Helping Others to See Jesus

[This was shared during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, this past Sunday, January 18.]

John 1:43-51

Let’s say that friends are visiting you at your house.  

You’ve just renovated your living room: new chairs, couch, end tables, lamps, entertainment center, furnishings. Sometime during their visit, your friends are going to ask you about your newly appointed living room. Where did you get the furniture, the paint, the carpeting? Did you have help? If so, who was the contractor? Did you have a decorator? 

And I’m sure that when you're asked these questions, you won’t say, “That’s personal. We don’t talk about our furnishings in public.” 

You’d be happy to answer their questions. When we have good things we want to share, we do it unstintingly.

We’re now in a season of the Church Year called Epiphany. The word epiphany comes from the Greek word epiphaino, meaning to show oneself, to appear. The Gospel lessons for the season of Epiphany are ones in which Jesus showed Himself to be God enfleshed, the Savior Who offers freedom from sin and death to all who will repent for sin and entrust their lives to Him alone.

Today, as in Biblical times, the true identity of Jesus can be shown to people sometimes in miraculous signs, sometimes in a lifetime of unquestioned belief, and sometimes in simple moments of quiet clarity when, as one person put it to me years ago, “You know what you know” about Jesus Christ. But however people come to believe in Jesus as their God and Savior, it always involves an epiphany or a series of epiphanies bringing a realization that Jesus is everything for which our restless souls have  longed. 

Today’s Gospel lesson recounts an epiphany in which Jesus revealed His identity to an honest skeptic named Nathanael. 

And it all happened when a friend of Nathanael’s talked about Jesus as freely and as easily as we might talk to friends about a newly renovated living room. 

You know the story well. But let’s look at it together this morning. Please go to our Gospel lesson, John 1:43-51 (page 740 in the sanctuary Bibles).

A little background: Three days before the incidents recounted in these verses, John the Baptist had told crowds thronging to him to repent for sin because the Messiah was coming. He said that he himself was such an imperfect sinner, he was unworthy to even do the slave’s work of untying the thongs of the Messiah's sandals. 

The next day, John saw Jesus and said, in John 1:29: “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” 

The next day, John told two of his own followers, Andrew and John: “Look, the Lamb of God.” Here, John was, in effect, telling his two disciples, “I’m giving you to a new teacher, one infinitely greater than me. I must decrease and He must increase. He’s Savior you and I and all the world have been waiting for! Follow Him!"

We pick up what happens next in today’s lesson. Jesus has gone from the Jordan to His native region of Galilee. Philip is from Bethsaida, a fishing town on the lakeshore there. Jesus goes to Philip and says, “Follow Me.” Philip follows Jesus. 

We know from other places in Scripture that people who were open to Jesus saw that He was different. He taught, the crowds observed, like someone with authority, an underived power exuding from Him, and not like the religious leaders of those times. 

Philip sees Jesus as the fulfillment of the promises of a King who would bring forgiveness and new life to His subjects that God had made through the law and the prophets in the preceding centuries. Philip sees that in Jesus, the lives of those who repent for sin and believe in Jesus as their God and King, are changed forever. 

Look, please, at verse 45. Philip hasn’t been to a Bible study class. He’s received no training as an evangelist. He hasn’t been to seminary. But he can’t contain himself! He clearly didn't see the coming of the Messiah as "a personal thing."  

So, Philip finds his friend, Nathanael and tells him: “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” 

Nathanael has an understandable question. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth was a pigsty of a village in the Galilean hills, composed of maybe 15 shacks where impoverished people eked out their livelihoods. 

Besides, Nathanael may have known what the law and the prophets had said of the Messiah as well as Philip: He was supposed to come from Bethlehem. Knowing nothing of the place where Jesus was born, Nathanael was skeptical.

We run into skepticism about Jesus all the time, especially in these days when most people know more about the stereotypes of Jesus palmed off by popular culture than they do about Jesus Himself, as seen in the witness of people who walked Judea with Jesus and recorded in the New Testament. 

This uninformed skepticism about Jesus is enough to make Christians want to run and hide when people ask what we believe about Jesus or why we bother with church. 

But Philip doesn’t run away from witnessing. He runs to it. 

He doesn’t become defensive. Neither should we. 

We should learn from Philip's response in verse 46: “Come and see.”

This is a great example for us as Christians who have been commissioned by Jesus Himself to “make disciples.” 

And this is no small matter! As I read the Bible, making disciples is the only job Christ has given to Christians and the Church. 

And the New Testament underscores this command to us repeatedly. 

In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus says: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” 

In Mark 16:15-16, Jesus says: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” 

In Luke 24:46-48, the risen Jesus tells the dumbfounded disciples in Emmaus: “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” 

In John 20:21-23, Jesus says: “‘...As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.’ And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.’” 

And in Acts 1:8, Jesus says: “...you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” 

Church: Sharing Jesus to make disciples is our only job.

This is a simple task. But often we Christians forget it or complicate it. 

John’s account of Philip’s three-word invitation to Nathanael should tell all who are part of the body of Christ to keep things simple! 

We in the Church are commissioned to simply speak and simply seek to lovingly live out God’s truth about human sin and about the forgiveness and hope offered to every single person on the planet through faith in Jesus Christ. 

Our only task is to let others, see Jesus for themselves so that they too can follow Jesus and have eternal life with God.

  

We see Philip going about this task in his approach of Nathanael as soon as he came to faith in Jesus. I saw it in an acquaintance of mine named Zack, when he went to his father. 

After Zack's mother died, his dad was inconsolable. Unlike Zack's mom, a faithful believer in Jesus, his dad had always been indifferent to God, almost scornful of the Church. 

Following his mother's death, Zack watched his father go into a tailspin of depression and, worse, self-destructive behavior. The man had no hope and he ricocheted between long periods of sleeping for hours on end and almost frenetic activity, anything to block out his pain and grief and utter hopelessness.

Zack finally approached his father. "Dad," he said, "do you remember how strong and joyful Mom was? It was because of her faith in Jesus, Dad. You need Jesus, too. If you'll trust in Him, you'll know that He's beside you, helping you get through these tough days. You'll also know that one day, not only will you see Jesus, but you'll see Mom again." 

Amazingly, Zack's Dad took his son's message to heart. He came to faith in Christ. 

When I met Zack's father some years later, he was a truly joyful follower of Jesus, deeply involved in his church. This once self-absorbed man spent many hours every week providing help to people without work, food, or shelter. He invited everyone he came to know to check out Jesus for themselves. 

It all happened because his son, like Philip in our Gospel lesson, proactively went to him and said, "Dad, come and see. Come and see Jesus."

Who could you issue the same invitation to this week? When Nathanael took Philip up on his invitation and Jesus told Nathanael things about himself that Jesus could only have known if Jesus were God in the flesh, Nathanael confessed his faith in Jesus: "Rabbi, You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" 

Philip, the Gospel of John makes clear, was no perfect disciple. But he was what we are called to be: an honest witness for Jesus. He made himself available for Jesus’ great commission and available to his friend who needed the Savior. When he invited Nathanael to “come and see” the Messiah, Nathanael saw the God Who knows all about us and loves us anyway.

May we be more like Philip, so that the people we know will experience epiphanies about the forgiveness, the healing, and the wholeness God gives to all who turn from sin and trust in Christ. May we tell the story of Jesus and let others see Jesus for themselves. Amen

Choosing Life

[This was shared during worship this morning with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]
Acts 4:32-5:11
The first lesson appointed for today, Acts 4:32-35, comes to us from the New Testament book of Acts.

It takes place not only after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, but also some time after Pentecost, the day when the crucified and risen Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to the disciples.

At one level, the topic of today’s lesson is money, which seems an odd thing to be talking about on the Second Sunday of  Easter.

But Jesus said more about money than He did about heaven and hell combined. And for good reason: As Quaker theologian Richard Foster has pointed out, money is a power in this world, an alternative god that many people follow and give their lives for.

Every day, you and I must decide whether we will control the money we have or whether money will control us.

If we repose our hope in money or in anything other than Jesus, we separate ourselves from the risen Jesus, the only One Who can give us a life worth living on this earth or a life with God beyond the grave.

Today's appointed lesson, Acts 4:32-35, is just the start of  a slightly longer story that Luke, the author of Acts, wants to tell us. Today, I want to look not only at the beginning of the story, but also its completion in Acts 5.

So, please go to Acts 4:32. There, we’re told that the first Christians were united and “neither did anyone say that any of the things he [or she] possessed was [their] own, but they had all things in common...” Now, slip down to verse 34: “Nor was there anyone among them who lacked; for all who were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles‘ feet.”

Nobody told the first Christians that they had to share with each other or take care of poorer fellow Christians. Out of simple gratitude to Christ for dying and rising to give them forgiveness for their sins and everlasting life with God, they made the decision that they would all take care of one another. They responded to the radical act of God in Jesus with a radical commitment to His Lordship over their lives.

In 2 Corinthians 9:7-8, Paul writes: “Each of you must give as you have made up your mind [notice, he doesn’t say, “as someone tells you to give”], not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver [the original Greek more literally says, “a hilarious giver”]. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.” According to our lesson, the first Christians were living this way of life. Because of their belief in Jesus, no one among them went without anything they needed.

Now look at Acts 4:36: “And Joses, who was also named Barnabas by the apostles (which is translated Son of Encouragement) [it was his nickname], a Levite of the country of Cyprus, having land, sold it, and brought the money and laid it at the apostles‘ feet.”

This is faith in the risen Jesus! In those days, land equaled wealth, which equaled prosperity. As long as you had land, you could farm it, sell its produce, and eat the rest of the crops yourself. With land, you probably would never go hungry. And if you ever ran into a rough financial patch, you could sell off parcels of it and have enough money to float through until the good times returned. Land meant financial security.

Yet, here was Barnabas, selling off his land, selling off his financial security, because he believed in Jesus more than he believed in financial security.

The story of Barnabas is a positive, joyful expression of faith in Jesus.

Yet, even in a church in which there was so much faith, where believers voluntarily gave themselves to Christ and to one another, there was also unbelief.

That’s what we see in what Luke writes next in Acts, the second act in his narrative about the early Christians and their possessions. Look at Acts 5:1-2: “A certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession. And he kept back part of the proceeds, his wife also being aware of it, and brought a certain part and laid it at the apostles’ feet.”

People like Barnabas gave all they had voluntarily. When they did so, obviously, the early Church was grateful, even though, we know from other things we learn about his life from Acts and from the writings of Paul that Barnabas did what he did to honor God, not to gain people’s gratitude.

Ananias and Sapphira wanted to be complimented and revered like Barnabas. And they wanted to do it on the cheap. They wanted the title of sacrificial, giving Christians without making the sacrifices or truly trusting that Jesus would take care of them.

They were like people who want...

• Easter without Good Friday, 
• forgiveness without repentance, 
• the power of Jesus at work in their lives without surrendering to Jesus, 
• Christianity without the stuff in God’s Word, the Bible, they don’t like. 

 Read what happened next. “Peter said, ‘Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and keep back part of the price of the land for yourself? While it remained, was it not your own? And after it was sold, was it not yours to control? Why have you conceived this thing in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.’”

Satan, Peter writes in the New Testament book of 1 Peter, is like a roaring and ravenous lion, looking for who to destroy, even among Christians who claim to follow Jesus, yet lack the self-discipline to seek God's help in resisting temptation.

Maybe Peter had the memory of Ananias in mind when he wrote those words. Ananias had listened to Satan telling him, “Better hold back some for yourself. Who do you trust: yourself and your own judgment or an unseen Holy Spirit you can’t see sent by Savior you can’t see?” Ananias caved. He believed more in himself and his money and craved the accolades of others more than he did believed in or craved Jesus.

In verse 5, we’re told that Ananias heard Peter’s words and fell down dead. Then it says, “So great fear came upon all those who heard these things.” I’ll bet!

The book of Hebrews says that it’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of living God. The first Chritians saw just how fearful the moment that Ananias fell dead.

Through the years, some members in the churches I’ve served as pastor have used this passage as a reason for not estimating their giving for the coming year. “I don’t want to lie to God if my financial situation changes,” they tell me.

Listen: God will never hold us accountable for promises we can’t keep, only those we refuse to keep.

Ananias made a promise not commanded of him by God or the Church. But having made that promise, he deliberately broke it.

Could he have been forgiven? Of course he could have been, had he been repentant. But there’s no evidence of that. Nor was his wife Sapphira repentant. When confronted by Peter, she stuck with the same lie and met the same fate. 

What are we to make of these events?

At the beginning today, I said that at one level, this lesson is about money. But it’s also about other things.

Look at Acts 5:11. Sapphira has just, like her husband, fallen over dead. We’re told: “So great fear came upon the church and all who heard these things.”

This is the first time in the book of Acts that Luke refers to the first Christians as “the church.” The word translated as church in the Greek language in which the New Testament was written is ekklesia, which literally means “called out ones.”

The church is the fellowship of believers in Jesus who have been called out of the world to stand under Jesus’ lordship, who claim Jesus as the center and the only hope of their lives.

When we submit to Jesus’ lordship, we also become part of a fellowship in which we are accountable to our fellow Christians.

The Church is that group of people who, in response to Christ’s promise of forgiveness and new life for all who repent and believe in Him, make promises of our own. Our promises may be to trust in Jesus, be faithful in our marriages, or to listen to the Holy Spirit when He tells us the truth about sin and about forgiveness. But when we make promises to God, the Church is there to remind us of those promises, help us keep them, show us when we have failed to keep them, and encourage us when we have kept them.

All of this is what Jesus calls, “the keys of the kingdom,” the power and responsibility to declare forgiveness to the repentant and condemnation to the unrepentant. We see Jesus giving this job to the Church in our Gospel lesson for this morning, on the evening of His resurrection: "Jesus said to them again, 'Peace be with you. As the Father has sent Me, so I send you.' When He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them if you retain the sins of any, they are retained" (John 20:21-23).

Peter confronted Ananias and Sapphira not because he was a holier than thou busybody, but because he knew Satan was at work in their lives and wanted to give them a chance to repent and get back on track with God and because when we fail to challenge Satan’s attacks on believers, the witness of the Church for Christ is compromised. This is why Martin Luther said that in every sermon, a preacher must proclaim both God’s law and God’s promise or else the whole truth about God hasn’t been proclaimed.

But here, I think, we come to the deepest point of what Luke wants to show us in these verses of Acts 4 and 5.

Luke compares and contrasts belief and unbelief. It’s very easy to look like a Christian. And, unlike Ananias and Sapphira, we may get away with it until the days we die far less dramatically than they did.

But why settle for looking like Christians when we can actually be Christians? Authentic belief in Jesus may entail greater sacrifice and greater truthfulness before God than the fake Christianity it can be so easy for us to adopt.

But fake faith always ends in death.

True faith always ends in resurrected life with Jesus Christ!

Which do we prefer? That’s a question we need to answer with our lives every day.

We watched Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace yesterday in Catechism class. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany who opposed Hitler and his Nazi regime, not because he thought the Church or pastors should be involved in politics, but because the Nazis demanded that Hitler be worshiped alongside God.

In the movie’s closing scene, Bonhoeffer is about to be executed and someone says to him, “So now it ends?” Bonhoeffer replies quietly, “No.” Then, he stepped onto the scaffold to his death.

When you belong to the crucified and risen Jesus, when you’re repentant for your sins and believe that Jesus is your only hope, you know that the end of this life is not the end of your life.

Following Jesus frees us to make and keep outrageous promises, to hold Him first, last, and foremost in our lives even when Satan and things like materialism or the praise of others falsely gained, try luring us away from Christ.

Jesus frees us to be outrageously giving, believing, encouraging believers like Barnabas--to be part of Christ’s true and eternal church.

May the Holy Spirit empower all of us who are part of Saint Matthew to be outrageously believing followers of Jesus every day of our lives.

There Are No Second Class Believers!

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today. Today is Pentecost Day, the third great festival of the Church Year.]

Numbers 11:24-30
Acts 2:1-20
If there’s nothing else you remember from today’s sermon, please remember this: There are no second class believers!

Our Bible lessons from Numbers and Acts for this Pentecost, the festival of the Holy Spirit, drive this point home. In the whole history of the world, any person who has called on the Name of the Lord is saved from sin and death and futility. That includes you!

Bob Dylan once sang that “even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” It was a reminder that all human beings are equal in their failings, flaws, and sins.

Dylan was right. But those who believe in Jesus Christ are also covered by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross for sinners like you and me. We are covered by the grace—the charitable forgiveness and acceptance of God—given to all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ. There are no second class believers!

There are differences in function among us. But that doesn’t make a preacher more important than a plumber, or a theologian more of a Christian than a teacher. The apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 4: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.”

God always grants the Holy Spirit to every believer, no matter what their individual talents or professions, all for the same single purpose.

Please pull out the special insert and look at our first lesson from Numbers. Now, to those of you who have been participating in Read the Bible in a Year, the background of this particular passage will be familiar. Numbers recounts some of what happened when God’s people, Israel, after more than 400 years of enslavement in Egypt, wandered in the wilderness for forty years before arriving in the land that God had promised them.

Numbers tells us that God’s people tested God (or rebelled against God) seven times in this period. (Likely they tested God even more than that. But Numbers tells us about seven major incidents.) Our text comes in the narration of the second test, a time when not just the people of Israel rebelled against God, but their leader Moses did too!*

Just a short time before, the people had been on the brink of starvation when God started daily to provide them with manna, a mysterious bread-like substance. The people had been grateful for God’s provision for a time. But now the people were whining about wanting to have meat to eat. “We’re tired of this manna!” they said. Fed up with the complaining of the people, God tells Moses, “The people want meat? I’ll give them meat. I’ll give them so much meat that they’ll end up vomiting it through their noses.”

That’s a lot of meat! And it’s this overabundant promise and threat that saw Moses rebel against God. Totally forgetting who had been providing Israel—and him—with “daily bread,” Moses asks where on earth he was supposed to get so much meat? He also wonders what God expected him to do with such a people. Here, Moses is expressing two feelings: doubts about God’s power and frustration with having to be Israel’s earthly leader.

To Moses’ doubts, God asks, “Is the Lord’s power limited?” (Or, more literally, “Is the Lord’s hand too short?”) Here, God was reminding Moses that He was no less powerful than He had been on the day He delivered them from Pharaoh. In the midst of crises, we need to remember that the God Who was helping us yesterday can still help us today.

To Moses’ frustrations, God orders that seventy elders of Israel be gathered near the tent containing the Holy of Holies, where God’s presence lived among His people. There, God poured out His Spirit on the seventy. They began to prophesy. That is, they spoke God’s Word. Moses didn’t need to go it alone in sharing God’s Word with the people. Just as happened on Pentecost ten days after the risen Jesus ascended to heaven, the elders with Moses in about 1400BC, were empowered to tell about “the mighty deeds of God.”

After this amazing event took place, two other Israelites, Eldad and Medad, neither one an elder, who had drawn close to God just as the elders were getting together, gave evidence that God’s Spirit had come to them, too. They began to proclaim God’s greatness. They prophesied.

A young man heard this and found it highly irregular. This guy was like the person who says at a Church Council meeting, “We’ve never done it that way before.” Or even worse, the person at the same meeting who adds, “And we never will.” He didn’t think that Eldad and Medad were authorized to have the Holy Spirit. So, he ratted them out. Hearing this complaint, Joshua begged Moses to stop Eldad and Medad. But Moses wouldn’t do that. “Are you jealous for my sake?” Moses asks Joshua. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put His Spirit on them!”

Pentecost celebrates the day when God’s Holy Spirit came to the first followers of Jesus. Just as Jesus had instructed them before He ascended into heaven, they had prayed for the Spirit’s power to come upon them. And He did, empowering them to tell, in ways the thousands gathered in Jerusalem that day could understand, the mighty works of God. That included the mightiest work of all, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, true God and true human being, so that all who turn from sin and believe in Him can live eternally with God!

The odd thing is that the Holy Spirit had already been given to these believers. In John, chapter 20, the risen Jesus breathed on the first Christians and told them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” But you see, the Holy Spirit can breathe on us anew, even when our enthusiasm is waning or times are tough.

That’s because the Spirit is infinite. He’s not like gas you pump into your car that runs out. And even if you’re full of the Spirit, He can fill you up even more. The Spirit can be “pressed down, shaken together, running over” in us. The Spirit ensures that there are no second-class believers. All who believe in Jesus Christ are given the capacity to trust in God and the ability, within their own spheres of life, to share Christ with others.

Of course, some Christians would rather remain second-class believers. That way, they don’t feel the need to live or share their faith. The excuses are many: “Let the younger ones do it. I did my time.” “I’m not very good at that.” “I don’t know my Bible very well (and I’m not going to try to do so either).” And so on.

But others are happy to have the Spirit’s power to fulfill their calling to spread the Good News of Jesus in their own ways. At a conference, I heard a pastor recount the day he told a carpenter (God likes carpenters, you know) that even in his carpentry shop, he could be an ambassador for Jesus. Tears welled up in the man’s eyes as he asked, “I can do that?”

In recent days, I’ve read about other Christians who have claimed their God-given places as first-class believers who share Jesus with the world. I read about an engineering student who graduated magna cum laude who’d had offers from top firms. But during his junior year, he’d given his life to Christ and subsequently decided to take a lower-paying job with a firm that worked to provide engineering for people in Third World countries.

I read about a teacher who had worked in a suburban school district, but decided that her way of following Christ must take her to an inner-city classroom instead. But she went the extra mile, visiting her students’ homes, trying in her own way to share Jesus. At one home, she discovered that the girl in her class was one of five children, aged 3 to 15, being raised by a single mom in a few rooms, with a few beds, their apartment heated by the kitchen oven being turned on and left open. That teacher didn’t go to the church council to ask for permission to be a Christian. She simply went to some of her prayer partners from church and together, they began taking care of this family, telling them about Jesus as they did.

I read too, about a retired couple who spend most of their time going to the sites of natural disasters, bringing help. The husband even went to Sri Lanka during a civil war. When asked why they do what they do, this guy asked, “What else would we do in our retirement years?” Besides, he went on, his main object in life is to share Jesus with as many people as possible.

All of these people—and millions more—have shaken off the lie about some Christians being more important than others or being more able to spread the Good News of Jesus than others. They’ve committed themselves to sharing Jesus where they are, with the gifts the Holy Spirit has given to them.

Another person like this is our own Mike McGonagle. Once again this year, Mike will be working with our youth on their local mission “trip.” Mike can share Christ in ways that I never could because the Spirit has blessed Mike with gifts I don’t possess. And Mike will tell you that last year’s mission was one of the most gratifying experiences of his life. The service God may call us to render in Jesus’ Name will vary widely, but the Holy Spirit can empower each of us in our own individual serving.

Martin Luther said, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is [also] a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” In the power of the Spirit, we are both lords and servants, all in the Name of Jesus. There are no second-class believers.

Let today be your Pentecost. Claim all it is that God has called you to be and that the Holy Spirit has empowered you to be: In your own way, dare to tell others about Jesus.

In a word, in the power of the Holy Spirit, the giver of life, take the life God has given to you and LIVE! Amen!

*Moses did this again during the sixth rebellion of the people against God recorded in Numbers.