Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study of Acts, Chapter 14

 

Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study of Acts, Chapter 8

Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study of Acts, Chapter 1

Hear, Then Scatter

Pentecost Thoughts: Learning to Speak with One Another

During the pandemic, we're celebrating online Holy Communion synchronously with members of our congregation. This evening, I read Psalm 51, David's great psalm of repentance, and a portion of the Biblical account of the first Christian Pentecost, Acts 2:1-4. Then, I shared the thoughts contained in the video below.

Below that yet, you'll find the Malcolm Guite video I mention.

How do I live in God's Kingdom TODAY?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Treat others with simple decency.

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

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

For Christ and the Gospel, the Church and Clergy need to stay out of politics

I tweeted this about an hour ago:

“Now, at long last, will my fellow Christian clergy get out of politics? Instead of playing for worldly power and dirtying the Church’s reputation, let’s do our job: proclaim Christ and make disciples!”

I speak as one who, thirteen years ago, made the mistake of running for public office while serving as a pastor. While I was always quick to say that I was not a “Christian candidate” or that I knew what God’s politics (I don’t believe there is such a thing) was, running was a terrible risk.

Why was it a risk?

Because it risked alienating people from Christ, the Gospel, and the Church when people heard a pastor advocating particular political ideas.

No political idea is worth losing the chance to commend Christ’s saving gospel, which is the only way to forgiveness of sins and life with God. Nothing is important as that.

If I’m going to offend people, I want to do it by lovingly lifting up Christ, “the way, and the life, and the truth” (John 14:6).

I've written before that there are exceptional circumstances when the Church and its clergy will feel called to speak up about political issues. This applies especially when one feels that injustices are being committed. But such speaking should never be done in the service a political party or candidate, so as to avoid subordinating the gospel message to a human message or a human being.

To subordinate anyone or anything to Christ and His gospel is to engage in idolatry, a violation of God's First Commandment: "You shall have no other gods before Me."

I pray fellow clergy and church bodies, both politically right and left, will stop playing politics and instead proclaim Jesus Christ!

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

Crystal Cathedral: Cautionary Tale for Christ's Church

This week, I've attended Lutheran Week, the annual family reunion of the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) that includes the gathering of the Women of the NALC, the Braaten-Benne Theological Lectures, the NALC Mission Festival, and the NALC's Convocation. All in all, it's a wonderful "tradition" in this five year old denomination with its commitment to four core values:

• Christ-centered (We believe that people are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone.)
• Mission-driven (We believe that Jesus has sent us to go and make disciples of all nations.)
• Traditionally-grounded (We reject presentism that presumes wisdom from past generations of Christian history must be automatically wrong or suspect.)
• Congregationally-focused (We aren't waiting for our denominational leadership to give us permission to do the ministries to which God's Holy Spirit may be calling us and the denominational apparatus exists to facilitate the ministries of the local congregation.)

It's exhilarating to be part of a denomination devoted to the authority of God's Word over faith, lives, and practices. Exhilarating too, is the NALC's commitment to making, forming, and empowering believers to enjoy personal relationships with Christ through Christ's body, the Church, and to carry Christ into the world!

Last night, we had a free evening and the four of us from Living Water Lutheran Church who are attending Luther Week decided to take the 1.2 mile walk to what was once The Crystal Cathedral of Garden Grove, California. The name was given to what had formerly been Garden Grove Community Church, a congregation of the Reformed Church of America, founded by the late Robert Schuller, after the congregation--with lots of financial help from viewers of Schuller's Hour of Power broadcast--erected a building designed by architect Philip Johnson.

There were rumors for years that the Crystal Cathedral was a financially overextended institution, less invested in being a congregation making disciples in its community than in keeping an institution with a large TV studio afloat. After Schuller retired and his son took over as pastor of the congregation, including offering the Biblical call to repentance and new life through faith in Jesus Christ, global support for the Crystal Cathedral shrank.

So did giving from around the world. The Crystal Cathedral's ministries fell apart, victim of a founder's ego and his consequent edifice complex. Schuller may well have had positive and godly motivations for his approach. But as his ministry fell apart with family members suing each other amid recriminations and taking sides, the Crystal Community Church died.

But now, the six buildings will not become ignored or vandalized, like some oversized Sears store decaying before the forces of urban change.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange has purchased the campus, renaming it Christ Cathedral. I like the name, because it points to the only One Who can save us from sin, death, and futility, rather than to the architectural innovations involved in the design and erection of the building itself.

While the Crystal Cathedral sanctuary will not be fully remodeled for two years, other buildings are being used. We noted that in one building, a youth group was gathered, a group of adults were studying Scripture, and a choir rehearsed. One building has been dedicated to pastoral care.

It's exciting to see this place being repurposed by a Christian denomination. But the Crystal Cathedral is also a cautionary parable.

The first priority of Christ's Church is not to build empires or even impressive buildings. (In fact, there wasn't any such thing as a permanent church building structure in the Christian movement until the fourth-century AD.)

The Church is charged by Jesus with one mission only, to, in the power of the Holy Spirit, call people to become disciples of Jesus so that they can live each day with the freeing forgiveness of God and can look forward to an eternity with God. Buildings can be used as tools to facilitate that mission. But they are only tools, not ends. To think otherwise, is really faithless to Jesus Christ.

Below are some pictures I took on the Christ Cathedral campus last night.

To the left in the picture above is the frequently-televised "cathedral" itself. On the right, is the famed tower.

Here, a sign explains plans for turning Crystal Cathedral into Christ Cathedral. I wonder whether several nearby businesses will change their names, including the Crystal View Apartments and the Crystal Car Wash. 

This statue portrays Matthew 19:14, when Jesus said, "Let the children come to me."

I liked this shot showing the Prayer Tower, SoCal palm trees, and the moon clearly visible on a cool night. It's hard not to love southern California.

This statue portrays the Good Shepherd, which is how Jesus describes Himself in John 10:11-17.

This statue's subject is the flight to Egypt by Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus. You'll find that bit of history portrayed in Matthew's gospel.

This sculpture portrays Moses bringing the Ten Commandments given to him by God at Mount Sinai (Exodus)

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

Pastors: People Need Christ, Not Our Political Opinions

It saddens me to see so many Facebook and Twitter posts about politics by pastors.*

We Christian pastors have a much more important message to share with the world than our political opinions, no matter how righteous we may feel our opinions are.

And what's our more important message?

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son." (John 3:16-18)

We're to lift Christ up to the world--not a candidate, not a party, not a philosophy.

Jesus alone can deliver hope, peace, purpose, grace, forgiveness, justice, and life.

And when Jesus gives us these things, they come without defect, adulteration, strings, or term limits.

They're free gifts that belong to all who seek to turn from sin and trust in Jesus Christ each day--who believe in or trust in Him--here in this imperfect world with all its challenges and beyond death in a perfect eternity with the crucified and risen Jesus.

That's the message. And it never gets old. It's one of which we all need to be constantly reminded. And it can change the way we think, the way we raise our kids, the way we treat our neighbors, the ways we face life and death, and the way we live as citizens.

As a Christian, I want people to know and follow Jesus so that they can have life with Him now and in eternity.

As a pastor I don't want my personal political opinions--which could, after all, be wrong--to get in the way of that eternity-changing message getting through.

*In the interest of full disclosure, I have not always been so reticent about expressing myself politically. I even ran for the Ohio House of Representatives. I wish that I never had. Although there were no negative ramifications of my run of which I'm aware, as I've matured in my faith and as a pastor, I've concluded it was a wrong move. I do occasionally talk about the politics of politics and the history of politics--I've been a student my entire life and majored in Social Studies Education at Ohio State, I haven't publicly shared my opinions on issues, parties, or candidates for some time.

Never Be Afraid, Trust in Christ!

[This was shared during both worship services of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Galatians 1:11-24
Robert F. Kennedy once told the story of an out-of-power general who looked on a public demonstration against the government in power unfolding in the street below his apartments. His personal ambition was fired, looking on this as a chance to ride the waves of public opinion back into power. As he saw the angry protesters approaching the gates of the president’s palace, he turned to his valet and said, “Get my uniform! I must follow my people so I can lead them."*

Kennedy’s point was clear: Unlike that general, leaders do not follow.

And: People of deep beliefs do not alter their beliefs to suit the crowds or gain acceptance.

In the verse that immediately precedes the words of our second lesson for today, the apostle Paul tells the Galatian Christians (I’m reading from the English Standard Version): “If I were still trying to please [human beings], I would not be a servant of Christ.” 

A question that confronts every generation of Christians is this: Are we going to strive to please God or are we going to try to please human beings?

For the apostle Paul, writing to Christians tempted to alter the message of the gospel--the good news that God the Son died and rose to set sinners who repent for sin and believe in Him free from sin and death--the answer to that question is clear. Let’s take a look at what he writes in our second lesson, Galatians 1:11-24.

The first thing Paul underscores is that the gospel message and the Word of God, the Bible, that gives witness to it, are not human inventions. Look at what he says in verse 11: “But I make known to you, brethren [and sisters], that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man.”

In other words, the gospel about Jesus Christ is a truth from God, not something that a bunch of delusional people made up. Jesus of Nazareth was a real human being Who claimed also to be God and, according to those who followed Him, performed miracles, died on a cross, and rose from the dead.

If the first followers of Jesus Christ wanted to pull a fast one on people, they would have made up a different religion from Christianity.

They would have created a religious system that appealed to people’s egos, assured them that if they took certain steps they could get things like their own planets. (Like Joseph Smith and the Mormon religion he created.)

Or they would have promised people if they followed a proscribed set of religious acts, they would live in paradise. (This is the legalistic path commended by Islam.)

Or they might have been like L. Ron Hubbard, who created Scientology as a money-making scheme.   

If they’d wanted a religion that could bring them money or power or popularity, they wouldn’t have made up the gospel. There was absolutely nothing to be gained by the first Christians by insisting that all human beings were sinners alienated from God--a message certainly not designed to win friends and influence people--whose only hope for forgiveness of sins, reconciliation with God, and a life with God that begins now and is perfected in the life to come, was to repent and believe in Jesus Christ alone.

That’s why the first Christians were persecuted, martyred, and marginalized. (That's also why many Christians in the world today are persecuted, martyred, and marginalized.)

The first Christians didn’t follow the crowds, but willingly gave their lives because they believed that Jesus Christ is, as He Himself claimed to be, the only way to life with God.

Paul goes on: “For I neither received [the gospel] from [human beings], nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Paul, like the other apostles and first Christians, came to receive the gospel through the direct intervention of Jesus Christ. And that's true of everyone who believes in Jesus Christ. Faith comes when we move beyond just hearing the gospel about Jesus and, in one way or another, Jesus encounters us and we willingly receive Him.

Now, in speaking of his encounter with Jesus, when Christ was revealed to him, Paul shouldn’t be lumped with people Joseph Smith, the inventor of Mormonism and claimed that it had come to him straight from God. Paul didn’t make up the gospel about Jesus. There were already people who believed in it; they were the people Paul was chasing down in Damascus, holding authority to bring Jews who believed in the gospel about Jesus back to Jerusalem, where they could be excommunicated from Jewish life and maybe face worse. (Like the first Christian martyr, Stephen.)

Paul knew the gospel before he went to Damascus. He knew it at an intellectual level, just as many people who occupy church pews know it. They can recite The Apostles’ Creed and John 3:16 by heart. They’ve heard the gospel many times. But they haven’t received it.

Years ago, I got a phone call from a man who said he was dying. He could no longer leave his house. But as he sat in his home, he remembered hearing the gospel about Jesus when he was a child. He wanted to repent and be assured of the forgiveness of sins. He wanted to receive the good news of Jesus. He wanted to know Jesus, to have a revelation of Jesus. So, he asked if I would come to his home and teach him more about Jesus. We met several times in a short period of time, because we knew he likely would be dying soon. On about our third visit, he asked me, “Could I be baptized?” After more than seventy years of hearing the gospel and knowing what it was, he finally received Jesus. With childlike faith, knowing that he wouldn’t survive the disease that was ravaging his body, he believed in the gospel that had been revealed in Jesus Christ and doesn’t come from human beings.

In our lesson, Paul goes on to explain how the gospel about Jesus turned his life upside down. Rarely does Paul present so much autobiographical information. His focus is on sharing Christ so that believing in Him, people can have eternal life with God. But he tells some of his own story here in order to show how the gospel of God’s grace changes enemies of God, which all of us are at birth, to children of God. Paul writes:

For you have heard of my former conduct in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it. And I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries in my own nation, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but I went to Arabia, and returned again to Damascus.

Paul had been a young man on the ladder of success within Judaism. He was learned, zealous, able. But God upset whatever plans Paul may have had for his life. God, in fact, already had made plans for Paul when he was in his mother’s womb: to preach the Gospel to non-Jews, Gentiles, people he had been taught to disdain, maybe even hate. But when the risen and ascended Jesus revealed Himself to Paul, Paul says he didn’t confer with human beings about it. He simply believed and followed and obeyed.

As you know if you remember Luke’s account of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus which he presents in the book of Acts, Paul did go to Ananias on a street called Straight in Damascus, where Paul was baptized, given sight again, and his call to preach was confirmed. But, according to Paul, while he already knew the gospel before he went to Damascus, now he believed in it. He received the gift of new life by faith in Jesus Christ.

And, Paul says, he didn’t dilly-dally. He did what God called him to do: preach the good news of Jesus. There has been some speculation that when Paul when to “Arabia,” he was on a retreat, spending time alone with God in preparation for his ministry. Martin Luther didn’t believe that for a second. In his Lectures on Galatians, Luther says: “What else was [Paul] to do but preach Christ?” Paul, because of his faith in Christ, set out immediately to do what Christ had called and commanded him to do!

Not all of us who claim faith in Jesus Christ are called to be apostles to the Gentiles like Paul, but we are all called to be witnesses for Christ. “You will be My witnesses,” Jesus tells us.

Many times through the years, Christians have told me that they feel completely inadequate to witnessing for Christ. They say they don’t have the training for it.

But here’s the thing: You don’t need training to tell others about the most important Person in your life! You don't need training to be a witness for Christ if you have received the gift of faith in Him, any more than you need training to tell people about your favorite restaurant, baseball team, or TV show.

If Christ has revealed Himself to you as your loving God and Savior and you believe in Him, the Holy Spirit will give you the words you need to say and the actions you need to do to live out your call as His witness. In another place, Paul says, “I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me.”

When Martin Luther challenged the hierarchies of Church and State with the pure gospel of Jesus Christ, he was asked, "Who are you, Luther?" He said that he was only Luther, but he spoke with the authority of the gospel behind what he said and it was up to the hierarchies to prove that he didn't.

Luther also said that a simple peasant armed with the Word of God had more authority than any pope, bishop, cardinal, or priest without the Word of God.

You have that same authority when you know Christ as your God and Savior. You have the same authority to share the gospel that brings life with God to all who believe it that Paul had! We can say with Paul, writing in Romans: “I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation...”

In verses 18 to 23, Paul underscores that the gospel and his authority to preach it and teach it had not come from human beings, but from God. He went to Jerusalem not to get the approval of the first Christians there; Paul was confident that he already had God’s approval for the gospel he preached. He went to seek unity for the Church and to assure himself that the Church in Jerusalem was actually preaching and teaching the gospel, the good news that sinful human beings are saved by God’s grace through our faith in Jesus.

When Paul got to Jerusalem, he learned that Christians there who had never seen him, knew about him. They knew that God had taken a man who had been a religious terrorist and through God’s grace, turned him into not just a believer, but a preacher of God’s truth. Paul writes in the last verse: “And they glorified God in me.”

Now, Paul wrote these verses near the beginning of Galatians to underscore that, while he was nothing in Himself, the gospel had given him authority. When we believe in Christ, we have authority too, an authority that comes from the crucified and risen Jesus to live with confidence and hope as people of God.

When someone says to you, “Isn’t there room for Buddha or Mohammad or atheists in the gospel? Isn’t there room for the ways people think and live today in the gospel?,” you can say, “The God made flesh in Jesus Christ loves Buddhists and Muslims, He loved Buddha and Mohammad, and He loves the people He made who show contempt for Him by willfully going their own ways rather than seeking to follow God’s way. The gospel says that Jesus alone is the way, and the truth, and the life. It says that He died for the sins of the whole world and offers new life to all who will submit to the crucifixion of their old selves and rely on Christ alone to raise them to be who God made them to be. There is room for everyone in the gospel of Christ. But there’s no room for Christ in the life of anyone who won’t let the gospel take hold of them and make them children of God.”

When we share our faith in Christ with others without boastfulness or unkindness or arrogance, we need not hang our heads in shame or be embarrassed. Even if the world rejects faith in Christ as passe, we know better. We belong to the Alpha and the Omega, the master of time and eternity, the Lord of heaven and earth, the author of life and the conqueror of death! We belong to the King of kings Who died for our sins and rose from the dead to tear open eternity for all who will follow Him.

Never be afraid.

Never be afraid!

Never be ashamed!

Never be embarrassed to lift up Christ, the Name above all names, the only name given to us by which anyone can be saved!

You may not please everyone when you follow Christ, but you will please the only one Whose opinion matters, the God we know in Jesus Christ. Amen

*I told this story from memory. I believed that Kennedy recounted it in the memorial edition of President John F. Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage. But when I checked my copy, I didn't find it. I now believe that Robert Kennedy told the story in the preface to Thirteen Days, his memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since I no longer own a copy of that book, I couldn't check on it. But the story, conveyed here in its essence, is one that has stuck with me since I first read it in 1969, one year after RFK's death.

The Time for Cute is Over: The World Needs Jesus!

The time for cute is over.

That's the thought that crossed my mind and came out of my mouth during a recent breakout session with Lutheran colleagues from southern Ohio.

One member of our group shared the impact on him of some polling he'd read about done among people leaving Easter Sunday worship services. A high number of them, people who had presumably just heard the good news of Easter--that God the Son, Who had taken on human flesh and died on a cross, taking humanity's rightful punishment for sin, and then, on Easter, rose from the dead in order to give all who turn from sin and believe in Him everlasting life with God--had been proclaimed, sung about, and shouted, could not articulate what Easter was about.

Truth is, what my colleague shared did not surprise me, not because I think that the average worshiper on Easter Sunday is stupid.

The problem is that we who are called by God through the Church to preach and teach about Jesus routinely make the wrong assumption. We forget that the ground has shifted beneath us.

In North America and Europe, we live in a post-Christian culture. But we assume that most people who pass through the doors of our church buildings know the content of the Gospel--the good news--about Jesus and the new life He offers freely to those who believe in Him. Our job, we assume is to simply remind people of this gospel in compelling, entertaining, painless (cute) ways, being careful not to take up so much time that people are late for the Sunday brunches at local restaurants.

But cute isn't working any more.

Churches are losing membership, my denomination (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) more rapidly than any other denomination in the United States. And, according to an article in last week's TIME magazine by Jon Meacham, Americans claiming no religious affiliation at all has risen from 15% to 20% in the past five years.

While mainline churches have sought to present a message indistinguishable from a corrupt and failing culture and while many evangelical churches have watered down the Gospel to be culture-current and both strains of Christian faith in America have often followed the siren song of political engagement rather than Gospel proclamation, Americans have tuned the Church out.

And who can blame them? If we sound like everybody else, just the praying wings of this or that philosophy or political party, who needs us or the message we offer?

After hearing about the polling of Easter worshipers who didn't know what Easter was about, my colleague decided that his preaching had to change, starting on Easter Sunday, 2012. "You know what I preached about last Easter?" he asked us. "Easter!"

That stood in contrast to reports I'd heard about the sermon of another mainline Christian pastor (not Lutheran) on that same Easter. She had shown pictures of Easter bunnies and talked about not how Christ can make the life of those who surrender their lives and wills to Him brand new, but about how Christians needed to be good people and make the world new by their good works. That isn't the Gospel! The Gospel is God-centered, Christ-dependent. 

It turns out my colleague wasn't alone in sensing God's call to get back to the basics and to forget about being entertaining, culture-current, or cute. That became clear as the rest of us began sharing.

"I just finished a sermon series looking at the basics of Christian faith through Luther's Small Catechism," said another one of our group.

"We've been doing a Bible study based on The Augsburg Confession," said another.

Two had done adult Sunday School class on basic Bible teachings.

I offered that our adult Sunday School class was looking at the Biblical underpinnings of The Augsburg Confession, a basic statement of Lutherans' understanding of Christ and the Christian faith, and that I would soon be doing a sermon series on the same theme.

No bishop or church council had told any of us to take this back to basics approach. It seemed to me that this strange convergence in our thinking, born of prayer and study, had the same source: God the Holy Spirit was telling us to forget about cute and simply proclaim the Good News about Jesus, to assume nothing, to take nothing for granted.

To tell you the truth, this moment of desperation and of wrestling with why the Church is needed and how Christ is essential for every human being, is exhilarating and liberating. In the past few years, my preaching has changed. For most of my twenty-eight years as a pastor, my sermon preparation has, to some extent, been weighed down by two questions, the very asking of which, was limiting: How can I get their attention? How can I make it palatable?

Now though, the Holy Spirit seems to be guiding me and others who want to share the Gospel to ask a different question: What do people need to hear?

That very question liberates the pastor from being a marketer to become a preacher and teacher.

It also drives me to God's Word for direction and to God's Spirit for wisdom more than ever before.

And the feedback I get tells me that, on the whole, people hunger for this kind of back to basics approach. People need to hear the truth about God the Father, God the Son Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit. They need to hear the truth about the Bible, the sacraments, repentance, faith, salvation, discipleship, loving God, loving neighbor, the Ten Commandments, sin, evil, the devil, original sin, and being set free from sin and death by God's grace given through faith in Jesus Christ. A back to basics approach fills these needs for God's truth.

According to that article by Meacham, it isn't just we Lutheran Christians in southern Ohio being led by God's Spirit in this way. He says that this back to basics approach is one of the ten big ideas reshaping American life right now:

In a classic attempt to turn adversity to advantage, Christian leaders who once assumed a cultural dominance...are now arguing for a double-down strategy. Rather than softening the Gospel message to make it more marketable to America skeptical of institutions...what draws real energy among the faithful is a renewed commitment to what Christians call the Great Commission, the words the resurrected Jesus spoke to his apostles at the end of Matthew: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.'" [See this translation of the passage, Matthew 28:19-20.]

In His famous conversation with the Jewish teacher Nicodemus, Jesus says:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God." (John 3:16-18) 

The compassion that God has for those who don't yet know Christ or the Good News about Him is undoubtedly behind the back to basics push many of us are feeling as we pray and read God's Word these days.

It appears that Pope Francis I, newly elected head of the Roman Catholic Church, is getting the same message from the Holy Spirit. In his informal homily before the College of Cardinals on the day after his election to the papacy, Francis said:

We can walk as much as we want, we can build many things, but if we do not profess Jesus Christ, things go wrong. We may become a charitable NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of the Lord. When we are not walking, we stop moving. When we are not building on the stones, what happens? The same thing that happens to children on the beach when they build sandcastles: everything is swept away, there is no solidity. When we do not profess Jesus Christ, the saying of Léon Bloy comes to mind: "Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil." When we do not profess Jesus Christ, we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness.

Amen!

The time for cute is over. 

[UPDATE: As I was writing this piece, thinking of all the people who need Jesus in their lives and how each minute that passes without our plainly proclaiming the Gospel about Jesus puts those people's eternal lives in jeopardy, lines from Bob Dylan's song, All Along the Watchtower kept coming back to me: "...let us not speak falsely now, the hour is getting late." Jesus is what people need from the Church and from Christians. No one else will give Him to them.]

Are Christian Conservatives the Big Losers of the 2012 Election?

A New York Times article asks, "Are Christian conservatives the big losers of the presidential election?"

My answer is, I don't know. 

But I do think that we who are charged with the proclamation of the Gospel should refrain from being identified with particular political philosophies. 

When we do so, we risk creating a false image of Jesus, turning Him into an idol made in our own images. 

We also risk conveying the false impression to the world that God endorses a particular political point of view, alienating people from God unnecessarily.

The true Christian message will alienate people. Bank on it. Jesus said so more than once. Check out His words in Matthew 10:35-38, for example.
 
But unless a government commands us to sin or to engage in idolatry, such as happened in Nazi Germany or happens in despotic states today, there shouldn't be a whiff of politics in what the Church or Christian leaders say. 

Individual Christians should be encouraged to be engaged in politics, whatever their philosophies. But the cause of Christ is too important to be made the hostage of politics.

My own denomination has made Jesus subordinate to liberal politics. 

Other Christian leaders have portrayed Jesus as marching to a conservative politics.

Both notions are lies. 

According to Pastor Ed Stetzer, an old saying has it right: When you mix politics and religion, you get politics. Politics is important. But only the faith commended by the Bible--faith that God in the flesh, Jesus Christ has died and risen so that all who turn from sin and believe in Him are reconciled with God, for now and for eternity--can change our lives.

And when the God we know in Christ changes our relationship with Him from enmity to friendship, He also will begin to transform the decisions we make and the reasons we make them. That includes political decisions. 

Will God make us more conservative or more liberal? 

The answer to that is probably, yes. 

When you dare to put yourself in the hands of the sovereign God of the universe, give Him the freedom to take charge of your whole life, there's no way of predicting where He will lead you. It makes me think of the risen Jesus' words to Peter on how Peter's life would be changed by following Him: "Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go” (John 21:18). 

Christians know that we are not in control. And that's a good thing, hard as it may sometimes be. 

That's what we mean when we Christians pray subversively, as Jesus taught us to pray, "Hallowed be Thy Name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

Our nation might not be in the state it's in, selfishness elevated to a paramount position, if the Church and Christian leaders were more committed to proclaiming the Gospel and less concerned about seeing their preferred candidates elected to office. 

After all, we could be wrong about who to vote for. 

But we will never be wrong in commending Jesus, "the Way, and the Truth, and the Life"!

So, I come back to the Times' original question. Were conservative Christians the big losers in last Tuesday's election? I hope so. 

I hope equally fervently that liberal Christians were the big losers last Tuesday.

I hope that anyone who would dare to take a political position and claim, "Thus saith the Lord," got burnt so badly that they'll turn in repentance to the Lord, seek His forgiveness for trivializing the death and resurrection of Jesus, and pray that God will help all of us who bear Christ's Name to proclaim the Gospel in its purity for as long as God gives us breath.

The gospel message we are called to share is too important to be intermingled with our own political notions. We owe Christ more than that.

"Bold Lutheran" Need Not Be an Oxymoron!

[This is from my devotions for the Saint Matthew Church Council this evening.]

Tonight, I'd like to look at three passages of Scripture. The first is John 14:1. It comes from the same section of John as our gospel lessons for the past few Sundays have come. It's what scholars call the Farewell Discourse, words spoken by Jesus in the presence of the twelve apostles on the night of His arrest. In John 14:1, Jesus says:

"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in Me."

Martin Luther had some especially important things for Lutherans to hear about these words of Jesus.

First, Luther said:

...if we Christians stay close to [Christ], we know that He speaks to us.

Those who trust that Jesus is God and Savior and is risen and is living, seated at the right hand of God the Father, know that, to this day, Jesus speaks to us.

• Jesus, first of all and most assuredly speaks to us in the only book in the world the contents of which were breathed into its writers by the Holy Spirit: the Bible. 
• And, Jesus speaks to us in what one pastor calls "whispers," bits of guidance, messages to the heart, that the Holy Spirit speaks to the minds of those who follow Jesus. (Those "whispers" will always be consistent with what we know of Jesus from the Bible, by the way. Whispers that urge us to sin aren't from God!)
• Jesus also speaks to us through the Sacraments: Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, the "visible words" that have been instituted by Christ, involve physical elements (bread and wine or water), and bring the forgiveness of sins. 

Luther then says this of Jesus' words in John 14:1:

We can be sure of this: a sorrowful, timid, and frightened heart doesn't come from Christ.

Wow! We Lutherans need to especially latch onto the truth in those words. That's because when it comes to living our faith out loud or sharing the Good News of new life that can belong to anyone who turns from sin and believes in Jesus, we Lutherans tend to be timid.

Words on a T-shirt I saw not long ago give a good characterization of we Lutherans:

I'm proud to be a Lutheran...but not too proud.

I want to tell you that our hesitation about letting the light of Jesus shine from us and about telling others the Good News about Jesus does not come from Jesus or from the Holy Spirit.

Our hesitation is learned and cultural, not spiritual. It's not of God!

A second passage of Scripture I want to look at underscores this fact. It's 2 Timothy 1:6-7. These verses come from the second letter we have in the New Testament that was written by the apostle Paul to a young pastor named Timothy. Paul writes:

For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline. 

All Christians have the Holy Spirit living within them. The Spirit is sometimes portrayed in Scripture as a burning flame. Paul says that we need to rekindle this flame, stoke the fire of passion and belief in Christ within us.

We do this by daily contact with God, especially by praying throughout our days about anything and everything, seeking God's help and guidance and praising Him, along with regularly reading and studying God's Word.

The Holy Spirit is not "a spirit of cowardice." The more we Christians rely on God, the more the Holy Spirit ignites and sustains our passion and makes us bold in sharing our faith with others.

We need to seek the help of God's Holy Spirit so that we can live with the same boldness and conviction shown by Paul in the book of Romans:

...I am not ashamed of the gospel [Paul writes]; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek [or Gentile, the non-Jew]. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, "The one who is righteous will live by faith."

May God's Holy Spirit fill us with boldness as we spread the good news of new life that belongs to those (and only to those) with faith in Jesus Christ!

It's Not ABOUT Us...the Gospel is FOR Us

Donavon Riley shares these thoughts from R. Scott Clark: 

The heart of the Gospel isn't about us. The heart of the Gospel is Christ for us (Christus pro nobis). This was the essence of Paul’s message: that Christ came for us, to do for us what we couldn't & wouldn't do. He obeyed. He was crucified. He was raised. He is ascended. He is returning. The medieval church turned the Gospel into a message about what Christ is doing in us, by grace, in sanctification & about what we must do to do our part in order to benefit: cooperate w/grace. The good news is that we have no part, not in this story. We’re recipient. We’re beggars; we’re not contributors to the story.