"No More Curse

Dear Friends in Christ,         

     I’d like to begin my sermon this morning by taking you back to what may have very well been the most carefree time of your life.  If I had to give you an exact age for it, it would probably be between the ages of 3 and 5 – your post-diaper/pre-kindergarten years.  Those were good years, weren’t they?  The best part of the day was the first part of the day because when you woke up in the morning you had a whole worry-free, carefree day ahead of you.  The worst part of the day was the last part of the day when you had to go to bed because you didn’t want the journey of delight you had been on all day to come to an end.  You were old enough to potty, but not old enough to worry.  I mean, what was there to worry about?  Back in those days ice cream had no calories, your life had no salaries, your imagination had no boundaries.  Though you might climb a ladder that led up to your tree house or the top of a slide on the playground, you didn’t even think about the ladders we climb as adults: the ladder of success, the corporate ladder, the ladder that leads to the top of the social scale. 

   Your desires back then were so simple too, weren’t they?  All you needed was a sidewalk and a couple pieces of chalk and you could spend the day doodling and drawing on that sidewalk or playing hopscotch or a game we used to play when I was a kid called Chalk the Rabbit.  Get an empty can of peas from mom’s kitchen and you and the neighborhood gang could entertain yourselves for hours playing Kick the Can in the back yard.  Go to the beach and you could spend an afternoon playing in the sand with nothing more than a plastic shovel and pail. 

   And as for your schedule, you never even heard of the word itinerary.  You never consulted a calendar.  You didn’t wear a watch.  Or if you did, it was a plastic one you got out of a cereal box.  You didn’t care about what brand of clothing you wore.  And if you had holes in your jeans, they were attained honestly by falling down while running or riding your bike rather than by purchasing them that way.  And your mom would patch them rather than leaving them there so that nobody would think you were poor.

   Wouldn’t you agree that those were simple days, carefree days?  So the question is, what happened?  Well, lots of things happened.  For starters, time happened.  Alarm clocks started buzzing, school bells started ringing, birthday candles started increasing.  And we soon learned the fallacy of the phrase “telling time.”  We don’t tell time anything.  Rather it tells us.  It tells us when to get up, when to go to bed, when to go to work, when to go to school, when to be at ball practice.  Time grows prepositions as we get older like on time and in time.  Little kids don’t worry about being on time or if they’ll get something done in time.  Those prepositions come with age and experience.

   So time is one thing that disrupted our carefree childhood.  Another thing was stuff.  Stuff complicates life, doesn’t it, because that stuff has to be taken care of?  It has to be tended to.  I’ve got to keep the car maintained, the house cleaned, the lawn mowed, the refrigerator stocked, the desk cleared, the office organized,.  Four-year-olds don’t worry about things like that, do they?  They don’t give a second thought about what they’re going to eat.  It just somehow magically appears and they gobble it down.  When you were 4 you didn’t know the difference between a mortgage and a monkey, but when you’re 40 you not only know the difference, but that mortgage sometimes becomes a proverbial monkey on your back as you struggle to pay it each month.

  You know what else complicates life?  People.  Mom, Dad, brothers, sisters, friends, former friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, former boyfriends, former girlfriends, bosses, co-workers.  People can really make a mess out of our lives, can’t they? Hurt feelings, settling the score, revenge, divorce, lawsuits, anger, bitterness.  Back in those childhood days, yeah, you might have an argument with your best buddy and maybe even bloody each other’s noses, but the next day it would all be forgotten and things would be back to normal.  But when we become adults, It’s not quite that simple.

   So time, stuff, people, all of these complicate life.  But you want to know what really complicates it more than anything else?  How about sin?  The literal definition for the Greek word that is translated “sin” in the New Testament is “missing the mark.”  When we sin, we miss the marks that God has set up for us, what David called in the 23^rd Psalm “the paths of righteousness.”  Please note that God places those marks before us not because he’s some mean or dictatorial tyrant who wants to run and control every area and aspect of our lives, but he does it because he loves us and he trying to protect us. 

   So let me ask you, how simple do you think your life would be today if you had never sinned?  Do you think things would be different for you if you had never picked up that bad habit, made that bad choice, or spoke those bad words out of the anger you were feeling at the time?  What if you’d never had a fight, never had a hangover, never had a traffic violation, never lived or spent beyond your means?  Do you think your life would be different?  Would your life be better?  Of course it would.  But because you faltered and failed so many times just like I’ve done, your life has become increasingly complicated, complex, and chaotic.  Well, take that complexity that sin has brought into your life and multiply it by about 7 billion people who inhabit this planet right now and you get a pretty good idea why the world is in the mess it’s in today.  But extract sin from the world, vacuum it from this planet, erase it from the earth, and imagine how nice things would be.  If no one ever sinned, there would be no unwanted children, no warring nations, no road rage, no tension in your home, no tension in your office, no stress in your life.  Indeed, remove sin from the picture and it’s amazing how simple and wonderful life becomes.  And if you can get that picture in your mind, my friends, you’re starting to get a picture of what life with Christ will be like for all eternity.  And that’s really the point that John is getting at in our text for today when he says: “And there shall be no more curse.”    

   Now in order to understand the beauty of that verse we need to understand the ugliness of the curse.  Author Max Lucado once referred to the curse as the hangover of sin.  It’s the consequences that we and our planet and our universe bear because of Adam and Eve’s fall into sin.  Now there are 4 dimensions to that curse that I want to briefly go over with you.  First of all, work got very complicated.  Prior to the Fall, the ground produced abundantly for Adam, but after the Fall God cursed the ground and it began to bring forth thorns and thistles and weeds and Adam had to work by the sweat of his brow to get anything from it.  Applying that to our day and age, what that means is that the whole activity of earning a living became more stressful than it was enjoyable and I’m confident that we’ve all felt that stress in some form or another.  Then the 2^nd dimension of the curse is that it affected our relationship with God.  Prior to the curse Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden.  Though they were naked, they were not ashamed or embarrassed to be in his presence like that.  But after they sinned, they were afraid of God.  They ran from God.  They hid from him.  And mankind has been doing the same ever since then, not necessarily in bushes but how about 80 hour work weeks or bottles of alcohol or material pleasures or recreational activities or sexual affairs?  Then the 3^rd dimension or consequence of the curse is that it affected our relationships with others.  Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent, the blame game began, and we’ve been playing it ever since.  Any time you point a finger of blame at someone else, that’s a result of the curse.  No one wants to take responsibility for their actions anymore.  In fact, I heard a great example of this when I went to a Cardinals’ game last month with my best friend from my high school days.  His name is Bob.  He’s the manager of a plant in St. Louis where they make battery chargers.  And he was telling me about one employee whom he had to call into his office several times for different reasons.  The last time he called him in he gave him a final warning that if he messed up one more time, he’d have to let him go.  Well, the very next day he came into work late.  So Bob called him into his office and told him that was it.  He was terminated.  And this fellow said, “What???  So you’re just going to throw me out on the street??  You’re not going to give me another chance??  How can you do that???”  What a classic example of the curse of sin in action, of a person refusing to take responsibility for his own actions.

   Then one more consequence of the curse – what we might call the knockout punch of the curse – is death.  Romans 6:23 says that “The wages of sin is death.”  That’s what we earn, that’s what we get paid for our ongoing violations of God’s will.  Prior to the Fall there was no death in our world.  But since the Fall the tentacles of death have spread into every nook and cranny of God’s once perfect creation and unless Christ comes back first, they will reach every one of us here today at some time or another.

   Wow!  Talk about a downhill slide!  Adam and Eve’s fall into sin took us from a beautiful, wonderful, perfect world to a sin-tainted, sin-effected, sin-cursed world that continues to reel from its consequences.  And that’s why I love our text so much.  That’s why this is one of my favorite verses in the entire Bible: “There shall be no more curse.”  Now it’s hard for us to imagine what that will be like because we’ve never lived without the curse.  But looking at the consequences of the curse that we’ve just examined, if there is no more curse then that means there will be no more struggle with the earth, no more distance from God, no more tension or conflict with others, and no more fear of death.  And the reason there won’t be is because of what the Apostle Paul tells us in Gal. 3:13 when he says: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”  When he took our sins upon his shoulders on the cross, my friends, he bore the full brunt of the curse and suffered and died to pay its penalty all so that we could enjoy a curse-less eternity.

   But there’s another reason why there will be no more curse in heaven and that is because there will be no more sin there.  Imagine that!  Imagine you never sinning again – in fact, never having the ability or even the desire to sin.  And one reason you won’t sin anymore is because the one who is the source of all sin, Satan, will not be there to tempt you to sin.  He will be living out his eternity in what the Book of Revelation calls the lake of fire or what we typically refer to as hell and he will never again have access to the saints of God.  In the perfection of heaven then sin will lose its appeal.  The temptations that lure you here will appall and disgust you there.  One author says they will have the appeal of cockroaches in heaven.  How many of you here today like cockroaches?  How many of you are having cockroaches for lunch today?  Do you eat your cockroaches salted or maybe with a dash of sugar on them?  Do you go to McDonald’s and ask them to sprinkle some cockroach wings on your Big Mac or put some cockroach heads on your salad to make it more crunchy?  Of course not!  The thought is absolutely appalling because cockroaches hold no appeal for us.  Likewise, sin will hold no appeal for us in heaven.  The very thing that today pulls on your heart and distracts you from God and destroys relationships will have the appeal of cockroaches when we finally find ourselves in the presence of Christ.

   When Leonardo da Vinci was painting his masterpiece of the Last Supper he searched long and hard for a man who could serve as a model for the face of Christ.  Finally he found a man who was a choir member in one of the churches of Rome who had striking facial features.  His name was Pietro Bandanelli and he served as a great model for the face of the Savior.  The painting however went unfinished for quite some time and when da Vinci got back to it, he had a difficult time finding a model for the face of Judas, the disciple who betrayed Christ.  Finally he spotted a beggar on the streets of Rome with a face so evil, so villainous that da Vince shuddered in fear when he first saw him.  He hired the man to sit for him and when he was finished he realized he had failed to ask his name.  The man said, “My name is Pietro Bandanelli.  I served as your model for Christ.”

   What in the world happened to Pietro Bandanelli?  I’ll tell you what happened to him.  In one word, sin happened to him.  Sin can do that to a person.  It can change your counyenance.  It can heavy your heart.  It can ruin your life.  It can destroy a human being.  Bible scholar Erwin Lutzer once said: “Sin takes you farther than you want to go, keeps you longer than you want to stay, and costs you more than you intended to pay.”  So my friends, I encourage you to take whatever sin you have in your life to the foot of the cross and lay it down there and leave it there.  Allow the blood of Jesus to cleanse you from those sins.  Trust his sacrifice on the cross as the all-sufficient payment for your sins.  And one day you will be able to enjoy the ultimate benefit of that sacrifice as you will dwell in his glorious and sinless presence for all eternity where there will finally be no more curse.                          

Amen.