Motivation

[This was the message for this evening's Ash Wednesday worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Tonight’s gospel lesson is Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21. Here, Jesus tells us things like, “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them…” (Matthew 6:1). 

And, “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets...But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret.” (Matthew 6:2-4) And, “when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others...But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen…” (Matthew 6:5-6). 

And “[w]hen you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do...But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting…” (Matthew 6:16-18)

Now, if we read Jesus’ words superficially, we might think that He’s contradicting something He said to His followers--including you and me--just one chapter earlier. There, Jesus says, “...let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16) In this verse, Jesus is telling us to live our faith in Him and our love for Him out loud, “let-everyone-see-the-good-we-do-in-His-name” loud. 

Yet, in tonight’s lesson, He tells us to: give to help the poor, just don’t announce it to the world; live with a right respect for the God Who saves us by grace through faith in Jesus, just don’t call attention to your righteousness; pray for everyone, just don’t call attention to your praying; fast, just don’t let anyone see what you’re sacrificing. 

So, which is it: Live your faith loudly in the public square or refuse to call attention to your own faithfulness?

The answer, friends, is both. 

We are to live out our faith in Jesus out loud for all the world to see. As Jesus says elsewhere, “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 10:32) 

That means living our gratitude to God for saving us from sin and death by the faith in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ that His Holy Spirit and His Word have created within us. 

It means trusting in Christ to love God completely, to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, to love each other in the Church with the same devotion Christ showed for us on the cross, to live each day in the light of Jesus’ resurrection promise. 

And it will mean giving to the poor, praying for others--including our enemies, fasting from--that is avoiding--those things that can get in the way of our relationship with Jesus, and telling others about the good news--the gospel--of new and everlasting life for all who follow Jesus.

But we also are not to live out our faith to call attention to ourselves. When I’m out to dinner and I pray over my meal--and I realize that at the Famous Restaurant in Centerville last night, sitting there in my clerical collar, I forgot to pray--but when I do pray over my meal in a public place, I’m to do it not for any audience around me, but for an audience of One: the God I know in Jesus. When I fast, I'm not to do it so that I can create an impression on others. When I give to the poor, I'm not to do it with an eye to how good it makes me look to the world, only to honor the God Who gives me everything I have.

It all boils down to motivation. 

Do we do the things that Jesus commands--things like love God, love neighbor, make disciples, worship with God’s people every week--to point to Jesus or to point to ourselves? 

Do we do the things that Jesus commends--things like praying, giving to the poor, fasting--to give Jesus control over our lives or just to control what others think of us? 

Listen: You can get the whole world convinced that you are the most wonderful, devoted, loving, faithful follower of Jesus by doing the kinds of play-acting Jesus condemns in tonight’s lesson. You can be known for your generosity, your beautiful-sounding prayers, your notorious fasting from the pleasures of the world. But if your motive in all these and other religious acts is anything other than honoring the God Who saves you through Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, God is not impressed. 

In fact, God will condemn us for using Him to build up our reputations at Christ’s expense. Hebrews 4:13 reminds us, “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” 

You cannot fool God! That’s why our motivation is so important.

Let’s be honest though. 

None of us acts from purely pristine or holy motives. My sinful nature reminds me that when I pray in a restaurant, others may see me doing it. As long as I live on this earth, the old Adam in me will try to mess up everything. 

Compelled by Jesus’ grace love and empowered by the Holy Spirit, I’ll do something for another person without a thought of how it may look to others...until later, I think, “That’s a really good thing I did.” 

And it happens to preachers too. In the weeks before virtually every Sunday for the past thirty-five-plus years, Ann can tell you, I have agonized over what God wanted me to say in my sermons. Deep inside, I know that I have nothing to say. I offer up desperate, pleading prayers to God to help me discern what I should tell you about His Word for that week. God has always been faithful; He has always given me what I should say, even when I get in God's way while I preach. I always thank God for giving me a sermon. But it takes just one person to tell me, "Good sermon," and I'm thinking to myself, "Wow! I really am good."

So, our motives for doing the things God calls us to do always get clouded by our sinful selves.

But just because the devil, the world, and our sinful selves constantly remind us that our motives aren’t totally pure doesn’t mean that we should refrain from living our faith in Jesus for all the world to see.

Don’t be afraid to live your faith out loud! 

Don’t be afraid tonight to stop at a store or somewhere else with the ashy cross still on your forehead. 

The apostle Peter tells Christians, “...in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” (1 Peter 3:15)

As we begin Lent on this Ash Wednesday, 2020, I’d like to ask you to consider doing the following things, not as works to earn God's favor, but as ways to open your heart and life to Jesus working and living within you. 

• 1. Ask Jesus to help you follow Him more closely. 
• 2. Ask Jesus to help you live for Him more devotedly and openly.
• 3. Ask Jesus to keep your motives for your acts of devotion focused on Him and not on yourself, to grow closer to Him and not to impress others. 
• 4. Ask Jesus for forgiveness and help when you see your motives turn selfish. 
• 5. As you repent and put yourself in Jesus’ hands, know that you belong to God, not because of anything you do, but totally because of what Jesus Christ did for you on the cross. 
• 6. Ask God to daily remind you that, by grace through faith in Christ, You belong to the God Whose opinion of you is infinitely and eternally more important than what anyone else may think of you! (Even more important than what you think of you.)

At the end of our lesson for tonight, Jesus says, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21) 

In this Lenten season, may God plant within each of us a deepened desire to honor Him Who, in Jesus Christ, has given us everlasting life with God, a treasure greater than anything--including the good opinions of others--that this dying universe could ever give us. 

May we repent and trust in Jesus in response to the Word and the Sacraments and may we learn to trust Jesus always. Amen

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

Want Faith? Let Yourself Catch Grace

The Bible teaches that we come to a saving faith in the God revealed through Jesus Christ only by the power of the Holy Spirit. "No one can say, 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit," Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:3.

Faith in anyone but ourselves or in what we can control is foreign to human nature. And belief in the witness given by the apostles and other first Christians that, despite their own doubts, they could vouch with their lives that Jesus Christ, sinless God-in-the-flesh, not only died an undeserved death on a cross, but also rose from the dead, is also foreign to our natures.

Unless we're open to the ministry of the Holy Spirit--Who uses the witnesses of ordinary human beings to convict us of sin and convince us of the grace available to all sinners who turn from sin and believe in Christ as their only God and hope--the Spirit cannot create faith within us.

The refusal to even be willing in our imperfect human ways to believe in the Holy Spirit's proclamation of the God Who made us, Who hates sin, and Who, because He loves sinners, gives us a way to escape the consequences of sin--death and eternal separation from God--is epidemic in the Church and in society.

Bishop John Bradosky of the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) recently wrote insightfully:

In the Atlantic Monthly, columnist Jonathan Rauch writes that America has made “a major civilization advance” in recent years. Rauch, an atheist, is thrilled about a phenomenon he calls apatheism (“apathetic theism”). “It’s not that people don’t believe in God anymore,” Rauch writes, “the majority will still say they believe. ... The faithful in America haven’t been putting much thought or effort into their faith. They’re looking for comfort and reassurance, not for a God who asks anything of them. Apathetic theists don’t care about their own religion and care even less about the faith of others.”

New York Times columnist David Brooks noticed a trend a few years ago and coined the term flexidoxy (“flexible beliefs”).

“Flexidoxy describes the form of religion practiced by many educated young Americans, as opposed to orthodoxy. Basically, it means that people have become flexible in their belief system and look at religion as a giant smorgasbord from which they can pick and choose the beliefs that most suit them. They become the center of their own faith and adapt it to what they see as important.”

Both apathetic theism and flexidoxy may well be the consequence and by-product of the church when it avoids the Holy Spirit, on one hand, or abuses it on the other. Apathetic theism and flexidoxy are grounded in the power of popularity and political correctness but not the power of the Holy Spirit.

Into this world, the Church must bring to bear what it alone possesses and is called to proclaim, the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the power and work of the Holy Spirit.

Nobody can "prove" the truth of the Christian proclamation: 

• the truth that human beings are born in a condition of separation from God called sin; 
• the truth that, imprisoned by this condition, we inevitably commit sins and just as inevitably, even what seems like altruistic acts on our parts are tinged with selfishness and self-will; 
• the truth that God is unwilling to let us to go to hell, the fate we deserve, without a fight; 
• the truth that because of God's love for us, He sent Jesus into the world; 
• the truth that Jesus died, taking our punishment for sin, and rose from the dead to offer new life that begins here and now even as we remain imperfect and extends into eternity where we will live in perfect fellowship with God and others saved by the grace given to all who believe in Christ.

No argument for these truths will convince anyone. But when we leave ourselves open to the witness the Bible offers about God and what God has done in Jesus Christ, something happens to us that subordinates (but does not eliminate) our intellects, our wills, and our emotions.

Put simply, we come to believe in Jesus Christ. Hebrews 11:1, in the New Testament, says: "...Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen

I once was an atheist. I thought the Bible was a book written by human beings with their ideas about God, not, as I've come to believe that the Bible was inspired by God presented to human beings to save us. I thought that faith in Christ was for the pathetic. I thought that the message about Jesus, the gospel, was implausible.

But when I allowed myself to be open to Christ and to the ministry of the Holy Spirit operating in the Bible, in the fellowship of the Church, in the sermons of pastors, in the writings of Christians over the past twenty centuries, and in Holy Communion, even though I couldn't understand how Jesus' body and blood could be present in the bread and the wine or how a sinner like me could be forgiven by Christ, something happened to me. I came to believe in Jesus.

In the intervening thirty-seven years, my faith has been strong some times, weak at others. But the Holy Spirit has used means like those I mentioned above to shore up my faith, convict me of sins and so, convict me of my need for Christ, to convince me that Christ's death and resurrection were done for all sinners, including me, and that through Jesus, I really am forgiven and saved to live with and to live for God for eternity. 

Whether you're an atheist who stands outside the Church, as I once did, or a non-believing churchgoer like so many are today, if you want to have a faith that can change and shape your life and if you want the capacity to leave behind the delusion that you as a created being don't need your creator, I can assure you that you can have faith that changes this life and the one to come!

Let the Holy Spirit speak to you:

• In the Bible
• In the fellowship of Christians who honestly admit their own imperfections and relish the perfection and grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ
• In the prayers you offer to God in Jesus' Name, prayers in which you should honestly share your doubts, but also your desire to believe
• In listening to the preached Word
• In joining convicted and convinced Christians in serving others in Jesus' Name
• In being connected with a Church whose pastor (or pastors) and members evidence true belief in the God of the Bible, who reverence the Bible as God's perfect, inspired Word for the human race
• In the Sacrament of Holy Communion, during the receiving of which you earnestly pray, "I don't know how Your body and blood and Your forgiveness can be in bread and wine, Lord, but I ask you to help me to trust that that is so"

None of the items in that list are good religious works. They will not earn salvation for you. And if you approach them as though they will, you will miss their point and miss out on faith. They are what the Reformation theologians called "means of grace," holes through which eternity bursts through to us, openings through which the arms of God can enfold you.

I've used the analogy before, but they're like a batted ball to which an outfielder goes to make a catch. The fielder has no control over the speed of the pitch made by the person on the mound. The fielder can't control what kind of charge the hitter puts into the ball once he's swung. All the fielder can do is position herself or himself to make the catch. 

God is using these means to "bat" faith our way. The question is are we willing to be where we need to be to "catch" the faith the Holy Spirit wants to hit our way?

The faith you catch won't make sense to you at first. There's so much about the Christian Gospel that doesn't make sense. That may, in your mind, make a case against surrendering faith in Christ at first. But, as C.S. Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, isn't also characteristic of the biggest facts in life to be not what you'd have anticipated at all? 

I met an elderly woman at a church where I was preaching one Sunday. She was matronly, having spent years as an elementary teacher and being something of a second mother to her students. This doughty little woman, I learned, had one something like $50-million dollars in the Ohio Lottery just the day before. I couldn't believe it. But it was true. The truest truths are often like that, beyond your capacity to imagine. That's the way it is with the message of the Bible about Jesus.

No matter how hard it is to believe in Jesus, it is absolutely true and it becomes more plausible as you allow yourself each day to more and more walk in Christ's orbit. And before you know it, if you're not careful, the Holy Spirit will have you saying and meaning things like this:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
  
I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.  He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.  He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried.  He descended into hell.  On the third day He rose again.  He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.  He will come again to judge the living and the dead. 
 
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.  Amen.

Are you willing to have faith like that expressed in the Apostles' Creed? 

If so, position yourself for it. Go to the places where the Holy Spirit can be counted on to be present. Then just tell God, "I'm willing to believe in Christ, Lord. I'm willing to doubt by doubts and worship You as my only God. Work the miracle of faith in me."

Guess what? I've seen that miracle take hold in the lives of hundreds of people during my twenty-nine years as a pastor and during thirty seven years as a Christian, including in my own life.

What have you got to lose? Shall I name what you've go to lose? You can lose sin and death and the hounding of the devil. Those are great things to lose!

Turn to Christ. Let the Spirit have access to your will and your life.

Then let the Spirit give you a faith in Christ that is more than Sunday morning propriety, but week-in and week-out trust in Christ that's so big you don't care who thinks you're crazy.

You'll want the whole world to know that the crucified and risen Jesus is alive and ready to change anyone's life. By your words and your life of (however imperfect) commitment to Christ, you'll unleash the Spirit that's changing you to change others. 

Changing may scare you. You may feel quite comfortable in your favorite sins or in your letting God do His thing while you do yours. But Jesus says, "Everyone...who acknowledges Me before others, I also will acknowledge before My Father in heaven; but whoever denies Me before others, I also will deny before My Father in heaven" (Matthew 10:32).

The Holy Spirit stands ready to help you get to know the truth about Jesus Christ and to learn how to publically acknowledge Jesus every day. 

Are you ready to let Him? Even if your answer is only, "Maybe," charge ahead! Position yourself to receive God's grace and the Lord Jesus at the center of your life!

For Everyone

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

1 Timothy 2:1-7
For a moment this morning, I want you to do a little thought experiment. Imagine that you live in a country ruled by a brutal dictator. Thousands are jailed or killed each year because of his paranoid whims. He has a special hatred for Christians. While this ruler long ago gave up on requiring Jews to pray to him each day, allowing them to pray for him to their God, no such special dispensation has been given to Christians. The dictator is offended (and truth be known, threatened) by this small, but growing fellowship of believers who insist that a Judean carpenter named Jesus, Who died and rose from the dead, is Lord and King of all, not the dictator. As a Christian yourself, you live in fear each day of the secret police coming to take you and your family to imprisonment and public execution because of your allegiance to Jesus.

In the midst of all this, your pastor receives a letter from an older pastor who you and your fellow Christians know, love, and respect. This pastor has risked life and limb many times just to share the Good News of Jesus Christ, that all who turn from sin and trust in Jesus have a new life that begins here and will continue in eternity with God. You certainly trust Jesus in ways and at depths you could never trust the dictator. But more than that, you even trust Jesus more than you trust your own family members, your own friends, your own common sense, or the prevailing opinions of those around you. You know that such trust—or, at least the desire for such trust that you lay at the feet of God every day—is what being a follower of Jesus is all about. Each day, you turn to the Lord again for strength to believe in Jesus.

But when your pastor shares the content of the letter he just received from this respected evangelist, you and the members of your congregation are stunned! In it he says that as Christians, you should pray for the dictator. He says that you should do so because it’s God’s wish that everyone should be saved and that the dictator has a part to play in moving your homeland toward that goal. There is dead silence as those words sink in—words exhorting you to pray for the monster who persecutes you, to pray for the one who denies the truth of the Gospel message that has changed your life, to pray for the one whose thugs make every knock on the door a living terror.

Except for the fact that in the first century Roman world, the dictator was called emperor, all of the elements of this little thought experiment precisely describe the circumstances in which our second Bible lesson for today was written. There is some dispute among scholars as to whether the book of First Timothy was actually written by the apostle Paul to the young pastor, Timothy. This isn’t a terrible thought since, in the ancient world, there were no copyright laws and it was considered perfectly acceptable for people who represented the thought world of respected teachers to write in their names. But I accept that this letter really was from the apostle Paul, written in about 64AD. It’s one of several books in the New Testament, collectively called the Pastoral Epistles, which we’ll be looking at over the next several weeks.

Please pull out the Celebrate insert and read along silently with me as I read aloud the first four stunning verses:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 

If you have a pencil or a pen, you might want to circle the words “everyone,” in the places it appears in those four verses. We are to pray for everyone, including leaders who may be hostile to Christians and our message about Jesus. And we are to do so because it’s God’s desire that everyone be saved from sin and death.

At least two ideas in these verses need to be unpacked this morning.

The first is this. Governments, however imperfect and however unjust they may sometimes be, exist to enforce God’s Law, the Mosaic Law, the Ten Commandments. This is so because not everybody voluntarily submits to the Lordship of Jesus or commits themselves to lives of daily repentance and renewal in His Name. Not all people live with the Holy Spirit guiding them each day, prompting them to repent for wrong or to choose the right. And even Christians forget or forego calling on God to help them live rightly.

Whether knowingly or not, every time a government acts justly, it does so in conformity with God's Law, that sense of right and wrong God has written on all hearts.

Every time a government acts unjustly, it nonetheless seeks to justify its actions on the bases of what we all know is right and wrong.

And every time someone opposes an action of a government, she or he does so by appealing to what everyone knows to be right or wrong.

Of course, as I’ve said, not all people in our world have surrendered their wills to Jesus as Lord. They don’t want to agree with God about what’s right and wrong. (Truth be known, none of us wants to agree with God about what's right and wrong all of the time!)

Some might want to steal in order to feed a drug habit, or extort in order to get rich at the expense of others, or drive their cars while under the influence of alcohol, or play trumpets in their front yards at 3:00 in the morning as neighbors are trying to sleep, or cheat on the college entrance exam. God gives the Law, governments, and designated authorities so that all who refuse to submit to His will by faith in Christ will still be curbed and so that—and this is key--so that a peaceable order in which it will be easier for you and me to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ can be established in our nations and our neighborhoods.

We pray for leaders, even dictators, so that, as Paul puts it in our lesson, “we may lead a quiet and peaceable life.”

In the late-1940s, Frank Laubach, a Methodist missionary, wrote a fantastic book called Prayer, The Mightiest Force in the World. Laubach thought that the most important thing Christians could do, apart from sharing the good news of Jesus with others, was to pray for world leaders. When we pray for leaders, Laubach said, God’s Spirit flows through our prayers and speaks directly to leaders, whether they believe in God or not.

Laubach writes, “We can do far more for the world with prayer than if we could [tell the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, or the President of Russia] what to do—far more!” “If they listened to our suggestions,” he says, “we would probably be more or less wrong. But what God tells them, when they listen to Him, must be right. It is infinitely better for world leaders to listen to God than for them to listen to us.”

We are to pray for leaders—of governments, of organizations, of towns, counties, and townships, and of churches—so that peace and stability can displace violence and uncertainty and make it easier for we Christians, who have been commissioned to make disciples of all nations--even this nation--to share the Good News of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ!

This brings us to the second idea we need to unpack, this one found in verse 4. It says that the God revealed in Jesus “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The truth, of course, is what Jesus referred to in a conversation one day with Thomas: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” It’s the truth Jesus told that old teacher of the law, Nicodemus, that while those who refuse to believe in Him condemn themselves, He came not to condemn, but to save, to bring new, everlasting life to all who trust in Him. God’s desire is that all will be saved.

Does that mean that everyone will be saved? Please underline the word, desires, in verse 4. The word in the Greek, in which this letter and all the books of the New Testament were first written, is thelei. It means want, will, wish, or desire.

God wants or desires all to be saved. That’s why Jesus went to the cross. “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son,” Jesus also told Nicodemus.

God’s desire, His wish, is that all will turn from sin and trust in Christ, even if their faith is the size of a mustard seed, as Jesus puts it. But this doesn’t mean that God saves anyone against their wills, their desires, their wants, or their wishes.

Jesus says in Matthew 10:32: “Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.”

The older son in last week’s Gospel lesson, the parable of the Prodigal Son, chose to spurn the father’s invitation to come to the party, to join the celebration. He stands for all who refuse to surrender to Christ because they choose to rely on themselves, their own work ethic, their own chosen gods, or anything else but Christ.

Such people can even be found in our churches: They equate church membership with being a Christian, but never surrender a bit of their wills to Christ, never seek God’s wisdom for their decision making, never establish their priorities at God’s direction. In her book, The Hiding Place, Corrie ten-Boom recounts what her father said when the ten-Booms got word that their pastor had led the Nazi armies then occupying their homeland of the Netherlands to Jews who had been hiding. The ten-Booms, like many of their Christian friends were hiding their Jewish neighbors so that they could escape the Nazis. Why, Corrie asked her father, would their pastor have done such a horrible thing? How could any Christian church-goer? His answer was simple: "Just because the mouse is in the cookie jar, it doesn't mean that it's a cookie."

Warming the same church pew for decades doesn't necessarily make us Christians. It doesn't mean that we are saved from sin and death. Salvation is a matter, not of membership in a religious club, but of faith--trust--in Jesus Christ.

Jesus says that those who acknowledge Him as Lord and Savior are saved from sin and death. God wants all people to be saved, but God never forces faith in Christ or salvation on anyone.

That’s why Paul urges Christians to pray for leaders—and for everyone. We pray for a peaceable world in which people are ready to hear the Good News which Jesus has commissioned Christians to tell others: the Good News, the truth, that their sins can be covered over and they can live with God forever by turning from sin and trusting their lives to Jesus Christ.

So, the message of this week’s sermon is simple. It comes from Saint Paul and the pages of God’s Word: pray for everyone and tell everyone about Jesus. This is the job of every Christian no matter what their profession.

May God bless us as we do our jobs each day.