Each year, Good Friday comes as a brutal dose of reality for those prone to living in the pretend world of a perfect past.
The phrase "nostalgic Christian" is an oxymoron.
In fact, believers in Jesus want to jettison the past, living with Christ in the now and looking ahead with excitement and anticipation to the perfect future ahead for all who believe in Jesus.
"Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead," the apostle Paul wrote, "I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13-14).
Good Friday reminds us of the bad old days from which Jesus Christ wants to set us free.
From the moment that Adam and Eve bit into the fruit God had warned them not to eat, the human race has been, collectively and individually, plunged into sin: alienated from God, from one another, from the creation God gave us to manage and tend.
Sin entered into the human gene pool, passed along from generation to generation.
It was to eliminate the condition of sin from us and our slavery to sin and to restore our relationship with God that Jesus, God in the flesh, came into our world. He took death, the punishment for sin that you and I deserve, onto Himself. God the Father made Jesus "to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Jesus entered into death. Then He rose from the grave to claim new life, a perfect future for all who follow Him.
It wasn't "bad Romans" or "bad Jews" or aberrant representatives of the human race who put Jesus on the cross. It was you, me, our parents, and our grandparents and the common human desire to "be like God," to flush God from our lives or considerations, going all the way back to Eden, that drove the nails into Jesus' flesh on the first Good Friday.
Different expressions of our sinful nature go in and out of style.
But in the morality department, we're no better or worse today than past generations were.
Good Friday shows us that.
But it also shows us that sin, the human race's ancient and ongoing alienation from God and the life only God can give, does not have to be the last word over our lives.
God has acted.
In Christ, God is reconciling Himself to all who confess their sins and entrust their lives to the rule of Jesus, the King of kings.
It's a lie to believe in some perfect past. It never existed.
But when we trust in Christ, the Savior Who died and then rose to give us life, our present is invaded by the presence, power, and love of God.
And if we remain steadfast in following Him, our future will be more perfect than we could ever imagine.
On the Sunday after Jesus' crucifixion, some of the female disciples went to anoint Jesus' dead body. But they were met by a "young man, dressed in a white robe" who told them that Jesus was not dead, but risen. "Go," he told them, "tell his disciples and Peter that [Jesus] is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you" (Mark 16:7).
Jesus has broken out of the dead past.
He's blown our nostalgic notions to bits.
He's ahead of us, making a way for us through this life and opening up eternity to us.
Don't pine for the past. Follow Jesus into the future!
Friday, April 06, 2012
Thursday, April 05, 2012
What's So "New" About Jesus' "New Commandment"?
[This was prepared to be shared with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, along with their guests and friends, as we celebrated Maundy Thursday earlier this evening.]
The late Watchman Nee, a Christian author and leader, told the true story of a Chinese Christian who owned a rice paddy next to one owned by a communist neighbor.
The Christian irrigated his paddy by pumping water out of a canal, using a leg-operated pump that makes users look like they’re riding bicycles. Every day, after the Christian had pumped enough water to fill his field, the neighbor would come out, remove some of the boards that kept the water in the Christian man’s field and let all the water flow down into his own field. That way, he didn’t have to pump.
Of course, it also left the Christian man's field without the water needed to make his rice crop grow.
This went on for a number of days. Finally, the Christian prayed, “Lord, if this keeps up, I’m going to lose all my rice, maybe even my field. I’ve got a family to take care of. What can I do?”
After the man prayed in this way, the Lord put a thought in his mind. So, the next morning, he woke up well before dawn, while it was still dark, and started pumping water into the field of his neighbor. Then, he replaced the boards and pumped water into his own rice paddy. In a few weeks, both fields of rice were doing well.*
In our lesson for this evening, Jesus tells the eleven disciples who remain with Him to celebrate the Passover just before His arrest: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.”**
I used to wonder what was so new about this commandment.
This went on for a number of days. Finally, the Christian prayed, “Lord, if this keeps up, I’m going to lose all my rice, maybe even my field. I’ve got a family to take care of. What can I do?”
After the man prayed in this way, the Lord put a thought in his mind. So, the next morning, he woke up well before dawn, while it was still dark, and started pumping water into the field of his neighbor. Then, he replaced the boards and pumped water into his own rice paddy. In a few weeks, both fields of rice were doing well.*
In our lesson for this evening, Jesus tells the eleven disciples who remain with Him to celebrate the Passover just before His arrest: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.”**
I used to wonder what was so new about this commandment.
After all, as every Lutheran Catechism student knows, the ten commandments, given by God to the world through Moses about 1500 years before Jesus’ birth, can be divided into two tables. The first table, composed of the first three commandments, says that we are to love God. The second table, made up of the fourth through tenth commandments, tell us to love others.
And, as we’ve remembered in our confession of sin at the beginnings of our Sunday services during Lent, Jesus once summarized the two tables in what we know as the Great Commandment. It’s in Matthew 22:37-40, where Jesus says: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
And before Jesus gave the “new commandment” He gives in our lesson for this evening, He already had expanded the boundaries of who among our neighbors He expected all human beings to love. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the hero of Jesus’ story is the member of an ethnic group His people hated.
And early in His ministry, during what we call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...”
It’s always been God’s will and command that we love. So, what’s so new about the commandment He gave on the night when He was arrested?
And before Jesus gave the “new commandment” He gives in our lesson for this evening, He already had expanded the boundaries of who among our neighbors He expected all human beings to love. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the hero of Jesus’ story is the member of an ethnic group His people hated.
And early in His ministry, during what we call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...”
It’s always been God’s will and command that we love. So, what’s so new about the commandment He gave on the night when He was arrested?
The answer to that question comes in what Jesus says in its entirety. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another,” Jesus says and then adds, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
We are to love others as Jesus loved the disciples gathered with Him on that first Maundy Thursday. He did the work of a slave, washing the grimy feet of His disciples, even the feet of Judas, the man He knew was going to betray Him in a short while, sending Jesus to an undeserved and violent death.
We’re to love others as Jesus loved those who prayed that God the Father would forgive those who shouted for His death, who spat on and punched Him, who plaited a crown of thorns for His head and mocked Him, who cheered and jeered as cold, hard nails were pounded into His flesh.
We’re to love others as Jesus loved and had compassion for Peter, forgiving Peter after Peter had denied even knowing Jesus three different times at the very moment when Jesus could have used a friend.
To love as Jesus loves is to sacrifice oneself to the nth degree. It doesn’t mean being a doormat: Jesus, you’ll remember, wasn’t shy about confronting people about their sins, sins that threatened to put up a wall between God’s grace and the people who wallowed in their sin. He threw the moneychangers from the temple. He called Peter a “Satan” who was trying to keep God’s will from being done. He expressed frustration with the disciples when they argued who of them was the greatest, when they failed to feed crowds who were hungry, and when they claimed to be powerless to pray for anxious parents with demon-possessed children. But even these signs of anger and frustration on Jesus' part were the expressions of the Savior Who had come to call us all out of slavery to sin into the freedom of new life with God!
We are to love others as Jesus loved the disciples gathered with Him on that first Maundy Thursday. He did the work of a slave, washing the grimy feet of His disciples, even the feet of Judas, the man He knew was going to betray Him in a short while, sending Jesus to an undeserved and violent death.
We’re to love others as Jesus loved those who prayed that God the Father would forgive those who shouted for His death, who spat on and punched Him, who plaited a crown of thorns for His head and mocked Him, who cheered and jeered as cold, hard nails were pounded into His flesh.
We’re to love others as Jesus loved and had compassion for Peter, forgiving Peter after Peter had denied even knowing Jesus three different times at the very moment when Jesus could have used a friend.
To love as Jesus loves is to sacrifice oneself to the nth degree. It doesn’t mean being a doormat: Jesus, you’ll remember, wasn’t shy about confronting people about their sins, sins that threatened to put up a wall between God’s grace and the people who wallowed in their sin. He threw the moneychangers from the temple. He called Peter a “Satan” who was trying to keep God’s will from being done. He expressed frustration with the disciples when they argued who of them was the greatest, when they failed to feed crowds who were hungry, and when they claimed to be powerless to pray for anxious parents with demon-possessed children. But even these signs of anger and frustration on Jesus' part were the expressions of the Savior Who had come to call us all out of slavery to sin into the freedom of new life with God!
Jesus didn’t spare any sacrifice, including the giving of His very life, to do the loving thing, the thing that was best for us.
That’s the kind of love Jesus commands of us. I truly blush in shame and repentance when I remember that Jesus doesn’t suggest that we love others as He has loved us. He commands us to love, not as a condition for being saved from sin and death, but as an expression of faith, joy, and gratitude over the fact that Jesus has already saved those who are baptized and believe in Him from sin and death.
If you and I will love as Jesus has loved us, Jesus says, “everyone will know that you are my disciples.”
This is why I so love the story of the Chinese Christian rice farmer. He could have had an angry confrontation with his neighbor and maybe there would be times when the loving thing would demand such confrontation. But before he acted out of his justifiable anger, the man prayed. Then, as he prayed, God seemed to tell him not to exercise his righteous indignation, but to try something different: to serve and love and sacrifice at an outrageous level.
This is why I so love the story of the Chinese Christian rice farmer. He could have had an angry confrontation with his neighbor and maybe there would be times when the loving thing would demand such confrontation. But before he acted out of his justifiable anger, the man prayed. Then, as he prayed, God seemed to tell him not to exercise his righteous indignation, but to try something different: to serve and love and sacrifice at an outrageous level.
“You’ve been loved and, because of Jesus, you are with Me always,” God seemed to tell the man. “You have eternity as your certain possession. Not everyone has the freedom from sin and death you possess as My child. Only those who know Jesus as you know Jesus have that. So, have compassion on those enslaved by sin and death. Dare to love as My Son loved you on the cross and see what, if anything, happens.”
When you and I, under the guidance of the living Lord we intimately know and have come to believe in through prayer, the reading and study of Scripture, public worship, and receiving the Sacraments, dare to love others as Jesus has loved us, strange things happen.
When you and I, under the guidance of the living Lord we intimately know and have come to believe in through prayer, the reading and study of Scripture, public worship, and receiving the Sacraments, dare to love others as Jesus has loved us, strange things happen.
Watchman Nee says that after the Chinese Christian farmer spent weeks waking up before the crack of dawn, giving the free gift of his labor and love to an atheist neighbor who hated and stole from him, the neighbor came to faith in Christ.
In a way, that shouldn’t surprise us. After Jesus’ outrageous act of love on the cross, He rose again from the grave and now offers to all who turn from sin and believe in Him new and everlasting life. And since the risen Jesus is still alive and living within all who trust in Him, we can expect surprising things when we seek God’s help in loving others as Jesus loves us.
May we all dare to obey Jesus’ new commandment. May we all learn to love others as Jesus has loved us!
In a way, that shouldn’t surprise us. After Jesus’ outrageous act of love on the cross, He rose again from the grave and now offers to all who turn from sin and believe in Him new and everlasting life. And since the risen Jesus is still alive and living within all who trust in Him, we can expect surprising things when we seek God’s help in loving others as Jesus loves us.
May we all dare to obey Jesus’ new commandment. May we all learn to love others as Jesus has loved us!
*The true story told by Watchman Nee is recounted in this book.
162 Reasons to Be Excited About Start of Baseball Season
"Tweeting" the Easter Story
This is a great video! If you're on Twitter, you'll especially appreciate it. But even if you're not, take a look.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
He is the Champion, My Friend! (And You Need Him!)
Satan loves nothing better than for people to think he doesn't exist.
Don't make that mistake!
If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you're engaged in spiritual warfare. And you are the spoils of war that the devil wants to take and you are the great prize God wants to save for His kingdom.
The closer you are to Christ, the more the devil wants to take you and the more temptations to sin--whether the renunciation of faith, treating others lovelessly, adultery, despair, idolatry, bearing false witness, taking God's Name in vain, or others--he will push your way.
If you aren't a follower of Jesus, you will remain blissfully ignorant of the war going on for you. That, sadly, will indicate both that the devil is confident that he has you in his pocket and that you have either never heard of the new life Jesus gives to those who repent and believe in Him--shame on the Church and on Christians, if that's the case--or that you have never opened yourself to the saving help that God provides to all who trust in Jesus.
Because we are, by nature, "in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves," as we Lutherans often say in our confessions (cf., Psalm 51:5 and Romans 5:12), we are incapable of resisting temptations to sin with our own strength of will or character.
We can't choose to believe in Christ. We can only choose to surrender and let God create both faith in Christ within us and the power to resist temptation and live as the free children of God we were meant to be.
We need to rely entirely on Christ.
In this connection, I find the second verse of Martin Luther's hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, especially comforting and empowering:
"No strength of ours can match his [the devil's] might!
"We would be lost, rejected.
"But now a champion comes to fight [Jesus],
"Whom God Himself elected.
"You ask Who this may be?
"The Lord of hosts [God's angelic armies] is He!
"Christ Jesus, mighty Lord,
"God's only Son adored.
"He holds the field victorious!"
In 1 Corinthians 10:13, you can read: "No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and He will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing He will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it." I have learned the truth of this Biblical promise. Whenever I have truly wanted to resist temptation, I've been able to call on my "champion," Christ, and resist.*
Don't be fooled. Satan does exist. So does the temptation created by Satan, the world, and our sinful selves.
But Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is alive today and stands ready to fight for and empower any who are humble enough to rely on Him to give them forgiveness, life, and the power to resist temptation and keep on trusting in Him.
Jesus is the champion who has come to fight for you. Let Him.
AMEN!
[For more on this subject, see here.]
*Conversely, there have been times when I have conveniently ignored God's will in order to commit the sins I've wanted to commit. In such instances, I have thought that I was exercising my free will, when in fact, I was making the only kinds of choices we can make when we spurn the freedom from sin and death God only provides for those who cling to Christ: bad ones.
Don't make that mistake!
If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you're engaged in spiritual warfare. And you are the spoils of war that the devil wants to take and you are the great prize God wants to save for His kingdom.
The closer you are to Christ, the more the devil wants to take you and the more temptations to sin--whether the renunciation of faith, treating others lovelessly, adultery, despair, idolatry, bearing false witness, taking God's Name in vain, or others--he will push your way.
If you aren't a follower of Jesus, you will remain blissfully ignorant of the war going on for you. That, sadly, will indicate both that the devil is confident that he has you in his pocket and that you have either never heard of the new life Jesus gives to those who repent and believe in Him--shame on the Church and on Christians, if that's the case--or that you have never opened yourself to the saving help that God provides to all who trust in Jesus.
Because we are, by nature, "in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves," as we Lutherans often say in our confessions (cf., Psalm 51:5 and Romans 5:12), we are incapable of resisting temptations to sin with our own strength of will or character.
We can't choose to believe in Christ. We can only choose to surrender and let God create both faith in Christ within us and the power to resist temptation and live as the free children of God we were meant to be.
We need to rely entirely on Christ.
In this connection, I find the second verse of Martin Luther's hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, especially comforting and empowering:
"No strength of ours can match his [the devil's] might!
"We would be lost, rejected.
"But now a champion comes to fight [Jesus],
"Whom God Himself elected.
"You ask Who this may be?
"The Lord of hosts [God's angelic armies] is He!
"Christ Jesus, mighty Lord,
"God's only Son adored.
"He holds the field victorious!"
In 1 Corinthians 10:13, you can read: "No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and He will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing He will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it." I have learned the truth of this Biblical promise. Whenever I have truly wanted to resist temptation, I've been able to call on my "champion," Christ, and resist.*
Don't be fooled. Satan does exist. So does the temptation created by Satan, the world, and our sinful selves.
But Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is alive today and stands ready to fight for and empower any who are humble enough to rely on Him to give them forgiveness, life, and the power to resist temptation and keep on trusting in Him.
Jesus is the champion who has come to fight for you. Let Him.
AMEN!
[For more on this subject, see here.]
*Conversely, there have been times when I have conveniently ignored God's will in order to commit the sins I've wanted to commit. In such instances, I have thought that I was exercising my free will, when in fact, I was making the only kinds of choices we can make when we spurn the freedom from sin and death God only provides for those who cling to Christ: bad ones.
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Only a Living Christ is Worth Following
I love this article by retired Lutheran missionary Donald L. Raun here.
The implications for the North American context are clear. Today we have Lutheran and mainline pastors and theologians who deny truths like Jesus' virgin birth and His resurrection.
Without these truths and the new life that come from trusting in the living Christ they proclaim, we Christians are "of all people, most to be pitied" and, when your beliefs and teachings are no different from what the rest of the rest of the world subscribes to, there is simply no reason for a person to become a Christian.
Non-Christian Christianity is not only oxymoronic, it denies those who fall under its influence of the unique hope that comes from the living Jesus Christ. Only a living Christ is worth following!
The implications for the North American context are clear. Today we have Lutheran and mainline pastors and theologians who deny truths like Jesus' virgin birth and His resurrection.
Without these truths and the new life that come from trusting in the living Christ they proclaim, we Christians are "of all people, most to be pitied" and, when your beliefs and teachings are no different from what the rest of the rest of the world subscribes to, there is simply no reason for a person to become a Christian.
Non-Christian Christianity is not only oxymoronic, it denies those who fall under its influence of the unique hope that comes from the living Jesus Christ. Only a living Christ is worth following!
This Sunday, We'll Sing, "Alleluia!" and "Hallelujah!": What Are We Saying?
This coming Sunday--Easter--churches throughout much of the world will sing out, "Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!"
But what does Alleluia mean?
Alleluia is the Latin transliteration of what was originally a Hebrew word, Hallelujah.
Hallelujah literally means Praise Yah. It lifts up praise to Yahweh, or I AM, the Name by which God revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14).
To be able to speak God’s Name is a privilege, a special gift that should be kept holy (set apart), the name never used superfluously.
It's to guard the specialness of His Name that God gives the second commandment:
“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" (Exodus 20:7).
Because of the holiness of God’s Name, the ancient Jews were hesitant to use both syllables of the name by which God revealed Himself to Moses, lest they accidentally speak the Name in a vain (worthless) manner. So, instead of Halelu Yahweh, they sang, Hallelu Yah. (Some of my Jewish friends display this same reticence about misusing God's Name, when, in their correspondence with me, they refer to God as, "G--d.")
Jesus identified Himself as Yahweh in the flesh when He told His fellow Jews: “Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58).
The Name of Jesus is as holy as all the other names by which the Bible records that God has revealed Himself.
The second Bible lesson read in many churches last week, Philippians 2:5-11, tells us that, through Jesus’ faithful pursuit of the servant’s path and the cross, God the Father, “highly exalted [Jesus] and gave Him the Name that is above every name, so that at the Name of Jesus, every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11).
In Martin Luther’s Small Catechism explanation of the second commandment, he says: “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.”
Easter is the greatest world event since the creation of the universe! Through it, God conquers sin and death for all who repent (turn from their sins) and believe in (surrender their lives to) Jesus. If anything God has done is worthy of offering prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, it’s Easter!
Alleluia!
But what does Alleluia mean?
Alleluia is the Latin transliteration of what was originally a Hebrew word, Hallelujah.
Hallelujah literally means Praise Yah. It lifts up praise to Yahweh, or I AM, the Name by which God revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14).
To be able to speak God’s Name is a privilege, a special gift that should be kept holy (set apart), the name never used superfluously.
It's to guard the specialness of His Name that God gives the second commandment:
“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" (Exodus 20:7).
Because of the holiness of God’s Name, the ancient Jews were hesitant to use both syllables of the name by which God revealed Himself to Moses, lest they accidentally speak the Name in a vain (worthless) manner. So, instead of Halelu Yahweh, they sang, Hallelu Yah. (Some of my Jewish friends display this same reticence about misusing God's Name, when, in their correspondence with me, they refer to God as, "G--d.")
Jesus identified Himself as Yahweh in the flesh when He told His fellow Jews: “Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58).
The Name of Jesus is as holy as all the other names by which the Bible records that God has revealed Himself.
The second Bible lesson read in many churches last week, Philippians 2:5-11, tells us that, through Jesus’ faithful pursuit of the servant’s path and the cross, God the Father, “highly exalted [Jesus] and gave Him the Name that is above every name, so that at the Name of Jesus, every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11).
In Martin Luther’s Small Catechism explanation of the second commandment, he says: “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.”
Easter is the greatest world event since the creation of the universe! Through it, God conquers sin and death for all who repent (turn from their sins) and believe in (surrender their lives to) Jesus. If anything God has done is worthy of offering prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, it’s Easter!
Alleluia!
Sunday, April 01, 2012
Welcome the King!
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
Mark 11:1-11
(Palm Sunday)
Some of you may remember the song, The New Kid in Town. Though the melody is somber, its opening lyrics seem filled with the promise of a new hero who will make everyone happy. It starts:
But this picture of popularity and happy anticipation gets interrupted in the first iteration of the chorus, when we hear:
Those words sound like a warning to me, as if people are saying: “We’re all behind you, as long as you please us and do what we expect of you, when we expect it, and how we expect it.”
The song has it right. People can be fickle. One day, they’re for you. The next, they’re shouting, “Crucify!”
That’s especially true when they feel that the “Johnny Come Lately” they hailed on Sunday has “let them down” later in the same week.
In many ways, this is the story of Palm Sunday.
Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem. Everybody was happy. Everyone was His friend. Everyone wanted Him to be the Messiah King, to take the throne of ancient King David.
Yet, amid the Palm Sunday celebrating was an atmosphere of implied violence, of threatened rejection. The actions and the words with which the crowds welcomed Jesus were fraught with ambiguity.
Like the happy first verse of the Eagles song, the words of the crowd seemed to speak of belief in Jesus as their King.
But the word they used, “Hosanna,” meaning “Save us,” is one of those phrases that can cut two ways.
On the one hand, it can be a statement of faith and surrender: “Only You can save, Lord. We need You!”
But it can also carry a threat: “We’re putting our hopes in you. So, be the king we want you to be...or else!”
The Palm Sunday crowd, itching for war and conquest and personal vindication, must have scratched their heads at what Jesus did that Palm Sunday evening.
Instead of giving people their marching orders, Jesus did something strange. At the end of our gospel lesson, Mark tells us:
...Jesus went into Jerusalem and into the temple. So, when He had looked around at all things, as the hour was already late, He went out to Bethany with the twelve. (Mark 11:11)
This is a strangely anticlimactic ending to a day in which Jesus' fellow Jews had proclaimed Him their King. It would be like inaugurating a president in this country--the oath administered, the crowd cheering, the Marine Band playing, Hail to the Chief--and then seeing the new president simply sit down. No speech-making. No marching orders. No crowing.
Jesus showed no interest in being a king who would lead the people in battle to rid themselves of the Romans.
The crowds and Jesus’ own followers must have been further mystified by what Jesus did the next day.
Mark 11:15-19 says that Jesus went back to the temple and still didn’t take up arms against the enemies of His homeland.
Instead, for the second time in His ministry, He turned on His fellow Judeans, throwing the money changers out of the temple. After being hailed as King, Jesus didn’t go after the Romans. He indicted His own people--the people of God--for turning the worship of God into an occasion for doing business! He was telling them that their real enemies weren't Roman soldiers, but the sin that drove them to worship money and worldly comforts and family and nation instead of the one true God of the universe!
On Palm Sunday, the crowds welcomed Jesus because they thought Jesus had come to do their will.
By Thursday of that week, what they came to realize was that He had really come to do the Father’s will. He had come, as He had already told them, “to serve, not to be served and to give His life as a ransom for many,” to bring the possibility of new and everlasting life with God to all who dared to surrender their lives to Him.
And so, like the crowds in The New Kid in Town, disappointed by the Messiah they thought they could keep in their hip pockets, the Jerusalem crowd turned on Jesus.
On Thursday night, just four days after His triumphant entry into the city, Jesus was arrested and the next day, the same crowd that had laid down their clothes and branches to welcome Him like a military hero cried for His blood.
They cried too that the Roman governor would release a terrorist named Barabbas. The crowds may have thought that, unlike Jesus, Barabbas had the stomach to fight the war against the Romans they wanted.
Truth is, they wanted a leader who would follow them, not a leader like Jesus, Who took His direction from God the Father.
And it's precisely here that we're hit with the questions that Palm Sunday forces us all to confront:
Will we be like the crowds or will we learn to be true followers of Jesus?
Will we follow our own selfish impulses and the habits of a dying world?
Or will we follow Jesus through tough times--even through death--so that we can receive what Jesus, because of His faithfulness to the will of God the Father, received on Easter Sunday: never-ending resurrection life with God?
And how exactly do we make this choice?
Above all, we must realize that faith in Jesus is not our achievement.
You and I are incapable of choosing to trust anyone or anything except ourselves.
We human beings are not born with free wills.
Left to our own devices, we will always choose the same selfish and self-destructive path the Palm Sunday crowd chose.
But that doesn’t mean that we’re without hope! Turn to 1 Corinthians 12:3. There, we read that “no one speaking by the Spirit of God calls Jesus accursed, and no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.”
Listen: Faith in Jesus, the capacity to believe in Him and surrender to Him despite what the crowd is saying, is a gift.
And how do we get the gift of faith? Turn to Romans 10:10. It says: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” Notice that faith does not come by our decision. It doesn't come by our effort. Faith comes when we receive God's Word, when we let it invade our consciousness, get past our self-justifications, and speak to us.
God’s Word is the most powerful force in the universe!
The Word of God has the power to comfort us when we grieve, assure us of God’s presence with us through every moment we live, and give us the certainty that Jesus “is the resurrection and the life” and that all who believe in Him, even if they die, will live and that whoever believes in Him will live forever. Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life.” Faith comes only to those who dare to listen to the Gospel word about Jesus.
The Palm Sunday crowd would have done well to follow the example of Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. One day, you remember, Jesus was in the home of these three siblings, teaching.
Martha was busy hustling around. She made sure that everyone's glasses were full of drink and their plates were replenished with hors d'oeuvres. She served dinner. She cleaned up messes and saw that everyone was comfortable.
Mary, meanwhile, sat listening to Jesus.
Martha became enraged. Luke 11:40 says: “Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached [Jesus] and said, ‘Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?...Tell her to help me.”
Martha thought she was a good person, just like the Palm Sunday crowd. “I’m a good person, a nice person” they must have thought. “I even belong the First Jerusalem Church of Nice! I do lots of good stuff! I deserve a break! I deserve a better life, some comfort, some perks for what a nice person I am!”
Jesus’ reply to Martha, in verses Luke 11:41-42, is stunning: “Martha...you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from you.”
All the things that the Palm Sunday crowd wanted could be taken from them: freedom from foreign conquerors, lower taxes, more possessions and financial security.
Jesus was offering them “the one thing” they needed: Himself. (He offers us the same thing.)
If, instead of celebrating on that first Palm Sunday, the crowd had listened to Jesus, allowing His Word to work faith in them, they would have had much more than anything they were shouting or striving for.
They would have received the gift of faith and a life with God that never ends.
And that is an incredible gift!
A man I know spent many years warming a pew at the church he attended, but never believed. Then, after a member of his family became gravely ill, he realized that all his attempts to control his life and his world were futile. A crack in his personal armor finally allowed the word about Jesus, the King Who saves helpless people from sin and death and gives eternity to those who believe in Him, got through.
God gives faith to all who truly hear the good news that God took on human flesh, voluntarily took the death sentence for sin you and I deserve, and then find, miraculously, God’s Holy Spirit has made it possible for us to say, “I believe. I believe in Jesus more than I believe in money, or good grades, or lottery winnings, or Ohio State basketball, or upholding or dismantling national health care, or my family, or America. None of these things has ultimate importance. When we peer into the mystery of eternity and the mysteries of each day, I believe that Jesus is all I need, the only One Who can see me through!”
Gary, a friend of mine, recently wrote about getting word from the family of a friend that the friend was in the last stages of dying.
Gary’s friend had always been a hard-charging businessman who resisted the notion of surrendering to Christ. He had no time to listen to the Word, the good news of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus. There were too many deals to be struck, too much riding on his executive judgment.
Still, Gary and he had remained friends through the years. Now, called to his friend’s death bed, Gary prayed that finally, his friend would listen to the Word of God and surrender to and trust in Jesus. Gary didn’t want his friend to face an eternity separated from God. Jesus says that God so loved this world that He gave His Son Jesus so that everyone who believes in Him won’t perish, but have life with God forever.
When Gary got to his friend’s hospital room, he found him not only suffering, but deeply disturbed. Maybe now this friend, who Gary loved like a brother, would finally listen to the Word about Jesus and God would impart the gift of faith to him.
“How are you?” Gary asked. “Oh,” the friend said, “I’m really depressed. All my stocks tanked yesterday.”
Only a few heartbeats from eternity, Gary’s friend still kept his heart, just like the hearts of the Palm Sunday crowd, closed to Christ, the only King Who can save us to live as we were meant to live, forever!
If anyone listening to my voice on the radio today has heard the message that Jesus died and rose to give everlasting life to all who repent and believe in Him, then I urge you to surrender to Jesus.
Let Him give you the gift of faith.
Let Him be your King.
And if anyone who already believes has unfinished business with Jesus--and we all do--some part of your life you’ve been keeping to yourself and out of Jesus’ hands, some part of you that doubts Jesus’ love for you--I urge you now: Surrender to Jesus.
Daily repent and daily let Jesus give you new life.
Let God’s Word, recorded in the Bible, dwell richly within you.
Gladly receive the Word of forgiveness and new life He gives to believers who taste the bread and the wine of Holy Communion.
Welcome Jesus as the King of your life “while it is still called 'today.'” You will never regret it...and if you will endure in trusting in Jesus alone, I guarantee that you will spend eternity joyfully celebrating what God’s Word did in you when you opened your heart, mind, and will and truly listened to Jesus. Amen
Mark 11:1-11
(Palm Sunday)
Some of you may remember the song, The New Kid in Town. Though the melody is somber, its opening lyrics seem filled with the promise of a new hero who will make everyone happy. It starts:
There’s talk on the streets it sounds so familiar
Great expectations, everybody’s watching you
People you meet all seem to know you
Even your old friends treat you like your something new.
But this picture of popularity and happy anticipation gets interrupted in the first iteration of the chorus, when we hear:
Johnny Come Lately, the new kid in town
Everybody loves you, so don’t let them down.
Those words sound like a warning to me, as if people are saying: “We’re all behind you, as long as you please us and do what we expect of you, when we expect it, and how we expect it.”
The song has it right. People can be fickle. One day, they’re for you. The next, they’re shouting, “Crucify!”
That’s especially true when they feel that the “Johnny Come Lately” they hailed on Sunday has “let them down” later in the same week.
In many ways, this is the story of Palm Sunday.
Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem. Everybody was happy. Everyone was His friend. Everyone wanted Him to be the Messiah King, to take the throne of ancient King David.
Yet, amid the Palm Sunday celebrating was an atmosphere of implied violence, of threatened rejection. The actions and the words with which the crowds welcomed Jesus were fraught with ambiguity.
Like the happy first verse of the Eagles song, the words of the crowd seemed to speak of belief in Jesus as their King.
But the word they used, “Hosanna,” meaning “Save us,” is one of those phrases that can cut two ways.
On the one hand, it can be a statement of faith and surrender: “Only You can save, Lord. We need You!”
But it can also carry a threat: “We’re putting our hopes in you. So, be the king we want you to be...or else!”
The Palm Sunday crowd, itching for war and conquest and personal vindication, must have scratched their heads at what Jesus did that Palm Sunday evening.
Instead of giving people their marching orders, Jesus did something strange. At the end of our gospel lesson, Mark tells us:
...Jesus went into Jerusalem and into the temple. So, when He had looked around at all things, as the hour was already late, He went out to Bethany with the twelve. (Mark 11:11)
This is a strangely anticlimactic ending to a day in which Jesus' fellow Jews had proclaimed Him their King. It would be like inaugurating a president in this country--the oath administered, the crowd cheering, the Marine Band playing, Hail to the Chief--and then seeing the new president simply sit down. No speech-making. No marching orders. No crowing.
Jesus showed no interest in being a king who would lead the people in battle to rid themselves of the Romans.
The crowds and Jesus’ own followers must have been further mystified by what Jesus did the next day.
Mark 11:15-19 says that Jesus went back to the temple and still didn’t take up arms against the enemies of His homeland.
Instead, for the second time in His ministry, He turned on His fellow Judeans, throwing the money changers out of the temple. After being hailed as King, Jesus didn’t go after the Romans. He indicted His own people--the people of God--for turning the worship of God into an occasion for doing business! He was telling them that their real enemies weren't Roman soldiers, but the sin that drove them to worship money and worldly comforts and family and nation instead of the one true God of the universe!
On Palm Sunday, the crowds welcomed Jesus because they thought Jesus had come to do their will.
By Thursday of that week, what they came to realize was that He had really come to do the Father’s will. He had come, as He had already told them, “to serve, not to be served and to give His life as a ransom for many,” to bring the possibility of new and everlasting life with God to all who dared to surrender their lives to Him.
And so, like the crowds in The New Kid in Town, disappointed by the Messiah they thought they could keep in their hip pockets, the Jerusalem crowd turned on Jesus.
On Thursday night, just four days after His triumphant entry into the city, Jesus was arrested and the next day, the same crowd that had laid down their clothes and branches to welcome Him like a military hero cried for His blood.
They cried too that the Roman governor would release a terrorist named Barabbas. The crowds may have thought that, unlike Jesus, Barabbas had the stomach to fight the war against the Romans they wanted.
Truth is, they wanted a leader who would follow them, not a leader like Jesus, Who took His direction from God the Father.
And it's precisely here that we're hit with the questions that Palm Sunday forces us all to confront:
Will we be like the crowds or will we learn to be true followers of Jesus?
Will we follow our own selfish impulses and the habits of a dying world?
Or will we follow Jesus through tough times--even through death--so that we can receive what Jesus, because of His faithfulness to the will of God the Father, received on Easter Sunday: never-ending resurrection life with God?
And how exactly do we make this choice?
Above all, we must realize that faith in Jesus is not our achievement.
You and I are incapable of choosing to trust anyone or anything except ourselves.
We human beings are not born with free wills.
Left to our own devices, we will always choose the same selfish and self-destructive path the Palm Sunday crowd chose.
But that doesn’t mean that we’re without hope! Turn to 1 Corinthians 12:3. There, we read that “no one speaking by the Spirit of God calls Jesus accursed, and no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.”
Listen: Faith in Jesus, the capacity to believe in Him and surrender to Him despite what the crowd is saying, is a gift.
And how do we get the gift of faith? Turn to Romans 10:10. It says: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” Notice that faith does not come by our decision. It doesn't come by our effort. Faith comes when we receive God's Word, when we let it invade our consciousness, get past our self-justifications, and speak to us.
God’s Word is the most powerful force in the universe!
The Word of God has the power to comfort us when we grieve, assure us of God’s presence with us through every moment we live, and give us the certainty that Jesus “is the resurrection and the life” and that all who believe in Him, even if they die, will live and that whoever believes in Him will live forever. Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life.” Faith comes only to those who dare to listen to the Gospel word about Jesus.
The Palm Sunday crowd would have done well to follow the example of Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. One day, you remember, Jesus was in the home of these three siblings, teaching.
Martha was busy hustling around. She made sure that everyone's glasses were full of drink and their plates were replenished with hors d'oeuvres. She served dinner. She cleaned up messes and saw that everyone was comfortable.
Mary, meanwhile, sat listening to Jesus.
Martha became enraged. Luke 11:40 says: “Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached [Jesus] and said, ‘Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?...Tell her to help me.”
Martha thought she was a good person, just like the Palm Sunday crowd. “I’m a good person, a nice person” they must have thought. “I even belong the First Jerusalem Church of Nice! I do lots of good stuff! I deserve a break! I deserve a better life, some comfort, some perks for what a nice person I am!”
Jesus’ reply to Martha, in verses Luke 11:41-42, is stunning: “Martha...you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from you.”
All the things that the Palm Sunday crowd wanted could be taken from them: freedom from foreign conquerors, lower taxes, more possessions and financial security.
Jesus was offering them “the one thing” they needed: Himself. (He offers us the same thing.)
If, instead of celebrating on that first Palm Sunday, the crowd had listened to Jesus, allowing His Word to work faith in them, they would have had much more than anything they were shouting or striving for.
They would have received the gift of faith and a life with God that never ends.
And that is an incredible gift!
A man I know spent many years warming a pew at the church he attended, but never believed. Then, after a member of his family became gravely ill, he realized that all his attempts to control his life and his world were futile. A crack in his personal armor finally allowed the word about Jesus, the King Who saves helpless people from sin and death and gives eternity to those who believe in Him, got through.
God gives faith to all who truly hear the good news that God took on human flesh, voluntarily took the death sentence for sin you and I deserve, and then find, miraculously, God’s Holy Spirit has made it possible for us to say, “I believe. I believe in Jesus more than I believe in money, or good grades, or lottery winnings, or Ohio State basketball, or upholding or dismantling national health care, or my family, or America. None of these things has ultimate importance. When we peer into the mystery of eternity and the mysteries of each day, I believe that Jesus is all I need, the only One Who can see me through!”
Gary, a friend of mine, recently wrote about getting word from the family of a friend that the friend was in the last stages of dying.
Gary’s friend had always been a hard-charging businessman who resisted the notion of surrendering to Christ. He had no time to listen to the Word, the good news of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus. There were too many deals to be struck, too much riding on his executive judgment.
Still, Gary and he had remained friends through the years. Now, called to his friend’s death bed, Gary prayed that finally, his friend would listen to the Word of God and surrender to and trust in Jesus. Gary didn’t want his friend to face an eternity separated from God. Jesus says that God so loved this world that He gave His Son Jesus so that everyone who believes in Him won’t perish, but have life with God forever.
When Gary got to his friend’s hospital room, he found him not only suffering, but deeply disturbed. Maybe now this friend, who Gary loved like a brother, would finally listen to the Word about Jesus and God would impart the gift of faith to him.
“How are you?” Gary asked. “Oh,” the friend said, “I’m really depressed. All my stocks tanked yesterday.”
Only a few heartbeats from eternity, Gary’s friend still kept his heart, just like the hearts of the Palm Sunday crowd, closed to Christ, the only King Who can save us to live as we were meant to live, forever!
If anyone listening to my voice on the radio today has heard the message that Jesus died and rose to give everlasting life to all who repent and believe in Him, then I urge you to surrender to Jesus.
Let Him give you the gift of faith.
Let Him be your King.
And if anyone who already believes has unfinished business with Jesus--and we all do--some part of your life you’ve been keeping to yourself and out of Jesus’ hands, some part of you that doubts Jesus’ love for you--I urge you now: Surrender to Jesus.
Daily repent and daily let Jesus give you new life.
Let God’s Word, recorded in the Bible, dwell richly within you.
Gladly receive the Word of forgiveness and new life He gives to believers who taste the bread and the wine of Holy Communion.
Welcome Jesus as the King of your life “while it is still called 'today.'” You will never regret it...and if you will endure in trusting in Jesus alone, I guarantee that you will spend eternity joyfully celebrating what God’s Word did in you when you opened your heart, mind, and will and truly listened to Jesus. Amen
Saturday, March 31, 2012
This Always Blows Me Away
This always blows me away: "...while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly." (Romans 5:6)
Christ died for me, in spite of the ungodly, sinful nature with which I was born and in spite of the sins I've committed.
And then, miraculously, in spite of my unworthiness, the Holy Spirit makes it possible for a sinner who is, by nature, cynical and self-serving, to trust that God loves me and wants a relationship with me. No writer of fiction could create something so wonderful, so countercultural, so amazing!
"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound," the sound of the Word about forgiveness and new life for all who turn from sin and believe in Christ. That word has saved "a wretch like me."
God is incredible! He always blows me away!
Christ died for me, in spite of the ungodly, sinful nature with which I was born and in spite of the sins I've committed.
And then, miraculously, in spite of my unworthiness, the Holy Spirit makes it possible for a sinner who is, by nature, cynical and self-serving, to trust that God loves me and wants a relationship with me. No writer of fiction could create something so wonderful, so countercultural, so amazing!
"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound," the sound of the Word about forgiveness and new life for all who turn from sin and believe in Christ. That word has saved "a wretch like me."
God is incredible! He always blows me away!
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The War on My Ego
For decades now, I've prayed that God would make war on my ego.
And the thing is, I've almost meant it.
I don't mean to say that I've been insincere. But honestly, I like having things go my way. I mean always. It's a desire I inherited from my ancestors, Adam and Eve, who wanted to "be like God."
So, what's so bad about an ambition like that. After all, we're told to dream big, right?
The reason for my prayer is simple: It's my non-empircal observation that, apart from unconquered diseases, roughly one-third of the world's problems (more or less) are caused by people with inflated egos, another one-third (more or less) by people with low self-esteem, and the other third (or way more) caused by people whose self-images wildly careen between these two poles, depending on how they're feeling, what's happened to them, or if they won the lottery the night before.
I don't want to be a problem-causer in the world. (The world has enough problems, doesn't it?) Besides, who needs the drama?
More than that though, I don't want my ego issues to obstruct my view of the only one with a right to be an egomaniac but who never has been one: the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
I want to see myself as I am: a child of God for whom God took on flesh, went to a cross, died, and rose again to give me a new and everlasting life.
In my soul's darkest places, my ego wants to prove that I'm more important than anyone else, wittier, smarter, abler, more informed, the best husband, the best father. But God has shown me that sort of thinking leads away from life, happiness, or joy...away from God.
So, in my heart of hearts, where God's law is written, I want to be humble. I honestly believe, as someone has said, that humility isn't thinking less of yourself; it's thinking less about yourself.
Humility leaves room for God and for others in our hearts. And that's something I want very much.
So tonight, in spite of my inborn resistance to it, I'm asking God to once again tomorrow make war on my ego. And the thing about this war is that no matter how much I may moan or complain about the work that God does in response to my prayer is that, when I lose, I win!
And the thing is, I've almost meant it.
I don't mean to say that I've been insincere. But honestly, I like having things go my way. I mean always. It's a desire I inherited from my ancestors, Adam and Eve, who wanted to "be like God."
So, what's so bad about an ambition like that. After all, we're told to dream big, right?
The reason for my prayer is simple: It's my non-empircal observation that, apart from unconquered diseases, roughly one-third of the world's problems (more or less) are caused by people with inflated egos, another one-third (more or less) by people with low self-esteem, and the other third (or way more) caused by people whose self-images wildly careen between these two poles, depending on how they're feeling, what's happened to them, or if they won the lottery the night before.
I don't want to be a problem-causer in the world. (The world has enough problems, doesn't it?) Besides, who needs the drama?
More than that though, I don't want my ego issues to obstruct my view of the only one with a right to be an egomaniac but who never has been one: the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
I want to see myself as I am: a child of God for whom God took on flesh, went to a cross, died, and rose again to give me a new and everlasting life.
In my soul's darkest places, my ego wants to prove that I'm more important than anyone else, wittier, smarter, abler, more informed, the best husband, the best father. But God has shown me that sort of thinking leads away from life, happiness, or joy...away from God.
So, in my heart of hearts, where God's law is written, I want to be humble. I honestly believe, as someone has said, that humility isn't thinking less of yourself; it's thinking less about yourself.
Humility leaves room for God and for others in our hearts. And that's something I want very much.
So tonight, in spite of my inborn resistance to it, I'm asking God to once again tomorrow make war on my ego. And the thing about this war is that no matter how much I may moan or complain about the work that God does in response to my prayer is that, when I lose, I win!
Monday, March 26, 2012
This Never Ceases to Crack Me Up!
I guess he was "on message." But every time British opposition leader Ed Miliband appears in the news, I remember this interview in which he endlessly--and hilariously--gives the same answer to every question.
A Story of Repentance, Forgiveness, and Transformation
I mentioned The Painted Veil, starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, here.
Based on a Somerset Maugham story, this film tells a character-driven story about two imperfect human beings who discover great love through adversity, service, repentance, and growth. Of course, you can watch it for free on Netflix. But below is a link to purchase the DVD through my Amazon Associates account. (I get credit points from Amazon, which in turn allows me to purchase things from them less expensively.)
Warning: There is one brief scene portraying a sexual encounter. As I recall, there is no frontal nudity there, however.
Based on a Somerset Maugham story, this film tells a character-driven story about two imperfect human beings who discover great love through adversity, service, repentance, and growth. Of course, you can watch it for free on Netflix. But below is a link to purchase the DVD through my Amazon Associates account. (I get credit points from Amazon, which in turn allows me to purchase things from them less expensively.)
Warning: There is one brief scene portraying a sexual encounter. As I recall, there is no frontal nudity there, however.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Which Do We Need: Fixer or High Priest?
[This was shared today during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]
Hebrews 5:5-10
In the movie, The Painted Veil, Naomi Watts plays a spoiled daughter of wealth who marries a scientist committed to doing good for others. She finds her husband a bore. One night in a remote Chinese village, she and her husband are at the home of an Englishman whose Chinese wife, unable to speak any English, clearly adores her husband. Why, Kitty Fane, Watts’ character, asks the English man, does his wife love him so? He translates Kitty’s question for his wife and the answer comes back, “She says because I am a good man.” Kitty nearly spits out her reaction: “As if a woman ever fell in love with a man for his virtues.”
We all know men and women like that who think that the only kind of person worth falling in love with is one who is self-centered, physically imposing, rude, or inclined to ignore or disrespect those less “gifted” than themselves.
But good women or men who fall for bad members of the opposite sex aren’t the only ones who throw in with people who sin with little sense of dishonor or shame.
Whole nations--like Nazi Germany--have been known to give their allegiance and even worship to people they knew to be evil but who “kept the trains running on time.”
Less dramatically, we ourselves have a tendency in our own culture to wink at evil-doers while labeling those who try to do the right things in life as “wimps.”
“Marketing” Jesus in a world like this, a world that loves sinful heroes who impose their wills on others, has always been a tough sell for Christians.
Our second lesson for today, Hebrews 5:5-10, says that Jesus is our “high priest.” The question, I suppose, is why would anyone want a high priest when what we really want is to wink at us as we “get away with murder,” to experience what we imagine being God, the master of the universe, must be like?
And what exactly is a high priest, anyway?
Please look at the verses just before our lesson, Hebrews 5:1-4 for an answer to that question.
Hebrews is describing the faithful descendants of Levi, one of Jacob’s sons, back in Old Testament times. Levi’s descendants were the priests of ancient Israel.
In verse one, we’re told that the high priests offered “both gifts and sacrifices for sins.” The priests made offerings to God as the people repented for their sins and trusted God to forgive them.
In verse 2, we’re told that a high priest “can have compassion on those who are ignorant and going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness.” The high priest had what we call empathy. He knew what it was like to be human and understood how human beings can fall into sin.
Verse 3 says that the high priest so identified with the weaknesses of the people that he offered sacrifices for his own sins as well as those of the people. Faithful priests never held themselves up as being superior to others. They were servants. Jesus exhibited this very attitude when He went to the Jordan to baptized by John. John's baptism was a sign of the baptized person's repentance. Jesus was sinless and had no need to repent. That's why John objected to baptizing Jesus. Matthew's gospel says:
Hebrews 5:4 then says that no one dared to take the honor of the priesthood for himself--something that was going on in the first century world in which Hebrews was written--but was called to it by God.
The high priest wasn’t a dictator who kept the trains running on time! He:
Fine, we might think, the high priests were “nice” guys. But when we’re up against the calamities of life--job loss, relational discord, divorce, disobedience in children, irresponsibility in parents, violence, terrorism, fatal disease, death, grief--what good is a high priest?
What good is a virtuous servant of God when what we want is a “fixer” who can get us out of the fixes we’re in?
God evidently thinks that in the face of all our life’s enemies, including sin and death, a high priest is precisely what we need.
Look now at what Hebrews tells us about Jesus in our lesson, Hebrews 5:5-10.
Verse 5: “Christ did not glorify Himself to become High Priest...”
Don't be mistaken about what this means. Jesus was clear about proclaiming Who He was: God in human flesh. “I and My Father are one,” He says in John 10:30, for example.
And yet, Jesus never forced anyone to acknowledge Him as God and Savior. Jesus never sought honors from the world. He only sought to do the will of the Father. Like the high priests of old, Jesus never glorified Himself or pushed Himself ahead of others. Jesus didn’t take the job of the great high priest of creation; it was conferred on Him by God the Father Who said, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well. Hear him!” (Matthew 17:5)
In Hebrews 5:6, the preacher says too, that the Father spoke the words of Psalm 110:4 to Jesus: “You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”
What on earth is that about?
Melchizedek is mentioned in just two places in the Old Testament: in the Psalm quoted here in Hebrews and in Genesis 14:18-20.
There, we’re told that Abraham has just returned from a battle in which he saved his nephew Lot and Lot’s family and possessions from a coalition of five kingdoms that had kidnapped them. After the battle, Melchizedek comes from Salem, Shalom in Hebrew, a word that means Peace, among other things. Salem existed at the very site on which Jerusalem and the temple would be built hundreds of years later.
Now, think of this: Long before Abraham’s grandson Jacob had a son named Levi, who would become the ancestor of Israel’s high priests...long before there was a temple or a Jerusalem, God had a high priest bringing God's shalom, God's peace, and the availability of reconciliation with God to the human race.
Already, 2000 years before Jesus was born, crucified, or resurrected, God was laying the foundation for our salvation from sin and death through Jesus.
Priests, you see, are the conduits between heaven and earth of God’s law and promise.
They offer up prayers for sinful humanity and they convey the call of God to humanity to repent and believe in God. (The New Testament book of 1 Peter says, by the way, that every baptized believer in Jesus is a priest of God. That includes you and me. That though, is a topic for another sermon some day.)
Genesis says that Melchizedek was “the priest of God Most High” long before the ancestors of Israel’s high priests were even conceived. And unlike the descendants of Levi who inherited their priesthood, Melchizedek received his call, not by inheritance, but directly from God.
And Melchizedek wasn’t just a high priest. He was also the king of Salem.
That may not seem earth-shaking to us. But in those days, kings were kings and priests were priests and the twain rarely, if ever, met...usually with terrible results.
Even today, it would seem strange if a pastor were elected president, wouldn’t it? The two functions--priest and ruler--don’t seem to go together.
But Jesus, our second lesson tells us, is a priest in the order of Melchizedek. That means that like the Levitical priests, He never sought His priesthood. But unlike them, He didn’t inherit the priesthood from an earthly father. God the Father made Jesus a priest in the same way He had made a priest of Melchizedek. Hebrews 7:3 says of Melchizedek: “Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, [Melchizedek] remains a priest continually.”
Like Melchizedek, Jesus is a king. But unlike Melchizedek, He is the King of all kings, Who brings shalom, peace with God, to all who will turn from sin and believe in Him!
In the rest of our lesson from Hebrews, we see how Jesus the King of all kings, accepted human limitations in order to bring salvation to us. We’re told, starting with verse 7, that while on earth, Jesus offered up prayers and requests to God “with vehement cries and tears to Him Who was able to save Him from death...” And verse 8 says that Jesus learned obedience through what He suffered, meaning, above all, through His cross.
Jesus doesn’t sound much like those rogue heroes we love so much, does He? He sounds like He willingly accepted human weakness as He prayed to God, “not my will, but Your will be done.” (Matthew 26:39)
In the garden of Gethsemane on the night of His arrest, He told Peter to put away his sword when Peter tried to protect Jesus from the soldiers and the temple police who had come to arrest Him. Jesus asked Peter, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53).
Even at the point of His death, Jesus renounced the sword and all the other signs and symbols of human power. He accepted the weakness under which the old high priests had also lived and so, went to the cross.
“So, Jesus is our high priest?” you may be asking. “Can a high priest who accepts the same limitations and weaknesses we have, even our subjection to death, do us any good?”
Writer Louis Cassels wrote a story called, The Man Who Stayed Home.
A man believed that the idea of God becoming a human being was silly. One Christmas Eve, because He couldn’t accept Jesus being both God and human, he refused to attend the candlelight worship service.
Shortly after his family left for the service, the snow began to fall and he was startled by a thud. Then another thud. Then another. He thought someone was throwing snowballs at his house.
But on looking outside, he found a flock of birds, some of them occasionally flying toward the light coming from his house, looking for shelter.
The man thought he should try to help them. So, he put on his coat and took a loaf of bread outdoors. He then created a trail of bread crumbs that would lead the freezing birds to a barn where his kids kept a pony.
But the birds weren’t interested in the bread. They wanted to get warm.
He tried catching the birds, shooing them, corralling them, walking around them, waving his arms. But nothing he did would get the birds to go into the warm barn.
He realized that they were afraid of him.
“If I were a bird,” he thought, “I guess that I could speak their language. I could tell them not to be afraid. I could promise to help them and lead them to safety. But I’d have to be one of them so that they could see and understand.”
At that moment, church bells rang in the distance and the man’s eyes filled with tears. He fell to his knees in the snow.
What good is a high priest...
All the good we need, that’s what good Jesus is!
Only the high priest Jesus, Who understands us and has compassion for us, gives us forgiveness and life forever.
Only the high priest Jesus has the love to stick by us for eternity, no matter what.
Only the high priest Jesus is worth surrendering our whole lives to, because only Jesus can give us what nobody and nothing in this world has in their power to give: life with God.
You know, we can look for life and fulfillment and happiness in many places. (It's like the old country song, Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places. We do that.)
But only our great high priest can give us--can give you--all that God wants for you to have and enjoy for all eternity. Only the high priest Jesus can give you God and lead you to God.
Jesus is reaching out to you again this morning.
Don’t turn away.
Follow Jesus.
Fall in love with Him.
Take hold of Jesus and never let go and know that, for His part, our great high priest and king, will never, never let go of you!
Amen
Hebrews 5:5-10
In the movie, The Painted Veil, Naomi Watts plays a spoiled daughter of wealth who marries a scientist committed to doing good for others. She finds her husband a bore. One night in a remote Chinese village, she and her husband are at the home of an Englishman whose Chinese wife, unable to speak any English, clearly adores her husband. Why, Kitty Fane, Watts’ character, asks the English man, does his wife love him so? He translates Kitty’s question for his wife and the answer comes back, “She says because I am a good man.” Kitty nearly spits out her reaction: “As if a woman ever fell in love with a man for his virtues.”
We all know men and women like that who think that the only kind of person worth falling in love with is one who is self-centered, physically imposing, rude, or inclined to ignore or disrespect those less “gifted” than themselves.
But good women or men who fall for bad members of the opposite sex aren’t the only ones who throw in with people who sin with little sense of dishonor or shame.
Whole nations--like Nazi Germany--have been known to give their allegiance and even worship to people they knew to be evil but who “kept the trains running on time.”
Less dramatically, we ourselves have a tendency in our own culture to wink at evil-doers while labeling those who try to do the right things in life as “wimps.”
“Marketing” Jesus in a world like this, a world that loves sinful heroes who impose their wills on others, has always been a tough sell for Christians.
Our second lesson for today, Hebrews 5:5-10, says that Jesus is our “high priest.” The question, I suppose, is why would anyone want a high priest when what we really want is to wink at us as we “get away with murder,” to experience what we imagine being God, the master of the universe, must be like?
And what exactly is a high priest, anyway?
Please look at the verses just before our lesson, Hebrews 5:1-4 for an answer to that question.
Hebrews is describing the faithful descendants of Levi, one of Jacob’s sons, back in Old Testament times. Levi’s descendants were the priests of ancient Israel.
In verse one, we’re told that the high priests offered “both gifts and sacrifices for sins.” The priests made offerings to God as the people repented for their sins and trusted God to forgive them.
In verse 2, we’re told that a high priest “can have compassion on those who are ignorant and going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness.” The high priest had what we call empathy. He knew what it was like to be human and understood how human beings can fall into sin.
Verse 3 says that the high priest so identified with the weaknesses of the people that he offered sacrifices for his own sins as well as those of the people. Faithful priests never held themselves up as being superior to others. They were servants. Jesus exhibited this very attitude when He went to the Jordan to baptized by John. John's baptism was a sign of the baptized person's repentance. Jesus was sinless and had no need to repent. That's why John objected to baptizing Jesus. Matthew's gospel says:
Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, "I need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?" But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." (Matthew 3:14-15)Like the high priests of the Old Testament period, Jesus identified with you and me and our needs for reconciliation and rightness with God.
Hebrews 5:4 then says that no one dared to take the honor of the priesthood for himself--something that was going on in the first century world in which Hebrews was written--but was called to it by God.
The high priest wasn’t a dictator who kept the trains running on time! He:
- prayed for those who fell into sin,
- bore compassion for those subject to temptation,
- identified with the people he served, and
- didn’t do the job because he thought he was qualified or because he loved the honor or felt himself to be better than others. He served as high priest just because God had called him.
Fine, we might think, the high priests were “nice” guys. But when we’re up against the calamities of life--job loss, relational discord, divorce, disobedience in children, irresponsibility in parents, violence, terrorism, fatal disease, death, grief--what good is a high priest?
What good is a virtuous servant of God when what we want is a “fixer” who can get us out of the fixes we’re in?
God evidently thinks that in the face of all our life’s enemies, including sin and death, a high priest is precisely what we need.
Look now at what Hebrews tells us about Jesus in our lesson, Hebrews 5:5-10.
Verse 5: “Christ did not glorify Himself to become High Priest...”
Don't be mistaken about what this means. Jesus was clear about proclaiming Who He was: God in human flesh. “I and My Father are one,” He says in John 10:30, for example.
And yet, Jesus never forced anyone to acknowledge Him as God and Savior. Jesus never sought honors from the world. He only sought to do the will of the Father. Like the high priests of old, Jesus never glorified Himself or pushed Himself ahead of others. Jesus didn’t take the job of the great high priest of creation; it was conferred on Him by God the Father Who said, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well. Hear him!” (Matthew 17:5)
In Hebrews 5:6, the preacher says too, that the Father spoke the words of Psalm 110:4 to Jesus: “You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”
What on earth is that about?
Melchizedek is mentioned in just two places in the Old Testament: in the Psalm quoted here in Hebrews and in Genesis 14:18-20.
There, we’re told that Abraham has just returned from a battle in which he saved his nephew Lot and Lot’s family and possessions from a coalition of five kingdoms that had kidnapped them. After the battle, Melchizedek comes from Salem, Shalom in Hebrew, a word that means Peace, among other things. Salem existed at the very site on which Jerusalem and the temple would be built hundreds of years later.
Now, think of this: Long before Abraham’s grandson Jacob had a son named Levi, who would become the ancestor of Israel’s high priests...long before there was a temple or a Jerusalem, God had a high priest bringing God's shalom, God's peace, and the availability of reconciliation with God to the human race.
Already, 2000 years before Jesus was born, crucified, or resurrected, God was laying the foundation for our salvation from sin and death through Jesus.
Priests, you see, are the conduits between heaven and earth of God’s law and promise.
They offer up prayers for sinful humanity and they convey the call of God to humanity to repent and believe in God. (The New Testament book of 1 Peter says, by the way, that every baptized believer in Jesus is a priest of God. That includes you and me. That though, is a topic for another sermon some day.)
Genesis says that Melchizedek was “the priest of God Most High” long before the ancestors of Israel’s high priests were even conceived. And unlike the descendants of Levi who inherited their priesthood, Melchizedek received his call, not by inheritance, but directly from God.
And Melchizedek wasn’t just a high priest. He was also the king of Salem.
That may not seem earth-shaking to us. But in those days, kings were kings and priests were priests and the twain rarely, if ever, met...usually with terrible results.
Even today, it would seem strange if a pastor were elected president, wouldn’t it? The two functions--priest and ruler--don’t seem to go together.
But Jesus, our second lesson tells us, is a priest in the order of Melchizedek. That means that like the Levitical priests, He never sought His priesthood. But unlike them, He didn’t inherit the priesthood from an earthly father. God the Father made Jesus a priest in the same way He had made a priest of Melchizedek. Hebrews 7:3 says of Melchizedek: “Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, [Melchizedek] remains a priest continually.”
Like Melchizedek, Jesus is a king. But unlike Melchizedek, He is the King of all kings, Who brings shalom, peace with God, to all who will turn from sin and believe in Him!
In the rest of our lesson from Hebrews, we see how Jesus the King of all kings, accepted human limitations in order to bring salvation to us. We’re told, starting with verse 7, that while on earth, Jesus offered up prayers and requests to God “with vehement cries and tears to Him Who was able to save Him from death...” And verse 8 says that Jesus learned obedience through what He suffered, meaning, above all, through His cross.
Jesus doesn’t sound much like those rogue heroes we love so much, does He? He sounds like He willingly accepted human weakness as He prayed to God, “not my will, but Your will be done.” (Matthew 26:39)
In the garden of Gethsemane on the night of His arrest, He told Peter to put away his sword when Peter tried to protect Jesus from the soldiers and the temple police who had come to arrest Him. Jesus asked Peter, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53).
Even at the point of His death, Jesus renounced the sword and all the other signs and symbols of human power. He accepted the weakness under which the old high priests had also lived and so, went to the cross.
“So, Jesus is our high priest?” you may be asking. “Can a high priest who accepts the same limitations and weaknesses we have, even our subjection to death, do us any good?”
Writer Louis Cassels wrote a story called, The Man Who Stayed Home.
A man believed that the idea of God becoming a human being was silly. One Christmas Eve, because He couldn’t accept Jesus being both God and human, he refused to attend the candlelight worship service.
Shortly after his family left for the service, the snow began to fall and he was startled by a thud. Then another thud. Then another. He thought someone was throwing snowballs at his house.
But on looking outside, he found a flock of birds, some of them occasionally flying toward the light coming from his house, looking for shelter.
The man thought he should try to help them. So, he put on his coat and took a loaf of bread outdoors. He then created a trail of bread crumbs that would lead the freezing birds to a barn where his kids kept a pony.
But the birds weren’t interested in the bread. They wanted to get warm.
He tried catching the birds, shooing them, corralling them, walking around them, waving his arms. But nothing he did would get the birds to go into the warm barn.
He realized that they were afraid of him.
“If I were a bird,” he thought, “I guess that I could speak their language. I could tell them not to be afraid. I could promise to help them and lead them to safety. But I’d have to be one of them so that they could see and understand.”
At that moment, church bells rang in the distance and the man’s eyes filled with tears. He fell to his knees in the snow.
What good is a high priest...
- Who has become one of us?
- Who has offered up desperate prayers when His throat was choked by fear and his face was streaked by tears?
- Whose anxiety was so great that blood was secreted through the pores of His skin, along with His sweat?
- What good is a Savior Who went to a cross and tells us that the way to life leads through Him?
All the good we need, that’s what good Jesus is!
Only the high priest Jesus, Who understands us and has compassion for us, gives us forgiveness and life forever.
Only the high priest Jesus has the love to stick by us for eternity, no matter what.
Only the high priest Jesus is worth surrendering our whole lives to, because only Jesus can give us what nobody and nothing in this world has in their power to give: life with God.
You know, we can look for life and fulfillment and happiness in many places. (It's like the old country song, Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places. We do that.)
But only our great high priest can give us--can give you--all that God wants for you to have and enjoy for all eternity. Only the high priest Jesus can give you God and lead you to God.
Jesus is reaching out to you again this morning.
Don’t turn away.
Follow Jesus.
Fall in love with Him.
Take hold of Jesus and never let go and know that, for His part, our great high priest and king, will never, never let go of you!
Amen
Saturday, March 24, 2012
No Throwaway People
"If my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up" (Psalm 27:10).
For God, there are no throwaway people!
God gives us the freedom to walk away from Him. But God's desire to be there for us forever is so fierce that He took on flesh to live among us, to die for us, to rise for us, and to give new, eternal life to all who will turn from sin and believe in Christ.
Even when you or those you love have this life taken from you, God will never leave you nor forsake you.
You simply need to turn to Him in faith in order to have and be sustained in the relationship with Him we all need.
This is simple, but not easy.
Turning to--really surrendering to--Jesus Christ entails giving up on all the habits and sins we use to make ourselves feel important or worthy or safe and, instead, concerning ourselves with the opinion and will of just one person, God.
Turning to Christ means crucifying the old sinful self so that the new self can derive life from God, the only one Who can really give us life!
"Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Acts 2:21).
God loves you and wants you to be with Him today and in eternity.
With God, there are no throwaway people.
(For more on Psalm 27, see here.)
For God, there are no throwaway people!
God gives us the freedom to walk away from Him. But God's desire to be there for us forever is so fierce that He took on flesh to live among us, to die for us, to rise for us, and to give new, eternal life to all who will turn from sin and believe in Christ.
Even when you or those you love have this life taken from you, God will never leave you nor forsake you.
You simply need to turn to Him in faith in order to have and be sustained in the relationship with Him we all need.
This is simple, but not easy.
Turning to--really surrendering to--Jesus Christ entails giving up on all the habits and sins we use to make ourselves feel important or worthy or safe and, instead, concerning ourselves with the opinion and will of just one person, God.
Turning to Christ means crucifying the old sinful self so that the new self can derive life from God, the only one Who can really give us life!
"Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Acts 2:21).
God loves you and wants you to be with Him today and in eternity.
With God, there are no throwaway people.
(For more on Psalm 27, see here.)
Friday, March 23, 2012
Cut Off What?
This past Sunday, a young member of the congregation had a question. "Pastor," he said, "I've been reading the New Testament a chapter a day with the rest of the congregation. What does Jesus mean when He talks about cutting off your hand and stuff?"
The place where Jesus "talks about cutting off your hand and stuff" can be found in the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, specifically chapter 5, verses 27 to 30.
Jesus is explaining some of the Ten Commandments, given by God to Moses about 1500 years before Jesus was born. This is what Jesus says:
In the words the sixth grader asked me about, Jesus isn't telling us to literally cut out eyes or lop off our hands, any more than He's suggesting that eyes or hands can cause us to sin. Wills held hostage to selfish thinking cause us to sin, not the body parts that facilitate our sin.
What Jesus is saying is that, when we trust our lives to Jesus, whatever tempts us to violate God's will or whatever habits may routinely lead us into sin can be confessed and turned over to God.
Christ died on the cross to take the punishment for sin we all deserve and rose from death to give new and everlasting life to all who will turn from sin and entrust their lives to Him.
When faced with temptation, Christ can help us to resist it and the death it brings and to, instead, choose life with God. The Bible promises: "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it" (1 Corinthians 10:13).
When we've caved to temptation and sinned and recognized our wrong, we need to approach God in the Name of Jesus immediately and seek forgiveness. The Bible also promises: "If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).
Sin dehumanizes us and carries us away from God. Because all sin "and fall short of the glory of God," anyone who wants the life with God made available only through Jesus Christ, will find themselves in a daily tussle with temptation and sin as long as they remain in this world.
Ask God to help you resist your temptations and trust that, through Jesus, you have the forgiveness of your sins and the power to resist the devil. That's the way you'll be able to cut off that "stuff" and enjoy the life God has in mind for you.
The place where Jesus "talks about cutting off your hand and stuff" can be found in the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, specifically chapter 5, verses 27 to 30.
Jesus is explaining some of the Ten Commandments, given by God to Moses about 1500 years before Jesus was born. This is what Jesus says:
"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 with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go to hell."Throughout this section of teaching we've come to call the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew's gospel, Jesus uses hyperbole, exaggerated language, to make His points. It's all on a par with the exaggerated image Jesus paints when He says elsewhere: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Matthew 19:24). Through that hyperbolic image Jesus was showing that wealth can create the illusion of control in those with money, making it deity in place of the only one Who can give them life, God.
In the words the sixth grader asked me about, Jesus isn't telling us to literally cut out eyes or lop off our hands, any more than He's suggesting that eyes or hands can cause us to sin. Wills held hostage to selfish thinking cause us to sin, not the body parts that facilitate our sin.
What Jesus is saying is that, when we trust our lives to Jesus, whatever tempts us to violate God's will or whatever habits may routinely lead us into sin can be confessed and turned over to God.
Christ died on the cross to take the punishment for sin we all deserve and rose from death to give new and everlasting life to all who will turn from sin and entrust their lives to Him.
When faced with temptation, Christ can help us to resist it and the death it brings and to, instead, choose life with God. The Bible promises: "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it" (1 Corinthians 10:13).
When we've caved to temptation and sinned and recognized our wrong, we need to approach God in the Name of Jesus immediately and seek forgiveness. The Bible also promises: "If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).
Sin dehumanizes us and carries us away from God. Because all sin "and fall short of the glory of God," anyone who wants the life with God made available only through Jesus Christ, will find themselves in a daily tussle with temptation and sin as long as they remain in this world.
Ask God to help you resist your temptations and trust that, through Jesus, you have the forgiveness of your sins and the power to resist the devil. That's the way you'll be able to cut off that "stuff" and enjoy the life God has in mind for you.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Tebow Jets Deal May Be a Disaster...But Not Because He's a Christian
Tim Tebow is going to the New York Jets.
There are legitimate questions about whether Tebow can be an effective quarterback in the NFL. It was because of those questions that the Denver Broncos were anxious to unload him once they had secured the services of Peyton Manning. The Jets' acquisition of Tebow may prove to be one of the all-time bonehead moves made by a National Football League team.
But the negative reactions of some sports journalists to the move seem to be go beyond legitimate questions about quarterback mechanics, leadership ability, the willingness to be a back-up, or Tebow's on-the-field potential.
For example, in this interview, New York Post sports writer Bart Hubboch raises legitimate concerns about how much help Tebow can provide to the Jets, the motives behind the trade, and the effect the Tebow acquisition may have on Jets starting QB Mark Sanchez.
It's when he's asked about Tebow's possible positive effect on the Jets locker room that Hubboch seems to lose his way.
By all accounts, Tebow is an upbeat and fiercely competitive "team" guy. Anyone who's seen the video of his half time rant to his Florida Gator teammates in the national championship game must concede that. And while we might rightly wonder if that sort of cheerleading is welcomed in pro locker rooms, the accounts that I read from the Broncos locker room this past season indicated that Tebow is a team guy. Period.
But Hubboch says he doesn't understand why Tebow would be regarded as a positive force in the locker room. OK, he says, "he's very religious, he's a virgin, and he's a model citizen."
Are these the kinds of things that people refer to when they applaud Tebow's positive locker room presence?
I do applaud Tebow's willingness to be overt about his faith in Christ and to put that faith in practice by doing things for fans that most players don't.
But that isn't what I would call being a positive force in the locker room. I don't think that most semi-knowledgeable sports fans would either.
To me, any athlete who is a positive force among teammates is someone who thinks team first, works hard, and is focused on winning. From what I know, Tebow fits that bill and you can never have enough people like that on your team (assuming they can play).
What Hubboch seems to be reacting to is Tebow's faith and his expressions of that faith.
Early in the interview he deplores the fact that Tebow will bring "divisiveness in the locker room and in the fan base." In part, Hubboch was referencing the "quarterback controversy" that may result from Tebow's mere presence in the locker room. His subsequent remarks make clear, however, that so far as he's concerned Tebow's overt discipleship doesn't suit his tastes.
Tim Tebow won't bring divisiveness to New York or to the Jets unless people like Bart Hubboch decide to reject Tebow simply because they don't like him for the manner in which he follows his Lord or professes his faith.
That would hardly be fair and I think it ought to be labeled for what it is: bigotry (intended or not).
The Jets' deal for Tim Tebow may prove to be a disaster. But if it proves to be so, it will be because Tim Tebow can't do on the field what the New York Jets need for him to do. It won't be because he's a Christian, a virgin, or a model citizen.
There are legitimate questions about whether Tebow can be an effective quarterback in the NFL. It was because of those questions that the Denver Broncos were anxious to unload him once they had secured the services of Peyton Manning. The Jets' acquisition of Tebow may prove to be one of the all-time bonehead moves made by a National Football League team.
But the negative reactions of some sports journalists to the move seem to be go beyond legitimate questions about quarterback mechanics, leadership ability, the willingness to be a back-up, or Tebow's on-the-field potential.
For example, in this interview, New York Post sports writer Bart Hubboch raises legitimate concerns about how much help Tebow can provide to the Jets, the motives behind the trade, and the effect the Tebow acquisition may have on Jets starting QB Mark Sanchez.
It's when he's asked about Tebow's possible positive effect on the Jets locker room that Hubboch seems to lose his way.
By all accounts, Tebow is an upbeat and fiercely competitive "team" guy. Anyone who's seen the video of his half time rant to his Florida Gator teammates in the national championship game must concede that. And while we might rightly wonder if that sort of cheerleading is welcomed in pro locker rooms, the accounts that I read from the Broncos locker room this past season indicated that Tebow is a team guy. Period.
But Hubboch says he doesn't understand why Tebow would be regarded as a positive force in the locker room. OK, he says, "he's very religious, he's a virgin, and he's a model citizen."
Are these the kinds of things that people refer to when they applaud Tebow's positive locker room presence?
I do applaud Tebow's willingness to be overt about his faith in Christ and to put that faith in practice by doing things for fans that most players don't.
But that isn't what I would call being a positive force in the locker room. I don't think that most semi-knowledgeable sports fans would either.
To me, any athlete who is a positive force among teammates is someone who thinks team first, works hard, and is focused on winning. From what I know, Tebow fits that bill and you can never have enough people like that on your team (assuming they can play).
What Hubboch seems to be reacting to is Tebow's faith and his expressions of that faith.
Early in the interview he deplores the fact that Tebow will bring "divisiveness in the locker room and in the fan base." In part, Hubboch was referencing the "quarterback controversy" that may result from Tebow's mere presence in the locker room. His subsequent remarks make clear, however, that so far as he's concerned Tebow's overt discipleship doesn't suit his tastes.
Tim Tebow won't bring divisiveness to New York or to the Jets unless people like Bart Hubboch decide to reject Tebow simply because they don't like him for the manner in which he follows his Lord or professes his faith.
That would hardly be fair and I think it ought to be labeled for what it is: bigotry (intended or not).
The Jets' deal for Tim Tebow may prove to be a disaster. But if it proves to be so, it will be because Tim Tebow can't do on the field what the New York Jets need for him to do. It won't be because he's a Christian, a virgin, or a model citizen.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
How You Can Keep Anger from Controlling Your Life
Anger isn't always wrong. This is important for Christians to know.
But, as a way of life, it's destructive to our health and to our relationships with others. Proverbs 29:22 says, "One given to anger stirs up strife, and the hothead causes much transgression."
It's no doubt because of the destructiveness of anger that Ephesians 4:26-27 says, "Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger and do not make room for the devil." In other words, get your anger with others resolved or give up the anger. Unresolved anger turns into hate, which is a synonym for "grudge."
We should also shy away from associating with constantly angry people. In Proverbs 22:24, a passage cited by Pastor Rick Warren on Twitter this evening, we're told, "Make no friends with those given to anger, and do not associate with hotheads."
I think that this is even good Biblical advice to us when considering whether to watch, listen to, or read angry political pundits. Stay away from them as readily as you would stay away from constantly angry people in daily life. Associate long with such people and you become an angry person too: After all, computers aren't the only thinking machines for which it's true to say, "Garbage in, garbage out."
Pray for chronically angry people, asking God to give them new attitudes.
Treat them with love and respect.
But don't associate with them.
So, what if you find yourself drifting into a chronic attitude of angry hatefulness toward other people or toward life?
The nineteenth century geologist and Christian evangelist Henry Drummond wrote a remarkable booklet about love called The Greatest Thing in the World, and said that when we find an angry temper gaining a foothold in our lives:
When anger threatens to take center stage in our own characters, we must ask God to get rid of the "I-Me-Mine" thinking that causes us to adopt anger and hatred as our default position and to instead replace it with with Jesus-thinking. (Philippians 2:5-11 explains what Jesus-thinking is like.)
If you'll be patient in praying that, enforcing it by daily reading God's Word and by getting involved in a local church where you can undertake acts of kindness in Jesus' Name and pray, worship, and study with other believers, anger will be put in its proper perspective in your life.
The Spirit of Christ will displace your anger and Jesus will take first place in your life, where He belongs.
But, as a way of life, it's destructive to our health and to our relationships with others. Proverbs 29:22 says, "One given to anger stirs up strife, and the hothead causes much transgression."
It's no doubt because of the destructiveness of anger that Ephesians 4:26-27 says, "Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger and do not make room for the devil." In other words, get your anger with others resolved or give up the anger. Unresolved anger turns into hate, which is a synonym for "grudge."
We should also shy away from associating with constantly angry people. In Proverbs 22:24, a passage cited by Pastor Rick Warren on Twitter this evening, we're told, "Make no friends with those given to anger, and do not associate with hotheads."
I think that this is even good Biblical advice to us when considering whether to watch, listen to, or read angry political pundits. Stay away from them as readily as you would stay away from constantly angry people in daily life. Associate long with such people and you become an angry person too: After all, computers aren't the only thinking machines for which it's true to say, "Garbage in, garbage out."
Pray for chronically angry people, asking God to give them new attitudes.
Treat them with love and respect.
But don't associate with them.
So, what if you find yourself drifting into a chronic attitude of angry hatefulness toward other people or toward life?
The nineteenth century geologist and Christian evangelist Henry Drummond wrote a remarkable booklet about love called The Greatest Thing in the World, and said that when we find an angry temper gaining a foothold in our lives:
...it is not enough to deal with the [outward expressions of anger]. We must go to the source and change the inmost nature, and the angry humors will die away themselves. Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out but by putting something in--a great new love, a new spirit, the Spirit of Christ...The Spirit of Christ interpenetrating our spirit, sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This only can eradicate what is wrong, work a chemical change, renovate, reinvigorate, and rehabilitate the inner [person]. Will power does not change [people]. Christ does.He goes on to quote the prescription found in Philipians 2:5: "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus..."
When anger threatens to take center stage in our own characters, we must ask God to get rid of the "I-Me-Mine" thinking that causes us to adopt anger and hatred as our default position and to instead replace it with with Jesus-thinking. (Philippians 2:5-11 explains what Jesus-thinking is like.)
If you'll be patient in praying that, enforcing it by daily reading God's Word and by getting involved in a local church where you can undertake acts of kindness in Jesus' Name and pray, worship, and study with other believers, anger will be put in its proper perspective in your life.
The Spirit of Christ will displace your anger and Jesus will take first place in your life, where He belongs.
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