The Sermon of the Ashes

[Below is the live stream video of the Ash Wednesday worship service of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, along with the message shared during the service.]



Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Tonight, friends, Jesus tells us not to engage in religious activity that calls attention to us.

Also tonight, we have received the mark of the cross on our foreheads which, if we stop by a store or a filling station on the way home, will be noticed by everyone who sees us.

Are we violating the very commands Jesus gives us in tonight’s Gospel lesson? Let’s talk about that.

The Imposition of Ashes isn’t you being a religious show-off. It’s something else altogether.

As good Lutherans, you know that every sermon, in order for it to be faithful to God, must include both Law and Gospel.

Law and Gospel are the two ways speaks to us in His Word.

It’s God’s Law that convicts us of our sin, showing us that, from the moment we’re conceived, despite God’s good will for us, we are in rebellion against God and we are indifferent to others. This means that we deserve death, condemnation, and everlasting separation from God and from others.

It’s God’s Gospel that comes to us through the crucified and risen Jesus assuring us that, despite our sins, we are justified, made eternally right with God, because, by the power of God’s Spirit-borne Word, we believe Jesus Christ gave His sinless life to cover even our sins on a cross for us.

Paul summarizes the Gospel about Jesus Christ when he says in Romans: “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.” (Romans 3:28)

Because on this side of our own death and resurrection, when Jesus will call believers in Him from the dead to live with Him forever, we who have been made saints by God’s grace through faith in Christ will keep needing to hear God’s Law and Gospel again and again. As Martin Luther noted, “We need to hear the Gospel all the time because we forget it all the time.” And, as we forget that Gospel, we slip back into a reliance on our good deeds or personal goodness to save us. That course is the way to death.

We don’t receive ashes on our foreheads tonight in order to impress people.

Given current attitudes toward Christian faith, people who see us are more likely to think we’re weirdos than to be impressed with our spirituality or our devotion to Christ.

The ashes are meant to be a sermon to and for those of us who receive them and not for anyone who may see us wearing them.

But what is the content of this sermon in ashes?

After Adam had fallen into sin in the garden of Eden, God told him, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19, ESV)

This is the Law and God spoke it to us again tonight. Like Adam, we have failed to keep God’s Law or live with righteousness. We know this because of the Ten Commandments, the distillation of all of God’s moral law for us, which we constantly fail to obey.

And you never get so old or so advanced in the faith as to not need to be catechized again. So, let me do it for you once again tonight.

God says, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Yet, we’re constantly worshiping other things: youth, health, success, and so on, chasing after them as though they were the end-all and be-all, as they could justify our existences.

God says, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” Yet, even while using God’s name to pray for our needs and the needs of others, as well as to praise and thank God, we use His name as a punchline or to curse or swear or mislead others.

God says, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” a command all about gladly receiving the Word of God. But our Bibles often grow dusty. And we look at our watches on Super Bowl Sundays, wanting to be sure that the service won’t eat into our pre-pre-pre-game viewing.

God says, “Honor your father and your mother,” meaning to honor those in authority, yet we tend to believe that anyone in authority over us is a liar, a thief, an incompetent, or all of the above. Because we want to be God, we’re always sure we could do better than anyone else that God places in authority over us.

God says, “You shall not kill (or murder),” which Jesus says includes not just killing people physically, but also not killing them in psyche or spirit by denigrating them, berating them, or labeling them. We violate this command all the time, it seems!

God says, “You shall not commit adultery,” yet our brains are often a maelstrom of lustful thoughts.

God says, “You shall not steal,” yet we justify conniving to get something for nothing because, after all, “it’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

God says, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,” yet gossip is our favorite indoor sport.

God says, “You shall not covet,” yet our envy of others’ success, possessions, status, or achievements ruins our moods and our relationships with them and with God. I’ve seen more families destroyed by greed and resentment than by dishonoring parents, adultery, and theft combined!

When the world preaches a cheap gospel, telling us that God doesn’t really care if we heed His commands to love God or love our neighbor or to honor the will of God, the ash on our foreheads is a sermon from God telling us: This is who you are, a dust-bound sinner who can’t keep My Law and because you cannot keep My Law, you deserve damnation.

But there is Gospel–good news–in these ashes too!

The mark on your foreheads is meant to be in the form of the cross.

This is the part of the sermon meant to tell you that while there is nothing you can do to set yourself free of the death sentence you deserve for sin, Jesus Christ, God the Son, has already acted to set you free from that condemnation. Now and for all eternity!

As you’ve heard me say a zillion times before and I will keep saying it as long as I have breath in my body, when Jesus Christ said, “It is finished,” He meant it!

And He meant it for you.

Jesus took the punishment He didn’t deserve to spare us the punishment we do deserve.

Peter, a man who knew what it meant to be caught by God dead-to-rights in his sin and unrighteousness, declares, “Christ…suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.” (1 Peter 3:18)

And the apostle Paul who knew the power of the crucified Christ to save enemies of God and to save sinners from condemnation and to make them righteous in the eyes of God, says: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” (Romans 5:8-9)

And Jesus, Who would soon be going to His cross to win everlasting life for us, told His grieving friend Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die…” (John 11:25-26) That is what the cross means for us!

That smudgy cross on your forehead is the Gospel Word–the Good News Word–from God to you.

The psalmist wrote centuries before Jesus’ birth: “As a father has compassion on his children…[God] remembers that we are dust.” (Psalm 103:13-14)

What a promise! God grades us on a curve…the Christ curve…the grace curve.

There’s a great scene in the movie, Jesus of Nazareth. Simon Peter is portrayed of being very critical of Levi, Matthew, the tax collector. And in this telling of Jesus’ story, Jesus tells the parable of the prodigal son, the tale of the notorious sinner who comes back to the father. After telling it, Jesus looks at Peter, who begins to weep. Peter says, “Forgive me, Master. I’m just a stupid man.” He may as well have said, “I’m just dust.”

God never forgets that about us. He was the One Who formed you from dust. He is the One Who chose to give you life. And He’s the One Who chose to take on dust for Himself and go to a cross to save you from yourself. The cross on your forehead is a proclamation of the Gospel from Jesus’ cross for you!

Jesus Christ, God the Son, died and rose to set sinners free from condemnation and separation from God. We don’t have to do it with our little religious works that we try to tout during Lent. Things like, “I’m going to give up chocolate.” God doesn’t care if you give up chocolate!

God wants you! He wants you! And He saved you! The call of Lent is to turn as He calls you to follow Him and receive life from Him.

So, when the world, the devil, and our sinful selves want to preach only Law to us, damning us, discouraging us, miring us in hopelessness and futility, setting us off on some spiritual self-improvement program designed to prove ourselves worthy of God’s favor, an effort that will always fail, we can say with confidence and hope, “But Jesus Christ died for me. Jesus has done everything needed to make me righteous, to give me life, to make me commendable in the eyes of God. Because of Jesus and because I take refuge in Him alone as my God and Savior, when God looks at me, He doesn’t see my sins, failings, and unrighteousness; He sees only the sinless Jesus Who graciously covers me in His righteousness!”

This dust will live forever with God not because of anything I do or ever will do, but solely, completely, totally because of what Jesus has already done for me at the cross and the empty tomb! I have been saved by grace through faith in Christ alone. And I will be made holy, righteous, and acceptable to God by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone!

The ashes preach Law and Gospel to us. And the Gospel of salvation of new and everlasting life in Christ will have the final word over the lives and eternal destinies of all who acknowledge their sin and take trusting refuge in Jesus Christ! 

Ann and I bought our gravesites a few years ago. Our ashes will be buried at Sunset Cemetery, just west of Columbus. The thing I love about that is that the day I am raised, I am going to see all the people from the west side of Columbus I knew and loved and shared faith in Jesus with. And then I’m going to look you all up. And we will party for all eternity.

I pray that the sermon preached by the ashes on your forehead is one you hear tonight and always! Amen

Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study, The Biblical Background of The Small Catechism, Part 2

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Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study, The Biblical Background of The Small Catechism (#1)

 

[This is a picture of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. It was on the doors of this church building that Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on October 31, 1517, All Saints' Eve (Hallowed Evening, Hallowe'en) that unleashed the Reformation. I took this picture during our Reformation tour of Germany, on October 31, 2018.]

[This is not the actual door to which Luther attached the Theses, both because of the aging process and souvenir hunters. But this is where those doors were. Castle Church, Wittenberg, Germany.]

[This is the Town Church in Wittenberg. Luther preached here often.]

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What Are the Ten Commandments For? (Back to Basics: Revisiting the Catechism)

[This message was shared tonight as part of the Lenten midweek devotional series at Living Water Lutheran Church, Back to Basics: Revisiting the Catechism.]

Exodus 20:1-17
During these Wednesdays in Lent, we’re going back to the basics of Christian faith with Martin Luther’s Small Catechism as our guide. 

Luther wrote this catechism after he and his Reformation colleagues had visited the by then-Lutheran evangelical churches in Saxony soon after they were let go by the Roman Church. Luther and the other Reformation leaders wanted to see if the Gospel was being rightly proclaimed and the Sacraments--Holy Baptism and Holy Communion--were being rightly administered.

Luther was horrified by what they saw! He writes in the preface to the catechism, published in 1529: “[Most Christians, he said]...live like dumb brutes and irrational hogs. Now that the Gospel has come [through the Reformation], they have nicely learned to abuse all [the] freedom [of the Gospel] like experts.” 

You can’t be a Christian if you don’t know something of what the Bible teaches, what Christians believe. Apart from that, one’s Christianity may be habit or superstition, but it isn’t saving faith in Jesus Christ. 

To cast the light of God’s truth and the Gospel of new and everlasting life with God for all who repent and believe in Jesus, Luther wrote his catechism. It was composed of six chief parts, plus a table of duties for everyday tasks and living. Today, in our instruction, we tend to focus on only five of the chief parts: 

• The Ten Commandments 
• The Apostles’ Creed 
• The Lord’s Prayer 
• Holy Baptism 
• Holy Communion 

We talk about the content of the other article Luther included, one on confession, but in other contexts. Luther composed the catechism in a simple question-and-answer form and urged that believers review some section of it each day.

So, tonight, a quick overview of the Ten Commandments. (I urge you to read it for yourself this week.) 

The commandments were, of course, given by God to the people of Israel through Moses. In the Hebrew language in which the Old Testament was written, the Ten Commandments are Torah, or instruction or the way. These commandments are the ultimate expression of what theologians call God’s moral law. God gives moral laws elsewhere in the Old Testament; for example in the holiness code of Leviticus. But the Ten Commandments are the ultimate summation of God’s moral law, as valid today as when God first gave them to Moses.

There are other kinds of law in the Old Testament. Two other kinds, in fact. 

One is the ritual/sacrificial law. These are the laws and regulations surrounding the offering of sacrifices to God that include mandates on things like diet and feast days. But, of course, the need for sacrifices ended at the moment Jesus died on the cross. The New Testament book of Hebrews says, after referencing the constant sacrifices offered by priests at the Jerusalem temple that could never completely cover human sins, “But when this priest [Jesus] had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God…” (Hebrews 10:10-12) While reading about Old Testament ritual / sacrificial law helps us understand Jesus, unlike the moral law, it’s no longer necessary or valid. 

The third kind of law in the Old Testament is civil law. Ancient Israel functioned as a theocracy. The civil law God lays down in the Old Testament is like the laws we have today that are administered by courts and law enforcement. Obviously, no nation on earth is a theocracy. (Even the ones that claim to be.) So, those laws, while helping us understand God’s heart, aren’t valid any longer either.

But the moral law, as we see in the Ten Commandments, is forever valid. They express God’s unchanged and unchanging will for the human race. Jesus was referring to this moral law when He said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.:” (Matthew 5:17)

Wait, you might be thinking. We’re saved by God’s grace through our faith in Jesus Christ. Why do we need the moral law? Isn’t salvation a get-out-of-hell-free card? While it is true that God’s Law can’t save us from sin or death because none of us are capable of perfectly obeying it--only Christ does that, God has given us this law for three major reasons.

First, God gives us the law as a hedge to prevent all people, Christian or otherwise, from violating God or others. The Bible says that God’s law is “written on our hearts.” Every human being, though sinful by nature, knows the difference between right and wrong. And even the evilest person, when caught in some sin will try to justify it on the basis of the moral law that we all know. 

Second, God gives us the law as a mirror to show us that we are sinners in need of the forgiveness God makes available only in Jesus Christ. When I read the Ten Commandments and know, as Jesus tells us in the New Testament, that I violate them even when I think about doing them, I realize I need Jesus as my Savior. (See here and here.) The Law as a mirror of my soul drives me to repentance and new life through submission to Jesus. 

Third, God gives us the law as a guide for Christians. In them, God instructs us on how a Christian who wants to live out their gratitude for being saved by grace through faith in Jesus, can do so. When you realize that God has saved you from eternal separation from Him, you’re ready to hear God’s will for you. In the Ten Commandments, God says, “It’s within these gracious boundaries that the blessings of life with Me are experienced.”

In The Small Catechism, Luther penetrates to the underlying meaning of the commandments God gives to the human race He loves.

For example, when explaining the Eighth Commandment, ”You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,” Luther explains that this isn’t just about refraining from outright lies about others. “We should fear and love God,” he says, “so that we do not betray, slander, lie, or gossip about our neighbors, but defend them, speak well of them, and put the most charitable construction on all that they do.” 

He does the same thing with the Third Commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” Luther shows that with Christ’s death and resurrection, every day is holy, every day is a time to honor God and receive God’s Word. “We should fear and love God,” he says, “so that we do not despise His Word and the preaching of it, but acknowledge it as holy, and gladly hear and learn it.”

Someone has pointed out that what God has given to the world is the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Suggestions. But Luther shows that every one of the commandments was given to us by God to point us to Jesus, the One Who has obeyed the Law perfectly and won salvation and new life for the rest of us who don’t keep it perfectly. 

In them, God invites us to hold a mirror to our lives and, seeing the ways in which we don’t reflect Jesus living in us, to confess our sins in Jesus’ name and be reconciled again to God. 

Over the next week, I’d like to ask you to spend a few moments each day looking at each of the eleven sections of the catechism’s explanations of the Ten Commandments and their conclusion. That means that several days, you’ll look at two sections. That’s OK; they’re really short. 

If you don’t have a copy of the catechism, let me know; I’ll order one for you. 

You can also find several versions online. 

As you look at each command and its explanation, you might want to ask God, “What do you want me to confess, Lord? What new habit do you want me to incorporate into my life today?” 

Then, thank God for the gift of Jesus Who brings forgiveness of sin to all who confess their sin and believe in Him for both forgiveness and new and everlasting life with God. 

And, no longer a dumb brute or an irrational hog, be at peace with God and yourself. More on The Small Catechism next week.

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

You don't have to love. You get to love!

John 14:15-21
A renowned theologian made a confession to a group of people who were celebrating his career. “For forty years,” he said, “I’ve told people, ‘You’ve got to love.’ Now I realize that I’ve had it wrong. The message of Jesus is, ‘You get to love.’”

It’s so easy for us to get the message of Jesus wrong.

It’s so easy to become Christian Pharisees, turning Jesus into a law-giver, and boiling our faith down to being obedient to His command (and the entire Bible’s command) that we love God and love neighbor.

But how confident are we of our ability to be perfectly obedient to God’s law of love? I hope not very confident.

Otherwise, the confession of sin we offered to God together at the beginning of worship today was a meaningless exercise.

Even more seriously, if you and I are confident in our ability to obey God’s law of love, we’re placing our trust in ourselves and not in God.

“Wait a minute,” you might say, “I’m not such a bad person. I do a fair job of loving God and loving my neighbor...to a point.”

To those who may be inclined to offer such a hedged defense, may I remind you of what’s involved in God’s law of love, as summarized in the Ten Commandments?

• You shall have no other gods before God. 
• You shall not take the name of God in vain. 
• Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. 
• Honor your father and your mother. 
• You shall not murder. 
• You shall not commit adultery. 
• You shall not steal. 
• You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 
• You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. 
• You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his workers, his livestock, or anything that else that is your neighbor’s.

“I’m good at nine out of ten of them,” some might think. Or, "I obey most of them."

But James reminds us: “...whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (James 2:10).

And Jesus tells us that even to think of committing these sins is the same as committing them. “The things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart,” Jesus says in Matthew 15:18-20, “and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person…”

Considering these facts, the conclusion reached by the apostle Paul is unavoidable: “...all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…” (Romans 3:23).

And since “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), Paul’s question for himself in Romans 7:24 is one that every member of the human race should be asking themselves: “Wretched man [or woman] that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (ESV)

This, of course, is where Jesus comes in.

God looks on the children He created in His image with compassion, even though we are sinners who fail to abide by His law of love. It saddens Him because He doesn’t want us to condemn ourselves by remaining enslaved to sin, putting our trust in our own “pretty good” behavior. Every baby born into the world today is destined for death and condemnation for sin unless God acts to saves them.

That’s why He sent Jesus to bear the condemnation for sin we deserve and to rise to become our trailblazer to eternity. 

And that’s why He sends the Holy Spirit to teach us and to remind us to turn to Christ and be forgiven, turn to Him and live, turn to Him and be given new, eternal lives.

Today’s gospel lesson finds Jesus not laying down laws that will earn us salvation. No such laws exist.

You and I can never be good enough to be saved.

Instead, Jesus describes the life that He, by His death and resurrection, makes possible for those who trust in Him. 

He isn’t telling us, “You have to love,” but, “You get to love.” 

And, He tells us that we get so much more by the power of His grace and deity. 

Let’s take a look at what He says this morning in John 14:15-21.

Verse 15: “If you love me, keep my commands.” Already, Jesus has promised the disciples (including you and me):

• that all who follow Him have an eternal place in His kingdom prepared by Him (John 14:1-4); 
• that He is the way to life with God (John 14:6-7); and 
• answers to prayers to the Father offered in Jesus’ name (John 4:13-14),

for all who believe in Him.

Now, let me ask you something: Knowing that God has loved you so much that He does all of this for you as a gift to the one with faith in Jesus, what is the only appropriate response from you (or me)? 

Love. Trusting, grateful love!

We love God, as the apostle John writes elsewhere, because God loved us first (1 John 4:19). 

Once trust in Christ and gratitude for God’s grace infects a soul, love is the response.

And so, Jesus offers here not so much a command, but an observation. When, by faith, you have come to love God and God resides in you, you will do what God commands.

Not perfectly. Our old sinful selves get in the way.

But as we live in daily repentance and renewal, daily surrender to Jesus, the great arc of our lives will bend increasingly toward Jesus and His loving way of life.

You’ll do that as an almost automatic, involuntary response to the relationship of love with God into which Christ brings you.

After my mother died, I thanked my dad for all the many years he spent caring for her. He said, matter-of-factly, “Well, what else was I going to do?”

What else was I going to do? That’s the question of love.

When, in the words of a great song by B.B. King and U2, “love comes to town,” when it comes to save you and when it comes to take residence in your life, what else are you going to do? Love becomes not a command, but a way of life.

Jesus shows this in His great parable about the last judgment when He says He will say to His sheep: "Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me..." And the sheep will ask Jesus, "When did we do any of that? We don't remember doing any of that!" Jesus says that His sheep are the ones who respond to His love with love for God and love for neighbor, simply living without a thought of getting credit or keeping score! (Matthew 25:31-46)

But how will we love? After all, “love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)

These verses from the Bible's "love chapter," of course, are often read at weddings. When I read them at weddings, I will often look up at the couples standing before me as they smile smugly, their expressions saying, "Yes, that's our love. That's how we love each other." Really?

How is it possible for us to perfectly keep Christ’s law by loving in the style of the love chapter?

Jesus tells us. Verse 16: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.”

To baptized believers in Jesus, Jesus comes to live. Through His Holy Spirit, Jesus comes to us. He speaks Jesus’ word of truth to us, in us, for us.

• He does this at the Baptismal font, where we are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then “marked by the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit forever.” 
• He does it in His Word, where we read and hear God’s life-giving truth. 
• He does it in the bread and wine, where He says, “Take and eat; this is My body...Take and drink; this is My blood,” offered to bring us forgiveness and effecting the miracle of re-membering us to Christ--breaking down the walls of separation, the walls of sin and death. By this, I mean that when Jesus gives us His body and blood at Holy Communion and says, "Do this in remembrance of Me," He is not saying, "Bring memories of Me to mind." He isn't saying, "Recollect Me." He's saying, "Be remembered to Me. Be reconnected to Me. Be the branches to My vine and take My life into your very body, soul, spirit, and will."

To the unbelieving world, the notion that by the power of the Holy Spirit, God comes to us in the Word and sacraments is crazy.

When you’ve never dared to open yourself to Christ and His love, talk of the Holy Spirit seems like foolishness.

But we know better.

When Jesus knocks on the doors of our hearts and we let Him in (Revelation 3:20), we know what it is to have life-giving communion with the God revealed in Jesus.

The Holy Spirit lives in believers in Jesus.

• When we sin, He calls us to repent. 
• When we love, He tells us, “good and faithful servant.” 
• When we don’t know what to pray, He forms our longing into groaning prayers too deep for words. 

Despite a bad news world filled with sin and death and selfishness, even within ourselves, the Holy Spirit empowers us to trust that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life and that because Jesus, crucified and risen, lives, we too will live.

The Holy Spirit brings Jesus’ love into the centers of our souls and we know that we’re not orphans and, fortified by His love, He makes it possible for us to love when we can’t.

I’ve told you that one prayer I’ve offered through the years is, “Lord, I find myself incapable of loving so-and-so. Please love them through me.” I find that God not only loves those people through me, over time, He creates within me genuine love for them.

I’m sure that others have offered similar prayers regarding Mark Daniels.

A woman heard me share this years ago and told me months later that she had tried this on her husband. “I’d gotten to where I couldn’t stand him,” she told me, “but after awhile, I began to see him differently and his behavior seemed to change as I loved Him.”

When Christ’s love and the Holy Spirit come to town, when we let Christ and the Spirit lodge within us and we surrender, we will love.

We will keep Christ’s commands without thinking of it. That’s how grace works.

Jesus continues: “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”

Here’s an incredible thought: The Creator of the universe ushers with faith in Jesus into the same relationship of intimacy, trust, and love He has enjoyed within the Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--for all eternity. He wants you beside Him now and in eternity.

When we surrender to the grace that accepts us as we are and works to make us all that we can be, our relationship with God is totally transformed. We are transformed.

“You shall have no other gods before me,” for example, is changed from a command to a promise.

Through Jesus, we know we have no need of other gods.

We don’t look for love, affirmation, success, peace, or hope anywhere else.

We have it all in Jesus!

No other gods will bother us, entice us, or drag us down.

We’ll have the God we meet in Jesus and, through Him, we have life.

The message of Jesus then is that you don’t have to love, you get to love, just like the Lord Who made you, Who died and rose for you, Who speaks His truth to you again this morning.

Through Jesus, you get to be a free, redeemed child of God, now and forever. Hallelujah!

Now live in His love!


[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This was the message for today's Sunday worship services.]

Never Ashamed of THE Message That Can Change Everything!

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

2 Timothy 1:1-14 (NRSV)
This morning, I want to share with you a dream for our community which God has been inciting me to pray for and work for.

Sharing it with you frightens me a little. Not even preachers want to be seen as religious kooks.

But, in our second lesson for today, Paul says: “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” So, here’s the dream: Starting with the people of Saint Matthew, all of us praying in repentance and belief in Jesus, I dream that God will bring every person in Logan and Hocking County into a vibrant, life-changing, relationship with Jesus Christ.

I don’t know how far-fetched that dream may be. I don’t know how long it might take for it to come to pass. But I dream of a time when every woman, man, girl, and boy in Saint Matthew and in our community will be totally surrendered to Jesus Christ.

This dream goes way beyond a vision of packing church buildings with bodies. It looks to a time when all of us who call Hocking County home take hold of the life with God offered only through the crucified and risen Jesus. This dream takes seriously a promise that God gave to His Old Testament people, one that belongs to all who today dare to follow God-in-the-Flesh, Jesus Christ. You can find it in 2 Chronicles 7:14. Please read that passage from our pew Bibles with me now:

“If My people who are called by My Name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”(NKJV)

Isn’t it time we experienced those blessings in our community?

Isn’t it time we threw off the palls of spiritual lukewarmness, of going along to get along, of prayerlessness, of purposelessness, of being nice rather than being Christian, and instead, embraced the spirit of power, love, and self-discipline that God wants to give to every person for whom Jesus Christ died and rose?

Isn’t it time we invited Christ to transform our lives, businesses, schools, sports, marriages, and homes?

Second Chronicles 7:14 is a blank check which God desperately wants churches like Saint Matthew and individual Christians like you and me to cash.

God wants to transform our lives. He wants us to experience God’s presence, love, and power even in the challenges and tragedies that come to us in this imperfect world. He wants the same thing for all our neighbors and friends and family members.

It was to encourage the young pastor Timothy be a prayerful, repentant agent of God’s transforming power that Paul wrote 2 Timothy, the Bible letter from which today’s second lesson comes.

When Paul wrote it, he was imprisoned for the crime of claiming that Jesus was the King of the world. This notion didn’t set well in an empire where the Roman emperor was seen as both the king and as a god.

In spite of his imprisonment, Paul tells Timothy to never be ashamed to share the Christian message. Jesus offers what no one and nothing else can offer: New and everlasting life with God.

Folks: Never be ashamed of that message! Never water it down! Never mix it in with the prevailing religious attitudes of the culture or with whatever the police of political correctness may, at any given time, be pushing!

Stand firm in confessing what Jesus taught, that He is the way and the truth and the life and that no one comes to God the Father but through Him!

Money won’t give life.

Drugs won’t give life.

Buddha won’t give life.

Allah won't give life.

Nor will science, or psychology, or warfare, or nationalism, or a nice house, or religion.

Many of these things may have their places. But only one God can save us: the God made known to the world in Jesus. Stand firm in the truth of Jesus, Paul says, because Jesus has not given us a spirit of cowardice, but a spirit of power and love and self-discipline!

In a world in which the devil orchestrates a confusing array of little gods meant to pull us away from Jesus, it can be hard to hold onto Jesus and the gifts only He can give. In 1996, Marissa Cunningham, a native of Panama, was a law student at Rutgers University. She had just been through a divorce and was raising her daughter alone. Her future was threatened by her seeming inability to find a summer internship that would allow her to graduate. More than that, Marissa Cunningham felt empty, oppressed by a deep gloom. At times, she considered suicide.

One day, while walking down a street in Brooklyn, she saw a sign on a storefront: BOTANICA. Marissa knew that Botanica was a kind of fortune telling based on a form of Caribbean witchcraft called Santeria.

Desperate, this brilliant young woman entered the building and arranged an appointment with the curandero, a witch doctor. She saw him several days later. He told Marissa all sorts of things about her past, all of it true.

(This shouldn’t surprise us, by the way. The devil cannot know our futures, because the devil is not God. But as an unseen spiritual being who observes us and wants to take control of us, the devil does know all about our past. Those under the devil’s power, like the witch doctor are able to use our current circumstances to leverage us away from faith in God. This is exactly what the devil tried to do to Jesus during Jesus’ wilderness temptations, you’ll remember.)

Marissa was understandably impressed by the witch doctor’s knowledge. So, she agreed to come back two days later…with $90. The witch doctor would then sacrifice a chicken for her and bury it at a cemetery. That, he said, would get rid of all Marissa’s problems. As crazy as it sounded, Marissa was willing to try anything.

Yet, she wondered if she was doing the right thing. She decided to stop by the office of a church the next day. She asked to see a pastor. None of the pastors on staff were in. But, a staff member who had grown up in Haiti and knew about Santeria—Isn’t it funny how God puts coincidences together like that sometimes?—spoke with Marissa. She invited Marissa to a Bible study happening that night.

Marissa was wary. She had grown up in a church and didn’t think that Christianity had anything to offer. She went to the study anyway, arriving late, forced to sit in the only chair left, next to a character who Marissa, the social climber, would ordinarily have avoided. During a break, Marissa and this man, John, struck up a conversation. John showed empathy for Marissa and then pointed her to a passage in Ephesians 6. It said, “For our struggle [and that includes all the struggles you and I might have brought with us this very morning. Our struggle] is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil…”

John told Marissa that the blood of a chicken couldn’t help her through her darkness. Only Jesus, Who shed His blood on the cross and rose to reclaim life for sinful human beings, could give her the day-in-, day-out hope she craved.

After that, Marissa skipped her appointment with the witch doctor and embraced Christ as her God. The things that caused Marissa to be afraid didn’t suddenly go away, of course. But Jesus took her fears off of her back and took them onto Himself, setting her free to live. “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” That’s what Marissa experienced in Jesus!

Folks, we are surrounded by Marissas, people without hope, imprisoned by sin, by addictions, by depression, by loneliness. We live among people searching for better lives.

And sometimes, we are Marissas ourselves.

All of us in our community and in Saint Matthew need to know two truths. First, we need to know the truth about sin, as revealed in the Ten Commandments:

• that God alone is God and that God’s Name is holy*; 
• that life is precious, including the lives of our parents, children, spouses, and neighbors and we must honor God’s gift of life**; 
• that sexual intimacy is a gift from God to be opened only by those engaged in a marriage of a woman and a man***; 
• that we are to honor the property of others****; 
• that we are to help our neighbors keep their good names*****.

We also need to know a second truth: In spite of our common inability to keep God’s commands, “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.”

The first truth tells us that we don’t deserve eternity with God. The second truth though, tells us that God gives as a free gift the very thing we don’t deserve and can never earn.

God lifts all who receive His forgiveness and who trust in Christ into a never-ending relationship with the God Who made us and loves us.

Only the Church—that’s you and me--is entrusted with seeing that the world hears, knows, and experiences these two transforming truths.

They aren't easy to share, which is why most Christians never get around to telling their spiritually-disconnected friends about Jesus. It seems that we’re more afraid of having the world dislike us than we are of not honoring the God Who created us and went to a cross for us.

But Paul says that we must not be ashamed. We must not be afraid to experience others’ displeasure with God’s truth. God is looking for Christians who are willing to be disliked—even hated—for their faith in Christ, so that all have a chance to know and experience God’s love.

My daily prayer is that God will fill the entire Saint Matthew family with God’s “spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline,” so that we can do what Jesus has charged us to do.

Paul tells us today that God has entrusted a great treasure to us—the treasure of God’s truth, the truth of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ. May we open that treasure for ourselves and for our neighbors so that the dream of a Logan and Hocking County made new by Jesus Christ can start to happen.

God says: “If My people who are called by My Name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

Starting today. Starting this moment, let’s all dare to pray that God’s forgiveness and healing will come to us personally, to Saint Matthew, and to our community.

And may we be bold in telling the truest story the world has ever known, the story of Jesus, our crucified and risen King!

*These are among the concerns of the First through Third Commandments.
**These are concerns associated with the Fourth, Fifth, and Tenth Commandments.
***This is the concern of the Sixth Commandment.
****This is a concern of the Seventh and Ninth Commandments.
*****This is a concern of the Eighth Commandment.
For a great discussion of the Ten Commandments and meaning of each, see Martin Luther's Small Catechism, one translation of which can be found here.