How God is Speaking to This Recovering Sin Addict

I try to start each day in a quiet time with God. I use the "Stop, look, listen, respond" method for meeting with God each day.

As explained here, I stop, look, listen, and respond in order to interact with God before I "hit the bricks" of everyday life.

A few days ago, I looked at Matthew 16:5-12. This is The Message translation, an rendering of Scripture I'm using right now in order to break open truths from God that I may have previously missed because the renderings of other translations have become so familiar to me that I miss out on God's Word for me. Here's what I read:

On their way to the other side of the lake, the disciples discovered they had forgotten to bring along bread. In the meantime, Jesus said to them, “Keep a sharp eye out for Pharisee-Sadducee yeast.”

Thinking he was scolding them for forgetting bread, they discussed in whispers what to do. Jesus knew what they were doing and said, “Why all these worried whispers about forgetting the bread? Runt believers! Haven’t you caught on yet? Don’t you remember the five loaves of bread and the five thousand people, and how many baskets of fragments you picked up? Or the seven loaves that fed four thousand, and how many baskets of leftovers you collected? Haven’t you realized yet that bread isn’t the problem? The problem is yeast, Pharisee-Sadducee yeast.” Then they got it: that he wasn’t concerned about eating, but teaching—the Pharisee-Sadducee kind of teaching.

As I looked into the passage, God underscored important truth for me. This is what I wrote in my journal:

The disciples realize that they've forgotten to take bread as they travel across the lake. Jesus gives a cryptic warning about avoiding the "yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees," two religious sects who dominate first century Judea's life. The disciples think that Jesus is chastising them for not bringing bread. 

But Jesus asks if they don't remember how He'd fed the 5000 and the 4000 miraculously. 

Bread isn't the issue. Jesus can provide daily bread. 

The problem Jesus is warning the disciples to avoid is in approaching the questions of daily life--like bread--in the same way as Pharisees and Sadducees. Their worldview was me-centered, not God-centered. They even thought of righteousness as their achievement. 

But everything comes from God. 

"Remember," Jesus is saying, "I provide bread without you doing a thing. The religious leaders commend a righteousness of their own making, detached from Me or dependence on God. Be different from them! 

How different we are to be is shown in Matthew 16:24-27. We're to embrace Christ and His cross; that's where life is, not in "the world's bread." Jesus is the bread we need.

Next, I listened for God to tell me what I needed to know and apply from this truth that day.

God has never spoken to me in an audible voice, though I have sometimes heard His whispers in my soul and felt His touch on my shoulders when I'm on my knees in prayer.

But since the Bible is God's definitive word, often I sense Him pressing certain truths on me as I keep silence before Him after I delving into a passage of Scripture.

When this happens, I sometimes write what I feel God is telling me as though He were the speaker. God seemed to say this to me on this particular morning:

Too often, you settle for being half-Christian, Mark. You embrace suffering with the cross until the suffering comes. You seek to live pleasingly to Me, until it becomes inconvenient or threatens your "right" to ease. You fantasize about worldly vindication and success. You splinter your commitment to Me by your commitment to you. I said to follow Me; you follow, but take plenty go selfish detours along the way. That's not following!

One of the things about the devotional method taught by the Navigators that I love is that, when it comes to the "respond" part of our time with God, the method acknowledges our humanity, how hard it is to keep any resolutions for us, especially when we drift into thinking that we must keep them in our own power.

Being a recovering sinner saved by God's incredible grace given to us through Christ is like being a recovering alcoholic, drug addict, food addict, or compulsive gambler.

In this life, we always remain addicted to sin--addicted to our inborn desire to "be like God."

But each day--in a practice Martin Luther called "daily repentance and renewal"--we come back to God to help us face this day, to seek the power of God's Holy Spirit, sent by Jesus to all who trust in Him, to live as free grown-up children of God.

So, the Navigators say, just seek God's help to respond to His Word--be it His Word of direction, correction, promise, or grace--through the day you're entering. Don't resolve to live differently for the entire rest of your life. That's too daunting and way beyond our capacity to fulfill.

This then, was my simple response to what God taught me in Matthew 16:5-12, a few days back:

(1) Today, Lord, help me not to complain; (2) Today, when selfish thoughts come to me, help me to crowd at my self-serving penchant by praising God, thanking God, and praying for someone else.

Within twenty minutes of my quiet time, I was in the shower and a selfish thought crossed my mind. I remembered what I had asked God to help me to do. I filled my time in the shower with praises for God, petitions for the needs of others, and special prayers for friends and family.

I almost remembered to respond to God as I resolved to do through much of the day. Like a recovering alcoholic, I've fallen off the wagon more than once since then. I get full of myself and tell myself to get my attention off of me and back on God and my neighbor. And I ask God to help me to remember.

Last week, during a study of Mike Foss' book, Real Faith for Real Life: Living the Six Marks of Discipleship, I decided to read these entries from my journal to the Living Water folks who were there. Though I occasionally share journaling of my quiet time with God, I don't make a habit of it because my quiet time is all about my own relationship with God, seeking to grow as a disciple of Christ, not a project for my call as preacher, teacher, leader, minister of Word and Sacrament.

But I also want people to know that just because God has called me to this work doesn't mean that I'm not a child of God in constant need of His guidance and reassurance. Fortunately, God makes guidance, reassurance, and so much more in His Word.

Martin Luther said that Christians are the Holy Spirit's workshop. Each day, through His Word, God chisels and scrapes, remodels and renews, those who are willing to submit to Him, and in the submission, experience the freedom of being made over--often slowly and with fierce blows to our egos--into the image of Jesus Christ, heirs of God's grace.

If that isn't as true of the subset of redeemed sinners called to be pastors as it is of laypeople, pastors shortchange God, ourselves, and the people we are called to work among as servant/leaders.

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

Epiphany: Stop, Look, Listen, Respond

[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church during worship services on January 10, 2016. Though Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, is always on January 6, we commemorated January 10 as Sunday of the Epiphany, so that we could celebrate the day together during Sunday worship.]

Matthew 2:1-12

Once, the pastor of our home church in Columbus told the story of how he became a follower of Jesus Christ. He came from a non-churchgoing family. He’d never been in a church building until, when he was a boy, he heard that there was going to be a magic show in the fellowship hall of the local Lutheran congregation. Curious, he went. Apparently, the magician talked about faith in Christ as he did his act. Our future pastor came for the magic. But he stayed for the Savior.

His experience relates to today’s Gospel lesson is several ways.

We call the visitors who brought gifts to the baby Jesus in our Gospel lesson wise men. We also sometimes call them kings. And while there’s nothing terrible about those designations, they’re really not accurate.

The original Greek of the New Testament calls them magi. We get our word magic from the term.

The magi were, to put it bluntly, first century versions of palm readers or fortune tellers. Only they had credibility. They enjoyed a high status in places the New Testament called “the East”—they probably were from countries that set in what is modern day Iran or Iraq. They often served as the powerful advisers to kings.

But God’s people, the Jews, took a dim view of people like the magi. That's because God is clear in His Word that things like horoscopes and consulting with fortune-tellers is wrong. God’s people were (and are) to rely on God and His Word alone.

The magi though, thought that events in the heavens bore a relationship to events on earth. When they saw a light that may have been the conjoining of Jupiter and Saturn or, according to a new and interesting theory, maybe a comet, they were certain that something major was up. Probably unschooled in the prophecies of a Savior Who would be more than the king of the Jews, but also the Savior of the whole human race, they went to Herod. In 40BC, Herod the Great had been declared to be King of the Jews by the Roman Empire, though Herod himself wasn't really a Jew. The magi may have thought that a baby had been born into Herod's royal household.

Instead, Herod’s household and servants--and Jerusalem--were thrown into an uproar, a fact that they tried to conceal from the visitors from the East.

Scholars and theologians were consulted and the magi were told that the Old Testament prophecy from Micah had said that a king of the Jews, the Messiah, was to be born in a tiny village about five miles from Jerusalem, the hometown of Israel’s first king, David. The place was called Bethlehem.

That’s all the magi needed to know. They left the king and found the baby living in a house in Bethlehem. There, we’re told, they worshiped Jesus.

Think of it: The first people to worship Jesus were Gentiles, non-Jews.

Just as the angels’ announcement to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’ birth signaled that the Messiah had come for the humble and lowly of heart, God’s guidance of the magi to the house of the baby Jesus was God’s signal God loves all people and it’s God’s desire that all people should come to worship and follow Jesus and have eternal life with God.

Like our home pastor who had been attracted by a magic show and instead found the Lord of his life, the Magi had been attracted by what they thought was the portent of a birth in the Judean equivalent of Buckingham Palace. Instead, in a humble home in a tiny town, they found the God of all creation, come to save the world from sin and death!

You never can tell what might attract people who have never had anything to do with God before to come and worship Him! The unlikeliest things can be attracted to follow the Savior. And magic shows and stars aren’t the only things that can attract people to Christ. Sometimes other people--siblings, parents, friends, classmates, co-workers, even husbands and wives--can attract others to Christ!

Today we celebrate the Epiphany, the day that God used a star to guide people who didn’t even know God to Jesus Christ, the Light of the world.

The word epiphany is what’s called a transliteration of a Greek word, epiphane. It literally means shine upon. It carries the meaning of making something clear, of manifesting something. In other grammatical forms, the word can mean to see glory.

On the first Epiphany, a bright star shone upon the magi. But having received clarification from the Word of God in Jerusalem, they understood that they were doing more than following a star. The Savior of the world, the One Who gives the gift of new and everlasting life to all who repent, or turn from their sin, and believe in Jesus Christ, was made clear to them. Jesus was the brightest light the magi saw that day at Bethlehem!

Some three decades after the Magi visited the baby Jesus, after Jesus died and rose from the dead and spent forty days instructing His disciples, it was time for Him to ascend to heaven. But before He did, Jesus gave one last bit of instruction to His followers, including me and you. “As you go through your lives,” Jesus said, “make disciples of all peoples, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” This is often called the Great Commission.

You and I are called to be stars who shine the light of Christ’s Gospel into the lives of others. You and I are called to make Gospel clear to others, so that they can see the goodness and the greatness of the Lord Who was born among us, died for us, and rose for us to give us life with God forever. In short, God has called us to be something that is a bad word to some people, witnesses for Christ!

We’re to let others see Jesus Christ.

We’re to invite our friends to know Jesus.

We are, when asked, to share what God has revealed to us in His Word, the salvation that comes in Christ alone.

We are to make disciples.

I know how hard being a witness can be. But I also know that it can be done. I am here this morning because people dared to witness for Christ to me.

And when we dare to be witnesses, God can do amazing things. This past week, I was talking with Dennis. He showed me some texts and pictures he received from a pastor in Haiti. The pastor indicated that his church was hosting a women's conference. The picture showed that the event was packed and that not just women were present. The women had invited male family members to attend as well.

The next day, the Haitian pastor texted that there had been three-hundred present, including males and females and people of all ages.

The next day he reported that the previous day's meeting had brought four-hundred to the event. This time, the youth of the congregation had gone door-to-door in the village to invite people to come. That night, eight people gave their lives to Jesus Christ!

I know that in our rich American culture, we have more distractions to entertain us and keep us from interacting with others or thinking about God. According to a 2014 study cited by the New York Daily News, the average time spent watching TV by Americans each day is five hours. And that doesn't count the time spent on Snapchat, Instagram, Genius, Twitter, or Facebook. It can be tough to reach people whose only accessibility is of the cyber-variety.

But witnessing is also hard for us. Often we lack the confidence to witness for Christ.

What if someone asks me a question I can’t answer?

What if my friend or family member will be offended and dismiss me as a nut?

It’s always possible that followers of Christ will be dismissed as nuts, of course. After all, if Jesus Himself was crucified, we can probably expect to sometimes be misunderstood or dismissed.

But when you know that you belong to the King of the world, you have every reason to be confident. And the better you know Him, the more confident you will be.

But how can we be confident? How can we be the means by which others come to follow Jesus?

As we prepare to begin the second phase of establishing a discipleship culture at Living Water, under the coaching of Navigators, there is a group of people who make up here in the congregation known as the Life and Learning Team. One tool that we’ve learned about and are now using is something called Quiet Time. Quiet Time is a means we can use to cultivate closeness to and gain confidence in witnessing for Christ.

Quiet Time is summarized in four words: stop, look, listen, respond.

Here’s how it works. Five days a week (you can take two days a week off)--for most people usually the first thing in the morning, though others may find other parts of their days more conducive--close the door, turn off the cell phone, move away from the laptop, shut off the dumb box, get rid of distractions.

Then stop! Come into the Lord's presence. Ask God, “Lord, where is my heart today?” Simply take the time to appreciate being in the presence of the God Who made you and loves you beyond all telling.

Next look into God’s Word. I suggest reading just one chapter of the New Testament each day and working through the New Testament as the year progresses. If you only get through part of a chapter when God gets your attention, that's great. Then, focus on the one verse in the chapter that strikes you most. As you do so, the Navigators teach us, you should ask God, “Lord, what new truth do you want me to discover from Your Word today?” This is not a request for head knowledge. You’re asking God to speak His truth to you through His Word. Since God’s Word is inspired by the Holy Spirit, this can happen often.

After you've stopped and looked, next listen. We remain silent before God and ask Him, “Lord, what is Your thought for me today?” Don’t be afraid to be silent for a while. It sometimes takes a time for God’s message to get through the noise and distractions of our lives.

Finally, respond. Responding to what God has told us may mean offering up a prayer of repentance. Or, asking for guidance for a particular issue that God’s truth has surfaced in your mind. Or, it may mean deciding on an action step in line with the truth God teaches you.

A few months ago during my Quiet Time, God convicted me for failing to respond to the needs of people I met while walking down a North High Street in the Short North of Columbus before a concert. Several people, maybe homeless, certainly impoverished, asked me for money.

In my mind, I thought, “They probably want to use it for drugs or alcohol or cigarettes.” But the truth is that I was making rationalizations because  I didn’t to bother with people for whom Jesus Christ died and rose!

Jesus’ words from Matthew 25:40 rattled my conscience: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

“Lord,” I prayed during my Quiet Time, “how can I respond to the truth You’ve put before me today?”

In my spirit, God seemed to suggest that I buy gift cards from a fast food restaurant so that the next time I was tempted to  pass an imploring person on a city street or freeway off-ramp, I could hand them a gift card. I responded by buying four cards shortly thereafter. I keep a stash with me all the time.

The magi followed a star, looking for an earthly king and instead, found God come to earth as a baby. When we spend quiet time with God each day--when we stop, look, listen, and respond, we will know the Lord better. We will gain confidence in our faith. And we can be the stars shining in a darkened world, guiding people to Christ. God needs us to be confident witnesses for Christ now more than ever. Amen

Am I a Record Keeper?

The congregation I serve is little more than halfway through the first year of a three-year contract with Navigators aimed at helping us establish a disciple-making culture. The emphasis is on empowering us to live out our faith in every aspect of our lives. The first year focuses on coaching the pastoral staff.

In preparation for my next meeting with the Navigators coach, I'm going through a short Bible study with reflective questions. Several of the questions have been challenging, but one really smacked me and I'm still not sure what my answer to it is. It's a two-parter that asks: "Have you been keeping a record of wrongs? What are they?"

The trigger for this challenging question is a portion of Saint Paul's description of love found in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a. Paul is giving a portrait of love here and says at one point, "Love...keeps no record of wrongs."

Now, two things are true in considering this passage.

First, the only being in the universe to live this kind of love is God (definitively revealed in God-in-human-flesh, Jesus Christ). Without the power of God for living that is given to those who repent and believe in Jesus, this brand of love will never be exhibited in a human being and then, only imperfectly, inconsistently, until we die and are raised again with Christ. We must ask daily for an infusion of God's love because love that forgiving and committed is foreign to our natures. At least it is to mine.

God's love is such that when He forgives, He also forgets, something that's impossible for me to do.

Second, not keeping a record of wrongs, does not mean that you leave yourself open to further abuse by people who are violent or hurtful, who have a track record of such abusive behavior.

To me, not keeping a "record of wrongs" means not storing up grievances, nursing them, pulling them out for frequent inspection in order to feel morally superior to someone else, or harming myself or my well-being through bitterness. Keeping a record of others' wrongs toward us is keeping grudges to gain the false assurance of our own righteousness and virtue and stake out our virtuous victimization.

I'm not conscious of holding any grudges. But the question has made me consider whether I am, in far more subtle, and therefore hellish, ways than I realize. I'm still considering it. It seems worthwhile for me to do so. I don't want unconfessed or unacknowledged sin to stand as a wall between God and me or between others and me.

More than that, I want my love to be authentic and of God.

But what is love, really?

I like a definition embodied in a quote from Patrick Lencioni found in the same book that posed the two-part thought-provoking question:

...true love is less about feelings and more about actions and decisions. That's not to say feelings don't have a role in love [isn't that good to know?], but feelings are certainly not the most important or prevalent element. 

I don't change my son's diaper because I feel like it, or because I find him cute; I do it because it's what's best for him, and I'm committed to him... 

Those who wait for their feelings to inspire them to love certainly will find themselves in temporary and fleeting relationships with friends, spouses, and children.

Feelings emphatically do matter. That "in love" feeling (notice I didn't say that in lust feeling) can be a great clue to two people that if they marry, they will be rowing in the same direction through their lives. And anyone who has been married to an uncommitted spouse (read that, unmarried spouse) knows how love (and commitment) can be destroyed, effectively ending the relationship even if "the marriage" continues. But Lencioni's words seem true to me.

In the end, love is what we do. And it doesn't keep records.

God, give me the strength to confront those with whom I disagree or who have hurt me, not from a sense of superiority, but from a desire to do Your will. If I'm keeping a record of perceived wrongs done to me, holding grudges, show this to me. Help me to leave my records of others' wrongs at the foot of Jesus' cross, never to be seen again.  In the name of Jesus.

James 2:18 (A 5 by 5 by 5 Reflection)

Historically, we Lutherans have cringed a bit when we read the New Testament letter of James. Martin Luther called it "the epistle of straw" and wished it removed from the Biblical canon. (But it's telling that in his translations of Scripture, he never presumed to remove James and, it seems, in later years, gained something of an appreciation for it.)

I find that I, personally, even though I've come to love this letter, I really have to bear down and think when I read James. It's as though he speaks a language foreign to me or, more accurately maybe, that he speaks a language I know but in an accent and with idioms I don't readily understand.

For Lutherans, it has often seemed that while the rest of Scripture teaches that human beings are made right with God (justified) as an act of God's grace (charity) through faith (trust) in the God definitively disclosed in Jesus, while James is saying that you need good works to be saved. It can seem when one reads James that he is salvation as a gift on the shelf in favor of salvation by works, the latter of which is heresy.

But that's not what James is saying at all. One early clue to that fact is what James writes about the Christian praying for wisdom: "But ask in faith..." (James 1:6). Faith is as much a cornerstone for James as for Paul.

Today, the assigned reading for the 5 by 5 by 5 New Testament reading plan is James 2.

In James 2:18, James writes:

"But someone will say, 'You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith."

It's simple, I realize, what James is saying. If we have faith in Jesus--if, in another words, we are surrendered to Him as God and King over our lives, it will have an impact on the things we do.

If, on the other hand, we compartmentalize Jesus with a Christian compartment here, a professional compartment here, a relationship compartment there, and so on, our fragmented life will demonstrate that we have little or no faith in Christ, that we lack a saving relationship with Christ.

When Christ is Lord over us, often without our even seeing it, His presence active within us and our trust in Him, will issue in works of love and compassion.

Jesus once warned His followers against "false prophets," preachers and teachers who spoke falsely on God's behalf. (The antidote for this, of course, is for us to get to know God and His Word in Scripture for ourselves so that no wolf is ever able to pull the wool over the eyes of we sheep.) But in doing so, Jesus enunciated a principle that can clarify things as we look at our own lives: "You will know them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:16).

If we believe in Jesus Christ, it will show in acts of love and selflessness.

If we truly trust in Christ, it will be demonstrated--however imperfectly, however it may sometimes get obscured by our selfishness and shortsightedness, in the things we do. If we believe in Jesus Christ, it will show in acts of love and selflessness.

We can't be made right with God--saved from sin and death, by the good things we do. Christ on His cross has already done everything needed for us to be saved. We need only trust in Him.

But trust in Him will erase our fears over our worthiness or our capacity to help others without denigrating ourselves. We won't mind being servants of all, just as Jesus was a servant of all, even our servant when He went to the cross. We're set free "to be the people of God," free to love God completely and love others as we love ourselves. That's why James closes chapter 2, with a simple and powerful observation: "For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead" (James 2:26).

When we trust Jesus, He comes to live in us. Then He starts to do things within us we never would do apart from faith in Him:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God--not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what He has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. (Ephesians 2:8-10)

"Faith" that doesn't result in works of love demonstrates that there is no faith, that the confessions of compartmentalized Christians (counterfeit Christians) are so much hot air. Good works without faith are done by human effort, with no reference to God, without the hand of God, devoid of the power of God.

Good works empowered by, inspired by, directed by God demonstrates authenticity of faith in the doer and has God's power for transformational good in them.

Lord Jesus, fill me with reckless abandon. Help me to love others unstintingly, knowing that's how You love me. Help me to know that when I come to the end of me, my fears are conquered and your love can spill from me onto a thirsty world. Empower me to live the faith in You I confess in every part of my life. In Your Name I pray. Amen

Galatians 6:2, 5 (A 5 by 5 by 5 Reflection)

As some may know, I'm using the Navigators' 5x5x5 Bible Reading Plan for my daily times with God. Today's reading is Galatians, chapter 6. I've read this chapter many times. But today, something stood out: The seeming contradiction between verses 2 and 5.

Verse 2:

Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.

The "law of Christ," I take it, is first, Jesus' great commandment, summarizing the two tables of the Ten Commandments, that we love God with our whole beings and love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

I take it also to mean the new commandment that Jesus gave to His followers to love fellow believers as Christ has loved them, with their whole lives.

Finally, I take this "law" to encompass Jesus' great commission that all who are part of His Church make disciples.

But since Galatians 6 deals with the internal life of Christ's Church, I think Paul has in mind the first two components of what I believe he means by the "law of Christ."

The thrust of the passage is that, even in restoring those who have rebelled against Christ, being careful not to fall into temptation ourselves (v. 1), we in the Church are to bear each other's burdens.

I've seen this exemplified in the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in the days leading up to and following my wife's recent surgery. On the night before the surgery, during our Lenten midweek service, the people in attendance gathered around me (my wife was unable to attend) and prayed for her healing and for my encouragement. We received many calls, cards, and emails of encouragement, assuring us of people's prayers. On the day of the surgery, a couple from the congregation drove the hour-plus to the hospital to be with my daughter, mother-in-law, and me; they stayed all day. Someone sent us a gift card to a local restaurant. Several have brought or offered to bring meals. Some have offered to take my wife to where she needs to be, since she can't drive right now. These are the kinds of things, I believe, that Paul has in mind when he tells Christians to "bear one another's burdens." The love of Christ is seen and experienced in these acts and gestures of love, the power of Christ is demonstrated when we pray for one another.

I also have a friend who lives miles away who is wonderful about praying for people whose needs are brought to her attention. In addition, this friend is compassionate, generous, and forgiving of others, whatever their needs. All of these traits too, demonstrate the Christian bearing others' burdens.

But then we come to Galatians 6:5:

For all must carry their own loads.

I'll never forget eating lunch, more than thirty years ago, with a seminary classmate at a fast food restaurant in Columbus. We were working on a project together and we both had our Bibles open, discussing the project. A middle aged man approached us, who, it became clear, had a bee in his bonnet.

"You know," he said, "if everyone studied the Bible the way you two are, we wouldn't need welfare or charity programs for the poor. There wouldn't be any poor."

My classmate asked the guy how he'd arrived at that conclusion. He pointed to Galatians 6:5 and said, if everybody carried their own loads, everyone would be working.

I'd half-forgotten that encounter until I read this passage again this morning.

Of course, even thirty years ago, I realized that the man at the fast food restaurant was taking one passage of Scripture out of context with no regard for the total witness of Scripture on what the believer's stance toward the poor should be.

For example, throughout the Old Testament moral law, God's people were told to make provisions for the poor, the orphaned, foreigners, and the widowed. Farmers weren't to harvest their crops to the edges of their fields and if, after harvesting, they realized that parts of their fields were unharvested, they weren't to go back to harvest the rest of their crops. All of these leavings were to remain for the benefit of the poor who could glean them.

Jesus and the New Testament commends a similar concern for the poor.

Whether any of this bears relevance to government relief programs is one question. But there can be no question that what the man called "charity" programs, at least those in which Christians who have give to others who have not, is both commended and commanded by God.

So, is Paul contradicting himself in Galatians 6:2 and 6:5?

I dug a little deeper today.

In Galatians 6:2, the word translated as burdens that Paul uses in the Greek in which his letter was originally composed is baros. The word he uses in Galatians 6:5 translated as loads is phortion.

While these words can have similar meanings, there are subtle shades of difference between the two.

According to one New Testament Greek-English lexicon, baros, carries the meanings of "heaviness, weight, burden, trouble." In the context of Galatians 6, the burdens referred to are clearly those experiences in life that weigh us down, things like physical illness, relational discord, financial troubles, worry over loved ones, poverty, grief, heartbreaks, depression. The call in Galatians 6:2 is for Christians to lighten the burdens of fellow believers when they encounter these weights of life.

That same lexicon says that phortion can mean burden or load, with particular reference to the cargo being carried by a ship. It can also reference burdensome religious duties or "faults of the conscience that burden the soul."

In the context of 6:5, a different meaning emerges: the obligations we have to respond to the free gifts of God's forgiveness and new life that comes to all who believe in Christ. This "load," to be borne by every Christian is what Paul calls in Romans 12:1 our "true and proper worship" or, in other translations, "spiritual worship" or "reasonable service."

In other words, concern and care for the poor and all who are in need are among the good fruits that will spring from the life a person made new by the forgiveness and grace of Jesus Christ.

In fact, Galatians 6:5 appears to have no direct reference to work for an income, but the work of every believer as a priest and minister of the gospel. 

As with Jesus in His parable of the final judgement in Matthew 25:31-46, Paul isn't saying that we are saved by our good works, by shouldering some odious burdens, but that, touched and transformed by Christ, we will, almost as an involuntary Holy Spirit-created response to grace, do good works, including caring for the poor. (See Ephesians 2:8-10)

The "load" that Paul talks about in Galatians 6:5, is what Jesus also talks about when he tells those heavily laden either by the implacable demands of a dog-eat-dog world or by religious striving to be "good:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

The light burden to which Christ refers, I think, is taking His loving lordship over our lives, believing in Him as our God and Savior.

When we do that, in Martin Luther's words, Christians become "the Holy Spirit's workshop." God goes to work on us, transforming us even without our conscious awareness. It's as though we fall into Christ's orbit and can't always see the ways in which He is changing us. The "load" is to keep living in daily repentance and renewal so that the Master Craftsman can continue to to make us over in the image of Christ.

In dispelling the seeming contradiction between Galatians 6:2 and 6:5, The Lutheran Study Bible says simply: "Those who are willing to accept personal accountability for their own actions before God (bearing their own "load"...phortion) are more willing to to bear others burdens (v.2, "burden"...baros)..."

So, Paul's message in a nutshell, seems to be: "Christians: Bear the burdens of others. Your willingness to do so is the measure of God's grace operating in your life; it's your 'load' as a believer."

Salvation is a free gift and each believer is responsible to God for how they use their salvation.

To not use the power of God living within us as Christians to help others is like being gifted with the power to make music and never singing a note or playing a tune.

Or like having the power to do medical research that might save lives, but staying away from the lab.

Or being a gifted athlete and never trying out for the team.

Just as God wants Christians to use their spiritual gifts for the mutual upbuilding of all in Christ's Church, He also wants us to use His grace to take on the ministry of caring for others.

Galatians 3:24 (A 5 by 5 by 5 Reflection)

Today is a reflection day for those using the Navigators' 5 by 5 by 5 Bible Reading Plan. This morning, I read Galatians, trying to more fully glean and assimilate this tremendous section of the New Testament.

The verse on which I perched was Galatians 3:24:

Therefore the law [God's law] was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.

In this chapter, Paul, himself a Jew, is explaining to Gentile Christians how they could be heirs of God's promises to Abraham, the founding patriarch of the Jewish people.

He asserts here, and elsewhere, that Abraham was God's choice to found a people to save and to bring His salvation to others, was made not because Abraham obeyed God's law. (Which wasn't formally given until hundreds of years later, through Moses at Mount Sinai, anyway.)

Abraham became the heir to God's promises by believing in or trusting his life to the promises of God, however imperfectly he did so. "Abraham believed and God reckoned it to him as righteousness" (Genesis 15:6; Galatians 3:24).

God's law, holy though it is, cannot make us right with God.

We can't be made right with God by obeying the law and our inborn impulse to sin and "go our own ways." Our sinful nature makes it impossible for us to keep the law in its entirety over the course of our lifetimes or even over the course of a nanosecond.

It's true in all of our lives, as Paul demonstrates in this chapter, that  until we meet Jesus Christ, the One Who brings God's promise of a right relationship with God and with others (in other words, peace or shalom with God, with others, with God's creation, and with ourselves), the law serves to curb us from the full expression of our sinful natures.

The Bible says that God's law is written on our hearts. We're born with a sense, however imperfect or fuzzy, of right and wrong. (Read the first few chapters of C.S. Lewis' book, Mere Christianity for a fuller and intriguing exploration of this topic.) God's law is a bridle, a hedge against our sin.

And when we do sin, we offer reasons at least partly rooted in the law of God written on our hearts, to demonstrate to ourselves or others that we're justified in committing the sins we love.

The law is a whip commanding our submission until...relief, Christ comes to us and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we believe in Him.

The law keeps our sin tamped down and teaches us the foolishness and futility of self-reliance until, like cool water to a person dying of thirst, Christ comes to us.

Christ may come to us in a Sunday School class, through the witness of a friend, in the loving service Christians render in Christ's name, or in a Bible study or a sermon, or in other ways Christ might choose.

But however He comes to us, He teaches us that we cannot be made right (made righteous or justified in taking up space in the universe) by our performance of God's rules, by doing good works, but solely by faith, simple moment to moment trust, in Christ and what He has done for us in dying on a cross and rising from the dead on the first Easter.

I am justified by my faith in Christ's perfect goodness, not by trusting my imperfect and always failed attempts to be good.

That is really good news. The best I'll read or hear about all day, every day, for all eternity.

Therefore the law [God's law] was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.