Here's last Sunday's online worship service from Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio. The text of my message for the day is below. God bless you!
Matthew 28:16-20
You’ve seen it dozens of times in your life.
A person is brought to a font and, while being doused with three splashes of water, is baptized “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Why, exactly, do we do that?
Why do we invoke the three names of the three persons Who, Scripture teaches, make up the one true God?
The easy answer, of course, is that Jesus commands us to do it. In words we find in today’s Gospel lesson, Matthew 28:16-20. He says, “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...”
Of course, when we baptize people, our commission of making disciples hasn’t been completed; Jesus also tells us to teach them to observe everything that He has commanded.
Still, we may wonder what the big deal is about baptizing people or teaching them to observe Jesus’ commandments in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit.
What’s so important about that?
I think we need to go back to two places in the Old Testament to help us understand.
First, we go to about two-thousand years before the birth of Jesus, some four-thousand years ago from where we sit now, to a couple named Abram and Sarai, whose names God would later change to Abraham and Sarah.
Under oak trees in a place called Mamre, these nomads were visited by three mysterious strangers. When these three men spoke, they did so with a single voice. Abram knew that He was in the presence of God, Whose fullness apparently cannot be contained in one Person. “If I have found favor in your eyes, my Lord,” Abraham said, “do not pass your servant by.” (Genesis 18:3) And the Lord--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--did not pass Abram and Sarai by, but blessed them to be blessings to the world.
Some five-hundred years later, God tells Moses to instruct his brother Aaron and the other priests of God to bless Abraham’s and Sarah’s descendants with a benediction. You know it. “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.” (Numbers 6:24-26)
This Aaronic Benediction, as we call it, bestows blessings from each of the three Persons of the Trinity. You see, this benediction has three parts, each part corresponding to the three Person of the one God.
It’s God the Father Who blesses and keeps us. The Father created us and all that exists and provides all that we need to live from day to day. Our call from Him is to take care of this creation and to share our blessings with others.
It’s God the Son, Jesus the Christ, Who shines the loving, forgiving face of God on a fallen and mortal human race. He brings us undeserved grace, including forgiveness for our sins and new and everlasting life, for all who repent and believe in Him.
It’s God the Holy Spirit, Who turns His face toward us through the Word of God. And through this Word, He empowers us to believe that Jesus is our Lord and Savior, filling us with God’s peace, now and forever!
Not all, probably not most of, God’s ancient people, the Israelites, understood God’s three-in-one nature. Truth is, we find it hard to understand too.
But the mystery of the Holy Trinity is central to God’s identity.
The New Testament letter of First John says, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). On this side of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, we can confidently agree. In Christ, God has done His love for us, offering Himself up as the perfect sacrifice for our sins before we even know we need saving.
But when he says that “God is love,” I think that John means something deeper than that. He’s saying that it is the very nature of God, always has been, always will be, to love. Love is something that God has been doing within the mystery of the Trinity in eternity before there was time, space, or matter.
His very decision to give life to a creation beyond Himself sprang from a love so vast, so total, so overwhelming, so tested and true, that He made a whole universe to which He could give it a way, most especially, to a human race made in His image!
People object to the whole idea of the Trinity by appealing to math. “One plus one plus one always equals three,” they say.
But in the Trinity, we see a higher form of math: “One times one times one equals one,” a God superabundant in life and in love.
When God the Son, Jesus, came into our world, He did so as a human being. In effect, God cupped His hand over the glory of His deity, although Jesus was always both truly God and truly human. But God came to us as a humble slave because He wanted to woo the human race into receiving His love.
He didn’t want to intimidate us, wow us, or bludgeon us with His power and perfection so that we would simply cave into Him. God chose to become our servant, dying on a cross for us, and relying on God the Father, to raise Him from the dead just as God will now do for all who turn in repentance from the ways of this world and turn instead in faith to Jesus. Jesus renounced His power so that He could woo us into the Kingdom of God by His love.
After Jesus rose, the cupped hand of God was removed. And there, on that mountain in Galilee, some of the eleven apostles worshiped Jesus, seeing in Him the very God revealed to Abram, Sarai, Moses, and Aaron long before. Jesus tells them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” (Matthew 28:18)
Jesus reclaimed the full authority of His deity, authority over heaven and earth, over Jews and Gentiles, whites and blacks, men and women, even over the demons of hell.
Jesus, you’ll remember, had refused the devil’s offer of dominion over the puny earthly kingdoms of this world. (Matthew 4:8-9) Jesus had no interest in replacing people like Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Kim Jong-un in North Korea, or Donald Trump in the United States. Their days, along with all the other power, money, influence, and ease a dying world craves, will pass away.
Jesus persevered through cross and tomb to resurrection for one purpose only: that through faith in Him, people otherwise dying in their sin, might experience the fullness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, here and now through a glass dimly as we await our own deaths and resurrections, and in eternity when at last, we will look on the Trinity in all His fullness, power, and love.
We baptize and teach in the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, because this is Who God has revealed Himself to be.
But we do so also because when God’s Word is spoken--when, as Jesus commands us, the names of the Three Persons of the One God, meet water at the font--a new birth happens. The old self dies and the new self rises.
The baptismal water becomes a kind of amniotic fluid and we are born again as the full power, majesty, glory, grace, and love of God claim us from the devil, the world, and our own sinful selves to make us children of God.
From that point on, in every trial or temptation or test, in every joy and blessing, in every challenge and triumph, any one of which could cause us to forget God, we have the fullness of God living within us and, in the fellowship of the Church, the Word of God comes to call us to repentance and renewal in order to lead us through each day and to take us, with faith in Jesus, to our ultimate destination, into the loving arms of God.
While we walk on this earth, there will remain mystery about God’s trinitarian nature. I’m not even sure we’ll fully understand it in eternity. But in the end, all we need to know is that this vast, eternal, infinite triune God of all creation loves us three times over: one times one times one. Amen
Showing posts with label 1 John 4:8. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1 John 4:8. Show all posts
Friday, June 12, 2020
Sunday, August 20, 2017
"Red and yellow, black and white...we all need Jesus"
Matthew 15:21-28
God has interesting timing.
Just as the attention of our country and much of the world is on the recent activities of white supremacist and Nazi groups in our midst, the lectionary--the plan for Bible lessons based on ancient Christian practice--appoints today’s gospel lesson for tens of thousands of churches throughout the world.
That’s no coincidence...it’s a God-incidence!
It is exactly the word that you and I and all the world need to hear today.
The lesson tells us about Jesus’ encounter with a woman who is a member of a race of people hated by God’s people since Old Testament times, the Canaanites.
At the end of the lesson, Jesus confirms two important insights into Christian faith known by this Canaanite woman, insights that Saint Paul later summarized: “...all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:27-28)
Jesus came into this world to die and to rise and to call all who believe in Him to become part of one race, the fully restored human race who populate the Kingdom of God.
The Church of Jesus, whatever the denomination, color, or nationality of its people, is a preview of John’s vision in Revelation: “I looked, [John says] and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language...And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’" (Revelation 7:9)
One of my favorite Sunday School songs growing up, said: “Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight / Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Today, in a world rocked by hatred, we need the gospel message. We need Jesus!
When I say that, I’m not just using words. I’m proclaiming the absolute, bottom-line truth: WE NEED JESUS!
Only Jesus can fill our deepest need.
Only Jesus can bring forgiveness of sins.
Only Jesus can put God’s love into our hearts.
Only Jesus can give us sanity for living and thinking.
Only Jesus can give us eternal life with God.
WHAT WE All NEED IS JESUS AND ONLY JESUS!
As the Church, we need to be challenged to proclaim, with no embarrassment, that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life, that no one comes to the Father except through Him; that God loves us and that Christ came to die and rise to offer new life with God to all people: Jews, Canaanites, blacks, whites, browns, yellows, Republicans, Democrats, Americans, Arabs...everyone.
WE NEED JESUS!
Desperately.
Totally.
Now.
In today’s lesson, Jesus meets a woman who knows just how much she needs Jesus.
Jesus, she knows, is the only hope for her demon-possessed daughter.
By faith, she knows the truth of what the Bible repeatedly teaches: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." (Romans 10:13; Acts 2:21; Joel 2:32)
Let’s take a look at our gospel lesson, Matthew 15:21-28. It begins: “And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon.”
Jus before our lesson's narrative begins, Jesus has been teaching His fellow Jews that it’s not the outward rituals that people perform that make them right with God, it’s a faith that turns to God in humility, repentance, and faith that God uses to build righteousness within us.
Most of His fellow Jews didn’t care for this message. They thought of their religion in transactional terms: They offered sacrifices, did good things, or pointed to their pure Jewish ancestry as their part of the bargain and they thought that in return, God had to give them favor.
Jesus said that unless they (and we) turn to God in surrender and faith, we will still be dead and separated from God. No matter how many good things we do. No matter how religious we are.
Not a popular message. Even today. People don’t like to think that their relationship with God or their salvation aren’t under their control, but God’s control.
So, Jesus left His homeland for a bit. It wasn't that Jesus was afraid of unpopularity or of dying. He had come to be rejected by the people and go to the cross. He had His face set for Jerusalem for precisely this reason. He would go to a cross, but it wasn’t the right time yet (John 7:6, 30). He and the disciples go to Tyre and Sidon, a pagan area filled with Gentile unbelievers.
Verse 22: “And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.’”
Back in Old Testament days, God decided that because of the Canaanites’ idol-worship and injustice, He was going to take their land from them and give it to Israel, the Jews, His people. That’s what God did. Canaanites were still, at the point when Jesus meets this woman centuries later, idol-worshipers. They were also hated and mistrusted by the Jews. And yet, here’s this Canaanite woman, approaching Jesus, calling Him by the title that Jews associated with the Messiah, “Son of David.”
See what happens next, verse 23: “But [Jesus] did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she is crying out after us.’ [Jesus] answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’”
Some people look at this passage and think that Jesus is being heartless.
I’ve even heard some preachers suggest that the Canaanite woman came along and taught Jesus a lesson. According to these people, Jesus was a bigot who had to be set straight by this petitioner.
Please! Jesus is both God and man. He knows exactly what's going to happen before it happens. Jesus was not surprised that this Canaanite showed up.
And there is no bigotry in Jesus! God does not hate what God creates. The God Who is love, Who commands loves, and Who is sinless, doesn’t need to be taught how to love. (1 John 4:8)
So, how do we explain Jesus’ words then?
For one thing, they’re the truth. Although in the Great Commission, Jesus would later command His disciples to go to all peoples, Old Testament promises from God said that, during His time on earth, the Messiah would go to Israel. Jesus knows, as Paul writes in our second lesson, “God did not reject his people...” (Romans 11:2) And so, while Jesus would encounter Gentiles (non-Jews) in His ministry and even make a Gentile, the good Samaritan, the hero of one of His most famous parables, the Messiah had to be proclaimed among God’s people before Jesus died and rose.
I think Jesus also said this--"I was sent only the lost sheep of Israel"--because Jesus had things to teach His disciples, including you and me. Jesus always knew the teachable moment!
Verse 25: “But she came and knelt before him [Jesus], saying, ‘Lord, help me.’”
Most English translations of the Bible do an inadequate job of rendering this passage. The verb knelt translates the Greek word proskuneo, which is the word that Matthew used when writing this verse in the Greek. Proskuneo means worship.
It’s the same word Matthew used of the eleven disciples who meet the risen Jesus, about to ascend to heaven in Matthew 28:17, literally, “Having seen Him, they worshiped Him...”
This foreign woman of the wrong race and ethnicity, from the wrong side of the tracks who is hated by Jesus' fellow good Jews, worships Jesus!
She sees Him not only as a human descendant of King David, she sees Him as God.
And she offers no evidence that she’s a good person deserving of what she begs Jesus to do for her daughter. She just believes and is completely helpless.
And belief and helplessness, as our mentor Ole Hallesby has taught many of us here at Living Water, is what we need to be every time we approach God in Jesus’ name. As Hallesby points out, without belief and helplessness, it's doubtful that any of our prayers are really prayers. The Canaanite woman truly prays!
“Lord,” she says, “help me.”
Jesus accepts her worship because He is God. You may remember that in the book of Acts, the Christian missionaries Paul and Barnabas were being hailed as gods by Gentiles. They were horrified and told the crowds to stop, that there was only one God, the one revealed in Jesus (Acts 4:12-15). Jesus accepts the woman's worship. How could He not? He IS God!
It's hard to imagine what the disciples who were with Jesus must have thought of all this. But Jesus lets things go on a bit still: He has a lesson to teach we disciples.
Verse 26: “And he answered, ‘It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.’”
Many Jews used the term dog for Gentiles the way that white racists use the N-word to describe African-Americans today.
Most Jews regarded non-Jews as subhuman trash.
Now, we must always let Scripture interpret Scripture. And what we know from the rest of Scripture about Jesus totally precludes the notion that He shared His people's prejudice against Gentiles.
I believe that, as one Bible scholar has said, Jesus used this term with a twinkle in His eye, a bit like a comic tweaking prejudice. Humor is always a good tool for demolishing prejudice.
Make no mistake about it though, Jesus saw this woman’s desperate, audacious faith. He was about to perform a sign showing that He is the Messiah and God of all who have a desperate, audacious faith in Him.
And the Canaanite woman is in on Jesus’ joke. Verse 27: “She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.’”
“Yes, Lord,” she’s saying, “I know that the Jews are God’s people and that salvation will come into the world through the Jews. That’s the first thing I know. But I also know a second thing: that You are the Lord of heaven and earth and that through You, salvation will come to all who believe in You. Even those with the wrong color of skin and those with the wrong ethnic background. Just as the dogs get the crumbs, You have grace enough to spare for everyone!”
In verse 28, Jesus explodes with the same kind of joyous exclamation that must come from God every time we turn to Him with desperate, audacious faith. “‘O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.”
God receives all who turn from their sin and trust in Jesus as their only hope, the only way to life, the only way to God.
God receives all who turn to Him with desperate, audacious faith.
God hears all who trust Jesus with desperation and helplessness, who know that Jesus is our only hope for this world and the next!
God will, through Jesus, even receive you and me and all the other Canaanites who trust in Jesus.
The only in-crowd in the Kingdom of God is the crowd who confess that Jesus is Lord and then follow Him wherever He leads!
Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the text for the worship message this morning.]
God has interesting timing.
Just as the attention of our country and much of the world is on the recent activities of white supremacist and Nazi groups in our midst, the lectionary--the plan for Bible lessons based on ancient Christian practice--appoints today’s gospel lesson for tens of thousands of churches throughout the world.
That’s no coincidence...it’s a God-incidence!
It is exactly the word that you and I and all the world need to hear today.
The lesson tells us about Jesus’ encounter with a woman who is a member of a race of people hated by God’s people since Old Testament times, the Canaanites.
At the end of the lesson, Jesus confirms two important insights into Christian faith known by this Canaanite woman, insights that Saint Paul later summarized: “...all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:27-28)
Jesus came into this world to die and to rise and to call all who believe in Him to become part of one race, the fully restored human race who populate the Kingdom of God.
The Church of Jesus, whatever the denomination, color, or nationality of its people, is a preview of John’s vision in Revelation: “I looked, [John says] and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language...And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’" (Revelation 7:9)
One of my favorite Sunday School songs growing up, said: “Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight / Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Today, in a world rocked by hatred, we need the gospel message. We need Jesus!
When I say that, I’m not just using words. I’m proclaiming the absolute, bottom-line truth: WE NEED JESUS!
Only Jesus can fill our deepest need.
Only Jesus can bring forgiveness of sins.
Only Jesus can put God’s love into our hearts.
Only Jesus can give us sanity for living and thinking.
Only Jesus can give us eternal life with God.
WHAT WE All NEED IS JESUS AND ONLY JESUS!
As the Church, we need to be challenged to proclaim, with no embarrassment, that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life, that no one comes to the Father except through Him; that God loves us and that Christ came to die and rise to offer new life with God to all people: Jews, Canaanites, blacks, whites, browns, yellows, Republicans, Democrats, Americans, Arabs...everyone.
WE NEED JESUS!
Desperately.
Totally.
Now.
In today’s lesson, Jesus meets a woman who knows just how much she needs Jesus.
Jesus, she knows, is the only hope for her demon-possessed daughter.
By faith, she knows the truth of what the Bible repeatedly teaches: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." (Romans 10:13; Acts 2:21; Joel 2:32)
Let’s take a look at our gospel lesson, Matthew 15:21-28. It begins: “And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon.”
Jus before our lesson's narrative begins, Jesus has been teaching His fellow Jews that it’s not the outward rituals that people perform that make them right with God, it’s a faith that turns to God in humility, repentance, and faith that God uses to build righteousness within us.
Most of His fellow Jews didn’t care for this message. They thought of their religion in transactional terms: They offered sacrifices, did good things, or pointed to their pure Jewish ancestry as their part of the bargain and they thought that in return, God had to give them favor.
Jesus said that unless they (and we) turn to God in surrender and faith, we will still be dead and separated from God. No matter how many good things we do. No matter how religious we are.
Not a popular message. Even today. People don’t like to think that their relationship with God or their salvation aren’t under their control, but God’s control.
So, Jesus left His homeland for a bit. It wasn't that Jesus was afraid of unpopularity or of dying. He had come to be rejected by the people and go to the cross. He had His face set for Jerusalem for precisely this reason. He would go to a cross, but it wasn’t the right time yet (John 7:6, 30). He and the disciples go to Tyre and Sidon, a pagan area filled with Gentile unbelievers.
Verse 22: “And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.’”
Back in Old Testament days, God decided that because of the Canaanites’ idol-worship and injustice, He was going to take their land from them and give it to Israel, the Jews, His people. That’s what God did. Canaanites were still, at the point when Jesus meets this woman centuries later, idol-worshipers. They were also hated and mistrusted by the Jews. And yet, here’s this Canaanite woman, approaching Jesus, calling Him by the title that Jews associated with the Messiah, “Son of David.”
See what happens next, verse 23: “But [Jesus] did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she is crying out after us.’ [Jesus] answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’”
Some people look at this passage and think that Jesus is being heartless.
I’ve even heard some preachers suggest that the Canaanite woman came along and taught Jesus a lesson. According to these people, Jesus was a bigot who had to be set straight by this petitioner.
Please! Jesus is both God and man. He knows exactly what's going to happen before it happens. Jesus was not surprised that this Canaanite showed up.
And there is no bigotry in Jesus! God does not hate what God creates. The God Who is love, Who commands loves, and Who is sinless, doesn’t need to be taught how to love. (1 John 4:8)
So, how do we explain Jesus’ words then?
For one thing, they’re the truth. Although in the Great Commission, Jesus would later command His disciples to go to all peoples, Old Testament promises from God said that, during His time on earth, the Messiah would go to Israel. Jesus knows, as Paul writes in our second lesson, “God did not reject his people...” (Romans 11:2) And so, while Jesus would encounter Gentiles (non-Jews) in His ministry and even make a Gentile, the good Samaritan, the hero of one of His most famous parables, the Messiah had to be proclaimed among God’s people before Jesus died and rose.
I think Jesus also said this--"I was sent only the lost sheep of Israel"--because Jesus had things to teach His disciples, including you and me. Jesus always knew the teachable moment!
Verse 25: “But she came and knelt before him [Jesus], saying, ‘Lord, help me.’”
Most English translations of the Bible do an inadequate job of rendering this passage. The verb knelt translates the Greek word proskuneo, which is the word that Matthew used when writing this verse in the Greek. Proskuneo means worship.
It’s the same word Matthew used of the eleven disciples who meet the risen Jesus, about to ascend to heaven in Matthew 28:17, literally, “Having seen Him, they worshiped Him...”
This foreign woman of the wrong race and ethnicity, from the wrong side of the tracks who is hated by Jesus' fellow good Jews, worships Jesus!
She sees Him not only as a human descendant of King David, she sees Him as God.
And she offers no evidence that she’s a good person deserving of what she begs Jesus to do for her daughter. She just believes and is completely helpless.
And belief and helplessness, as our mentor Ole Hallesby has taught many of us here at Living Water, is what we need to be every time we approach God in Jesus’ name. As Hallesby points out, without belief and helplessness, it's doubtful that any of our prayers are really prayers. The Canaanite woman truly prays!
“Lord,” she says, “help me.”
Jesus accepts her worship because He is God. You may remember that in the book of Acts, the Christian missionaries Paul and Barnabas were being hailed as gods by Gentiles. They were horrified and told the crowds to stop, that there was only one God, the one revealed in Jesus (Acts 4:12-15). Jesus accepts the woman's worship. How could He not? He IS God!
It's hard to imagine what the disciples who were with Jesus must have thought of all this. But Jesus lets things go on a bit still: He has a lesson to teach we disciples.
Verse 26: “And he answered, ‘It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.’”
Many Jews used the term dog for Gentiles the way that white racists use the N-word to describe African-Americans today.
Most Jews regarded non-Jews as subhuman trash.
Now, we must always let Scripture interpret Scripture. And what we know from the rest of Scripture about Jesus totally precludes the notion that He shared His people's prejudice against Gentiles.
I believe that, as one Bible scholar has said, Jesus used this term with a twinkle in His eye, a bit like a comic tweaking prejudice. Humor is always a good tool for demolishing prejudice.
Make no mistake about it though, Jesus saw this woman’s desperate, audacious faith. He was about to perform a sign showing that He is the Messiah and God of all who have a desperate, audacious faith in Him.
And the Canaanite woman is in on Jesus’ joke. Verse 27: “She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.’”
“Yes, Lord,” she’s saying, “I know that the Jews are God’s people and that salvation will come into the world through the Jews. That’s the first thing I know. But I also know a second thing: that You are the Lord of heaven and earth and that through You, salvation will come to all who believe in You. Even those with the wrong color of skin and those with the wrong ethnic background. Just as the dogs get the crumbs, You have grace enough to spare for everyone!”
In verse 28, Jesus explodes with the same kind of joyous exclamation that must come from God every time we turn to Him with desperate, audacious faith. “‘O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.”
God receives all who turn from their sin and trust in Jesus as their only hope, the only way to life, the only way to God.
God receives all who turn to Him with desperate, audacious faith.
God hears all who trust Jesus with desperation and helplessness, who know that Jesus is our only hope for this world and the next!
God will, through Jesus, even receive you and me and all the other Canaanites who trust in Jesus.
The only in-crowd in the Kingdom of God is the crowd who confess that Jesus is Lord and then follow Him wherever He leads!
Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the text for the worship message this morning.]
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
The Trinity: Knowing God
Matthew 28:16-20
This morning, a re-run. I hope you don’t mind.
Today is an often-overlooked day on the Church calendar: Holy Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost.
When I was about eight, I asked my mom for an explanation of the Trinity. How could God be one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Mom told me to ask our pastor, which I did.
“Mark,” he said, “think of water. It can come in the form of a liquid, a solid (in water’s case, ice), or gas (in this case, steam). But whatever form it takes, it’s always water. Three in one.”
That helped somewhat, though it tilts toward a heresy called modalism long ago rejected by the Church.
The problem with the analogy is that as Christians, we don’t believe that God takes on different forms as though God were engaged in some eternal Halloween party, changing His costume from time to time. We confess that God is always one being and that God is always three persons. No analogy is going to exactly explain something as mysterious as the Trinity.
Some people think that the Trinity is an arcane idea best left undiscussed.
Yet as I’ve gotten to know God better through the pages of Scripture, the fellowship of believers, and the Lord’s Supper, I’ve come to agree with an acquaintance of mine who wrote a few years ago, that there may be nothing more important for us to try to “get” as Christians than the Trinity.
The word “Trinity” is never used in the Bible. But repeatedly, by inference in the Old Testament and in plain words in the New Testament, the Bible affirms that three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are co-equal, co-eternal personalities of the one and only God the universe.
For example, in our first lesson, from Genesis, God the Spirit brings the life of the universe into being (Genesis 1:2).
When God decides to create human beings, He says, "Let us make..." Who's He talking to? I think that pretty clearly, God is talking to Himself (Genesis 1:26).
And, look, please at today’s Gospel lesson. It contains the Great Commission. In verse 19, Jesus says: “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...” Jesus is putting Himself and the Holy Spirit on the same level as God the Father.
The Gospels tell us that Jesus makes a point of placing Himself on an equal footing with God the Father many times.
So, without ever using the word trinity, the Bible affirms that God is one God in three persons.
But what has the Trinity God to do with you and me in 2017?
You’ve heard the phrase: “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.” We find that funny because we know that there is no validity to our claims of being loving people in general if we are unwilling to love particular people.
Love at its most basic level is not about affectionate feelings. Love is a commitment to willing and doing what is best for those we love, even when we disagree, drive each other crazy.
Love that isn’t lived out practically isn’t love. You can’t be loving if there is no object of your love.
Now, one of the most famous passages of the New Testament is 1 John 4:8, which says, in part, “God is love.”
It's important to note that John didn't write, "Love is God." That would make God just an idea.
Nor does God’s loving character make Him tolerant of all our behaviors. Much of what we human beings do is sinful and of sin, God is absolutely intolerant, even though He never stops loving us.
In these three words, “God is love,” we aren’t given a license to do whatever we want, irrespective of the will of God.
No, in saying that, "God is love," John is making an eternal statement about an eternal God. Before God created the heavens and the earth, before Jesus died and rose so that all who believe in Him may be freed of their sins, before the Holy Spirit formed the Church, God is, God was, and God will be eternally loving.
"God is love" means that love is at the core of God’s character and being. Love is why and how He acts.
But, that raises a question: Who did God love before the beginning?
The answer, I think, is that in eternity, before there was time, before there was a creation, God was already loving others. God the Father loved God the Son and God the Spirit and God the Son and God the Spirit each loved the other two members of the Trinity, have done so and will do so for all eternity.
Even the existence of this universe in which we live at least suggests that God is one, but is more than one person. Only One Who loves and has always known how to love would have thought of giving such a great gift as this thing called life.
When I was twenty-five, I’d been married for five years and my parents were growing impatient. Where, they wondered, were the grandchildren we were supposed to be coming up with? Then, my dad, father of five kids, decided to have a talk with me, giving me advice for the first and only time that I can remember.
Dad told me that if we were looking for the right time or the right reason for having children, to forget it. There’s never a right time. There’s never a good reason.
And that’s the point. It’s in the very nature of love to forgo convenience to self and to give, to serve, to stand by, to live for, even, if necessary, to die for.
God has always known how to love. He exists in what the theologians call a "triune" relationship of perfect love and doesn’t need more love. He’s always loved perfectly. He's always been loved perfectly. God doesn't need more love. Honestly, He doesn't really need us.
But, because God is infinite and eternal in His love, God loved the universe into being. God the Word, Christ, spoke into the darkness and chaos and God the Spirit wended His Word and life sprang up.
We--every one of us--are the products of God’s love: unnecessary but loved nonetheless, superfluous but cherished.
Today, the Holy Trinity calls us to follow Christ right into the center of His loving fellowship.
He claims us as His own in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at our Baptism, and then calls us into an ever-renewing relationship of love with Him and all that He has made.
Sin and death and isolation from God and from others will be the last word over every human life unless people are washed clean of sin and made new through repentance and faith in Christ. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
Christ calls us into life abundant and eternal. But there is no life without love. This is no biological observation: the unloved child, abused by her or his parents, isn’t experiencing life; the couple in a loveless marriage aren’t living; the teen subjected to bullying and putdowns is experiencing a love deficit that is, inherently, a life deficit; the visitors ignored when they worship at a church they’ve never been to before are being treated both lovelessly and as though they weren’t even alive.
And this is why the Trinity is such an important reality for us to experience. We live in a fractured, fractious world. People are divided and often hateful. Love of neighbors, including love of our enemies, is a rare thing. It’s so rare that only Jesus and the people who, by faith, draw life from Jesus really live it.
God has created the Church, the fellowship of believers in Christ, to make disciples and to usher believers into a community of love that fills us with the power of God to move toward being the loving people we were made to be and promises us eternal fellowship with God and others.
In the Garden of Gethsemane before His arrest, Jesus prayed to God the Father that all who followed Him, “may be one...just as you are in me and I am in you...” (John 17:21). God wants us to live in the same selfless fellowship with others He has always known. That’s what Jesus died and rose to give to those who dare to believe in Him.
If all of this sounds airy and theoretical, removed from the hard realities of your life, consider this: Every time we pray to our Father in heaven in Jesus’ name, we do so at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, Who through God’s Word and the witness of other Christian disciples, helps us to trust that when we come to the Father on the bases of Jesus’ perfect righteousness, our prayers are heard.
More than that, we believe that when we’re confused, afraid, worn out, incapable of putting a coherent thought into words and simply call out to the God we know in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit forms our groans into prayers that, through Jesus, reach the Father. (Romans 8:26-27)
I have never prayed so completely as I have when, wrung out by life, I have asked heaven, “What? What?”
If it weren’t for the Holy Spirit and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus to open our access to God the Father, prayers like that would only bounce off the ceiling.
The Holy Trinity can make a difference in our everyday lives if we will be open to His threefold ministry to us. God in His fullness, Who cares about us even though He doesn’t have to, Who is able to stand with us in every experience, also makes it possible for us to experience fellowship, community, with Him and with His family, the Church.
This is why the Church is so important. Only the Church has been designated to connect people with the Trinity. And in a world filled with the idea of mashing others into oblivion and lifting ourselves to the top, of crushing and being crushed by selfishness and self-will, we need the liberation from self and the connection to God and to others that only the God Who is the Holy Trinity can give us.
We need, truly, more than anything else, love that changes our hearts, our minds, and our eternities. And only the God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can give it. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
This morning, a re-run. I hope you don’t mind.
Today is an often-overlooked day on the Church calendar: Holy Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost.
[This is example of a genre of Christian imagery known as gnadenstuhl. It portrays the Trinity at the moment of Jesus' crucifixion. I thank my son, Pastor Philip Daniels, for sharing this particular image on his Facebook account this past week.]
When I was about eight, I asked my mom for an explanation of the Trinity. How could God be one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Mom told me to ask our pastor, which I did.
“Mark,” he said, “think of water. It can come in the form of a liquid, a solid (in water’s case, ice), or gas (in this case, steam). But whatever form it takes, it’s always water. Three in one.”
That helped somewhat, though it tilts toward a heresy called modalism long ago rejected by the Church.
The problem with the analogy is that as Christians, we don’t believe that God takes on different forms as though God were engaged in some eternal Halloween party, changing His costume from time to time. We confess that God is always one being and that God is always three persons. No analogy is going to exactly explain something as mysterious as the Trinity.
Some people think that the Trinity is an arcane idea best left undiscussed.
Yet as I’ve gotten to know God better through the pages of Scripture, the fellowship of believers, and the Lord’s Supper, I’ve come to agree with an acquaintance of mine who wrote a few years ago, that there may be nothing more important for us to try to “get” as Christians than the Trinity.
The word “Trinity” is never used in the Bible. But repeatedly, by inference in the Old Testament and in plain words in the New Testament, the Bible affirms that three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are co-equal, co-eternal personalities of the one and only God the universe.
For example, in our first lesson, from Genesis, God the Spirit brings the life of the universe into being (Genesis 1:2).
When God decides to create human beings, He says, "Let us make..." Who's He talking to? I think that pretty clearly, God is talking to Himself (Genesis 1:26).
And, look, please at today’s Gospel lesson. It contains the Great Commission. In verse 19, Jesus says: “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...” Jesus is putting Himself and the Holy Spirit on the same level as God the Father.
The Gospels tell us that Jesus makes a point of placing Himself on an equal footing with God the Father many times.
- “Before Abraham was, I am [Yahweh],” He says in John 8:58.
- “I and the Father are one,” He says in John 10:30.
- “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father,” He claims in John 14:9.
So, without ever using the word trinity, the Bible affirms that God is one God in three persons.
But what has the Trinity God to do with you and me in 2017?
You’ve heard the phrase: “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.” We find that funny because we know that there is no validity to our claims of being loving people in general if we are unwilling to love particular people.
Love at its most basic level is not about affectionate feelings. Love is a commitment to willing and doing what is best for those we love, even when we disagree, drive each other crazy.
Love that isn’t lived out practically isn’t love. You can’t be loving if there is no object of your love.
Now, one of the most famous passages of the New Testament is 1 John 4:8, which says, in part, “God is love.”
It's important to note that John didn't write, "Love is God." That would make God just an idea.
Nor does God’s loving character make Him tolerant of all our behaviors. Much of what we human beings do is sinful and of sin, God is absolutely intolerant, even though He never stops loving us.
In these three words, “God is love,” we aren’t given a license to do whatever we want, irrespective of the will of God.
No, in saying that, "God is love," John is making an eternal statement about an eternal God. Before God created the heavens and the earth, before Jesus died and rose so that all who believe in Him may be freed of their sins, before the Holy Spirit formed the Church, God is, God was, and God will be eternally loving.
"God is love" means that love is at the core of God’s character and being. Love is why and how He acts.
But, that raises a question: Who did God love before the beginning?
The answer, I think, is that in eternity, before there was time, before there was a creation, God was already loving others. God the Father loved God the Son and God the Spirit and God the Son and God the Spirit each loved the other two members of the Trinity, have done so and will do so for all eternity.
Even the existence of this universe in which we live at least suggests that God is one, but is more than one person. Only One Who loves and has always known how to love would have thought of giving such a great gift as this thing called life.
When I was twenty-five, I’d been married for five years and my parents were growing impatient. Where, they wondered, were the grandchildren we were supposed to be coming up with? Then, my dad, father of five kids, decided to have a talk with me, giving me advice for the first and only time that I can remember.
Dad told me that if we were looking for the right time or the right reason for having children, to forget it. There’s never a right time. There’s never a good reason.
And that’s the point. It’s in the very nature of love to forgo convenience to self and to give, to serve, to stand by, to live for, even, if necessary, to die for.
God has always known how to love. He exists in what the theologians call a "triune" relationship of perfect love and doesn’t need more love. He’s always loved perfectly. He's always been loved perfectly. God doesn't need more love. Honestly, He doesn't really need us.
But, because God is infinite and eternal in His love, God loved the universe into being. God the Word, Christ, spoke into the darkness and chaos and God the Spirit wended His Word and life sprang up.
We--every one of us--are the products of God’s love: unnecessary but loved nonetheless, superfluous but cherished.
Today, the Holy Trinity calls us to follow Christ right into the center of His loving fellowship.
He claims us as His own in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at our Baptism, and then calls us into an ever-renewing relationship of love with Him and all that He has made.
Sin and death and isolation from God and from others will be the last word over every human life unless people are washed clean of sin and made new through repentance and faith in Christ. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
Christ calls us into life abundant and eternal. But there is no life without love. This is no biological observation: the unloved child, abused by her or his parents, isn’t experiencing life; the couple in a loveless marriage aren’t living; the teen subjected to bullying and putdowns is experiencing a love deficit that is, inherently, a life deficit; the visitors ignored when they worship at a church they’ve never been to before are being treated both lovelessly and as though they weren’t even alive.
And this is why the Trinity is such an important reality for us to experience. We live in a fractured, fractious world. People are divided and often hateful. Love of neighbors, including love of our enemies, is a rare thing. It’s so rare that only Jesus and the people who, by faith, draw life from Jesus really live it.
God has created the Church, the fellowship of believers in Christ, to make disciples and to usher believers into a community of love that fills us with the power of God to move toward being the loving people we were made to be and promises us eternal fellowship with God and others.
In the Garden of Gethsemane before His arrest, Jesus prayed to God the Father that all who followed Him, “may be one...just as you are in me and I am in you...” (John 17:21). God wants us to live in the same selfless fellowship with others He has always known. That’s what Jesus died and rose to give to those who dare to believe in Him.
If all of this sounds airy and theoretical, removed from the hard realities of your life, consider this: Every time we pray to our Father in heaven in Jesus’ name, we do so at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, Who through God’s Word and the witness of other Christian disciples, helps us to trust that when we come to the Father on the bases of Jesus’ perfect righteousness, our prayers are heard.
More than that, we believe that when we’re confused, afraid, worn out, incapable of putting a coherent thought into words and simply call out to the God we know in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit forms our groans into prayers that, through Jesus, reach the Father. (Romans 8:26-27)
I have never prayed so completely as I have when, wrung out by life, I have asked heaven, “What? What?”
If it weren’t for the Holy Spirit and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus to open our access to God the Father, prayers like that would only bounce off the ceiling.
The Holy Trinity can make a difference in our everyday lives if we will be open to His threefold ministry to us. God in His fullness, Who cares about us even though He doesn’t have to, Who is able to stand with us in every experience, also makes it possible for us to experience fellowship, community, with Him and with His family, the Church.
This is why the Church is so important. Only the Church has been designated to connect people with the Trinity. And in a world filled with the idea of mashing others into oblivion and lifting ourselves to the top, of crushing and being crushed by selfishness and self-will, we need the liberation from self and the connection to God and to others that only the God Who is the Holy Trinity can give us.
We need, truly, more than anything else, love that changes our hearts, our minds, and our eternities. And only the God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can give it. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?
John 14:6
Acts 4:12
A week ago, I attended the Centerville mayor’s annual Faith Leaders Breakfast. A representative from each of the faith organizations was asked to say a few words. A man from a local Islamic mosque told us, “We all worship one God.”
Muslims are told this and taught to say this to non-Muslims. In Quran 29:46, Muslims are instructed to tell Jews and Christians: “And our God and your God is one; and we are Muslims [in submission] to Him."
That’s great PR. But is it the truth?
Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?
Nabeel Qureshi, the noted author and Christian apologist, a convert from Islam, writes in his book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, that even after he had become a Christian, he thought that the God of Christianity and the Allah of Islam were essentially the same. After all, Christianity is the fulfillment of the promises God made to the world through ancient Israel, and Islam, like Mormonism, is a legalistic derivative of Christianity. The Bible and the Quran both mention people like Adam and Eve, Abraham, and so on.
But, after he'd spent time in God's Word, Qureshi came to realize that the God of Christianity and the Allah of Islam are very different in nature, being, and attitude toward the human race.
Above all, we see this through the prism of the Trinity, the Christian belief that God has revealed Himself to be one God in three Persons. Jesus and the apostles taught this reality without ever using the term “trinity.”
Before He ascended to heaven, for example, the risen Jesus told His Church, “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” (Matthew 28:19), putting Himself and the Holy Spirit on the same level as God the Father.
During His earthly ministry, Jesus claimed: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
And one of the most famous benedictions in the New Testament invokes our three-in-one God: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14).
For Jesus and the early Church to claim that He and the Holy Spirit were co-equal to God the Father would have been blasphemous if it weren’t true. Yet Jesus and the first Christians could never be rightly accused of being blasphemous or disrespectful of God.
Even the Old Testament implies the existence of this mysterious three-in-one God in several places. One example: When God creates the universe in the Old Testament, we read that God said: “Let us make mankind in our image…” (Genesis 1:26). Who was God speaking to when He said “let us make” the human race? He certainly wasn’t suggesting that the animals, plants, moon, stars, or planets join Him in doing what only He could do, give life. And there's absolutely nothing to support the idea that God was using the royal "we." No, God was talking to Himself: “Let us make…”
But the Trinity is more than an arcane teaching, the Trinity just makes sense. First John 4:8 tells us that “God is love.” Only a God Who knows what love is and how to give love away would have even thought of creating the universe. If God weren’t practiced in and committed to love, He would have preferred to, as the Brits say, “keep himself to himself.” But when God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Who has experienced from all eternity, the joy of giving love away, that superabundance of love feels compelled to express itself in every molecule and every supernova and every human being God has ever made, every part of the universe for which He became human, died, and rose.
This understanding of God is central to what we believe as Christians.
It’s simple:
We can also see how different the Christian and Muslim views of God are when we consider one of the most common names we Christians use in talking to God.
When Jesus was asked by the disciples how to pray, He began the prayer with: ‘Our Father in heaven…’” (Matthew 6:9).
Jesus was telling all who approach God in His name to regard God as our loving Father.
Islam, on the other hand, is revolted by the idea of God being our Father. Quran 5:18 says: “the Jews and the Christians say, "We are the children of Allah and His beloved." [Tell them] ‘Then why does He punish you for your sins?’ Rather, you are human beings from among those He has created. He forgives whom He wills, and He punishes whom He wills.”
Notice that repentance, faith, or a heart open to God mean nothing to Allah. To Islam, Allah is a mercurial dictator who may give you a break...or not. Allah rules entirely by fiat. And Muslims don’t see how Christians can believe that God would dirty His hands by claiming to be related to human beings as our Father.
Islam also rejects the idea that Jesus, Who said, “...before Abraham was, I AM” (in other words, “before Abraham was, Yahweh”) (John 8:58) and Who accepted the worship of people like Thomas, Peter, and the blind man from this past Sunday’s Gospel lesson, is God.
Quran 5:72 insists that anyone who believes that Jesus is God, the One we Christians proclaim as “the Word made flesh” (John 1:14) will be forbidden a place in Paradise, their only refuge fire, from which they can receive no help. In other words, the Quran teaches that if we believe that Jesus is God, we are going to hell.
Islam also rejects the idea that Jesus is God’s Son.
Jesus teaches, famously of course, “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” (John 3:16).
But the Quran says: “No son did Allah beget, nor is there any god along with Him.”
Jesus says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The Quran says, effectively, that Jesus is lying.
Islam tries to have it both ways: to claim a share in the God of Israel ultimately revealed to the world in Jesus, Who they rename Allah, as their own, while repudiating much of what God has revealed to the world in Jesus.
The God of the Bible is a heartsick lover Who beckons us to turn from sin and turn to Him to live, a God Who despised His own dignity so that by sacrificing Himself on the cross, He could win us back from from sin and death.
The Allah of Islam is like the Greek and Roman gods, who neither give nor promise grace, who sport with the human race while floating above it all, moving only from indifference to anger with humanity.
Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God.
But this shouldn’t make Christians smug. Ephesians 2:8 reminds us: “...it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.”
Rather than being smug, we should be thankful for Christ’s gift of salvation and new life to us.
We are blessed to be baptized and to have heard the Gospel from faithful people so that we have the chance to know God! We’ve been saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus. That’s a lot to be thankful for, but we can claim no credit for it; it's God's work alone!
And from sheer ratitude, we have every reason to be faithful to the great commission Jesus has given to us, to make disciples of all peoples.
That includes those who are trapped in Islam.
May we be grateful and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, may we be faithful in lifting up Christ to our neighbors, all of our neighbors.
For we believe exactly what the first century Church believed of Jesus: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)
Let’s show and tell the world this truth in every way God opens to us!
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message is the fourth installment of the midweek Lenten series at Living Water, Tough Questions.]
Acts 4:12
A week ago, I attended the Centerville mayor’s annual Faith Leaders Breakfast. A representative from each of the faith organizations was asked to say a few words. A man from a local Islamic mosque told us, “We all worship one God.”
Muslims are told this and taught to say this to non-Muslims. In Quran 29:46, Muslims are instructed to tell Jews and Christians: “And our God and your God is one; and we are Muslims [in submission] to Him."
That’s great PR. But is it the truth?
Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?
Nabeel Qureshi, the noted author and Christian apologist, a convert from Islam, writes in his book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, that even after he had become a Christian, he thought that the God of Christianity and the Allah of Islam were essentially the same. After all, Christianity is the fulfillment of the promises God made to the world through ancient Israel, and Islam, like Mormonism, is a legalistic derivative of Christianity. The Bible and the Quran both mention people like Adam and Eve, Abraham, and so on.
But, after he'd spent time in God's Word, Qureshi came to realize that the God of Christianity and the Allah of Islam are very different in nature, being, and attitude toward the human race.
Above all, we see this through the prism of the Trinity, the Christian belief that God has revealed Himself to be one God in three Persons. Jesus and the apostles taught this reality without ever using the term “trinity.”
Before He ascended to heaven, for example, the risen Jesus told His Church, “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” (Matthew 28:19), putting Himself and the Holy Spirit on the same level as God the Father.
During His earthly ministry, Jesus claimed: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
And one of the most famous benedictions in the New Testament invokes our three-in-one God: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14).
For Jesus and the early Church to claim that He and the Holy Spirit were co-equal to God the Father would have been blasphemous if it weren’t true. Yet Jesus and the first Christians could never be rightly accused of being blasphemous or disrespectful of God.
Even the Old Testament implies the existence of this mysterious three-in-one God in several places. One example: When God creates the universe in the Old Testament, we read that God said: “Let us make mankind in our image…” (Genesis 1:26). Who was God speaking to when He said “let us make” the human race? He certainly wasn’t suggesting that the animals, plants, moon, stars, or planets join Him in doing what only He could do, give life. And there's absolutely nothing to support the idea that God was using the royal "we." No, God was talking to Himself: “Let us make…”
But the Trinity is more than an arcane teaching, the Trinity just makes sense. First John 4:8 tells us that “God is love.” Only a God Who knows what love is and how to give love away would have even thought of creating the universe. If God weren’t practiced in and committed to love, He would have preferred to, as the Brits say, “keep himself to himself.” But when God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Who has experienced from all eternity, the joy of giving love away, that superabundance of love feels compelled to express itself in every molecule and every supernova and every human being God has ever made, every part of the universe for which He became human, died, and rose.
This understanding of God is central to what we believe as Christians.
It’s simple:
- No Trinity; no creation.
- No Trinity; no salvation.
- No Trinity; no Gospel.
- No Trinity; no Church.
We can also see how different the Christian and Muslim views of God are when we consider one of the most common names we Christians use in talking to God.
When Jesus was asked by the disciples how to pray, He began the prayer with: ‘Our Father in heaven…’” (Matthew 6:9).
Jesus was telling all who approach God in His name to regard God as our loving Father.
Islam, on the other hand, is revolted by the idea of God being our Father. Quran 5:18 says: “the Jews and the Christians say, "We are the children of Allah and His beloved." [Tell them] ‘Then why does He punish you for your sins?’ Rather, you are human beings from among those He has created. He forgives whom He wills, and He punishes whom He wills.”
Notice that repentance, faith, or a heart open to God mean nothing to Allah. To Islam, Allah is a mercurial dictator who may give you a break...or not. Allah rules entirely by fiat. And Muslims don’t see how Christians can believe that God would dirty His hands by claiming to be related to human beings as our Father.
Islam also rejects the idea that Jesus, Who said, “...before Abraham was, I AM” (in other words, “before Abraham was, Yahweh”) (John 8:58) and Who accepted the worship of people like Thomas, Peter, and the blind man from this past Sunday’s Gospel lesson, is God.
Quran 5:72 insists that anyone who believes that Jesus is God, the One we Christians proclaim as “the Word made flesh” (John 1:14) will be forbidden a place in Paradise, their only refuge fire, from which they can receive no help. In other words, the Quran teaches that if we believe that Jesus is God, we are going to hell.
Islam also rejects the idea that Jesus is God’s Son.
Jesus teaches, famously of course, “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” (John 3:16).
But the Quran says: “No son did Allah beget, nor is there any god along with Him.”
Jesus says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The Quran says, effectively, that Jesus is lying.
Islam tries to have it both ways: to claim a share in the God of Israel ultimately revealed to the world in Jesus, Who they rename Allah, as their own, while repudiating much of what God has revealed to the world in Jesus.
The God of the Bible is a heartsick lover Who beckons us to turn from sin and turn to Him to live, a God Who despised His own dignity so that by sacrificing Himself on the cross, He could win us back from from sin and death.
The Allah of Islam is like the Greek and Roman gods, who neither give nor promise grace, who sport with the human race while floating above it all, moving only from indifference to anger with humanity.
Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God.
But this shouldn’t make Christians smug. Ephesians 2:8 reminds us: “...it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.”
Rather than being smug, we should be thankful for Christ’s gift of salvation and new life to us.
We are blessed to be baptized and to have heard the Gospel from faithful people so that we have the chance to know God! We’ve been saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus. That’s a lot to be thankful for, but we can claim no credit for it; it's God's work alone!
And from sheer ratitude, we have every reason to be faithful to the great commission Jesus has given to us, to make disciples of all peoples.
That includes those who are trapped in Islam.
May we be grateful and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, may we be faithful in lifting up Christ to our neighbors, all of our neighbors.
For we believe exactly what the first century Church believed of Jesus: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)
Let’s show and tell the world this truth in every way God opens to us!
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message is the fourth installment of the midweek Lenten series at Living Water, Tough Questions.]
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
How can a loving God send people to hell? (Tough Questions, Part 3)
Ezekiel 18:23-32
John 3:16-18
The latest Pew Research polling I’ve seen says that 72% of the American people believe that there is a heaven and 58% say that there is a hell.
Of course, it doesn’t really matter what we think. There are simply some things in life that are facts, whether we like them or not.
The Bible and Jesus Himself affirm that heaven and hell are real...and it doesn’t matter if 3 in 10 don’t believe in one or that 4 in 10 don’t believe in the other. To not believe those two things is to call Jesus a liar and a liar could hardly be a trustworthy Savior.
Nonetheless, Christians and non-Christians alike wrestle with our tough question for tonight: How can a loving God send people to hell?
As Christians, we wrestle with it, of course, because the entire record of God’s self-disclosure as found in Scripture and as seen in Jesus, supports the assertion of 1 John 4:8: “God is love.”
The creation of which you and I are a part argues that God is loving. This universe is, when you think about it, completely unnecessary. God is totally self-sufficient. He didn’t need to give life to the universe. Yet He created we human beings in His image and placed us in a creation which, though marred by our sin, still retains the marks of a Creator intent on providing us with everything we could ever need or want.
Just as husbands and wives who care for each other don’t really need children, yet choose to have children anyway in order to give fulfillment and greater expression to their love, God, Who doesn’t need us, created us to give fulfillment and expression to His love.
But we see the ultimate expression of God’s loving nature in the Person and work of God the Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus told Nicodemus: “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. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” [John 3:16-17]
You and I deserve death and condemnation for our sin. But Jesus took the punishment we deserve so that all who turn from sin and surrender to Him will have eternal life with God. Only love can explain why an innocent Savior voluntarily bore death in order to save people who don’t deserve saving, in order to give life to those who, without Him, would be separated from God, the Source of life, for all eternity.
“Yes,” we may say, “I believe that God is loving. But what about hell? Would a loving God send anyone to hell?” This appears to be the attitude of many interviewed by Pew Research; more people are willing to believe in heaven than they are to believe in hell.
In answer to our question for tonight, I point to a few facts.
First, Jesus talked three times as much about hell as He did about heaven.
If you don’t believe me, print, say, the Gospel of Matthew, from biblegateway.com. Then, go read the gospel, with two different highlighters in hand, one yellow and the other green. Highlight every time Jesus talks about hell with one color and highlight heaven every time He talks about heaven with the other. This exercise won’t demonstrate that hell is more important than heaven. But it will show that Jesus wanted us to have a clear understanding about the eternal stakes involved in our lives and the lives of those we love when it comes to following Him or not.
Clearly, Jesus believed in the reality of a state of total, eternal separation from God, the Giver of Life.
Second, God doesn’t want anyone to be condemned or separated from Him.
In the Old Testament, God says through His prophet Ezekiel: “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?” (Ezekiel 18:23)
The whole point of God calling Israel into being was that it would be a light to the nations, pointing the whole world to a saving relationship that only the God we meet in Jesus Christ can give.
The whole point of Jesus coming to earth and dying on the cross, was to save us from separation from God, to save us for life with God.
Third, the Bible shows us that there are many nice people in this world who will choose hell over life with God, heaven.
Do you remember Jesus’ encounter with the rich young man in Matthew 19:16-22? By all appearances, this young man was a nice person. He evidently believed that God is real and kept the commandments that have to do with caring for one’s neighbor.
But Jesus said that the young man lacked something. Jesus could see that the young man’s idol, taking the place of God in his life, was money and possessions. Elsewhere, you know, Jesus says that if anything in our lives causes us to sin, we need to remove it from our lives. So, Jesus tells the man to sell everything he has, give it to the poor, and then, follow Him.
Matthew tells us that: “When the young man [that nice young man] heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.” We don’t know what happened later in that young man’s life. But we do know that as of Matthew 19:22, he had chosen hell over heaven. And Jesus didn’t stop him.
Jesus won’t stop anyone from choosing hell. Truth be known, hell is our default choice as human beings anyway. Unless the saving Word of Jesus Christ is shared with us and the Holy Spirit is unleashed in us through Baptism or the prayers of caring Christians, you and I wouldn’t even be able to believe in the God revealed in Jesus. [1 Corinthians 12:3; Romans 10:17]
As a result, many people think that their own goodness will be “good enough.” But at the judgment, there will be no such thing as “good enough”: We will either be covered in the forgiveness of Jesus, washed clean by the blood He shed on the cross; or, we will stand naked in our sins before God. And facing God naked in our sins at the judgment, friends, won’t be good enough.
So, does a loving God send people who don’t believe in him to hell?
The answer, I think, is “Yes and no.”
God loves us and wants us to be with Him forever. But He doesn’t force heaven on us.
Just as good parents let go of their adult children, God lets us go.
As Jesus puts it in John 3:18: “Whoever believes in [God’s only Son] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”
Effectively paraphrasing Jesus, C.S. Lewis writes: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell choose it.”
Like Lewis, I would love to be able to tell people that no one will go to hell. It would make me more popular. Sadly though, it wouldn’t be the truth.
But it's not because the loving God we know in Jesus Christ sends people to hell. God lets those go to hell who refuse to believe that they need saving or that they need Christ to save them.
If that seems as tragic to you as it does to me--more importantly, if it seems as tragic to you as it does to God--then it ought to give greater urgency to all of us doing the one and only job Christ has given His Church: sharing the good news of forgiven sin and everlasting life through faith in Jesus Christ alone with everyone we know, making disciples.
Let’s pray and work on that one mission together and individually, every day. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This was the message for this evening's midweek Lenten service. It's the third installment of a Lenten series, Tough Questions.]
John 3:16-18
The latest Pew Research polling I’ve seen says that 72% of the American people believe that there is a heaven and 58% say that there is a hell.
Of course, it doesn’t really matter what we think. There are simply some things in life that are facts, whether we like them or not.
The Bible and Jesus Himself affirm that heaven and hell are real...and it doesn’t matter if 3 in 10 don’t believe in one or that 4 in 10 don’t believe in the other. To not believe those two things is to call Jesus a liar and a liar could hardly be a trustworthy Savior.
Nonetheless, Christians and non-Christians alike wrestle with our tough question for tonight: How can a loving God send people to hell?
As Christians, we wrestle with it, of course, because the entire record of God’s self-disclosure as found in Scripture and as seen in Jesus, supports the assertion of 1 John 4:8: “God is love.”
The creation of which you and I are a part argues that God is loving. This universe is, when you think about it, completely unnecessary. God is totally self-sufficient. He didn’t need to give life to the universe. Yet He created we human beings in His image and placed us in a creation which, though marred by our sin, still retains the marks of a Creator intent on providing us with everything we could ever need or want.
Just as husbands and wives who care for each other don’t really need children, yet choose to have children anyway in order to give fulfillment and greater expression to their love, God, Who doesn’t need us, created us to give fulfillment and expression to His love.
But we see the ultimate expression of God’s loving nature in the Person and work of God the Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus told Nicodemus: “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. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” [John 3:16-17]
You and I deserve death and condemnation for our sin. But Jesus took the punishment we deserve so that all who turn from sin and surrender to Him will have eternal life with God. Only love can explain why an innocent Savior voluntarily bore death in order to save people who don’t deserve saving, in order to give life to those who, without Him, would be separated from God, the Source of life, for all eternity.
“Yes,” we may say, “I believe that God is loving. But what about hell? Would a loving God send anyone to hell?” This appears to be the attitude of many interviewed by Pew Research; more people are willing to believe in heaven than they are to believe in hell.
In answer to our question for tonight, I point to a few facts.
First, Jesus talked three times as much about hell as He did about heaven.
If you don’t believe me, print, say, the Gospel of Matthew, from biblegateway.com. Then, go read the gospel, with two different highlighters in hand, one yellow and the other green. Highlight every time Jesus talks about hell with one color and highlight heaven every time He talks about heaven with the other. This exercise won’t demonstrate that hell is more important than heaven. But it will show that Jesus wanted us to have a clear understanding about the eternal stakes involved in our lives and the lives of those we love when it comes to following Him or not.
Clearly, Jesus believed in the reality of a state of total, eternal separation from God, the Giver of Life.
Second, God doesn’t want anyone to be condemned or separated from Him.
In the Old Testament, God says through His prophet Ezekiel: “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?” (Ezekiel 18:23)
The whole point of God calling Israel into being was that it would be a light to the nations, pointing the whole world to a saving relationship that only the God we meet in Jesus Christ can give.
The whole point of Jesus coming to earth and dying on the cross, was to save us from separation from God, to save us for life with God.
Third, the Bible shows us that there are many nice people in this world who will choose hell over life with God, heaven.
Do you remember Jesus’ encounter with the rich young man in Matthew 19:16-22? By all appearances, this young man was a nice person. He evidently believed that God is real and kept the commandments that have to do with caring for one’s neighbor.
But Jesus said that the young man lacked something. Jesus could see that the young man’s idol, taking the place of God in his life, was money and possessions. Elsewhere, you know, Jesus says that if anything in our lives causes us to sin, we need to remove it from our lives. So, Jesus tells the man to sell everything he has, give it to the poor, and then, follow Him.
Matthew tells us that: “When the young man [that nice young man] heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.” We don’t know what happened later in that young man’s life. But we do know that as of Matthew 19:22, he had chosen hell over heaven. And Jesus didn’t stop him.
Jesus won’t stop anyone from choosing hell. Truth be known, hell is our default choice as human beings anyway. Unless the saving Word of Jesus Christ is shared with us and the Holy Spirit is unleashed in us through Baptism or the prayers of caring Christians, you and I wouldn’t even be able to believe in the God revealed in Jesus. [1 Corinthians 12:3; Romans 10:17]
As a result, many people think that their own goodness will be “good enough.” But at the judgment, there will be no such thing as “good enough”: We will either be covered in the forgiveness of Jesus, washed clean by the blood He shed on the cross; or, we will stand naked in our sins before God. And facing God naked in our sins at the judgment, friends, won’t be good enough.
So, does a loving God send people who don’t believe in him to hell?
The answer, I think, is “Yes and no.”
God loves us and wants us to be with Him forever. But He doesn’t force heaven on us.
Just as good parents let go of their adult children, God lets us go.
As Jesus puts it in John 3:18: “Whoever believes in [God’s only Son] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”
Effectively paraphrasing Jesus, C.S. Lewis writes: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell choose it.”
Like Lewis, I would love to be able to tell people that no one will go to hell. It would make me more popular. Sadly though, it wouldn’t be the truth.
But it's not because the loving God we know in Jesus Christ sends people to hell. God lets those go to hell who refuse to believe that they need saving or that they need Christ to save them.
If that seems as tragic to you as it does to me--more importantly, if it seems as tragic to you as it does to God--then it ought to give greater urgency to all of us doing the one and only job Christ has given His Church: sharing the good news of forgiven sin and everlasting life through faith in Jesus Christ alone with everyone we know, making disciples.
Let’s pray and work on that one mission together and individually, every day. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This was the message for this evening's midweek Lenten service. It's the third installment of a Lenten series, Tough Questions.]
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Giving (Part 5, Reaching Up, Reaching In, Reaching Out)
[This was shared during midweek Lenten worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, earlier today.]
Malachi 3:8-10
Luke 6:38
If a skeptical friend were to ask us as Christians what we think is God’s most basic character trait, we probably would say love. After all, 1 John 4:8 tells us, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” At the very center of God's character then, is love.
“But how,” our friend might ask us, “do we know that about God?”
More than anything, we see that God loves not by His words, but in His giving.
God gave life to us, a gift none of us deserved.
And when the human race fell into the condition of sin, separation from God, that brought death, God wasn’t done giving. Every Christian knows 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.”
We know about God’s love because God gives.
And when we become Jesus’ disciples--when we let Jesus reign over our lives--we’re called reach out to others in Christ’s name through lives that reflect the generosity God has shown to us.
Giving involves our whole beings: giving our time, commitment, energy, for example.
But giving does involve money too.
Personally, this has been a hard part of my faith in Christ to live out. For lots of reasons, by the time I hit my teens, I was a tightwad.
I could list all sorts of contributing factors, but there’s really a simple explanation for the stinginess that characterized my young adult years: I was an atheist then and didn’t know that my brain and my brawn, the means by which I earned my income, came from God and therefore, everything I had was a gift from God.
But even after I came to faith at age 23, giving was hard for me.
And yet, in response to God’s love in Christ, we are to be generous.
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers,” the apostle Paul writes in Romans 12:1, “by the mercies of God, to present [or give] your bodies [your whole selves] as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”
We read statements like this and think, “If I give myself and my money away, there will be less for me.”
But when we think that, we underestimate our God.
When it comes to the provision, love, and grace of God, there’s always more where that came from.
We can never outgive God!
In Old Testament times, God’s people were commanded to give the first 10% of their income-a tithe-to support the priests at the temple. But in the whole history of ancient Israel, the people rarely did that. It was true that many of the priests were corrupt. So, they may have thought they had a good excuse for not giving the tithe.
But, the corruption of the prophets didn’t invalidate God’s command that His ancient people give in response to His grace.
In Malachi 3:8-10, God tells His people: “Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me. But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’ In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,' says the Lord Almighty, 'and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.'”
This is the only place in Scripture where God tells His people to test Him. Be generous, part with what you don’t think you can part with, God was saying, and see if I don’t look after you.
God isn’t commending the “prosperity gospel” peddled by some televangelists here. He’s not saying, “GIve me 10% of your income and I’ll make you a millionaire.”
He is saying that giving is a way in which we express thanks to Him for grace and a way in which we express faith in God’s ability to keep caring for eternity.
In fact, our faith and our joy in the Lord tend to grow in proportion to the ways in which give we give of ourselves to the causes of loving God, loving others, and making disciples. In Luke 6:38, Jesus says: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
Through the years, God has sent me living examples of giving disciples for me to imitate.
At the church I served in Cincinnati, we used to have a message in the worship bulletins: “We ask our guests not to make an offering. It’s our privilege to welcome you today.” That message was wrong for several reasons. (And I was the one who insisted it needed to be included in the bulletin!) One is that it saw the church in institutional terms, as though the offerings we give in worship are all about the care and feeding of the church as an institution.
Much of our offerings do go to support the work that congregations do to fulfill Christ’s great commission of making disciples. But more than anything, we give because as believers in Christ, we need to give. Giving takes our attention off of ourselves and puts it onto God and neighbor. Giving also expresses our trust in God.
It was a woman who began worshiping with us at our church in Cincinnati who taught me that. The first time she worshiped with us, she saw that message--“We ask our guests not to make an offering. It’s our privilege to welcome you today"--and thought, “There is no way you’re going to keep me from making an offering.”
That's because years before, she had left an abusive marriage, was raising a young child on her own, and was working a job that allowed her to barely eke out a living. But she knew that God was sustaining her through her challenges and she decided then that she would join a church and give, even of her money, 10% of her meager income. The New Testament doesn’t designate a required amount for our giving, but what that woman found, as she later told me, was that as she trusted God, “God took care of 100% of my needs on 90% of my income.” That lesson stuck with me.
Our call is to reach up, reach in, and reach out because we follow a God Who saves us by grace through faith in Christ.
When we give, whether to the Church or to mission agencies or to people in need, we give praise, worship, and honor to the God Who shows His love for us in how much He gives to us. We trust Him to take care of all our needs--to provide our daily bread--even as we dare to give. Amen
Malachi 3:8-10
Luke 6:38
If a skeptical friend were to ask us as Christians what we think is God’s most basic character trait, we probably would say love. After all, 1 John 4:8 tells us, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” At the very center of God's character then, is love.
“But how,” our friend might ask us, “do we know that about God?”
More than anything, we see that God loves not by His words, but in His giving.
God gave life to us, a gift none of us deserved.
And when the human race fell into the condition of sin, separation from God, that brought death, God wasn’t done giving. Every Christian knows 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.”
We know about God’s love because God gives.
And when we become Jesus’ disciples--when we let Jesus reign over our lives--we’re called reach out to others in Christ’s name through lives that reflect the generosity God has shown to us.
Giving involves our whole beings: giving our time, commitment, energy, for example.
But giving does involve money too.
Personally, this has been a hard part of my faith in Christ to live out. For lots of reasons, by the time I hit my teens, I was a tightwad.
I could list all sorts of contributing factors, but there’s really a simple explanation for the stinginess that characterized my young adult years: I was an atheist then and didn’t know that my brain and my brawn, the means by which I earned my income, came from God and therefore, everything I had was a gift from God.
But even after I came to faith at age 23, giving was hard for me.
And yet, in response to God’s love in Christ, we are to be generous.
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers,” the apostle Paul writes in Romans 12:1, “by the mercies of God, to present [or give] your bodies [your whole selves] as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”
We read statements like this and think, “If I give myself and my money away, there will be less for me.”
But when we think that, we underestimate our God.
When it comes to the provision, love, and grace of God, there’s always more where that came from.
We can never outgive God!
In Old Testament times, God’s people were commanded to give the first 10% of their income-a tithe-to support the priests at the temple. But in the whole history of ancient Israel, the people rarely did that. It was true that many of the priests were corrupt. So, they may have thought they had a good excuse for not giving the tithe.
But, the corruption of the prophets didn’t invalidate God’s command that His ancient people give in response to His grace.
In Malachi 3:8-10, God tells His people: “Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me. But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’ In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,' says the Lord Almighty, 'and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.'”
This is the only place in Scripture where God tells His people to test Him. Be generous, part with what you don’t think you can part with, God was saying, and see if I don’t look after you.
God isn’t commending the “prosperity gospel” peddled by some televangelists here. He’s not saying, “GIve me 10% of your income and I’ll make you a millionaire.”
He is saying that giving is a way in which we express thanks to Him for grace and a way in which we express faith in God’s ability to keep caring for eternity.
In fact, our faith and our joy in the Lord tend to grow in proportion to the ways in which give we give of ourselves to the causes of loving God, loving others, and making disciples. In Luke 6:38, Jesus says: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
Through the years, God has sent me living examples of giving disciples for me to imitate.
At the church I served in Cincinnati, we used to have a message in the worship bulletins: “We ask our guests not to make an offering. It’s our privilege to welcome you today.” That message was wrong for several reasons. (And I was the one who insisted it needed to be included in the bulletin!) One is that it saw the church in institutional terms, as though the offerings we give in worship are all about the care and feeding of the church as an institution.
Much of our offerings do go to support the work that congregations do to fulfill Christ’s great commission of making disciples. But more than anything, we give because as believers in Christ, we need to give. Giving takes our attention off of ourselves and puts it onto God and neighbor. Giving also expresses our trust in God.
It was a woman who began worshiping with us at our church in Cincinnati who taught me that. The first time she worshiped with us, she saw that message--“We ask our guests not to make an offering. It’s our privilege to welcome you today"--and thought, “There is no way you’re going to keep me from making an offering.”
That's because years before, she had left an abusive marriage, was raising a young child on her own, and was working a job that allowed her to barely eke out a living. But she knew that God was sustaining her through her challenges and she decided then that she would join a church and give, even of her money, 10% of her meager income. The New Testament doesn’t designate a required amount for our giving, but what that woman found, as she later told me, was that as she trusted God, “God took care of 100% of my needs on 90% of my income.” That lesson stuck with me.
Our call is to reach up, reach in, and reach out because we follow a God Who saves us by grace through faith in Christ.
When we give, whether to the Church or to mission agencies or to people in need, we give praise, worship, and honor to the God Who shows His love for us in how much He gives to us. We trust Him to take care of all our needs--to provide our daily bread--even as we dare to give. Amen
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Why Does God Command Us to Love Him?
To put it simply, God doesn’t need our love. While speaking to the people in the marketplace in first century Athens, the apostle Paul noted: "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.”
God doesn’t need for us to love Him. God isn’t some self-absorbed egomaniac needing constant reassurance that He’s the apple of our eyes. God has all the love He could ever need or ever want within Himself, the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The New Testament tells us that, “God is love,” which doesn’t mean that God is some abstraction called love. It means that love informs every aspect of God's character and personality. Love is the motive behind everything God does--including judgment and discipline, including giving us the freedom to walk away from Him, including the cross and the empty tomb.
Out of an extravagance of love, though He didn’t need to do it, God gave us life and made us in His image.
The Old Testament says that we are the apple of God’s eye, the object of His passion and commitment and concern. That’s why, after humanity fell into sin, God set to work to save us from our sin--to save us from ourselves--and to save us from the death we deserve by becoming one of us in Jesus Christ, then dying and rising, so that all who repent and believe in Christ have life with God that begins now in this imperfect world and is “brought to perfection in the world to come.”
The fact is that God commands us to love Him not because He needs to be loved by us, but because we need to love Him.
When we love God, we simply acknowledge the reality that He is God and we aren’t, that He made us and that our lives are completely in His hands. We acknowledge that all of life is a gift from Him. And with gratitude, we acknowledge the depths of His passion for us, a passion that led Him to submit to suffering and death on the cross for us.
Friday, November 28, 2014
When Love Comes to Town By U2 and B.B. King
"When love comes to town I'm gonna jump that train
"When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame.
"Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
"But I did what I did before love came to town."
Before love comes to our town, before love becomes real to us, before it singes us with its power and starts the painful work of transforming us gut deep, we're prone to thoughtless betrayal of those who love us and who, we realize too late, we both love and were always called to love.
Yet love, true love, the love that has only one source, can conquer any divide. It can make war on our selfish impulses. "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).
"I was there when they crucified my Lord
"I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword.
"I threw the dice when they pierced his side
"But I've seen love conquer the great divide."
First though, we must surrender to it. "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved..." (Acts 16:31)
And we need to keep surrendering to it "...because of the prevalent disregard of God's law the love of the great majority will grow cold; but those who stand firm to the End shall be saved." (Matthew 16:12-13)
[See here.]
"When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame.
"Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
"But I did what I did before love came to town."
Before love comes to our town, before love becomes real to us, before it singes us with its power and starts the painful work of transforming us gut deep, we're prone to thoughtless betrayal of those who love us and who, we realize too late, we both love and were always called to love.
Yet love, true love, the love that has only one source, can conquer any divide. It can make war on our selfish impulses. "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).
"I was there when they crucified my Lord
"I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword.
"I threw the dice when they pierced his side
"But I've seen love conquer the great divide."
First though, we must surrender to it. "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved..." (Acts 16:31)
And we need to keep surrendering to it "...because of the prevalent disregard of God's law the love of the great majority will grow cold; but those who stand firm to the End shall be saved." (Matthew 16:12-13)
[See here.]
Monday, June 16, 2014
Why the Trinity is Important
[This was prepared to be shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, yesterday.]
Matthew 28:16-20
Today is Holy Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost.
When I was a boy, about eight, I remember going to my Mom and asking for an explanation of the Trinity, of how God could be one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Mom punted. She told me to ask our pastor, which I did.
I asked him to explain the Trinity. “Mark,” he said, “think of water. It can come in the form of a liquid, a solid (in water’s case, ice), or gas (in this case, steam). But whatever form it takes, it’s always water. Three in one.”
That helped somewhat. But the problem with that analogy is that as Christians, we don’t believe that God takes on different forms as though God were engaged in some eternal Halloween party, changing His costume from time to time.
We confess that God is always one and always three. God is always one being; God is always three persons.
Fact is, no analogy we draw is going to exactly explain something as mysterious as the Trinity. And, of course, only God can really understand it. It’s HIS reality, after all. How could we ever get that?
But the very notion of the Trinity is so difficult for us to get our brains wrapped around that some people give up on even talking about it. I heard one pastor, for example, say that the Trinity was difficult to understand, he'd decided to never talk about the subject.
But as I’ve gotten to know God better through the pages of Scripture, the fellowship of believers, and the Lord’s Supper, I’ve come to agree with a Presbyterian friend of mine (a petroleum engineer who’s a very good theologian) who wrote on his blog a few years ago, that there may be nothing more important for us to try to “get” as Christians than the Trinity.
Not the Trinity as a doctrine to be memorized.
Not the Trinity as a teaching propped up by arcane and sometimes meaningless analogies.
But the Trinity as a reality, the Trinity as something centrally important to how you and I live every day, the Trinity as a template for how to truly live as human beings.
The word “Trinity” is never used in the Bible. But repeatedly, by inference in the Old Testament and in plain words in the New Testament, the Bible affirms that three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are co-equal, co-eternal personalities of the one and only God the universe.
For example, in our first lesson, from Genesis, God the Spirit brings the life of the universe into being.
In our second lesson, recounting the apostle Peter recalls how ancient King David referred to the Messiah--the Christ--Who would come centuries after his own death as Lord.
And, look, please at today’s Gospel lesson. It contains the Great Commission. In verse 19, Jesus says: “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...” Jesus is putting Himself and the Holy Spirit on the same level as God the Father.
The Gospels also tell us that Jesus makes a point of placing Himself on an equal footing with God the Father many times.
“Before Abraham was,” He told skeptical followers, “I AM.” (“Before Abraham was,” in other words, “Yahweh,” using the Name with which God identified Himself to Moses and ancient Israel.)
“I and the Father are one,” He claims.
“Anyone who has seen Me,” He says, “you have seen the Father.”
Yet, Jesus isn’t suggesting that there are two or three Gods over the universe. Like centuries of Jews before and since, Jesus affirmed the truth of Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”
So, without ever using the word trinity, the Bible affirms that God is one God in three persons. By now, you may be crying, "Uncle! Enough already. The Bible teaches that God is one God in three Persons. So what?"
For those who recently read Mere Christianity, some what I’m about to say will sound familiar, but let me suggest why I think it’s so important.
You’ve heard the phrase: “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.” We find that funny because we know that there is no validity to our claims of being loving people in general if we are unwilling to love particular people in particular.
Love at its most basic level is not about affectionate feelings.
It’s not about an attitude of heart.
Love is a commitment to willing and doing what is best for the beloved.
Love that isn’t lived out practically isn’t love.
You can’t be loving if there is no object of your love. (Hang with me now.)
One of the most famous passages of the New Testament is 1 John 4:8, which says, in part, “God is love.” Now, John didn't write, "Love is God." God is not an abstraction. Nor is God tolerant of all our behaviors. Much of what we human beings is sinful and of those behaviors, God is completely intolerant, even though He never stops loving us.
In these three little words, John isn't giving us a rationale for doing whatever we want, irrespective of the will of God.
No, in saying that, "God is love," John is making an eternal statement about an eternal God.
Before God created the heavens and the earth, before Jesus died and rose so that all who believe in Him may be freed of their sins, before the Holy Spirit formed the Church, God is, God was, and God will be eternally loving. Love is at the core of God’s character and being.
But, that raises a question: Who did God love before the beginning?
The answer, I think, is that in eternity, before there was time, before there was a creation, God was already loving others. God the Father loved God the Son and God the Spirit and God the Son and God the Spirit each loved the other two members of the Trinity, have done so and will do so for all eternity.
Even the existence of this universe in which we live at least suggests that God is one, but is more than one person.
When I was twenty-five, we’d been married for five years and my parents were growing impatient. Where, they wondered, were the grandchildren we were supposed to be coming up with? Then, my dad, father of five kids, decided to have a heart to heart with me. He told me that if I were looking for the right time or the right reason for having children, to forget it. There’s never a right time. There’s never a good reason.
And that’s the point. Love doesn’t need a right time or a good reason. It’s in the very nature of love to forgo convenience to self and to give, to serve, to love, to stand by, to live for, even, if necessary, to die for. God has always known how to love.
He exists in what the theologians call a "triune" relationship of perfect love and doesn’t need more love. He’s always loved perfectly. He's always been loved. God doesn't need love. Honestly, He doesn't really need us.
But, because God is infinite and eternal in His love, God loved the universe into being. God the Word, Christ, spoke into the darkness and chaos and God the Spirit wended His Word and life sprang up.
We are the product of God’s love, unnecessary but loved nonetheless, superfluous but cherished.
Today, the Holy Trinity calls us to follow Christ right into the center of His loving fellowship. He calls us into a new relationship of love with Him and all that He has made. Sin and death and isolation from God and from others will be the last word over every human life unless people are washed clean of sin and made new through repentance and faith in Christ. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
Christ calls us into life abundant and eternal.
But there is no life without love.
This is no biological observation: the unloved child, abused by her or his parents isn’t experiencing life; the couple in a loveless marriage aren’t living; the teen subjected to bullying and putdowns is experiencing a love deficit that is, inherently, a life deficit; the visitors ignored when they worship at a church they’ve never been to before are being treated both lovelessly and as though they weren’t even alive.
And this is why the Trinity is such an important reality for us to experience.
We live in a fractured, fractious world. People are divided and often hateful. Love of neighbors, including love of our enemies, is a rare thing. It’s so rare, it seems, that only Jesus and the people who, by faith, draw life from Jesus really live it. God has created the Church, the fellowship of believers in Christ, to make disciples and to usher believers into a community of love that fills us with the power of God to move toward being the loving people we were made to be and promises us eternal fellowship with God and others. In the Garden of Gethsemane before His arrest, Jesus prayed to God the Father that all who followed Him, “may be one...just as you are in me and I am in you...” God wants us to live in the same selfless fellowship with others He has always known. That’s what Jesus died and rose to give to those who dare to believe in Him.
If all of this sounds airy and theoretical, removed from the hard realities of your life, consider what C.S. Lewis memorably says about how the Holy Spirit is involved in every prayer offered in the Name of Jesus, even the simplest prayers:
God in His fullness, Who cares about us even though He doesn’t have to, Who is able to stand with us in every experience, also makes it possible for us to experience fellowship, community, with Him and with His family, the Church.
This is why the Church is so important. Only the Church has been designated to connect people with the Trinity.
And in a world filled with the idea of mashing others into oblivion and lifting ourselves to the top, of crushing and being crushed by selfishness and self-will, we need the liberation from self and the connection to God and to others that only the Holy Trinity can give us.
We need, truly, more than anything else, love that changes our hearts, our minds, and our eternities.
And only the God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can give it. Amen
Matthew 28:16-20
Today is Holy Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost.
When I was a boy, about eight, I remember going to my Mom and asking for an explanation of the Trinity, of how God could be one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Mom punted. She told me to ask our pastor, which I did.
I asked him to explain the Trinity. “Mark,” he said, “think of water. It can come in the form of a liquid, a solid (in water’s case, ice), or gas (in this case, steam). But whatever form it takes, it’s always water. Three in one.”
That helped somewhat. But the problem with that analogy is that as Christians, we don’t believe that God takes on different forms as though God were engaged in some eternal Halloween party, changing His costume from time to time.
We confess that God is always one and always three. God is always one being; God is always three persons.
Fact is, no analogy we draw is going to exactly explain something as mysterious as the Trinity. And, of course, only God can really understand it. It’s HIS reality, after all. How could we ever get that?
But the very notion of the Trinity is so difficult for us to get our brains wrapped around that some people give up on even talking about it. I heard one pastor, for example, say that the Trinity was difficult to understand, he'd decided to never talk about the subject.
But as I’ve gotten to know God better through the pages of Scripture, the fellowship of believers, and the Lord’s Supper, I’ve come to agree with a Presbyterian friend of mine (a petroleum engineer who’s a very good theologian) who wrote on his blog a few years ago, that there may be nothing more important for us to try to “get” as Christians than the Trinity.
Not the Trinity as a doctrine to be memorized.
Not the Trinity as a teaching propped up by arcane and sometimes meaningless analogies.
But the Trinity as a reality, the Trinity as something centrally important to how you and I live every day, the Trinity as a template for how to truly live as human beings.
The word “Trinity” is never used in the Bible. But repeatedly, by inference in the Old Testament and in plain words in the New Testament, the Bible affirms that three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are co-equal, co-eternal personalities of the one and only God the universe.
For example, in our first lesson, from Genesis, God the Spirit brings the life of the universe into being.
In our second lesson, recounting the apostle Peter recalls how ancient King David referred to the Messiah--the Christ--Who would come centuries after his own death as Lord.
And, look, please at today’s Gospel lesson. It contains the Great Commission. In verse 19, Jesus says: “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...” Jesus is putting Himself and the Holy Spirit on the same level as God the Father.
The Gospels also tell us that Jesus makes a point of placing Himself on an equal footing with God the Father many times.
“Before Abraham was,” He told skeptical followers, “I AM.” (“Before Abraham was,” in other words, “Yahweh,” using the Name with which God identified Himself to Moses and ancient Israel.)
“I and the Father are one,” He claims.
“Anyone who has seen Me,” He says, “you have seen the Father.”
Yet, Jesus isn’t suggesting that there are two or three Gods over the universe. Like centuries of Jews before and since, Jesus affirmed the truth of Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”
So, without ever using the word trinity, the Bible affirms that God is one God in three persons. By now, you may be crying, "Uncle! Enough already. The Bible teaches that God is one God in three Persons. So what?"
For those who recently read Mere Christianity, some what I’m about to say will sound familiar, but let me suggest why I think it’s so important.
You’ve heard the phrase: “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.” We find that funny because we know that there is no validity to our claims of being loving people in general if we are unwilling to love particular people in particular.
Love at its most basic level is not about affectionate feelings.
It’s not about an attitude of heart.
Love is a commitment to willing and doing what is best for the beloved.
Love that isn’t lived out practically isn’t love.
You can’t be loving if there is no object of your love. (Hang with me now.)
One of the most famous passages of the New Testament is 1 John 4:8, which says, in part, “God is love.” Now, John didn't write, "Love is God." God is not an abstraction. Nor is God tolerant of all our behaviors. Much of what we human beings is sinful and of those behaviors, God is completely intolerant, even though He never stops loving us.
In these three little words, John isn't giving us a rationale for doing whatever we want, irrespective of the will of God.
No, in saying that, "God is love," John is making an eternal statement about an eternal God.
Before God created the heavens and the earth, before Jesus died and rose so that all who believe in Him may be freed of their sins, before the Holy Spirit formed the Church, God is, God was, and God will be eternally loving. Love is at the core of God’s character and being.
But, that raises a question: Who did God love before the beginning?
The answer, I think, is that in eternity, before there was time, before there was a creation, God was already loving others. God the Father loved God the Son and God the Spirit and God the Son and God the Spirit each loved the other two members of the Trinity, have done so and will do so for all eternity.
Even the existence of this universe in which we live at least suggests that God is one, but is more than one person.
When I was twenty-five, we’d been married for five years and my parents were growing impatient. Where, they wondered, were the grandchildren we were supposed to be coming up with? Then, my dad, father of five kids, decided to have a heart to heart with me. He told me that if I were looking for the right time or the right reason for having children, to forget it. There’s never a right time. There’s never a good reason.
And that’s the point. Love doesn’t need a right time or a good reason. It’s in the very nature of love to forgo convenience to self and to give, to serve, to love, to stand by, to live for, even, if necessary, to die for. God has always known how to love.
He exists in what the theologians call a "triune" relationship of perfect love and doesn’t need more love. He’s always loved perfectly. He's always been loved. God doesn't need love. Honestly, He doesn't really need us.
But, because God is infinite and eternal in His love, God loved the universe into being. God the Word, Christ, spoke into the darkness and chaos and God the Spirit wended His Word and life sprang up.
We are the product of God’s love, unnecessary but loved nonetheless, superfluous but cherished.
Today, the Holy Trinity calls us to follow Christ right into the center of His loving fellowship. He calls us into a new relationship of love with Him and all that He has made. Sin and death and isolation from God and from others will be the last word over every human life unless people are washed clean of sin and made new through repentance and faith in Christ. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
Christ calls us into life abundant and eternal.
But there is no life without love.
This is no biological observation: the unloved child, abused by her or his parents isn’t experiencing life; the couple in a loveless marriage aren’t living; the teen subjected to bullying and putdowns is experiencing a love deficit that is, inherently, a life deficit; the visitors ignored when they worship at a church they’ve never been to before are being treated both lovelessly and as though they weren’t even alive.
And this is why the Trinity is such an important reality for us to experience.
We live in a fractured, fractious world. People are divided and often hateful. Love of neighbors, including love of our enemies, is a rare thing. It’s so rare, it seems, that only Jesus and the people who, by faith, draw life from Jesus really live it. God has created the Church, the fellowship of believers in Christ, to make disciples and to usher believers into a community of love that fills us with the power of God to move toward being the loving people we were made to be and promises us eternal fellowship with God and others. In the Garden of Gethsemane before His arrest, Jesus prayed to God the Father that all who followed Him, “may be one...just as you are in me and I am in you...” God wants us to live in the same selfless fellowship with others He has always known. That’s what Jesus died and rose to give to those who dare to believe in Him.
If all of this sounds airy and theoretical, removed from the hard realities of your life, consider what C.S. Lewis memorably says about how the Holy Spirit is involved in every prayer offered in the Name of Jesus, even the simplest prayers:
An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God [God the Father]. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God so to speak, inside him [God the Holy Spirit]. But he also knows that all real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God [God the Son]— that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying — the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on — the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. The whole threefold life of the three-personal Being [all three Persons of the Trinity] is actually going on in that ordinary act of prayer.The Holy Trinity can make a difference in our everyday lives if we will be open to His threefold ministry to us.
God in His fullness, Who cares about us even though He doesn’t have to, Who is able to stand with us in every experience, also makes it possible for us to experience fellowship, community, with Him and with His family, the Church.
This is why the Church is so important. Only the Church has been designated to connect people with the Trinity.
And in a world filled with the idea of mashing others into oblivion and lifting ourselves to the top, of crushing and being crushed by selfishness and self-will, we need the liberation from self and the connection to God and to others that only the Holy Trinity can give us.
We need, truly, more than anything else, love that changes our hearts, our minds, and our eternities.
And only the God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can give it. Amen
Sunday, March 09, 2014
Loving God
[This was prepared to be shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, during worship this morning.]
Matthew 22:36-40
Fads blaze in and out of life in the Church world as surely as they do in the realms of business, education, medicine, movies, and teenage music. All the time, it seems, someone selling a book or a DVD or a whole program with claims of having the silver bullets that will transform the lives of churches and individual believers, helping congregations to find and pursue their missions, and grow in all the ways God intends.
And some parts of those products and programs may actually help churches. After all, even a stopped clock, as they say, is right two times a day.
But, the problem is that often once churches and pastors adopt such programs, however well-intentioned, their lives effectively demonstrate that where they claim to believe in Jesus, they really believe in the mission statement, or the program, or the book, or the church growth guru, or the computer algorithm. Yet Jesus says, “I will build My church.”
The Church doesn’t need fads or new mission statements or DVDs or programs to know what its mission should be. Jesus, true God and true man, Who endured the condemnation for sin we deserved when He submitted to death on the cross, then sprung alive from the grave so that He can give us reconciliation with God, forgiveness of sin, power for living today, and eternity with God to all who repent and believe in Him as their only God and King, has already laid out the mission of the Church and the mission of Christ in plain language.
In three passages in the Gospels, Jesus defines the mission of every Christian congregation and of every Christian.
What He commands in these three passages is so impossible for us to do that unless we live in constant faithful dependence on Him, unless we constantly and regularly receive His grace and power as we pray in Jesus’ Name, worship Him with other believers, and receive His forgiveness and presence in Holy Communion, we simply will not be able to live the fivefold mission Jesus has given to us in these three key passages of Scripture.
As we begin this journey into deeper discipleship this Lenten season, let’s leave behind any notions of silver bullets or special programs that create instant discipleship or an instantly faithful and effective congregation.
If we as a congregation want to be all that Christ has in mind for us to be and if we as individual Christians want to live with the hope and peace that God has in mind for us, we must be attentive to the five building blocks for Christian living and mission that Jesus gives us in these three passages.
Let’s take a look at each of the three passages briefly.
The first is what we call the Great Commandment, found in Matthew 22:36-40. (Page 692 in the sanctuary Bibles.) A man asks Jesus, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Here, Jesus quotes two Old Testament passages which, taken together, summarize the two tables of the Ten Commandments, the first three deal with our relationship with God and the latter seven dealing with our relationship with our neighbors.
The second passage in which Jesus gives us our mission as congregation and individuals is referred to as the Great Commission, Matthew 28:18-20. (Page 698 in the Bibles.) The resurrected Jesus tells the 11 remaining apostles just before ascending to heaven: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go 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 surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."
Notice how frequently Jesus uses the word all here: God the Father ceded all authority to Him and Jesus in turn gives us authority in His Name to make disciples of all people and to teach them everything (another word for all) about Jesus, His commands, and the new and everlasting life He offers to all people who trust in Him.
The third passage that gives us our mission is the New Commandment, John 13:34-35. (Page 751 in the Bibles.) Speaking to His disciples during the Last Supper, Jesus says to His Church: "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
Here, Jesus commands us to love our fellow disciples because doing so authenticates the reality of our faith and that we really have been made new by the grace of Christ.
This doesn't mean we will never disagree. Someone has said that if two people agree on everything, at least one of them is irrelevant. We will have disagreements with one another in the Church; that doesn't mean we don't keep loving each other!
The five building blocks by which Christ builds His Church are seen in these three passages. They were the focal point of our church-wide vision and mission retreat in January.
They will continue to inform everything we do as a congregation and can help us all become the followers of Jesus--the disciples of Christ--we are called to be and that we all want to be.
The building blocks are:
Today, our focus is on loving God. Jesus says, quoting Moses’ sermon in Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
Jesus, Who, after all is also God, says that this “the first and greatest commandment.”
Why does God need our love?
And why should we love Him?
And what does it mean to love God?
Let’s take each of those questions in order. Why does God need our love?
To put it simply, God doesn’t need our love. While speaking to the people in the marketplace in first century Athens, the apostle Paul noted: "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.”
God doesn’t need for us to love Him. God isn’t some self-absorbed egomaniac needing constant reassurance that He’s the apple of our eyes. God has all the love He could ever need or ever want within Himself, the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The New Testament tells us that, “God is love,” which doesn’t mean that God is some abstraction called love. It means that love informs every aspect of God's character and personality. Love is the motive behind everything God does--including judgment and discipline, including giving us the freedom to walk away from Him, including the cross and the empty tomb.
Out of an extravagance of love, though He didn’t need to do it, God gave us life and made us in His image.
The Old Testament says that we are the apple of God’s eye, the object of His passion and commitment and concern. That’s why, after humanity fell into sin, God set to work to save us from our sin--to save us from ourselves--and to save us from the death we deserve by becoming one of us in Jesus Christ, then dying and rising, so that all who repent and believe in Christ have life with God that begins now in this imperfect world and is “brought to perfection in the world to come.”
The fact is that God commands us to love Him not because He needs to be loved by us, but because we need to love Him.
When we love God, we simply acknowledge the reality that He is God and we aren’t, that He made us and that our lives are completely in His hands. We acknowledge that all of life is a gift from Him. And with gratitude, we acknowledge the depths of His passion for us, a passion that led Him to submit to suffering and death on the cross for us.
But how do we love God?
1 John 4:19 says: “We love because He first loved us.” Only God can empower us with the capacity for loving Him. We are only capable of truly loving God or other people because God, in Christ, has loved us into relationship with Him. In Christ, our love is no longer hostage to our thoughts or our emotions, which can change from day to day. To love God is to acknowledge the reality of both my need for Him and His grace for me, no matter what the circumstances of my life or my psyche at the moment.
My friends sometimes call me a human Thesaurus. If that’s even partly true then I have to tell you that a near synonym for the phrase love God is one simple word, worship.
To love God is to worship God, not just on Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights, but with our whole lives. The Old English word from which we get worship was worth-ship. When we worship God, we acknowledge His worthiness of all our praise, honor, allegiance, and sacrifice. When you know that you have been saved for eternity from sin and death by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, you know that putting your life at His disposal is the only course in this life that makes sense. God’s people, the Israelites, who looked to the coming of the Messiah so that God could make His fallen creation right again, often extolled God’s worthiness. “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom,” Psalm 145:3 declares, for example.
But this raises a final point: To worship God involves more than our words: more than recited creeds, more that hymns or praise songs, more than offerings.
Through the prophet Amos in Old Testament times, God confronted a people who were evidently good at planning and executing impressive worship services. But He wasn’t pleased. “I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies," God told His people. "Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” In other words, to truly love God means that we do more than give God or Jesus or our faith lip service. It entails seeking to do God's will and enlisting His power to do so.
David talks about this in Psalm 51: “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it...My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise...”
To love God means to seek each day to align ourselves with God.
To praise and honor Him, not just with our lips, but with our lives.
To repent for sin.
To pray for the needs of others.
To help those in need.
To put God first because we know that in Christ, God has always put us first.
To put God first is the hardest and most impossible of all the commands God gives. It runs counter to our inborn nature as sinners.
But as we heed the call of the Holy Spirit to faith in Christ and to call out to God in Christ’s Name, God will do battle each day in the little places where we live our lives so that, whether with our families, at work, or in some ministry of the congregation in which we’re involved, God will help us render Him worship, honor, glory, and praise through who we are and what we do. By the power of the Holy Spirit given to Christians by Jesus, Who Himself was given to us by the Father, we will love God. Amen
Matthew 22:36-40
Fads blaze in and out of life in the Church world as surely as they do in the realms of business, education, medicine, movies, and teenage music. All the time, it seems, someone selling a book or a DVD or a whole program with claims of having the silver bullets that will transform the lives of churches and individual believers, helping congregations to find and pursue their missions, and grow in all the ways God intends.
And some parts of those products and programs may actually help churches. After all, even a stopped clock, as they say, is right two times a day.
But, the problem is that often once churches and pastors adopt such programs, however well-intentioned, their lives effectively demonstrate that where they claim to believe in Jesus, they really believe in the mission statement, or the program, or the book, or the church growth guru, or the computer algorithm. Yet Jesus says, “I will build My church.”
The Church doesn’t need fads or new mission statements or DVDs or programs to know what its mission should be. Jesus, true God and true man, Who endured the condemnation for sin we deserved when He submitted to death on the cross, then sprung alive from the grave so that He can give us reconciliation with God, forgiveness of sin, power for living today, and eternity with God to all who repent and believe in Him as their only God and King, has already laid out the mission of the Church and the mission of Christ in plain language.
In three passages in the Gospels, Jesus defines the mission of every Christian congregation and of every Christian.
What He commands in these three passages is so impossible for us to do that unless we live in constant faithful dependence on Him, unless we constantly and regularly receive His grace and power as we pray in Jesus’ Name, worship Him with other believers, and receive His forgiveness and presence in Holy Communion, we simply will not be able to live the fivefold mission Jesus has given to us in these three key passages of Scripture.
As we begin this journey into deeper discipleship this Lenten season, let’s leave behind any notions of silver bullets or special programs that create instant discipleship or an instantly faithful and effective congregation.
If we as a congregation want to be all that Christ has in mind for us to be and if we as individual Christians want to live with the hope and peace that God has in mind for us, we must be attentive to the five building blocks for Christian living and mission that Jesus gives us in these three passages.
Let’s take a look at each of the three passages briefly.
The first is what we call the Great Commandment, found in Matthew 22:36-40. (Page 692 in the sanctuary Bibles.) A man asks Jesus, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Here, Jesus quotes two Old Testament passages which, taken together, summarize the two tables of the Ten Commandments, the first three deal with our relationship with God and the latter seven dealing with our relationship with our neighbors.
The second passage in which Jesus gives us our mission as congregation and individuals is referred to as the Great Commission, Matthew 28:18-20. (Page 698 in the Bibles.) The resurrected Jesus tells the 11 remaining apostles just before ascending to heaven: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go 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 surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."
Notice how frequently Jesus uses the word all here: God the Father ceded all authority to Him and Jesus in turn gives us authority in His Name to make disciples of all people and to teach them everything (another word for all) about Jesus, His commands, and the new and everlasting life He offers to all people who trust in Him.
The third passage that gives us our mission is the New Commandment, John 13:34-35. (Page 751 in the Bibles.) Speaking to His disciples during the Last Supper, Jesus says to His Church: "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
Here, Jesus commands us to love our fellow disciples because doing so authenticates the reality of our faith and that we really have been made new by the grace of Christ.
This doesn't mean we will never disagree. Someone has said that if two people agree on everything, at least one of them is irrelevant. We will have disagreements with one another in the Church; that doesn't mean we don't keep loving each other!
The five building blocks by which Christ builds His Church are seen in these three passages. They were the focal point of our church-wide vision and mission retreat in January.
They will continue to inform everything we do as a congregation and can help us all become the followers of Jesus--the disciples of Christ--we are called to be and that we all want to be.
The building blocks are:
- loving God;
- loving our neighbors (wherever they may live);
- loving our fellow believers;
- making disciples; and
- personally growing in our faith every day of our lives.
Today, our focus is on loving God. Jesus says, quoting Moses’ sermon in Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
Jesus, Who, after all is also God, says that this “the first and greatest commandment.”
Why does God need our love?
And why should we love Him?
And what does it mean to love God?
Let’s take each of those questions in order. Why does God need our love?
To put it simply, God doesn’t need our love. While speaking to the people in the marketplace in first century Athens, the apostle Paul noted: "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.”
God doesn’t need for us to love Him. God isn’t some self-absorbed egomaniac needing constant reassurance that He’s the apple of our eyes. God has all the love He could ever need or ever want within Himself, the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The New Testament tells us that, “God is love,” which doesn’t mean that God is some abstraction called love. It means that love informs every aspect of God's character and personality. Love is the motive behind everything God does--including judgment and discipline, including giving us the freedom to walk away from Him, including the cross and the empty tomb.
Out of an extravagance of love, though He didn’t need to do it, God gave us life and made us in His image.
The Old Testament says that we are the apple of God’s eye, the object of His passion and commitment and concern. That’s why, after humanity fell into sin, God set to work to save us from our sin--to save us from ourselves--and to save us from the death we deserve by becoming one of us in Jesus Christ, then dying and rising, so that all who repent and believe in Christ have life with God that begins now in this imperfect world and is “brought to perfection in the world to come.”
The fact is that God commands us to love Him not because He needs to be loved by us, but because we need to love Him.
When we love God, we simply acknowledge the reality that He is God and we aren’t, that He made us and that our lives are completely in His hands. We acknowledge that all of life is a gift from Him. And with gratitude, we acknowledge the depths of His passion for us, a passion that led Him to submit to suffering and death on the cross for us.
But how do we love God?
1 John 4:19 says: “We love because He first loved us.” Only God can empower us with the capacity for loving Him. We are only capable of truly loving God or other people because God, in Christ, has loved us into relationship with Him. In Christ, our love is no longer hostage to our thoughts or our emotions, which can change from day to day. To love God is to acknowledge the reality of both my need for Him and His grace for me, no matter what the circumstances of my life or my psyche at the moment.
My friends sometimes call me a human Thesaurus. If that’s even partly true then I have to tell you that a near synonym for the phrase love God is one simple word, worship.
To love God is to worship God, not just on Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights, but with our whole lives. The Old English word from which we get worship was worth-ship. When we worship God, we acknowledge His worthiness of all our praise, honor, allegiance, and sacrifice. When you know that you have been saved for eternity from sin and death by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, you know that putting your life at His disposal is the only course in this life that makes sense. God’s people, the Israelites, who looked to the coming of the Messiah so that God could make His fallen creation right again, often extolled God’s worthiness. “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom,” Psalm 145:3 declares, for example.
But this raises a final point: To worship God involves more than our words: more than recited creeds, more that hymns or praise songs, more than offerings.
Through the prophet Amos in Old Testament times, God confronted a people who were evidently good at planning and executing impressive worship services. But He wasn’t pleased. “I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies," God told His people. "Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” In other words, to truly love God means that we do more than give God or Jesus or our faith lip service. It entails seeking to do God's will and enlisting His power to do so.
David talks about this in Psalm 51: “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it...My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise...”
To love God means to seek each day to align ourselves with God.
To praise and honor Him, not just with our lips, but with our lives.
To repent for sin.
To pray for the needs of others.
To help those in need.
To put God first because we know that in Christ, God has always put us first.
To put God first is the hardest and most impossible of all the commands God gives. It runs counter to our inborn nature as sinners.
But as we heed the call of the Holy Spirit to faith in Christ and to call out to God in Christ’s Name, God will do battle each day in the little places where we live our lives so that, whether with our families, at work, or in some ministry of the congregation in which we’re involved, God will help us render Him worship, honor, glory, and praise through who we are and what we do. By the power of the Holy Spirit given to Christians by Jesus, Who Himself was given to us by the Father, we will love God. Amen
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