The Only Thing We Need

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

Mark 10:17-22
Our gospel lesson for this morning, Mark 10:17-22, begins: “As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. ‘Good teacher,’ he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?’”

To understand Jesus’ answer to the man’s question, we need to unpack two things he says in asking it. 

The first is this: The man assumes that if he’s going to inherit eternal life, he will have to do something. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he asks. The man is trapped in the idea that if he’s to get anything good from God, he must earn it.

It’s not hard to understand where he would get such an idea. It seems like the whole world tells us that we have to earn, or claw, or steal, the things that are valuable.

People even apply this to their thinking about God. One modern commentator says that in first century Judea, where Jesus lived, religious groups from the Pharisees to the Essenes, sects of Judaism, would have told the man to follow their stringent rules and he could earn his way into God’s kingdom. In fact, in order to make a point, the first part of Jesus’ answer to this man will sound very much like the traditional religious answer, do more. 

But you and I know that this is not the way for dying sinners like you and me to inherit eternal life. You can’t earn an inheritance. An inheritance is a gift that you may renounce, but you can never earn. This is no less true of the inheritance of eternal life that God wants to give to us. Ephesians 2:8-9, reminds us, “For 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.”

Here’s the second thing to unpack from the man’s question, the phrase eternal life. 

In the Greek and Roman worlds of the first century, that phrase would have carried the idea of some milky, spiritual world that the disembodied souls of good people supposedly enter into when they die. This would have been completely foreign to the man who asks the question, to Judaism, to Jesus’ disciples, and to Jesus Himself. 

From the perspective of Biblical faith, it’s impossible to separate a soul from a body. We are bodies, containing our minds, souls, and spirits all wrapped up in one, indivisible package. 

That’s why the human fall into sin was so horrible. Sin brings death to the whole human self. That’s why we desperately need to be saved from ourselves!

In the Bible, eternal life refers to the coming age, the age that will come after God has judged all people, an age not in some wifty spirit world, but in a renewed creation like this one--filled with atoms and molecules, rock and granite, canyons and water, lions and tigers, and strawberry shortcake. 

The Bible teaches that Jesus rose, the first-born from the dead, still identifiable by the scars on His hands and feet and side. 

We confess each Sunday what the Bible teaches, “the resurrection of the body.” This is the life--the resurrected life--that the man is asking Jesus about when He says, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus challenges the man right away. Verse 18: “‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. ‘No one is good—except God alone.’” 

“Say what you mean and mean what you say,” Jesus is telling the man. “If you think I’m good, then I must be more that just a teacher. Don’t patronize me with honorary titles you don’t mean.” 

A merely human teacher is incapable of being good. In numerous places, the Bible says of the human race, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God...there is no one who does good, not even one.” (Romans 3:10-12; Psalm 14:1-3; Psalm 53:1-3; Ecclesiastes 7:20) 

Jesus is good because He’s truly God as well as truly human. Jesus wants the inquiring man to understand this.

Jesus proceeds with His answer. Verse 19: “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.’” 

Notice both the commandments Jesus mentions and the ones He leaves out. 

• He mentions the Fifth Commandment, the Sixth, the Seventh, the Eighth, then adds His own commandment about fraud, and goes back to the Fourth Commandment. 
• But Jesus leaves out the First (“You shall have no other gods.”; the Second (“You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain”); the Third (“You shall remember the Sabbath”); and the Ninth and Tenth Commandments, which deal with coveting. 

It’s these exclusions that are the key to understanding this whole passage because Jesus understands precisely what is lacking in this man’s life.

Verse 20: “Teacher, he declared, ‘all these I have kept since I was a boy.’ Jesus looked at him and loved him. ‘One thing you lack,’ he said. ‘Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.’”

Did you know that Adolf Hitler, one of the most brutal dictators in the history of the world, responsible for the deaths of millions because of his sick racism, was always polite in social settings, never cursed, and drank no alcohol? 

You can be outwardly virtuous, yet still filled with the fire of hell. The questioning man was excited to tell Jesus, “I’ve been doing all those good things since I was a boy.” But Jesus saw that there was something this rich man lacked. He was a nice man who worshiped money and possessions more than he worshiped God. They were his gods of choice. They were the means he used to measure the blessedness of his life. Jesus loved the man and wanted to set him free.

In short, the man lacked God, the God revealed in Christ. He didn’t trust in God. He trusted in His money. He had everything but God.

And so, Jesus gave the man His prescription, “Sell everything you have, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Me, trust in Me. Trust in Me and not in your money.”

This prescription isn’t precisely the same for everyone. Abraham was a rich man; God didn’t tell Abraham to get rid of his wealth. Wealth wasn’t something Abraham was tempted to worship. But there is no shortage of candidates for the gods of our lives besides money--success, power, conviviality, happiness, influence, popularity, food, alcohol and other drugs, good times, our families, our work. Any god we follow other than the One we meet in Jesus Christ will always demand more of us, wringing life itself from us. When anything other than the God we know in Jesus is someone’s god, they end up dead, far from God. Death, not eternal life is their inheritance.  

But when we follow Jesus, we have the inheritance we cannot earn, eternal life that begins not in the sweet by-and-by, but right now as we follow Him. 

Jesus tells those who lay aside their idol gods and their sins that the kingdom of God is among them now, even before we are raised from the dead (Luke 17:21). 

This crucified and risen Jesus can promise us, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)  

Our gospel lesson is capped by one of the saddest passages in all the Bible: “At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.” 

I think that Jesus was even sadder than the man, who couldn’t bring himself to let go of the idol that would lead him to death so that he could grasp the outstretched hand of the good God Who offers us life.

Jesus wants to give us our inheritance, eternal life. This doesn’t happen when we make Jesus our top priority, as though Jesus is meant to be an item on our daily planner. It happens when Jesus becomes our life, when we accept what He has taught us to be the bottom line truth of human existence: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). May Jesus be our life today and always. Amen

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

Marriage and Divorce

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

Mark 10:2-16

True story. The wife of a prominent Christian leader, a man to whom she’d been married for decades, was asked if she’d ever considered divorce. “Divorce, no,” she replied. “murder, yes.”

Murder, believe it or not, is a good entry point for our discussion of the topic that takes up most of today’s Gospel lesson, Mark 10:2-16, marriage and divorce.

Let me explain the connection: While we usually teach the Fifth Commandment as saying, “You shall not kill,” the original Hebrew actually tells us, “You shall not murder.” Knowing that alone helps us to better understand the command. In giving us the Fifth Commandment, God is not saying that there are no circumstances under which, in the defense of life, it may become necessary to take lives. 

For example, when a nation is attacked and its people’s lives are threatened--as happened with the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, followed by Nazi Germany’s declaration of war on this country--that nation’s government has the responsibility to prevent the murder of its citizens. That will likely entail taking the lives of those who threaten such murder. 

God still prohibits murder. God still cherishes and commands that we cherish the gift of every human life He has created and He still commands us to protect life. 

But the hardness of human hearts--the sin in human hearts--means that people who have no desire to murder, that children, the vulnerable, need earthly protectors, like governments, which, in extreme situations such as those that came to this country in 1941, are left with no choice but to kill other human beings. And so, the God Who, in Old Testament times, commanded His people Israel not to murder, would at times, tell them to make war on those intent on murdering people.

God never bases His commands to us on exceptional circumstances that result from human hard-heartedness. His commands reflect His eternal will for those who, grateful for His undeserved grace and favor, seek to live the kinds of lives God blesses. It is God’s will that human beings not take the lives of other human beings, even to the point, according to Jesus, of commanding us not to use killing words to harm, ridicule, or dehumanize others. It’s only after God makes His good and gracious will--”You shall not murder”-- emphatically clear that He talks about the exceptional circumstances under which the sinfulness of our fallen world--the hardness of human hearts--may necessitate the taking of human life. 

Keep that in mind: In His commands, God always states the positive principle before talking about the exceptions. That's important to remember as we address Jesus' words on marriage and divorce in today's Gospel lesson.

And to do that, we must begin by looking at the verse in Mark's gospel appearing right before our lesson, Mark 10:1. There we’re told, “Jesus then left that place and went into the region of Judea and across the Jordan. Again crowds of people came to him, and as was his custom, he taught them.” 

This verse really presents us with a key to understanding everything that Jesus says about marriage and divorce in our lesson. Context, you know, is central to understanding passages of the Bible. Where do the verses fall within the particular book? And, in the cases of narrated events, like the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection told in the gospels, we need to pay heed to where He was geographically when He spoke the words.

And where is Jesus in today's gospel lesson? He’s in “the region of Judea and across the Jordan.” 

This is the place where John the Baptist ministered and preached. 

And it’s the place where John got into trouble with government and religious leaders. 

You'll remember that John had condemned and called to repentance King Herod for having divorced his own wife and caused the wife of his brother Philip to divorce the brother so that the two divorced folks could now marry and live happily ever after. 

John called Herod out on this violation of the sanctity of marriage. 

He claimed that Herod’s entire rule was delegitimized by this unrepented violation of God’s marriage command, given in the garden, that, in marriage, the two shall become one flesh. 

Religious leaders, who saw John as a threat to their power, aligned themselves with Herod and were glad when Herod beheaded John for what John had said about Herod's marriages and divorce. 

In our gospel lesson, the Pharisees, in the same place where John had preached, try to set the same trap that brought Herod’s execution of John for Jesus.

Mark 10: 2-5: “Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ ‘What did Moses command you?’ he replied. They said, ‘Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away. It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,’ Jesus replied.” 

“Marriages that last for lifetimes, this is  God’s will,“ Jesus is saying. “But it’s lawful for people to divorce because God recognizes that human sin hardens hearts.” 

In other words, people do and say things that destroy marriage covenants and the foundations on which the best ones are built: faith in the God we know in Christ, mutual trust, mutual servanthood, repentance, prayer. 

When a partner says or does those things repeatedly, unrepentantly, that destroy the marriage a partner may be warranted in seeking a divorce.

A divorce decree then becomes the mere public acknowledgment of the fact that human sin has already killed a marriage. 

In the eyes of God, the legitimate grounds for divorce might include adultery, as Jesus mentions in Matthew 19:9 and spiritual abandonment as Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 7:15. I’m sure that abuse, physical or mental, is also an understandable grounds for ending a marriage. 

As I often tell couples in premarital counseling or married folks who deal with one or more spouse’s addictions to drugs, alcohol, pornography, gambling, eating, materialism, whatever: There is more than one way to be unfaithful to a marriage, more than one way for human hardness of heart to destroy a marriage. 

Fortunately, blessedly, people can repent. People can turn to Christ for forgiveness and the power to restore their marriages and other relationships. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, died and rose to overcome the power of sin and death over those who repent and believe in Him. They can do this even after their hardness of heart has destroyed their marriage.

But Jesus refuses to base His reiteration of God’s command for marriage and against divorce on the exceptional circumstances that might form grounds for divorce. He doesn’t want people entering into marriage or being married spending their time looking for loopholes. 

And so He says, starting at verse 6: “'But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 

Without uttering the name of the fake king Herod, Jesus, the King of all kings, tells the Pharisees whose trap He perceives, “John the Baptist was right. Marriage is a gift to be cherished for life.”

Jesus isn’t one to “throw pearls before swine,” though. He doesn’t waste His breath trying to teach people who don’t really want to be taught. So, He waits to unpack His teaching with the disciples when they’re alone. Verse 10: “When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.’”

God loves marriage and everything that He intended for it: companionship, mutual affection and accountability, mutual protection, intimacy, and sometimes, children, to name just a few things. God desires our marriages to last a lifetime. He also desires unmarried friends to support their married friends in their marriage covenants. And so, in today’s lesson, Jesus invites us to focus not on the circumstances that might make it OK to divorce and to instead, in light of God’s love for and blessing of marriage, focus on what’s needed to make marriages work.

Here are just a few of them. 

• One: A shared faith in Jesus Christ. When husband and wife acknowledge that they are in bondage to sin and cannot free themselves and that they need the crucified and risen Savior Who, alone, makes it possible for them to be saved by grace from sin and death through faith in Him, couples are given the humility and understanding they need to forgive one another and support one another till death parts them. 
• Two: A shared commitment to prayer in Jesus’ name. 
• Three: A shared commitment to being disciples. When we’re committed to being disciples, God helps us to be patient with one another and honest about our own needs and faults. 
• Four: A shared commitment to mutual submission. Ephesians 5 makes clear that in Christian marriages, nobody is boss. Husband and wife submit to one another and to Christ to form a partnership which makes them not two separate people pursuing their own interests and desires, but as Genesis tells us, “one flesh.”

In thirty-four years of pastoring, there are certain predictable issues that have caused married couples to talk with me about their marriages. You can probably guess what they are: money, sex, in-laws, communication breakdowns, children. But all these common points of conflict that may arise in any marriage are rarely the true sources of conflict in marriages. They’re only the secondary battlefields. 

The real source of trouble in marriages is human hardness of heart, sin. 

The battle for our marriages and against divorce happens in the spiritual realm. 

When both partners believe, pray, repent and forgive--all in the name of the crucified and risen Jesus, our marriages can be strengthened. God can give married couples the strength to do the hard work needed to overcome those things that threaten our marriages. God can give our married friends and family members His strength when we go to battle for them in the spiritual realm with our prayers. 

Whenever possible, it’s best that our marriages not be ended by either divorce...or murder. 

May God strengthen all the marriages of our parish.

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

Trusting in Christ Alone

[This is the journal entry from my quiet time with God this morning. If you'd like help in having your own quiet time with God, you might want to read this.] 

Look: “In that day the people who live on this coast will say, ‘See what has happened to those we relied on, those we fled to for help and deliverance from the king of Assyria! How then can we escape?’” (Isaiah 20:6)

In the late 8th-century BC, Isaiah was called by God to enact a prophecy demonstrating that Egypt, in which some of God’s people were depending to defend them, would be conquered and enslaved by Assyria. Egyptian leaders and people would be marched along the coastline out of their homeland, as slaves, to Assyria. God’s people on the coast would be among the first to see this and they would ask who would save them now.

It’s fine for nations to have armies and even alliances, but when we place our trust for security, safety, and life in things of this world--armies, wealth, and so on--we delude ourselves. God won’t deliver or favor people who worship other “gods,” the way some of His people effectively worshiped the worldly power of Egypt, then merrily ignoring God daily lives.

Our hope can’t be found in political philosophies or figures, in armies or money. None of those things can protect us from the sin, death, and darkness of the world. Only the God revealed in Jesus Christ can. It’s foolish to put our ultimate faith (trust) in anyone or anything other than Jesus. “Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing. Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God.” (Psalm 146:3-5)

As Peter told a crowd at the temple after he had brought the risen Jesus’ healing to a beggar and proclaimed the saving power of Jesus’ death and resurrection: “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus.” (Acts 3:19-20) In the end, only God can protect us from ourselves, from sin and death.

Listen: The Lord has taught me again recently and underscores in this passage, the central importance of not relying on my smarts or shrewdness (such as it isn’t) or any of the markers of power or success in this world to give me security.

I am called to rely on the God revealed in Christ alone for all good things. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” (James 1:17)

I need to look to God alone to justify me, sanctify me, validate me, and protect me.

On that latter thing, protection: None of us is immune from the effects of living in this fallen world. We all age. We all fall to sickness and failure. We all die. The question is: Will we live and die relying on Christ or on the false deities of the world?

The answer to that question should be obvious. “Jesus is ‘the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone.’ Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:11-12)

Respond: Today, Lord, help me to live out the truth that You alone are God and You alone can save me from a fate worse than death, being separated from you while living in this world and for eternity beyond death. Be the Lord of my decisions, my thoughts, my mouth, and my actions. Help me to put the full weight of my trust for all good and necessary things in You alone. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen

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