Who is Your King?

[Below you'll find video of today's worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, as well as the text of the message shared. Happy new year!]

Matthew 2:13-23

The moral law of God is, you know, summarized in the Ten Commandments. In the first commandment, God tells us, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” The Small Catechism’s explanation of the commandment tells us, “We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things.” Clarifying things more, The Large Catechism says, “…to have a god is nothing other than trusting and believing Him with the heart…whatever you set your heart on and put your trust in is truly your god.” 

We have a lot of gods in our world, don't we? That's because we tend to set our hearts on things other than God.

As we begin a new year, we need to ask ourselves: Who is our God? Or, who is our King? This is important because the thing we want most in life is to be our own gods.

I bring all of this up for two reasons. First, because whenever we violate any of God’s commandments–and we inevitably do violate His commandments, whether by thought, word, or deed all the time, we also violate the first commandment. When we lie or steal, covet, murder, gossip, take God’s name in vain, or dishonor our parents, we violate the first commandment. That’s true because with every sin, we either worship the sin itself, or worship ourselves by holding our judgments about right and wrong to be superior to God’s judgments, or we do both.

The second reason I bring it up is that the question of who your god is, who is the ultimate authority over your life, is the central question of today’s gospel lesson.

You know the story well. About two years after Jesus’ birth, Magi from the East visit Him. After they leave the house where the infant Jesus is living with Joseph and Mary, Joseph is warned in a dream to take Jesus to Egypt until God says otherwise. King Herod wants to kill Jesus. Herod is so intent on being god and king of Judea--being the boss of everyone--that, unlike the Magi, he not only refuses to worship the newborn King, he wants Him dead.

Herod deserves to be compared to other murderous despots in history, like Adolf Hitler or Vladimir Putin. But let’s not sidestep the truth. We’re in no more of a hurry to worship God than Herod was. We are sinners and we would prefer to reign over our own lives or give our worship to the gifts of God–things like health, wealth, authority, sex, luxury–rather than worshiping God. We are born that way. But being born with an orientation to sin doesn’t make our sinning right. As Paul says in Romans, the human race falls prey to worshiping the creatures rather than the Creator.

We had a video call the other night with our son and our nearly two-year-old granddaughter. She is, in my unbiased view, completely sweet and adorable. But our son tells us that she has a new favorite word: No. We all want to be our own bosses, our own ultimate authorities. So, one thing we all have in common with Herod is that we are sinners bent on self-worship.

Because Herod has learned of the location where prophecy said the Messiah was to be born but didn’t know the child’s identity, he orders that every male child under the age of two be murdered. This is a disturbing tale. Years ago, after reading a sermon I had preached on these verses from Matthew and posted on my blog, a man in Northumberland in England wrote to me angrily, “The Christmas story tells us that if your son is threatened, then you save him and let the others take their chances.”

The man’s anger was maybe understandable but, I think, misdirected for two reasons. First, He seemed to think that God had willed the deaths of these babies. If there’s anything I’m sure of about our God, it’s that He Who formed us and loves us, never would will the murder of any other parents’ children. This is the God Who told Isaac and the people of Israel not to sacrifice their children. 

Even our lesson for today shows that God didn't will the murder of the innocents. There are three places in the lesson that note the fulfillment of prophecy. Two of them indicated by the prepositions used in the original Greek that the fulfillment of prophecies cited was what God desired. But in verse 17, where we're told of Herod's murderous act, the citation says that the weeping of Rachel for her children would happen because of the sinfulness of human beings, not because God desires it to happen.

But second and more importantly, that angry man forgot that God used Joseph to save Jesus from Herod’s armed troops so that Jesus, God the Son, could later go to the cross. There, Jesus bore the sins of us all, setting us free from the damnation and eternal separation from God we all deserve. Jesus wasn’t spared execution when Joseph whisked Him off to Egypt, any more than you and I are spared the horrors of a universe drowning in sin and death. Instead, Jesus was the last of the Bethlehem innocents to die.

Jesus would also be executed by a human race, Jew and Gentile, bent on having and being its own gods and kings. The difference between His death and the deaths of the other babies in Bethlehem and the deaths of us all is that His life and His life alone offered on a cross paid the eternal debt we all owe God for our sin. 

Jesus fulfilled the prophecy given to Isaiah: “...he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5) 

Despite what my angry commentator said, God didn’t spare Jesus on that horrible day in Bethlehem and let everyone else “take their chances.” Jesus was born so that He could die for us. Jesus knew this. Referring to His death on the cross as His baptism, Jesus once said: “I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!” (Luke 12:50)

The death of the sinless Christmas Child on the cross at Calvary was the perfect act of obedience to God that you nor I neither desire nor are able to perform. It was for His submission to death on the cross that, “God [the Father] exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name…” (Philippians 2:9)

Jesus was sent to Egypt not to be spared the hardships, adversities, and death of this world, but so He enter into those hardships, adversities, and death and redeem them by winning an eternity of peace, rest, and salvation for all who believe in Him. 

Herod was a king who wanted power for himself. Jesus is the King Who surrendered the advantages of His deity in order to make it possible for each of us to be justified by God’s grace through faith in Him alone. 

Jesus freely gives blessings none of us deserve: forgiveness, God’s presence with us through the joys and sorrows of this life, and life with God that never ends. 

Because Jesus went to the cross, we can say with the apostle Paul: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32)  

Jesus is no haughty, distant despot. Although our sin put Him on His cross, He makes us His friends. 

Paul also writes elsewhere in the Bible: “For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” (Romans 5:10) 

This King wants to give us everlasting life with God, a life that begins now as, by the power of His Word and the Sacraments, we can say, “Jesus is my God and my King!”

Friends, Jesus is our only hope and sure foundation today, in this new year, and always. He’s now accomplished all that He came to do for us, which is why the last of the Bethlehem innocents would declare with His dying breath on the cross, “It is finished!” This year, you can trust in Jesus and what He has done for you. You can claim Him as your gracious, loving King! Amen

Why is That in There?

[This was prepared to be shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, this morning.]

Genesis 22:1-18

Few Bible passages will ever be more difficult to understand than today’s first lesson, Genesis 22:1-18. 

Twenty-five years after promising a son to Abraham and Sarah, Isaac is born, the apple of their eyes. Isaac is to be the first in a long line of descendants to the couple. God has promised Abraham that he will be the father of many nations and that Israel would be a light to the nations. Today, we know that Israel was the means by which God would take on human flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, dying to pay for our sins, rising from the dead, and giving forgiveness of sin and everlasting life with God to all who repent and believe in Him. 

So, what on earth is God doing, in today’s first lesson, telling Abraham to take his one and only son, the son that he loves, and offer him as a sacrifice?

Some atheists look at this passage and claim it shows that the God of the Bible is a barbaric fiction, the product of a vicious imagined God. But God isn’t barbarous. We know that God had told His people never to engage in the child sacrifice prevalent in surrounding the cultures surrounding His chosen ones, the Israelites. In Leviticus 18:21, for example, God tells His people: “Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed…” God regarded child sacrifice as an abomination. 

Some Christians look at this incident and, embarrassed and confused, say it’s not important. That would be an easy way out. But just because we don’t fully understand something in the Bible is no reason to try to erase it from its pages. 

One of my professors at seminary told us about doing devotions with his wife. They were reading a lengthy and boring passage from Leviticus. “Ron,” she asked, “is this really that important?” “It must be,” he said. “It’s in there.” 

Genesis 22:1-18 is “in there.” So, let’s consider this incident, knowing that we will never understand God completely and certain through Jesus Christ that God is no monster. 

And let’s ask why is this passage “in there.”

Verse 1: “Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ ‘Here I am,’ he replied. Then God said, ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.’” 

Up to this point in Genesis, we know that Abraham has been less than reliable, less than faithful, to God. 

To save his own skin, he lied to two different kings about Sarah, saying she was his sister and not his wife. 

When God didn’t seem to be working quickly enough to deliver on His promise of a son, he quickly accepted his wife Sarah’s plan of taking her servant to give them a son. 

Abraham’s faith in God was a bit deficient. Imperfect. (A bit like yours and mine.) 

Yet God had a mission for Abraham. But Abraham had many temptations ahead of him, including the temptation of turning his son into an idol to take the place of God as the most important consideration in his life. 

God needed to test Abraham, to forge his faith. So, he devised a plan to do so. 

God often forges the faith and characters of those who believe in Him through testing and discipline. It’s how we grow. It’s how we learn to depend on Him as our only God, our only source of meaningful help, our only source of hope. 

Hebrews 12:6 tells us that, “...the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.” So, maybe the first reason this account of Abraham and Isaac is in the Bible is to warn all of us who follow the God of Israel ultimately revealed in Christ that there will be times when God will test our faith, when we will be called out of our comfort zones, when we will have to grow up in our faith.

You know what happens next. Abraham takes Isaac to the region called Moriah, to a place that God was going to show him, carrying all that he would need to sacrifice his son. 

Moriah is mentioned only twice in the Bible, here and in 2 Chronicles 3:1, which recounts something that happened centuries after the events of today’s lesson. Take a look at that passage now, if you would (page 300 in the sanctuary Bibles): “Then Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to his father David. It was on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite, the place provided by David.” 

When the temple in Jerusalem was built by its third king, it was at the very place where Abraham took Isaac in our first lesson. God directed Abraham to the spot where, for centuries, believers in God would go to connect with God, offering sacrifices for their sins, their thankfulness, their joy. 

I think that that’s the second reason that this account of Abraham and Isaac is in there. God had set aside that very spot to be the place where sacrifices of faith would be made to Him. Centuries later, of course, the need for those sacrifices would be eliminated when God sacrificed His Son on a cross. But for many centuries, Moriah was to be a site of sacrifice for God’s people.

I believe that there’s another important reason for the inclusion of this difficult text in Scripture. Please look at verse 7: “Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, ‘Father?’ ‘Yes, my son?’ Abraham replied. ‘The fire and wood are here,’ Isaac said, ‘but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Abraham answered, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.’...” 

Please look at Hebrews 11:17-19 (page 844). This passage is part of a New Testament chapter called, “the faith hall of fame.” The preacher says: “By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, ‘It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.’ Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.” 

When Abraham took Isaac to Moriah, he did so knowing that even if Isaac’s life was taken, God is the God of new life, the God of resurrection. 

The impossible thing that God had commanded of Abraham was designed to deepen Abraham’s faith. 

It’s like when Jesus commands that you and I be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We know that we can’t be perfect; but when confronted by that command, in our helplessness, we learn to trust that God can impart His perfection and power to those who surrender to Him. 

By faith, Abraham understood that not even death is an impediment to the God you and I are privileged to know through Jesus Christ. Abraham knew that God can give back life to the dead. 

In Christ, we know that too. And that, in turn, can give us the freedom to live each day without fear. 

Christians are like people who watch a really frightening movie, but have been told before going to the theater how it’s all going to turn out. The scary parts are still scary. Our hearts will still pound at some scenes. Our palms will sweat. We’ll wonder how we’re going to make it through. But we know that in the end, everything is going to be all right. This is a reality for all who believe in Jesus Christ.

That’s a third important reason our first lesson is in the Bible. But there is fourth and, I think, most important reason. Verse 11: “...the angel of the Lord [in the Old Testament, this phrase can mean the very voice or visage of God] called out to him from heaven, ‘Abraham! Abraham!’ ‘Here I am,’ he replied. ‘Do not lay a hand on the boy,’ he said. ‘Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’” Then, in verse 16, we read: “‘I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.’”

Listen: Because Abraham had not withheld what was most important to Him, God was able to give what was most important to Him. 

What good and perfect gifts from God are we missing out on because we’re withholding our lives from Him? 

When, by faith, we yield control over our lives to God, we’re ready to receive the new life, the constant help, and the eternal hope that God gives to all with faith in Christ. 

God didn’t ultimately require Abraham to sacrifice His son. 

The sacrifice of Isaac would have done nothing but bring grief and loss to Abraham and the human race. 

But Abraham passed God’s test by his willingness to give his son to God. 

What might God be asking us to be willing to surrender to Him in order to know God and His blessings, to be God’s blessings to others? Lent may be a good time for us to ask that question of ourselves and of God in prayer.

Abraham’s test is one that God Himself would later pass...painfully, but ultimately triumphantly. Paul writes of God giving His Son in Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare [some translations say, did not withhold] his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” 

The Lord who provided a ram for sacrifice to Abraham and Isaac on that day long ago provides the lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world for all who dare surrender their all to Christ alone. 

It’s to point us to this fact that, I believe, among other reasons, this passage is in the Bible.

This is a difficult passage. I can’t explain everything about it. 

It would make my life as a Christian and as a pastor a lot easier if I didn’t have to wrestle with it, if God would just eliminate it from His Word, the Bible. 

But God never promised us easy lives. 

Or lives in which we were always in control. 

Instead, in Jesus Christ, God promised us new lives, lives filled with His blessings even in the midst of things we can’t understand or control here and now and then, beyond death, lives filled with perfect fellowship with Him and others in eternity for all who, like Abraham and Isaac, dare to surrender to Him. 

Genesis 22:1-18 remains in our Bibles. May we glorify and thank God for the truths we can understand in these verses even as we wrestle with the mysteries in them that we will never understand this side of heaven. Amen

Why We Worship

[Shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Philippians 2:1-13
True story of a boy named Chad: One day Chad came home from school and told his mother that he wanted to make Valentine’s Day cards for his classmates. His mother wished that she could convince him to forget the idea. Chad’s classmates were always putting him down, picking him last for baseball at recess, and laughing at him. But Chad was insistent; he wanted to make those Valentine’s cards for his classmates. So, Chad’s mom bought the construction paper and the crayons and for three nights he worked hard on making the cards: Thirty five cards, one for each classmate!

On Valentine’s Day, Chad was excited! He carefully picked up the cards, put them in a bag, and ran out the door. Certain that he would be disappointed that his classmates hadn’t remembered him with Valentine’s Day cards, Chad’s mother baked his favorite cookies and had them waiting for the moment he got home from school.

At the usual time, she heard the other children laughing and talking as they walked toward their houses. Behind them all, walking by himself was Chad. It broke her heart to see him. But when he came through the door, there was a spring in his step, even though she could see that, unlike the other kids, Chad wasn’t holding a bag full of Valentine’s cards. Choking back tears, she announced that she had his favorite cookies and some milk for him. But Chad didn't seem to hear. His face was glowing and all he could say was, “Not a one...not a one.” Now, his mother thought she would cry. But then Chad told her, “I didn’t forget a one...not a single one!”

Today, I want to talk with you about worship.

By worship, I don’t mean just what we do on Sunday mornings. Worship is something that we do with our whole lives. And it begins not with our words or our songs or our offerings.

It begins with our attitudes, with the thoughts, actions, and feelings that we allow to be the controlling motifs of our lives. Chad could have been resentful. After all, once again, he had been overlooked and undervalued. Instead, he took a different attitude, the attitude of a servant who isn’t looking out for himself, but for others.

This is the very attitude that the first-century preacher and evangelist Paul commends in our second Bible lesson for today. Take a look at it in our Celebrate insert. Quoting from what had by that early point in the Church’s history, already become a valued worship song, Paul tells the followers of Jesus in the Greek city of Philippi:

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. [And then Paul points out that this reflects an attitude, the very attitude Jesus had while living here on earth:] Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, ...though he was in the form of God, [Jesus] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Worship, real worship, is something that the Christian is called to offer every moment of every day. Worship is a life lived in gratitude for the new life God gives to all with faith in Jesus Christ. In our worship, we constantly express thanks for the new life that Jesus has gained through His death and resurrection for all who repent for sin and entrust their lives to Him.

The word worship, is the descendant of a compound word from Old English, worth-ship. Lives of worship convey the worthiness of Jesus Christ. People who worship God in Jesus Christ say, “This Jesus is the most important Person, presence, power, and force in my life! I give every part of me to Him, because He has given His whole self for me.”

When we gather for community worship on Sunday mornings, we do so for several important reasons.

First and foremost, we worship together because the God we know through Jesus is really worthy of being honored and praised by His people. But we need to be reminded of how much we have to be grateful for.

It’s so easy to fall into ingratitude because we tend to take things for granted. When I was about six years old, my grandparents bought a wooden table and chair set for my sister, Betsy. She used to have tea parties for her dolls with it.

One day, I got the idea that a friend and I could put the table and chairs to better use! I decided to take them to my buddy’s house down the street. So, I found some rope in the garage and, keeping the table upright, I tied two of the legs to the back of my tricycle. With the extra rope, I tied the wooden chairs to the top of the table. My cargo safely secured, I pulled my trike out into the middle of the street and headed for my friend’s house.

Until that point, my mother had no idea what I’d been up to. But with the legs of the table scratching, dragging, and bumping on the pavement, she heard the noise and ran to the door. Then I heard a noise. It was my mother’s voice. “Mark James Daniels, stop this minute!”

After forcing me to help her carry the table and chairs back to our house and before meting out my punishment, my mother asked me what on earth I had been thinking. “Your grandparents spent good money to give this gift to your sister! What made you think you had the right to do that?”

Those words reminded me to never take gifts for granted, especially gifts that resulted from others’ sacrifices. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, sacrificed Himself on the cross and was raised from death by God that Father. Jesus did that for you! This, the most incredible act of self-giving love imaginable, was done for us, not because we deserved anything good, but so that all of us who deserve death for our sins can, if we repent and believe in Jesus, have life with God for eternity!

Sometimes we take Christ and our salvation for granted. In weekly worship, we remind each other of how great and awesome God’s gifts to us really are. We remind each other that a sacrifice of such infinite grace is worthy of the surrender of our whole selves to the God we know in Jesus.

Second, we worship to help us hold onto the God of the Bible alone. Life and a bad-news world seems intent on tearing us away from God.

But the confessions of the Lutheran movement, the constituting documents of our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the constitution of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church all confess that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are to be the yardstick against which all our decisions and actions are to measured.

While we don’t always practice what we preach, we Lutherans believe in the Bible not because the Bible is magical. We believe in the Bible because the Holy Spirit has taught us there is something God-inspired, God-breathed about the Bible. God is invested in these words He gave to finite, imperfect human beings. For over five-hundred years, we Lutherans have believed that the Bible is like no other book because of its unique and life-changing witness, from Genesis to Revelation, of the God of justice and grace we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.

We engage in public worship on Sunday mornings and at other times to hear God’s Word and to help us all to hold onto the God of the Bible, the God we meet in Jesus, for all our hope, inspiration, and encouragement.

Finally, we worship together to stir each other to live like Jesus, lives not lived for ourselves, but for others. That kind of life doesn’t make sense to many people you may meet. But you and I know differently.

Think of it like this. If you were billionaire Warren Buffet, how giving could you afford to be? The answer: Very giving! The fact is that is no matter what we may go through in this life, no matter how much of a success or a failure this world may see us as being, the baptized believer in Jesus Christ who repents and trusts in Christ is wealthy beyond all reckoning.

Believers in Jesus have an eternity of riches. Like Paul, writing in the New Testament book of Romans, we can say, “[God] who did not withhold His Son, but gave Him for all of us [on the cross], will He not with Him also give us everything else?”

How generous, how loving, how compassionate can we be toward others when we know that nothing can separate us from the love of the God we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus? Very generous. Very loving. Very compassionate. When we worship together, we’re reminded how much we’re loved…and how much we can love others as a result.

Worship is to be the Christian’s way of life. We worship together each Sunday because we know how worthy God is of our honor and praise. We worship to help us to hold onto the Good News of the God Who is for us even in the midst of a world that never seems to tire of feeding us bad news. And we worship God to inspire one another to live not for ourselves, but for the purposes of God, for the good of others who need the eternity of blessings that we followers of Jesus already have!

Worship is the work of God’s servants who, certain that they belong to God for all eternity, can give themselves utterly to the love of God and love of neighbor. As we worship God together and apart, may God help us to be faithful servants of our loving God. Amen

The story of Chad, originally told by Pastor Dale Galloway, is recounted by Chuck Swindoll, in his book, Improving Your Serve.