Jesus: The Light of God for Our Darkness

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

John 3:1-18

A man I know lost his wife at a young age. It was devastating for him. 

We lived in the same city at the time and I did my best to be there for him. There were times though when I prayed for him that I wondered whether the darkness that enveloped his life would ever go away. 

We both later moved and largely lost touch with each other. 

But then, unexpectedly, I ran into him at a conference. I could hardly believe it. The darkness in his life had given way to the undeniable light of God’s love given to believers in Jesus Christ even in a world that can be tragically dark.

As followers--disciples--of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, we are as prone as anybody else to fall into the darkness that can fill our lives as human beings: the darkness of sin and doubt that lead to things like self-pity, fear, the denial of realities we don’t want to face, and the demonizing of those with whom we disagree. 

Of Jesus, we confess with the apostle John: “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 1:4-5) 

And yet, we can often be like the first-century world--Jewish and Roman--that nailed Jesus to a cross, of which John writes, “...though the world was made through [Christ], the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” (John 1:10)

Why is that? Why did the world reject Jesus? Why is the first impulse of every human being to reject Jesus or our need for Him?

Jesus tells us the answer to those questions in John 3:19: “This is the verdict [He says of the human race]: Light has come into the world [Jesus has come into the world], but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” 

When we are honest, we must admit that we do prefer darkness. We wouldn’t say so overtly, but there are parts of ourselves that we like to keep tucked away in the darkness, places that we think are out of God’s sight. 

But it’s no good. To God, Jesus says, “...there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” (Luke 8:17)

Our Gospel lesson for this morning, John 3:1-18, tells us that a teacher of the Jewish religion, Nicodemus, went to see Jesus...at night...a time when it would be less likely that his peers or the peons he was supposed to be qualified to teach could see him. 

You see, by the time Nicodemus makes his visit to Jesus, associating with Jesus was starting to be suspicious, even dangerous, stuff. 

If you wanted to have others’ respect...if you wanted to get ahead in the world, you didn’t have anything to do with Jesus. 

Isn’t that still true today? 

How often have you wanted to tell a friend living in darkness about Jesus but kept quiet? 

How often have you wanted to pray with someone in Jesus’ name when you were in a public place but didn’t offer for fear that people might think you weird? 

How often have you wanted to tell people at the office that a decision being contemplated is more filled with the darkness of sin than with the light of God’s love, but clammed up? 

Then you know why Nicodemus visited Jesus at night. 

He knew that Jesus wasn’t just some preacher, that there was something more to Jesus than that. Still, Nicodemus wanted no one else to see Him fraternizing with Jesus.

How often do we justify dwelling in the shadows, hiding our faith from others, hiding our lives from God, by saying that faith is a private matter or that we don’t want to offend others? If Jesus is our Savior, our faith is not a private matter. It is a deeply public matter. 

After Jesus had died, risen, and ascended back into heaven, the apostles Peter and John told temple leaders who had ordered them to never again speak about Jesus, “...we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard." (Acts 4:20) They refused to conceal Jesus, the light of the world, from others!

So, in our lesson for this morning, we go with Nicodemus to Jesus under the cover of darkness. Even in the dark though, Jesus sees Nicodemus for the man cowering in the darkness he truly is. Nicodemus, Jesus sees, is a man afraid of being seen by his friends, of losing his position, of having his self-righteous religious belief exposed by Jesus, to seek out Jesus. 

So, Jesus tells him, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” (John 3:3) 

The word translated as again that John uses to quote Jesus here is anothen in the Greek in which John wrote his gospel. It can mean again, but it also means above. And, as is typical of John, it’s safe to say that he has both meanings in mind here. 

• We must be born again if we’re to have life in God’s kingdom. We are born sinners. The sinner must die to sin and rise to newness of life through repentance and faith in Jesus. 
• We must also be born from above. It’s God Who gives us new life. We have no control over it. And in the final analysis, when we are reborn matters less than that we are reborn. Listen: Even if you don’t have your birth certificate, your existence proves that you were born. Just so, the fact that you can confess that Jesus is your Lord, tells you that even if you don’t remember the time or the place it happened, Jesus has given you new life, you are born again, born from above.

Jesus underscores that being born again is God’s work and not ours when He tells the incredulous Nicodemus: “...no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” (John 3:5) 

Your salvation, your born again life, your birth from above, is God’s work. 

It’s a gift that came to you when you were baptized when the Holy Spirit moved over the waters of Holy Baptism and you were made God’s child. 

Just as you had no control over when your parents conceived you, you had no control over when the Spirit moved over your baptismal waters to give you new life with God. 

This is true even if you were baptized in later childhood or adulthood. Only the Holy Spirit would impel you to believe in Jesus and want to be baptized at that point. 

After the lay evangelist Philip explained the good news of new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in Jesus, an Ethiopian eunuch spied a desert wadi and asked Philip, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?" (Acts 8:36) 

It was the Holy Spirit who caused that man to be born from above, born again, not his own decision, not his ethnicity, not reason, not emotion, not an experience, not his parents. 

“The wind blows wherever it pleases,” Jesus tells Nicodemus in our Gospel lesson. “You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8) 

Left to our own inborn devices and impulses, we will always choose darkness, choose life without God, which is death, over life with God. 

We are so mired in ourselves, in our inborn desire to exercise power over our own lives, that we wouldn’t even think to turn to God. The desire we inherit from Adam and Eve--to 'be like God'--is integral to our characters and personalities. 

But when the gospel--the good news of new life for all who entrust themselves to the crucified and risen Jesus--comes to us, the Holy Spirit batters away at our defenses. 

He tears down the walled cities we erect around our hearts, minds, and wills. 

He floods our lives with light so that we first, see our need of God’s forgiveness and grace, and second, see Christ not just as the light of the world, but as the way to eternal life with God. 

Jesus becomes our light and we confess that what Jesus says of Himself is true: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)

In the Bible’s most famous verse, Jesus tells Nicodemus today, “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) 

Friends, if you believe in Jesus, imperfect though you may be, imperfect though your faith may be, you have been born from above. 

The Holy Spirit has done His work in you, creating faith in Christ within you. 

So, no more quaking in fear. 

No more hiding in the dark. 

Live in the light of God’s love given through Jesus, because all who can confess their faith in Jesus belong to the Kingdom of God. 

You belong to Jesus now and forever. Amen

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

[The photo above shows sunrise on an ocean body. It's a NASA satellite image. Jesus is the Light Who banishes the darkness of sin and death for all who believe in Him.]

The King Who Ignores Our Expectations

[This was prepared to share during the morning worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

Matthew 11:2-15
Life sometimes throws us curveballs.

The curveballs can be good or bad.

But whether good or bad, they break from our expectations.

They can leave us breathless with horror.

Or dazzled with wonder.

Grateful beyond expression.

Saddened beyond telling.

A man looks forward to retirement, expecting long years of enjoyment with his wife, but learns he has Stage 4 cancer weeks before his retirement date.

A woman, long hurt by life, assuming that she will always be alone, suddenly and amazingly falls in love with a wonderful man she hadn’t dared to hope existed for her.

Expectations dashed.

Expectations exceeded.

The curveballs of life are enough to counsel us, I think, to check our expectations.

For believers in the God Who has revealed Himself to the world in Jesus Christ, it means, above all I think, learning to pray the hardest prayer of all: “Thy will be done.”

I can tell you that much of my life as a Christian, even to this day, has been spent learning to conform my expectations to the will of God, to truly learn to pray with my Savior, “Not as I will, but as you will."

I have not yet learned how to fully yield to God’s will for my life over against my expectations of what my life should be.

I have not yet fully learned what Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 6:19, that my life is not really my own. And that is doubly true. It's true first, because I didn't bring my life into being. And it's true second, because Jesus Christ died and rose to give me new and everlasting life. Still I struggle over proprietary rights with God. I struggle to accept that my life does not belong to me and God doesn't dance to the tune I punch in on life's juke box.

Maybe you struggle with this just like I do.

If that is our common struggle here this morning (or one of them), our Gospel lesson for today tells us that we are not alone.

John the Baptist had certain expectations of the Messiah or the Christ. Messiah (Meshiah) is the Hebrew word for Anointed One; Christ, Christos in the original Greek of the New Testament, carries the same meaning.

John rightly understood that the Messiah, Who He correctly identified as Jesus, was going to bring judgment on this old world of sin.

John also understood that Jesus was to be the legitimate King of the Jews Who would bring the Kingdom of heaven to this earth.

But John’s expectations of what that meant, of what kind of King Jesus would be, of what the kingdom looked like, were very different from what Jesus seemed to be as Jesus traveled from place to place, preaching, teaching, and performing miraculous signs.

John was looking for a king who, acting in God’s righteousness, would supplant the corrupt and violent Herod, the king who had slapped John into jail in his own house because John’s proclamation of a new king threatened him.

John wondered what was going on.

Jesus wasn’t what he had expected.

That’s where our Gospel lesson starts and this morning, I hope you don’t mind, I want to focus on just the first few verses of the lesson today. Please go to it, Matthew 11:2-6 (page 682 in the pew Bibles). It begins: “When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’ Jesus replied, ‘Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor...’”

John was all-in for Jesus. Yet Jesus wasn’t doing any of the things John had expected of God's Anointed One!

Jesus hadn’t taken the reins of political power, hadn’t purified the temple and the priesthood, hadn’t put the righteous into power, hadn’t established the kingdom of heaven.

In His response, Jesus’ told John He needed to change his expectations. There was to be more to the kingdom of heaven than judgment!

Do you remember what happened when, near the beginning of His ministry, Jesus went to His hometown of Nazareth? To define His mission as the Messiah and the Kingdom He had come to earth to bring, Jesus chose to read from Isaiah 61:1-2. Please turn to it on page 517. It says: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn...”

Jesus does bring judgment, of course. It’s the judgment we pass on ourselves when deciding whether or not to receive the offer of life and forgiveness and joy that comes from God through Jesus alone. As Jesus told Nicodemus: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” And the aged Simeon said of Jesus when the Lord was only eight days old, brought to the temple by Mary and Joseph to be circumcised: "This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed."

People cast judgment on themselves--we cast judgment on ourselves--whenever we choose the darkness of life without God and when we choose sin over the brightness of forgiveness and fresh life that comes from Jesus, the Light of the world.

But judgment is not ultimately why Jesus came into the world.

And it isn’t why He will one day return to the world.

Jesus also told Nicodemus: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

All who believe in the Name of Jesus are saved to live in the kingdom of heaven where, Revelation 21:4 says that Jesus “will wipe away every tear from [believers’] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

This is why Jesus presents the evidence for His being Messiah to the emissaries of John the Baptist that He does. The words Jesus cites come from Isaiah 35:5-6. Please go there, page 497. Here, God’s ultimate intentions--beyond sin and death and judgment--and the content of life in His kingdom are described: “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water [living water?] will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”

Jesus didn't come into the world to force God’s kingdom on us.

He came so that all who trust in Him will receive a new Eden, an eternal city where there is no darkness, only light; no death, only life; no despair, only hope!

Jesus performed the signs of the coming Kingdom so that people would not feel forced or coerced into following Him but so that, in seeing, they would be open to believing in--to betting their lives on--Jesus and Jesus only! And so that by believing in Jesus, that kingdom would invade their (our) daily lives in this world and, one day, at what one of the old hymns called “the consummation,” believers in Christ will live in that new Eden, the new heavens and the new earth, the new creation.

In essence, Jesus tells John's disciples, “Tell John about the signs."

Then, Jesus says: “Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me."

In verse 11 of our lesson, Jesus says: “among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” Yet John, like you and me and every other human being on the planet this morning, was left with a critical decision when considering the life, deeds, signs, death, and resurrection of Jesus:

• Would he yield to the testimony of Christ’s activities on earth and the promptings of the Holy Spirit to leave himself open to accepting that Jesus is the One Who came into the world to destroy the fallen kingdoms of this world and to bring God’s kingdom into being?
• Or would John turn his back on Jesus because Jesus didn’t match the limited expectations he had of the Savior?

I have known people who have rejected Jesus because Jesus didn’t turn out to be what they wanted Him to be.

He didn’t do what they wanted Him to do when they wanted Him to do it.

He didn’t thwart the unfair boss.

He didn’t save the marriage.

He didn’t help them get into the National Honor Society.

He didn’t cure a loved one’s cancer.

I don’t say any of this to condemn those who reject Jesus because they have been hurt! Through the years, it’s been my experience that atheists are generally more sensitive about the hurts of the world than are we Christians. (To the shame of we Christians.)

It’s that very sensitivity and the belief that life in this world should be better than it is that leads many atheists to spurn God.

But, when I was an atheist, I had to ask myself, “Where does my sense that things ought to be better come from if not from the God Who made us for something better?”

The truth is that a godless universe would give us no reason to hold up things like love, justice, or grace as ways of life to which human beings should aspire.

If we are all the result of some random collision of elements derived from some unknown force and if all of life is a contest for the survival of the fittest, our stubborn human ideas about right and wrong would be inexplicable.

For me then, atheism, though perhaps understandable as a reaction to life, simply doesn't account for all of life's realities.

Others become atheists because, like John the Baptist who wrestled with doubts in a cell in Herod’s prison, the God they tried to believe in didn’t meet their expectations. Their picture of what God should be like was based on their preferences, not on Who God has revealed Himself to be. They tried to domesticate God.

In the first volume of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, in which four children from our world visit an alternative universe and are told about Aslan. Aslan is a figure of Christ in Lewis' books, "the great King, Son of the Emperor-beyond-the-sea." When informed that Aslan was a lion, one of the children asks, "Is he safe?" The reply: "Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king..."

Jesus is like that. He is the King. He is good. But if we're looking for safety, we should look elsewhere for our Savior. Jesus calls us to turn away from the safety of our favorite sins, the safety of lives turned inward for our own ends to a life lived for Him and for our neighbor.

It’s at those moments when God fails to meet our expectations that we need to consider Jesus. We need to look at Him closely.

The gospels’ accounts about Jesus’ time on earth tell us all we need to know to have saving faith and to expand our faith in Jesus, despite the hard realities of life.

The four Gospels in the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--make it possible for us to do exactly what Jesus said that John the Baptist should do: Look at what He did and why. See how He had control of life and death, yet never used that control for selfish purposes, not even self-preservation when they nailed His hands and feet to a cross. See the compassion of God evident in Jesus.

In effect, Jesus says, “Decide for yourself from the evidence Who I am!” Look at Jesus closely and we see the God of the universe Who may be different from our expectations, but Who is exactly the King we need!

Toward the end of his Gospel, another John writes: “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples [including, most miraculous of all, His death and resurrection], which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” If you would know God, look to Jesus!

Someone once wrote that life in this world is “nasty, brutish, and short.”* There is truth in that, although there is also much beauty, love, and wonder in this world.

I got another precious glimpse of that yesterday. One of the littlest of our Christmas carolers approached us in the kitchen after we'd been singing in the neighborhood, her nose running. She asked for a tissue. There were no tissues there, so I handed her a few napkins from the dispenser. She took the napkins and blew her nose as well as she could, then handed the napkins back to me. If that isn't precious and beautiful, I don't know what is!

Beauty and wonder still rise stubbornly "like grass through cement" in this fallen world. Despite our sin and the calamities it has brought to our life on this planet, we see glimpses of how perfect this world was meant to be, how dependent and trusting we were made to be toward God and one another, every day.

But if we expect that Jesus is going to make this world--unrepentant and self-driven--into Eden, we misunderstand Him.

If we think that Jesus has laid down a political program by which people of can live out certain principles and give the world a makeover.

One of the worst sins we commit in post-modern Christianity, whether conservative or liberal, is the sin of idolatry, turning Jesus into the God we prefer, replacing His deity and Lordship with our particular political preferences and programs so that we can get what we want in this world. That, friends, is a scandal!

And it's stupid because this world is under a death sentence!

This world must die so that the new world, the new Eden can come into being.

We must die--in the waters of Baptism and in daily repentance and renewal--so that the Kingdom can enter us and so that we can be part of the Kingdom.

The God we know in Jesus, “able to do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine” has bigger plans for us than remodeling this dying creation.

Eternal plans.

Plans not to harm us, but to give us a future no longer darkened by sin or death or futility.

He has come and will come again to establish a kingdom in which tears are dried, the lame walk, even run, and the aggrieved know joy.

Jesus is the sign and the seal of God’s good intentions for the human race.

His death and resurrection are God’s guarantee of life free from sin and death for all who dare to surrender to Jesus Christ.

The kingdom Jesus died and rose to bring into being is living in and among those who believe in Him, the Church, despite the imperfections of we individual Christians.

We are even today empowered by His Spirit to give sight to the blind, cleansing to the leprous, life to the dead, food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, and good news that brings everlasting life.

We see that in the many ministries pursued by the people of Living Water.

May we remain open to being conduits of Jesus’ kingdom each day.

May we become ever more receptive to going wherever our King calls us to be.

And may others see the signs of Jesus in our life and so, with us, come to everlasting life in His Name.

Amen

*The writer was Thomas Hobbes. He was actually specifically referencing war. But in my lifetime, war has been a sufficiently central feature of human existence that I feel no hesitation in saying that it reflects life in this world.

Do We Believe It?

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

Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Psalm 116
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31
Last Sunday, we considered Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and asked the question, “But did it happen?” We looked at some of the evidence presented in Matthew’s account of the first Easter Sunday. That evidence, it seems to me, supports what we Christians say about Jesus: “He is risen, risen indeed!” This Sunday we come to another question: Do we believe it?

Do we believe that Jesus, sinless God in the flesh, rose from the dead? That isn’t just a question of fact. Many believe it’s true that Jesus rose from the dead. But they aren’t believers.

A friend of ours wanted her brother and his family to get involved in a church, knowing what a difference her own church had made in the lives of her husband, children, and herself and how in a bad news world, involvement in the church helps us hold on tight to the Good News about Jesus.

But she was frustrated by her brother's response. “Look,” he told her, “John 3:16 says that whoever believes in Jesus has eternal life. I believe in Jesus. I believe He rose from the dead. Why do I have to mess with the Church?”

I suppose all of us wonder about that sometimes. But our friend’s brother was confusing two different meanings of the term, “believe.”

One meaning of belief is to simply accept the facts of a case. Even Satan believes that Jesus is the Son of God and that Jesus rose from the dead; that doesn’t mean he’s in the Kingdom of God. It doesn’t make him a believer.

When the Bible and the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds use the words, “We believe…” or “I believe…,” much more is meant than just, “These are the facts.”

For the Christian, to believe in the God revealed in Jesus Christ and to believe in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is to say:

• We entrust all our lives, all our past sins, all our present fortunes, all our future, into the hands of one person alone. 
• We don’t entrust our lives to ourselves, our efforts, or our understanding. 
• We don’t entrust our lives to our country, our political philosophy, our families, or our ways of life. 
• We entrust ourselves to the God revealed in Jesus Christ alone. 
• We trust that Jesus alone can bring us into the presence of God, that the risen Jesus alone can bring us forgiveness of sin, that the risen Jesus alone will one day make our dead bones rise to new life in the eternal presence of our God. 
• And we trust that Christ instituted the Church to help us believe in Him even as the devil, the world, and our sinful selves strive to drive us away from Christ. 

Do you believe this?

1 Corinthians 12, verse 3, says that no one can confess that Jesus is Lord—in other words, confess that Jesus is the ultimate authority over our lives and over the universe itself—unless the Holy Spirit empowers us to believe it. Belief in Jesus, is a gift, something we can’t manufacture.

In The Wizard of Oz, the Cowardly Lion tried to talk himself into courage. It didn’t work. Nor can we talk ourselves into believing in the risen Jesus.

But we can decide to be open to the gift of faith. This is true of all gifts, when you think about it. A gift is offered, but we must decide whether to take it.

When Ann and I were engaged, her stepfather offered a bucket of golf balls to me. I had no need of golf balls and, probably from pride, didn’t want to be seen as grasping for his charity. I told him, politely, “No, thanks.” He raged at me for “looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

People can look the gift of faith “in the mouth,” too, refusing it, just as our friend’s brother did. It’s part of the gracious, loving nature of God that He will not force us to entrust ourselves to Him. And though it breaks His heart, God lets us say, “No” to Him, giving us the final say over whether we live with Him or live in hell.

This has always been true. In the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam and Eve the freedom to say no to Him and the life He offered. They misused that freedom, submerging the whole universe (and you and me) into the bondage to sin from which we cannot free ourselves. (A bondage from which Jesus alone can free us.)

To Abraham and Sarah, God gave the freedom to trust in His promises of a son and a nation of descendants. Sometimes they trusted in God. Sometimes they didn’t. When they decided to trust God, even when adversity struck, they lived in the calming, empowering certainty of God’s presence. When they decided not to trust God, chaos inevitably broke out.

Through Read the Bible in a Year, we’ve seen that this same story played out in the history of God’s people after God freed them from slavery in Egypt; it’s because Israel decided with depressing frequency to walk away from God that what should have been an eleven day journey in the wilderness took God's half-believing chosen people forty years to complete!

Every day, we have a choice, a decision. We must choose whether to be open to the gift of an ever-deepening faith that the God we meet in the risen Jesus offers us or to close our wills to Him, ignore the clear teachings of Scripture and go our own ways. Do we truly believe in the God Who raised Jesus from the dead?

In the Old Testament, Joshua, the man God chose to replace Moses as leader of the Israelites, confronts the people with a decision. “Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve,” Joshua told them, "...but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord."

That is the decision that each of us must make: Whether to believe, trust, and serve the one and only God of the universe or not.

Each of our Bible lessons for today address this reality.

In the first lesson, part of Peter’s Pentecost sermon delivered ten days after the risen Jesus had returned to heaven, Peter confronts his fellow Jews with the truth that Jesus, according to the plan of God laid out in the Old Testament, though sinless, had died for the sins of all and had risen from the dead, an event he, along with 500 of his fellow Jesus-Followers, could vouch for. His sermon was a challenge for them to decide whether they would believe that the God of promise had fulfilled the promise of new life for all who believe in their time. “Do you believe it?” Peter asked.

Psalm 16, from Old Testament times, challenged the people to believe that those who ran after other gods or ways of life were led only to trouble, but that those who trust in God are never abandoned. “Do you believe it?” the Psalmist asked.

Peter, in our second lesson, writing to Christians in Asia Minor and other locations—people who faced daily persecution for their belief in the risen Jesus—challenged them to make the decision to trust that their faithfulness would result in “indescribable and glorious joy” when Jesus returned to bring an end to the life of this world and fully establish the new heaven and new earth of which all Christians will be citizens. Peter asked again: “Do you believe it?”

Our Gospel lesson ends with what I call John the Evangelist’s mission statement—the reason why he wrote the Gospel and really, the whole reason the Church and individual, ordinary Christians like you and me tell the world about the risen Jesus. Take a look at John 20:30-31:

Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life his name. 

“Here is the evidence for the new life with God that only comes to those who believe in the risen Jesus,” John is saying. “Do you believe it?”

Do we believe it? How we answer this question day-in and day-out is important not just for our lives beyond the grave. It’s important today.

On February 25, a dear friend of Ann’s and mine died. Ron Claussen was the pastor of a neighboring parish when we arrived at our first call in northwest Ohio in 1984. Later, Ron became a member of the congregation I served, Bethlehem Lutheran Church near Okolona.

But to describe Ron simply as a neighboring pastor or a parishioner doesn’t quite give you the right idea of who he was for so many people, including my family. Ron was, quite simply, one of the greatest people and greatest Christians I have ever known. He was certainly the finest pastor I ever met. Everything about him, including his wonderful sense of humor, displayed the risen Jesus Christ. When someone was hurting, no matter the time of day or night, Ron was there. I loved him more than I ever was able to tell him!

But there’s more to Ron’s story. In the 1950s, during his teen years in Nebraska, Ron was among the last people to be afflicted with polio, just before the first polio vaccines came out. Polio, for the benefit of you young people, is a horrible virus that, without the vaccines we now take for granted, can bring about total or partial paralysis and can cause bones and muscle to shrivel and atrophy. Polio can do other horrible things to the body of someone who suffers from it. That Ron contracted polio when he did was a horribly, tragic occurrence that would impact the rest of Ron’s life. Its effects would have destroyed or embittered many people. But it did neither to Ron. I spent many hours with Ron, but I never once heard him complain about his circumstances. He radiated the certainty that can come to those who follow Jesus!

The reason for this is simple: Each and every day of his life, Ron made a decision to trust in Jesus and to live for Him alone. You see, when we decide to open ourselves to the gift of faith in Jesus Christ, the joy and hope of eternity inevitably spills over our everyday lives. We know that already we have what Peter describes as “the outcome of…faith, the salvation of [our] souls.”

Deciding to let God build faith in the risen Jesus within us helps us face each day with confidence, joy, and hope.

We know that with Christ by your side, even when the world turns against us, we will prevail.

We know that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We know that we can love as we’ve been loved, forgive as we’ve been forgiven, be as patient with others as God is with us.

Through Jesus, you can can know that God is with you always and that, one day, God will welcome you into eternity with Him.

Do you believe all of this?

Then live it! Amen!