Sermon preached at Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church (Sioux Falls, SD) by Pr Benjamin Tomczak.

God doesn’t need your good works to make the world go round; or, to get you into heaven. That phrase speaks about justification by faith. God doesn’t need you to get you to heaven. It’s the opposite. While you consider giving your heart to God, someone needs to tell you, “What about your heart would God want? Think of all the disgusting sin in there, the rot, the abuse, the perversion. You want to give that to God?” So God says, I don’t need you to fix things. I will fix things. And he does. He offers up Christ, the doer of all good works, actual good works. He’s the one who turned our eyes to the Father to say, “Give us” and “Forgive us.” He’s the one we look upon and in looking upon his bleeding hands, his dead body, we see a God who really does give food and open his hands. He opened his hands to our sin. He put our sin into his hands: “Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”