MarkDaniels.Blogspot.com

It's a Frightened Clown!

2012-01-26T07:19:00.002-05:00

So, we were stopped at a red light in Lancaster, Ohio. Ahead of us was an SUV without a spare tire where it should have been. In its place, we saw the face of this frightened clown.

Audio of This Morning's 'Read the Bible in a Year' Discussion Group

2012-01-25T17:58:00.000-05:00

We're reading the Bible together in a year at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio. Each Wednesday, we have two discussion groups, one in the morning and one in the evening, of the week's readings. This week's readings were Acts 16 through Roman 9.

A few points:

1. Von Staupitz told Luther to not come back to him with "puppy sins," not "baby sins," as I erroneously said here.

2. The question was raised as to whether Martin Luther suffered from epilepsy. No, he didn't. But he may have had Meniere's Disease, "an inner ear disorder that affects balance and hearing."

For your information: My favorite biography of Martin Luther originally written in English is Here I Stand by Roland Bainton.

"I Want to Believe in God, But Find It Hard"

2012-01-24T09:33:00.001-05:00

"I want to believe in God, but find it hard. What can I do to believe?"

I got this question this past Sunday after we'd invited listeners to our church radio broadcast to text us.

I understand how hard it can be to believe. For a decade, I considered myself an atheist. I scoffed at the notion of God. A superficial understanding of science and its discoveries of the mechanics of life had led me to conclude that God was a fiction. After all, nobody had seen God while peering into the depths of space, the oceans, or subatomic particles.

This was silly on my part, of course. because there isn't a conflict between believing in God and being engaged in--or appreciating--science. As someone has said, "Science is largely, thinking God's thoughts after God."

The Bible and Science each ask different questions about the universe in which we live.

Science asks: What? When? How? These questions are important in helping us to understand the mechanics of the universe and how we can harness or "co-conspire" with them to do useful things.

But the Bible asks other questions, ones that science is incompetent to answer: Why? Who? The religions of the world show that human beings have considered these two questions and come up with all sorts of creative answers to them. But the Bible is the testimony of thousands of people over thousands of years who weren't speculating about why life exists or who made it, but reporting their encounters with the One Who created the universe and revealed His will for humanity and creation.

The Bible claims that over time, God has revealed Himself to the human race and ultimately, in the person we Christians call God the Son, Jesus. In Jesus, a man in Whom the full deity of God lived, we see a God of infinite love and rectitude.

According to the Bible, faith in God isn't something we claw to attain. It's God's gift to those who are willing to believe. The Bible also says that it's God's Holy Spirit, the third Person of the one God, Who persuades us to trust in God as revealed in the crucified and risen Jesus.

"God," we might tell the Lord, "there are lots of things I don't understand. I have many questions. And so much in the world is untrustworthy. But I want to trust in You. If Jesus displays Who You are, then I want to believe in You."

If you want to believe, God will build up faith in Him within You. You may feel that your faith is only, as Jesus once put it, the size of a small mustard seed. But that's OK. God doesn't judge us on the size of our faith, only on the One in Whom we place our faith.

As Jesus told Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."

A little faith in the big God we meet in Jesus, Who gave His life for us and then rose to open up eternity to those who trust in Him, is all you need. And if you want to believe, then I would say, you already do believe.

But your question indicates that you want your faith to grow. God wants the same thing.

That's part of why God has given you the Church.

Find a congregation where the Bible is preached and Jesus is exalted as the only pathway to knowing God.

Then get involved in that church's Sunday School and Bible studies and service projects.

You will learn more of God and you will see up close and personal, ordinary people like you and me, who wrestle with life's troubles and tragedies, yet trust in God. Your faith will grow in the process.

God bless you as you grow!

It Starts With Us

2012-01-22T10:15:00.001-05:00

[This sermon was prepared to be shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, on January 22. We had to cancel worship because of icy conditions. But the sermon was shared via the local radio station that carries our Sunday worship services and has done so since 1962.]

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
This morning, I want to walk through the six verses that make up our first lesson, taken from the Old Testament, Jonah 3, verses 1 to 5 and verse 10, and see what God wants to reveal to us this morning.

Jonah 3, verse 1, says: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.”

I love the understatement of this passage! You may remember the first time that God’s word came to Jonah, a prophet who lived in the Judean coastal city of Joppa eight centuries before Jesus was born. The first time God called Jonah is recounted in Jonah, chapter 1, verse 2. It says: “Go at once to Ninveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me.”

God gave Jonah simple instructions. He was to go to Nineveh, the most important metropolis of the Assyrian nation and decry their sin.

In those days, all of God’s people, the Judeans, probably feared Assyria, a rising world power. But Jonah clearly hated the people of Assyria and its major city, Nineveh.

So, instead of doing as God directed, Jonah booked a berth on a ship headed for Spain.

Things didn’t go well for him after that! God stirred up a storm on the Mediterranean. Jonah knew that the lives of all on the ship were threatened by his faithlessness toward God.

So, he told them to throw him overboard. As soon as they did so, the storm ended. They were spared.

But what about Jonah?

As you know, God caused him to spend time in the belly of a great fish. Jonah was there for three days, praying. Finally, the fish vomited him onto dry land.

After trying to thwart the will of God, Jonah was exhausted, filthy, and smelly.

You know what I’ve learned over the years, folks? This world can be a hard place. We have no control over the evil that the devil and this world sometimes bring against the most faithful people we know. That’s hard and horrible.

But there are others kinds of suffering we may undergo over which we do have control. It’s the suffering that comes to us when we who claim to believe in the God ultimately revealed to the world in Jesus Christ, but deliberately contradict the Word and the will of God. It's the kind of suffering Jonah caused himself when he refused to do what God told him to do.

I once counseled with a man, a pillar of his church, who gave generously to Christ’s causes in the world, but who was deeply unhappy. As I scratched below his surface talk, I leaned that he was having an affair. He was alienated from the kids he constantly discouraged. He was drinking to excess, which, in turn, was a major cause for multiple hospitalizations and ever-worsening health.

It was clear why he was so unhappy: As was true of Jonah when God sent the storm to disrupt his Mediterranean escape, God hadn’t given up on this man. So God was making this man miserable, waging war for his soul. He was still close enough to God to feel badly when he continued to do what he knew in his soul and from the Word of God was wrong!

When we who claim to be believers in the God revealed in Jesus turn our backs on the will of God, God will put us in the vise of what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance: the miserable condition that comes to those who claim to see reality in one way, yet live in a different way.

If people who confess Christ brazenly violate the will of God—using God’s Name for anything other than prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, for example; or, cheating others in business dealings; or, spreading unconfirmed rumors without knowing the facts; or, having a sexual relationship outside of the marriage of a man and a woman; or whatever the sin may be—God will hound them until they have either repented and returned to Christ or until they have totally stopped their ears and hearts to God.

After he headed for Spain, God didn’t given up on Jonah.

God had apparently not given up on Nineveh, either. If God hadn’t wanted the people of Nineveh to repent for their sins and believe in Him, He wouldn’t have called Jonah to go to them, either the first or the second times.

If you're listening to me today, having taken the time to go to worship or listen to the Saint Matthew radio broadcast, it shows that God hasn't given up on you...and, whether you're willing to admit it or not, God hasn't given up you either!

Listen, folks: Pray that God will always make you miserable when you ignore His will.

If your conscience bothers you when you realize you’re guilty of sin, that is a very good sign. Only those who have left themselves within range of God's loving arms feel guilt for their wrongs. And it's only when we're touched by guilt that we go to God for the forgiveness and the power for living eternally with God that only Jesus Christ can give.

The New Testament book of Hebrews says, “Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline?”

Followers of Jesus Christ will rise again to live in God’s new heaven and new earth and God disciplines us to prepare us to be the useful, joyful people you and I are going to be in eternity. Earthly pains can yield heavenly gains!

Verses three and four tell us that Jonah, battered from his battle with the God he claimed to serve, “…set out and went to Nineveh, according to the Word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, 'Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.'”

Jonah may have said those words with relish. He hated the Ninevites, after all.

But even if Jonah meant his message for evil, God meant it for good!

Jonah hoped that the words he spoke from God would fall on deaf ears and that God would destroy the Ninevites.

He underestimated the power of the Word of God, though. Through the prophet Isaiah, God says, “My Word…shall not return to Me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” God's Word has the power to melt the hardest of hearts and turn them to God! If we let it, God's Word can penetrate our darkest times with the comfort of His presence and the promise of eternity.

When I get up to preach on Sunday mornings, I believe that, even if it happens in the life of just one person, the sermon will accomplish something.

It may cause one unrepentant sinner to ask for God’s forgiveness.
Or lead one atheist or doubter to turn in faith to Christ.
It may bring comfort to one grieving person, hope to one despairing person.

I believe all of this because I’m confident that when we lift up the Word of God in all its fullness, God’s Word will accomplish great things.

Jonah was a less than enthusiastic preacher. It didn’t matter. He was speaking the Word of God and the Word of God has power!

Look at verse 5 to see how much power: “And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.”

I almost have to laugh every time I read this verse. Jonah never mentioned God! But the power of God’s Word is such that those who are open to it know it when they’ve heard it.

Folks, there are people you know who are steeped in sin who are just waiting to hear your invitation to turn from sin and believe in Jesus. You won’t be judgmental if you deliver this message to them. You’ll be sharing the greatest love the world has ever known: the love of God that saves sinners from death and futility to live with God, imperfectly today and one day in eternity, in complete perfection.

Don’t be discouraged when people aren’t receptive to your word about Jesus. I turned down people's invitations to follow Jesus for years before God used my wife, Ann, to introduce me to a group of joyful Lutheran Christians whose faith was so infectious, I wanted follow Jesus. During my atheist decade, I was once invited to a Christian movie at the Ohio Theater in Columbus by a friend. As we sat in the theater afterward, I told him, "No, I don't want Jesus in my life." Little did I know that thirty-plus years later, I would be captain of the team that counseled thousands of people who said, "Yes" to Billy Graham's invitation to follow Jesus during Dr. Graham's 2002 Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Mission at Paul Brown Stadium. Just because people say no to your invitations to experience or follow Jesus the first time doesn't mean that's their final answer. As a disciple-maker for Jesus, you aren't responsible for other people's answers, only for praying for them and sharing Christ's invitation.

And don’t be surprised when people take you up on your invitations to join you for church or Sunday School or Bible study or prayer. “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold,” Jesus once said. “I must bring them also, and they will listen to My voice.” You and I are called to be the voice of Christ in this world! If we’ll just be open about our faith in Christ, we’ll be amazed at how many people are receptive.

In Jonah, chapter 3, verse 10 we're told: “When God saw what [the Ninevites] did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed His mind about the calamity that He had said He would bring upon them; and He did not do it.”

God’s character is never changing and constant:

God will always love you passionately. (Sadly, hell will be filled with people God loves. But God will not force His love and forgiveness on anyone.)
God will always hate sin and not allow it in His presence.
God will always command that you repent for sin and trust in His Son.
God will always welcome those who repent and believe, like the father who welcomed the prodigal son.
God will always have a place ready and waiting for you in His heart and in His kingdom if you're willing to turn from sin and give your life to Christ.

Even though God is unchanging, God can change His mind. He did so when it came to His planned destruction of Nineveh. God used Jonah's half-hearted preaching to turn people from enemies of God into children of God. God wanted to save the people of Nineveh from condemnation and hell. He wants to do the same thing for every person in Logan and Hocking County today.

So, I challenge you (and me) to do two things with our lives. First, to take stock of our own lives, asking God to show us what we may need to repent for. Make this a daily practice. In Psalm 51, King David prays to God, “You desire truth in the inward being.”

When we get honest with God about our sins, He gives us forgiveness and helps us to live our lives differently. God’s Holy Spirit will help us to be sensitive to how we can keep walking in the will of God and to remain sensitive to the call to repentance that will put us back on the right track. When we daily repent and renew our trust in Jesus, God will help us to live the faith we profess.

Second, don’t be reluctant about going to your friends with the truth about their sin and their need of Jesus’ forgiveness. This is not being judgmental. When Jesus says, "Judge not, lest you be judged," he is warning us against making judgments that are unfair. But if a friend of yours was stepping out into traffic, you wouldn't decide to say nothing because of some fear that you would be casting judgment on your friend's bad decision, would you? No way. You'd yell loudly and clearly, "Stop!" Loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, which Jesus commands of every Christian, must entail caring enough about others to tell them that their favorite sins are hurting them, hurting God, and putting their eternities at risk.

I'm convinced many people want to hear the simple message Jesus delivers in today’s Gospel lesson: “Repent, and believe in the good news.” They're just waiting for the Christian who is bold enough and loving enough to share it with them. It's a message I want to share with you today. If you have wandered far from God, then I invite you to turn from sin and death and turn instead to Jesus and the life that only He can give. Life on this earth isn't perfect. But you don't want to draw another breath or take another step without Jesus Christ as your God and companion. And you surely don't want to step into eternity, whenever that might happen, without Jesus as your Savior and king. Turn to Him now and live!

God has a simple plan for renewing the people of the world. It begins with us.

First, we daily and consistently repent and trust in the God we know in Jesus.

Second, we invite others to repent and trust in this same God.

If the Ninevites proved open to this message, maybe the Loganites will too. Maybe the people of the world will be open to it.

Are you ready for that?

Then, start with repentance for your own sins and trusting Jesus to forgive you and make you new each day.

Then, start telling others what an amazing God He is. Amen

Audio of Wednesday Morning's 'Read the Bible in a Year' Discussion

2012-01-19T00:17:00.014-05:00

At Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, we're reading the Bible together in a year, about three chapters at a time. Once a week, we get together to discuss the readings. This week's readings have been John 19 through Acts 15. Today's discussion mostly focused on Acts.

7 Things Jesus Will Never Say or Do to Get Your "Vote"

2012-01-18T09:10:00.000-05:00

It's presidential campaign season. Candidates say a lot of things to get your vote. The God we meet in Jesus Christ (in Him, the Bible says, "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell") has been engaged in a "campaign" to win our "votes" as Lord and Savior of our lives for centuries. But, unlike the political candidates frenetically seeking your vote, there are some things that Jesus will never say or do to get your vote:

Jesus will never pretend to be something He's not, part 1. Jesus, God the Son, never downplayed His origins. Asked, "Are You the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?" Jesus answered, "I AM" (Mark 14:62). I AM, Yahweh, is the name with which God first identified Himself when God called Moses to lead His people Israel.
Jesus will never pretend to be something He's not, part 2. When God came to earth in the Person of Jesus, He experienced a life of humility and simplicity. He was raised by a couple so poor that when they brought Jesus to be dedicated at the Temple in Jerusalem, they couldn't afford the sacrifice given by wealthier parents, a lamb. Instead, the offered what the Old Testament stipulated for families of more modest means: "a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons" (Luke 2:23, Exodus 13:2, 12).
Jesus will never pretend to be empathetic; He really does understand us. The Bible says that we do not have in Jesus a "high priest," an advocate, Who "is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but...One Who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin." This allows us to "approach the throne of grace [God] with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need" (Hebrews 4:15-16).
Jesus will never turn His back on some followers in order to placate others. He promises all who believe in Him, "I am with you always, even to the close of the age" (Matthew 28:20).
Jesus will never tell us that we are blameless. Politicians try to build coalitions of support by appealing to our egos. But Jesus once told a group of people who had believed in Him (John 8:31), "If I tell you the truth, why do you not believe Me? Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear then is that you are not from God..." (John 8:46-47). Yet it was to "seek and save" those lost in sin--the entire human race--that Jesus came to die on a cross and rise from the dead (Luke 19:10). Only those who "repent and believe" in the Kingdom of God over which He reigns can have Jesus as their king, today and in eternity (Mark 1:15).
Jesus will never tell you He will make this world perfect for those who "vote" for Him. While Jesus' kingdom has invaded this imperfect world (Luke 17:21), His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). It's Jesus' intention to establish a "new heaven and a new earth," in which sin and injustice is banished forever and where those who have become part of His new creation, by faith in Him (2 Corinthians 5:17), will live eternally (Revelation 21:1). In the meantime, even believers in Jesus will be pressed hard by the pain, difficulties, and tragedies of this fallen world. Sometimes, following Jesus will make our lives harder than they otherwise would be. "In this world you face persecution" for faith in Him, Jesus once said, "But take courage; I have conquered the world" (John 16:33).
Jesus never promises His followers material wealth. But He does warn us of the dangers an obsession of wealth can cause our souls when money takes the place of God in our priorities: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Matthew 19:24).

With campaign promises like these, it's no wonder that the people of Jesus' day--Jew and Gentile--elected to crucify or abandon Him.

But today, as in Jesus' time on earth, those who receive Him and believe in His Name, are given the power to become the children of God (John 1:12-13).

Vote for Jesus by giving your life to Him. As Jesus Himself says: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life."

After God Has Forgiven You...Forgive Yourself

2012-01-17T08:47:00.001-05:00

Today, after you've confessed your sins to God, ask God to help you to forgive yourself as God has forgiven you.

No more rehearsing of the sins that caused you to tell God you were sorry and to ask God for His forgiveness! God's Word in the Bible promises: "As far as east is from the west, so far [God] removes our transgressions from us" (Psalm 103:12).

When we hold onto sin that God has forgiven, we display a lack of faith in God's compassion and God's willingness to keep His promises. But the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, show us God's compassion and God's resolve to do all that's necessary for us to be forgiven and have our relationship with God restored. When we genuinely confess our sins to God in Jesus' Name, we can be sure that we are forgiven.

Holding onto our sin and refusing to accept God's forgiveness can also turn our guilt into shame.

Guilt is God's prod to our consciences, alerting us to something we have done that's building a barrier between God and us, between us and others, between us and God's forgiveness.

Shame is that boulder we carry on our shoulders when we think that our faults, real and imagined, make us irredeemably bad.

Look, no one is irredeemably bad. Even the bandit on the cross next to Jesus turned from sin and to faith in Jesus with His dying breaths and Jesus told him, "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43).

Through Jesus, we know, as the Bible tells us, "If we confess our sins, [God] Who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). It also says that "everyone who believes in [Jesus] receives forgiveness of sins through His Name" (Acts 10:43).

Today, after you've confessed your sins to God, ask God to help you to forgive yourself as God has forgiven you.

To Be an Honest Witness for Jesus

2012-01-15T22:59:00.001-05:00

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

John 1:43-51
Let’s say that friends are visiting you. You’ve just renovated your living room: new chairs, couch, end tables, lamps, entertainment center, furnishings. All are tasteful, plain, functional, pleasing to the eye. The chairs and couch are comfy. The wall coloring is rich and inviting.

Now, sometime during their visit, your friends, who have been to your house before, are going to ask you about your newly appointed living room. Where did you get the furniture, the paint, the carpeting? Did you have help? If so, who was the contractor?

Let me ask you this: If your friends asked you questions like these, would you refuse to answer them? Of course not! You’d be happy to answer their questions, maybe even with a trace of pride. When we have good things happen in our lives, we want to share the story with others.

We are now in a season of the Church Year called Epiphany. The New Testament was, of course, originally written in Greek and the word epiphany comes from the Greek word epiphaino. It means to show oneself, to appear. The Gospel lessons for the season of Epiphany are ones in which Jesus showed Himself to be more than just another man—more even than just another king, but God enfleshed, the King of all kings, the Savior Who offers freedom from sin and death to all who will repent for sin and entrust their lives to only Him.

Today, as in Biblical times, the true identity of Jesus can be shown to people in miraculous signs as well as in moments of quiet clarity. People come to life-saving faith in Jesus Christ in many different ways. But coming to believe in Jesus always involves an epiphany, whether one that evolves slowly, one that takes roots in us as children on our parents' knees, or one that comes in a flash.

Whenever our epiphany comes to us, we know that Jesus is our God and King and that the only reasonable thing to do is bow down and surrender our whole lives to Him.

Today’s Gospel lesson recounts an epiphany in which Jesus revealed His identity to an honest skeptic named Nathanael. And it all happened when a friend of Nathanael’s talked about Jesus the way we might talk about a newly renovated living room with friends.

You know the story well. But let’s look at it together this morning. Please go to our Gospel lesson, John 1:43-51.

Here's a bit of background to put the incidents in today's lesson in context. Three days before the incidents recounted in our lesson, John the Baptist had told crowds thronging to him to repent for sin because the Messiah was coming. He said that he himself was such an imperfect sinner, he was unworthy to even do the slave’s work of untying the thongs of the Messiah's sandals.

The next day, John saw Jesus and said, “Here is the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.” (John was saying here that Jesus, without sin Himself, would become the perfect sacrificial Lamb for the whole human race, taking our deserved punishment for sin so that, when He rose from the dead, He could give everlasting life with God to all who follow Jesus through the crucifixion of their old sinful bodies and the resurrection of their new bodies in eternity.)

The following day, John told two of his own followers, Andrew and John, known as disciples, mathetes in the Greek, a word that means students: “Look, here is the Lamb of God.” John, the preacher who said elsewhere, “He [Jesus] must increase, I must decrease” was, in effect, telling his two students, “I’m giving you to a new teacher, this One is the Lamb of God, the One you and I and all the world have been waiting for!”

We pick up what happens next in today’s lesson. Jesus has gone from the Jordan to His native region of Galilee. Philip is from Bethsaida, a fishing town on the lakeshore there. Jesus goes to Philip and says, “Follow Me.” Philip, who already has spent time with Jesus the previous evening, is ready to follow when Jesus calls.

But Philip understands that following Jesus is not a private matter. He seems to understand that if followers of Jesus fail to tell others about Jesus, God will be forced to make the inanimate stones cry out Jesus’ Name, so that all the world will have the chance to hear of Him!

Look at what happens next, in verse 45. Philip has received no training as an evangelist. He hasn’t been to seminary. But he can’t contain himself! (Jesus is a bigger deal than a renovated living room!) So, Philip finds his friend, Nathanael and tells him: “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote…” Stop right there a second.

We’re nearing the end of our year of reading the Bible together. It’s been the best experience of my twenty-seven years as a pastor! Two things that come through loudly and clearly as you read the whole Bible—Old and New Testament—are:

how the God of the Old Testament is exactly the same God we meet in the New Testament and
how all of history up to Jesus’ time was aimed toward the moment when God would take on flesh, walk among us, go to a cross for us, and rise to give everlasting life to repentant sinners who believe in the Messiah, Jesus.

Philip knew his Biblical history and he was sure that Jesus was the Messiah. “We have found Him,” Philip tells Nathanael (read what he says next in verse 45), “Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.”

Nathanael has an understandable question. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

Nazareth was a pigsty of a village in the Galilean hills, composed of maybe 15 shacks where impoverished people eked out their livelihoods.

Besides, Nathanael may have known the prophecies as well as Philip: the prophets said that the Messiah would be from Bethlehem. Knowing nothing of the place where Jesus was born, Nathanael was skeptical.

We run into skepticism about Jesus all the time. But Philip doesn’t get defensive. Neither should we when people challenge our faith. Look at Philip's response in verse 46: “Come and see.”

Folks, this is a great example for us as Christians who have been commissioned by Jesus Himself to “make disciples.”

And this is no small matter! As I read the Bible, making disciples is the only job Christ has given to the Church.

Jesus did not commission the Church to do political advocacy, to erect church buildings as monuments to our piety, to perpetuate congregations as social clubs where everybody smiles and nobody's life gets changed.

The Church has one job and one job only: to make disciples, to help people know and grow in their faith in Jesus Christ.

Conservative and liberal Christians alike often grow impatient with Jesus’ way of changing people’s lives. They want to push their own particular versions of Christian living on people through things like politics, political correctness, or social pressure.

But Jesus never once coerced goodness or faithfulness out of people and we would be faithless, shortsighted fools to try coercion ourselves.

Instead, we Christians, together in Christ’s body, the Church, are commissioned to speak and lovingly live out God’s truth about human sin and about the forgiveness and hope offered to every single person on the planet through faith in Jesus Christ.

We do so in order to make disciples of Christ.

Ideally, this can happen when people see us living for Jesus and they ask us about the steadying, joy-giving influence over our lives and we can say, “Jesus.” That, after all is the quiet way we Lutherans would prefer to spread the Good News of Jesus. No muss. No fuss. No witnessing.

And sometimes, it actually works that way. I've known John since I was in the fourth grade. We were in Cub Scouts together. We played Gra-Y and Junior Hi-Y basketball together. John was a good athlete. I wasn't. John was popular. I wasn't. John got elected to student council. I didn't. John and I liked the same girl in the sixth grade. Guess who she went with to Fun Night, the biggest event of the year?

In the forty years after we graduated from high school, I ran into John twice and each time our conversations were quick and perfunctory. Then, at our high school class reunion last year, John, his wife, and I had a long and enjoyable chat. After the reunion, a number of our classmates kept in touch through a Facebook page. We talk with each other fairly often, even John and I.

In the months since last June, John undoubtedly saw the sermons and prayer requests I post on Facebook. But I never once "witnessed" to John. Yet he wrote to me last month just before Christmas to say, "Mark, haven't been to church in a long time, but you've inspired me to go. Christmas Eve I will attend a service here in town."

It isn't a confession of faith, but when I read that, it made me feel good! It's a beginning and it's to hear and read things like that that every Christian is made for! My invitation to John to "come and see" Jesus had happened quite indirectly, without my really knowing it.

But Jesus has commissioned us to take a more direct approach in making disciples for Jesus. It's an approach like that of Philip, who went to his friend, Nathanael...or, like my friend Zack, when he went to his father.

After Zack's mother died, his dad was inconsolable. Unlike Zack's mom, a faithful believer in Jesus, his dad had always been indifferent to God, almost scornful of the Church. Following his mother's death, Zack watched his father go into a tailspin of depression and self-destructive behavior. He had no hope and he ricocheted between long periods of sleeping for hours on end and almost frenetic activity, anything to block out his pain and grief and utter hopelessness.

Zack finally approached his father. "Dad," he said, "do you remember how strong and joyful Mom was? It was because of her faith in Jesus, Dad. You need Jesus, too. If you'll trust in Him, you'll know that He's beside you, helping you get through these tough days. You'll also know that one day, not only will you see Jesus, but you'll see Mom again."

Amazingly, Zack's Dad took his son's message to heart. He came to faith in Christ. When I met Zack's father some years later, he was a truly joyful follower of Jesus, deeply involved in his church. This once self-absorbed man spent many hours every week providing help to people without work, food, or shelter. It all happened because his son, like Philip in our Gospel lesson, proactively went to him and said, "Dad, come and see. Come and see Jesus."

Who could you issue the same invitation to this week?

When Nathanael took Philip up on his invitation and Jesus told Nathanael things about himself that Jesus could only have known if Jesus were God in the flesh, Nathanael confessed his faith in Jesus: "Rabbi, You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!"

Philip, the Gospel of John makes clear, was no perfect disciple. But he was what we are called to be: an honest witness for Jesus. He made himself available for Jesus’ great commission and available to his friend who needed the Savior. When he invited Nathanael to “come and see” the Messiah, Nathanael saw the God Who knows all about us and loves us anyway.

May we be more like Philip, so that the people we know will experience epiphanies about the forgiveness, the healing, and the wholeness God gives to all who turn from sin and trust in Christ.

May we tell the story of Jesus and let others see Jesus for themselves. Amen

'Only Our Hearts' by Paul McCartney

2012-01-13T22:14:00.002-05:00

As you may know, in February, Paul McCartney is releasing an LP composed of covers of old crooner standards and a few new tracks he's composed written in the styles of people like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Bing Crosby, and others.

It's an homage to music he listened to while growing up, a bit like his Run, Devil, Run project containing 50s rock and roll tunes and a few new Macca compositions in that style.

I was skeptical of this new project and didn't like the first McCartney tune I heard from it, featuring a guitar solo by Eric Claption.

But this tune, with a harmonica solo by Stevie Wonder, Only Our Hearts, is very nice.

Next, for Macca as I understand it, is an LP made of hard-rockers he composes.

I'm still hoping that the rumored collaboration with Bob Dylan is in the offing.

McCartney's productivity impresses me almost as much as his incredible talent.

Here's the other McCartney-penned composition on the new LP, Kisses on the Bottom. The track is called My Valentine and it's growing on me. It's the one that features Clapton on guitar.

The Church: A Fellowship of Recovering Sinners

2012-01-12T19:35:00.002-05:00

Church isn't a place for the perfect, but a fellowship for recovering sinners.

After I posted that on Facebook earlier today, a high school classmate wrote to ask, "Mark do we ever really 'recover' from sinfulness?"

If by "recover," it was meant to "get over," the answer is no. Just as with any addiction, we never fully get over the common human condition of sin this side of the grave. We depend on God's grace and the power of the Holy Spirit to help us resist temptation and to enable us do better when we "fall off the... wagon" and any sin, from taking God's Name in vain to engaging in sexual intimacy outside of marriage, from gossip to thievery.

Just as an alcoholic who has given up drink is still only a recovering alcoholic no matter how many years it's been since their last drink, Christians are nothing more than recovering sinners.

But, thank God for the process of recovery--what the Biblical theology calls "sanctification"--that happens for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ.

That's why Christians, mindful that we are sinners saved only by the grace of God given through Jesus Christ, should never look down their noses on unrepentant sinners. Instead, we should befriend them, tell them God's truth in love, pray for them, and ask them, one sinner to another, to "come and see" what it's like to be set free from sin's power, to live today as recovering sinners, and to look to an eternal future when we will live the sinless lives for which God first made us.

The Church exists as the fellowship within which we hear God's Word and receive the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, confess our sins, receive forgiveness through Christ, and learn together to follow Jesus in our everyday lives. While Christians boldly confess, as Jesus Himself has taught, that Jesus is the only way to a relationship with God, arrogance is inconsistent with being a Christian. As Paul puts it in the New Testament: "If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness...", that is, my complete dependence on Jesus Christ.

So, if you're looking for a church home, find one where neither pastor nor people think they're "all that," but who freely acknowledge their imperfections. It's in the fellowship of other "recovering sinners" that you can really experience what it is to be set free from the power of sin.

Church isn't a place for the perfect, but a fellowship for recovering sinners. Want to be a part of that?

[If you live in or near Logan or Hocking County, Ohio, you're invited to "come and see" how Jesus is living in our congregation, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church. Sunday School for all ages--and we have a great adult Sunday School class--meets at 9:15AM each Sunday. Worship happens at 10:15AM. If you currently have no church home, we would love to welcome you!]

Audio of Wednesday Morning's 'Read the Bible in a Year' Discussion

2012-01-12T00:14:00.001-05:00

At Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, we're reading the Bible together in a year. This is the Wednesday discussion of this week's readings, Luke 19 through John 15.

How Can I Pray When I Don't Feel Like Praying?

2012-01-10T17:38:00.001-05:00

"How can I discipline myself to pray even when I don't 'feel' like praying?"

This is what a man asked me recently.

It's a good question. Here's something that works for me, which, like all my good ideas, I stole from someone much wiser than myself. This idea comes from Bill Hybels, senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois. He writes about it in his book, Too Busy Not to Pray.

Hybels' approach is built off of the ACTS pattern for prayer. ACTS is an acronym, the letters of which stand for adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication.

But Hybels takes ACTS-praying one step further. He suggests that, at least for a period of time, we write out our prayers (whether on the computer or in long hand is up to you, I suppose), in the ACTS format.

So, instead of jumping into your prayer requests (supplications), you first write out words praising God for His greatness, grace, rectitude, and power.

Second, you humbly confess our sins to God. This is a good time to put your life under the microscope of the Ten Commandments, which aren't an archaic list of "thou shalt nots," but expressive of God's plan for the optimal human life. (If you're not sure about the contents of the Ten Commandments, here is a good place to go for them. This list is taken from Martin Luther's Small Catechism, which also gives brief explanations of each commandment.)

The Bible says this about confession:

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:8-10)

Third, you write out our words of thanksgiving for all of God's blessings to you, from the death and resurrection of God's only Son, Jesus, to the everyday blessings all of us can take for granted.

Fourth, Hybels says, write out your prayer requests (supplications).

Offer all these requests in Jesus' Name. To ask for anything in Jesus' Name means that you:

acknowledge that it's only through Jesus that you dare approach God;
are willing to receive from God--whether it's greater than you can ask or imagine or less than you want--what is consistent with God's character and will as revealed in Jesus; and
submit to the will of God, as Jesus did when He faced execution on the cross.

Next, Hybels suggests that you read aloud the prayers you've written, offering them to God.

I use this method several days a week and find it beneficial, especially when, periodically, as Hybels suggests, I go back to read the previous prayers and see how God is working in my life.

You can take this approach to your prayers at any time of day that works best for you. But if you really want to pray, I think that what I call ACTS journaling is one good tool to help you stick to regular prayer.

The benefit of committing to this approach is that it disciplines us to STOP. AND. TAKE. THE. TIME. for the most important relationship in our lives and the most important conversation we can have any day.

Can Revival Happen Here and Now? Yes!

2012-01-08T19:41:00.002-05:00

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Mark 1:4-11
In his best-selling book, Whatever Became of Sin?, psychiatrist Karl Menninger tells the true story of a man, stern-faced and unremarkably dressed, who stood on a busy sidewalk in Chicago.

As people hurried along, he pointed to a person he singled out, and shout, "Guilty!" Then without changing expression, he resumed his stance for a few more moments until he directed the same gesture and word at someone else: "Guilty!"

You can almost imagine the effect this strange display had on the passersby. They stared at him, hesitated, looked away, looked at each other, and then hurried on their ways. One man who had received this stranger’s verdict turned to another and asked, "But how did he know?"

Was the stern man who indicted passersby crazy or was he on a mission from God?

Whether he was nuts or not, one thing is true: His verdict was correct. The Bible says that, “there is no one who is righteous, not even one.” We are all guilty of sin. And the Bible teaches that the proper wages for sin is death, separation from God. Crazy or not, the streetside prophet was onto something.

We live in a time, though, when the notion of sin or judgment by God is out of fashion. Actually, this attitude is nothing new. Four hundred years before the birth of Jesus, the prophet Malachi said that God’s own people were wearying God by telling each other, "’God loves sinners and sin alike. God loves all.’ And also by saying, ‘Judgment? God's too nice to judge.’" I hear people say stuff like that all the time.

Look, folks, God makes it clear in His Word: Just because God loves us does not mean that He winks indulgently at our sins. God will not force us into His eternal kingdom if we choose to spend our time in this life walking away from God’s will. In the suffering and cross of Jesus, God has spared no effort to reach out to us, to save us from our sins, and, as Jesus Himself puts it, “to seek and save” those who are lost in their sin. But God will not veto the choices that human beings make when they walk their own way and not God’s way.

We don’t like to be told that we’re guilty of sin. That’s what made the ministry of John the Baptist so remarkable. John told people that they were guilty. Yet despite his unpalatable message, thousands of people apparently thronged to him and confessed that they were sinners in need of the grace of God. Verse 5 of our Gospel lesson from Mark says, “People from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him, confessing their sins.”

Why did that happen? Why did thousands go to repent and be washed in the Jordan River?

Because the power of God was at work in a person who himself was cleansed through repentance and faith in God. People went to hear John the Baptist's call to repentance and faith not because of John the Baptist, but because they saw God working within this strange man.

Is it possible in the sin-hardened times in which you and I live where sin is so accepted that people might, like they did when John preached on the Jordan, turn to repent for sin and humbly trust in God?

Will people admit their greed and materialism, sexual immorality and selfishness, racism and sexism, gossiping and other forms of violence that characterize these times, then give them up, and seek God’s power to help them walk with God?

I believe that the answer is, “Yes!”

In 1989, Pastor Tim Keller, went to midtown Manhattan in New York City to start a new church. Midtown Manhattan is one of the most interesting and exciting places in the world. I love it! But it’s also a place where the most flagrant disregard for God’s will is on open display, where sin is commended and sinners are seen as heroes. Manhattan is home to some of the most important churches in American history and many of them are dead or dying.

But Redeemer Presbyterian Church, the congregation Keller founded, has grown and is thriving. People who visit there are surprised, Keller says, that the church doesn’t have contemporary praise bands or glitzy video presentations.

Nor is the congregation’s theology tilted toward winning over the multicultural free-spirits of New York City: Keller and the Church teach that all human beings are sinners who need the forgiveness and new life that come to those who repent for sin and believe in Jesus Christ. They teach that Jesus is the one and only way to a relationship with God, that sinners who refuse to repent or believe in Christ will go to hell, that sexual intimacy is meant only for a man and a woman in the covenant of marriage.

Despite holding up the teachings of Jesus and the Bible and running directly against all the politically correct preferences of American culture—in Logan as much as in New York City, Redeemer has grown and welcomes thousands of people to worship each week. Why?

Quite simply, Keller and the people of Redeemer, with humility about their own failings, tell the truth about sin, repentance, and the grace of Christ.

People went to see John the Baptist back in first century Judea because he told the truth about the human condition and their need of God. Through this same truth-telling, Redeemer Presbyterian Church is making disciples for Jesus Christ in what some would consider an inhospitable place.

The same thing needs to happen here in Logan!

But if we want people in Logan to experience the miracle of a life made new by Christ, it must start with Christ’s Church, with you and me.*

In 1947, a group of five men in the Hebrides Islands off the coast of Scotland began to pray together in a barn. They were heartsick over the spiritual state of their community and country. People were far from God, lost in sin. “God,” they cried out, “do something for our islands.” They prayed together nightly.

Every time they prayed, they also read a passage of Scripture. After two years of prayer, nothing had changed in their village, let alone their country. But one night in 1949, they gathered once more to pray, beginning by opening their Bibles, this time reading these words from Psalm 24: “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in His holy place? Those who have clean hands and pure hearts…”

Suddenly, God hit these men with a hard, heavenly truth: They had been praying for two years that their islands would turn from sin and turn to Christ, but their own hands were unclean, their own hearts were impure!

They needed to clear away the mark of sin on their own lives and put their sins and their lives under the blood of Jesus Christ! Then, with lives made clean by the grace of Jesus, their prayers for revival--new life--might be heard.

They began to confess their sins to one another. Then they prayed. When they finished, it was 1:30 in the morning. They headed for their homes.

As they walked together, they topped a hill and saw two town drunks, stumbling and mumbling on their knees in a ditch. But as they got closer, they saw that the two men were sober, praying, and asking God to forgive them for their sins.

Then they looked up to see that all over the village, lights had come on in the middle of the night. Dozens of families, aware suddenly of how far they were from God, had gotten out of their beds to pray for forgiveness.

The next morning, people throughout the village met one another and they knew that something had changed. The pall of unrepented sin and selfish living had been lifted. They were walking in the lightness and freedom that belongs to all repentant believers in Jesus.

After that, the people of the village invited Duncan Campbell, an English evangelist, to preach in their homeland. He came and preached and on the strength of the repentant prayers of hundreds, then thousands, of Scots, a great revival of faith happened. The Hebrides Revival, as history now calls it, lasted for three years. Thousands came to faith in Christ.

The same kind of thing can happen here in Logan! God is just as anxious to call people to repentance and faith and new life in Jesus today in Hocking County as He was when He called John the Baptist to preach by the Jordan River, just as anxious as He was when He died on a cross and rose from the dead for us.

But our neighbors and friends not presently walking with Jesus will never know that they need to repent for sin and they’ll never know that their sins can be forgiven through Jesus Christ if all we Christians ever do is engage in our favorite indoor sport. Do you know what that is? It's bellyaching about the awful mess the world is in.

The world is in an awful mess and it has been since Adam and Eve bit into the forbidden fruit.

It was to eternally free us from the mess we’re in that Jesus came into our mess in order to die and rise for us.

So, get over the world being a mess and instead, resolve today not to be a bellyacher, but a knee-bender, a prayer warrior!

Be someone who prays, “God, clean my hands and my heart so that my prayers will be acceptable to you, so that, covered by the grace and forgiveness of Jesus, I can pray for those whose lives are in messes because they don’t have you to guide them through the good and the bad times. Make me clean so that my personal witness for Christ has credibility and the power to convince others to follow Jesus, too!”

This year, I believe that we at Saint Matthew need to commit ourselves to prayer in Jesus’ Name as we never have before. God is doing so much among us and through us and there is still so much more that God wants to do.

We must not be complacent, either about our own need for Christ or the needs of others for Christ. We must pray!

Are you ready for the kingdom of God to break out in the Hocking Hills and see the devil hamstrung?
Are you ready to see hundreds repent and trust in Jesus Christ?

The path to that vision is clear, though it will demand much of us. We must

daily confess our sins;
ask for the power of the Holy Spirit to live as faithful witnesses for Christ;
pray that Jesus will be the undisputed Lord of Saint Matthew and of our community;
and when we pray that God’s will be done in our lives, we must also volunteer to do whatever God wants to do through us.

Then, beloved people of Saint Matthew, watch what the God we know in Jesus Christ does.

God has plans for us! But they will not come to pass unless you and I live completely and totally for the One Who died and rose for us. If you’re ready for this, you may be in for the best time of your whole life. Jesus, please make it so. Amen!

*Of course, it starts with God, Who claims us in Baptism and incites us to repentance and prayer. But, as Jesus shows in the Great Commission, God brings spiritual renewal and revival through the people of His Church (Matthew 28:19-20).

A Mindful Life

2012-01-06T10:11:00.001-05:00

Jesus said: "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have strength...to stand before the Son of Man" (Luke 21:34-36).

Jesus says that we're to live "mindful lives." Grateful for the free gifts of forgiveness and new life that belong to all who turn from sin and give their lives to Him, we're to be mindful of ways in which we can fulfill what Jesus calls the greatest commandment: to love God completely and to love others as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40).

Mindfulness of others--of God and of other people--doesn't come naturally to us. The Bible says that from imperfect parents and imperfect ancestors, we inherit an inborn impulse to think of ourselves first (Psalm 51:5).

But self-absorbed living, Jesus says, is a trap. It prevents us from having the life only the Creator of life can give. And it prevents us from fulfilling the most joyful part of being human, being able to share the life God gives in Christ with others (1 John 1:4).

We spend much of our lives trying to gain, earn, beg, or steal the things we think will give us life. But only Christ can do that (John 14:6; John 6:68).

One step toward a mindful life is to ask that God will free us from the common human addiction to living for ourselves (or for our family, country, or cause) and to replace it with a dependence on Christ alone (Luke 10:41-42). Jesus sets us free to become our true selves, who we were created to be by the master designer, God.

When we're living mindfully, here's some of what happens:

We see Christ in those in need and try to serve them as though we were serving Christ Himself (Matthew 25:31-46).
We prepare to share the hope we have with others (1 Peter 3:15-16).
We resist the temptation to sin, which is really a temptation to dehumanize ourselves or others and dishonor God and ourselves (Matthew 6:13).
We get over ourselves and forgive others as God forgives us (Luke 11:4).

Turn to Christ each day and ask Him, "Lord, help me to lead a mindful life. Help me to be alert to the possibilities this day presents for me to live in the freedom from self You want to give to me. Amen."

[This was inspired by yesterday's readings for Read the Bible in a Year here at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]

Audio of Yesterday Morning's 'Read the Bible in a Year' Discussion

2012-01-05T14:38:00.000-05:00

We're reading the Bible together in a year at Saint Matthew. Each week since last March, when we began, we've been discussing the week's readings from the Scriptures. Yesterday, we discussed readings from Mark, chapter 13 through Luke, chapter 18.

I hope that you find it helpful.

"You walk three miles a day in your house? Isn't that boring?"

2012-01-05T13:34:00.001-05:00

Nah! Check it out.

Frankly, I don't take a walk just to take a walk, but to stay fit for living the life I almost lost when I had my widow-maker heart attack back in June, 2010.

I walk to push aside health limitations that would otherwise cling to me, for the same reason that I repent for my sins each day, setting aside sins, guilt, and discord that would otherwise destroy me, so that I can, as the book of Hebrews puts it, "run with perseverance the race that is set before [me], looking to Jesus the Pioneer and Perfecter of [my] faith, Who for the sake of the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and [for our sake's] has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebrews 12:1-2).

When I was being formed in my mother's womb, God miraculously installed an extra artery in my heart which, fifty-seven years later, took some of the blood that could not be pumped as it ordinarily would have been, so that I could take these added days to this life for a purpose: To share the message that God so loves every human being that He gave His only Son Jesus so that all who believe in Him will not perish, lost to God forever in hell, but have eternal life with God.

It would be ungrateful for me not to use my own unique life and gifts to do anything other than lift Jesus up.

That's why I run the race God has set before me. Well, right now, I walk it...but I walk it real fast!

From Someone Who's 'Dumber Than Dirt'

2012-01-03T10:10:00.001-05:00

The biggest regrets of my life are all associated with those times when I have impulsively decided to do what I wanted to do, rather than taking the time to seek the wisdom of God in the Bible and through prayer in Jesus' Name.

Fifty-eight years on Planet Earth have taught me that I'm not "all that" and that the mere passage of years doesn't make a person wise. Only the God we know and follow in Jesus Christ can give us wisdom. That's why I love Proverbs 9:10 in the Old Testament:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,
and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

Though my use of God's wisdom has often been limited by my own egotistical resistance to taking instruction from anyone or anything besides my intelligence, knowledge, common sense, or emotional impulses, I've learned that God is not stingy about giving us His wisdom if we're humble enough to ask for it.

We may not always like the guidance that God gives to us, but it will always set us on the right path. I can't say that about the "wisdom" I might derive from myself or other people.

So, seek God's wisdom. Dig into God's Word, the Bible. Lift up prayers for counsel to God through prayer in Jesus' Name. Ask God to send Christian counselors to you as you make decisions. And ask God to give you the faith to walk in the paths He marks out for you.

James writes in the New Testament:

If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, Who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you. (James 1:5)

My wife and I often say that, in so many ways in life, we are "dumber than dirt." But we've found, often against our own wills or initial judgments, that God is a lot wiser than we are and that when we submit to Him, He helps us to make wise decisions.

Check out these thoughts on getting wisdom from God in today's post at Our Daily Bread. Be sure to read Proverbs 2:1-9, on which it's based, first.

When Someone is Hard to Love

2012-01-02T10:36:00.001-05:00

The words of Jesus on which this Our Daily Bread post is based are really hard to put into practice! In fact, we can only do it in the power of God's Holy Spirit. Many of you know that one of the prayers I pray when needing to deal with people who have hurt me, but knowing that Jesus commands that I love this neighbor as much as I love myself, is: "Lord, in spite of how I feel, love this person through me." It seems to work. And often I find, without noticing that it's happened, God brings me to the point of actually loving that person.

"Am I Saved?"

2012-01-01T12:00:00.002-05:00

[This was prepared to be shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio this morning.]

Galatians 4:4-7
Let’s pretend that you’re an average, normal Lutheran walking through a crowded mall.

You’re minding your own business, not bothering anybody else--because, after all, you are an average, normal Lutheran--when a young man walks up to you and with urgency in his voice, asks, “Are you saved?”

Now, as an average, normal Lutheran, you’re thrown off by this sudden violation of your personal space. (After all, you’re still trying to get used to the pastor who hugs everybody during the Sharing of the Peace!) All you hear at first is the word, “saved” and naturally, as an average, normal Lutheran who likes to save a buck, you assume that this guy is bragging about a bargain that saved him a lot of money.

But the young man's message and manner don’t quite compute. So you respond to his question by saying, “Huh?” The young man repeats himself, “Are you saved?” “Oh,” you think to yourself, “one of those Christians!”

By now, you are practiced at fending off such unwanted discussions of God, salvation, sin, and being born anew. So, you say, softly, so that nobody else can hear, “Why, yes, I am saved.” The young man, pleased with your answer and concerned that he might soon be stopped by security, looks over his shoulder, then scans the mall for his next victim.

Let me say at the outset that by that little vignette, I mean no disrespect either for the interviewer or the interviewee. The young man is right to want to share his faith in Christ with others. Jesus has commanded—and not just suggested that—all Christians to make disciples.

On the other hand, the average, normal Lutheran is right to feel that making disciples ought to happen more in the course of conversations between two willing participants—sort of like Philip telling Nathanael in the Gospel of John to come and see Jesus for himself—than in a flash of religious verbiage among strangers.

Nonetheless, as our average, normal Lutheran finds a bench to wait for his wife while she hits the After-Christmas Sale at Bath and Body Works, he can’t help thinking of the young man’s question: “Are you saved?” “Am I saved?” he asks himself.

Actually, this is a question I get a lot from Lutherans. “I don’t know what to say when people ask me that question,” they’ll say. “Am I saved?”

Our second lesson for this Sunday in which we celebrate the power of Jesus’ Name may help you to feel a little more comfortable in addressing that question.

Before digging into the lesson though, we should note that both Jesus and the Bible teach that there are people who will not be saved and that there are things from which we all need to be saved.

According to Jesus, there are people—maybe people you and I know—who will go to hell. In one of Jesus’ parables, which we looked at this past week as part of reading the Bible together in a year, Jesus tells about a wedding banquet filled with people who gain entry into the party by wearing special wedding robes issued by a king. One man crashes the party without such a robe. The king has him thrown out, Jesus says, into the “outer darkness, where there [is] weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The point of Jesus’ story is clear: Those who seek to gain entrance into eternity with God while remaining naked in their sins, unclothed by the forgiveness of sin that belongs only to those who repent for sin and believe in Christ, will ticket themselves for separation from God, for hell.

Hell is real. But life with God is also real. And because both heaven and hell are real, this business of salvation has life-and-death importance for every single human being!

Now, pull out the Celebrate insert, please, and turn to our second lesson for today, Galatians 4:4-7.

The church in Galatia was started by the first-century evangelist Paul in about 49AD. Galatia was a prosperous region in what is today Turkey. The church’s members were Gentiles, that is, non-Jews. They had received the good news of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ through Paul’s ministry. It had come as great, life-changing news to them.

But since Paul had left them, a group of people known as Judaizers had come along to confuse them about their faith. They told the Galatians that it wasn’t enough to believe in Jesus. If they really wanted salvation, the Judaizers said, they also had to submit to Old Testament ritual law. The men had to be circumcised. Everybody had to conform to Jewish dietary laws. They needed to make sacrifices for their sins. All of these things and more, they claimed, were the conditions for salvation.

Some of the folks in the church at Galatia bought into all this nonsense. They allowed themselves to turn what God had given as a free gift—new and everlasting life for all who believe in Jesus Christ—into a legal transaction.

Others, intimidated by the Judaizers in the way our avergage, normal Lutheran was in his encounter with the young man at the mall, were rocked back on their heels and wondered, “Am I saved?”

Paul responds to this question and to the decision of some to turn their backs on Christ to take up the notion that they could save themselves by doing the right things. “You foolish Galatians!” he says at one point. “Who has bewitched you?”

He goes on to say that all who simply trust in Jesus Christ become descendants of Abraham, the founder of God’s Jewish people. Abraham himself was saved, Paul points out, not because of any good works he had done, but simply because he believed in the promises of God, promises that pointed to the sending of God’s Son for the salvation of all people.

Paul talks about the coming of the Son in verses 4 and 5, the opening of our lesson. Take a look at those verses, please: “…when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem [that is, to buy them back from slavery to sin and death] those who were under the law, so that they might receive adoption as children.”

When God decided that the time was right, He sent His Son. But, as we remember at Christmas, Jesus didn’t come in the full majesty of His deity. Nor did He arrive with the paraphernalia of the world's tinhorn kings and dictators. He came as a man to share our lives, our deaths, and our condemnation for sin.

The Bible tells us that Jesus, after His death, even experienced life in hell, where “He made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.” Jesus shared the condemnation that belongs to human beings when they refuse His outstretched hand of mercy, who decide that they don’t need God and don’t need to worry about the question, “Am I saved?”

To be "saved" is to be adopted as God’s children. This is an important point! Jesus once told some of His fellow Jews who refused to believe in Him that, because of their failure to trust in Him, they were children of their father, the devil. Imperfect ourselves, we are nonetheless saved by the blood of Jesus, our Savior! We are adopted into the family of God as a gift of God to all with faith in Christ.

Verse 6 says: “And because you are children [of God], God has sent the Spirit of His Son [this is another way of talking about the Holy Spirit] into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”

People sometimes ask me, “How do I know that I have the Holy Spirit?”

One way to confirm that you have the Holy Spirit is to ask yourself, “Do I believe in Jesus Christ?” If your answer is, “Yes,” you know that the Holy Spirit is operating in your life because, as the New Testament tells us elsewhere, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit."

You can also know you have the Holy Spirit when you’re able to call God, “Abba!” “Abba” is the term Jesus used for “our Father in heaven” when He taught us the Lord’s Prayer. In Jesus’ everyday language of Aramaic, “Abba” was the term that little children used for their fathers, a term that connoted all the trust a child has in her or his daddy. When you trustingly and submissively pray to your Father in heaven, your own spirit is confirming that God’s Holy Spirit lives within you and that you are a child of God through faith in Christ.

Besides, we have the promise of the Bible, in the words of Peter at the first Pentecost, among other places, that all who are baptized in Jesus’ Name have forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Don’t let anyone ever make you feel like a second-class Christian because you don’t have the same spiritual gifts that they claim as some achievement on their parts! If you humbly pray to God, your Father, you have the Holy Spirit. And He will bring You comfort, hope, guidance, and the assurance of God’s love for you, no matter what happens in your life.

Paul underscores this in verse 7 of our lesson: “So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.” In the New Testament book of Romans, Paul writes in another passage: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

In neither of these passages are there any ifs, ands, or buts. If you believe in the Jesus revealed in life and on the pages of Scripture—who was born of a virgin, suffered death on the cross for our sins, raised from the dead by God the Father, who offers new life to all who turn from their sins and believe in Him—you can rest assured that you have been saved. You are a child of God!

Now folks, that’s such an incredible thing that, while we may not like the method of the young man in the mall of our little scenario, we should be able to understand why he wants to share the good news of salvation for all who believe in Jesus with others, don't you think?

Confident that we have been saved through Christ, may 2012 be a year in which we average, normal Lutherans join the apostles Peter and John, who, when facing persecution told those who threatened them with punishment if they ever again spoke in the Name of Jesus, “we cannot keep from speaking about” Jesus, the One Whose Name is above all names, the One Who has saved us.

If you believe in Jesus Christ, you are saved. That's good news. Amen!

One Woman's Solution to Modern Day Slavery

2011-12-31T13:22:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned before that there are more slaves in our world today than at any time in history. Here, Holly Boardman talks about her exploration of this subject and one woman's remarkably simple and gratifying solution to this evil.

We Have Seen the Enemy and He is Us

2011-12-30T00:43:00.000-05:00

From an inspiring daily reader by Joseph C. Piscatella, a three-and-a-half decade survivor of heart bypass surgery:

Remember, for every one person whose heart disease originates with bad genes, there are 449 who have created their problems with a knife, a fork, and an unhealthy love affair with their couch.

Guess the Year To Which This Refers

2011-12-30T00:31:00.000-05:00

"The [economic downturn] hit that year with whirlwind suddenness and created widespread economic devastation...The boom economy, fed by easy credit, abruptly ended."

Guess the year. I'll give the answer, as well as the source of the quote in the Comments section.

God with Us

2011-12-30T00:28:00.000-05:00

"...if we embrace the Christian teaching that Jesus is God and that he went to the Cross, then we have deep consolation and strength to face the brutal realities of life on earth. We can know that God is truly Immanuel--God with us--even in our worst sufferings." (Tim Keller, The Reason for God)

Reds Will Win 2012 World Series

2011-12-29T17:12:00.000-05:00

Forget about the upcoming presidential election, the biggest story of 2012 will be the Cincinnati Reds winning the World Series. So says a Sports Illustrated writer. And there's more good news for Reds fans in his predictions. See here.

Now, if we could just get the Veterans Committee to vote David Concepcion into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, that would be great!

The Connection Between Faith and a Sense of Purpose

2011-12-29T13:47:00.000-05:00

Interesting research. Here.

The Drama of Salvation: God Saves the Best for Last (Christmas Morning)

2011-12-25T11:45:00.003-05:00

[This was prepared to be shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Hebrews 1:1-4
When I was in the ninth grade at Westmoor Junior High School in Columbus, I took Drama class. We read and analyzed plays, designed sets, learned the nomenclature of theater, and created skits and monologues.

I wasn’t a very good drama student. But I do remember one point that Miss Snead drummed into our heads about a good dramatic presentation: The final act of a good play is the part where all the threads of the story get pulled together. The resolution toward which the plot of the play has been leading becomes clear. Everything that precedes it readies an audience for the last act. The best is saved for last.

The New Testament book of Hebrews, from which our second lesson is taken, is a sermon delivered by an unknown preacher to a group of Jewish believers in Jesus, who were being tempted to turn their backs on Jesus and Christ’s Church by authorities of the Roman Empire under which they lived.

The Roman government had never been kind to Jews, often subjecting them to persecution. But the Jews never threatened the very foundations of worldly power the way believers in Jesus did. When men or women realized that they had an everlasting relationship with the one God of the universe simply by turning from sin and believing in God the Son Jesus, they were freed from the pressures to conform exerted by all the cults of the Roman gods and by the government.

When the first Christians came to believe that Jesus had destroyed the power of death over their lives, threats from Roman emperors, governors, and centurions lost their power. Like the apostle Paul, they lived in the assurance that there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” and that nothing “in all creation [is] able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” They realized that death is not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian.

When, through Jesus Christ, a person is free from the fear of dying, dictatorships, political correctness, and other earthly powers cannot control them.

Confounded by the first Christians’ stubborn allegiance to Jesus, the leaders of the Roman Empire panicked as despots and dictators always do.

They decided on a strategy that they thought would divide and destroy the Christian movement. They promised to let Jewish believers in Jesus live in peace, without harassment, without the threat of death, and with no requirement that they acknowledge Roman gods, if they would only renounce their faith in Jesus.

All the Christians had to do was pledge their ultimate allegiance to the emperor and disavow belief in Jesus as the Son of God Who gives eternal life to all who repent for sin and believe in Him, and go back to the rites and customs of Judaism they and their families had known for centuries.

It’s into this situation that the preacher of Hebrews, himself clearly a Jewish Christian, steps, urging his fellow Jewish Christians not to cave into the tempting offer of acceptance and freedom from persecution offered by the Roman authorities.

He does so by reminding them that as Jews, members of God’s chosen people, descendants of Abraham and Sarah, they knew about the opening act of the salvation drama that has been playing out in human history ever since the first human beings, Adam and Eve, bit into fruit pulled from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden.

But he also reminded them that, through Jesus, the final act of that drama was (and is) being played out.

Pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the second lesson and read the first two verses aloud with me: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.”

The first act of the salvation drama is recorded in the Old Testament. God is both the playwright and the leading actor.

The last scenes—the last books—of the Old Testament find God using prophets to drop hints of what’s to come in the second and final act.

Through Isaiah, for example, God said that in “the latter time” He would make His glory fully known in “the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.” And then speaking of the future in the past tense, we’re told in Isaiah, chapter 9: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who have lived in a land of deep darkness—on them a light has shined…For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests on His shoulders; and He is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace…”

Through Jeremiah, God said, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign…”

And, as we remembered last evening, through Micah, God promised, “But you, O Bethlehem Ephratah…from you shall come forth for Me, One Who is to rule in Israel, Whose origin is…from ancient days.”

In the opening verses of his sermon, the preacher in Hebrews reminds his fellow Jewish Christians of how God spoke through many prophets to point them to the coming of the one anointed King of kings, the Savior of the world, God in the flesh: Jesus. Now, he says, in the last days—in the second and final act—that started when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, God speaks to us directly, intimately, personally through His Son, Jesus, through Whom God created all the worlds.

And just so we understand that Jesus isn’t second-fiddle to God the Father, but is God Himself in the flesh, look at what the preacher says of Jesus in verse 3: “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and He sustains all things by His powerful word.”

As the second act of God’s salvation drama began two thousand years ago, the Author Himself came onto the stage, taking on the role of a human being Who would speak God’s call to repentance and belief to us directly and repeatedly and then, go to a cross in order to set the stage for the final scene of His great drama.

That’s what the preacher addresses next in the rest of verse 3. Look at what he says: “When He had made purification for sins [that is, when the Savior Jesus offered up His sinless body on the cross as the perfect sacrifice not for any sins He committed, because He committed none, but for our sins], He sat down at the right hand [that is, the power hand] of Majesty [God the Father] on high, having become as much superior to angels as the Name He has inherited is more excellent than theirs.”

Through Jesus Christ, we know now how the play is going to end.

Sin and death will end!

Tears and suffering will be no more!

But there is one last scene to be played out.

It’s the scene of the drama in which the Jewish Christians to whom the book of Hebrews was addressed were then participants.

It’s the scene in which you and I find ourselves today.

It’s the scene in which followers of Jesus, filled with His desperate love for all people, share His call to repent and believe in Him and so, live with God forever.

It’s also the scene in which you and I are tempted, as were the first century Jewish Christians, to choose between the Jesus road and the easy road.

The easy road is the one we taken when honor God with our lips, but keep our hearts far from Him.

The easy road is the one we take when see trouble, pain, sorrow, or grief as a reason or an excuse to give up on God.

Jesus says that “the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Jesus and trust in Jesus, no matter what life may bring us, is the only way to God, the only way to life.

The path of faith in Christ will sometimes lead us through adversity and pain. As surely as sin, death, and the devil ran Jesus through their gauntlets, as we follow Jesus, we too, will go through the same gauntlets.

But if we will seek God’s strength, the power of His Holy Spirit, to keep following Jesus—to keep on keeping on in faith—we will have God’s peace and help and the presence of the risen Jesus, in our lives right now.

And when the last scene of the last act plays out, we will be with Jesus in eternity, along with all those who have believed in Him. Jesus promises us that “the one who endures [in faith] to the end will be saved.”

Pastor Joe Stowell wrote in Our Daily Bread this past week that “Christianity is unique among all religions for it is about God’s pursuit of us to draw us to Himself” and not, like other religions, about the human pursuit of deities or harmony with the universe.

In the drama of salvation, God is both author and star. But God is no egotistical actor looking for close-ups and glory for His own selfish ends.

On the first Christmas, God became a helpless baby.

When He grew into manhood, He took on the role of slave, servant, and condemned criminal just so He could die and rise and welcome all who believe in Him into a new life now and into life as it was meant to be for us—a life without disease, suffering, death, oppression, or hardships—in eternity.

On this Christmas Morning, 2011, ask God to help you make and keep a vow to never more be part of the audience observing God’s salvation drama, a pew sitter who leaves Jesus at the church door, but a participant, taking any role God and His Church may give you that will let you join the saints and angels in proclaiming, “To the One seated on the throne and the Lamb [Jesus] be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”

Dearly loved people of God, merry Christmas and God’s blessings to you now and through the coming year! Amen!

Christmas: The Punchline God Wants You to Get

2011-12-24T23:41:00.004-05:00

[This message was prepared for the Christmas Eve Candlelight Worship Service of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]

Luke 2:1-7
In the first parish I served as a pastor was a couple who had been married many years and were deeply devoted to each other. Several years before I arrived, the woman, Laura, had been struck with Alzheimer’s Disease. By the time I became Laura’s and Vern’s pastor, she was confined to a bed in a nursing home, incapable of recognizing anyone or carrying on a conversation, not even Vern. But every day, Vern would visit and spend hours with Laura. He fed her with a baster, read the Bible and the newspaper to her, told her all the latest family news, and prayed with her. Often, when I visited Laura to pray aloud for her, I would find Vern there by her bedside. And often, when we spoke in private, Vern would tell me all about Laura, his love for her, and their life together. “She was always the first to send a note of encouragement to people who had bad things happen in their lives,” he told me. “And always called them to congratulate them or just be happy with them when good things happened. And she loved going to church, especially at Advent, just before Christmas, because she loved remembering that one day, Jesus was coming back again.” I remember commenting to Vern how rare it was for someone to love Advent. They might love Christmas or Easter, but few people loved Advent. But Laura did.

Some five years after Vern first told me of Laura’s love for Advent, she died. It was just a few days before Christmas, in the waning days of Advent. We’re never ready for the loss of loved ones, even when we know that their deaths are inevitable. I was with Vern when Laura passed. Tears filled his eyes and his throat was choked with emotion. But he turned to me with a smile on his face and chuckle in his voice when he said, “It was her Advent, pastor. Laura is with Jesus now.” In the midst of tragedy, because of Jesus Christ, Vern knew he (and Laura) had something to smile about! They were in on God’s punchline!

One way to read the events of the first Christmas that we celebrate tonight is to see them as one wonderful punchline that God wants all the world to get.

In our Gospel lesson from Luke, we’re told that the emperor in Rome decided that everyone under the domain of the Roman Empire needed to be counted in a census. Judea, composed of God’s people, the Jews, had been conquered by Rome decades earlier. So, the people of Judea, including the couple God had chosen to act as foster parents to Jesus, had to submit to the census. In ancient times, a census, especially when those being counted were a conquered people, was designed to find who could be conscripted into the military and forced labor and to let the extortionist tax collectors know where they could find all their victims. A census was a way for corrupt dictators to flex their power.

That’s what Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor, thought he was doing in ordering this particular census. He surely had no knowledge of the words of God spoken through the prophet Micah 740 years earlier: “But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are one the littlest clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for Me One Who is to rule Israel, Whose origin is from old, from ancient days…” The Messiah, the Anointed King, the Christ, repeatedly promised by God through the prophets, was to be born in Bethlehem, a tiny town about five miles from Jerusalem.

The promises of a Messiah had been forgotten or dismissed as myth by many Jews by the time the Roman emperor issued orders for a census. But not by God! God never forgets His promises!

Now, the Jews had a custom: Whenever they had a census, they were counted not in the places where they resided, but in their ancestral homes. So, though Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth, they went to be counted—registered—in the ancestral home of both their families, Bethlehem, about sixty miles away.

The trip, in first-century Judea, would have been routine. People from all over the country ordinarily traveled to nearby Jerusalem several times a year for the great festivals of their faith, like Passover.

But there’s nothing routine about a woman nine months pregnant making such a trip over such hard terrain!

And yet, as Mary and Joseph left Nazareth and headed for Bethlehem, they may have smiled. An emperor in faraway Rome who would never know their names thought that he was exercising power, moving millions of people around like so many checkers on a game board. He had no idea that, unwittingly, by his orders, he was placing Mary exactly where God wanted her to be to fulfill the ancient promise of a Savior.

Luke tells what happened next simply: “So it was, that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger…”

When, some time after Jesus’ birth, shepherds arrived with the story of how an angel had told them that the Messiah had been born, Mary and Joseph may have smiled again, knowing that, whatever the obstacles, however much heartache or time may pass between the delivery of God’s promises and their fulfillment, and no matter how people may fool themselves with ideas that they’re in control or that their sins don’t matter or that they don’t need God’s help, there are really only two ways that the affairs of the world can go (you've heard me say it before): Either God gets His way or God gets His way!

Be still. God is in control!

The truth that God is in ultimate control of the universe is sometimes hard for us to believe or to see.

It may be hard for you to see it tonight.

You may be facing financial hard times and wonder what use God is in dealing with them.

You may be dealing with health issues, grieving the loss of a loved one, experiencing discord in your family, or battling an addiction and feel that God is far away or even useless.

You may look at the world, with its injustices, natural disasters, and selfishness and even think that God is out of the picture, that we’re all on our own. But don’t you believe any of those lies!

On the first Christmas, God let a simple couple from Nazareth in on the most wonderful joke of all. No matter how far sin seems to have spun the world out of God’s hands, no matter what tragedies may befall us, no matter how arrogantly those who think they have power may act, God is still in charge.

God can put a baby into the womb of a virgin.

God can let emperors think they’re in control while working His good and gracious will through their orders.

And, in Jesus Christ, you can know that God still cares about you.

God still holds those who believe in Him in the palm of His hands.

And God can sustain you through the tough times of this life when nothing makes sense by giving You the certainty that His grace and mercy for You will always prevail!

We can rest assured in God, or as the New Testament book of James calls Him, “the Father of lights, with Whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

The God we know in Jesus Christ “is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

And this is the God Who tells us that He so loved the world—that He so loved you—that “He gave His only Son [Jesus], so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish [may not go to hell, the place of no life] but may have eternal life.”

God is still in control. This fact was underscored again when, hree decades after the first Christmas. Pilate, an emissary from the Roman Emperor, in Judea, the preachers and teachers of Judea, and people gathered in Jerusalem from the far corners of the known world, all agreed that Jesus, the One Whose birth the angels sang at Christmas, had to die. In nailing Jesus to a cross, they tried to declare their independence from God. They sought to assert human control over life and death, the present and the future. On that Good Friday when Jesus was executed, those who had believed in Him were sure that the promises of God had only been a dream. They thought that they could never be happy again, that life was, in the words of an English writer, “nasty, brutish, and short.” And then Jesus’ dead body was placed in a tomb.

But on Easter, God once more showed that He was in control. Jesus rose from the dead to claim forgiveness and new life for all who turn from sin and entrust their lives to Him.

Tonight, you may feel alone. To you, the Jesus Who was born on Christmas, died on Good Friday, and rose from the dead, says, “Remember, I am with you always.”

You may feel that your sins are too great for God to forgive. God’s Word says that in Jesus, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have One Who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” In Jesus, we see that God is “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” We see that though we are, “are stained red with sin, [God] will wash [us] as clean as snow.”

Tonight, you may feel that the pain of grief or relational discord you feel is unbearable. But God’s Word says that when we suffer, emptied of arrogance or self-sufficiency, Christ’s power is perfected in us. God replaces our weakness with His strength and we can face anything.

And tonight, you may think that your eternal future is bleak and that death is the end of things. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in Me, though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.” And God’s Word promises that in eternity, God “will wipe every tear from [believers'] eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more…”

No matter how far from God you may have felt when you walked in here tonight, you can walk away from here knowing that the God Who came into our world at Christmas and Who will return one day to fully establish His eternal kingdom, will never leave your nor forsake you.

Christmas, the feast of Jesus’ birth, can be a moment of rebirth and renewal for you, whether you’ve followed Christ your whole life, had a distant, Christmas-and-Easter relationship with Christ, or never in your life bowed down and confessed that Jesus the Messiah is your Lord and your God and your King.

You see, God wants you to be “in on the joke.” He wants you to let Him love you and make you new, now, and He wants you to be with Him for all eternity. He wants all of us to experience intimacy with Him and the incredible comfort and power that belongs to all who surrender and dare to believe in Him.

If you want any of those things tonight, please bow your heads now and silently affirm that the prayer I’m about to offer is your prayer, too:

Gracious Father God, we thank You that You have never given up on us or on Your promises to us. We thank You that on the first Christmas You sent Jesus, God the Son, to live life as we do, to experience all that we experience, to die on our behalf, and to rise from death, so that You can give forgiveness and new life to all who believe in Jesus. We thank You that Your Holy Spirit is here with us right now, in good and bad times, in moments of clarity and in times of confounding mystery, convincing us that Your promises are true, that You want to be with us always, that You want to reshape our characters and make us more like Jesus, and that, at the ends of our days, whenever they come, You will be waiting for us with open arms and infinite love. We ask You to fill us with joy, peace, and hope, no matter the condition of our health, our emotions, or our pocketbooks. As Jesus lived for us, help us to live for You only, tonight and always. In Jesus’ Name we pray. Amen

Merry Christmas, everybody!

"Calculating Christmas"

2011-12-24T19:44:00.000-05:00

I thought I knew how the date for Christmas was set. But I may have been wrong. Read this interesting article.

Are Bishops Necessary?

2011-12-20T14:52:00.001-05:00

From today's devotional in Our Daily Bread: "Caring for God’s people includes feeding them spiritually, leading them gently, and warning them firmly. Leaders in the church are to be motivated by the incalculable price Christ paid on the cross."

These are important words.

But here are a few additional thoughts triggered by the Bible passage on which the devotion is based, Acts 2:22-32. (You might want to go read it now. Go ahead! I'll wait here for you to do it.)

The word translated in the New Revised Standard Version rendering of the passage, as "overseers," is, in the original Greek, "episcopos." Episcopos is a compound word composed of the prefix, "epi," meaning "over," and "skopos" (from which we get words like telescope and microscope) and means "see."

So, an episcopos, is an overseer, someone who, in the church, sees over the spiritual needs of a congregation or a group of individual Christians.

The word "episcopos" came to be rendered in English as "bishop" and has come to be applied to clergy persons who oversee the work of groups of congregations and pastors, whether those groups are referred to as synods, conferences, districts, or dioceses.

However, the New Testament has no reference to persons bearing the title "bishop" or "episcopos" functioning in this way.*

When the New Testament refers to "overseers" or "bishops," it has in mind what we would today call "pastors." Pastors, in the New Testament context, could be the shepherds of congregations or serve the shepherding role among groups of believers within a larger body.

The New Testament doesn't lay out any particular system for individual congregations or groups of congregations to organize themselves. Biblically, we are free in Christ to be organized in any way that seems practical, helping us to pursue our common mission as believers in Christ.

The Lutheran Confessions are similarly indifferent to how congregations or groups of congregations are organized. Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession, an expression of how Lutheran Christians understand God, the Bible, and Christian faith, says, "It is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word."

Lutherans have always believed that authority over the actions of the Church aren't governed by human beings, but by God, as mediated to us through God's Word, the Bible. Part 1 of the Formula of Concord, another basic Lutheran confessional statement, says, "We believe, teach, and confess that the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged...Other writings of ancient and modern teachers, whatever their names, should not be put on a par with Holy Scripture. Every single one of them should be subordinated to the Scriptures..." [italics are mine]

It's fine for denominational groups, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) of which I am a part, to have bishops, so long as that's agreeable to those within the ELCA. But the Bible only knows "bishops" (overseers) as pastors. Bishops over a synod or a diocese are in a category Martin Luther called "adiaphora," an element of church life that has nothing to do with and is unnecessary for, our salvation.

*You will notice that the word episcopos is very much like the term Episcopalian. That's because the Episcopal Church, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, traces its organizational structure back to that of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, and other Christian traditions, operate with an episcopal system. This means that they are governed largely by bishops. Most notably, bishops in all of these traditions assign pastors to congregations, rather than congregations prayerfully deciding who to call to be their pastors.

Under episcopal structures, to varying degrees, bishops also are deemed to be the ultimate authorities within the regions, dioceses, synods, or districts in which they serve, over the faith and practice of the Church. So, for example, when some bishops in the the Episcopal Church-USA, authorized the ordination of practicing homosexuals, some Episcopal parishes chose to place themselves under the authority of bishops of other dioceses, ones in which the bishops adhered to differing understandings of the underlying Biblical issues.

It's a Judgment Call

2011-12-16T00:47:00.000-05:00

When Jesus tells us to judge not, He means for us to still use our judgment, but not to judge others unfairly.

The Scripture passages under consideration are here and here.

What Can We Do About Sexual Violence in the United States?

2011-12-15T12:54:00.001-05:00

"On average, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States..." That's the chilling opening introduction to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS). When I heard this information last night on the news, I was shocked! I turned to my wife and said, "That is appalling!" See here.

This is a tragic element of life in our country. Is the phenomenon of sexual violence perpetrated by people with intimate access to others worse than in the past? Or are these incidents being more commonly reported?

I don't know the answers to those two questions. But I am certain that without the respect for each other as children of God fostered by a relationship with Christ, all legal and social remedies to sexual violence will be mere bandaids. (Even though, clearly, legal and social remedies must be applied!)

Please pray for people willing to share Jesus with those around them.

And don't be surprised that as you pray, God may incite you to action steps He may want you to take to help change the climate in our culture.

In the meantime, if you know of any people victimized in ways shown in this new study, urge them to get help and to call the appropriate authorities.

By the way, this seems like a good point to mention that God created sexual intimacy to be a means by which a husband and wife may be bonded to each other, to enjoy one another's company, and, at times, to become parents.

The misuse of our sexuality is a sin.

Like all sin, it can be forgiven by the gracious God we know in Christ when in repentance and in faith in Christ, we seek forgiveness.

But the misuse of human sexuality has reached epidemic proportions in our society.

May God teach us to use all of His gifts as He intends them to be used.

Great Passage from Malachi for Those of Us in ELCA To Consider

2011-12-13T17:22:00.000-05:00

From the prophet Malachi:

You have wearied the Lord with your words. Yet you say, “How have we wearied him?” By saying, “All who do evil are good in the sight of the Lord, and he delights in them.” (Malachi 2:17)

Nobody is sinless, least of all me. But we have an obligation as the Church, ambassadors for Christ, to present God's whole truth to the world. When we "unsin" what God calls sin, as we have and do in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), we fail our responsibilities to God, we become faithless, and we wander into error. May God set us right!

A Few Christmas Thoughts

2011-12-13T17:06:00.000-05:00

When I was a young man, I hated Christmas. I really did.

But after I fell in love with Jesus, all that changed.

I love Christmas and the opportunity it presents for us all to once again praise and thank God for the new life He gives to all who turn from sin and believe in the Savior born on Christmas, crucified on Good Friday, raised from the dead on Easter Sunday, and ascended to heaven where He now is an advocate for all believers in Him.

Each Christmas, when we celebrate the coming of Jesus into world on a "silent night," I remember that one day, He is returning, the dead in Jesus will rise, and all who have welcomed Jesus into their lives will see Him face to face and we will be with Him for all eternity.

Today, an older man, I love Christmas and am so excited to celebrate the day with my fellow believers on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!

I love Christmas not because of any "feelings" I have about it.

I love Christmas because of what God did on that day and in on all the succeeding "days" after He came to the earth and because of what He has promised us, promises sealed by His shed blood and His resurrection triumph over death.

We don't need to feel Christmas, just trust Christ, "the way, and the truth, and the life," the One of Whom the Bible says, "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved" (John 14:6, Acts 4:12).

God bless you as you continue to keep Advent and, on Christmas Eve, when we remember the best Christmas gift of all!

Relax and Let God's Hand Guide You

2011-12-11T13:57:00.000-05:00

[This sermon was prepared for delivery during worship this morning with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio. While I ended up preaching on the same text and making many of the same points made here, I delivered a different sermon in the pulpit. There's no written version of it, though.]

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
If you made a list of Bible words that Lutherans like, “justified” would be one of them. It’s a great word!

Paul uses it in Romans when he writes that “we hold that a person is justified by faith [he means faith in Christ] apart from works prescribed by the law.”

Someone has said that when I come to Christ in repentance and faith, God now looks at me “just if I’d” never sinned.

The person who is justified is declared by God to be just or right with God. This is the most precious gift God can give because it cost Him the life of Jesus on a cross.

No wonder that Martin Luther called justification the central teaching “by which the church stands or falls.”

All other religious systems teach that people can, in some way, save themselves or propel themselves to higher places in the cosmos by adhering to certain rules, regulations, or practices.

But the God of the Bible, while using rules to show us our need of Him and the hopelessness of proving ourselves worthy through our own works and to give us a guideline for responding to His love, this God, justifies us as a gift of grace to all with faith in Christ!

But there’s a problem with our justification obsession, too.

Have you ever noticed that most love stories end at the beginning? I mean, they tell the stories of how two people meet, fall in love, get married, and start their families. But, really, after the storytellers narrate all those things, they’ve only told us the beginnings of their stories. We’re left wondering: How did they live happily ever after? What did they do in life? An elderly man once told a friend of mine, “These newlyweds talk about how much they love each other. But don’t even talk to me about loving your husband or wife until you’ve been married a few decades. You don’t know what love is before then.”

Justification is like falling in love. God is a desperate suitor Who, in Christ, incites us to fall in love with Him. By His self-sacrificing love, He makes us worthy to be live eternally—and happily—ever after with God.

Then what?

Some people cynically say that, after the wedding day, marriage is a hard slog to retirement and death, filled with tragedies, mortgage payments, pinching pennies, squabbles, hard times. But thirty-seven years into my marriage to Ann, I can tell you that while we have had our tough times, I love her more today than I did when we were first married, more than I did yesterday. I find that I am just beginning to learn how to respond to the gift of her love and her presence in my life. And all this learning and growing is the product of one simple fact: The certainty that when I wake up tomorrow, no matter what stupid or selfish things I may have said or done the day before, Ann will still love me.

And it’s this process of being loved and growing in love that makes our marriage stronger and better today than I could ever have imagined when, with my heart pounding out of my chest, my face beaming, I walked down the aisle with Ann as my new bride.

There is a similar deepening in love, relationship, reliability, and mutual affection that develops in the Christian life after we’ve been justified. It’s called sanctification or being sanctified.

And it really is the theme of the whole section of the New Testament book of 1 Thessalonians from which today’s second Bible lesson comes.

Scholars teach us that in the Bible, a theme or idea is highlighted when it appears at the start of a section of Scripture and then again at the end of the section. These bookends form what they call “inclusions.”

Pull out a pew Bible, please, and turn to page 684 and then look at 1 Thessalonians 4:3. We’re not going to look at the whole verse right now, just the pertinent start of it. It says, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification…” Now, go over to the next column, almost to the end of the book and of our second lesson for this morning, to chapter 5, verses 23. It says, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely…”

The root of the word sanctification is sanctus, which means holy or set apart.

After Ann and I were married, I was set apart for her alone and she was set apart for me alone. Similarly, after we have been justified, God is set apart to be our only God, the highest allegiance in our lives.

The Church is set apart to be God’s people, justified and empowered to bring His love to others.

But sanctification, this business of having one’s whole life set aside for God alone, is a process and it’s sometimes difficult. And just as the only way to learn to be married is to be married, the only way to learn what it means to be God’s holy people is to live as God’s holy people every day.

So, what does that mean?

Well, pull out the Celebrate inserts and go to the second lesson. Scan it. Paul tells us to always rejoice, pray without ceasing, give thanks to God in all circumstances, don’t try to hide yourself from what God’s Word and the Holy Spirit may be prompting you to do, but don’t be a chump who falls for every supposed holy man or woman who comes down the pike, hold tightly to what is good, refuse to do what is bad.

Most of us would agree that Paul’s list well describes the to do list of holy people. But who has time for such a list? How could we possibly be good enough to make that a to do list for my life? If God expects all these things of us, we may think, we’re going to have to wait to get serious about this Christian business until after we’re retired and just take our chances with God until then.

If that list raises your anxiety level, I have a word from God for you this morning: Chill!

Do you think that the God Who did everything necessary for you to be justified, including sending God the Son to die and rise for you, would leave you standing at the altar trying to figure out how to live as a Christian after that?

To be sure, God will discipline His children when we go in the wrong direction in our lives. The New Testament book of Hebrews says, “The Lord disciplines those whom he loves, and chastises every child whom he accepts.”

But the Bible also tells us that when we do go wrong, our Father is quick to help us. As the apostle John puts it, “My little children, I am writing these things so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous…He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins…”

Maybe you can think of sanctification like this. When I was a boy, I became fascinated by the fact that people wrote things. I wanted to be able to write. But I wasn’t left to figure out how to write on my own. I remember my parents sitting with me at the dining room table. First, they would take one of those fat black pencils and write a letter, maybe an A. Then, they would put the pencil in my hand, put a hand on top of mine, and move my hand in the right ways until, gradually, they could let go and watch me as I imperfectly formed the letter A on my own. We moved onto B and C and the rest of the alphabet in the same way.

This is what sanctification is like. Not another grim to-do list, but God working in us, through us, and on us to help us become all that we were meant to be.

Place yourself each day in the hands of God. If you let Him, His hand will move over your hand to write the story of your life—in good and bad times, in happiness and sorrow, even in the wake of sin for which you have repented and sin He forces you to see because He loves you and doesn’t want to lose you.

If you will be open to God, God’s hand will keep moving in your life until that day when you see Him face to face and all the mysteries will be solved, all the tears will be dried, and all believers in Christ become truly, eternally holy.

Even after he gives what seems like a to-do list to the Christians at first century Thessalonica, Paul also says to be at peace in the arms of the Savior Jesus. Pull out the Celebrate insert and look again at the final two verses of our lesson. Read verses 23 and 24 silently with me now. Paul says: “May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely [you see, it’s God and not you by your works who will make you holy or set apart as God’s beloved]; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.”

Each day, the faithful God made known in Jesus is willing to take those who entrust themselves to Him and by the power of His presence working in our lives, transform us from harried, frightened people who look at lists like the one we see in our lesson today, into people so infused by Christ’s love, forgiveness, power, and indestructible hope that, from grateful hearts, barely aware of it, that we “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks at all times, pay heed to God’s Word, hold fast to what is good, and abstain from evil.”

We will never be entirely holy this side of our own resurrections. Nor will we ever begin to understand mysteries like why bad things happen to faithful people while the faithless seem to skate through life without a care.

But from Jesus, we have an eternal “I do,” a promise to never leave us nor forsake us, a promise to make us new for all eternity.

Count on that promise.

Give yourself to Jesus today and every day.

Then, relax, breathe, live, certain that His grace that justified you will, as you submit to Him, sanctify you—make you holy, fit you for heaven—too.

God has an eternity of patience and love for each of us. Give Him your days and He will make you, over time and eternity, into everything He meant for you to be when He formed you in your mother’s womb. Amen.

What's the Difference Between Helping and Enabling?

2011-12-08T22:41:00.000-05:00

During adult Sunday School class this past week, someone asked, "What's the difference between helping people and enabling them?"

Christians aren't the only ones for whom this question is important, of course. But it's especially critical for us.

Why? Because Jesus' great commandment, a summation of the two sections of the Ten Commandments in which Jesus cited passages from the Old Testament books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, says that we are to love God completely and love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

The love Jesus commands is not about sentiment. It's a command to actively and practically help others. In His parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus says that a man who provided assistance to a stranger, was the truest neighbor, the one fulfilling the great commandment.

But there are some people who count on Christian compassion to incite Christians to provide assistance that doesn't really help, instead enabling their destructive habits and behaviors. Help is something we're called to provide others; enabling isn't. Compassion may be the primary motive for both helper and enabler, but helping is constructive and enabling is destructive.

How can we tell the difference? Here are a few observations based on my reading of Scripture and my twenty-seven years as a pastor:

Helping meets a need. Enabling addresses wants.
Helping lifts people toward maturity. Enabling encourages ongoing immaturity.
Helping is a bridge to the other person's self-sufficiency. Enabling is an open-ended commitment to co-dependence.
Helping eliminates the other's distress. Enabling can be as much about eliminating our own distress as that of the other person. Enabling can be a selfish, rather than a selfless, act.
Helping is always about the other person. Enabling can be about massaging one's own ego or self-righteousness.

To love others means helping them, not enabling them. I've found that examining one's motives based on any of these five points can help us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

Happy Saint Nicholas Day

2011-12-06T13:07:00.000-05:00

Here.

How to Make Your Life a No Bellyaching Zone

2011-12-06T09:56:00.001-05:00

I love this piece based on Psalm 37 by David Branon.

The psalm gives an alternative to the favorite indoor sport for Christians in their church fellowship halls: bellyaching about how bad things are in the world.

Sin has been standard operating procedure on Planet Earth since Adam and Eve bit into the fruit of the knowledge of and good and evil. It was that evil that thought to rid humanity of all accountability to God and all notions of love for God or neighbor by killing off Jesus, though He was truly God and a truly sinless human being. So, the fact that there are bad things--often horrific things--in the world may arouse our compassion and our horror, but never our surprise.

Bellyaching and whining about how great things were in the supposed "good old days" only guts us of joy and robs the world of our witness for the truly better life that can belong to all who trust in Jesus Christ, here and in eternity.

In his beautiful post on Psalm 37, Branon surfaces five things the Psalm says that we can do as believers in Christ to stand subversively against all the hatred, cynicism, selfishness, and adulation of self over others that exists in our world. The list:

Trust in the Lord and do good.
Feed on God's faithfulness.
Delight yourself in God. (I would say, "Enjoy God and His goodness!)
Commit your way to God. (Turn the keys of your life over to God. Learn to pray, "Thy will be done.")
Rest in the Lord. (Be confident that God, Who brought everything into being, will have the last say, and it will be good!)

I suggest reading the Psalm and Branon's piece on it often, then jotting down these five points on a card that you can keep with you at all times. When the impulse to bellyache about how horrible things are, pull out the card and let it be a reminder.

And remember Jesus' words:

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

When we trust in Jesus as the final Authority over our lives, we have a lot to be thankful for. I know that I need to be reminded of that. I need to remember that all bellyaching is unnecessary!

(By the way, here is a link to Psalm 37.)

Preparing for the Fire

2011-12-04T18:41:00.002-05:00

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
Every few years, there are forest fires out west not caused by the carelessness of campers or the crimes of arsonists. They happen as a result of spontaneous combustion. The fires simply erupt when the trees in forest have become brittle and lifeless.

Foresters tell us this is a good thing. The canopies of dead and dying trees prevent sunlight and rain from reaching any plants or trees trying to take root and grow beneath. Fires take those canopies away.

But often, within days of such massive natural conflagrations end, a TV camera crew will be allowed to go into forests seemingly devastated and dead and find, amid the charred remains of once enormous trees and the still-swirling smoke of the fire, signs of new life: sprigs of mighty oaks or sequoias starting to sprout all around.

Any of you who has ever endured a fire in your home know how destructive fires can be. But, it seems, fires can also be the engines by which new life supplants the dead.

Fire can bring life.

The Bible knows this truth. In fact, the Bible associates fire with God, the giver of all life.

Hebrews 12: 29, for example, finds the Christian preacher who is its author say, “Our God is a consuming fire.”

That phrase “consuming fire” carries with it the notion that our God, like forest fires, consumes or destroys that which is dead or not filled with the life that only He can give.

No wonder then, that the ancient Israelites were afraid of God. Remember when Moses returned from spending time with God on a mountaintop while he and Israelites were in wilderness? Go to Exodus 34, starting on v. 29 pew Bibles and read what it says:

Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. ³⁰When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him.

Moses had been in the presence of God, the consuming fire.

This is why the Old Testament prophets warned the people about what the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, calls the "day of Lord." The day of the Lord is when God will set all things right. Jesus will return. The dead in Jesus will rise. And Jesus will judge all. All that is not of God will be burned in the fires of hell for eternity. Those who have turned from sin and believed in Jesus will live with God for eternity. And Jesus will destroy the old to give rise to new heavens and a new earth in which His kingdom will be fully established for all eternity.

The day of the Lord isn't an occasion to be anticipated casually. It will be wonderful. But it won't be peaches and cream for everyone. Turn to Amos 5:18-20 in the pew Bibles to see what the Old Testament prophet Amos said about the day of the Lord back in the 8th century BC:

Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake. Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?

The Season of Advent is a time when we remember that just as Jesus once came into our world to reveal the glory of God, to die for our sins,and to rise again in order to give life to all Who believe in Him, He is returning when God brings an end to this world and supplants all that is evil and dead with the kingdom of God.

Look at how Peter explains the day of the Lord, the second Advent (or coming) of Jesus, in our second lesson:

...the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed. [After all, things can be seen clearly with fire.]

¹¹Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, ¹²waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? ¹³But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

Our Gospel lesson from Mark, written of events that occurred two-thousand years ago, just before Jesus began His ministry, John the Baptizer points both to Jesus’ first advent (remember advent means coming) and to His advent at the end of this world’s history, when He will judge the living and the dead.

Look at last thing John says in verse 8 of Gospel lesson: “I have baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Matthew indicates that John said not only that Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit, but "with the Holy Spirit and fire."

We believe that when we are baptized, the Holy Spirit comes to burn or purge us of all sin and fill us with the life of God. That's exactly what happened on the first Pentecost, you'll remember. Jesus' first followers gathered in prayer, awaiting the risen and ascended Jesus' direction for their lives. As they prayed, the Holy Spirit came on each of them with tongues of fire!

At Christmas, we celebrate and remember the act of deep selflessness and love that caused the mighty God of the universe to lay His glory by in order to live as servant for our salvation. But when Jesus returns, He will come in His full blazing glory.

This is why the prophet Malachi, writing about 430 years before Jesus, considered the day of the Lord and asked, “Who can endure the day of his coming…?...For He is like a refiner's fire...”

The bottom line of all this fire talk is simple. God is not our buddy. God is our Friend, for sure. But God is also our Master, our Lord, our Creator, our King, our Savior. And at the end of history, God intends to destroy all that is not of God, whether it resides within us as believers or in the unbelieving universe around us.

God has already come into the lives of Christians with the fire of His Holy Spirit, of course. But, the fact is that most Christians only toy with God. They like to bank the fire of God, turning Him into a pilot light they can turn up when things are going badly and they need help and then turn down whenever having God in their lives is inconvenient.

A pastor friend of mine once said that "The problem with Church is that we're afraid of the Holy Spirit." The fear he was talking about isn't the holy awe we all should have before almighty God. Rather, the fear we have of God most of the time is the fear of turning over the keys of our lives to the God we know in Jesus. We want to be in control. Our inborn human arrogance, our sin, makes us want to leave God out of our lives, to leave God standing in a corner until we're ready to call Him.

But this approach to God will never do on the day of the Lord, when all that is within us and all around us not of God will be dissolved in the fire of His holiness.

Years ago, I heard the true story of a group of engineers and their wives having dinner together. The talk turned to all the projects the engineers had been working on: bridges, buildings, towers, water treatment facilities. The whole talk seemed to be turning into an ode to their accomplishments. But then, one of the engineers, thinking of the day of the Lord, put things in perspective. "Some day," he said, "all of this will burn."

So, how can we be ready for Jesus’ second great advent? Three ways, I think.

First: We repent for sin. We let God’s holy fire burn away all that is not pleasing to Him, all our sin.

As we've said before, repentance is not a "one and done" proposition. Just as was true of the crowds who came to be baptized by John, we prepare the way of the Lord into our lives and into the lives of those we touch by engaging daily in repentance.

In repentance, we submit to God’s holy fire putting torch to all our sin, egotism, selfishness. We say, "Thy will be done."

It's in repentant believers, long before the return of Jesus, that God begins the process of replacing the dead and sinful in us with His life. One of my favorite passages of Scripture, 2 Corinthians 5:17, says, "If anyone is in Christ Jesus, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new." We make way for the new life Christ wants to give us each day through repentance.

Second: We trust in the Lord. That is, we believe in Jesus Christ. We trust that Christ, the fiery light of the world, will guide us from here to eternity. This is essential. The Bible teaches that we are saved not by our works, but by our faith--our belief, our trust--in, our surrender to Jesus Christ.

Our eternal destinies, whether we will be with God or the devil, depend on whether we entrust our lives to Christ. In Luke 18:7, after saying that He would make things right—bring God’s justice to those who call on Him, Jesus asks chilling question: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith?”

When we believe in Jesus Christ, our priorities are no longer the most important thing to us. God’s priorities are. I’ve told the true story before of the experience of a woman Ann and I came to know years ago through her daughter, Valerie. When Valerie was two years old, she got away from the watchful eye of her mother, as two year olds can do, and made her way to the family pool and, without a soul in sight, then fell to the very bottom.

Now, you should know by way of background that just two years before, another daughter, just one year older than Valerie, had died from leukemia. From that moment, this woman made Valerie the center of her universe. She did everything for Valerie, at the expense of her husband and their marriage, all her friendships, her work, everything.

When Valerie was found in the pool, some time had passed and her life hung in the balance. She was taken to a hospital ER. Valerie's mother was understandably hysterical. She went to a room in the hospital and began screaming at God: "Not again! Not again! You can't do this to me again!"

Finally, she had no more words and, sobbing in silence, she heard within herself the voice of God: "You shall have no gods before me."

She realized at that moment that she had made Valerie her god. All was done for Valerie. You see, if we make the things we see--whether it's a loved one, our families, our jobs, our finances, our possessions, our status--the most important things in our lives, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we have control.

What God was telling that woman was simple, "Stand aside. Let me be your God. I can take care of Valerie. I can take care you. I can take care of everything, now and for eternity."

When Jesus returns, all the worldly things we have thought so important, including our pretense of control, will die. Only that which is under the Lordship of Jesus will stand. Jesus tells us, "Even in the face of things you will not understand until you see me face to face, believe in Me."

Third: We share Good News with others. We pass on the life-giving fire of our crucified and risen Jesus to others.

In our second lesson, Peter says that God is not slow about day of Jesus’ return, but is patient. God is waiting for not only the Church to repent and believe in Christ, but for world to repent and believe in Christ. God is giving all of us the chance to get our lives in order and get in sync with Him.

Our job—the job of every Christian—is to share that Good News with others. Jesus has given each of us the Great Commission to go and make disciples.

Paul writes about that commission when he asks about those who need to know and believe in Jesus: “But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?”

Jesus sends us to be His witnesses to everyone we know, because everyone we know is someone Jesus wants with Him for eternity.

Repentance, belief, and witnessing for Christ. This is the lifestyle of "holiness and godliness" that Peter describes in our second lesson. These are the things we need to be about as prepare the way for Jesus' second advent.

One day, Peter says at the very end of our lesson for today, God's righteousness will be at home in all of God’s universe.

Until that day, may God’s righteousness be at home in us.

And until that day, may we live in God’s grace through lifestyles of repentance, belief, and witness. Amen

A Great Organization

2011-12-03T20:13:00.000-05:00

Earlier today, my son Philip and I attended a presentation in Farmersville, Ohio today about the World Mission Prayer League (WMPL).

This is a Lutheran organization committed to both praying for and sending missionaries to share the Good News of Jesus Christ in "underreached" parts of the world.* Underreached areas are those where people have had no chance to learn about Jesus Christ.

At present, roughly one-third of all the people on earth have never heard the Name of Jesus Christ or the Good News about new life for all who turn from sin and believe in Him.

And approximately 66,000 people die EACH DAY who have never been told about Jesus!

This simply cannot be allowed to continue!

Too many are dying without knowing that "everyone who calls on the Name of the Lord shall be saved" (Acts 2:21).

WMPL helps Lutheran Christians pray together and joins in prayer with other Christians committed to Christ's Great Commission to "make disciples of all nations."

It also sends missionaries to 20 countries at present, each country in parts of the world that have been largely unreached by the Gospel heretofore. (Most in the so-called 10/40 Window.)

WMPL never asks for money. With allowances for numbers of children, its entire staff, including its director as well as missionaries, is provided with the same salary and benefits. People who give the organization money do so from a commitment to reaching the unsaved for Jesus Christ.

Go to the WMPL web site, here, and see how you can become a prayer partner with this worthy organization.

Thanks to my colleague and friend, Pastor Larry Lindstrom and the people of Saint Andrew Lutheran Church for hosting this get-together with WMPL director Chuck Lindquist!

*WMPL has respectful ties with other evangelical Christian groups, by the way.

The Miracle of Christmas

2011-12-02T23:49:00.002-05:00

Here.

'The Widow Maker' and Me

2011-12-02T23:17:00.000-05:00

Earlier today, I went to the James Cancer Center at Ohio State for an evaluative appointment.

In October, a small melanoma was removed from my left leg. In about a week, I'll have an outpatient procedure to remove surrounding tissue.

I was impressed by the staff at the James and the ease with which I was registered.

In addition to the doctor, I also met with a nurse practitioner. She looked at the wallet cards I carry identifying me as someone with both a stent and a defibrillator and said, "Do you know that the heart attack you had is what we call 'the widow maker'? It's a miracle you're alive. God must have plans for you."

Miracles still happen. Why God chose to work this miracle on me, I don't know and no doubt won't know until I see Him face to face.

But I pray that I will make the most of this life God has given to me.

In any case, to God be all the glory!

Confidence in the Midst of the Questions

2011-12-01T14:41:00.000-05:00

[This was shared during the funeral for Dorothy, a member of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio. Dorothy was 98 years old at the time of her passing.]

John 14:1-7
In the past four years, I’ve gotten to know Dorothy fairly well. Not as well as you who are her family and friends who loved her and knew her best, of course. But I came to know something of her personality and of her character.

I can tell you that Dorothy loved her family. In the nearly monthly visits we shared, no visit went by without Dorothy telling me about how her parents taught her to believe in Christ and how that belief sustained her even when she went through bleak times.

She always loved telling me about her husband Alec, his kindness, his sense of humor, and the life they shared. (She also told me that Alec, eleven years her senior, used to say that he raised her.)*

She loved to talk about her boys, Greg and Kirk. “I was so grateful to have them,” she would say, “that I spoiled them and I don’t think that it hurt them at all.” Then, she would always tell me how wonderful they were.

I came to know that she appreciated her family and her friends--like Bessie, with whom she had a more than eighty year friendship, loved Logan, and enjoyed baseball, especially the Pittsburgh Pirates.

And, almost from our first visit, Dorothy also conveyed the strong message that she was a red-hot Democrat. She still thought that Franklin Roosevelt was the greatest and, though John Edwards had been her first choice in the most recent election, came also to be a fan of Barack Obama. She was ready always to discuss current events with me when I arrived.

Above all, I learned that Dorothy was a person of deep faith in Jesus Christ.

But during almost every one of our visits, Dorothy seemed to return to the same question again and again. “Why am I still here?” she would ask.

Sometimes, I would honestly say that while only God could answer that question, I could say that I was personally glad that she was around. Dorothy and her faith inspired me and I told her so. She was surprised to know that I found her inspiring, but my answer never pleased her. She was ready to leave this life and though she respected and accepted that her life was in God’s hands, she found God’s logic hard to comprehend.

Dorothy had these thoughts not because she was morbid, but because she had a deep and confident faith. She knew well the words Jesus spoke to His disciples that we read a short while ago. He says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places...I go to prepare a place for you...And...I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

Dorothy knew this promise.

She knew that Jesus had prepared a place for her, just as He had for every believer she’d known and cherished most—Alec, her parents, and others.

She knew that Jesus’ death on the cross, where He took the punishment for sin we all deserve, was not the end of His story.

On the Sunday following His Good Friday death, Jesus rose from the dead and even today offers to all of us what we cannot and could never find on our own—not through religion, not through worldly achievement, not through satisfying personal relationships, not through our own efforts to combine what we think is best in all the world’s religions and philosophies.

Jesus offers us the only way for any of us to connect with God, the source of life.

Here’s how Jesus puts it in our reading from John's gospel in the New Testament: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Jesus made the same point in His conversation with a man named Nicodemus. “For God so loved the world,” Jesus said, “that he gave his only Son [Jesus Himself], so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Several months after Jesus was killed on a cross and then raised again to life by God the Father, two of Jesus’ disciples could confidently say of Jesus, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”

Jesus saves us from the ravages of sin, death, aging and all that bedevils us here. This world, as wonderful and as blessed as it can be, is not all that God has in mind for us!

He wants to give us new and everlasting life in direct fellowship with Him, a life so abundant, so full, so rich and real that we can hardly imagine it now.

In the midst of her battles with depression, in the midst of her frustration with the way advancing years had robbed her of feeling productive, and even in the midst of her questions about why God was keeping her on this earth, always, always, Dorothy believed in Christ. She had confidence in the midst of her questions.

She knew that Christ has prepared a place for all who believe in Him to be with Him and all the saints for all eternity. All tears will be dried and there will be joy and purpose and productivity and peace.

I never knew a person with a clearer focus on heaven than Dorothy had and today, God be praised, she is with the Lord and all His saints, including Alec and her parents.

I loved getting to know Dorothy. I’m excited that one day, because of the grace God gives to all who repent of sin and trust in Christ alone, I will get to see her once again.

To all of you who knew and loved Dorothy best, I can say with confidence that, just as He did for Dorothy, Christ has prepared a place for you and I’m sure that Dorothy is waiting for you, too.

Trust in Christ as Dorothy did and you will live each day on this earth in the certainty of an eternity of happy reunions and of endless joy. Knowing that, through Christ, you have life with God in eternity, can imbue each day you live here with a purpose and hope and joy you can find nowhere else!

May God’s purpose, hope, and joy be yours today and always. Amen

*Most people knew Dorothy's husband as Alex. But she always referred to him as Alec.

Three Gifts for Those Who Wait

2011-11-27T18:30:00.001-05:00

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

1 Corinthians 1:3-9
How would you react if someone you trusted told you that by this time tomorrow, your life on this earth would be over? How would knowing the exact time of your death affect the way you lived? What would it do to your relationship with God?

Chances are, if you're as wise as I think you are, you’d spend some of the next twenty-four hours repenting for sin, affirming your faith in Christ, and, to the extent you could, living a life of love for God and love for others.

But, how would you react if at the twenty-third hour, the same trusted person who had told you that you had one day to live said, “Actually, you may have more than one hour left. You will die, but the time left is indefinite”? Would that seem like a reprieve from a death sentence or permission to ease up on the faith you so fervently confessed just the day before?

When people in the first century AD came to faith in Christ, many assumed that Christ would be returning soon to judge the living and the dead and to fully establish His kingdom.

They even had a term for the day when Jesus would do all this. They called it the parousia, a Greek word meaning presence, arrival, or even official visit.

But as the early Church grew, the years went by, Christians were persecuted, and the first believers died, Christians grew restless. They felt like the parousia had been delayed and they wondered what the hang-up was.

Why, they wondered, was Jesus waiting so long?

And how could they keep on in faith with the return of Jesus now off in some indeterminate future?

We Christians in 2011 may not spend much time considering when Jesus will be coming back. But we do know all about the frustration of not seeing the things for which we’ve hoped and prayed when we want to see them. Delayed gratification is as hard for us as it was for the first Christians.

The Advent season we begin today is one in which we wait for the arrival of Christmas.

It's also a time when we remember that, like those first Christians, we await the moment when we will see Jesus face to face. It may be long years from now. It may be in a few moments. It may be when Jesus returns to the earth. It may be when we leave the earth.

But whenever it may be, we face the same question: How do we live until we meet the crucified and risen Jesus face to face? All of the second lessons of this Advent season focus on this question.

Today’s lesson, from 1 Corinthians, reminds us that until we see Jesus, God gives us three special gifts.

First, verse 4 says that “the grace of God has been given [to us[ in Christ Jesus.” In Christ, God gives the gift of grace.

Grace is the charitable attitude that God has for every human being. But it’s more than mere sentiment. The most famous passage of Scripture, John 3:16, shows us that God acts on His attitude of grace. God the Father sent God the Son Jesus to live a simple life in the Judean hills, then to die as the perfect sacrifice for our sins, then to rise so that all who trust in Him will have what none of us deserve: new and everlasting life with God.

The word we translate as grace is, in the original Greek of the New Testament, charitas, from which we get our English word, charity. While we wait to see Jesus face to face, we can live each day in the charitable grace of God.

God will forgive the genuinely repentant.

He will help those who humbly admit their need of Him.

He will empower us to love Him and to love others with acts of service and kindness.

While we await Jesus' return, God gives us grace.

In verse 7, Paul says of believers in Jesus Christ that none are “lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” God gives believers in Jesus Christ spiritual gifts.

Being a follower of Jesus Christ is not a solo proposition. Some people say that they can worship God just as well on the golf course as they do in worship on a Sunday morning. While I know that God's Name probably gets used more on a golf course than it does in a church building, I don't agree.

Just as we’re going to be part of a great company of believers in eternity, God means for us to be part of a great company of believers—the Church—here and now.

And to each and every one us of God parcels out spiritual gifts with which He expects us to make ourselves useful to His purposes and to His Church as long as we draw breath.

A few months ago, I was waiting for a prescription to be filled at Riverside Hospital in Columbus. I was in my collar, having gone there after visiting Janice and my own doctor. I was reading a magazine at a table, waiting. A janitor came in and went about his business quietly. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d decided that, to the extent it was possible for anyone in a collar, I wanted to be anonymous.

But then, God gave me a nudge. “Talk to that person,” God seemed to tell me. I don’t always like it when God does that! I put my magazine down and decided to do the bare minimum in obeying God's nudge. I looked at the guy and said: “Hi.”

The janitor stood up and, with a beaming smile, returned my greeting. “Are you a priest or a pastor?” he asked. I explained that I was a Lutheran pastor.

That began a conversation in which he told me some of his life story. Two years ago, this man, Daniel, and his wife fled Ethiopia, where they had faced persecution for their faith in Christ. Today, Daniel and his wife work different shifts at the hospital, both as janitors, so that one of them can be at home for their son at all times.

Now, most people in Daniel’s position, having escaped a life of deprivation and fear, would content themselves with trying to work up to a better position and scratch together the money to buy a house and secure educations for their children. That, after all, is what we call the American Dream and there’s nothing wrong with it. And maybe that figures in the thinking of Daniel and his wife.

But what he spent time telling me about was the growing church of which he’s a part, where 300 Ethiopian Christians and more gather to worship God each Sunday, and all the service and evangelism they’re doing together in the northern tier of Columbus.

He also told me about the ministry he’s taken on at Riverside, a ministry he's so excited about that he's recruited his supervisor to help with it. Every day during his breaks, he and his supervisor go to the hospital chapel and pray for the intensive care patients and for anyone else aware of their ministry who asks for prayer.

All Christians are called to “pray without ceasing,” of course. But my guess is that Daniel has the spiritual gift of intercession, the special passion God gives to some Christians to not only pray extensively for others, but also to persuade others in doing the same thing.

Spiritual gifts aren’t what God gives you to make a living, they’re what God gives you to be fully alive in Christ.

What spiritual gift has God given to you to honor God, to tell others about Jesus, and to encourage and build up Christ’s Church?

God’s Word says that you’ve got at least spiritual gift, maybe more, and using your gift is one way God wants you to spend the time between now and when you see Jesus face to face.

Verse 8 of our lesson says that the risen and ascended Jesus will “strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” As we wait to see Jesus face to face, God gives us the power for holy living.

This doesn’t mean that you and I will be perfect. Only God is perfect.

But, as we live in relationship with Jesus, daily owning our sins, putting our lives before Him for examination, and seeking His help for living more like Him today than we did yesterday, His power for holy living will invade our lives.

One method I use to stay close to Christ and His power in my life is the ACTS method for daily prayer.

ACTS is an acronym for adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. (A supplication is a request. But if we used request in the acronym, it wouldn't spell out ACTS.)

By praying each day in this way, I try to keep my priorities straight.

With adoration, I begin my prayers by praising God for Who He is.

In confession, I admit my sins and ask God to show me others of which I’m unaware. I seek forgiveness in Christ’s Name and receive the power of the Holy Spirit to live differently.

In thanksgiving, I name and thank God for my blessings. My wife. My kids. My life and the new life I have through Jesus. My work. My extended family. This church. And, most of all, for Jesus Christ.

Finally, after I’ve transacted this business, I feel free to offer supplications, my requests. I invite God into all the people’s lives and circumstances for which I pray.

I pray for our sick.

I pray for those who mourn.

I pray that God would help every member of Saint Matthew to experience and enjoy God’s presence with them that day; that God would cause our congregation to grow in faith, in numbers, in generosity, and in joy.

I pray for my family and friends.

I pray for myself.

Like your days, folks, mine can get busy. But what I have learned is that the busier I get, the more I need to pray and that the more I pray, the more actual good I get done each day.

When we make requests in Jesus’ Name, it’s like turning the tap of heaven onto every person and circumstance for which we pray. As someone has said, "When we work, we work; when we pray, God works."

We don’t know when we will see Jesus face to face. But until we do, our second lesson for the day reminds us that among all the many gifts God gives us to use until we see Him are:

His grace,
Spiritual gifts, and
the power for holy living.

If you feel that any of these things are missing in your life right now, I can assure you that it isn’t because God hasn’t given them to you. If the problem isn’t with the Sender, it must be with the Receiver. (Speaking for myself, when I get honest with God, I see just how often I get in the way of God giving me gifts He wants me to have. Don't let that happen to you!)

Psalm 46:10 tells us to “be still and know” that God is our God. So, sometime this week, hop off the merry-go-round and take a little quiet time with just God and you.

You might pray, “God, I find it hard to believe, but I know that Your Word teaches that You want me to live in the certainty of Your grace; that You have given me spiritual gifts by which I can honor You, encourage Your Church, and tell others about Jesus; and that You give me the power to lead a life marked by Your forgiveness and presence in all I do. Help me to experience this kind of living, Lord, until I see you face to face. Get me off the rat race and help me live in Your power each day.”

Keep praying that prayer and I promise, God will surprise you with the answers He brings into your life. Amen

"It's Not Your Birthday"

2011-11-25T16:22:00.000-05:00

That's the title of this post from Allen White. He considers the hypermaterialism with which we usually celebrate Christmas and makes four good suggestions for changing things:

1. Set a budget for your Christmas spending.
2. Buy presents for your loved ones.
3. Buy a present for Jesus.
4. Take time to reflect on the meaning of Christmas on December 25.

Specific to suggestion #3 above, it's worth remembering this past Sunday's Gospel lesson. In it, Jesus portrays the day when, having returned to earth, He will judge all people.

Jesus is served, we see, when we give food to the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, provide clothing for the naked, care for the sick, and visit the imprisoned.

When we provide for those who can't possibly return the favor, we "buy a present for Jesus." So, donate or volunteer at a local food bank. Or, give to Lutheran World Relief or World Vision. Honor Jesus, Who gave His life for You on a cross. Buy a present for Jesus this Christmas.

The world and we ourselves are better when we do that.

"Finding Hope"

2011-11-25T12:30:00.000-05:00

That's the name of this inspiring piece, which contains this important reminder:

No follower of Christ should feel reluctant to seek counsel for depression. Nor should we feel that faith and prayer are too simplistic to help. There is always hope in God!

Powerful Story

2011-11-23T00:50:00.000-05:00

Here.

10 Things to Be Thankful For

2011-11-22T18:13:00.000-05:00

Here.

Relentless Shepherd (Christ the King Sunday)

2011-11-20T19:35:00.000-05:00

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
In his book, Too Busy Not to Pray, Bill Hybels tells about a day at his church in the Chicago area when lots of people were baptized. All were adult converts, many of them people who had spent years walking without God or away from God. But on this day they found themselves welcomed into the Lord’s family, the way little McKenzie was at our baptismal font a few Sundays ago.

Hybels was understandably excited. But after the service, he found a woman crying in a church stairwell.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “No,” she answered. “I’m struggling. My mother was baptized today.”

Hybels wondered what the problem was. The woman went on, “I prayed for her every day for twenty years.”

Hybels still couldn’t understand the woman’s tears.

“I’m crying,” she said, “because I came so close—so close—to giving up on her…at five years, I said, Who needs this? God isn’t listening. After ten years I said, Why am I wasting my breath? After nineteen years, I said, I’m just a fool. But I…just kept praying, even though my faith was weak. I kept praying…and she was baptized today. I will never doubt the power of prayer again.”

We can rightly be impressed by that woman’s perseverance in prayer.

But, even more impressive to me is the perseverance of the God to Whom she prayed.

The Bible teaches us that it’s God Who gives us the capacity to believe despite our doubts. It was God who incited that woman to keep praying for her mom when she felt like giving up. It was God Who never gave up on her mother as a hopelessly lost sinner.

The God ultimately revealed to the world in Jesus Christ is absolutely relentless in reaching out to us, in caring about us, in desiring a relationship with us. He will go to any lengths to make those things happen.

Just how far God goes can be seen in our first lesson for this morning, Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24.

Ezekiel lived six centuries before the birth of Jesus. He was part of a group of Jews, the elite of their country, captured and sent to Babylon to serve the king there as bureaucrats and courtiers in 597 BC.

When he was thirty, while living in Babylon, God called Ezekiel to be a prophet.

The work God gives to prophets is thankless. That was especially true for Ezekiel. God gave him a succession of messages, mostly for his fellow Jewish exiles in Babylon, that they didn’t want to hear at all.

That’s because, in Babylon, the exiles led fairly cushy lives. Sure, they no longer lived in the land God had given their ancestors, but their bellies were full, they had roofs over their heads, and they enjoyed luxuries. (It's amazing how cheaply we'll sell out what's important, even God, for our creature comforts!)

So, when God sent Ezekiel to tell his fellow exiles that their homeland would soon be crushed and that all of God’s people would be scattered and hounded by enemies unless they and all the people back home turned from sin and trusted in God once more, Ezekiel’s fellow exiles laughed it off. Many went to hear him just to be entertained.

The exiles were like many churchgoers who like the sound of the pastor’s voice or the playing or singing of musicians, but have no intention of surrendering their lives and wills to Christ.

So, the exiles, like their countrymen back home, kept worshiping other gods, acceding to the sacrifice of children to those gods (a horrific form of child abuse), mistreating the foreigners in their midst, ignoring the needs of widows, stealing from one another, violating each others’ wives, and depending on the military power of foreign allies rather than on God alone.

God’s people had moved so far away from a relationship with God that, through Ezekiel, God said unless they repented and trusted in Him alone, He would soon wipe Israel, Jerusalem, and the temple off the map. God would execute judgment on His people and do it through a conquering foreign power whose kings and people didn’t even believe in Him.

God incited Ezekiel to persevere in sharing this message because God was so relentless in His love for His people: Though His people jilted Him over and over, God still wanted them back.

Ezekiel’s exile audience laughed off these prophecies until 586 BC, when Babylon overran God’s people, destroyed the temple, and sent the Jews running in terror. The laughing stopped.

Long before this point, a reasonable person would say that God would have been justified in giving up on Israel…and on the whole sorry human race, for that matter.

But as long as we have breath, God will never give up on us.

God won’t give up on you.

After Israel was destroyed, God gave Ezekiel prophecies of hope. Punishment for past sin doesn’t have to be the end of the human story. Weeping and gnashing of teeth in hell doesn’t have to be the final, eternal destiny of human beings.

“As I live,” God instructed Ezekiel to prophesy, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?”

Even in prophecies God ordered Ezekiel to share with foreign nations, God showed Himself to be relentless in His desire that all people—Jews and Gentiles—to turn to Him and live.

It’s because of this very desire on God’s part that Jesus has commissioned we Christians to make disciples of all nations.

In our lesson, we see that God presents Ezekiel with a vision of a new future God wants to give Israel and all people. To people all over the world, scattered by their sins and the sins committed against them in this fallen world, in verse 11 of our lesson God says: "I Myself will search for My sheep and will seek them out.”

And in verse 23, God says that the shepherd will also be a descendant of David.

Six hundred years before Jesus’ birth, God said that He would be the Shepherd King Who would come to His own people as a humble human servant in order to take us to Himself once again.

Jesus, of course, God in human flesh, is the same Shepherd King Who spoke through Ezekiel and six hundred years later would Himself say, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.”

In my work as a pastor, I find there are two major ways people look at God that keep them from trusting their lives and concerns to God.

The first way was expressed by a woman in a former congregation when she told me that she never prayed. “I don’t think that I could ever ask God for anything," she said. "I wouldn’t want to bother him.” She thought that God was too big, too busy, and too important to care about her.

Another wrong way that people look at God is to see God as powerless. A member of my extended family once told me, “Look, Mark, God may have started this world up. But He’s done all that He can. It’s up to us to keep it going.”

But on this Christ the King Sunday, we affirm that God is neither too busy for us nor too powerless to help us!

For sure, there are things that happen to us in this fallen and imperfect world that we can’t explain. But we still affirm that God cares about us and has the power to give us life with God that never ends.

God is our Shepherd King, so relentless in His love for us that He searches us out no matter how lost we may be, so persevering in His love that He takes on our humanity and though sinless Himself, willingly receives the punishment for sin we deserve, then rises from death to give new and everlasting life to all who believe in Him.

Maybe today you feel that, like the Israel of Ezekiel’s day, you’ve wandered too far from God.

Maybe your life feels rudderless or you realize that you’ve fallen into patterns of sin that are walling you off from God. God wants to be your Shepherd King.

No matter where we are spiritually, whether we are mature believers, as I hope one day to become, or people far away from God, we can always use more of Jesus.

All of us would do well to take as our own a simple prayer that Johann von Staupitz taught a young monk named Martin Luther when Luther felt far from God. The prayer goes like this: “Lord Jesus, I am Yours; save me.” “Lord Jesus, I am Yours; save me.”

Say that prayer with me right now, so that you’ll remember it later: “Lord Jesus, I am Yours; save me.”

God, the Shepherd King Who we know through Jesus, will take to Himself anyone who so surrenders to Him!

He can forgive our sins.

He can give us the power to resist the temptations that threaten to take over our lives.

He can heal our hurts and lighten our burdens.

He can set us free to be more than the mere products of our environments, our genetics, or our sinful impulses.

He can move all who surrender to Him toward becoming the people God means for us to be: free and hopeful, faithful and in sync with our Maker, no longer imprisoned by our past and confident that our future is in the hands of Christ!

As long as we are still on this earth, God will never give up on finding us, saving us, and making us His own.

And He will never tire of keeping us as His own for all eternity! Jesus Christ, God enfleshed, is our Shepherd King!

In Jesus Christ our King, fully God and fully human, we meet a God Who understands us and all that we go through. He is never too busy to hear from us. And He is big enough and great enough to give us new life now and in eternity.

That’s worth remembering not just on this last day of the Church Year, but every day of our lives. Amen

Growing Older?

2011-11-19T01:22:00.000-05:00

Take more chances.

A Few Words with My Fellow Christians (I hope my non-Christian friends will eavesdrop)

2011-11-18T11:01:00.003-05:00

Today's Our Daily Bread post and the powerful passage of Scripture on which it's based, has me reflecting and now, sharing with you.

The Biblical passage is one of my absolute favorites. The first century preacher and evangelist Paul is speaking at a site in ancient Athens known as the Areopagus. People went there to exchange ideas and gossip all the time. It was to Athens what the local bar, a favorite restaurant, the break room at work, or Internet sites like Twitter and Facebook, are today.

Paul wanted to tell people about how, through the centuries, God had revealed Himself and His will for the human race, first through Israel and ultimately through a son of Israel, Jesus.

Jesus, he said, also happened to be God Himself. After dying, Paul asserted, Jesus was raised from the dead as a sign that God would one day take full control of all creation and judge humanity based on whether they have welcomed Jesus with faith or rejected His authority over them. (Actually, Jesus will just be affirming the judgment people make about Him.)

But, in addressing this heavy issue, Paul didn't start out by reciting a bunch of Bible verses or lore from his own religious or ethnic heritage.

He met the people where they were, reciting the words of one of their very own poets.

Just as Martin Luther translated the Bible into German so that his people could know God for themselves and just as he translated and reformed the Mass so that people could participate with understanding in the worship of God, we modern Christians need to understand "where people are coming from" in order to help them know the God Who meets our greatest needs through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Christians need to be intentional in forming respectful friendships with all people. After all, we're commanded to love our neighbor, no matter what.

In addition, because we're commanded to love all people, God's Word commands (and privileges) us to share the new, eternal life that belongs to all who turn from sin and trust in the crucified and risen Jesus.

That's what Paul did.

We can do this ourselves with the non-Christian friends we make in our lives.

Knowing that they're NFL fans, we might ask our friends, "What did you think of the Jets getting Tebowed last night?"

Or, to a Lady Gaga fan, we might say, "I think she's right when she says that we're all 'born that way.' The question for me, though, is whether just because we're born that way, does it mean we should stay that way?"

Or, to the movie buff, we might authentically ask, "My wife and I are thinking of going to a move tonight. Any recommendations?"

Or we might simply and truthfully ask them about their spouses, their families, their work.

We might ask how they're doing as they grieve the recent loss of a family member. It's sometimes amazing to me hear people say, "You're the first person who's mentioned [their loved one] in weeks."

Christians don't do these things to be "ambulance chasers" who earn heavenly brownie points by piling up "good works" or by trapping hapless victims into following Jesus.

We do these things because Christ calls us to love our neighbor, tells us that when we do, we're really loving God, and because we know that our friends, like us, crave being treated with respect and love and concern.

We do these things because they're right.

And we do these things to share Christ with others. It's God's will for us to share our Best Friend with our other friends. Our Best Friend is the God you and I have met and know in Jesus Christ!

So, fellow Christians...

Establish relationships.
Display authentic humility.
Own personal ignorance.
Let your friends see that you grapple with the issues of life, many of which may have you stumped, in the certainty that, despite mysteries and your faults and shortcomings, you have a relationship with Christ that helps you live today in confidence and to face tomorrow with hope.

The conversations in which these things happen ought to unfold naturally, respectfully, and without judgment or unkindness. The New Testament says, "Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence" (1 Peter 3:15-16).

I've been able to have lots of these conversations with spiritually-disconnected friends over the years. Only a few have culminated in people turning from sin and trusting in Christ. But I do know that God has used conversations like these and conversations these friends have with other people, life events, and other things--to nudge people closer to Jesus Christ.

Only God can open a person to Christ. And He does it, not by force, but by gentle persuasion.

But God can use us all as instruments by which He turns an enemy of God, bound for eternal separation from God, into a person of faith in Christ, living life in the power of God's amazing grace.

When we show sensitivity and concern for the interests and needs of others, they see a Christ-follower and stereotypes of Christians as arrogant, self-righteous, and closed-minded are challenged.

They see our hopefulness and wonder whether they couldn't appropriate the same way of life themselves.

Over time, they may become open to the message that Paul ended with in first-century Athens, Greece: "God overlooks it [our ignorance of Him and His will for our lives] as long as you don't know any better—but that time is past. The unknown is now known since Paul has told them about the God revealed through the history of Israel], and he's calling for a radical life-change. He has set a day when the entire human race will be judged and everything set right. And he has already appointed the judge, confirming him before everyone by raising him from the dead" (Acts 17:30-31, The Message].

Let's love our neighbors so much that it will become unthinkable to us--maybe keep us up nights praying for them--that they could face a Christless eternity or that they need to struggle through this life without the incredible comfort of knowing the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Pray about it. Then find those little "wrinkles in time," when you might, naturally, give an account for all the hope that you have through Christ!

Jesus, Slip 'n Slides, and the Purpose of Your Life

2011-11-13T23:37:00.000-05:00

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Matthew 25:14-30
A young man came to see me. “I know that Jesus loves me and that I’m saved by grace through my faith in Christ,” he said, “but what exactly is the purpose of my life?”

The short answer is that you and I are alive for only one purpose: To glorify God.

In Isaiah 43:7, God says, “Everyone who is called by My Name…I created for My glory.”

We most glorify God though, not when we look at the Bible’s portrayal of holy living, like we see in the Ten Commandments or in Jesus’ Beatitudes and then grit our teeth and strive to be good and holy people, whether it makes us or others miserable or not.

We most glorify God when we enjoy God and use His gifts to us in ways that honor Him.

Following Jesus from here to eternity presents its challenges. But there will be no joy in living with Christ if we think we must face those challenges on our own or in our own power.

The Lord Who saved us by going to the cross for us will also be glorified within us (and we will enjoy His company), if we will begin to learn one simple prayer of faith: “Lord, live within me and give me joy so that You are glorified.”

“Lord, live within me and give me joy so that You are glorified.”

The parable Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson is the story of two men who didn’t grit their teeth to do the right thing, but who remembered the goodness of their master and so enjoyed and used the blessings of the master.

It’s also the story of a third man who ignored the blessings given to him by his master, relying on his own personal sense of what was right and wrong, and so, denied himself a continuing relationship with him.

You know the story. A master, clearly a stand-in for God the Son, Jesus, is about to go on a journey. As we read Jesus’ story, we understand the “journey” Jesus is talking about. Since the crucified and risen Jesus ascended into heaven, we know that He has been enthroned in heaven, giving His followers millennia to share the Good News that all who turn from sin and believe in the crucified and risen God of all creation, will not perish in eternal separation from God, but will have eternal life with God!

There will be a day though when the millennia cease and Jesus returns here to judge the living and the dead and to establish His eternal kingdom in the new heaven and the new earth.

Anticipating his journey, the master in Jesus’ parable entrusts some of his money to three different servants. Even the measly single talent—a unit of money—the master gave the third servant could be worth between 20 and 600 years of a day laborer’s wages!

In the same way, God entrusts a fortune of blessings to every human being. It’s called being alive.

And that’s just the start for followers of Jesus Christ! Jesus expended His life on the cross so that all we fallen, sinful, imperfect human beings can, like the thief who was crucified next to Jesus on the cross, acknowledge our sin, turn from that sin, and turn to Him Jesus in faith to live with God for eternity.

What a gift! Living lives that joyfully express gratitude for these two gifts--the gift of life and the gift of life made new that comes to us by grace through faith in Christ--is not a burden. It’s joy, pure it’s-so-great-to-be-alive-that-I’m-belly-flopping-downhill-on-a-Slip-and-Slide-joy!

If you’ve ever done a Slip and Slide, you know that as much fun as it can be, there will often be a few painful bruises as a result of throwing yourself to the ground with abandon. I've even been known to throw myself onto a Slip and Slide in my adult years and every time I have, I've ended up with bruises and sore spots and friction burns.

Throw yourself with similar abandon into the life of following Jesus and you’ll get bruised too. Maybe more than bruised.

Today is an international day of prayer for the persecuted church around the world. There are Christians today who live in 52 nations in which it is illegal to confess that Jesus is Lord. (That's a huge percentage of the globe's 196 countries!)

Many Christian believers are losing their lives or being tossed into jails right now because they believe in Jesus. I think of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani mother of five condemned to death for blasphemy--for which there is no law on the books--against Allah simply because she is a follower of Jesus Christ. She is just one of many Christians throughout the world for whom it isn't safe to confess belief in Jesus!

Other Chrisitans, in safer places, feel afraid to follow Jesus because of what their friends, their neighbors, their bosses, or their family members may say about them.

But anyone who dares to follow Jesus is bound to be attacked by more than just flesh and blood enemies. Follow Jesus and you will be bruised by Satan, who hates no human being more than the one who seeks to follow Jesus.*

A woman told me a few weeks ago that she cannot speak with her father about her relationship with Christ. “He thinks I’m crazy,” she told me. That's hard!

But all who are bruised for believing in Jesus need to remember the words of James in the New Testament: “My sisters and brothers, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking for nothing”—or, as I would put it, you will be completely ready for everything in this life and the world to come!

In Jesus’ parable, the master came back, as Jesus one day will return to the earth, and, like Jesus on judgment day, the master demanded an accounting for how the servants had used all he had given to them.

The master was delighted to see that the first two men had enjoyed and used their gifts and so brought glory to his name.

The last man, not so much. His failure to honor and enjoy either his gifts or the giver brought him total separation from the master, just as happens to those who refuse to honor or enjoy Jesus, the Giver of the best gifts of all.

In his book, The Purpose Driven Life, Pastor Rick Warren gives five portraits of what people who glorify God look like.

First, they worship God all the time. As Warren puts it, “Worship is a lifestyle of enjoying God, loving Him, and giving ourselves to be used for His purposes.”

Second, they love other believers. Long before Jesus walked the earth, God had already commanded all people to love God and to love neighbors. But just before His crucifixion, Jesus told believers, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you…”

Jesus’ sacrificial love for us brought us eternity with God and He commands us to love our fellow believers in exactly the same way.

Echoing Jesus' command, Paul writes in the New Testament: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” That's sacrificial love.

I know that I can only love like that by relying on the supernatural power of God’s Holy Spirit, asking God to love others I find unlovable through me.

Loving sacrificially does not mean that we become spineless yes-women or yes-men.

It doesn’t mean that we go along with sin.

Jesus shows that sacrificial love must be tough in confronting evil, even when we find it among fellow believers. When Peter chastised Jesus for insisting that He must go to Jerusalem to be crucified, then rise from the dead, in order to claim an eternal kingdom, Jesus was blunt. “Get behind Me, Satan,” He told Peter.

Sacrificial love will always speak and live out the truth in Christian love toward our fellow believers, even when the truth isn’t pleasant.

Third, they glorify God by allowing Him to shape them into the likeness of Jesus. The New Testament teaches that it’s God’s aim for all of us to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus. Submitting to God reshaping us into the likeness of Jesus is a difficult process that doesn’t end this side of our resurrection.

Submission to Christ means that the Word of God and the will of God must always trump our preferences, our emotions, our reason, and our experiences.

This is something we are at risk of totally forgetting in North American Christianity and for which we must repent or risk losing all connection to Jesus. Like our Savior in the garden at Gethsemane, we must be committed to daily telling God, “Nonetheless, not my will, but Thine alone be done.”

Fourth, we glorify God by serving others with our gifts. No matter what our gifts or our limitations, God has gifted every Christian to glorify God by serving others in some way or another.

Finally, Warren says, we glorify God by telling others about Jesus. As some readers of my blog know, this past week I heard a colleague tell the true story of a contractor he recently met in Ethiopia, a lay member of the Lutheran Mekane Yesus Church. This contractor takes on big jobs in various parts of his country.

Along with the rest of the work crews at any site, he also hires two pastors for every project. Every morning, the pastors lead worship among the crew before the start of the workday. After that, the pastors go into the nearby towns to see if there are any needs they can address, any prayers they can offer, any people who might want to know about Jesus and the new life He offers.

If there’s a group of people in that community who want to be part of a new Lutheran congregation, this contractor will then also pay the salary of one of the pastors for an additional year in order to develop the new church.

Sometimes, this guy gets flak for his witness for Christ from local government authorities or from leading people in the community. He always meets the skeptics, gives them Bibles, invites them to read the Bibles, and, if after they’ve read some of God’s Word, they still have questions about why he does what he does, he offers to meet them again.

It's because of committed lay Christians like this man that the Lutheran Church in Ethiopia gained 300,000 new members between 2009 and 2010. It already has 1-million more members than our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And, recognizing how desperately America needs Jesus Christ, the Lutherans in Ethiopia are about to send missionaries to the United States.

Not all of us can do what that contractor does to tell others about Christ. But each of us can do something to tell others about Jesus, even something as simple as using one the “This meal’s on us!” cards you can still find in the back of the sanctuary.

We can be like the first two men in Jesus’ parable. We can use the gifts our Master has given to us to glorify God and joyfully use our gifts.

We do this when we worship God in our daily lives, love our fellow believers, ask God’s help to become more like Jesus, use our gifts to serve others, and tell others about Jesus and the new and everlasting life only He can give to those who turn from sin and believe in Him.

Today, I want to close with one simple question. Who among us is willing to belly flop with utter abandon to enjoy and follow Jesus Christ?

If you are, I promise you that Jesus will always be there to catch you...and you will glorify God!

Amen!

*Ephesians 6:10-12, in the New Testament, explains this well:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. ¹¹¹²

"Word of God, Speak"

2011-11-12T09:14:00.000-05:00

Less of me; more of God. Not my thoughts, feelings, and experiences; but God's Word alone!

This song expresses so much about the desire of every imperfect, saved, and grateful follower of Christ to live the life of an authentic disciple, who wants to mean it when praying, "Thy will be done."

The song is called, Word of God, Speak, performed by MercyMe.

By the way, Saint Matthew folks, the chorus of this song will serve as our Gospel Verse prior to the the announcement of the Gospel lesson, during the Sundays of Advent.

The Contractor Who Does More Than Put Up Buildings!

2011-11-10T21:26:00.000-05:00

I mentioned here that today I heard a colleague who has frequent contact with the Lutherans in Ethiopia tell two true and inspiring stories of faithfulness from that rapidly growing church body. I told one of the stories in that linked piece. Here's the other one.

Several months ago, while in Ethiopia, my colleague met a Lutheran layperson who owns a construction firm. Every time this man and his firm start a project in a community, he also hires two pastors along with all of construction workers he hires for the job. Every morning, before work begins, the pastors conduct a worship service on the site.

That sounded great to my colleague. But, he asked, what do they do the rest of the day?

The two pastors go into the town and look for people who need help, whether it's prayer or some physical need, and address them. If a group of people comes to believe in Christ through the work of the pastors, after the construction job is completed, the owner will provide one of the pastors pay for one year as the pastor works to get a new congregation started.

If any local authorities question this businessperson's practices, he goes to them and hands them a Bible. He tells the authorities, respectfully, that this book will explain why he does the things he does. He asks them to read it and, in a few weeks, if they have any further questions, to get in touch with him for conversation. These conversations, like the visits of the two pastors who work with the construction projects, allow the business owner to tell public officials about Christ.

The congregational starts spawned by this man's method receive no financing from the denominational hierarchy, but initially only from one committed Christian who looks for ways to spread the gospel, the good news, of new life for all who repent for sin and believe in Jesus Christ through his business.

Not every follower of Christ can bankroll church starts, of course. But we all can be prayerfully on the lookout for ways of spreading the gospel. Learn from the example of this contemporary Ethiopian Lutheran saint: Ask God to help you share Jesus Christ every single day!

Lesson Learned from Ethiopia

2011-11-10T21:07:00.002-05:00

I heard two true stories from Ethiopia today, both told by a colleague who has frequent contact with the Lutheran body there, the Mekane Yesus Church.

The first involved a theologian of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the body of which I'm a member and which has wandered so far from God, Christ, and the authority of Scripture. This ELCA theologian was invited to teach a class on the Gospels at an Ethiopian Lutheran seminary.

One class was devoted to discussing the miracles of Jesus. The professor told the class of Ethiopian seminarians that his wife had a doctorate in Chemistry and had confidently assured him that it would have been physically impossible to change water to wine, as the Gospel of John says that Jesus did during a wedding in the village of Cana. All the miracles, he went on to say, were added into the New Testament narrative to buttress the first century Church's claims that Jesus is God-enfleshed and Savior of the world.

One student wasn't sure that he'd correctly heard the American theologian. So, he asked the visiting professor to repeat what he'd said. The professor did so.

The student closed his book and walked out of the class room, as did all the other Ethiopian seminarians.

The professor was mystified. This had never happened to him in the States.

Soon, the president of the seminary came by to confirm what had happened. He, like the students was offended by the professor's assertion, and asked the professor if he believed in the Trinity, the teaching supported by Scripture that God is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

"Yes," the professor replied.

Then why, the seminary president wondered, would he teach something totally contrary to God's revealed truth about the Trinity in the Bible?

The doctrine of the Trinity affirms that God the Father is the Creator of the universe, the One Who invented chemistry. The doctrine also says that Jesus is God the Son. If God the Father is Lord over the chemical elements of the universe, how could anyone say that God the Son couldn't be Lord over those same chemicals to perform a miracle which affirmed His identity as God on earth?

In too much of the mainline North American churches, we've gotten to the point where we think we're smarter than God and have the right to rescind the clear witness of Scripture. We put too much stock in our own intellects, emotions, and experiences, rather than in what God has revealed through His Word over the centuries. That's why views like that of the ELCA professor who went to Ethiopia are widespread among bishops, pastors, theologians, and even church members in our denomination.

To confess that, "Jesus is Lord" is to say that God is greater, wiser, and smarter than I am.

To confess that Jesus is Lord is to say that when His revelation conflicts with what I think or feel or have experienced, what God teaches in His Word wins the conflict. Period. End of story.

A Lord Who can't turn water into wine--or kill the power of sin and death for all who believe that He died and rose to life again--isn't worth following, no different from any of the fallible human beings, from football coaches to CEOs, from theologians to reality show participants, that people often hold up as examples or heroes. (Or whose prominence they invoke as an excuse for believing or doing what they want to do, whether their beliefs or actions agree with God's will or revealed truth or not.)

Fortunately, the Church in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is teaching the rest of us who have forgotten what it means to say that Jesus is Lord. Thank God!

I pray that all of us in my own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (and all Christians in North America and western Europe) will learn and live this truth, too. We need to connect to God again! The world needs for us to connect to God again.

Following Christ Into the Future

2011-11-07T14:12:00.000-05:00

I've always found it interesting that, at Christ's empty tomb, the angels told the women who had arrived to anoint Jesus' body only to be told that Jesus was risen from the dead:

"Go, tell His disciples and Peter that He [Jesus] is going ahead of you to Galilee..." (Mark 16:7).

This has always seemed an apt metaphor for the fact that to follow Jesus doesn't involve nostalgia for the past or propping up old ways of doing things.

When you follow Jesus, you can be grateful for what has happened in the past--including Jesus' death and resurrection. You can also learn from the past. But your focus is on Him and the future--both here and now and in eternity--to which Jesus takes those with faith in Him.

With a focus on Jesus and the future, we're freed from the endless rehearsal of past failures and hurts. We're free from religion's insistence on reproducing proscribed rites and conditions in order to win God's attention or approval.

Instead, Christians bearing their scars and mindful of the lessons of their lives with Christ, learn and grow and move into the great future that belongs to all who follow Christ!

Check out these thoughts, today's installment of Our Daily Bread.

If You Cover Up Child Molestation, You're a Molester Too

2011-11-07T12:03:00.000-05:00

Obviously, I don't know if all the allegations are true regarding the sexual abuse of eight boys by a former Penn State assistant football coach.

There does appear to have been a cover-up of whatever did happen, however.

The bottom line is this: There is absolutely no one more destructive or hurtful in the world than a child molester. It cannot be tolerated.

If the alleged molestations occurred and anybody in the Penn State administrative or athletic staffs knew about them, prison time would be almost too good an outcome. Nobody in the Penn State athletic program who may have had knowledge of these alleged cases and failed to tell authorities could be said to be any better than child molesters themselves. To abet molesters is to give them a free pass to keep hurting kids.

I love sports, but I can only hope and pray that the false deity of sports won't prevent the appropriate working out of justice in this case. Punishing people who have damaged children is a lot more important than a football program!

In Memory of Sarah

2011-11-06T22:50:00.001-05:00

Today, immediately following worship, with the brief service you'll find below, the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church prayerfully dedicated a memorial in honor of Sarah Starner, to the glory of God. Sarah died in August, but not before teaching us all so much about living and following Christ.

The memorial includes an oak tree and three butterfly bushes. (Butterflies loved Sarah!) A stone with a plaque cites the sermon which Sarah preached on Easter Sunday in 2009 and Psalm 46:10, which meant so much to her and to her family. [You can click on the images above to enlarge them.]

Dedication of a Memorial to

Sarah Elizabeth Starner

Offered to the Glory of God

All Saints’ Sunday

November 6, 2011

[We will recess from the sanctuary to the site of the memorial, on the front lawn of the church building, and sing acapella, #752 in the blue With One Voice songbooks, I, the Lord of Sea and Sky.]

Pastor: Sisters and brothers in Christ, on this All Saints’ Sunday, we seek God’s blessings as we gather with thankfulness for the life and witness of Sarah Starner and set aside this memorial to her, offered to the glory of God.

We read responsively Psalm 46, words that have sustained the saints for ages and which sustained Sarah and her family these past years.

Pastor: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Congregation: Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; 3though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

Pastor: There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.

Congregation: God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved; God will help it when the morning dawns.

Pastor: The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; He utters his voice, the earth melts.

Congregation: The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.

Pastor: Come, behold the works of the Lord; see what desolations He has brought on the earth.

Congregation: He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; He breaks the bow, and shatters the spear; He burns the shields with fire.

Pastor: “Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth.”

All: The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.

Prayers
Pastor: Blessed are You, O Lord our God, the King of the universe. Your days are without number; a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it is past. You are the Lord of the past, the present, and the future; You hold eternity in the palm of Your hand.

We remember with thankfulness all the saints and witnesses to Your goodness who have gone before us, who, by their lives have testified to Your love. Give us grace to follow their examples as Your beloved children, maturing in the likeness of Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, by Whose death and resurrection You give eternal hope to all Your saints.

Be with us now and bless this memorial, a living reminder of the faith and witness of our sister in Christ, Sarah, who taught and showed us so much about what it means to follow You. As You raised up Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the firstfruits of those who sleep, so also by You Holy Spirit make us to be partakers of that new life which You have promised to those who believe; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

All: Amen

Pastor: Let us bless the Lord!

All: Thanks be to God!

Pastor: The blessing of almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be with you all.

All: Amen!

All Saints' Sunday (What is a Saint?)

2011-11-06T20:45:00.000-05:00

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Revelation 7:9-17
Today is All Saints’ Sunday. But what is a saint?

This is an important question. In a real sense, the eternal destinies of every person here today—and every person in the world—depends on the answer.

To find the answer, we’ll turn today to the New Testament book of Revelation. That’s where our first lesson comes from.

Revelation, you know, is based on a series of visions given to John about sixty years after Jesus’ resurrection, while John was imprisoned for his faith in Jesus.

Beginning at chapter 6, John sees Jesus, the second Person of the one God, open the first six of seven seals. With the opening of each seal, each one of which God has been using to hold together this sinful universe and to delay the judgment that must come at God’s selected moment, John sees this creation moving closer to its inevitable end.

John also sees glimmers of the new creation that the risen and ascended Jesus will finally and fully usher in when He returns to claim His kingdom from sin, death, and the devil. Jesus’ return will bring celebration and relief to all who have turned from sin and who have believed in Christ.

But, as the last verse of Revelation 6 points out, the return of Jesus won’t be a universally welcomed event. Those who have lived for themselves, for their own sinful impulses, who have rejected Christ and the Holy Spirit’s call to repent for sin, will ask the caves, mountains, and rocks for help. “Fall on us,” they’ll beg, “and hide us from the face of the One seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb [the Lamb being Jesus, Who, Revelation also describes as the Lion]; for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”

But then, just before the opening of the seventh and final seal, John is allowed to see two scenes in Revelation, chapter 7.

The first scene comes in Revelation 7:1-8, right before today’s lesson. The location of this scene is this world. God assigns four angels to hold back the final destruction of the old creation. “Don’t damage the earth,” God tells the angels, “until we’ve marked all of the servants of God with a seal on their foreheads.” (Like the seal of the Holy Spirit with which McKenzie was marked on her forehead last Sunday after her Baptism.)

Then the numbers of those sealed for salvation are counted out. The total comes to 144,000. Don’t be worried by this number, though! The Bible is not saying that a measly 144,000 people out of all human history will be part of God’s eternal kingdom! For first century Christians, this would have been a number of perfection and completion. The number144 is the total derived from multiplying the 12 tribes of Israel times the 12 apostles Jesus chose to lead the post-resurrection church. For first-century Jews and Christians, tacking thousand onto the back of 144 would be a bit like one of us talking about “a gazillion” in describing the numbers of people shopping at Kroger’s on a Friday evening.

We see how symbolic a number this 144,000 is when we look at the first verse of our lesson, Revelation 7:9. John writes, “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count…”

Now, I can hardly read those words without getting goosebumps! This is no little crowd of 144,000. This is a multitude! But what brings me chills is the phrase saying that the crowd was so big, “no one could count.”

Here’s why I find those words so moving: On a starlit night 4000 years ago, an elderly man to whom God had promised the impossible struggled to believe that God could overcome change, decay, and death to give him a son and his descendants a future. The man’s name at the time was Abram. (Later to be changed by God to Abraham, a name that means “father of nations.”) Turn to page 8 in one of the pew Bibles and read what God did Genesis 15:5 to help Abram believe. “Then He [that is, God] brought him [Abram] outside and said, ‘Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.’ And He said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’”

Do you know who that multitude from every nation is that John sees in His vision of heaven after the life of this old world has come to an end?

They are the descendants of Abram whom God had promised on that starry night so long ago.

And each of those descendants came to be part of the kingdom of God—they came to be the saints of God—not because they were the genealogical descendants of Abraham and his wife Sarah. They became saints in just the way Abram came to be a saint. Genesis 15:6 says that when Abram heard God’s promise, he “believed and [God] accounted it to him as righteousness.”

Today, God has revealed Himself to all the world in the crucified and risen Jesus. “If you know Me,” Jesus says, “you will know My Father also.”

And He says, “The Father and I are one.”

And, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

Everyone who turns from sin and believes in the God we see in Jesus is a descendant of Abraham. They are saints.

What gives me the chills when I read the vision Jesus gave to John is the realization that God has never changed.

God has always wanted to rescue His fallen children from sin and death and to give them life.

And His plan has always been the same: to give eternal life in His new creation to all who will trust, not in their own achievements, smarts, money, shrewdness, health, or anything else, but who trust only in Him.

Saints are those who trust God to give them the free gifts that come to all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus: gifts like forgiveness of sin, eternal life, and a sense of purpose.

But if sainthood is a free gift from God, we must not think for a moment that sainthood is easy. We see this from just four words in our lesson from Revelation today.

The first two of those words appear at the beginning of verse 9: “After this.” After what, exactly?

John saw the multitude of saints after an event that’s mentioned in verse 14. That’s where you can read two more important words: “great ordeal.”

The great ordeal is something John never saw in the scenes described in Revelation 7.

But the great ordeal is something through which every believer in Jesus will go, in big ways and small.

Folks, we live in a world filled with beauty and wonder. But with its beauty and wonder marred by human sin, death, and even the suffering of the saints, this world also presents but a glimmer of the beauty and wonder—the perfection—that await all who persevere in following Jesus to the end.

After life in this world, the saints who have kept on trusting Jesus, will be met by the Savior, Who will make them clean forever, Who will dry their tears, Who will feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty, and lead them into the new creation for which each of us were made.

For now, we live in an in-between time in which, as Paul writes in the New Testament, both we and the whole of creation wait with eager longing for Christ to reveal Himself and His children.

Life in this world can be hard. And sometimes, as we’ve noted before, life in this world is made harder because we believe.

I am personally convinced that the devil couldn’t care less about tempting or testing those who live their lives without faith in Christ or fear and respect for God. The devil already has them bagged; so, why should he bother them?

Instead, the devil tests, tempts, and tries the saints. And every believer in Christ will, eventually, bear the scars—physical, emotional, or relational—that come to those who put following Jesus first in their lives.

Our own personal “great ordeals” may include persecution, chronic or fatal illness, disagreements over priorities with those we love or with whom we work, or the internal conflicts that happen within us when a sin tantalizes us and we know that we must choose God’s way and not our own.

A dear friend of Ann’s and mine, Karen, spoke for millions of Christians after she’d gotten yet another poor report on the cancers that would eventually take her life. We were sitting alone when she remarked, “I just can’t seem to catch a break, Mark.”

People who haven’t experienced the biggest break any of us could possibly get—forgiveness and new life through Jesus—have no reason to wonder about the bad breaks life brings them. If you don’t know the God we meet in Jesus, Who is all-powerful and all-loving, the bad breaks of this life aren’t mysterious or baffling.

Yet, despite her disappointment and mystification, Karen, an exceedingly intelligent and wise person, persisted in her faith, confident that while the many prayers for her healing weren’t answered in this life, she would, because of her faith in Christ, experience the ultimate healing when she would, in eternity, be with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and with all the saints who, like her, trust in Jesus.

And unlike others who endure life’s difficulties without meaning or purpose, the saints on earth, like the saints in heaven, have a purpose: to glorify God and to point to Jesus as our only hope.

A year ago, my friend and colleague, Pastor Glen VanderKloot, suffered a heart attack that required two stents. Just a few weeks ago, he learned that he was suffering from a serious form of skin cancer, Merkel Cell, which is rare. The initial signs are encouraging, but Glen will be undergoing radiation treatments between now and Christmas. Today, once more, he is in the pulpit proclaiming the new life that belongs to all who repent and believe in Jesus. In an email to the subscribers of his daily devotions this past week, Glen gave glory to the God he knows in Christ. “God is good all the time,” Glen affirmed. “All the time, God is good!”

What are saints?

They’re people who trust their whole lives to Jesus.

They know to Whom they belong and they know where they’re headed.

They know that this life is not perfect.

But they have a purpose in this life: To let the whole world know about the Lamb Jesus, Who will, after the last page has been closed in the last chapter of this world's story, welcome all who have trusted in Him to His new creation.

In the meantime, dear saints of God, don’t be afraid!

Trust in Jesus.

Know His love and power for you even in the midst of life’s greatest ordeals and know for a fact that, like the saints whose names we have read, remembered, and honored this morning, Jesus will welcome you in His heavenly kingdom.

He’s eagerly waiting for the moment when you too will join angels and saints in singing and savoring the glories of our loving God and when all who have persistently, perseveringly followed their Savior in this world hear the Lord say to them in the next, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” Amen!

A Confession

2011-11-05T22:17:00.002-04:00

I have no religion; I'm a follower of Christ. (And I fail many times along the way.)

It's Harder to Believe Than Not To (Reflections of a Former Atheist)

2011-11-05T20:51:00.000-04:00

I've been an atheist. Since 1976, I've been a Christian.

I can tell you that living a life of faith in a God of total love and absolute power while continuing to live in a fallen world in which bad, senseless things happen to faithful people is far more difficult than going through this life as an atheist.

As an atheist, I had no expectations of God’s deliverance, ascribed no meaning to existence, and was not offended, except insofar as they created nuisances for me, when bad things came my way. In an uncreated world in which there is no good Creator or need for redemption, there is no reason to get riled up over what seems unfair or wrong. There are fewer things to explain and fewer unanswered questions when you're an atheist. It's a far simpler, even simplistic, way of life.

As musician, filmmaker, and satirist Steve Taylor once observed, "It's harder to believe than not to."

But whatever difficulties belief in the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ may present, I would rather live and die with Christ than live or die without Him.

Like the apostle Peter, after Jesus had asked him and his fellow disciples if, like others, they would like to abandon him, I have to say, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that You are the Holy One of God" (John 6:68).

My life has been interesting lately.

I had a heart attack that destroyed 40% of my heart in June, 2010. A stent was implanted shortly thereafter.

Just before I received a pacemaker and defibrillator on October 13, less than a month ago, a small mole was removed from my leg which turned out to contain melanoma cancer cells. The dermatologist is confident that he removed all of the cancer, but I'll undergo an outpatient procedure to remove tissue from the surrounding area in December.

These experiences are mere bumps in the road compared to what many people experience in life. I have no complaints.

But I can tell you that I have been sustained by Jesus Christ and by the prayers of other believers in the past year or so.

I have become even more convinced of the love and power--and the ultimate lordship over all things in heaven and on earth--of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Christ is with me and I am promised that when I die, as a repentant believer in Jesus, I will be with Christ for all eternity.

How could I be anything but hopeful when I know those things to be true, even when life gets tough?

I pray that every day, God will help me to make the prayer of Saint Paul, who suffered so much not in spite of, but precisely because, he followed Jesus, my very own:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. (Romans 8:18)

It is harder to believe than not to.

But those who believe in Jesus are blessed with a certainty about their futures that gives us the freedom to love our neighbors, to choose the path of joyful service, to shake off unkindness from others, to work for justice, and to walk humbly with our God. You really can't deter or bring ultimate discouragement to people who know they're going to live forever.

I have found that, in spite of everything, while it may be better, it's still better to believe than not to.

Parents: Let Your Kids See Your Dependence on Jesus

2011-11-04T23:25:00.001-04:00

"Christianity is mentored, not learned." (John Schroeder)

The simple truth John points to here is why the charge we Lutherans give to parents of children being baptized is more than just a collection of words:

In Christian love, you have presented this child for Holy Baptism. You should, therefore, faithfully bring her to the services of God’s house, and teach her the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments. As she grows in years, you should place in her hands the Holy Scriptures and provide for her instruction in the Christian faith, that, living in the covenant of her Baptism and in communion with the Church, she may lead a godly life until the day of Jesus Christ.

Later in the same service, we pray for the parents of newly baptized children:

O God, the giver of all life, look with kindness upon the father and mother of this child. Let them ever rejoice in the gift You have given them. Make them teachers and examples of righteousness for their children. Strengthen them in their own Baptism so they may share eternally with their children the salvation you have given them, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Parents have two jobs:

To prepare their children for adulthood.
To prepare their children for eternity by letting them know the One Who opens eternity to all who believe in Him, Jesus the Christ.

Providing for their children's instruction in the faith is only part of what's involved in that second job. The most important part is in living your own faith in Christ--humbly, without pretending to be perfect, letting your kids see that you face life and eternity not in your own strength, but in the strength God provides to believers in Jesus.

Another way to say what my friend John Schroeder says about Christian faith is mentored, not learned, is that Christianity is more caught than taught.

Parents: Let your kids catch your authentic dependence on Jesus. That authenticity will make all the difference for them both in their adult years and in eternity.

"When Is It Time to Fight?"

2011-11-04T21:12:00.002-04:00

Thoughts from my friend, Steve Sjogren.

The One People of God

2011-11-04T12:01:00.000-04:00

Christians who are called supersessionists believe that the Gentile believers of Jesus in the Church have superseded the Jews as the people of God.

But that's not what the New Testament teaches.

It says that all--Jew and Gentile--are called to repent and believe in God's ultimate self-disclosure, the Messiah, Jesus and all be part of God's one people. Joseph L. Mangina gets at this in his very fine commentary on Revelation 7:

It is the unanimous witness of the New Testament that the church is Israel (e.g., Galatians 6:16; 1 Corinthians 10; Ephesians 2:12, 19; 3:6; 1 Peter 2:9-10), the same elected and beloved people of God who were delivered from Egypt, though now under the conditions of the messianic age and with the addition of the Gentiles to Abraham's children after the flesh.

Read all the linked passages above to see the basis of Mangina's argument.

As Paul, a Jew who believed in Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of God's plans for the humanity, as the Messiah, and as God-enfleshed writes, that beginning with Israel's patriarch-founder Abraham, righteousness--that is, a right relationship with God--has always been a matter of faith and not of ethnicity, lineage, or the performance of religious duties:

For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise void...For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who the faith of Abraham...in the presence of the God in Whom he believed, Who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist... (Romans 4:13-17)

Revelation 7:9-17 is one of the Biblical texts for All Saints' Sunday, coming up this weekend.

God Ain't Too Proud to Beg

2011-11-03T00:04:00.002-04:00

I know you wanna leave me,
But I refuse to let you go
If I have to beg and plead for your sympathy,
I don't mind coz' you mean that much to me

Ain't too proud to beg, sweet darlin
Please don't leave me girl, don't you go
Ain't to proud to plead, baby, baby
Please don't leave me, girl, don't you go

Those words from the Temptations song, Ain't Too Proud to Beg, crossed my mind while reading Jeremiah 44:4, this past week.

Jeremiah was an Old Testament prophet who lived in the early seventh- and late-sixth centuries BC. God gave him a series of prophetic messages not only to God's people in Judah (the southern portion of what had once been a larger Israel) and to neighboring nations. Through Jeremiah, God called all to repent. But nobody listened.

In Jeremiah 44, God uses Jeremiah to recount His people's sorry history of trying to find life in dead things like false deities, foreign alliances, economic power, injustice toward foreigners and the powerless, and child sacrifice. God says, "...I persistently sent to you all my servants the prophets, saying, 'I beg you not to do this abominable thing that I hate!'"

God begged!

Is that unseemly behavior for the God of the universe?

To beg people to whom He had given everything--life, blessings, a land--as free gifts to beg the people to trust in Him alone, not for His ego, but for their good to turn from their persistent sin and to know life, whole and pure, again?

Eventually, of course, time ran out on Judah, and God let the Babylonians overtake the promised land, turning God's people into refugees or slaves. (But even after that, He promised restoration to all who will turn from sin and believe in Him.)

But God, it would seem, still does this begging thing. In Luke 15, in the New Testament, God in the flesh, Jesus, tells the story of the prodigal son. Throughout the whole story, the father, Jesus' parabolic representation of God the Father, does all sorts of unseemly (some would say unmanly, unfatherly) things.

First, the father violates cultural norms by giving inheritances to both his oldest and his youngest sons. Neither boy earns their estates, mind you, but in those days, a younger son could have expected nothing. The old man is a softie though and, on demand, gives the young boy his inheritance.

Second, after the younger son wastes every gift he's given and fallen into poverty and dishonor (feeding pigs and envying their menu), he heads back home to ask his dad for a job alongside the servants. Instead, showing what would have been seen as unseemly compassion, the father runs to the boy when he sees him approaching the estate, and wraps his arms around him in forgiveness and acceptance before the boy can utter a word of repentance.

With the younger son returned, the father throws a party, Jesus' parabolic representation of the kingdom of God to which all people are invited through Him. The older boy, offended by the charity and forgiveness that the father was showing the younger son, refuses to join the party. (He apparently was too good for the kingdom of God.) Jesus says the father came out of the house to plead with the older son to come and join the party.

Sin, which is separation from God, can take many forms.

It can be seen in the kind of idolatry and injustice exhibited by God's people in Jeremiah's time.

It can look like the hedonism seen in the younger son of Jesus' parable.

It can look like the stuck-up, holier-than-thou priggishness of the older son.

But whatever the form of our sin, God ain't too proud to beg us to return to Him.

There will come times--in this world, maybe, and in the age to come, for certain--when God will allow those who refuse His begging love and forgiveness, to live with the consequences of their decisions to go it alone without God.

Like a jilted lover, God told the people of Israel through Jeremiah that they had broken the covenant He had with them, "though I was their husband" (Jeremiah 31:32). But He spent years begging His people to return and remains faithful to them and to the whole human race to this day.

God is begging us now to return to Him. Through Jesus Christ, God has made Himself known to us all and wants us to be part of His eternal party.

He's begging because, paraphrasing the message of the Bible in the words the Temptations could have sung, "you mean that much to Him."

[The prophet Jeremiah by Marc Chagall. Click to enlarge.]

Martin Luther and the Need for Reformation Today!

2011-10-30T17:29:00.000-04:00

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning. We celebrated Reformation Sunday.]

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 46
Romans 3:19-28
John 8:31-36

He was born in November 1483, in the German principality of Saxony. His name was Martin Luther. From an early age, he exhibited intelligence and many talents. As time passed, he would become a great preacher, a theologian, and a musician.

These pursuits were far from his father’s intentions for young Martin. Hans Luther wanted the boy to become a lawyer.

That was the trajectory on which Martin’s life was moving until a shattering experience intervened. He was going back to the university he attended when a thunderstorm arose. A lightning bolt knocked Luther to the ground. Understandably terrified, Martin cried out to the patron saint of miners. “Saint Ann,” he said, “save me; I will become a monk.”

Luther was mistaken, of course, to trust in a saint instead of God. As one of our Read the Bible in a Year passages from last week, Jeremiah 17:7 puts it, “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.”

But who knows? If Luther hadn’t gone to a monastery, you and I, the beneficiaries of his rediscovery of Biblical truths that had been buried beneath traditions and power plays, might not be here this morning.

Nonetheless the new monk Luther was a disturbed young man. He saw himself as completely guilty and hopelessly condemned to an eternity in hell. He couldn’t imagine that God would ever forgive him. He was a mess!

Believing that a fully occupied life would crowd out Luther’s worries though, his superiors decided that Luther should study to become a doctor of theology. He would then teach at a new university being started in the Saxon town of Wittenberg.

At first, the new regimen of work, which included administering fourteen monasteries, pastoring a local church, and teaching at the new university, did nothing to change Luther’s loathing of God and himself.

But then, something happened to change Luther’s life--and history itself.

Like most seminarians and priests of his day, Luther had never studied Scripture. He did so now, as he prepared for the classes he was teaching. In the Bible, Luther found a God quite different from the one often preached in the Church of his day. He saw a God of grace and love...

Who reaches out to His children,
Who charitably understands their fallen humanity,
Who forgives and empowers right living, and promises eternity to all with faith in Him.

Luther saw a God:

Who hates sin while loving sinners,
Who lovingly calls all to repent for their sin and believe in His Son, Jesus.

Luther’s new understanding of God crystallized as he studied two verses in the New Testament book of Romans. Please pull out the pew Bibles and turn to page 648 to read them, Romans 1:16-17. They say:

For I am not ashamed of the Gospel [that means, the Good News about how God sent His Son Jesus to die and rise so that all who believe in Him will not be eternally separated from God in hell, but live with God eternally], for it [the Gospel] is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it [that is, in the Gospel’s message about Jesus] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written [and this comes from the Old Testament book of Habakkuk]: "The just shall live by faith."

Luther saw that righteousness is not some goodness owned by super-saints. Righteousness is having a right relationship with God.

Through Jesus’ cross and empty tomb, Christ gives righteousness to all who turn from sin and believe in Him. Christ does all this as a free gift.

The Bible calls this gift, along with all of God’s other undeserved blessings, grace.

Ephesians sums up the truth that changes the lives of followers in Jesus for eternity when it says, “by grace you have been saved through faith…”

As Luther grew in the confidence he had in the new life given to him by Christ, he grew bolder in sharing what he had learned from the Bible. On October 31, 1517, he posted 95 theses--or propositions for debate—on the church door in Wittenberg.

Luther’s theses challenged a common practice in the Roman Catholic Church of his day. The Church then taught that there was a place called “purgatory,” a sort of holding room that the dead supposedly went to between death and eternity. Purgatory was supposed to be a place where people were purified for entry into heaven. Purgatory was purely a human invention. To raise money, the Church often authorized the mass sale of pieces of paper called indulgences. Indulgences allowed people to buy hundreds or thousands of years out of purgatory for loved ones or even themselves. (Depending on how much a person wanted to or could spend.) Luther was offended by this practice. It turned God's gift of grace for all who trust in Christ into a commodity to be bought and sold by human beings.

When Luther’s preaching and teaching against indulgences impacted the bottom line on their sale, the Church went after him. At a gathering in the German city of Wurms, before the emperor, Luther was ordered to recant, or repudiate, all of his writings. He refused. Ultimately, he came under what was known as an “imperial ban,” meaning that anyone who saw Luther was authorized to kill him on sight. Luther was labeled a heretic, a perverter of the Christian faith.

But Luther and those who came to agree with him remained steadfast in proclaiming the God we see in Jesus Christ, the God of grace and God of glory. Among Luther’s last words were, “We are all beggars,” an acknowledgement that none of us is better or more important than others in God's eyes and that all with faith in Christ are the recipients of God’s charitable gifts: forgiveness and new life. We cannot earn them, but thank God, He loves to give them to those humble enough to surrender to Christ! These are the central truths of God’s Word, the Bible.

Luther died in 1546.

We celebrate October 31 each year as Reformation Day because on All Saints Eve, Hallowed Evening or, as we call it, Hallowe'en, in 1517, Luther’s 95 Theses began a major reformation of the Church.

That reform movement goes on to this day.

We celebrate the Sunday closest to October 31 each year as Reformation Sunday.

I’m convinced that if Martin Luther were a pastor of our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) today, there would be some things he would celebrate. But I'm equally sure that he would also be agitating for reform within the ELCA and would be unpopular among many.

On one hand, Luther, who believed that the Bible contains God’s authoritative Word and was willing always to be shown what the truth is by Scripture and plain reason, would be delighted that, in accordance with the Scriptures, we ELCA Lutherans see women and men as equals and that women called by God are ordained as pastors among us.

But I’m sure that Luther would also look at Called to Common Mission, the agreement struck between the ELCA and the Episcopal Church-USA in 1999, and be appalled that people who call themselves Lutherans have accepted the belief that the words and actions of bishops—mere human beings—have as much authority as the Word of God.

He would look at the legalistic system we have in selecting voting members to our synod and churchwide assemblies and ask why we have replaced attentiveness to God’s Word with a Pharisee-like insistence on quotas.

I’m also certain that Luther would look at the many ELCA bishops, pastors, and seminary professors who reject the Bible’s teachings on things like Jesus’ virgin birth, on Jesus’ miracles, on Jesus being truly God and truly human, and on Jesus’ physical resurrection from the dead and ask, “Why do people of the Reformation tradition no longer accept the faith of the Bible and of the Lutheran Confessions?”

Clearly, the need for the movement to reform Christ’s Church that began when Martin Luther posted those 95 Theses on October 31, 1517, has not ended.

As long as there are people within and outside the Church who believe that they can construct lives from fortresses of their own designs and efforts, in which they make people and things other than Jesus Christ the foundations on which they build their lives and hope for eternity, the Reformation must continue.

We must keep singing and continue to strive to live for the truth Luther summarized in his greatest hymn, “A mighty fortress is our God!”

Martin Luther learned and then taught from God’s Word that our relationship with God and our freedom from sin and death come only from the God of the Bible, the God ultimately revealed to all the world in Jesus Christ.

These gifts—relationship with God, freedom from sin and death—come to us freely from a God Who is not subject to our human authority or our puny religiosity.

They come to us from Christ alone, Who shows us that God isn’t our enemy, but our very best friend, and worthy of all our glory, honor, praise, living, trust, hope, obedience, and surrender.

Keep the Reformation Luther began going!

Keep turning to God’s Word alone, to God’s Son Jesus alone, to salvation by grace through our faith in Christ alone!

Then, pass the truth of grace alone, faith alone in Christ alone, and God’s Word alone as our guide in life, onto everyone you know. Amen!

The Reformation Polka

2011-10-28T14:12:00.002-04:00

I've shared this before, but we're celebrating Reformation Sunday this weekend. So, here it is again.

Certainty Among Mysteries

2011-10-28T09:49:00.002-04:00

There are mysteries beyond fathoming. But one thing that is not mysterious, because God has clearly revealed Himself in Jesus, is that God loves us. God stands with us in all of this life's mysteries and has revealed the new, everlasting life belongs to all who trust in Christ. Read today's installment from Our Daily Bread.