Anger and How God Can Turn It Into Love

As Jesus' behavior in tomorrow's Gospel lesson (John 2:13-22) will remind us, there are times when it's OK for us to get angry.

When God is being dishonored or an injustice is being perpetrated against the weak or defenseless, anger is very appropriate. Righteous indignation is no sin. In Ephesians 4:6, the book of the Bible which provides the verses on which today's Our Daily Bread post is based, we're told, "Be angry but do not sin" (Ephesians 4:26).

So, anger isn't a sin in itself. But when anger leads to grudge-holding, when we use it as an excuse for not forgiving others, we sin.

Our moments of anger present us with enormous spiritual dangers. We risk losing our relationship with God and so, losing our salvation.

Here's why: After teaching the disciples to pray, "Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors," He goes on to tell them (and us): "For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but it you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses" (Matthew 6:12, 14-15).

The greatest danger associated with anger then, is that it can tempt us to see ourselves as gods, standing in judgment over others.

Jesus says that if we're intent on holding onto our anger, we'd better prepare ourselves for seeing God judge us by the same stringent standards we apply to others. Forgiveness and new life are available still as free gifts to all who repent and believe in Jesus. But if we add conditions to our willingness to love and forgive others--even our "enemies," those same standards will be adopted by God to us. In spite of His desire to forgive and embrace us, God will let us lie in the beds we ourselves make.

Jesus puts it this way: "For with the judgment you make you will be judged..." (Matthew 7:2).

But by God's grace, through Christ, we can be free of anger that destroys us, destroys our relationships, and drives wedges between God and us, between us and other people.

Anger should be like a thunderstorm. No matter how fierce a thunderstorm may be, it always passes on.

That's why after telling us, "Be angry, but do not sin," Ephesians goes on to say: "Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil" (Ephesians 4:26-27).

In other words, either get things resolved (Jesus gives a process for conflict resolution in Matthew 18:15-20) or, if you don't feel it's serious enough to warrant trying to resolve things with the other person, then forget about it, never give it another thought, let it go.

(It's instructive that the usual New Testament word for forgive is aphiemi, which literally means release. When we forgive others, we release them of the "debt" they owe us. We also release ourselves from the tension and pain that come to us when we hold onto our grudges.)

A few weeks ago, one of our Saint Matthew young people asked a practical question: "How can I love a creepy classmate?" Jesus tells us that we're to love others as we love ourselves.

How do you that with people who are creepy?

Or, for that matter, how do you love someone with whom you're angry?

How do you love the volatile and unloving who may readily spark your anger?

I'll tell you one way it can't be done. It can't be done if we, with gritted teeth, resolve to love others. Resolve to love the unlovable on the strength of your own goodwill and you'll break that resolution quicker than the ones you make on New Year's Eve each year!

But here's a technique I've mentioned before, one that works for me. "Lord," I pray, "I'm finding it hard to love so and so. You tell me that without Jesus, I can do nothing, and I'm really feeling my powerlessness in this situation. So, God, I'm asking you to push me out of the way. Love this person through me. Work Your love for them in me until, by Your grace, I learn to love them." God has never failed to answer that prayer. (It usually takes a long time.)

It's comforting to know that God honors the prayers of those who humbly admit their shortcomings and ask God to compensate for their weaknesses.

David speaks for me anyway when He prays to God in Psalm 51: "You desire truth in the inward being...You have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, You would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise" (vv. 6, 16-17).

Comforting to me also are the words of the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians: "...I will boast...of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me...whenever I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).

God gives the strength to be faithful and to keep striving to be faithful, to those who honestly admit their human weakness and their need of the strength that comes from Christ, in every aspect of their lives.

In today's post from Our Daily Bread, writer Dave Branon reminds us of directives for Christlike behavior given in Ephesians 5 and other places in the New Testament. Place like Ephesians 5:8, that says, "Live as children of the light," meaning that the lives of people who believe in Jesus ought to reflect the presence of Jesus, the Light of the world, in all that they do.

Or Ephesians 4:29-32, where we're told to avoid "evil talk," to give grace to others, and put away things like bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling with others, slander and malice, and instead embrace a life in which we are "kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you" (Ephesians 4:29-32).

Or, Colossians 4:6, where Paul says: "Let your speech always be gracious."

If those directives and Jesus' command that we love others as we love ourselves intimidate you (and if they don't intimidate you, they should), don't throw in the towel or decide that being a Christian is just for spiritual superstars. The God Who loved you enough to go to the cross for you and then rose to open up eternity to those you when you (daily) repent and (daily) believe in Jesus, also loved you enough to (daily) give you the power to love others as you have been loved.

We begin to acquire that power when we confess our weak inability to love and ask Christ to fill us with His love.

And the power to love others as Christ commands grows in us as we keep offering that same prayer of weakness and need to God every day.

You may be barely conscious of the changes God brings into your life as, in Jesus' Name, you daily admit your weaknesses to God and seek His strength to love as You have been loved. You'll hardly feel how God turns your anger into love.

But God will notice...and His judgment is the only one that matters.

Life Isn't Like 'Let's Make a Deal'

"Good works are not the means of salvation but the result."

That sentence comes at the end of today's installment of Our Daily Bread. I found the entire piece moving.

But as it moved me, it also conveyed great Biblical theology, based on Micah 6:1-8. (Incidentally, be sure to read the hyperlinked passage from Micah before reading the hyperlinked Our Daily Bread post.)

So often, we see the frequently-quoted (and beautiful) Micah 6:8, in isolation from its context. Viewed in that way, it's possible for us to think that God is commanding the performance of good deeds--doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God--as means by which we earn God's forgiveness and grace.

But when you look at the verses immediately preceding verse 8, you see that the theme here is that forgiveness and relationship with God cannot be secured by the performance of good deeds. We can't earn God's favor, forgiveness, or the new and eternal life, what we Christians call salvation, that only He can give.

Life with God isn't like being a contestant on Let's Make a Deal.

Life with God is like this:

• FIRST, we surrender to and receive God's grace. God already loves you. God already has done everything needed for you to be reconciled to Him. He did it all through Jesus Christ. You don't have to make deals with God by performing guilt- or fear-induced good works.
• THEN, good works become not ways of winning the approval of people or of God, but of expressing our thanks to God for all His undeserved gifts, most especially the gift of Christ, God in the flesh, Who lived, died, and rose to give all these gifts to who will divest themselves of their addiction to sin (repent) and surrender their whole lives to Christ (believe only in Him).

When you know that Christ has saved you from sin and death, without any merit or effort on your part, you want to trust Him with every part of your life. You want "to do justice, and to love kindness, and walk humbly with your God..."

Read the New Testament with Us This Year!

Yesterday, our congregation finished reading the entire Bible in a year at a pace of three chapters a day, twenty-one chapters a week. Both as a Christian and as a pastor, it's been an exhilarating experience!

People who have hung in there for the full year and participated in our weekly one-hour discussions of the readings are saying that, as a result of the experience, they feel "more centered" and confident in their faith, closer to God, and more appreciative of the deep connections between the Old and New Testaments. I feel he same way.

All of which is why today, I'm excited that we've started to read just the New Testament in the same way in the coming year. At this slower pace, we'll be able to delve more deeply into God's Word and get to know the God revealed to the whole world ultimately in Jesus, better.

It should be a great journey!

You might want to join along, wherever you are. It's simple: Just read five chapters of the New Testament--from Matthew to Revelation--each week over the coming year. You can use Saturdays and Sundays either to "take a break" or, more likely, to catch up.

To help you to better understand what you're reading, I'd suggest that you get a readable commentary on the New Testament. There are lots of good ones out there. But let me recommend two:

Eerdmans Companion to the Bible
The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament

Both are a tad pricey. But, after all, you're investing in your development as a Christian and at Amazon, you can snag both for reasonable prices. I found the second one at Half Price Books for $17.49.

If you have a good study Bible, you may want to forgo buying a commentary. The good ones won't provide you with as much great background information as a good commentary, but they will help you understand what you read. I would suggest you consider buying one of these two:

Life Application Bible
Study Bible

Dig into God's Word. You will not regret it!

Why I Cringe When Presidents Say, "God Bless America"

In recent years, it's become standard practice for our presidents, Republican and Democrat, to end their speeches with variations on the statement, "God bless the United States of America."

On the face of it, it seems noble, a prayer from the political leader of the nation that God would favor America with His grace.

But I cringe every time I hear it. In fact, I hate hearing it!

Why?

First of all, it sounds to me less like a humble supplication for God's help than a xenophobic assertion of American superiority. There are many things about America I love and I am happy to be an American. But God loves all people and all nations. No exceptions.

Secondly, it's an appeal to our egos.

That's what politicians (and advertisers) do, of course. They appeal to our vanity. They woo us with soft soap about how good we are and how much we deserve.

Back in 1976, I remember that Jimmy Carter told us that we deserved a government as good and honest as the American people.

The candidates out on the trail in this miserably depressing campaign season, thirty-six years after Carter's successful run for the presidency, are launching similar appeals to our vanity. (I was going to say "launching similar cow pies." Aren't you glad that I resisted phrasing it in that way?)

To invoke God in such appeals is simply disturbing. The God we meet in the Bible--both the Old and New Testaments--wants to give us much better and more enduring blessings than the politicians envision in their stump speeches and position papers. But we block those blessings from our lives when we insist on living for "me, mine, and my kind."

The God I believe has been revealed to the world--first, through ancient Israel and ultimately, through Jesus Christ--calls us to acknowledge our selfishness and then divest ourselves of it, to rely completely on the compassion, grace, wisdom, and will of God. Christians are to check their egos at the foot of the cross and let God call the shots in their lives. Pride in country is one thing. But there's no place for red, white, and blue swagger in the Kingdom of God.

The Bible shows us that there are greater dangers in this life than those from which governments or nations can protect us. (Even acknowledging the legitimate and God-given role that governments can play in our lives.)

Before these other dangers--our own sin and the waste and heartache it brings to us, others, and the created order, the inevitability of our deaths, and the futility of a life lived in selfishness toward our Creator and other human beings--governments, presidents, and kings are impotent.

That's why these words appear in the New Testament portion of the Bible:

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. (1 Peter 5:6-7)

The God shown to the world in Jesus Christ, Who took the death sentence our sin merits and then rose from the dead, doesn't promise us a perfect life in this world. He also doesn't promise that He will validate our egotism or xenophobia.

But if we will humble ourselves by turning from our sin and surrendering our lives to Him, He will fill us with a sense of purpose and peace in this life and the certainty of eternal life with God. He will help us to live in the relationships of tough love toward God and neighbors that He wills for the human race, not just Americans.

A third reason I'm disturbed when presidents end their speeches with, "God bless America" is that it sounds like a perfunctory add-on designed to appeal or placate the religious demographic.

The Second Commandment given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai says: "You shall not take the Name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold guiltless those who take His Name in vain."

In explaining the commandment in The Small Catechism, Martin Luther wrote:

We should fear and love God so that we do not use His Name superstitiously or to curse, swear, lie, or deceive, but call upon Him in every time of need, and worship Him with prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.

I hope that presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama are sincerely using God's Name in God-honoring ways at the ends of their speeches.

But, as a student of history, I can tell you that George Washington didn't end all of his presidential addresses in this way. Neither did Abraham Lincoln. Neither did most of our presidents.

In fact, it seems that the more distant we grow from God in post-Christian America, the more God's Name gets used in our political rhetoric, as though we were invoking some ancient and forsaken incantation over our spiritually befuddled, take-one-from-column-A-and-two-from-column-B nation.

I'd love for our national leaders to use God's Name less and to rely on God more in their decision-making.

I'd like to keep the Name of God sacred and not hear it used as an appeal to national egomania.

When Christ becomes the center of our lives, the prayer, "God, bless America" becomes a little less meaningful.

We're more inclined to pray, "Thank You, God, for all the undeserved blessings--forgiveness of sin, new and everlasting life--that You've given to me. How can I share them, along with Your physical and financial blessing to me, with others?"

Or, we're inclined to ask God to turn America, starting with ourselves, to humble submission to Jesus Christ alone.

Or maybe, we might feel compelled to ask God to teach us how to encourage our neighbors--and our presidents--to end their speeches not with a benediction, but an exhortation: "America, bless God!"

Have Your Say...Bruce Springsteen's 'Wrecking Ball'

I used to be a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. And I caught the bug before TIME and Newsweek magazines both featured him on their front covers in the same week. Along with Jon Landau, the Rolling Stone music critic and subsequent Springsteen producer, in the Boss, I thought I detected the future of rock and roll.

Springsteen's emotive vocals, which he said were inspired in part by Roy Orbison, and lyrics that were topical, timeless, and poetic, undoubtedly paved the way for U2 and a whole gamut of passion rockers.

But right around the release of Nebraska (1982), three decades ago, Bruce lost me. The passion seemed forced and instead of bravely scoping out new musical territory, as he had on The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle and Born to Run, Springsteen seemed bent on repeating other peoples' musical histories while trying to vivify his music with "conviction."

He's a massive talent and he's laid down some of the greatest rock and roll of all time, but I just haven't been into Springsteen for years.

I rarely buy music any more. I grow more frugal as I grow older. I bought one release in 2010, none in 2011.

But Springsteen has a new LP out. Should I give it a chance? Lady Gaga loves it (for its "passion"), while Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune pans Wrecking Ball, the title of Springsteen's newest studio release. Frankly, I couldn't care less about LG's musical tastes, though Kot's arguments, given Springsteen's decades-long track record, ring true.

What do you say? Have you bought Wrecking Ball? What do you think?

The Kirk Cameron Firestorm (Preceded by Some Cameron Caveats)

But first, a set of Cameron caveats...

Actor and evangelist Kirk Cameron has gotten a lot of flack for his comments on homosexuality, offered in response to questions posed to him during the Piers Morgan Show on CNN several nights ago.

Cameron said that homosexuality is "unnatural" and contrary to God's will for human beings. He also said, in response to another question by Morgan, that if one of his six children indicated an orientation to homosexuality, he would advise them that it's not always right to act on our feelings.

A firestorm of condemnation has befallen Cameron since, particularly from the Hollywood community. Most notable of all, maybe, was the response of Alan Thicke, who played the father to Cameron's character on the TV sitcom, Growing Pains. Said Thicke on his Twitter account:

I'm getting him [Cameron] some new books. The Old Testament simply can't be expected to explain everything.
— Alan Thicke (@alan_thicke) March 5, 2012

Thicke's remarks reflect a common mis-perception about the Old Testament. The stereotype, even among misinformed and Biblically-illiterate Christians, is that the God of the Old Testament is severe, harsh, unbending, and brutal, whereas the God Who comes into the world in the person of Jesus is, as someone memorably put it, "Mister Rogers in a bath robe," a softie. I even heard a pastor of my own denomination once say--I'm paraphrasing--that, "in the Old Testament, God hadn't really gotten the hang of being God and improved His performance in the New Testament."

For the record, Jesus, the One we Christians confess to be God incarnate (in the flesh) saw no difference between Himself and the God revealed in Old Testament times. In John 10:30, Jesus is quoted as saying: "The Father and I are one."

Also for the record, Jesus repeatedly gave His stamp of approval to the law God gave in Old Testament times. Notably, in Matthew 5, Jesus says:

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished [until Jesus fully ushers in His kingdom on His return to the earth]. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of God." (Matthew 5:17-19)

There are several important points to be made here:

(1) There were three kinds of law in the Old Testament.

There was ritual/sacrificial laws, from which even regulations about diet emanated. These were rooted in the sacrificial system in which people offered up lambs, birds, or, if they were especially poor, cereal to pay the penalty for their sin to God.

But Jesus, the New Testament says is "the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world," Whose "once and for all" sacrifice has done for all eternity what the sacrificial system could not do: make us right with God. So ritual/sacrificial law is no longer needed or operative.

A second kind of law in the Old Testament was civil law. It functioned to regulate the everyday lives in the same way laws passed by Congress, state legislatures, and city councils function today. We don't live under a theocratic government system today. So Old Testament civil law, meant to govern the Hebrews in the promised land, is no longer valid.

But in the passage from Matthew above, Jesus is talking about the Mosaic Law, the Ten Commandments. They are valid for all time.

(2) The law of God cannot save us from sin, death, or eternal separation from God. That can only be accomplished by Jesus. The law of God can act as a mirror, showing us how far we are from God and how hopeless it is for us to try to be "good enough" to get into God's kingdom. Entrance into God's kingdom and "good graces" comes about only for those who repent (turn from sin) and believe in (entrust their whole lives to) Jesus.

At the top of my blog is a personal confession:

I'm a sinner, no better than any other human being. I have no personal bragging rights. My only boast is that, in spite of my many sins and my numerous faults, through God's grace, given in Jesus Christ, my sins are forgiven and I have a new life.

I'm not perfect and there is no person in the world is more of a sinner than I am.

But God's law has taught me my need for grace, God's charitable forgiveness and new life. Jesus gives that grace. The grace Jesus offers becomes mine when I surrender to Jesus.

Thereafter, my call is to daily surrender to Jesus: daily repent, daily follow Him.

In this imperfect world, with our inborn impulses to go our own ways instead of God's way, we need to know God's law. We need to know the truth about sin and the truth about the grace God offers to sinners through Jesus.

And we need people who are brave enough to share these truths with us. Otherwise, we will only walk away from God and the new and everlasting life that can only come to us through repentance and belief in Jesus.

This is why Jesus takes God's law so seriously and why, if anything, Jesus is more strict about the Ten Commandments than God is seen to be in the Old Testament.

During His famous 'Sermon on the Mount,' which many people know by the short set of beatitudes that Jesus gives near its beginning ("Blessed are the poor in spirit...Blessed are those who mourn...Blessed ate the meek..and so on), Jesus explicates the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses and the people of the world at Mount Sinai centuries earlier.

A small sampling of what Jesus says shows Him applying a much stricter interpretation of the commands than is explicitly made by God in the Old Testament. A few examples:

• "You have heard that it was said to those in ancient times, 'You shall not murder'...But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister [Jesus here is referring to grudge-holding refusal to forgive], you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council [this refers to the leadership of Christian communities, congregations]; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire..." [Yes, Jesus believed/believes there was/is a hell. It's what He came to save us from.] (Matthew 5:21-22)
• "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his heart." (Matthew 5:27-28)

Jesus claims that the Ten Commandments apply to much more than our behaviors. They go to our motives.  When our motives are wrong, Jesus says, we violate God's commands even before we have done a thing. That's strict. And it's in the New Testament, not the Old.

So, apart from affirming all of the Ten Commandments, what exactly do Jesus and the New Testament have to say about sexuality and homosexuality?

To start with, in Matthew 19:4-5, Jesus quotes two passages from Genesis in the Old Testament to give His understanding of marriage:

"Have you not read that the One Who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, the two shall become one flesh'?" 

Jesus clearly sees marriage as a covenant involving God, a woman, and a man.

There are some who read these words and say, "Jesus lived a long time ago. He didn't know the things about sexuality we know today." But Christians believe that Jesus is God and that God invented sex. God has no ignorance either about how sex is supposed to work or how it's not supposed to work.

Some also, thinking of Jesus as simply a first-century Judean man (and not also, as the New Testament teaches, God), will say that Jesus couldn't have possibly observed the gay lifestyle we see today. This is a strange argument. It's offered by the same people who claim that varied sexual orientations have always existed in human beings. Yet, they argue in this case that homosexuality as known today is a unique historical phenomenon beyond the comprehension of Jesus. Of course, this argument is a logical inconsistency. In any case, various sexual practices were more widely present and known in the first-century world in which Jesus lived while on earth than are probably known or touted today. Yet He still insisted that sexual intimacy is for a woman and a man in marriage. Period.

If we invest any credibility in Jesus, especially if we believe that He is God in the flesh, Who came to die and rise to bring new life to people made dead by their sins (you and me), then everything He asserts must be seen as the truth and not as the mere opinions of a person many today insist on disdainfully describing as "a great teacher."

This, of course, is not the last word on sexuality or homosexuality in the New Testament. Take, for example, Romans 1, where God's Holy Spirit inspires Paul to write:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. 

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. 

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. (Romans 1:18-27)

Here, homosexuality is seen as a notable outgrowth of our human penchant for suppressing the truth about our sin--and so suppressing the truth about our need for forgiveness or for God.

But one of the most interesting New Testament passages of all is 1 Timothy 1:8-11. Here, without saying that's what he's going to do, Paul proceeds to interpret the Ten Commandments as God's will for the human race. Here's what he writes, with a note on the commands to which he's referring in brackets:

Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it legitimately [We use God's law illegitimately if we make obedience to it a condition for salvation. No one is capable of keeping God's law. But Christ has kept it for those who turn from sin and believe in Him. He then fills believers with the Holy Spirit, Who helps us as we surrender each day to Christ, to resist sin, identify the sins we have thoughtlessly committed, seek forgiveness in Jesus' Name, and receive the power to continue to the process of being made over in God's image.]. This means understanding that the law is laid down not for the innocent but for the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinful [The First Commandment: You shall have no other gods before Me.], for the unholy and profane [The Second and Third Commandments: You shall not take the Name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold guiltless those who take His Name in vain; Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy], for those who kill their father or mother [The Fourth Commandment: Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God give you], for murderers [The Fifth Commandment: You shall not kill, fornicators, sodomites [The Sixth Commandment: You shall not commit adultery], slave traders [The Seventh Commandment: Paul clearly found slave trading a particularly onerous form of thievery, involving the theft of a person's freedom and livelihood, so violating the stricture, You shall not steal], liars, perjurers [The Eighth Commandment: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor], and whatever else [Paul leaves out specific reference to the Ninth and Tenth Commandments. But its clear where he's going with his comments} is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.

Both fornication and sodomy are listed as ways of adulterating the gift of human sexuality. This means that premarital sex and any extramarital sex, heterosexual and homosexual, is contrary to God's will. It's not a worse sin than any other sin. But it is a sin and to engage in it unrepentantly is spiritually dangerous.

After Kirk Cameron's appearance on his show, Piers Morgan commented:

I don't think this Kirk Cameron interview went entirely how he thought it would... #CNN
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) March 3, 2012

Maybe not. But I can tell you one thing that didn't take Cameron by surprise and that's the outrage, censure, and condemnation he's undergone since making the comments. He knew when he opened his mouth in response to Morgan's questions about homosexuality, I'm sure, that he was going to be savaged by a culture that is moving away from the Old and New Testaments and from Jesus. He knew that his comments would be welcomed in the same way any belief that runs counter to the prevailing culture is welcomed, with scorn and derision.

That's why, irrespective of the many ways in which I disagree with Kirk Cameron on faith and politics, I agree with Morgan who said that Cameron had been brave in the straightforward manner in which he answered Morgan's questions.

The New Testament tells Christians to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:26-27). I think that's what Cameron did on Morgan's show when speaking about homosexuality.

Think of it in this way: If you had a cure for cancer or AIDS and had a friend (or even someone who hated you) who suffered from those afflictions, wouldn't you rightly be considered a monster if you didn't share that cure with them? Of course you would be!

If you believe that God condemns sin, but releases people from the power of sin and its consequence, death, by repenting and believing in Jesus, trusting God's wisdom to be greater than our own, what choice do you have but to speak the truth in love, to warn people of the trap of unrepented sin that leads us away from God?

It doesn't surprise any Christian to see people being so condemnatory of Kirk Cameron today. The Savior Who both Cameron and I, in different ways, follow, once said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). People didn't want to hear that truth; so, they killed Jesus. The truth of the Bible always crashes our parties of self-worship and self-indulgence. But if we will only listen and believe, God will make us part of His new creation. And to be part of that new creation for all eternity makes all the hell we take from others for daring to speak God's truth in this life worth the trouble!

I don't go for your lame acting. I don't go for your "end times" fixation. I don't go for your mixture of politics and theology. But you go, Kirk!

Radical Problem, Radical Therapy

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

Mark 8:31-38
Imagine a scene with me. You're in your doctor's office for a consultation. A few weeks earlier, you found something that wasn't quite right and went to see the doctor. She ordered up some tests and now you're back to see her to learn the results. She enters the office and says, "I'm sorry, but it's very serious. You have cancer and the prognosis is not good." Your heart is sinking until she offers this word of hope: "But I have a treatment regimen that's going to make everything OK." Shuddering with excitement, you listen closely as she tells you the treatment: "I'm going to give you a facelift."

You know that can't be right: When you're up against a major illness, a superficial remedy won't do. In the face of radical maladies, only radical therapies will do.

We human beings are confronted with a major malady. It's called death and it's the result of sin.

You and I were created in the image of God. That means that we are unique among all of God's creatures and creation. We are the pinnacle of God's creation. But sin has distorted our very natures. And because the human race is the pinnacle of the creation, charged with being God's good managers of all things, the Bible says that all creation groans under the weight of our sin.

The Bible uses that word, sin, in two different ways.

One way the Bible talks about sin is as a condition of our birth, what the Bible scholars and theologians call original sin. This is what David is referring to in Psalm 51:5. The psalm is a song of repentance on David's part, composed after he had committed adultery and then had his lover's husband killed. David asks for forgiveness and renewal from God, taking complete blame for his sins. Then he says this: "Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me."

I'm sorry to have to reveal this to you, but if you had human parents, you were born guilty, too.

Sin is a debt we owe to God and you and I are born with a debt so crippling we could never possibly pay it off.

But if that sounds bad, it gets worse.

Being born in sin means that we have an inborn inclination to add to our debts by sinning ourselves. (This inborn inclination to sin is what the Lutheran confessions call concupiscence, a predisposition to use God's good gifts at the wrong times, or for the wrong reasons, or with the wrong people.)

The other way the Bible talks about sin is the way you and I usually use the word: a violation of the will of God as expressed in the Ten Commandments. We fail to honor God as God. We fail to show as much concern for others as we do for ourselves.

Because of the condition of original sin, our sins are stubbornly evidenced in all our thinking, speaking, and living. In Romans 7:15, the apostle Paul writes: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want [anything that expresses love and regard for God and others], but I do the very thing I hate [anything that has me setting off on my own without regard to the will of God]." "I sin," Paul is saying, "and left to my own devices I cannot help myself."

Now folks, this is serious business. We are born in sin and we find ourselves incapable of refraining from sin. Paul reminds us elsewhere that there is only one outcome we can expect from the sin that, in both its forms, live within all of us: "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). We sin and deserve to die,  separated from God forever.

"Wait a minute," you might say. "I know I'm not perfect. But I've never committed any of the really big sins. I've never murdered someone. I've never committed adultery. I've never embezzled thousands from my employer."

In James 2:10-11, we read: "For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For the One Who said, 'You shall not commit adultery,' also said, 'You shall not murder.' Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law."

If we violate one of God's commandments--from taking God's Name in vain to bearing false witness about a classmate, church member, or neighbor--God considers us in violation of all His commandments.

In sin, we have a major problem. The prognosis is death.

And even we who confess Jesus as our King and God need radical therapy every day.

That's what Jesus is talking about in today's Gospel lesson. Turn to Mark 8:31-38.

To understand this passage, we need to set the stage. Shortly before the incidents recounted in our lesson, Jesus had a conversation with His disciples. "Who is everybody saying that I am?" Jesus asks. The disciples report that some say He is John the Baptist returned from the dead. Others say that Jesus is actually Elijah, who had lived and been carried into heaven by a chariot of fire some nine centuries earlier. Others, the disciples reported, said that Jesus was "the prophet," a mysterious figure whose appearance many had been awaiting. "But," Jesus asked the disciples, "who do you say that I am."

In Mark 8:29, Peter says, "You are the Messiah [or, the Christ]."

The title, Christ [from Christos as it appears in the New Testament, which was written in Greek] or Messiah [from the Hebrew in which the Old Testament was written], means Anointed One.

The kings of God's people--called variously Hebrews, Israelites, Judeans, Jews--were always anointed with oil on being enthroned.

In Old Testament times, as much as eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, God had revealed through the prophets that there would one day come a special Christ--Anointed One--who would reconcile God and the human race.

Through the intervening centuries, anticipation had risen and fallen for the promised Christ. And there were certain expectations that people developed about the coming Christ or Messiah.

The people of first-century Judea, the place to which Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, came to live, thought that the Messiah would make what would amount to cosmetic changes, the moral equivalent of a facelift as a cure for cancer.

To them, the problems they faced had nothing to do with themselves or their own deficiencies. They wanted a king who would toss the Romans out of their land. They wanted an end to oppressive government regulations. They wanted the rich to pay their fair share in taxes and ease up on the poor. They wanted a king who would do their bidding, using the latest Gallup Poll as his guide for pleasing them. As is true for us today, their idea of what God should do in their lives was very different from what God had in mind.

That's why Peter's declaration of faith in Jesus as the Messiah was so dangerous. Jesus had to make sure that Peter and the rest of the disciples received some instruction on what it means to confess Jesus as the Christ. He didn't want to feed their false expectations. Jesus had come to do more than offer facelifts to dying people!

Look at Mark 8:31: "Then He began to teach them that the Son of Man [a title Jesus often used for Himself] must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again."

The therapy for our sin, Jesus is saying, begins with Him. He, Who never once sinned, undergoes the suffering and death we deserve for our sin so that the debt can be paid for all who repent and believe in Jesus.

But this was more than Peter could bear!

We have no idea how much attention, if any, he and the other disciples paid to Jesus' prediction that He would rise from the dead. But we do know that he heard Jesus loud and clear when it came to predicting that He would suffer, be rejected, and be killed.

Look at Mark 8:32: "Peter took Him [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke Him." Peter manhandled Jesus, taking Jesus off somewhere away from the rest of the group. The word rebuke, epitimao in the Greek in which Mark originally wrote, means warn, upbraid, condemn, set straight.

Imagine this! Peter has just declared Jesus to be God's Anointed King and now he has the audacity to tell Jesus how to do His job!

But if Peter thought he was sparing Jesus embarrassment by taking Jesus aside, Jesus has no intention of sparing Peter any embarrassment. Jesus knows that Peter is speaking for a lot of people when telling Jesus not to mention things like suffering, crosses, or executions.

Look now at verse 33: "But turning and looking at His disciples, [Jesus] rebuked Peter and said, 'Get behind Me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." 

You'll remember that last Sunday, we considered Jesus' encounter with Satan in the wilderness. Satan tempted Jesus away from suffering, rejection, and the cross. But Jesus knew that He needed to stay the course, whatever pain He caused Himself. 

Now Jesus applies the name of Satan to His right hand man, Peter! Peter may have thought that He was doing a nice thing, like the church member who says, "Pastor, I know that the Bible says that Jesus is the only way to eternity with God, but you make people feel uncomfortable when you tell the truth like that." "Niceness" of the kind Peter exhibits here leads people away from God. "Niceness" like that suits Satan's purposes just fine. Jesus, in essence, is telling Peter, "I am the great Physician and My suffering, rejection by others, and death on a cross are the first part of the cure. So, get out of My way!"

Then, Jesus gives the second part of His radical therapy for our sin and death. Look at verses 34 and 35: "He called the crowd with His disciples, and said to them, 'If any want to become My followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for My sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it."

Here we see that to believe that Jesus is the Christ--the King, the Lord of all--is more than just saying the right words on Sunday mornings. 

To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is, first of all, to surrender ourselves, even to the point of discomfort and death, to God's only aim for our lives, our sole aim in life. Do you know what God's aim is for your life? Colossians 3:18 says: "And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit."

God aims to make us like Jesus! 

That means that you and I need to remain focused--day to day and moment to moment--on Jesus. 

We need to daily repent for sin and allow the Holy Spirit to renew us. 

As we stay focused on Jesus, through all of life, the Holy Spirit works a miracle: We who have been distorted by sin are made over in the image of Christ! 

It doesn't happen overnight. 

It doesn't happen within our time on this earth. 

On the way to our resurrection from the dead, we won't avoid suffering, rejection, or death any more than Jesus did. 

But we become more and more like Jesus. 

1 John 3:2 says to those who dare to follow Jesus, "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when [Jesus] is revealed [on His return to the earth], we will be like Him..." We will be made over into the truly human beings God intended us to be when He made the first man and the first woman.

To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is, secondly, to embrace the very life style of Jesus. When, through Jesus' death and resurrection, you understand that you are number one in God's eyes, you no longer feel the need to "look out for number one." You can start to look out for others the way Jesus looks out for us. 

Philippians 2:3-4 says: "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others."

John Stott tells the story of a college classroom in India. The professor, a Hindu, realized that one of his students was a Christian. "If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ," the professor told the student, "India would be at your feet tomorrow." 

No Christian wants to have others at their feet. But our joy as Christians is only made complete when we share Christ with others and they too, come to believe in Jesus as the Christ.

Sin and death threaten to separate us from God for eternity.

God's cure is radical, but sure. 

It begins with the Christ, God the Son, suffering, dying, and rising for us. 

And it's fulfilled when, after confessing Jesus with our lips, we confess Him with our lives, taking up our crosses and following Him: submitting ourselves to the death of our old sinful selves, committing ourselves to letting God make us over in the image of Jesus Himself, and embracing the very life of self-sacrifice and unstinting love that Jesus lived.

May God give us the power to have a faith that's more than words, a faith that shows in our whole lives. May we submit to the radical cure that gives us life with God forever!

Amen

"Post-Birth Abortions"?

That's what two academic ethicists in Australia are advocating. The prefer the term "post-birth abortion" to infanticide.

God grant that their proposals, which they say should extend to babies whose mothers simply don't want them, never gain credence.

The Love We Need to Face the Wilderness

[This, as near as I can recall, is the sermon I shared this morning during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]

Mark 1:9-15
Years ago, when our kids were small, we were all shopping together at a mall book store in Toledo. In the children's section, we ran across a book with a blue cover showing a happy toddler in a bath room with reams of toilet paper he had pulled from the dispenser. The title was Love You Forever. Ann read it first and then, crying, handed it to me. When I read it, I couldn't keep from crying either. Love You Forever is a fun and touching ode of love from a mom to her child. The text is punctuated with a recurring promise from mother to child: "I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."

Any normal parent can identify with that sentiment. When parents have children enter their lives, they don't stop being parents just because their kids grow up and live responsible, adult lives. As long as we're living, our kids will be our kids and even if they sin and rebel and walk away from God or us, we will always love them.

Parents who love their children give their kids strong foundations for life. And, while I hate to think of this as being genetically built into us, studies have shown that the love, support, and caring discipline provided by fathers is especially important.

Several studies, for example, have been done comparing the faith lives of two groups of children, those who regularly attend worship with their moms only as opposed to those who do so regularly with their dads only. Those who attend with only their fathers are far more likely to continue with lives of prayer, service in Christ's Name, and regular worship than those brought to worship only by their mothers.

Of course, it's better when both parents go to worship and Sunday School with their kids. Better too, when both parents seek to live out their faith in Christ on Mondays through Saturdays, as well as on Sundays. Martin Luther said that the family is to be "a little church," in which Christ is daily worshiped, glorified, and served. But these studies on the spiritual development of children are echoed in studies into other realms of living too: When fathers love, affirm, and nurture children, children are better prepared to face life's challenges.

Our Gospel lesson shows us that God the Father knew the importance of giving strong affirmations of His love to Jesus, God the Son. He knew that His love could sustain Jesus through all that Jesus came into the world to do for you and me. Take a look at the first few verses of today's Gospel lesson, Mark 1:9-11.

Jesus, Mark tells us, was baptized by John the Baptist. We know, of course, that Jesus didn't need to be baptized by John. John was offering a baptism of repentance, a baptism that symbolized that people were turning away from their sin and turning, instead, in faith toward God, God's will, and God's promises, in anticipation of the coming of the King of kings. Jesus never sinned and Jesus was and is the King of kings. But Jesus also came into our worlds to share everything that we go through. So, He was baptized by John.

Look at what happens next: "...just as He was coming out of the water, He saw the heavens torn apart..." Last Sunday, when we looked at Jesus' transfiguration, we saw this very thing happen. The heavens were torn apart so that God the Father could express His approval for Jesus. The same verb translated as "torn apart" shows up again at another place in Mark's Gospel: At the moment when Jesus died on the cross and curtain in the temple that concealed the holy of holies, the place where God dwelt on earth, was torn. In all these instances, the unseen realm of God were breaking into our fallen, imperfect world. God's kingdom was breaking into the world at the very moment that Jesus was baptized in the Jordan.

Now, look at what comes next: "...and the Spirit [descended] like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are My Son, the Beloved; with You I am well pleased." Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all together in that moment. This really was the kingdom of God breaking into our world!

But notice what God the Father says to Jesus: "You are My Son, the Beloved; with You I am well pleased." Do you see what the Father was saying to Jesus? It's this: "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."

The One Jesus taught us to call Abba, Father, the first person of our three-three-person-in-one-God is a great Father! "I love You completely and always," the Father was telling Jesus.

Something similar happens to us when we are baptized. The Word of God is invoked over the waters of Holy Baptism, the Holy Spirit reaches down to us, and in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we become children of God. Rebellious children can walk away from parents and God, of course. But that doesn't alter God's love for or commitment to us. Pull out the green hymn books and turn to page 124 in the front. This comes near the end of the baptismal liturgy. A blessing is given to the baptized:

Mark James, child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.

You see, through the pastor and the Church, God tells the baptized, in words similar to those the Father addressed to Jesus in today's Gospel lesson: "I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."

Jesus needed the assurance of the Father's love for Him. Go back to our Gospel lesson, to Mark 1:12. "And the Spirit immediately drove Him [Jesus] into the wilderness."

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke are a bit more dainty in describing how Jesus came to be in the wilderness. They say that the Holy Spirit "led" Jesus there.

Mark though, says that the Spirit "drove" Jesus into the wilderness. The word translated into our English translation is, in the Greek in which it was originally written, ekballei, a past tense form of a compound word ekballo. Ek is a prefix meaning out. Ballo, from which we get words like ball and balloon, means throw. Literally, the Holy Spirit threw Jesus out into the wilderness.

The wilderness, or literally in the Greek, the desolate, is a place of terror, a place of sin and temptation, of struggle with tests of character. In other words, the wilderness is the every day world in which you and I live.

It's also a place in which a war for our eternal souls is waged between unseen forces: God and His angels, on the one hand, and Satan--a name for the devil that means adversary--and his demonic forces, on the other.

Through His cross and resurrection, Jesus has already won this war. All who repent and believe in Him and the Good News He has brought are part of God's kingdom and live with God for all eternity, starting right here and now in the wilderness.

But Satan is selfish and desperate, violent and willful. He wants to tear us from God's hands, not because he values us, but because he knows how much God values us, which God showed when Jesus went to a cross bearing our sins on His sinless shoulders.

Some well-meaning Christians deny the existence of the spiritual realm, or of a war going on between God and Satan, with you and me as the prizes for which they battle. Years ago, I was in a study group with other Lutheran pastors. The subject of angels came up and one of our colleagues scoffed at the whole notion of angels or demons, Satan or hell. "I find it hard to believe in extraterrestrials," he told us with something of a smirk. One of our older colleagues put his hand on this fellow's shoulder and said, "Mike, if you don't think that Satan, demons, or hell are real, you haven't been paying attention."

We need to pay attention too!

Turn Ephesians 6:12 in the New Testament. It says: "...our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic forces of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." (And here, "heavenly" doesn't refer to the place where God reigns, but to the unseen spiritual realm where the war for our souls is played out each moment of our lives.)

In the wilderness, you and I are tempted to take the easy way through life: to sin and walk away from God. God will let us do that, if that's the path we choose.

God won't force Himself on us, ever.

And, there are going to be millions of people in hell who were baptized and who are loved passionately by God, but who spurned God's love, Christ's cross, and the call to repent and believe and so are eternally separated from God.

But that isn't the way it has to be!

We can walk with God even in the wilderness and Jesus shows the way. Look at the last phrase of verse 13 in our Gospel lesson: "and the angels waited on Him." If we will rely completely on God, He will care for us. He will make a way through the wilderness.

In his book, You Were Made for More, Pastor Jim Cymbala tells the story of Roberta, a member of his New York City congregation. Roberta had misused drugs and engaged in all sorts of sinful relationships for decades. She came to faith in Christ through Cymbala's congregation and began a life of recovery from her addictions. She was living with God, free of her past. And though she was HIV-positive, Roberta refused to let the possibility of death from AIDs keep her from living life to the full with Christ by her side.

As she was improving, serving God, and growing in her faith, at that moment, a man from her past re-entered her life. (This shouldn't be surprising, by the way. My experience shows that anytime Godly and good things are happening, Satan will try to find ways to derail them.) The man told Roberta that he was clean, free of drugs for some time.

While wary, Roberta began seeing this man. She didn't love him. But she did feel affection for him. And, as she told Cymbala, they knew about each other's "stuff." Maybe they could build a life together. Still, she was still uncertain and praying about things.

In the meantime, the man invited her to visit him at his place in upstate New York. Roberta had a friend who lived in the same little town and, wanting to do things God's way this time, she arranged to stay at the friend's house, then visit the man at his place.

She had settled into her friend's place and borrowed the friend's car to see the man she now referred to as her "boyfriend." But she was thrown out into the wilderness at almost the moment she greeted him in his kitchen. In his pocket, she could see, was a pipe for smoking crack cocaine.

Without saying a word, her head swimming, she went to his living room and began to pray. "God," she cried out silently, "give me strength to get up and run out of this house right now! I know I should leave!"

As Roberta prayed, she heard an unspoken whisper, spoken undoubtedly by Satan, the one who tempted Jesus in His wilderness: "Let's be honest here--this is who [your boyfriend] is, and this is who your are down deep, don't you know?" Satan continued to tell her that her life could never get better, that she could never be right with God, that she ought to make do and once more take up the life of an addict and enjoy some good times before she left this world.

Just then, as though reading from Satan's playbook, the boyfriend came into the living room. He knew that the jig might be up. "Don't leave!" he kept telling Roberta.

But praying to God for strength and help, Roberta picked up her purse, pulled out her keys, made her way to the car, climbed in behind the wheel, and, her hands shaking, put the key in the ignition and drove away.

The man didn't stop campaigning to get her back. He would leave calls on her answering machine. But Roberta didn't answer. You see, she knew what all of the Bible teaches and what we see in Jesus in our Gospel lesson:

When confronted with temptations to sin or testing circumstances that could lure us away from God, we close our ears; we run away from the temptation; and we cry out to God to help us do things the right way, God's way.

And even if and when we do fall into sin, replacing our flimsy wisdom for the true wisdom of God, so long as we're still breathing, we can turn back to God. We can, in the Name of Jesus, turn from sin. We can entrust ourselves to Christ and know that God will make a way through all of our testings and temptations. And we can come back to God, because, as God has said through the death and resurrection of His Son:

"I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."

Trust in Christ and God will make a way for you to believe and to know that His love is always true. It will empower you to live your life a better way, God's way. Amen

How Involved Should the Church Be with Politics? Try Almost Not At All

How involved should the Church be in politics or public policy debates?

How about, except in extreme circumstances, not at all?

At the end of the Gospel lesson for this coming Sunday, we're told:

Now after John [the Baptist] was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news." (Mark 1:14-15)

Did you notice what was missing?

Jesus thought highly of John the Baptist, whose ministry was about calling God's people to turn from sin and trust in God to prepare for the coming of God's Messiah. (This is a Hebrew word that means Anointed One and which was rendered in the Greek language used by all the New Testament's writers as Christos, Christ. Jesus was revealed to be that Messiah or Christ, of course.) Jesus once said, "Truly, I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist..." (Luke 11:11).

But in spite of Jesus' high opinion of John and of the faithfulness with which John pursued his God-given mission and, in spite of the clear injustice of John's arrest or imprisonment, the moment the injustice is perpetrated, Jesus doesn't speak up.

He doesn't agitate for John's release.

He doesn't go to the next meeting of the Jewish leadership council, the Sanhedrin, or wait for the next public appearance of the King Herod Antipas to register complaints.

What's missing is anything akin to political activism on Jesus' part.

Instead, He proclaims the gospel (the good news). Jesus is saying that He is the Messiah Who has come to bring God's reign into the world. "Repent (turn away from sin)," Jesus says, "and believe that I am the Good News of God."

If there had been pundits or talking heads in those days, they might have thought Jesus' first foray into public ministry was anemic and irrelevant. "What about John?" they might have asked. "Aren't you going to go after the authorities to obtain his release? What kind of a leader are you, anyway?"

People undoubtedly did ask questions like these.

If they did, it wouldn't be the last time Jesus disappointed people looking for some other kind of kingdom of God than He was offering.

The people of first century Judea, where Jesus lived, wanted a king who would give the Roman occupiers and the puppet Herodian kings the boot, someone who would give them what was rightly theirs. They wanted a king who would put together a great army and do their bidding.

They wanted a revolution and when Jesus refused to lead one after the roaring welcome they gave to him on what we have since come to call Palm Sunday, they lost their patience with Him and lobbied for His execution on a cross.

Jesus refused to be the King they wanted.

He refused to play political games.

He knew that no amount of lobbying or activism would ever bring God's kingdom into the world.

He knew that even if He bowed to the ways of the world and took control of all the earthly kingdoms that ever were or ever would be, the fundamental issue confronting the human race would not be resolved.

That fundamental issue is that every one of us is born in sin (Psalm 51:5), a condition of alienation from God, and the fact that we can't save ourselves from it or its gravest consequence, death.

It all goes back to our first parents, Adam and Eve. A serpent persuaded them to disobey God and the human race then became infected with the poison of sin. Jesus came into the world in order to absorb all that poison in His own body on a cross. "For our sake [God] made Him to be sin who knew no sin," 2 Corinthians 5:21 in the New Testament says, "so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God."

To be righteous is to be right with God. We're born "not right" with God because of the poison of sin we inherit from our parents.

When Jesus absorbed that poison, He made it possible for us to be right with God and have new lives with Him, starting imperfectly in this world and then, when we are resurrected by God the Father as Jesus was on the first Easter Sunday, in eternity with God.

Jesus wanted to cleanse us from the poison of sin. He knew that He couldn't accomplish that through political action, but only by proclaiming and living out the good news that those who dare to follow Him will be part of His new creation.

Jesus didn't do politics. And, the Bible, God's Word, seems to me to teach that unless governments or kings command us turn our backs on God or the will of God, the Church shouldn't do politics either.

Individual Christians should feel free to be engaged in politics, but not in the Name of God or in the name of Christ's family, the Church.

The Church has much bigger fish to fry than the passage of this or that law or the election of this or that candidate: We're out to invite as many people into God's kingdom as we can.

Politics and public policy would only distract us from doing that.

Repentance: Changing Our Way of Thinking

[This is the text I prepared for this evening's Ash Wednesday worship at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio. But it's not exactly what I preached.]

Psalm 51
You know, sometimes we forget that the Word of God in the Bible arose from specific historical circumstances or specific encounters between God and real life human beings, like you and me.

Take, for example, Psalm 51, which we read responsively a short time ago. It was written by Israel’s King David, later in his reign, sometime after 1003 BC. And it arose from a specific situation.

Open a Bible to 2 Samuel 12. David had committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of one of his most loyal soldiers, Uriah. Bathsheba became pregnant. David tried to make it look as though Uriah was the father. But that didn't work. So, David made arrangements for Uriah to get isolated and exposed to enemy fire and killed in battle. The king God refers to as “a man after My own heart,” was guilty of adultery and murder!

In 2 Samuel, God sends the prophet Nathan to confront David for his sins. Nathan does it by telling David the story of a poor man who owned a ewe lamb. This ewe lamb was so beloved that both the poor man and his family see the lamb as another one of the children. When a rich man down the road has visitors, he decides that as a good host, he has to throw a big dinner for them. But he doesn’t want to use any of his own flock for the main course. So, he steals the poor man’s ewe lamb and serves it up at dinner.

Look at David’s reaction in 2 Samuel 12:5-6. “So David’s anger was greatly aroused against the man, and he said to Nathan, ‘As the Lord lives, the man who has done this shall surely die! And he shall restore fourfold for the lamb because he did this thing and because he had no pity.”

The king had spoken and rendered his verdict. But there was a question: Who was the man who had done this awful thing?

Nathan gives the answer in verse 7, telling King David: “You are the man!"

He goes on: "'Thus says the Lord God of Israel: “I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your keeping [This, by the way, doesn’t mean that God had given David permission to take these women as his wives. It means that God had given David control over that which his predecessor, in that patriarchal society, had control.]...and [I] gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if that had been too little, I also would have given you much more! Why have you despised the commandment of the Lord to do evil in his sight? You have killed Uriah...you have taken his wife to be your wife...”’”

Through Nathan, God was telling David, “I gave you blessings you never could have earned or deserved. I did these things for you out of pure divine and fatherly love and mercy. But instead of gratitude, instead of trying to follow the way of life I revealed long ago in the Ten Commandments, you decided to go your own way. Why?”

You know, every time a Christian deliberately flouts the will of God, I’m sure God asks the same question: “I went to the cross for you, endured the beating, the punches, the spitting, the insults, the nails, the thorns plaited into a mocking crown, and a slow agonizing death...all for you. I took the punishment for sin you deserved. I rose from death to open eternity up to you. I did all these things to give you a new life freed from the power of sin and death. I set you free to become the person I made you to be. And I want to spend eternity showering blessings on you. So, why would you block Me from your life by deliberately doing anything that I have shown you is the way of death? Why?"

Having been confronted for his sins, David might have reacted in a number of ways.

As king, he could have simply ordered Nathan’s death. It wouldn't have been the first time David had ordered the murder of an innocent man, after all. But David didn’t do that.

Or, he might have made excuses, like the ones I've heard people make in counseling sessions through the years:

“My wife hasn’t been fulfilling my needs.”

Or, “You must understand, Nathan: Bathsheba and I really love each other.”

Or, “If I hadn’t ordered Uriah’s death, the poor old devil would have died of a broken heart anyway knowing that his wife loved me and not him.”

But David didn’t make excuses either.

Or, after hearing Nathan out, David might have set up a commission to discern, given the ways the world had changed and grown more complex since God gave the Ten Commandments, whether sin and murder might not be sins any more. “If our consciences are bound to a different idea,” David might have said, “it could be that now, when we know so much more than God did hundreds of years ago, adultery and murder are OK.”

But David didn’t lash out at Nathan, didn’t make excuses, or appoint a commission to cover the truth with lies.

Look at how David did react, in verse 13: “I have sinned against the Lord."

That's it.

Here, David is exemplifying what the Bible--both the Old and the New Testament in their different languages--calls repentance.

In the Greek of the New Testament, the most common word for repent is metanoia. It means to have a change of mind.

The person who repents--or lives the lifestyle Martin Luther called, “daily repentance and renewal”--is saying, “I got off track. I was thinking my way. I was following my own sinful nature--the nature that David mentions in Psalm 51:5, when he confesses, ‘I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.’ But now, aware of the sins I’ve committed by following that way, I’m asking God to change my mind, to change the way I’ve been thinking. I’m asking God to help me think His way, not mine.”

This is what Paul is talking about in Philippians 2:5 when he exhorts followers of Jesus: “Let this mind be in you which also was in Christ Jesus.”

God wants us to take on the mind of Jesus: a mind that doesn’t look out just for what I want in this moment, but that wants what God wants, even when what God wants isn’t pleasant for me.

To repent is to confess that when God and I disagree about anything, God is always right and I am always wrong.

After David said plainly, “I have sinned against the Lord,” Nathan told David, “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.”

This all reminds me of what Paul says in Romans 6:23: “...the wages of sin is death [death is what we sinners deserve], but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Only the God we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus can set us free from death--separation from God--and hell.


And that can only happen when we repent and trust in Christ, relying on Christ alone to give our lives meaning.

On this Ash Wednesday, as we remember that we are creatures of God formed from the dust and that we will return to dust again one day, we also remember this: If we will change our minds, turning to Christ and to the way of God, rather than to the ways we prefer, this dust will rise again.

We can live each day knowing that while God will never force Himself on us, if we will keep turning to Christ--living, as the New Testament puts it, "in Christ"--nothing will ever separate us from Him.

And we can trust the promise that Jesus made to the sister of His friend, Lazarus: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in Me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me, will never die" (John 11:25).

Had David steeped himself in God’s Word, remained in fellowship with other believers, or been praying the day he first set eyes on Bathsheba--in other words, if he had allowed God to reign over his thoughts--the terrible chain of events that followed never would have taken place.

That’s one lesson we can learn from David’s experience: Life with God belongs to those who seek live life God's way and not our own.

But there’s another lesson, a lesson about God’s grace and goodness: If, when we have sinned, we can forgo our tendency to block out the truths of God we don’t like and instead, let God change our minds, acknowledge our sins, and trust in God to do the right thing--even when it means consequences we don’t like--our relationship with God can be restored.

Life with God belongs to all who repent for sin and trust in Christ. May repentance and renewal be our way of life not just on Ash Wednesday or during Lent, but every day we live on earth. Amen.

How to See Jesus

[This is the sermon prepared for today's worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio. While the one given had a lot of what's here, this isn't the actual sermon delivered.]


Mark 9:2-9

On this Transfiguration Sunday, the last Sunday of the Epiphany season, we’re going to explore the Gospel of Mark’s account of the day that Jesus took three of His disciples--Peter, James, and John--to a mountaintop and His glory as God was made plain to see.

But to set the stage, we need to look at a passage in the Gospel of John. So, turn to John 1:14, please. John, you remember, says that Jesus is the Word, Who was with God and was God. John then says this: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us...”

The biggest word in that verse is the verb, dwelt. In the Greek in which John originally wrote his gospel, the word translated as dwelt is eskenosen. It’s the verb form of a noun, skene, which means tabernacle or tent.

John is saying that God Almighty took on flesh and experienced everything that we human beings experience because He pitched His tent among us.

Now, the idea of the tent or the tabernacle was important in the centuries before Jesus, in Old Testament times. In the 21st. century BC, God called a couple He later renamed Abraham and Sarah to leave their comfortable lives in the land of Ur, in what is today known as Iraq, and go live in a place God would show them after they’d gotten their start. God said that He would also make this childless and elderly couple the ancestors of God’s own people, of which we as people who confess Jesus Christ as Savior and God, are part. From the moment God called, Abraham and Sarah knew that they were just passing through this life and so, lived in tents or tabernacles.

Some six-hundred years later, about 1450 BC, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, having been freed from slavery in Egypt by God, spent forty years in a wilderness before entering the land God had promised their ancestors. In the wilderness, they slept in tents.

During their journey, the Old Testament says, God led them by a cloud. God was in the cloud, a bright and overwhelming presence shining within it. God’s perfection would kill any imperfect human being who came directly into His presence and, in fact, the Abraham’s descendants--the Hebrews, AKA Israelites, AKA the Jews--begged their earthly leader Moses not to let them be exposed to God’s presence. The cloud in which God’s presence and glory were shrouded were OK at a distance distance. But they didn’t want to see God up close.

But the fact is, God has never wanted to be removed from us. God cares about us. And while we should always approach God with reverence and awe, knowing that He is the Creator and we are His creatures, we also treasure knowing that we were made for intimacy with God, an intimacy God craves. That’s why God didn’t want to stay in the cloud away from His people.

Turn to Exodus 25:8. There, God is giving instructions to Moses on how His people are to worship Him and He says: “And let them [God’s people] make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them.” By now, you can guess what God told Moses in the original Hebrew: “Build a tent, a tabernacle, for Me, that I may pitch My tent, live, among them.”

For many years, God’s people lived in tents while the presence of God lived among them in a tent that also housed the Ten Commandments. In the very inner sanctum of this tent was a place called “the holy of holies,” the place where the holiness of God dwelt on earth.

Five hundred years after God gave those instructions to Moses, King Solomon built a temple which, like the tent in the wilderness, was a copy of God’s heavenly throne room. In the midst of it was the tabernacle, the holy of holies, the place where God pitched His tent. It could only be entered only once a year, on a day known as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. A priest, after making several sacrifices for his own sin, would enter the holy of holies to sacrifice a perfect, unblemished lamb for the sins of God’s people, then sprinkle the waiting worshipers with the blood of the lamb, assuring them that their sins from the previous year had been atoned for and forgiven. A curtain concealed the holy of holies, a wall that the people feared to breach, afraid, just like their ancestors, of meeting God face to face.

Now, we come to our Gospel lesson, Mark 2:2-9. Take a look at it, please.

Six days before the events the lesson recounts, Jesus told His disciples: “Truly, I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”

Now, Jesus takes His core leadership group--Peter, James, and John--to a mountaintop. While there, verse 3 says, Jesus “was transfigured before them [His appearance was radically changed], and His clothes became dazzling white...” Suddenly, Peter, James, and John, though they didn’t yet understand it all, saw Jesus in the bright splendor of His deity.

Look now at verse 4: “And there appeared to them Elijah and Moses...” The main strands of the Old Testament scriptures are the Law and the Prophets. The Law and the Prophets pointed to Jesus and here was Moses, the great Lawgiver, and Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet, conversing with Jesus.

Look at what happens next, in verse 5. “Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings...”

Can you guess what the word translated as dwellings might be in the original New Testament Greek?

It’s skenas, the plural word for tents or tabernacles.

Jesus says nothing to Peter’s well-meaning but misguided suggestion. But there are two problems with what Peter wants to do.

First: Peter is putting Moses and Elijah on the same level with Jesus. Peter still doesn’t understand that Jesus is God in human flesh.

Second: When the Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us, God signaled that He was busting out of the confines of tents or clouds or any of the other straitjackets in which we try to put God.

God wants to come into your life right now, today, with all its messiness and drama, boredom and challenge, joy and sorrow.

God wants to be your friend and Savior.

God doesn’t want you to wait for the sweet by and by to have an intimate relationship with Him.

God wants in on every part of Your life, to clean up what is sinful and ugly and to give you a new life.

Peter doesn't understand any of these things about God yet. It's out of this ignorance, Mark tells us that Peter suggests building coequal dwelling places or monuments for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Peter “did not know what to say,” Mark tells us in verse 6, “for they [Peter, James, and John] were terrified.”

Their fright no doubt increased with what happened next. Look at verse 7: “Then a cloud overshadowed them [a cloud again] and from the cloud came a voice, ‘This is My Son, the Beloved; listen to Him.”

Not long after these events, the God Who came to tabernacle among us would die on a cross and, strangely, the curtain of the temple, the wall between God and the human race, breached only rarely, would tear in two, from top to bottom.

No longer would human beings need to offer sacrifices or live without the constant, sustaining presence of God in their lives.

Through Jesus, all who turn from sin in His Name and trust in Him alone as their God and King can have immediate access to God.

Need your sins forgiven? Approach God in Jesus’ Name.

Need guidance on how to live your life? Come to God in Jesus’ Name.

Wrestling with a tragedy or setback that has befallen you? You may not get an answer to the question of why, but you will get God by your side.

Jesus Himself was and is the only sacrifice needed to bridge the gulf between a perfect God and imperfect people like you and me. He is, as John the Baptist said of Jesus, "the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world."

After the voice of God the Father spoke on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus stood alone with Peter, James, and John.

But those three apostles still could’t yet understand what you and I can understand, if only we will open our wills, minds, and hearts to Jesus. Here's why. Notice that Jesus says, in verse 9, “to tell no one about what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”

You see, none of us can really see Jesus for Who He really is, God in human flesh, until we see the cross of Jesus and know that it was our sins--yours and mine--that made Jesus’ death necessary. The wages of sin is death and sinless Jesus took the wages we earned on His sinless body.

And none of us can see Jesus for Who He really is until we accept by faith the testimony about His actual, physical resurrection from the dead. Jesus rising from the dead is the sure sign that He and He alone is the way to new, eternal life with God.

Until Jesus' death and resurrection happened, no matter how amazed Peter, James, and John must have been by Jesus' transfiguration, they could not see Who Jesus really was...and is.

Today, at this moment, you and I can't see the risen Jesus physically. But we can see Jesus by faith in Him. Here are five ways that can happen:

• First: Read the New Testament. The New Testament is the cradle in which the baby Jesus can be found, His cross can be experienced, and His empty tomb can be seen. Starting on March 8, you can be part of Read the New Testament in a Year, digging into and discussing the second great part of God's written word for the human race, the Bible, with other members of the Saint Matthew family. As we read and discuss and pray over the New Testament, we're going to see Jesus together. 
• Second: Pray in Jesus' Name.
• Third: Receive Holy Communion every time it’s offered. “This is my body; this is my blood,” Jesus says of the bread and the wine. In Communion, Jesus literally comes to us and enters us. He is as present and as powerful for us when we receive the body and blood by faith in Jesus, as He was to Peter, James, and John at the Transfiguration.
• Fourth: Spend time in fellowship with God’s people, including regularly worshiping, studying Scripture, and praying with people who believe in Jesus. The Bible says that "iron sharpens iron," meaning that as we challenge and affirm one another, we grow. If you're intent on seeing Jesus, you can't go solo; you need to hang out with and learn from other believers.
• Finally: Ask God to show you the ways in which you may have displeased him. King David prayed, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting." We need to submit to a spiritual examination by God and to confess the sins God makes known to us. Jesus died a rose to tear open the curtain--the wall--that sin had put between us. Our sins, the things we do that hurt God or hurt others, can become new walls between God and us. When we ask God to show us the walls we’ve erected against His will, God forgives our sins and dismantles the walls, and we get a clearer view of Jesus, God in the flesh.

Jesus wants to pitch His tent in your life every day. He wants to live with you now as well as live with you in eternity.

These five things--reading the New Testament, praying in Jesus' Name, receiving the Sacrament, living in fellowship with believers in Jesus, and asking God to show you your sins so that they can be dismantled by the forgiveness He offers to all with faith in Jesus--can be means by which Jesus helps us see Him in our lives today.

May you always see Him clearly, starting now.

The Gift of Self-Control

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


1 Corinthians 9:24-27
This past week, I went for a checkup with my cardiologist. After the assistant had done her thing and the doc had looked over my files, he walked into the examination room and said, “Everything looks good.” Then, with a smile, he asked, “What’s with the weight?” I had gained six more pounds since our last visit, putting me about 27 pounds above my ideal weight. The culprit? I love bread.

So, I’m asking God to help me exercise self-control in order to more faithfully treat this body, which the Bible reminds me is not my own, but something that, with His death on the cross, Jesus bought back from sin, death, and the devil. And it’s this body that, if I endure in my faith in Jesus Christ, will rise again from the dead when Jesus returns on what the Bible calls “the Day of the Lord.” The Bible also teaches that every Christian’s body is: “a temple of the Holy Spirit.” To take care of this body, I need self-control.

We live in a world that, in many ways, discourages self-control.

Lady Gaga sings, “I was born that way,” encouraging people to commit whatever sins they think consistent with their inborn natures.

TV commercials and shopping channels prompt us to waste money on products—from mouthwash to financial planning services—for which often false promises are made.

Married men and women engage in what they think of as harmless trysts, while other people mouth smutty talk, giving no thought to how, as they do these things, they debase the gift of sexual intimacy God has given to them.

Pornography, it’s estimated, is a $10 to $15-billion industry, in which devotees are encouraged to idolize sex (or, as the Bible puts it, to worship the creation instead of the Creator) and end up viewing other people as objects to be used for their own pleasure, rather than as fellow human beings made in the image of God.

Obesity is becoming a pandemic: About one-third of all adults in the United States—33.8%--are obese.

All of these instances (and countless more) and the heartaches and the wedges they drive between God and us, between others and us, and between us and the people God made us to be, exemplify human sin and a death-dealing lack of self-control.

The Bible has a lot to say about self-control. And for good reason.

We’ll see why self-control is so important and how we can have it in a moment.

But let's first establish that God Himself wants us to exercise self-control in how we live.

Please look at Genesis 4:6. These are words spoken by God to Cain, one of Adam’s and Eve’s sons, after his offering of leftovers to God looked bad compared with his brother Abel’s grateful offering of the firstlings from his flocks: “So the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.”

It was a lack of self-control that caused Cain to not give God first place his life, to resent his brother for Abel’s grateful faith in God, and to despair of the importance of his own life…in other words, to sin. God is telling Cain to exercise self-control, to master his sinful impulses.

Our second lesson for today was written to the church the apostle Paul founded in the Greek city of Corinth. The letter was written in about 54AD. Look at what Paul says in our short second lesson. His words are worth reading and hearing again:

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.

Paul, of course, is using an analogy or a metaphor, both comparing and contrasting the life of a follower of Jesus Christ with the life of an athlete.

An athlete exercises self-discipline: She trains; he practices; they exercise and watch what foods they eat.

In Paul’s day, athletes who won their contests—a race or a wrestling match, for example—didn’t receive money, gold medals, commercial endorsements, or trips to Disney World. They received wreaths, made of laurel leaves, placed on their heads. Wreaths are perishable and they were dead shortly after given as awards.

Paul says that he and all Christians live our lives—we run—for a prize that is imperishable, one that will never wither or die. The prize is the gift of a relationship with God, here and eternity.

It’s a gift for which we don’t compete. All who believe and are baptized are already gold medal winners. We are saved by God’s charity (His grace) through our faith in Christ.

We cannot earn—or achieve—our way to a saving relationship with Christ. Jesus died on a cross, absorbing all the poison of our sin and selfishness, paying the debt to God we owe for our sin, then rising from the dead, so that all who repent for their sin and give their lives to Christ, are saved from sin, death, and futility as a free gift.

It is possible for us to kick away the life that Christ offers to us freely, though.

We kick Christ and life with God away when we lose our self-control and let the world, the devil, and our sinful selves call the shots in our lives.

But as anyone who has ever tried to take off a few pounds can testify, self-control, the mastery of self, the punishment of self in order to bring it into submission to the loving will of God, is not easy.

The good news is that we can have self-control.

Let me show you where the power for self-control can be found. Turn to Galatians 5, starting at verse 18, in the Bible.

There, Paul says that if we are led by the Holy Spirit sent by Jesus Christ to all who believe in Him, we aren’t condemned by the law. The power of sin to keep us from living with God has been destroyed.

Then, beginning with verse 19, Paul describes “the works of the flesh”: the things we do when we rely on ourselves instead of on God. It’s not a happy list! Look at it:

“adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies [that’s advocating or actively living doctrine contrary to the teachings of Jesus and the Bible], envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like.”

Paul says that people who make a practice of these things “will not inherit the kingdom of God.” They push Jesus and salvation out of their lives.

But look at verses 22 and 23 to see what the Spirit produces in us when we daily and continuously give ourselves to Christ and ask for God’s guidance and help:

...love, joy, peace, longsuffering [that’s patience in the face of difficulties and opposition to us for our faith in and witness for Christ], kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…

In other words, as we consciously submit our every moment and our every decision to God’s evaluation, correction, and wisdom, we will be given the power to exercise self-control. We’ll experience the peace of God that passes all human understanding.

Every time we make decisions, we evidence either the self-control that comes from God or the lack of self-control that comes from sin.

Here’s a (far from perfect) eight-point checklist you might want to use when you’re confronting any decision in your life. These might help you to invite God's Holy Spirit into the process to give you Godly self-control:

• If the decision will take you down the easy path, you probably shouldn’t take it. Jesus says in Matthew 7:13-14, “…the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction…the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life...” 
• If what you're considering doing is what you want to do, you probably shouldn’t do it. Proverbs 14:12 and other Bible passages tell us: “There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way to death.” The key is not to rely on your own thinking or common sense, but on the wisdom God freely gives to those who ask for it. 
• If your prospective decision appeals to your ego, watch out. 1 Corinthians 10:31 teaches: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.” Ask yourself, “Will this decision glorify God?”
• If your feelings are leading you to a decision, you may want to avoid it. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God reveals that: “The heart is devious above all else…”  Unless we, in the words of Psalm 51, are praying regularly and submissively for “a clean heart…and…a new and right spirit within…,” it’s almost always wrong to base our decisions on what we feel. 
• If a trusted Christian friend warns you against a prospective decision, reconsider it. Proverbs 24:6 tells us that “in abundance of counselors, there is victory.” 
• If you haven’t sought the counsel of at least one Christian friend, you may be about to make a bad decision. Jesus told Nicodemus that a sinful world refused to come to Him, the light of the world; instead, they huddled in darkness because they didn’t want their evil to be exposed. If we're not willing to share the decision we're contemplating with at least one other follower of Jesus Christ, we need to ask ourselves what we're hiding and why.
• Is this decision designed to please others, not God. Paul says bluntly in Galatians 1:10: “If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” As followers of Jesus Christ, our decisions should not be driven by the opinions of others, even if the opinion in question is that of just one other person.
• Finally, never make a decision if you haven’t been regularly reading God’s Word and praying. Jesus says that wise people build their lives on Him alone. And the Psalm tells us that God’s Word is a light to our path and a lamp to our feet. When we make decisions without regularly reading God's Word and regularly talking things over with God, we are flailing in the dark.

Self-control is the fruit of a life lived in total surrender to the God Who has done everything needed for us to have a life with Him that never ends. As we submit our lives to Jesus Christ and invite Him to be the final authority over us, our lives are transformed.

In following Jesus, we may not always earn the world’s applause or make bigger pay checks, but we will be able to face our Lord at the ends of our lives and say with Paul: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith."

And we will hear Jesus say, “Well done… Enter into the joy of your Master.” Amen