Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study of Romans, Chapters 15 and 16

Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study of Romans, Chapter 14

The Right Time to Love

[This message was shared earlier today during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Luke 14:1-14

Imagine a scene with me. You walk outside the church building this morning toward our parking lot and look across Congress Park to see a man about 6’5” tall, muscular, weighing about 250 pounds, throw a toddler violently and abruptly a distance of some ten feet. When the child lands on the pavement of the sidewalk across the street, she appears to be shaken up and bruised. She cries.

What would you do in this situation? What should you do?

If you’re a Christian, your answer to these questions should be rooted in your identity as a baptized child of God, a disciple of Jesus. As such, your response ought to reflect the love of God, a love that saves us by grace through faith in Christ, whether we deserve being saved or not. (By the way, none of us deserves it.) Christians are the grateful recipients of the ultimate act of love: God becoming human, bearing the death sentence for sin that we deserve despite His own sinlessness, and giving new and everlasting life to all who repent and believe in Him. As Romans 5:8 tells us, “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” 

When Christ comes to live in believers in Him, we are set free to love God and love others the way Christ loves us. 

So, as you see the big man throw the little baby, the love of Christ should inform your response. 

But what is the loving response?

And speaking of that, what exactly is love? 

The world offers all sorts of definitions. 

Many of these definitions are rooted in the idea of affection. If you feel affection for someone, the world says, that's love.

For example, people say that you ought to be able to marry whoever you love, whoever you have affection for, whatever their gender or yours. 

That’s true legally. Society allows that.

But what does God think? Well, when Jesus, who lived in a Roman-dominated world in which homosexual and bisexual behaviors were far more prevalent and accepted than they are today, spoke about marriage, He always assumed that the covenant of marriage involved a husband and a wife. When Jesus is asked a question about divorce, He cites Genesis and says: “...at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’” (Mark 10:6-9)

So, if Jesus is telling us that some affections people may form for each other are contrary to God's will and plan for human beings, what is God’s definition of love? 

The writer and scholar C.S. Lewis considered that question in reading the Bible and gave what I think is an accurate summary of what God calls love as revealed in His Word, the Bible: “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

In other words, from God’s vantage point, love is willing and doing that which is best for the other person: Best for them not just for today but for all eternity, best for them spiritually even more than financially or emotionally.

Love has little to do with how we or others feel about people and everything to do with seeking what is best for them, even when it costs us, even when it's inconvenient. 

It’s a love that does not come naturally to we human beings, a love that God implants in those willing to daily surrender their lives and wills to the One Who died and rose for us. 

Such love may sometimes incite us to say or do unpleasant things to protect people from physical or eternal dangers. 

Love tells a child to stay away from the fire for fear of the child being burned. 

Love also tells a child to keep sex for marriage for fear of emotional and eternal dangers. 

The apostle Paul told the first-century-Christians at Phillippi to let the transplanted love from Christ fill them, even when doing so brings pain, rejection, or misunderstanding, as it did to Jesus Himself. “In your relationships with one another,’ Paul says, “have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant…” 

And that is what love is. Love is servanthood to God and to others in the name of Jesus Christ, Who saves us from sin and death. It confidently loves and serves others in Jesus’ name even when it puts people’s goodwill or our lives at risk, knowing that because of what Jesus has accomplished on the cross and because of His empty tomb, we belong to God forever!

In the past, I’ve preached several sermons (which I’m sure you all remember) on the last eight verses of today’s gospel lesson. Today, I want to focus on just the first six, Luke 14:1-6. It tells us what it means to love as Christ loves in our everyday lives. Take a look at the passage now, please.

Verse 1: “One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched.” 

In the preceding chapter of Luke, we’re told that Jesus violated the Pharisees’ sensibilities when, on a sabbath day, He did the work of bringing miraculous healing to a woman suffering from a crippling disease. At that time, Jesus asked the Pharisees whether “this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, [should not] be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?” (Luke 13:16)* 

Jesus was saying that, whether on the Sabbath or any other day of the week, it’s God’s will that we live in the freedom of His grace to serve God and others in His name. The Pharisees are unmoved and instead, as today’s gospel lesson begins, have their eyes fixed on Jesus, wondering if He will once more do God’s will in defiance of their expectations. 

There's a lot of their attitude in the world and in the Church these days. People expect the God we meet in Jesus to conform to their expectations and standards. 

Some people, though they would never say it, want to out-holy God. They're like Jonah in the Old Testament who didn't want to go to Nineveh for fear that if he spread the message of God's condemnation for their sin among the Ninevites, they might repent and be saved by God. He was disappointed when that happened, angry that God didn't do His God-business the way he thought God should. 

Other people, advocates for their favorite sins, parse Scripture to show how God agrees with them. 

Our call as human beings is to submit to the gracious lordship of Jesus not so we can make God conform to our image of Him, but so that God can go to work conforming us to His image. Seeing God in the flesh in Jesus, the Pharisees didn't like that idea very much. Do we?
Verse 2: “There in front of him was a man suffering from abnormal swelling of his body.” The word used of the suffering man’s condition in the original Greek involves an inflammation of his extremities, likely caused by congestive heart failure. Jesus decides to use this as a teachable moment. So, He turns to the Pharisees gathered for dinner in verse 3: “Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?’ But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him on his way.”

Jesus’ question wasn’t a hard one. But the Pharisees didn’t answer. They preferred a God and a faith tethered to their rules, expectations, and beliefs, rather than having a living God Who sets us free to do God’s loving will. 

Luke says that Jesus took hold of the sick man, healed him, and then released Him. Jesus pulled the man to Himself, then set him free. That's what Jesus wants to do for us and it's precisely what He does every time He calls us to confession and pronounces His forgiveness, His absolution, over us.

The Pharisees aren't impressed with Jesus' healing of the man, it seems. They might not have minded Jesus performing such an act of love on any other day of the week. But they thought Jesus had no business doing so on the Sabbath.

Verse 5: “Then [Jesus] asked them, “If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?” And [again] they had nothing to say.”

Love is servanthood to God and to others in the name of Jesus Christ, Who saves us from sin and death. 

And the right time to live out that love is every moment of every day. 

When the love of God invades our lives, it will cause us to do things like...

• speak and work against injustice, 
• share the good news of new life through faith in Jesus, 
• help with disaster relief, 
• pray for those who hate us, 
• sacrifice for our kids as well as discipline them, and 
• speak uncomfortable and unwelcome truths to friends in hopes of bringing them help, safety, or salvation.

And what about the brute who threw the baby in the imagined scene on Congress Park? Well, imagine that a split second after the man threw the baby to the sidewalk on the other side of the street, an RTA bus goes speeding by. The man wasn’t harming the child; he was saving the child who had somehow wandered out into the road. The man put himself at risk to save the child. 

That, friends, is love.

It’s a love that reflects the love of God Himself for us as seen on the cross. 

True story: A man was flirting with an affair with a woman from work. 

A friend, like Jesus pulling the sick man to Himself in today’s gospel lesson or the burly man in our illustration flinging the baby to safety, pulled the man aside and told the man bluntly, “Don’t do this. Don't do this.” 

The man was angry. He railed at his friend. “How dare you tell me what to do? You’re not perfect.” 

His friend didn’t rail back. He allowed as how he wasn’t perfect, how he made mistakes, how he committed sin, how he, to his regret and pain, had committed the very sin against which he was now trying to warn his friend. As a Christian, chastened by that experience, he tried to turn away from his sin and turn to God each day. He was only giving his friend what he thought was loving counsel. In Paul’s phrase, the friend spoke “the truth in love.” 

What truths are we willing to tell others in love and gentleness? 

What boats are we willing to rock to lovingly serve neighbor, friend, relative, spouse, parent, child, stranger, foreigner, immigrant? 

Are we willing to love our neighbor even when the time does not seem right?

These are the questions Jesus lays before us today. May we, as Jesus’ disciples, already saved from sin and death by Him, choose this day, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to love and serve others in His name. Amen

*The woman Jesus heals in Luke 13, followed by teaching on humility, and His healing of the man in this passage from Luke 14, followed by teaching on humility, exemplify Luke's characteristic pairing of incidents involving women and men throughout his gospel. Sometimes he contrasts their faith responses. At other times, their responses affirm one another's and underscore God's faithfulness. For example, early in the gospel, Zechariah is told by an angel that he will become the father of John the Baptist and doubts, while Mary is told by angel that she will give birth to Jesus and accepts the message. In the temple in Jerusalem, where the baby Jesus is taken by Mary and Joseph to be circumcised at eight days old, two elderly people, Simeon and Anna, separately affirm that the child is the Messiah-Savior of the world.

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

The Journey of Here and Now

[This was shared during worship this morning with the members and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Luke 9:51-62

Christian journalist and thinker Philip Yancey has advice for Christians. “We do well to remember that the Bible has far more to say about how to live during the journey [through this life] than about the ultimate destination [beyond this life].”

That’s good advice. Jesus sets those who believe in Him free from sin and death not so that they can wait smugly for the days they die and get to be with Him. He sets us free so that, having the assurance that we belong to God forever, we can live this life differently and so that, through our lives and witness, we can invite others to join us in our journey with Jesus through this life.

In Matthew 24:13, Jesus tells us that the destination of an eternity with God only belongs to those who start living in that eternity through faith in Him today. “[T]he one who stands firm to the end [that means to the end of this life] will be saved [for the next].”

And the apostle Peter makes it clear that we are saved by Jesus not just for eternity and not just for ourselves, but for now and for others. “[Y]ou are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession,” Peter tells disciples of Jesus, “that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” [1 Peter 2:9] Our call in this life, today, right now, is to be and to make disciples out of gratitude for the grace through which God has saved us from ourselves. That’s our path, the journey Christ has marked out for us.

Our gospel lesson for today finds Jesus beginning the decisive final leg on the path, the journey that God the Father has marked for Him. Take a look at it, please, Luke 9:51-62. It begins: “As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem.”

In the Greek in which Luke composed his gospel, that verse more literally says: “Then it came to pass, in the fulfillment of His ascension, that He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem.” Ascension here doesn’t refer here to the day forty days after Jesus’ resurrection that He ascended to heaven. It refers instead to His overall mission of going to Jerusalem to suffer, be crucified, to rise, and then to ascend to heaven. 

Jesus has set His face to complete the journey that began with His birth at Christmas, to buy sinners out of our slavery to sin, death, and the devil through His death, resurrection, and ascension. 

Yesterday, we saw a re-run of an old Law and Order in which Detective Green, always a straight-shooter, faces a murder rap he doesn't deserve in order to spare someone else prison time. He turns to the prosecuting attorney who has unraveled what was going on and asks, “Why are you doing this?” “Because,” the prosecutor answers, “we thought you were worth saving.” 

You know, sometimes, on rare occasions, God graces us with clear pictures of ourselves. We see, when all self-justification and rationalization are cast aside, how we have marred ourselves and our characters with our sin and selfishness. We may see that we are, in many ways, damaged goods. 

But listen: The God Who made you and all that exists thinks you, along with every other human being without exception, are worth saving. You are worth saving. 

That’s why Jesus set His face to journey to Jerusalem. 

That’s why He calls us to journey with Him today.

But not everyone thinks they need saving. Or if they do think they need saving, they believe that they, or the gods of their choosing, or a particular way of life will save them. Verse 52: “And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem.”

The Samaritan villagers didn’t welcome Jesus any more than had Jesus' fellow Jews in Jerusalem had at His birth or would in Holy Week, any more than the Romans would, any more than most people in the world today welcome Him for Who He is--God and King and Savior. Isaiah prophesied well of Jesus in the eighth-century BC: “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” [Isaiah 53:3]

But the Samaritan villagers who spurned Jesus weren’t the only ones who didn’t understand Who Jesus is or what the journey of Christian discipleship is about. Verse 54: “When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, ‘Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?’ But Jesus turned and rebuked them.”

Luke says much more than that Jesus rebuked James and John. In the original Greek, he quotes Jesus as telling the two that they’re spiritually confused: “Οὐκ οἴδατε οἵου πνεύματός ἐστε ὑμεῖς”: “You don’t know of what spirit you are!” In other words, Jesus was saying, “If you guys want to torch people I came to save, you’re following the spirits of hell rather than the Holy Spirit.” 

For the person who journeys with Jesus, hatred for or indifference to those who may disagree with us are not options. 

If we insist on hating Muslims or atheists, or those who disagree with the Bible’s teaching on things like sexuality, how can we possibly introduce them to Jesus Christ? How can a Christian being hateful introduce others to the loving God we know in Jesus? 

Our call isn’t to torch others, literally or figuratively, but to touch them with the gospel of Christ, through our prayers, our faithfulness, our love, our witness. 

Though by this time James and John have been with Jesus for some time, they still don’t understand what it means to journey with Him in this life.

They weren’t alone in their lack of understanding about being disciples of Jesus. 

Verse 57: “As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’” To follow Jesus means accepting uncertainty. It means accepting that He may be calling us to venture outside our comfort zones so that we may learn to rely on Him alone.

Forty years ago, the last thing I wanted to be was a pastor. I remember telling my boss at the United Way, at a time I was furtively beginning my journey out of atheism to life with Christ, “I have no use for pastors.” That’s what I’d been taught by my grandfather and it was what I still believed. Within three years, I was in seminary, no longer able to resist the path that God seemed to have in mind for me. 

Thank God, not everyone is called to be a pastor, but He calls every Christian to journey away from what makes them comfortable to do what points others to Christ. 

To what uncomfortable place is Jesus calling you today?

Verse 59: “[Jesus] said to another man, ‘Follow me.’ But [the man] replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ [In Jewish custom, there was no higher responsibility than taking care of a parent’s burial...preferably after they died.] Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’” The call to follow Jesus is to set our faces toward whatever He may call us to be and do. Sometimes families will understand. But only sometimes. 

Verse 61: “Still another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.’ Jesus replied, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.’” 

All farmers knew in the centuries before air conditioned tractor cabs outfitted with GPS guidance, that if you looked back while sowing or plowing, you’d either have crooked rows or torn up crops. To journey with Jesus is to look to where He’s leading us and not to torment ourselves over the sins and mistakes of our past and not to look back nostalgically on a lost past. 

When we turn to Jesus, we realize again, damaged or goods or not according to the world or our own dark imaginings, that we are children of the King. We belong to the One leading us through our individual journeys of discipleship, now and forever. 

Following Jesus can be uncomfortable and it would be impossible to do if following Jesus didn’t also mean journeying with Jesus by our sides, here and now, every day. 

To Christians on their journey of discipleship, the apostle Paul wrote, “...he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” [Philippians 4:6] Through all the days of this life, with their challenges and joys, tragedies and triumphs, may this be our one certainty as Jesus’ disciples: As we set our faces toward Jesus, He will bring the completion and fulfillment that He has in mind for us. 

And though I sometimes forget it, that’s all we really need to know. Amen

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