus’s critics asked, “Who is this, who even forgives sins?” Who can forgive sins but God alone? Thus Jesus spoke words of absolution that were comforting to those who heard it, because it effected what it promised, and words of offense — they just happen to be the same exact words. And upon ascending to heaven, He gave the task of absolving sins and offending enemies to the pastors of His church, who have forgotten the task of the last part. He was the one who told the pastors to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and no other. He was the one who said, “This is my body, this is my blood, given and shed for you for the remission of sins.” Many pastors do this: “in remembrance of me.”
To confess in the Christian faith means to speak truth about God’s truth, even to those who deny there is such a thing as religious truth — which is 90% of everybody on the planet these days. To confess in the Christian faith means to speak the truth even as if we’re being interrogated, like Pilate did Jesus on Good Friday when he asked Jesus, “What is truth?” He wasn’t asking about the facts of the case. He was making a fatalistic response to Jesus’s assertion where He said, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” For most people, including Pilate, knowing the truth is hard work. Yet there before Pilate stood a bloody, bound, pathetic Jew from Galilee, claiming to not only be the voice of truth but the only source of divine truth: the truth that has the power to enlighten men with faith and to lead them unto everlasting life.
You see, empirical truth, or what we might call scientific truth, is a hard thing to know. We must use the ladder of scientific inquiry and observation and theoretical postulations to create truth statements that accurately define and reflect the physical and tangible world. But the problem here is that this kind of truth can never be certain, right? Observations change. Theories get modified. Assumptions get negated. But God’s truth is not hard to understand for most people.
First is truth of the law: the Ten Commandments. They seem clear enough: “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Honor your father and your mother. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” And nine and ten: don’t covet anything that belongs to somebody else.
As Israel was about to enter the promised land, Moses told the Israelites that “this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.” That is, do it by virtue of true Christian faith. When we ask, “Why did Israel fail to fulfill God’s commands if they’re so easy? Did they not understand what God was telling them to do and not to do?” And the answer is yes, they did understand. Just as we understand that First Commandment: that we are not to have any other gods beyond the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We’re not to place our trust and confidence in anything else. We’re not to live for any other thing other than our life in Christ Jesus our Lord. But just as I cannot make my heart love God beyond all other things because of my limitations and my old sinful nature and original sin, so also Israel could not keep God’s law because they too carried original sin in their old sinful natures.
But when a person realizes he or she cannot fulfill God’s law, there’s really only two options. One is give up, ignore, live, run from God and live as if God doesn’t exist. Or to pretend that in some measure you’re fulfilling God’s law in an acceptable way before the sight of the Lord. Both lead to very sorry outcomes. Many of the Jews in Paul’s day chose option number two: they pretended that they were fulfilling the law of God, so they rejected God’s other easy-to-understand truth: His gospel. And as Paul wrote the epistle to the Romans, he wrote it for one sole purpose: to bring front and center the gospel of Jesus Christ in the place of true faith and of true confession.
Now, you’re not saved because you utter some magical words in a confession. You’re saved because the words that you utter, if they are the ones God has given to us in the biblical text, save you already. The work is already done. If you’re confessing the faith, Jesus said to the Jews who believed in Him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
The truth of the gospel is easy to understand, but not for the natural man. It’s an unbelievable thing. And Paul addressed that too in 1 Corinthians chapter 1: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.”
God’s undeserved kindness runs contrary to how we’re hardwired. But it’s contrary to our natures to believe that God would save us not by our works and deeds but rather by sending His only begotten Son into the flesh to live a perfect life under the law, to be our substitute, and to die in our place for our sins. It’s contrary to reason that as our substitute, Jesus would rise from the dead and join His sanctified body to our unsanctified bodies, to await the resurrection of the dead, where we will be raised in His glorious image, both physically and spiritually.
His word does not convince us by taking us into heaven with logical arguments or scientific observations. His word does not create faith by taking us to the depths of the soul through the disciplines of psychology and sociology. His word of truth simply creates faith in the heart when and in whom God alone chooses. His word has inherent power to create what God requires: faith. It is a gift, the book of Ephesians argues, from God — not a faith that we generate in our own hearts and minds. His word creates faith in the heart of infants. That’s why we baptize. It creates faith in the hearts of the broken and sinful human beings who have transgressed knowingly and willingly the commands of God and who deserve nothing but temporal and eternal punishment. It creates simple faith simply by the hearing of it, for all elected to salvation, through the means: words and sacrament.
God creates Christians: you people, people of faith. And the word has been spoken to and over us and has opened our ears and eyes to the simplicity and the deadliness of both our law and our sin, and to the simplicity of the grace and kindness given to us by God in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now having our ears open to the law and gospel, when we open our mouths and we say back to God what He has spoken to us — each and every time you do it, and you do do it — you speak it in the creeds and the liturgy, singing of good hymns and prayers, and speaking the gospel to another person, and so on.
We often hear it said that doctrine isn’t important. But that’s that confess part. That’s all about knowing, speaking, believing the right things about Jesus Christ, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But that is not what the book of Romans says in regard to doctrine. The book of Romans says the word “doctrine.” Teaching is important. It’s essential. It’s necessary. That’s the confession part of our faith.
Jesus told the disciples, the first pastors of the New Testament: “The one who hears you hears me, and the one who hears me hears him who sent me.” Luther writes about this act of confessing: “For confession is the principal work of faith, by which a person denies himself” — that means denies everything: his works, his evil works, his attempt to cover himself up with good works, his stature before God — “what Christ has done for him and his salvation. For confession is the principal work of faith by which a person denies himself and confesses God. In confessing God and denying himself, he dies to himself and has risen up a new creation.”
When Lent gives way to Passion week and Good Friday, we will see Jesus standing before Pilate and declare that everyone who listens to Him is listening to the divine gospel truth. Everything Jesus taught is truth. His truth is not from the world, or from science, or philosophy, or psychology. His word does not come from governors or kings or presidents. It comes from the lips of Jesus, not the word of doctors and professors and lawyers and successful businessmen. It’s a simple word, a foolish word, as Paul argues in First Corinthians. When Jesus speaks and does, it’s just as sweet and simple as possible, but as powerful as God Himself. Like the word spoken to Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” He speaks these words: “Your sins are forgiven.” So we believe, and so we confess. We’re forgiven sinners. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.