The One Who Does All Our Works for Us

In my quiet time today, I considered Isaiah 26. Verse 12 hit me:

"O Lord, you will ordain peace for us,
for you have indeed done for us all our works."

It's the second part of the verse that struck me. Nothing good that we do comes from us. That's because in our own power or moral strength, as Isaiah writes elsewhere, "all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment." (Isaiah 64:6) The moment we set out to consciously do a good or righteous thing, our sinful natures stand up to applaud and tell us what wonderful, good people we are, giving the lie to our pretended intrinsic goodness or righteousness.

In Jesus' portrayal of the day when He returns to bring the Kingdom of God in its fullness, He tells His sheep to enter into the joy He's prepared for them because they had visited imprisoned disciples, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and given drink to the thirsty. In giving these gifts to "the least of these," Jesus says, the sheep really cared for Him. But the sheep have no memory of these good deeds. 

This underscores the transformation that happens in the baptized as they turn to Christ in trust. The God revealed to us in Christ invades their lives and God does HIS good work through them. They're just living their lives in the freedom of forgiven sin, the freedom of knowing that as God the Father raised Jesus from the dead, He will do the same for those who trust in Jesus.

This is exactly what the apostle Paul talks about in his famous verse about those who are saved by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ and not by any good thing they do. He says: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." (Ephesians 2:8-10)

Notice that good works, being a good person, cannot make us acceptable to God, bring us forgiveness for our sin, or give us eternal life with God. That's because in ourselves, we could never be good enough.

Instead, God gives us faith in Christ, then, as we turn daily turn to Christ (Luke 9:23), Christ does His good works through us and in us. If Christians do anything good, righteous, or loving, they'll know not to take credit for it. In fact, they'll be completely unaware of having done anything good at all. 

But Isaiah's words apply to more than just good works. He says to God, "...you have indeed done for us all our works..." 

ALL is an ALL-ENCOMPASSING WORD. Without God, we can do nothing. 

In Athens in the first century, Paul quoted one of the Greek poets and said of the God we all now can know in Jesus Christ, "...in him we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:28) 

If you're living, breathing, and reading these words, it's the work of God. 

If you're able or have been able to make a living by your brain and brawn, your brain and brawn comes from God, along with your capacity to work or think. 

God didn't have to give us life. And once the whole human race fell into sin, God didn't have to give new life through the crucified and risen Christ. But He does. And He works in our lives.

Today, like every day, is a good one to repent--turn away from our sin, including our sins of pride and pretended self-sufficiency--and trust in Jesus. 

Growing Up

Here's the journal entry for my quiet time with God this morning.

Look: “It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them.” (Hosea 11:3)

Eight-centuries before Jesus’ birth, the prophet Hosea was used by God to call God’s people to repentance and faith. If they refused to respond to God’s grace, their faithlessness, idolatry, and injustice would catch up with them; they would be overrun by powerful enemies and be sent into exile. Ephraim was the largest of the tribes of Israel and was sometimes used, as here, to describe all of God’s people, the entire nation.

God uses different metaphors to describe His relationship with His people. Sometimes, God is portrayed as husband to a faithless wife. Here, God is the nurturing father who raised His people from infancy, who now in their adolescence, have spurned God. They’ve forgotten their father, even if they sometimes still invoke His name (Hosea 11:7). They’ve forgotten that it was He Who taught them to walk, Who brushed them off and cleaned their skinned egos and hearts when they stumbled.

Listen: How easily we forget God when everything is going well. There may be no atheists in foxholes, when adversity and pain target us. We often are prayerful and pious in our desperation. But when things “smooth out,” we forget about the One Who steadied us and set us on the paths to healings of all kinds. We forget about the One in Whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

But if we disconnect from the God Who, in Jesus Christ, gives us “life...to the full” (John 10:10), we walk away from life. We walk into death Arrogance and the myth of self-sufficiency sets in. “My people are determined to turn from me,” God says of His people in Hosea 11:7. Then, when hard times come or times when we face the consequences of our idolatry and hard-heartedness, as they do inevitably come in our fallen world, we blame God for not taking care of us. Or we disavow His existence.

But this verse speaks of God’s tender feelings for His people, the same tender feelings that Jesus says God has for all the people of the world (John 3:16). He wants a relationship with us. He doesn’t want us to remain perpetually infants. God wants us to grow in our relationship with Him, in our faith. It’s we who choose either to walk away from God or to remain spiritual infants. God wants to have a grown-up relationship with Him, one in which He empowers us to live in the freedom from sin, death, and idolatry that is our childish default mode, in the freedom He gives to us to love Him and to love all of our neighbors.

To those who have been made God’s people through Jesus, Jesus says, “I  no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:15)

I talk with my father almost every day. I honor him as my father. I respect him. But now that dad is 88 and I’m 64, our relationship is as much one between two old friends as it is as between father and son. We have many shared memories and interests. We strive to be good to each other. That’s a little bit like the relationship God wants to develop with believers saved through Jesus, I think. God is always God: our Creator Who is infinite, eternal, perfect in love, justice, and power. To honor and worship Him as our only God and King is to give Him His due. But the One Who gives me life also wants to be my Friend. He wants me to get over myself and place myself in His hands and at His disposal so that He can make me over into the adult child of my Father that I’m intended to be.

This process of renewal, which is called sanctification, is a gift of grace from God by which He makes us over in the image of Jesus...if we will only be with Him and let Him love us and change us and show us the way. This is the process that happens, the apostle Paul says, when we all “...who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

God wants those to Whom He gives life and gives life again in Christ to grow into the men and women He meant for us to be when He first gave us life. He wants us to be able to say, along with Paul: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Respond: Today, Lord, help me to grow up: to let go of my hubris and pretended self-sufficiency, to ignore the calls of this world’s false gods: security, acceptance by others, popularity, power, ease, comfort, stuff I don’t need, and a thousand other things I could mention. Help me to keep my eyes, my attentions and my intentions on Christ alone and so have my views of the world and my daily activities changed by the freedom only You give to believers to become all that You make us to be, all that Christ died and rose to set us free to be. In Jesus’ name. Amen  

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

Never Forget the One Who Never Forgets You!

John 14:1-14
Has this ever happened to you?

You go to the grocery store with a list of eight items in your mind. You’re confident that you’ll remember every item because you rehearsed the list over and over again earlier in the day. You get a cart and start to pick up the items. Bananas; check. Lettuce; check. Asparagus; check. Gluten free bread; check. Lunchmeat and cheese; check. Orange juice; check. You look at your cart: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 items.

But what was the eighth again? You think and think, but can’t remember.

You’re still not worried, though. You’ll just saunter up and down the aisles, hoping that you’ll spy the eighth item on your mental list.

The saunter strategy only makes things worse because, as you see things on sale or items you think you might need, you load up your cart with them. It only buries the forgotten item into the deeper recesses of your brain. You keep on forgetting until, just as your garage door goes up, you remember that you needed to pick up the main course for the night, chicken!

Our memories can be faulty. Unless we take the proper precautions, we are all at risk of forgetting the most important things in life. If we’re not careful, we can forget the important things that we know.

This is even true of our relationship with the God revealed to all of us in Jesus. In the rush of daily living, we can forget Jesus.

I’m not talking about forgetting the facts surrounding Jesus. Nobody who knows the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed is apt to forget that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, was true God and true man, died for our sin, and rose to give life to all who believe in Him.

But, though all of these statements describe life-giving truths about Jesus, knowing them and even memorizing them without knowing Jesus won’t bring us life with God. Only Jesus does that. And only those who maintain a relationship with Jesus, daily turning from sin, daily following Him and trusting in Him, have life with God.

Christian faith isn’t a set of religious propositions. Christian faith is a relationship with God enfleshed, Jesus Christ.

And you know what? Relationships have to be nurtured.

A woman was married to a man who loved her. But he was boring, not flashy, predictable. She had an affair with a man who was none of those things. But after the excitement wore off, she realized that this man didn’t love her the way her husband did. So she committed herself to reconstructing her relationship with her husband. Later, she told a friend, “I took my husband for granted. I’d forgotten who he was and what he did with me and for me. I nearly lost him.”

As our gospel lesson for today begins, the disciples are in danger of losing their relationship with Jesus. Jesus, heading for His crucifixion, speaks to them in what we call His “farewell discourse.” He tells them: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”

The disciples should have known exactly what Jesus was talking about when He claimed to be one with God. They had heard Him say: “Before Abraham was born, I am,” using strange grammar to claim for Himself the same name God revealed to be His to Moses back at the burning bush, Yahweh, I Am (John 8:58). The disciples had heard Jesus say, “I and the Father are one" (John 10:30). They had watched Jesus raise His friend Lazarus from the dead (as well as countless other signs).

They also should have known where Jesus was going. They’d heard Jesus tell Lazarus’ sister, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). They had heard Jesus tell 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” (John 3:16).

But now, in the rush of their daily lives, looking down the barrelhead of opposition and death in Jerusalem, they seem to have forgotten everything. They had gotten so accustomed to live with “the Word [made] flesh,” that they forgot that this flesh and blood rabbi they followed was (and is) also God. (John 1:14)

Verse 5: “Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?’ Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.’”

Dr. Jim Nestingen says that Thomas was looking for a roadmap. We don’t need a roadmap. If we know Jesus and follow Him, we know the Way and that’s enough.

Jesus is the way because He’s the foundational truth on which the new creation is built. Any life not built on Jesus is a lie. Other ways promise life, but only Jesus can deliver. Jesus told Pilate: “Everyone on the side of truth listens to Me” (John 18:37).

Jesus is the way because when He ushers us into intimacy with the Father, we are connected to the only One Who can make life or make life new. Thomas should have known all of this already; but he forgot. We too can forget. We too need to be regularly reminded or risk forgetting the Way.

Verse 8: “Philip said, ‘Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.’ Jesus answered: ‘Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.’”

Philip, one of Jesus’ first followers, the disciple who told his friend Nathanael, “Come and see” (John 1:46), had evidently forgotten the things he had seen and heard: the miracles, the teaching, the changed lives. He demands that Jesus show them the Father. Jesus reminds Philip that Philip had already seen the Father in Jesus. And, Jesus pleads, “If you don’t believe what you’ve seen in Me, then believe in what you’ve seen Me do.”

I sometimes forget Who Jesus is and what He has accomplished for you at the cross and from His empty tomb.

I forget His promises, promises for which His death and resurrection are the downpayment and the guarantee.

I get so caught up in all my doing, that I forget that the God we know in Jesus Christ is the One in Whom “‘we live and move and have our being.' “ (Acts 17:28)

Jesus’ death and resurrection prove that He can deliver on His promises to us, promises like forgiven sin, new life, the presence of God with us along this life’s way. 

And promises like the ones He makes at the ends of our lesson today: “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.” 

Jesus promises that the people who remain connected to Him, His Church, will do even greater things than He did during His three decades on earth.

He promises too, that whatever things we ask in His name--in other words, whatever things we ask of God that conform to Jesus' will, that draw others to life through Christ, that reflect His character of love and goodness, Jesus will see that they happen.

Some of you know the amazing thing that happened when my mother was dying a few weeks ago.

At the hospital, my niece contacted a friend of hers who also is a friend of my brother’s and asked her to tell my brother what was going on.

We hadn’t seen my brother in six and a half years. But we had prayed that before either of our parents left this life, there would be a reconciliation. We didn’t want our brother to live with any unnecessary guilt. I dreaded the thought of that.

My brother came to the hospital. We didn’t know that he had only moved back to the Columbus area two weeks earlier! (The God we know in Jesus is the master orchestrator of events!) There was a wonderful reconciliation.

What if we had given up on praying for reconciliation?

What if my niece had given up on trying to reach out for my brother?

What if my brother had turned a deaf ear to the Savior in Whom he believes?

When we remain connected to Jesus, trusting in Him, not everything in this world goes as we want. (After all, this isn't heaven!) But Jesus gives us the strength to endure when all seems hopeless. And He enters the places and the lives into which we invite Him to transform hurt to healing, despair to hope, life to death. In fact, He specializes in doing just those kinds of things.

I have no magic formula on how you can remain connected and intimate with the Savior, Who by His grace, saves all who trust in Him. This is a relationship that requires time, commitment, and work, not as the prices we pay for salvation, but as the sacrifices we willingly to make to remain intimate and alive with the Lord Who sacrificed all for us.

Do you want to always remember Jesus and stay connected to Him? Here’s how:

• Be in corporate worship every week you can. We are strengthened by God's Word and God's Truth as we gather in Christ's name.
• Receive Christ’s body and blood, which brings you His life and forgiveness, every time they’re offered. Someone once asked my mentor, Pastor Bruce Schein, how often people should receive Holy Communion. His answer: "Every time you can!" In this supper, Christ comes to us, giving us His very life and imparting His forgiveness to us. Holy Communion is God's Word incarnated. It's a treasure not to be passed by or forgotten!
• Join hands with your Christian family for prayer, study, mutual encouragement and accountability, and service in Jesus’ name. 
• And spend time each day personally in God’s Word, asking the Lord what He wants to tell you and how He wants to lead you that day. 

Then, fortified by God’s Word and His presence in your life, go do those works of love and gracious power Jesus promised that each of us who bear His name would do. In these ways, you won’t forget Jesus and He will empower you as His disciple.

Jesus never forgets you; please, never forget Jesus.

Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This was the message for worship on Sunday, May 14, 2017.]

Invitation to Life

[This was shared during the morning worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, earlier today.]

Matthew 22:1-14
As Christians, we cherish what's called the grace of God.

And we should! Grace is God’s charitable offer of new and everlasting life for everyone who repents for sin and follows Jesus.

In fact, in the original Greek in which the New Testament was written, the word we translate as grace is charitas, which we’ve carried over into English as charity.

Charity, like grace, can be given. It can be received. It can be rejected and thrown away. But grace, like charity, cannot be earned.

Romans 5:8 says: “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” In the Person of Jesus Christ, God the Son, God gave up everything for us in order to bring us God’s invitation of new life, a life free of sin and free of death. That’s grace. And it's worth cherishing!

But grace is not and never has been everything you and I need to know about God. According to the Bible, grace brings God's gift of new life to all with faith in Jesus Christ. There is no other way to receive God’s saving grace but through faith in Christ. And faith in Jesus Christ entails trusting Him enough to turn from our sins—that is, to repent—and to turn to Him alone for life.

Believing in Christ means being committed day-in and day-out to laying aside our sin and trusting our whole lives to Christ.

You can accept God’s invitation to His heavenly party that never ends or you can turn it down. You can grasp Christ's hand of grace or you can pass it by.

All of this is what Jesus is talking about today in the Gospel lesson. Please go to the Gospel lesson, Matthew 22:1-14 (page 691 in the sanctuary Bibles) and let’s consider it verse-by-verse.

Jesus is once more telling a parable. The word, parabolos, the Greek New Testament word from which we get our word, parable, literally means to throw or roll along side. In His parables, Jesus told stories. But rolling alongside the stories were other stories, of deeper significance.

In this parable, like others that Jesus tells, Jesus describes what the kingdom of God, the reign of God, is like.

Jesus says in verses 1, 2, and 3, that a king, a stand-in for God the Father, decides to throw a party for his son, who is getting married. In the parable, Jesus is the bridegroom and the banquet is the Kingdom of God.

Now, it's no accident that Jesus here portrays Himself as the groom. You'll remember that in the Old Testament, the prophets often portrayed God as the husband to His chosen people, Israel, and Israel was portrayed as the adulterous bride who was unfaithful to her husband, worshiping false deities. In the Gospels, Jesus portrays Himself as the groom and John the Baptist as His best man. In Revelation, Jesus is once more portrayed as the groom and the Church, His redeemed people, are seen as the Bride of Christ.

By the custom of those days, the invitation that the king in Jesus' parable issues at the beginning would actually have been the second invitation the guests received. A first would have been issued simply informing the guests that a wedding was in the offing and to be prepared when the second invitation, issued just as the ceremonies and celebration were to begin, would arrive.

Guests, under these customs, had to be ready to drop everything as soon as they were summoned to a wedding, especially, you would think, when the king was asking them to his son’s wedding banquet.

As Christians, you and I are called to be willing to drop everything--all our sins, the worldly props we hold onto to prove our significance, even to make our livings, and all our own priorities in order to follow Jesus. To grasp God’s grace necessitates dropping everything that keeps us from living the life to which He’s called us. Otherwise, His amazing grace is lost to us.

In casting Himself as the bridegroom, Jesus was also clearly laying His claim to be the Messiah, the Christ, God’s anointed king, the One appointed to bring God’s grace to the nations. God the Father had already confirmed this about Jesus, first at Jesus’ baptism and later at His transfiguration. “This is My Son, the Beloved,” God’s voice had called out from heaven then.

But the leaders of God’s people, as we’ve seen before, wanted nothing to do with Jesus. That would mean signing over their power and influence to God. That’s why the invitees in the parable “refused to come” to the wedding banquet. They refused the invitation to the banquet just as, within the week of Jesus telling this parable, Jerusalem and Rome would refuse to heed Jesus’ invitation to repent and believe in Him. Instead, they would put Him to death.

Yet the king, like God, was “compassionate and gracious...slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.” He wanted His invitees to be part of the banquet for his son.

For centuries, God had used His prophets to call His people to repent and believe in Him. God wants everyone at His banquet.

But the prophets and messengers God has sent to issue His invitation to people, in Old Testament times and today, have often been ignored and worse.

In verse 4, the king in Jesus’ parable sent out servants who told his invited guests to come to the party. Everything was ready!

Look at verse 5, though: “But they paid no attention and went off--one to his field, another to his business.” Another translation says that the invitees “made light” of their invitation. These two takes at the passage translate the Biblical Greek word, amaleo, which means to treat with apathy or indifference.

These invitees didn’t care about the invitation. And they didn’t care about the king who issued it. Their world revolved around themselves, their paychecks, their desires.

People can be that way toward the invitation of God to follow Jesus today. They think--we may often think--that God isn’t needed.

This isn't a new attitude. And God's Word repeatedly warns us against the sort of apathy and indifference toward God rooted in the belief that we don’t really need God.

In Deuteronomy 8:17-18, God tells His people through Moses: “You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’  But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth...”

And in Acts 17:28, the apostle Paul, preaching in first century Athens, quotes one of the Greek poets that in God, “we live and move and have our being.”

Everybody needs God, whether they know it or not.

In verse 6, we’re told that some invited to the banquet went beyond ridiculing the slaves and the king they served. They seized, mistreated, and killed the slaves.

Verse 7 says that the king was “enraged” by this behavior. He sent soldiers to destroy that city that had chosen to ignore His invitation.

God allows everyone the freedom to turn down the invitation to join Him in the kingdom. And that means God will also let those who pay no heed to him to live eternally with the consequences of their refusal to follow Him. In John 3:18, Jesus tells Nicodemus: “Whoever believes in him [that is, whoever accepts the invitation and follows Jesus] 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.”

In verses 8 and 9, Jesus says that the king in His parable does a stunning thing. He sends more slaves into the streets to “invite everyone to the wedding banquet.” He wanted to invite people who had never been invited before! Even today, God invites all the riff-raff of the world, including you and me, to be part of His kingdom.

For Jesus’ original hearers, arrogant in their spiritual pride, these words would have been scandalous! But God nonetheless invites everyone to His kingdom. God wants everyone to experience His grace. Everyone. No exceptions.

Our commission as Christians and church members is to share God’s incredible invitation to His kingdom with everyone, no exceptions, so that they can be part of God’s kingdom too.

The last part of Jesus’ parable, beginning at verse 11, should have special meaning for those of us who are part of His Church today. The king in Jesus’ parable sees a man at the wedding banquet not dressed in wedding clothes. The king is offended.

Now, Jesus isn’t saying that we’ve got to wear our Sunday best to be in His kingdom. Those in tattered jeans and those in three-piece suits have an equal place at His table.

And, you should know that in the first century world, there was no specific article of clothing for weddings.

The guests at such a feast were simply expected to wear clean clothes. Similarly, in the heavenly banquet enjoyed by God’s people in eternity, only those made clean by Christ will be in the presence of God the King.

While on earth, as Jesus points out in His parable of The Wheat and the Weeds, God will allow the weeds to live among the wheat in His Church. The weeds are the fake Christians, the go-through-the-motions Christians, the ones who talk a good game on Sunday but don’t even get suited up on Monday.

Galatians 3:27 says that, “all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.”

And in Romans 13:14, Paul urges believers to “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.”

To clothe ourselves in Christ, to follow Christ, is to seek to do His will and not our own, even when everything in us wants to do things our way.

If we willfully soil ourselves in the dirt and sin of the world--selfishness, greed, lust, envy, gossip--we choose those idols over Christ and we refuse to be part of God’s kingdom! This is why daily repentance and renewal was identified by Martin Luther as the ongoing theme of the Christian's life.

The man in Jesus’ parable not clothed in his wedding garb was thrown “into the outer darkness, where there [was] weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The same fate awaits those who think they deserve to be in God’s kingdom just for having their name in a church directory.

This isn't said enough in the Church these days, nor certainly as much as Jesus Himself said it. But hell is the fate of all who reject the grace of God in Christ by refusing to turn from their sins and believe in Jesus Christ. These are people who faked living for Christ, while holding onto death, instead of the saving, sensible grace of God given in Christ.

In his book, The Great Divorce, 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. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy [the joy of belonging to God through Christ] will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”

This is why clothing ourselves in Christ is so important.

In James 4:10, we’re told: “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.”

We seem to spend so much time in this life trying to lift ourselves up. “Pull yourself by your own bootstraps,” we’re told. We're told that, even though it's physically impossible!

But God invites us to let Him pull us out of the slime of sin and death and fear and futility into His kingdom, the heavenly banquet, which we can just start to taste now in His Word, the sacraments, and the fellowship of the Church. His kingdom is a place where we will know forgiveness, life, peace, and purpose for all eternity. But it isn't just about the sweet by-and-by: God lifts us up every time we choose to follow Jesus and only Jesus and lay everything else aside. May God give us the grace to do just that. Amen

God Says, "Come to the Party!"

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

Matthew 22:1-14
Christians--especially I think, we Lutheran Christians--cherish the grace of God.

And we should cherish it!

Grace is God’s charitable regard for you and me and every human being. In fact, in the original Greek in which the New Testament portion of the Bible was written, the word we translate as grace is charitas, which we’ve carried over into English as charity.

This tells a lot about grace. Like charity, you can’t earn God's grace. It can be given. It can be received. It can be rejected. It can be wasted. But grace, like charity, cannot be earned.

It was because of God’s grace that God came into the world in the Person of Jesus Christ and died and rose so that all who believe in Him will not die, but have life with God, now and in eternity. No wonder we sing about God’s “amazing grace.”

But grace is not and never has been everything you and I need to know about God! The Bible teaches that God’s grace is offered to us as a free gift. But we have the freedom to reject it.

In chapter 2 of the New Testament book of Ephesians, there’s a celebration of “the immeasurable riches of [God’s] grace,” expressed as God’s “kindness toward us in Jesus Christ.” Then it says “by grace you have been saved through faith.”

Grace brings God's gift of new life to all with faith in Jesus Christ.

And faith in Jesus Christ entails trusting Him enough to turn from our sins—that is, to repent—and to turn to Him alone for life.

If you’re going to take up God’s grace, you need to be committed day-in and day-out to laying aside your sin and trusting your whole life to Christ.

The grace of God’s forgiveness, acceptance, and new life is a blank check available to everybody. But you can only cash it through repentance and belief in Him.

You can accept God’s invitation to His heavenly party that never ends or you can turn it down.

This is what Jesus is talking about today in the Gospel lesson. Please pull out the Celebrate insert from your bulletin, go to the Gospel lesson, and let’s consider it verse-by-verse.

Once again, Jesus is telling a parable. The word, parabolos, the Greek New Testament word from which we get our word, parable, literally means to throw or roll along side. In His parables, Jesus told stories. But rolling alongside the stories were other stories, of deeper significance.

The first people to hear this parable from Jesus, particularly the religious elites of first century Judea, were like many Christian denominations and leaders today: They had replaced the revealed Word and will of God with their own notions about how God should work.

In this parable, like others that Jesus tells, He describes what the kingdom of God, the reign of God, is like.

Jesus says in verses 1 and 2 that a king, clearly a stand-in for God the Father, decided to throw a party for his son, who was getting married. In the parable, Jesus is the bridegroom and the banquet is the Kingdom of God.

Then in verse 3, Jesus says, the king sent slaves to tell the already-invited guests that the party had begun and that he was waiting for them to join the celebration. Jesus’ first hearers would have understood themselves as being on that invited guest list. They were, after all, the religious leaders of God’s chosen (or invited) people, Israel.

In casting Himself as the bridegroom, Jesus was laying His claim to be the Messiah, the Christ, God’s anointed king, the Son of God, Who the Old Testament prophets had said God would send into the world to set up His kingdom, overcome the power of sin and death, and bring God’s grace to the nations.

You'll remember that God the Father had already confirmed Who Jesus was. At Jesus’ Baptism in Matthew 3, for example, a voice from heaven said of Jesus, “This is My Son, the beloved…” Later, you'll also recall, when Jesus was transfigured in His appearance, the voice from heaven spoke again, this time saying, "This is My Son, the beloved; with Him I am well pleased; listen to Him."

But the leaders of God’s people wanted nothing to do with Jesus. That would mean signing over their power and influence to God. But they had a good gig going: lording it over other people, having people’s respect, wielding political clout. That’s why the invitees in Jesus’ parable, in verse 3, “would not come” to the marriage banquet. They turned the invitation down just as Jerusalem would turn Jesus down on the night of His trial before His crucifixion.

But the king, like God, was gracious. He wanted these arrogant, selfish people to be part of the banquet for his son. For centuries, God had used His prophets to call people—including people from outside of Israel—to repent and believe in Him.

God has always wanted all people to be part of His everlasting kingdom. But the prophets and messengers God has sent to issue His invitation to people, in Old Testament times and today, have often been ignored and worse.

In verse 4, the king in Jesus’ parable sent out servants who told his invited guests to come to the party. Everything was ready!

Look at verse 5, though. Some of the invited guests, it says, “made light” of the invitation. The phrase, made light of, translates the Biblical Greek word, amaleo, which means to treat with apathy or indifference. These invitees didn’t care about the invitation.

People can be that way toward the invitation of God to follow Jesus today. They feel they don’t need God. “What has God ever done for me?” they ask. “I’m the one who busts my chops to make a living each day.”

This isn't a new attitude. But God's Word repeatedly warns us against this arrogance. In Deuteronomy, Moses told the people of Israel: “Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is He Who gives you power to get wealth…”

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that:“[God] makes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

In another place in the Bible, the apostle Paul, while preaching in Athens, Greece, quoted one of the Greek poets to point out that in God, “we live and move and have our being.”

Everybody needs God, whether they know it or not.

Of course, the invitation we receive from Jesus isn’t for a private party. The Christian doesn’t think in terms of “Jesus and me,” but “Jesus and we.” In Jesus, God invites us to a banquet, an eternal kingdom in which we keep company not only with God, but also with everyone who repents for sin, believes in Jesus, and gladly receives God's pure Word of truth and the Sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.

We will need each other to be whole in eternity.

And, as we go through our lives on earth, we need one another as we worship together, seek forgiveness together, and receive grace together. In the New Testament book of Hebrews, we’re told not to neglect meeting together to worship regularly because when we do so, we encourage one another. I bet that one reason many of you are here this morning, is that you need the encouragement that comes from knowing God loves you and that you are not alone in trying to follow Jesus every day!

In verse 6, we’re told that some invited to the banquet went beyond ridiculing the slaves as they turned down their invitations. They seized, mistreated, and killed the slaves.

Verse 7 says that the king was “enraged” by this behavior. He sent soldiers to destroy that city that had chosen to ignore His invitation.

You know, God allows us to turn down the invitation to join Him in the kingdom. And that means God will also let us live eternally with the consequences of our decision. In the Gospel of John, Jesus told Nicodemus, you’ll remember, that if people choose the darkness of life without His grace, they will live with their choice for eternity. God doesn’t want us to make that choice. He wants us to come to the party!

In verses 8 and 9, Jesus says that the king in His parable does a stunning thing. He sends more slaves into the streets to “invite everyone to the wedding banquet.” He wanted to invite everyone, people who had never been invited before! Jesus was saying that through Him, God is now inviting all the riff-raff of the world—all the prostitutes and tax collectors, all the Jews and Gentiles, all the Cardinal fans and Brewer fans, all the Buckeyes and Wolverines and Cornhuskers—everybody is to be invited to be part of His kingdom.

For Jesus’ original hearers, arrogant in their spiritual pride, these words would have been scandalous! Jesus said something similar, though, when He told Nicodemus, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

God invites everyone to His kingdom. God wants everyone to experience His grace. Everyone. No exceptions.

Our commission as Christians and church members is to share God’s incredible invitation to His kingdom with everyone so that they can be part of God’s kingdom too. That’s why I can’t wait to get started on some more kindness outreaches after my defibrillator is implanted this week!

But the last part of Jesus’ parable, beginning at verse 11, is written especially for those of us who are part of His Church today.

The king in Jesus’ parable sees a man at the wedding banquet not dressed in a wedding. The king is offended. Now, Jesus isn’t saying that we’ve got to wear our Sunday best to be in His kingdom. He’s telling people not to pretend to be part of God’s kingdom if they haven’t been clothed in His grace, if they haven’t repented for sin and believed only in Him.

The man in Jesus’ parable not clothed in his wedding garb was thrown “into the outer darkness, where there [was] weeping and gnashing of teeth.” A similar horrible fate awaits those who think they deserve to be in God’s kingdom just for showing up, sitting in a church pew, making an offering, or having their name in a church directory. Hell is the fate of all who reject the grace of God in Christ by refusing to turn from their sins and believe in Jesus Christ.

Those dressed in the robes of repentance and faith in Christ have grasped hold of God's grace. They are in the kingdom of God.

Think of it this way: You can only watch your favorite TV show when your TV set is on and tuned to the right channel. You cannot claim God’s grace if you refuse to repent for your favorite sins and if you think you can follow other “saviors” besides Jesus. If anything but Jesus is our Savior, we shut off the flow of God’s grace into our lives. Turn to Jesus though, and grace will spill all over your life, even in the most trying of circumstances!

Please pull out a pew Bible and turn to page 701. Look at James, chapter 4, verse 10. It says:

Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.

God’s grace offered through Jesus Christ is a free gift. It comes to those humble enough to confess their sin and to surrender themselves to Christ. As the great hymn reminds us, God’s grace is amazing!

Let it soak into every part of your life, let it usher you into God’s kingdom every single day. Repent and believe in Christ and grace will fill your life, now and in eternity. Amen

Palm Sunday: Jesus' Call to Humility

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

Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 21:1-11
Today, as we celebrate Palm Sunday, I want to talk with you about humility. Both our Gospel lesson from Matthew and our second lesson, written by the apostle Paul to the Christian church in the Greek city of Philippi, underscore that Jesus accomplished His mission of saving all who believe in Him from sin and death through His humble submission to the will of God the Father.

In recounting Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday when crowds hailed Jesus as a conquering king, our Gospel lesson remembers the Old Testament prophecy of Zechariah:

Tell the daughter of Zion, "Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey… 

Prophetic fulfillment or not, it may have been at this moment of seeming triumph that some in the crowd began to suspect that Jesus hadn’t come to be the sort of king for whom they were looking.

The people didn’t expect Jesus to be a humble Savior Who submitted to death on a cross as the ultimate and only atoning sacrifice for sin. They wanted Jesus to be a conquering king who fulfilled their expectations of Him,  destroying their Roman conquerors, lining their pockets with money, and making their lives easy.

You can imagine why, within a few days’ time, disappointed and angry that Jesus wasn’t the king they wanted Him to be, many in this same crowd who hailed Jesus as king would, by Thursday, call for His execution.

They wanted Jesus to exhibit humility, alright: a humble submission to their wants and whims and not to God the Father Whose intention it was (and is) to offer us much more than ease in this world.

He offers instead, an eternity of life with Him. And that eternity with God begins in this life, where God refashions us, sometimes in ways that bring us pain and humiliation, into the people God wills us to be, the people we were made to be.

Jesus was humble before the Father and so not only fulfilled His mission of dying and rising for us, but also reclaimed His rightful place as King of all creation, as your King and my King.

Look at the hymn to Jesus Paul quotes in our second lesson. You can find it on our Celebrate insert. Paul writes:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

Just as Jesus, Who never knew sin, had to humbly submit to the will of the Father in order to claim new, everlasting life for all who believe in Him, we who are sinners must humbly submit to God so that our old sinful selves can be crucified day by day and God can give us the life Christ has won for us.

That entails submission to Jesus Christ and His Word, the Bible, as the final authority over our lives.

It also means confessing our sins and humbly seeking and accepting His forgiveness.

And it means submitting to the death of the arrogant presumption we all inherited from Adam and Eve, that we can turn our backs on God's will and “be like God.”

The apostle Peter, who knew a thing or two about repenting for his sins and swallowing his pride, writes in 1 Peter 5:6, “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time.”

Jesus’ plan for those who follow Him is that, with Him, we will rule over creation for all eternity. But that will only happen when we humble ourselves, surrendering to Christ and Christ alone.

Now, please look at the very first verse of our processional Gospel, Matthew 21:1-11. That verse establishes this theme of humility. Look at what it says:

When they [that is, Jesus and His disciples] had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage [a town close to Jerusalem], at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples… 

Then Jesus gives instructions on how they’re to prepare for their celebration of the Passover.

The other day while preparing for this sermon, I noticed something in that first verse that I’d never seen before: The two disciples Jesus sent aren’t named.

Think about that! These two disciples are sent on one of the most important missions in human history and Matthew doesn’t see fit to give us their names. They aren't given any credit.

You already know why: Because who Jesus sent wasn’t important; Who sent them—Jesus—was everything.

Paul once quoted a Greek poet who said that in God "we live and move and have our being.” Those who simply walk in the good actions God has prepared for them beforehand to be their way of life don’t need credit.

All the credit and the glory go to God. Those who humbly trust in Christ have the simple and awesome privilege of living as God made human beings to live, imperfectly now and fully in eternity! “Have this mind you that was in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes. Be humble as your King is humble.

The question which all this talk of humble submission to Christ lays before me anyway, is, “How humble am I willing to be for Christ?” How low am I willing to go in order to place myself completely under Jesus' Lordship?

Two weeks ago, I recounted the true story of Pastor Jim Cymbala’s encounter with a homeless man after worship on an Easter Sunday and how Cymbala’s revulsion melted and he was able to share the Savior Jesus with this man who desperately wanted Him.

During worship, right after I delivered that sermon, I prayed silently, telling God, “I try to share Jesus with people in my ministry all the time. But unlike the other people in this sanctuary, who don't have  credentials, titles, or clerical collars standing as walls between them and other people, I don’t always have the opportunity to share Jesus personally with others. Please give me that privilege, Lord.”

As I told the church council this past Tuesday, "Be careful what you pray for." Within minutes of my offering that prayer, a member of this congregation told me about someone who needed to hear about Jesus. On the following Monday, I got a call from a member telling me about someone else who needed the same thing. I went to both of those people, in absolute awe of the ways in which God answers our humble prayers. Later that week, I was able to share the Good News of Jesus with the family and friends of that second person when I was asked to preside at her funeral.

In the face of these answered prayers, all I could do was thank God and express my awe of His greatness and of His willingness to allow an imperfect sinner like me to play some small role in bringing Jesus to others. It was amazing!

Be in awe of God. But, please, do not be impressed with me! You see, this past week, I fell off the humility wagon.

Another phone call. Another person from outside of the congregation in need. But this time, like the priest and levite in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, I was preoccupied with my own agenda, bothered by this inconvenient interruption. I was curt with the person who made the request for help. “I can’t do everything,” I said. But, of course, God hadn’t asked me to do everything. He asked me to do just one thing…and that one thing was something I had actually asked Him to send my way!

Now, I can be thick-skulled. It can take me awhile to figure things out…or as Ann might put it, it takes some time before God’s two-by-four penetrates my consciousness. But yesterday, as I kneeled by my bed for my daily devotional and prayer time, I found it hard to pray. I sensed God telling me, “Don’t even think of praying right now. You have business to attend to.”

I remembered Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:23-24: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.“ I realized that I couldn’t offer my praise (or my requests) to God until I had done what I could to set things right with this person I had wronged.

So, I rummaged through my trash (that's humbling) until I found the discarded paper on which was written the telephone number of the person with whom I felt I’d been so short. I called. There was no answer. But thankfully, there was an answering machine on the other end of the line. I mentioned who I was and apologized for my wrong.

I don’t know if they’ve gotten the message yet. But I can tell you that I sensed a wall between God and me had been torn down. I was actually able to pray. I was able to come into God’s presence with joy once again. Remember what Peter wrote: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time.”

We can’t manufacture humility. We can’t resolve to be humble. Humility is a gift we may not always want, but which truly is a gift. God will give us humility only as we submit to Jesus Christ, asking the Father and the Holy Spirit to give us the same humble spirit that caused Jesus to willingly ride a donkey into Jerusalem, knowing full well what horrors lay ahead of Him in the next few days.

As we prepare for Holy Week and Easter, pray that God will fill you with the humble spirit of Jesus.

If you pray that prayer, there will be times, I suspect, when you too will fall off the humility wagon.

But it is the humble, those who willingly lay their whole lives under the authority of the God made known in Jesus Christ, who experience oneness with God.

They know the exhilaration of being part of God’s holy plans and work in the world.

They have the privilege of seeing what happens as they fulfill the great commandment to love God and neighbor and the great commission to make disciples in their neighborhood and in the world.

And it’s those who humbly surrender to Jesus Christ, believing in Him, who can look forward to a day when they will be exalted and hear those words of Jesus, which, as I’ve told you before, I long to hear more than any others: “Well done, good and trustworthy slave…enter into the joy of your master.”