"Self-control is the key to accomplishing anything in life and I am convinced that it only lastingly belongs to those who daily surrender their wills to Jesus Christ"

Today's installment of Our Daily Bread contains a favorite story of mine from the life of Dwight Eisenhower, who is one of my personal heroes.

The story recounted is one Ike told in his wonderful personal memoir, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends. If you haven't read this book, treat yourself and do so soon!

Galatians 5:22-23 says that self-control is one of the fruits of the Spirit which Christians receive through their relationship with Jesus Christ. Daily repentance and renewal in the Name of Christ can bring this attribute into our lives and in turn, help us to live more productively, as well as more faithfully.

The section of Proverbs on which the Our Daily Bread piece is based is a particularly favorite part of that Old Testament book for me. 

Proverbs 16:21b rings so true! We are far more likely to gain a hearing for our ideas and more apt to listen to the ideas of others when we engage in "pleasant speech." That means, I think, speaking the truth in love, as the New Testament counsels.

V. 25 is an important bit of wisdom, next to which I've written this in one of my Bibles, attempting to put the passage in my own words: "Don't rely on your intelligence, but on God's revealed wisdom." 


V. 26 makes me smile every time I read it. My margin note there says that "hunger" is the "prod in productivity." I don't know whether I read that somewhere or if it just struck me, but it's rooted in what God revealed to Solomon here in any case.


V. 28 reminds us that gossiping is contrary to God's will and that it is incredibly destructive.


V. 32 is the passage on which the Our Daily Bread piece is especially built. Those who allow the God revealed in Israel and ultimately, in the Person of Jesus Christ, to conquer their anger, are those whom God can use to make a difference with their lives. In a very real sense, the good accomplished by Dwight Eisenhower--whether it was the destruction of Nazi Germany, the passage of the first Civil Rights Law (1957) in more than ninety years (over the objections of Senators John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson), playing hardball with the US military in which he formerly served to ensure that President Truman's integration of our Armed Forces was a fact and not just an executive order, or instituting the interstate highway system--accomplished so much good because he had control of his volcanic temper and could therefore work with anybody. 

This was valued in Eisenhower; today, it seems, at least those who are the most angry and who garner the most attention, irrespective of their ideologies, prefer political leaders who give vent to their anger, rather than being persons of self-control who can work with those with whom they disagree.


Another of my personal heroes, George Washington, also learned self control over not only his temper, but also his impulsiveness. He therefore achieved great things. (In fact, I once heard historian Garry Wills say that Washington was the greatest political leader in human history.) 

Self-control did not come to Washington naturally. As a young colonial officer, he incurred justified condemnation for leading his men into a precipitate, ill-conceived battle, resulting in many unnecessary deaths. But Washington learned from this tragedy. His faith, an underestimated aspect of his life as pointed out in my favorite Washington biography, that by Richard Norton Smith, no doubt played a role in Washington's famed self-control and ability to get along with others. 

Washington could still let loose with his anger in his more mature years. But at that time, it always seemed targeted, dealt for a purpose. He needed every ounce of self-control he could find to hold the Revolutionary Army together through a long war of attrition with Great Britain, then the greatest military power in the world, for example. 

He demonstrated this same self-control when on two occasions, he squelched attempts to make him  king of the newly independent United States. The first occasion came when he went back to Mount Vernon after the war, when many in his army and not a few in the country at large, conspired to put Washington on an American throne. (When advised before the end of the war that Washington planned to refuse kingly power and instead, go back to farm in Virginia, British king, George III said. "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.") 

Again, when Washington was almost forcibly made president in order to hold the infant republic together, many suggested that he should become king. But again, Washington demurred and went back to Mount Vernon to take up private life at the end of two terms.

Self-control is the key to accomplishing anything in life and I am convinced that it only lastingly belongs to those who daily surrender their wills to Jesus Christ. 

Paul writes in Romans 8, that believers are "more than conquerors" through the God Who has loved us through the crucified Savior, Jesus. This isn't an invitation to arrogance or triumphalism; Christians know that our only boast is the goodness of God that comes to us as gift of grace through Christ. But Paul is saying that all who trust in Christ, also share in Christ's victory over our death-dealing egotism, our sin, and our death.


V. 33 may seem strange to us today. But in Biblical times, believers would ask God's guidance over particular decisions before them, then cast lots in the belief that God would answer their prayers, and tell them what they should do. Whatever the process we use to lay our needs before God and even if we make bad decisions with good intentions, the believer in God knows that in the end, God, not us, is the ultimate decider.

'Today is a New Day'

[That's the title of a fantastic message presented by my colleague, Pastor Glen VanderKloot. It's worth the time it will take you to read it. Glen is pastor of Faith Lutheran Church in Springfield, Illinois. You can receive his daily emailed inspirations by going to this web site and following the prompts.]

Today is a new day!

Yesterday is over. Yesterday does not matter.  It does
not matter how often you messed up.  It does not  matter
how badly you messed up.  The past is past.  There is
nothing you can do about it, other than learn from it
and let it go.

It is essential that we learn to let go of yesterday. 

Joyce Chapman wrote...

    If you're still hanging onto a dead dream of
    yesterday, laying flowers on its grave by the hour,
    you cannot be planting the seeds for a new dream
    to grow today.

We have to let go.  Paul understood this.
He wrote to the Philippians...

    This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind
    and straining forward to what lies ahead.
    Philippians 3:13 NRSV

That does not mean we should forget good memories. 
We want to treasure those good memories in our hearts
and minds forever.   It does not mean to forget lessons
learned. Those lessons will keep us from making the
same mistakes over and over again.  Gary Marshall said...

    It's always helpful to learn from your mistakes
    because then your mistakes seem worthwhile.

Let go of all the things from yesterday that drag you down.
Let go of all the things from yesterday that hold you back.
Let go of all the things from yesterday that cause you
    shame and embarrassment.
Let go of all the things from yesterday that cause
    you guilt.
Let go of all the things from yesterday that leave
    you with regret.

Today is a new day!  Let us join with the Psalm writer
and say...

    This is the day that the LORD has made;
    let us rejoice and be glad in it.
    Psalm 118:24 NRSV

We can let go of yesterday's guilt and regrets. 

We can let go of guilt and regret because Jesus has
taken our guilt and regret with him to the cross at
Calvary.  Jesus has set us free.  We are forgiven. 
The slate is wiped clean.  God said through the
prophet Jeremiah...

    These people that I've saved will start out
    with a clean slate.
    Jeremiah 50:18  The Message

We have a clean slate.  Every day we can make a fresh
start and a new beginning.

There are some clergy that who will tell you that God is
keeping a record of everything wrong you have ever done,
ever said or ever thought. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Satan might be keeping track, but not
God.  Instead, God speaking through the prophet
Isaiah, says...

    I, I am the One who erases all your sins,
    for my sake; I will not remember your sins. 
    Isaiah 43:25 NRSV

God erases all our sins. God no longer remembers our
sins.  If God has let go of our sins, surely we too
can let go instead of being crippled by guilt and regret.
   
Today is a new day!  Let us join with the Psalm writer
and say...

    This is the day that the LORD has made;
    let us rejoice and be glad in it.
    Psalm 118:24 NRSV

The Father celebrates when his children come home.
So welcome home! 

In the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15, the
younger son asks for his inheritance early. After
he receives it from his father, he takes off to a
foreign and exotic land.  He is the life of the party
until his money runs out.  Then he is stuck with the
lowest of the low jobs for a Jewish man:
feeding the pigs. 

Luke tells us that suddenly it dawned on him that his
father's servants have it better than he does.  So
he decides to go home.  He rehearses his apology to
his father and even offers to give up the rights
of a son and instead be a servant.

What kind of reception does he get? Jesus tells us...

    But while he was still far off,
    his father saw him and was filled with 
    compassion; he ran and put his arms around him
    and kissed him.
    Luke 15:20 NRSV

Joy, celebration, compassion and love - that was
his father's reaction to his homecoming.  The father
welcomed him home, not as a servant, but as the long
lost son who has come home.  The Father explains...

    Let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine
    was dead and is alive again; he was lost and
    is found!
    Luke 15:23-24  NRSV

What did the father and all of his household except
the older brother do?

    And they began to celebrate.   
    Luke 15:24 NRSV

Our Father in heaven is filled with joy, compassion,
and love when any of his wayward children come home. 
When we come home, it is a time for celebration.
When we come home, it is party time.

So, believe that you can make a fresh start and do it. 
That is what God offers to us.  Paul writes...
   
    Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone
    united with the Messiah gets a fresh start,
    is created new.
    2 Corinthians 5:16 The Message

It does not matter what has happened in the past. 
You can have a fresh start, a new beginning.  Paul
explains further...

    If anyone belongs to Christ, there is a new creation.
    The old things have gone; everything is made new!  
    2 Corinthians 5:17  NCV
The old is gone.  Everything is made new.  You can make
a fresh start.

A sculptor ruined a huge piece of beautiful Carrara marble.
It was left in the courtyard of the cathedral in Florence,
Italy, for almost a hundred years. Artisans thought it
was beyond repair.

In 1505, a young sculptor by the name of Michelangelo
was asked if he thought anything could be done with
"The Giant." He measured the block and carefully noted
the imperfections caused by the bungling workman of an
earlier day. To his mind came the image of the young
shepherd boy David. He carefully made a sketch of that
biblical character as he envisioned him. For 3 years
he worked steadily, his chisel skillfully shaping the
marble into a beautiful towering figure, 18 feet high
and weighing 9 tons.

Beginning fresh often is a product having the vision
to see beyond the ordinary and into the extraordinary.
The Bible is full of stories of people and nations who
were able to envision what could be. 

Hara is a mother and recovering addict who has been
incarcerated multiple times on drug-related charges.
"I never committed a crime sober," she says. She used
alcohol and drugs on and off for 22 years to help her
cope with a very painful life.

Hara has made a fresh start. You can too. On February
20 this year, Hara was released from prison. Again.
This time, though, she was determined to do something
different. To help her in her quest for a new life,
she sought the help of Connections, a program of
Lutheran Social Services of Illinois. Connections
works with incarcerated women and their families,
as well as women re-entering the community following
prison.

The Connections staff knew that Hara was serious
about change and willing to work at it. The people
at Connections went to work helping Hara in her
transition from prison to the free world.

The staff helped her get a bus pass, put together
her resume and find work.

Hara, who is in recovery from her addiction,
insists that there are people like her who want
to change. And that once they're able to change,
they can reach out to others who are struggling
-- in a way that others who haven't been through
these hardships just can't.

That's exactly what Hara does. While going to college,
she works at Project Success, which helps people,
including those recently released from prison, make
a way to go to college.

She's also a volunteer for the Department of Women's
Justice Services, part of the Sheriff's Department.
A passionate speaker, Hara talks to incarcerated women,
women on furlough, social workers, youth and church
groups.  She tells those just getting out of prison...

    Never give up. Whatever your problem is,
    I say it's not who you are.     You can change.
    You can start life over. 

Today is a new day!  Let us join with the Psalm
writer and say...

    This is the day that the LORD has made;
    let us rejoice and be glad in it.
    Psalm 118:24 NRSV
It is time for a fresh start and a new beginning. 
Will you make one? 
Amen

Bless those who persecute you...Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good

From Romans 12:14-21, in the New Testament:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. ¹⁵Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. ¹⁶Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. ¹⁷Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. ¹⁸If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. ¹⁹Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” ²⁰No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” ²¹Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. 

Read Julie Ackerman Link's outstanding reflections on these words, today's installment of Our Daily Bread.

September 11 Prayer

Tomorrow, I'm scheduled be one of a number of local clergy offering prayers during a September 11 commemorative prayer service happening in our community. I've been assigned praying for our government. Here's the prayer I plan on offering (unless God has other plans):

Gracious God: Your Word tells us that there is no authority on earth that does not come from You. And so, we pray for the leaders of governments throughout the world, especially for those in our own country. To our president provide Your protection and Your wisdom. Grant these same blessings to all federal, state, and local officials, so that they will be guided by Your will. Grant that we, as citizens of this republic, even if we disagree with those who govern, will remain respectful of them. We pray guidance and protection for all in government service—from first responders to Peace Corps volunteers, from those in diplomatic service to those who regulate industries and ensure our safety, from cabinet secretaries to those in our Armed Forces. Mindful of the fleeting nature of life on this earth, aware that we are sinners by nature in need of our Savior, and knowing that we have nothing for which we can boast, we cling to Jesus Christ as our hope for this life and the one to come. We pray these things in Jesus’ holy and mighty Name. Amen

Forgiving the 9/11 Perpetrators?

A commenter on a friend's Facebook page said that, irrespective of what Christians are called to do, she would never forgive the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. Another commenter suggested that if a person can forgive the terrorists, "then you need to check yourself."

I understand their sentiments, of course. In the days following the 9/11 attacks, my wife and I were fond of the political cartoon showing an American eagle sharpening its talons preparing to respond. We liked it so much that we posted it on our refrigerator. Without getting into the specifics of endorsing or condemning any particular policies, my wife and I, like hundreds of millions of others thought that some response to the September 11 outrages had to come.

But I didn't agree with the commenters at my friend's site today when it came to this business of forgiveness. This is what I wrote:

There's a difference between forgiveness and heedlessness. In an imperfect world where people do evil things, God has provided for the establishment of governments in part to pursue justice--whether through domestic police powers, economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, imprisonment, or armies. The government that is heedless of injustices like the September 11 attacks would not be doing its job.

[Similarly, the woman, for example, who fails to get out of an abusive relationship or fails to take the necessary legal steps to keep an abuser from continuing to harm her, is not doing the right thing. She will be right to forgive, but she will be reckless to take no action, to be heedless of the threat her abuser poses in her life. She must do something to stop her abuser!]

But Jesus leaves no question as to whether we should forgive. Not forgiving will, if allowed to prevail in our lives, make us monsters who also commit injustices against others.

Forgiveness is hard to do. It requires supernatural power given to us only by God, which is why Jesus taught us to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."

Vengeance is not the same thing as justice. 

Forgiveness is not the same thing as excusing. 

Release (aphiemi is the word in the Greek in which the New Testament was written) is one word for forgiveness used in the New Testament. [When we forgive,] we not only release others from their indebtedness to us, we release ourselves from the corrosive, hellish feelings that accompanying holding onto hatred, vengeful sentiments, and putting ourselves on God's throne of judgment. 

[Government leaders can only think clearly about how best to mete out justice, including the possibility of waging war, by getting all notions of revenge out of their minds. When armies wreak vengeance, they violate one of the most important principles of Christian belief on what constitutes a just war: proportionality.

[We similarly escalate relational discord in our own lives when we seek revenge rather than justice.]

I'm only a student of the lessons God wants us to learn, by the way.

What I try to do when faced with my inability to forgive or love others is to ask God to forgive or love them through me, in spite of my feelings. [Imperfectly,] I try to follow as Savior Who, as He died at the hands of hateful, violent people, against all common sense and evidence to the contrary, put the most charitable construction on his murderers' actions and prayed, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do!"

If Jesus can do that in His own power, maybe He can do it through [me in spite of] my weakness.

My New Favorite Bumper Sticker

"As followers of Jesus Christ, we want the words that flow from our hearts and out of our mouths to be...life-giving..."

That's a quote from today's installment from Our Daily Bread. It's worth reading. The New Testament passage on which it's based is Ephesians 4:25-32:

So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. ²⁶Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, ²⁷and do not make room for the devil. ²⁸Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. ²⁹Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. ³⁰And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. ³¹Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, ³²and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

These words from God's Word imply, among other things, that we are both to lovingly tell others the truth about the reality of our sin AND the truth about Jesus, Who brings forgiveness of sin and everlasting life to all who believe in Him. 

Whether we tell it to those who are part of the Christian family or to those not yet experiencing the new life that only Jesus Christ can give, everybody needs to hear and to be reminded of the truth that "the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23). We also need to hear and be reminded that:

the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets [that is, by the two major strands of Old Testament writings], the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood effective through faith...[God] justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:21-26)

God's call and command that we who follow Jesus "speak the truth in love," also means, in Martin Luther's words in his explanation of the Eighth Commandment, "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor" that:

We are to fear and love God so that we do not betray, slander, or lie about our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain his actions in the kindest way.

I don't mean to imply that the sort of truth-telling to which believers are called is in any way possible to do when we rely on our own will power or strength of character. The self-reliant can never, in the guts of everyday life, experience the truth of the promise of Jesus that "with God, all things are possible." 

In the face of derision and the pressures of "political correctness," we all would rather do almost anything than speaks God's truth...and usually will. 

But we can tell the truth and come back to the truth that Jesus calls us to tell and to live when we rely on God. God-reliance will always empower us to to be the people that self-reliance only deludes itself into thinking it can achieve!


When it comes to sharing the truth about sin and forgiveness, about life and death, about heaven and hell though, we Christians are all to be proclaimers of the truth. 

Some will be called to tell it from the pulpit. Others are commissioned by Christ to tell this truth while kicking back with friends in those conversations that, as conversations with good friends always do, drift into the subjects that really matter. 

We Christians who withhold the truth about Jesus, that He is, "the way, and the truth, and the life," from our neighbors--even the "neighbors" in our own homes, the "neighbors" with whom we watch ball games, shop at the mall, share cubicles at work, or have a drink--are not fulfilling our sacred obligation or experiencing the unique joy that comes from telling others about Jesus. 

In that sense then, every Christian is commissioned by Jesus, in a sensitive and caring way, to be a preacher of the good word--the good news--about Christ. Paul puts it simply in Romans:

...how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are hey to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?...not all have obeyed the good news [that is, believed in the gospel that life and forgiveness come to those who repent of sin and entrust their lives to Jesus Christ]; for Isaiah [the Old Testament prophet] says, 'Lord, who has believed our message?' So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of the Lord.

Beyond this special and important truth, we are to tell all truth to others, not in a desire to hurt, but to build up others. When tempted to "tell the truth" about those we dislike or who dislike us, those whose integrity or intelligence we may question, and anyone with whom we may be angry or not in sync, the Ephesians 4 passage tells us that we should consider a great option: Keeping our traps shut. This is true whether we're speaking to them directly or when speaking to others about them.

By all means, when we have conflicts with others and the cause, the relationship, and the stakes are important enough to us, we should lovingly "have it out" with the other person. Otherwise again, we should keep our traps shut.

It's passages from God's Word like Ephesians 4, that make my daily prayers of repentance so long!

They're also the reason behind one of my most frequent prayer requests. In many situations I face, I ask God to cause me to speak the right words and to keep the right silences and to know the difference. And I find that when I trustingly get out of God's way, God answers that prayer.

That's how I know, by the way, that God does impossible things: I've learned that God can use an imperfect sinner like me to bring His life to others. If that's not some sort of miracle, I don't know what is.

Burn Korans? Not If You Want to Do Christ's Will

It's hard to fathom the motives of the Gainseville, Florida pastor and his 50-member flock who plan on holding what they call an "International Burn the Koran Day," this coming Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

I can't help suspecting that a big motivator on the part of the pastor, Terry Jones, is to gain attention for himself and his struggling church.

He has certainly gotten that. Newspapers, TV news shows, and Internet web sites are filled with stories about the planned event. There have been protest demonstrations in the Islamic world, where pictures of Jones have been set afire. A U.S. State Department spokesperson and the White House press secretary have condemned the planned Koran-burning. General David Petraeus has taken time from his combat duties in Afghanistan to warn that the Jones event would endanger U.S. combat forces and every American by inciting Jihadists and confirming the Muslim world's worst misapprehensions about Americans. (And about Christians too, I would add.)

It's difficult to see what good that Jones and his flock think all this attention will produce. It certainly won't advance the cause to which every follower of Jesus Christ should be committed.

That cause, which we Christians believe the risen Jesus gave to us just before He ascended to heaven, is called, the Great Commission. Forms of it appear in all four of the New Testament gospels and in Luke's history of the early Church, the Book of Acts. The most famous version is in the Gospel of Matthew. There, Jesus commissions Christians to:

 "¹⁹Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” 

 As an evangelical Christian, I take this commission seriously. Jesus claims that He is God in the flesh and that repentance for sin and belief in Him is the only means by which human beings can grasp the grace of God and be reconciled with God. I pray every day that God will use me, inadequacies, faults, sins, and all, to share with everyone I contact, the good news of new and everlasting life from God that, as I believe the Bible teaches, only comes through Christ. I want all people to know the joy and the peace that comes from Christ, even in the midst of life's challenges.

But none of this should lead a Christian to burn Islam's book, even if we don't believe that the Koran came from God.

In fact, it should lead us away from such off-putting actions. If we want all people to come to faith in Christ, we should be looking for ways to build bridges, not burn them down.

Mr. Jones and his congregation might want to turn to the apostle Paul for an example of how to approach Muslims, a small fraction of whom act as the seedbed from which Jihadists grow terrorists.

Paul was the greatest of the early Church's preachers, a devout Jew who once persecuted believers in Christ, then became a great champion of Christian faith, and who spent most of his adult life traveling the Mediterranean basin, starting churches, winning converts, and encouraging believers. Ultimately, he was martyred for his faith in Christ.

Sometime around 50-52AD, Paul spent time in Athens awaiting the arrival of friends. The Book of Acts in the Bible's New Testament says that Paul was "distressed to see the city was full of idols." For a Jewish Christian like Paul, steeped in the Old Testament's teaching (and what would also be the New Testament's teaching) that there is just one God, the many statues depicting false gods was undoubtedly disgusting. The temptation to throw a fit and pour condemnations on the Athenians would have been huge for a man like Paul, passionate, sharp-tongued, and devout. He might have felt that he had good warrant to do just that.

But Paul had a higher call, a great commission! A rhetorical assault on the Athenians and their worship of many Gods would have been the first-century equivalent of burning a Koran, momentarily satisfying to the one with the torch, maybe, but ultimately useless to the cause of Christ.

Instead, we're told that Paul went to the synagogues there to tell his fellow Jews about Jesus and also to the Athenian marketplaces where learned people discussed life issues. He debated, but he didn't attack.

Then, one day, Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, curious about, if disdainful of, Paul's message about Christ took him to a place called the Areopagus, a low Athenian hill. With the city's multiple idols visible to everyone, Paul didn't attack.

“Athenians," he began, "I see how extremely religious you are in every way. ²³For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you." Paul, starting with where the Athenians were, told them about the one God of the universe he believed was first revealed to God's people, Israel, and was ultimately revealed in the crucified and risen Jesus. He even quoted one of their poets as he talked with them.

After Paul finished speaking, some simply wrote him off. Others said that they wanted to hear more. Still others became followers of Christ. Paul wouldn't have seen these results if he had decided to scold and excoriate the Athenians for their evil beliefs. Instead, Christians believe that God's Holy Spirit used Paul's approach to make disciples of some.

Abraham Lincoln is widely reported to have been asked once by partisans why, instead of attempting reconciliation with his enemies, he didn't try destroying them instead. Lincoln replied, "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
 
In an imperfect world in which violent people pose threats to others, there is a place for military, police, jails, prisons, and aggressive government action. 

But the Bible I read and the Savior I follow gives Christians no encouragement and no warrant to burn Korans. Doing so will not only endanger the lives of many Americans who want no part of what Terry Jones and his Gainesville congregation are planning to do, it will also hurt the cause we Christians are commissioned to pursue: Making new friends and followers of Jesus.  

Pray for and Help the People of Pakistan

If you watched the PBS Evening News Hour tonight, you know how dire things are in Pakistan are in the wake of recent flooding: Millions are displaced, living in constant exposure to the elements, without food or medical care, families are separated, and children separated from their families are subject to the strong possibility of exploitation or violence.

Please pray for the people of Pakistan and prayerfully consider a contribution to Lutheran World Relief so that some of that sterling organization's partner groups can bring relief and help to the people in Pakistan.

Here is a link by which you can contribute online.

The Fear We Desperately Need

The great 20th.-century Lutheran pastor and theologian, Ole Hallesby, wrote about the fear we need in a sermon based on Luke 12:5*:

The disciples needed an admonition to fear God. We need it too. Yes, I often ask myself: Is there anything our generation needs more urgently than to really fear God? There is fear enough otherwise in our day and age. We fear illness...We fear poverty...We fear people...Yes, there is enough fear. Jesus tells us that this fear which stunts the growth of a person's character and contaminates the soul is all due to the fact that we do not fear the only one whom we should fear, namely, the living God.**

If you want an explanation for why so many Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) congregations are failing either to rise up and demand that the denomination reform and repent or, in the knowledge that the deck is heavily stacked against the Word of God in the ELCA, leave it to join other Lutheran bodies, you need look no further than Hallesby's insightful quote.  

ELCA Lutherans are failing to speak and act in concert with the will of God because they fear everything more than they fear God.

For many in the ELCA, God is an abstraction, not a real living Being, the Ground of All Being, as Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich put it. For many, the Bible is not the Word of God, the authoritative record of God's self-disclosure, first "in many and various ways," to the people of Israel and ultimately in the Person of the Word made flesh, Jesus.

Bishops stand idly by, failing to exercise their pastoral responsibility to correct, rebuke, and discipline those pastors and theologians who deny Christ's virgin birth (even the ELCA's official web page that our confession of Jesus' virgin birth is not "a gynecological assertion," which no doubt comes as a great surprise to Jesus and would to the Biblical writers and to the early Christians, including Jesus' own family, who spent some energy denying the allegations made by many that Jesus was a "bastard," conceived by the usual means), who deny that Christ was physically resurrected or that Christians who believe in Christ will physically rise with Christ, and who, even on the official pages of the ELCA, uphold the universalistic notion that since Christ died for all, all will be saved, whether repenting or believing in Christ or not. (Although "saved" is a term meaning little in some universalists' hands, if there is also no resurrection.) The Bible, and Jesus Himself, teaches that faith in Jesus is the means by which God's grace is appropriated by believers and that there is no other way to God but through Jesus. (See here, here, and here.) (Also see here and here.)

The ELCA countenances pastors who teach that while there may be a heaven, there is no hell, in direct contradiction of Jesus Himself.

It countenances, in the presence of and with the complicity of participating bishops, the offering of flagrantly un-Christians prayers in "celebratory" rites. (To see a recent "rite" at which three ELCA synodical bishops were present, in which several alternative versions to the Lord's Prayer and in which there is a refusal to acknowledge God's power and might, see here. Warning: It's deeply depressing reading, especially because it so slyly displaces Biblical truth with plausibly phrased heresy and sin.)

The presiding bishop of the ELCA stands idly by at a conference called Sharing the Gospel (a conference supposedly about sharing the good news of Jesus, the one and only Savior and God), while Muslim and Buddhist prayers invoking other deities or "ways," are offered, ostensibly to allow participants to appreciate the beauty of the prayers***

And, of course, consistent with all of these acts of outright rebellion against God and lazy complicity with heresy, the ELCA, last August, officially denied the authority of God to declare what behaviors are acceptable and what are sin, when it granted congregations the right to ordain practicing homosexuals.

All these sins of commission and of omission are perpetrated by a denomination and by complicit congregations who fear the world more than they fear God.

God's will and Word on all the sins and errors enumerated above, which hardly represents an exhaustive bill of particulars, are crystal clear. A reading of the Bible in which we allow it to speak in its clear sense, untouched by rope-a-dope theology will tell us that the ELCA has wandered far from God. 

The ELCA and many of its congregations fear the world; fear being on the outs with those to whom we look for what is politically correct; fear appearing "fanatical" if we side with God rather than the arbiters of contemporary mores and attitudes; fear offending people; fear hurting people; fear breaking up somnambulant clubs masquerading as churches, clubs that have forgotten that the Church belongs to Christ, not to church members.

The truth of God's Word always hurts when we let it tell us the truth about our sin and our need of God. But the truth of God--the truth of Jesus Himself--can also set sinners who repent and believe in Christ free from sin, death, and futility for all eternity.

Jesus tells us to fear God alone. Fearing God leads to freedom and life. Fearing anything else leads to slavery and yes, hell.

Are we listening?

*[Jesus said:] "But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!" ⁵


**This is cited in By What Authority: Confronting Churches Who No Longer Believe Their Own Message.

***Obviously, it's a good thing to learn about world religions and to interact with those of other faiths. We Christians want to live in peace with all people AND, by our servant hearts and Christians love, we want to earn a hearing for the good news of Jesus, which can lift people out of darkness into God's marvelous light. But when Christians are gathered to worship God, they should turn their attention to the God we meet in Jesus Christ. Period.

How to Be What You Cannot Be

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

Luke 14:25-33
When I was a boy, our family took a fishing vacation to Michigan with my grandparents. We had done this several times before, but the cabin my grandparents rented this particular year was in a different spot next to a different Michigan lake. My grandfather was pleased because, though he had never seen the cabins before, they were owned by an old friend of his and he felt that he had gotten a good deal. The brochures his friend sent to us pictured this as a great place that all of us would enjoy.

When we first pulled up to our cabin, we were all disappointed; the lake was a little more than a pathetic pond and the cabin itself was a dump. The disappointment continued when we went inside and searched in vain for a bathroom. My grandfather confronted his friend: “The brochure said that the cabins had bathing facilities." With a sweeping backhanded wave, his friend drew our attention to the water and said, “There’s a whole lake right there.”

A little truth in advertising might have spared a friendship and our family having what turned out to be a fairly rotten week. Of course, both of those outcomes could also have been avoided had my grandfather followed a simple old motto: Buyer, beware! A few questions, a little research, and he wouldn’t have even booked those cabins in the first place. One of the last things any of us want to do is make decisions that we later regret.

Our Gospel lesson from Luke for today finds Jesus engaging in “truth in advertising.” He wants people to know exactly what is involved in following Him. God’s grace, His forgiveness and favor, is a free gift; but to grasp hold of it costs us everything, our whole lives. Jesus is intent on our knowing that.

Turn once more, to the Celebrate inserts and find this morning’s Gospel lesson, Luke 14:25-33. Read along as I read just the first clause of verse 25: “Now large crowds were traveling with him.” Whenever references to crowds appear in Luke’s Gospel, Luke is talking about people who are interested in Jesus, maybe even hopeful that Jesus will do something for them, but who haven’t committed to following Jesus. Like many people today, they wanted just enough of Jesus to get from Him what they wanted, but not enough to change their personal priorities.

Read on with me, please: “and he turned and said to them, ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.’” If Jesus were writing a promotional brochure, it’s hard to imagine Him doing a worse job of attracting people to Christian discipleship than in starting out like this! In Jesus’ hands, the brochure sent to us by my grandfather’s friend might have said, “The lake is really a pond. The cabins don’t have any bathrooms. And, oh, by the way, the fishing is lousy! Call to make your reservations now!”

What is Jesus saying here about being a disciple, then? In Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke every day, the word “hate” didn't imply hostility, but often had the meaning to love less, to hold one thing or person as having less important than another. In this verse, Jesus is telling us to love our families and our own lives less than we love Him, to love Him more than these things.

The so-called “family values” crowd of today will be appalled to know that Jesus doesn’t agree with them when they say, “Family is the most important thing.” Jesus says, “No. Your family is not the most important thing. I am.”

To modern narcissists who talk about needing to take care of themselves, look after themselves, or find themselves, Jesus says, “Finding yourself, being happy, is not the most important thing in the world. I am.”

Jesus refuses to be just another item on a religious buffet table. We can’t take one from Column Buddha, one from Column Mohammad, one from Column Joseph Smith, and, oh, a side of Jesus. Jesus is saying that He will either have first place in our lives, or He will have no place in our lives.

I like what one Lutheran wrote on Facebook this past week about the God Who comes to us in Jesus: "God does not offer us a choice. He comes, not hat in hand, but ready for battle. He breaks into the strong man’s house [that is, He breaks into our wills, held captive by sin from the moment of our conceptions] entering into contention against the heart, soul & mind of the [sinner]. The rational free will of [human beings] cannot believe or accept this & as such God always ...appears as the opposite, contrary to our expectations, confounding appeals to choice." Where does Jesus and His Word found in the Bible fall on your list priorities in life? Is Jesus everything or nothing to you?

 Read verse 28 now [Jesus is still speaking]: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” One scholar writing about these words, says: “The language of cross bearing has been corrupted by overuse. Bearing a cross has nothing to do with chronic illness, painful physical conditions, or trying family relationships. It is instead what we do voluntarily as a consequence of our commitment to Jesus Christ. Cross bearing requires deliberate sacrifice and exposure to risk and ridicule [I would add, even death] in order to follow Jesus. This commitment is not just a way of life, however. It is a commitment to a person. A disciple follows another person and learns a new way of life.” That person Who calls us to a different way of life is Jesus. Discipleship then, means breaking with the world’s values, radically turning from what is popular or politically correct to follow Jesus and the Word of God alone.

After this, Jesus tells two parables, each meant to urge those considering following Him to count the cost involved. In one, Jesus says that farmers, who in first century Judea where He lived, often built towers to give themselves early warning about marauding thieves or wild animals, would be crazy not to figure out whether they could afford the structures before starting to build them. Similarly, Jesus says, a king who didn’t know about the strength of an opposing army would be foolish to start a war with that army. Again, Jesus wants us to know that following Him isn’t easy.

Then, in verse 33, as if to totally turn off His original listeners (and us), Jesus says, “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” I don’t think that Jesus means that we all have to sign the deeds to our houses over to the Church. It’s one thing to read the Scriptures for their literal meaning, which I do, and quite another to read them literalistically. If you read the Bible cover to cover, which I hope every Christian will do more than once in their lifetimes, you’ll read about believers in Israel’s God and followers of Jesus who had a lot and others who had very little. They all belonged to God. The only person I can recall who was told by Jesus to sell everything he owned, give it away, and follow Him, was a rich young man who, Jesus saw, valued his wealth more than anything. Jesus knew that unless this young man got rid of his wealth, it would get in the way of his following Jesus. Wealth in itself is not a bad thing. Nor are the things Jesus mentions in today's lesson: parents, siblings, spouses, children, or life itself. All are gifts from God. A literal, if not a literalistic reading of the Bible will tell us that if we value any of God’s gifts more than we do Jesus, we cannot be His disciples.

Now, if these words of Jesus for this morning are as daunting—almost frightening—to you as they are to me, as we close, I want you to consider some important good news.

Three times in our lesson, Jesus uses the phrase “cannot be my disciple.” Look, it's in verses 26, 27, and 33. In the original Greek, the same words are used in each place, giving the verses this literal meaning, “You don’t have the power or ability to be my disciples unless you put me in first place, take up the cross, and give me access to your whole life.”

Martin Luther said that if we want to understand passages of Scripture that confuse us, the best thing to do is to go elsewhere in Scripture to clear things up. It might interest you to know that Jesus uses that word for power or ability in another place in Luke’s Gospel. It comes on the heels of His encounter with that rich young man, after Jesus tells the disciples that it will be harder for a rich person—someone who is more tempted than others to rely on their money rather than on God—to enter God’s kingdom than it would be for a camel to be pushed through the eye of a needle. The disciples, who had thought that wealth was a sign of God’s favor, ask Jesus, “Then, who does have the power or ability to get into the kingdom?” Jesus says, literally, “The things that human beings cannot do [or don’t have the ability to do], God can do.”

Folks, I can’t imagine why anyone who gets to know anything about Jesus wouldn’t want to follow Him. Those who follow Jesus have all the gifts He came into our world to bring: forgiveness of sin, lives lived for good purposes, strength when we’re weak, and eternity with God. But unless Jesus rules over our lives without rival, these gifts cannot come to us.

The good news is that your ability to follow Jesus doesn’t depend on you. If you want Jesus to take first place in your life, all you need is to make yourself available to Him and ask Him to help you do just that. This is what Luther called “daily repentance and renewal.” Today, as you come to receive Jesus’ body and blood, I invite you to say a silent prayer:

“Jesus, help me to be what I most want to be, but what I cannot be without You. Make me your disciple. Help me to live in the covenant of Baptism You’ve made with me. Take control of my whole life.”

Now, if you’re anything like me, one nanosecond after you’ve prayed that prayer, you’ll start making your own plans, dreaming your own dreams, obsessing on your own thoughts, maybe even committing your own favorite sins. Just keep asking Jesus to take first place in your life.

But, just as the buyer should beware, the would-be follower of Jesus should be aware, too: Let Jesus in and He will start to make of you what cannot make of yourself. Jesus will make you His disciple.

"Are we willing to keep coming back to God for help in getting the spiritual character enhancement we need?"

This should be a question that every Christian faces every single day, hard as it is. It appears in today's installment of Our Daily Bread.

Martin Luther said that the life style of a Christian grateful for the free gift of salvation in Christ, is "daily repentance and renewal." Pursuing this life style--a life of pursuing Jesus, really--requires a courage and an honesty that only God can provide to us. But each day, we need to be willing to pray with the psalmist, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting" (Psalm 139:23-24).

But be warned that if you pray that prayer and mean it, and aren't just mouthing pious words you've been taught, God will show you your sins. God will show you your character deficiencies. God will show you the ways in which you need to align your heart, your will, and your actions with God. The simple fact of the matter is that if God and you disagree about whether you've sinned or even about what constitutes a sin, God is not the One Who needs to have a change of mind. God has made clear what is right and what is wrong, putting it all in black and white on the pages of Scripture, no matter how many fancy theological end runs we might try to pull to elude the truth.

But God will never show us our sins and deficiencies--as I experience God doing with me every day--out of malice or spite. God doesn't want you to feel like a worm.

When we ask God to tell us about the wicked ways that are in us, we really ask God to let us see our actual selves, stripped of the masks that we put on to fool other people, to fool God, and to fool even ourselves. It's only when God helps us get real with Him in this way that we understand how desperately we need Jesus Christ.

Vulnerability before God and confession of the sins of which God makes us aware when we are honest before God, will allow us not just to ask God for forgiveness, but also open the way for God to give us the power to combat our faults, to live in different ways, to be reconciled with those we may be hurting, to walk away from the sins that we, in our own power and under our own self-driven reasoning, find irresistible.

"Are we willing to keep coming back to God for help in getting the spiritual character enhancement we need?" If we can answer, "Yes," to that question, even if the size of our affirmation is that of a small mustard seed and no matter how incapable we are of resisting the sins to which we are oriented, we will be well on the road to wholeness, to life with God, to becoming the people God originally intended for us to be.

Jesus Christ, the only one given under heaven through which we can be saved from sin and death and ourselves, makes this possible for all who are willing to turn from the world's futile ways and trust in Him alone.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Here's the New Testament verses on which today's Our Daily Bread devotional is based:

Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:17-24)^{18192021222324}

"Salt"

Great takes on the crisis in the ELCA and the hope afforded for faithful witness to the Gospel that exists in Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) and the new North American Lutheran Church (NALC) here.

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin

Great words from my one-time seminary adviser, Hans Schwarz, Professor Emeritus of Protestant Theology and Contemporary Theological Issues at University of Regensburg in Germany:

Christ-like conduct requires us to have compassion for both faithful and sinners, but it requires us to discern between faithful living and sin, to espouse the former and to reject the latter. While we welcome everybody into our midst, especially those for whom Jesus cared, namely the poor, the despised, and the outcast of society, we dare not bless or condone that which the Bible in all its witness to God's saving action disapproves.

[From By What Authority?: Confronting Churches Who No Longer Believe Their Own Message]

Beyond the Emptiness

[This was shared during a memorial worship service for the family and friends of a member of Saint Matthew Lutheran in Logan, Ohio. The service occurred in the Saint Matthew sanctuary.]

Romans 8:31-39
John 14:1-6
Several weeks have passed now since Elly’s death. While I know that George, Elly’s extended family, and all her many friends saw Elly’s passing as a release from her suffering, the grief—the sense of an empty place at your table, of an empty place in the studio where bowls were spun, glazed, and fired for Empty Bowls, and of an empty spot at the meetings where hospital auctions were planned—that sense of emptiness is great for all of you today. I too will miss my monthly visits with Elly, where I shared Christ’s body and blood in Holy Communion and God’s Word with her and where, as we got to know one another better and better and we laughed over these past thirty-four months.

When the emptiness of grief comes to us, there are several ways we can react. One way is to take death, futility, and grief as the final words over our lives.

But there is another way. It’s the way commended by Jesus in the lesson from the Gospel of John in the New Testament that we just read. Jesus has been comforting His disciples in anticipation of His cross. All the disciples know with certainty is that in Jerusalem, with the Jewish religious leaders and the Roman government fearful of Jesus, bad things might happen. What good, they might wonder, will Jesus' death bring?

Jesus tells them—and us—not to be troubled. “I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus says. “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

For the follower of Jesus, that person who repents for sin and bets their whole lives on Jesus Christ, which is what faith is—betting our all on Jesus, futility and emptiness, grief and death do not have control of us. The follower of Jesus lives each day in the certainty that the Savior Who died to erase sin’s power over us and rose from death to give us new life, has prepared places for us in the house of God the Father. We know that, as the other lesson we read, from the New Testament book of Romans, reminds us, “nothing…will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Not death.

Not grief.

Not emptiness.

None of this is to say that trusting in what God has done for us in the death and resurrection of Jesus will make our grief go away. Knowing how the stories of all believers in Jesus end—that places are prepared for them with God--doesn’t mean that we don’t grieve the loss of those we love and care about. Jesus knew that His friend, Lazarus, believed in Him. Jesus knew that as a believer in Him, Lazarus would spend eternity with God. But when Jesus considered Lazarus’ death and how Lazarus was no longer there among his family and friends in the village of Bethany, Jesus still wept.

Grief is real and don’t let anyone ever tell you that Christians shouldn’t grieve.

But for the believer in Jesus, there is more than grief and loss. It’s to underscore this truth that, in the latter part of our lesson from John’s gospel, Jesus says to the disciples, “And you know the way to the place where I am going.”

Thomas though, speaking for people like me—thick of head and slow in the pick-up--asks Jesus honestly, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Thomas is so overwhelmed by grief, loss, and fear, that he can’t see what he has already seen and experienced.

Thomas already knew that Jesus was God in the flesh. He already knew from the many signs Jesus had performed, that Jesus had power over death and life. But Thomas was afraid that, without Jesus right there physically present to him, he would lose his way, that all the sorrows and sins of life would overwhelm Him.

It’s then that Jesus tells Thomas words that I hope all of you can claim for yourselves this morning. When you’ve lost your way. When all of life seems vain and pointless. When grief grips you and sadness threatens to morph into despair, recall Jesus’ words: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Jesus, the crucified Lord, reclaimed life…not just for Himself, but for all who believe in Him.

Jesus is the only way to the Father and those who follow Him, even when they grieve, are never without hope!

In a way, the empty bowls that Elly made and helped others to make each year stand as a fitting symbol for us today. For the person who is hungry, there is nothing more daunting or frightening than an empty bowl they can’t fill on their own. But Hocking County’s Empty Bowls events take that symbol of defeat, emptiness, and death and turns it on its head.

The empty bowls that Elly and so many of you here this morning have made, sold, and bought through the years have helped to fill the bowls and the bellies of many people, giving them the power to go another day and the hope to keep waking up the next day. Those empty bowls thus became a symbol of hope, love, and community for the hungry.

Today, you and I gather in the bright, illuminating shadow of another symbol turned on its head. In the ancient Roman Empire, crosses were reserved for the worst enemies of the state. Execution on the cross was a horrible way to die and there was no possible reprieve from death for the criminals nailed to them. But Jesus’ mission of love and mercy could not be stopped even by death on a cross. After the seeming defeat of the cross, Jesus, as I've said many times before, would not stay dead. His resurrection turned an instrument of death and a sign of hopelessness, the cross, into a symbol of God’s deathless love.

This morning, we grieve. But we also have hope. The Savior sought by Elly every time she reached out her hands to take the bread and the wine of Holy Communion, has prepared a place for you.

All who believe in Jesus will be united with God and with all who have trusted in Christ in eternity. Our tears will be wiped away. Our griefs erased. And our emptiness filled with an eternity of joy and laughter. Even today, we have so much to look forward to.

God bless you!

'THE Person of the Bible'

Jesus is the One to Whom the Bible--Old and New Testaments--points.

Reading the Bible leads us, ultimately, to Jesus. I'm finding that to be true for me again these days as I read the Old Testament book of Leviticus for my personal devotions at night.

Leviticus, which established the system of sacrifice which was, as pointed out by the Jewish-Christian preacher in the New Testament book of Hebrews, a "shadow" of Jesus, "the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world."

Allow yourself to be enlightened by the blazing, brilliant light of the Bible and soon you will fall in love with the Light of the world, the One Who fulfilled and embodied God's long-ago call to Israel to be the light to the nations: Jesus, God-enfleshed, the Messiah, the Lord of heaven and earth!

Check out today's Our Daily Bread devotion, The Person of the Bible, based on John 5:31-40. [Note: Jesus is the speaker in that passage of Scripture.]

Why I Care So Much About Sharing Christ with Others

Ephesians 2:8 reminds us that we are saved from sin and death by God's grace through our faith in Jesus Christ. That's why I am so passionate about sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ with others. I want all people to experience the forgiveness, joy, and everlasting hope that comes to those who end their inborn rebellion to God and surrender to the Savior.

Sharing Christ with others is the only activity to which we can commit themselves that will make any real difference, whether in our own lives or in the lives of others. It also happens to be the mission every Christian is charged with fulfilling.

Please click on the links above and please also read the following passages of Scripture:

 "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." (Romans 10:9)

[Jesus told Nicodemus:] “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. ¹⁷Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. ¹⁸Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God" (John 3:16-18)

 [Peter and John said:] "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). 

Check out today's devotion from Our Daily Bread.

Words That Have Gained Importance for Me

In the past forty-eight hours, these words have only gained in their importance for me. (They're some of what the apostle Paul wrote back in the first century to a young pastor named Timothy.)

"Proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. ³For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, ⁴and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. ⁵As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully" (2 Timothy 4:2-5)

Welcome to God's Upside Down Kingdom

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

Luke 14:1, 7-14
It would be easy to think that the two stories Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson are just about good manners, fables complete with  morals. But if we thought that, we would be missing important lessons Jesus wants to teach us.

Once more today, please pull out the Celebrate inserts and go to the Gospel lesson from Luke 14. Look at verse seven with me: “When [Jesus] noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.”

A parable, of course, is a story. But a parable is a special sort of story. In the Greek in which the New Testament was written, the word that we transliterate into English as parable is parabole. It’s a compound word that literally means to throw or roll alongside. A parable is a story woven from people's everyday experiences, with another story of deep significance rolled alongside of it. Jesus’ parables were always meant to tell us something about the kingdom of God that Jesus brought into the world.

Jesus told the two parables in today’s Gospel lesson during a banquet at the home of a Pharisee. Pharisees, you’ll remember, were Jews who, like Jesus, believed in the physical resurrection of the dead. But they also believed that if they adhered to certain rules, most of which were made up by human beings and did not come from God, then their behavior would force God to give them places in the heavenly banquet hall.

In the end, of course, the Pharisees did not believe that rightness with God—what the Bible calls righteousness—is a gift from God conferred on those who repent for sin and trust in God. Instead, they believed that, by their actions, they would earn a place in heaven that not God, the devil, or the world could deny to them. Despite their seeming faithfulness, the Pharisees really tried to whittle God down to human size, to turn God into a tiny deity they could force to make concessions to them simply because they were such good people.

Today, people don’t worry so much about God’s favor. We often seem to have whittled God right out of our lives. Or we’ve twisted the Bible’s teaching that God is love and turned the mighty God of the universe into an indulgent sugar daddy. Many people, even those identifying themselves as Christians, seem to think that all roads lead to heaven. Polling, in fact, repeatedly shows that Christians in the United States accept Jesus’ teaching that there is a heaven. But much smaller numbers of Christians accept the word of Jesus that there is a hell.

Let’s face it: The Bible is filled with inconvenient truths we would rather not hear about. We’re like the rebel people of God the prophet Isaiah addressed some seven hundred years before Jesus. “Do not prophesy what is right,” Isaiah heard them saying, “speak to us smooth things…” 

By contrast, for all their many faults, most of the Pharisees would never have knowingly taught things contrary to the will of God. In fact, they unknowingly and thoughtlessly drifted into their false beliefs.

And Christ’s Church always struggles to resist such unintentional drifting from God. That’s why the Reformation begun by Martin Luther and others back in the sixteenth century must be a continuing part of our lives today. We need to constantly return to God, to God’s Word, to God’s will.

But many Christians seem to have settled into a new kind of Pharisaism in which we are expected to passively go along with what I call Christianity Lite, the religion of anything goes so long as it conforms to the shifting standards of society regarding what is politically correct.

Someone has said that if Jesus were to come to a typical Lutheran congregation in North America and teach, as He did to the Pharisees in first-century Judea, “Stop trying to earn righteousness and salvation,” the response would be, “Who’s trying?”

That’s how far we Lutherans have wandered from Martin Luther’s belief that whenever God’s Word is proclaimed—whether from a pulpit or in all Christians’ everyday interactions with others, we must include the Law (the revelation of God’s will for human beings) and the Gospel (the Good News that in Christ, we who don’t measure up to God’s will for us, can be forgiven and made new and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit to turn from our sins and sinful impulses and receive eternal life from God).

We’ve wandered, too, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Nazis at the end of World War II, who, in The Cost of Discipleship, warned Lutherans and all Christians against what he called “cheap grace,” which he described as “the grace we bestow on ourselves…the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession.”

Still and all, in this time with so little consciousness of God or concern about the will of God, people are, as in first-century Judea, still in a frenzy to push themselves to the top, to be noticed, to win, to die with the most toys in their possession. These impulses are bred in our sinful bones. And Jesus’ two parables are aimed as much at us as they were His original hearers, the Pharisee host and all his guests.

The first one was told specifically to the guests who were jockeying for places of honor at the banquet. Read along with me, starting at verse 8. “’When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you,”Friend, move up higher”; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

From the very beginning of Luke’s Gospel, we’re told that Jesus came into our world to flip humanity’s standard operating procedures on their head. A few weeks ago, we looked at the words of Jesus’ earthly mother, Mary, who said of God: “He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; He has brought down the powerful from their thrones; and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things; and he has sent the rich away empty.” 

Mary knew the truth that Jesus affirms in today’s first parable, that those who humble themselves before God, even if despised by the world, are exalted in God’s kingdom. Jesus calls us to live in confidence not in ourselves or our achievements or our shrewd exploitation of people and circumstances, but in the God Who loves us just as we are and Who is committed to helping those humble enough to confess their sins and their need of Him to enter the process of becoming more Christ-like in this life.

As believers in Jesus, we can live each day knowing that, whatever the world may think or say, we are God’s children forever. When you have Jesus living within you, you most certainly will try to be and do your best every day. But you also will know that the God Who sent His Son to die and rise for you will honor your repentance and shower you with a sense of your infinite value in the eyes of heaven, whatever your job, irrespective of how many degrees you have acquired, however large your income, no matter how good your health, however popular you may be, or even if you get the best spot at the banquet or the football game.

In Christ, I hope and pray that you know that no matter what you’ve done, or how guilty you may be, or how inadequate you may feel, you could not possibly be more loved by God than you are at this very moment.

And if we are willing to let God tear down all the walls that can block out His grace and love, if we are willing to repent for our sins and receive forgiveness, we become God’s personal reclamation projects. Not only can God erase the power of sin and death over you, He can, for those who surrender each day, decrease your taste for the sins that may keep you from knowing peace with God and peace with yourself.

The Lord wants you to take a place of honor at His table even if you think that you’re too lowly or too unworthy to take it. God loves you and all people are welcome to, in the words of Scripture, “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.”

Jesus tells a second parable to His host. You can read it, starting at verse 12. “He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Jesus isn’t making deals here. He’s saying that we who have been welcomed by God our host into the kingdom of God are called to also welcome others. All others. Jesus puts it this way in the Great Commission, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” 

Filled with God’s Spirit, you and I are to be the instruments God uses to invite others to hear God’s Word, Law and Gospel, to hear God’s call and command to repentance, to hear God’s call and command to believe in Jesus and know life everlasting.

We have no control over whether those we invite or welcome will let go of their sins to grasp hold of the grace offered in Jesus. But we must never stop telling them, by our words and our lives, either the inconvenient truth about human sin and our need of God or the incredible, life-changing, good news of the God Who, in Christ, can turn our lives upside down and in doing so, turn our souls right-side up, facing God for life, following Christ for hope, being filled with the Holy Spirit to give us a joy that will never end. Amen!

"Listen to God before you speak for God."

Reading this piece from Our Daily Bread, as well as the Biblical passage on which it's based, John 8:1-11, will be time well spent. And it won't take long.

Trusting in Christ Alone is Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing

Here. Really good!

Check out Matthew 15:7-20:
[Jesus said:]

⁷You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said: ⁸‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; ⁹in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’”

¹⁰Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand: ¹¹it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” ¹²Then the disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?” ¹³He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. ¹⁴Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.” ¹⁵But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.” ¹⁶Then he said, “Are you also still without understanding? ¹⁷Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? ¹⁸But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. ¹⁹For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. ²⁰These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”

Older or Better?

"Rather than becoming more crotchety, intolerant, and unloving, the maturing follower of Jesus grows better at forgiving, loving, and caring." Please read the whole thing.

Interesting

Learning Contentment

Here.

Want Personal Renewal? Rejoice!

"Happiness depends on what is happening around you. Happiness is dependent on the present circumstances of your life.  Joy is an inward, constant and sure confidence that God is in control and God is good." Read the whole thing.

The God Who Loves to Set Captives Free!

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

Luke 13:10-17

The God we know in Jesus Christ loves to set captives free. God loves to free people from the prisons that the devil, the world, and our sinful selves can impose upon us.

In His hometown synagogue back when He began His public ministry, Jesus read words from the Old Testament prophet’s book of Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me… to proclaim liberty to the captives…” Then, the Bible tells us, Jesus said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

On this Sabbath day today, Jesus wants you to know that whatever sins or temptations bedevil you, whatever regrets you carry on your shoulders, whatever doubts you may harbor about God’s goodness or God’s Word, whatever feuds may mar your personal relationships, whatever failures you may rue, you can be set free.

Don’t let Satan rob you of the joy, and the peace, and the hope that Jesus Christ wants to give to you, even in the midst of life’s difficulties, pains, and challenges. Let Jesus set you free! You simply need to come to Him when He calls, as we’ll see in today’s Gospel lesson.

It tells us about something that happened in another synagogue in an unnamed town during Jesus' journey to Jerusalem and the cross, where He underscores His desire to set captives free, as well as His authority to do just that.

I’d like to ask you to once more this morning pull out the Celebrate insert and turn to today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 13:10-17 and this time, if you have a pencil or pen handy, pull that out as well. (Don’t worry; you’re not going to have to write any essays!)

Read the first verse along with me silently. “Now he [that is, Jesus] was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath.” Elsewhere in Luke’s gospel, we’re told that it was Jesus’ custom to always go to worship on the Sabbath day. The Bible also tells us that all of Jesus’ early followers and the apostle Paul were in the habit of honoring the Sabbath by worshiping God every week.

This habit may seem contradictory to us. We know that the Ten Commandments commanded God’s people, the Jews, to “remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” But, good Lutherans that we are, we also know that (a) we human beings, having been born in sin, are incapable of keeping God’s commands perfectly and (b) keeping the law cannot save us from sin, death, and pointless lives anyway. Only Christ’s cross and empty tomb and our repentant faith in Christ can accomplish that.

So, why did Jesus and the first Christians make such a big deal of keeping the Sabbath? Because the Sabbath is a gift from God, an oasis on our weekly calendars where we can be met by the living God in His Word and in the strengthening fellowship of those who, just like us, are people of God’s Word. It can play this role as much in our lives today as it did in the lives of the ancient Jews. The New Testament book of Hebrews tells us:

...a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God's rest also cease from their labors as God did from His. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through...disobedience...[as was true of God's people in their wilderness journey between Egypt and the promised land]

(It's interesting to me that the text says "make every effort to enter that rest." Sometimes, it requires a lot of hard work and effort to set aside time to rest, especially in these busy days.)

Further on in Hebrews, we're reminded of the part that Sabbath rest plays in the lives of believers, beyond just giving them time to recharge their batteries:

...let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day [of Christ's return to the world] approaching.

On the Sabbath, God cleans the clutter from our lives so that we can hear the clear, unambiguous message of the Bible together. This is what Martin Luther talked about in his explanation of the Third Commandment, to remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy:

We are to fear and love God so that we do not neglect His Word and the preaching of it, but regard it as holy and gladly hear and learn it.

Remember that Jesus came not to abolish God's law--including the commandment to keep the Sabbath, but to fulfill it. Though we will never keep the Sabbath with the same perfection and holy intentions that Jesus did, weekly worship was part of Jesus’ way of life and because the Sabbath is God’s gift to us, He wants it to be part of our lives, too.

The Gospel lesson continues: “And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight.”

You might want to circle the word “eighteen,” then draw an arrow over to the margin and jot this down there: Luke 13:4. In Luke 13:4, Jesus mentions “eighteen who were killed.” You might want to look that verse up in your Bible when you go home today. You see, there are no accidents in Scripture and so, when you see “eighteen” appearing in two passages just a few lines apart, you know that they share an important theme.

Luke 13:4 is part of the section of Luke’s gospel that comes right before our lesson for today. In it, Jesus encounters a group of people who are jabbering about the latest news headlines in the very same way you and I do that sort of thing today. Among the headlines that group was discussing was the then-recent tragic death of eighteen people killed when a tower crashed at a place called Siloam.

Jesus picks up on the tenor of the crowds' comments and asks them if any of them think that those who died were worse offenders of God’s will than they were.

This is a pointed question that relates to what happens in today’s Gospel lesson. People can be quick to attribute the hardships of others to their sins. You’ve heard people say things like that. But Jesus dismisses such notions. We do bring some bad things onto ourselves, of course. We also all can probably name times when we have eluded bad consequences for our bad choices. But usually, when we have bad things happen in our lives, it isn’t because we’ve violated God’s will; it’s because we live in a fallen and imperfect world where bad things happen. It’s the risk that all the living endure. That's because this is isn’t heaven.

Now, back in our Gospel lesson, notice that “a spirit” crippled the woman. “Medically,” one prominent New Testament scholar writes, “the illness has been diagnosed as spondylitis ankylopoietica (a fusion of spinal bones) or as skoliasis hysterica…, a hysterical rather than an organic paralysis.” Whatever the diagnosis, Jesus will soon make clear that this woman who came for Sabbath worship in spite of the bitterness toward God she could have felt because of her crippling condition, is being afflicted through no fault of her own. Her condition is caused by Satan, the prince of all the spirits--demons--in rebellion against God.

Keep that in mind as you read along silently with the next part of our Gospel lesson. “When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’ When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.“

If you will, please underline the words “set free.” Behind those two words in our translation is a single verb in the original Greek of the New Testament: luo. It can mean not only set free, but also unloosed, untied, or unshackled. As a sign of His power to set all people free from the more lasting scourges of sin, death, and futility, Jesus set this woman free from her crippling condition.

Read on with me, please. “But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, ‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.’”

The synagogue leader seems more concerned that his tidy little worship service has been disrupted, than He is amazed that God’s mercy and love has come to the place or that a woman once doubled over in agony was standing straight and praising God!

One of the biggest problems in the contemporary Church is caused by theologians,  bishops, pastors, and laypeople who think that no matter what God’s Word tells us about God’s will, grace, and power, they know better. Instead of “standing under” the Bible, which is what the word “understand” means, they presume to stand over the Scripture, claiming to understand things that God, Who inspired the words of the Bible, didn’t know. The synagogue leader had this same kind of presumptuousness. Fortunately, Jesus corrected this misled leader right away.

Take a look at what happens next: “But the Lord answered him and said, ‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?’”

The use of the term, “the Lord” is no accident. The word in the original Greek of the New Testament is kurios. It’s the usual Greek rendering of the Name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush: Yahweh, I AM. In Jesus, Yahweh, God, was speaking to this presumptuous synagogue leader, setting him straight, along with any in the synagogue who might agree with him.

Underline the word "untie" in verse 15. In the Greek, it's luo again. “How dare you, you hypocrites!” Jesus is saying. “You would do a little work by setting an ox or donkey free to get water on a Sabbath day, treating animals better than human beings! But, you want to keep me from freeing this woman, who has been bound by Satan all these years!"

A denominational leader once told the true story of a brilliant pastor who, by use of a formula he had created, was able to project at what times of year his suburban congregation would grow numerically.* This went on for years. The young pastor later confessed that he felt no real need to pray. He had church growth all figured out. One Sunday, two elderly members of the congregation asked if he would mind if they used the church basement one afternoon a week to pray for the congregation. The pastor couldn’t see the harm, told them it would be OK, and thought no more about it.

Some months later, the congregation had a phenomenal growth spurt--including incredible spiritual growth--that the pastor’s calculations couldn’t explain. It actually bothered him! A thought crossed his mind. “No, it couldn’t be!” he told himself. But he decided to check the church basement on the day of the week that those two women had set aside for regular prayer for the congregation. To his absolute shock, he saw that there were now sixty people praying with those two women. (I would love for something like that to happen at Saint Matthew, by the way!)

It’s hypocrisy for us to say that we believe in the God of the Bible and then expect Him to stay within the orderly parameters we try to impose on Him. As our second lesson for today reminds us, our God is a consuming fire. God's power is beyond our control, no matter how wise, upstanding, or clever we may think we are!

Just as an aside, there’s a phrase I’d like you to put in brackets in verse 16. It’s “daughter of Abraham.” This is the only place in all of Scripture where that phrase is used, though there are many places that speak of the “son of Abraham.” Jesus and the early Christians may have been surrounded by a male-dominated culture. But they were no part of it. Men and women, both created in the image of God, are equal in the sight of God. No wonder that Paul writes in Galatians that in Christ, “there is no longer Jew or Greek…slave or free…male and female…If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.”

Our lesson ends with Jesus’ opponents put to shame and the crowd rejoicing at the wonderful things Jesus was doing.

Whatever it is that may be afflicting you or people you care about today, turn to Christ, expect Him to do the unexpected, expect Him to set you free to live for Him, in this life, whatever it may bring, and in the life to come.

This morning, may God set you free in all the ways you need God’s freeing action…and may you praise God for it. Amen!

*I heard Paul Cedar, then president of the Evangelical Free Church, tell this story at a Billy Graham School of Evangelism at Wheaton College back in 1993.