Luke 14:1-14
It would be easy to think that the two stories Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson are just about good manners. But if we think that, we will be missing important lessons Jesus wants to teach us.
Take a look, please, at our Gospel lesson, Luke 14:1-14, starting at verse 7: “When [Jesus] noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable.”
A parable, of course, is a special sort of story. A parable is a story woven from people's everyday experiences, with another story of deep significance rolled alongside of it. The term parable has been transliterated into English from the Greek word, parabolos, a compound word composed of para, a prefix meaning alongside (as in parallel) and bolos, related to the terms throw or ball. A parable is a story with another story, a deeper story told alongside it. Jesus’ parables always tell us something about the kingdom of God that Jesus brought into the world and still brings to those who believe in Him.
Jesus told the two parables in today’s Gospel lesson while He sat a banquet at the home of a Pharisee. We know something about the Pharisees, of course. Although they wouldn’t have expressed themselves in quite this way, the Pharisees didn’t believe that rightness with God—what the Bible calls righteousness—is a gift from God given to those who repent for sin and believe in the God we now know in Jesus. Instead, they believed that, by their actions, they would earn a place in heaven.
Despite their seeming faithfulness, the Pharisees really tried to whittle God down to human size, to turn God into a deity they could force to make concessions to them because they were such good people.
Today, people don’t worry so much about God’s favor. We moderns seem to have whittled God completely out of our lives. Or we’ve twisted the Bible’s teaching that God is love and turned the mighty God of the universe into an indulgent sugar daddy.
Many people, even those identifying themselves as Christians, seem to think that all roads lead to heaven. Polling, in fact, repeatedly shows that Christians in the United States accept Jesus’ teaching that there is a heaven. But much smaller numbers of Christians accept the word of Jesus that there is a hell. How it's possible to accept some of Jesus' teaching, while not accepting other of His teachings, while claiming Him as Lord is something these folks can't explain very well.
Let’s face it: The Bible is filled with inconvenient truths we would rather not hear about. I know that this is true for me. We’re like the rebel people of God the prophet Isaiah addressed some seven hundred years before Jesus. “Give us no more visions of what is right!” they tell the prophet in Isaiah 30:10. “Tell us pleasant things…”
By contrast, for all their many faults, most of the Pharisees would never have knowingly taught things contrary to the will of God. In fact, like the dumb sheep that populated many of Jesus’ other parables, they unknowingly and thoughtlessly drifted into their false beliefs.
Christ’s Church always struggles to resist such unintentional drifting from God. That’s why the Reformation begun by Martin Luther and others back in the sixteenth century must be a continuing part of our lives today. We need to constantly return to God, to God’s Word, to God’s will, to Jesus Christ.
But many Christians seem to have settled into a new kind of Pharisaism in which we are expected to passively go along with what I call Christianity Lite, the religion of anything goes so long as it conforms to the shifting standards of society. Someone has said that if Jesus were to come to a typical Christian congregation in North America and teach, as He did to the Pharisees in first-century Judea, “Stop trying to earn righteousness and salvation,” the response would be, “Who’s trying to be righteous?”
Many churches and many Christians--even we ourselves, we must confess--have wandered from surrendering trust in Christ and from reverence for God’s Word and will.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Nazis at the end of World War II, warned Christians against what he called “cheap grace,” which he described as “the grace we bestow on ourselves…the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession.”
Still and all, in this time with so little consciousness of God or concern about the will of God, people are, as in first-century Judea, still in a frenzy to push themselves to the top, to be noticed, to win, to die with the most toys. These impulses are bred in our sinful bones. And Jesus’ two parables are aimed as much at us as they were at His original hearers.
The first one was told specifically to the guests who were jockeying for places of honor at the banquet. Take a look at it, please, starting at verse 8. “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
From the very beginning of Luke’s Gospel, we’re told that Jesus came into our world to flip humanity’s standard operating procedures on their head. His mother, Mary had it right, when she said, in what we call the Magnifcat, “[God] has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” [Luke 1:51-53]
Mary knew the truth that Jesus affirms in today’s first parable, that those who humble themselves before God, even if despised by the world, are exalted in God’s kingdom.
Jesus calls us to live in confidence not in ourselves or our achievements or our shrewd exploitation of people and circumstances, but in the God Who loves us just as we are and Who is committed to helping those humble enough to confess their sins and their need of Him to enter the process of becoming more Christ-like in this life.
Those who trust in Christ are God’s children forever. There’s nothing you can do or need to do to earn that exalted status. When you have Jesus living within you, you most certainly will try to be and do your best every day. You’ll want to do everything to the glory of the God Who made you and sets you free from sin and death. But you also will know that the God Who sent His Son to die and rise for you will honor your repentance and shower you with a sense of your infinite value in the eyes of heaven, whatever your job, irrespective of how many degrees you have acquired, however large your income, no matter how good your health, however popular you may be, or even if you get the best spot at the banquet or the football game.
In Christ, I hope and pray that you know that no matter what you’ve done, or how guilty you may really be for some past wrong none of us could guess, or how inadequate you may feel, you could not possibly be more loved by God than you are at this very moment.
And if we are willing to let God tear down all the walls we have that can block out His grace and love, if we are willing to repent for our sins and receive forgiveness, we become God’s personal reclamation projects. Not only can God erase the power of sin and death over you, He can, for those who surrender each day, decrease your taste for the sins that may keep you from knowing peace with God and peace with yourself.
The Lord wants you to take a place of honor at His table even if you think that you’re too lowly or too unworthy to take it. God loves you and all people are welcome to, in the words of Scripture, “taste and see that the Lord is good.” [Psalm 34:8]
Jesus next tells a kind parable to His host, a scenario in which He asks the man (and us) to imagine himself (and we ourselves) as the lead character. You can read it, starting at verse 12. ““When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
Jesus isn’t making deals here. He’s saying that we who have been welcomed by God our host into the kingdom of God are called to also welcome others. All others.
Jesus is here expressing again what He says in the Great Commission: “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” [Matthew 28:19-20]
Filled with God’s Spirit, you and I are to be the instruments God uses to invite others to hear God’s Word, Law and Gospel, to hear God’s call and command to repentance, to hear God’s call and command to believe in Jesus and know life everlasting.
We have no control over whether those we invite to follow Christ with us will let go of their sins to grasp hold of the grace offered in Jesus. But we must never stop telling them, by our words and our lives, either the inconvenient truth about human sin and our need of God or the incredible, life-changing, good news of the God Who, in Christ, can turn our lives upside down and in doing so, turn our souls right-side up, facing God for life, following Christ for hope, being filled with the Holy Spirit to give us a joy that will never end. Amen!
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Saturday, August 27, 2016
How can we love?
[This was shared during the marriage ceremony of Rebecca and Mike earlier today.]
1 Corinthians 13
Another translation puts the last two verses of that passage like this: “...for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.”
These words written back in the first century by the apostle Paul weren’t originally addressed to two people getting married. They were written to a local congregation in the Greek city of Corinth, a congregation torn to pieces by some people thinking they were all that because they had money and power and certain spiritual gifts. They looked down their noses at everyone else. The congregation was falling apart for lack of love.
There are many marriages that fall apart for lack of love, too.
The funny thing about that though, is that every couple who stands before God and a congregation of people like you are right now, Mike and Rebecca, love each other.
The problem is that they often don’t understand what love is.
They don’t reckon with how hard it is to love, to keep love going.
Did you hear the description of love that Paul gave in those verses from 1 Corinthians 13?
It's as true of love as C.S. Lewis said it was of humility: The person who loves doesn’t think less of themselves, they think of themselves less.
That way of thinking and living doesn’t come to us naturally.
And yet, I think that we all would agree, without love--self-giving, self-sacrificing love--no relationship--marriage, family, friendship, what have you, will not work.
The question for you then, Rebecca and Mike, is how can you do the impossible? How can you love in ways that, in your own power, you are incapable of loving?
The answer is to be found in those two other things that Paul says will “remain” no matter what happens to any of us: faith and hope.
They will remain long after the crucified and risen Jesus has made things “complete” by bringing down the curtain on this old universe created by and through Him, fully establishing His eternal kingdom in which all who have daily turned from sin and surrendered to Him will live eternally.
Hang with me here just a few more moments, now.
That other translation I mentioned earlier describes faith as “trust[ing] steadily in God.” That means this: Every time you mess up, every time good stuff happens, every time you sin, every time you hit a brick wall, every time you enjoy success, every time you have an argument, every time you make up, every time you have a good time together, every time you cry together, keep trusting in the God we see in Jesus Christ.
Jesus promises those who trust in Him, “I am surely with you always.” He also promises that those who stand firm with Him won’t only be saved from sin and death, but also from futile living.
That other translation also says to “hope unswervingly.” This isn’t about hoping in things or people or events. Things like: “I hope we don’t run out of food at the reception.” “I hope it doesn’t rain just as everyone is getting there for the wedding.” “I hope that everyone gets along at their tables.”
Statements like those probably have more in common with wishing and worrying than they do with hoping. No, to hope, to really hope, is to bet everything, your whole life, your marriage on the God we meet in Jesus Christ.
To hope in Christ is to know that this world really doesn’t offer much to hope for. Money is nice, for example, but it can’t give you life. A house is great, but it won’t give your life meaning. Even being married to a person you care for is great, but it won’t make you whole.
Only Jesus Christ, the One Who made you and died on the cross for you and claimed life again at Easter for you, can fill your life with hope. He’s the only One worth hoping in.
The follower of Jesus can say things like, “Today was sort of sucky. But I belong to Christ forever.” “The sunset on the beach is beautiful, but it’s only a faint hint of the beauty Christ has for me in eternity and the beauty of His love for me right this moment.”
How can you find the love you need to make your marriage all that you want it to be and that God wants it to be, Mike and Rebecca?
Trust in God steadily.
Hope in Christ unswervingly.
And let Christ fill you with the love you need to have a good marriage, a solid marriage...a marriage filled with love.
And then, to help you love each other, forgive each other, strengthen each other, enjoy each other as God intends, connect with a church home that will help you to live with faith, hope, and love your whole life through. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
1 Corinthians 13
Another translation puts the last two verses of that passage like this: “...for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.”
These words written back in the first century by the apostle Paul weren’t originally addressed to two people getting married. They were written to a local congregation in the Greek city of Corinth, a congregation torn to pieces by some people thinking they were all that because they had money and power and certain spiritual gifts. They looked down their noses at everyone else. The congregation was falling apart for lack of love.
There are many marriages that fall apart for lack of love, too.
The funny thing about that though, is that every couple who stands before God and a congregation of people like you are right now, Mike and Rebecca, love each other.
The problem is that they often don’t understand what love is.
They don’t reckon with how hard it is to love, to keep love going.
Did you hear the description of love that Paul gave in those verses from 1 Corinthians 13?
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.Love, it turns out, isn’t just about or even mainly about how we feel. Love is composed of the decisions we make day in and day out for the good of the people we’re committed to: husband, wife, friend, sibling, parent, child, grandparent, church member, coworker.
It's as true of love as C.S. Lewis said it was of humility: The person who loves doesn’t think less of themselves, they think of themselves less.
That way of thinking and living doesn’t come to us naturally.
And yet, I think that we all would agree, without love--self-giving, self-sacrificing love--no relationship--marriage, family, friendship, what have you, will not work.
The question for you then, Rebecca and Mike, is how can you do the impossible? How can you love in ways that, in your own power, you are incapable of loving?
The answer is to be found in those two other things that Paul says will “remain” no matter what happens to any of us: faith and hope.
They will remain long after the crucified and risen Jesus has made things “complete” by bringing down the curtain on this old universe created by and through Him, fully establishing His eternal kingdom in which all who have daily turned from sin and surrendered to Him will live eternally.
Hang with me here just a few more moments, now.
That other translation I mentioned earlier describes faith as “trust[ing] steadily in God.” That means this: Every time you mess up, every time good stuff happens, every time you sin, every time you hit a brick wall, every time you enjoy success, every time you have an argument, every time you make up, every time you have a good time together, every time you cry together, keep trusting in the God we see in Jesus Christ.
Jesus promises those who trust in Him, “I am surely with you always.” He also promises that those who stand firm with Him won’t only be saved from sin and death, but also from futile living.
That other translation also says to “hope unswervingly.” This isn’t about hoping in things or people or events. Things like: “I hope we don’t run out of food at the reception.” “I hope it doesn’t rain just as everyone is getting there for the wedding.” “I hope that everyone gets along at their tables.”
Statements like those probably have more in common with wishing and worrying than they do with hoping. No, to hope, to really hope, is to bet everything, your whole life, your marriage on the God we meet in Jesus Christ.
To hope in Christ is to know that this world really doesn’t offer much to hope for. Money is nice, for example, but it can’t give you life. A house is great, but it won’t give your life meaning. Even being married to a person you care for is great, but it won’t make you whole.
Only Jesus Christ, the One Who made you and died on the cross for you and claimed life again at Easter for you, can fill your life with hope. He’s the only One worth hoping in.
The follower of Jesus can say things like, “Today was sort of sucky. But I belong to Christ forever.” “The sunset on the beach is beautiful, but it’s only a faint hint of the beauty Christ has for me in eternity and the beauty of His love for me right this moment.”
How can you find the love you need to make your marriage all that you want it to be and that God wants it to be, Mike and Rebecca?
Trust in God steadily.
Hope in Christ unswervingly.
And let Christ fill you with the love you need to have a good marriage, a solid marriage...a marriage filled with love.
And then, to help you love each other, forgive each other, strengthen each other, enjoy each other as God intends, connect with a church home that will help you to live with faith, hope, and love your whole life through. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Thursday, August 25, 2016
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
One More Day (No Word) by Todd Rundgren
A song about waiting from what is widely considered to be Rundgren's best LP. This appeared on the third side of a 2-record LP. On the first three sides, Rundgren played all the tracks. On the fourth side, he plays with a studio band live, no overdubs except for recordings of stuff played by a band Rundgren had been in long before.
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Encouraging others through forgiveness and love
Today for my quiet time with God, I read 2 Corinthians 2. God particularly spoke to me through Paul's words to the first-century church at Corinth in verse 7:
Paul counsels that after the church's appropriate condemnations and the man's authentic repentance had happened, it was time for the congregation offended by the sin to forgive.
Jesus, of course, says that unless we forgive others, we will block God's forgiveness for sin from our own lives.
We can be sure that Paul agrees with Jesus on that count, of course.
But Paul gives the Corinthians a different reason to forgive their sinful fellow disciple: Absent forgiveness and their reaffirmed love for the man (v.8), he might despair of being forgiven by God.
How is that? Well, Paul and the other New Testament writers insist that the Church is Christ's body. We who make up the Church are Christ's presence on the earth. And we are Christ's presence to one another.
It's right that we in the Church should be accountable to each other for the sins we've committed against each other and against Christ's body. That's part of being a loving body of Christ.
But so is assuring one another of Christ's forgiveness and our forgiveness. So is affirming our Christian love for each other.
The last thing we want anyone to feel is that God can't or won't forgive them.
Anyone who turns to Christ with authentic regret for sin and trust in what Christ has done for them on His cross can be forgiven and is forgiven. We distort this truth from God when act "holier than God."
We need to be prepared to actively convey, without condescension, the forgiveness God bears for all who repent and trust in Christ.
Prayer: Lord, in the next twenty-four hours, help me to make some gesture of love or forgiveness to someone in Your Church who needs it. You show me who it should be. In Jesus' name.
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
...you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.Evidently, someone in the Corinthian church had incurred condemnation for sin. (That would be no mean achievement in that notoriously sinful group!)
Paul counsels that after the church's appropriate condemnations and the man's authentic repentance had happened, it was time for the congregation offended by the sin to forgive.
Jesus, of course, says that unless we forgive others, we will block God's forgiveness for sin from our own lives.
We can be sure that Paul agrees with Jesus on that count, of course.
But Paul gives the Corinthians a different reason to forgive their sinful fellow disciple: Absent forgiveness and their reaffirmed love for the man (v.8), he might despair of being forgiven by God.
How is that? Well, Paul and the other New Testament writers insist that the Church is Christ's body. We who make up the Church are Christ's presence on the earth. And we are Christ's presence to one another.
It's right that we in the Church should be accountable to each other for the sins we've committed against each other and against Christ's body. That's part of being a loving body of Christ.
But so is assuring one another of Christ's forgiveness and our forgiveness. So is affirming our Christian love for each other.
The last thing we want anyone to feel is that God can't or won't forgive them.
Anyone who turns to Christ with authentic regret for sin and trust in what Christ has done for them on His cross can be forgiven and is forgiven. We distort this truth from God when act "holier than God."
We need to be prepared to actively convey, without condescension, the forgiveness God bears for all who repent and trust in Christ.
Prayer: Lord, in the next twenty-four hours, help me to make some gesture of love or forgiveness to someone in Your Church who needs it. You show me who it should be. In Jesus' name.
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Following the Narrow Way (audio and text)
Audio version, here.
Luke 13:22-30
Today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 13:22-30, begins with two seemingly simple verses. They tell us:
For the disciples who have been paying attention to Jesus’ words and actions, there was a dread about what was coming in Jerusalem. For a long time before this point, Jesus has made it clear that in going to Jerusalem, He’s also heading to His death.
From the beginning of Jesus’ life on earth, in fact, it was clear that He had come with a singular mission, to live a sinless life, then offer that life as the perfect sacrifice for our sin.
There are some megachurches that have chosen not to have crosses in their sanctuaries. "The cross is such a downer," they reason.
Listen: The cross is the place where Jesus would fulfill His mission and destroy the power of sin and death over all who take up their crosses--owning the reality of their own sin and their need of a Savior--and follow Jesus.
The cross is the place where all who believe in Jesus are saved.
The cross is the place of Jesus’ victory for us. That’s why I love the story about the Lutheran being asked by another Christian, “When were you saved?” The Lutheran answered, “On a hill outside Jerusalem three thousand years ago.”
Jesus’ resurrection serves as confirmation of Jesus’ Good Friday victory. But it's at the cross that His victory for us came about.
The apostle Paul, a learned man, deemed the cross so transformative, so powerful, that he told the Corinthian Christians among whom he'd worked that he decided when he was them not to use any of his vast knowledge to convince them to follow Jesus. "For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you," he writes in 1 Corinthians 2:2, "except Jesus Christ and him crucified." Jesus' cross is that powerful!
Even Satan understood that the cross is the whole ballgame; it’s why He was constantly trying to keep Jesus from going to Jerusalem and the cross, tempting Him with worldly kingdoms.
After Jesus asked the disciples Who they believed Him to be and Peter rightly answered that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the living God, Jesus told the disciples bluntly: “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” [Luke 9:22]
After setting His face to go to Jerusalem [Luke 9:51], Jesus told the disciples, referring to His crucifixion as His “baptism”: “I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!”
So, by the time we get to our lesson from Luke’s gospel narrative, the disciples are feeling extremely apprehensive.
But the curious, if unbelieving, crowds are feeling tension at this point.
You see, most first century Judeans assumed that because they were Jews, they would be saved from sin and death and be resurrected. It was all a matter of DNA. All Jews were righteous, they thought. All non-Jews, Gentiles, were not righteous. All Jews would therefore be saved, they reasoned.
But Jesus had been saying things in chapters 12 and 13 of Luke that said their confidence about salvation because they belonged to the club was misplaced. Salvation comes only through faith in the God now revealed definitively to the world in Jesus Himself.
The crowds of Jesus' fellow Jews needed to follow Jesus, to repent for sin and trust in Jesus, and submit to Jesus’ Lordship so that His grace could transform them. They needed to become disciples of Jesus.
This upset a lot of the crowds' preconceived notions. So, it was with apprehension that the man asked Jesus, “Lord, are only a few going to be saved?”
Jesus responds in Luke 13:24: “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to.”
We live in an age when people, if they ever think of God, say that God is such a nice guy that He won’t send anyone to hell.
Let’s be clear: Jesus, God in the flesh, did die for everyone. But He doesn’t force salvation on anyone.
He doesn’t force anyone to repent or believe in Him.
He gives us the freedom to say no, to eat, drink, and be merry in this world, presuming to be gods unto ourselves until this life ends.
The doorway to a self-centered, self-indulgent, whatever-seems-right-to-us kind of life is wide open to everyone of us here on earth. But Jesus says that there’s only one way--a narrow way--to life with God.
And that narrow way is through Jesus.
“I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me,” Jesus says in John 14:6.
If we don’t enter God’s kingdom through Jesus, we can’t get it in, we won’t get in.
Jesus expands on this theme in the next verses: “Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’ But he will answer, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from.’ Then you will say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will reply, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!’”
There will come a time when another door, the door allowing us to escape a life of apart from God, will be closed to us.
Death will come and then it will be too late to enter eternity with God.
No matter how much they pound at heaven’s door, those who haven’t entrusted their lives to the God we know in Christ will pound in vain.
And it won’t do any good for them to say, “We made big offerings to the Church. We sang hymns and praise songs...even the ones we didn’t like and almost never complained about them. We volunteered for outreaches.” To people like this, the owner of the house--God Himself--will say at the Judgment, “I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!”
You see, Jesus doesn’t claim to truly know those who have no relationship of faith with Him. No matter how many good things we may do, even when we do them through and with the Church, Christ only knows those who have opened the doors of their own lives and let Him into the very center of their beings.
Without such humble surrender and a daily discipleship relationship with Christ, we’re just playing at religion.
To a church filled with lukewarm faith mentioned in the book of Revelation, the crucified and risen Jesus is recorded as saying: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” [Revelation 3:20] Jesus offers a relationship of intimacy and trust with Him, not just because it feels good, but because we need this relationship today and in eternity! Without a relationship with Jesus, we are dead now and we are dead for eternity.
With a relationship with Jesus, we are alive, even in life’s darkest and most difficult times. Five years ago yesterday, the young woman in whose remembrance I wear these two blue wristbands, Sarah, passed from this life at the age of twenty. She was a remarkable person, who fought leukemia through two bone marrow transplants, five remissions, and amazing faith! She lived her life with purpose and humor. She loved receiving Holy Communion. She loved helping young people. Even while she was fighting to live, she volunteered for the local Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization near the campus of Denison University. I wrote a song in memory of her a few months back called Phenomenon, motivated by the fact that from an early age, she knew that her life was going to be about helping kids. (And it was.) The first verse goes like this:
And one day, all who trust in Christ will be alive in a kingdom of perfection with God for all eternity.
To His fellow Jews, suffering from the delusion that being Jewish was all they needed to be saved--the way some people today think that all you need is to be Lutheran, Baptist, or on the church rolls somewhere--Jesus says: “There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out.”
Do you know what it means to gnash one’s teeth? It means to grit our teeth and say, “I blew it! I blew it!”
Those who turn from Jesus or who take Him for granted in this life, will have that kind of regret. They’ll be left out the way Tim and I were when our morning flight out of Dallas was canceled last Sunday.
But Jesus doesn’t end His answer to the apprehensive crowd member at that. He says in verses 29-30: “People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God. [Even Lutheran Christians! Even people from Dayton, Centerville, Springboro, Miamisburg, and West Carrollton, who have trusted in Jesus as their God and King!] Indeed [Jesus goes on] there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.”
I take great comfort from these final words from Jesus. They echo what Ephesians 2:8-9 teaches us: “...it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”
I belong to God not because I’m good, because, in fact, I’m not. I belong to God because God is good and He covers me with the goodness of Jesus and the power of His sacrifice over death, accomplished on the cross.
And, just as I didn’t care last Sunday if I was boarding the plane from Dallas with group 2 or group 4, I don’t care if I get into the kingdom of God first or last. All I want to do is be a part of it...to be with Jesus! Like the psalmist, I say: “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” [Psalm 84:10]
When I consider that one day I will see the Lord Jesus face to face and that, because of His grace, I won’t have to hang my head in shame, I'm overwhelmed.
The world may consider me (and you) to be part of its gallery of losers, the least, the last, the pointless, the powerless, the unknown. But Jesus views no one in that way.
Every single human being is a child of God for Whom Jesus died and rose.
Every single person can be part of that vast throng that gets a table at the feast that never ends, if they will only trust in Jesus enough to follow Him today and everyday.
Today, as we receive Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament, we will be given a foretaste of that feast. It’s the inheritance, the prized possession, of all who trust in Christ and let Him reign over their lives, who let Him into be their God and Savior and King and Redeemer.
It’s funny: Jesus never gets around to answering the question of how many will be saved. You see, He’s not into the mathematics of salvation; He wants everyone to be saved. And He refuses to give up on the possibility that every human being for whom He gave His life will give their lives to Him in return!
Today and everyday, trust Jesus and live confidently, joyfully in the knowledge that for all eternity, there’s a place reserved just for You in the kingdom of God. Live in that certainty...then go share Jesus with everyone you know so that they too can know and believe in Jesus and so, come to the banquet that never ends. Will you do that, please? Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the message from worship this morning.]
Luke 13:22-30
Today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 13:22-30, begins with two seemingly simple verses. They tell us:
Then Jesus went through the towns and villages, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem. Someone asked him, "Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?”Simple though they may seem, these two verses reflect the tension and apprehension that many people, both the disciples and the curious crowds following Jesus, are feeling.
For the disciples who have been paying attention to Jesus’ words and actions, there was a dread about what was coming in Jerusalem. For a long time before this point, Jesus has made it clear that in going to Jerusalem, He’s also heading to His death.
From the beginning of Jesus’ life on earth, in fact, it was clear that He had come with a singular mission, to live a sinless life, then offer that life as the perfect sacrifice for our sin.
There are some megachurches that have chosen not to have crosses in their sanctuaries. "The cross is such a downer," they reason.
Listen: The cross is the place where Jesus would fulfill His mission and destroy the power of sin and death over all who take up their crosses--owning the reality of their own sin and their need of a Savior--and follow Jesus.
The cross is the place where all who believe in Jesus are saved.
The cross is the place of Jesus’ victory for us. That’s why I love the story about the Lutheran being asked by another Christian, “When were you saved?” The Lutheran answered, “On a hill outside Jerusalem three thousand years ago.”
Jesus’ resurrection serves as confirmation of Jesus’ Good Friday victory. But it's at the cross that His victory for us came about.
The apostle Paul, a learned man, deemed the cross so transformative, so powerful, that he told the Corinthian Christians among whom he'd worked that he decided when he was them not to use any of his vast knowledge to convince them to follow Jesus. "For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you," he writes in 1 Corinthians 2:2, "except Jesus Christ and him crucified." Jesus' cross is that powerful!
Even Satan understood that the cross is the whole ballgame; it’s why He was constantly trying to keep Jesus from going to Jerusalem and the cross, tempting Him with worldly kingdoms.
After Jesus asked the disciples Who they believed Him to be and Peter rightly answered that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the living God, Jesus told the disciples bluntly: “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” [Luke 9:22]
After setting His face to go to Jerusalem [Luke 9:51], Jesus told the disciples, referring to His crucifixion as His “baptism”: “I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!”
So, by the time we get to our lesson from Luke’s gospel narrative, the disciples are feeling extremely apprehensive.
But the curious, if unbelieving, crowds are feeling tension at this point.
You see, most first century Judeans assumed that because they were Jews, they would be saved from sin and death and be resurrected. It was all a matter of DNA. All Jews were righteous, they thought. All non-Jews, Gentiles, were not righteous. All Jews would therefore be saved, they reasoned.
But Jesus had been saying things in chapters 12 and 13 of Luke that said their confidence about salvation because they belonged to the club was misplaced. Salvation comes only through faith in the God now revealed definitively to the world in Jesus Himself.
The crowds of Jesus' fellow Jews needed to follow Jesus, to repent for sin and trust in Jesus, and submit to Jesus’ Lordship so that His grace could transform them. They needed to become disciples of Jesus.
This upset a lot of the crowds' preconceived notions. So, it was with apprehension that the man asked Jesus, “Lord, are only a few going to be saved?”
Jesus responds in Luke 13:24: “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to.”
We live in an age when people, if they ever think of God, say that God is such a nice guy that He won’t send anyone to hell.
Let’s be clear: Jesus, God in the flesh, did die for everyone. But He doesn’t force salvation on anyone.
He doesn’t force anyone to repent or believe in Him.
He gives us the freedom to say no, to eat, drink, and be merry in this world, presuming to be gods unto ourselves until this life ends.
The doorway to a self-centered, self-indulgent, whatever-seems-right-to-us kind of life is wide open to everyone of us here on earth. But Jesus says that there’s only one way--a narrow way--to life with God.
And that narrow way is through Jesus.
“I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me,” Jesus says in John 14:6.
If we don’t enter God’s kingdom through Jesus, we can’t get it in, we won’t get in.
Jesus expands on this theme in the next verses: “Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’ But he will answer, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from.’ Then you will say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will reply, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!’”
There will come a time when another door, the door allowing us to escape a life of apart from God, will be closed to us.
Death will come and then it will be too late to enter eternity with God.
No matter how much they pound at heaven’s door, those who haven’t entrusted their lives to the God we know in Christ will pound in vain.
And it won’t do any good for them to say, “We made big offerings to the Church. We sang hymns and praise songs...even the ones we didn’t like and almost never complained about them. We volunteered for outreaches.” To people like this, the owner of the house--God Himself--will say at the Judgment, “I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!”
You see, Jesus doesn’t claim to truly know those who have no relationship of faith with Him. No matter how many good things we may do, even when we do them through and with the Church, Christ only knows those who have opened the doors of their own lives and let Him into the very center of their beings.
Without such humble surrender and a daily discipleship relationship with Christ, we’re just playing at religion.
To a church filled with lukewarm faith mentioned in the book of Revelation, the crucified and risen Jesus is recorded as saying: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” [Revelation 3:20] Jesus offers a relationship of intimacy and trust with Him, not just because it feels good, but because we need this relationship today and in eternity! Without a relationship with Jesus, we are dead now and we are dead for eternity.
With a relationship with Jesus, we are alive, even in life’s darkest and most difficult times. Five years ago yesterday, the young woman in whose remembrance I wear these two blue wristbands, Sarah, passed from this life at the age of twenty. She was a remarkable person, who fought leukemia through two bone marrow transplants, five remissions, and amazing faith! She lived her life with purpose and humor. She loved receiving Holy Communion. She loved helping young people. Even while she was fighting to live, she volunteered for the local Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization near the campus of Denison University. I wrote a song in memory of her a few months back called Phenomenon, motivated by the fact that from an early age, she knew that her life was going to be about helping kids. (And it was.) The first verse goes like this:
Fourteen years old and you know exactly what you're going to doSarah was alive through circumstances of life in which other people who don't know Jesus would give up, more alive than most people I know who live each day in perfect health. With Jesus as our Lord, we are alive even when life is at its darkest and most difficult.
Listening and watching, I know you're bound to follow through
It's a mystery how one can be so young and yet so wise
When most of us go through our years and barely ever come to life
And one day, all who trust in Christ will be alive in a kingdom of perfection with God for all eternity.
To His fellow Jews, suffering from the delusion that being Jewish was all they needed to be saved--the way some people today think that all you need is to be Lutheran, Baptist, or on the church rolls somewhere--Jesus says: “There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out.”
Do you know what it means to gnash one’s teeth? It means to grit our teeth and say, “I blew it! I blew it!”
Those who turn from Jesus or who take Him for granted in this life, will have that kind of regret. They’ll be left out the way Tim and I were when our morning flight out of Dallas was canceled last Sunday.
But Jesus doesn’t end His answer to the apprehensive crowd member at that. He says in verses 29-30: “People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God. [Even Lutheran Christians! Even people from Dayton, Centerville, Springboro, Miamisburg, and West Carrollton, who have trusted in Jesus as their God and King!] Indeed [Jesus goes on] there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.”
I take great comfort from these final words from Jesus. They echo what Ephesians 2:8-9 teaches us: “...it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”
I belong to God not because I’m good, because, in fact, I’m not. I belong to God because God is good and He covers me with the goodness of Jesus and the power of His sacrifice over death, accomplished on the cross.
And, just as I didn’t care last Sunday if I was boarding the plane from Dallas with group 2 or group 4, I don’t care if I get into the kingdom of God first or last. All I want to do is be a part of it...to be with Jesus! Like the psalmist, I say: “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” [Psalm 84:10]
When I consider that one day I will see the Lord Jesus face to face and that, because of His grace, I won’t have to hang my head in shame, I'm overwhelmed.
The world may consider me (and you) to be part of its gallery of losers, the least, the last, the pointless, the powerless, the unknown. But Jesus views no one in that way.
Every single human being is a child of God for Whom Jesus died and rose.
Every single person can be part of that vast throng that gets a table at the feast that never ends, if they will only trust in Jesus enough to follow Him today and everyday.
Today, as we receive Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament, we will be given a foretaste of that feast. It’s the inheritance, the prized possession, of all who trust in Christ and let Him reign over their lives, who let Him into be their God and Savior and King and Redeemer.
It’s funny: Jesus never gets around to answering the question of how many will be saved. You see, He’s not into the mathematics of salvation; He wants everyone to be saved. And He refuses to give up on the possibility that every human being for whom He gave His life will give their lives to Him in return!
Today and everyday, trust Jesus and live confidently, joyfully in the knowledge that for all eternity, there’s a place reserved just for You in the kingdom of God. Live in that certainty...then go share Jesus with everyone you know so that they too can know and believe in Jesus and so, come to the banquet that never ends. Will you do that, please? Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the message from worship this morning.]
Saturday, August 20, 2016
Painting Pictures of Egypt by Sara Groves
Since I mentioned Sara Groves in an earlier post about Francesca Battistelli's If We're Honest, I thought that I'd put this video for one of my favorite Groves tune.
Using the metaphor of ancient Israel's nostalgia for its days of slavery in Egypt, as recorded in the Old Testament book of Exodus, Groves talks about our reluctance for diving outside of our comfort zones with God as our only certainty. She talks too, about the often painful process we need to go through to get to where God is leading us.
Great tune!
Using the metaphor of ancient Israel's nostalgia for its days of slavery in Egypt, as recorded in the Old Testament book of Exodus, Groves talks about our reluctance for diving outside of our comfort zones with God as our only certainty. She talks too, about the often painful process we need to go through to get to where God is leading us.
Great tune!
I Can't Hold Out by Eric Clapton
The 1974 LP, 461 Ocean Boulevard, was a comeback project for Eric Clapton, having successfully entered recovery from his cocaine addiction. The first track, Motherless Children, comes screaming at you with an insane and loud guitar riff. Though Clapton goes through many musical moods on 461, from the slowly soulful Christian-themed confessional Give Me Strength to the poppy I Shot the Sheriff, the quality never lets up. To this day, it remains one of my favorites.
This is an old, and a bit racy, Elmore James tune, Clapton once again giving homage to his beloved blues. I say it's "a bit racy." But even by 1974 standards, the tune was tame, slightly suggestive but still G-rated. Like an old Looney Tunes cartoon, you could play this song in front of your kids without clamping your hands on their ears. (Contemporary artists seem to have lost this knack. James displays it in I Can't Hold Out.)
Clapton, who has always disdained his own voice, delivers on this entire LP and, as always, his guitar work is second to none.
This is an old, and a bit racy, Elmore James tune, Clapton once again giving homage to his beloved blues. I say it's "a bit racy." But even by 1974 standards, the tune was tame, slightly suggestive but still G-rated. Like an old Looney Tunes cartoon, you could play this song in front of your kids without clamping your hands on their ears. (Contemporary artists seem to have lost this knack. James displays it in I Can't Hold Out.)
Clapton, who has always disdained his own voice, delivers on this entire LP and, as always, his guitar work is second to none.
If We're Honest by Francesca Battistelli
This song from 2014 is amazing.
Battistelli has a beautiful voice, reminding me of Sara Groves. The lyrics are so incredible. They're given in full below (from Google Play). I'm going to buy this song!
Battistelli has a beautiful voice, reminding me of Sara Groves. The lyrics are so incredible. They're given in full below (from Google Play). I'm going to buy this song!
Truth is harder than a lieThe dark seems safer than the lightAnd everyone has a heart that loves to hideI'm a mess and so are youWe've built walls nobody can get throughYeah, it may be hard, but the best thing we could ever do, ever do
Bring your brokenness, and I'll bring mine'Cause love can heal what hurt dividesAnd mercy's waiting on the other sideIf we're honestIf we're honest
Don't pretend to be something that you're notLiving life afraid of getting caughtThere is freedom found when we layour secrets down at the cross, at the cross
Bring your brokenness, and I'll bring mine'Cause love can heal what hurt dividesAnd mercy's waiting on the other sideIf we're honestIf we're honest
It would change our livesIt would set us freeIt's what we need to be
Bring your brokenness, and I'll bring mine'Cause love can heal what hurt dividesAnd mercy's waiting on the other sideIf we're honestIf we're honestWritten by Francesca Battistelli, Jeff Pardo, Molly E. Reed • Copyright © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc
La Vie en Rose by the Mantovani Orchestra
TCM featured one of my favorite movies tonight, Billy Wilder's Sabrina. It was released in 1954 and starring Humphrey Bogart (my absolute favorite actor), Audrey Hepburn, and William Holden and featured this beautiful melody, once a hit for singer Edith Piaf.
Sabrina tells the story of a young woman who, for years, thought she was in love with a man closer to her in age, only to find herself falling helplessly in love with her flame's much older brother. Wilder, certainly the rangiest of all directors, co-wrote the script and, as usual, is beautifully written.
I love this rendition of La Vie en Rose. The pairing of it with clips from Sabrina is perfect.
Sabrina tells the story of a young woman who, for years, thought she was in love with a man closer to her in age, only to find herself falling helplessly in love with her flame's much older brother. Wilder, certainly the rangiest of all directors, co-wrote the script and, as usual, is beautifully written.
I love this rendition of La Vie en Rose. The pairing of it with clips from Sabrina is perfect.
Avoiding the Faithlessness of Being a Political Church
Four days ago, Pastor Dennis Di Mauro, on Facebook, posted a link to an article detailing the recent votes of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) calling for an end to US aid to Israel and mandating that the retirement fund of the denomination to refrain from making investments that might benefit Israel.
As a person who left the ELCA to join the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) over the issue of the authority of the Bible, the Word of God, over the life, faith, and practice of the Church, I took particular interest in DiMauro's linked article. Lots of other people did and it's engendered many comments.
Many of those comments lamented the ELCA having become a "liberal" denomination. But I had a slightly different take on things, which I shared in the comments section in the wee hours this morning. Here, in slightly edited form, is what I wrote:
As a person who left the ELCA to join the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) over the issue of the authority of the Bible, the Word of God, over the life, faith, and practice of the Church, I took particular interest in DiMauro's linked article. Lots of other people did and it's engendered many comments.
Many of those comments lamented the ELCA having become a "liberal" denomination. But I had a slightly different take on things, which I shared in the comments section in the wee hours this morning. Here, in slightly edited form, is what I wrote:
Without commenting specifically on the resolution in question, I want to comment on how the ELCA is characterized by many of its opponents and critics. (Of which I'm one.)What do you think?
I see the ELCA not so much as a "liberal" church, though I understand what people mean when they use this characterization.
Rather, I see it as an unbiblical and unconfessional church body.
I see the body of which I am now a part, the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), seeking to be biblical, approaching the Word of God with reverence, and confessional, seeking to faithfully live out the Lutheran Cobfessions' understanding of Christian faith. I also don't see the NALC as "conservative."
While the ELCA often seems to be in sync with political movements that are politically liberal, I pray that the NALC will steadfastly avoid associations with any political ideology or agenda.
Jesus isn't conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. He is God in the flesh who died and rose to set sinners free from sin and all of its consequences, to give life with God ever new to all who trust in Christ and the Gospel Word about Him.
Making disciples through the proclamation of this Word is work enough for the Church, the only work Jesus assigned to it, work that will eternally transform the lives of those who receive it with faith. It will even transform the way they view their world, how they live each day, and how they vote.
The problem with church political activism is that it's work of the flesh, reflective of human reasoning and understanding, rather than being the work of the Holy Spirit within us. Church political activism, liberal and conservative, isn't an expression of faith in Jesus. It's actually faithless, born of Christian impatience with how God operates to redeem and transform people.
We need to trust in God, love our neighbor, speak God's revealed truth, make disciples.
Friday, August 19, 2016
How to spot a liar
"You may think that fidgeting and not making eye contact are telltale signs that someone’s lying to you," writes Jenna Goudreau at motto, from the editors of TIME. "But according to Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy, there is no one nonverbal cue that’s a dead giveaway."
Cuddy, a psychologist says, though:
The Bible warns that no human being is righteous, no one. And lying, the attempt to avoid unpleasant disclosures, has been part of the human profile since Adam and Eve bit into the forbidden fruit and attempted to conceal it from God. In John 8, Jesus says that our fallen race are all children of "the father of lies," Satan. No amount of wriggling, dodging, or "explaining" can change that fact.
Some people are more dishonest than others, of course. Some people are more comfortable with lying. Some, as the old saying puts it, "lie when the truth would suit better." But we all need the help that only God can give to us in the honesty department.
The New Testament says that a reliance on Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit He sends to all believers in Him, can empower us to speak "the truth in love." Doing so is part of growing into maturity as a disciple of Jesus.
Overcoming this sin, as is true of any sin, is a constant battle in this life for those who truly want to follow Christ and live life God's way. It begins (and is continued) with the simple acknowledgment that we're addicted to sin, to self-willed living, including lying. It continues with utter reliance on Christ for the grace of God that brings forgiveness for all sins and peace with God. And it continues on from there in daily seeking God's help to be authentic, loving truth-tellers.
People who lie to us can and do harm us, in many ways. But before we get too self-righteous, we need to look at ourselves. One of my favorite passages in the Old Testament offers a prayer that all of us might adopt as our own:
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Cuddy, a psychologist says, though:
...instead of looking for one big “reveal,” the best way to spot deception is to look for discrepancies across multiple channels of communication, including facial expressions, posture, and speech.
“Lying is hard work,” Cuddy says. “We’re telling one story while suppressing another, and if that’s not complicated enough, most of us are experiencing psychological guilt about doing this, which we’re also trying suppress. We just don’t have the brainpower to manage it all without letting something go — without ‘leaking.'”
The best way to catch these “leaks” is to look for differences between what people are saying and what they are doing, she says. Conflicting emotions, like a happy tone of voice paired with an agitated facial expression, can be particularly telling.Another way to spot a liar might be to take a look in the mirror. There are so many different ways we might be lying, most of which we might be apt to excuse as "a little white lie." "Does this dress make me look fat?" is a question dreaded by many husbands. ("Do I look as old as the other men in my class?" is the one dreaded by many wives.)
The Bible warns that no human being is righteous, no one. And lying, the attempt to avoid unpleasant disclosures, has been part of the human profile since Adam and Eve bit into the forbidden fruit and attempted to conceal it from God. In John 8, Jesus says that our fallen race are all children of "the father of lies," Satan. No amount of wriggling, dodging, or "explaining" can change that fact.
Some people are more dishonest than others, of course. Some people are more comfortable with lying. Some, as the old saying puts it, "lie when the truth would suit better." But we all need the help that only God can give to us in the honesty department.
The New Testament says that a reliance on Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit He sends to all believers in Him, can empower us to speak "the truth in love." Doing so is part of growing into maturity as a disciple of Jesus.
Overcoming this sin, as is true of any sin, is a constant battle in this life for those who truly want to follow Christ and live life God's way. It begins (and is continued) with the simple acknowledgment that we're addicted to sin, to self-willed living, including lying. It continues with utter reliance on Christ for the grace of God that brings forgiveness for all sins and peace with God. And it continues on from there in daily seeking God's help to be authentic, loving truth-tellers.
People who lie to us can and do harm us, in many ways. But before we get too self-righteous, we need to look at ourselves. One of my favorite passages in the Old Testament offers a prayer that all of us might adopt as our own:
Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)"Show me my wrong, God," the psalm teaches us to pray to God, "and then lead me to life with You that never ends."
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Two evils the love of money brings
Michael Kelley is right in saying that 1 Timothy 6:10 is one of the best known and most misunderstood passages in Scripture.
There, the apostle Paul writes to the young pastor, Timothy:
But how so?
Kelley identifies two evils into which the love of money can lead us, ways that he says we might otherwise overlook:
1. The love of money "can lead me to wander from my faith." Kelley writes chillingly:
Thirty years ago, a friend of mine went to work for a man who had been a pioneer in the dot com world and raked in tens of millions of dollars as a result. One day, he told my friend wistfully, "You know, ten years ago, all I could think was that I would be happy and secure once I'd made my first million. Now, all I do is worry about how to keep the millions I have." Not long after that, he died suddenly, unexpectedly,...and unhappily.
There's nothing wrong with money. And God gifts some people with both the ability to handle money and to use it in ways that honor Him and show love to others. (To this latter point, in fact, Ephesians 4:28 says that a major reason for Christians to work is so that they'll have something to share with those in need.)
But money can become a god, an object of religious worship by which we measure our worthiness and value and by which we think that we can become gods ourselves, manipulating life to our own liking.
It's then that evil--things like selfishness, worry, and blindness to the needs or virtues of others--flood into our lives, taking us far from the God revealed to the world in Christ and from the life that only Christ can give.
Read all of Kelley's short piece.
There, the apostle Paul writes to the young pastor, Timothy:
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.Paul doesn't say that money is intrinsically bad. He does say that the love of money--making the acquisition of more of it or the hoarding of it (I said hoarding, not saving)--major objects of our lives leads to all kinds evil and grief.
But how so?
Kelley identifies two evils into which the love of money can lead us, ways that he says we might otherwise overlook:
1. The love of money "can lead me to wander from my faith." Kelley writes chillingly:
I can’t be both greedy and content. I can’t worship both God and money. So if I choose money, I’m eventually guaranteed a departure from the faith.2. Love for money "causes lots of pain points in my life." He enumerates a few:
...worry, remorse, discontentment, debt, and anxiety … the list goes on and on. The passionate pursuit of money promises liberty but only brings captivity.I think he's right.
Thirty years ago, a friend of mine went to work for a man who had been a pioneer in the dot com world and raked in tens of millions of dollars as a result. One day, he told my friend wistfully, "You know, ten years ago, all I could think was that I would be happy and secure once I'd made my first million. Now, all I do is worry about how to keep the millions I have." Not long after that, he died suddenly, unexpectedly,...and unhappily.
There's nothing wrong with money. And God gifts some people with both the ability to handle money and to use it in ways that honor Him and show love to others. (To this latter point, in fact, Ephesians 4:28 says that a major reason for Christians to work is so that they'll have something to share with those in need.)
But money can become a god, an object of religious worship by which we measure our worthiness and value and by which we think that we can become gods ourselves, manipulating life to our own liking.
It's then that evil--things like selfishness, worry, and blindness to the needs or virtues of others--flood into our lives, taking us far from the God revealed to the world in Christ and from the life that only Christ can give.
Read all of Kelley's short piece.
[Photo from DataCapSystems.]
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Jesus, the Best, wants YOU
A few years ago, I learned that a friend openly admitted his guilt to an ethical transgression. But he didn't see what the big deal was. Or so he said.
The particulars aren't important, both because I want to protect the friend's identity and because, though he was guilty of a particular wrong, it was born, like all wrongs are, of the same thing that drives us all to sin: a desire for something that wasn't his to have.
All sins boil down to our wanting or grasping for otherwise good things at the wrong times, or in the wrong ways, or for the wrong reasons, or with the wrong people. (To quote Jesus, after looking at that definition, I challenge you, "Those without sin, cast the first stone.")
Whether it's coveting, libeling, gossiping, cheating, lying, stealing, committing adultery, using God's name for anything other than prayer, praise, or thanksgiving, or a whole bunch of other things we might name, we're talking about sin. Sin violates God's holiness, God's intentions for human beings, God's boundaries for life at its best, and, apart from repentance and faith in Christ, something that can bring ruin to us, now and in eternity.
But when I heard about my friend's publicly acknowledged and unrepented wrong, saddened as I was by his act, more deeply, I felt an awareness of my own sins. As I thought about him, I couldn't bring myself to toss any stones.
I also wished--had he not cut himself off from many of us--surely a tacit, if unconscious, admission of the "wrongness" of his wrong--that I could talk with him.
I wanted to hear him out.
I also wanted to beg him not to allow pride to prevent him from seeing that his sin was not just a "personal choice" and that there was a way to be free of his sin, if not of the relational and worldly consequences they might bring for the short-term (i.e., the rest of this life).
I wanted to acknowledge my own imperfections that led me to sin and tell him that I was able to deal with them through the grace of God available to anyone willing to let God's Word about Jesus Christ wash over their lives, freeing us from sin and empowering us to live in an intimate relationship with Him.
Jesus, the perfect innocent, God in the flesh, died on the cross to erase the power of all our wrongs over our lives and eternities. Then God the Father raised Jesus from the dead, confirming that Jesus is the only way to life with God.
Jesus sets free from sin and death all who trust in this Gospel--this Good News--Word about Him.
While driving a long country road on the night I'd gotten the news of my friend's admission, I prayed for him and for those most affected by his wrong. "God," I remember praying, "help him turn to Christ. Bring someone who can speak the truth of Your love and power to him. Change his mind about all of this."
In the darkness, as I drove to a group Bible study, words and music came into my mind and out of my mouth, words that I wished I could speak to my friend right then, had I been able to find him:
I believe that that grace can change our lives now, allowing the power, strength, and peace of God's eternal kingdom to enter our imperfect, dying lives.
And I believe that all who cling to Christ and His cross, owning their sin and their need of God's grace, will live with God in a perfect kingdom beyond death.
Jesus' death and resurrection prove that those beliefs are well-founded.
No matter what your sins, Jesus wants you.
No matter your imperfections or screw-ups, Jesus wants you.
And even after you sin again tomorrow, Jesus will still want you to lay claim to His grace and forgiveness and new life so that you can get on with the business of living life as it was made to be lived by the God Who made you.
Jesus is proof that, if you want Him, God will always be there. In a memorable sermon during Luther Week in Anaheim last week, theologian Dr. Jim Nestingen said of Jesus, "He's the Best! There's nobody better."
Keep trusting in Jesus, God the Son, and let Him cover your imperfections and wrongs with His perfection and righteousness.
Fall into Jesus' orbit through regular worship, regularly receiving Holy Communion, regularly reading and reflecting on His Word in the Bible, and regularly growing as disciples alongside other believers in Jesus in the Church. You will know the truth of Jesus' promise to be with you always.
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
The particulars aren't important, both because I want to protect the friend's identity and because, though he was guilty of a particular wrong, it was born, like all wrongs are, of the same thing that drives us all to sin: a desire for something that wasn't his to have.
All sins boil down to our wanting or grasping for otherwise good things at the wrong times, or in the wrong ways, or for the wrong reasons, or with the wrong people. (To quote Jesus, after looking at that definition, I challenge you, "Those without sin, cast the first stone.")
Whether it's coveting, libeling, gossiping, cheating, lying, stealing, committing adultery, using God's name for anything other than prayer, praise, or thanksgiving, or a whole bunch of other things we might name, we're talking about sin. Sin violates God's holiness, God's intentions for human beings, God's boundaries for life at its best, and, apart from repentance and faith in Christ, something that can bring ruin to us, now and in eternity.
But when I heard about my friend's publicly acknowledged and unrepented wrong, saddened as I was by his act, more deeply, I felt an awareness of my own sins. As I thought about him, I couldn't bring myself to toss any stones.
I also wished--had he not cut himself off from many of us--surely a tacit, if unconscious, admission of the "wrongness" of his wrong--that I could talk with him.
I wanted to hear him out.
I also wanted to beg him not to allow pride to prevent him from seeing that his sin was not just a "personal choice" and that there was a way to be free of his sin, if not of the relational and worldly consequences they might bring for the short-term (i.e., the rest of this life).
I wanted to acknowledge my own imperfections that led me to sin and tell him that I was able to deal with them through the grace of God available to anyone willing to let God's Word about Jesus Christ wash over their lives, freeing us from sin and empowering us to live in an intimate relationship with Him.
Jesus, the perfect innocent, God in the flesh, died on the cross to erase the power of all our wrongs over our lives and eternities. Then God the Father raised Jesus from the dead, confirming that Jesus is the only way to life with God.
Jesus sets free from sin and death all who trust in this Gospel--this Good News--Word about Him.
While driving a long country road on the night I'd gotten the news of my friend's admission, I prayed for him and for those most affected by his wrong. "God," I remember praying, "help him turn to Christ. Bring someone who can speak the truth of Your love and power to him. Change his mind about all of this."
In the darkness, as I drove to a group Bible study, words and music came into my mind and out of my mouth, words that I wished I could speak to my friend right then, had I been able to find him:
Ev'rybody falls off their pedestals and tumbles to the groundI believe in the grace of God that Jesus went through a cross and an empty tomb to give to people who dare to lay aside their hubris, fears, and sin and follow Him.
And there's no point in feigning strength when we all have fallen down
But when I'm made weak
By the things that I seek
I know Someone Who's strong.
I send out a prayer
And I know that He's there
And somehow I can carry on
Through the laughter, through the tears
Through all the raging years
In the deep heart of a bleak night I know my God is there
Through the joy and through the pain
Through all the driving rain
When all my hope has left sight
I know
I know
I know my God is there.
© 2016, Mark Daniels
I believe that that grace can change our lives now, allowing the power, strength, and peace of God's eternal kingdom to enter our imperfect, dying lives.
And I believe that all who cling to Christ and His cross, owning their sin and their need of God's grace, will live with God in a perfect kingdom beyond death.
Jesus' death and resurrection prove that those beliefs are well-founded.
No matter what your sins, Jesus wants you.
No matter your imperfections or screw-ups, Jesus wants you.
And even after you sin again tomorrow, Jesus will still want you to lay claim to His grace and forgiveness and new life so that you can get on with the business of living life as it was made to be lived by the God Who made you.
Jesus is proof that, if you want Him, God will always be there. In a memorable sermon during Luther Week in Anaheim last week, theologian Dr. Jim Nestingen said of Jesus, "He's the Best! There's nobody better."
Keep trusting in Jesus, God the Son, and let Him cover your imperfections and wrongs with His perfection and righteousness.
Fall into Jesus' orbit through regular worship, regularly receiving Holy Communion, regularly reading and reflecting on His Word in the Bible, and regularly growing as disciples alongside other believers in Jesus in the Church. You will know the truth of Jesus' promise to be with you always.
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Great thought
When's best time to respond to your critics? 2 o’clock in the morning when you’re asleep and everything you think will never be written down— Leonard Sweet (@lensweet) August 17, 2016
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
4 things God taught me about spiritual gifts on Monday
During my quiet time on Monday morning, I considered 1 Corinthians 12 in the New Testament. I was particularly struck by verse 18:
But since Paul left the Corinthians, unchristian ideas and practices had taken root in their church. Among them was the notion that the possession of some spiritual gifts made a person superior to others in the church who didn't have that gift. (You still hear nonsense like this from some Christians today. Paul responded to such smug lovelessness among the first century Corinthian Christians with 1 Corinthians 13.)
In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul compares the Church to the human body. In fact, in many other places in the New Testament, Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, does more than compare the Church to a human body. Paul asserts that the Church is the body of Christ in the world. While the crucified and risen Jesus has ascended into heaven, the Church is Jesus Christ's physical presence here and now. For example, Paul says in different places:
As radical as the Bible's teaching that Jesus is the second Person of a triune God (one God, three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is its insistence, voiced often by Paul, that the Church is Christ's body, every disciple a member of Christ's body.
That person with the annoying cackle, the pastor who talks too much, the man with moral failures, the woman who seems to measure her worth by what she does rather than by what Christ has done for her on the cross...all who turn to Christ in repentance and faith are members of Christ's body, children of God the Father.
And each of them, Paul would say, is irreplaceable. When members of Christ's body at any given place fail to exercise their spiritual gifts, parts of the body die and individual congregations are at risk of dying.
On Monday, it struck me how truly revolutionary this whole business would be for the Church (and the world) if we would take Paul's words seriously. God impressed four major points on me as I read 1 Corinthians 12:18:
1. We must not doubt that by whatever agency--be it history, circumstance, mistakes--that the parts of the body possessed by any given congregation at any given time are precisely what God has decided that congregation needs to fulfill its Christ-given mission.
This means no more searching for the "ideal" church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his fantastic little book, Life Together, warns Christians against falling in love with their ideal church, the church of their imaginations, lest they fail to appreciate the church they're already in, the church where God's Holy Spirit is already active.
This also means no more church of the fantasized future. It's God's future that we are meant to discover through lives of faithfulness, not a future born of the empty well of human wisdom and sin.
Jesus says that no truly wise person begins something without counting the cost. But He also tells a parable in Luke 12 about a man who had so much that he decided to build big barns to store everything and simply live a life of ease. He had big plans born of his own view of things.
Jesus' fictional man's smug self-satisfaction (there's that smug thing again) came to an abrupt end when, Jesus says, God came to him and said: "You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?" (Luke 12:12) In other words, it's fine for people (and congregations) to make plans; but we'd better be prepared to trash them when God throws up walls or calls us in different directions. James 4:13-15 puts our fantasized futures in perspective when he writes:
2. We must not allow other disciples' quirks to get in the way of recognizing their God-gifts that must be exercised for our congregations to do what God is calling us to do.
Everybody has quirks. (Even you!) There are no quirkless humans.
And it's through humans who make up Christ's body, with all their peculiarities and particularities, that God does His work in the world. The Church is called to "make disciples," internally and externally. God has given all the parts needed for any congregation needed to do this. And all of those parts will be imperfect, idiosyncratic, quirky.
It's always been that way. Paul had a volcanic temper, it seems. Peter was impulsive. James and John had to learn to get over looking out for number one. David had an eye for the ladies. Naomi was self-pitying. No matter. God used them all with their quirks. So, who are we to mentally disqualify people from doing the part in Christ's mission for His Church to which God has called them?
I've always remembered a wonderful bit of advice given by Alan Loy McGinnis in his book, The Friendship Factor. For any relationship to thrive and be all that it can be, each person must make allowances for the peculiar insanities of the other person. That's true in friendships, in marriages, and in the most sacred of all relationships, the Church, this organic body of Christ, the only relationship in this world that will continue to exist in eternity.
3. We cannot overestimate nor underestimate the value or necessity of any spiritual gift or the baptized believer in Christ who possesses the gift. We in the body of Christ all need each other.
4. We must encourage every Christian disciple to know and exercise their spiritual gifts, with mutual accountability to Christ and to the Church.
Congregations need to work hard at getting rid of gatekeepers who prevent some members from doing the ministries to which God calls them through their gifts.
Congregations need to discourage the "humble pie" excuse-makers who claim they can't do anything for the mission of the Church because, "I have no gift." People who ply such nonsense are calling God a liar, because God's Word insists that the Holy Spirit has given every believer in Christ a spiritual gift by which the Church fulfills its calling.
1 Peter 4:10 says: "Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms." Peter assumes that "each of you" in the churches he addresses in first century Asia Minor has been allotted at least one spiritual gift. For a Christian to say that she or he missed out on a spiritual gift is a humble-sounding way of dodging our calls to play our part in Christ's great commission of all Christians.
Help me to live out these insights as a Christian disciple and as a servant-leader in Your Church, Lord. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
...in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.Here, the apostle Paul is talking to a church that had come into being through his proclamation of Jesus Christ as the way to salvation and new life with God.
But since Paul left the Corinthians, unchristian ideas and practices had taken root in their church. Among them was the notion that the possession of some spiritual gifts made a person superior to others in the church who didn't have that gift. (You still hear nonsense like this from some Christians today. Paul responded to such smug lovelessness among the first century Corinthian Christians with 1 Corinthians 13.)
In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul compares the Church to the human body. In fact, in many other places in the New Testament, Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, does more than compare the Church to a human body. Paul asserts that the Church is the body of Christ in the world. While the crucified and risen Jesus has ascended into heaven, the Church is Jesus Christ's physical presence here and now. For example, Paul says in different places:
Now you are Christ's body, and individually members of it. (1 Corinthians 12:27)And that's just a sampling.
For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. (Romans 12:4-5)
He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. (Colossians 1:18)
...no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. (Ephesians 5:29-30)
As radical as the Bible's teaching that Jesus is the second Person of a triune God (one God, three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is its insistence, voiced often by Paul, that the Church is Christ's body, every disciple a member of Christ's body.
That person with the annoying cackle, the pastor who talks too much, the man with moral failures, the woman who seems to measure her worth by what she does rather than by what Christ has done for her on the cross...all who turn to Christ in repentance and faith are members of Christ's body, children of God the Father.
And each of them, Paul would say, is irreplaceable. When members of Christ's body at any given place fail to exercise their spiritual gifts, parts of the body die and individual congregations are at risk of dying.
On Monday, it struck me how truly revolutionary this whole business would be for the Church (and the world) if we would take Paul's words seriously. God impressed four major points on me as I read 1 Corinthians 12:18:
1. We must not doubt that by whatever agency--be it history, circumstance, mistakes--that the parts of the body possessed by any given congregation at any given time are precisely what God has decided that congregation needs to fulfill its Christ-given mission.
This means no more searching for the "ideal" church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his fantastic little book, Life Together, warns Christians against falling in love with their ideal church, the church of their imaginations, lest they fail to appreciate the church they're already in, the church where God's Holy Spirit is already active.
This also means no more church of the fantasized future. It's God's future that we are meant to discover through lives of faithfulness, not a future born of the empty well of human wisdom and sin.
Jesus says that no truly wise person begins something without counting the cost. But He also tells a parable in Luke 12 about a man who had so much that he decided to build big barns to store everything and simply live a life of ease. He had big plans born of his own view of things.
Jesus' fictional man's smug self-satisfaction (there's that smug thing again) came to an abrupt end when, Jesus says, God came to him and said: "You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?" (Luke 12:12) In other words, it's fine for people (and congregations) to make plans; but we'd better be prepared to trash them when God throws up walls or calls us in different directions. James 4:13-15 puts our fantasized futures in perspective when he writes:
Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 12:18 also tell us no more lamentations for what our congregation is not, but celebration for what it is when Jesus and the Word of God hold center place, as well as prayerful faith in God that He is providing and He will provide what we need in gifted people to do, not what we want to do, but what He is calling us to do.
2. We must not allow other disciples' quirks to get in the way of recognizing their God-gifts that must be exercised for our congregations to do what God is calling us to do.
Everybody has quirks. (Even you!) There are no quirkless humans.
And it's through humans who make up Christ's body, with all their peculiarities and particularities, that God does His work in the world. The Church is called to "make disciples," internally and externally. God has given all the parts needed for any congregation needed to do this. And all of those parts will be imperfect, idiosyncratic, quirky.
It's always been that way. Paul had a volcanic temper, it seems. Peter was impulsive. James and John had to learn to get over looking out for number one. David had an eye for the ladies. Naomi was self-pitying. No matter. God used them all with their quirks. So, who are we to mentally disqualify people from doing the part in Christ's mission for His Church to which God has called them?
I've always remembered a wonderful bit of advice given by Alan Loy McGinnis in his book, The Friendship Factor. For any relationship to thrive and be all that it can be, each person must make allowances for the peculiar insanities of the other person. That's true in friendships, in marriages, and in the most sacred of all relationships, the Church, this organic body of Christ, the only relationship in this world that will continue to exist in eternity.
3. We cannot overestimate nor underestimate the value or necessity of any spiritual gift or the baptized believer in Christ who possesses the gift. We in the body of Christ all need each other.
4. We must encourage every Christian disciple to know and exercise their spiritual gifts, with mutual accountability to Christ and to the Church.
Congregations need to work hard at getting rid of gatekeepers who prevent some members from doing the ministries to which God calls them through their gifts.
Congregations need to discourage the "humble pie" excuse-makers who claim they can't do anything for the mission of the Church because, "I have no gift." People who ply such nonsense are calling God a liar, because God's Word insists that the Holy Spirit has given every believer in Christ a spiritual gift by which the Church fulfills its calling.
1 Peter 4:10 says: "Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms." Peter assumes that "each of you" in the churches he addresses in first century Asia Minor has been allotted at least one spiritual gift. For a Christian to say that she or he missed out on a spiritual gift is a humble-sounding way of dodging our calls to play our part in Christ's great commission of all Christians.
Help me to live out these insights as a Christian disciple and as a servant-leader in Your Church, Lord. Amen
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Monday, August 15, 2016
The strange madness, the only way to be human
From our son, Pastor Philip Daniels:
When we are too busy loving our brothers and sisters, it is hard to find time to demonize them or write-off their sins and problems. When you love someone, you want what is best for that person. When you love someone, they will see your vision for them as being modeled on Christ-centered love rather than pharisaical hypocrisy. To love your enemies doesn't mean you allow them to do whatever they want. It means you love them so much that you are willing to enter into the messiness of their lives and be there for the hard cleaning. When we love our enemies, we are being like Christ. When we hate our enemies, we are nothing more than animals fighting for survival. There is a strange madness to the love of Christ, but the only way to live as a human is to be quite mad.Amen
Saturday, August 13, 2016
Should Americans be making more babies?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry argues that they should be. While it's good that teens are having fewer babies, he argues:
That doesn't mean that married couples should have more kids so that we can forestall the Russians and the Chinese, though both of those nations, at present, pose a far greater existential threat to the peace and security of the United States than do Islamist terrorists.
I would argue that our reticence about having more kids in this country is rooted less in concern about the environment, a fear fostered Paul Erhlich's absurdly overwrought book, The Population Bomb, back in the the late-60s and 70s--a fear that many in my generation, fearful of having less, bought into, than it is in materialism and selfishness.
We had two children who I love dearly, but I wish that we'd had more. There's simply nothing like family living and being a dad is, for me, not only one of the biggest challenges in the world, but also one of its greatest pleasures. There's something beautiful and humbling about pouring yourself into your children and watching them grow up to be wonderful in spite of your parenting.
According to Gobry, there are practical reasons why the United States should be concerned about its low birth rate, "59.6 births per 1000 women," the lowest rate in US history:
Gobry suggests several ways government could entice husbands and wives to have more kids. But for me, the most compelling reason for bigger families is spiritual. The Bible teaches that it's more blessed to give than to receive. Apart from the fact that a nation with fewer children leads to scarcity, fewer opportunities, less productivity, and economic and military weakness, couples who have the wherewithal to raise families--and far more do than they think they do, learn the blessedness of giving to themselves to their kids, not indulgently, but with love that includes loving discipline, time, and personal investment. A parent learns that life isn't about what you keep, harbor, husband, or get for yourself, it's about what you give away.
Parents have a sacred and fulfilling two-fold responsibility. First, they are to prepare their own children for adulthood, nurturing them with the two sides of the coin of love: gracious love and gracious discipline. Second, they are to "make disciples," teaching their children to know the God we meet in Jesus Christ so that they can become not only their children, but God's children as well.
Parenting is a daunting thing. But God has also engineered it to be one of the greatest blessings a human being could ever experience. And, for those who seek to follow Christ, parenting can be a tremendous calling in which to learn love, humility, selflessness, and a right relationship with money and possessions, among other things.
OK, husbands and wives of child-bearing age, don't replicate the mistake of my own self-centered Baby Boomer generation, get busy and make babies.*
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
*By the way, it has always struck me as absurd that people my age can get "senior discounts," something utterly unnecessary for most of us, while young couples with kids and mortgages have to pay full price. It ought to be the other way around, shouldn't it?
It used to be taken for granted that the best indicator of a nation's health was its citizens' desire and capacity to reproduce. And it should still seem self-evident that people's willingness to have children is not only a sign of confidence in the future, but a sign of cultural health. It's a signal that people are willing to commit to the most enduring responsibility on Earth, which is raising a child.This is still fairly clear, I think. Despite the menacing moves of authoritarian Russia and communist China toward exercising regional hegemony (or more), both countries are severely limited in their aspirations by their birth rate trends. Russia is already aged and in crisis, China will almost inevitably be in such crisis soon.
But reproduction is also a sign of national health in a more dollars-and-cents way. The more productive people you have in your society, the healthier your country's economy. It's an idea that was obvious back in the 17th century, when economist Jean Bodin wrote "the only wealth is people."
That doesn't mean that married couples should have more kids so that we can forestall the Russians and the Chinese, though both of those nations, at present, pose a far greater existential threat to the peace and security of the United States than do Islamist terrorists.
I would argue that our reticence about having more kids in this country is rooted less in concern about the environment, a fear fostered Paul Erhlich's absurdly overwrought book, The Population Bomb, back in the the late-60s and 70s--a fear that many in my generation, fearful of having less, bought into, than it is in materialism and selfishness.
We had two children who I love dearly, but I wish that we'd had more. There's simply nothing like family living and being a dad is, for me, not only one of the biggest challenges in the world, but also one of its greatest pleasures. There's something beautiful and humbling about pouring yourself into your children and watching them grow up to be wonderful in spite of your parenting.
According to Gobry, there are practical reasons why the United States should be concerned about its low birth rate, "59.6 births per 1000 women," the lowest rate in US history:
Today we see the problems wrought by the decline in productive populations all over the industrialized world, where polities are ripping each other to shreds over how to pay for various forms of entitlements, especially for old people. The debates play out in different ways in different countries, but in other ways they are exactly the same. That's because they are ruled by the same ruthless math: The fewer young, productive people you have to pay for entitlements for old, unproductive people, the steeper the bill for the entire society becomes. This basic problem is strangling Europe's economies. And while the United States is among the least bad of the bunch, it is still headed in the wrong direction.While acknowledging that evidence for the effectiveness of government programs to encourage people to have kids is mixed, Gobry points out "the fact of the matter is that in contemporary America, 40 percent of women have fewer children than they want to."
Gobry suggests several ways government could entice husbands and wives to have more kids. But for me, the most compelling reason for bigger families is spiritual. The Bible teaches that it's more blessed to give than to receive. Apart from the fact that a nation with fewer children leads to scarcity, fewer opportunities, less productivity, and economic and military weakness, couples who have the wherewithal to raise families--and far more do than they think they do, learn the blessedness of giving to themselves to their kids, not indulgently, but with love that includes loving discipline, time, and personal investment. A parent learns that life isn't about what you keep, harbor, husband, or get for yourself, it's about what you give away.
Parents have a sacred and fulfilling two-fold responsibility. First, they are to prepare their own children for adulthood, nurturing them with the two sides of the coin of love: gracious love and gracious discipline. Second, they are to "make disciples," teaching their children to know the God we meet in Jesus Christ so that they can become not only their children, but God's children as well.
Parenting is a daunting thing. But God has also engineered it to be one of the greatest blessings a human being could ever experience. And, for those who seek to follow Christ, parenting can be a tremendous calling in which to learn love, humility, selflessness, and a right relationship with money and possessions, among other things.
OK, husbands and wives of child-bearing age, don't replicate the mistake of my own self-centered Baby Boomer generation, get busy and make babies.*
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
*By the way, it has always struck me as absurd that people my age can get "senior discounts," something utterly unnecessary for most of us, while young couples with kids and mortgages have to pay full price. It ought to be the other way around, shouldn't it?
Crystal Cathedral: Cautionary Tale for Christ's Church
This week, I've attended Lutheran Week, the annual family reunion of the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) that includes the gathering of the Women of the NALC, the Braaten-Benne Theological Lectures, the NALC Mission Festival, and the NALC's Convocation. All in all, it's a wonderful "tradition" in this five year old denomination with its commitment to four core values:
Last night, we had a free evening and the four of us from Living Water Lutheran Church who are attending Luther Week decided to take the 1.2 mile walk to what was once The Crystal Cathedral of Garden Grove, California. The name was given to what had formerly been Garden Grove Community Church, a congregation of the Reformed Church of America, founded by the late Robert Schuller, after the congregation--with lots of financial help from viewers of Schuller's Hour of Power broadcast--erected a building designed by architect Philip Johnson.
There were rumors for years that the Crystal Cathedral was a financially overextended institution, less invested in being a congregation making disciples in its community than in keeping an institution with a large TV studio afloat. After Schuller retired and his son took over as pastor of the congregation, including offering the Biblical call to repentance and new life through faith in Jesus Christ, global support for the Crystal Cathedral shrank.
So did giving from around the world. The Crystal Cathedral's ministries fell apart, victim of a founder's ego and his consequent edifice complex. Schuller may well have had positive and godly motivations for his approach. But as his ministry fell apart with family members suing each other amid recriminations and taking sides, the Crystal Community Church died.
But now, the six buildings will not become ignored or vandalized, like some oversized Sears store decaying before the forces of urban change.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange has purchased the campus, renaming it Christ Cathedral. I like the name, because it points to the only One Who can save us from sin, death, and futility, rather than to the architectural innovations involved in the design and erection of the building itself.
While the Crystal Cathedral sanctuary will not be fully remodeled for two years, other buildings are being used. We noted that in one building, a youth group was gathered, a group of adults were studying Scripture, and a choir rehearsed. One building has been dedicated to pastoral care.
It's exciting to see this place being repurposed by a Christian denomination. But the Crystal Cathedral is also a cautionary parable.
The first priority of Christ's Church is not to build empires or even impressive buildings. (In fact, there wasn't any such thing as a permanent church building structure in the Christian movement until the fourth-century AD.)
The Church is charged by Jesus with one mission only, to, in the power of the Holy Spirit, call people to become disciples of Jesus so that they can live each day with the freeing forgiveness of God and can look forward to an eternity with God. Buildings can be used as tools to facilitate that mission. But they are only tools, not ends. To think otherwise, is really faithless to Jesus Christ.
Below are some pictures I took on the Christ Cathedral campus last night.
- Christ-centered (We believe that people are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone.)
- Mission-driven (We believe that Jesus has sent us to go and make disciples of all nations.)
- Traditionally-grounded (We reject presentism that presumes wisdom from past generations of Christian history must be automatically wrong or suspect.)
- Congregationally-focused (We aren't waiting for our denominational leadership to give us permission to do the ministries to which God's Holy Spirit may be calling us and the denominational apparatus exists to facilitate the ministries of the local congregation.)
Last night, we had a free evening and the four of us from Living Water Lutheran Church who are attending Luther Week decided to take the 1.2 mile walk to what was once The Crystal Cathedral of Garden Grove, California. The name was given to what had formerly been Garden Grove Community Church, a congregation of the Reformed Church of America, founded by the late Robert Schuller, after the congregation--with lots of financial help from viewers of Schuller's Hour of Power broadcast--erected a building designed by architect Philip Johnson.
There were rumors for years that the Crystal Cathedral was a financially overextended institution, less invested in being a congregation making disciples in its community than in keeping an institution with a large TV studio afloat. After Schuller retired and his son took over as pastor of the congregation, including offering the Biblical call to repentance and new life through faith in Jesus Christ, global support for the Crystal Cathedral shrank.
So did giving from around the world. The Crystal Cathedral's ministries fell apart, victim of a founder's ego and his consequent edifice complex. Schuller may well have had positive and godly motivations for his approach. But as his ministry fell apart with family members suing each other amid recriminations and taking sides, the Crystal Community Church died.
But now, the six buildings will not become ignored or vandalized, like some oversized Sears store decaying before the forces of urban change.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange has purchased the campus, renaming it Christ Cathedral. I like the name, because it points to the only One Who can save us from sin, death, and futility, rather than to the architectural innovations involved in the design and erection of the building itself.
While the Crystal Cathedral sanctuary will not be fully remodeled for two years, other buildings are being used. We noted that in one building, a youth group was gathered, a group of adults were studying Scripture, and a choir rehearsed. One building has been dedicated to pastoral care.
It's exciting to see this place being repurposed by a Christian denomination. But the Crystal Cathedral is also a cautionary parable.
The first priority of Christ's Church is not to build empires or even impressive buildings. (In fact, there wasn't any such thing as a permanent church building structure in the Christian movement until the fourth-century AD.)
The Church is charged by Jesus with one mission only, to, in the power of the Holy Spirit, call people to become disciples of Jesus so that they can live each day with the freeing forgiveness of God and can look forward to an eternity with God. Buildings can be used as tools to facilitate that mission. But they are only tools, not ends. To think otherwise, is really faithless to Jesus Christ.
Below are some pictures I took on the Christ Cathedral campus last night.
To the left in the picture above is the frequently-televised "cathedral" itself. On the right, is the famed tower.
Here, a sign explains plans for turning Crystal Cathedral into Christ Cathedral. I wonder whether several nearby businesses will change their names, including the Crystal View Apartments and the Crystal Car Wash.
This statue portrays Matthew 19:14, when Jesus said, "Let the children come to me."
I liked this shot showing the Prayer Tower, SoCal palm trees, and the moon clearly visible on a cool night. It's hard not to love southern California.
This statue portrays the Good Shepherd, which is how Jesus describes Himself in John 10:11-17.
This statue's subject is the flight to Egypt by Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus. You'll find that bit of history portrayed in Matthew's gospel.
This sculpture portrays Moses bringing the Ten Commandments given to him by God at Mount Sinai (Exodus)
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Friday, August 12, 2016
Why would any city or country want to host the Olympics?
It makes little sense.
That's why Malcolm Gladwell says the Olympics should be split out by events in various cities and countries. To me, Gladwell's proposal makes sense, sparing cities and countries $12-billion boondoggles that benefit no one by the International Olympic Committee.
That's why Malcolm Gladwell says the Olympics should be split out by events in various cities and countries. To me, Gladwell's proposal makes sense, sparing cities and countries $12-billion boondoggles that benefit no one by the International Olympic Committee.
Monday, August 08, 2016
What Biblical writer really says about sex, marriage, & divorce
The apostle Paul is often portrayed as a rigid sexist. You can isolate passages from Paul's New Testament writings to force such a message on him. But that's eisegesis, imposing our own constructs onto a piece of Scripture, rather than exegesis, deriving its clear meaning from the actual words and context of the passage.
Paul views marriage as a covenant of mutual submission and service which wives and husbands enter under the lordship of the God we know in Christ.
This morning for my quiet time with God, I read Paul's inspired words in 1 Corinthians 7. In the chapter, Paul talks about marriage. I found that Eugene Peterson's rendering of the chapter refreshed my understanding of Paul's words, written to a congregation among whom sexual escapades were on the loose, just as some devout believers wondered if they should even be married.
A sampling:
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Paul views marriage as a covenant of mutual submission and service which wives and husbands enter under the lordship of the God we know in Christ.
This morning for my quiet time with God, I read Paul's inspired words in 1 Corinthians 7. In the chapter, Paul talks about marriage. I found that Eugene Peterson's rendering of the chapter refreshed my understanding of Paul's words, written to a congregation among whom sexual escapades were on the loose, just as some devout believers wondered if they should even be married.
A sampling:
Now, getting down to the questions you asked in your letter to me. First, Is it a good thing to have sexual relations?Important things to pay attention to in the twenty-first century.
Certainly—but only within a certain context. It’s good for a man to have a wife, and for a woman to have a husband. Sexual drives are strong, but marriage is strong enough to contain them and provide for a balanced and fulfilling sexual life in a world of sexual disorder. The marriage bed must be a place of mutuality—the husband seeking to satisfy his wife, the wife seeking to satisfy her husband. Marriage is not a place to “stand up for your rights.” Marriage is a decision to serve the other, whether in bed or out...
...if you are married, stay married. This is the Master’s command, not mine. If a wife should leave her husband, she must either remain single or else come back and make things right with him. And a husband has no right to get rid of his wife...
And don’t be wishing you were someplace else or with someone else. Where you are right now is God’s place for you. Live and obey and love and believe right there. God, not your marital status, defines your life.
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Sunday, August 07, 2016
How to be free of worry
Luke 12:22-34
Some of the worst tragedies I’ve witnessed as a pastor have had their roots in what people thought gave their lives value. Marriages have broken up. Families have been driven asunder. And other tragedies have happened because people tend to put too much trust in the things this world has to offer.
For the Christian, it’s clear that our value can’t be found in money, the affirmation of other people, in pleasure, or in power. Nor can it be found in our work or even our families, no matter how much we may enjoy the one and cherish the other.
The reason that none of these common ways we use to measure our value will do is that they’re of this world. They’re finite, imperfect, and dying.
Now, let’s be clear.
I’m not saying, “Don’t love your spouse or kids.”
I’m not saying, “Don’t be devoted to doing a good job at work” or, “Don’t sometimes relax and take it easy.”
And I’m not saying, “Don’t try to be worthy of others’ trust in your business relationships, family relationships, and friendships.”
What I am saying is that if you or I use the success with which we do these things, as the measure of our value of our lives, we delude ourselves and set ourselves up for both massive disappointment and eternal separation from God.
There’s only one measurement of our value that matters. That’s the value that God places on us.
Listen: There is no one and nothing God more values than you!
According to Genesis, after God created everything else in the universe, He declared it, “Good.” But when God made human beings, God called His whole creation, “Very good.”
It was only human beings, of all the things God created in this universe, that God made “in the image of God.”
And, it was to human beings that God gave authority over creation.
To God, human beings are a very big deal!
You’ve heard the saying: “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.” God doesn’t have this kind of ambivalence toward us. He loves you, an individual human being, with all the passion, commitment, concern, and joy with which He loves humanity.
Every single one of us has been individually, custom-designed by God and every one of us is the object of God’s love.
King David in Old Testament times was amazed by God’s love and concern for every human being, how wrapped up in every individual person God is. David writes in Psalm 139:15-16: “My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
And, God’s love for us didn’t end once sin became part of the standard equipment with which every one of us is born. As soon as the human race fell into sin, God went to work with a plan to make it possible for all of us who are the objects of His love, could be saved from sin, death, and darkness.
In Genesis 3:15, God promised that He would send a Son of the human race, hated by the serpent, but who, despite Satan’s and the world’s efforts to kill Him off, would crush the power of sin beneath His feet. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers,” God tells the serpent, “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
God, as always, was as good as His promise, sending Jesus to save all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus to live with God forever.
Second Corinthians 5:21 speaks of this gracious love, saying: “God made him [Jesus] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Sinless God became the embodiment of every human sin--including every one of our sins, so that by faith in Christ, we could receive His righteousness and be restored to God.
Only the God we know and believe in in Jesus Christ confers value on our lives.
And what does He say our value is to Him? By His action in Jesus,
In today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 12:22-34, Jesus warns us against three of the most common ways we’re inclined to follow in order to ensure our value in this world. The three ways are:
Self worship, which the advertisers encourage in us every time we turn on our TVs or laptops, is born of the delusion that we can or should be in control of the world, or at least of our own worlds.
In other words, the real source of worry, in the end, is a common human desire, the same desire that drove Adam and Eve to bite into the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the desire to be like God.
We think that if we conquer the world--or our little pieces of the world, get lots of stuff, look good, wow other people, get promoted, we will be in control. We’ll be on top. Though we’d never say it this way, we’ll be gods. The desire for control, the desire to prove and secure our value, is where worry comes from.
Let me be honest, I struggle with this myself.
At the beginning of this summer, I set five major goals to achieve by this fall as the pastor and spiritual leader of Living Water. I didn’t expect that needing to hire a new secretary / administrative assistant would get thrown into the mix.
I spent hours not only praying, but also worrying. I will confess that I probably spent more time worrying, worshiping the idol of Mark-being-in-control, than I did praying and working on a solution.
But God is good even when we're goofy. (That's a technical theological statement, by the way.) Despite me and all the ways I’ve tried to get in His way, God is bringing these five goals close to fruition.
It’ll be a few months before we know if all five goals have been met. But when they are met, it will be because God worked, not because I worried.
Jesus has been underscoring the wisdom of His words in Luke 12:25-26, for me: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?”
I’ve never been a fan of roller coasters. I love the rides that whirl you around and throw you sideways. I like Disney World’s Tower of Terror that drops you a few stories at a time, ratchets you back up, drops you back down again, then pushes you out over the park and pulls you back in again. I like water rides that take you up, down, and all around. But I’ve always had an irrational fear of roller coasters. They’ve always scared me to death, mostly I think, because they make me feel so out of control.
On the day after we were married, Ann and I went to Cedar Point. She fooled me into getting onto a coaster that was mostly concealed by trees. I was terrified the entire time. But guess what? I survived. I lived. I’m still here forty-two years and four days later.
Here’s the deal: We all have irrational fears about this life.
We’re afraid of things that shoot down our delusions of control.
But look, whatever it is we adopt as the thing that makes us feel like we’re in charge and makes us feel that we have attained the status of “valuable” is one day going to let us down.
Only God is in charge.
Only God assures us of our value when the world turns away or leaves us behind.
Only God assures us of our value when He welcomes us to resurrection beyond the bounds of death.
Only the God we know in Jesus Christ, Who died for us, collectively and individually, can imbue our lives with a value that can never be berated, reduced, or denied to those who trust in Him as their God and Lord and King.
In Luke 12:33 of our Gospel lesson, Jesus says this to all we worriers: “Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.”
Jesus isn’t telling us we need to take a vow of poverty, although some Christians have done so through the centuries. Their examples of trust in Christ inspire us all.
But Jesus is saying this:
And friends, there is only one commodity on this earth that’s eternal. That commodity is the people for whom Jesus died and rose who believe in Him. Invest in people for the sake of Jesus Christ.
Give yourself to the mission of the Church and of every individual Christian, to the mission of making disciples.
And give all you can, every bit of yourself, wherever you work or live, to that cause.
When you do, you can be sure that one day, you will see your dividends, the payoff, in eternity.
That payoff won't be more value from God. You already are valued by God eternally, infinitely!
That payoff will be the people you see in eternity who trusted in Jesus because of the way you lived your life, the way you shared the Gospel, the way you loved God and loved neighbor, the way you prayed for others, the way you served in Jesus' name, the way you made disciples.
When we follow Jesus’ directions in verse 33, we will be living in the certainty of our own eternal value and passing that certainty onto others so that they too, can live with God forever. We will kill off our worries and give a life of eternal value to others too.
Could there possibly be a better way to live?
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Some of the worst tragedies I’ve witnessed as a pastor have had their roots in what people thought gave their lives value. Marriages have broken up. Families have been driven asunder. And other tragedies have happened because people tend to put too much trust in the things this world has to offer.
For the Christian, it’s clear that our value can’t be found in money, the affirmation of other people, in pleasure, or in power. Nor can it be found in our work or even our families, no matter how much we may enjoy the one and cherish the other.
The reason that none of these common ways we use to measure our value will do is that they’re of this world. They’re finite, imperfect, and dying.
Now, let’s be clear.
I’m not saying, “Don’t love your spouse or kids.”
I’m not saying, “Don’t be devoted to doing a good job at work” or, “Don’t sometimes relax and take it easy.”
And I’m not saying, “Don’t try to be worthy of others’ trust in your business relationships, family relationships, and friendships.”
What I am saying is that if you or I use the success with which we do these things, as the measure of our value of our lives, we delude ourselves and set ourselves up for both massive disappointment and eternal separation from God.
There’s only one measurement of our value that matters. That’s the value that God places on us.
Listen: There is no one and nothing God more values than you!
According to Genesis, after God created everything else in the universe, He declared it, “Good.” But when God made human beings, God called His whole creation, “Very good.”
It was only human beings, of all the things God created in this universe, that God made “in the image of God.”
And, it was to human beings that God gave authority over creation.
To God, human beings are a very big deal!
You’ve heard the saying: “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.” God doesn’t have this kind of ambivalence toward us. He loves you, an individual human being, with all the passion, commitment, concern, and joy with which He loves humanity.
Every single one of us has been individually, custom-designed by God and every one of us is the object of God’s love.
King David in Old Testament times was amazed by God’s love and concern for every human being, how wrapped up in every individual person God is. David writes in Psalm 139:15-16: “My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
And, God’s love for us didn’t end once sin became part of the standard equipment with which every one of us is born. As soon as the human race fell into sin, God went to work with a plan to make it possible for all of us who are the objects of His love, could be saved from sin, death, and darkness.
In Genesis 3:15, God promised that He would send a Son of the human race, hated by the serpent, but who, despite Satan’s and the world’s efforts to kill Him off, would crush the power of sin beneath His feet. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers,” God tells the serpent, “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
God, as always, was as good as His promise, sending Jesus to save all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus to live with God forever.
Second Corinthians 5:21 speaks of this gracious love, saying: “God made him [Jesus] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Sinless God became the embodiment of every human sin--including every one of our sins, so that by faith in Christ, we could receive His righteousness and be restored to God.
Only the God we know and believe in in Jesus Christ confers value on our lives.
And what does He say our value is to Him? By His action in Jesus,
- He says that you’re worth the sacrifice of His life on a cross.
- Worth suffering for.
- Worth dying for.
- Worth sharing the victory over sin and death He gained for all who trust in Him.
In today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 12:22-34, Jesus warns us against three of the most common ways we’re inclined to follow in order to ensure our value in this world. The three ways are:
- worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow;
- worry over having enough; and
- worry over whether we’re going to look good. (In this, I include both what we wear and how we look to the world.)
Self worship, which the advertisers encourage in us every time we turn on our TVs or laptops, is born of the delusion that we can or should be in control of the world, or at least of our own worlds.
In other words, the real source of worry, in the end, is a common human desire, the same desire that drove Adam and Eve to bite into the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the desire to be like God.
We think that if we conquer the world--or our little pieces of the world, get lots of stuff, look good, wow other people, get promoted, we will be in control. We’ll be on top. Though we’d never say it this way, we’ll be gods. The desire for control, the desire to prove and secure our value, is where worry comes from.
Let me be honest, I struggle with this myself.
At the beginning of this summer, I set five major goals to achieve by this fall as the pastor and spiritual leader of Living Water. I didn’t expect that needing to hire a new secretary / administrative assistant would get thrown into the mix.
I spent hours not only praying, but also worrying. I will confess that I probably spent more time worrying, worshiping the idol of Mark-being-in-control, than I did praying and working on a solution.
But God is good even when we're goofy. (That's a technical theological statement, by the way.) Despite me and all the ways I’ve tried to get in His way, God is bringing these five goals close to fruition.
It’ll be a few months before we know if all five goals have been met. But when they are met, it will be because God worked, not because I worried.
Jesus has been underscoring the wisdom of His words in Luke 12:25-26, for me: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?”
I’ve never been a fan of roller coasters. I love the rides that whirl you around and throw you sideways. I like Disney World’s Tower of Terror that drops you a few stories at a time, ratchets you back up, drops you back down again, then pushes you out over the park and pulls you back in again. I like water rides that take you up, down, and all around. But I’ve always had an irrational fear of roller coasters. They’ve always scared me to death, mostly I think, because they make me feel so out of control.
On the day after we were married, Ann and I went to Cedar Point. She fooled me into getting onto a coaster that was mostly concealed by trees. I was terrified the entire time. But guess what? I survived. I lived. I’m still here forty-two years and four days later.
Here’s the deal: We all have irrational fears about this life.
We’re afraid of things that shoot down our delusions of control.
But look, whatever it is we adopt as the thing that makes us feel like we’re in charge and makes us feel that we have attained the status of “valuable” is one day going to let us down.
Only God is in charge.
Only God assures us of our value when the world turns away or leaves us behind.
Only God assures us of our value when He welcomes us to resurrection beyond the bounds of death.
Only the God we know in Jesus Christ, Who died for us, collectively and individually, can imbue our lives with a value that can never be berated, reduced, or denied to those who trust in Him as their God and Lord and King.
In Luke 12:33 of our Gospel lesson, Jesus says this to all we worriers: “Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.”
Jesus isn’t telling us we need to take a vow of poverty, although some Christians have done so through the centuries. Their examples of trust in Christ inspire us all.
But Jesus is saying this:
- Free yourself of fear’s and worry’s rule over your life.
- Get rid of those things you don’t need for you, your family, your life, your work.
- Travel light because you won’t be taking it with you.
- If what you get rid of can be sold, use the proceeds to help the poor.
And friends, there is only one commodity on this earth that’s eternal. That commodity is the people for whom Jesus died and rose who believe in Him. Invest in people for the sake of Jesus Christ.
Give yourself to the mission of the Church and of every individual Christian, to the mission of making disciples.
And give all you can, every bit of yourself, wherever you work or live, to that cause.
When you do, you can be sure that one day, you will see your dividends, the payoff, in eternity.
That payoff won't be more value from God. You already are valued by God eternally, infinitely!
That payoff will be the people you see in eternity who trusted in Jesus because of the way you lived your life, the way you shared the Gospel, the way you loved God and loved neighbor, the way you prayed for others, the way you served in Jesus' name, the way you made disciples.
When we follow Jesus’ directions in verse 33, we will be living in the certainty of our own eternal value and passing that certainty onto others so that they too, can live with God forever. We will kill off our worries and give a life of eternal value to others too.
Could there possibly be a better way to live?
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Counting Stars by Onerepublic (and some thoughts)
Love this line:
Everything that kills me makes me feel aliveThat can be taken several ways.
One way is hinted at in the line, "I feel something so wrong / Doing the right thing." Doing the right thing often feels right, makes you feel more alive. Sin is tempting, for example, not because it's ugly, but because it's attractive.
Another way is more overtly Christian. (Band members are Christian, but Onerepublic isn't a "Christian band.") The New Testament teaches that those who repent and believe in Christ submit to the death of their old sinful selves so that the new selves can be raised with Christ. So, Christians can easily sing that everything that kills the old us brings us to life.
There are other ways the line could be seen.
Most probably, it's just a song lyric.
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)