Saints: Who Are They? Who Aren't They?

[This message was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio during All Saints' Sunday worship last Sunday.]

Revelation 7:9-17

What is a saint? All Saints’ Sunday challenges us to ask that question each year. 

The first thing we should do in approaching this question, I suppose, is to talk about what saints aren't, or in a phrase used by the late Lutheran composer John Ylvisaker, what the saints ain't. There's a helpful discussion of this subject in Article XXI of what's known as the Apology to the Augsburg Confession. The confession makes up a portion of The Book of Concord, a place where Lutheran Christians summarize their understanding of Biblical Christian faith.

Article XXI deals with the subject of the invocation of saints, the use of saints' names to intervene for people in prayer. Behind this idea is that saints are somehow superabundantly good and can somehow put in good words for us with God that Jesus, the One we confess to be Lord, God, and Savior, doesn't.

The article says, in part, "Our Confession approves honoring the saints in three ways. The first is thanksgiving. [In their lives, we see examples of God's mercy for sinful human beings.]...The second service is the strengthening our faith. When we see Peter's denial forgiven, we also are encouraged to believe all the more that grace truly superabounds over sin...The third honor is the imitation, first of faith, then of the other virtues...[God, by His grace creates through Christ]...We admit that, just as the saints (when alive) pray for the Church universal in general, so in heaven they pray for the Church in general. However no passage about the praying of the dead exists in the Scriptures...Scripture does not teach the invocation of the saints, or that we are to ask the saints for aid..."

In short, dead saints aren't who we're to talk to when we're trying to communicate with God. Scripture teaches that we're to pray in the name of God the Son, Jesus. The early Church knew that there is no other name given by God by which we can be saved. Jesus says that He is the way, the truth, and the life, the only connection that humanity can have to God for salvation and prayers heard by God. As a young person said to me years ago, "If I can go right to the top, to God, in my praying, why would I talk to a dead believer who can't hear me?"

That's what saints aren't. To find out what they are, we’ll turn to today’s first lesson, Revelation 7:9-17. 

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

Beginning at chapter 6, John sees Jesus, the second Person of the one God, open the first six of seven seals. With the opening of each seal, John sees this old creation in which we live move closer to its inevitable end. He also sees glimmers of the new creation that the risen and ascended Jesus will fully usher in at His second coming, when He returns to this world to claim His kingdom from our enemies: sin, death, and the devil. Jesus’ return will bring celebration and relief to all who have turned from sin and who have believed in Christ.

But, as the last verse of Revelation 6 points out, the return of Jesus won’t be universally welcomed, any more than He or His people are universally welcomed today. Those who have rejected Christ will ask the caves, mountains, and rocks for help. “‘Fall on us,’ they will beg, ‘and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb [the Lamb being Jesus]!’ For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?” (Revelation 6:16)

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

The first scene comes in Revelation 7:1-8, right before today’s lesson. The location of this scene is this world. God assigns four angels to hold back the final destruction of the old creation. “Don’t damage the earth,” God tells the angels, “until we’ve marked all of the servants of God with a seal on their foreheads” (Revelation 7:3) (This is the seal of the Holy Spirit which every baptized person receives on the day they’re made new by water and the Spirit.) Then the numbers of those sealed for salvation are counted out. The total comes to 144,000. The Bible is not here saying that just 144,000 people out of all human history will be part of God’s eternal kingdom! The number 144 is derived from multiplying the 12 tribes of Israel times the 12 apostles Jesus chose to lead the post-resurrection church. For John, it would have been a number implying perfection and completeness. And, tacking three zeroes onto the back of 144, would be a bit like one of us saying that “a gazillion” people showed up for an Ohio State football game or watched the seventh game of the World Series this past week. 

Then comes Revelation 7:9. John writes: “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count…” 

This is no little crowd of 144,000! It’s a crowd so big that “no one could count” it! 

I find this incredibly moving because on a starlit night 4000 years ago, an elderly man to whom God had promised the impossible struggled to believe that God could overcome decay and death to give him a son and a future to his descendants.

The man’s name at the time was Abram. (Later to be changed by God to Abraham.) To Abram, the promise seemed too good to be true. So, God reassured Abram in Genesis 15:5: “[God took Abram] outside and said, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’” 

The multitude from every nation that John is shown in His vision of heaven after the life of this old world has come to an end are the descendants of Abram, the very descendants God had promised on that starry night so long ago. They were, in the words of John in his gospel: “children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:13). This multitude comes to be numbered among Abraham’s descendants not by genetics, but by faith in the God Who ultimately revealed Himself to Jews and Gentiles in the person of Jesus Christ. 

Jesus says in John 14:9: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” This the Father, God the Father, the same one Who made Abraham and Sarah the ancestors of nations, not because their bodies were capable of making children, but because God’s Holy Spirit, by the grace of God, can make new life in all who turn from sin and entrust themselves to Jesus.  

Jesus, God the Son, is the God Who gave Abraham that promise four millennia ago. And He is the God Who promises that all who turn from sin and believe in Him become descendants of Abraham. They are saints of God. When we come to believe in Christ as our God and Savior, we are the saints of God!

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

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

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

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

Despite the propaganda that comes from those who misconstrue Revelation, "the great tribulation" does not refer to some endtime cataclysm. The great tribulation is the common experience through which every believer in Jesus goes in this life.

Life in this world is the great tribulation. 

We live in a place filled with beauty and wonder. But with its beauty and wonder marred by human sin, death, and even the suffering of the saints, this world, at its best, can still only give us a glimpse--a kind of shimmering shadow--of the beauty and wonder—the perfection—that await all who persevere to the end in following Jesus as their only God and King. 

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

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

But even in the best of times, this life can be a struggle. 

And sometimes, our struggles are made even harder because God’s Word has ignited faith in Jesus Christ within us. 

How much easier the lives of Christians would be if we just went along with the world instead of rooting ourselves in the truth and grace of God revealed in His Word. Of course, along with that ease would come death, because life is only found in Christ!

The devil tests, tempts, and tries the saints. And every believer in Christ will, eventually, bear the scars—physical, emotional, relational, or all three—that come to those who seek to follow Christ. 

Mark it well: Follow Christ and He will most certainly thwart you in some of your most heartfelt desires because He is far less interested in giving you momentary happiness than He is in fitting and forging you and your character for an eternity spent in His presence. In this life, I have chafed under Christ's hand of loving discipline more than once and I'm sure that I will chafe under it many times again before I die. I'm reminded of the words of the preacher in the New Testament book of Hebrews: "Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined--and everyone undergoes discipline--then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness." (Hebrews 12:7-10)

The Old Testament saints living in exile, the victims of injustice, would cry out to God, “How long, O Lord?” Their pain was echoed for me in the words of a saint and friend battling cancer who told me, “I just can’t seem to catch a break.” In this life, we’ve all been there...or will be. 

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

What is a saint? 

Saints are people who daily turn to Jesus for forgiveness, faith, courage, and new life. 

Saints are sinners who trust that Jesus loves and gives new and everlasting life to sinners. 

Sometimes saints turn to Jesus haltingly. Always imperfectly. At times, speaking for myself anyway, resentfully. But saints find that their lives as disciples and human beings are always buttressed by daily repentance and renewal. 

No matter how saints’ hearts may wander, they always know to come back to Christ. 

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

They know that this life is not perfect. But they have a purpose in their living: To live for and to let the whole world know about the Lamb Jesus, Who will, after the last page has been closed in the last chapter of the last volume of this world's story, welcome all who have trusted in Him to His new creation. 

In the meantime, dear saints of God, trust in Jesus. Know His love for you even in the midst of life’s greatest tribulations and know for a fact that, if you remain steadfast in following Jesus, like saints before us, you will be in Jesus' everlasting kingdom. You will hear Jesus say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” (Matthew 25:34) Amen!

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. I'm also a saint by grace through faith in Jesus Christ and a sinner by my very nature at the same time.]

You Might Be a Saint...Really

[This is the message that was shared during both worship services yesterday, All Saints' Sunday, at Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Revelation 7:9-17
On this All Saints’ Sunday, a modified rerun, from three years ago. But, since God inspired the message in the first place, I’m hopeful that it will still speak to the primary question of this day: What is a saint?

To find out, we’ll turn to today’s first lesson, Revelation 7:9-17. Revelation is based on a series of visions given to the apostle John about sixty years after Jesus’ resurrection.

Beginning at chapter 6, John sees Jesus, the second Person of the one God, open the first six of seven seals.

With the opening of each seal, John sees this old creation moving closer to its inevitable end. He also sees glimmers of the new creation that the risen and ascended Jesus will fully usher in at His second coming, when He returns to this world to claim His kingdom from our enemies: sin, death, and the devil.

Jesus’ return will bring celebration and relief to all who have turned from sin and who have believed in Christ. But, as the last verse of Revelation 6 points out, the return of Jesus won’t be universally welcomed, any more than He or His people are universally welcomed today.

Those who have rejected Christ, will ask the caves, mountains, and rocks for help. “‘Fall on us,’ they will beg, ‘and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb [the Lamb being Jesus]!’ For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?” (Revelation 6:16)

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

The first scene comes in Revelation 7:1-8, right before today’s lesson. The location of this scene is this world. God assigns four angels to hold back the final destruction of the old creation. “Don’t damage the earth,” God tells the angels, “until we’ve marked all of the servants of God with a seal on their foreheads” (Revelation 7:3) (This is the seal of the Holy Spirit which every baptized person receives on the day they’re made new by water and the Spirit.)

Then the numbers of those sealed for salvation are counted out. The total comes to 144,000. Now, the Bible is not saying that just 144,000 people out of all human history will be part of God’s eternal kingdom! The number 144 is derived from multiplying the 12 tribes of Israel times the 12 apostles Jesus chose to lead the post-resurrection church. For John, it would have been a number implying perfection and completeness. And, tacking three zeroes onto the back of 144, making it 144,000, would be a bit like one of us talking about “a gazillion” people showing up at yesterday's women's retreat or for the Black Friday sales at Macy’s or Target.

Then comes Revelation 7:9, where John writes, “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count…” This is no little crowd of 144,000! It’s a multitude! It’s a crowds so big that “no one could count” it!

I find this incredibly moving because on a starlit night 4000 years ago, an elderly man to whom God had promised the impossible struggled to believe that God could overcome decay and death to give him a son and a future to his descendants. The man’s name at the time was Abram. (Later to be changed by God to Abraham, a name that means “father of nations.”) To Abram, the promise seemed too good to be true. So, God reassured Abram in Genesis 15:5: “[God took Abram] outside and said, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’” “I will give you a son, Abram,” God was saying. “And not only that, your descendants will dwarf the numbers of stars in the sky."

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

They were, in the words of John in his gospel: “children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:13).

This multitude comes to be numbered among Abraham’s descendants not by genetics, but by faith in the God Who ultimately revealed Himself to Jews and Gentiles in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus says in John 14:9: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” The Father, God the Father, the same one Who made Abraham and Sarah the ancestors of nations, not because their bodies were capable of making children, but because God’s Holy Spirit, by the grace of God, can make new life in all who turn from sin and entrust themselves to Jesus.

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

And He is the God Who promises that all who turn from sin and believes in Him become descendants of Abraham. They are saints. We are the saints!

Reading about the vision that the risen Jesus gave to John shows us that God has never changed. In God, there is, James 1:17 tells us, “no variation or shadow due to change.”

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

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

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

But if sainthood is a free gift from God, we must not think for a moment that sainthood is easy.

We see this from just four words in our lesson from Revelation today. The first two of those words appear at the beginning of verse 9: “After this.” After what, exactly? John saw the multitude of saints after an event that’s mentioned in verse 14. That’s where you can read two more important words: “great tribulation.”

Now, despite the propaganda the comes from those who misconstrue Revelation, "the great tribulation" does not refer to some endtime cataclysm. The great tribulation s the common experience through which every believer in Jesus goes in this life.

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

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

For now, we live in an in-between time in which, as Paul writes Romans 8, both we and the whole of creation wait with eager longing for Christ to reveal Himself and His children. But the truth is that life in this world is hard. Even in the best of times, life can be a struggle.

And sometimes, our struggles are made even harder because we believe in Jesus Christ. How much easier the lives of Christians would be if we just went along with the world instead of rooting ourselves in the truth and grace of God revealed in His Word. Of course, along with that ease would come death, because life is only found in Christ!

The devil tests, tempts, and tries the saints. And every believer in Christ will, eventually, bear the scars—physical, emotional, or relational—that come to those who put following Jesus first in their lives. Mark it well: Follow Christ and He will most certainly thwart you in some of your most heartfelt desires because He’s less interested in giving you momentary happiness than He is in fitting and forging you and your character for eternal life with Him.

The ancient saints living in exile, the victims of injustice, would cry out to God, “How long, O Lord?”

Their pain was echoed for me in the words of a saint and friend battling cancer who told me, “I just can’t seem to catch a break.”

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

What is a saint?

Saints are people who trust their whole lives to Jesus. Sometimes haltingly. Always imperfectly. At times, speaking for myself anyway, resentfully. Always buttressed by daily repentance and renewal.

But no matter how saints’ hearts may wander, they always know to come back to Christ.

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

They know that this life is not perfect.

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

In the meantime, dear saints of God, trust in Jesus. Know His love for you even in the midst of life’s greatest tribulations and know for a fact that, if you remain steadfast in following Jesus, like saints before us, you will be in Jesus' everlasting kingdom.

If we remain faithful to Christ, you and I will one day join our fellow saints, along with God’s messengers, the angels, in singing and savoring the glories of our loving God and all who have persistently, perseveringly, enduringly followed their Savior in this world will hear the Lord say to us in the next world, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” (Matthew 25:34) Amen!

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church.]

The Trinity: Knowing God

Matthew 28:16-20
This morning, a re-run. I hope you don’t mind.

Today is an often-overlooked day on the Church calendar: Holy Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost.

[This is example of a genre of Christian imagery known as gnadenstuhl. It portrays the Trinity at the moment of Jesus' crucifixion. I thank my son, Pastor Philip Daniels, for sharing this particular image on his Facebook account this past week.]

When I was about eight, I asked my mom for an explanation of the Trinity. How could God be one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Mom told me to ask our pastor, which I did.

“Mark,” he said, “think of water. It can come in the form of a liquid, a solid (in water’s case, ice), or gas (in this case, steam). But whatever form it takes, it’s always water. Three in one.”

That helped somewhat, though it tilts toward a heresy called modalism long ago rejected by the Church.

The problem with the analogy is that as Christians, we don’t believe that God takes on different forms as though God were engaged in some eternal Halloween party, changing His costume from time to time. We confess that God is always one being and that God is always three persons. No analogy is going to exactly explain something as mysterious as the Trinity.

Some people think that the Trinity is an arcane idea best left undiscussed. 



Yet as I’ve gotten to know God better through the pages of Scripture, the fellowship of believers, and the Lord’s Supper, I’ve come to agree with an acquaintance of mine who wrote a few years ago, that there may be nothing more important for us to try to “get” as Christians than the Trinity.

The word “Trinity” is never used in the Bible. But repeatedly, by inference in the Old Testament and in plain words in the New Testament, the Bible affirms that three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are co-equal, co-eternal personalities of the one and only God the universe.

For example, in our first lesson, from Genesis, God the Spirit brings the life of the universe into being (Genesis 1:2).

When God decides to create human beings, He says, "Let us make..." Who's He talking to? I think that pretty clearly, God is talking to Himself (Genesis 1:26).

And, look, please at today’s Gospel lesson. It contains the Great Commission. In verse 19, Jesus says: “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...” Jesus is putting Himself and the Holy Spirit on the same level as God the Father.

The Gospels tell us that Jesus makes a point of placing Himself on an equal footing with God the Father many times.

• “Before Abraham was, I am [Yahweh],” He says in John 8:58. 
• “I and the Father are one,” He says in John 10:30. 
• “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father,” He claims in John 14:9. 

Yet, Jesus isn’t saying that there are two or three Gods over the universe. Like His fellow Jews, Jesus affirmed the truth of Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”

So, without ever using the word trinity, the Bible affirms that God is one God in three persons.

But what has the Trinity God to do with you and me in 2017?

You’ve heard the phrase: “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.” We find that funny because we know that there is no validity to our claims of being loving people in general if we are unwilling to love particular people.

Love at its most basic level is not about affectionate feelings. Love is a commitment to willing and doing what is best for those we love, even when we disagree, drive each other crazy.

Love that isn’t lived out practically isn’t love. You can’t be loving if there is no object of your love.

Now, one of the most famous passages of the New Testament is 1 John 4:8, which says, in part, “God is love.”

It's important to note that John didn't write, "Love is God." That would make God just an idea.

Nor does God’s loving character make Him tolerant of all our behaviors. Much of what we human beings do is sinful and of sin, God is absolutely intolerant, even though He never stops loving us.

In these three words, “God is love,” we aren’t given a license to do whatever we want, irrespective of the will of God.

No, in saying that, "God is love," John is making an eternal statement about an eternal God. Before God created the heavens and the earth, before Jesus died and rose so that all who believe in Him may be freed of their sins, before the Holy Spirit formed the Church, God is, God was, and God will be eternally loving.

"God is love" means that love is at the core of God’s character and being. Love is why and how He acts.

But, that raises a question: Who did God love before the beginning?

The answer, I think, is that in eternity, before there was time, before there was a creation, God was already loving others. God the Father loved God the Son and God the Spirit and God the Son and God the Spirit each loved the other two members of the Trinity, have done so and will do so for all eternity.

Even the existence of this universe in which we live at least suggests that God is one, but is more than one person. Only One Who loves and has always known how to love would have thought of giving such a great gift as this thing called life.

When I was twenty-five, I’d been married for five years and my parents were growing impatient. Where, they wondered, were the grandchildren we were supposed to be coming up with? Then, my dad, father of five kids, decided to have a talk with me, giving me advice for the first and only time that I can remember.

Dad told me that if we were looking for the right time or the right reason for having children, to forget it. There’s never a right time. There’s never a good reason.

And that’s the point. It’s in the very nature of love to forgo convenience to self and to give, to serve, to stand by, to live for, even, if necessary, to die for.

God has always known how to love. He exists in what the theologians call a "triune" relationship of perfect love and doesn’t need more love. He’s always loved perfectly. He's always been loved perfectly. God doesn't need more love. Honestly, He doesn't really need us.

But, because God is infinite and eternal in His love, God loved the universe into being. God the Word, Christ, spoke into the darkness and chaos and God the Spirit wended His Word and life sprang up.

We--every one of us--are the products of God’s love: unnecessary but loved nonetheless, superfluous but cherished.

Today, the Holy Trinity calls us to follow Christ right into the center of His loving fellowship.

He claims us as His own in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at our Baptism, and then calls us into an ever-renewing relationship of love with Him and all that He has made.

Sin and death and isolation from God and from others will be the last word over every human life unless people are washed clean of sin and made new through repentance and faith in Christ. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

Christ calls us into life abundant and eternal. But there is no life without love. This is no biological observation: the unloved child, abused by her or his parents, isn’t experiencing life; the couple in a loveless marriage aren’t living; the teen subjected to bullying and putdowns is experiencing a love deficit that is, inherently, a life deficit; the visitors ignored when they worship at a church they’ve never been to before are being treated both lovelessly and as though they weren’t even alive.

And this is why the Trinity is such an important reality for us to experience. We live in a fractured, fractious world. People are divided and often hateful. Love of neighbors, including love of our enemies, is a rare thing. It’s so rare that only Jesus and the people who, by faith, draw life from Jesus really live it.

God has created the Church, the fellowship of believers in Christ, to make disciples and to usher believers into a community of love that fills us with the power of God to move toward being the loving people we were made to be and promises us eternal fellowship with God and others.

In the Garden of Gethsemane before His arrest, Jesus prayed to God the Father that all who followed Him, “may be one...just as you are in me and I am in you...” (John 17:21). God wants us to live in the same selfless fellowship with others He has always known. That’s what Jesus died and rose to give to those who dare to believe in Him.

If all of this sounds airy and theoretical, removed from the hard realities of your life, consider this: Every time we pray to our Father in heaven in Jesus’ name, we do so at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, Who through God’s Word and the witness of other Christian disciples, helps us to trust that when we come to the Father on the bases of Jesus’ perfect righteousness, our prayers are heard.

More than that, we believe that when we’re confused, afraid, worn out, incapable of putting a coherent thought into words and simply call out to the God we know in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit forms our groans into prayers that, through Jesus, reach the Father. (Romans 8:26-27)

I have never prayed so completely as I have when, wrung out by life, I have asked heaven, “What? What?”

If it weren’t for the Holy Spirit and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus to open our access to God the Father, prayers like that would only bounce off the ceiling.

The Holy Trinity can make a difference in our everyday lives if we will be open to His threefold ministry to us. God in His fullness, Who cares about us even though He doesn’t have to, Who is able to stand with us in every experience, also makes it possible for us to experience fellowship, community, with Him and with His family, the Church.

This is why the Church is so important. Only the Church has been designated to connect people with the Trinity. And in a world filled with the idea of mashing others into oblivion and lifting ourselves to the top, of crushing and being crushed by selfishness and self-will, we need the liberation from self and the connection to God and to others that only the God Who is the Holy Trinity can give us.

We need, truly, more than anything else, love that changes our hearts, our minds, and our eternities. And only the God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can give it. Amen

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

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

John 14:6
Acts 4:12
A week ago, I attended the Centerville mayor’s annual Faith Leaders Breakfast. A representative from each of the faith organizations was asked to say a few words. A man from a local Islamic mosque told us, “We all worship one God.”

Muslims are told this and taught to say this to non-Muslims. In Quran 29:46, Muslims are instructed to tell Jews and Christians: “And our God and your God is one; and we are Muslims [in submission] to Him."

That’s great PR. But is it the truth?

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

Nabeel Qureshi, the noted author and Christian apologist, a convert from Islam, writes in his book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, that even after he had become a Christian, he thought that the God of Christianity and the Allah of Islam were essentially the same. After all, Christianity is the fulfillment of the promises God made to the world through ancient Israel, and Islam, like Mormonism, is a legalistic derivative of Christianity. The Bible and the Quran both mention people like Adam and Eve, Abraham, and so on.

But, after he'd spent time in God's Word, Qureshi came to realize that the God of Christianity and the Allah of Islam are very different in nature, being, and attitude toward the human race.

Above all, we see this through the prism of the Trinity, the Christian belief that God has revealed Himself to be one God in three Persons. Jesus and the apostles taught this reality without ever using the term “trinity.”

Before He ascended to heaven, for example, the risen Jesus told His Church, “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” (Matthew 28:19), putting Himself and the Holy Spirit on the same level as God the Father.

During His earthly ministry, Jesus claimed: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).

And one of the most famous benedictions in the New Testament invokes our three-in-one God: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14).

For Jesus and the early Church to claim that He and the Holy Spirit were co-equal to God the Father would have been blasphemous if it weren’t true. Yet Jesus and the first Christians could never be rightly accused of being blasphemous or disrespectful of God.

Even the Old Testament implies the existence of this mysterious three-in-one God in several places. One example: When God creates the universe in the Old Testament, we read that God said: “Let us make mankind in our image…” (Genesis 1:26). Who was God speaking to when He said “let us make” the human race? He certainly wasn’t suggesting that the animals, plants, moon, stars, or planets join Him in doing what only He could do, give life. And there's absolutely nothing to support the idea that God was using the royal "we." No, God was talking to Himself: “Let us make…”

But the Trinity is more than an arcane teaching, the Trinity just makes sense. First John 4:8 tells us that “God is love.” Only a God Who knows what love is and how to give love away would have even thought of creating the universe. If God weren’t practiced in and committed to love, He would have preferred to, as the Brits say, “keep himself to himself.” But when God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Who has experienced from all eternity, the joy of giving love away, that superabundance of love feels compelled to express itself in every molecule and every supernova and every human being God has ever made, every part of the universe for which He became human, died, and rose.

This understanding of God is central to what we believe as Christians.

It’s simple:

• No Trinity; no creation. 
• No Trinity; no salvation. 
• No Trinity; no Gospel.
• No Trinity; no Church.

The God worshiped by Christians is Trinitarian. Everything He has done, from making us, to saving us, from making us part of His Church, to making us holy by the power of His own Spirit springs from His Trinitarian nature. God would not be God if weren't one God in three Persons. That's not the version of deity that Muslims worship.

We can also see how different the Christian and Muslim views of God are when we consider one of the most common names we Christians use in talking to God.

When Jesus was asked by the disciples how to pray, He began the prayer with: ‘Our Father in heaven…’” (Matthew 6:9).

Jesus was telling all who approach God in His name to regard God as our loving Father.

Islam, on the other hand, is revolted by the idea of God being our Father. Quran 5:18 says: “the Jews and the Christians say, "We are the children of Allah and His beloved." [Tell them] ‘Then why does He punish you for your sins?’ Rather, you are human beings from among those He has created. He forgives whom He wills, and He punishes whom He wills.”

Notice that repentance, faith, or a heart open to God mean nothing to Allah. To Islam, Allah is a mercurial dictator who may give you a break...or not. Allah rules entirely by fiat. And Muslims don’t see how Christians can believe that God would dirty His hands by claiming to be related to human beings as our Father.

Islam also rejects the idea that Jesus, Who said, “...before Abraham was, I AM” (in other words, “before Abraham was, Yahweh”) (John 8:58) and Who accepted the worship of people like Thomas, Peter, and the blind man from this past Sunday’s Gospel lesson, is God.

Quran 5:72 insists that anyone who believes that Jesus is God, the One we Christians proclaim as “the Word made flesh” (John 1:14) will be forbidden a place in Paradise, their only refuge fire, from which they can receive no help. In other words, the Quran teaches that if we believe that Jesus is God, we are going to hell.

Islam also rejects the idea that Jesus is God’s Son.

Jesus teaches, famously of course, “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).

But the Quran says: “No son did Allah beget, nor is there any god along with Him.”

Jesus says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The Quran says, effectively, that Jesus is lying.

Islam tries to have it both ways: to claim a share in the God of Israel ultimately revealed to the world in Jesus, Who they rename Allah, as their own, while repudiating much of what God has revealed to the world in Jesus.

The God of the Bible is a heartsick lover Who beckons us to turn from sin and turn to Him to live, a God Who despised His own dignity so that by sacrificing Himself on the cross, He could win us back from from sin and death. 

The Allah of Islam is like the Greek and Roman gods, who neither give nor promise grace, who sport with the human race while floating above it all, moving only from indifference to anger with humanity.

Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God.

But this shouldn’t make Christians smug. Ephesians 2:8 reminds us: “...it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.”

Rather than being smug, we should be thankful for Christ’s gift of salvation and new life to us.

We are blessed to be baptized and to have heard the Gospel from faithful people so that we have the chance to know God! We’ve been saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus. That’s a lot to be thankful for, but we can claim no credit for it; it's God's work alone!

And from sheer ratitude, we have every reason to be faithful to the great commission Jesus has given to us, to make disciples of all peoples.

That includes those who are trapped in Islam.

May we be grateful and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, may we be faithful in lifting up Christ to our neighbors, all of our neighbors.

For we believe exactly what the first century Church believed of Jesus: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)

Let’s show and tell the world this truth in every way God opens to us!

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message  is the fourth installment of the midweek Lenten series at Living Water, Tough Questions.]

How Christmas Looks from Heaven

John 1:1-14
The Gospel of John, from which today’s gospel lesson comes, is both the easiest and the hardest to understand of the New Testament’s accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

John’s gospel is a bit like Jesus Himself, I suppose. A child can understand that Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead so that all who turn from their sin and trust in Him have forgiveness and new, eternal life with God. But even a mature believer who has given steady attention to an intimate relationship with Jesus over many years, will never be able to fully understand everything about Jesus.

There will always be some mystery about Jesus and that’s as it should be because, after all, Jesus is God and you and I aren’t.

On Christmas Day, we encounter the mystery of God in full through the prologue to John’s Gospel.

It’s appointed as our Gospel reading, even though, unlike Matthew and Luke, John never tells the story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.

The Christmas story is in the first fourteen verses of John’s gospel, though. Whereas Matthew tells the story from the perspective of Joseph, the carpenter chosen to be Jesus’ earthly father, and Luke tells it from the vantage point of Mary, the virgin chosen to be Jesus’ earthly mother, John through the first thirteen-and-a-half verses of our lesson, tells us what happened on the first Christmas from the perspective of eternity, from the vantage point of God Himself.

Then, starting in the middle of verse 14, John switches perspectives. But let’s not jump ahead of ourselves.

Go to our lesson, starting at verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

John’s Gospel starts out like Genesis 1: “In the beginning…” But while Genesis only goes back to the beginning of the universe God made for us, John’s “in the beginning” goes back before God had created the first thing.

John starts when the only life that existed was God, ever one, ever three persons.

We will meet the Holy Spirit later in John’s Gospel, but for now, his focus--like our focus at Christmas--is on the second person of the Trinity, the Word.

God the Word, God the Son, was, John says, the very power by which God brought creation into being. According to Genesis, God spoke and creation happened. According to John, God the Word was that word that God spoke into chaos and nothingness and made life, order, peace.

God the Word was God’s, “Let there be life” and there was life, including life for you and me.

This eternal Word seared the darkness of nothingness with the blazing light of His powerful, life-giving love. Darkness, John says, “has not overcome it,” or more literally, “has not seized it, overcome it, arrested it, or comprehended it.”

Created light, you know, travels at 186,000 miles per second, but its power dissipates over distance. The Word, the Light of God though, cannot be chained, inhibited, hid, or brought under control. It never fades or gives out.

Whenever humanity has sought to stop or avoid this Light, the Word has kept on shining: showing us our sin, showing us the way to be free of our sin, lighting the way to free others of their sins, so that the Word can keep doing what He did at the creation, make life.

Verse 6: “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.”

Some scholars believe that the John who wrote our gospel lesson was originally a disciple of the John he writes about here, John the Baptist. (Is that confusing enough?)

The gospel writer says that the Baptizer was, above all, “a witness,” pointing the world to the Word. “Don’t get confused,” our gospel writer is saying, “John the Baptist was a great and faithful man. But he wasn’t the Word and he wasn’t the Light of the world. His job was to point to the Word and the Light.”

By now, some of the gospel’s original hearers and listeners would have likely become impatient. “Spit it out, John,” they might have thought, “what’s this whole Word business about?” So far, you’ve told us Who He isn’t; but you haven’t told us Who He is. We’ve heard of God before. We’ve even heard of God’s Holy Spirit before. But what is this Word you keep talking about in circles?”

Had he been challenged in this way, John might have thought, “Glad you asked.” Verse 9-14a: “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

The Word of God didn’t remain in the comfort of heaven.

He refused to be a mere philosophical proposition.

He wouldn’t be a distant deity.

He wouldn’t be, as some people picture God, a cosmic watchmaker who set the mechanics of the universe and then left His creatures to their own devices.

No!

The brilliant blazing second Person of the Trinity decided to brave the darkness of this sinful, fallen world to light our way to life with God.

He took our flesh upon Himself and “made His dwelling among us,” literally, “pitched His tent” with those He first made in His own image.

He became a baby subjected to death by exposure as he lay in a manger on a silent night, who cried from hunger and pain, who soiled His diapers and would need to learn to walk and run eventually, do the work of a fix-it man.

The Word came to live lives like ours, full of challenges, tragedies, joys, fulfillment, and temptations. He came to live one perfect life, so that, in the words of Hebrews 4:15, He could be: “...tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin.”

Then He could give His sinless life as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. The Word was born into this world so that He could die in our places and so that all who turn from sin and believe in Him will have life with God, given “the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God,” as John puts it.

The Word Who once spoke the world into being, has come into our world. By His death and resurrection, He pronounces the good news that, by His grace, all who believe in Him are saved and made new. By grace through faith in Christ alone, we become God’s children.

At the end of verse 14, as I mentioned, John’s perspective changes. He moves from what God has done through this Word to explaining how he and his friends who followed this Word experienced Him on earth.

He talks about what He saw in the Word Who said of Himself, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father.” [John 14:9]

And: “The Father and I are one.” [John 10:30]

And: “Before Abraham was born, I AM.” [John 8:58]

John writes in our lesson: “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

In the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, we’re told that after Moses met with God at Mount Sinai, his face shone with the reflected light and glory of God Himself. The Israelites were so afraid of God’s brilliant light--fearful that their sins would be exposed, fearful that they would clearly see the way God wanted them to live and be forced to trust in Him, rather than themselves and their own preferred and sinful ways--that they told Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.” [Exodus 20:19] They were terrified to be exposed in their sinfulness in the fiery presence of God.

Their terror was not ill-founded.

If we dare to stand before God without repentance and without faith in the Word, the only one Who can make us clean, we don’t stand a chance. Hebrews 10:31 says: “ It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

But remember: Jesus came not just in truth; He also came in grace. Grace means charity, God’s charity for people born in sin like you and me. (The word we translate from the Greek in which the New Testament was written as grace is charitas, from which we get our English word, charity.)

The Word Who came to pitch His tent among us also came to cover us in the favor, resurrection, new life, and grace He won for all who believe in Him.

Because of His grace, we can say with the preacher in Hebrews 4:16: “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”

An intimate and eternal relationship with the Almighty King and Lord of the universe! That’s what the Word made flesh came to make possible for you and for me.

We know this Word as Jesus, truly God and truly man.

Jesus, the Word, is more than a Hallmark card, words of love spoken from afar by God.

Jesus is God with His sleeves rolled up, doing the hard work, making the painful sacrifice of love for each of us.

Jesus, the Word, is Immanuel, God with us, God for us, God our redeemer.

Even a child can understand this about Jesus. And even an adult needs Jesus just as much.

Always receive Him and you will have what you can find nowhere else: Life--new, eternal life--from God and with God, now and always.

That’s what Christmas is about.

Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was shared during worship this morning.]

Why the Trinity is Important

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

Matthew 28:16-20

Today is Holy Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost.

When I was a boy, about eight, I remember going to my Mom and asking for an explanation of the Trinity, of how God could be one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Mom punted. She told me to ask our pastor, which I did.

I asked him to explain the Trinity. “Mark,” he said, “think of water. It can come in the form of a liquid, a solid (in water’s case, ice), or gas (in this case, steam). But whatever form it takes, it’s always water. Three in one.”

That helped somewhat. But the problem with that analogy is that as Christians, we don’t believe that God takes on different forms as though God were engaged in some eternal Halloween party, changing His costume from time to time.

We confess that God is always one and always three. God is always one being; God is always three persons.

Fact is, no analogy we draw is going to exactly explain something as mysterious as the Trinity. And, of course, only God can really understand it. It’s HIS reality, after all. How could we ever get that?

But the very notion of the Trinity is so difficult for us to get our brains wrapped around that some people give up on even talking about it. 

I heard one pastor, for example, say that the Trinity was difficult to understand, he'd decided to never talk about the subject.

But as I’ve gotten to know God better through the pages of Scripture, the fellowship of believers, and the Lord’s Supper, I’ve come to agree with a Presbyterian friend of mine (a petroleum engineer who’s a very good theologian) who wrote on his blog a few years ago, that there may be nothing more important for us to try to “get” as Christians than the Trinity.

Not the Trinity as a doctrine to be memorized.

Not the Trinity as a teaching propped up by arcane and sometimes meaningless analogies.

But the Trinity as a reality, the Trinity as something centrally important to how you and I live every day, the Trinity as a template for how to truly live as human beings.

The word “Trinity” is never used in the Bible. But repeatedly, by inference in the Old Testament and in plain words in the New Testament, the Bible affirms that three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are co-equal, co-eternal personalities of the one and only God the universe.

For example, in our first lesson, from Genesis, God the Spirit brings the life of the universe into being.

In our second lesson, recounting the apostle Peter recalls how ancient King David referred to the Messiah--the Christ--Who would come centuries after his own death as Lord.



And, look, please at today’s Gospel lesson. It contains the Great Commission. In verse 19, Jesus says: “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...” Jesus is putting Himself and the Holy Spirit on the same level as God the Father.

The Gospels also tell us that Jesus makes a point of placing Himself on an equal footing with God the Father many times.

“Before Abraham was,” He told skeptical followers, “I AM.” (“Before Abraham was,” in other words, “Yahweh,” using the Name with which God identified Himself to Moses and ancient Israel.)

“I and the Father are one,” He claims.

“Anyone who has seen Me,” He says, “you have seen the Father.”

Yet, Jesus isn’t suggesting that there are two or three Gods over the universe. Like centuries of Jews before and since, Jesus affirmed the truth of Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”

So, without ever using the word trinity, the Bible affirms that God is one God in three persons. By now, you may be crying, "Uncle! Enough already. The Bible teaches that God is one God in three Persons. So what?"

For those who recently read Mere Christianity, some what I’m about to say will sound familiar, but let me suggest why I think it’s so important.

You’ve heard the phrase: “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.” We find that funny because we know that there is no validity to our claims of being loving people in general if we are unwilling to love particular people in particular.

Love at its most basic level is not about affectionate feelings.

It’s not about an attitude of heart.

Love is a commitment to willing and doing what is best for the beloved.

Love that isn’t lived out practically isn’t love.

You can’t be loving if there is no object of your love. (Hang with me now.)

One of the most famous passages of the New Testament is 1 John 4:8, which says, in part, “God is love.” Now, John didn't write, "Love is God." God is not an abstraction. Nor is God tolerant of all our behaviors. Much of what we human beings is sinful and of those behaviors, God is completely intolerant, even though He never stops loving us.

In these three little words, John isn't giving us a rationale for doing whatever we want, irrespective of the will of God.

No, in saying that, "God is love," John is making an eternal statement about an eternal God.

Before God created the heavens and the earth, before Jesus died and rose so that all who believe in Him may be freed of their sins, before the Holy Spirit formed the Church, God is, God was, and God will be eternally loving. Love is at the core of God’s character and being.

But, that raises a question: Who did God love before the beginning?

The answer, I think, is that in eternity, before there was time, before there was a creation, God was already loving others. God the Father loved God the Son and God the Spirit and God the Son and God the Spirit each loved the other two members of the Trinity, have done so and will do so for all eternity.

Even the existence of this universe in which we live at least suggests that God is one, but is more than one person.

When I was twenty-five, we’d been married for five years and my parents were growing impatient. Where, they wondered, were the grandchildren we were supposed to be coming up with? Then, my dad, father of five kids, decided to have a heart to heart with me. He told me that if I were looking for the right time or the right reason for having children, to forget it. There’s never a right time. There’s never a good reason.

And that’s the point. Love doesn’t need a right time or a good reason. It’s in the very nature of love to forgo convenience to self and to give, to serve, to love, to stand by, to live for, even, if necessary, to die for. God has always known how to love.

He exists in what the theologians call a "triune" relationship of perfect love and doesn’t need more love. He’s always loved perfectly. He's always been loved. God doesn't need love. Honestly, He doesn't really need us.

But, because God is infinite and eternal in His love, God loved the universe into being. God the Word, Christ, spoke into the darkness and chaos and God the Spirit wended His Word and life sprang up.

We are the product of God’s love, unnecessary but loved nonetheless, superfluous but cherished.

Today, the Holy Trinity calls us to follow Christ right into the center of His loving fellowship. He calls us into a new relationship of love with Him and all that He has made. Sin and death and isolation from God and from others will be the last word over every human life unless people are washed clean of sin and made new through repentance and faith in Christ. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

Christ calls us into life abundant and eternal.

But there is no life without love.

This is no biological observation: the unloved child, abused by her or his parents isn’t experiencing life; the couple in a loveless marriage aren’t living; the teen subjected to bullying and putdowns is experiencing a love deficit that is, inherently, a life deficit; the visitors ignored when they worship at a church they’ve never been to before are being treated both lovelessly and as though they weren’t even alive.

And this is why the Trinity is such an important reality for us to experience.

We live in a fractured, fractious world. People are divided and often hateful. Love of neighbors, including love of our enemies, is a rare thing. It’s so rare, it seems, that only Jesus and the people who, by faith, draw life from Jesus really live it. God has created the Church, the fellowship of believers in Christ, to make disciples and to usher believers into a community of love that fills us with the power of God to move toward being the loving people we were made to be and promises us eternal fellowship with God and others. In the Garden of Gethsemane before His arrest, Jesus prayed to God the Father that all who followed Him, “may be one...just as you are in me and I am in you...” God wants us to live in the same selfless fellowship with others He has always known. That’s what Jesus died and rose to give to those who dare to believe in Him.

If all of this sounds airy and theoretical, removed from the hard realities of your life, consider what C.S. Lewis memorably says about how the Holy Spirit is involved in every prayer offered in the Name of Jesus, even the simplest prayers:

An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God [God the Father]. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God so to speak, inside him [God the Holy Spirit]. But he also knows that all real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God [God the Son]— that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying — the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on — the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. The whole threefold life of the three-personal Being [all three Persons of the Trinity] is actually going on in that ordinary act of prayer.

The Holy Trinity can make a difference in our everyday lives if we will be open to His threefold ministry to us.

God in His fullness, Who cares about us even though He doesn’t have to, Who is able to stand with us in every experience, also makes it possible for us to experience fellowship, community, with Him and with His family, the Church.

This is why the Church is so important. Only the Church has been designated to connect people with the Trinity.

And in a world filled with the idea of mashing others into oblivion and lifting ourselves to the top, of crushing and being crushed by selfishness and self-will, we need the liberation from self and the connection to God and to others that only the Holy Trinity can give us.

We need, truly, more than anything else, love that changes our hearts, our minds, and our eternities.

And only the God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can give it. Amen

Fear God?

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

1 Peter 1:17-25
When I was a boy, up until I was about age thirteen, I was, in a phrase often used by members of my parent's generation, "a pistol." But by the time I turned thirteen, a change had come. I was obedient to my parents. I wasn’t perfect by any means. And I’m still not. But when I hit my teens, my parents weren’t always wondering whether they could trade me in for a new model.

The reason for this transformation, I think, was simple: I feared my father.

I don’t mean that I was afraid of how he might punish me. I was afraid of hurting him, of angering him, and of disappointing him because I knew how much he loved me. My fear was born of my gratitude to my father. My dad and I didn’t always see eye to eye and we still don’t and he was far from perfect, but I always knew that, at least in relationship with the world outside our doors, he had my back.

So that later, when at age 18, I went to work in the factory where he was a time study man, I tried to work hard and reflect well on dad.

And when I was a young man, borrowing the car to go out with a girl, I paid attention to dad when he would remind me, “Remember, she’s a person too.” 

I grieve for those people who grew up without knowing that at least one of their parents always had their backs. I grieve because it’s a hard and hurtful way to be introduced to the world. And I grieve too, because it’s hard for a person to trust the One we Christians call “our Father in heaven,” when the only father they’ve ever had was so untrustworthy.

Now I’ve spent time painting this picture of my father because, I hope, it will help us all understand what the apostle Peter is getting at in today’s lesson.  

Peter wrote this letter to churches in Asia Minor, a region of the world which today is basically Turkey. There’s some dispute among scholars as to the nature of the experiences which the Christians to whom Peter wrote were then undergoing. Some scholars say the Asia Minor Christians were suffering outright government persecution and the threat of death. Others insist that they were people--like Jews who had come to faith in Christ--who were undergoing pressure from their families and friends to renounce Christ.

Whatever opposition the Christians in Asia Minor were suffering--persecution, pressure from loved ones and friends, or the simple allure of conforming to their own desires rather than the will of God, Peter wanted to remind them of the faithfulness of the Father Who had sent His Son Jesus to die for them and their sins, then rose for them to open up forgiven, eternal life to those who trust in Christ.

And he also wanted them to see that trust in God is lived out each day in the decisions we make, the actions we take, and the things we’d like to do, but refuse to do or that, in moments of disconnectedness from God, we may do, for which we repent.

Peter’s encouragement to a group of first century Christians is something you and I need today. So, please go to our second lesson for today, 1 Peter 1:17-25 (page 850 in the sanctuary Bibles).

It begins: “Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.” This verse really is the whole ballgame in understanding today's lesson. So, we'll spend some time unpacking it.

First, Peter calls God the Father.

Now, God is called Father in only a few places in the Old Testament, although in the years before Jesus was born, some Jews had taken to referring to God in this way.

But when Jesus came along, He not only called God Father, He did so by using the most intimate term for Father in Aramaic, the language he used every day. He called the Father Abba, basically meaning daddy.

Even more stunningly, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus told all who believe in Him, to think of God the Father as their dad.

He’s the Dad Who’s got His children’s backs. Through Jesus, we know that our heavenly Father really is with us always!

Good dads and good moms, no matter how much they love us, are only a fraction as loving as our heavenly Father.

Second, in this one verse, Peter tells us that our Father will also judge each person’s work impartially.

Lutherans, your ears should perk up when you hear phrases like this. You may be thinking, we're saved by grace, not by our works.

But let’s be clear, Peter is not saying that we are saved by our works. The word Peter uses which is translated as work in our Bibles has the idea of the whole content, the whole flow of our life’s works and motives, not a single work or set of works.

Every one of us sins every day. God knows our imperfections. He understands that we never get this Christian thing completely right.

That's why God, our compassionate Father, judges those who trust in Christ, however imperfectly, by the intentions of our hearts. He judges us by that in which we repose our ultimate hope.

Christians know not to place their trust in themselves, or their money, or their accomplishments, or their religiosity, but in Jesus Christ alone.

When they do that...when we do that...it changes how we live our lives, it prompts us to lives and service rendered in Christ’s Name, no matter what pressures or temptations we may face.

Our work in this life is not to negotiate a set of religious requirements, but to trust in Christ, to follow Him always, and, whenever we lose our ways, to follow Him again. When we do that, God will show us the way.

Jesus was once asked: “What must we do to do the works God requires?" In John 6:29, Jesus answers: "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent."

Trust the One Who has offered you eternity and peace with God through Me, Jesus is saying, and He will so infect your life with gratitude and holy fear, you will live this life and eternity differently.

Ephesians 2:8-10 tells believers in Christ: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”

Trust the Father and keeping trusting the Father you know through Jesus and His love will change how you live, often without your even knowing it.
 
And the third major point I draw from this one verse in today's second lesson is this: We’re to live our lives as followers of Christ, knowing that we are foreigners to this world.

As we mentioned last Sunday, through our faith in Christ, we’ve been made new. We’re not a part of this dying world.

When the things of this world die, they die. When we who trust in Christ die, we rise.

Peter wants to remind us not to get too comfortable with this world...and not to pay too much attention to what a dying world thinks is important.

That sets the table for what Peter says in verses 18-21. They speak clearly to we Christians today in 2014: “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold [things that the world values] that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors,  but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. [If you have your Bibles with you today, underline those words, please.] He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him [that is, through Jesus] you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.”

In John 14:9, Jesus tells the apostle Philip: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”

And in John 10:30, Jesus says: “I and the Father are one.”

Through Jesus, you and I know God the Father.

We know how much He loves us.

We know that we can trust Him.

And because of that love, we can have intimacy with God.

We know that God has our backs.

Throughout Martin Luther’s explanation of the Ten Commandments in The Small Catechism, he says of believers, “We are to fear and love God so that...”

Some people read those words and are disturbed. They think it means that God is cruel and capricious, that we have to try to please Him to prevent Him from sending us to fiery hell without access to air conditioning.

But this is what we know through Jesus: God isn’t out to get you. He hates your sin. He hates my sin. But He loves you and He loves me.

He sent Jesus to rescue us from ourselves and from the eternal condemnation we deserve. That rescue comes to us when we trust in Christ as our God and our only Savior.

To fear God is to be filled with gratitude for His love and grace, to fear nothing so much as hurting the feelings of the One Who has loved and still loves you and me more than any person we’ve ever known.

Through your faith in Christ, God has become your Father.

Our call is to follow and live for Him alone. May God help us to do that. Amen