The Only Thing We Need

[This was shared during the Sunday morning worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier today.]

Mark 10:17-22
Our gospel lesson for this morning, Mark 10:17-22, begins: “As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. ‘Good teacher,’ he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?’”

To understand Jesus’ answer to the man’s question, we need to unpack two things he says in asking it. 

The first is this: The man assumes that if he’s going to inherit eternal life, he will have to do something. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he asks. The man is trapped in the idea that if he’s to get anything good from God, he must earn it.

It’s not hard to understand where he would get such an idea. It seems like the whole world tells us that we have to earn, or claw, or steal, the things that are valuable.

People even apply this to their thinking about God. One modern commentator says that in first century Judea, where Jesus lived, religious groups from the Pharisees to the Essenes, sects of Judaism, would have told the man to follow their stringent rules and he could earn his way into God’s kingdom. In fact, in order to make a point, the first part of Jesus’ answer to this man will sound very much like the traditional religious answer, do more. 

But you and I know that this is not the way for dying sinners like you and me to inherit eternal life. You can’t earn an inheritance. An inheritance is a gift that you may renounce, but you can never earn. This is no less true of the inheritance of eternal life that God wants to give to us. Ephesians 2:8-9, reminds us, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”

Here’s the second thing to unpack from the man’s question, the phrase eternal life. 

In the Greek and Roman worlds of the first century, that phrase would have carried the idea of some milky, spiritual world that the disembodied souls of good people supposedly enter into when they die. This would have been completely foreign to the man who asks the question, to Judaism, to Jesus’ disciples, and to Jesus Himself. 

From the perspective of Biblical faith, it’s impossible to separate a soul from a body. We are bodies, containing our minds, souls, and spirits all wrapped up in one, indivisible package. 

That’s why the human fall into sin was so horrible. Sin brings death to the whole human self. That’s why we desperately need to be saved from ourselves!

In the Bible, eternal life refers to the coming age, the age that will come after God has judged all people, an age not in some wifty spirit world, but in a renewed creation like this one--filled with atoms and molecules, rock and granite, canyons and water, lions and tigers, and strawberry shortcake. 

The Bible teaches that Jesus rose, the first-born from the dead, still identifiable by the scars on His hands and feet and side. 

We confess each Sunday what the Bible teaches, “the resurrection of the body.” This is the life--the resurrected life--that the man is asking Jesus about when He says, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus challenges the man right away. Verse 18: “‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. ‘No one is good—except God alone.’” 

“Say what you mean and mean what you say,” Jesus is telling the man. “If you think I’m good, then I must be more that just a teacher. Don’t patronize me with honorary titles you don’t mean.” 

A merely human teacher is incapable of being good. In numerous places, the Bible says of the human race, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God...there is no one who does good, not even one.” (Romans 3:10-12; Psalm 14:1-3; Psalm 53:1-3; Ecclesiastes 7:20) 

Jesus is good because He’s truly God as well as truly human. Jesus wants the inquiring man to understand this.

Jesus proceeds with His answer. Verse 19: “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.’” 

Notice both the commandments Jesus mentions and the ones He leaves out. 

• He mentions the Fifth Commandment, the Sixth, the Seventh, the Eighth, then adds His own commandment about fraud, and goes back to the Fourth Commandment. 
• But Jesus leaves out the First (“You shall have no other gods.”; the Second (“You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain”); the Third (“You shall remember the Sabbath”); and the Ninth and Tenth Commandments, which deal with coveting. 

It’s these exclusions that are the key to understanding this whole passage because Jesus understands precisely what is lacking in this man’s life.

Verse 20: “Teacher, he declared, ‘all these I have kept since I was a boy.’ Jesus looked at him and loved him. ‘One thing you lack,’ he said. ‘Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.’”

Did you know that Adolf Hitler, one of the most brutal dictators in the history of the world, responsible for the deaths of millions because of his sick racism, was always polite in social settings, never cursed, and drank no alcohol? 

You can be outwardly virtuous, yet still filled with the fire of hell. The questioning man was excited to tell Jesus, “I’ve been doing all those good things since I was a boy.” But Jesus saw that there was something this rich man lacked. He was a nice man who worshiped money and possessions more than he worshiped God. They were his gods of choice. They were the means he used to measure the blessedness of his life. Jesus loved the man and wanted to set him free.

In short, the man lacked God, the God revealed in Christ. He didn’t trust in God. He trusted in His money. He had everything but God.

And so, Jesus gave the man His prescription, “Sell everything you have, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Me, trust in Me. Trust in Me and not in your money.”

This prescription isn’t precisely the same for everyone. Abraham was a rich man; God didn’t tell Abraham to get rid of his wealth. Wealth wasn’t something Abraham was tempted to worship. But there is no shortage of candidates for the gods of our lives besides money--success, power, conviviality, happiness, influence, popularity, food, alcohol and other drugs, good times, our families, our work. Any god we follow other than the One we meet in Jesus Christ will always demand more of us, wringing life itself from us. When anything other than the God we know in Jesus is someone’s god, they end up dead, far from God. Death, not eternal life is their inheritance.  

But when we follow Jesus, we have the inheritance we cannot earn, eternal life that begins not in the sweet by-and-by, but right now as we follow Him. 

Jesus tells those who lay aside their idol gods and their sins that the kingdom of God is among them now, even before we are raised from the dead (Luke 17:21). 

This crucified and risen Jesus can promise us, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)  

Our gospel lesson is capped by one of the saddest passages in all the Bible: “At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.” 

I think that Jesus was even sadder than the man, who couldn’t bring himself to let go of the idol that would lead him to death so that he could grasp the outstretched hand of the good God Who offers us life.

Jesus wants to give us our inheritance, eternal life. This doesn’t happen when we make Jesus our top priority, as though Jesus is meant to be an item on our daily planner. It happens when Jesus becomes our life, when we accept what He has taught us to be the bottom line truth of human existence: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). May Jesus be our life today and always. Amen

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

How Jesus Disciples Live

[This was shared during worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church yesterday morning.]

Mark 1:14-20
In today’s short gospel lesson, Mark 1:14-20, Jesus shows us something of what it is to be His disciple. It boils down to four words:

• Repent 
• Believe 
• Follow 
• Fish.

Our lesson, written in Mark’s rapid-fire style, falls after his narration of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist and Jesus’ time in the wilderness, immediately after John the Baptist's arrest by Herod.

Take a look at verse 14, please: “After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.” (Mark 1:14) John’s ministry had been preparation for this moment when Jesus began His ministry. John had worked to get people ready for the coming of Jesus, the King. “After me,” John had said, “comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.” (Mark 1:7)

Verse 15: “‘The time has come,’ [Jesus] said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’”

The word translated as “time has come” is, in the Greek in which Mark wrote his gospel, Πεπλήρωται, from the verb πληρόω. It means full up, fully complete. The time was full up, Jesus was saying. Full up for the kingdom of God to be ushered into our world by the King of kings, Jesus!

There may be no more overlooked Biblical concept than the kingdom of God. Yet Jesus talks about it all the time.

When we think of that phrase “kingdom of God,” we might think of something that will happen in the future, beyond our own deaths, after our resurrections.

This view of God’s kingdom turns this life into nothing but heaven’s waiting room.

Not only is that incredibly boring, it’s built on a false understanding of the kingdom that Jesus came to bring to us.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to petition God, “Thy kingdom come.” When we say that, we’re not asking God to make us part of His reign after we die. We're asking God to reign over our lives right now.

In explaining this petition of the prayer, Martin Luther writes in The Small Catechism: “God’s kingdom comes when our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit [now], so that by His grace we believe His holy Word [now] and live a godly life now and in eternity.”

Jesus says in John 5:25: “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.”

He says to those who come in contact with Him, “...the kingdom of God is in your midst." (Luke 17:21)

And 2 Corinthians 5:17 tells us, “... if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

So, Jesus comes to bring us into direct relationship with God our King in these days, as we walk on this earth! We become citizens of His kingdom now. We don’t have to wait till we die!

Jesus explains exactly how the kingdom of God comes to us in verse 15 of our gospel lesson too. When Jesus brings God’s kingdom to us--in His Word, in the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, in the fellowship of other believers, we enter the kingdom of God and we enter it at deeper and deeper levels of connection and joy when we “repent and believe in the good news.”

Those are the first two aspects of being disciples in the kingdom of God: repenting and believing in the good news.

Let's unpack those two things for a moment.

As you know, a lot of people have the wrong idea about repentance. Repentance does begin with sorrow for sin, with regret over hurting the God Who made us and sent Jesus to die and rise for us. But after sin has been confessed honestly to God, repentance ends with the joy of reconciliation with God. It ends with God telling us we are forgiven. Repentance clears the clutter of sin that otherwise obstructs our relationship with God. His life flows to us again.

To believe in the good news is to believe in Jesus, to trust that when He died on the cross, He died for my sins, to trust that when He rose from the dead, He did so to give me life. That’s good news! “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.” (John 5:24)

Discipleship begins with repentance and belief. These two things alone are enough to save us. They are gifts God gives to those who are open to Jesus. Repentance and belief in Jesus, both of which only God the Holy Spirit can create within us, are the conduits by which we are saved by grace through faith in Christ.

But we live in a world darkened by sin. And until our own physical deaths, you and I will be dogged by our sin and the temptation to sin. Unless we remain resolutely connected to Christ, we can fall away from God. We can lose our ways.

This is why Jesus told the disciples who wanted to sleep at Gethsemane, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26:41)

So, on top of repenting and believing, the disciple of Jesus will diligently seek to follow Him.

They follow Jesus so that they can be filled with God’s strength and not have to face life or temptations to sin on their own.

In our gospel lesson, Jesus finds Simon and Andrew, two brothers who are fishermen, and tells them, “Come, follow me…” (Mark 1:17). Later, Jesus calls another set of brothers, John and James, to follow and they do (v.20).

But what does it mean for you and me to follow Jesus?

Imagine for a second a couple who get married, then decide, even though they live under the same roof and have jobs in the same city, that they’ll just see each other for one hour every week...unless they have something more interesting or fun to do.

How deep do you think their relationship would be?

How prepared do you think they’d be when adversities hit?

You couldn’t really describe what they had as a marriage, could you?

As ridiculous as that illustration sounds, it precisely describes the manner in which most people who call themselves Christians approach the most important relationship in their lives, their relationship with Jesus.

They set up a time to meet Jesus every week (unless something more interesting or fun comes along) and then forget Him the rest of the week. Weekly worship with fellow believers is essential to the Christian life; I'm not knocking it. But if that’s the only connection you have with Christ over the course of your weeks, how deep can your relationship with Christ really be? How prepared will you be for life’s adversities when Jesus is nothing more than a distant acquaintance?

We need to spend some focused time each day in prayer, in reading God’s Word, in asking Jesus, “What do you have in mind for me to think or do in this passage of Scripture today, Lord?”

I also find myself as I grow older more closely adhering to Paul's admonition to pray without ceasing. Many times over the course of my days, I'll find myself talking with God about one thing or another. I'll be driving along in my car, praying. And I know people who pass by think I'm talking to myself. I don't care what they think! I want to keep praying that God's kingdom will come to people.

But even if you're not that crazy, having a daily focused time with God is important. If it seems too hard to do for say five days a week, try at first to do it one day a week, then two, and so on. And, if you need help in even getting started on following Jesus in this way, contact one of the members of our Life and Learning Team to ask them for tips.

So, disciples of Jesus repent, believe in the good news, and follow Jesus. And then, they fish. Jesus told Simon and Andrew to follow Him “and I will send you out to fish for people.” (Matthew 1:17)

This metaphorical description of every disciple's mission would have resonated with Simon and Andrew. And not just because they were fishermen.

You see, God’s people, the Jews, viewed the sea as a daunting, evil thing. It was a place of death and ferocious sea monsters. They remembered Genesis 1, in which God’s Holy Spirit moved over dark chaos to impose order, bring good from evil, and to create life.

To fish for people is to draw them out of chaos, sin, evil, and darkness.

To fish for people is to bring them to life with God, to the light of God’s goodness.

To fish for people is to make disciples.

I try to go fishing all the time, even though it doesn’t come naturally to me, even though I would rather keep to myself. (Believe it or not...and Ann will vouch for this, I am an introvert. God has had to kick me out of my shell and still has to remind me to move beyond myself all the time!)

So, at Jesus’ behest, I go fishing for people.

Last night, I made a run to a Kroger deli.

Not my usual one.

I was trolling different waters last night.

I happened to be in uniform, my clerical collar. That can be more of a disadvantage than an advantage.

Whatever, I followed my usual pattern of interaction: I struck up a conversation with the clerk who waited on me. “Have you been busy today?” “No need to put paper between every slice of cheese.”

This is the way you start when you go fishing for Jesus:

• You strike up conversations. 
• You ask questions. 
• You show genuine concern. 
• As time goes on and people get to know you, as appropriate, you mention your faith in Jesus. 
• As they share things about themselves, you ask if you can pray for them. 
• You plant the seeds of the good news of the God Who sent His Son Jesus so that all who believe in Him will never die, but have everlasting life with God. You go fishing.

Before you say, “I could never do that,” let me remind you of something. However you came to faith in Jesus--through your parents, through a friend, whatever, it ultimately can be traced back to moments when some Christian disciple went fishing. They cared enough about people swamped by the darkness, chaos, and sin of this world to share Christ with them.

Fishing for people is the greatest expression of love in the world.

Repent. Believe. Follow. Fish.

This is how disciples live.

This is how Christ uses us to make more disciples.

May we always be faithful disciples of Jesus. Amen

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

How do I live in God's Kingdom TODAY?

Most days, I try to begin the morning in quiet time with God. You'll see an explanation of how I approach quiet time here. Below is the journal entry for today's quiet time.

Look: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’” (Mark 1:14-15)

Jesus brings the kingdom of God. He embodies it. He is its king. Jesus is saying here, I think: “You’ve been looking for the kingdom of God. Here it is. And if you want to be part of it, you need to do two things. First, turn away from your sins and trust in the forgiveness I bring from God. That’s what it means to repent. Second, trust in or believe in the gospel. The gospel is the good news that all who trust in God’s Son, crucified and risen for us, is part of God’s kingdom.”

And when is someone part of God’s kingdom? NOW. The kingdom will come in its fullness, of course, when Jesus returns to the earth, closing down this old creation, and those who have trusted in Him rise to be with Him eternally in His new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). But the kingdom has already come to us. When we repent and believe in Jesus, we are in the kingdom now.

Jesus says in John 5:25: “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.”

And He says in Luke 17:21, that “...the kingdom of God is in your midst."

Listen: How do I live in Your kingdom now, Lord?

In the high priestly prayer offered in the garden before His crucifixion, Jesus prayed to the Father: “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.” (John 17:14-15)

It’s Jesus’ will for His disciples to live in the world while not being of the world. We are to be cordial and loving toward the world, but when its worship, values, actions, thoughts, and approach to justice conflict with those of God’s kingdom, we’re to stand with Christ. To manifest the kingdom of God today, we must be in but not of the world.

This is hard.

But I have several important resources to rely on when it comes to being in but not of the world.

Jesus mentions one of them in this petition of the prayer: God’s Word. Spending time in God’s Word is essential. Otherwise, my brain gets addled and I go to the default position of my sinful, human nature. Spending the first hours of my day Fox and Friends or Morning Joe will help me live in the kingdom. (Help me to remember this, Lord.)

But this will only happen, I think, if my reading of God’s Word is begun, filled with, and supported by the very thing that Jesus did in the garden. He prayed. I must pray. Prayer is a conversation in which I connect with God. When I ask God to show me what I need to see in His Word, I find that I see lots more of God and His will for my life than I would if I approached it as a reading assignment.

These are two private resources God gives to us to buttress kingdom-living, to foster our own growth as disciples.

But God also makes me part of the body of Christ, the indispensable Christian community.

People who profess faith Christ but don’t want to have anything to do with the messy business of being part of His family, the Church, are at risk of becoming lost sheep who wander away from Christ and His kingdom. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20)

We are made for life in the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27). When the kingdom of God comes fully, we will be part of an eternal kingdom that lives out the great commandment, a fellowship in which we love God and love others.

Other Christians may annoy us, offend us, even harm us. But we need Christ’s body, the Church.

It’s in the body of Christ that we hear God’s Word, not always as we want to hear it, but as read and proclaimed; we receive the sacraments, in which God claims us as His own (Holy Baptism) and which renews us and fills us with Christ’s very life (Holy Communion); we commit ourselves to mutual care and accountability.

Respond: As I think about how I can manifest my citizenship in God’s kingdom right now, I ask, Lord, that You will help me:

1. Express love for my fellow citizens of the kingdom today.

2. Look for opportunities to share Christ with those who seem to live outside of the kingdom.

3. Seek justice for those who are abused or left behind by the world’s system of warped values.

4. Treat others with simple decency.

Help me in these ways, Lord Jesus, to live as one saved by Your gospel and so prove to be an ambassador in this foreign land in which I live on this side of the resurrection (1 Peter 2:11-12; 2 Corinthians 5:20-21)

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