Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study of Romans, Chapter 12

The Hardest, Most Essential Truth of All!

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

John 6:22-35

In today’s gospel lesson, John 6:22-35, we encounter the single most difficult truth to accept or understand about being a follower of Jesus Christ, a disciple. 

It’s the one thing about being a Christian that has, through the centuries, most often tripped up people of all backgrounds and experiences, sending them down all sorts of rabbit holes and blind alleys to death and life without God. 

It’s the thing about Christianity that most scandalizes the world...and many in the Church today. 

This one thing is, as Martin Luther liked to remind people, is the thing, the truth, “on which the Church stands or falls.” 

And, as I say, this truth so difficult for people to accept is the most important thing you and I can ever know, accept, or accede to, the most important thing you can hear about from this or any other pulpit.

Let’s set the stage. Over the last few Sundays, we’ve considered Mark’s telling of Jesus feeding the 5000 and its immediate aftermath. Mark tells us about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection with a journalist’s economy. Mark, like a modern newsperson, produces a “first draft of history,” with the idea of getting the story of Jesus out to first-century churches, his first audience, as quickly and accurately as possible. 

The other gospel writers take their time, approaching the story of Jesus in different ways. Matthew has been described as “the scribe of the Kingdom.” Luke is a historian obsessed with prayer. John is an artist, a poet, a scholar, a theologian, steeped both in the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek philosophers. 

All of the gospel writers tell us the truth that can set us free. But Matthew, Luke, and John often tell us things that Mark leaves out. In today’s lesson, John tells us more than Mark does about what happened the day after Jesus fed a throng of thousands from a few pieces of bread and some fish.

Earlier in John, chapter 6, John says that after Jesus had done this miracle, the crowd wanted to make Jesus a king. But the crowd wanted Jesus to be an earthly sort of king, the kind of king who was ruled by the whims and desires of people, who followed the latest Gallup Poll or the sentiments of his "base." 

People still approach Jesus in this way. They’ll “follow” Him or “believe in” Him, so long as Jesus conforms to their expectations, as long as He acts more like a good luck charm for their wishes rather than the Lord of their lives Who commands us to take up our crosses and follow. In recent years, we’ve seen entire Christian denominations, conservative and liberal, turn from following Jesus when they didn’t like what He had to say about sin, grace, or salvation. 

Because He never bowed to popular sentiment but only to the will of God the Father, Jesus withdrew from the crowd (John 6:15).

You remember what happened next. Jesus went to a quiet place while the apostles climbed into a boat. A storm kicked up on the lake. Jesus walked across the lake, calmed the storm, then rode to the other shore with the twelve. Although they knew nothing about all of this, the crowd wasn’t done with Jesus yet. Realizing that Jesus must have gone to the other side of the lake, they boarded boats that had just come to shore from Tiberias and headed off for Capernaum in order to catch up to Jesus. (John 6:24)

Look at what happens next, beginning in verse 25: “When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, ‘Rabbi, when did you get here?’ Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill…’” (John 6:25-26)
 

The Bible repeatedly affirms that God knows what’s going on inside of us, what’s in our hearts. David says in Psalm 139:1: “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.” Here in these verses from our gospel lesson, we get further confirmation that Jesus isn’t only a real human being, He also is really God. He sees through the motives of the crowd who have chased Him down to Capernaum. He knows their hearts. 

“Very truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” 

“You want to use Me for your own purposes,” Jesus is telling them. “But the miracle of the loaves and fishes should have been a sign pointing you to the fact that I’m the God of all creation you’ve been claiming to believe in all your lives. Instead, you want to march to your tune. You want to use Me, not worship Me.”

But, rather than pouring scorn on the crowd, Jesus tells them: “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.’” (John 6:27) 

Food that’s eaten will only give us energy for a little while. Food that’s not eaten might be tossed down a disposal or rot somewhere (like in our refrigerator crispers because we forget it's there). Whatever the case, food doesn’t last forever. So, Jesus tells the crowd, it’s silly to expend the kind of effort they’ve expended in following Him across the lake just to get more food that will either rot or go away. 

What we really need is the “food that endures to eternal life.”

When Jesus says this, the crowd is curious, like the woman at the well to whom Jesus mentioned “living water.” Verse 28: “Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’ Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’” (If you have your Bibles with you, you might want to underline John 6:29.)

That, friends, is the single most difficult truth to accept or understand about being a follower of Jesus Christ. To receive the food that endures to eternal life, the living bread from heaven, the living water, life with God that never gives out and never ends, there’s nothing we can or have to do. 

• We don’t have to strain to be good people, although when we have the food that never gives out, we will want to be good people. 
• We don’t have to memorize fifty Bible verse, though when you recognize that the Bible is God’s living Word, you will want to know it better. 
• We don’t have to intone magic words. 

Our work is simply and only to believe in the One sent by God, to trust in Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord. 

As Jesus famously told Nicodemus (say it with me): “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.” (John 3:16) 

In other words, we are justified--our right to exist in the sight of God despite our sins--is secured simply and only and exclusively by God's grace through our faith--our belief--in Jesus Christ! 

When we believe in Jesus, God makes us new. God makes us His. “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17) It’s as simple as that!

But, we may say, wanting to complicate things as we human beings always seem to do, there must be more to Christian discipleship than that? 

No, Jesus says our one and only work is no work at all; it’s simply to believe in Him. 

But, we may object, aren’t we supposed to serve, aren’t we supposed to do good works, to pray? 

If you keep turning from sin and trustingly believing in Jesus, you will serve, you will do good works, you will pray. In fact, your whole life and all of your priorities will be turned upside down. 

You’ll run from your sins and run into the arms of Jesus. 

That’s because the more you turn to Jesus, the more you will believe in Jesus. And the more you believe in Jesus, the more Jesus will rub off on you. 

A high school friend of ours told me several years after I had come to faith in Christ, “You’ve changed, Mark. You seem more centered, focused.” I appreciated his words, but I hadn't thought about any of that before.

People will tell Christians who keep trusting in Jesus things like this all the time: 

“You’ve changed." 

"You’re more loving." 

"You’re calmer." 

"You seem to have more peace in your life." 

"You’re a better listener." 

"You seem more able to handle the tough stuff.” 

As you walk in trust with Jesus and people say things like that to you, you likely won’t know what to say, unaware of the changes that have come to you because you’ve fallen into Jesus’ orbit...simply because you believe in Him. 

As we keep trusting in Jesus Who justifies us, He also sanctifies us. That is, He will transform us from the inside out. He will make us holy. He will set us aside for God’s purposes and we will live with greater confidence. 

Paul describes what happens to those who believe in Jesus in 2 Corinthians 3:18: “...we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

And it’s all rooted in simply believing in Jesus, the most important truth any of us can ever know or grasp hold of. 

Do you find it hard to believe? 

Turn to Jesus and tell Him about it. (He knows already anyway. Just be honest with Him.) Jesus is anxious to turn our availability into faith in Him, the faith we need to live in Him. He will help us believe. 

And, as the Bible reminds us, “Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame." (Romans 10:11)

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

Growing Up

Here's the journal entry for my quiet time with God this morning.

Look: “It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them.” (Hosea 11:3)

Eight-centuries before Jesus’ birth, the prophet Hosea was used by God to call God’s people to repentance and faith. If they refused to respond to God’s grace, their faithlessness, idolatry, and injustice would catch up with them; they would be overrun by powerful enemies and be sent into exile. Ephraim was the largest of the tribes of Israel and was sometimes used, as here, to describe all of God’s people, the entire nation.

God uses different metaphors to describe His relationship with His people. Sometimes, God is portrayed as husband to a faithless wife. Here, God is the nurturing father who raised His people from infancy, who now in their adolescence, have spurned God. They’ve forgotten their father, even if they sometimes still invoke His name (Hosea 11:7). They’ve forgotten that it was He Who taught them to walk, Who brushed them off and cleaned their skinned egos and hearts when they stumbled.

Listen: How easily we forget God when everything is going well. There may be no atheists in foxholes, when adversity and pain target us. We often are prayerful and pious in our desperation. But when things “smooth out,” we forget about the One Who steadied us and set us on the paths to healings of all kinds. We forget about the One in Whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

But if we disconnect from the God Who, in Jesus Christ, gives us “life...to the full” (John 10:10), we walk away from life. We walk into death Arrogance and the myth of self-sufficiency sets in. “My people are determined to turn from me,” God says of His people in Hosea 11:7. Then, when hard times come or times when we face the consequences of our idolatry and hard-heartedness, as they do inevitably come in our fallen world, we blame God for not taking care of us. Or we disavow His existence.

But this verse speaks of God’s tender feelings for His people, the same tender feelings that Jesus says God has for all the people of the world (John 3:16). He wants a relationship with us. He doesn’t want us to remain perpetually infants. God wants us to grow in our relationship with Him, in our faith. It’s we who choose either to walk away from God or to remain spiritual infants. God wants to have a grown-up relationship with Him, one in which He empowers us to live in the freedom from sin, death, and idolatry that is our childish default mode, in the freedom He gives to us to love Him and to love all of our neighbors.

To those who have been made God’s people through Jesus, Jesus says, “I  no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:15)

I talk with my father almost every day. I honor him as my father. I respect him. But now that dad is 88 and I’m 64, our relationship is as much one between two old friends as it is as between father and son. We have many shared memories and interests. We strive to be good to each other. That’s a little bit like the relationship God wants to develop with believers saved through Jesus, I think. God is always God: our Creator Who is infinite, eternal, perfect in love, justice, and power. To honor and worship Him as our only God and King is to give Him His due. But the One Who gives me life also wants to be my Friend. He wants me to get over myself and place myself in His hands and at His disposal so that He can make me over into the adult child of my Father that I’m intended to be.

This process of renewal, which is called sanctification, is a gift of grace from God by which He makes us over in the image of Jesus...if we will only be with Him and let Him love us and change us and show us the way. This is the process that happens, the apostle Paul says, when we all “...who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

God wants those to Whom He gives life and gives life again in Christ to grow into the men and women He meant for us to be when He first gave us life. He wants us to be able to say, along with Paul: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Respond: Today, Lord, help me to grow up: to let go of my hubris and pretended self-sufficiency, to ignore the calls of this world’s false gods: security, acceptance by others, popularity, power, ease, comfort, stuff I don’t need, and a thousand other things I could mention. Help me to keep my eyes, my attentions and my intentions on Christ alone and so have my views of the world and my daily activities changed by the freedom only You give to believers to become all that You make us to be, all that Christ died and rose to set us free to be. In Jesus’ name. Amen  

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

Choosing Christ and the cross over the easy lies I tell myself

I met the Lord today during my quiet time in Genesis 12-14. Below is my journal entry from that encounter. To see how I approach quiet time with God, see here.

Look: “When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai his wife, ‘I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, “This is his wife.” Then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.’” (Genesis 12:11-13) 

Abram (later Abraham) is the patriarch of Biblical faith. Through the grafting of grace, God makes all who believe in His only Son Jesus spiritual descendants of Abraham (Romans 11:11-31). So, it’s instructive, sometimes inspiring, and sometimes uncomfortable to observe him. 

In chapter 12, Abram is instructed by God to leave his home of Ur to a land that God would show him. This land was God’s pledge to Abram’s descendants. In obeying God, picking up stakes and moving his entire household, Abram exhibits faith, the kind of faith in God I would like to have. 

Abram goes to the promised land, traveling around for a time. But when a famine hits the land, he books. He heads for Egypt. 

A history of God’s people going to Egypt in times of crisis would later develop. The Israelites were more or less forced to go to Egypt during a later famine after God had placed Joseph, Abraham’s great-grandson, in a place of authority through which he could save the people. 

In the New Testament, another Joseph, selected by God to raise Jesus in his home, is told by God to go to Egypt in order to save the Christ Child from the murderous intentions of King Herod. 

Though Genesis records God’s command to Abram to go to the land He would show him, we have no indication as to whether God told him to go to Egypt when the famine hit. Abram may have just thought, “There’s no food here. I’ll go to Egypt.” 

It’s plausible to believe that the trip to Egypt was all Abram’s idea when we see the plot he hatches just as he, Sarai (later Sarah), and their people and livestock are about to enter Egypt. He tells Sarai that he’s afraid that if the Egyptians think he’s married to Sarai, they’ll kill him so that one of them can have her for their wife. 

Listen: There are several problems with this plan: 

1. Abram is thinking instead of praying. Had he prayed instead of thought, allowing God to guide his thinking, he wouldn’t have suggested such a conspiracy to his wife. I think of Proverbs 14:12 (again!): “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” 

Certainly, we’re to think. God gave us our brains. But we need to let God lead our thoughts. If we don’t let God lead, we’re led into sin and into death, separation from God. 

2. Abram is yielding to his fears, not following the God who had called him to faith. In this instance (and in another one when Abraham did the same stupid thing), fear beat out faith. Not good! 

God had promised Abram: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:2-3) 

God had shown Abram the land that He was going to give to him. Abram knew that God was good for His promises and that in order for Abram to become the ancestor of a great nation, he would need to father a son. Inherent in that promise is another one, that Abram wouldn’t die before he had fathered a son. 

Yet, Abram decided to place greater faith in his own intellect, his own analysis, and his own plans than he placed in God. 

3. Abram is essentially giving his wife permission to commit adultery in order to save his neck. Not even the Pharaoh thinks that this is a good idea! When Pharaoh finally learns that the woman he’s taken into his house for a wife is already Abram’s wife, he’s horrified. “What is this you have done to me?” he asks Abram. “Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife; take her, and go.” (Genesis 12:18-20) 

Abram isn’t only sinning against God then, he’s encouraging his wife to do so and enticing the Pharaoh to do so. 

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis’ observation in Mere Christianity, there have been cultures that have said that men should have only one wife and others that said they could have multiple wives. But no culture has ever said that it’s OK to take another man’s wife or another woman’s husband. This was true even before God gave the ten commandments to His descendants at Mount Sinai. So, Abram is skating on extremely thin ice. 

Nonetheless, this third “problem” (read sin) with Abram’s plan is just the result of the fundamental sin: Failing to trust in God. 

Like Abram, I sometimes fail to trust in God. I value my own thinking more than I value His. I value my fears more than my faith. 

To trust in anyone or anything--even rational fears, even smart analysis, even feelings of love--more than we trust in God is idolatry. 

Every sin, in fact, from taking God’s name in vain to murder, from gossip to theft, is idolatry. 

Abram’s problem in the wilderness is that he was conflicted about who to worship: God or himself. 

That’s what lay behind his other conflicts: God or his fears, God’s promises or the temptations and dangers of the current circumstances. 

It’s amazing to me how often this conflict between following God, on the one hand, and following my thoughts, my fears, my plans, my reasoning, or my feelings, come into play in my life. 

This conflict is caused by my resistance to the anvil of sanctification on which God wants to forge me and my character for faithful living with Him now and in eternity.
God is interested more in my eternal comfort and my having a God-seeking character than he is in me avoiding problems in this world. (And to God, even death is only a problem, one solved by the resurrection of Jesus in which those who repent and believe in Jesus have a share.) 

It can be painful to opt for the eternal security of life with God over the immediate security of doing what we think is right, which is why I try so hard to avoid what God wants to tell me, why Abram concocted his lying conspiracy, and why the hardest petition of the Lord’s Prayer for me is, “Thy will be done.” 

It is painful. Every day, Lord, I have to ask You repeatedly to make war on my penchant for comforting myself, for doing what I want to do, for ignoring Your gracious call to turn from temptation and sin and to turn to Christ with honesty and transparency.
It’s painful to heed Your words, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) 

The New Testament books of 1 Peter and Colossians, among others, promise that those who submit to this process will be transformed, becoming more like Christ, fit for eternity with God, fit as an instrument of God’s grace and love in this world.
But what Your Word tells me God is: It is through this painful process that You can set me free from fear and allows me to become my better self. It’s a process that will be incomplete before my time on earth is ended, I know, Lord. But I need the courage to stick with this process, to learn to yield to You, to ask You to guide my thinking and my living. 

Abram was confused. He didn’t know what he wanted more, security or You. My desires get similarly muddled, Lord. I need to be unmuddled every single day. 

Respond: God, in Jesus’ name, set me free from myself. Set me free from sin. Set me free to live for You with joyful abandonment. You know me: You know how relentlessly willful I can be. You know too how fearful I can become of offending someone. When sin or fear or idolatry tempt me this day, help me to resist. When tempted to act on a comforting lie rather than Your life-giving truth, help me to choose the truth. Help me to follow Jesus and live, no matter how others may judge or dismiss me as a fool or even hate me. No matter how hard following You may sometimes be. Let me opt for the pain of following You over the death that comes from following myself. Let me act on my faith today. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen

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

Tumbling on an Escalator: My Life with Christ

This GIF, shared by my son over on Facebook, is hysterical!

"Sanctification" is the process by which sinners like me, who have been made right with God (justified) by God's grace (His charity) through faith in Jesus Christ, are made over by the Holy Spirit to conform to the image of Christ.  

The Spirit often does this against our wills. 

Usually in surprising ways. 

And frequently through pain and hardship, amid our half-hearted resistance of sin, 

Martin Luther described sanctification by saying that the Christian submits to being "the Holy Spirit's workshop." That probably gives a good idea of the process: To fit us for eternity, God starts here on earth by beginning a makeover on us. There's a lot of hammering, sawing, remodeling...along with falling, dropping, squirming, and ego-bruising...that has to happen.

The apostle Paul describes sanctification in eloquent terms in 2 Corinthians, using as a starting point the fact that, in Christ, believers are afforded a privilege not even Moses had: to be in intimate proximity to God's blazing glory without being burned out of existence. Christ died in order to give all who believe in Him what Chuck Swindoll has called "intimacy with the Almighty." Paul writes: "And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Sanctification most assuredly is a glorious process, a bit like a mouse being transformed into a steed for Cinderella's carriage by the supreme power of God's grace. And it is solely the work of the Holy Spirit done in the lives of those who turn to Jesus.

But given my sin, my resistance to authority (even God's authority), my shortsightedness, and the desire to "be like God" I inherited from Adam and Eve, I'm sure that, from the standpoint of God, the process of my sanctification often looks as awkward, plodding, painful, and silly as this man doing battle with an escalator. God help me.

When I Look at the World by U2

I've had this song in my head and playing on my computer all day long.

It fits perfectly with tomorrow's second Bible lesson, which I'll be talking about during worship, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21. I even thought of playing this video during worship. But it would be a bit too long and not leave time to do the passage justice.

In the passage, Paul talks about how being "in Christ," in relationship with Jesus, empowers us to see people and the whole world differently, through the eyes of Christ. I find that this transformation of perspective is far from complete in me. (I know that it will never be complete on this side of the grave as the old Mark still daily battles with the new Mark. That transformation will only be perfected after I have been raised with all the other dead in Christ.)

Like Bono though, I pray that God will help me to feel and see things more like He does.

I aspire to pray with sincerity each day the same petition offered by the late Bob Pierce: "Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.”

Frequently, I confess to God the frustration I feel with myself, as Bono does at the end of the song: "Tell me, tell me, what do you see? / Tell me, tell me, what's wrong with me?"

"Change my heart, make it ever true / Change my heart, O God / May I be like You / You are the Potter / I am the clay / Mold me and make me / This is what I pray."

Set Apart

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

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

Advent is a season of anticipation. 

It recalls the centuries when God’s people anticipated the birth of the Messiah, the Christ, God’s Anointed One. 

In Advent, we also anticipate the coming of Christmas day. (Especially if you're about six or seven years old.)

But more than anything, Advent is a season in which we remind ourselves that we need to live each day in eager anticipation of Jesus’ return. 

One of the most ancient liturgical confessions of the Church is simply: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”

Over the past two Sundays, the first two Sundays in Advent, we’ve talked about how to anticipate, how to wait, for the return of Jesus, how to get ready to meet Jesus, either at the ends of our own earthly lives or at the end of this world, when He will, as we confess each Sunday, “judge the living and the dead.” We’ve talked about preparing through daily repentance and daily renewal through the forgiveness God gives to those who trust in Christ as their only God and King.

But in today’s second lesson, the apostle Paul gives us a different way of looking at how to anticipate the coming of Jesus. It’s one I like a lot and it can all be summarized by a single word: sanctification. 

The word sanctification is rooted in a Latin word, sanctus, which means holy. The part of the traditional liturgy in which we sing, “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God power and might, heaven and earth are full of Your glory…” is called the sanctus. 

The word holy means set apart, special, different. It could even be translated as weird, odd, not like other things.

This book is called the Holy Bible or Holy Book, because out of all the books in the world, this one is set apart. It is the Word of God. No other book can make that claim. 

Holy Baptism is set apart and different from any other baptism, including John the Baptist’s baptism, because Holy Baptism is set apart, the only baptism in which God’s Holy Spirit comes to live in the baptized. 

Holy Communion is unlike any other meal in which people have community with each other because in Holy Communion, we have communion with God, we receive the very body and blood of Jesus, and through it, God's forgiveness and life pulsing within us. 

Now, we’ve mentioned before what the Bible scholars call inclusios or inclusions. An important theme of a particular section of Scripture is underscored when a particular word or idea appears at its beginning and at its conclusion. That signals the reader that everything in between those two markers is about a single idea. These bookends form what they call “inclusions.” 

Pull out a sanctuary Bible, please, and turn to page 825 and then look at 1 Thessalonians 4:3. We’re not going to look at the whole verse right now, just the pertinent start of it. It says, “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified…” 

Now, turn the page and look at a line that comes almost at the end of our second lesson for this morning, to chapter 5, verses 23. It says, in part, “May the God Himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through…”” 

So, the theme of this section of Paul’s first century letter to the Christians in the city of Thessalonica, including today’s second lesson is let God set you apart. 

Give God access to your heart, mind, and will so that He can make you over in Christ’s image. 

That’s God’s will for our lives, to make us more like the One Who died and rose to set us free from sin and death, set us free to be the people God had in mind when He formed us in our mothers’ wombs. 

We’re not supposed to look, act, sound like, or be like the rest of the world. We’re supposed to be set apart, different. 

In 1 Peter 2:11, we’re told, “...as foreigners and exiles...abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.” 

And in Romans 12:1-2, we’re told: “...in view of God’s mercy...offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

It turns out that being open to the process by which God sets us apart from the world and makes us over into Christ’s image is precisely the way we prepare to meet Jesus. 

But what does that process look like? 

Please take a look at our lesson, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 (page 826 in the sanctuary Bibles). Paul writes: “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” 

Can you imagine anything harder than fulfilling the three imperatives that Paul gives in this one verse? 

"Rejoice always"? 

Even when the gift I’ve been unable to find at the first five stores also isn’t at the sixth? 

Even when my child is in the intensive care unit, his life hanging in the balance? 

Even when I’ve lost my wife or my husband? 

I think that we react in this way often because we don’t understand the difference between joy and happiness. (I know this is hard for me to remember!) 

Happiness is about the things that happen to us: We laugh at a joke, win the lottery, meet a friend. 

Joy is that deep in the bone sense of contentment that comes from knowing that because Jesus Christ died and rose and still lives and because I believe in Him, I have the forgiveness of my sins and life with God forever. 

Happiness happens to us because of our circumstances; joy is ours in spite of our circumstances. 

Joy can’t be taken from us even when we’re unhappy. (I have often found that an important truth to hold onto.)

In 1 Thessalonians 4:13, for example, Paul talks about the difference between the grief of those who follow Christ and those who don’t: Those without Christ grieve with no hope; those who trust in Christ still grieve. It would be unnatural not to. But they have an eternity of hope. They have joy.

Back in our lesson, Paul says, to “pray continually.” (Some translations put it, "pray without ceasing.") 

I’d guess that in my years as a pastor, this is the passage about which I've gotten the second greatest number of questions. “‘Pray continually’ or ‘Pray without ceasing,’” someone will ask. “How on earth am I supposed to do that? Don’t I have other things to do in life?” 

Yes, you do. 

And so did Jesus. 

And it’s from Him that we can learn what this means. 

Jesus had intense times when He went off by Himself to pray, of course. 

He also prayed publicly with other people. 

But Jesus was also in continual fellowship with God the Father. In John 5:19, Jesus says of Himself, “...Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”

Jesus remained prayerfully connected to God the Father all through His day. And if Jesus needed to pray constantly like this, how much more do we need to do the same thing? 

Trying to live the Christian life without the power God gives to us through prayer in Jesus’ Name is like trying to drive our cars without gas in the tank. It doesn’t work. 

The prayerless person simply isn’t prepared for the inevitable tough times of this life...or for the coming of Jesus. 

I once saw evangelist Billy Graham on a late night talk show. He amazed the host by saying that the whole time he was being interviewed, he was praying, asking God to help him say the right thing, to glorify God even in this interchange. That’s praying continually, even while hard at work.

“Give thanks in all circumstances.” This passage has been the subject of maybe the greatest number of questions I've gotten as a pastor. 

It’s important to note that Paul says to pray in all circumstances, not for all circumstances. Not all circumstances that come into our lives are blessings, you know. Evil things come from the devil, the world, and our sinful selves. Jesus makes clear that all disease is ultimately attributable to the devil. But even in the midst of life's difficulties, even horrors, we have reason to be thankful to a God Who understands us and has conquered for all eternity our enemies, sin and death.

An elderly man, deeply shaken by the death of his wife, told me that every night, amid tears of grief, he fell to his knees and thanked God for the years they’d had together and for the hope of eternity through Jesus Christ that they’d shared. Even in sadness, he was thankful and had God’s peace, what Paul calls elsewhere in the New Testament, a “peace which surpasses all understanding.”

Starting at verse 19 of our lesson, Paul continues: “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all;hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.” 

We live in a cynical time, a time too, in which people doubt the notion that there are any hard and fast truths. So, when people--even Christian people--hear others speaking in the Name of Jesus, claiming that what they say has the backing of God’s Word in Scripture, we tend to be cynical. We tend toward skepticism in the face of witnesses for Christ who display what one Bible scholar identifies as the key characteristics of John the Baptist: “public, certain, and humble.”

Part of our skepticism may be that we don’t know God’s Word well enough to know what “prophecies” spoken in Christ’s Name are true or false. 

A knowledge of God’s Word is just as important as prayer in helping us get through our days, living in hope, or anticipating the coming of Jesus. 

In fact, if prayer is conversation with God, reading and digesting God’s Word is essential to prayer. 

Our words of prayer to God are mere responses to the Word from God. 

We respond to its call to repent, to believe, to trust, to live in the assurance of His love, grace, and provision, to call on God and be saved, and to call on God in every time of need. 

When we know God’s Word, we grow up, no longer, in the words of Ephesians 4:14, “...infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.” This is one reason why I hope that you’ll join the journey through the Bible in 2015.

Paul’s words for this morning end in a prayer. Verse 23: “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.” 

May God grant these things to us as well. 

As we submit to God, allowing Him to set us apart and sanctify us, worship with His people, soak in His Word, thank Him in all circumstances, pray continually, and receive His body and blood, may you and I be ready to truly celebrate Christmas, be ready to meet our Lord face to face, be ready to face life and death and eternity. Amen