Here's the video of this past Sunday's online worship from Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio. Below it is the text of the message shared during the service.
John 17:1-11
One morning a few years back, I was alone in our bedroom, on my knees next to the bed, praying. Ann didn’t know I was there and opened the door. When she saw me and realized what I was doing, she was apologetic. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s OK,” I told her. But again she said, “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”
Christians can and do pray with others, of course. Our first lesson for today tells us of the first Christians disciples that after the risen Jesus ascended into heaven, “They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” (Acts 1:14)
But, through Jesus, God also gives us the privilege of doing just as Jesus often did, pray directly to the Father as individual believers. Our private prayers can be intensely intimate conversations with God. We confess our sins, reveal our deepest insecurities and secrets, entrust our most heartfelt requests, and own our doubts. I think that’s why Ann kept apologizing when she opened our bedroom door and found me in prayer.
In today’s Gospel lesson, John 17:1-11, we’re privileged to listen in on one of Jesus’ intimate prayers. The lesson is composed of the first portion of what’s known as Jesus’ high priestly prayer, the prayer that John says Jesus offered on the night of His betrayal and arrest. This section has four petitions.
What’s remarkable about them is that, in the final analysis, each of the petitions is offered on behalf of believers in Jesus like you and me, disciples who live in this world right now.
When Jesus prayed on the night He faced the greatest agonies imaginable, He was thinking of you and everyone for whom He was going to die and rise.
The first petition is in verse 1: “‘Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you.’”
The hour to which Jesus refers is the one in which He would be glorified by God the Father through His death, resurrection, and ascension. In the gospel of John, Jesus calls these three things, Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension, together as His glorification.
It may be hard for most people to see any glory in a sinless Savior being nailed to a cross to die. But for the Christian, the cross displays the immensity of God’s love for the human race.
On the cross, Jesus faced the wrath and endured the death that we deserve because we are born sinners incapable of making ourselves fit for life with God. And that’s a glorious, weighty thing!
This is what the apostle Paul celebrates at another place in the Bible's New Testament, Romans 5:8: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
In this first petition, Jesus prays that the Father will help Him to see His mission of dying for us through. Jesus wants all people to be saved from sin, death, and futility. That can only be accomplished through His cross.
Jesus then prays in verse 5: “And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.”
This too, is a prayer for us. Jesus knew that after He was glorified and seated at the right hand of the Father, He would send His Holy Spirit to believers. In John 16:7, He already told the disciples, “...it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate [the Holy Spirit] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”
Many of you know the comfort that the Holy Spirit gives to you. He’s the One Who brings God’s Word to you, prompts you to pray, gives you faith in Jesus, inspires you to share your faith, empowers you to serve others in Jesus’ name.
I enjoy doing the live weeknight Bible studies on Facebook these days. But I would be lying if I said that they’re easy. I generally put in two to three hours of preparation for each night’s session.
More than that, I daily pray that God will help me to explain the sometimes complicated things people need to know to more fully understand and appreciate the greatness, power, and love of God that are revealed in the books of the Bible we study. And though I’ve been an ardent student of Scripture for forty years now, there are things that I don’t understand as well as I would like to. That’s why the most important part of my preparation is begging the Father in Jesus’ name to send the Holy Spirit to make something out of what feels like the nothing I have to impart. Whatever good is coming of these studies is because Jesus ascended back to the glory He had before coming into the world and because He is constantly sending His Spirit to needy believers like you and me.
Jesus' next petition is in verses 6 through 9, where He prays for us, believers who have received the powerful, eternity-changing Gospel Word of new life through faith in Jesus. He says in verse 9: “I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours.”
Earlier in the gospel of John, we’re told that many people who had initially believed in Jesus deserted Him. Jesus asks the twelve apostles if they intend to turn away from faith in Him too. Peter responds for all of them, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:68)
In His high priestly prayer, Jesus prays that we will stay connected day-in and day-out to Him through His life giving Word. It’s His Word that can guide us, assure us, bring forgiveness, and sustain us until the day we see the Lord personally, face to face.
Jesus’ fourth petition builds off of this. It’s in verse 11: “Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.”
God the Father, the New Testament tells us elsewhere, has given Jesus “the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:9-11)
The name of Jesus has power! Martin Luther said that the mere utterance of Jesus’ name by a believer will subdue Satan.
Calling out to Jesus when we’re in trouble, when we’re tempted, when we need guidance or inspiration, will ensure that He is present with us, leading us on the resurrection path.
The protection that Jesus asks the Father to extend to us may not prevent us from things like accidents, cancer, heart failure, COVID19, or being rejected by others for believing in Jesus.
But, as we flee to Him for all our hope and help, Jesus will protect our faith, our justification, our eternal life with God.
Anyone who can speak Jesus’ name with trust in Him as their God and Savior has exactly what He came into the world to bring, something we don’t deserve and could never ear, life with God that never ends.
This week, ask God to renew you each day in your faith in the Savior Who, as He faced the cross, prayed for you and even now, wants you with Him for all eternity. Amen
Showing posts with label Acts 1:14. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Acts 1:14. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Preparing for the Fire
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
Every few years, there are forest fires out west not caused by the carelessness of campers or the crimes of arsonists. They happen as a result of spontaneous combustion. The fires simply erupt when the trees in forest have become brittle and lifeless.
Foresters tell us this is a good thing. The canopies of dead and dying trees prevent sunlight and rain from reaching any plants or trees trying to take root and grow beneath. Fires take those canopies away.
But often, within days of such massive natural conflagrations end, a TV camera crew will be allowed to go into forests seemingly devastated and dead and find, amid the charred remains of once enormous trees and the still-swirling smoke of the fire, signs of new life: sprigs of mighty oaks or sequoias starting to sprout all around.
Any of you who has ever endured a fire in your home know how destructive fires can be. But, it seems, fires can also be the engines by which new life supplants the dead.
Fire can bring life.
The Bible knows this truth. In fact, the Bible associates fire with God, the giver of all life.
Hebrews 12: 29, for example, finds the Christian preacher who is its author say, “Our God is a consuming fire.”
That phrase “consuming fire” carries with it the notion that our God, like forest fires, consumes or destroys that which is dead or not filled with the life that only He can give.
No wonder then, that the ancient Israelites were afraid of God. Remember when Moses returned from spending time with God on a mountaintop while he and Israelites were in wilderness? Go to Exodus 34, starting on v. 29 pew Bibles and read what it says:
This is why the Old Testament prophets warned the people about what the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, calls the "day of Lord." The day of the Lord is when God will set all things right. Jesus will return. The dead in Jesus will rise. And Jesus will judge all. All that is not of God will be burned in the fires of hell for eternity. Those who have turned from sin and believed in Jesus will live with God for eternity. And Jesus will destroy the old to give rise to new heavens and a new earth in which His kingdom will be fully established for all eternity.
The day of the Lord isn't an occasion to be anticipated casually. It will be wonderful. But it won't be peaches and cream for everyone. Turn to Amos 5:18-20 in the pew Bibles to see what the Old Testament prophet Amos said about the day of the Lord back in the 8th century BC:
Look at how Peter explains the day of the Lord, the second Advent (or coming) of Jesus, in our second lesson:
Our Gospel lesson from Mark, written of events that occurred two-thousand years ago, just before Jesus began His ministry, John the Baptizer points both to Jesus’ first advent (remember advent means coming) and to His advent at the end of this world’s history, when He will judge the living and the dead.
Look at last thing John says in verse 8 of Gospel lesson: “I have baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Matthew indicates that John said not only that Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit, but "with the Holy Spirit and fire."
We believe that when we are baptized, the Holy Spirit comes to burn or purge us of all sin and fill us with the life of God. That's exactly what happened on the first Pentecost, you'll remember. Jesus' first followers gathered in prayer, awaiting the risen and ascended Jesus' direction for their lives. As they prayed, the Holy Spirit came on each of them with tongues of fire!
At Christmas, we celebrate and remember the act of deep selflessness and love that caused the mighty God of the universe to lay His glory by in order to live as servant for our salvation. But when Jesus returns, He will come in His full blazing glory.
This is why the prophet Malachi, writing about 430 years before Jesus, considered the day of the Lord and asked, “Who can endure the day of his coming…?...For He is like a refiner's fire...”
The bottom line of all this fire talk is simple. God is not our buddy. God is our Friend, for sure. But God is also our Master, our Lord, our Creator, our King, our Savior. And at the end of history, God intends to destroy all that is not of God, whether it resides within us as believers or in the unbelieving universe around us.
God has already come into the lives of Christians with the fire of His Holy Spirit, of course. But, the fact is that most Christians only toy with God. They like to bank the fire of God, turning Him into a pilot light they can turn up when things are going badly and they need help and then turn down whenever having God in their lives is inconvenient.
A pastor friend of mine once said that "The problem with Church is that we're afraid of the Holy Spirit." The fear he was talking about isn't the holy awe we all should have before almighty God. Rather, the fear we have of God most of the time is the fear of turning over the keys of our lives to the God we know in Jesus. We want to be in control. Our inborn human arrogance, our sin, makes us want to leave God out of our lives, to leave God standing in a corner until we're ready to call Him.
But this approach to God will never do on the day of the Lord, when all that is within us and all around us not of God will be dissolved in the fire of His holiness.
Years ago, I heard the true story of a group of engineers and their wives having dinner together. The talk turned to all the projects the engineers had been working on: bridges, buildings, towers, water treatment facilities. The whole talk seemed to be turning into an ode to their accomplishments. But then, one of the engineers, thinking of the day of the Lord, put things in perspective. "Some day," he said, "all of this will burn."
So, how can we be ready for Jesus’ second great advent? Three ways, I think.
First: We repent for sin. We let God’s holy fire burn away all that is not pleasing to Him, all our sin.
As we've said before, repentance is not a "one and done" proposition. Just as was true of the crowds who came to be baptized by John, we prepare the way of the Lord into our lives and into the lives of those we touch by engaging daily in repentance.
In repentance, we submit to God’s holy fire putting torch to all our sin, egotism, selfishness. We say, "Thy will be done."
It's in repentant believers, long before the return of Jesus, that God begins the process of replacing the dead and sinful in us with His life. One of my favorite passages of Scripture, 2 Corinthians 5:17, says, "If anyone is in Christ Jesus, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new." We make way for the new life Christ wants to give us each day through repentance.
Second: We trust in the Lord. That is, we believe in Jesus Christ. We trust that Christ, the fiery light of the world, will guide us from here to eternity. This is essential. The Bible teaches that we are saved not by our works, but by our faith--our belief, our trust--in, our surrender to Jesus Christ.
Our eternal destinies, whether we will be with God or the devil, depend on whether we entrust our lives to Christ. In Luke 18:7, after saying that He would make things right—bring God’s justice to those who call on Him, Jesus asks chilling question: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith?”
When we believe in Jesus Christ, our priorities are no longer the most important thing to us. God’s priorities are. I’ve told the true story before of the experience of a woman Ann and I came to know years ago through her daughter, Valerie. When Valerie was two years old, she got away from the watchful eye of her mother, as two year olds can do, and made her way to the family pool and, without a soul in sight, then fell to the very bottom.
Now, you should know by way of background that just two years before, another daughter, just one year older than Valerie, had died from leukemia. From that moment, this woman made Valerie the center of her universe. She did everything for Valerie, at the expense of her husband and their marriage, all her friendships, her work, everything.
When Valerie was found in the pool, some time had passed and her life hung in the balance. She was taken to a hospital ER. Valerie's mother was understandably hysterical. She went to a room in the hospital and began screaming at God: "Not again! Not again! You can't do this to me again!"
Finally, she had no more words and, sobbing in silence, she heard within herself the voice of God: "You shall have no gods before me."
She realized at that moment that she had made Valerie her god. All was done for Valerie. You see, if we make the things we see--whether it's a loved one, our families, our jobs, our finances, our possessions, our status--the most important things in our lives, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we have control.
What God was telling that woman was simple, "Stand aside. Let me be your God. I can take care of Valerie. I can take care you. I can take care of everything, now and for eternity."
When Jesus returns, all the worldly things we have thought so important, including our pretense of control, will die. Only that which is under the Lordship of Jesus will stand. Jesus tells us, "Even in the face of things you will not understand until you see me face to face, believe in Me."
Third: We share Good News with others. We pass on the life-giving fire of our crucified and risen Jesus to others.
In our second lesson, Peter says that God is not slow about day of Jesus’ return, but is patient. God is waiting for not only the Church to repent and believe in Christ, but for world to repent and believe in Christ. God is giving all of us the chance to get our lives in order and get in sync with Him.
Our job—the job of every Christian—is to share that Good News with others. Jesus has given each of us the Great Commission to go and make disciples.
Paul writes about that commission when he asks about those who need to know and believe in Jesus: “But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?”
Jesus sends us to be His witnesses to everyone we know, because everyone we know is someone Jesus wants with Him for eternity.
Repentance, belief, and witnessing for Christ. This is the lifestyle of "holiness and godliness" that Peter describes in our second lesson. These are the things we need to be about as prepare the way for Jesus' second advent.
One day, Peter says at the very end of our lesson for today, God's righteousness will be at home in all of God’s universe.
Until that day, may God’s righteousness be at home in us.
And until that day, may we live in God’s grace through lifestyles of repentance, belief, and witness. Amen
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
Every few years, there are forest fires out west not caused by the carelessness of campers or the crimes of arsonists. They happen as a result of spontaneous combustion. The fires simply erupt when the trees in forest have become brittle and lifeless.
Foresters tell us this is a good thing. The canopies of dead and dying trees prevent sunlight and rain from reaching any plants or trees trying to take root and grow beneath. Fires take those canopies away.
But often, within days of such massive natural conflagrations end, a TV camera crew will be allowed to go into forests seemingly devastated and dead and find, amid the charred remains of once enormous trees and the still-swirling smoke of the fire, signs of new life: sprigs of mighty oaks or sequoias starting to sprout all around.
Any of you who has ever endured a fire in your home know how destructive fires can be. But, it seems, fires can also be the engines by which new life supplants the dead.
Fire can bring life.
The Bible knows this truth. In fact, the Bible associates fire with God, the giver of all life.
Hebrews 12: 29, for example, finds the Christian preacher who is its author say, “Our God is a consuming fire.”
That phrase “consuming fire” carries with it the notion that our God, like forest fires, consumes or destroys that which is dead or not filled with the life that only He can give.
No wonder then, that the ancient Israelites were afraid of God. Remember when Moses returned from spending time with God on a mountaintop while he and Israelites were in wilderness? Go to Exodus 34, starting on v. 29 pew Bibles and read what it says:
Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. 30When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him.Moses had been in the presence of God, the consuming fire.
This is why the Old Testament prophets warned the people about what the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, calls the "day of Lord." The day of the Lord is when God will set all things right. Jesus will return. The dead in Jesus will rise. And Jesus will judge all. All that is not of God will be burned in the fires of hell for eternity. Those who have turned from sin and believed in Jesus will live with God for eternity. And Jesus will destroy the old to give rise to new heavens and a new earth in which His kingdom will be fully established for all eternity.
The day of the Lord isn't an occasion to be anticipated casually. It will be wonderful. But it won't be peaches and cream for everyone. Turn to Amos 5:18-20 in the pew Bibles to see what the Old Testament prophet Amos said about the day of the Lord back in the 8th century BC:
Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake. Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?1920The Season of Advent is a time when we remember that just as Jesus once came into our world to reveal the glory of God, to die for our sins,and to rise again in order to give life to all Who believe in Him, He is returning when God brings an end to this world and supplants all that is evil and dead with the kingdom of God.
Look at how Peter explains the day of the Lord, the second Advent (or coming) of Jesus, in our second lesson:
...the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed. [After all, things can be seen clearly with fire.]
11Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, 12waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? 13But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.
Our Gospel lesson from Mark, written of events that occurred two-thousand years ago, just before Jesus began His ministry, John the Baptizer points both to Jesus’ first advent (remember advent means coming) and to His advent at the end of this world’s history, when He will judge the living and the dead.
Look at last thing John says in verse 8 of Gospel lesson: “I have baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Matthew indicates that John said not only that Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit, but "with the Holy Spirit and fire."
We believe that when we are baptized, the Holy Spirit comes to burn or purge us of all sin and fill us with the life of God. That's exactly what happened on the first Pentecost, you'll remember. Jesus' first followers gathered in prayer, awaiting the risen and ascended Jesus' direction for their lives. As they prayed, the Holy Spirit came on each of them with tongues of fire!
At Christmas, we celebrate and remember the act of deep selflessness and love that caused the mighty God of the universe to lay His glory by in order to live as servant for our salvation. But when Jesus returns, He will come in His full blazing glory.
This is why the prophet Malachi, writing about 430 years before Jesus, considered the day of the Lord and asked, “Who can endure the day of his coming…?...For He is like a refiner's fire...”
The bottom line of all this fire talk is simple. God is not our buddy. God is our Friend, for sure. But God is also our Master, our Lord, our Creator, our King, our Savior. And at the end of history, God intends to destroy all that is not of God, whether it resides within us as believers or in the unbelieving universe around us.
God has already come into the lives of Christians with the fire of His Holy Spirit, of course. But, the fact is that most Christians only toy with God. They like to bank the fire of God, turning Him into a pilot light they can turn up when things are going badly and they need help and then turn down whenever having God in their lives is inconvenient.
A pastor friend of mine once said that "The problem with Church is that we're afraid of the Holy Spirit." The fear he was talking about isn't the holy awe we all should have before almighty God. Rather, the fear we have of God most of the time is the fear of turning over the keys of our lives to the God we know in Jesus. We want to be in control. Our inborn human arrogance, our sin, makes us want to leave God out of our lives, to leave God standing in a corner until we're ready to call Him.
But this approach to God will never do on the day of the Lord, when all that is within us and all around us not of God will be dissolved in the fire of His holiness.
Years ago, I heard the true story of a group of engineers and their wives having dinner together. The talk turned to all the projects the engineers had been working on: bridges, buildings, towers, water treatment facilities. The whole talk seemed to be turning into an ode to their accomplishments. But then, one of the engineers, thinking of the day of the Lord, put things in perspective. "Some day," he said, "all of this will burn."
So, how can we be ready for Jesus’ second great advent? Three ways, I think.
First: We repent for sin. We let God’s holy fire burn away all that is not pleasing to Him, all our sin.
As we've said before, repentance is not a "one and done" proposition. Just as was true of the crowds who came to be baptized by John, we prepare the way of the Lord into our lives and into the lives of those we touch by engaging daily in repentance.
In repentance, we submit to God’s holy fire putting torch to all our sin, egotism, selfishness. We say, "Thy will be done."
It's in repentant believers, long before the return of Jesus, that God begins the process of replacing the dead and sinful in us with His life. One of my favorite passages of Scripture, 2 Corinthians 5:17, says, "If anyone is in Christ Jesus, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new." We make way for the new life Christ wants to give us each day through repentance.
Second: We trust in the Lord. That is, we believe in Jesus Christ. We trust that Christ, the fiery light of the world, will guide us from here to eternity. This is essential. The Bible teaches that we are saved not by our works, but by our faith--our belief, our trust--in, our surrender to Jesus Christ.
Our eternal destinies, whether we will be with God or the devil, depend on whether we entrust our lives to Christ. In Luke 18:7, after saying that He would make things right—bring God’s justice to those who call on Him, Jesus asks chilling question: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith?”
When we believe in Jesus Christ, our priorities are no longer the most important thing to us. God’s priorities are. I’ve told the true story before of the experience of a woman Ann and I came to know years ago through her daughter, Valerie. When Valerie was two years old, she got away from the watchful eye of her mother, as two year olds can do, and made her way to the family pool and, without a soul in sight, then fell to the very bottom.
Now, you should know by way of background that just two years before, another daughter, just one year older than Valerie, had died from leukemia. From that moment, this woman made Valerie the center of her universe. She did everything for Valerie, at the expense of her husband and their marriage, all her friendships, her work, everything.
When Valerie was found in the pool, some time had passed and her life hung in the balance. She was taken to a hospital ER. Valerie's mother was understandably hysterical. She went to a room in the hospital and began screaming at God: "Not again! Not again! You can't do this to me again!"
Finally, she had no more words and, sobbing in silence, she heard within herself the voice of God: "You shall have no gods before me."
She realized at that moment that she had made Valerie her god. All was done for Valerie. You see, if we make the things we see--whether it's a loved one, our families, our jobs, our finances, our possessions, our status--the most important things in our lives, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we have control.
What God was telling that woman was simple, "Stand aside. Let me be your God. I can take care of Valerie. I can take care you. I can take care of everything, now and for eternity."
When Jesus returns, all the worldly things we have thought so important, including our pretense of control, will die. Only that which is under the Lordship of Jesus will stand. Jesus tells us, "Even in the face of things you will not understand until you see me face to face, believe in Me."
Third: We share Good News with others. We pass on the life-giving fire of our crucified and risen Jesus to others.
In our second lesson, Peter says that God is not slow about day of Jesus’ return, but is patient. God is waiting for not only the Church to repent and believe in Christ, but for world to repent and believe in Christ. God is giving all of us the chance to get our lives in order and get in sync with Him.
Our job—the job of every Christian—is to share that Good News with others. Jesus has given each of us the Great Commission to go and make disciples.
Paul writes about that commission when he asks about those who need to know and believe in Jesus: “But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?”
Jesus sends us to be His witnesses to everyone we know, because everyone we know is someone Jesus wants with Him for eternity.
Repentance, belief, and witnessing for Christ. This is the lifestyle of "holiness and godliness" that Peter describes in our second lesson. These are the things we need to be about as prepare the way for Jesus' second advent.
One day, Peter says at the very end of our lesson for today, God's righteousness will be at home in all of God’s universe.
Until that day, may God’s righteousness be at home in us.
And until that day, may we live in God’s grace through lifestyles of repentance, belief, and witness. Amen
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