[This message was prepared to be shared during worship on Sunday, September 30, 2018, with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. I felt moved to share a different message. That other message will be shared too. But this scrapped sermon is the sixth installment of our series on the Biblical themes raised by the book, I Am a Church Member, by Thom Rainer.]
1 Corinthians 12:27
Revelation 21:2
John 3:29
Lucy Van Pelt, the creepy little kid in the old Peanuts comic strip who always pulled the football away just as Charlie Brown was about to kick it, said, “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.”
Some people in the Church have an equivalent attitude about all local congregations. “I love Christ’s Church,” they seem to say, “It’s the people in individual congregations that I have no use for.”
But, as Thom Rainer rightly points out in the sixth and final chapter of his book, I Am a Church Member, people who try to make such distinctions aren’t really paying attention to the witness of the New Testament. Rainer writes that “...the universal church and the local church are not mutually exclusive...The Bible is clear that we are to be connected to a specific church in a specific context.”
This insight comes from reading Paul’s letters to New Testament congregations. Each letter was written to individual, local congregations, each committed to living out their faith in partnership with and accountability to one another.
Essential to being a member of Christ’s church universal or church catholic then, is to be a member of a local church. The holy catholic Church is in every local congregation where Christ’s gospel is rightly proclaimed and the sacraments are rightly administered. And every member of every local congregation where those conditions are met is also part of the whole Church in heaven and on earth. We who make up local congregations like Living Water are part of Christ’s body, His eternal fellowship. This is why the apostle Paul says to we disciples of Jesus, “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27)
But church life can be difficult. Like families or workplaces, we can disagree, argue, and not see eye to eye. Why then does God give us the gift of salvation only through the life, ministry, and proclamation of Christ’s Church? And why does He consider the Church such a gift for its members anyway?
Members of my extended biological family experienced a major blow-up with their local church and its pastor. They tell me that they now have “church” at home, inviting companionable friends over for Bible studies that they lead.
Now, I’m an advocate of small groups. They are essential for our growth as disciples. But the problem with these family members’ approach to church, of course, is that people who treat a small group as their “church” are more likely to take a wrong turn in their faith.
When you’re only around the companionable people with whom you feel comfortable, you’re ripe for heresy that can pull you far away from God and the truth of His Word. It’s only when “iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17), when we’re in a church in which we can disagree with Christ’s love, that we grow, that we really learn what it means to love each other as Christ loves us. The approach taken by my family members also leaves them at risk of forgetting all about the entire mission of Christ’s Church, to make disciples, instead, being satisfied to just read Scripture and pray with people who will never challenge them for self-satisfaction or spiritual smugness.
So, one reason that God considers the Church His gift to us is that it helps keep us faithful. I mentioned Hebrews 10:25 in the first installment of this series a few weeks ago. There, we’re told not to give up “meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” So, as the day of Christ’s return grows ever closer, we need the people of our local churches even more. We need to gather around the Word and Sacrament, we need to be challenged and afflicted by God’s Word, as well as comforted and empowered by it. That’s part of what Christ’s Church, part of what this church, does!
Another reason God says we should regard the Church as His gift is that it shows contempt for God to see it in any other way. In Revelation, chapters 18 to 22, we find an idea developed that comes from Jesus: The Church is the bride of Christ. This is rooted in the very language that Jesus used about Himself during His earthly ministry. In John 3:29, Jesus says, “The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom [the best man, John the Baptist] waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom's voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete.”
Jesus here speaks of His joy of being one with His bride, the Church. The marriage of Christ and His Church is consummated in Holy Baptism and strengthened in Holy Communion. And one day, the groom will come to take His bride into His home for all eternity.
John saw this in one of the visions he had while on the island of Patmos, where he records, “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” (Revelation 21:2)
The Church then, including Living Water Lutheran Church, is a big deal, an eternal fellowship. That’s why Rainer writes, “Church membership is a gift. A gift must be treasured. It should not be taken for granted or considered lightly. Because it is a gift, we must always be thankful for it. And when we are thankful for something, we have less time and energy to be negative.”
The Church ultimately is the fellowship of believers in Jesus in which we learn that Christian faith is not about me, it’s about us as a community of believers submissive to Christ whose only mission is to invite and welcome “outsiders” into that same community so that, believing in Jesus, they too will have life with God.
That’s a truth that we cannot and will not learn apart from the fellowship of the Church Jesus established through His apostles and their successors.
The crucified and risen Jesus tells His Church, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:16)
The Church then is a gift because through it, we learn and build our lives around the truth of the gospel that God gives new and everlasting life to all who daily turn from sin and daily follow Jesus...and then, by His Holy Spirit, empowers us to grow each day in the likeness of the Lord Who died and rose for sinners like us.
When you have the gift of Christ and the Church that can never be taken from those who believe, you then can keep giving those gifts away--Christ and the Church. And as that happens, not only will more people be given the chance to know Christ, follow Christ, and share Christ with others, those same people--new believers in Jesus--will join us in sharing our free gifts of life with Christ and His Church with others.
The apostle Peter was one of the first to be sent out to invite others to receive the gifts of Christ and Church. One day at the temple, Peter encountered a lame man begging for money and told the man, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” (Acts 3:6) Peter claimed that he could offer prayer and new life in Jesus’ name and Jesus underscored the validity of Peter’s words by also giving the man the ability to walk and jump once again. That was because Peter was part of Christ’s Church. And you can bet that that formerly lame man was anxious to hear all about Peter’s church after that.
Are we treasuring Christ’s Church enough to respect those with whom we disagree in our congregation?
Or, do we speak of them and treat them like the refuse that some politicians claim their opponents to be?
Are we Lucy Van Pelt Christians?
Or do we love our sisters and brothers in Christ in this church? Do we pray for them, speak well of them, encourage them?
Treasure your church; after all, if we’re saved by grace through faith in Christ, all of the people in every local church of which you may be a part, are people with whom you’re going to spend eternity! Better to learn to love them now than wait until Jesus returns.
And if we don’t learn to love them now, it may be too late to learn after Jesus comes back and time has run out for us to repent for our half-hearted discipleship. “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” Let’s live out that truth with gratitude and love for one another. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Showing posts with label 1 Corinthians 12:27. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1 Corinthians 12:27. Show all posts
Monday, October 01, 2018
Friday, September 28, 2018
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Sharing Christ and His Church with Our Families ('I Am a Church Member,' Part 5)
[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on Sunday morning, September 23.]
Deuteronomy 6:7-9
Recently, I had two separate conversations with members of my extended family: one a believer who doesn’t attend church; the other is a non-believer who attends church.
In the conversation with the believer who doesn’t attend church, I mentioned some of the things I was going to be doing over the succeeding few days. “I’m sure that must be hard,” the family member told me. “Well, not that hard,” I started to explain. “Oh,” my family member interjected, “it must be old hat for you by now.” “No,” I said, “I mean that my work depends less on how much experience I have than it does on how much I depend on God to do it.” I think that sounded like a foreign language to my relative.
In the conversation with the non-believer who attends a church, we were talking about how people in their church helped at the church office. Looking at me, this family member said, “I guess that’s what the Church is about, isn’t it?” “Well, sort of,” I said. I wanted to recite this month’s Living Water memory verse about the Church: “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27) Church life isn’t so much about being nice to each other as it is about helping each other so that we can fulfill our mission as the Church. Once again, I think I sounded like a foreigner to a family member.
Folks, Jesus commissions each of us as His people, both collectively and individually, to make disciples. First Peter tells us that you and I were bought out of our slavery to sin and death by Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection not only so that we could be saved, but so that we could help others to a saving faith in Jesus. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession,” Peter writes, “that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (1 Peter 2:9) That’s our purpose.
When you and I leave worship on Sundays, we go into our own personal mission fields. They include every place we work, play, study, shop, exercise, relax, or socialize.
And the most challenging part of our personal mission fields is our families.
What makes reaching our families with the good news about Jesus so challenging? I think that it's this: Our families--spouses, children, parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles--know all about us. (Or they think they do.)
They know our imperfections.
They know our weak spots and what makes us crazy.
Our family members have built-in walls of defense against our witness for Christ.
I’m sure that many of my relatives think, when our conversations veer off into dangerously Christian territory, “There he goes again” and simply tune me out or move onto the next subject.
And yet two things are true.
First, as Thom Rainer reminds us in the fifth chapter of his book, I Am a Church Member, we are called to help our families know Christ. (I refuse to say, as Rainer does, that we lead people to Christ. We can’t lead anyone to Christ! Only the Holy Spirit can lead a person to Christ, even if the Spirit happens to use me in some way to that end!)
Secondly, it’s also true that we have no more intimate connections than the ones we have with our families. Nowhere are we able to have more opportunities to share the gospel of new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ than in our own homes, among our own kin.
The Bible says that parents have a particular responsibility to share their faith and the importance of living in the community of faith with their kids. In Deuteronomy 6, starting at verse 7, God tells Israel, the ancient proto-church that anticipates the eternal Church that Jesus would later begin: “Impress them [God’s words of law and promise] on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:7-9)
In other words, the primary place in which children are to be instructed in the faith and where they’re to see how the Church is to function as Christ’s community in the world is in their homes.
This is why Martin Luther called the family “a little church.”
It’s also why he wrote The Small Catechism to be used by families as part of worship and devotional life in their homes.
In our families, as we pray together, talk about what was discussed in worship and Sunday School, read Scripture together, and, love each other and even love and care about the people in our churches or the world who try our patience, children and parents learn together and live out together the meaning of their Christian discipleship.
It’s in our families that we learn the meaning and importance of the Church, the only agency in the world through which the Gospel of new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in Jesus is proclaimed. Without the Church, no one would know that there is a loving God Who has acted to save us from sin, death, and darkness. The family is one of the most important places in which the work of the Church is done.
So, how can we best point our families to Christ as the only hope human beings have for life with God and to His family, the Church, as the only fellowship in which we can know and experience the truth about God?
Let me make a few suggestions.
First, our family members must see that we love Christ and His Church, including church members who have annoyed or hurt us. It’s good when, in the power of the Holy Spirit, we seek to live out what Jesus tells us about forgiveness: “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:5) When our families understand from our witness and our lives that the Church is Christ’s hospital for hypocrites and we are among its life-long patients, both Christ and the central importance of the Church are authenticated.
Second, families must see that Christians don’t think that they’re better than others. If we’ve been saved by grace through faith in Christ, how can we think that we’re better than other people anyway? In one of His parables, Jesus said that a Pharisee had it wrong when he thanked God that he wasn’t a sinner like a tax collector then standing at a distance from the altar. But Jesus said that the tax collector had it right when he prayed, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). In Ephesians, we’re told, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)
Third, our families must catch us being Christians. Some Christians can talk about faith with others, but the rubber hits the road in their life and witness.
I read about a rebellious teenager whose elderly Norwegian-American grandfather came to live with the family. One day, the teen walked by his grandfather’s bedroom. The door had slipped ajar and he saw the old man kneeling at his bed, praying for the salvation of his teenage grandson, tears rolling down his cheeks. That teenager later became a committed Christian and a pastor.
When our families see us praying, worshiping at church and at home, witnessing to others for Christ, and serving others in Jesus’ name, when they see us dealing with success with gratitude and failure with magnanimity, they can better see the validity of the Christian life and life in connection with Christ’s Church.
Our families are our mission fields. They are the people with whom we have the greatest influence, the ones to whom we can most readily show that Christ is the way and the truth and the life and that it’s only in the fellowship of the Church that we can know Christ and be part of His mission in the world.
Finally, I want to say a word to you who have family members who, like those family members of mine I mentioned, presently have no apparent connection to Christ and His Church: Don’t lose hope!
Even if your family members are today ignoring their need for Christ and His eternal family, you can still pray in Jesus’ name.
You can continue to share your witness for Jesus with them.
You can tell them that, while you are an imperfect sinner deserving of death and judgment, you’ve been made alive by God in your Baptism and given new and everlasting life by your trust in the Savior Who died and rose for sinful human beings.
You can let them see how much this church family means to you.
Trust that God will use your prayers and witness and the prayers and witness of other Christians to give that spiritually disconnected family member every chance to know and follow Christ into life with God. Even after we’re dead and gone, God will still hear our prayers and find ways to answer them. Our call is simply to be faithful and leave everything else to the God Who washes sinners clean and raises the dead.
May the Holy Spirit use us to point our families to Christ and His Church. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Deuteronomy 6:7-9
Recently, I had two separate conversations with members of my extended family: one a believer who doesn’t attend church; the other is a non-believer who attends church.
In the conversation with the believer who doesn’t attend church, I mentioned some of the things I was going to be doing over the succeeding few days. “I’m sure that must be hard,” the family member told me. “Well, not that hard,” I started to explain. “Oh,” my family member interjected, “it must be old hat for you by now.” “No,” I said, “I mean that my work depends less on how much experience I have than it does on how much I depend on God to do it.” I think that sounded like a foreign language to my relative.
In the conversation with the non-believer who attends a church, we were talking about how people in their church helped at the church office. Looking at me, this family member said, “I guess that’s what the Church is about, isn’t it?” “Well, sort of,” I said. I wanted to recite this month’s Living Water memory verse about the Church: “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27) Church life isn’t so much about being nice to each other as it is about helping each other so that we can fulfill our mission as the Church. Once again, I think I sounded like a foreigner to a family member.
Folks, Jesus commissions each of us as His people, both collectively and individually, to make disciples. First Peter tells us that you and I were bought out of our slavery to sin and death by Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection not only so that we could be saved, but so that we could help others to a saving faith in Jesus. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession,” Peter writes, “that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (1 Peter 2:9) That’s our purpose.
When you and I leave worship on Sundays, we go into our own personal mission fields. They include every place we work, play, study, shop, exercise, relax, or socialize.
And the most challenging part of our personal mission fields is our families.
What makes reaching our families with the good news about Jesus so challenging? I think that it's this: Our families--spouses, children, parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles--know all about us. (Or they think they do.)
They know our imperfections.
They know our weak spots and what makes us crazy.
Our family members have built-in walls of defense against our witness for Christ.
I’m sure that many of my relatives think, when our conversations veer off into dangerously Christian territory, “There he goes again” and simply tune me out or move onto the next subject.
And yet two things are true.
First, as Thom Rainer reminds us in the fifth chapter of his book, I Am a Church Member, we are called to help our families know Christ. (I refuse to say, as Rainer does, that we lead people to Christ. We can’t lead anyone to Christ! Only the Holy Spirit can lead a person to Christ, even if the Spirit happens to use me in some way to that end!)
Secondly, it’s also true that we have no more intimate connections than the ones we have with our families. Nowhere are we able to have more opportunities to share the gospel of new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ than in our own homes, among our own kin.
The Bible says that parents have a particular responsibility to share their faith and the importance of living in the community of faith with their kids. In Deuteronomy 6, starting at verse 7, God tells Israel, the ancient proto-church that anticipates the eternal Church that Jesus would later begin: “Impress them [God’s words of law and promise] on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:7-9)
In other words, the primary place in which children are to be instructed in the faith and where they’re to see how the Church is to function as Christ’s community in the world is in their homes.
This is why Martin Luther called the family “a little church.”
It’s also why he wrote The Small Catechism to be used by families as part of worship and devotional life in their homes.
In our families, as we pray together, talk about what was discussed in worship and Sunday School, read Scripture together, and, love each other and even love and care about the people in our churches or the world who try our patience, children and parents learn together and live out together the meaning of their Christian discipleship.
It’s in our families that we learn the meaning and importance of the Church, the only agency in the world through which the Gospel of new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in Jesus is proclaimed. Without the Church, no one would know that there is a loving God Who has acted to save us from sin, death, and darkness. The family is one of the most important places in which the work of the Church is done.
So, how can we best point our families to Christ as the only hope human beings have for life with God and to His family, the Church, as the only fellowship in which we can know and experience the truth about God?
Let me make a few suggestions.
First, our family members must see that we love Christ and His Church, including church members who have annoyed or hurt us. It’s good when, in the power of the Holy Spirit, we seek to live out what Jesus tells us about forgiveness: “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:5) When our families understand from our witness and our lives that the Church is Christ’s hospital for hypocrites and we are among its life-long patients, both Christ and the central importance of the Church are authenticated.
Second, families must see that Christians don’t think that they’re better than others. If we’ve been saved by grace through faith in Christ, how can we think that we’re better than other people anyway? In one of His parables, Jesus said that a Pharisee had it wrong when he thanked God that he wasn’t a sinner like a tax collector then standing at a distance from the altar. But Jesus said that the tax collector had it right when he prayed, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). In Ephesians, we’re told, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)
Third, our families must catch us being Christians. Some Christians can talk about faith with others, but the rubber hits the road in their life and witness.
I read about a rebellious teenager whose elderly Norwegian-American grandfather came to live with the family. One day, the teen walked by his grandfather’s bedroom. The door had slipped ajar and he saw the old man kneeling at his bed, praying for the salvation of his teenage grandson, tears rolling down his cheeks. That teenager later became a committed Christian and a pastor.
When our families see us praying, worshiping at church and at home, witnessing to others for Christ, and serving others in Jesus’ name, when they see us dealing with success with gratitude and failure with magnanimity, they can better see the validity of the Christian life and life in connection with Christ’s Church.
Our families are our mission fields. They are the people with whom we have the greatest influence, the ones to whom we can most readily show that Christ is the way and the truth and the life and that it’s only in the fellowship of the Church that we can know Christ and be part of His mission in the world.
Finally, I want to say a word to you who have family members who, like those family members of mine I mentioned, presently have no apparent connection to Christ and His Church: Don’t lose hope!
Even if your family members are today ignoring their need for Christ and His eternal family, you can still pray in Jesus’ name.
You can continue to share your witness for Jesus with them.
You can tell them that, while you are an imperfect sinner deserving of death and judgment, you’ve been made alive by God in your Baptism and given new and everlasting life by your trust in the Savior Who died and rose for sinful human beings.
You can let them see how much this church family means to you.
Trust that God will use your prayers and witness and the prayers and witness of other Christians to give that spiritually disconnected family member every chance to know and follow Christ into life with God. Even after we’re dead and gone, God will still hear our prayers and find ways to answer them. Our call is simply to be faithful and leave everything else to the God Who washes sinners clean and raises the dead.
May the Holy Spirit use us to point our families to Christ and His Church. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Friday, January 19, 2018
How do I live in God's Kingdom TODAY?
Most days, I try to begin the morning in quiet time with God. You'll see an explanation of how I approach quiet time here. Below is the journal entry for today's quiet time.
Look: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’” (Mark 1:14-15)
Jesus brings the kingdom of God. He embodies it. He is its king. Jesus is saying here, I think: “You’ve been looking for the kingdom of God. Here it is. And if you want to be part of it, you need to do two things. First, turn away from your sins and trust in the forgiveness I bring from God. That’s what it means to repent. Second, trust in or believe in the gospel. The gospel is the good news that all who trust in God’s Son, crucified and risen for us, is part of God’s kingdom.”
And when is someone part of God’s kingdom? NOW. The kingdom will come in its fullness, of course, when Jesus returns to the earth, closing down this old creation, and those who have trusted in Him rise to be with Him eternally in His new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). But the kingdom has already come to us. When we repent and believe in Jesus, we are in the kingdom now.
Jesus says in John 5:25: “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.”
And He says in Luke 17:21, that “...the kingdom of God is in your midst."
Listen: How do I live in Your kingdom now, Lord?
In the high priestly prayer offered in the garden before His crucifixion, Jesus prayed to the Father: “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.” (John 17:14-15)
It’s Jesus’ will for His disciples to live in the world while not being of the world. We are to be cordial and loving toward the world, but when its worship, values, actions, thoughts, and approach to justice conflict with those of God’s kingdom, we’re to stand with Christ. To manifest the kingdom of God today, we must be in but not of the world.
This is hard.
But I have several important resources to rely on when it comes to being in but not of the world.
Jesus mentions one of them in this petition of the prayer: God’s Word. Spending time in God’s Word is essential. Otherwise, my brain gets addled and I go to the default position of my sinful, human nature. Spending the first hours of my day Fox and Friends or Morning Joe will help me live in the kingdom. (Help me to remember this, Lord.)
But this will only happen, I think, if my reading of God’s Word is begun, filled with, and supported by the very thing that Jesus did in the garden. He prayed. I must pray. Prayer is a conversation in which I connect with God. When I ask God to show me what I need to see in His Word, I find that I see lots more of God and His will for my life than I would if I approached it as a reading assignment.
These are two private resources God gives to us to buttress kingdom-living, to foster our own growth as disciples.
But God also makes me part of the body of Christ, the indispensable Christian community.
People who profess faith Christ but don’t want to have anything to do with the messy business of being part of His family, the Church, are at risk of becoming lost sheep who wander away from Christ and His kingdom. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20)
We are made for life in the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27). When the kingdom of God comes fully, we will be part of an eternal kingdom that lives out the great commandment, a fellowship in which we love God and love others.
Other Christians may annoy us, offend us, even harm us. But we need Christ’s body, the Church.
It’s in the body of Christ that we hear God’s Word, not always as we want to hear it, but as read and proclaimed; we receive the sacraments, in which God claims us as His own (Holy Baptism) and which renews us and fills us with Christ’s very life (Holy Communion); we commit ourselves to mutual care and accountability.
Respond: As I think about how I can manifest my citizenship in God’s kingdom right now, I ask, Lord, that You will help me:
1. Express love for my fellow citizens of the kingdom today.
2. Look for opportunities to share Christ with those who seem to live outside of the kingdom.
3. Seek justice for those who are abused or left behind by the world’s system of warped values.
4. Treat others with simple decency.
Help me in these ways, Lord Jesus, to live as one saved by Your gospel and so prove to be an ambassador in this foreign land in which I live on this side of the resurrection (1 Peter 2:11-12; 2 Corinthians 5:20-21)
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Look: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’” (Mark 1:14-15)
Jesus brings the kingdom of God. He embodies it. He is its king. Jesus is saying here, I think: “You’ve been looking for the kingdom of God. Here it is. And if you want to be part of it, you need to do two things. First, turn away from your sins and trust in the forgiveness I bring from God. That’s what it means to repent. Second, trust in or believe in the gospel. The gospel is the good news that all who trust in God’s Son, crucified and risen for us, is part of God’s kingdom.”
And when is someone part of God’s kingdom? NOW. The kingdom will come in its fullness, of course, when Jesus returns to the earth, closing down this old creation, and those who have trusted in Him rise to be with Him eternally in His new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). But the kingdom has already come to us. When we repent and believe in Jesus, we are in the kingdom now.
Jesus says in John 5:25: “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.”
And He says in Luke 17:21, that “...the kingdom of God is in your midst."
Listen: How do I live in Your kingdom now, Lord?
In the high priestly prayer offered in the garden before His crucifixion, Jesus prayed to the Father: “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.” (John 17:14-15)
It’s Jesus’ will for His disciples to live in the world while not being of the world. We are to be cordial and loving toward the world, but when its worship, values, actions, thoughts, and approach to justice conflict with those of God’s kingdom, we’re to stand with Christ. To manifest the kingdom of God today, we must be in but not of the world.
This is hard.
But I have several important resources to rely on when it comes to being in but not of the world.
Jesus mentions one of them in this petition of the prayer: God’s Word. Spending time in God’s Word is essential. Otherwise, my brain gets addled and I go to the default position of my sinful, human nature. Spending the first hours of my day Fox and Friends or Morning Joe will help me live in the kingdom. (Help me to remember this, Lord.)
But this will only happen, I think, if my reading of God’s Word is begun, filled with, and supported by the very thing that Jesus did in the garden. He prayed. I must pray. Prayer is a conversation in which I connect with God. When I ask God to show me what I need to see in His Word, I find that I see lots more of God and His will for my life than I would if I approached it as a reading assignment.
These are two private resources God gives to us to buttress kingdom-living, to foster our own growth as disciples.
But God also makes me part of the body of Christ, the indispensable Christian community.
People who profess faith Christ but don’t want to have anything to do with the messy business of being part of His family, the Church, are at risk of becoming lost sheep who wander away from Christ and His kingdom. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20)
We are made for life in the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27). When the kingdom of God comes fully, we will be part of an eternal kingdom that lives out the great commandment, a fellowship in which we love God and love others.
Other Christians may annoy us, offend us, even harm us. But we need Christ’s body, the Church.
It’s in the body of Christ that we hear God’s Word, not always as we want to hear it, but as read and proclaimed; we receive the sacraments, in which God claims us as His own (Holy Baptism) and which renews us and fills us with Christ’s very life (Holy Communion); we commit ourselves to mutual care and accountability.
Respond: As I think about how I can manifest my citizenship in God’s kingdom right now, I ask, Lord, that You will help me:
1. Express love for my fellow citizens of the kingdom today.
2. Look for opportunities to share Christ with those who seem to live outside of the kingdom.
3. Seek justice for those who are abused or left behind by the world’s system of warped values.
4. Treat others with simple decency.
Help me in these ways, Lord Jesus, to live as one saved by Your gospel and so prove to be an ambassador in this foreign land in which I live on this side of the resurrection (1 Peter 2:11-12; 2 Corinthians 5:20-21)
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
4 things God taught me about spiritual gifts on Monday
During my quiet time on Monday morning, I considered 1 Corinthians 12 in the New Testament. I was particularly struck by verse 18:
But since Paul left the Corinthians, unchristian ideas and practices had taken root in their church. Among them was the notion that the possession of some spiritual gifts made a person superior to others in the church who didn't have that gift. (You still hear nonsense like this from some Christians today. Paul responded to such smug lovelessness among the first century Corinthian Christians with 1 Corinthians 13.)
In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul compares the Church to the human body. In fact, in many other places in the New Testament, Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, does more than compare the Church to a human body. Paul asserts that the Church is the body of Christ in the world. While the crucified and risen Jesus has ascended into heaven, the Church is Jesus Christ's physical presence here and now. For example, Paul says in different places:
As radical as the Bible's teaching that Jesus is the second Person of a triune God (one God, three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is its insistence, voiced often by Paul, that the Church is Christ's body, every disciple a member of Christ's body.
That person with the annoying cackle, the pastor who talks too much, the man with moral failures, the woman who seems to measure her worth by what she does rather than by what Christ has done for her on the cross...all who turn to Christ in repentance and faith are members of Christ's body, children of God the Father.
And each of them, Paul would say, is irreplaceable. When members of Christ's body at any given place fail to exercise their spiritual gifts, parts of the body die and individual congregations are at risk of dying.
On Monday, it struck me how truly revolutionary this whole business would be for the Church (and the world) if we would take Paul's words seriously. God impressed four major points on me as I read 1 Corinthians 12:18:
1. We must not doubt that by whatever agency--be it history, circumstance, mistakes--that the parts of the body possessed by any given congregation at any given time are precisely what God has decided that congregation needs to fulfill its Christ-given mission.
This means no more searching for the "ideal" church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his fantastic little book, Life Together, warns Christians against falling in love with their ideal church, the church of their imaginations, lest they fail to appreciate the church they're already in, the church where God's Holy Spirit is already active.
This also means no more church of the fantasized future. It's God's future that we are meant to discover through lives of faithfulness, not a future born of the empty well of human wisdom and sin.
Jesus says that no truly wise person begins something without counting the cost. But He also tells a parable in Luke 12 about a man who had so much that he decided to build big barns to store everything and simply live a life of ease. He had big plans born of his own view of things.
Jesus' fictional man's smug self-satisfaction (there's that smug thing again) came to an abrupt end when, Jesus says, God came to him and said: "You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?" (Luke 12:12) In other words, it's fine for people (and congregations) to make plans; but we'd better be prepared to trash them when God throws up walls or calls us in different directions. James 4:13-15 puts our fantasized futures in perspective when he writes:
2. We must not allow other disciples' quirks to get in the way of recognizing their God-gifts that must be exercised for our congregations to do what God is calling us to do.
Everybody has quirks. (Even you!) There are no quirkless humans.
And it's through humans who make up Christ's body, with all their peculiarities and particularities, that God does His work in the world. The Church is called to "make disciples," internally and externally. God has given all the parts needed for any congregation needed to do this. And all of those parts will be imperfect, idiosyncratic, quirky.
It's always been that way. Paul had a volcanic temper, it seems. Peter was impulsive. James and John had to learn to get over looking out for number one. David had an eye for the ladies. Naomi was self-pitying. No matter. God used them all with their quirks. So, who are we to mentally disqualify people from doing the part in Christ's mission for His Church to which God has called them?
I've always remembered a wonderful bit of advice given by Alan Loy McGinnis in his book, The Friendship Factor. For any relationship to thrive and be all that it can be, each person must make allowances for the peculiar insanities of the other person. That's true in friendships, in marriages, and in the most sacred of all relationships, the Church, this organic body of Christ, the only relationship in this world that will continue to exist in eternity.
3. We cannot overestimate nor underestimate the value or necessity of any spiritual gift or the baptized believer in Christ who possesses the gift. We in the body of Christ all need each other.
4. We must encourage every Christian disciple to know and exercise their spiritual gifts, with mutual accountability to Christ and to the Church.
Congregations need to work hard at getting rid of gatekeepers who prevent some members from doing the ministries to which God calls them through their gifts.
Congregations need to discourage the "humble pie" excuse-makers who claim they can't do anything for the mission of the Church because, "I have no gift." People who ply such nonsense are calling God a liar, because God's Word insists that the Holy Spirit has given every believer in Christ a spiritual gift by which the Church fulfills its calling.
1 Peter 4:10 says: "Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms." Peter assumes that "each of you" in the churches he addresses in first century Asia Minor has been allotted at least one spiritual gift. For a Christian to say that she or he missed out on a spiritual gift is a humble-sounding way of dodging our calls to play our part in Christ's great commission of all Christians.
Help me to live out these insights as a Christian disciple and as a servant-leader in Your Church, Lord. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
...in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.Here, the apostle Paul is talking to a church that had come into being through his proclamation of Jesus Christ as the way to salvation and new life with God.
But since Paul left the Corinthians, unchristian ideas and practices had taken root in their church. Among them was the notion that the possession of some spiritual gifts made a person superior to others in the church who didn't have that gift. (You still hear nonsense like this from some Christians today. Paul responded to such smug lovelessness among the first century Corinthian Christians with 1 Corinthians 13.)
In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul compares the Church to the human body. In fact, in many other places in the New Testament, Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, does more than compare the Church to a human body. Paul asserts that the Church is the body of Christ in the world. While the crucified and risen Jesus has ascended into heaven, the Church is Jesus Christ's physical presence here and now. For example, Paul says in different places:
Now you are Christ's body, and individually members of it. (1 Corinthians 12:27)And that's just a sampling.
For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. (Romans 12:4-5)
He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. (Colossians 1:18)
...no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. (Ephesians 5:29-30)
As radical as the Bible's teaching that Jesus is the second Person of a triune God (one God, three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is its insistence, voiced often by Paul, that the Church is Christ's body, every disciple a member of Christ's body.
That person with the annoying cackle, the pastor who talks too much, the man with moral failures, the woman who seems to measure her worth by what she does rather than by what Christ has done for her on the cross...all who turn to Christ in repentance and faith are members of Christ's body, children of God the Father.
And each of them, Paul would say, is irreplaceable. When members of Christ's body at any given place fail to exercise their spiritual gifts, parts of the body die and individual congregations are at risk of dying.
On Monday, it struck me how truly revolutionary this whole business would be for the Church (and the world) if we would take Paul's words seriously. God impressed four major points on me as I read 1 Corinthians 12:18:
1. We must not doubt that by whatever agency--be it history, circumstance, mistakes--that the parts of the body possessed by any given congregation at any given time are precisely what God has decided that congregation needs to fulfill its Christ-given mission.
This means no more searching for the "ideal" church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his fantastic little book, Life Together, warns Christians against falling in love with their ideal church, the church of their imaginations, lest they fail to appreciate the church they're already in, the church where God's Holy Spirit is already active.
This also means no more church of the fantasized future. It's God's future that we are meant to discover through lives of faithfulness, not a future born of the empty well of human wisdom and sin.
Jesus says that no truly wise person begins something without counting the cost. But He also tells a parable in Luke 12 about a man who had so much that he decided to build big barns to store everything and simply live a life of ease. He had big plans born of his own view of things.
Jesus' fictional man's smug self-satisfaction (there's that smug thing again) came to an abrupt end when, Jesus says, God came to him and said: "You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?" (Luke 12:12) In other words, it's fine for people (and congregations) to make plans; but we'd better be prepared to trash them when God throws up walls or calls us in different directions. James 4:13-15 puts our fantasized futures in perspective when he writes:
Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 12:18 also tell us no more lamentations for what our congregation is not, but celebration for what it is when Jesus and the Word of God hold center place, as well as prayerful faith in God that He is providing and He will provide what we need in gifted people to do, not what we want to do, but what He is calling us to do.
2. We must not allow other disciples' quirks to get in the way of recognizing their God-gifts that must be exercised for our congregations to do what God is calling us to do.
Everybody has quirks. (Even you!) There are no quirkless humans.
And it's through humans who make up Christ's body, with all their peculiarities and particularities, that God does His work in the world. The Church is called to "make disciples," internally and externally. God has given all the parts needed for any congregation needed to do this. And all of those parts will be imperfect, idiosyncratic, quirky.
It's always been that way. Paul had a volcanic temper, it seems. Peter was impulsive. James and John had to learn to get over looking out for number one. David had an eye for the ladies. Naomi was self-pitying. No matter. God used them all with their quirks. So, who are we to mentally disqualify people from doing the part in Christ's mission for His Church to which God has called them?
I've always remembered a wonderful bit of advice given by Alan Loy McGinnis in his book, The Friendship Factor. For any relationship to thrive and be all that it can be, each person must make allowances for the peculiar insanities of the other person. That's true in friendships, in marriages, and in the most sacred of all relationships, the Church, this organic body of Christ, the only relationship in this world that will continue to exist in eternity.
3. We cannot overestimate nor underestimate the value or necessity of any spiritual gift or the baptized believer in Christ who possesses the gift. We in the body of Christ all need each other.
4. We must encourage every Christian disciple to know and exercise their spiritual gifts, with mutual accountability to Christ and to the Church.
Congregations need to work hard at getting rid of gatekeepers who prevent some members from doing the ministries to which God calls them through their gifts.
Congregations need to discourage the "humble pie" excuse-makers who claim they can't do anything for the mission of the Church because, "I have no gift." People who ply such nonsense are calling God a liar, because God's Word insists that the Holy Spirit has given every believer in Christ a spiritual gift by which the Church fulfills its calling.
1 Peter 4:10 says: "Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms." Peter assumes that "each of you" in the churches he addresses in first century Asia Minor has been allotted at least one spiritual gift. For a Christian to say that she or he missed out on a spiritual gift is a humble-sounding way of dodging our calls to play our part in Christ's great commission of all Christians.
Help me to live out these insights as a Christian disciple and as a servant-leader in Your Church, Lord. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Sunday, July 17, 2016
AUDIO: One with Christ, God Enfleshed
Here.
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was delivered at the 8:45 worship this morning.]
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was delivered at the 8:45 worship this morning.]
One with Christ, God Enfleshed
Colossians 1:21-29
Today brings us to the second installment of our series, Christ, the Fullness of God, based on the New Testament of Colossians, from which our second lesson is coming over these four weeks.
To even begin to understand today’s second lesson--and I’m only beginning to understand it myself, I confess--we must reckon with the understanding of the Church from which Paul wrote.
You know, in today's world, when people get around to selecting a church community for themselves, they're moved by factors like: "The people are nice." Or, "The preacher's sermons are short." Or, "They've got things for the kids." Or, "They never ask for money." We can be superficial, looking for what's in it for us, looking for a church that won't make waves in our lives.
This would have been totally foreign to Paul! He had a different understanding of Church.
Paul got this understanding from Jesus Himself. It happened in the famous incident recounted in Acts 9, in which Paul, then named Saul and heading for Damascus, seeking to arrest Christians, was overwhelmed by a bright light that blinded him for three days and heard a voice that demanded of him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?”
Saul asked who this was who has driven him to knees in abject helplessness. The voice answered: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”
In that moment, one of the many things that Paul learned was this: Whatever impacted the Church impacted the living and risen Christ. The crucified and risen Jesus Christ is one with His Church. His Church is one with Him. And His people are one with each other. If Saul was persecuting the Church, he was also persecuting Christ Himself.
It’s a lesson that Saul, now Paul, learned and taught well.
“Now you are the body of Christ, and each one is a part of it,” Paul would later tell believers in 1 Corinthians 12:27.
And: “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” [1 Corinthians 12:26]
Paul understood that through Christ, disciples of Christ are knit together with Christ and with each other. We are one with our King, Jesus, and with all who profess Jesus as Lord.
The verses that come after last Sunday’s second lesson (1 Corinthians 1:1-14) and before today’s, are among the most beautiful in all of Scripture. They were read near the end of this past Tuesday’s installment of Louie Giglio’s Passion films, Colossians 1:15-20.
There, Paul recites an early Christian poem or hymn. He does so because, as you’ll remember from last Sunday, the Colossian Christians were mixing other religions with their Christian faith. But, Paul wants them to remember that Jesus is God and only the God we meet in Jesus is worthy of following.
Read this hymn aloud with me, if you would:
Yet, Paul has learned that the Colossian Christians are starting to turn from following Jesus, treating Jesus like just another item on a religious menu. They seem to have forgotten Who Christ is or what Christ has done for them. Paul writes to them from prison. Please take a look at our lesson, Colossians 1:21-29.
It begins: “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.”
Years ago, a man came to me in my office. He had made a mess of his life. He drank excessively and used drugs. There were brushes with the law. There were numerous false starts on new careers that only ended with failures. There had been a wife who left him because he couldn’t be relied upon.
It finally dawn on him that maybe he needed God. After our first meeting, I met with him weekly over a period of several months. He started attending worship, then Sunday School. In the meantime, he got a job and started doing well. He met a woman and they became engaged.
Then, as quickly as he showed up at my office, he was gone, off the radar. He didn't answer my phone calls or emails. God had helped him through his rough patch. Things were now going well. God didn’t seem as essential to him any more. He forgot all that Christ had done to redeem him, to make him new, to set his feet on solid ground. He walked away from God.
As our second lesson begins, Paul pleads with the Colossian Christians to not forget all that God had done for them in Christ, not to walk away from Christ!
In His own flesh, Christ had bridged the chasm between God and them, Paul reminds them. To all who repented and believed, Christ had brought new life with God that never ends.
But the Colossian Christians developed what Paul calls elsewhere “itching ears." They were enticed by other religious systems that, unlike Jesus, didn’t tell them to take up their crosses--in other words, to confess their sins and own their need of God--and follow Him.
For anyone who holds onto the futile desire to be gods over their lives, the Gospel can be tough to take. And that includes all of us because all of us have inherited from Adam and Eve a desire to "be like God."
Paul was calling the Colossians to remember the most basic confession of Christian faith: “Jesus is Lord."
Not me.
Not anyone else.
Not my family.
Not my country.
Only Jesus is Lord.
Only Jesus can make sense of my life.
Only Jesus can give me God’s presence today and life with Him beyond death.
Jesus is Lord!
When things are going well, that’s tough to remember. Paul says, “Never forget!”
Then, Paul writes the most curious part of this passage: “Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness— the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
There are two things that make these words strange, I think.
First, Paul is rejoicing in suffering. Is he sick? No.
This is the same rejoicing offered up by the very first Christians when facing persecution.
After being dragged before the Sanhedrin, the governing authorities, Acts 5:41 tells us: “The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.”
When I first came to faith in Christ at the age of 23, I thought to myself, "Now what?" I believed; now I wanted to know what I needed to be thinking and doing to live out that faith. I knew that the New Testament book of Acts was the history of the Church from the risen Jesus' ascension until about 60 AD. "Maybe," I thought, "I should read Acts to find out how to be a Christian." I remember reading Acts 5:41 in the study of the house we were renting at the time and starting to weep. "Oh, God," I prayed, "give me a faith like that."
Paul was happy that his suffering wasn’t for something wrong he had done, but for his faith in the crucified and risen Jesus. And he was happy too, because his suffering was a witness that pointed others to Christ.
Listen: If people get mad at you for being faithful to Christ, you’re doing something right!
The second reason this passage seems strange is because Paul says: “...I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions…”
It’s important to remember that Paul is not saying that Christ didn’t do everything necessary to win freedom from sin and death for all who repent and believe in Him. Christians don’t have to suffer more than Christ suffered in order to be saved.
In fact, the Greek word for sufferings used by Paul here, παθήμασιν, isn’t even the same word used of Jesus’ passion and death on the cross in the New Testament.
What Paul is saying is that until the day Jesus returns to the earth to raise the dead and bring His kingdom fully into being, Christ’s afflictions will continue to be experienced by His people, the Church.
We who trust in Christ will complete the Church’s story of suffering at the hands of the world for being disciples of Christ who share Him with the disbelieving world. That’s part of our oneness with Christ and with our fellow disciples.
Just as Christ has reached down into our humanity, experiencing everything we experience in order to fully connect with us, take the punishment we deserve, and buy us out of slavery to sin and death to give us eternal life with God, we also connect with Christ in His sufferings as He lifts us up to Himself in heaven.
We share Christ’s suffering in that, as we bear His name, we’re subject to the same rejection that He endured.
But we also have the hope of glory He secured for all who believe in Him when He rose from the dead. That’s what Paul was experiencing while imprisoned.
The blessing that comes when people like Paul live in enduring faith in Christ is that it inspires and upbuilds the Church. It even wins new disciples.
We all remember the execution of Egyptian Christians perpetrated by ISIS last year. Twenty-one people were killed, all of them confessing, “Lord Jesus Christ” as they died. But you’ll also remember that it was later learned that only twenty of the executed had been Coptic Christians before the moments of their deaths. A twenty-first had not been. But, impressed by the faith of the Christians with whom he would die, rather than renouncing them or Christ, he embraced Christ as his Lord. He too died confessing, “Lord Jesus Christ.” This is what happens when we endure in faith. Eternity gets changed. We become one with Christ and with His people, the Church.
Christ lives in all who trust in Him, implanting within them the hope of everlasting glory. Paul closes today’s lesson with words that could serve as the mission statement of every believer: “He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.”
Brothers and sisters in Christ, may we who belong to Christ and to each other strenuously, lovingly, and with every ounce of energy Christ gives to us, proclaim Christ, admonishing and teaching each other with God’s wisdom so that we may all become mature followers of Christ, fully prepared to live and share the hope Christ gives to us with everyone we know and meet.
Ready for today.
Ready for eternity.
Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was shared during both worship services this morning.]
Today brings us to the second installment of our series, Christ, the Fullness of God, based on the New Testament of Colossians, from which our second lesson is coming over these four weeks.
To even begin to understand today’s second lesson--and I’m only beginning to understand it myself, I confess--we must reckon with the understanding of the Church from which Paul wrote.
You know, in today's world, when people get around to selecting a church community for themselves, they're moved by factors like: "The people are nice." Or, "The preacher's sermons are short." Or, "They've got things for the kids." Or, "They never ask for money." We can be superficial, looking for what's in it for us, looking for a church that won't make waves in our lives.
This would have been totally foreign to Paul! He had a different understanding of Church.
Paul got this understanding from Jesus Himself. It happened in the famous incident recounted in Acts 9, in which Paul, then named Saul and heading for Damascus, seeking to arrest Christians, was overwhelmed by a bright light that blinded him for three days and heard a voice that demanded of him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?”
Saul asked who this was who has driven him to knees in abject helplessness. The voice answered: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”
In that moment, one of the many things that Paul learned was this: Whatever impacted the Church impacted the living and risen Christ. The crucified and risen Jesus Christ is one with His Church. His Church is one with Him. And His people are one with each other. If Saul was persecuting the Church, he was also persecuting Christ Himself.
It’s a lesson that Saul, now Paul, learned and taught well.
“Now you are the body of Christ, and each one is a part of it,” Paul would later tell believers in 1 Corinthians 12:27.
And: “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” [1 Corinthians 12:26]
Paul understood that through Christ, disciples of Christ are knit together with Christ and with each other. We are one with our King, Jesus, and with all who profess Jesus as Lord.
The verses that come after last Sunday’s second lesson (1 Corinthians 1:1-14) and before today’s, are among the most beautiful in all of Scripture. They were read near the end of this past Tuesday’s installment of Louie Giglio’s Passion films, Colossians 1:15-20.
There, Paul recites an early Christian poem or hymn. He does so because, as you’ll remember from last Sunday, the Colossian Christians were mixing other religions with their Christian faith. But, Paul wants them to remember that Jesus is God and only the God we meet in Jesus is worthy of following.
Read this hymn aloud with me, if you would:
“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”The hymn reminds us that through His death on the cross, Jesus, the fullness of God, God on earth, makes peace with all who turn from sin and trust in Him. And He does it not from a distance, but by taking on the limitations of our flesh, taking our place on the cross, the sinless sacrifice for our sin. God won salvation for all who repent and believe in Christ with the sacrifice of His flesh and blood. This is the most eternity-changing truth we will ever encounter.
Yet, Paul has learned that the Colossian Christians are starting to turn from following Jesus, treating Jesus like just another item on a religious menu. They seem to have forgotten Who Christ is or what Christ has done for them. Paul writes to them from prison. Please take a look at our lesson, Colossians 1:21-29.
It begins: “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.”
Years ago, a man came to me in my office. He had made a mess of his life. He drank excessively and used drugs. There were brushes with the law. There were numerous false starts on new careers that only ended with failures. There had been a wife who left him because he couldn’t be relied upon.
It finally dawn on him that maybe he needed God. After our first meeting, I met with him weekly over a period of several months. He started attending worship, then Sunday School. In the meantime, he got a job and started doing well. He met a woman and they became engaged.
Then, as quickly as he showed up at my office, he was gone, off the radar. He didn't answer my phone calls or emails. God had helped him through his rough patch. Things were now going well. God didn’t seem as essential to him any more. He forgot all that Christ had done to redeem him, to make him new, to set his feet on solid ground. He walked away from God.
As our second lesson begins, Paul pleads with the Colossian Christians to not forget all that God had done for them in Christ, not to walk away from Christ!
In His own flesh, Christ had bridged the chasm between God and them, Paul reminds them. To all who repented and believed, Christ had brought new life with God that never ends.
But the Colossian Christians developed what Paul calls elsewhere “itching ears." They were enticed by other religious systems that, unlike Jesus, didn’t tell them to take up their crosses--in other words, to confess their sins and own their need of God--and follow Him.
For anyone who holds onto the futile desire to be gods over their lives, the Gospel can be tough to take. And that includes all of us because all of us have inherited from Adam and Eve a desire to "be like God."
Paul was calling the Colossians to remember the most basic confession of Christian faith: “Jesus is Lord."
Not me.
Not anyone else.
Not my family.
Not my country.
Only Jesus is Lord.
Only Jesus can make sense of my life.
Only Jesus can give me God’s presence today and life with Him beyond death.
Jesus is Lord!
When things are going well, that’s tough to remember. Paul says, “Never forget!”
Then, Paul writes the most curious part of this passage: “Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness— the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
There are two things that make these words strange, I think.
First, Paul is rejoicing in suffering. Is he sick? No.
This is the same rejoicing offered up by the very first Christians when facing persecution.
After being dragged before the Sanhedrin, the governing authorities, Acts 5:41 tells us: “The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.”
When I first came to faith in Christ at the age of 23, I thought to myself, "Now what?" I believed; now I wanted to know what I needed to be thinking and doing to live out that faith. I knew that the New Testament book of Acts was the history of the Church from the risen Jesus' ascension until about 60 AD. "Maybe," I thought, "I should read Acts to find out how to be a Christian." I remember reading Acts 5:41 in the study of the house we were renting at the time and starting to weep. "Oh, God," I prayed, "give me a faith like that."
Paul was happy that his suffering wasn’t for something wrong he had done, but for his faith in the crucified and risen Jesus. And he was happy too, because his suffering was a witness that pointed others to Christ.
Listen: If people get mad at you for being faithful to Christ, you’re doing something right!
The second reason this passage seems strange is because Paul says: “...I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions…”
It’s important to remember that Paul is not saying that Christ didn’t do everything necessary to win freedom from sin and death for all who repent and believe in Him. Christians don’t have to suffer more than Christ suffered in order to be saved.
In fact, the Greek word for sufferings used by Paul here, παθήμασιν, isn’t even the same word used of Jesus’ passion and death on the cross in the New Testament.
What Paul is saying is that until the day Jesus returns to the earth to raise the dead and bring His kingdom fully into being, Christ’s afflictions will continue to be experienced by His people, the Church.
We who trust in Christ will complete the Church’s story of suffering at the hands of the world for being disciples of Christ who share Him with the disbelieving world. That’s part of our oneness with Christ and with our fellow disciples.
Just as Christ has reached down into our humanity, experiencing everything we experience in order to fully connect with us, take the punishment we deserve, and buy us out of slavery to sin and death to give us eternal life with God, we also connect with Christ in His sufferings as He lifts us up to Himself in heaven.
We share Christ’s suffering in that, as we bear His name, we’re subject to the same rejection that He endured.
But we also have the hope of glory He secured for all who believe in Him when He rose from the dead. That’s what Paul was experiencing while imprisoned.
The blessing that comes when people like Paul live in enduring faith in Christ is that it inspires and upbuilds the Church. It even wins new disciples.
We all remember the execution of Egyptian Christians perpetrated by ISIS last year. Twenty-one people were killed, all of them confessing, “Lord Jesus Christ” as they died. But you’ll also remember that it was later learned that only twenty of the executed had been Coptic Christians before the moments of their deaths. A twenty-first had not been. But, impressed by the faith of the Christians with whom he would die, rather than renouncing them or Christ, he embraced Christ as his Lord. He too died confessing, “Lord Jesus Christ.” This is what happens when we endure in faith. Eternity gets changed. We become one with Christ and with His people, the Church.
Christ lives in all who trust in Him, implanting within them the hope of everlasting glory. Paul closes today’s lesson with words that could serve as the mission statement of every believer: “He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.”
Brothers and sisters in Christ, may we who belong to Christ and to each other strenuously, lovingly, and with every ounce of energy Christ gives to us, proclaim Christ, admonishing and teaching each other with God’s wisdom so that we may all become mature followers of Christ, fully prepared to live and share the hope Christ gives to us with everyone we know and meet.
Ready for today.
Ready for eternity.
Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was shared during both worship services this morning.]
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