Faith Beyond Our Fears

[Below, you'll find the message prepared for today's worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. You can also view the live stream video of both the services. Have a good week and God bless you!]

Genesis 15:1-6

Often in both the Old and New Testaments, when God or an angel sent by God encountered human beings, the first thing God or His messengers told people was, “Don’t be afraid.”

One reason for saying this is that it’s intimidating to be in the presence of God or of angels who directly reflect the glory of God.

But there are other reasons for these admonitions. In one of his Christmas sermons, Martin Luther recounts how, on Christmas night, an angel visited shepherds.”Fear not,’ said the angel,” Luther noted. Luther then confessed: “I fear death, the judgment of God, the world, hunger, and the like.”

Luther is right, isn’t he? We fear many things.

Parents fear for the safety of their kids when they send them off to school and when they see their teens get behind the wheel of a car.

Grandparents fear that their children and grandchildren will turn from Christ and the Church.

Employees fear being laid off. Consumers fear that inflation will eat up their savings and retirement accounts.

And with things like COVID, monkeypox, and the re-emergence of polio among the non-immunized over the past few years, people have feared for their health, the health of their loved ones, and for their lives.

Fear is the opposite of faith.

Faith trusts in God, in the promises of God, in the finished work of the crucified and risen Jesus assuring us that God will never leave us nor forsake us and that all who trust–who believe, who have faith–in Jesus will be raised from the dead even as Jesus was raised.

To Christians who receive the Holy Spirit at their baptism, God’s Word says: “The Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead. If the same Holy Spirit [The Holy Spirit Who enables you to believe in Jesus. If the same Holy Spirit…] lives in you, He will give life to your bodies in the same way.” (Romans 8:11)

Because faith is foreign to our natures, God even gives us faith in Jesus. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God…” we’re told in Ephesians 2:8.

Faith overcomes fear when, by the power of the Holy Spirit working in God’s Word, we trust that “the one who believes in [Jesus] will live, even though they die…” (John 11:25)

In saying that fear is the opposite of faith, we’re not saying that we should throw caution to the wind! When the devil tempted Jesus to jump off the pinnacle of the temple, Jesus didn’t do it. Stupid is still stupid, even when you have faith!

God’s Word tells us that our “bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit…You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20)

Jesus, by His death on the cross, has bought us out of our slavery to sin and death. We believe that these bodies, even after they’ve aged and deteriorated, even after death when we’ve been reduced to dust, will rise to live eternally with God. Since God values our physical bodies so much, we also are called to treat them with reverence. 

But, friends, we need never fear that God has forgotten us.

Or that we are alone.

Or that our sins are too great for Him to forgive.

Or that our prayers are too insignificant for Him to hear.

Or that Jesus’ resurrection promises are for everyone but us.

Because God acted on Good Friday and Easter Sunday to save us from sin, death, and condemnation, we need not fear anything!

But as long as we live on this earth, the battle between faith and fear will rage within us.

We see this battle in Abram, later renamed by God, Abraham, the ancestral father of God’s people, ancient Israel, in our first lesson for this morning, Genesis 15:1-6.

The book of Hebrews tells us: “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.” (Hebrews 11:8)

Abraham had faith in God. He also often caved into fear, afraid that God couldn’t be trusted to keep His promises. Twice to save his own neck, he lied to kings through whose territory he traveled, claiming that his wife was actually his sister, nearly tripping the kings into adultery with Sarah. Afraid that God had forgotten His promise to provide Sarah and him with a son and many descendants, he went along with Sarah’s plan of impregnating Sarah’s slave Hagar.

Fear causes us to underestimate God and to take sinful shortcuts because we don’t trust God to fulfill His promises.

When we join Abram today, God has just done two amazing things for him. First, he helped Abram, in concert with some local potentates, to save the family of his relative Lot after they were kidnapped by several strong armies. God had accomplished this impossible thing, giving Abram a front-row seat on God’s grace. Then, God sent Melchizedek, the king of a place called Salem, now Jerusalem, and also a priest of God, to Abram with bread and wine as signs that He hasn’t forgotten His promises.

After these things, Abram should be fortified in faith.

Instead, God finds Abram wallowing in fear.

God tells Abram: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.” (Genesis 15:1)

Listen, friends, the Law is of God. It’s His perfect will for human beings. Among those laws is that we trust in God. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding…” God’s Word tells us. Proverbs 3:5)

But, have you noticed that being told things like, “Trust in God” or “You shall have no other gods before Me” doesn’t make us less prone to putting other things ahead of God? At most, hearing God’s Law, even from the mouth of God Himself, makes us conscious of our need for repentance.

But God’s Law, perfect though it is, cannot save us. It can’t make us righteous, acceptable to God, or prop up any self-driven self-improvement program.

So, after God tells Abram to not be afraid, Abram vents his fears: “‘Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?’ And Abram said, ‘You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.’” (Genesis 15:2-3)

Think about Abram’s words. “Elohim Yahweh,” he’s saying, “you’ve done some interesting things in my life. But when are you going to come through for me? When will you start paying off on that promise of nations of faithful people descending from my wife and me then?”

Now, God would have been justified in giving Abram a big smackdown at this point.

But it’s now that God speaks not the Law to Abram, but words of promise, what we could call Gospel, good news. “This man [Eliezer] will not be your heir,” God tells Abram, “but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” Then God takes Abram outside and God tells Abram, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them….So shall your offspring be.” (Genesis 15:5)

Nothing about Abram’s objective situation has changed as of this moment.

He and his wife are still childless.

They still aren’t sure where they’re going to live permanently.

They can’t see the multitudes of nations that were to issue from them.

But, by the power of the Word of God, by the power of God’s good will for fallen, imperfect human beings like Abram, like you and me, faith supplanted fear.

God, you remember, once brought the universe into existence by speaking His Word into lifeless, disordered chaos. God brings faith into the lives of sometimes fearful people as He speaks His Word of promise and love into our chaos.

And so, the last verse of our lesson tells us that after God had preached His Word of promise to Abram: “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.” (Genesis 15:6)

Abram’s faith wasn’t Abram’s accomplishment. Faith, faith that saves us from sin and death, that takes hold of the promises of God, comes to us through God’s Word as a free gift.

Standing under God’s Word of promise, hearing it, receiving it, is what gives us a faith that, in spite of our sins, including the sins of fear, dread, and despair, God reckons to us as righteousness.

It’s the kind of faith that Abraham had when He heard God’s Word.

It’s the kind of faith that turned back to God again and again, even after sin and failure.

It’s the kind of faith that today, the Word of God about Jesus Who died and rose for you, gives to you as you receive it.

In the Law, God tells us, “Do not fear.”

In the Gospel, God says, “I have already overcome all that causes you to fear.”

Today, friends, God tells us we need not be afraid. Nothing this world or our sins can do to us can separate those who take refuge in Jesus, God the Son, Who enables us to trust in the Gospel from the God Who loves us.

Just like Abraham, we may not be able to see how God will fulfill His promises to us. Nonetheless, His Word comes to all who confess in Christ again this morning and tells us, “You belong to God, now and forever.” Amen!

Big Question: What is a Saint?

[This message was shared during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio today.]

Revelation 7:9-17
Today is All Saints’ Sunday. But what exactly is a saint?

This isn’t just some academic question. The answer has eternal consequences for all of us here this morning, in fact for everyone in the world.

To find out what a saint is, we’ll turn today to the New Testament book of Revelation 7:9-17, our first lesson.

Revelation, you know, is based on a series of visions given to the apostle John about sixty years after Jesus’ resurrection.

Beginning at chapter 6, John sees Jesus, the second Person of the one God, open the first six of seven seals. With the opening of each seal, John sees this creation moving closer to its inevitable end.

He also sees glimmers of the new creation that the risen and ascended Jesus will finally and fully usher in when He returns to claim His kingdom from our enemies, sin, death, and the devil.

Jesus’ return will bring celebration and relief to all who have turned from sin and who have believed in Christ.

But, as the last verse of Revelation 6 points out, the return of Jesus won’t be universally welcomed. (Just as He is far from universally welcomed today.)

Those who have rejected Christ and the Holy Spirit’s call to repent for sin and trust in Him alone for life, will ask the caves, mountains, and rocks for help. “‘Fall on us,’ they will beg, ‘and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb [the Lamb being Jesus, Who, Revelation also describes as the Lion]!’ For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”

Then, just before the opening of the seventh and final seal, John is allowed to see two scenes which he records in Revelation, chapter 7.

The first scene comes in Revelation 7:1-8, right before today’s lesson. The location of this scene is this world. God assigns four angels to hold back the final destruction of the old creation. “Don’t damage the earth,” God tells the angels, “until we’ve marked all of the servants of God with a seal on their foreheads.” (Like the seal of the Holy Spirit which the Baptized receive on the day they are made new by water and the Spirit.)

Then the numbers of those sealed for salvation are counted out. The total comes to 144,000.

Don’t be worried by this number, though! The Bible is not saying that a measly 144,000 people out of all human history will be part of God’s eternal kingdom!

The number 144 is derived from multiplying the 12 tribes of Israel times the 12 apostles Jesus chose to lead the post-resurrection church. For John, it would have been a number implying perfection and completeness.

And, tacking three zeroes onto the back of 144, making it 144,000,  would be a bit like one of us talking about “a gazillion” people showing up for Black Friday sales at Macy’s or Target.

We see how symbolic a number this 144,000 is when we look at the first verse of our lesson, Revelation 7:9. John writes, “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count…”

I can hardly read those words without getting chills! This is no little crowd of 144,000! It’s a multitude!

But what brings me chills is the phrase saying that the crowd was so big, “no one could count.”

Here’s why it’s so moving: On a starlit night 4000 years ago, an elderly man to whom God had promised the impossible struggled to believe that God could overcome change, decay, and death to give him a son and a future to his descendants. The man’s name at the time was Abram. (Later to be changed by God to Abraham, a name that means “father of nations.”)

Turn to page 9 in one of the sanctuary Bibles and read what God did in Genesis 15:5 to help Abram believe: “[God took Abram] outside and said, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’” "Abram," God was saying, "I Who made more stars than any mortal could ever count is capable of keeping My promise to you. I will give you a son. And not only that, your descendants will dwarf the numbers of stars you see in the sky right now."

The multitude from every nation that John is shown in His vision of heaven after the life of this old world has come to an end are the descendants of Abram, the very descendants God had promised on that starry night so long ago.

And each of those descendants came to be part of the kingdom of God—they came to be the saints of God—not because they were the genealogical descendants of Abraham and his wife Sarah. They became saints in just the way that Abram came to be a saint. Genesis 15:6 says that when Abram heard God’s promise, “Abram believed the Lord, and [God] credited it to [Abram] as righteousness.”

Abram--Abraham--was saved by grace through faith in the God of promise. That God has since revealed Himself definitively to all the world in the crucified and risen Jesus.

“If you know Me,” Jesus says, “you will know My Father also.” 

And He says, “The Father and I are one.” 

And, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

Jesus is the God Who gave Abraham that promise four millennia ago.

And He is the God Who promises that everyone who turns from sin and believes in Him becomes a descendant of Abraham. They are saints.

What gives me the chills when I read the vision that the risen Jesus gave to John is the realization that God has never changed. In God, there is, James 1:17 tells us, “no variation or shadow due to change.”

God has always wanted to rescue His fallen children from sin and death and to give them life.

And His plan has always been the same: to give eternal life in His new creation to all who will trust, not in their own achievements, smarts, money, shrewdness, health, or anything else, but who trust only in Him. 

Saints are those who trust God to give them the free gifts that come to all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus: gifts like forgiveness of sin, eternal life, the power to live each day for His purposes.

But if sainthood is a free gift from God, we must not think for a moment that sainthood is easy. We see this from just four words in our lesson from Revelation today.

The first two of those words appear at the beginning of verse 9: “After this.” After what, exactly? John saw the multitude of saints after an event that’s mentioned in verse 14.

That’s where you can read two more important words: “great tribulation.”

Despite the propaganda who misconstrue Revelation, "the great tribulation" does not refer to some endtime cataclysm. It’s the common experience through which every believer in Jesus goes, in big ways and small.

We live in a world filled with beauty and wonder. But with its beauty and wonder marred by human sin, death, and even the suffering of the saints, this world can, at its best, still only give us nothing more than a glimmer of the beauty and the wonder—the perfection—that await all who persevere in following Jesus as their only God and King to the end.

After completing life in this world, the saints who have kept on trusting Jesus, will be met by the Savior, Who will make them clean forever, Who will dry their tears, Who will feed their hunger and quench their thirst for the righteous life only He can give, and lead them into the new creation for which each of us were made.

For now, we live in an in-between time in which, as Paul writes Romans 8, both we and the whole of creation wait with eager longing for Christ to reveal Himself and His children.

Here's a fact you may not have noticed: Life is hard.

Even in the best of times, life can be a struggle.

And sometimes, our struggles are made even harder because we believe in Jesus Christ. How much easier the lives of so many here today might have been had they, when confronted by evil and false teaching in another church a few years ago, stood with the shifting mores of the world instead of with the truth and grace of God revealed in His Word?

And I am personally convinced, by my experience of moving from being an atheist who rarely had a troubled conscience to being a follower of Jesus Who wants to please the God Who loved me all the way to the cross, that the devil couldn’t care less about tempting or testing those who live their lives without faith in Christ or fear and respect for God.

Instead, the devil tests, tempts, and tries the saints.

And every believer in Christ will, eventually, bear the scars—physical, emotional, or relational—that come to those who put following Jesus first in their lives.

Mark it well: Follow Christ and He will most certainly thwart you in some of your most heartfelt desires because He’s less interested in giving you momentary happiness than He is in fitting and forging you and your character for eternal life with Him.

Our own personal “great ordeals” may include persecution, chronic or fatal illness, disagreements over priorities with those we love or with whom we work, or the conflicts that happen within us when a sin tantalizes us and we know that we must choose God’s way and not our own.

A member of our parish in Cincinnati, Karen, spoke for millions of Christians after she’d gotten yet another poor report on the cancers that would eventually take her life. We were sitting alone when she remarked, “I just can’t seem to catch a break.” There was nothing I could say to make her situation understandable. I couldn’t understand it.

Yet, despite her disappointment and mystification, Karen, an environmental scientist who was exceedingly intelligent, persisted in her faith, confident that while the many prayers for her healing weren’t being answered in this life, she would, because of her faith in Christ, experience the ultimate healing when, in eternity, she would be sheltered forever from all disappointment and pain by God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, along with all the saints who, like her, put their trust in Jesus. 

What is a saint?

Saints are people who trust their whole lives to Jesus. Sometimes haltingly. Always imperfectly. At times even resentfully. But no matter how their hearts may wander, they always know to come back to Christ.

They know to Whom they belong and they know where they’re headed.

They know that this life is not perfect.

But they have a purpose in this life: To live for and to let the whole world know about the Lamb Jesus, Who will, after the last page has been closed in the last chapter of this world's story, welcome all who have trusted in Him to His new creation.

In the meantime, dear saints of God, do not be afraid!

Trust in Jesus.

Know His love and power for you even in the midst of life’s greatest tribulations and know for a fact that, if you remain steadfast in following Jesus, like saints before us, Jesus will welcome you in His heavenly kingdom.

If we remain faithful to Christ, you and I will one day join our fellow saints, along with God’s messengers, the angels, in singing and savoring the glories of our loving God and all who have persistently, perseveringly, enduringly followed their Savior in this world will hear the Lord say to them in the next world, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” Amen!

A Conversation in the Night

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

John 3:1-21

Father: When we gather for worship each week, of course, Your Holy Spirit speaks Your Word of Law and Gospel to us. But, in the tradition of the Old Testament psalms and worship as Jesus knew it, we also speak words inspired by Your Spirit: Words of praise and supplication to You and Words of challenge and encouragement to one another. In an old hymn that helps us to speak both to You and to each other, we find these words, “Come home! Come home! You who are weary come home. Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling, 'O sinner, come home.'” Use the words of this sermon today to call not only sinners who feel they’ve wandered from You, their home, but also to encourage we forgiven sinners—the people Your Word calls saints—to call others from the darkness of life without Jesus into the eternal light of heaven. In Jesus’ Name we pray. Amen

Today we’ll move, verse by verse, through our Gospel lesson. It records a conversation that took place one night between Jesus and Nicodemus. Hopefully, speaking their words aloud together this morning will help bring their conversation to life for us.

Please pull out the special insert and read verse 1 aloud with me:

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 

Nicodemus was an important man. If Jesus had been politically correct, He would have buttered Nicodemus up. But Jesus had no interest in being politically correct. Instead, as we read here, His interest in Nicodemus is the same as His interest in all of us: Whether Nicodemus would spend eternity with God or be separated from God in hell. That was the issue that concerned Jesus most!

Let’s read verse 2:

He came to Jesus by night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” 

It was risky for Nicodemus to be seen with Jesus. That’s why He came at night. Nicodemus didn’t believe that Jesus was the Word made flesh—God with us. But he did see God working in Jesus and so had gone to see Jesus.

Verse 3

Jesus answered him, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” 

Here we see that Nicodemus has an agenda. But Jesus has His own agenda! He wants to help Nicodemus (and all of us) to be born into a new life from God.

Verses 4 through 8, please:

Nicodemus said to him, "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?" Jesus answered, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” 

Nicodemus is confused by Jesus’ saying that Nicodemus will remain in the dark, unable to see the kingdom of God, unless He is reborn. Jesus explains that just as fleshy human beings give birth to other fleshy human beings, God’s Holy Spirit can re-create us spiritually.

Jesus then speaks of the wind blowing where it will. What's that all about?

As you know from our Read the Bible in a Year readings of this past week, in Genesis 1:2, we’re told that, in the beginning, a mighty wind or the Spirit of God (depending on your translation of the Bible) moved over chaotic waters and brought life and order and peace into being.

Later, the verb form of the word translated as either wind or Spirit describes the breath of God that entered inanimate dust to make the first human being, Adam. The Hebrew root word in each case is ruach.

Jesus uses a similar word when He talks about wind here. The word in the Greek of the New Testament is pneuma. (Which is the root for common English words like pneumonia or pneumatic brakes.) The same word, pneuma, is used when the New Testament tells us about how God’s Holy Spirit came to bring Christ’s Church to life on Pentecost through a violent wind.

It’s God’s Holy Spirit, bringing the Good News of new life for all who believe in Jesus, blowing where it will, that brings life to us. It happens at the Baptismal font.

We can’t control or direct the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit, Third Person of the Trinity, goes where He will.

This past week, I was talking with a member of the congregation who said that he used to be stymied by people who asked him, “When were you saved?,” expecting him to name a specific time and place when he came to believe in Jesus. “I don’t ever remember not believing in Jesus,” he told me. A friend told him how to answer that question, “When were you saved?” “On a cross outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago. That's when I was saved!"

Our relationship with Jesus Christ is not limited by our experiences. The Wind—the Holy Spirit—blows where He will and if the Spirit makes it possible for you to truthfully believe what we confess in the Apostles’ or Nicene Creeds, then you can be sure you are saved even if you can’t remember your baptism or the hour you first believed!

Now read verses 9 and 10:

Nicodemus said to him, "How can these things be?" Jesus answered him, Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” 

Nicodemus wonders if the things Jesus speaks of are possible.

Faith entails believing that God can and does and will do what is otherwise impossible.

Some four thousand years before Jesus was born, God spoke to a man named Abraham. Abraham was old, his wife was old, and they were childless. But God challenged Abraham to imagine by faith that he would become the father of nations. The Old Testament says that Abraham believed and God counted Abraham righteous for his belief in the same God you and I know through Jesus Christ.

In our Gospel lesson, Jesus is frustrated that Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel, can’t believe that God does things that Nicodemus thinks impossible.

Listen, folks: If Christian preachers and teachers cannot affirm...

• that Jesus was born of a virgin, 
• that Jesus led a sinless life, 
• that He physically rose from the dead, 
• that He ascended into heaven and will one day return to this earth to judge the living and the dead, and 
• that believers will rise bodily to live with God forever, 

then those preachers and teachers aren’t from God.

You can bet that teachers and preachers like this are as frustrating to Jesus now as they were on the night Nicodemus came to see Him.

Please read verses 11 through 15 with me:

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” 

In verses 14 and 15, Jesus refers to a famous incident in the Old Testament, when, during their wilderness wanderings, the people of Israel were punished by God. Poisonous snakes bit them. Many died. God told Moses to forge a bronze serpent, put it on a pole, hold it aloft, and tell the people to look at it. The serpent, reminiscent of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, reminded the people of their sin. Looking at it represented their confession. Those bitten who looked at the serpent were healed by God.

Jesus tells Nicodemus that, like the bronze serpent, He too will be lifted up—on a cross bearing our sins—and that all who look to Him—believe in Him—will be saved.

Please read verses 16 and 17:

“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. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” 

Martin Luther called Jesus' words in John 3:16, “the Gospel in a nutshell.” After humanity fell into sin through Adam and Eve, God didn’t give up on us. He refuses to let any human being go to hell without a fight! He waged that fight—a fight for you and me--ultimately through Jesus Christ.

All who entrust their lives to Christ will have eternal life with God! This is the best news anyone will ever hear!

Let’s read verses 18 through 21:

“Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” 

This is the politically incorrect Jesus, the Jesus the first century world crucified, the Jesus that the twenty-first century world, including much of what calls itself His Church, wants to ignore.

Jesus insists that in order for us to be beneficiaries of His sacrificial death on the cross and His resurrection from the dead, we must believe in Him.

He must be the sole foundation on which we build our lives.

We condemn ourselves if we refuse to believe in Him.

Jesus says that those who forthrightly come to Him, who—unlike Nicodemus—refuse to skulk in the dark and instead acknowledge their sin and their need of Him for life will live with God forever!

This past week, I met several Lutheran colleagues who just returned from Ethiopia, for a conference attended by 20,000 Ethiopian Lutherans.

The Lutheran Church there—the Mekane Yesus Church—is experiencing incredible growth.

At the same time, it’s experiencing persecution.

There have recently been 57 Lutheran churches or mission stations burned to the ground by radical Jihadists. Thousands of Christians have been displaced or lost their lives.

Yet, the Church still grows.

In fact, one colleague reported walking down a street and seeing 200 people waiting under a tree by a church to be baptized.

They wanted Jesus.

They wanted the life that only Jesus can give.

How does this happen?

Why aren’t 200 previously unchurched people waiting outside of Saint Matthew’s building on Sunday mornings, desperate for the new life that comes from Jesus Christ?

It’s not for a lack of people who need Christ. There are thousands in Hocking County mired in futile lifestyles who don’t know Jesus and who need Him.

Another colleague helped me to see one reason the unchurched and spiritually disconnected aren't waiting by our doors for Baptism and spiritual nourishment: Every member of the Mekane Yesus Church sees the great commission—Jesus’ command that we make disciples—as their own person responsibility.

The Lutherans there are desperate to share Jesus. I can’t always say that’s true of this Lutheran. Maybe you can say the same thing about yourself.

The Ethiopian Lutherans are like Jesus. He looked at Nicodemus, and didn’t see a prominent person to be buttered up (or an unimportant person to be ignored), but a lost soul who, without faith in Him, would go to hell.

Each of us must see the personal responsibility we bear for sharing the Good News with those with whom we work, study, party, play, and live.

God doesn’t want to condemn anyone.

Through Jesus Christ, He wants to save them.

Ask God what you can do to help those around you who live in darkness to see how much they need a Savior and how Jesus and Jesus alone is the Savior they need. Then tell them about Jesus. Remember: Jesus loves them too. Amen

Those Funny Church Words: SIN and FAITH

[This is the second message in a series I'm doing on words that are only used or are used uniquely by Christians. It was given during the worship celebration at Friendship Lutheran Church, Amelia, Ohio earlier today.]

Genesis 15:1-6
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 16:4-14
A daredevil wanted to use a motorcycle to jump over a portion of the Grand Canyon. The place where he wanted to do this was so wide and the canyon below so deep that nobody--not even Evel Knievel--had ever tried jumping it before.

When he went to his engineer and mechanic, they both said it was a looney idea.

When he approached his usual financial backers and insurance company, they said that if he tried something so stupid, he’d be on his own.

His wife and kids were totally against it.

The TV networks, in spite of their apparent love of death and mayhem, wouldn’t pay to cover what they said was his certain death.

Even his pastor called him up and said, “Don’t do this!”

But the daredevil was intent on following through. He scraped together most of the money he’d earned from previous stunts and personally outfitted a bike for the jump.

The day for the jump came. The daredevil revved his engine, tore down the runway, hit the ramp at more than 200-mph, and began soaring through the void above the canyon. Everything went well until he got about halfway across. That’s when gravity took over. The daredevil plunged to his death.

God met him near the gates of heaven. The daredevil was steaming. “How could you have let this happen to me, Lord? My wife is now a widow who’ll be forced to raise our kids without me!” “Don’t I know it!” God said. “That’s why I sent the engineer, the mechanic, your financial backers, the insurance company, your wife, your kids, the network execs, and your pastor all with the word to not jump. But you wouldn’t listen to Me!”

Last week, in the first installment of this series on Funny Church Words, we talked about grace. Grace is God’s undeserved, unearned gifts of forgiveness and new life which become ours when we turn from sin--repent--and receive Jesus Christ as our Lord and our Savior.

But there’s something that gets in the way of our receiving God’s grace. We can be a lot like that daredevil. God may offer us grace repeatedly. But we can refuse His offers. Those who refuse the grace offered to all people through Jesus Christ are daredevils who inevitably plunge to their eternal deaths.

But why do people refuse God’s grace offered in Christ? God’s forgiveness, presence, and guidance in this life and the promise of everlasting life with God are such good things, why would anybody ever turn Christ down?

The Bible teaches that our sin causes us to refuse God.

The Bible has two main ways of picturing sin.

To understand the first way, imagine yourself in a carnival hall of mirrors. The distorted shapes and angles of the mirrors result in distorted reflections of your image. That’s largely how the Old Testament speaks of sin. It’s a distortion of our true selves. As you know, Genesis teaches that human beings were created in God’s image. But sin distorts us and how we look at the world.

To understand a second major way in which the Bible portrays sin, picture yourself standing before a target, bow and arrow in hand. Then, see yourself pulling the arrow back, taking aim, and firing. And missing. And firing again. And missing again. This is how the New Testament usually pictures sin. Deep down, each of us has a common target. We want to live our lives as fully human beings, in sync with God and His will. But the target is always elusive, always beyond our ability to hit.

Writing in the New Testament, the apostle Paul says, “I do not understand what I do; for I don’t do [the right] I would like to do, but instead I do what I hate.” If we’re honest, we may feel this same sort of frustration with ourselves and our actions. But it’s really no mystery. We actually inherit our sinfulness from our parents. As Israel’s King David wrote in Psalm 51: “In sin did my mother conceive me.”

Sin, then, is an inborn condition which we can’t overcome on our own. As one of the most venerated Christian confessions puts it, “We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”

Think of our motorcycle daredevil again. He didn’t refuse God’s rescue attempts because he was exercising a free will. He refused God's will because his will was imprisoned to his inborn sinfulness. Sin distorted his judgment, made him selfish and egotistical.*

You and I are likely to refuse God’s grace because we won't allow Jesus Christ to clear our heads and set us free to make wise decisions about this life and the one to come.

When your will is distorted by sin, grace seems too good to be true. But God has a strategy for overcoming the reign of sin over our lives. He always has! We see it in today’s Bible lesson. It recounts an incident from the life of Abram, later to be renamed Abraham by God. He lived some two-thousand years before the birth of Jesus. We know Abraham as the father of God’s chosen people, the Jews. But when we meet him in today's lesson, Abram is nobody's father!

Our lesson finds him, a man aged 99, in despair. God had promised him and his now-89 year old wife a son. But twenty-fours have passed since that promise was made. They’d traveled many miles, going to uncertain destinations, uprooted by God’s promise. But, as Abram despairs, God renews His promise. He takes Abraham out into the desert night and says, “Look at the sky...try to count the stars; you’ll have as many descendants as that.”

Then, the Bible tells us that Abraham did something very strange. He believed in God and in God’s promises. The Bible tells us that God looked at Abraham’s faith and counted Abraham’s trust in God as righteousness.

The antidote to Abraham’s sin was his faith, his trust, in God. Today, that same antidote is available to all who believe in God-in-the-flesh, Jesus Christ. God calls us to believe that our sin cannot destroy us because we trust that when Jesus died and rose two-thousand years ago, He crushed sin’s power over us for all eternity.

In our second lesson for today, Paul says that the message that Jesus’ death by crucifixion saves us from sin and death is, “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

Faith in God is easier for us than it was for Abraham. To uphold his faith, all Abraham had were some stars in the sky and a promise. You and I can point to Jesus on a cross and to His empty tomb. Those are accomplished facts which incited otherwise practical, down-to-earth people like Peter and Thomas to stake their lives on their faith in Christ.

Of course, we’ve never seen Jesus face to face. That can make it hard even for us to have faith sometimes.

But God overcomes that difficulty. A number of years ago, Ann and I attended the funeral of one of her childhood friends, a high school classmate of ours. He died after learning he had a brain tumor just two months before. As we sat in the same sanctuary where Ann and I were married, where Philip was baptized, and I was ordained, the thought crossed my mind, “This is where the rubber hits the road. This is where the promises of God are true or they aren't.”

Then I asked myself, “How can I know that God has conquered sin and death for me and for all who believe?”

Soon, I heard God’s Word read. It sounded like a love letter from God. I listened to and drew hope from the message by the pastor. I received Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine of the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Something happened to me: God filled me again with faith. God reminded me again that He’s here and that we can trust in Him. God used His Word, His Church, and the Sacraments to remind me of His presence, His promises, and His faithfulness!

Faith isn’t something that we convince ourselves about.

Faith isn’t an intellectual thing, although it should engage our minds.

It isn’t an emotional thing, although our hearts will be touched by it.

Faith is rooted in the empirical realities of Christ’s death and resurrection and in our willingness to believe.

In the end, faith is completely a construction of God, a tower of hope and strength that God builds when we allow Him to do it.

If we want faith, God will give us faith.

That’s really the point of some the letters of Mother Teresa that we’ve been hearing so much about this week. She saw and dealt with the worst in life and struggled to believe. But she laid it all at God’s feet and allowed Him to help her keep trustingly serving God and her neighbor. Sometimes a Christian’s faith is, as Jesus said, only as large as a mustard seed. But that’s all the faith we need. Little faith in a big God can still move the greatest mountain. Look at what Mother Teresa did for God and for the dying on the streets of India when she put her small faith into action!

In The Small Catechism, Martin Luther writes: “I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, and sanctified [that is, made me holy] and kept me in true faith.”

In our last lesson today, Jesus says, “When the [Holy] Spirit...comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” There's an old saying that tells us, "If you feel distant from God, guess who moved?" When we allow ourselves to get close enough to Jesus, the Holy Spirit will create and deepen faith within us.

Sin imprisons us.

Faith in Christ sets us free.

Give God the go-ahead and He will fill you with just the faith you need for today and for all eternity!

Next week, our funny church word will be discipleship.

*It might just as well have caused him to think himself completely unworthy because whether we think of ourselves as gods or as nobodies, the culprit is the distorion of our natures caused by sin.