Using God's Greatest Gifts

Matthew 5:13-20
An accomplished musician offered to teach a young man how to play the piano...for free. The young man was excited to learn.

For the first few sessions, the young man excitedly came to the lessons prepared and he did learn.

But then, something happened. The young man still wanted to receive the free gift he was receiving and still wanted to play like his mentor. But he didn’t want to practice. He liked the idea of being able to tell people that he was a musician. But he clearly wasn’t being one or becoming one.

Finally, his teacher said, “You’re not using this gift.” and he dropped the young man’s lessons.

What do we do with the free gifts that come to us in this life?

I’m not talking about the “free gifts” we receive from businesses trying to get us spend our money on their products. I’m talking about precious gifts given to us with love.

Of all the precious gifts that might come to us in this life, none is more spectacular than God’s gift of His Son, Jesus.

Jesus is the perfect sacrifice for our sin, the perfect bridge between a righteous God and you and me, who are born into a state of unrighteousness, of sin, of separation from God that can only lead to death. Jesus enacts and proves the powerful love of God for each one of us. In Romans 5:8, we read: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

And Jesus refers to the magnitude of this gift when He tells Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  [John 3:16]

All who repent and believe in Jesus Christ have a great gift. It cost Jesus a death of great suffering on the cross to secure it for us. As a friend of mine once told me, "Whenever I think of what Jesus did for me on the cross, I wonder why I sin." She values this incredible gift!

The question for all who confess Jesus as their God and King each day then is this:

What will we do with this gift?

Our first lesson from today reminds us of how ancient Israel was given great gifts like a relationship with God, a land of their own, and the promise of life with God for all who believed. But Israel seemed to think that God’s gift was their entitlement.

They turned their relationship with God into a business transaction. They thought that if they worshiped right, prayed right, sacrificed right, God would owe them what they wanted.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God told Israel: “...on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers...You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high...Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer [what we would today call immigrants or refugees] with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn…”

James delivers the same message to Christians in the New Testament when he succinctly writes, “faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” [James 2:17]

Are we using the gift of new life God grants to all who believe in Jesus, as intended?

Or are we forgetting the gift, living without the power of God in our lives, ignoring the needs of others?

This brings us to Jesus’ words for us in today’s Gospel lesson, Matthew 5:13-20. Jesus’ words here continue His time of teaching disciples, believers like you and me, that we began to look at last week. So, please look at our lesson. Verse 13: “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

In first century Judea, salt not only seasoned food, it was also widely used as a preservative.

Jesus’ disciples are people who change the flavor of this world. They’re not caught up in dog-eat-dog. They know they belong to the God Who has conquered sin, death, and darkness of this world and so, they pour themselves out in love for God, love for neighbor, and in sharing Christ with others.

Jesus’ disciples also preserve the message of the Gospel for the world to know. Someone has said that the Christian Church is always just one generation from extinction. Unless we pass the good news of Jesus onto our families, friends, co-workers, classmates, and disbelieving world, that good news might not be available to others.

They won’t know that God can save them from sin and death.

They won’t know that God can give their lives meaning and purpose.

They won’t know the freedom God gives to us to fight injustice, feed the hungry, and make disciples.

When salt loses its saltiness, it’s useless. When disciples no longer live out their faith, their faith is useless and they erect a wall between themselves and God.

Verse 14-16: “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

When I was in the fifth and sixth grades, it was common for boys and girls who liked each other to say that they were "going steady." Going steady then basically meant that they held hands when they walked home from school and when their parents dropped them off at places like the movies or Fun Night. In the sixth grade, I couldn't figure out why any girl wouldn't go steady with me, because I was a charmer. Eventually, I asked a girl to go steady with me. She said yes. Then, I thought better of it. The girl wasn’t popular and I was afraid that people would make fun of me if they knew that I was seeing her. So I asked her if we could keep the whole thing our little secret. Not good.

Here’s the deal: When Jesus Christ is your God and Savior and King, you don’t ask Him to let you keep the whole thing your little secret.

When we push Jesus into the closet of our lives, we can’t fulfill our purpose in life of bringing His light to others.

We also plunge our own lives into darkness, snuffing out the flame of Christ’s grace that comes to those who believe.

Jesus says in Matthew 10:32-33: “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.”

Do you own your relationship with Jesus before the world?

Do people know that the good you do in your daily life comes from Jesus Christ alone?

You and I were saved from sin and death so we could be free to live in the brightness of God’s grace, with Christ’s love at the center of everything. It's not a thing to be concealed, but shared!

In Matthew 5:17-20, the balance of our Gospel lesson, Jesus warns us not to forget God’s moral law. The moral law is summarized in the ten commandments. Jesus further distilled them in the great commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength sums of the first through third commandments; love your neighbor as you love yourself summarizes commandments four through ten.

Jesus came into our world not to abolish the moral law, but to fulfill it perfectly, so that a sinless Savior could take the death punishment He didn’t deserve on behalf of sinners, like you and me, who do deserve it. All who live a lifestyle of sustained repentance and belief in Jesus have the victory over death that He won on the cross.*

Some people see God’s forgiving grace as license to do whatever they want to do, to ignore God’s will for human beings as embodied in God’s moral law. Wrong!

That’s why Jesus says in verse 19: “...anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

A disciple would never presume to say things like: “Because I’ve been saved by grace, I can steal, I can take God’s name in vain, I can slander others, I can commit adultery.”

God’s grace isn’t permission to ignore the will of God.

God’s grace is the freedom to daily call out to God for help in the name of Jesus to seek to live a life lived in the power of God.

Christians see grace as their emancipation proclamation; in Christ, God sets us free to pursue being our best selves, our God selves. That’s what Christians seek to be with the gifts of grace--forgiveness, new and everlasting life with God--that come to us through faith in Jesus.

In the last verse of our lesson, Jesus says: “...unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

The Pharisees of first century Judea, of course, were known as a straight-laced, judgmental bunch.

The Pharisees boiled down their faith to a contract with God: If I do good things, God is bound to recognize my righteousness.

But the Bible testifies that none of us has or can attain righteousness on the strength of our own good works.

You know, there are times when I do something good, that follows God's will, and I think to myself, ever so subtly, "I really am a good person." Even the good things I do in response to God's grace then, aren't free of the taint of my sin.

This what the prophet Isaiah was confessing when he said “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” [Isaiah 64:6]

And Paul reminds us in Romans 3: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.” [Romans 3:10-11]

But thank God, God seeks us! 

God wants us.

He wants us with Him for eternity.

He loves us passionately.

And to everyone who daily surrenders to God’s grace, available in Christ, God gives what we can’t earn, manufacture, or pretend our way into having. God gives us His righteousness, a right relationship with Him, with others, with ourselves.

God covers us in the pure, perfect righteousness of Jesus that infinitely surpasses any righteousness that can be found or faked in this world.

The righteousness of Jesus given to those who believe is the greatest gift of all. 

Use it well, disciples!

• Trust in Jesus. 
• Then let Him use you to be salt and light, upholders of His law, bearers of His righteousness. 

That’s the best way for us to tell God, “Thank You,” for all His gifts. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the message shared during both worship services earlier today.]

*It's important to remember that repentance isn't simply sorrow for one's sin. It's a sorrow that leads one to turn to Christ for forgiveness, for the granting of grace that covers our sins, and for the power of the Holy Spirit to lead new lives filled with peace with God.

Seeing and Serving the "Invisible" People

[This was shared during the 10:15 worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

James 2:1-17
Through the centuries, the New Testament book of James, from which our second Bible lesson for today is drawn, hasn’t enjoyed much appreciation by we Lutheran Christians. Martin Luther himself called it an “epistle of straw,” worthy of being burned.

Yet Luther also said that this New Testament letter had important wisdom for those who already believe in the gospel.

And that’s why I believe the book of James is, as much as any other book of the Bible, the Word of God: It’s a word from God about how to live as though Jesus Christ really is the Savior and God we confess Him to be.

The Church, as I’ve said before, is Christ’s hospital for recovering hypocrites. It’s in the fellowship of the Church that we are confronted by the reality of our sin and hypocrisy, face the reality that death is sin’s natural consequence, and that only those who believe in the crucified and risen Jesus are set free  from sin and death.

But it’s also in the fellowship of the Church, gathered around God’s Word in Jesus’ Name, that God affects those mid-course corrections that we imperfect hypocrites need as we travel through life toward the moment we meet Christ face to face.

In today’s lesson, James addresses one of the most common ways we can go off course in our faith: Showing partiality to some people over others.

Please turn to the lesson, James 2:1-17. James begins:

My brethren [sisters, too], do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with partiality. For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings, in fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, ‘You sit here in a good place,’ and say to the poor man, ‘You stand there,’ or, ‘Sit here at my footstool,’ have you not shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?’

The churches to which James wrote were themselves largely composed of poor people. Yet, James says, they fell all over themselves in welcoming rich people to their worship gatherings.

This may have been something they did out of habit; the poor of ancient cultures were taught to be completely subservient to the rich and were also taught that wealth was a sign of God’s favor.

On the other hand, they may have treated poor visitors to their worship the way they did either because it made them feel good to be superior to somebody else for once or because they had been taught that poverty was God’s curse for sin.

Whatever the reasons for their partiality, James was saying it was always wrong! It still is.

And you know what? Partiality of any kind is always wrong.

In a sermon on this passage from James, Pastor Maxie Dunham tells the true story of a woman, Dr. Ridenour, who, in her mid-forties, suffered from a stroke that rendered her partially paralyzed for some time.

“The paralysis,” Dunnam writes, “was an embarrassment, creating a kind of vulnerability and nakedness, a sadness, and an infinite kind of loneliness.” People didn’t know how to relate to her and so, hung up on their own discomfort, they ignored Jesus’ command to love others as we love ourselves and ignored Dr. Ridenour. She became invisible.

Who do we avoid--who do we render invisible--by ignoring them?

“Did you meet the visitors in worship last Sunday?” I’ve routinely asked the members of the three congregations I’ve served as pastor over the years. Inevitably, it seems, someone will say, “No. I didn’t meet them because I never met them before.”

Isn’t that answer a way of saying, “I didn’t meet them because I don’t want to meet them”?

It’s really a handy way to foil God’s purpose for our lives. And what are God's purposes for us?

Take a look, please, at 2 Corinthians 5:20. It says:

“Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For [God] made [Christ] Who knew no sin to be sin for us [Christ, though sinless, bore our sin on the cross], that we might become the righteousness of God in [Christ].” 

Through our faith in Christ, God has made us right with God [that’s a big part of what righteousness means for us, being right with God] and we in turn are to be ambassadors for Christ and His kingdom to other people.

But, if we make other people invisible, we won’t have to be ambassadors. We won't see anybody who needs the gospel.

 “I didn’t see that visitor to worship,” we say.

“I didn’t know there were hungry people in Hocking County."

"I didn’t know that my neighbor was unemployed or having health issues."

"I didn’t know about their grief.”

This is no different from those Jesus condemns in His parable of the last judgment. Take a look at Matthew 25:44-45. “Lord,” the condemned ask plaintively, “when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?” You can’t see people you’ve willfully made invisible, of no account, unworthy of your consideration, concern, or even a simple greeting.

In Matthew 5:46, Jesus says that, at the final judgment, he will say to those who have condemned themselves by ignoring Him and others, “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.”

Now, don’t get confused!

You will not be saved from sin and death and purposeless living by doing good works.

In Jesus Christ, God has already done all the work needed to save us so that we can live this life with purpose and look forward to living with God for eternity.

Jesus didn’t lead a sinless life, die on a cross, and rise from the dead just to turn you into a neurotic who thinks you have to work hard at doing enough good things to earn God’s love or grace!

God already loves you. That’s why He sent God the Son to die and rise for you.

Turn please to Ephesians 2:8-9. It says:

“For by grace [that is, God’s charity] you have been saved through faith, and that is not of yourselves [you didn’t earn your salvation]; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” 

We are saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Period.

For God’s “amazing grace,” we should give glory to God every single day!

But faith in Jesus Christ is more than the acceptance of an intellectual proposition. James puts it this way back in our lesson, at James 2:17: “Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”

Faith is a trust in Jesus that will so free us from concern about ourselves that, if we let it, God will open our eyes to see others.

We’ll see the visitor to worship, the hungry, the jobless, the grieving.

The still small voice of God will tell our spirits, “Now that you have eternity with Me, what have you got to lose from reaching out to others? Not even death itself can separate you from Me. So, go for it!”

A man I know, a Christian, hesitated to call on a friend whose wife had just left him. He didn’t want to butt in and he was sure others were reaching out to his friend.

Besides, the very idea of calling his friend made him feel uncomfortable.

What would he say?

How could he handle those awkward silences?

But when he told a wise friend about his hesitation, the friend told him, as gently as he could, “Get over yourself. Your discomfort is not the issue at hand. The issue is that, right now, is that your friend feels alone, isolated from others and from God. You need to call your friend.”

He did and you know what? He learned that he was the first person to have called that hurting man in weeks. He was so glad he’d taken his friend’s advice!

First Corinthians 12:27 says that we Christians, members of Christ’s eternal Church, are part of the “body of Christ.” That means that we are Christ’s hands and feet in the world.

What does that mean exactly?

Well, for one thing, it means that no one should be invisible to us. Jesus, God the Son, could have stayed safely enthroned in heaven, listening to the praises of the angels, acting as though you and I didn’t exist, ignoring the fact that without His intervention, we would live this life without His help, die in our sins, and spend eternity in hell.

But the God of love was unwilling to give up on us so easily. We weren’t invisible to God!

That’s why we’re told that Jesus “became flesh and dwelt among us.”

And when Jesus walked on this earth, He reached out to and loved all sorts of people: the rich, the poor, the religious, the unrepentant sinners, the blind, the lame, the grieving, the in-crowd, and the forgotten.

Jesus could do that because He operated in the certainty that, as He trusted in God the Father, nothing could separate Jesus from Him: not the hatred of the crowds, not the condemnation of religious or government authorities, not the torture or execution or death on the cross He would undergo.

As believers in Jesus, we can live in the same assurance.

So, this week, I want to ask you to go to God in prayer and make a simple request.

“God,” we can pray, “this week let me put my faith into action. Reveal to me one person who would otherwise be invisible to me. It might be someone I have tried to forget or it may be a stranger I’ve never met. Help me to see them as you see them, as children in need of Your grace and help me to reach out to them in Your love in some way.”

I’m going to be offering the same prayer myself.

May God help us to put away partiality.

May God help us to love as He has loved us.

Faith without works is dead. May our faith in Christ be alive every day!

Moving from Belief to Action

Bob Logan tells about a church where each member is encouraged to spend one hour in service outside of the church for every hour spent in the church, presumably in worship, study, small groups, fellowship, and meetings. The idea seems to be: Breathe in God, breathe out God.

What a simple and exciting way for Christians to hold ourselves accountable to Christ for being more than hearers of the Word, but doers of the Word!

Putting my faith into practical action is definitely something I need to do more of, because, as the apostle James reminds us in the second Bible lesson many of us will be considering this coming Sunday, "faith without works is dead."

Our works cannot save us from sin and death. Only the crucified and risen Jesus Christ can do that. But works of service in Christ's Name are a sure sign of actual faith and not just intellectual (or cultural) assent on our parts.

Keeping Your Gold Medal

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


Matthew 10:40-42
Imagine for just a second that you’ve turned on your TV to watch the opening ceremonies for the Olympics.

This is always a popular event. Athletes from around the world march into a stadium for the official starts of the games.

But imagine, for just a second, a different kind of opening ceremony this time. On the field are row after row of pedestals, all of equal height. At the appointed time, just as always, all the athletes march into the stadium. But today, all of them stand on a podium and every single one of them, before a single game, quarter, period, match, bout, round, scrimmage, or scrum has happened, receive gold medals.

Every single athlete.

Then imagine the announcer saying, “You’ve already received your medals. You don’t have to play to win them. The goal of these games is to play so that you don’t lose your reward.”

Grace, God’s undeserved favor, God’s charitable action for us to save us from sin and death and to give us life with Him for eternity, is a reward we cannot earn.

It’s a gold medal God wins for us.

The New Testament book of Romans says that “God proves his love for us, in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

Before we even knew we needed a Savior, Christ died and rose for us.

Before most of us were aware of it, we were claimed by God in Baptism as His very own children.

Salvation, eternal life, the promises of Christ to be with us—all these things are ours not because of any good thing we have done, but simply because God has acted for us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Life for the Christian is about keeping the prize—the reward—we’ve already been given.

Today’s Gospel lesson from Matthew comes at the end of what scholars call Jesus’ missionary discourse. It takes up all of Matthew 10.

Jesus is sending His disciples throughout their native Judea with “authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.”

They’re to proclaim the good news of new life that comes only through Jesus.

Most of Matthew 10 is taken up with Jesus telling the disciples how they’re to conduct themselves while on their mission. But in our verses, Jesus tells them (and all of us who follow Christ) what’s at stake for those who have the choice of receiving or rejecting the people like us who share Christ with them. Nothing less than the gold medal of God’s grace is at stake.

Please pull out the Celebrate inserts from the bulletin and turn to today’s Gospel lesson. It’s short. You can read along with me as I read it again:

[Jesus says,] “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”

If the Olympic athletes in our imagined opening ceremonies don’t stand on the podium, they can’t receive the gold medal. They have to be positioned to receive the reward they don’t deserve.

The only way we can receive the gold medal of God’s grace is to position ourselves in a faith relationship with Jesus Christ.

The rewards of eternal life with God come to those with faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus famously told Nicodemus, ““For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Now, it’s precisely here that we Lutheran Christians often get ourselves into trouble. We turn faith into some proposition we agree to, no different from saying things like, “I believe that rainbows are pretty,” or, “I believe that LeBron James is the greatest basketball player since Michael Jordan.” In other words, we turn belief in Christ into nothing more than intellectual assent.

But, as I’ve pointed out before, even the devil believes that Jesus is the Savior of the world. Jesus says the true believers in Him will be known by their fruits. The seed of true faith in Christ won’t sprout as sinful actions, even though on this side of the grave, you and I will never shake ourselves of our inborn human orientation to sin.

Yet, as the New Testament book of James reminds us, “Faith without works [faith without evidence of the lordship of Jesus in your life] is dead.”

To believe in Jesus—to have faith in Jesus—is to trust in Him and when we trust in Jesus, it will show up in how we live our lives.

It’ll show up in the decisions we make.

It’ll show up in the service we render in His Name and in our willingness to give a witness for Him, even in something as simple and fun as our “This meal’s on us!” kindness outreach cards.

Faith in Jesus is active reliance on Him in our lives.

I once heard what this means illustrated by the picture of a canyon across which a tightrope is strung. Born sinners, we start out lives on one side of the canyon while on the other is God and the life God wants to give to us—His presence with us today and His promise of eternity for tomorrow. There’s a shuttle that crosses the canyon. It's a man on a unicyle who tells each of us, “Climb on my back. I’ve never lost a single person. Not one. But you’ve got to trust me to get you across. I’m the only way.”

Of course, in this homely illustration, Jesus is the unicyclist and faith is our dependence on Him to take us through the often scary, tragic, hard, and unknown places of our lives, beyond death and to a resurrected life with God.

When Jesus sent the disciples out in Matthew 10, they had no idea what following Him might entail. He was inviting them to climb on His back across all the canyons of life.

They found that the life to which Jesus called them wasn’t easy. Judas, of course, bugged out and betrayed Jesus before Jesus went to the cross. Of the remaining eleven, only John lived to an old age. The rest of them lost their earthly lives taking the good news of new life for all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus into the world. They didn’t always get this discipleship thing right. But there was a direction in their lives, a purpose. Their faith was more than something they said on a Sunday morning. It was the way they lived their lives. Christ gave them the rewards of His grace before they set out on their lifelong mission of faithfulness to Christ. And by their faithful reliance on Christ, they did not lose their reward!

The same can be true for all of us, whatever our professions or social status or age.

Earlier in Matthew 10, Jesus warned the disciples that not everybody would welcome them when they lived out their faith in Him. Some would reject them. Some would persecute them. Some would kill them. Yet, He told them to persevere in their trust in Him anyway.

He tells us to do the same, even when it would be easier not to persevere in following Him.

In one of my former congregations, I was approached by a church member, a really good man, who said that he needed prayer. Competent and thorough in everything he did, he said that he’d reached a crossroads in his professional life. “Every day, Mark,” he told me, “I’m asked to do things that are shady or unethical. It’s made very clear that if I don’t do them, I not only won’t advance, I probably won’t even have a job. I’ve got a lot of years in this profession. I’ve always gotten good reviews. But I think that if I left my current position over qualms about what’s right and wrong from a faith standpoint, I wouldn’t even get a good reference. Would you pray for me?”

That man was being called by Christ to choose between the rewards offered by his career—financial security, chief among them—and the rewards of life with God already given to him at Baptism. To take Christ or kick Him away, that was his choice. That was a tough call.

If we're truly living for Christ though, we will face those kinds of tough calls often, too. Following Jesus isn’t easy. Steve Taylor, a Christian poet-musician, wrote some years back, “It’s harder to believe than not to.”

To trust in the rewards of a Savior you’ve never seen more than you trust in the rewards of things you can see, like financial security, comfort, or popularity, isn’t an easy or obvious choice. But when we come to the end of our lives and we stand before Jesus, the wisdom of living a life of holding onto the gold medal of Christ’s grace will shine through. Our Lord will look at us and say, “Well done, good and faithful slave. Inherit the kingdom God has prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” We'll know for certain then that all the things we've worked and slaved for in this life die, rot, and decay; only those filled with the new life that comes from Jesus Christ will last.

Jim Elliot was a missionary who was killed by the Waodoni people in Equador to whom he had gone to share Christ. It was only years after his death that most of the people in the place where he was martyred, including people who had murdered him, came to faith in Christ. Some would say that Elliot’s death was a waste. But he wouldn’t see it that way. Elliot’s aim was always to honor the God revealed in Jesus Christ for the reward of eternal life that comes to all with faith in Christ. He knew that those who spend their lives trying to earn the rewards (and the regard) of this world are the ones wasting their lives. As he once said of his call to live for and share Christ with others, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose."

You can throw away Christ’s grace by failing to trust in Him to help you live for Him every day of your life.

Or you can hold onto Him.

If we will hold onto Christ and follow Him in every part of our lives, we’ll experience real purpose in our lives.

If we’ll turn back to Him for forgiveness and new life every time we become aware of our sin, He will give us a lifetime of fresh starts.

And if we will devote ourselves to truly believing in and following Jesus, we will never lose our reward.

We will never lose our gold medals. Amen