Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study of Acts 2:29-3:26

"You make me want to be a better man"

There are people who come into our lives who make us feel this way.

Sometimes, we are so confounding for them, so frustrating and infuriating, that we never get the chance to tell them how they make us want to be better people.

Nor do they see what effect they have on our characters, our actions, our thought processes.

I've had people like this in my life. They've never seen how God has used them to call me to repent and how, as the Holy Spirit sent by Christ uses them, calls my attention to the examples of their character, integrity, and honesty, and how God's Spirit is slowly changing me.

This is dedicated to people who have made me and make me want to be a better man.




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

Tumbling on an Escalator: My Life with Christ

This GIF, shared by my son over on Facebook, is hysterical!

"Sanctification" is the process by which sinners like me, who have been made right with God (justified) by God's grace (His charity) through faith in Jesus Christ, are made over by the Holy Spirit to conform to the image of Christ.  

The Spirit often does this against our wills. 

Usually in surprising ways. 

And frequently through pain and hardship, amid our half-hearted resistance of sin, 

Martin Luther described sanctification by saying that the Christian submits to being "the Holy Spirit's workshop." That probably gives a good idea of the process: To fit us for eternity, God starts here on earth by beginning a makeover on us. There's a lot of hammering, sawing, remodeling...along with falling, dropping, squirming, and ego-bruising...that has to happen.

The apostle Paul describes sanctification in eloquent terms in 2 Corinthians, using as a starting point the fact that, in Christ, believers are afforded a privilege not even Moses had: to be in intimate proximity to God's blazing glory without being burned out of existence. Christ died in order to give all who believe in Him what Chuck Swindoll has called "intimacy with the Almighty." Paul writes: "And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Sanctification most assuredly is a glorious process, a bit like a mouse being transformed into a steed for Cinderella's carriage by the supreme power of God's grace. And it is solely the work of the Holy Spirit done in the lives of those who turn to Jesus.

But given my sin, my resistance to authority (even God's authority), my shortsightedness, and the desire to "be like God" I inherited from Adam and Eve, I'm sure that, from the standpoint of God, the process of my sanctification often looks as awkward, plodding, painful, and silly as this man doing battle with an escalator. God help me.

Pentecost: Out of the Ditches, Into God's Kingdom

[This was shared during worship this past Sunday, Pentecost Day, with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost already was an important day on the Jewish calendar when the day we Christians often call the first Pentecost happened. For Jews, Pentecost was the fiftieth day after Passover. While Passover celebrated ancient Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt, Pentecost celebrated the giving of the law, the ten commandments, by God through Moses to Israel (and, through him, to all the world) at Mount Sinai. 

That may seem weird to us. We don’t like laws. They hem us in, keep us from doing what we want to do, control us. 

And some human laws can be unjust and oppressive, obviously.

But ancient Israel saw God’s Law, the ten commandments and the moral laws that stem from them, as good things, as blessings that marked out the boundaries of what they called shalom, a place of peace with God and neighbor and self. 

The Israelites even sang about God’s Law in their hymnal, which we know as the Psalms. “Oh, how I love Your law!” Psalm 119:97 says, for example, “I meditate on it all day long..”

God's people had a problem though: They loved God’s law. They couldn’t keep it. 

If following God’s law was like staying on a paved road marked out for driving, disobeying it was like falling into a ditch of mud. 

And like kids who have just taken a bath, Israel loved heading for the ditches of sin: the ditch of idolatry, the ditch of materialism, the ditch of wanting to fit in with others and ignore the will of God, the ditch of adultery and fornication, the ditch of false witness and character assassination, the ditch of self will, the ditch of thievery and false business and political dealings. 

Through the centuries though, even after God sent prophets to remind His people to obey His laws, as human beings they were incapable of keeping themselves out of the ditches of sin and death.

Life in the ditches leads inevitably to separation from God. And to be separated from God, the Maker of life, is to be separated from life. 

Yet, like the ancient Israelites, we can’t help ourselves. We’re born ditch-seekers. 

Some of us like some ditches better than others. But from the moment we’re born, we’re like lemmings programmed by the sin we inherit from our parents to head for the mud, to do the very sin we hate! 

We can hear and know God’s law and even delight in it. We may even spend some shameful time in condemning others who don't keep God's law in the way we think they should.

But we cannot, through the force of our own characters or wills, keep God's law.

Our only hope is the Gospel, the good news. 

The Gospel isn't some abstract story about love. 

The Gospel springs from a particular true story. 

It’s the true story of how God took on flesh in a particular human life. 

It’s the true story of Jesus, conceived by the Holy Spirit so that He would not inherit the sin that the rest of the human family inherits from our parents. 

Jesus was the perfect once-and-for-all sacrifice for the sins of the world. 

Jesus rose from the dead and offers the benefits of His sacrifice--new life--to all who believe in Him as their God and Savior. 

And Jesus came to replace the evil kingdom of sin and the dying kingdoms of this world with the kingdom of God for all who repent and believe in Him.

The new kingdom that Jesus died and rose to bring into being isn’t opposed to the law God gave through Moses. Some people have the erroneous idea that Jesus abolished God's law and has given us all a free pass to eternity.

In fact, in some ways, Jesus makes God’s Law even more demanding than it is in the Old Testament. 

In Matthew 5:21-22, for example, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said...‘‘You shall not murder’...But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister [by which Jesus, Who got angry, clearly means here sustained, vengeful, unforgiving anger] will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ [raca was a term of derision that said a person was empty-headed] is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.”

So, Jesus says to anyone who thinks that His death and resurrection are a free pass, a letter of indulgence, allowing believers to heedlessly and unrepentantly do whatever we want or believe whatever we want, no matter how disobedient or contemptuous of the will of God it may be, they’re wrong. 

“Do not think,” Jesus says in Matthew 5:17, “that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets…” 

Then He says in Matthew 5:20: “...unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Our situation would be hopeless were it not for the fact that Jesus Christ, the One Who delivers this stern message, has done for us what we can’t do for ourselves. 

He has obeyed the law. 

Perfectly. 

Jesus has kept the law and so, by His innocent death for us, has conquered the law and its stern verdict against every one of us! 

So Romans 8:1-2 tells us this: “...there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.” 

Think of that: No condemnation for those who live in the sheltering, saving, forgiving love of Christ!

Those who are saved by God’s grace through their faith in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ are pulled out of the ditch of sin and death and set on the narrow path that Jesus speaks of in Matthew 7:13-14. “Enter through the narrow gate” Jesus says. “For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” 

Jesus is the narrow path and there is life to be found nowhere else. In no legalistic religious system. In no psychobabbling fad. In nothing that this world has to offer. All of those wide and inviting paths lead to condemnation because, as they're all built around the idea that I can be good enough to warrant a pass from God, they leave us naked in our sin, worthy only of condemnation. When we follow Jesus, He clothes us in His righteousness.

All of which brings us back to Pentecost. The first chapter of Acts shows us that the first Christians experienced how Jesus’ grace can change people’s relationships with God and with each other. Jesus forgave them for abandoning Him and denying Him on the night of His betrayal. Through the crucified and risen Jesus and their faith in Him, God pulled them from the ditches of shame and guilt. They were set right with God and learning what it meant to live in the kingdom of heaven. 

But their minds, like ours, were still fogged by sin. So they ask, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” [Acts 1:6] 

Jesus tells them they need to pray, to quit striving and start surrendering. 

Then, the power of God’s Holy Spirit, the power that created the universe, would come to them. 

That’s exactly what happened on the Pentecost of our second lesson.

Like the first disciples, all who today believe in Jesus and are baptized receive the Holy Spirit. 

But, you may have noticed something: The world is a ditch and it’s so easy to wallow in its sins, to wallow in our own sins. 

This side of our own resurrections, we will never be completely free of sin. 

And, acting in our own strength, even when we think we're doing good things, we can only make things worse. 

That’s why Jesus has sent the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit gives birth to faith. 

The Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin and drives us to the cross. 

The Holy Spirit assures the repentant of forgiveness through faith in Christ. 

The Holy Spirit enables to be used by God to pull others out of their ditches.

As we submit our lives to the control and grace of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit can empower us to live differently. We begin to exhibit what Galatians 5:22-23 calls “the fruit of the Spirit,” things like “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” 

This is the life of the kingdom of heaven, the life of shalom, of peace with God, peace with others, peace with others.

The Pentecost crowd must have wondered how this kind of peace could come to them. So do we. 

How can we know peace in the midst of chaos? 

How can we have serenity in the midst of this world’s uncertainties? 

Peter knew the answer to those questions, not because he was perfect or arrogant or intelligent. Peter knew the way to peace because like the other first followers of Jesus, he had...

...seen it revealed, 

...heard its voice, 

...received bread and wine from its hand, 

...touched the hem of its garment, 

...saw it crucified and resurrected. 

Peter knew the one way to the peace for which we long. 

Peter knew the way to life with God personally because that way of life had been revealed to him, sometimes painfully, by God. 

In Acts 2:21, the last verse in our lesson, Peter shares God’s peace with the crowd. Quoting from an Old Testament passage that used the word Yawheh, I AM, God’s Name revealed to Moses the lawgiver and which we translate in our Bibles simply as LORD, Peter commended to the crowd the One he and his fellow disciples had come to call, “Lord." He commended the Lord Jesus to them. 

Peter told the crowd, “...whoever calls on the Name of the Lord shall be saved.”

Today, this week, the Holy Spirit can empower you to live each day in the assurance that, no matter how crazy, conflicted, marked by futility, sad, or even horrible and tragic the world may be, as you submit your sins, your hopes, your decisions, your family, your whole life to Jesus Christ, you are saved, again and again...from the law condemns us for our sin even as it shows us the will of God, from death, and from the devil. 

You are saved from the gossip that tears you down, from the fears that haunt you, from the temptations that allure you, from the sadness that dogs you, from sin, from death. 

To have Jesus is truly to have God’s peace.

Jesus Christ is in heaven at the Father’s right hand. But if you believe in Him and call His Name, you are not and you never will be alone. 

The Holy Spirit has come to let you know that whoever calls on the Name of the Lord Jesus--when you call  on the Name of the Lord Jesus--you are saved, safe forever in the arms of God, empowered forever to leave the ditch behind and walk as freed, redeemed, and forever loved children of God. Amen!

What Does the Holy Spirit Do? (AUDIO)

Here.

Pentecost Welcome

[This is the welcome included in this past Sunday's bulletin to all worshipers as we celebrated Pentecost.]

Welcome to worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church! We’re happy that you’ve come to worship God with us this morning.

Today we celebrate one of the three great festivals of the Christian year, Pentecost! (The other two are Christmas and Easter.) On this day, we remember that fifty days after Jesus rose from the grave and ten days after He ascended into heaven, He sent the Holy Spirit to His praying disciples. The Spirit made it possible (and makes it possible today) for sinners forgiven and given new life by grace through faith in Christ, to...

...know God’s presence in their lives
...be renewed and to grow in their faith in Christ
...to make disciples of all nations
...to become children of God in the first place

As Christians, we believe in “the Trinity.” That word never appears in Scripture, but it describes the God to Whom witness is given there, One God in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The third article of the Apostles’ Creed, that summation of Christian faith which we invite worshippers to confess each Sunday, tells us some of what the Holy Spirit does. It says that He is:.

..the Creator of the Church
...the One Who creates fellowship among the saints, the forgiven sinners who are part of Christ’s Church on earth and in heaven
...the One Who imparts Christ’s forgiveness to those who repent and believe
...the One Who will raise up believers when Christ returns
...the very Breath of life Who will allow believers in Jesus to live eternally with God.

Someone has called the Holy Spirit, “the shy member of the Trinity.” He never calls attention to Himself. Yet, in John 3:3, Jesus says we can only be born into the Kingdom of God He died and rose to bring through “water and the Spirit.” And 1 Corinthians 12:3, we’re assured that trust in God is so foreign to our inborn human nature that it’s only by the power of the Holy Spirit working within us that we can confess, “Jesus is Lord.”

If you would like to know more about the Holy Spirit, a very good basic yet thorough explanation can be found in the book, The Holy Spirit by Billy Graham.

Pray that each day can be a Pentecost for you, a day when the Holy Spirit fills you again and again with the new and everlasting life that Jesus died and rose to give to all who believe. Happy Pentecost!

What Exactly Does the Holy Spirit Do?

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

Acts 2:1-21
Today brings us to the third great festival of the Church Year. There’s Christmas, then Easter, and now Pentecost.

Of course, Christmas and Easter get all the press. Churches are filled for celebrations of Jesus’ birth and His resurrection from the dead. But unless young people are being confirmed on Pentecost, as happens in many Lutheran congregations on this day, attendance is rarely higher on Pentecost Sunday than it is on most other Sundays of the spring or summer.

In the secular media, magazines and cable channels seem to always use Christmas and Easter as occasions for specials claiming that they’ve found “the real Jesus.” There’ll be no special Pentecost programming about "the real Holy Spirit" on CNN or the History Channel tonight.

Maybe that’s because the Holy Spirit, the One Whose coming fifty days after Jesus rose from the dead Pentecost celebrates, doesn’t really call attention to Himself.

He’s been called the “shy member of the Trinity,”--the third Person of the Three-in-One God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—Who seems always to be in the background.

Cartoonists may show God the Father as a white-bearded old man.

And Jesus has been the focal point of endless artistic renderings for the past two-thousand years.

Though the Scriptures insist that the Spirit has a personality—Jesus calls Him a Counselor, a Comforter, an Advocate, for example, and that He is equal to and co-eternal with God the Father and God the Son, it's been hard for artists, theologians, preachers, and Christians, generally, to find ways to portray Him.

The Holy Spirit is sometimes shown as a dove. That’s because Luke’s Gospel, for example, tells us that when Jesus was baptized, the Spirit came to Him in the bodily form of a dove, a bird that the ancient Jews thought was pure, without bile.

Sometimes the Spirit is shown as fire. This is appropriate, not only because in our lesson from Acts for today, the Holy Spirit rested on 120 praying followers of Jesus like tongues of fire, but also because of some properties that fire shares with the Holy Spirit. Fire enlightens, destroys, and purifies. The Spirit of God does all of these things, depending on our needs at the time.

And sometimes, the Spirit is seen as wind. This too, is appropriate. The word translated as spirit from the Old Testament Hebrew is ruach, a word that also means wind or breath. It’s God’s ruach—wind or spirit—that moves over the waters in Genesis to create the world. It’s also God’s ruach that God breathes into dust to make the first human being.

In the Greek of the New Testament, the word pneuma has the same multiple meanings as ruach. Pneuma can also mean wind, breath, or spirit. But the problem with trying to picture something like wind or breath is that, as Jesus told Nicodemus, you may hear the sound of it—and on the first Pentecost, the Spirit must have sounded like a freight train filling the house where the first disciples had been praying--but you can’t really see it. You can only see the evidence of it.

Maybe the Spirit’s shyness and His insusceptibility to being pictured are why we attach so little importance to Pentecost.

Maybe too, it’s easier to understand what Jesus does for us than it is to understand what the Spirit does for us. At Christmas, we easily understand that Jesus, God the Son, took on the burden of being human. At Easter, we understand that after dying on a cross for us, Christ rose to give life to all who turn from sin and follow Him.

But what exactly does the Holy Spirit do for us? A lot of things, really, if we will let Him do them for us.

If you want a good starting understanding of what the Holy Spirit does to and for believers, look at the Apostles' Creed, which Christians around the world agree is a faithful presentation of the basics of Christian faith. It used to be I misunderstood the Creed. I did get that it was divided into three sections or articles of faith. I understood that the first article talks about what God the Father does and that the second article about what Jesus, God the Son, does. But I got confused by the third article: I saw it as offering a perfunctory affirmation of the Holy Spirit at the beginning of a laundry list of things Christians also believe. But, in fact, everything listed in the third article are things that the Holy Spirit does. They include:

• Creating the whole Church on earth
• Creating communion among all forgiven believers in Christ
• Giving the forgiveness Christ won on the cross to repentant believers in Christ
• Resurrecting those with faith in Christ
• Giving eternal life to Christians

Those are all works of the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, about whom we think so little.

And the Holy Spirit does much more than these things in the lives of believers. I want to talk about two things the Spirit does for us today, as seen in our first lesson, which comes from Acts 2.

First, the Holy Spirit gives us the courage to live past our fears. Before the events recounted in our lesson, 120 followers of Jesus had gathered in a room to, just as Jesus had ordered them to do, wait and pray for the power of God to come upon them.

When the Spirit came upon them “like the rush of a violent wind,” they did something they probably couldn’t have imagined doing moments before: They hit the hostile streets of Jerusalem, moving out among some of the very crowds who, just a few weeks before, had cried for Jesus’ death. They told anyone who would listen about God's mighty deeds and conveying the message that all who call on the Name of the Lord will be saved.

The Spirit gives courage to people who pray. Years ago, we met a woman who was the mother of three children. Once, there had been four. The oldest child died at the age of two. After that tragic death, the woman had taken solace in two things: being a super-mom to her second child, another girl, and in using God as a lucky charm. When she wasn’t doting on her daughter, watching her like a hawk, she was immersed in church activities, intent on warding off anything bad that might happen to the child. One day, the woman turned her head for an instant and when she turned back, the little girl was gone. The mother looked everywhere. When she finally found her, the little one was at the bottom of their pool. She had been there for some time. Terrified, the woman, who had been sent to a waiting area once her child had been transported to a hospital emergency room, screamed out to God. Then, panting between her shrieks of terror, she heard, in her mind, a message that must have come from the Holy Spirit: “You shall have no other gods before Me.”

From the Holy Spirit, Who, Jesus says, convicts us of our sin and convinces us that Christ can forgive our sin and lead us down better paths, this woman learned that her “faith” had really been superstition, a ploy to be in control of a world not in our control. She had been worshiping her child. She needed to let go, letting God be God and letting both her daughter and her be children of God. Miraculously, the child survived. But, whether the daughter had survived or not, from the Holy Spirit, the mother knew that God had given her the courage to live past her fears. The Holy Spirit does that for us.

The Holy Spirit also gives us a reason for living. Often, elderly people will ask me, “Why hasn’t God taken me yet? What am I still doing here?”

Sadly, these questions often come from people who have been hard workers their entire lives but who are no longer able to do the things they formerly could.

And young people, tired of the seeming futility of their lives often ask me the same question. I try to remind these Christians that they (and all of us) are human beings, not human doings.

They (and we) have value not because of what we do, but because of who we are.

When we stand before the judgment seat of God in eternity, God won’t ask us, “How much money did you make? How many points did you score? How often did you clean your house, stay late on the job?” God won't even ask us, "Did you leave a happy and fulfilling life?"

Instead, God will ask, “Were you a believer in the Lord Jesus? Were you a repentant sinner? Were you a grateful disciple?”

All baptized Christians are given the gift of the Holy Spirit Who reminds us that by grace, God accepts us we are and helps us to move toward becoming who we were made to be and by that same grace, God gives us a reason for living no matter what our abilities.

The first followers of Christ must have wondered after Jesus ascended into heaven why they were still around. In Jesus, they’d glimpsed eternity and they wanted to be with Him. But here they were, stuck on a planet filled with people who would rather worship themselves, or possessions, or power, or prominence, rather than the God Who made them and died and rose for them. They were stuck living a life in which they would have to struggle and possibly suffer. They were stuck too, in their imperfections, still susceptible to sin.

But when the Holy Spirit came, He gave Jesus’ praying followers a reason for living this as fully as they could. In short, the Holy Spirit game them a vocation.

All followers of Jesus have the same vocation, whatever jobs they do, even if they can no longer do a scrap of work.

A village in southern Italy learned this in the waning days of World War 2. The German soldiers who had occupied their community after re-installing Benito Mussolini as the Fascist dictator of Italy, retreated in the face of the Allied military forces.

But as the Germans fell back, their artillery shattered a statue of Christ that had once stood in the village square. The local priest told the men of the village to search for the arms, legs, and head of the statue of Christ. In the meantime, the women would prepare a village feast.

At dusk, in despair, the men approached the priest. “Father,” one of them said, “we have tried to put the statue back together. But there are no hands for Jesus. They are in pieces.”

“Children,” the priest replied, “don’t you realize? You are His hands?”

You are the hands of Christ.

That is your vocation.

That is your reason for living.

And, as was true of the first followers of Christ, the Holy Spirit will give you the capacity to fulfill your vocation, to be Christ’s hands.

The Holy Spirit doesn’t get a lot of attention. Maybe He doesn’t want it.

He’s like the quiet saint content with a ministry of praying for others, or of giving an anonymous offering so that a child can go to a mission trip, or buying a devotional book for someone struggling with hurts in their lives, or of carting the food offerings to the local food bank.

The Spirit takes a backseat in the Trinity, content with supporting Jesus as He speaks to us, content with supporting us as we call out to Jesus, follow Him, and share Him with others. The Spirit never calls attention to Himself.

But He showers believers in Christ with gifts, including the courage to live past our fears and a reason for living, a vocation of pointing others to Christ, serving them in Jesus’ Name and inviting others to follow Christ, a vocation that lasts our whole lives.

Today, I want to tell you something you've probably not heard very often: Happy Pentecost!

May you keep in prayerful contact with the Holy Spirit so that you will have the courage to live past your fears and have a reason for living life--to be the hands of Christ, witnesses for Christ--every day of your life. Amen

God's Holy Spirit Can Still Set Hearts on Fire for Christ

William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, said, “We are not such fools as to refuse good bank notes because there are false ones in circulation; and although we see here and there manifestations of what appears to us to be nothing more than mere earthly fire, we none the less prize and value, and seek for the genuine fire which comes from the altar of the Lord.” 3

Cymbala, Jim (2012-02-21). Spirit Rising: Tapping into the Power of the Holy Spirit (Kindle Locations 435-438). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Without comment...

Psalm 73:

¹Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart.

²But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; my steps had nearly slipped.

³For I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

⁴For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek.

⁵They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people.

⁶Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them like a garment.

⁷Their eyes swell out with fatness; their hearts overflow with follies.

⁸They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression.

⁹They set their mouths against heaven, and their tongues range over the earth.

¹⁰Therefore the people turn and praise them, and find no fault in them.

¹¹And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?”

¹²Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches.

¹³All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence.

¹⁴For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning.

¹⁵If I had said, “I will talk on in this way,” I would have been untrue to the circle of your children.

¹⁶But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task,

¹⁷until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end.

¹⁸Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin.

¹⁹How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors!

²⁰They are like a dream when one awakes; on awaking you despise their phantoms.

²¹When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart,

²²I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you.

²³Nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.

²⁴You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me with honor.

²⁵Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.

²⁶My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

²⁷Indeed, those who are far from you will perish; you put an end to those who are false to you.

²⁸But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge, to tell of all your works.

Real Church Growth

Riffing off of a series by our mutual friend, Mark Roberts, blogger John Schroeder has some thoughts on what constitutes true church growth.

Eustace, Aslan, and Becoming Better People

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm a fan of Our Daily Bread, the daily devotional produced by Radio Bible Class. I often will link to the web version of readings I've found particularly meaningful on a given day. But I must confess that I found today's reading a bit disconcerting.

Writer Dennis Fisher begins by recalling an incident from one book in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's an incident I myself have used to illustrate what happens to people when they submit to Christ's authority over our lives. As Fisher explains it:

In...The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Edmund, Lucy, and their spoiled cousin Eustace are summoned to help on a quest in the Eastern Sea. Along the way, Eustace is tempted by enchanted treasure and turned into a dragon. The desperate dragon accepts the help of the great lion Aslan, king of Narnia. But Eustace can only be freed by allowing Aslan’s claws to painfully tear off the dragon’s flesh.

So far, so good. Eustace submits to painful reconstruction of his life, beginning with the destruction of the being he had become, so that the new Eustace could emerge.

Aslan, it should be pointed out, is a figure of Christ in Lewis' novels. The process that Edmund undergoes then, is a bit like the process of "daily repentance and renewal" that Martin Luther discusses in The Small Catechism. It comes as part of Luther's discussion of Baptism, which he says should be daily affirmed. "What does Baptism mean for daily living?" Luther asks, using the question-and-answer form. He answers:

It means that our sinful self, with all its evil deeds and desires, should be drowned through daily repentance [repentance is a word which, in the Hebrew means to turn back to God and in Greek means to change one's mind]; and that day after day a new self should arise to live with God in righteousness and purity forever.

The point? We can submit to the God we meet in Jesus Christ. But only God can make us new. We cannot decide to be better people or better Christians. The Christian life is about God's grace--God's charitable acceptance of sinners who turn from sin and trust in Jesus Christ as Lord of their lives--from beginning to end and beyond.

It's with this reality that Paul wrestles in Romans:

I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin. (Romans 7:19, 22-25)

In Lewis' parallel universe of Narnia, Eustace was "saved" by Aslan. And each day, given his obvious natural inclinations toward being selfish, he could only be "saved" by Aslan, no matter how good his intentions.

That's why Fisher's summary sentence about Eustace's encounter with Aslan so rubbed me the wrong way. "Grateful for his deliverance, Eustace chooses to become a better boy." Aaaarrrggghhh!

This reflects a fairly common line of thinking among Christians these days. Several years ago, I read a book by a prominent evangelical pastor. I found the book helpful until I ran into a sentence that said something like, "Our salvation depends solely on God's grace. But after we're saved, everything depends on our works."

Wrong! Paul's words, the confession of a man who by the time he wrote his letter to the first-century Roman church had been a Christian for several decades, indicate that we never stop depending on God's grace. I cannot decide to be a better person. I can only, like Eustace did with Aslan, submit to the authority of God the Holy Spirit, Who, as Luther puts it elsewhere in The Small Catechism, "In this Christian church day after day [God the Holy Spirit] forgives my sins and the sins of all believers. On the last day he will raise me and all the dead and give me and all believers in Christ eternal life. This is most certainly true."

The most I can do to be saved from sin and death is let God the Son, Jesus Christ, save me.

The most I can do to maintain my relationship with God and to grow in faith and holiness is to let God the Holy Spirit have His way in my life.

Our will is an imperfect thing. We can want to be better people. But only the God to Whom Jesus teaches us to pray, "Your will be done," can make us better people. And even the most devoted of Jesus' followers will only, in this lifetime, see through a mirror dimly. But one day, by God's grace and God's grace alone, we will see God face to face.

Maybe it was unintentional. But today's Our Daily Bread devotional made it seem that we can resolve to do what only God can accomplish.

What Does the Holy Spirit Do for Us?

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

Acts 2:1-21
Today brings us to the third great festival of the Church Year. There’s Christmas, then Easter, and now Pentecost. Of course, Christmas and Easter get all the attention. Churches are filled for celebrations of Jesus’ birth and His resurrection from the dead. But unless young people are being confirmed on Pentecost, something that’s scheduled to happen both next year and the year after here at Saint Matthew, attendance is rarely higher on Pentecost Sunday than it is on most other Sundays of the year.

In the secular media, magazines and cable channels seem to always use Christmas and Easter as occasions for specials claiming that they’ve found “the real Jesus.” There’ll be no special Pentecost programming on CNN or the Discovery Channel tonight.

Maybe that’s because the Holy Spirit, the One Whose coming fifty days after Jesus rose from the dead Pentecost celebrates, doesn’t really call attention to Himself. He’s been called the “shy member of the Trinity,” the the third Person of the Three-in-One God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—Who seems always to be in the background. Cartoonists may show God the Father as a white-bearded old man. And Jesus has been the focal point of endless artistic renderings for the past two-thousand years. But the Spirit has always been tough to portray.

Though the Scriptures insist that the Spirit has a personality—Jesus calls Him a Counselor, a Comforter, an Advocate, for example, it’s been hard for artists to find ways to portray Him.

The Holy Spirit is sometimes shown as a dove. That’s because Luke’s Gospel, for example, tells us that when Jesus was baptized, the Spirit came to Him in the bodily form of a dove, a bird that the ancient Jews thought was pure, without bile.

Sometimes the Spirit is shown as fire. This is appropriate not only because in our first lesson for today, the Holy Spirit rested on 120 praying followers of Jesus like tongues of fire, but also because of some properties that fire shares with the Holy Spirit. Fire enlightens, destroys, and purifies. So does the Spirit of God, depending on our needs at the time.

And sometimes, the Spirit is seen as wind. This too, is appropriate. The word translated as spirit from the Old Testament Hebrew is ruach, a word that also means wind or breath. It’s God’s ruach—wind or spirit—that moves over the waters in Genesis to create the world. It’s also God’s ruach that God breathes into dust to make the first human being. In the Greek of the New Testament, the word pneuma has the same multiple meanings as ruach. Pneuma can also mean wind, breath, or spirit. But the problem with trying to picture something like wind or breath is that, as Jesus told Nicodemus, you may hear the sound of it—and on the first Pentecost, the Spirit must have sounded like a freight train filling the house where the first disciples had been praying--but you can’t really see it. You can only see the evidence of it.

Maybe the Spirit’s shyness and His insusceptibility to being pictured are why we attach so little importance to Pentecost.

Maybe too, it’s easier to understand what Jesus does for us than it is to understand what the Spirit does for us. At Christmas, we easily understand that Jesus, God the Son, took on the burden of being human. At Easter, we understand that after dying on a cross for us, Christ rose to give life to all who turn from sin and follow Him. But what exactly does the Holy Spirit do for us?

A lot of things, really, if we will let Him do them for us. I want to talk about two things the Spirit does for us today, as seen in our first lesson, which comes from Acts 2.

First, the Holy Spirit gives us the courage to live past our fears. Before the events recounted in our lesson, 120 followers of Jesus had gathered in room to, just as Jesus had ordered them to do, wait and pray for the power of God to come upon them. When the Spirit came upon them “like the rush of a violent wind,” they did something they probably couldn’t have imagined doing moments before: They hit the hostile streets of Jerusalem, moving out among some of the very crowds who, just a few weeks before, had cried for Jesus’ death. They told anyone who would about God's mighty deeds and conveying the message that all who call on the Name of the Lord will be saved.

The Spirit gives courage to people who pray. Years ago, Ann and I knew a woman who was the mother of three children. Once, there had been four. The oldest child died at the age of two. After that tragic death, the woman had taken solace in two things: being a super-mom to her second child, another girl, and in using God as a lucky charm.

When she wasn’t doting on her daughter, watching her like a hawk, she was immersed in church activities, intent on warding off anything bad that might happen to the child. One day, the woman turned her head for an instant and when she turned back, the little girl was gone. The mother looked everywhere. When she finally found her, the little one was at the bottom of their pool. She had been there for some time.

Terrified, the woman, who had gone to a waiting area once her child had been transported to a hospital emergency room, screamed out to God. Then, panting between her shrieks of terror, she heard, in her mind, a message that must have come from the Holy Spirit: “You shall have no other gods before Me.”

From the Holy Spirit, Who, Jesus says, convicts us of our sin and convinces us that Christ can forgive our sin and lead us down better paths, this woman learned that her “faith” had really been superstition, a ploy to be in control of a world not in our control. She had been worshiping her child. She needed to let go, letting God be God and letting both her daughter and her to be children of God.

Miraculously, the child survived and grew up to be a brilliant young woman back when Ann and I knew her. But, whether the daughter has survived or not, from the Holy Spirit, the mother knew that God had given her the courage to live past her fears. The Holy Spirit does that for us.

The Holy Spirit also gives us a reason for living. Often, elderly people will ask me, “Why hasn’t God taken me yet? What am I still doing here?”

Sadly, these questions often come from people who have been hard workers their entire lives but who are no longer able to do the things they formerly could. I try to remind these elderly Christians that they (and all of us) are human beings, not human doings.

They (and we) have value not because of what we do, but because of who we are. When we stand before the judgment seat of God in eternity, God won’t ask us, “How many pies did you bake? How much money did you make? How often did you clean your house, stay late at the plant or the office?” Instead, God will ask, “Were you a believer in the Lord Jesus? Were you a repentant sinner? Were you a grateful disciple?” All baptized Christians are given the gift of the Holy Spirit Who reminds us that by grace, God accepts us we are and by that grace, God gives us a reason for living no matter what our abilities.

The first followers of Christ must have wondered after Jesus ascended into heaven why they were still around. In Jesus, they’d glimpsed eternity and they wanted to be with Him. But here they were, stuck on a planet filled with people who would rather worship themselves, or possessions, or power, or prominence, rather than the God Who made them and died and rose for them. They were stuck living a life in which they would have to struggle and possibly suffer. But when the Holy Spirit came, He gave Jesus’ praying followers a reason for living this as fully as they could. In short, the Holy Spirit game them a vocation.

All followers of Jesus have the same vocation, whatever jobs they do, even if they can no longer do a scrap of work. A village in southern Italy learned this in the waning days of World War 2. The German soldiers who had occupied their community after re-installing Benito Mussolini as the Fascist dictator of Italy, retreated in the face of the Allied military forces. But as the Germans fell back, their artillery shattered a statue of Christ that had once stood in the village square. The local priest told the men of the village to search for the arms, legs, and head of the statue of Christ. In the meantime, the women would prepare a village feast. At dusk, in despair, the men approached the priest. “Padre,” one of them said, “we have tried to put the statue back together. But there are no hands for Jesus. They are in pieces.” “Children,” the priest replied, “don’t you realize? You are His hands?”

You are the hands of Christ. That is your vocation. That is your reason for living. And, as was true of the first followers of Christ, the Spirit will give you the capacity to fulfill your vocation, to be Christ’s hands, whether you’re two or one-hundred, whether you're strong enough to run a marathon or on your death bed.

Some of you have heard me speak before of our friends Sig and Chris. They came to this country from Germany in the early-1960s. Sig was an engineer and Christ was a pediatric intensive care nurse. But above all, they were ambassadors for Christ! When Sig died several years ago, he was a patient at a hospital in Cincinnati. His room was a holy place, bathed in prayer, filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit. When Sig would occasionally regain some semblance of consciousness, he would ask that Scripture or writings by his favorite writer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, be read to him. People who weren't even believers wanted to be in that room, so palpable was the presence of God. Even as he lay dying, you see, Sig had a reason for living. He had a vocation.

The Holy Spirit doesn’t get a lot of attention. Maybe in some ways, He doesn’t want it. He’s like the quiet saint content with a ministry of praying for others, or of giving an anonymous offering so that a child can go to church camp, or of being the choir member who never sings a solo, or of carting the food offerings to the local food bank. The Spirit takes a backseat in the Trinity, content with supporting Jesus as He speaks to us, content with supporting us as we call out to Jesus, follow Him, and share Him with others. The Spirit never calls attention to Himself. But He showers us with gifts, including the courage to live past our fears and a reason for living, a vocation of pointing others to Christ, serving them in Jesus’ Name and inviting others to follow Christ, a vocation that lasts our whole lives.

Today, I not only wish all of our moms a happy Mother’s Day, but I wish to all of you, a very happy Pentecost! May you keep in prayerful contact with the Holy Spirit so that you will have the courage to live past your fears and a reason for living life every day you remain on this earth. Amen