Saved not Solved - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

Paul's not trying to get us to be fixed. And he's trying to get us out of the mentality that we are fixable. Or that Jesus came here to fix us. To solve us. There is a difference between being solved and being saved. There is a difference between being fixed and being loved. God loves you. God lives for you, dies and lives again for you. God saves us as we are, not fixes us so we can be savable. And those are different things. Now many of us, many of us in this room, have been quite successful at solving problems. And I want to say, there's a place for it. It's not bad. Well, Phil told me today that problem solving is bad. Now we got to solve problems, I get that. There's a bunch of things we got to work on, I understand that. Us being ourselves is not a problem to be solved though. And there are things that we cannot muscle our way through. We cannot use our bodies and our minds so strongly and so perfectly that finally we will be acceptable to God because we are already acceptable to God, the God who loves us and is faithful to us. Thanks be to God in Jesus Christ To have a mind set in the flesh is a mind set in the belief that you can use your body to make yourself perfect. And Paul says that leads to death. Death, when you try to make yourself perfect in relationship with others, when you try to make yourself perfect in relationship to God, when you think you've just got to keep working or else you cannot love and be loved, you are killing yourself, my friends.