YOU Have Found Grace with God

[Below is the text and the live stream video of yesterday's Sunday morning worship service with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Luke 1:26-38

Our gospel lesson for this morning begins with a virgin named Mary who is visited by an angel. The angel is Gabriel, whose name means God is our strength.

Gabriel, as is true whenever God sends an angel, because the word angel means messenger, has a sermon to preach. That’s what angels do: preach. Not all preachers on this earth are angels; but all angels are preachers.

Only one part of the sermon is for Mary alone though: Mary, though a virgin, will give birth to a son. Understandably, this is the part of the sermon Mary is troubled by. How, she wonders, am I going to become pregnant when I have never been with a man?

To assure Mary that, in the pursuit of His good ends, God can do what otherwise would be impossible, Gabriel gives Mary a sign. The sign is this: He tells her that six months earlier, her relative Elizabeth, who had always been unable to conceive, became pregnant.

But, you know, while miraculous signs from God may strengthen our faith or point us toward faith, signs in themselves cannot give us saving faith in the God revealed to us in Jesus.

Less than twenty-four hours after Jesus had fed them with a few fish and pieces of bread, you’ll remember, a crowd asked Jesus to show them some sign that He was the Messiah and God; then, they said, they would believe in Jesus. Signs don’t create faith.

And I have known people who have been given miracles from God, but never believed.

A man once told me how happy he was that I’d given him a tip to pray regularly because all of his relationships were falling apart. I asked him, “Have you thought of praying about it?” He later told me, “I started praying and my relationship with my boss has completely changed.” But months later, he told me he didn’t believe in God or Jesus’ resurrection or eternity. The man had been given a seemingly miraculous sign, but signs in themselves don’t create faith.

Only the Word of God can give us saving faith in Christ. That’s why you and I are called to preach Christ. The apostle Paul says, “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified…” (1 Corinthians 1:22-23) Only the Word about Jesus crucified, risen, ascended, and, one day, returning to the world to judge the living and the dead and establish His kingdom, will give us saving faith in Jesus!

To give both Mary and you faith in Jesus Christ, Gabriel preaches God’s Word to us today.

In our lesson, he’s going to tell Mary that God is about to fulfill the promises He made directly and through His prophets of the Messiah, God in the flesh, come to reconcile us to God and to save us from sin and death. But before he speaks that Word, Gabriel speaks five words from God that God wants to speak to you today in our gospel lesson.

First, Gabriel preaches: “Greetings!” This is not as bland a salutation as our translation makes it out to be. The word translated here as “Greetings!” is, in the Greek in which the New Testament was originally written, Χαῖρε. It means, “Rejoice! Be glad! I’m bringing you news that will be cause for you to celebrate!” Gabriel is telling Mary and you that God’s promises of a Savior Who would negate the power of sin, death, and darkness over our lives is about to arrive. “Watch out!” Gabriel is saying, “Eternal joy is coming your way!”

Next, Gabriel calls Mary, “O favored one.” This title doesn’t apply to Mary only. The word translated as “favored one” is κεχαριτωμένη. This means that Mary and all sinners are ones on whom God chooses to give and to keep giving His grace.

In the months and years that followed in Mary’s life, when the tongues of gossips wagged, implying that she couldn’t have been a virgin when she conceived Jesus or when she watched her first-born suffer the agony of the cross, Mary may have wondered how much grace God was actually giving her.

When suffering comes to us or when we’re assailed by doubt, we too may wonder whether we, even though we believe in Jesus, are under His grace.

This is why it’s so important for us not only to come to God in prayers of confession, but also to confess our sins in worship or in private times of confession and absolution with a pastor, so that we can once more hear from pastors and worship leaders: “In the name of Jesus Christ, all your sins are forgiven.”

God favors repentant believers with His grace, even in dark and difficult times!

Gabriel also tells Mary and us, “The Lord is with you!” The God we know in Jesus Christ doesn’t stand far off, like a rubbernecker observing an accident on the freeway.

He enters our lives.

He celebrates with us.

He weeps with us.

Jesus, God the Son, is truly God and truly human. So, one of His titles is Emmanuel, God with us.

The Bible tells us that even when we are tempted, Jesus is with and He understands: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.” (Hebrews 4:15)

Whatever you go through in this life, Jesus has gone through it before you and He goes through it with you.

We can live with the same assurance my dying friend had when she pointed to a crucifix and said, “He’s always with me.”

With David, we can pray, “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me…” (Psalm 23:4)

Gabriel then says, “Do not be afraid, Mary…” These words are for you too!

In one of his Christmas sermons, Martin Luther, considering how the angels, on the night of Jesus’ birth, told the shepherds not to fear, confesses, “I fear death, the judgment of God, the world, hunger and the like. The angel announces a Savior who will free us from fear. Not a word is said about our merits and works, but only of the gift we are to receive.”

Jesus and the gift of justification by grace through faith in Him alone is the greatest gift we can receive from God!

In this life, our old sinful selves will be tempted to fear. But in Jesus Christ, we have no more reason to fear! Neither sin, death, nor the devil will have the final word over our lives! Because Christ has claimed us in Holy Baptism and given and sustained faith in Christ within us through His Word and Holy Communion, we have nothing to fear. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Gabriel then says, “You have found favor with God.” What he actually says in the Greek in which Luke originally wrote his gospel is: “You have found grace with God.”

Grace is God’s undeserved charity for sinners who deserve nothing but condemnation and hell.

Instead, God has sent Jesus to forgive sinners who, by the power of His Word, turn to Him and, in Him, find God’s charity, His forgiveness, and His new life.

The thief on the cross turned from His sin and asked Jesus to remember him when Jesus established His Kingdom at His second coming. Jesus’ promise to the thief was unconditional and complete: “Today you will be with Me in paradise.” The Word of Jesus, God the Son, brought the thief the grace, the favor of God.

Gabriel’s sermon to Mary is God’s sermon to you today, friends! God is not your enemy and in Jesus, you see, as Luther put it, God’s smiling face.

He graces you.

He favors you.

He is with you.

He gives you nothing to fear.

As you prepare for Christmas, for the living of everyday life, and for eternity itself, you can take up your cross–that is, acknowledge your sin–and follow Jesus–receiving His forgiveness, with confidence and hope, no matter what else may be happening in your life.

You can live the whole year long in all the “comfort and joy” that Christ has come into this world to give to you. This is what God gives to you in His gospel Word.

Amen

The God Who Never Forgets You

[Below you'll find both live stream videos of yesterday's Sunday worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio and the text of the prepared message.]





Matthew 4:1-11

Years ago, a man shared with a group of us what his dad told him every time he borrowed the car keys when he was a teenager. His dad said: “Remember who you are.”

Those seem like wise words to me because it’s so easy in the daily challenges of life to forget who we are and who we’re meant to be and to become someone else.

The Word of God teaches that we all have a call, a vocation. For the Christian, our vocation has less to do with our jobs than with who we are and who we are called by God to be, whatever our jobs or stations in life.

The call we all have as disciples of Jesus Christ is given to us at the moment of our baptisms when, after we are washed in the water connected to God’s Word and God’s promise, Christ’s cross is marked on our foreheads, and we are given our vocation, our identity, “child of God.” “Mark James,” the pastor said at my baptism, “child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” Pastors said similar things when you were baptized, whenever you were baptized.

As Christians, our vocation, our call, is to be God’s children, daily turning to the One Who has saved us in repentance and faith and through our faith in Jesus, acting as God’s light in a dark world.

We Christians aren’t the first God called children or sons of God. Moses once told Egypt’s king, Pharaoh: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Israel is my firstborn son,  and I told you, “Let my son go, so he may worship me.’” (Exodus 4:22-23)

History shows though that Israel failed in its calling as God’s son. The people of Israel constantly forgot who they were. They chased after false gods, temporary pleasures, worldly power. They became diverted from their mission as God’s children to be God’s light to the nations.

Our first lesson for this morning shows us that it was always God’s intention to send a Messiah into the world in order to save the human race and the universe our sin has impacted. God told the serpent–the devil, “...I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:15)

Jesus, the Messiah, was to fulfill the call that Israel--and no one else among we sinful human beings--ever could fulfill: the call of being the perfectly obedient Son of God, Who by going to the cross as God the Father willed, would crush the power of Satan over all of us.

Our gospel lesson for today starts right after Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River. There, “a voice from heaven said of Jesus, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’” (Matthew 3:17) Jesus was given His call to be the obedient Son of God. Abruptly, Matthew 4:1 then tells us, “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”  

Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, but He is also a human being, though a sinless one, Who did not inherit the condition of sin we all have inherited from Adam and Eve. Jesus had to take on our humanity, becoming the perfect human sacrifice for our sins, paying the debt we owe for failing in our call to be children of God. We sinful human beings don’t want God to have authority over us. But Jesus, as the Son of God, lives under the authority of the Father and the Holy Spirit.

So the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness for the express purpose of Jesus being tempted by the devil. Like ancient Israel, who God had called His son, Jesus, just proclaimed God’s Son at the Jordan, goes into the wilderness. In Jesus’ forty days, He was tempted in the same ways that ancient Israel was tempted. But with a different result: Jesus resists every temptation, fulfilling His call as the Son of God.

Jesus is tempted in three ways by the devil. 

Knowing that Jesus is hungry, the devil tells Jesus to turn stones into bread. Jesus cites words from Deuteronomy: “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:4)

Next, the devil tells Jesus that He should throw Himself from the top of the Temple in Jerusalem to show people how the Father takes care of Him. Jesus refuses, saying, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” (Matthew 4:7) 

Finally, the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and says that Jesus can have them all without suffering, scorn, rejection, cross, death, or grave, if Jesus will just worship him. “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’” (Matthew 4:10) Although the devil continued to try luring Jesus away from His call as our Savior, and still tempts people today, the devil knew at that moment that the jig was up. Jesus defeated the devil in the wilderness and would finally, definitively defeat Him at the cross by obediently remembering Who He was and that His call was and is to save us.

We often read this account and think of it as a how-to guide: “how to evade temptation by knowing God’s Word.” I've even preached on this lesson that way.

Being steeped in God’s Word, as Jesus was, will help us to avoid the temptation to individual sins: adultery, cursing, thievery, gluttony, covetousness, murder, idolatry, not worshiping with God’s people, or lying.

But if we think that’s why the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted, we miss the point. In Jesus' temptations, God is not telling us to so much remember who we are, but to remember Who Jesus is.

You see, if Jesus came into this world only to be a good example for us, He could have skipped the cross. The temptation to sin and sin itself isn’t something that we can manage by following “three steps to holy living.” Jesus isn’t a self-help guru. To think so underestimates both how helpless and hopeless we are in the face of both our sin and our temptation. It ignores how deadly, how eternally fatal, sin is! The Bible says that “the wages of sin is death” and we are born in infinite debt to God for our sin.

People who think, after reading the account of Jesus’ temptations, that they’re prepared to face off against the temptations of the devil, the world, and their (our) sinful selves are sitting ducks, bound for condemnation and hell no matter how firm their resolutions to walk away from temptation and sin.

We dare not face off against temptation in our own power!

Even if your intentions are good, the devil will drag you down to hell with him.

So will the sinful world.

So will your sinful, good-intentioned self.

The apostle Peter reminds us, “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)

Sin is so deadly that it required a Savior facing our temptations and living in total sinless righteousness to die on a cross to set us free from its power to eternally separate us from God. We can only resist the temptation to sin and we can only know that our sins–the sins we commit every day because we are human–are forgiven as we turn repeatedly to Jesus.

Jesus turned back the devil in the wilderness and at the cross by remembering Who He was--He remembered His call, so that He could save you from the sins we all commit that distort us into becoming something other than what He died and rose to make us, children of God.

So, when we are tempted, we can take refuge in the Savior Who renders the devil, the sinful world, and our sinful selves powerless over us!

Jesus remembered that He was the Son of God for you. He willingly became one of us, bore the rejection of the world, flogging, hatred, condemnation, and crucifixion because He never forgot you.

He never forgot that you need to be saved from sin, death, and the grave.

He always remembered His vocation.

In Jesus, the preacher of the New Testament book of Hebrews says, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.” (Hebrews 4:15) 

The Savior Who went to the wilderness and the cross and now sits at the right hand of the Father, always remembers you.

It’s in Him and Him alone that we find forgiveness and the grace to be who we could never be by our own willpower or pious resolutions: children of God.

Throughout this Lenten season and each day of life, friends turn to Jesus.

He will never forget nor leave defenseless in the face of sin and death those who turn to Him in trust. Amen

The One Who Remembers

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

Matthew 4:1-11
Years ago, a man I knew shared with a group of us what his dad told him every time he went out with friends or with his girl back during his teenage years. “Remember,” his dad said, “who you are.” 

Those seem like wise words to me because it’s so easy in the individual moments of life that come at us like the ocean tide every second of every day to forget who we are and who we’re called to be.

The Word of God teaches that we all have a call, a vocation. This doesn’t refer to our jobs, although our call will usually include what we do as working people. For the Christian though, our vocation is about who we are and who we are called by God to be.

The call we all have as disciples of Jesus Christ is given to us at the moment of our baptisms when, after we are washed in the water charged with God’s life by God’s Word, Christ’s cross is marked on our foreheads and we are given our vocation, our identity, “child of God.” “Mark James,” the pastor said at my baptism, “child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” Pastors said similar things when you were baptized, whenever you were baptized. 

As Christians, our vocation, our call, is to be God’s children: God’s daughters, God’s sons. 

To be a child of God is an incredible privilege of grace, making us God’s intimates and heirs of all that He has in mind for those who repent and believe in Jesus.

We Christians aren’t the first on whom God has conferred the title and the call, child of God, daughter of God, son of God. Moses once told Egypt’s king, Pharaoh: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Israel is my firstborn son,  and I told you, “Let my son go, so he may worship me.’” (Exodus 4:22-23) Through Abraham, Israel had been given its call to be God’s children. Israel was to be a light to the nations, helping the whole world to see the God Who loves us and saves all who turn to Him in faith from sin, death, and darkness. 

History shows that Israel failed in its calling as God’s son. The people of Israel--the children of God--forgot who they were. They chased after false gods, temporary pleasures, worldly power. They became diverted from their mission as God’s children to be God’s light to the nations.

Our first lesson for this morning shows us that it was always God’s intention to send a Messiah into the world in order to save the human race and the universe our sin has impacted. After the fall of Adam and Eve, from whom we all inherit the condition of sin, God told the serpent, the devil, speaking of the Messiah Who would be born of a woman in Bethlehem thousands of years later, “...I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:18) 

Jesus was to fulfill the call that Israel--and no human being in their own power--ever could fulfill: the call of being the perfectly obedient child of God, the Son of God, Who by going to the cross as God the Father willed, would crush the power of Satan over you and me.

Our gospel lesson for today picks up Matthew’s narrative of Jesus’ story right after Jesus had been baptized in the Jordan River. There, you’ll remember, “As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’” (Matthew 3:16-17) Jesus was given His call, His call as the Son of God. But in today’s lesson, Matthew 4:1-11, we see that Jesus was given no time to savor that. The first verse says: “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.”  

Notice that while Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism emphasized Jesus’ deity, here Matthew underscores Jesus’ humanity. Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, but He is also a human being. He had to take on our humanity in order to save us from the inside out, becoming the perfect human sacrifice for our sins, paying the debt we owe for failing to remember our call to be children of God. Jesus is, like all human beings, even those who know nothing of God or who reject the very idea that God exists, under the authority of the other Persons of the Trinity: the Father and the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness for the express purpose of Jesus being tempted by the devil. Like ancient Israel, who God had called His Son, Jesus, just proclaimed God’s Son at the Jordan, goes into the wilderness. In Jesus’ forty days, He was tempted in the same ways that ancient Israel was once tempted for forty years. But with a different result: Jesus resists every temptation, fulfilling His call as the Son of God.

Jesus is tempted in three ways by the devil. 

Knowing that Jesus is hungry, the devil tells Jesus to turn stones into bread. But citing words Moses uses in Deuteronomy to speak of Israel’s wilderness wanderings, Jesus refuses to perform this miracle to prove Himself or to feed His groaning belly. “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:4) 

Next, the devil tells Jesus that He should throw Himself from the top of the Temple in Jerusalem to show people how the Father takes care of Him. Again, citing words from Israel’s wilderness days, Jesus refuses saying, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” (Matthew 4:7) 

Finally, the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and says that Jesus can have them all without suffering, scorn, rejection, cross, death, or grave, if Jesus will just worship him. “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’” (Matthew 4:10) 

Although the devil continued to try to prevent Jesus from dying on the cross for our redemption, tried to lure Jesus into turning from His call as our Savior, and still tempts people today, the devil knew at that moment that the jig was up. Jesus had defeated the devil by remembering Who He was and that His call was and is to save us.

We often read this account and think of it as a how-to guide: “how to evade temptation by knowing God’s Word.” I've even preached on this lesson that very way.

Being steeped in God’s Word will help us to avoid the temptation to individual sins: adultery, cursing, thievery, gluttony, covetousness, murder, idolatry, not worshiping with God’s people, or lying. 

But if that’s why we think the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted, we miss the point. 

In Jesus' temptations, God is not telling us to so much remember who we are, but more to remember Who Jesus is. 

And who is Jesus? 

He is God the Son Who willingly became one of us, bore the rejection of the world, flogging, hatred, condemnation, and crucifixion because He never forgot you. 

He never forgot that you need to be saved from sin, death, and the grave. 

He always remembered His vocation. 

In Jesus, the preacher of the New Testament book of Hebrews says, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.” (Hebrews 4:15) 

Jesus remembered Who He was--He remembered His call, so that He could save you from yourself, from the temptations we all face and the sins we all commit to be something other than what He died and rose to make us, children of God. 

The Savior Who went to the wilderness and the cross and now sits at the right hand of the Father, always remembers you. May we never forget that! Amen


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