Help me be an un-self-conscious servant

This is a reflection on my quiet time with God today. For an explanation of how I approach my time with God see here.

If the model you find there, taught to us by Navigators, doesn't work for you, I encourage you to find some way that you can get away with God, read and ponder His Word, and pray at least five days a week. It can be transforming to spend time regularly, not just in worship on Sunday, which is an essential part of Christian faith, but also on our own, quietly, attentively. I try to maintain quiet time about five days a week.

Look: “So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’” (Luke 17:10)

Luke 17 begins with a warning from Jesus: “Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. So watch yourselves.” (Luke 17:1-3)

These are frightening words. They warn believers in Jesus not to be the instruments by which others are tempted into sin. In my life, I can look back on times when I have been exactly that.

Jesus’ words call for me to genuinely repent, leaning on the grace that God only gives to those who turn from sin and turn to Jesus as their only hope. Without Jesus, I am without hope for forgiveness or for life with God beyond death. It’s terrifying to contemplate!

Jesus also tells me to watch myself. In other words, I need to honestly assess my thoughts, actions, and motives. I need to seek the help of the Holy Spirit to see the truth about myself, so that I can repent. I need the help of the Holy Spirit to run away from temptation and sin. Watching myself means being willing to hear what God, with His perfect insight, tells me about myself in His Word. If I’m open to God, God will grow my faith and my character. Then, I will want to forgive those who sin against me, as Jesus commands in this chapter.

But very often, I’m like the twelve apostles who, in response to Jesus’ words in Luke 17:1-3, say: “Increase our faith!” If God would just magically increase our faith, we wouldn’t be susceptible to temptations, we wouldn’t be disloyal to God and so, tempt others into sin. If God would give me a bigger faith, it would be easy for me to forgive. At least, that’s what the disciples seem to think. And, honestly, it’s what I often think. I’ll catch myself in a sin and think, “Why did God let me do that? God should have given me bigger faith.” My first impulse is to blame God, instead of myself.

Jesus tells the apostles that the issue isn’t the size of their faith. A little faith (about the size of a mustard seed) in a big, gracious God is all that’s needed (Luke 17:6).

Besides, Jesus seems to say in vv. 7-10, concern over the size of our faith grows out of our sinful self-absorption. Faith, whatever its size, is a gift from God. It’s a gift that opens our hearts, minds, and wills to doing what God wants to do through us. No matter the size of our faith, or its depth, God can use the opening to Him created by our faith to enter our lives, prayers, actions, and thoughts and do great things. “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). “Get your minds off of yourselves,” Jesus is telling us, “and just walk in whatever faith you have at the moment.” “Walk away from sin and walk toward Me,” He’s telling us, “and I’ll take care of the rest.”

This approach will steer us away from getting full of ourselves when, by the power of God working through our faith in Christ, we do something good. Like faithful servants, if attention is called to some good we’ve done, we can say: “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.”

In fact, Jesus seems to say that as we seek to walk in fellowship with Jesus each day, we will lose our self-consciousness. In the judgment scene Jesus portrays in Matthew 25:31-46, the “sheep,” the faithful, have no idea what King Jesus is talking about when He lauds them for visiting imprisoned believers, offering water or food to the thirsty or hungry, clothing the naked, and so on. “When did we [do any of those things]?” they wonder (Matthew 25:44).

Listen: As I walk more closely with Jesus, I am bound to hear more clearly as He warns me about the temptations I may present to others, the faultiness of my own character and behaviors, and the susceptibility of those who seek to be faithful to self-rigtheousness or dismissive of the seriousness of my own sin. Just yesterday, I said something cutting about another person which presented an invitation to others to join in. It took me a while to realize what I had done. Now, I regret it and repent for it. I contacted several people to whom I had made the comment to apologize for my sin. I need to be open to God both to avoid a recurrence of such sins (and many others) and to know when to seek God’s forgiveness in Christ’s name. “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father--Jesus Christ, the Righteous One” (1 John 2:1).

I cannot presume that when I approach the Father in Jesus’ name that God will excuse my sin, but that He will forgive my sin. God is gracious to the repentant! (Thank You, God, for that!)

Respond: God, help me to focus on following Christ without reference to others’ applause or notice.

Help me to be so focused on following Christ that You can freely work through me.

Help me to resist temptation and grant, God, that today I will not be an instrument of temptation to sin for others.

Help me to simply do what You tell me to do: love You, love neighbor, be a disciple, make disciples.

In Jesus’ name I pray. 

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

Don't ask for bigger faith, just a willingness to obey

In a recent quiet time with God, I looked at Luke 17. Verse 6 got my attention:

“You don’t need more faith. There is no ‘more’ or ‘less’ in faith. If you have a bare kernel of faith, say the size of a poppy seed, you could say to this sycamore tree, ‘Go jump in the lake,’ and it would do it."

These words of Jesus are preceded by daunting commands to: (1) not be the cause of others falling into sin; (2) be ever ready to forgive a repentant friend even if the friend's weakness drives them back to sinning against you and repenting for their sin repeatedly.

The disciples understood how hard both commands are. They thought they would need more faith to be able to fulfill them.

"You don't need more faith," Jesus tells the disciples. He then goes on to talk about the servant of a rich man. The servant goes to extraordinary lengths to serve in the ways his master commands. At the end of this mini-parable, Jesus says, "When you’ve done everything expected of you, be matter-of-fact and say, ‘The work is done. What we were told to do, we did.’” (v. 10) (The last two lines remind me of Jesus' words from the cross in John's gospel, "It is finished.")

In this passage, I believe that Jesus is telling us (telling me), Don't wait for a monster faith that will make it easy to do the things I command you to do. Nothing I command you to do--love God, love neighbor, make disciples, give to the poor, don't push yourself ahead of others, forgive your enemies--is easy to do.

The question isn't how big our faith, it's how ready our obedience.

It's been my observation that for we recovering sinners--we intrinsically selfish, if recovering, control freaks--the more we obey the God revealed in Christ, obedience doesn't become easier. It doesn't.* But the more we obey Christ, the more we want to obey Him.

To have faith in Christ is to trust in Him alone. But faith is an abstraction until we commit ourselves--day-in and day-out--to seeking to obey Him, however imperfectly.

We are only saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, as the Scriptures teach. And there's nothing we can do to be saved. Salvation for a life of peace with God, forgiven sin, and eternity with God is a gift we can do nothing to earn. But until we seek to obey Christ, our faith will remain an abstraction.

Don't look for more faith, Jesus seems to be saying here. Looking for more faith is a delaying tactic. Instead, Jesus tells me to do what He commands of me with whatever faith we have. He will fill in the blanks in my courage, my deficient faith, my authenticity.

Later in the chapter, verse 33, Jesus says: "If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you’ll lose it, but if you let that life go, you’ll get life on God’s terms."

Wanting more faith, as pious a request as it seems to be, is still grasping for life on my terms. "Fine things to do, Jesus, your commands," we effectively say. "But You're going to have to give me more faith before I can do them." The disciples, in making their request, and I myself whenever I think it or say it to God, are in essence, laying down conditions for obedience. "I couldn't possibly do any of that, Jesus," I say, "without bigger faith. You'll need to get back with me on that."

This excuse is perennial. I've been guilty of it many times myself, I confess.

But it's simple, really. If I trust Jesus even a little bit, I'm called to obey. No matter the size of my faith, it's sill a fact that He died and rose, so the power to do what He's called me to do exists, no matter the size of my faith.

Besides, the One commanding me is the King to Whom my whole life (and the life of the whole human race) is accountable.

So, the call is clear: I need to do what the King Who saves me by grace tells me to do. I am to do what He commands with little faith and quaking hands, with low competence, little stomach for it, and giant fears. I am to obey because it's not about the quantity or quality of my faith; it's about the greatness of my King and what my King does through obedient people.

Today, Lord, help me to obey You, no matter the size of my faith. In Jesus' Name.

*In fact, obedience might grow harder as we grow in our faith, because as we obediently accept the smallest charges of Jesus, He gives us more difficult charges. Jesus says in Luke 16:10: "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much." I believe that Jesus amps the difficulty of following Him as we grow and to promote our further growth as His disciples. God is more interested in our characters than in our comfort. With each new "impossible" challenge to which we seek to respond obediently, we learn the truth of two other things that Jesus said:

• "...with God, all things are possible." (Matthew 19:26)
• "...apart from Me, you can do nothing." (John 15:5)

When we seek obedience in doing the impossible things Jesus commands of us, we learn to rely even more on Him. That's faith.


[All Bible quotes in this post are from The Message translation.]

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

What About Good Works? (Part 6, The Augsburg Confession)

[This was shared during worship this morning with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, and our guests.]

This morning as we continue to explore what it means to be a Lutheran Christian, we need to begin by getting a clear understanding of the meanings of two different ways of living.

The first way of living is religion. Our English word for religion comes to us from the French language and it has the idea of being tied to, or fastened to a deity for whom one has fear or dread, but not necessarily love.

In religion, people feel tied down or tethered by a god that expects them to follow orders like submissive slaves. When a person is part of a religion, all of life is a grim obligation. Their speech is full of phrases like, “I have to...” “I should...” “I must...” They may say similar things to others, as in, "You have to..." Or, "You should..." And, "You must..."

When a people follow a religion, they're never certain if they’re good enough to warrant the favor of their god.

And in religion, almost anything can be one’s god: a man, a woman, a family, a career, the approval of others, or some strange, fictionalized version of God. That’s religion.



But there’s another way of life. It’s the life of faith in Jesus Christ.

When you have faith in Christ, you know that when you repent and turn to Jesus Christ as the only place where hope and life can be found, God accepts you, as the old hymn puts it, “just as I am, without one plea, but that Christ’s blood was shed for me...”

You know that you are made right with God not by the things you do--”not by works, lest any one should boast,” as the New Testament book of Ephesians puts it--but only because of what Jesus Christ did for you when He died on a cross and rose from the dead and because you believe in only Him.

Faith means that you trust Christ with your life. You know that there is nothing you can do, nothing you could do, or nothing you ever will do to earn His approval.

But just as a drowning person, otherwise sure to be overcome by the wind and the waves, grabs hold of the outstretched hand of a rescuer, you and I are saved simply by taking the hand of our Savior Jesus by faith.

Religion is the natural impulse of human beings. Terrified of their god though the adherents of religions may be, religion fits with the original sin with which we are born. Original sin means that we’re born without any ability to trust in God or anything else.

When people believe in a religion, they don’t trust in God. They trust in themselves. They trust in their ability to be good enough to squeak into heaven.

And when they get into scrapes, they try to make deals with God. They try to negotiate with God as though He were a retailer in a marketplace: “If you’ll do this for me, God, I’ll do that for you.”

Faith knows that there’s nothing we could give God, no good work that we could perform, that God needs or that could cleanse our souls sufficiently of sin to make us worthy of God’s help, or love, or favor, or of being declared innocent, justified, right with God.

As God’s Word puts it, “by grace [we] have been saved, and this is not [our] own doing; it is the gift of God--not the result of works, so that no one may boast...”

Faith is the supernatural gift God grants to those who let the God revealed to the world in Jesus Christ love them.

Religion thinks that we can be self-sufficient.

Faith in Christ knows better than that.

Faith knows too that being right with God, with ourselves, and with others depends only on Christ and on what Christ has done for us.

Now this is radical stuff. It’s not the way the world thinks. It’s surely not the way the Roman Catholic Church in 16th-century Europe, where the Lutheran movement began, thought.

The official church theologians of that time accused Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, and the other evangelical reformers of doing away with good works.

People still accuse Lutherans of this. “You Lutherans think that as long as you believe in Jesus, you don’t have to live like a Christian,” they say.

No doubt there are Lutherans who are great hypocrites, sinners who forget that God loves the sinner while hating our sin; who forget that the Ten Commandments are still in force; who forget that repentance, turning away from and renouncing our sin, is part of faith in Christ.

But we believe God’s Word when it tells us that we sinners are saved not by our works, but by what Christ has done for us and by our faith in Christ.

Our good works flow from our faith in Christ, sometimes without our even realizing it and never to be noticed or to gain brownie points with God.

We believe in good works; we just don’t believe they say anything about us. Instead, they say everything about the God Who saved us.

We know, in the words of Ephesians 2:10 that “we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” Every truly good work, every deed performed by a believer in Jesus that lets others see the glory and goodness of God, comes not from us, but from Christ, Who created that good work and empowered us to do it centuries before we were even born.

You all know that I like to thank people. I like to let people know I appreciate them. But I got a lesson in Lutheran Christianity 101 from a woman of one of the congregations I served before coming to Saint Matthew. She had undertaken some ministry in our church and I said, “Thank you.” She looked at me with a smile telling me that while she loved me, she was about to school me in God’s truth. “Pastor Mark,” she told me, “I didn’t do it for you. I did it for my Lord.”

Good works spring from gratitude for grace undeserved. They are done with no thought of self, but only of the One Who sets us free from sin and death.

Turn please to John 15:5. These are words Jesus spoke to His disciples in the upper room just before He was arrested, tried, and killed on the cross. Here, Jesus speaks of the importance of abiding in Him, staying connected to Him. But don’t be confused. Connection to Jesus isn’t the same thing as religion’s restricted tethering. To abide in Jesus is to enjoy a connection that brings us life and the freedom to be who God made us to be. Jesus says: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me, you can do nothing.”

To “bear much fruit” means to do the works of God--to love God, to love neighbor, to tell others about Christ, to engage in acts of service and mercy. And Jesus says that we cannot do these things--these good works--unless He is working in us, living in us, powering us. The only ones who can do the works of Jesus are the ones in whom Jesus has taken up residence. Without Jesus at the center of our lives, we can do nothing. No matter how the world may applaud what nice people we are, our works will mean nothing. But when Christ lives in us, when we know that we have been saved by Him, God will do good, loving works through us that the world may not notice, but that heaven cheers.

This is what Article VI of The Augsburg Confession, one of the foundational expressions of the Lutheran understanding of Biblical Christianity, affirms. It says, in part:

Our [Lutheran] churches teach that this faith is bound to bring forth good fruit...It is necessary to do good works commanded by God..., because of God’s will. We should not rely on those works to merit justification before God. The forgiveness of sins and justification is received through faith. The voice of Christ testifies, ‘So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty...” [Luke 17:10]

Good works are central to anyone with faith in Jesus Christ. Unlike all the religions of the world, faith in Christ views good works as expressions of our thanks to God for the new life we have through Christ.

When people mired in religion do good deeds, the deeds are dirtied by their motives. It’s as if they’re saying, “Look at me. Look at how I serve God. Look at what a good person I am. Look at how much I sacrifice for others.”

When we first think to express our thankfulness to Christ by doing good deeds in His Name, it may require us to think about them and we may always think about them to some extent. After all, Christ may forgive our original sin, but it won’t die until we have died and risen again in the image of Christ. But, the person who wants to do the deeds Christ is a little like the person who sets out to learn to shoot a basketball, or pitch a baseball, or dance a step, or play an instrument. After a time, the shooting, pitching, dancing, or playing becomes part of who the person is. And here's the thing: The closer Christians grow to Christ, the more their good deeds are done without thought of self or even of the deed.

As you and I draw closer to the cleansing, enlightening flame of Jesus, the more our lives are set on fire by His love, the more the way we live is changed.

The apostle John says this in 1 John 4:9-10: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love...” 

The greatest deed ever done for you happened when Jesus gave His life for you.

You can never repay Him for that gift. But you can thank Him.

Ask God to help you love others the way He loves you and He will give you a lifetime of good deeds He designed for you alone to do.

Live a life of good works not because religion says you must, but because faith in Christ says you can.

You’re allowed to do them.

You’re empowered to live a life of faith active in love.

Christ has set you free to truly live.

So, live! Amen