The Word That Saves You

[Below, you'll find both live stream video of today's single worship service with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church and the text of the message shared today. Have a good and blessed week!]



Matthew 14:22-33

One of the joys of being a parish pastor, a joy that the Bible tells us can be shared by any Christian willing to be Christ’s hands and feet in the world, is in what’s called the Office of the Keys.

We exercise the Office of the Keys whenever someone, in the name and under the lordship of Jesus, confesses their sins, turns from them, seeks the assurance of God’s forgiveness from us, and we are able to proclaim God’s forgiveness of all their sins to them.

Jesus has given this office to the Church and, while all members of the Church can exercise it, the Church has given particular responsibility to pastors to do so.

Jesus does this, for example, in John 20:23, when He tells the Church: “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

And Jesus also says in Matthew 18:18: “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

God, it turns out, is not against us sinners.

God is for sinners, like you and me.

He wants to free all sinners from the bondage to sin from which we cannot free ourselves.

That’s why Jesus, God the Son, came into our world and, enfleshed as the Man without sin, took our sins, all of our sins, into Himself, absorbing the death and condemnation we deserve, on His cross so that we could have His righteousness and life forever.

When penitent sinners are told, “Because of Jesus Christ, all your sins are forgiven,” they are hearing the Word from Jesus Christ Himself. They can believe that their sins are forgiven.

Nothing more needs to be said.

No questions need to be asked.

Through Jesus, we are free of sin, condemnation, and death.

“If the Son sets you free,” Jesus says of Himself, “you will be free indeed.” (John 8:36)

But I’ve noticed something that sometimes happens to sinners when God’s Word of forgiveness, His Word of absolution, comes to us.

A woman came to see me, mostly to confess a sin for which she felt guilty, a sin that had happened decades before.

I told her that her guilt for the sin was appropriate, but that, as she turned to Jesus Christ, she could be assured of God’s forgiveness.

I reminded her of biblical promises like, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners…” (1 Timothy 1:15)

“In Christ,” I told her, “all your sins are forgiven.” Her guilt, I assured her, was erased by the grace of God extended to us through Christ!

The woman wept for a few moments and then said, “I wish that I could believe that.”

There was little more I could say to her now. I’d given her Christ’s Word that she was forgiven, that Jesus, God the Son, had taken her sin away. But here she was taking it  back again!

At the end of our second lesson for today, the apostle Paul tells us, “...faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.” (Romans 10:17) That woman ignored the Word about Christ and so could not and would not believe that she was saved from sin and death and forgiven through Him. She insisted on believing the words of the devil, the world, and her sinful self that told her that forgiveness couldn’t possibly be that simple, that she needed to do more, that she needed to be more for her to be out from under condemnation and death. Jesus was offering her forgiveness and new life with God as a gift and she wanted to earn it.

That woman isn’t alone. Years ago, a man told me that he liked reading a particular Christian author. Why? “Because,” he said, “he always makes me feel guilty. And after I get guilty, I can get busy working on my salvation and holy living.”

The Bible tells us that Jesus, by going to the cross and rising from the tomb, has already secured our salvation, our justification, and our holy lives, our sanctification. Our call is to simply attend to His Word, given to us in the Bible and the Sacraments…to keep receiving these gifts, because it is by these gifts, that God gives us the gift of faith and strengthens that faith. (This is why regular worship with the Church is essential to being a follower of Jesus. There’s no such thing as a solo Christian.) Hebrews 10:10 says, “we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” You don’t have to do anything to make that happen.

We see a person like this woman and this man in the apostle Peter in today’s Gospel lesson.

After feeding the 5000-plus, Jesus sends the disciples away by boat, dismisses the crowd, and goes to a mountain to pray alone. Deep into the night, toward dawn, the disciples are still in their boat on the sea during a raging storm. Don’t confuse this with an earlier incident in which Jesus slept through a storm that terrified the disciples. Matthew tells us about that incident too. This time though, we have no indication that the disciples were afraid of the storm. They seem to feel they have everything under control. They’re competent, have it together, and they know exactly what they’re doing. Jesus is about to show them differently.

“Shortly before dawn,” Matthew says, “Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake.” When the disciples catch sight of this, they’re terrified!

A lot of people think they would have liked to lived back when Jesus walked on the earth. They think they would see Him and see His kind, sweet visage.

But, listen, friends: unrepentant sinners, like the disciples who had so recently suggested that, rather than helping the needy crowd around them, Jesus should send them away so they could buy their own food, never find it pleasant to be in the presence of the perfect, holy, righteous Son of God. That’s why they were terrified. But the New Testament says that, “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31)

Those who refuse to live in daily repentance and faith in Christ stand naked in their sins, unprotected from God’s wrath and condemnation. When the disciples see Jesus, they think He’s a ghost. They cry out in fear.

But then, Jesus tells them, literally, in verse 27: “Take courage. I AM. Do not fear.” “Take courage. Yahweh. Do not be afraid.”

Friends, although He is God and we are sinful human beings, Jesus speaks a Word that conquers our sin, sets us free from death, and gives us peace.

The disciples are right to initially feel terrified in coming face to face with Jesus. He is God. He is, as the theologian of the last century, Paul Tillich said, “wholly Other”: completely different from us, completely holy, completely righteous, completely perfect.

The disciples are seeing the Messiah Who will one day judge the living and the dead.

They see Jesus in His raw deity.

They recognize the distance between Him, in His righteousness and purity, and them, in their unrepentant, proud, arrogant, self-sufficient sinfulness.

But the God we know in Jesus has no desire to damn them–or us–for sin, no desire to see us die, separated from God, consumed by wrath from which He otherwise protects us.

So, Jesus speaks a comforting Gospel Word to you and me even now: “Do not fear. I take the wrath you deserve into myself. Your sins are forgiven.”

So, to the first disciples, terrified in the boat, Jesus speaks His Gospel Word of promise. That should be enough to calm the fears of all.

But, there in the boat is one who still isn’t sure: Peter, out stand-in.

Even after Jesus’ Word of absolution, Peter is unbelieving. Peter doesn’t trust Jesus or His Word. Like the man who told me he liked the author who left him feeling guilty, Peter wants Jesus to give him a program by which he, not Jesus, can overcome his guilt, sin, and fear. He wants Jesus to prove He’s the Messiah Peter wants and he wants to prove what a righteous person he is even without the Messiah, Jesus.

And, so he says, “Lord, if it’s you,...tell me to come to you on the water.” (Matthew 14:28)

“Come,” Jesus tells Peter.

Jesus, in effect, is saying, “OK, Peter, you won’t believe that My Word is enough to save you? You need proof that My Word can even save an unrepentant sinner like you? Come out here and take a walk on the water.”

Of course, as soon as Peter turns his attention to the wind, he’s back to feeling terrified again and begins to sink. Jesus catches Peter and upbraids Him: “You of little faith,...why did you doubt?”

Friends, do not doubt!

You were saved from sin and death at Holy Baptism, when Jesus fished you from the water and claimed you as His own.

Your salvation is confirmed every time you are able, by the power of the Holy Spirit, working in God’s Word, to confess that Jesus is your Lord.

The Word has come to you again and again during sermons, family devotion times, Bible studies, and Holy Communion.

This Word has spoken through God’s Law to show you your sin and through Christ’s Gospel to give you the gifts of repentance, saving faith, forgiveness, and new life.

Jesus tells us, “...my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” (John 6:40)

Friends, this morning it is again my joy to exercise the Office of the Keys and tell you who repent and turn to Jesus, “Do not be afraid. You are not condemned. Christ died and rose for you. In Him, you are forgiven!” Amen

The Message We Need to Hear

[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, during worship yesterday.]

Mark 1:1-8
On Thursday, Bloomberg Businessweek reported the latest trend in Silicon Valley. The tech businesses there are bringing in models and actors, male and female, who are given fake biographies and sign non-disclosure agreements, to show up for companies’ Christmas parties. They’re supposed to bring some life to the otherwise dreary gatherings of tech geeks.

Believe it or not, as a different kind of geek myself, this story made me think of John the Baptist.

John, the Baptizer, first-century outspoken and ill-clad man of God, would never be hired by the mavens of Silicon Valley to spread Christmas cheer among their twenty-first century employees. And yet, during Advent every year, as we Christians gather to worship God and prepare for Christmas and for eternity, we invite John to speak to us and, in a different way, liven things up. That’s true again on this Second Sunday of Advent.

Is that a good idea?

I think so, because, unlike the models recruited for high tech Christmas parties, telling people the things they want to hear, John came into the world to tell people, including you and me, what we need to hear.

John and his message are front and center in the gospel lesson, Mark 1:1-8, for today, the Second Sunday of Advent. Take a look at it, please. (And if you have your Bibles with you, be sure to underline passages and make notes in the margins.)

The lesson starts with a simple and significant sentence fragment. Verse 1: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God…”

Mark is here signaling that the entire succeeding sixteen chapters are just the beginning of the gospel, the good news of new and everlasting life with God for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ.

Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are just the beginning of what this gospel--this good news--is doing.

The fact that you and I are here this morning testifies that the gospel is still at work giving life to all who believe.

And it will keep on giving those who trust in Christ life for all eternity!

This good news, as Mark says, is “about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God…” The phrase, Son of God, doesn’t mean that Jesus descended from the Father. It means that He is one with the Father. He is the Messiah, God’s anointed King, to be sure. But He is also God Himself.

By the way, this is a good time to mention someone is invited to all Christmas season gatherings, sacred and secular every year: Saint Nicholas. Nicholas, celebrated every year as a gift-giver, was a bishop and theologian. History tells us that he was so committed to biblical truth, that no heresy ever arose in the diocese of Bishop Nicholas.

He also reportedly smacked or punched a guy named Arius in the nose for saying that Jesus was only "like the son of God" and not actually the "Son of God," as Mark says in today's gospel lesson.

Arius and the adherents to his ideas claimed that God had created Jesus before Jesus came to earth. They repudiated the idea that Jesus had been God the Son before He was born in Bethlehem.

The Arians, as they were called, missed the point of the prologue to John's gospel, which tells us: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made...The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." (John 1:1-3, 14)

Nicholas threw the punch at Arius during the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. At the end of the council, the gathered bishops and theologians issued a statement of faith--the Nicene Creed, which we don’t recite nearly often enough--that includes the confession that Jesus is “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”

Mark tells the good news about Jesus, the Messiah and the Son of God.

In verses 2 and 3, Mark cites two passages from Old Testament prophecy, Isaiah 40:3 and Malachi 3:1. Hundreds of years before the births of either John the Baptist or Jesus, these words point to a messenger, a voice, who would prepare the world for meeting the Son of God. Mark says that that messenger/voice was John the Baptist.

Verse 4: “And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

As I’ve pointed out before, Jews were not unfamiliar with baptism. Gentiles who became Jews were required to be baptized because Gentiles were seen as dirtied by sin and Jews were seen as clean, simply because they were the genetic descendants of Abraham. (No condescension there, right?)

But, John is preaching that if his fellow Jews want to be ready for the Son of God to enter their lives, or to become part of the Messiah’s eternal kingdom, they needed to repent for their sin. They too were unclean. They too needed to own their sinfulness. They too needed to receive God’s forgiveness.

Now, in other times, Jews would have completely repudiated John’s message. And some, most notably King Herod, would repudiate John. Ultimately, Herod would have John killed.

And, let’s be honest, most of the time, you and I don’t like to hear the truth about our sinful natures or our sinful actions. When I get called to the carpet for my sins, whether by other Christians or by God and His Word, I don’t like it. When this happens to us, we want to dismiss both the message and the messenger.

But, at least for a season, John the Baptist wasn’t an unwanted guest. Verse 5: “The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.”

There are probably two reasons for this astounding response to John’s preaching.

One, of course, is that John was moving on God’s timetable and in response to God’s call.

The other is that the people of the Judean countryside and those in Jerusalem--the hayseeds and the sophisticates, notice--were living in desperate times. They were under the boot of Roman occupation. They were largely poor and destitute.

When we are vulnerable, we see reality more clearly.

When things are going well--when we’re doing OK financially, we’re healthy, or our families are seemingly functioning well, it’s easy to delude ourselves with the idea that our good fortune stems from our virtue and goodness.

It’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we’ve got everything under control and don’t need God. Or at least that we only need Him on the edges of our lives, when we can fit Him in.

But when life makes us vulnerable, we see how much we need God.

Vulnerability also causes us to look at our own characters, our faults, our sins.

Until we’re aware of our own vulnerability, we won’t be open to God. 

Nor will we be open to our need for repentance and forgiveness.

The people who thronged to meet John in the wilderness were vulnerable enough--honest enough--to confess their sins and trust in God so that they could be ready to meet Jesus.

Are we living our lives with the same kind of vulnerability so that we’re ready to meet Jesus whenever it happens?

Now, John’s baptism was only a symbolic action. It was a way for repentant people to outwardly demonstrate to God, themselves, and others that they wanted to turn from sin and live under the gracious reign of the Son of God.

But, at the end of our lesson, John points to another baptism, a baptism instituted by One greater than John.

Verses 7 and 8: “[John said] After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

“I’m just a voice. I’m just a messenger. This baptism is only a symbol,” John is saying. “But soon the Son of God will be here and when His Word connects with water in Holy Baptism, much more than a symbol will be seen. The fire of His Holy Spirit will meet you in the water and you’ll be set ablaze with the very life of God.”

There in the Judean wilderness, John was pointing away from himself and from his symbolic baptism.

Instead, he pointed to Jesus and to the sacrament of Holy Baptism in which God, without our help, gives us life and makes us His own, gives us a share in His crucifixion, where our death is atoned for, and a share in His resurrection.

John is pointing to the time when all believers baptized in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, will be able to live with the Son of God Who the crowds who thronged to John in the wilderness waited for.

As twenty-first believers in Jesus, we also wait, of course.

But we don't wait for Jesus to show up and do something.

We know that Christ has already done something.

He already has appeared and already died and risen for us.

He already has conquered our sin and our death for us.

He already has set apart baptized believers to be His for eternity.

Hebrews 10:10 says that: “...we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

What we wait for is Jesus to return. We wait to meet Jesus.

We need not fear facing Jesus or facing the death that will likely precede that moment.

If, like those vulnerable and open people in the Judean wilderness, we will daily turn from our sin and trust in Christ, the God Who has set the fire of the Holy Spirit ablaze within us in our Baptisms, empowering us to believe in the crucified and risen Jesus, we can rest assured that the moment we meet Jesus face to face will be infinitely and eternally more joyful and wonderful than we can imagine.

And that joy and wonder will never go away. Nor will it ever be taken from us!

This is the truth, the message, to which John, voice and messenger for Jesus, the Messiah and Son of God, was pointing. With a message like that, I move that we keep inviting John the Baptist to spend time with us during Advent. Amen

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

The Sacrifice for Sin (Maundy Thursday)

John 13:1-17, 31-35
During Sundays in the Lenten season as we bring our offerings to the altar, we often pray: “Almighty God, you gave your Son both as a sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life…”

Of course, what’s most important about Jesus is not the life He models. You and I could repeatedly resolve that we are going to live like Jesus...and repeatedly fail.

Not that people haven’t tried. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin, a deist who didn’t really believe in the God revealed in Jesus, decided to live his life around a set righteous virtues he had identified. Franklin wrote each of these virtues on the top of a piece of paper and gathered them in a small book. His plan was to conquer one virtue, then move to the next, conquering it, and so on. He never conquered the first one.

Without realizing it perhaps, Franklin had learned the truth of the apostle Paul’s words in Romans 7: “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:19) Paul concludes: “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” (Romans 7:20) In other words, we cannot live a godly life in our own power.

When we try, we seem to get in the way.

Some of you know that last year, I was losing the weight I needed to shed. But more recently, I’ve been eating too much and putting weight back on. God’s Word says that our bodies are “temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). That means that the abuse to which I subject my body is a spiritual issue. It’s a sin issue.

Right now, I must report, that as it relates to the food I’m putting into my body, sin is winning out.

And why has this happened? Because I took my eyes off of Jesus.

To be sure, I took Jesus as an example of the godly life because Jesus was always self-disciplined in the use of His mind and body. I also became subtly proud of my virtuous self-discipline.

I forgot what Jesus tells all who want to follow Him: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.” (John 15:5-6)

The point? If we see Jesus only or even primarily as our example as we set out to lead virtuous lives, we will fall on our faces every time.

We need help.

We need Jesus.

We need Him infinitely less as a model of the godly life than we need Him as the definitive sacrifice for our sin.

We need His righteousness because we are completely unrighteous.

We need His goodness, because God alone is good.

That’s why Jesus does and says things in the order in which He does and says them in tonight’s Maundy Thursday gospel lesson.

John is the most sacramentally minded of the four gospel writers. He begins his account of Jesus' earthly ministry with Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine, pointing to the two sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion. He draws the curtain on Jesus' pre-resurrection earthly ministry with a soldier piercing Jesus' side and water and blood emanating from the wound, again pointing to Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.

Yet in recounting events on Maundy Thursday, John doesn’t talk about Holy Communion, which Jesus instituted on that night. Instead, he focuses on three things from the events of Maundy Thursday:

• Jesus washing the feet of His disciples; 
• Jesus telling the disciples to serve each other similarly; 
• Jesus giving a new commandment, the only new commandment Jesus ever gave. 

Let’s look at each one of these.

During the course of the meal, Jesus ate with His disciples, got up, stripped down to nothing but a towel wrapped around His waist, and prepared to wash the disciples’ feet, starting with Peter’s. You’ve lived through enough Maundy Thursdays to know that washing people’s feet in the first century AD was the work of servants. It seems to get mentioned in every Maundy Thursday sermon.

But feet were seen predominantly in two ways in that culture.

One was to look on them with revulsion, encrusted as they were with dirt from walking in sandals through the sand and rocks of Judea.

The other was to regard feet as euphemistic representations of the most private places of the human body. This is what’s behind the otherwise cryptic passage of Ruth 3:14, which tells us that: “So [Ruth] lay at [Boaz’s] feet until morning, but got up before anyone could be recognized; and he said, ‘No one must know that a woman came to the threshing floor.’"

So, Jesus washing the feet of His disciples was not just an act of selfless servanthood, but also one of loving intimacy, the Bridegroom serving His Bride, the Church.

And Jesus points to His washing of the disciples’ feet as symbolizing the great act of servanthood and love that He’s about to accomplish at the cross. “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand,” Jesus tells Peter who, at first protests Jesus’ intention of washing the disciples’ feet.

Hebrews 10 tells us that through Christ’s act of servanthood and love on the cross, all who believe in Him “have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” (Hebrews 10:10)

And, Hebrews says that, through this sacrifice, we have an advocate for eternity: “...when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” (Hebrews 10:12-14)

Baptized believers in Christ are washed clean of their sin. That's why Jesus says that we don't need to be completely rewashed of our sin again and again; once we have been born as children of God in Baptism, we only need to come again to God in the name of the Lord in which we have been baptized to repent and be renewed as God's people.

Each time we repent and trust Christ with our sins and our lives, remembering that we are baptized into His death and resurrection, Jesus cleans us again from the grime of sin and death that’s always dogging us and attaching itself to us in this life.

Jesus is the perfect sacrifice for our sin and when we trust in Him, He takes up residence within us. We experience what Paul talks about in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Martin Luther may have had this passage in mind when he said: "When [the devil] comes knocking at the door of my heart, and asks, ‘Who lives here?’ Jesus goes to the door and says, 'Martin Luther used to live here, but he has moved out. Now I leave here.'”

After pointing to His cross, Jesus gives us two commands, one a re-expression of the Old Testament law regarding hospitality, the other a totally new law with Jesus.

Command one: “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:17) In other words, Jesus is telling us, “Serve as I have served you. Without thought to your status in the world, or to how humbling it may be.”

Command two: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35) In other words, Jesus is telling us, “Love your sisters and brothers in the faith sacrificially just as I have loved you.”

It’s no accident that Jesus gives these two commands after pointing to the cross, because it’s only after taking up residence in our lives through our faith in Him that Jesus can change the ways we live, the ways we respond to our neighbors.

Jesus may be an example for godly or wholesome living to the whole world, Christian and non-Christian alike; but unless Jesus lives in us and powers us, we cannot lead godly lives.

On Monday, I drove to Cincinnati, where God allowed me to administer Holy Baptism to Jameson, the little guy for whom we’ve been praying through his three years of life, and his older brother, Jackson.

After getting back to Dayton, I went to Columbus to be with my mom and my family at a hospital ICU, where mom died on Tuesday morning.

To tell you the truth, my thoughts weren't prone to focus on the homeless guy standing at the freeway off-ramp that day.

And the Old Mark battled with the Lord Jesus Who has taken up residence in my life. “Who knows if he’s really homeless,” I argued. “Besides, I’m out of the McDonald gift cards I keep for situations like this. And on top of that, I’m busy, I’m tired, I’m concerned about my family. Is this guy really that big a deal, God?”

But Jesus won the argument. (He usually does when you start talking with Him!)

I pulled out a five-dollar bill and handed it to the man at the ramp.

Listen: I would not have done that had I relied on my own reasoning. If I'd only been arguing with myself, I would have easily convinced myself to drive on by. Instead, because Jesus lives in me and I have the assurance that no matter how much duping, using, or humiliation this world may subject me to, I still belong to the God we meet in Jesus, Jesus set me free to part with a little of money.

It was, for all its simplicity and humanity, a divine moment that wasn’t done by me, but by Jesus living in me.

I’ve gotten to the point where I believe the line in the old Amy Grant singalong song: “If there’s anything good that happens in life, it’s from Jesus.”

And when you know that, in the words of the late Baptist pastor, Gerald Mann, through Christ you have "God's cosmic okie-dokie," the humiliations meted out by this world become less important to you. You know that the world cannot rob you of you dignity, because by God's grace through faith in Christ, your life is imbued with an eternity dignity.

I don’t have to know whether the ramp guy spent those five bucks on cigarettes, alcohol, drugs,  lottery tickets, or food.

I don’t care to know whether he was, from the standpoint of the world, “worthy” of my help.

But I do know two things.

First, I know that on the night of His betrayal, even though He knew what Judas was going to do, Jesus washed Judas’ feet. Jesus gives grace to all, worthy in the world’s eyes or not. Think of that!

Second, I know that, in the eyes of heaven, I’m not worthy of the grace, forgiveness, and love God makes available to us through Christ.

I’m a sinner. So, who am I to withhold from another person any smidge of grace God puts it in my power to give away?

Despite my sin, Christ served, loved, and died for me anyway. Romans 5:8 reminds us that, “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Christ is the “sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life.”

But Maundy Thursday reminds us that if we would live a godly life, a useful life, a life that even unbelievers would acknowledge to be a life filled with goodness, it doesn’t begin with any of us trying to be good. 

It begins and continues only with Christ loving us, serving us, dying for us, rising for us, and our day in, day out, letting Him into our lives so that God’s will becomes our will, God’s love for others becomes our love for others. 

It begins and ends with Jesus alone!

Jesus’ message for us tonight is simple. Don’t try to be a good person on your own steam. Let Jesus into your life, let Jesus live in you, and He will lead you in the godly life, empowering you to love and serve today and preparing you to joyfully love and serve for all eternity. Amen

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

What is "the Law"?

A few weeks ago, our congregation began reading the Bible together, three chapters or so every day. In this way, we'll read all sixty-six books in a year's time. Each Wednesday at two different times, one in the morning and the other in the evening, we get together to discuss the readings from the previous week. We had our second morning session earlier today. The discussion was animated and interesting.

One person asked what was meant by "the Law" when speaking of the Bible.

This was a great question since in the early books of the Old Testament, there are all sorts of laws or commandments laid down by God for the descendants of Abraham, God's chosen people, the Israelites. (AKA: Hebrews)

In the Old Testament, three kinds of laws can be identified:

(1) Civic or civil law
(2) Ritual law
(3) Moral law

The first category refers to what we usually mean when we talk about the law in everyday conversation. Civic or civil law governs how society functions socially and politically. The civic or civil law of Old Testament times is no longer relevant because we don't live in a theocratic society as the ancient Hebrews did.

Ritual law or sacrificial law dealt with all the regulations surrounding the offering of sacrifices for reconciliation with God which ultimately was centered on the Temple in Jerusalem. It incorporated dietary rules and things like circumcision, all designed simply to set apart the Hebrews behaviorally and physically from those who did not follow Yahweh, their Lord. (The term holy means set apart.)

These laws are no longer needed because, as the New Testament book of Hebrews reminds us, "it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Hebrews 10:10). This is what John the Baptist was talking about when He saw Jesus and said, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29). The ultimate sacrifice for sin has been made in Jesus Christ, Who took all of humanity's sins to the cross. His sacrifice renders further sacrifice unnecessary, along with all ritual laws associated with ritual sacrifice. God confirmed this for Peter when He revealed that, after Jesus' death and resurrection, all foods are clean.

The moral law encompasses the Ten Commandments and the explications and explanations of it found in both the Old and New Testaments. The moral law tells us God's will for human beings for all time. It's what Jesus referred to when He said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. ¹⁸For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. ¹⁹Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:17-19).

God's law cannot save us from sin and death above all, because none of us is capable of keeping it perfectly. Salvation from sin and death only comes to those who repent (turn from sin and turn to Christ) and believe in Christ.

But the law reflects God's will for us, shows us our need for repentance, and reveals why Jesus, Himself innocent of sin, had to become the perfect sacrifice for our sin. (If a sinless man dies because of our sin, it shows you what a serious matter sin really is.)

The uses of the Law will be the subject of another post.