Believing and Following Jesus (Part 1, The Disciple's Life)

[This was shared during midweek Lenten worship with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on February 21.]

Romans 10:9
1 John 1:9

As you know for the past three years, we’ve been involved with life-to-life discipleship, an emphasis of our North American Lutheran Church (NALC).

Like other NALC congregations, we’ve received coaching from the Navigators.

Currently, we have nearly forty Living Water people involved in life-to-life discipleship groups convened by members of our congregation’s Life and Learning Team.

God is leading us to align our life and culture as a congregation with the great commission, the only mission Jesus gave to His Church. “...Go,” Jesus tells us, “and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

And then Jesus gives us this promise: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20)

But what is a disciple?

The word that’s been translated into English as disciple is, in the Greek of the New Testament, mathetes. It means learner, pupil, student.

To be a disciple of Jesus is to be involved in learning how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit sent to us by Jesus when we are baptized to be more like Jesus, the One Who has saved us from sin and death and darkness.

Jesus talks about discipleship when He says in Matthew 11:29: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Discipleship is a process, a way of life by which God makes our lives more and more like the life of Jesus Himself (Galatians 4:19).

If being a student sounds boring to you, you need to remember what Jesus means when He calls you to be His student, His disciple.

When Jesus called people to follow Him, He didn’t take them to a classroom. He called them to follow Him, live alongside Him, observe Him, and then, after He’d deputized and empowered them with the Holy Spirit, to do exactly all He did: share the good news, heal the sick, cast out demons, and make disciples.

Jesus’ classroom for discipleship is the world we live in.

The textbook is His Word, the Bible.

The classmates are first, fellow believers who we help and who help us to live out our faith in Christ through small groups in which people reflect on Scripture together, pray together, and own their common need of God for everything, including forgiveness.

Disciples of Jesus will also seek out ways to bond around God’s Word and prayer with people who may not know Jesus but who want to know Him. In this, our model is the Samaritan woman at the well, who told the villagers in Sychar after meeting Jesus, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” (John 4:29)

Bottom line: The conscious life of a disciple begins, irrespective of when we were baptized, when we respond to the invitation to, “Come and see the God we meet in Jesus.”

It’s probable that most of you here tonight can’t remember a moment when you didn’t know about Jesus and believe in Him.

But it’s also possible for Christians to continue as baby disciples all their lives, And that’s tragic.

Jesus doesn’t love us any less when we refuse to grow up as Christians, any more than parents love their problem children who refuse to grow up any less. But if we’re not seeking to be faithful disciples of Jesus, we will miss the joy of intimacy with God, be ill-equipped to face life, be unable to make good decisions, make the most of our time on earth, or be all that God intends for us to be.

The preacher in Hebrews expressed his frustration with a group of first-century Christians in Asia Minor who refused to grow in their faith when he said: “...though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again.” (Hebrews 5:13-6:2)

Jesus expressed a similar frustration with the apostles when, after following Him for several years, they still seemed unable to live out their faith in Him: “You unbelieving and perverse generation, how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?” (Matthew 17:17).

It’s a measure of Jesus’ grace and love that He continued putting up with the apostles and that He puts up with us even when we turn our backs on the call to discipleship, the call to grow in our faith, that could, if we paid heed to it, give us joy!

Here’s the deal: If we’ve been Christians more than a few months, we shouldn’t be content to be mere spectators of the Christian faith; we should be full-fledged participants in the life of discipleship. We should be disciples and be seeking to make disciples and we should be supporting each other in the disciple’s life.

The first trait of a disciple is to believe in the God you and I meet in the crucified and risen Jesus.

The Old Testament tells us that Abraham, the patriarch of Biblical faith, “believed [in God] and God reckoned it to him as righteousness.” (Or as The Message paraphrase of the Bible puts it, “[Abraham] believed! Believed God! God declared him ‘Set-Right-with-God.’” (Genesis 15:6)

When we believe in the God we know in Jesus, we are set right with God, now and for all eternity.

Jesus says something similar in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

The two passages of Scripture we read earlier convey the same message: Discipleship is built on the foundation of believing in Jesus. Believe in Jesus and you are saved from sin, death, and darkness.

But belief is more than what goes on between your ears, more even than the words of confession we speak at worship.

Abraham lived the faith in God he confessed with his lips by what he did with his life. When God called him from the cushy lifestyle he enjoyed among his own people, God told Abraham (then called Abram): “Go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.” (Genesis 12:1-2)

Abraham’s belief in God, his faith in God expressed itself in what he did next: He packed up his wife and servants and livestock and belongings and headed for God only knew where.

Believers are disciples and disciples are followers.

Disciples let God decide directions and destinations. They follow the God we meet in Christ.

When Jesus calls us to believe in Him, He says: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).

The disciple’s life is built on believing expressed in a life of following Jesus.

Are we following?

More next week.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

How to face temptation

"No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it." (1 Corinthians 10:13)

One reason we cave into sin, violating God's will as expressed in the Ten Commandments, is that we grow deaf to God when we're tempted. Instead of living in the freedom and dignity of a child of God, we're trapped by slavery to self, the opinions of others, and, to be honest, the devil. It's happened to me. It's happened to you.

The key to resisting temptation, with an aim to living lives that express gratitude to God for the grace and life we only receive from Christ, is to be tuned into what God wills for our lives, again as expressed in the Ten Commandments.

You get tuned into God and an intimate relationship with God when you spend time in His Word each day, not just reading it, but soaking it up, even memorizing it.

For example, this passage from 1 Corinthians 10:13 is one that small groups at Living Water have been memorizing in our Navigators discipleship small groups.

A good example of how God's Word can protect us from making sinful, stupid decisions is found in the experience of Joseph, son of Jacob, in the Old Testament book of Genesis.

Joseph's brothers had sold him into slavery in Egypt. But there, he ended up working for a powerful man named Potiphar, essentially functioning as his chief of staff and administrator.

Potiphar's wife was attracted to Joseph and tried repeatedly to get Joseph to go to bed with her. Joseph explained that he couldn't sin against God nor his master in this way.

But Potiphar's wife wouldn't take no for an answer. One day, she grabbed Joseph's tunic, saying, "Lie with me!" Joseph ran. When he did, the tunic slipped off of Joseph and he found himself running from Potiphar's wife naked. Enraged, she accused him of trying to rape her. Her possession of Joseph's cloak implicated him. Potiphar had Joseph slapped into prison.

Some might hear or read that story and think that the moral is that Joseph could have spared himself imprisonment if he'd only gone along with Potiphar's wife.

Nope!

The moral is that Joseph ran from temptation and chose to walk with God, even when that meant being falsely accused and imprisoned for some time. He maintained his faith, his integrity, and his usefulness to the purposes of God for our lives. And Joseph was able to make the decision to run because He knew God through being steeped in God's Word.

Ultimately, of course, it was precisely because Joseph was imprisoned that he came to the attention of the Pharaoh. And because of Joseph's faithfulness to God and his faithful stewardship of gifts God had given to him, including the gift of administration, he was able to save his own people--God's people, Israel--from extinction. It was to be from the people of Israel that God's plan for salvation from sin and death was to be opened to all humanity through Jesus Christ. So, Joseph's decision to run from sin rather than to acquiesce to it is of eternal significance.

Truth be told, every time we face the temptation to sin, the stakes are higher than we may realize or imagine. Not only is our eternal salvation in play, so, potentially, is the salvation of every person whose life is impacted by our decision, whether we decide to cave or run.

Running from the temptation to sin can be painful. The things that tempt us hold out the real promise of pleasure. At least, they do for the short term. The fruit that Adam and Eve ate tasted good, but it also brought the burden of sin, of knowing not just good and righteousness, but also knowing evil and death.

It's better to run from sin and into the arms of the God we know in the crucified and risen Jesus. When we do that, we literally run from death to life.

Of course, when we cave into sin, that need not be the end of our life story. It need not be the end of our connection with the God of grace we know in Jesus Christ. It needn't be the end of a useful life. Jesus came to ensure that sin and death need not be the last word over our lives. It's a matter of trusting God with our sins, our past, our present, our future, our whole lives. It's a matter of running to Him. 1 John 1:9, another of our Navigators verses, reminds us: "If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9)

Deep down, we probably all want to run from sin. We want God, whether we know much about Him or not. God wants to help us enjoy the life Christ died and rose to make possible. Soak up God's Word each day and He will help you stand where you should stand and run when you need to run.

Just some thoughts on this Wednesday.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Cut Off What?

This past Sunday, a young member of the congregation had a question. "Pastor," he said, "I've been reading the New Testament a chapter a day with the rest of the congregation. What does Jesus mean when He talks about cutting off your hand and stuff?"

The place where Jesus "talks about cutting off your hand and stuff" can be found in the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, specifically chapter 5, verses 27 to 30.

Jesus is explaining some of the Ten Commandments, given by God to Moses about 1500 years before Jesus was born. This is what Jesus says:

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go to hell."

Throughout this section of teaching we've come to call the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew's gospel, Jesus uses hyperbole, exaggerated language, to make His points. It's all on a par with the exaggerated image Jesus paints when He says elsewhere: "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). Through that hyperbolic image Jesus was showing that wealth can create the illusion of control in those with money, making it deity in place of the only one Who can give them life, God.

In the words the sixth grader asked me about, Jesus isn't telling us to literally cut out eyes or lop off our hands, any more than He's suggesting that eyes or hands can cause us to sin. Wills held hostage to selfish thinking cause us to sin, not the body parts that facilitate our sin.

What Jesus is saying is that, when we trust our lives to Jesus, whatever tempts us to violate God's will or whatever habits may routinely lead us into sin can be confessed and turned over to God.

Christ died on the cross to take the punishment for sin we all deserve and rose from death to give new and everlasting life to all who will turn from sin and entrust their lives to Him.

When faced with temptation, Christ can help us to resist it and the death it brings and to, instead, choose life with God. The Bible promises: "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it" (1 Corinthians 10:13).

When we've caved to temptation and sinned and recognized our wrong, we need to approach God in the Name of Jesus immediately and seek forgiveness. The Bible also promises: "If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).

Sin dehumanizes us and carries us away from God. Because all sin "and fall short of the glory of God," anyone who wants the life with God made available only through Jesus Christ, will find themselves in a daily tussle with temptation and sin as long as they remain in this world.

Ask God to help you resist your temptations and trust that, through Jesus, you have the forgiveness of your sins and the power to resist the devil. That's the way you'll be able to cut off that "stuff" and enjoy the life God has in mind for you.

After God Has Forgiven You...Forgive Yourself

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.

The Best News We'll Ever Hear

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

The Gospel Lesson: John 8:31-36
Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.  ^3233343536

Whenever I read the words of our Gospel lesson, I think that Jesus sure knows how to kill a celebration.

Earlier in chapter 8 of John’s Gospel, from which today’s Gospel lesson is drawn, Jesus called Himself, “the light of the world.” He promised that, “Whoever follows Me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” In these words, Jesus was staking His claim to be “the true light, which enlightens everyone…” Jesus was claiming that He was God in the flesh, come to be the Messiah and Savior of the world. The crowd, composed of Jesus’ fellow Jews, was excited. The verse just before our lesson says that, “As [Jesus] was saying these things, many believed in Him.”

Many believed in Him! That was the idea, right? Jesus came into the world to gather a people who believed in Him. He had said it. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him…” Many believed in Jesus. They had signed the contract. They bought the T-shirt. Mission accomplished. Let the party begin.

But Jesus couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had to explain what it means to believe in Him. You see, Jesus isn’t an unscrupulous advertiser who tries to divert our attention from the fine print. He’s not a politician of the conniving kind who says that she or he can’t possibly go into details on what they will do in office until after they’ve been elected. He’s not the scheming suitor who hides his true nature until after the honeymoon. Jesus practices truth in advertising. With Him, everything is up front. No hidden charges, no gimmicks.

But His timing is strange. Take a look at the first two verses of the Gospel lesson in the Celebrate insert. Just as the crowd is cheering, we’re told: “Then Jesus said to the Jews who believed in Him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly My disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

The crowd skips over the words in those two verses that might trip us up. Many in today’s world claim that, contrary to the witness of the Bible, everybody has their own versions of the truth and that every version is swell, no matter what God has said.

Had many post-modern folks been listening to Jesus that day, they might also have recoiled at the notion of “continuing” in Jesus’ Word; that sounds too much like an ongoing commitment.

They might also have been offended by Jesus saying that anyone needs to continue in His Word, the revealed Word of God. After all, many today would say, there are so many words not uttered or endorsed by Jesus, not found in the pages of Scripture. Many would rather treat God's Word like the menu at a cafeteria, picking what words they want to continue in and which they'd rather ignore.

Had other contemporary folks been there to hear Jesus' words, they might have been turned off by the idea of being His “disciples”—His followers, His students. That sounds like a call and a command from Christ to subordinate our egos and desires to Christ alone. (Which, of course, it is.)

Something else Jesus says in those verses is what caught the attention of the Jews in who believed in Jesus, though.

They didn’t like Jesus’ promise, “the truth will make you free.” Look at what they said in verse 33 of our Gospel lesson, “They answered Him, ‘We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free?’”

“Free?” they ask Jesus indignantly, “Who needs to be free?” They claim that they have never been slaves to anyone! That, of course, is a lie. The whole history of the Jewish people had been riddled with slavery. They had been slaves in Egypt for 430 years. The Babylonians and the Assyrians had conquered and enslaved them for many more years. And, even as they recoil at Jesus’ insinuation that they need to be set free, these Jews are living under the harsh dictatorship of the Romans, a kind of slavery.

Folks, people who are addicted to alcohol or drugs of any kind like to say, “I could quit any time I like” and then keep on using. Some people who are drowning in debt rail against the wastefulness of others, then take extravagant vacations and buy baubles they can’t afford. Some adults speak disparagingly of the unhealthy practices of young people who get tattoos or they say drink too much while themselves endangering the bodies and lives God gave to them by ingesting thousands of unhealthy calories and walking just enough to find the remote before falling asleep in the Lazy Boy. The point is, as the saying goes, denial is more than a river in Egypt. Like all these modern examples I just cited, the Jews in our Gospel lesson are in massive denial. They are slaves, but they won’t admit it.

And at this point in our lesson, they’re also in an uproar. How dare Jesus say that they needed to be free? But Jesus makes clear in verse 34, that He’s only begun to insult them. He says that they are slaves at even deeper and deadlier levels than they might imagine. Look at that verse, please. “Jesus answered them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.’”

Let me take a little survey. (And please do not, under any circumstances, raise your hands. I will collect your responses telepathically*.)

How many of you have sinned—and by that I mean, violated one of the Ten Commandments—in, say, the past year?

How about in the past week?

How about since you arrived here at the church building this morning?

Now, I’m going to make the assumption that all of us gave honest answers and announce the results. It’s a landslide that would make any politician happy this coming Tuesday: 100% of us said yes to every single question. Of course, the bad news is that, according to Jesus, that makes all of us slaves to sin.

“The trouble with saying that out loud,” one commentator writes, “is that many people in the Western world are bored of hearing about sin. They think it just means offences against someone else’s morality.” But, he goes on to explain how the sins we commit, however seemingly minute they appear, enslave us. “When people rebel against God in whatever way, new fields of force are called into being, a cumulative effect builds up, and individuals and societies alike become enslaved just as surely as if every single one of them wore chains and was hounded to work every day by a strong man with a whip.”

Whenever we wander from the plan of God for truly human living—in other words, whenever we sin, we give away parts of our souls.

Like a junkie moving more deeply into the clutches of addiction, with every sin, we become more enslaved to sin. And each sin we commit makes the next one that much easier to commit, that much harder to avoid.

That might not seem horrible. We might be willing to accept slavery in exchange for the pleasures that sin offers us in this life. After all, we commit sins not because we're repulsed by them, but precisely because they're so attractive to us, precisely the things we want to do when we do them.

Being slaves to sin might be OK if this life were all there was to our life, if sin brought pleasure and no eternal consequences.

But we know better. In one of my former parishes, a man came to see me and confessed that he had been conducting an affair with another man’s wife for ten years. “I know I should want to stop,” he told me, “but I enjoy it. Every time I vow that I won’t see her again, she calls and we end up planning to meet again. I can’t seem to break free and I know that, eventually, I will face God and pay the price. But right now, all I can think of is how much I want her.” With tears in his eyes, he looked at me and asked, “What can I do?”

In twenty-six years of ministry, I’ve heard that man’s question—“What can I do?”—from countless other people. That cry of enslavement has come from each of them, whether their particular sin was insensitivity to their spouse, gossiping, misusing God’s Name, thievery, envy, or covetousness. “What can I do?” All these people have known the truth of what Paul writes in the New Testament book of Romans: “The wages of sin is death…”

In the sixteenth century, that truth haunted a German monk and priest named Martin Luther. Brought up in a Church that, like many modern church bodies, conservative and liberal, put human traditions and human reason on a par with the revealed Word of God, Luther had done all the things that the Church of his day told him to do: penance, purchasing indulgences, self-abasement.

But he still felt far from God, enslaved to sin, certain that he would go to hell.

Luther’s life was changed though, when he came to understand a deeper truth recorded on the pages of the Bible. It’s the truth to which Jesus points in our Gospel lesson this morning. Look at what Jesus says in verses 35 and 36. “The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there [in the household of God] forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Do you know what I told that man who asked, “What can I do?” The same thing I’ve told all the other people who have ever asked me that question, the same thing I’m telling you now: “You can do nothing. But if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Through His life, death, and resurrection, Jesus has done everything needed to free us from the power of sin and death over our lives. We simply need to keep believing—keep trusting in Him. We need to continue in His Word.

When Luther realized that God sets free all who entrust their lives to Jesus Christ, he said that the very doors of heaven opened to him. The same can be true for us.

“So what?” we may wonder, “After all, this isn’t heaven.” This sure isn’t heaven! But the certainty of heaven belongs to all who believe in Jesus Christ and that can set us free to live this life with a love and a passion and a boldness that no poet has ever imagined and no brave warrior has ever experienced.

In 1984, Archbishop Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize. In the country of South Africa, where Tutu lived (and still lives), many Christians churches claimed that the oppressive system of apartheid, in which blacks were treated as slaves, was ordained by God. In the Name of Jesus Christ, Tutu rightly called any "Christian" justification for injustice a lie. For his opposition to apartheid, he received death threats every day. Tutu was asked why he risked death. He couldn't help it, he said, injustice is wrong in God's eyes and it must be opposed. "Besides," he added, "death is not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian."

All who believe in Jesus Christ know that heaven is their home. And knowing that sets us free to live this life to the full, no matter what the cost, no matter the opposition.

All who are set free by Christ know that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God.

Luther wrote about this in his great hymn about spiritual warfare based on Psalm 46, A Mighty Fortress is Our God. Listen to the words of the final verse:

God’s Word forever shall abide,
No thanks to foes, who fear it;
For God Himself fights by our side
With weapons of the Spirit.
Were they to take our house,
Goods, honor, child, or spouse,
Though life be wrenched away,
They cannot win the day.
The Kingdom’s ours forever!

Christ can set us free forever. We do nothing to gain our freedom. Christ has already done it all. All we must do is believe in Him.

The Reformation is a call to the freedom that belongs only to those who by faith in Christ are learning to, "Let go. Let God!" That's our call today: "Let go. Let God!" And knowing that by entrusting our lives in Christ we can let go and let God, is the best news that you and I will ever hear! Amen!

*I am kidding about the telepathy stuff, by the way, just in case anyone misses the attempt at humor.

40-Days to Servanthood: Day 40

We worship God through our servanthood.

When I served on the church council of my home congregation in Columbus, our pastor once told us, “You can worship God by serving your neighbor.” One man reacted negatively. He felt that we expressed our worship only by our expressions of love for God--our service of praise--on Sunday mornings.

But that man was wrong. The apostle John writes, “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (First John 4:20) Jesus Himself paired love for God and love for neighbor into a single “great commandment” (Matthew 22:36-38).

There is an inextricable link between worship and servanthood. This is why worship gatherings are often called “services.” In them, God teaches us how to love Him and to love others, to live with a focus upward to Him and outward to our neighbor. But unless our services of praise are matched by service to our neighbors in Jesus’ Name, our worshiping is nothing more than lip service.

In the book of Genesis, we’re told that one of Adam’s and Eve’s sons, Abel, offered God “the firstlings” of his flock. His brother, Cain, gave God the leftovers from his crops. When Cain noted God’s pleasure with Abel’s offerings and the displeasure with which his own offerings were met, he was resentful and killed Abel. When God asked Cain where Abel was, Cain responded angrily, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:1-16)

Centuries later, Jesus was asked another question: “Who is my neighbor?” He responded with the story of a man who was mugged by bandits and left to die on the road. Two religious officials, a levite and a priest, each having duties associated with public worship in Judea, passed by the dying man. But, in Jesus’ story, a Samaritan man stopped and took care of the wounded victim. By serving his neighbor, the Samaritan was the one who truly worshiped God. (Luke 10:25-37)

If our love for God is authentic, it will be seen in active service to others. Of course, we won’t always express this authentic love for God and neighbor. Christians, like other human beings, are infected with the disease of sin. But God is willing to help us when we fail. “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (First John 1:9). All who believe in Jesus Christ are to live, as Martin Luther reminds us, in “daily repentance and renewal,” seeking God’s help as we strive each day to love God and to love others.

This coming Sunday, as we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, I hope that you’ll make a personal commitment to God, a commitment that the God Who calls us to a life of active love is anxious to help us fulfill. I hope that everybody who has been reading this series will approach their (your) call to service with prayer and attentiveness and ask God to help you undertake a renewed and joyful Christian servanthood. “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:28-29)

We worship God through our servanthood.

Bible Passage to Ponder: “...those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (First John 4:20)