Today, I went to Columbus to visit Janice, a member of our Saint Matthew congregation who suffered a stroke on Monday night. She is doing remarkably well and may be discharged soon. Fantastic care at the hospital in Columbus, buttressed by the prayers offered by many people, no doubt explain Janice's progress. We said a prayer that included thanks to God during my visit today.
I've been feeling sort of "flu-ish" over the past several days. So, I decided that while in Columbus, I would see my own doctor. He diagnosed a sinus infection and prescribed an antibiotic. Knowing that I was planning on visiting Janice, he asked if I would like for him to send the scrip to the hospital pharmacy. That's how I found myself sitting in the hospital pharmacy when Daniel walked in today.
Daniel works at the hospital as a custodian. I'm sure that the table next to me needed dusted and polished. But I'm also sure God sent Daniel at that particular moment to teach me a lesson.
"Hi," I said. Daniel, who up to that point, had looked intent on being unobtrusive, stood erectly and smiled at me while returning my greeting.
He saw my clerical collar. "Are you a priest or a pastor?" he asked. I explained that I was a Lutheran pastor.
He told me that, at the hospital, he had a ministry. Every day during his breaks, he and his supervisor go to the chapel and pray for the intensive care patients and for anyone else, aware of their ministry, who asks for prayer. (Often, I take breaks, all I do is stuff my face and scan a magazine. Daniel prays for people!)
As our conversation progressed, he told me that he and his wife were from Ethiopia. Both worked at the hospital, taking different shifts so that they could take turns caring for their son. They had just flipped shifts.
He went on to explain that under Ethiopia's previous regime, life was difficult for Ethiopian Christians. It still can be. I told him that both Saint Matthew and I personally had been praying for the oldest Protestant body in Ethiopia, the Mekane Yesus Church, which is a Lutheran denomination. In recent months, more than 50 congregational buildings of the Mekane Yesus Church, which is larger than the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America of which I'm a part, have been burned by radical Islamists.
In Ethiopia, it turns out, Daniel had worked for a Bible society which distributed audiotapes of the Bible, part of a program called, Faith Comes Through Hearing. At many Ethiopian churches, believers and those seeking to know the God of the Bible, ultimately revealed in Jesus, gather to listen to segments of the Bible on tape, then discuss what they've heard. It's one means by which faith in Christ is growing in depth and in numbers in Ethiopia.*
Daniel told me about the day he went to visit one of the churches that was using the Bible on audiotape. The church's building had been attacked by radical Islamists. That was difficult enough for the church's pastor and for Daniel to accept. But Daniel told me that he and the pastor wept when, going through the ash and rubble, they found the case in which the Bible tapes were kept, burnt. "Look, Daniel," the pastor said, "they even burned the Word of God." Daniel told me that on seeing this, both he and the pastor wept.
Two years ago, Daniel and his family came to America. Because of persecution, they had been praying for the chance to leave Ethiopia. "Then," Daniel told me, "God let us come here."
Today, Daniel and his family are involved with an Ethiopian immigrant church in Columbus where 300 believers regularly gather on Sundays. His smiling face betrayed none of his past pain.
My guess is that Daniel would like one day to return to Ethiopia. But I know that wherever he goes, he will have a ministry. He will carry Jesus with him everywhere.
I also know this: All who believe in Jesus Christ can live in the confidence that through our crucified and risen Savior, nothing can separate us from God. When I think of all the bellyaching I can do over minor inconveniences and setbacks, it makes me feel ashamed. That's especially true when I meet joyful Christians with servant hearts, people like Daniel.
People like Daniel inspire renewed confidence in the Lord Who promises to be with His people always, Who promises to meet them even in eternity, where He has prepared places for all who turn from sin and believe in Him.
Thank You, God, for sending Daniel to dust that table and to teach me to trust in You.
*The Mekane Yesuse Church, for example, grew by 300,000 members from 2009 to 2010!
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Why We Worship
[Shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
Philippians 2:1-13
True story of a boy named Chad: One day Chad came home from school and told his mother that he wanted to make Valentine’s Day cards for his classmates. His mother wished that she could convince him to forget the idea. Chad’s classmates were always putting him down, picking him last for baseball at recess, and laughing at him. But Chad was insistent; he wanted to make those Valentine’s cards for his classmates. So, Chad’s mom bought the construction paper and the crayons and for three nights he worked hard on making the cards: Thirty five cards, one for each classmate!
On Valentine’s Day, Chad was excited! He carefully picked up the cards, put them in a bag, and ran out the door. Certain that he would be disappointed that his classmates hadn’t remembered him with Valentine’s Day cards, Chad’s mother baked his favorite cookies and had them waiting for the moment he got home from school.
At the usual time, she heard the other children laughing and talking as they walked toward their houses. Behind them all, walking by himself was Chad. It broke her heart to see him. But when he came through the door, there was a spring in his step, even though she could see that, unlike the other kids, Chad wasn’t holding a bag full of Valentine’s cards. Choking back tears, she announced that she had his favorite cookies and some milk for him. But Chad didn't seem to hear. His face was glowing and all he could say was, “Not a one...not a one.” Now, his mother thought she would cry. But then Chad told her, “I didn’t forget a one...not a single one!”
Today, I want to talk with you about worship.
By worship, I don’t mean just what we do on Sunday mornings. Worship is something that we do with our whole lives. And it begins not with our words or our songs or our offerings.
It begins with our attitudes, with the thoughts, actions, and feelings that we allow to be the controlling motifs of our lives. Chad could have been resentful. After all, once again, he had been overlooked and undervalued. Instead, he took a different attitude, the attitude of a servant who isn’t looking out for himself, but for others.
This is the very attitude that the first-century preacher and evangelist Paul commends in our second Bible lesson for today. Take a look at it in our Celebrate insert. Quoting from what had by that early point in the Church’s history, already become a valued worship song, Paul tells the followers of Jesus in the Greek city of Philippi:
The word worship, is the descendant of a compound word from Old English, worth-ship. Lives of worship convey the worthiness of Jesus Christ. People who worship God in Jesus Christ say, “This Jesus is the most important Person, presence, power, and force in my life! I give every part of me to Him, because He has given His whole self for me.”
When we gather for community worship on Sunday mornings, we do so for several important reasons.
First and foremost, we worship together because the God we know through Jesus is really worthy of being honored and praised by His people. But we need to be reminded of how much we have to be grateful for.
It’s so easy to fall into ingratitude because we tend to take things for granted. When I was about six years old, my grandparents bought a wooden table and chair set for my sister, Betsy. She used to have tea parties for her dolls with it.
One day, I got the idea that a friend and I could put the table and chairs to better use! I decided to take them to my buddy’s house down the street. So, I found some rope in the garage and, keeping the table upright, I tied two of the legs to the back of my tricycle. With the extra rope, I tied the wooden chairs to the top of the table. My cargo safely secured, I pulled my trike out into the middle of the street and headed for my friend’s house.
Until that point, my mother had no idea what I’d been up to. But with the legs of the table scratching, dragging, and bumping on the pavement, she heard the noise and ran to the door. Then I heard a noise. It was my mother’s voice. “Mark James Daniels, stop this minute!”
After forcing me to help her carry the table and chairs back to our house and before meting out my punishment, my mother asked me what on earth I had been thinking. “Your grandparents spent good money to give this gift to your sister! What made you think you had the right to do that?”
Those words reminded me to never take gifts for granted, especially gifts that resulted from others’ sacrifices. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, sacrificed Himself on the cross and was raised from death by God that Father. Jesus did that for you! This, the most incredible act of self-giving love imaginable, was done for us, not because we deserved anything good, but so that all of us who deserve death for our sins can, if we repent and believe in Jesus, have life with God for eternity!
Sometimes we take Christ and our salvation for granted. In weekly worship, we remind each other of how great and awesome God’s gifts to us really are. We remind each other that a sacrifice of such infinite grace is worthy of the surrender of our whole selves to the God we know in Jesus.
Second, we worship to help us hold onto the God of the Bible alone. Life and a bad-news world seems intent on tearing us away from God.
But the confessions of the Lutheran movement, the constituting documents of our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the constitution of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church all confess that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are to be the yardstick against which all our decisions and actions are to measured.
While we don’t always practice what we preach, we Lutherans believe in the Bible not because the Bible is magical. We believe in the Bible because the Holy Spirit has taught us there is something God-inspired, God-breathed about the Bible. God is invested in these words He gave to finite, imperfect human beings. For over five-hundred years, we Lutherans have believed that the Bible is like no other book because of its unique and life-changing witness, from Genesis to Revelation, of the God of justice and grace we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.
We engage in public worship on Sunday mornings and at other times to hear God’s Word and to help us all to hold onto the God of the Bible, the God we meet in Jesus, for all our hope, inspiration, and encouragement.
Finally, we worship together to stir each other to live like Jesus, lives not lived for ourselves, but for others. That kind of life doesn’t make sense to many people you may meet. But you and I know differently.
Think of it like this. If you were billionaire Warren Buffet, how giving could you afford to be? The answer: Very giving! The fact is that is no matter what we may go through in this life, no matter how much of a success or a failure this world may see us as being, the baptized believer in Jesus Christ who repents and trusts in Christ is wealthy beyond all reckoning.
Believers in Jesus have an eternity of riches. Like Paul, writing in the New Testament book of Romans, we can say, “[God] who did not withhold His Son, but gave Him for all of us [on the cross], will He not with Him also give us everything else?”
How generous, how loving, how compassionate can we be toward others when we know that nothing can separate us from the love of the God we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus? Very generous. Very loving. Very compassionate. When we worship together, we’re reminded how much we’re loved…and how much we can love others as a result.
Worship is to be the Christian’s way of life. We worship together each Sunday because we know how worthy God is of our honor and praise. We worship to help us to hold onto the Good News of the God Who is for us even in the midst of a world that never seems to tire of feeding us bad news. And we worship God to inspire one another to live not for ourselves, but for the purposes of God, for the good of others who need the eternity of blessings that we followers of Jesus already have!
Worship is the work of God’s servants who, certain that they belong to God for all eternity, can give themselves utterly to the love of God and love of neighbor. As we worship God together and apart, may God help us to be faithful servants of our loving God. Amen
The story of Chad, originally told by Pastor Dale Galloway, is recounted by Chuck Swindoll, in his book, Improving Your Serve.
Philippians 2:1-13
True story of a boy named Chad: One day Chad came home from school and told his mother that he wanted to make Valentine’s Day cards for his classmates. His mother wished that she could convince him to forget the idea. Chad’s classmates were always putting him down, picking him last for baseball at recess, and laughing at him. But Chad was insistent; he wanted to make those Valentine’s cards for his classmates. So, Chad’s mom bought the construction paper and the crayons and for three nights he worked hard on making the cards: Thirty five cards, one for each classmate!
On Valentine’s Day, Chad was excited! He carefully picked up the cards, put them in a bag, and ran out the door. Certain that he would be disappointed that his classmates hadn’t remembered him with Valentine’s Day cards, Chad’s mother baked his favorite cookies and had them waiting for the moment he got home from school.
At the usual time, she heard the other children laughing and talking as they walked toward their houses. Behind them all, walking by himself was Chad. It broke her heart to see him. But when he came through the door, there was a spring in his step, even though she could see that, unlike the other kids, Chad wasn’t holding a bag full of Valentine’s cards. Choking back tears, she announced that she had his favorite cookies and some milk for him. But Chad didn't seem to hear. His face was glowing and all he could say was, “Not a one...not a one.” Now, his mother thought she would cry. But then Chad told her, “I didn’t forget a one...not a single one!”
Today, I want to talk with you about worship.
By worship, I don’t mean just what we do on Sunday mornings. Worship is something that we do with our whole lives. And it begins not with our words or our songs or our offerings.
It begins with our attitudes, with the thoughts, actions, and feelings that we allow to be the controlling motifs of our lives. Chad could have been resentful. After all, once again, he had been overlooked and undervalued. Instead, he took a different attitude, the attitude of a servant who isn’t looking out for himself, but for others.
This is the very attitude that the first-century preacher and evangelist Paul commends in our second Bible lesson for today. Take a look at it in our Celebrate insert. Quoting from what had by that early point in the Church’s history, already become a valued worship song, Paul tells the followers of Jesus in the Greek city of Philippi:
If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. [And then Paul points out that this reflects an attitude, the very attitude Jesus had while living here on earth:] Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, ...though he was in the form of God, [Jesus] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.Worship, real worship, is something that the Christian is called to offer every moment of every day. Worship is a life lived in gratitude for the new life God gives to all with faith in Jesus Christ. In our worship, we constantly express thanks for the new life that Jesus has gained through His death and resurrection for all who repent for sin and entrust their lives to Him.
The word worship, is the descendant of a compound word from Old English, worth-ship. Lives of worship convey the worthiness of Jesus Christ. People who worship God in Jesus Christ say, “This Jesus is the most important Person, presence, power, and force in my life! I give every part of me to Him, because He has given His whole self for me.”
When we gather for community worship on Sunday mornings, we do so for several important reasons.
First and foremost, we worship together because the God we know through Jesus is really worthy of being honored and praised by His people. But we need to be reminded of how much we have to be grateful for.
It’s so easy to fall into ingratitude because we tend to take things for granted. When I was about six years old, my grandparents bought a wooden table and chair set for my sister, Betsy. She used to have tea parties for her dolls with it.
One day, I got the idea that a friend and I could put the table and chairs to better use! I decided to take them to my buddy’s house down the street. So, I found some rope in the garage and, keeping the table upright, I tied two of the legs to the back of my tricycle. With the extra rope, I tied the wooden chairs to the top of the table. My cargo safely secured, I pulled my trike out into the middle of the street and headed for my friend’s house.
Until that point, my mother had no idea what I’d been up to. But with the legs of the table scratching, dragging, and bumping on the pavement, she heard the noise and ran to the door. Then I heard a noise. It was my mother’s voice. “Mark James Daniels, stop this minute!”
After forcing me to help her carry the table and chairs back to our house and before meting out my punishment, my mother asked me what on earth I had been thinking. “Your grandparents spent good money to give this gift to your sister! What made you think you had the right to do that?”
Those words reminded me to never take gifts for granted, especially gifts that resulted from others’ sacrifices. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, sacrificed Himself on the cross and was raised from death by God that Father. Jesus did that for you! This, the most incredible act of self-giving love imaginable, was done for us, not because we deserved anything good, but so that all of us who deserve death for our sins can, if we repent and believe in Jesus, have life with God for eternity!
Sometimes we take Christ and our salvation for granted. In weekly worship, we remind each other of how great and awesome God’s gifts to us really are. We remind each other that a sacrifice of such infinite grace is worthy of the surrender of our whole selves to the God we know in Jesus.
Second, we worship to help us hold onto the God of the Bible alone. Life and a bad-news world seems intent on tearing us away from God.
But the confessions of the Lutheran movement, the constituting documents of our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the constitution of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church all confess that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are to be the yardstick against which all our decisions and actions are to measured.
While we don’t always practice what we preach, we Lutherans believe in the Bible not because the Bible is magical. We believe in the Bible because the Holy Spirit has taught us there is something God-inspired, God-breathed about the Bible. God is invested in these words He gave to finite, imperfect human beings. For over five-hundred years, we Lutherans have believed that the Bible is like no other book because of its unique and life-changing witness, from Genesis to Revelation, of the God of justice and grace we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.
We engage in public worship on Sunday mornings and at other times to hear God’s Word and to help us all to hold onto the God of the Bible, the God we meet in Jesus, for all our hope, inspiration, and encouragement.
Finally, we worship together to stir each other to live like Jesus, lives not lived for ourselves, but for others. That kind of life doesn’t make sense to many people you may meet. But you and I know differently.
Think of it like this. If you were billionaire Warren Buffet, how giving could you afford to be? The answer: Very giving! The fact is that is no matter what we may go through in this life, no matter how much of a success or a failure this world may see us as being, the baptized believer in Jesus Christ who repents and trusts in Christ is wealthy beyond all reckoning.
Believers in Jesus have an eternity of riches. Like Paul, writing in the New Testament book of Romans, we can say, “[God] who did not withhold His Son, but gave Him for all of us [on the cross], will He not with Him also give us everything else?”
How generous, how loving, how compassionate can we be toward others when we know that nothing can separate us from the love of the God we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus? Very generous. Very loving. Very compassionate. When we worship together, we’re reminded how much we’re loved…and how much we can love others as a result.
Worship is to be the Christian’s way of life. We worship together each Sunday because we know how worthy God is of our honor and praise. We worship to help us to hold onto the Good News of the God Who is for us even in the midst of a world that never seems to tire of feeding us bad news. And we worship God to inspire one another to live not for ourselves, but for the purposes of God, for the good of others who need the eternity of blessings that we followers of Jesus already have!
Worship is the work of God’s servants who, certain that they belong to God for all eternity, can give themselves utterly to the love of God and love of neighbor. As we worship God together and apart, may God help us to be faithful servants of our loving God. Amen
The story of Chad, originally told by Pastor Dale Galloway, is recounted by Chuck Swindoll, in his book, Improving Your Serve.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Choose the Right Path, Not the Easy One
From Julie Ackerman Link:
Whenever we set out to do something good, even when we’re certain that God wants us to do it, we shouldn’t be surprised when the situation gets worse before it gets better. This doesn’t prove that we’re doing the wrong thing; it just reminds us that we need God to accomplish everything. [emphasis mine][See here.]
Monday, September 19, 2011
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"
One of my nieces posted this on Facebook recently and I re-posted it. It contains a great anti-bullying message and apparently was circulated in connection with suicide prevention:
Put on Christ (Wedding of Katelyn and Noah)
[This was share during the wedding our niece, Katelyn, and her new husband, Noah. God bless you both!]
Romans 13:14
Noah, you surely know by now that Katelyn loves to accessorize!
I’ll never forget the day that Katelyn showed us some of the contents of her bag. Inside were other bags. Inside them were purses and holders of all kinds. Accessories inside of accessories, purses inside of purses, sort of like those Russian babushka dolls, each one concealing smaller dolls inside, until you get to a tiny one in the middle.
Today, as you begin your married life together, I want to talk with you about the essential accessory you will need for both your marriage and your lives. This accessory and what we need to do with it is described in Romans chapter 13, verse 14. It says, “Put on Christ.”
That phrasing may seem odd at first, but it’s deliberate and precise in describing what it means to be a follower of Christ. Each of us knows that, as the Bible tells us that love, the love we need to power our marriages and our relationships, “is patient…kind…not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” We know that it doesn’t “insist on its own way…is not irritable or resentful…does not rejoice in wrongdoing…bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Some couples hear that description of love, smile smugly, casting knowing looks at one another and seem to believe, “That’s us. We know how to love.” Sigh.
Let me share a bit of wisdom with you, as your uncle, as a pastor, and as someone who’s been around the block a time or two. No couple—no matter how much they love each other, no matter how well intentioned they are—no couple can muster the kind of love we all know that it takes for a lifetime marital partnership to work.
Only the God we meet in Jesus Christ, the God Who took on human flesh, Who offered His life as the perfect sacrifice for our sin, taking the death sentence we all deserve, Who was raised to life again by God the Father so that all who turn from sin and trust in Christ have everlasting life with God, and Who sends the Holy Spiirit to stand by us, guide us, give us wisdom, and pump us full of hope when it can’t be found anywhere else—only this God can fill you with the love, the forgiveness, the charity, and the understanding you will need to have a marriage more filled with love fifty years from now than it is today.
That’s why you need to “put on Christ,” you need to clothe yourselves in Christ, entrust yourselves to Christ each day. You need to import His tough love, wear it as the essential accessory for living life to the full!
Now, don’t get the wrong idea, the only “happily ever afters” Jesus promises come in eternity. In fact, Jesus once made a strange promise to those Who follow Him. “In this world,” He said, “you will have trouble.” But, He goes on to tell us to take heart because, through His death and resurrection, Jesus also says, “I have overcome this world.” Life can do its worst to us, yet through Christ, we can know that nothing will separate us from the love of God!
Putting on Christ—having faith in Christ—does not come naturally to us. We like to think that we can make it through life on the strength of our own love, or own wills, or our own resolution. But Jesus is emphatic when He says that apart from Him, we can do nothing. The love and help of Christ can be hard to accept; it seems too good to be true that a Savior we can’t see can possibly help us.
But He can, no matter how puny our surrender to Him may sometimes be. A man once approached Jesus. He needed a miracle for his child. “If You are able” to help my son, the man pleaded with Jesus, “would you?” “If?” Jesus asked Him. Anything can be done for the person who believes, Jesus said. “I do believe,” the man responded, “help my unbelief.” It may be hard for us to believe or trust in Jesus—and by the way, harder by far to believe in Jesus when things are going well than when things are going poorly. But if, like that father going to Jesus on behalf of his son, you’re willing to trust Jesus, if you’re willing to put Him on your life and fill you with love and power, you will be amazed at what God does.
Put on Christ! And to reinforce your relationship with Him, be involved with a church family, pray, study God’s Word, serve others in Jesus’ Name, daily repent for sin and trust in Jesus, forgive as you’ve been forgiven.
As you put Christ on day by day, your marriage and your faith will grow stronger. And Jesus will no longer be a mere accessory. He will be, as He has been for Aunt Ann and me these thirty-seven years, “the way, and the truth, and the life,” the third member of your marriage, the One Who helps you confidently to say that while you may be able to do nothing without Christ, you can, as the Bible puts it, “do all things through [Christ] Who strengthens” you.
God bless you both. I love you. Amen
Romans 13:14
Noah, you surely know by now that Katelyn loves to accessorize!
I’ll never forget the day that Katelyn showed us some of the contents of her bag. Inside were other bags. Inside them were purses and holders of all kinds. Accessories inside of accessories, purses inside of purses, sort of like those Russian babushka dolls, each one concealing smaller dolls inside, until you get to a tiny one in the middle.
Today, as you begin your married life together, I want to talk with you about the essential accessory you will need for both your marriage and your lives. This accessory and what we need to do with it is described in Romans chapter 13, verse 14. It says, “Put on Christ.”
That phrasing may seem odd at first, but it’s deliberate and precise in describing what it means to be a follower of Christ. Each of us knows that, as the Bible tells us that love, the love we need to power our marriages and our relationships, “is patient…kind…not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” We know that it doesn’t “insist on its own way…is not irritable or resentful…does not rejoice in wrongdoing…bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Some couples hear that description of love, smile smugly, casting knowing looks at one another and seem to believe, “That’s us. We know how to love.” Sigh.
Let me share a bit of wisdom with you, as your uncle, as a pastor, and as someone who’s been around the block a time or two. No couple—no matter how much they love each other, no matter how well intentioned they are—no couple can muster the kind of love we all know that it takes for a lifetime marital partnership to work.
Only the God we meet in Jesus Christ, the God Who took on human flesh, Who offered His life as the perfect sacrifice for our sin, taking the death sentence we all deserve, Who was raised to life again by God the Father so that all who turn from sin and trust in Christ have everlasting life with God, and Who sends the Holy Spiirit to stand by us, guide us, give us wisdom, and pump us full of hope when it can’t be found anywhere else—only this God can fill you with the love, the forgiveness, the charity, and the understanding you will need to have a marriage more filled with love fifty years from now than it is today.
That’s why you need to “put on Christ,” you need to clothe yourselves in Christ, entrust yourselves to Christ each day. You need to import His tough love, wear it as the essential accessory for living life to the full!
Now, don’t get the wrong idea, the only “happily ever afters” Jesus promises come in eternity. In fact, Jesus once made a strange promise to those Who follow Him. “In this world,” He said, “you will have trouble.” But, He goes on to tell us to take heart because, through His death and resurrection, Jesus also says, “I have overcome this world.” Life can do its worst to us, yet through Christ, we can know that nothing will separate us from the love of God!
Putting on Christ—having faith in Christ—does not come naturally to us. We like to think that we can make it through life on the strength of our own love, or own wills, or our own resolution. But Jesus is emphatic when He says that apart from Him, we can do nothing. The love and help of Christ can be hard to accept; it seems too good to be true that a Savior we can’t see can possibly help us.
But He can, no matter how puny our surrender to Him may sometimes be. A man once approached Jesus. He needed a miracle for his child. “If You are able” to help my son, the man pleaded with Jesus, “would you?” “If?” Jesus asked Him. Anything can be done for the person who believes, Jesus said. “I do believe,” the man responded, “help my unbelief.” It may be hard for us to believe or trust in Jesus—and by the way, harder by far to believe in Jesus when things are going well than when things are going poorly. But if, like that father going to Jesus on behalf of his son, you’re willing to trust Jesus, if you’re willing to put Him on your life and fill you with love and power, you will be amazed at what God does.
Put on Christ! And to reinforce your relationship with Him, be involved with a church family, pray, study God’s Word, serve others in Jesus’ Name, daily repent for sin and trust in Jesus, forgive as you’ve been forgiven.
As you put Christ on day by day, your marriage and your faith will grow stronger. And Jesus will no longer be a mere accessory. He will be, as He has been for Aunt Ann and me these thirty-seven years, “the way, and the truth, and the life,” the third member of your marriage, the One Who helps you confidently to say that while you may be able to do nothing without Christ, you can, as the Bible puts it, “do all things through [Christ] Who strengthens” you.
God bless you both. I love you. Amen
Select, Pray, Invite; Select, Pray, Invite
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, on Sunday morning, September 18, 2011.]
Jonah 3:10-4:11
Every Sunday School student knows the story of Jonah, an eighth century Israelite prophet.
God told Jonah to cry out against the evil perpetrated by the people of the city of Nineveh in Assyria. Assyria was the menacing evil empire of its day. For Jonah, as a Jew, to go to Nineveh and tell the people how rotten their sins were would be a bit like God sending you or me to go tell the leadership of al Qaeda that terrorism is evil. That would be a scary mission!
No wonder then that in chapter one of the Old Testament book named for him, after being given his marching orders with God’s message for Nineveh, Jonah got on board a ship and headed instead in the opposite direction, for the Spanish port of Tarshish.
You know what happened next. God caused a fierce storm that terrified everyone on the ship. When the other passengers and the crew learned that it was Jonah’s refusal to go where God had sent him that had roused God’s anger and brought on the storm, Jonah said that the only thing that could save them was to throw him into the sea.
Reluctantly, they agreed and tossed Jonah into the drink. That solved things for everyone but Jonah. But God had a solution, a special taxi service in the form of a great fish. Eventually, God caused Jonah to be disgorged by the fish. After that, Jonah went to Nineveh, in the heart of enemy territory to deliver God’s message for the people there.
Jonah clearly didn’t spend a lot of time polishing it. He made no attempt to give his listeners any background. And he showed them no compassion. He simply went to the city and said: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
That’s it. The whole city, knowing almost nothing about the God of Israel, nonetheless repented for their sins and trusted (or believed) in God. The Ninevite king voiced their faith when he said, “Who knows? God may relent and change His mind; He may turn from His fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”
What happened in Nineveh after Jonah preached his pathetic sermon is analogous to one of us, without a megaphone or advertising or press releases or billboards or web sites or interviews on ‘Good Morning, America,’ going to Times Square in New York City, uttering a one-sentence message from God, then seeing the entire city turn from sin and turn in faith to Jesus Christ!
The power of a message from God is not in the human messenger God uses to bring that message. The power is in the message-sender, in God Himself! We see that in Jonah.
I once heard Lutheran pastor Don Abdon talk about one of the first times he shared Jesus Christ with another person. He asked the man, “Would you like to receive Jesus Christ as your Savior?” The guy answered, “Yes.” Abdon, aware of what a disjointed mess his witness for Christ had been, couldn’t believe his ears. “Are you sure?” he asked. Fortunately, despite this opportunity to weasel out of it, the man repeated, “Yes.”
Jonah should have looked at what happened in Nineveh with awe and gratitude. God’s Word had turned a whole city from sin and turned it to faith in God!
How would we feel if we saw that happen in Logan and Hocking County today?
Wouldn’t we be happy with the changes that would take place when those of low self-esteem walked confidently in the grace of God?
Or when gossip and backstabbing were seen as something to repent for and not to encourage?
When community leaders sought to think less of their own agendas and more about what the will of God might be?
Or when young people saw their bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit and not places to dump drugs?
Or when everyone prayerfully enlisted the power and help of God to resist temptation and keep the gift of sexual intimacy within the bounds of marriage between a man and a woman?
I think we would be happy if our whole community and we ourselves were totally sold out to the God we know in Jesus Christ, if our community were, not perfect, but repentant and believing.
Jonah wasn’t happy to see these kinds of things happen in Nineveh. He was angry!
Scan our first lesson, printed on the Celebrate insert. As the lesson begins you'll see that Nineveh has repented and turned to God. God changed His mind about the calamity He had planned to bring on the city for its sin.
This leads to the strange prayer in Jonah 4:2. (If you can call what Jonah utters a prayer.) Jonah claims that the reason he'd at first headed for Tarshish in the first place wasn’t because he was terrified to go to Nineveh, but because he knew that this was the kind of stunt God would pull. Jonah recalls words that God had used of Himself some six centuries earlier, speaking with the people of Israel in the wilderness when Moses was their leader. I didn’t want to come to Nineveh, Jonah says, because I knew that You are the God Who is “gracious…and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”
Jonah accuses God of being too wimpy, too lacking in backbone, too willing to forgive sinners!
These are stupid words coming from a man who had personally experienced the power of God.
And they are ungrateful words from someone who had rebelled against God, yet been forgiven and helped by God.
Jonah seems to have forgotten that, like the people of Nineveh, he too had been saved by God’s grace.
I’ve mentioned before the conversation I had after worship at one of my previous parishes with a man who was upset with the passage from Matthew that makes up today’s Gospel lesson, which recounts a parable Jesus told about a wealthy man who gave the same wages to workers no matter how early or late in the day he had hired them.
My parishioner understood Jesus’ point. “Jesus is saying that someone who’s led a rotten life who repents for their sins and believes in Jesus Christ is given eternal life just the same as someone like me who has always believed,” he said with considerable feeling. “Someone like me,” he went on. “Yes,” I said. “But that’s not fair!” he replied.
Listen: God isn’t fair.
But the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, affirms two things about God.
I sometimes wonder whether we don’t have the same attitude about the world we live in as Jonah had. I wonder whether we modern believers don't just want to hunker down and quietly believe, and wait our lives out until we can get into heaven. Polling consistently shows that something like 1% of all Lutherans ever tell a spiritually disconnected person about Jesus, even though Jesus commands all Christians to be His witnesses and to make disciples.
We don’t tell others about Jesus because, like Jonah, I think, we’re afraid.
There may be good reason for our fear. After the church of my friend, Pastor Steve Sjogren, started doing kindness outreaches regularly, an influx of visitors started worship there and the congregation saw many people coming to faith in Christ. Not all of the people coming to Steve's church played well with others initially, though. Many conformed to the description of the Ninevites that God gives at the end of our lesson, they didn’t know “their right hand from their left.”
One day, Steve was shocked when a family attracted to the church through the outreaches started a knock-down, drag-out fight in the church parking lot. The elders had to call the cops to break things up. It could have been a terrible turning point in the life of the congregation. The people of Steve’s church could have been so revolted by the behavior of these sinful people that, like Jonah, they could have sulked and kept to themselves.
Instead, they decided that if they were going to continue reaching out to people whose lives were made messy by sin and being disconnected from God, it would be best to have some police on the church parking lot every time they got together for worship. They didn’t stop sharing Jesus!
From that point on, Steve’s church grew from several hundred people, about the size of Saint Matthew, to a congregation that welcomed 6000 to worship each weekend.
Now, in a city like Logan, whose population is 6000, I can’t envision Saint Matthew becoming a megachurch, although maybe God can.
But I do know that the people of our community need the God Who is both just and gracious, the God Who will demand punishment for people’s sins unless they receive the free gifts of His grace and forgiveness by faith in Jesus Christ.
And I know that God has called us to share this message with our neighbors. God wants to use us to transform the life of our community by calling people to repent for sin and believe in Christ.
So, here’s a simple plea from your pastor. Make it your aim every Sunday night to select one spiritually-disconnected person you know, to pray over the next three days that God will make that person receptive to Jesus, and then on Thursday of that same week, invite them to worship, Sunday School, the women's group, or Bible discussion group.
Don’t be spooked if they say no. Keep praying for them and pray that God will give you another crack at inviting them later.
Then, the next Sunday, select another person who has no connection to Christ’s Church, start praying for their receptivity to your invitation on Sunday night, and then on Thursday, invite them to worship, Sunday School, women's group, or Bible discussion group.
Keep doing this week-in and week-out: select, pray, invite; select, pray, invite.
While you know lots more people in Logan than I do, I promise to go through this same procedure—select, pray, invite—as best I can.
God used a reluctant Jonah to save a whole city once steeped in sin and far from God. How much more might God be used by the people of Saint Matthew as we willingly share the Good News of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ with our community?
God is looking for Saint Matthew members willing to say, “Here I am, Lord; send me!” May we be those people!
Jonah 3:10-4:11
Every Sunday School student knows the story of Jonah, an eighth century Israelite prophet.
God told Jonah to cry out against the evil perpetrated by the people of the city of Nineveh in Assyria. Assyria was the menacing evil empire of its day. For Jonah, as a Jew, to go to Nineveh and tell the people how rotten their sins were would be a bit like God sending you or me to go tell the leadership of al Qaeda that terrorism is evil. That would be a scary mission!
No wonder then that in chapter one of the Old Testament book named for him, after being given his marching orders with God’s message for Nineveh, Jonah got on board a ship and headed instead in the opposite direction, for the Spanish port of Tarshish.
[This map shows Joppa, where Jonah received his marching orders from God, and that Nineveh is a relatively short distance to the east, while Tarshish was well to the west in Spain.]
You know what happened next. God caused a fierce storm that terrified everyone on the ship. When the other passengers and the crew learned that it was Jonah’s refusal to go where God had sent him that had roused God’s anger and brought on the storm, Jonah said that the only thing that could save them was to throw him into the sea.
Reluctantly, they agreed and tossed Jonah into the drink. That solved things for everyone but Jonah. But God had a solution, a special taxi service in the form of a great fish. Eventually, God caused Jonah to be disgorged by the fish. After that, Jonah went to Nineveh, in the heart of enemy territory to deliver God’s message for the people there.
Jonah clearly didn’t spend a lot of time polishing it. He made no attempt to give his listeners any background. And he showed them no compassion. He simply went to the city and said: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
That’s it. The whole city, knowing almost nothing about the God of Israel, nonetheless repented for their sins and trusted (or believed) in God. The Ninevite king voiced their faith when he said, “Who knows? God may relent and change His mind; He may turn from His fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”
What happened in Nineveh after Jonah preached his pathetic sermon is analogous to one of us, without a megaphone or advertising or press releases or billboards or web sites or interviews on ‘Good Morning, America,’ going to Times Square in New York City, uttering a one-sentence message from God, then seeing the entire city turn from sin and turn in faith to Jesus Christ!
The power of a message from God is not in the human messenger God uses to bring that message. The power is in the message-sender, in God Himself! We see that in Jonah.
I once heard Lutheran pastor Don Abdon talk about one of the first times he shared Jesus Christ with another person. He asked the man, “Would you like to receive Jesus Christ as your Savior?” The guy answered, “Yes.” Abdon, aware of what a disjointed mess his witness for Christ had been, couldn’t believe his ears. “Are you sure?” he asked. Fortunately, despite this opportunity to weasel out of it, the man repeated, “Yes.”
Jonah should have looked at what happened in Nineveh with awe and gratitude. God’s Word had turned a whole city from sin and turned it to faith in God!
How would we feel if we saw that happen in Logan and Hocking County today?
Wouldn’t we be happy with the changes that would take place when those of low self-esteem walked confidently in the grace of God?
Or when gossip and backstabbing were seen as something to repent for and not to encourage?
When community leaders sought to think less of their own agendas and more about what the will of God might be?
Or when young people saw their bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit and not places to dump drugs?
Or when everyone prayerfully enlisted the power and help of God to resist temptation and keep the gift of sexual intimacy within the bounds of marriage between a man and a woman?
I think we would be happy if our whole community and we ourselves were totally sold out to the God we know in Jesus Christ, if our community were, not perfect, but repentant and believing.
Jonah wasn’t happy to see these kinds of things happen in Nineveh. He was angry!
Scan our first lesson, printed on the Celebrate insert. As the lesson begins you'll see that Nineveh has repented and turned to God. God changed His mind about the calamity He had planned to bring on the city for its sin.
This leads to the strange prayer in Jonah 4:2. (If you can call what Jonah utters a prayer.) Jonah claims that the reason he'd at first headed for Tarshish in the first place wasn’t because he was terrified to go to Nineveh, but because he knew that this was the kind of stunt God would pull. Jonah recalls words that God had used of Himself some six centuries earlier, speaking with the people of Israel in the wilderness when Moses was their leader. I didn’t want to come to Nineveh, Jonah says, because I knew that You are the God Who is “gracious…and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”
Jonah accuses God of being too wimpy, too lacking in backbone, too willing to forgive sinners!
These are stupid words coming from a man who had personally experienced the power of God.
And they are ungrateful words from someone who had rebelled against God, yet been forgiven and helped by God.
Jonah seems to have forgotten that, like the people of Nineveh, he too had been saved by God’s grace.
I’ve mentioned before the conversation I had after worship at one of my previous parishes with a man who was upset with the passage from Matthew that makes up today’s Gospel lesson, which recounts a parable Jesus told about a wealthy man who gave the same wages to workers no matter how early or late in the day he had hired them.
My parishioner understood Jesus’ point. “Jesus is saying that someone who’s led a rotten life who repents for their sins and believes in Jesus Christ is given eternal life just the same as someone like me who has always believed,” he said with considerable feeling. “Someone like me,” he went on. “Yes,” I said. “But that’s not fair!” he replied.
Listen: God isn’t fair.
But the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, affirms two things about God.
- First, that God is just. “The wages of sin is death,” the New Testament book of Romans says. And Jesus tells us emphatically, “Unless you repent, you will perish.”
- But the Bible also affirms that God is gracious and merciful. God is charitable for us. The Old Testament tells us that God remembers that we are dust, created beings in need of help and desperatelt dependent on His charitable love.
I sometimes wonder whether we don’t have the same attitude about the world we live in as Jonah had. I wonder whether we modern believers don't just want to hunker down and quietly believe, and wait our lives out until we can get into heaven. Polling consistently shows that something like 1% of all Lutherans ever tell a spiritually disconnected person about Jesus, even though Jesus commands all Christians to be His witnesses and to make disciples.
We don’t tell others about Jesus because, like Jonah, I think, we’re afraid.
There may be good reason for our fear. After the church of my friend, Pastor Steve Sjogren, started doing kindness outreaches regularly, an influx of visitors started worship there and the congregation saw many people coming to faith in Christ. Not all of the people coming to Steve's church played well with others initially, though. Many conformed to the description of the Ninevites that God gives at the end of our lesson, they didn’t know “their right hand from their left.”
One day, Steve was shocked when a family attracted to the church through the outreaches started a knock-down, drag-out fight in the church parking lot. The elders had to call the cops to break things up. It could have been a terrible turning point in the life of the congregation. The people of Steve’s church could have been so revolted by the behavior of these sinful people that, like Jonah, they could have sulked and kept to themselves.
Instead, they decided that if they were going to continue reaching out to people whose lives were made messy by sin and being disconnected from God, it would be best to have some police on the church parking lot every time they got together for worship. They didn’t stop sharing Jesus!
From that point on, Steve’s church grew from several hundred people, about the size of Saint Matthew, to a congregation that welcomed 6000 to worship each weekend.
Now, in a city like Logan, whose population is 6000, I can’t envision Saint Matthew becoming a megachurch, although maybe God can.
But I do know that the people of our community need the God Who is both just and gracious, the God Who will demand punishment for people’s sins unless they receive the free gifts of His grace and forgiveness by faith in Jesus Christ.
And I know that God has called us to share this message with our neighbors. God wants to use us to transform the life of our community by calling people to repent for sin and believe in Christ.
So, here’s a simple plea from your pastor. Make it your aim every Sunday night to select one spiritually-disconnected person you know, to pray over the next three days that God will make that person receptive to Jesus, and then on Thursday of that same week, invite them to worship, Sunday School, the women's group, or Bible discussion group.
Don’t be spooked if they say no. Keep praying for them and pray that God will give you another crack at inviting them later.
Then, the next Sunday, select another person who has no connection to Christ’s Church, start praying for their receptivity to your invitation on Sunday night, and then on Thursday, invite them to worship, Sunday School, women's group, or Bible discussion group.
Keep doing this week-in and week-out: select, pray, invite; select, pray, invite.
While you know lots more people in Logan than I do, I promise to go through this same procedure—select, pray, invite—as best I can.
God used a reluctant Jonah to save a whole city once steeped in sin and far from God. How much more might God be used by the people of Saint Matthew as we willingly share the Good News of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ with our community?
God is looking for Saint Matthew members willing to say, “Here I am, Lord; send me!” May we be those people!
Sunday, September 18, 2011
I've Begun My Campaign for Pope
My son snapped this picture of me in the Cardinal Room at Buca di Beppo.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Christian Teens and Single Adults...
...abstinence isn't something you give to God in order to get "the right one." Refraining from sexual intimacy outside of marriage, according to one single, is a simple matter of obedience to God.
Sometimes obedience doesn't get us what we imagined. But then...God didn't say that it would. Our hope and consolation are—they have to be—that he is worth it. No other hope or consolation will do.
Time for Some Midcourse Corrections
"A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion" (Proverbs 18:2).
One of the sad trends in the contemporary church--whether conservative or liberal--is that we dare to put our own experiences, preferences, feelings, analysis, scholarship, and opinions on a par with what God has revealed to be His will in His Word, the Bible. I know this to be true in my own denomination and it saddens me.
May God forgive us and guide us.
One of the sad trends in the contemporary church--whether conservative or liberal--is that we dare to put our own experiences, preferences, feelings, analysis, scholarship, and opinions on a par with what God has revealed to be His will in His Word, the Bible. I know this to be true in my own denomination and it saddens me.
May God forgive us and guide us.
Learning to Follow the God Who Is, Not the God We Want Him to Be
One recurring theme popping up as many in our congregation read the Bible in a year together, is that God often tells us what we do not want to hear, what we do not want to believe, and what we do not want to do.
This is true when it has to do with His law, which puts limits on our voracious desire to be gods unto ourselves.
It's also true when it comes to His gospel, the good news of the free gift of forgiveness and new life for all who trust in the crucified and risen Jesus. This violates our pride because we have pretenses of being able to make it on the basis of our merit, goodness, or power.
The Biblical record shows though, that God is committed to puncturing our comfortable fantasies and bringing us back to reality.
God speaks the truth in love to us and as I read the Bible, I often wince, not wanting to hear the truth.
Steve Taylor once sang, "It's harder to believe than not to." It's true. But if I followed a God Who always did my will and saw things my way, He would be no deity worth following.
This is true when it has to do with His law, which puts limits on our voracious desire to be gods unto ourselves.
It's also true when it comes to His gospel, the good news of the free gift of forgiveness and new life for all who trust in the crucified and risen Jesus. This violates our pride because we have pretenses of being able to make it on the basis of our merit, goodness, or power.
The Biblical record shows though, that God is committed to puncturing our comfortable fantasies and bringing us back to reality.
God speaks the truth in love to us and as I read the Bible, I often wince, not wanting to hear the truth.
Steve Taylor once sang, "It's harder to believe than not to." It's true. But if I followed a God Who always did my will and saw things my way, He would be no deity worth following.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
A Word for America...and for Me Personally
"Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people" (Proverbs 14:34).
May we lay down all pride, arrogance, and other sins at the foot of Jesus' cross, trusting in Him alone, and be made new by His grace.
May we lay down all pride, arrogance, and other sins at the foot of Jesus' cross, trusting in Him alone, and be made new by His grace.
On Character
This statement bothers me, but I believe that it's true: "Those who have a loss of character make a choice."
I know that when I have lived "out of character," opting to do things I knew to be wrong, I was really acting "in character," willfully so. I can't claim that the sins I have willfully or knowingly committed were aberrations. They were expressions of my fallen human nature and so, consistent with my fallen character.
That's why I ask God everyday to show me my sins, lead me to repentance, and empower the Holy Spirit to help me amend my ways. I want my character to be more and more like that of Jesus. Psalm 139:23-24 are important verses of Scripture to me:
I know that when I have lived "out of character," opting to do things I knew to be wrong, I was really acting "in character," willfully so. I can't claim that the sins I have willfully or knowingly committed were aberrations. They were expressions of my fallen human nature and so, consistent with my fallen character.
That's why I ask God everyday to show me my sins, lead me to repentance, and empower the Holy Spirit to help me amend my ways. I want my character to be more and more like that of Jesus. Psalm 139:23-24 are important verses of Scripture to me:
Search me, O God, and know my heart;Read this excellent piece on character by Cindy Hess Kasper. But be sure to read Job 1:13-21 first. (The "his" in the first sentence of the passage from Job refers to Job himself.)
test me and know my thoughts.
See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Forgiving As We've Been Forgiven
[This (except for the final paragraph, which I completely neglected to deliver) was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
Genesis 50:15-21
In today’s Gospel lesson from Matthew, Jesus was asked by His disciple Peter, how often he should forgive others, “as many as seven times?” Peter thought that he was being very liberal in couching his question in this way. To forgive someone as many as seven times, Peter felt, was the height of patience and kindness.
But Jesus rocks Peter’s world (and ours) when He says that we're to forgive others not seven times, but “Seventy-seven times” or, as some translations put it, “seventy times seven times” or even “seventy times seventy times.”
Whatever the precise phrasing Jesus used, His meaning is clear. Jesus was telling Peter, “Just as there’s no limit to how much I forgive all who repent and believe in me, there should be no limit to your forgiveness of others.”
This isn’t the only time that Jesus said that those who want the forgiveness and new life He came to give to all who repent and believe in Him must forgive others. pull out a pew Bible and turn to page 554 to find Matthew 6:14-15. There, Jesus says,
And when I consider that Jesus says we actually block His forgiveness and life with Him from our lives by failing to forgive, I feel…uncomfortable.
But Jesus’ command that we forgive is more than a stern dictate. You see, forgiving others is also a gift from God that can set us free for living life to the full.
Our first lesson for this morning, Genesis 50:15-21, shows us how this is so. Please pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the first lesson.
You know the story of Joseph well. This Joseph, of course, isn’t the one who, nearly two-thousand years later, would be chosen by God to be the earthly father of God the Son, Jesus of Nazareth. At an early age, this Joseph angered his brothers because their father Jacob so favored Joseph and because Joseph reported dreams God had given to him indicating that one day, he would be an important ruler and his brothers would bow to him.
The brothers’ resentments simmered until it reached a tragic boiling point: They sold Joseph into slavery and convinced Jacob that Joseph had been killed by a wild animal.
Joseph’s circumstances seemed to go from bad to worse. He became the slave and eventually the supervisor of all the holdings of Potiphar, one of Egypt’s most powerful generals, only to be falsely accused of attempting to rape Potiphar’s wife, who had been disappointed when Joseph refused to have an affair with her. Joseph long languished in prison.
Eventually, Joseph was delivered from prison and, gifted by God with both the ability to interpret dreams and lead an organization, he led a massive rationing program that saved millions from death by starvation when a famine hit.
You remember how his brothers, not knowing who Joseph was, came to Egypt seeking to buy food and how eventually, Joseph was reunited with his father and how God used Jacob to save God’s people, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the Jewish people, from extinction.
This, of course, was important for all of us because it was through the Jewish people, specifically through Jesus, that salvation would become possible for all who repent and believe in Him.
But our lesson takes place after Joseph’s reunion with his father. Jacob and all of his sons and their families had lived in Egypt with Joseph for a while when Jacob died.
There are two scenes recounted in the lesson. Scene #1 comes in verse 15. Jacob has died and Joseph’s brothers are in a panic. Now that Jacob is dead the brothers are sure that, at long last, Joseph would have his revenge for the years of agony he had endured because of their sin against him. The brothers ask each other, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?”
Joseph’s brothers were cynical, self-centered men and they couldn’t imagine that Joseph was any different. They projected their own evil ways of thinking and living onto Joseph. People still spend a lot of time projecting their own faults onto others. It's one of the biggest causes of misunderstandings and alienation between people.
So, afraid for their lives, the brothers concoct a phony story to tell Joseph. We read about it and everything that Joseph said and did in response to it in Scene #2 of our lesson, verses 16 through 21. The brothers tell Joseph that, just before he died, their father Jacob had directed them to tell Joseph not to exact vengeance on them for their sins against him.
Our lesson tells us that when Joseph heard his brothers' story, he wept. It reminds me of the day Jesus wept in Bethany many centuries later. That happened right after the death of Jesus' friend, Lazarus. When Jesus arrived in Lazarus' village, he found everyone weeping with despair. I'm sure that one Jesus wept was from grief over the death of His friend. But I feel equally certain that Jesus wept over the utter hopelessness of the whole village of Bethany. Until Jesus called Lazarus back to life, everybody there seemed to think that resurrection was too good to be true.
In the same way, Joseph's brothers found it hard to believe that Joseph could possibly forgive them for what they had done. That's why they wept. They clearly didn't know nor understand Joseph.
Look at his response to his brothers in verse 19 (read it aloud with me, please): “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” Though I’ve read them many times, I always find Joseph’s words here breathtaking!
Please notice several things about what he says.
First: Joseph sees his brothers kneeling before him and, even though this was exactly what the dreams he’d had as a boy told him would happen, he didn’t like it. Only God should be treated like God.
Bowing and scraping to human beings is what slaves of human masters do. Only God deserves such submissiveness.
Joseph insisted that he wouldn’t take God’s place.
You know, when someone hurts us, a reflex response goes off in our brains. A part of us seems to think that it’s only our due that the offending party will, in some way, come crawling to us for forgiveness. Joseph remembered that no matter what sins others perpetrate against us, God is really the One most hurt and offended by human sin.
“Vengeance is mine, I will repay” God says in His Word.*
Though Jesus entrusts the Church with the responsibility of declaring God’s forgiveness to the repentant and the opposite to the unrepentant, we aren’t in the vengeance business.
We must trust God to sort things out. That’s what Joseph did.
The second thing to notice is that Joseph could see God at work even in the midst of his pain. It was his connection with God that allowed him to forgive his brothers.
None of us can forgive others and be free of resentments that can destroy our happiness without God’s help and empowerment.
Essayist Alexander Pope famously said, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” In other words, forgiving those who hurt us is foreign to human nature. The ability to forgive others is a divine attribute, something of which only God is capable.
As Christians though, we confess that God works and lives within us. As Paul puts it in Galatians, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” You can't forgive others their trespasses against you. But Christ in you can!
Christ lives in you because you are a baptized believer in Him. Think of what that means for your everyday life! Even on the cross, Jesus Christ was able to pray for those who were killing Him and crying for His blood, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Five years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, a mere human being who followed Jesus and had Christ living within him, Stephen, could pray as he was being stoned to death for his faith in Christ, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Christ lived in him and even as Stephen died, he gave a witness for the one who had changed his life for eternity.
By the way, Christ living within us can also help us to forgive ourselves. Much of my counseling through the years has been with people who suspect that their sins are too terrible for God to forgive. Remember Jesus’ words to Nicodemus? “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son [Jesus] so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Everyone includes you.
The Bible says, “if you confess with your lips and believe with your heart that God has raised [Jesus] from the dead, you will be saved.”
When you believe in the God revealed in Jesus—the God of the Old and New Testaments, you can forgive others because you know that in Jesus, nothing can separate you from God and His love for you. And you can forgive yourself too, for this very same reason.
The most New Testament Greek work for forgive literally means, release. Forgiveness is releasing, letting go of all pretense of being God and instead, trusting God to deal with whatever punishments need to meted out against those who sin against us.
When we forgive others, God releases us to live with Him always.
Holding a grudge is like holding your breath for an extended period of time. As long as you do it, you can’t expel the toxins of bitterness and anxiety and you can’t breathe in the fresh air of God’s Holy Spirit.
If Joseph hadn’t trusted in God to release His grudges and hold onto God through bad and good times, there is no way he could fulfill the good purposes He wanted to fulfill in Joseph’s life.
God can do so much in the lives of people who surrender everything, even their anger and sorrow over the hurts, insults, slights, and horrible injuries others have inflicted on them.
God will do nothing in the lives of people who block His grace by refusing to forgive others.
If you’ve come here this morning holding a grudge against anybody, I invite you to lay it at the foot of Jesus’ cross right now and let God set you free to live the life you were made for!
*In Romans 12:19, Paul paraphrases several different passages of the Old Testament, including Deuteronomy 32:35, Leviticus 19:18, and Psalm 34:1.
Genesis 50:15-21
In today’s Gospel lesson from Matthew, Jesus was asked by His disciple Peter, how often he should forgive others, “as many as seven times?” Peter thought that he was being very liberal in couching his question in this way. To forgive someone as many as seven times, Peter felt, was the height of patience and kindness.
But Jesus rocks Peter’s world (and ours) when He says that we're to forgive others not seven times, but “Seventy-seven times” or, as some translations put it, “seventy times seven times” or even “seventy times seventy times.”
Whatever the precise phrasing Jesus used, His meaning is clear. Jesus was telling Peter, “Just as there’s no limit to how much I forgive all who repent and believe in me, there should be no limit to your forgiveness of others.”
This isn’t the only time that Jesus said that those who want the forgiveness and new life He came to give to all who repent and believe in Him must forgive others. pull out a pew Bible and turn to page 554 to find Matthew 6:14-15. There, Jesus says,
For if you forgive [people] their trespasses [their sins against you], your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive [others] their trespasses [against you], neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. [New King James Version]If you’re anything like me (and maybe you’re not), the thought that my unwillingness to forgive others for what they’ve done to me in just the same way Jesus forgives me, is daunting.
And when I consider that Jesus says we actually block His forgiveness and life with Him from our lives by failing to forgive, I feel…uncomfortable.
But Jesus’ command that we forgive is more than a stern dictate. You see, forgiving others is also a gift from God that can set us free for living life to the full.
Our first lesson for this morning, Genesis 50:15-21, shows us how this is so. Please pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the first lesson.
You know the story of Joseph well. This Joseph, of course, isn’t the one who, nearly two-thousand years later, would be chosen by God to be the earthly father of God the Son, Jesus of Nazareth. At an early age, this Joseph angered his brothers because their father Jacob so favored Joseph and because Joseph reported dreams God had given to him indicating that one day, he would be an important ruler and his brothers would bow to him.
The brothers’ resentments simmered until it reached a tragic boiling point: They sold Joseph into slavery and convinced Jacob that Joseph had been killed by a wild animal.
Joseph’s circumstances seemed to go from bad to worse. He became the slave and eventually the supervisor of all the holdings of Potiphar, one of Egypt’s most powerful generals, only to be falsely accused of attempting to rape Potiphar’s wife, who had been disappointed when Joseph refused to have an affair with her. Joseph long languished in prison.
Eventually, Joseph was delivered from prison and, gifted by God with both the ability to interpret dreams and lead an organization, he led a massive rationing program that saved millions from death by starvation when a famine hit.
You remember how his brothers, not knowing who Joseph was, came to Egypt seeking to buy food and how eventually, Joseph was reunited with his father and how God used Jacob to save God’s people, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the Jewish people, from extinction.
This, of course, was important for all of us because it was through the Jewish people, specifically through Jesus, that salvation would become possible for all who repent and believe in Him.
But our lesson takes place after Joseph’s reunion with his father. Jacob and all of his sons and their families had lived in Egypt with Joseph for a while when Jacob died.
There are two scenes recounted in the lesson. Scene #1 comes in verse 15. Jacob has died and Joseph’s brothers are in a panic. Now that Jacob is dead the brothers are sure that, at long last, Joseph would have his revenge for the years of agony he had endured because of their sin against him. The brothers ask each other, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?”
Joseph’s brothers were cynical, self-centered men and they couldn’t imagine that Joseph was any different. They projected their own evil ways of thinking and living onto Joseph. People still spend a lot of time projecting their own faults onto others. It's one of the biggest causes of misunderstandings and alienation between people.
So, afraid for their lives, the brothers concoct a phony story to tell Joseph. We read about it and everything that Joseph said and did in response to it in Scene #2 of our lesson, verses 16 through 21. The brothers tell Joseph that, just before he died, their father Jacob had directed them to tell Joseph not to exact vengeance on them for their sins against him.
Our lesson tells us that when Joseph heard his brothers' story, he wept. It reminds me of the day Jesus wept in Bethany many centuries later. That happened right after the death of Jesus' friend, Lazarus. When Jesus arrived in Lazarus' village, he found everyone weeping with despair. I'm sure that one Jesus wept was from grief over the death of His friend. But I feel equally certain that Jesus wept over the utter hopelessness of the whole village of Bethany. Until Jesus called Lazarus back to life, everybody there seemed to think that resurrection was too good to be true.
In the same way, Joseph's brothers found it hard to believe that Joseph could possibly forgive them for what they had done. That's why they wept. They clearly didn't know nor understand Joseph.
Look at his response to his brothers in verse 19 (read it aloud with me, please): “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” Though I’ve read them many times, I always find Joseph’s words here breathtaking!
Please notice several things about what he says.
First: Joseph sees his brothers kneeling before him and, even though this was exactly what the dreams he’d had as a boy told him would happen, he didn’t like it. Only God should be treated like God.
Bowing and scraping to human beings is what slaves of human masters do. Only God deserves such submissiveness.
Joseph insisted that he wouldn’t take God’s place.
You know, when someone hurts us, a reflex response goes off in our brains. A part of us seems to think that it’s only our due that the offending party will, in some way, come crawling to us for forgiveness. Joseph remembered that no matter what sins others perpetrate against us, God is really the One most hurt and offended by human sin.
“Vengeance is mine, I will repay” God says in His Word.*
Though Jesus entrusts the Church with the responsibility of declaring God’s forgiveness to the repentant and the opposite to the unrepentant, we aren’t in the vengeance business.
We must trust God to sort things out. That’s what Joseph did.
The second thing to notice is that Joseph could see God at work even in the midst of his pain. It was his connection with God that allowed him to forgive his brothers.
None of us can forgive others and be free of resentments that can destroy our happiness without God’s help and empowerment.
Essayist Alexander Pope famously said, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” In other words, forgiving those who hurt us is foreign to human nature. The ability to forgive others is a divine attribute, something of which only God is capable.
As Christians though, we confess that God works and lives within us. As Paul puts it in Galatians, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” You can't forgive others their trespasses against you. But Christ in you can!
Christ lives in you because you are a baptized believer in Him. Think of what that means for your everyday life! Even on the cross, Jesus Christ was able to pray for those who were killing Him and crying for His blood, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Five years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, a mere human being who followed Jesus and had Christ living within him, Stephen, could pray as he was being stoned to death for his faith in Christ, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Christ lived in him and even as Stephen died, he gave a witness for the one who had changed his life for eternity.
By the way, Christ living within us can also help us to forgive ourselves. Much of my counseling through the years has been with people who suspect that their sins are too terrible for God to forgive. Remember Jesus’ words to Nicodemus? “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son [Jesus] so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Everyone includes you.
The Bible says, “if you confess with your lips and believe with your heart that God has raised [Jesus] from the dead, you will be saved.”
When you believe in the God revealed in Jesus—the God of the Old and New Testaments, you can forgive others because you know that in Jesus, nothing can separate you from God and His love for you. And you can forgive yourself too, for this very same reason.
The most New Testament Greek work for forgive literally means, release. Forgiveness is releasing, letting go of all pretense of being God and instead, trusting God to deal with whatever punishments need to meted out against those who sin against us.
When we forgive others, God releases us to live with Him always.
Holding a grudge is like holding your breath for an extended period of time. As long as you do it, you can’t expel the toxins of bitterness and anxiety and you can’t breathe in the fresh air of God’s Holy Spirit.
If Joseph hadn’t trusted in God to release His grudges and hold onto God through bad and good times, there is no way he could fulfill the good purposes He wanted to fulfill in Joseph’s life.
God can do so much in the lives of people who surrender everything, even their anger and sorrow over the hurts, insults, slights, and horrible injuries others have inflicted on them.
God will do nothing in the lives of people who block His grace by refusing to forgive others.
If you’ve come here this morning holding a grudge against anybody, I invite you to lay it at the foot of Jesus’ cross right now and let God set you free to live the life you were made for!
*In Romans 12:19, Paul paraphrases several different passages of the Old Testament, including Deuteronomy 32:35, Leviticus 19:18, and Psalm 34:1.
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Audio of Today's 'Read the Bible in a Year Discussion (Psalms 111-145)
Here's today's discussion of the week's Bible readings. Tonight's discussion will be recorded too. If there's anything stunningly different from this morning's discussion, I'll post it here.
Read the Bible in a Year
Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio
Read the Bible in a Year
Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio
Monday, September 05, 2011
An Ancient Call to Post-Modern People
[This sermon was shared yesterday morning during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]
Ezekiel 33:7-11
God needs lots of Ezekiels today, people like Jon.
Jon is a man I know whose mother died when he was in his early twenties. Jon, his brother, and his sisters were comforted in knowing that their mother had trusted in Jesus Christ. They were confident that because of God’s gracious gift of the crucified and risen Jesus and their mother’s faith in Christ, she was with God for eternity.
But they were all concerned about their father. Though he had been a good husband and father in many ways, he had, years before, wandered from God. As a result of having no relationship with God, Jon’s Dad was shattered and beyond all comfort at the death of the woman he loved.
Christians grieve. But as the New Testament book of 1 Thessalonians puts it, Christians need not “grieve as others do without hope.” Jon’s dad was hopeless and, as a result, he was falling into some destructive patterns of behavior—drinking too much, working too much, staying up all hours watching infomercials. Jon decided he needed to have a heart-to-heart talk with his father.
“Dad,” he said, “I love you and I’m concerned about you. Dad, you’re slowly killing yourself. You’re letting your grief over Mom kill you. And you’re killing yourself too, by relying on beer and work to get you through. I know you don’t want to hear this, Dad, but you need to get right with God. You need to lean on Him.”
Jon’s father began to protest at hearing another religious jaw. “Wait a minute, Dad,” Jon said, “think about Mom. She believed in Jesus with all her heart.” Jon’s dad, tears welling in his eyes, admitted that was true. “Dad, she’s with Jesus, don’t you think?” Again, Jon’s dad agreed. “Dad, I not only don’t want you to be separated from God, I don’t want you to be separated from anyone who has believed in Jesus. I want you to be with Mom again in eternity.”
At that moment, Jon’s dad realized how far he had walked from God and God’s people and how he needed to lay everything aside that he’d been using to make it through his days. Jon’s dad turned to Christ and slowly, started to live again with hope and purpose. When I met him five years later, he was a truly happy man, deeply involved with his church, especially in helping feed hungry people. He still missed his wife. But he had hope.
Jon, a heavy machinery salesman by trade, was used by God in that moment as a sentinel—a guard—warning his Dad of the judgment his father was bringing down on himself, but also showing him the new life that could belong to his dad if he would turn from sin and self-absorption and trust in God alone. The life of Jon’s father was saved for eternity because Jon dared to speak a word of truth to him!
Our first Bible lesson for today comes from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. I can’t delve too far into the history of this remarkable book, but Ezekiel was a prophet and priest who, for years, had warned the people of Judah, the southern grouping of God’s people whose capital city was Jerusalem, that their continuing reliance on things other than God, their unjust and unloving treatment of others, and all their other sins would lead to the destruction of their country unless they repented and turned in faith to God.
These people—God’s people, the descendants of slaves who had been miraculously brought to a land filled with blessings showered on them by God, had turned a deaf ear to Ezekiel’s warnings. As the 33rd. chapter of Ezekiel begins, God calls Ezekiel again. He has more messages He wants Ezekiel to share with His people. God is about to orchestrate the devastation of Judah by foreign conquerors.
But God doesn't intend for that to be the end of the story. God meant the impending destruction and enslavement of his people in Ezekiel's time to lead a different conclusion.
God wanted Ezekiel to carry a new message to His people.
Now, if I had been Ezekiel, I might have thought, “I’ve had enough of the preaching business. No one wants to hear what God has to say anyway. Why should I waste my breath?”
But it was at precisely this moment that God came to Ezekiel again and, in some mysterious way, God told Ezekiel that just as Ezekiel had earlier prophesied destruction, now Ezekiel was to prophesy restoration. God was going to renew His people, give them back their land, allow them to rebuild their temple.
The key to the fulfillment of the promise of restoration was the same as the avoidance of the earlier (and ignored) threat had been: The people must repent for sin (turn away from sin) and trust in God alone. God told Ezekiel that Ezekiel must share this word with His people. Look at how God puts it in verses 8 and 9 of our first lesson: “If I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked ones, you shall surely die,’ and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life.”
God called Ezekiel to play for high stakes. He was to tell people to turn to God. If he failed to share that message, the blood of those he feared or hated too much to share it with would be on his hands.
If he shared the message and people still refused to repent and trust in God, their blood would be on their own hands.
Now, folks, this is more than a history lesson. In this history, we see the hand of God and we also see how God still operates to call unrepentant sinners to restored fellowship with Him when they turn from their sin and trust in Him.
We see God operating this way in today's Gospel lesson. There, Jesus lays down a process by which a church member sins against another can be restored to fellowship with God and with the church. If the member at fault refuses to renounce his sin, Jesus says, the Church must excommunicate that person, stripping him of his membership and denying him the privilege of receiving Christ's body and blood. Jesus says that this action must be taken not to bring an end to the story, but to allow the one at fault to understand the full consequences of unrepented sin. When we refuse to acknowledge our guilt, we are separated from God and the life that only God can give. If the one at fault, at the end of the process Jesus lays down in Matthew 18:15-20, will repent, restoration will come. Forgiveness and new life will come.
Jesus lays out this same pattern in his story of the prodigal son. The prodigal was allowed to experience the full consequences of his sin. But when he turned away from his sin and returned to his father, who, of course, represents God, his connection to his family was restored again.
When, six centuries after Ezekiel, God came to the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, He gave the same message to the world which, up to that point, God had given to His chosen people. Today, through Christ, eternal restoration and renewal, the new life that Jon’s father grasped that day Jon and he had a heart-to-heart, is what God offers to all who repent for sin and believe in Jesus. Jesus put it this way according to the Gospel of Mark, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the Good News.”
Also today, the call that God gave to Ezekiel, the prophet and priest, is a call that He gives to every believer in Jesus Christ. A passage that has played a critical role in Lutheran history, the basis for the Lutheran theology of "the priesthood of all believers," underscores this. Please take up a pew Bible and turn to page 703 and find 1 Peter, chapter 2, verse 9. Read it aloud with me, if you would:
When we believe in Jesus Christ, God walks with us through every step of this life, giving us strength and peace we can find nowhere else.
We all know that the message about Jesus Christ isn’t something that most people are clamoring to hear today, no matter how desperately they need it. Words like those God instructed Ezekiel to share with His people sound like antiquated nail scratches on a chalk board to modern ears. Read them in verses 10 to 11 of our first lesson:
But, here's a question we must all address:
God tells Ezekiel that He takes no pleasure when people spurn Him and follow the way of death rather than following Him. God still takes no pleasure in that. He wants to welcome all into relationship with Him.
Jesus, God in the flesh, demonstrated this same sentiment on the Palm Sunday before His arrest and crucifixion. You'll remember that Jesus was given a hero's welcome to Jerusalem. Later on that same day though, knowing all that awaited Him in the week to come, Jesus wept over the city. The days would come, He told this place that housed God's temple, that they would be crushed because they had failed to see that in Him, God had visited them and offered new and everlasting life to all who repent and believe in Him.
Today, there are people in our community—people in your own personal circles of acquaintance—who, right now, at this moment, are condemning themselves to eternal separation from God and who need you to be their sentinels.
They need you to warn them of the destruction to come for those who refuse Jesus’ outstretched hand of grace and forgiveness and of the new life that can be theirs if only they will quit struggling to be self-sufficient, self-contained, and self-driven and surrender to the only love that lasts forever, the love given to all through Jesus Christ.
Fine, you may say, I’m called to share Christ with others; how do I do that?
Well, it isn’t a matter of what you do. It’s a matter of who you are. As I've said before, God made you a human being, not a human doing.
By Baptism, you are already a child of God. Your belief in Jesus confirms that fact.
So, be a child of God. Live out the privilege of that.
Without apology or self-doubt, be the forgiven, free, and hopeful child of God Christ has already made you.
Ezekiel was a believer God used as a conduit for His message: repent and believe. If you and I try to make believers of others by our efforts or with our own messages, we will fail.
I used to be the kind of Christian and preacher who thought I could, by use of a program or a method or clever word games, win converts to Christ.
But the message I shared came from me, not God, and it was about me, not God.
I’ve never won anyone to Christ by being clever. But Christ has won people to Christ through me when I’ve gotten out of the way and let Christ live in me. He can do the same through all believers!
In Psalm 44, the writer remembers how God gave the promised land to His people: “…not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm give them victory; but Your right hand, and Your arm, and the light of Your countenance…”
God needs lots of Ezekiels today, people who will listen to the Word about Jesus Christ and then, in the power of the Holy Spirit, trusting that Christ is living in them (and He lives in all believers!), open their mouths to spread that Word to others.
That’s nothing other than being a Christian. That’s depending on God to be who we were made to be as children of God. That’s who Jon was. That’s who Christ can help us to be, who God made us to be, and who everyone of we know needs us to be: people who listen to God’s Word and then pass it on.
May we all be Ezekiels!
Amen!
Ezekiel 33:7-11
God needs lots of Ezekiels today, people like Jon.
Jon is a man I know whose mother died when he was in his early twenties. Jon, his brother, and his sisters were comforted in knowing that their mother had trusted in Jesus Christ. They were confident that because of God’s gracious gift of the crucified and risen Jesus and their mother’s faith in Christ, she was with God for eternity.
But they were all concerned about their father. Though he had been a good husband and father in many ways, he had, years before, wandered from God. As a result of having no relationship with God, Jon’s Dad was shattered and beyond all comfort at the death of the woman he loved.
Christians grieve. But as the New Testament book of 1 Thessalonians puts it, Christians need not “grieve as others do without hope.” Jon’s dad was hopeless and, as a result, he was falling into some destructive patterns of behavior—drinking too much, working too much, staying up all hours watching infomercials. Jon decided he needed to have a heart-to-heart talk with his father.
“Dad,” he said, “I love you and I’m concerned about you. Dad, you’re slowly killing yourself. You’re letting your grief over Mom kill you. And you’re killing yourself too, by relying on beer and work to get you through. I know you don’t want to hear this, Dad, but you need to get right with God. You need to lean on Him.”
Jon’s father began to protest at hearing another religious jaw. “Wait a minute, Dad,” Jon said, “think about Mom. She believed in Jesus with all her heart.” Jon’s dad, tears welling in his eyes, admitted that was true. “Dad, she’s with Jesus, don’t you think?” Again, Jon’s dad agreed. “Dad, I not only don’t want you to be separated from God, I don’t want you to be separated from anyone who has believed in Jesus. I want you to be with Mom again in eternity.”
At that moment, Jon’s dad realized how far he had walked from God and God’s people and how he needed to lay everything aside that he’d been using to make it through his days. Jon’s dad turned to Christ and slowly, started to live again with hope and purpose. When I met him five years later, he was a truly happy man, deeply involved with his church, especially in helping feed hungry people. He still missed his wife. But he had hope.
Jon, a heavy machinery salesman by trade, was used by God in that moment as a sentinel—a guard—warning his Dad of the judgment his father was bringing down on himself, but also showing him the new life that could belong to his dad if he would turn from sin and self-absorption and trust in God alone. The life of Jon’s father was saved for eternity because Jon dared to speak a word of truth to him!
Our first Bible lesson for today comes from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. I can’t delve too far into the history of this remarkable book, but Ezekiel was a prophet and priest who, for years, had warned the people of Judah, the southern grouping of God’s people whose capital city was Jerusalem, that their continuing reliance on things other than God, their unjust and unloving treatment of others, and all their other sins would lead to the destruction of their country unless they repented and turned in faith to God.
These people—God’s people, the descendants of slaves who had been miraculously brought to a land filled with blessings showered on them by God, had turned a deaf ear to Ezekiel’s warnings. As the 33rd. chapter of Ezekiel begins, God calls Ezekiel again. He has more messages He wants Ezekiel to share with His people. God is about to orchestrate the devastation of Judah by foreign conquerors.
But God doesn't intend for that to be the end of the story. God meant the impending destruction and enslavement of his people in Ezekiel's time to lead a different conclusion.
God wanted Ezekiel to carry a new message to His people.
Now, if I had been Ezekiel, I might have thought, “I’ve had enough of the preaching business. No one wants to hear what God has to say anyway. Why should I waste my breath?”
But it was at precisely this moment that God came to Ezekiel again and, in some mysterious way, God told Ezekiel that just as Ezekiel had earlier prophesied destruction, now Ezekiel was to prophesy restoration. God was going to renew His people, give them back their land, allow them to rebuild their temple.
The key to the fulfillment of the promise of restoration was the same as the avoidance of the earlier (and ignored) threat had been: The people must repent for sin (turn away from sin) and trust in God alone. God told Ezekiel that Ezekiel must share this word with His people. Look at how God puts it in verses 8 and 9 of our first lesson: “If I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked ones, you shall surely die,’ and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life.”
God called Ezekiel to play for high stakes. He was to tell people to turn to God. If he failed to share that message, the blood of those he feared or hated too much to share it with would be on his hands.
If he shared the message and people still refused to repent and trust in God, their blood would be on their own hands.
Now, folks, this is more than a history lesson. In this history, we see the hand of God and we also see how God still operates to call unrepentant sinners to restored fellowship with Him when they turn from their sin and trust in Him.
We see God operating this way in today's Gospel lesson. There, Jesus lays down a process by which a church member sins against another can be restored to fellowship with God and with the church. If the member at fault refuses to renounce his sin, Jesus says, the Church must excommunicate that person, stripping him of his membership and denying him the privilege of receiving Christ's body and blood. Jesus says that this action must be taken not to bring an end to the story, but to allow the one at fault to understand the full consequences of unrepented sin. When we refuse to acknowledge our guilt, we are separated from God and the life that only God can give. If the one at fault, at the end of the process Jesus lays down in Matthew 18:15-20, will repent, restoration will come. Forgiveness and new life will come.
Jesus lays out this same pattern in his story of the prodigal son. The prodigal was allowed to experience the full consequences of his sin. But when he turned away from his sin and returned to his father, who, of course, represents God, his connection to his family was restored again.
When, six centuries after Ezekiel, God came to the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, He gave the same message to the world which, up to that point, God had given to His chosen people. Today, through Christ, eternal restoration and renewal, the new life that Jon’s father grasped that day Jon and he had a heart-to-heart, is what God offers to all who repent for sin and believe in Jesus. Jesus put it this way according to the Gospel of Mark, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the Good News.”
Also today, the call that God gave to Ezekiel, the prophet and priest, is a call that He gives to every believer in Jesus Christ. A passage that has played a critical role in Lutheran history, the basis for the Lutheran theology of "the priesthood of all believers," underscores this. Please take up a pew Bible and turn to page 703 and find 1 Peter, chapter 2, verse 9. Read it aloud with me, if you would:
But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.God calls every believer in Jesus Christ to be an Ezekiel, to be a Jon, who shares the life-changing news that all who turn from sin and trust in Christ live with God for eternity.
When we believe in Jesus Christ, God walks with us through every step of this life, giving us strength and peace we can find nowhere else.
We all know that the message about Jesus Christ isn’t something that most people are clamoring to hear today, no matter how desperately they need it. Words like those God instructed Ezekiel to share with His people sound like antiquated nail scratches on a chalk board to modern ears. Read them in verses 10 to 11 of our first lesson:
…say…’Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?’ Say to them, As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?’In an era in which...
- freedom is institutionalized as selfishness and an excuse for greed,
- drug addiction right here in Hocking County is epidemic,
- child abuse and a coarse disregard for the humanity of others can be seen everywhere,
- sexual promiscuity of all sorts is seen as the inevitable result of irresistible biological impulses rather than the choice of a society that worships at the altar of self, and
- things like racial bigotry, the unjust treatment of women, and a sense of entitlement pervade our culture,
But, here's a question we must all address:
Whose approval do we want more, that of a world hurtling toward death in its sins or that of heaven, which awaits repentant sinners with open arms?The answer, I think, should be obvious. Speaking for myself, I want to be on the side of the One Who will be standing when Jesus returns to claim His final victory over sin and death! And, if I can help convey the message of new life to people who don't know Jesus Christ, I am more than willing to live with the disdain of some.
God tells Ezekiel that He takes no pleasure when people spurn Him and follow the way of death rather than following Him. God still takes no pleasure in that. He wants to welcome all into relationship with Him.
Jesus, God in the flesh, demonstrated this same sentiment on the Palm Sunday before His arrest and crucifixion. You'll remember that Jesus was given a hero's welcome to Jerusalem. Later on that same day though, knowing all that awaited Him in the week to come, Jesus wept over the city. The days would come, He told this place that housed God's temple, that they would be crushed because they had failed to see that in Him, God had visited them and offered new and everlasting life to all who repent and believe in Him.
Today, there are people in our community—people in your own personal circles of acquaintance—who, right now, at this moment, are condemning themselves to eternal separation from God and who need you to be their sentinels.
They need you to warn them of the destruction to come for those who refuse Jesus’ outstretched hand of grace and forgiveness and of the new life that can be theirs if only they will quit struggling to be self-sufficient, self-contained, and self-driven and surrender to the only love that lasts forever, the love given to all through Jesus Christ.
Fine, you may say, I’m called to share Christ with others; how do I do that?
Well, it isn’t a matter of what you do. It’s a matter of who you are. As I've said before, God made you a human being, not a human doing.
By Baptism, you are already a child of God. Your belief in Jesus confirms that fact.
So, be a child of God. Live out the privilege of that.
Without apology or self-doubt, be the forgiven, free, and hopeful child of God Christ has already made you.
Ezekiel was a believer God used as a conduit for His message: repent and believe. If you and I try to make believers of others by our efforts or with our own messages, we will fail.
I used to be the kind of Christian and preacher who thought I could, by use of a program or a method or clever word games, win converts to Christ.
But the message I shared came from me, not God, and it was about me, not God.
I’ve never won anyone to Christ by being clever. But Christ has won people to Christ through me when I’ve gotten out of the way and let Christ live in me. He can do the same through all believers!
In Psalm 44, the writer remembers how God gave the promised land to His people: “…not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm give them victory; but Your right hand, and Your arm, and the light of Your countenance…”
God needs lots of Ezekiels today, people who will listen to the Word about Jesus Christ and then, in the power of the Holy Spirit, trusting that Christ is living in them (and He lives in all believers!), open their mouths to spread that Word to others.
That’s nothing other than being a Christian. That’s depending on God to be who we were made to be as children of God. That’s who Jon was. That’s who Christ can help us to be, who God made us to be, and who everyone of we know needs us to be: people who listen to God’s Word and then pass it on.
May we all be Ezekiels!
Amen!
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
"Who knows whether you have not come...for such a time as this?"
Esther played her unexpected part in God's project to save people. Maybe God has plans like that for you.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
"Where Do We Go When We Die?"
I wrote this piece on that question three years ago. Hope you find it helpful.
Give Me Your Picks
In the comments below, give me your picks for:
- 2011 World Series winning team
- 2011 College football national champions
- 2012 Super Bowl winning team
Monday, August 29, 2011
"Hurricane Irene and the Death of 'Here'"
That's the title of this interesting slice of life from the Hurricane Irene experience by Annie Gottlieb.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Jesus' Alternative Universe
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
Matthew 16:21-28
In his book, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, Pastor David Platt tells about several people from underground house churches in Asian countries where it’s illegal to worship or witness for Jesus Christ.
Jesus talks about the strange alternative universe—the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God—in which people Jian and Lin live in today’s Gospel lesson.
It’s the world in which He calls us all to live, too. If that scares you, it probably should. It scares me. Yet there is no other place where true life can be found than in Jesus’ kingdom. Let’s learn more about it. Please pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the lesson, Matthew 16:21-28.
The lesson actually continues an incident we started looking at two weeks ago. Back then, you may recall, Peter confessed his belief that Jesus was “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
The first verse of today’s lesson follows: “From that time on, Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”
How did Jesus “show” these things to the disciples, do you suppose? Pull out a pew Bible, please, and turn to page 609, to Luke 24:27. It’s part of Luke’s account of an encounter the risen Jesus had with two disciples on the road to a village called Emmaus on the first Easter Sunday. The disciples, blinded by their inability to believe in Jesus’ resurrection, don’t initially understand that the stranger with whom they’re speaking is Jesus. Then we’re told: “And beginning at Moses [in other words, starting at Genesis, the first of five Old Testament books traditionally attributed to Moses] and the Prophets [people like Isaiah and Jeremiah, whose prophetic ministries are recounted also in the Old Testament], [Jesus] expounded to them in all the Scriptures concerning Himself.”
Jesus always pointed to the God of the Old Testament to explain Who He was and what He was about. Jesus taught that everything that Christians confess about Him—from His virgin birth to His sacrificial death for our sin, from His kingship to His resurrection—was foretold in the Old Testament.
Peter though, wasn’t interested in what Jesus or the Old Testament had to say about the Messiah suffering, dying and rising. Peter wanted Jesus to be an earthly king who could produce results, like freeing him and his countrymen from Roman rule and their oppressive taxes. Peter wanted Jesus to make his life easy.
That’s why, in verse 22, we read: “Peter took [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This [suffering and crucifixion] must never happen to you.’”
Peter wanted to whittle the one he had just confessed to be the Messiah and the Son of the living God down to controllable dimensions. He wanted a king who would do things the way he thought that they should be done. He wanted a God who would wink at his favorite sins. Like Adam and Eve, Peter wanted to “be like God.”
You know, sometimes I go to God in prayer and say, "Now, Lord, what you need to do is thus and so. That will cause such and such a person to do what you and I both know they need to do. Then, I can step in and do this." Do you know what God's reaction to a "prayer" like that is? He laughs. We can't tell God how to do His job! If we do, our speech at that moment might be called many things, but it can't be called prayer.
Peter thought he was going to tell Jesus how to be God and King. Boy, was he wrong! Look at verse 23, for Jesus' reaction to Peter: “But [Jesus] turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Jesus uses the same word for Peter, the word Satan, which means accuser, that He used for the devil when the devil tempted Him in the wilderness. Back then, Satan tried to tempt Jesus to avoid the cross and take the easy way to becoming a king. No suffering. No cross. All Jesus had to do was worship Satan and Jesus could have the world He had come to reclaim for God. Jesus refused to take the easy way.
Like the devil, Peter wanted Jesus to take the easy way. The easy way, the way of going along to get along, is exactly what Jesus warned anyone who wanted to follow Him to avoid when He said, “The gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life.” What path are you and I following in life: the Jesus way or the easy way?
My mentor, Pastor Bruce Schein, used to tell us about counseling parents whose high school or college-age children were addicted to drugs. He told these parents that if they loved their children, they wouldn’t give the kids the money they knew the kids would just use to buy more drugs. “But we can’t stand the thought of our kids hating us and thinking they can’t turn to us for help,” they would say. “It’s too painful.” “How painful will it be,” he would ask them, “if you give them what they want and you lose them forever?”
Peter, like Satan before him, confronted Jesus with the same sort of choice that confronted those parents Pastor Schein counseled. It would have been far easier for Jesus to give people what they wanted, to be a king who led a revolution and tossed out the Romans, while leaving you and me imprisoned to sin and death. Jesus willingly endured the hatred of the whole human race and the punishment for sin we deserve so that He wouldn’t lose us forever, so that on Easter Sunday, when the Father raised Jesus from the dead, He could give new life to all who repent for sin and believe in Him.
It was by the hard way of the cross that Jesus won life for all who trust in Him. God’s saving grace in Christ is free, but we must give up life as it’s usually lived to be free to grab hold of it!
In verse 26, Jesus amplifies this point, when He says in part, “If any want to become My followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
To take up our cross is to acknowledge that our sins put Jesus on the cross. I love what Martin Luther says when, in The Small Catechism, he explains the meaning of Baptism for our daily lives:
When we live in daily repentance and renewal, we can confess with Jeremiah, writing in the Old Testament book of Lamentations: “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning…”
But what does it mean to deny ourselves? It means to dare to trust God’s revealed word and will and not in our own reasoning or experiences. Psalm 118 says that “it is better to take refuge in the LORD than to put confidence in mortals [that includes ourselves].”
Denying ourselves means admitting that we need God not as we want Him to be, but God as He is, the God Who can only save us from sin and death when we give Him our unconditional surrender and when we sign over control over our lives to Jesus Christ.
There is a joy and a peace to a life like this which, I confess, I have only tasted at times, but which I want more than anything! In the New Testament book of Philippians, the apostle Paul writes, “To me, living is Christ and dying is gain.” (Talk about upside down!)
Peter rebuked Jesus because he was concerned about living and organizing life as he wanted it to be. He was a slave to his desire for personal freedom and control. He wanted God to bend to His plans rather than submitting to whatever God had in mind for him.
One of the reasons I have such an irrational fear of water and have never learned to swim, I’m sure, is because I’m afraid to let go and just…swim. I like the feeling of control I have on dry land. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says that following Jesus is like learning to swim. “If you keep your foot on the bottom of the pool,” he says, “you’ll never work out how to do it.” If we are to follow Jesus into eternity, we’ll have to do something similar. Wright continues, “You have to lose your life to find it. What’s the use of keeping your feet on the bottom when the water gets too deep? You have the choice: swim or drown. Apparent safety, walking on the bottom, isn’t an option any longer.”
True living, whether in this life or in eternity, doesn’t belong to those who play it safe. It belongs to people who give control of their lives to Jesus—to people who deny themselves, who take up their crosses, and who follow Him.
This life, no matter how many years we live here, is just a warm-up lap for the one to come.
Let Jesus take control of your life now. Start living in Jesus’ alternative universe—the kingdom of heaven—today. Let Jesus call the shots. Let Jesus set your priorities. Do everything you can to tell the world about the new life that only those with faith in Jesus have.
You may not win any popularity contests for living in Jesus’ kingdom. You may not gain power or wealth or ease. But you will live in the power of the only one who can give you life, the only One Who will be left standing when sin and death have done their worst to us.
And as you live with Jesus each day, you will, as Jesus promises at the end of our Gospel lesson, “not taste death before [you] see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” You will see the imprint of Jesus on every moment that you breathe. And you will be alive.
Today, right now, this moment: Follow Jesus!
Matthew 16:21-28
In his book, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, Pastor David Platt tells about several people from underground house churches in Asian countries where it’s illegal to worship or witness for Jesus Christ.
- He mentions Jian, a “doctor who has left his successful health clinic and now risks his life and the lives of his wife and two kids in order to provide impoverished villages with medical care while secretly training [a] network of house-church leaders.”
- There’s Lin, a woman who teaches at a university where it’s illegal to talk about Jesus. She secretly meets with students interested in knowing more about Him though, risking the loss of her job in the process.
Jesus talks about the strange alternative universe—the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God—in which people Jian and Lin live in today’s Gospel lesson.
It’s the world in which He calls us all to live, too. If that scares you, it probably should. It scares me. Yet there is no other place where true life can be found than in Jesus’ kingdom. Let’s learn more about it. Please pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the lesson, Matthew 16:21-28.
The lesson actually continues an incident we started looking at two weeks ago. Back then, you may recall, Peter confessed his belief that Jesus was “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
The first verse of today’s lesson follows: “From that time on, Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”
How did Jesus “show” these things to the disciples, do you suppose? Pull out a pew Bible, please, and turn to page 609, to Luke 24:27. It’s part of Luke’s account of an encounter the risen Jesus had with two disciples on the road to a village called Emmaus on the first Easter Sunday. The disciples, blinded by their inability to believe in Jesus’ resurrection, don’t initially understand that the stranger with whom they’re speaking is Jesus. Then we’re told: “And beginning at Moses [in other words, starting at Genesis, the first of five Old Testament books traditionally attributed to Moses] and the Prophets [people like Isaiah and Jeremiah, whose prophetic ministries are recounted also in the Old Testament], [Jesus] expounded to them in all the Scriptures concerning Himself.”
Jesus always pointed to the God of the Old Testament to explain Who He was and what He was about. Jesus taught that everything that Christians confess about Him—from His virgin birth to His sacrificial death for our sin, from His kingship to His resurrection—was foretold in the Old Testament.
Peter though, wasn’t interested in what Jesus or the Old Testament had to say about the Messiah suffering, dying and rising. Peter wanted Jesus to be an earthly king who could produce results, like freeing him and his countrymen from Roman rule and their oppressive taxes. Peter wanted Jesus to make his life easy.
That’s why, in verse 22, we read: “Peter took [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This [suffering and crucifixion] must never happen to you.’”
Peter wanted to whittle the one he had just confessed to be the Messiah and the Son of the living God down to controllable dimensions. He wanted a king who would do things the way he thought that they should be done. He wanted a God who would wink at his favorite sins. Like Adam and Eve, Peter wanted to “be like God.”
You know, sometimes I go to God in prayer and say, "Now, Lord, what you need to do is thus and so. That will cause such and such a person to do what you and I both know they need to do. Then, I can step in and do this." Do you know what God's reaction to a "prayer" like that is? He laughs. We can't tell God how to do His job! If we do, our speech at that moment might be called many things, but it can't be called prayer.
Peter thought he was going to tell Jesus how to be God and King. Boy, was he wrong! Look at verse 23, for Jesus' reaction to Peter: “But [Jesus] turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Jesus uses the same word for Peter, the word Satan, which means accuser, that He used for the devil when the devil tempted Him in the wilderness. Back then, Satan tried to tempt Jesus to avoid the cross and take the easy way to becoming a king. No suffering. No cross. All Jesus had to do was worship Satan and Jesus could have the world He had come to reclaim for God. Jesus refused to take the easy way.
Like the devil, Peter wanted Jesus to take the easy way. The easy way, the way of going along to get along, is exactly what Jesus warned anyone who wanted to follow Him to avoid when He said, “The gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life.” What path are you and I following in life: the Jesus way or the easy way?
My mentor, Pastor Bruce Schein, used to tell us about counseling parents whose high school or college-age children were addicted to drugs. He told these parents that if they loved their children, they wouldn’t give the kids the money they knew the kids would just use to buy more drugs. “But we can’t stand the thought of our kids hating us and thinking they can’t turn to us for help,” they would say. “It’s too painful.” “How painful will it be,” he would ask them, “if you give them what they want and you lose them forever?”
Peter, like Satan before him, confronted Jesus with the same sort of choice that confronted those parents Pastor Schein counseled. It would have been far easier for Jesus to give people what they wanted, to be a king who led a revolution and tossed out the Romans, while leaving you and me imprisoned to sin and death. Jesus willingly endured the hatred of the whole human race and the punishment for sin we deserve so that He wouldn’t lose us forever, so that on Easter Sunday, when the Father raised Jesus from the dead, He could give new life to all who repent for sin and believe in Him.
It was by the hard way of the cross that Jesus won life for all who trust in Him. God’s saving grace in Christ is free, but we must give up life as it’s usually lived to be free to grab hold of it!
In verse 26, Jesus amplifies this point, when He says in part, “If any want to become My followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
To take up our cross is to acknowledge that our sins put Jesus on the cross. I love what Martin Luther says when, in The Small Catechism, he explains the meaning of Baptism for our daily lives:
[Baptism] signifies that the old Adam in us, together with all sins and evil desires, should be drowned by daily sorrow for sin and repentance and be put to death, and that the new person should come forth every day and rise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.Just as Christ’s crucifixion led to His resurrection, daily taking up our crosses, confessing our sins, and submitting to the death of our sinful impulses and orientations brings us fresh new life every moment we walk with Jesus.
When we live in daily repentance and renewal, we can confess with Jeremiah, writing in the Old Testament book of Lamentations: “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning…”
But what does it mean to deny ourselves? It means to dare to trust God’s revealed word and will and not in our own reasoning or experiences. Psalm 118 says that “it is better to take refuge in the LORD than to put confidence in mortals [that includes ourselves].”
Denying ourselves means admitting that we need God not as we want Him to be, but God as He is, the God Who can only save us from sin and death when we give Him our unconditional surrender and when we sign over control over our lives to Jesus Christ.
There is a joy and a peace to a life like this which, I confess, I have only tasted at times, but which I want more than anything! In the New Testament book of Philippians, the apostle Paul writes, “To me, living is Christ and dying is gain.” (Talk about upside down!)
Peter rebuked Jesus because he was concerned about living and organizing life as he wanted it to be. He was a slave to his desire for personal freedom and control. He wanted God to bend to His plans rather than submitting to whatever God had in mind for him.
One of the reasons I have such an irrational fear of water and have never learned to swim, I’m sure, is because I’m afraid to let go and just…swim. I like the feeling of control I have on dry land. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says that following Jesus is like learning to swim. “If you keep your foot on the bottom of the pool,” he says, “you’ll never work out how to do it.” If we are to follow Jesus into eternity, we’ll have to do something similar. Wright continues, “You have to lose your life to find it. What’s the use of keeping your feet on the bottom when the water gets too deep? You have the choice: swim or drown. Apparent safety, walking on the bottom, isn’t an option any longer.”
True living, whether in this life or in eternity, doesn’t belong to those who play it safe. It belongs to people who give control of their lives to Jesus—to people who deny themselves, who take up their crosses, and who follow Him.
This life, no matter how many years we live here, is just a warm-up lap for the one to come.
Let Jesus take control of your life now. Start living in Jesus’ alternative universe—the kingdom of heaven—today. Let Jesus call the shots. Let Jesus set your priorities. Do everything you can to tell the world about the new life that only those with faith in Jesus have.
You may not win any popularity contests for living in Jesus’ kingdom. You may not gain power or wealth or ease. But you will live in the power of the only one who can give you life, the only One Who will be left standing when sin and death have done their worst to us.
And as you live with Jesus each day, you will, as Jesus promises at the end of our Gospel lesson, “not taste death before [you] see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” You will see the imprint of Jesus on every moment that you breathe. And you will be alive.
Today, right now, this moment: Follow Jesus!
Friday, August 26, 2011
Good Advice vs. Good News
Lutheran Christians have always taught that understanding the Biblical categories of Law and Gospel and the distinction between the two is central to getting what God is all about in His dealings with us.
My colleague, Pastor Dave Mann, who is on the pastoral staff of a congregation here in Ohio, but is deployed in Haiti, recently wrote this on his Facebook page:
The Gospel--the good news that Jesus Christ died and rose to give new life to all who repent and trust in Him--is something that comes to us. All we need to do is respond to it with trust. As Jesus puts it, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes [trusts] in Him may not perish but may have eternal life" (John 3:16).
The Law points us to our need of someone to save us from ourselves.
The Gospel points us to the Savior Who does just that.
My colleague, Pastor Dave Mann, who is on the pastoral staff of a congregation here in Ohio, but is deployed in Haiti, recently wrote this on his Facebook page:
During a vacation Sunday this month, I attended a non-Lutheran congregation and heard one of the best sermons rooted in Lutheran theology I've ever heard. Here was one of the points the preacher made.Jesus once said that nothing from God's law had been eliminated. The Law--embodied in the Ten Commandments--give expression to God's will for human beings. But we all know that none us can go a single day without violating one or all of the commandments. (In my case, I can't go a day without repeatedly violating the commandments.) The Law is good advice.
What's the difference between Good Advice and Good News? Good Advice is advice about what you should do in the future. It may be wise counsel, something you really ought to do, but the burden is then on you to put it into action. News, on the other hand, is an announcement about what has already taken place. It does not depend upon you to make it happen; it's already part of history -- you simply respond. Good News is what Jesus Christ brings to you.
Without ever dropping the name of Luther, Lutheranism, or theology, this preacher made a very clear distinction between Law and Gospel.
The Gospel--the good news that Jesus Christ died and rose to give new life to all who repent and trust in Him--is something that comes to us. All we need to do is respond to it with trust. As Jesus puts it, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes [trusts] in Him may not perish but may have eternal life" (John 3:16).
The Law points us to our need of someone to save us from ourselves.
The Gospel points us to the Savior Who does just that.
A Book Like No Other
If we prayerfully read the Bible with our wills open to God, God will give us a deepening faith in Christ and will build our characters.
Conversely, when I fail to read God's Word and pray each day, the wheels pop off my life, my priorities are put askew, I more readily fall prey to temptations and sin, my ego gets out of hand, and I panic in the face of life.
The Bible is like no other book. It is, as the New Testament book of 2 Timothy says literally, "God-breathed," inspired by God, filled with the same grace and power God used to call the universe into being and that He used to raise Jesus from the dead.
Enjoy these thoughts on the Bible from today's installment of Our Daily Bread.
Conversely, when I fail to read God's Word and pray each day, the wheels pop off my life, my priorities are put askew, I more readily fall prey to temptations and sin, my ego gets out of hand, and I panic in the face of life.
The Bible is like no other book. It is, as the New Testament book of 2 Timothy says literally, "God-breathed," inspired by God, filled with the same grace and power God used to call the universe into being and that He used to raise Jesus from the dead.
Enjoy these thoughts on the Bible from today's installment of Our Daily Bread.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Sarah and the Meaning of Life
[This was shared during the funeral for Sarah, a twenty year old member of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]
2 Timothy 4:6-8
John 14:1-7
The day after it was determined that Sarah had sustained her fifth relapse with cancer, I walked into her room on J5 at Children’s Hospital in Columbus. What I saw surprised me a little. Sarah was sitting in a chair, looking healthy and strong, eating like a horse! For a moment, I looked at her and said nothing. She looked back and then said, “I know. I’m complicated.”
The fact is that Sarah was not complicated. By that, I don’t mean that she was simple or lacking in sophistication. She was, in fact, wise beyond her years. She had a fantastic, insightful sense of humor. Even on the Sunday before her passing, barely able to talk, she threw out a few pithy remarks that had us chuckling. But she was not complicated.
She was intelligent, gifted, direct, loving toward everyone she met, and faithful to Jesus Christ. With Sarah, except when she didn't want you to know how badly she was feeling, what you saw was who she really was. And who she really was, was one of the most remarkable people I have ever known.
But her life was complicated by a deadly adversary with which she fought for nearly eight years. It brought her pain and difficulties few of us could imagine bearing for moments, let alone years.
Yet I feel safe in saying that the last thing Sarah would want you to remember when you think of her is cancer. Sarah never allowed cancer to define her.
That’s how she kept achieving despite the odds.
That’s how she graduated from high school with honors.
It’s how she kept up with her studies at Denison University and was on track to graduate in four years' time.
It’s how she sang without missing a note at her beloved grandmother’s funeral several years ago.
And it’s how she lit up a room by her mere presence.
And this morning I can tell you that while the cancer that took Sarah’s earthly life is dead forever, Sarah is alive today with God in eternity!
I don’t say that because eternal life with God is a given. It’s not. Jesus, in the passage from John we read a few moments ago, is trying to comfort His first followers. He had told them earlier that He was going to Jerusalem to lay down His life, to be executed on a cross, taking the punishment all of us deserve for our sin: death.
Jesus then tells them—and us—that He is going to prepare places for those who trust in Him in eternity. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says, “Believe in God, believe also in Me.” Later, Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you know Me, you will know My Father also.”
Sarah is in eternity because, thanks to the witness of her family at home and the witness of her family here at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, she believed in Jesus Christ. It is as simple and uncomplicated as that.
And Sarah lived her belief in Christ. When she had her second bone marrow transplant back in 2008, I was shuttling between Children's Hospital, where she was a patient, and The OSU Medical Center where, Dee, another member of our congregation was undergoing another procedure. After looking in on Dee, I went back to see how Sarah was doing. The first thing she asked when I walked into her room was, "How's Dee?"
I heard second-hand this week about a young woman who graduated from high school with Sarah. This young woman said that she was sometimes subjected to ridicule by “the popular kids.” But Sarah, one of the popular kids herself, always made a point of speaking with her and befriending her.
You see, when you’re secure in your relationship with the God Who came to die and rise for you and when you’ve faced down death with that Savior by your side, it changes both the way you live and the way you die. You don’t need to go along with the crowd. You saw that in Sarah.
Of course, none of this banishes our questions this morning. This side of eternity, we cannot know why one so young and so wonderful suffered so much or left us so soon.
Sarah told me about a year-and-a-half-ago during an interview for a county youth newsletter, “Sometimes I get angry with God. But I know that He’s always with me. And He helps me focus on the meaning of life.” If any of you feel angry with God today, it’s OK. God is big enough to take your anger and still love you. And, as Becky and I have discussed many times, you don’t get angry with a God you don’t believe is there. But, as was true for Sarah, even now God can help you focus on the meaning of your life.
And the meaning of life is also an uncomplicated thing. We are each meant to love God, love others, trust in Christ, and share Christ with others by our words and our actions so that they too can trust in Christ and have life through Him. These were all touchstones for Sarah’s life.
She wanted more, of course. She wanted to graduate from college. She wanted to counsel young people fighting things like cancer because she would understand their struggles and give them hope. Like you, I prayed often and fervently that God would make Sarah’s aspirations come to pass. It hasn’t turned out the way any of us prayed it would.
But Sarah always understood that was a possibility. Two years ago, from this pulpit, Sarah preached on Easter Sunday morning. At one point, she retold the legend of three trees that her father, Bryan, sometimes read for children’s programs here at Saint Matthew. Each tree had hopes for itself.
One tree hoped that it would become a treasure chest, filled with jewels and precious things. “On the outside,” the first tree said, “I will have intricate designs and everyone will be dazzled by my beauty.”
The second tree wanted to be a ship that carried kings and queens. “Everyone will feel safe in me because of the strength of my hull,” the second tree said.
The third tree wanted to grow to be the tallest, straightest tree in the forest. “Everyone will look at me on top of the hill, see my branches pointing up to heaven, and think of God,” the third tree said. “I will be the greatest tree of all time and people will always remember me.”
The first tree became, not a treasure chest, but a feeding trough. One night in Bethlehem, it held the greatest treasure the world has ever seen: God-in-the-flesh, Jesus, just after He was born.
The second tree was turned into a fishing boat that plied the Sea of Galilee where, one day, a ferocious storm frightened Jesus’ disciples. From its hull, Jesus, the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords, quieted a storm, inciting the disciples to ask, “Who is this whom even wind and waves obey?”
The third tree was chopped down and turned into lumber. Some of its boards were made into a cross on which Jesus was crucified. For a while, the third tree felt ugly and hateful. Yet on the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion, it felt differently. Jesus had risen from the dead and the empty timbers of His cross pointed then, as it still points today, to heaven. It reminds us that through faith in Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life, God gives to all who turn from sin and believe in Christ eternal life with God.
After recounting that legend in her Easter sermon, Sarah said that the story was “a reminder to me that God has a special path that each of us will journey in our lives.” She continued, “For me on this Easter Day, I remember the past six years of my life. Through those years I knew that my life was and still is in God’s hands and I need to trust in him just as Jesus did when he died on the cross.”
Sarah lived a life filled with meaning, short though it was. And her life pointed to Jesus. It still does.
All this past week, whenever I thought of Sarah, I remembered the words of Saint Paul to the young pastor Timothy, which we read a little while ago. Paul knew he would die soon. But he could say words I can easily hear Sarah saying, “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.”
Sarah’s fight has ended and Christ has won it for her. She is in the presence of God at this moment. Our fight remains before us and it will only be won, as Sarah’s was, by holding on tenaciously to the nail-scarred hands of the Savior Who died and rose for us. I pray desperately that we will all do that!
Bryan, Becky, and Stephen, to you and your extended family: We love you. We stand with you. We pray for you. In the days and years ahead, keep looking to Jesus. He will give your lives meaning. He will sustain you as He has sustained you these past eight years and as He sustained Sarah. And He will hold onto you all the way to an eternity filled with a never-ending reunion with Christ and with all who, like Sarah, have loved His appearing.
What a reunion that will be!
God bless you!
2 Timothy 4:6-8
John 14:1-7
The day after it was determined that Sarah had sustained her fifth relapse with cancer, I walked into her room on J5 at Children’s Hospital in Columbus. What I saw surprised me a little. Sarah was sitting in a chair, looking healthy and strong, eating like a horse! For a moment, I looked at her and said nothing. She looked back and then said, “I know. I’m complicated.”
The fact is that Sarah was not complicated. By that, I don’t mean that she was simple or lacking in sophistication. She was, in fact, wise beyond her years. She had a fantastic, insightful sense of humor. Even on the Sunday before her passing, barely able to talk, she threw out a few pithy remarks that had us chuckling. But she was not complicated.
She was intelligent, gifted, direct, loving toward everyone she met, and faithful to Jesus Christ. With Sarah, except when she didn't want you to know how badly she was feeling, what you saw was who she really was. And who she really was, was one of the most remarkable people I have ever known.
But her life was complicated by a deadly adversary with which she fought for nearly eight years. It brought her pain and difficulties few of us could imagine bearing for moments, let alone years.
Yet I feel safe in saying that the last thing Sarah would want you to remember when you think of her is cancer. Sarah never allowed cancer to define her.
That’s how she kept achieving despite the odds.
That’s how she graduated from high school with honors.
It’s how she kept up with her studies at Denison University and was on track to graduate in four years' time.
It’s how she sang without missing a note at her beloved grandmother’s funeral several years ago.
And it’s how she lit up a room by her mere presence.
And this morning I can tell you that while the cancer that took Sarah’s earthly life is dead forever, Sarah is alive today with God in eternity!
I don’t say that because eternal life with God is a given. It’s not. Jesus, in the passage from John we read a few moments ago, is trying to comfort His first followers. He had told them earlier that He was going to Jerusalem to lay down His life, to be executed on a cross, taking the punishment all of us deserve for our sin: death.
Jesus then tells them—and us—that He is going to prepare places for those who trust in Him in eternity. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says, “Believe in God, believe also in Me.” Later, Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you know Me, you will know My Father also.”
Sarah is in eternity because, thanks to the witness of her family at home and the witness of her family here at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, she believed in Jesus Christ. It is as simple and uncomplicated as that.
And Sarah lived her belief in Christ. When she had her second bone marrow transplant back in 2008, I was shuttling between Children's Hospital, where she was a patient, and The OSU Medical Center where, Dee, another member of our congregation was undergoing another procedure. After looking in on Dee, I went back to see how Sarah was doing. The first thing she asked when I walked into her room was, "How's Dee?"
I heard second-hand this week about a young woman who graduated from high school with Sarah. This young woman said that she was sometimes subjected to ridicule by “the popular kids.” But Sarah, one of the popular kids herself, always made a point of speaking with her and befriending her.
You see, when you’re secure in your relationship with the God Who came to die and rise for you and when you’ve faced down death with that Savior by your side, it changes both the way you live and the way you die. You don’t need to go along with the crowd. You saw that in Sarah.
Of course, none of this banishes our questions this morning. This side of eternity, we cannot know why one so young and so wonderful suffered so much or left us so soon.
Sarah told me about a year-and-a-half-ago during an interview for a county youth newsletter, “Sometimes I get angry with God. But I know that He’s always with me. And He helps me focus on the meaning of life.” If any of you feel angry with God today, it’s OK. God is big enough to take your anger and still love you. And, as Becky and I have discussed many times, you don’t get angry with a God you don’t believe is there. But, as was true for Sarah, even now God can help you focus on the meaning of your life.
And the meaning of life is also an uncomplicated thing. We are each meant to love God, love others, trust in Christ, and share Christ with others by our words and our actions so that they too can trust in Christ and have life through Him. These were all touchstones for Sarah’s life.
She wanted more, of course. She wanted to graduate from college. She wanted to counsel young people fighting things like cancer because she would understand their struggles and give them hope. Like you, I prayed often and fervently that God would make Sarah’s aspirations come to pass. It hasn’t turned out the way any of us prayed it would.
But Sarah always understood that was a possibility. Two years ago, from this pulpit, Sarah preached on Easter Sunday morning. At one point, she retold the legend of three trees that her father, Bryan, sometimes read for children’s programs here at Saint Matthew. Each tree had hopes for itself.
One tree hoped that it would become a treasure chest, filled with jewels and precious things. “On the outside,” the first tree said, “I will have intricate designs and everyone will be dazzled by my beauty.”
The second tree wanted to be a ship that carried kings and queens. “Everyone will feel safe in me because of the strength of my hull,” the second tree said.
The third tree wanted to grow to be the tallest, straightest tree in the forest. “Everyone will look at me on top of the hill, see my branches pointing up to heaven, and think of God,” the third tree said. “I will be the greatest tree of all time and people will always remember me.”
The first tree became, not a treasure chest, but a feeding trough. One night in Bethlehem, it held the greatest treasure the world has ever seen: God-in-the-flesh, Jesus, just after He was born.
The second tree was turned into a fishing boat that plied the Sea of Galilee where, one day, a ferocious storm frightened Jesus’ disciples. From its hull, Jesus, the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords, quieted a storm, inciting the disciples to ask, “Who is this whom even wind and waves obey?”
The third tree was chopped down and turned into lumber. Some of its boards were made into a cross on which Jesus was crucified. For a while, the third tree felt ugly and hateful. Yet on the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion, it felt differently. Jesus had risen from the dead and the empty timbers of His cross pointed then, as it still points today, to heaven. It reminds us that through faith in Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life, God gives to all who turn from sin and believe in Christ eternal life with God.
After recounting that legend in her Easter sermon, Sarah said that the story was “a reminder to me that God has a special path that each of us will journey in our lives.” She continued, “For me on this Easter Day, I remember the past six years of my life. Through those years I knew that my life was and still is in God’s hands and I need to trust in him just as Jesus did when he died on the cross.”
Sarah lived a life filled with meaning, short though it was. And her life pointed to Jesus. It still does.
All this past week, whenever I thought of Sarah, I remembered the words of Saint Paul to the young pastor Timothy, which we read a little while ago. Paul knew he would die soon. But he could say words I can easily hear Sarah saying, “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.”
Sarah’s fight has ended and Christ has won it for her. She is in the presence of God at this moment. Our fight remains before us and it will only be won, as Sarah’s was, by holding on tenaciously to the nail-scarred hands of the Savior Who died and rose for us. I pray desperately that we will all do that!
Bryan, Becky, and Stephen, to you and your extended family: We love you. We stand with you. We pray for you. In the days and years ahead, keep looking to Jesus. He will give your lives meaning. He will sustain you as He has sustained you these past eight years and as He sustained Sarah. And He will hold onto you all the way to an eternity filled with a never-ending reunion with Christ and with all who, like Sarah, have loved His appearing.
What a reunion that will be!
God bless you!
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
So, You Think You Know the Truth About Marie Antoinette?
According to Juliet Grey, you may not.
It seems that Antoinette was (and remains) the victim of numerous falsehoods noised around in the blogs and the 24-hour news channels...er, in the newspapers...of her time.
Often, it seems, we forget that the public figures we excoriate are, first of all, human beings, and second, that the things we "know" about them may not be true at all.
God's eighth commandment is, "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." Jesus makes clear that our "neighbor" is any other human being. In his explanation of the eighth commandment in The Small Catechism, Martin Luther says:
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.Luther himself, of course, would have done well to remember the commandment's meaning when he debated. But it doesn't make his explanation any less valid.
I've probably been as guilty of saying nasty things and asserting unproven "facts" about public figures as The National Tattler.
The law--even God's law--can't clear away our guilt or help us chart new courses when it comes to the eighth commandment, any more than it can with our violation of any of the other commandments.
But God's law, His commands, can point us to the things for which we need to repent, driving us to seek the forgiveness God offers to all through Jesus Christ. The charity (what the Bible calls, grace) we find in Christ brings not only forgiveness, but the presence of God's Holy Spirit in our lives. The Spirit, in turn, can help us grow in God's grace. The Holy Spirit can teach us to defend, speak well of, and explain the actions of others...can cause us even to question the myths we might believe about public figures, historical and contemporary.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize politicians, of course. But it does mean we need to ask for God's help in doing so with civility, charity, and even love. As some prominent contemporary media types could tell you, habitual slander, gossip, or lying about others and the bad reputations they create can sometimes boomerang on us. If we live by the ethic of "where there's smoke, there must be fire," we must not be surprised when others believe the smoke people may blow about us.
And about that dismissive quote, "Let them eat cake," falsely ascribed to Marie Antoinette, I have to admit that I've always liked cake!
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
The Best Reunion: I Pray It for You
From 2 Timothy 4:6-8, in the New Testament, words from the first century preacher and teacher Paul to a young pastor:
I pray that timeless, eternal moment for you!
More thoughts here.
As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation [a drink offering], and the time of my departure [death] has come. 7I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 8From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing.I sometimes let the rush of everyday events and even the love I share with my wife, my family, and my friends, get in the way of the fact that nothing is as important as my relationship with Jesus Christ...and that no reunion is more to be anticipated than the one that will come when, by God's grace through my faith in Christ, I get to see Jesus face to face in eternity.
I pray that timeless, eternal moment for you!
More thoughts here.
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