This teenage girl got a bad report card from school one day that she kept hiding hoping that, someway or another, it would just go away.  But, judgment day finally came and she had to have at least one parent sign it before she could take it back to school.  So, she finally gave in and took it to her dad (not that teenage daughters just somehow know they have their dads wrapped around their finger).  But, when he saw the card he asked her, “Why haven’t you shown me this before now?”  Having nothing else to lose by this time his daughter said, “I didn’t think you’d love me if you saw how badly I’d done.”

So, a little frustrated, the dad took the card, signed it and said, “Honey, if your picture was on the front page of the paper tomorrow because you had committed some horrible crime, I wouldn’t love you any less than I do right now.  And, if your picture was on the front page of the paper tomorrow because you had just won some fabulous award I couldn’t love you then any more than I do right now.  I will always love you completely no matter how badly or how well you do.”  The daughter thought for a moment and then said, “That’s the problem, dad; you keep telling me things that don’t make any sense.”

Father’s have a way of doing that, don’t they?  Always telling us things that don’t make sense.  Like our Heavenly Father has told us through the scripture we have read, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus . . ..”  Think like Jesus did, our Father is saying.  Then, specifying the behavior in which that kind of thinking finally issues, the scripture calls us to a kind of thinking that puts the needs of others above our own.  It’s a kind of thinking that believes that the needs of others are at least as important as ours.  It’s a kind of thinking that believes that everything we have has been given us not to keep but to use in the service of God to meet the needs of others.  Any way you look at it, from a human perspective, that just doesn’t make sense.

Yet, coming anywhere close to making sense of what we are going to celebrate next week in the resurrection of Christ means at least trying to understand what got him in the tomb in the first place.  So, repeating the theme at the heart of last week’s message, the cross was not something Jesus suffered in order to change God’s mind about us.  The cross was something God did for us through His son to change our minds about him.   

God is not, like some bloodthirsty gods of pagan mythology, demanding sacrifices from us that pay off our moral debts so that he can then love us.  The love of God initiated the death of Jesus.  In Christ, was God taking upon himself, literally absorbing into himself, the moral guilt that was ours and ours alone.  “For our sake (God) made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”  (2 Corinthians 5:21) 

Our sins don’t just go away.  They eventually end up on the cross.  That is what the gospel means.  Here is how the scripture that grew out of the gospel takes the gospel further.  God not only intends what Christ did on the cross to change our minds about him.  He intends it to change our minds about each other, as well, so that the circle of redemption might be complete.  Salvation is not just something that alters our standing with God.  Salvation, when complete, is something that alters the way we think about and behave toward each other.  “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus . . ..”

So, grace works two ways.  First, were it not for grace, I’d always think that every time I failed my relationship with God was put at risk.  Every time I made a bad grade I would think I had to hide something from my Heavenly Father because he would love me less if he knew the truth – as though he doesn’t know the truth fully already.  I would live each day believing that my worth was something like the high-tech stocks on the Nasdaq, fluctuating from day to day in value.  That my stock with God is devalued or increased in value based on my behavior any give day.  Grace means at least this.  My worth to God can never change.  It can never be more or less than it was the day Jesus died for me because that is the day God made, forever, the highest investment in my worth he could ever make. 

Most of us live, though, by a different standard.  Our minds about God have not been changed.  And, the proof is not in that we cannot recite John 3:16 or that we don’t sing Amazing Grace with great enthusiasm.  The proof is in how treat each other.  If I see your need and my responsibility to meet it as a threat to my ability to hang onto what is mine then my mind has not been changed and I believe my worth is something for which I am responsible and something to which you have no right.  How we treat each other is the greatest proof of how much our minds have been changed about God.

About two months ago a house a few blocks down the street from ours burned.  All that is left is the shell of what was once was the home of a mother and a father and two boys.  While they are waiting for their house to be rebuilt they have rented another house in another part of town.  Recently I was in a local 7-11 when I ran into the oldest boy.  “Clayton,” I asked, “how is your new house?”  And, he said, “It’s great.  My house is bigger than yours.”  You should have seen the smile on his face.  He actually feels better about himself because his house is bigger than mine.  Aren’t we all that way just a little?  Clayton isn’t that much different than most adults with whom I commute to work each day.  Driving ourselves to an early grave because we actually think that we can make ourselves worth more by something we can own or possess.  My house is bigger than your house!  

The way we live in relationship to each other is, too often, proof that we haven’t changed the way we think about God.  We live as though we can import more worth to ourselves than God has already invested in us through his son, Jesus.  When grace has done its work it will change the way we think about ourselves because it will change the way we think about God. 

And, then, it will change the way we think about each other.  Jesus died on the cross to change our minds about God and, therefore, about what we think gives us our worth.  But, if the grace of God never gets further with us than to make us feel better about ourselves then we will never be more than just emotional spiritualists who worship in ways that don’t amount to anything more than so much sentimental slobbering.  Spiritual Dead Seas, we’ll be, stagnating in church as we take in but never give out.  The grace of God was not intended to just make us feel better about ourselves but to empower us to serve God in self-sacrificial ways that empower others.  That was the way “the mind . . . that was in Christ Jesus” thought.  And, it was the mind that finally led him to be the one, on our behalf, who, “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave . . . he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”

About twenty years ago my grandmother was cleaning out her attic one day and came across an old sewing machine that she promptly took and dumped in the trash.  When we found out we nearly died.  It was a turn-of-the-century treadle machine in mint condition.  They actually sell those things in antique stores for more than the original owners paid for them brand new.  But, she didn’t know that.  So, she threw it away because she didn’t know what it was worth.  And, so do we.  We throw our lives away in useless pursuits not only because we don’t know that we cannot export our worth through bad behavior but that we cannot import more worth into ourselves than God has already invested.  Were it not for grace, we’d live and die only to have lived and died for something that dies with us.  Were it not for grace we’d never change our minds.  About God and about each other. 

We’d all live the rest of our lives hoping to be able to say to each other, “my house is bigger than your house!”  We can do that.  We’ll have a lot of company commuting down that road to nowhere.  Or, we can listen again to the gospel from the very mouth of the one who made it possible.  The very one who, more than anyone, has the right to say, “my house is bigger than your house.”  The very Jesus, who as he prepared to die for us, said, “In my Father’s house there are many (mansions) . . . And . . . I go to prepare a place for you.  I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”  (John 14:2-3)  Whether or not we really believe that will not be proven by how well we memorize it but by how much we let it transform the way we live. 

Mrs. Stell was my second-grade Sunday School teacher.  Every year at Thanks-giving, instead of inviting over all of her friends and family for a big feast, she invited the homeless and the hungry.  There is no way of knowing how many people heard the gospel over her dining table that otherwise never would have.  People who heard it because, having heard and believed the gospel herself, Mrs. Stell spent the rest of her life, literally, saying to all who were hungry, “My house is your house.”