Thursday, March 08, 2018
Wednesday, March 07, 2018
Being Church (Part 3, The Disciple's Life)
[This was shared this evening during midweek Lenten worship with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
John 13:34-35
Matthew 28:19-20
You hear people say it all the time: “I don’t need to be part of a church to be a Christian.” People say this because they don’t like...
When Jesus and the New Testament writers speak of discipleship, the life of faith, it’s never as a solo proposition.
Even if, as Jesus says, we may have to choose Him over family members and friends, He does not call us to a “Jesus and me” relationship. Jesus calls us to a "Jesus and us" relationship. Jesus always calls us to be part of His body, the Church. He calls His disciples to be the Church.
Being the Church doesn’t mean that we’re part of a pack of automatons who think alike and never disagree. The New Testament has many examples of how the early Christians argued and disagreed with each other, even while Jesus lived and walked among them.
Remember how Jesus once caught the twelve apostles arguing over who among them was the greatest? (I can't imagine being caught having an argument over who's the greatest by Jesus!)
Or how James and John ticked off the other apostles by asking for special places in Jesus’ kingdom?
And how, after Jesus had dies, risen, and ascended into heaven, the Greek-speaking Christians and the Jewish Christians got into a dispute over whether one set of widows was being better treated than another?
Or how Paul and Barnabas split up their ministry team when Paul wouldn’t agree to take along a young pastor Barnabas wanted to take who Paul thought was unreliable?
And who can forget Paul reminiscing about a long-previously-resolved argument that he’d had with Peter? “When Cephas [Peter] came to Antioch,” Paul remembered, “I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.” (Galatians 2:11) (Way to let go of things, Paul!) While the two did resolve their dispute, there’s no record of Paul saying that later, he and Peter sang Kumbaya together.
When Jesus established His eternal salvation community, the Church, He fully anticipated that His people would sometimes disagree or even disappoint each other.
If the Church is Christ’s designated means for turning imperfect sinners into sanctified saints, you can bet that those people who, while on this earth, are simultaneously saints and sinners, will sometimes rub each other the wrong way.
That’s OK. That’s how we grow. “As iron sharpens iron,” Proverbs 27:17 tells us, “so one person sharpens another.”
Do you know what you call a couple or a family in which there is never disagreement? Dysfunctional.
The absence of disagreement in a church or the absence of a capacity to deal with disagreement in a healthy way indicates not that the people of a church love each other, but that they don’t care about the common life to which they have been called by the Holy Spirit. Who do you get angriest with: people you don't know or people you love?
A couple that refuses to deal healthfully with disagreements in their marriage demonstrates that they really don’t care about their marriage or each other.
The life of a disciple is other-minded. Within the fellowship of the Church, Christ seeks to set us free from all obsessions with ourselves--our desires, our will, our fears, our pride--to focus entirely on the God we know in Christ and His will for our lives and on others.
And so, Ephesians 4:6 urges Christian disciples, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger…”(ESV)
Love, the love of God appropriated through daily reflection on God’s Word, daily prayer, and daily application of God’s Word to our lives, is the way to healthfully work out potential conflicts and to do the will of God. 1 John 4:20 puts it bluntly and truthfully: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”
The bottom line is this: The Church, with its imperfect members and its imperfect pastors, is the indispensable means by which Christ brings His perfect, eternal kingdom to the world.
The Church is the people of God in and for the world who, through the power of God’s Word, the power of God’s Spirit, and the power of the Sacraments, are enabled to live for more than themselves to live:
This is why the words of Jesus that we read a few moments ago are so important. They give us our marching orders as disciples and as the Church.
In John 13:34-35, Jesus gives a new commandment, new because in it, He doesn’t just command Christians to love others as we love ourselves. He says that our love for the sisters and brothers who make up the Church should go way beyond that low standard. Look at what Jesus says: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” We are to love our fellow Christians the way Christ loved us: with suffering, self-sacrifice, and commitment.
But Jesus is clear that our fellowship as Christian disciples is not to be a closed circle.
Our love shouldn’t be confined to those who like us or we find companionable. (As Jesus says, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? [Matthew 5:46]) And by the way, how companionable do you think the apostle Paul was sometimes? Or Martin Luther?
Our love shouldn’t be confined to the fellowship of the Church. Jesus says that our love must incorporate those who aren’t yet His disciples. Matthew 28:19-20: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Disciples, members of Christ’s body, the Church, refuse to withhold the gospel of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ from the world. Pastor Rick Warren memorably says that the church that cares nothing about making disciples is really telling the world to go to hell. May we never be that church!
If being the Church sounds daunting, good. It is. One day, by the grace of God, I hope to learn this truth.
Being part of Christ’s Church isn’t like being a member of the local wholesale club in which you pay your dues to derive benefits.
It’s not like joining the National Geographic Society where all you do is send them some money and get twelve months of glossy pictures from around the world.
To be the Church is to be a community of disciples called to a way of life that is impossible apart from the God we know in Jesus Christ: a life of love for God, fellow disciples, and the world, come what may.
Just as it’s impossible for a couple to fulfill their marriage vows apart from the help of the God we know in Jesus, it is equally impossible for us to be Christians without the grace of God we receive in Jesus.
To live this impossible life together, Christ has given us means of grace: repentance, the Word of God read, pondered, shared, savored with others, and proclaimed, and the Sacraments. And He's given us something else. Do you know what it is? He's given us one another. He's given us each other. Christ has given us His Church.
To be disciples, we must be the Church. More next week.
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
John 13:34-35
Matthew 28:19-20
You hear people say it all the time: “I don’t need to be part of a church to be a Christian.” People say this because they don’t like...
- the messy business of being in relationship with others,
- being accountable to others, or
- being committed to working at making relationships grow.
When Jesus and the New Testament writers speak of discipleship, the life of faith, it’s never as a solo proposition.
Even if, as Jesus says, we may have to choose Him over family members and friends, He does not call us to a “Jesus and me” relationship. Jesus calls us to a "Jesus and us" relationship. Jesus always calls us to be part of His body, the Church. He calls His disciples to be the Church.
Being the Church doesn’t mean that we’re part of a pack of automatons who think alike and never disagree. The New Testament has many examples of how the early Christians argued and disagreed with each other, even while Jesus lived and walked among them.
Remember how Jesus once caught the twelve apostles arguing over who among them was the greatest? (I can't imagine being caught having an argument over who's the greatest by Jesus!)
Or how James and John ticked off the other apostles by asking for special places in Jesus’ kingdom?
And how, after Jesus had dies, risen, and ascended into heaven, the Greek-speaking Christians and the Jewish Christians got into a dispute over whether one set of widows was being better treated than another?
Or how Paul and Barnabas split up their ministry team when Paul wouldn’t agree to take along a young pastor Barnabas wanted to take who Paul thought was unreliable?
And who can forget Paul reminiscing about a long-previously-resolved argument that he’d had with Peter? “When Cephas [Peter] came to Antioch,” Paul remembered, “I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.” (Galatians 2:11) (Way to let go of things, Paul!) While the two did resolve their dispute, there’s no record of Paul saying that later, he and Peter sang Kumbaya together.
When Jesus established His eternal salvation community, the Church, He fully anticipated that His people would sometimes disagree or even disappoint each other.
If the Church is Christ’s designated means for turning imperfect sinners into sanctified saints, you can bet that those people who, while on this earth, are simultaneously saints and sinners, will sometimes rub each other the wrong way.
That’s OK. That’s how we grow. “As iron sharpens iron,” Proverbs 27:17 tells us, “so one person sharpens another.”
Do you know what you call a couple or a family in which there is never disagreement? Dysfunctional.
The absence of disagreement in a church or the absence of a capacity to deal with disagreement in a healthy way indicates not that the people of a church love each other, but that they don’t care about the common life to which they have been called by the Holy Spirit. Who do you get angriest with: people you don't know or people you love?
A couple that refuses to deal healthfully with disagreements in their marriage demonstrates that they really don’t care about their marriage or each other.
The life of a disciple is other-minded. Within the fellowship of the Church, Christ seeks to set us free from all obsessions with ourselves--our desires, our will, our fears, our pride--to focus entirely on the God we know in Christ and His will for our lives and on others.
And so, Ephesians 4:6 urges Christian disciples, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger…”(ESV)
Love, the love of God appropriated through daily reflection on God’s Word, daily prayer, and daily application of God’s Word to our lives, is the way to healthfully work out potential conflicts and to do the will of God. 1 John 4:20 puts it bluntly and truthfully: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”
The bottom line is this: The Church, with its imperfect members and its imperfect pastors, is the indispensable means by which Christ brings His perfect, eternal kingdom to the world.
The Church is the people of God in and for the world who, through the power of God’s Word, the power of God’s Spirit, and the power of the Sacraments, are enabled to live for more than themselves to live:
- for God,
- for sister and brother in Christ,
- for the spiritually disconnected of the world.
This is why the words of Jesus that we read a few moments ago are so important. They give us our marching orders as disciples and as the Church.
In John 13:34-35, Jesus gives a new commandment, new because in it, He doesn’t just command Christians to love others as we love ourselves. He says that our love for the sisters and brothers who make up the Church should go way beyond that low standard. Look at what Jesus says: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” We are to love our fellow Christians the way Christ loved us: with suffering, self-sacrifice, and commitment.
But Jesus is clear that our fellowship as Christian disciples is not to be a closed circle.
Our love shouldn’t be confined to those who like us or we find companionable. (As Jesus says, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? [Matthew 5:46]) And by the way, how companionable do you think the apostle Paul was sometimes? Or Martin Luther?
Our love shouldn’t be confined to the fellowship of the Church. Jesus says that our love must incorporate those who aren’t yet His disciples. Matthew 28:19-20: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Disciples, members of Christ’s body, the Church, refuse to withhold the gospel of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ from the world. Pastor Rick Warren memorably says that the church that cares nothing about making disciples is really telling the world to go to hell. May we never be that church!
If being the Church sounds daunting, good. It is. One day, by the grace of God, I hope to learn this truth.
Being part of Christ’s Church isn’t like being a member of the local wholesale club in which you pay your dues to derive benefits.
It’s not like joining the National Geographic Society where all you do is send them some money and get twelve months of glossy pictures from around the world.
To be the Church is to be a community of disciples called to a way of life that is impossible apart from the God we know in Jesus Christ: a life of love for God, fellow disciples, and the world, come what may.
Just as it’s impossible for a couple to fulfill their marriage vows apart from the help of the God we know in Jesus, it is equally impossible for us to be Christians without the grace of God we receive in Jesus.
To live this impossible life together, Christ has given us means of grace: repentance, the Word of God read, pondered, shared, savored with others, and proclaimed, and the Sacraments. And He's given us something else. Do you know what it is? He's given us one another. He's given us each other. Christ has given us His Church.
To be disciples, we must be the Church. More next week.
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Sunday, March 04, 2018
What's Most Important to Jesus
[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
John 2:13-22
Imagine for just a moment that you’re the parent of a young family. You’ve spent a rare evening out with your husband or wife. It’s about midnight. As you get closer to your house, you hear sirens. Then, you see flashing lights. A block from your home, you see that your cul de sac has been blocked off by emergency vehicles. Terrified, you pull your car off to the side of the road and run toward your house. Within seconds, you see that your house is engulfed in flames, destroyed. But you don’t care about that. When a second later, you see your kids huddled with the babysitter and some neighbors, you fall on your children with tearful embraces.
The house is just a building. What matters is the people inside it.
In today’s gospel lesson, John 2:13-22, we see that God feels the same way.
Let’s take a look at the lesson: “When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’ His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”
That last line quotes Psalm 69:9. On the face of it, the verse would seem to say that Jesus is protective of the temple, like the member of one of my previous parishes who was upset that I wasn’t upset when people brought coffee to worship.
In fact, Jesus is upset by the extortionists preying on the faith of those who have traveled to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at the temple. Many of these pious Jews came from long distances, many for the only time in their lives. It was impractical for them to bring sheep or pigeons from Spain or Italy or Egypt, or wherever they lived. So, once they got to the temple in Jerusalem, they exchanged their gold or local currencies for temple cash, the only stuff they could use to buy animals for sacrifice there.
Jesus didn’t like it that people who came to worship God were gouged for the privilege! It would be like Living Water charging admission to people who came to worship God on Sunday mornings. It was out of zeal for His fellow Jews, the household of God, that Jesus became angry.
And this is important to note. Jesus’ zealous ire is aroused against those who would stand between God and people who need God.
This reminds me of something Jesus said when His disciples tried to keep children away from Him: “Let the little children come to me [Jesus said], and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." (Matthew 19:14)
Listen: The only thing that seems to ever have made Jesus angry was when someone--be it the Pharisees, the religious authorities, the devil, the demons--got in the way of people who wanted to know God.
That’s because for the God we know in Jesus, nothing is as important as people.
All people.
Including you and me.
Jesus’ fellow Jews who made up the temple leadership were upset by what Jesus did. He was cutting into their revenue, disrupting their routine! So, they ask Jesus in verse 18 of our gospel lesson: “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”
Jesus proves His authority with these words: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” (v.19)
“I’m going to give an evil, cynical world a sign of my authority,” Jesus is saying. “My Body is the temple of God’s Holy Spirit, as is the body of every person who confesses faith in Me (1 Corinthians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 6:19). And if you cut this body down, if you kill Me, I will be raised again on the third day.”
The sign of Jesus’ authority is His resurrection.
It isn’t just the sign that He had the authority to throw the money-changers out of the temple, though.
It’s the sign too that He has authority over all that keeps people made in the image of God from experiencing life with God.
Jesus has authority over the sin that blackens your conscience, the public disclosure of which would mortify you, the sin that makes you sick to remember.
Jesus has authority over death.
He has authority over your heartaches and sadness.
He has authority over your deepest regrets and your most earnest desires.
Because of His resurrection, Jesus can erase the power of sin, death, heartaches, and disappointments over your life.
Because of His resurrection, Jesus can give life--abundant, never-ending life with God--to all who dare to daily turn from their sin and daily trust in Him.
But is it true? Did the resurrection, this sign of Jesus’ authority over everything in heaven and earth (Matthew 28:18) really happen?
An Israeli scholar, rabbi, historian, and diplomat of the last century wondered the same thing: Did Jesus really rise from the dead?
This scholar, Pinchas Lapide, set out to learn the truth. Lapide looked at the witness of the early church--of Peter, who had spinelessly denied knowing Jesus on the night of Jesus’ arrest; of the other apostles who had run away from trouble when Jesus was executed; of the 500 or so early Christians who had made themselves scarce on the first Good Friday.
He saw how these same once-gutless people, after they’d received the gift of the Holy Spirit, had staked their lives on proclaiming that Jesus was risen from the dead.
He considered how a rational scholar like Paul, a hard-headed businessman like Peter, and all the other first followers of Jesus Christ faced death and persecution and refused to renounce what they knew to be true: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, true God and true man, crucified, dead, and buried, was also risen from the dead and now seated at the right hand of the Father, offering new and eternal life to all who believe in Him.
Lapide looked at how the resurrection had changed these people’s lives and said that the resurrection of Jesus must be true.
As He put it: “I accept the resurrection of Jesus not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as an historical event." We can accept that too!
The resurrection of Jesus is the sure and certain sign of what Jesus bore witness to on that day in the temple: People, people made in the image of God, people lovingly formed in their mothers’ wombs, people for whom Jesus died on the cross, people, all people, including you and me, are what matters most to God.
It is people--your friends, your enemies, your family, your neighbors, YOU--that Jesus came to this world came to save, to gift new life, to know God for eternity.
And it is this resurrection that Jesus came to share with you and me if we will follow Him, day in and day out.
As Jesus promises: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.” (John 11:25)
Houses and skyscrapers will crumble.
Empires and fortunes will be lost.
But the God we know in the risen Jesus and all who trust in Him will live forever.
It is on this fundamental truth--and nothing else--that we baptized believers in Jesus are called to live our lives.
May we always do just that. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
John 2:13-22
Imagine for just a moment that you’re the parent of a young family. You’ve spent a rare evening out with your husband or wife. It’s about midnight. As you get closer to your house, you hear sirens. Then, you see flashing lights. A block from your home, you see that your cul de sac has been blocked off by emergency vehicles. Terrified, you pull your car off to the side of the road and run toward your house. Within seconds, you see that your house is engulfed in flames, destroyed. But you don’t care about that. When a second later, you see your kids huddled with the babysitter and some neighbors, you fall on your children with tearful embraces.
The house is just a building. What matters is the people inside it.
In today’s gospel lesson, John 2:13-22, we see that God feels the same way.
Let’s take a look at the lesson: “When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’ His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”
That last line quotes Psalm 69:9. On the face of it, the verse would seem to say that Jesus is protective of the temple, like the member of one of my previous parishes who was upset that I wasn’t upset when people brought coffee to worship.
In fact, Jesus is upset by the extortionists preying on the faith of those who have traveled to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at the temple. Many of these pious Jews came from long distances, many for the only time in their lives. It was impractical for them to bring sheep or pigeons from Spain or Italy or Egypt, or wherever they lived. So, once they got to the temple in Jerusalem, they exchanged their gold or local currencies for temple cash, the only stuff they could use to buy animals for sacrifice there.
Jesus didn’t like it that people who came to worship God were gouged for the privilege! It would be like Living Water charging admission to people who came to worship God on Sunday mornings. It was out of zeal for His fellow Jews, the household of God, that Jesus became angry.
And this is important to note. Jesus’ zealous ire is aroused against those who would stand between God and people who need God.
This reminds me of something Jesus said when His disciples tried to keep children away from Him: “Let the little children come to me [Jesus said], and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." (Matthew 19:14)
Listen: The only thing that seems to ever have made Jesus angry was when someone--be it the Pharisees, the religious authorities, the devil, the demons--got in the way of people who wanted to know God.
That’s because for the God we know in Jesus, nothing is as important as people.
All people.
Including you and me.
Jesus’ fellow Jews who made up the temple leadership were upset by what Jesus did. He was cutting into their revenue, disrupting their routine! So, they ask Jesus in verse 18 of our gospel lesson: “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”
Jesus proves His authority with these words: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” (v.19)
“I’m going to give an evil, cynical world a sign of my authority,” Jesus is saying. “My Body is the temple of God’s Holy Spirit, as is the body of every person who confesses faith in Me (1 Corinthians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 6:19). And if you cut this body down, if you kill Me, I will be raised again on the third day.”
The sign of Jesus’ authority is His resurrection.
It isn’t just the sign that He had the authority to throw the money-changers out of the temple, though.
It’s the sign too that He has authority over all that keeps people made in the image of God from experiencing life with God.
Jesus has authority over the sin that blackens your conscience, the public disclosure of which would mortify you, the sin that makes you sick to remember.
Jesus has authority over death.
He has authority over your heartaches and sadness.
He has authority over your deepest regrets and your most earnest desires.
Because of His resurrection, Jesus can erase the power of sin, death, heartaches, and disappointments over your life.
Because of His resurrection, Jesus can give life--abundant, never-ending life with God--to all who dare to daily turn from their sin and daily trust in Him.
But is it true? Did the resurrection, this sign of Jesus’ authority over everything in heaven and earth (Matthew 28:18) really happen?
An Israeli scholar, rabbi, historian, and diplomat of the last century wondered the same thing: Did Jesus really rise from the dead?
This scholar, Pinchas Lapide, set out to learn the truth. Lapide looked at the witness of the early church--of Peter, who had spinelessly denied knowing Jesus on the night of Jesus’ arrest; of the other apostles who had run away from trouble when Jesus was executed; of the 500 or so early Christians who had made themselves scarce on the first Good Friday.
He saw how these same once-gutless people, after they’d received the gift of the Holy Spirit, had staked their lives on proclaiming that Jesus was risen from the dead.
He considered how a rational scholar like Paul, a hard-headed businessman like Peter, and all the other first followers of Jesus Christ faced death and persecution and refused to renounce what they knew to be true: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, true God and true man, crucified, dead, and buried, was also risen from the dead and now seated at the right hand of the Father, offering new and eternal life to all who believe in Him.
Lapide looked at how the resurrection had changed these people’s lives and said that the resurrection of Jesus must be true.
As He put it: “I accept the resurrection of Jesus not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as an historical event." We can accept that too!
The resurrection of Jesus is the sure and certain sign of what Jesus bore witness to on that day in the temple: People, people made in the image of God, people lovingly formed in their mothers’ wombs, people for whom Jesus died on the cross, people, all people, including you and me, are what matters most to God.
It is people--your friends, your enemies, your family, your neighbors, YOU--that Jesus came to this world came to save, to gift new life, to know God for eternity.
And it is this resurrection that Jesus came to share with you and me if we will follow Him, day in and day out.
As Jesus promises: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.” (John 11:25)
Houses and skyscrapers will crumble.
Empires and fortunes will be lost.
But the God we know in the risen Jesus and all who trust in Him will live forever.
It is on this fundamental truth--and nothing else--that we baptized believers in Jesus are called to live our lives.
May we always do just that. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Saturday, March 03, 2018
"Animated Unsatisfying Situations" by Parallel Studio
Animated Unsatisfying Situations in Video (by Parallel Studio) pic.twitter.com/LQxrt4z6s2— Fubiz (@fubiz) March 3, 2018
If your church is really big, you may ask, "What are we doing wrong?"
I liked a tweet I saw earlier today:
But Jesus says that if we're going to follow Him and have life with God, we must submit to the cross of acknowledging our sin, our mortality, and our need of Him and what He has accomplished for us on the cross.
The Christian disciple is called to the death of self.
That's the way to liberation from sin and death, to life with God that nothing can destroy.
So, the apostle Paul, hardly a success in the eyes of the world, wrote: "...we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." (1 Corinthians 12:23-24)
Generally speaking, the churches that are more "successful" at making disciples are the ones who approach that commission from Christ with intentionality, deliberation, and love. They may not have huge footprints in their communities; but they have an enormous imprint on the lives of those who come to know and follow Christ because of them.
Of course, there are exceptional instances of authentic growth in churches. Three-thousand were baptized on the first Pentecost after Jesus' ascension (Acts 2:41).
But it's also true that some "churches" are huge in numbers because they proclaim a hugely mistaken version of the gospel. A gospel without a cross or Christ is no gospel. A church without cross and Christ is no church.
Now, I know of some big churches that are also big in proclaiming Christ and His cross. God's Holy Spirit can make that happen. But I know a lot more big churches where there needs to be more focus on Christ and the cross.
The Augsburg Confession says that the Church exists wherever the gospel is rightly proclaimed and the sacraments (Holy Baptism and Holy Communion) are rightly administered. If a church is wildly popular, there's a good chance it's not a faithful church. I'm just sayin'.
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. For those who are interested, we average 170 people in worship on Sunday mornings. We're doing our best to be successful at being faithful, whatever our numbers.]
"I met this guy at the grocery store. He had a bumper sticker, ‘Thrill of it All Christian Fellowship’.
"He tells me, 'We’re booming, man! 8,000 members and growing like crazy!'
"I say, 'Really? What are you guys doing wrong?...the message of the Cross has never been that popular.'"He's right. Jesus' words, "Take up your cross and follow Me," have rarely raked people in. Most people don't really want to have much to do with crosses.
But Jesus says that if we're going to follow Him and have life with God, we must submit to the cross of acknowledging our sin, our mortality, and our need of Him and what He has accomplished for us on the cross.
The Christian disciple is called to the death of self.
That's the way to liberation from sin and death, to life with God that nothing can destroy.
So, the apostle Paul, hardly a success in the eyes of the world, wrote: "...we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." (1 Corinthians 12:23-24)
Generally speaking, the churches that are more "successful" at making disciples are the ones who approach that commission from Christ with intentionality, deliberation, and love. They may not have huge footprints in their communities; but they have an enormous imprint on the lives of those who come to know and follow Christ because of them.
Of course, there are exceptional instances of authentic growth in churches. Three-thousand were baptized on the first Pentecost after Jesus' ascension (Acts 2:41).
But it's also true that some "churches" are huge in numbers because they proclaim a hugely mistaken version of the gospel. A gospel without a cross or Christ is no gospel. A church without cross and Christ is no church.
Now, I know of some big churches that are also big in proclaiming Christ and His cross. God's Holy Spirit can make that happen. But I know a lot more big churches where there needs to be more focus on Christ and the cross.
The Augsburg Confession says that the Church exists wherever the gospel is rightly proclaimed and the sacraments (Holy Baptism and Holy Communion) are rightly administered. If a church is wildly popular, there's a good chance it's not a faithful church. I'm just sayin'.
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. For those who are interested, we average 170 people in worship on Sunday mornings. We're doing our best to be successful at being faithful, whatever our numbers.]
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Loving God and Others (Part 2, The Disciple's Life)
[This was shared during this evening's Lenten devotional worship with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Deuteronomy 10:12
Matthew 22:37-39
Tonight, as we talk about the disciple’s life, we turn to love.
While love is a commonly used word, from a Biblical perspective, I don’t think that we moderns have a good handle on what love is.
An online dictionary defines the noun love as “an intense feeling of deep affection.” It defines the verb love as “[to] feel a deep romantic or sexual attachment to (someone),” as in, “I love so-and-so.”
Now, I’m not knocking anyone’s intense feeling of deep affection. Nor am I condemning, in the right circumstances, feelings of "deep romantic or sexual attachment.” What I am saying is that when, for example, in Deuteronomy, God commanded His ancient people the Israelites to love Him, or that when Jesus says in Matthew, that the greatest commandment is to love God and to love our neighbor, He is not telling us “feel affection for God and neighbor.” God does not command affection; God commands love.
Now that I’ve thoroughly confused you, let me try to unpack all of this. Jesus tells us in Matthew’s gospel: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matthew 22:37-39) Jesus here quotes Deuteronomy 6:5, a portion of Moses’ farewell sermon that pious Jews know as the shema, and Leviticus 19:18, what scholars call “the holiness code,” an explanation of God’s moral code, binding for all time, expressed briefly in the Ten Commandments.
Here, we see Jesus commanding us to love God and our neighbor, with all our hearts, and we panic or rail at the impossibility of it all.
Someone might say, “If you knew my boss, you would know how impossible she is to love.”
Or, “My ex was horrible in the custody proceedings. I can’t summon any warmth for him.”
In statements like these and countless others, we show that we’ve soaked up more of this world’s understanding of love than we have of God’s understanding of love.
When the Bible speaks metaphorically of our hearts, it isn’t talking about the seat of our feelings. It speaks of the seat of our wills, of our wants and desires, the place from which our yen for things like security, happiness, food, drink, and companionship comes.
If that all seems innocent, remember that the heart is also the seat of our sinful desires, things like our desire to get what we want when we want it, to make other people do what we want them to do, to have what we want no matter if it hurts us or hurts others.
And, no matter how much we desire to follow Christ, as long as you and I live this life, our human hearts will be polluted by selfish desires. Jeremiah 17:9 asks, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
His words echo my own after I’ve caught myself doing something I shouldn’t have. “Why did I do that?” I ask myself.
The answer is that my heart has inherited from Adam and Eve a desire to “be like God,” to be my own god, to call my own shots, to be the master of my own universe.
And yet, Jesus commands us to love God and love neighbor. What is a person who seeks to live as a Jesus disciple to do?
Here are several suggestions.
First of all, remind yourself daily that you cannot save yourself from your heart’s inborn penchant for selfishness and sin. If you and I could do anything to save ourselves from sin, Jesus Christ would not have had to die on the cross for us. Jesus resisted the temptation to act selfishly and sinfully, leading a sinless life to be the perfect sacrifice for our sins.
Second, also remind yourself daily that only Jesus can fill in the chasm that exists between you and me, on the one side, and God in His perfect holiness on the other. Even if this very night, you and I could find a way to always perfectly love God and our neighbors for the rest of our lives, our love would not erase the deficiencies in our love that have existed up until tonight. We must rely on Jesus to bridge the gap between who we are and who God has meant us to be. We must rely on God’s grace given in Christ.
But here’s a third thing. Just because we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone--and we are--doesn’t mean that Jesus’ great commandment goes away. We still are called to love God and love neighbor.
Out of simple gratitude for His saving an unlovable sinner like me, I will want to seek to fulfill this great command.
When I was in elementary school, my father and grandfather spent hours with, drilling me on the multiplication table. I kept at it not because I thought they would throttle me if I didn’t memorize the table or because I wanted to know the multiplication table, but because I saw how hard they were working with me on it our of sheer fatherly love. (I couldn’t have cared less about learning the multiplication table!) But these two men who cared for me wanted me to learn it and because of them, I did. God’s love, which has saved us from sin and death, should also motivate us to try to keep all of His commands and to seek His help when we fail to keep them.
So, how can you love someone you may find hard to love?
One: Ask God to help you love that person. And the more unlovable you find them, the more you’ll need to pray that prayer. Sometimes, I just say, “Lord, please love them through me. It’s beyond my capacity.”
Second: Pray for that person. Ask God to give them every comfort, joy, and success that you might desire for yourself.
Third: Seek ways to do some kindness to that person or to show openness to them. I promise that God honors earnest efforts to be obedient on the part of grateful disciples of Jesus.
Now, a word of caution. If the person you find it hard to love has abused you--emotionally, physically, or otherwise, you are under no obligation to continue to associate with them.
Love doesn’t compel you to subject yourself to unnecessary danger.
When a woman we knew in Cincinnati was physically abused by her husband, I told her that God’s command to love did not obligate her to stay in that home. I joined with others in helping her to get out. If she were to love her husband, it would have to be from afar.
The New Testament word for forgive is aphiemi, which literally means release. When we forgive others, we set people free from their debt to us for the wrongs they’ve committed against us, just as Jesus forgives us the enormous debt we owe to God for our sins against Him and His children.
But when we forgive, we also set someone else free, ourselves.
God wants to set us free to love as we were made to love. At the heart of our difficulty with loving others is an unwillingness to forgive, an unwillingness to let go of the things we hold others, that make us feel superior to them. And so Jesus teaches His disciples to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
In the power of God’s Holy Spirit, disciples who believe in and follow Jesus, seek to love God and to love neighbor.
More on the disciple's life next week.
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Deuteronomy 10:12
Matthew 22:37-39
Tonight, as we talk about the disciple’s life, we turn to love.
While love is a commonly used word, from a Biblical perspective, I don’t think that we moderns have a good handle on what love is.
An online dictionary defines the noun love as “an intense feeling of deep affection.” It defines the verb love as “[to] feel a deep romantic or sexual attachment to (someone),” as in, “I love so-and-so.”
Now, I’m not knocking anyone’s intense feeling of deep affection. Nor am I condemning, in the right circumstances, feelings of "deep romantic or sexual attachment.” What I am saying is that when, for example, in Deuteronomy, God commanded His ancient people the Israelites to love Him, or that when Jesus says in Matthew, that the greatest commandment is to love God and to love our neighbor, He is not telling us “feel affection for God and neighbor.” God does not command affection; God commands love.
Now that I’ve thoroughly confused you, let me try to unpack all of this. Jesus tells us in Matthew’s gospel: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matthew 22:37-39) Jesus here quotes Deuteronomy 6:5, a portion of Moses’ farewell sermon that pious Jews know as the shema, and Leviticus 19:18, what scholars call “the holiness code,” an explanation of God’s moral code, binding for all time, expressed briefly in the Ten Commandments.
Here, we see Jesus commanding us to love God and our neighbor, with all our hearts, and we panic or rail at the impossibility of it all.
Someone might say, “If you knew my boss, you would know how impossible she is to love.”
Or, “My ex was horrible in the custody proceedings. I can’t summon any warmth for him.”
In statements like these and countless others, we show that we’ve soaked up more of this world’s understanding of love than we have of God’s understanding of love.
When the Bible speaks metaphorically of our hearts, it isn’t talking about the seat of our feelings. It speaks of the seat of our wills, of our wants and desires, the place from which our yen for things like security, happiness, food, drink, and companionship comes.
If that all seems innocent, remember that the heart is also the seat of our sinful desires, things like our desire to get what we want when we want it, to make other people do what we want them to do, to have what we want no matter if it hurts us or hurts others.
And, no matter how much we desire to follow Christ, as long as you and I live this life, our human hearts will be polluted by selfish desires. Jeremiah 17:9 asks, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
His words echo my own after I’ve caught myself doing something I shouldn’t have. “Why did I do that?” I ask myself.
The answer is that my heart has inherited from Adam and Eve a desire to “be like God,” to be my own god, to call my own shots, to be the master of my own universe.
And yet, Jesus commands us to love God and love neighbor. What is a person who seeks to live as a Jesus disciple to do?
Here are several suggestions.
First of all, remind yourself daily that you cannot save yourself from your heart’s inborn penchant for selfishness and sin. If you and I could do anything to save ourselves from sin, Jesus Christ would not have had to die on the cross for us. Jesus resisted the temptation to act selfishly and sinfully, leading a sinless life to be the perfect sacrifice for our sins.
Second, also remind yourself daily that only Jesus can fill in the chasm that exists between you and me, on the one side, and God in His perfect holiness on the other. Even if this very night, you and I could find a way to always perfectly love God and our neighbors for the rest of our lives, our love would not erase the deficiencies in our love that have existed up until tonight. We must rely on Jesus to bridge the gap between who we are and who God has meant us to be. We must rely on God’s grace given in Christ.
But here’s a third thing. Just because we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone--and we are--doesn’t mean that Jesus’ great commandment goes away. We still are called to love God and love neighbor.
Out of simple gratitude for His saving an unlovable sinner like me, I will want to seek to fulfill this great command.
When I was in elementary school, my father and grandfather spent hours with, drilling me on the multiplication table. I kept at it not because I thought they would throttle me if I didn’t memorize the table or because I wanted to know the multiplication table, but because I saw how hard they were working with me on it our of sheer fatherly love. (I couldn’t have cared less about learning the multiplication table!) But these two men who cared for me wanted me to learn it and because of them, I did. God’s love, which has saved us from sin and death, should also motivate us to try to keep all of His commands and to seek His help when we fail to keep them.
So, how can you love someone you may find hard to love?
One: Ask God to help you love that person. And the more unlovable you find them, the more you’ll need to pray that prayer. Sometimes, I just say, “Lord, please love them through me. It’s beyond my capacity.”
Second: Pray for that person. Ask God to give them every comfort, joy, and success that you might desire for yourself.
Third: Seek ways to do some kindness to that person or to show openness to them. I promise that God honors earnest efforts to be obedient on the part of grateful disciples of Jesus.
Now, a word of caution. If the person you find it hard to love has abused you--emotionally, physically, or otherwise, you are under no obligation to continue to associate with them.
Love doesn’t compel you to subject yourself to unnecessary danger.
When a woman we knew in Cincinnati was physically abused by her husband, I told her that God’s command to love did not obligate her to stay in that home. I joined with others in helping her to get out. If she were to love her husband, it would have to be from afar.
The New Testament word for forgive is aphiemi, which literally means release. When we forgive others, we set people free from their debt to us for the wrongs they’ve committed against us, just as Jesus forgives us the enormous debt we owe to God for our sins against Him and His children.
But when we forgive, we also set someone else free, ourselves.
God wants to set us free to love as we were made to love. At the heart of our difficulty with loving others is an unwillingness to forgive, an unwillingness to let go of the things we hold others, that make us feel superior to them. And so Jesus teaches His disciples to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
In the power of God’s Holy Spirit, disciples who believe in and follow Jesus, seek to love God and to love neighbor.
More on the disciple's life next week.
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Focusing on God's Wisdom, Using Our Brains
[Here are reflections on my quiet time with God earlier today.]
Look: “A discerning person keeps wisdom in view, but a fool’s eyes wander to the ends of the earth.” (Proverbs 17:24)
God’s wisdom imparted through Solomon seems here to say, “Keep your focus on wisdom.”
The reason for this seems straightforward to me: Wisdom comes from God. Proverbs 2:6 says, “the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.”
To be wise is to keep focused on the God revealed to all the world in Jesus, to see nothing and nobody as important as God Himself and to, consequently, follow Him. This gives deeper meaning to Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”
To follow some other path or to try following multiple paths to gain “wisdom” is foolishness, foolish because all other paths lead to separation, not only from wisdom, but also from the only One Who can supply life. “There is a way that appears to be right,” Proverbs 14:12 says, “but in the end it leads to death.”
I must narrow my focus onto the God Who shows Himself to us in Jesus. Jesus says: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14)
And He says that He is the single entry point by which we live wisely and eternally: “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.” (John 10:9)
Listen: It’s so easy for me to be distracted, God, by the noise and the self-congratulatory and false wisdom of the world...and of my own broken soul.
It’s so easy to convince myself that I don’t have time for quiet time with You, time spent hearing what You tell me in Your Word and in the silence as I pray in Jesus’ name.
Little “successes” in which I rely on my own resources delude me into thinking that I don’t need you.
Day after day without casting a look toward Jesus can develop into a daily habit that leaves me wandering far from you, like a lost sheep.
Relying on my own “wisdom,” my own thoughts, my own feelings, leads me away from You.
I’m sure that focusing on You doesn’t mean that I should choose stupidity. I still should read and gain knowledge. It was a man who disdained knowledge who told the apostle Paul as Paul proclaimed the good news of Jesus, “You are out of your mind, Paul!" Your great learning is driving you insane." (Acts 26:24)
Great learning won’t make a person crazy. And we need to pay heed to people with great learning, even those who may not follow the Savior in Whom I believe. “Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.” (Proverbs 11:14)
I loathe anti-intellectualism, the chosen ignorance of those who resent the learning of people who have spent their lives gaining useful knowledge and expertise in specific areas, whose knowledge and expertise could benefit us all. I am sure that You would not have given us brains if it was Your intention for us not to use them!
It seems to me that what You are saying in Proverbs 17:24, Lord, is, “So cultivate your relationship with Me that, no matter how many voices you hear in a single day, You always will discern My wisdom. You’ll always know that the wisdom imparted to you by someone else is actually from Me. You will always hear My voice and so, know the right path.”
Jesus says, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27)
Respond: As You know, Lord, I’ve been ill the past several days. I thank You that You’ve given me the medical help I needed and the time to recover and heal. But I’ve also been lax about my quiet time. It’s unwise to ever “take a vacation” from You, too easy to cast my eyes on other things and be led down a sinkhole far from You.
Forgive my recent inattentiveness to You. Help me to keep my eyes on Jesus.
In His name I pray.
Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Look: “A discerning person keeps wisdom in view, but a fool’s eyes wander to the ends of the earth.” (Proverbs 17:24)
God’s wisdom imparted through Solomon seems here to say, “Keep your focus on wisdom.”
The reason for this seems straightforward to me: Wisdom comes from God. Proverbs 2:6 says, “the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.”
To be wise is to keep focused on the God revealed to all the world in Jesus, to see nothing and nobody as important as God Himself and to, consequently, follow Him. This gives deeper meaning to Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”
To follow some other path or to try following multiple paths to gain “wisdom” is foolishness, foolish because all other paths lead to separation, not only from wisdom, but also from the only One Who can supply life. “There is a way that appears to be right,” Proverbs 14:12 says, “but in the end it leads to death.”
I must narrow my focus onto the God Who shows Himself to us in Jesus. Jesus says: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14)
And He says that He is the single entry point by which we live wisely and eternally: “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.” (John 10:9)
Listen: It’s so easy for me to be distracted, God, by the noise and the self-congratulatory and false wisdom of the world...and of my own broken soul.
It’s so easy to convince myself that I don’t have time for quiet time with You, time spent hearing what You tell me in Your Word and in the silence as I pray in Jesus’ name.
Little “successes” in which I rely on my own resources delude me into thinking that I don’t need you.
Day after day without casting a look toward Jesus can develop into a daily habit that leaves me wandering far from you, like a lost sheep.
Relying on my own “wisdom,” my own thoughts, my own feelings, leads me away from You.
I’m sure that focusing on You doesn’t mean that I should choose stupidity. I still should read and gain knowledge. It was a man who disdained knowledge who told the apostle Paul as Paul proclaimed the good news of Jesus, “You are out of your mind, Paul!" Your great learning is driving you insane." (Acts 26:24)
Great learning won’t make a person crazy. And we need to pay heed to people with great learning, even those who may not follow the Savior in Whom I believe. “Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.” (Proverbs 11:14)
I loathe anti-intellectualism, the chosen ignorance of those who resent the learning of people who have spent their lives gaining useful knowledge and expertise in specific areas, whose knowledge and expertise could benefit us all. I am sure that You would not have given us brains if it was Your intention for us not to use them!
[This graphic contains a wise saying my father imparted to me more than once as I was growing up.]
It seems to me that what You are saying in Proverbs 17:24, Lord, is, “So cultivate your relationship with Me that, no matter how many voices you hear in a single day, You always will discern My wisdom. You’ll always know that the wisdom imparted to you by someone else is actually from Me. You will always hear My voice and so, know the right path.”
Jesus says, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27)
Respond: As You know, Lord, I’ve been ill the past several days. I thank You that You’ve given me the medical help I needed and the time to recover and heal. But I’ve also been lax about my quiet time. It’s unwise to ever “take a vacation” from You, too easy to cast my eyes on other things and be led down a sinkhole far from You.
Forgive my recent inattentiveness to You. Help me to keep my eyes on Jesus.
In His name I pray.
Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Sunday, February 25, 2018
In Christ, You Can Hold Your Head High!
[This message was prepared for worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier today. I developed a cough that erupts every time I take a deep breath. It's a cold both my wife and me have right now. So, I thank Mark Brennan, our worship director, for pinch-hitting for me.]
Romans 5:1-11
A Christian scholar writes of listening to a radio interview with a film star. The star said it was “ridiculous...to think that, if there is a God, he might actually be concerned with every single human creature at every single moment.” As the scholar, N.T. Wright says: “Put like that, of course, it seems absurd; and yet absurdity lies in the attempt to picture God as just like us only a bit bigger and more well-seeing.” [Italics are mine.]
People unfamiliar with the God first worshiped by ancient Israel and then disclosed to the rest of us through Jesus Christ don’t understand the enormity of God.
Nor do they understand the depths of His love for us.
As Wright says: “...his very nature is love, it is...completely natural for him to establish personal, one-to-one relations with every single one of us.”
That’s exactly what God has set out to do in Jesus Christ.
And it’s precisely through such a relationship with Christ that God can save us, give us strength for each day, and supply us with a hope that will never disappoint us.
All of this is what the apostle Paul writes about in our second lesson for this morning, Romans 5:1-11.
The New Testament book of Romans, you’ll remember, is a letter written by the apostle Paul to first-century house churches in Rome. It’s Paul’s masterpiece, an exhaustive presentation of the gospel that can bring eternal life to all who bet their lives on it.
In the chapters before our lesson appears, Paul has talked about the fundamental human problem, sin, which leads to death, among other things. Because sin is universal to every human being, Paul says, quoting a psalm: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”
But, Paul says that’s not the end of the story. God is unwilling to see you and me die in our sin, forever separated from Him. So God acts.
God the Father sends God the Son Jesus to receive the punishment we deserve for our sin. Jesus dies, although He committed no sin. Jesus experiences separation from God the Father, the Maker of life, which is why Jesus cries from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) It’s also part of the reason Jesus descended into hell (1 Peter 3:19); He bore the full weight of sin and its fatal consequences.
God the Father then raises Jesus from death. As Paul explains elsewhere: “...Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20).
All who renounce sin and trust in Christ have reconciliation with God and have life with God, an intimate and enduring personal relationship with the One Who loves us more than anyone in this world ever has or ever will.
Jesus tells us: “The one who believes in me will live, even though they die” (John 11:25). Even more than that, Paul goes on to tell us at the beginning of today’s lesson, we have peace with God even when the sin, darkness, and imperfection of this present world makes war on us.
Take a look at what Paul says, Romans 5:1: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…”
In other words, we who are born wrong and who have lived wrong are made right with God through our faith in Jesus.
Although we deserve death, God gives peace to those who trust in Christ.
A man saw me, deeply disturbed because he thought that his sins would forever separate him from God. A woman spoke with me, her conscience thunderstruck for some horror she had perpetrated. These are real people whose consciences convicted them.
They thought that they were too sinful to receive the promise of God given to us through the crucified and risen Jesus: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13; Acts 2:21). There is nobody beyond the scope of God's "everyone."
“You are stained red with sin,” God says in Isaiah 1:18, “but I will wash you as clean as snow.”
If you trust Christ with your sins, along with the rest of your life, you are made clean.
You have peace with God.
And you can keep having peace with God through faith in Jesus even when you, as is true of each of us every single day, sin again or experience life’s pressures and need to repent or take refuge in Christ.
That’s why Paul says what he does next. Verses 2 and 3: “...through [Jesus] we [believers] have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God…”
The word translated as stand is histemi. We get the word histamine from it. Histamines get released naturally by our immune systems to help our bodies to function properly, to help us to stand strong. (The New Testament Greek word for resurrection is rooted in this word and literally means to stand again.)
The idea here is that because of the charitable forgiveness--the grace--that God bears for sinners like you and me who open ourselves to trusting in Christ, we stand in God’s kingdom.
By this grace given to those who trust in Christ, God will always give us life, always give us hope.
The psalmist spoke of what it means to stand in God’s grace when he wrote: “I will not fear though tens of thousands assail me on every side…” (Psalm 3:6)
Paul says that we who stand and keep standing in the gracious kingdom of God can brag, not of ourselves, but “of the hope of the glory of God.”
When God’s full glory is revealed to all the world at Jesus’ return, everyone who has believed in Him, will experience the fullness of God’s promises. You have been saved by God’s grace through your faith in the crucified and risen Jesus. So, hold your head high, stand tall, not from arrogance, but knowing that by the grace of God, you’re eternally free from sin and death.
Paul says that’s not the only thing in which we can glory. Verses 3-5: “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
As believers we can glory in our sufferings.
Does that seem strange? It shouldn’t. Why?
Because in the person who stands in God’s grace, suffering produces endurance, the capacity to keep on believing as we meet the crucified Jesus at our crosses. And we can glory in our sufferings because through persevering faith in the midst of suffering, God forges our characters. We become more dependent on God the Father, as Jesus was as He bore His cross. We become more sympathetic to the suffering of others. We understand the depths of Christ’s love that reaches us even when we suffer. We’re humbled by the realization of our own limitations; we can no longer worship ourselves or our desires with straight faces or clear consciences.
And a character forged through reliance on Christ’s grace in the midst of our suffering will be filled with hope in the Savior Who pours Himself into us.
If you have experienced or are experiencing now the sustaining grace of Christ as you have suffered, you have a God-given rendezvous with an eternity about which you can boast, a story of grace to share, a track record with the Lord that can give you hope even “in the valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4). When you have a hope like that, you “fear no evil” (Psalm 23:4).
Paul then gives the reason for our hope as Jesus people. At the time set aside by God, Jesus died for sinners like us. Paul says that this happened “when we were still powerless” (Romans 5:6).
The word powerless translates the Greek word asthenon, which means weak, unable to stand.
Paul is saying that those who once were so weakened by sin that they couldn’t stand in the presence of a holy God nor have any hope of standing beyond their graves, now stand in God’s kingdom of grace because of what Christ has accomplished for them...for us, you and me!
Jesus lifts dead and dying believers out of everlasting separation from God and makes it possible for us to stand in the life-giving presence of God forever, even now!
In the last section of today’s lesson, Paul says that if by His shed blood on the cross, Jesus can save us from death, how much more as the One Who stood alive again and stands forever alive and forever first, can He give us life with God that nothing can destroy?
In Christ, we meet a God big enough to save us from sin and death.
He’s also loving enough to care about each of us, to die and rise for everyone, to hear our prayers, to stand with us in defeat, death, and darkness, and to give us the hope of living fully in His glory forever. This God cares about you as an individual person.
This week, I invite you to soak that reality up by reading the Gospel of Mark. Take a week to read this one gospel in the New Testament. Mark is just sixteen chapters long. That comes to 2.28 chapters a day. That’s doable. As you read, whether on your own or with your family or a friend--and this is key, ask God to help you see His love for you and show you too how you might respond to that love, His grace, that day or the next. Let Christ love you in every part of your life. There's nothing He wants to do more than that. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Romans 5:1-11
A Christian scholar writes of listening to a radio interview with a film star. The star said it was “ridiculous...to think that, if there is a God, he might actually be concerned with every single human creature at every single moment.” As the scholar, N.T. Wright says: “Put like that, of course, it seems absurd; and yet absurdity lies in the attempt to picture God as just like us only a bit bigger and more well-seeing.” [Italics are mine.]
People unfamiliar with the God first worshiped by ancient Israel and then disclosed to the rest of us through Jesus Christ don’t understand the enormity of God.
Nor do they understand the depths of His love for us.
As Wright says: “...his very nature is love, it is...completely natural for him to establish personal, one-to-one relations with every single one of us.”
That’s exactly what God has set out to do in Jesus Christ.
And it’s precisely through such a relationship with Christ that God can save us, give us strength for each day, and supply us with a hope that will never disappoint us.
All of this is what the apostle Paul writes about in our second lesson for this morning, Romans 5:1-11.
The New Testament book of Romans, you’ll remember, is a letter written by the apostle Paul to first-century house churches in Rome. It’s Paul’s masterpiece, an exhaustive presentation of the gospel that can bring eternal life to all who bet their lives on it.
In the chapters before our lesson appears, Paul has talked about the fundamental human problem, sin, which leads to death, among other things. Because sin is universal to every human being, Paul says, quoting a psalm: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”
But, Paul says that’s not the end of the story. God is unwilling to see you and me die in our sin, forever separated from Him. So God acts.
God the Father sends God the Son Jesus to receive the punishment we deserve for our sin. Jesus dies, although He committed no sin. Jesus experiences separation from God the Father, the Maker of life, which is why Jesus cries from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) It’s also part of the reason Jesus descended into hell (1 Peter 3:19); He bore the full weight of sin and its fatal consequences.
God the Father then raises Jesus from death. As Paul explains elsewhere: “...Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20).
All who renounce sin and trust in Christ have reconciliation with God and have life with God, an intimate and enduring personal relationship with the One Who loves us more than anyone in this world ever has or ever will.
Jesus tells us: “The one who believes in me will live, even though they die” (John 11:25). Even more than that, Paul goes on to tell us at the beginning of today’s lesson, we have peace with God even when the sin, darkness, and imperfection of this present world makes war on us.
Take a look at what Paul says, Romans 5:1: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…”
In other words, we who are born wrong and who have lived wrong are made right with God through our faith in Jesus.
Although we deserve death, God gives peace to those who trust in Christ.
A man saw me, deeply disturbed because he thought that his sins would forever separate him from God. A woman spoke with me, her conscience thunderstruck for some horror she had perpetrated. These are real people whose consciences convicted them.
They thought that they were too sinful to receive the promise of God given to us through the crucified and risen Jesus: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13; Acts 2:21). There is nobody beyond the scope of God's "everyone."
“You are stained red with sin,” God says in Isaiah 1:18, “but I will wash you as clean as snow.”
If you trust Christ with your sins, along with the rest of your life, you are made clean.
You have peace with God.
And you can keep having peace with God through faith in Jesus even when you, as is true of each of us every single day, sin again or experience life’s pressures and need to repent or take refuge in Christ.
That’s why Paul says what he does next. Verses 2 and 3: “...through [Jesus] we [believers] have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God…”
The word translated as stand is histemi. We get the word histamine from it. Histamines get released naturally by our immune systems to help our bodies to function properly, to help us to stand strong. (The New Testament Greek word for resurrection is rooted in this word and literally means to stand again.)
The idea here is that because of the charitable forgiveness--the grace--that God bears for sinners like you and me who open ourselves to trusting in Christ, we stand in God’s kingdom.
By this grace given to those who trust in Christ, God will always give us life, always give us hope.
The psalmist spoke of what it means to stand in God’s grace when he wrote: “I will not fear though tens of thousands assail me on every side…” (Psalm 3:6)
Paul says that we who stand and keep standing in the gracious kingdom of God can brag, not of ourselves, but “of the hope of the glory of God.”
When God’s full glory is revealed to all the world at Jesus’ return, everyone who has believed in Him, will experience the fullness of God’s promises. You have been saved by God’s grace through your faith in the crucified and risen Jesus. So, hold your head high, stand tall, not from arrogance, but knowing that by the grace of God, you’re eternally free from sin and death.
Paul says that’s not the only thing in which we can glory. Verses 3-5: “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
As believers we can glory in our sufferings.
Does that seem strange? It shouldn’t. Why?
Because in the person who stands in God’s grace, suffering produces endurance, the capacity to keep on believing as we meet the crucified Jesus at our crosses. And we can glory in our sufferings because through persevering faith in the midst of suffering, God forges our characters. We become more dependent on God the Father, as Jesus was as He bore His cross. We become more sympathetic to the suffering of others. We understand the depths of Christ’s love that reaches us even when we suffer. We’re humbled by the realization of our own limitations; we can no longer worship ourselves or our desires with straight faces or clear consciences.
And a character forged through reliance on Christ’s grace in the midst of our suffering will be filled with hope in the Savior Who pours Himself into us.
If you have experienced or are experiencing now the sustaining grace of Christ as you have suffered, you have a God-given rendezvous with an eternity about which you can boast, a story of grace to share, a track record with the Lord that can give you hope even “in the valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4). When you have a hope like that, you “fear no evil” (Psalm 23:4).
Paul then gives the reason for our hope as Jesus people. At the time set aside by God, Jesus died for sinners like us. Paul says that this happened “when we were still powerless” (Romans 5:6).
The word powerless translates the Greek word asthenon, which means weak, unable to stand.
Paul is saying that those who once were so weakened by sin that they couldn’t stand in the presence of a holy God nor have any hope of standing beyond their graves, now stand in God’s kingdom of grace because of what Christ has accomplished for them...for us, you and me!
Jesus lifts dead and dying believers out of everlasting separation from God and makes it possible for us to stand in the life-giving presence of God forever, even now!
In the last section of today’s lesson, Paul says that if by His shed blood on the cross, Jesus can save us from death, how much more as the One Who stood alive again and stands forever alive and forever first, can He give us life with God that nothing can destroy?
In Christ, we meet a God big enough to save us from sin and death.
He’s also loving enough to care about each of us, to die and rise for everyone, to hear our prayers, to stand with us in defeat, death, and darkness, and to give us the hope of living fully in His glory forever. This God cares about you as an individual person.
This week, I invite you to soak that reality up by reading the Gospel of Mark. Take a week to read this one gospel in the New Testament. Mark is just sixteen chapters long. That comes to 2.28 chapters a day. That’s doable. As you read, whether on your own or with your family or a friend--and this is key, ask God to help you see His love for you and show you too how you might respond to that love, His grace, that day or the next. Let Christ love you in every part of your life. There's nothing He wants to do more than that. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Saturday, February 24, 2018
Hello, France, Brazil, and Belgium!
Last week, I noticed that a lot of the traffic to the blog was from Russia, perennially in second-place among countries from which people visit the site. Today, with a surge of traffic generally, came a big surprise: Lots of folks from France, Brazil, and Belgium. (Along with readers from Italy, Kuwait, The Netherlands, Ukraine, Germany, and Canada.) Welcome to the site and feel free to leave comments! (By the way, I know nothing more about visitors than the countries from which they visit.)
"Car Dieu a tant aimé le monde, qu'il a donné son Fils unique, afin que quiconque croit en lui ne périsse point, mais qu'il ait la vie éternelle. Car Dieu n'a point envoyé son Fils dans le monde, pour condamner le monde, mais afin que le monde soit sauvé par lui. Celui qui croit en lui n'est point condamné, mais celui qui ne croit point est déjà condamné, parce qu'il n'a pas cru au nom du Fils unique de Dieu." (Jean 3:16-18)
"Porque Deus amou o mundo de tal maneira que deu o seu Filho unigênito, para que todo aquele que nele crê não pereça, mas tenha a vida eterna. Porque Deus enviou o seu Filho ao mundo, não para que julgasse o mundo, mas para que o mundo fosse salvo por ele. Quem crê nele não é julgado; mas quem não crê, já está julgado; porquanto não crê no nome do unigênito Filho de Deus." (João 3:16-18)
"Want alzo lief heeft God de wereld gehad, dat Hij Zijn eniggeboren Zoon gegeven heeft, opdat een iegelijk die in Hem gelooft, niet verderve, maar het eeuwige leven hebbe. Want God heeft Zijn Zoon niet gezonden in de wereld, opdat Hij de wereld veroordelen zou, maar opdat de wereld door Hem zou behouden worden. Die in Hem gelooft, wordt niet veroordeeld, maar die niet gelooft, is alrede veroordeeld, dewijl hij niet heeft geloofd in den Naam des eniggeboren Zoons van God." (Johannes 3:16-18)
"Car Dieu a tant aimé le monde, qu'il a donné son Fils unique, afin que quiconque croit en lui ne périsse point, mais qu'il ait la vie éternelle. Car Dieu n'a point envoyé son Fils dans le monde, pour condamner le monde, mais afin que le monde soit sauvé par lui. Celui qui croit en lui n'est point condamné, mais celui qui ne croit point est déjà condamné, parce qu'il n'a pas cru au nom du Fils unique de Dieu." (Jean 3:16-18)
"Porque Deus amou o mundo de tal maneira que deu o seu Filho unigênito, para que todo aquele que nele crê não pereça, mas tenha a vida eterna. Porque Deus enviou o seu Filho ao mundo, não para que julgasse o mundo, mas para que o mundo fosse salvo por ele. Quem crê nele não é julgado; mas quem não crê, já está julgado; porquanto não crê no nome do unigênito Filho de Deus." (João 3:16-18)
"Want alzo lief heeft God de wereld gehad, dat Hij Zijn eniggeboren Zoon gegeven heeft, opdat een iegelijk die in Hem gelooft, niet verderve, maar het eeuwige leven hebbe. Want God heeft Zijn Zoon niet gezonden in de wereld, opdat Hij de wereld veroordelen zou, maar opdat de wereld door Hem zou behouden worden. Die in Hem gelooft, wordt niet veroordeeld, maar die niet gelooft, is alrede veroordeeld, dewijl hij niet heeft geloofd in den Naam des eniggeboren Zoons van God." (Johannes 3:16-18)
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Believing and Following Jesus (Part 1, The Disciple's Life)
[This was shared during midweek Lenten worship with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on February 21.]
Romans 10:9
1 John 1:9
As you know for the past three years, we’ve been involved with life-to-life discipleship, an emphasis of our North American Lutheran Church (NALC).
Like other NALC congregations, we’ve received coaching from the Navigators.
Currently, we have nearly forty Living Water people involved in life-to-life discipleship groups convened by members of our congregation’s Life and Learning Team.
God is leading us to align our life and culture as a congregation with the great commission, the only mission Jesus gave to His Church. “...Go,” Jesus tells us, “and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
And then Jesus gives us this promise: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20)
But what is a disciple?
The word that’s been translated into English as disciple is, in the Greek of the New Testament, mathetes. It means learner, pupil, student.
To be a disciple of Jesus is to be involved in learning how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit sent to us by Jesus when we are baptized to be more like Jesus, the One Who has saved us from sin and death and darkness.
Jesus talks about discipleship when He says in Matthew 11:29: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
Discipleship is a process, a way of life by which God makes our lives more and more like the life of Jesus Himself (Galatians 4:19).
If being a student sounds boring to you, you need to remember what Jesus means when He calls you to be His student, His disciple.
When Jesus called people to follow Him, He didn’t take them to a classroom. He called them to follow Him, live alongside Him, observe Him, and then, after He’d deputized and empowered them with the Holy Spirit, to do exactly all He did: share the good news, heal the sick, cast out demons, and make disciples.
Jesus’ classroom for discipleship is the world we live in.
The textbook is His Word, the Bible.
The classmates are first, fellow believers who we help and who help us to live out our faith in Christ through small groups in which people reflect on Scripture together, pray together, and own their common need of God for everything, including forgiveness.
Disciples of Jesus will also seek out ways to bond around God’s Word and prayer with people who may not know Jesus but who want to know Him. In this, our model is the Samaritan woman at the well, who told the villagers in Sychar after meeting Jesus, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” (John 4:29)
Bottom line: The conscious life of a disciple begins, irrespective of when we were baptized, when we respond to the invitation to, “Come and see the God we meet in Jesus.”
It’s probable that most of you here tonight can’t remember a moment when you didn’t know about Jesus and believe in Him.
But it’s also possible for Christians to continue as baby disciples all their lives, And that’s tragic.
Jesus doesn’t love us any less when we refuse to grow up as Christians, any more than parents love their problem children who refuse to grow up any less. But if we’re not seeking to be faithful disciples of Jesus, we will miss the joy of intimacy with God, be ill-equipped to face life, be unable to make good decisions, make the most of our time on earth, or be all that God intends for us to be.
The preacher in Hebrews expressed his frustration with a group of first-century Christians in Asia Minor who refused to grow in their faith when he said: “...though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again.” (Hebrews 5:13-6:2)
Jesus expressed a similar frustration with the apostles when, after following Him for several years, they still seemed unable to live out their faith in Him: “You unbelieving and perverse generation, how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?” (Matthew 17:17).
It’s a measure of Jesus’ grace and love that He continued putting up with the apostles and that He puts up with us even when we turn our backs on the call to discipleship, the call to grow in our faith, that could, if we paid heed to it, give us joy!
Here’s the deal: If we’ve been Christians more than a few months, we shouldn’t be content to be mere spectators of the Christian faith; we should be full-fledged participants in the life of discipleship. We should be disciples and be seeking to make disciples and we should be supporting each other in the disciple’s life.
The first trait of a disciple is to believe in the God you and I meet in the crucified and risen Jesus.
The Old Testament tells us that Abraham, the patriarch of Biblical faith, “believed [in God] and God reckoned it to him as righteousness.” (Or as The Message paraphrase of the Bible puts it, “[Abraham] believed! Believed God! God declared him ‘Set-Right-with-God.’” (Genesis 15:6)
When we believe in the God we know in Jesus, we are set right with God, now and for all eternity.
Jesus says something similar in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
The two passages of Scripture we read earlier convey the same message: Discipleship is built on the foundation of believing in Jesus. Believe in Jesus and you are saved from sin, death, and darkness.
But belief is more than what goes on between your ears, more even than the words of confession we speak at worship.
Abraham lived the faith in God he confessed with his lips by what he did with his life. When God called him from the cushy lifestyle he enjoyed among his own people, God told Abraham (then called Abram): “Go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.” (Genesis 12:1-2)
Abraham’s belief in God, his faith in God expressed itself in what he did next: He packed up his wife and servants and livestock and belongings and headed for God only knew where.
Believers are disciples and disciples are followers.
Disciples let God decide directions and destinations. They follow the God we meet in Christ.
When Jesus calls us to believe in Him, He says: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
The disciple’s life is built on believing expressed in a life of following Jesus.
Are we following?
More next week.
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Romans 10:9
1 John 1:9
As you know for the past three years, we’ve been involved with life-to-life discipleship, an emphasis of our North American Lutheran Church (NALC).
Like other NALC congregations, we’ve received coaching from the Navigators.
Currently, we have nearly forty Living Water people involved in life-to-life discipleship groups convened by members of our congregation’s Life and Learning Team.
God is leading us to align our life and culture as a congregation with the great commission, the only mission Jesus gave to His Church. “...Go,” Jesus tells us, “and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
And then Jesus gives us this promise: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20)
But what is a disciple?
The word that’s been translated into English as disciple is, in the Greek of the New Testament, mathetes. It means learner, pupil, student.
To be a disciple of Jesus is to be involved in learning how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit sent to us by Jesus when we are baptized to be more like Jesus, the One Who has saved us from sin and death and darkness.
Jesus talks about discipleship when He says in Matthew 11:29: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
Discipleship is a process, a way of life by which God makes our lives more and more like the life of Jesus Himself (Galatians 4:19).
If being a student sounds boring to you, you need to remember what Jesus means when He calls you to be His student, His disciple.
When Jesus called people to follow Him, He didn’t take them to a classroom. He called them to follow Him, live alongside Him, observe Him, and then, after He’d deputized and empowered them with the Holy Spirit, to do exactly all He did: share the good news, heal the sick, cast out demons, and make disciples.
Jesus’ classroom for discipleship is the world we live in.
The textbook is His Word, the Bible.
The classmates are first, fellow believers who we help and who help us to live out our faith in Christ through small groups in which people reflect on Scripture together, pray together, and own their common need of God for everything, including forgiveness.
Disciples of Jesus will also seek out ways to bond around God’s Word and prayer with people who may not know Jesus but who want to know Him. In this, our model is the Samaritan woman at the well, who told the villagers in Sychar after meeting Jesus, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” (John 4:29)
Bottom line: The conscious life of a disciple begins, irrespective of when we were baptized, when we respond to the invitation to, “Come and see the God we meet in Jesus.”
It’s probable that most of you here tonight can’t remember a moment when you didn’t know about Jesus and believe in Him.
But it’s also possible for Christians to continue as baby disciples all their lives, And that’s tragic.
Jesus doesn’t love us any less when we refuse to grow up as Christians, any more than parents love their problem children who refuse to grow up any less. But if we’re not seeking to be faithful disciples of Jesus, we will miss the joy of intimacy with God, be ill-equipped to face life, be unable to make good decisions, make the most of our time on earth, or be all that God intends for us to be.
The preacher in Hebrews expressed his frustration with a group of first-century Christians in Asia Minor who refused to grow in their faith when he said: “...though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again.” (Hebrews 5:13-6:2)
Jesus expressed a similar frustration with the apostles when, after following Him for several years, they still seemed unable to live out their faith in Him: “You unbelieving and perverse generation, how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?” (Matthew 17:17).
It’s a measure of Jesus’ grace and love that He continued putting up with the apostles and that He puts up with us even when we turn our backs on the call to discipleship, the call to grow in our faith, that could, if we paid heed to it, give us joy!
Here’s the deal: If we’ve been Christians more than a few months, we shouldn’t be content to be mere spectators of the Christian faith; we should be full-fledged participants in the life of discipleship. We should be disciples and be seeking to make disciples and we should be supporting each other in the disciple’s life.
The first trait of a disciple is to believe in the God you and I meet in the crucified and risen Jesus.
The Old Testament tells us that Abraham, the patriarch of Biblical faith, “believed [in God] and God reckoned it to him as righteousness.” (Or as The Message paraphrase of the Bible puts it, “[Abraham] believed! Believed God! God declared him ‘Set-Right-with-God.’” (Genesis 15:6)
When we believe in the God we know in Jesus, we are set right with God, now and for all eternity.
Jesus says something similar in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
The two passages of Scripture we read earlier convey the same message: Discipleship is built on the foundation of believing in Jesus. Believe in Jesus and you are saved from sin, death, and darkness.
But belief is more than what goes on between your ears, more even than the words of confession we speak at worship.
Abraham lived the faith in God he confessed with his lips by what he did with his life. When God called him from the cushy lifestyle he enjoyed among his own people, God told Abraham (then called Abram): “Go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.” (Genesis 12:1-2)
Abraham’s belief in God, his faith in God expressed itself in what he did next: He packed up his wife and servants and livestock and belongings and headed for God only knew where.
Believers are disciples and disciples are followers.
Disciples let God decide directions and destinations. They follow the God we meet in Christ.
When Jesus calls us to believe in Him, He says: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
The disciple’s life is built on believing expressed in a life of following Jesus.
Are we following?
More next week.
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Monday, February 19, 2018
Presidents' Day Thoughts
Today is President's Day. I've been a student of the presidency since I was a boy.
Despite the naive cynicism that "informs" the attitudes and beliefs of many today, we've had more than a few great or good chief executives. (Naive cynicism, to me, is the default position of people who don't know diddly but think they know the score and suspect that everyone in public office is a rotten scoundrel. There are some rotten scoundrels in public office, just as there are rotten scoundrels in every job field. To think that they're all bad or all good, for that matter, is naive.)
For me, four US presidents stand out as great: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower. These four steered the country through challenging circumstances. And they all shared an important characteristic: They overcame themselves and their own deficiencies to become their best selves.
We've also had some fine presidents I would classify as nearly great: Theodore Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, Harry Truman, James A. Garfield, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter.
In history, there have been a few terrible presidents: Andrew Johnson, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, the sometimes well-intentioned Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon.
(Please note that I've included no presidents in these lists whose tenures were more recent than twenty-five years ago. Historical judgments must await perspective and the release of internal presidential documents.)
I respect our constitutional system. With its division of power among three co-equal branches of government and checks and balances, it's a blueprint for government that takes into account the fact of original sin and other human frailties. Its ratification effectively completed the American Revolution. Originally fought only for liberty (although, as we know, sadly not liberty for all), America's first "greatest generation" realized that liberty without mutual accountability was chaos. That's when they wrote the Constitution, bringing with it a potentially strong, but accountable chief executive and central government within a federal system.
Even our greatest presidents made mistakes under the system the Framers created. That's because every president has been a human being. Washington initially placed too much trust in the smarmy, backbiting Thomas Jefferson; Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; Roosevelt tried to pack the court; Eisenhower was too slow in embracing the civil rights movement.
But we can count ourselves blessed that most of our presidents have, once in office, tackled their job with responsibility and love for country. Chester Alan Arthur was a political hack who, once he was president, saw the impact that corruption has on politics and stood up to the bosses, becoming a champion of civil service reform. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson both voted against civil rights when they were in the Senate but became champions of the cause while they served in the presidency, especially Johnson.
Most presidents have felt the need to grow up and see themselves as the custodians of America's future once becoming president. Even the corrupt Richard Nixon, when confronted with tearing the country apart by fighting to stay in power after his criminal acts became known, chose to resign for the good of America.
Sadly missing in the list of US presidents, of course, is a woman. I'm convinced that America has been prepared to elect a woman chief executive for more than three decades. And it will happen, I'm sure, sooner than later. Who that will be and what her party affiliation will be is anyone's guess.
Americans, presidents included, need to respect our constitutional system and be informed about current events and about our history. When we do these two things, we not only perform our most basic and important patriotic duty, we acquire some of the wisdom needed to vote the best candidates into office.
Happy President's Day!
Despite the naive cynicism that "informs" the attitudes and beliefs of many today, we've had more than a few great or good chief executives. (Naive cynicism, to me, is the default position of people who don't know diddly but think they know the score and suspect that everyone in public office is a rotten scoundrel. There are some rotten scoundrels in public office, just as there are rotten scoundrels in every job field. To think that they're all bad or all good, for that matter, is naive.)
For me, four US presidents stand out as great: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower. These four steered the country through challenging circumstances. And they all shared an important characteristic: They overcame themselves and their own deficiencies to become their best selves.
We've also had some fine presidents I would classify as nearly great: Theodore Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, Harry Truman, James A. Garfield, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter.
In history, there have been a few terrible presidents: Andrew Johnson, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, the sometimes well-intentioned Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon.
(Please note that I've included no presidents in these lists whose tenures were more recent than twenty-five years ago. Historical judgments must await perspective and the release of internal presidential documents.)
I respect our constitutional system. With its division of power among three co-equal branches of government and checks and balances, it's a blueprint for government that takes into account the fact of original sin and other human frailties. Its ratification effectively completed the American Revolution. Originally fought only for liberty (although, as we know, sadly not liberty for all), America's first "greatest generation" realized that liberty without mutual accountability was chaos. That's when they wrote the Constitution, bringing with it a potentially strong, but accountable chief executive and central government within a federal system.
Even our greatest presidents made mistakes under the system the Framers created. That's because every president has been a human being. Washington initially placed too much trust in the smarmy, backbiting Thomas Jefferson; Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; Roosevelt tried to pack the court; Eisenhower was too slow in embracing the civil rights movement.
But we can count ourselves blessed that most of our presidents have, once in office, tackled their job with responsibility and love for country. Chester Alan Arthur was a political hack who, once he was president, saw the impact that corruption has on politics and stood up to the bosses, becoming a champion of civil service reform. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson both voted against civil rights when they were in the Senate but became champions of the cause while they served in the presidency, especially Johnson.
Most presidents have felt the need to grow up and see themselves as the custodians of America's future once becoming president. Even the corrupt Richard Nixon, when confronted with tearing the country apart by fighting to stay in power after his criminal acts became known, chose to resign for the good of America.
Sadly missing in the list of US presidents, of course, is a woman. I'm convinced that America has been prepared to elect a woman chief executive for more than three decades. And it will happen, I'm sure, sooner than later. Who that will be and what her party affiliation will be is anyone's guess.
Americans, presidents included, need to respect our constitutional system and be informed about current events and about our history. When we do these two things, we not only perform our most basic and important patriotic duty, we acquire some of the wisdom needed to vote the best candidates into office.
Happy President's Day!
Life for the Wilderness and Beyond
[This was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Mark 1:9-15
On Friday, I was scanning Twitter for the comments people were making on the recent school shooting in Florida. One woman’s tweet particularly struck me. She said, “I can’t believe in a God Who would let children be killed in school.”
She’s not alone in such feelings. People often feel and say things like this. “My husband/my wife has left me,” someone will say, “How could God let this happen?” “My friend was killed in a car accident, my wife has died from cancer. Where is God?” For many, life on this earth is a savage wilderness and God seems like a distant and powerless being.
As Christians, we can be brutally candid: This world is a wilderness.
As beautiful and breathtaking and wonderful as this life can sometimes be, it’s also a fallen place where bad things happen to unsuspecting and even faithful people.
It’s a place where evil and deranged people prey on others.
It’s a place where death can come to people at early age, where death, weeping, and sorrow exist.
As Christians, we realize that while we live on earth, we’re looking for what the New Testament calls “a city” God has prepared for us (Hebrews 11:16).
We believe God’s promises given in Christ of “a country of [our] own” (Hebrews 11:15).
But for now, we are “foreigners and strangers on earth” (Hebrews 11:13).
Every human being is an alien here, whether they know it or not. We weren’t meant for life in a brutal wilderness. Our very revulsion and questions in the face of tragedy demonstrate that fact.
But as hard as it can be to remember and cling to when the wilderness does its worst to us, we need never be alone!
God has not forgotten us.
And He never will.
Not when you’re at work or school.
Not when you’re at home.
Not when you rejoice in victories.
Not when you die.
God will never forget you!
Today’s gospel lesson finds God affirming this truth. Last week’s lesson from Mark narrated an event that happened near the end of Jesus’ ministry, the Transfiguration. This week’s lesson, Mark 1:9-15, takes us to the beginning of His ministry. The two events are connected in ways that remind us of God’s presence with us and His mission for us in this world, as well as God’s promise of life beyond the boundaries of this wilderness. So, please look at our our gospel lesson.
Verse 9: “At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: 'You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.'”
I love how graphic this verse is. After being baptized by John, Jesus looks up to see “heaven being torn open.” The phrase translated into the English as torn open from the Greek in which Mark wrote is σχιζομένους (schizomenous), the root of which is the verb σχίζω (schizo). (Yes, it’s where we get the word schizophrenia for a split personality.) This verb means to split, to cleave, to divide.
This is important!
When Jesus was baptized, God the Father was offering a preview of things to come. Through Jesus, God in the flesh, God was going to tear an opening in the wall that divided our perfect, loving, and holy God from His imperfect, sinful, and fallen human children.
This Jesus accomplished when He died on the cross. Mark 15:38 tells us that when Jesus died on the cross, “The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” The verb translated as torn there is ἐσχίσθη, a past tense form of the same verb in today’s lesson, σχίζω.
The curtain that was torn after Jesus’ crucifixion separated the area where pious Jews had worshiped from the place known as the holy of holies, where God was thought to dwell.
Listen: With the death of the sinless Jesus on behalf of sinful humanity, all that divides us from God was torn down.
Jesus tore an opening to eternity with God for all who repent and believe in Him.
It’s through Jesus that we are privileged to address God as “our Father.”
It’s because of Jesus that we can trust that nothing, not even the wilderness, can separate us from God’s love (Romans 8:31).
And it’s because of Jesus that we can affirm, as we often do after we’ve received Holy Communion, that in the sacrament in which Jesus comes to us, heaven touches earth. Eternity reaches us here in the wilderness, promising God’s forgiveness and presence here and an eternity with God forever!
All of this was foreshadowed when, after Jesus’ baptism, the heavens were torn open in celebration!
And the same thing happens when we are baptized in the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Heaven is opened to us as God claims us as His own, which is what happens next at Jesus’ baptism. “You are my Son, whom I love,” the Father says, “with you I am well pleased.”
But even after our baptisms, there is wilderness to go through. And Jesus could only tear open the heavens for us after He had gone through the wilderness too, only after He did successfully for us what God knows we can not do ourselves: Jesus lived in the wilderness without caving into sin or despair. Verse 12: “At once the Spirit sent [Jesus] out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.”
There’s no way to overestimate the importance of the fact that when God took on human flesh, as He did in Jesus, He faced the same challenges, dangers, everyday joys, and temptations you and I face.
Unless Jesus had been susceptible to the temptations of our wilderness, it would mean nothing to say Jesus is sinless.
If Jesus had been hotwired to resist temptation, it would have taken no dependence on God the Father for Him to say no when the devil and the world tried to lure Him into sin.
Because Jesus could be tempted, He was able to save those who believe in Him when He offered His sinless life on the cross.
It also means that when we face temptations and we cry out to Him, He understands.
And when we have given into temptations and sinned and cry out in His name for forgiveness, He understands and brings God’s forgiveness.
Hebrews 4:15 says: “[in Jesus] we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin.” Because Jesus was tempted in the wilderness of this world, He empathizes with us and gives us strength to face evil, whether that evil comes from the world around us or from the fallen hearts inside of us.
Many of you have heard me tell the story of the woman in my first parish who was dying of cancer. It had been a tough slog for her, with rallies and setbacks and finally the word from her doctors, “There’s nothing more we can do.” I asked her as she neared her death if she’d ever gotten angry with God. “At first, yes,” she told me. “But then I remembered, He’s right here with me.” And this same Jesus Who endured the worst this world can do to a human being, also is with all who trust in Him when they pass from this life to the next, leading us to those rooms He has prepared for all who trust in Him (John 14:2).
After Jesus had faced down Satan in the strength God provided to Him, the same strength God can send to us in our wilderness experiences, Jesus still had a mission to fulfill. He still needed to call people to follow Him and to believe in what He was doing for them...and us. Verse 14: “After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’”
When Jesus arrived on this earth, the days of this wilderness were numbered. The jig was up for the power of sin, death, the devil, despair, and darkness. Jesus has eternally and definitively conquered their power for all who believe in Him. We don’t know when Jesus will return to this earth. But we do know that we can trust the promised return of a Savior Who guaranteed His promise with His shed blood and His resurrection from the dead.
In the meantime, He stands living and ready to comfort and encourage the grieving and the dying, to give new life and new purpose to the uncertain and the doubting, to fill with strength those who have been knocked down low by life.
The psalmist says of the God we know in Jesus: “You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand” (Psalm 16:11).
Through Isaiah, God promises those who follow Him: “...those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” (Isaiah 40:31).
And Jesus tells us: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
If the wilderness seems to have been winning in your life lately, you’ve come to the right place, to worship God in this fellowship of believers. Jesus says that wherever two or three are gathered in His name, He is in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20).
The One Who conquered the wilderness is here today among us and He says, “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent [turn away from the wilderness, its blind alleys, and sin that leads to death] and believe the good news.”
The good news, the gospel, for us today is this: Every person lost in the wilderness who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Romans 10:13) and this Jesus can be with you always, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).
Count on Jesus to take you through your wilderness and beyond, to life with God that never ends. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Mark 1:9-15
On Friday, I was scanning Twitter for the comments people were making on the recent school shooting in Florida. One woman’s tweet particularly struck me. She said, “I can’t believe in a God Who would let children be killed in school.”
She’s not alone in such feelings. People often feel and say things like this. “My husband/my wife has left me,” someone will say, “How could God let this happen?” “My friend was killed in a car accident, my wife has died from cancer. Where is God?” For many, life on this earth is a savage wilderness and God seems like a distant and powerless being.
As Christians, we can be brutally candid: This world is a wilderness.
As beautiful and breathtaking and wonderful as this life can sometimes be, it’s also a fallen place where bad things happen to unsuspecting and even faithful people.
It’s a place where evil and deranged people prey on others.
It’s a place where death can come to people at early age, where death, weeping, and sorrow exist.
As Christians, we realize that while we live on earth, we’re looking for what the New Testament calls “a city” God has prepared for us (Hebrews 11:16).
We believe God’s promises given in Christ of “a country of [our] own” (Hebrews 11:15).
But for now, we are “foreigners and strangers on earth” (Hebrews 11:13).
Every human being is an alien here, whether they know it or not. We weren’t meant for life in a brutal wilderness. Our very revulsion and questions in the face of tragedy demonstrate that fact.
But as hard as it can be to remember and cling to when the wilderness does its worst to us, we need never be alone!
God has not forgotten us.
And He never will.
Not when you’re at work or school.
Not when you’re at home.
Not when you rejoice in victories.
Not when you die.
God will never forget you!
Today’s gospel lesson finds God affirming this truth. Last week’s lesson from Mark narrated an event that happened near the end of Jesus’ ministry, the Transfiguration. This week’s lesson, Mark 1:9-15, takes us to the beginning of His ministry. The two events are connected in ways that remind us of God’s presence with us and His mission for us in this world, as well as God’s promise of life beyond the boundaries of this wilderness. So, please look at our our gospel lesson.
Verse 9: “At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: 'You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.'”
I love how graphic this verse is. After being baptized by John, Jesus looks up to see “heaven being torn open.” The phrase translated into the English as torn open from the Greek in which Mark wrote is σχιζομένους (schizomenous), the root of which is the verb σχίζω (schizo). (Yes, it’s where we get the word schizophrenia for a split personality.) This verb means to split, to cleave, to divide.
This is important!
When Jesus was baptized, God the Father was offering a preview of things to come. Through Jesus, God in the flesh, God was going to tear an opening in the wall that divided our perfect, loving, and holy God from His imperfect, sinful, and fallen human children.
This Jesus accomplished when He died on the cross. Mark 15:38 tells us that when Jesus died on the cross, “The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” The verb translated as torn there is ἐσχίσθη, a past tense form of the same verb in today’s lesson, σχίζω.
The curtain that was torn after Jesus’ crucifixion separated the area where pious Jews had worshiped from the place known as the holy of holies, where God was thought to dwell.
Listen: With the death of the sinless Jesus on behalf of sinful humanity, all that divides us from God was torn down.
Jesus tore an opening to eternity with God for all who repent and believe in Him.
It’s through Jesus that we are privileged to address God as “our Father.”
It’s because of Jesus that we can trust that nothing, not even the wilderness, can separate us from God’s love (Romans 8:31).
And it’s because of Jesus that we can affirm, as we often do after we’ve received Holy Communion, that in the sacrament in which Jesus comes to us, heaven touches earth. Eternity reaches us here in the wilderness, promising God’s forgiveness and presence here and an eternity with God forever!
All of this was foreshadowed when, after Jesus’ baptism, the heavens were torn open in celebration!
And the same thing happens when we are baptized in the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Heaven is opened to us as God claims us as His own, which is what happens next at Jesus’ baptism. “You are my Son, whom I love,” the Father says, “with you I am well pleased.”
But even after our baptisms, there is wilderness to go through. And Jesus could only tear open the heavens for us after He had gone through the wilderness too, only after He did successfully for us what God knows we can not do ourselves: Jesus lived in the wilderness without caving into sin or despair. Verse 12: “At once the Spirit sent [Jesus] out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.”
There’s no way to overestimate the importance of the fact that when God took on human flesh, as He did in Jesus, He faced the same challenges, dangers, everyday joys, and temptations you and I face.
Unless Jesus had been susceptible to the temptations of our wilderness, it would mean nothing to say Jesus is sinless.
If Jesus had been hotwired to resist temptation, it would have taken no dependence on God the Father for Him to say no when the devil and the world tried to lure Him into sin.
Because Jesus could be tempted, He was able to save those who believe in Him when He offered His sinless life on the cross.
It also means that when we face temptations and we cry out to Him, He understands.
And when we have given into temptations and sinned and cry out in His name for forgiveness, He understands and brings God’s forgiveness.
Hebrews 4:15 says: “[in Jesus] we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin.” Because Jesus was tempted in the wilderness of this world, He empathizes with us and gives us strength to face evil, whether that evil comes from the world around us or from the fallen hearts inside of us.
Many of you have heard me tell the story of the woman in my first parish who was dying of cancer. It had been a tough slog for her, with rallies and setbacks and finally the word from her doctors, “There’s nothing more we can do.” I asked her as she neared her death if she’d ever gotten angry with God. “At first, yes,” she told me. “But then I remembered, He’s right here with me.” And this same Jesus Who endured the worst this world can do to a human being, also is with all who trust in Him when they pass from this life to the next, leading us to those rooms He has prepared for all who trust in Him (John 14:2).
After Jesus had faced down Satan in the strength God provided to Him, the same strength God can send to us in our wilderness experiences, Jesus still had a mission to fulfill. He still needed to call people to follow Him and to believe in what He was doing for them...and us. Verse 14: “After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’”
When Jesus arrived on this earth, the days of this wilderness were numbered. The jig was up for the power of sin, death, the devil, despair, and darkness. Jesus has eternally and definitively conquered their power for all who believe in Him. We don’t know when Jesus will return to this earth. But we do know that we can trust the promised return of a Savior Who guaranteed His promise with His shed blood and His resurrection from the dead.
In the meantime, He stands living and ready to comfort and encourage the grieving and the dying, to give new life and new purpose to the uncertain and the doubting, to fill with strength those who have been knocked down low by life.
The psalmist says of the God we know in Jesus: “You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand” (Psalm 16:11).
Through Isaiah, God promises those who follow Him: “...those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” (Isaiah 40:31).
And Jesus tells us: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
If the wilderness seems to have been winning in your life lately, you’ve come to the right place, to worship God in this fellowship of believers. Jesus says that wherever two or three are gathered in His name, He is in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20).
The One Who conquered the wilderness is here today among us and He says, “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent [turn away from the wilderness, its blind alleys, and sin that leads to death] and believe the good news.”
The good news, the gospel, for us today is this: Every person lost in the wilderness who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Romans 10:13) and this Jesus can be with you always, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).
Count on Jesus to take you through your wilderness and beyond, to life with God that never ends. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Hello, Russia
Once again, Google reports on recent visits to this blog show quite a few readers looking in from Russia.
Of course, this data gives no indication of who the visitors are. For those reading from Russia, I share this message:
веруй в Господа Иисуса Христа, и спасешься ты и весь дом твой. (Acts 16:31)
Friday, February 16, 2018
"Thoughts and Prayers": The Relationship of Prayer and Action
A Facebook friend posted this picture earlier today. It's a "campaign contribution" from a frustrated constituent to a member of Congress whose only response to yet another school shooting in the United States is "thoughts and prayers."
I too grow frustrated with the seeming unwillingness of Congress to act on a host of important matters.
Inertia born of a corrupted congressional apportionment process, the influence of interest group money, and spinelessness of legislators fearful they won't be re-elected is an ongoing reality in America.
And it's true that public figures send out hollow assurances of "thoughts and prayers" after mass shootings, terrorist acts, and other tragedies.
But I confess to wincing every time I read or hear someone say, "Prayer doesn't solve anything. It's time for action."
Actually, a slew of research done at top universities, including Harvard, shows that prayer, in fact, can solve lots of things. Two books I recommend to skeptics, both written by medical doctors and incorporating findings from rigorous scientific studies, are Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine by Larry Dossey and The Faith Factor: Proof of the Healing Power of Prayer by Dale Matthews and Connie Clark.
These books affirm what has been my experience after forty-two years as a Christian and thirty-three years as a pastor: Prayer can make a difference, both in the lives of those for whom prayer is offered and, importantly, in the lives of those who pray.
But prayer only makes a difference if those who pray do so with an openness to acting on what they pray about, an openness to God inciting them to action.
As a Christian, I'm taught to pray in Jesus' name. For example, Jesus says in John 16:24: "Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete."
But praying in Jesus' name isn't a secret formula. To pray in Jesus' name must mean several things:
- It means that I acknowledge that I can only approach God the Father through Jesus. God's holiness and perfection are such that I have no right to speak with God except through God the Son, Jesus, Whose death and resurrection for sinners like me tear down the wall between God and all who repent and believe in Christ. Jesus says: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6)
- It means that I'm asking God to answer my prayer petitions in ways that are consistent with the character of Jesus and will of God. Jesus teaches His disciples, including those living in 2018, to pray, "Your will be done." And in the garden of Gethsemane where He would be arrested and taken to be condemned and crucified, Jesus, knowing all that awaited Him, prayed, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup [of suffering and death] from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." (Luke 22:42)
True prayer is surrender. It's something you actually do and something God may use to tell you what to do.
But that happens only if you're really praying. Only if your prayer is an actual conversation with God in which you take the time to listen to what God tells you in His Word, the Bible, and in your spirit as you listen for His still small voice as you pray.
In fact, it's difficult not to suspect that all the sweet-sounding assurances of "thoughts and prayers" are nothing more than idle words, like saying, "I'll be there in spirit." As Pastor Rick Warren points out, people who say that they'll be somewhere in spirit are really saying, "I won't be there," no matter how high-minded they may want to sound.
The capacity of prayer in Jesus' name to result in action struck me again today during my quiet time with God. The list of daily Bible readings I use appointed Acts 16-18. As always, I asked God to show me the truth He wanted me to see as I read the Bible. I was struck by these verses from Acts 16:
Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. (Acts 16:6-10)The apostle Paul and his ministry team were dialed into God through their reading of God's Word in the Old Testament (the New Testament didn't yet exist), their relationship with God through the risen Jesus, and their times in prayer in Jesus' name.
These verses tell us that at first, they felt prevented from taking the good news of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus into Asia (by which the New Testament writers meant Asia Minor, which is now largely composed of Turkey). They were prevented not by soldiers, but by God. It wasn't time for them to go into Asia yet. How did they know not to act? Because God impressed that view on them as they read God's Word and prayed.
Once again, the "Spirit of Jesus" prevented them going into Bithynia.
But that night, in a dream, God seemed to tell Paul that he and his team were to go to Macedonia.
When Paul shared his vision with the others, they all appear to agree that this was what God wanted them to do.
In other words, when Paul and the others prayerfully lived in community with God through Christ, they were given their marching orders. Action was born in humble prayer.
Prayer is not the opposite of action. Prayer is useful action's motive force.
When we act without a vibrant prayer relationship with God through Christ, our action is futile.
When we fail to act after we've prayed and God has impressed us with the action we need to take, the fault is not with God or prayer, but with us.
So, of course, we should be praying for the victims of gun violence.
But we should also pray asking God what it is He would have us to do in the face of this scourge on our country. And then, for the sake of Christ and all for whom He died and rose, we should act.
[This photograph was taken by Joel Auerbach of the Associated Press. If it's a copyright infringement for me to use it here, I ask to be notified and I will take it down. It is a powerful symbol of the ongoing tragedy of school shootings in America.]
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Thursday, February 15, 2018
It's All About the Truth
[This message was shared during Ash Wednesday worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, last night.]
Ecclesiastes 3:20
As we all know, before the risen Jesus ascended into heaven, He told the Church to tell the world about Him and to make disciples. But, from a marketing standpoint, Jesus has made that a difficult task.
For example, the passage of Scripture that informs the designation of this as Ash Wednesday is Ecclesiastes 3:20, where we’re told: “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.” The Message translation/paraphrase of the Bible renders that verse this way: “We all end up in the same place—we all came from dust, we all end up as dust.”
Happy talk, huh?
Want some more happy talk? Here’s a terrible Valentine’s Day confession on my part: I’m not keen on having floral arrangements in my house. Flowers are pretty outside. But when they come into a house and fill the place with their fragrance, all I can think of is funerals.
Most of us don’t really like funerals. Funerals may give us strength, encouragement, peace, and hope from God’s Word and the fellowship of the Church. But they wouldn’t happen if people we cared about didn’t die.
I'm willing to be that if you and I had the choice between going to a movie, a game, a restaurant, or a funeral, I doubt that the funeral would be anyone’s first choice. Death isn’t a topic we like to consider, whether it’s the death of someone else or our own deaths. (As someone has said, "I don't mind dying as long as I don't have to be there when it happens.")
And yet, we set aside a day on the Church calendar every year dedicated to reminding us that you and I are dust and to dust and you and I shall return, that we’re going to die.
That’s a marketing problem for Christians.
When I look at how other things are marketed on TV, radio, and the Internet, I don’t see the promise of death.
The commercials for resorts market fun in the sun, an endless party.
The weight loss people market a new you who will attract the opposite sex.
The beer people do much the same.
The insurance companies, furniture stores, car dealers, diamond merchants, online retailers: Not one of them feature death in their marketing.
If anything, they tend to pitch their products as being able to help us fend off death, overcome our human limitations, even make us godlike in our control of aging, illness, money.
This applies even to the funeral home people whose commercials make only oblique reference to how hard, relentless, and unforgiving death is.
But we Christians gather each year at the beginning of Lent to put ashes on our foreheads.
So, why the difference between the Church and the world?
Here it is: The world wants to believe a lie; the Church seeks to live the truth.
There are actually two lies that the world, along with the devil and our sinful selves, wants to believe.
The first lie is that everything is vain and futile, that we’re going to die, so just “eat and drink and be glad.” This was the futile conclusion reached by King Solomon, a man who used the wisdom given to him by God to make himself wealthy and powerful at the expense of his own integrity, faith, and salvation.
This lie is rooted in the notion that there is no way out, that all are going to die, and that the grave or the crematorium will be the inevitable end of us. So, this way of thinking goes, you should do anything and everything you want. Nothing matters. Just grab whatever your version of the good life is and enjoy it till you die.
The fact is that for the person who trusts in the God you and I meet through Jesus Christ, this life isn’t the whole story.
Even Job, the man in Old Testament times who endured so much sorrow, could say centuries before Jesus died and rose, as a person of faith: “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”
Job trusted that despite his own sins and mortality, the God Who made the heavens and the earth, could also give life again to those who repented and trusted in God.
What Job believed by faith is now available to all who believe in the crucified and risen Jesus, God in the flesh, Who offers us beyond the grave or the crematorium.
The New Testament tells us: “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
We are ashes and dust. We must understand that. It shows us how finite and dependent on God we are, how much we need Jesus to save us from ourselves.
But as surely as God scooped up dust from the earth and animated it to give life to the first human being, He gives new, eternal lives to those who turn to Christ for life. This life isn’t pointless or futile when we seek, by the help of the Holy Spirit, to live it for Jesus Christ!
The other lie the world tries to sell is the idea that death isn’t that big a deal. It’s just a speedbump to eternity. In this view, everyone’s going to have life with God, whether or not they’ve paid any attention to Jesus, the only One Who can give us life with God, in their whole lives on earth. These people see death as a hiccup.
This lie is the very one that the serpent told Adam and Eve in the garden. When the serpent learned that God had told the couple that if they partook of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would die, the serpent said: “You will not certainly die” (Genesis 3:4). He chose not to add the fine-print caveat, right away. “You will not die right away…” Instead, he portrayed God as being stingy with His blessings because he didn’t want Adam and Eve to know about or experience the consequences of evil.
The serpent then said: “God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Again, the fine print was missing. The serpent should have said, “you will be like God, knowing good and evil. But because you’re creatures, not the Creator, you won’t be able to handle the knowledge of evil like God, Who is perfect and holy, can. It will be like kryptonite in your hands. It will be like a flame to a moth. It will kill you.”
This neglected fine print reminds me of the ten to fifteen seconds in the middle of every prescription drug commercial. After telling you how wonderful their product is, the advertisers add a bunch of disclaimers including one that can be summarized: It could kill you.
In the garden of Eden, the FDA hadn’t been invented yet. So, naively cynical, Adam and Eve bought the lie of endless life apart from God hook, line, and sinker.
Christians know that death is a big deal.
Death is real.
We must reckon with the reality of it.
We are born sinners and sinners die.
Medicine may extend our lives for a time. It may enhance our lives for a time. And that’s wonderful.
But in the words of that twentieth-century poet, the late Robert Palmer, we know that “no pill’s gonna cure my ill.”
The gospel tells us that we must turn away from our sin (we must repent) and trust that Jesus will give us life even after we die.
Jesus, the One Who rose from the dead, promises: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)
So, why ashes? Three reasons.
First, ashes remind us of our dust-iness, our mortality, of our utter dependence on God. Dust could never turn itself into a human being made an image of God. Only God could make something as magnificent as human beings from a clump of dust. Every human being can say with King David, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14).
Second, ashes remind us of the judgment which this old creation will undergo. The apostle Peter tells us that when Christ brings down the curtain on this creation: “The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.” (2 Peter 3:10) We must not grow too attached to this creation as it is.
Third, ashes represent repentance and renewal. Sometimes, our forestry service conducts controlled burns. Forests often erupt in natural fires. They’re God’s way of bringing renewal. Foresters cooperate with natural fires by confining them to certain areas, allowing old brush and threatening plant life to be burned away and for new life to emerge. From the ashes emerge the sprigs of new trees. Jesus once spoke of the resurrection life that would emerge from His death: “...unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24) Just so, when we repent, dying to our sins and our sinful desires and, instead seek to live in utter dependence on Christ, we are given new life from God. As often as we repent and trust in Christ, God will keep renewing us all through eternity. (Martin Luther said that the Christian is to live in daily repentance and renewal.)
We commemorate Ash Wednesday each year because we believe in telling ourselves, each other, and the world the truth: Death is real, but death is not the end for those who trust in Christ.
These ashes--you and I--have new life through faith in Jesus.
Paul puts it better in Romans 8:1: “...there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
If the ashes on our foreheads remind you of that tonight, then this symbolic beginning of the Lenten season will have done its work. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Ecclesiastes 3:20
As we all know, before the risen Jesus ascended into heaven, He told the Church to tell the world about Him and to make disciples. But, from a marketing standpoint, Jesus has made that a difficult task.
For example, the passage of Scripture that informs the designation of this as Ash Wednesday is Ecclesiastes 3:20, where we’re told: “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.” The Message translation/paraphrase of the Bible renders that verse this way: “We all end up in the same place—we all came from dust, we all end up as dust.”
Happy talk, huh?
Want some more happy talk? Here’s a terrible Valentine’s Day confession on my part: I’m not keen on having floral arrangements in my house. Flowers are pretty outside. But when they come into a house and fill the place with their fragrance, all I can think of is funerals.
Most of us don’t really like funerals. Funerals may give us strength, encouragement, peace, and hope from God’s Word and the fellowship of the Church. But they wouldn’t happen if people we cared about didn’t die.
I'm willing to be that if you and I had the choice between going to a movie, a game, a restaurant, or a funeral, I doubt that the funeral would be anyone’s first choice. Death isn’t a topic we like to consider, whether it’s the death of someone else or our own deaths. (As someone has said, "I don't mind dying as long as I don't have to be there when it happens.")
And yet, we set aside a day on the Church calendar every year dedicated to reminding us that you and I are dust and to dust and you and I shall return, that we’re going to die.
That’s a marketing problem for Christians.
When I look at how other things are marketed on TV, radio, and the Internet, I don’t see the promise of death.
The commercials for resorts market fun in the sun, an endless party.
The weight loss people market a new you who will attract the opposite sex.
The beer people do much the same.
The insurance companies, furniture stores, car dealers, diamond merchants, online retailers: Not one of them feature death in their marketing.
If anything, they tend to pitch their products as being able to help us fend off death, overcome our human limitations, even make us godlike in our control of aging, illness, money.
This applies even to the funeral home people whose commercials make only oblique reference to how hard, relentless, and unforgiving death is.
But we Christians gather each year at the beginning of Lent to put ashes on our foreheads.
So, why the difference between the Church and the world?
Here it is: The world wants to believe a lie; the Church seeks to live the truth.
There are actually two lies that the world, along with the devil and our sinful selves, wants to believe.
The first lie is that everything is vain and futile, that we’re going to die, so just “eat and drink and be glad.” This was the futile conclusion reached by King Solomon, a man who used the wisdom given to him by God to make himself wealthy and powerful at the expense of his own integrity, faith, and salvation.
This lie is rooted in the notion that there is no way out, that all are going to die, and that the grave or the crematorium will be the inevitable end of us. So, this way of thinking goes, you should do anything and everything you want. Nothing matters. Just grab whatever your version of the good life is and enjoy it till you die.
The fact is that for the person who trusts in the God you and I meet through Jesus Christ, this life isn’t the whole story.
Even Job, the man in Old Testament times who endured so much sorrow, could say centuries before Jesus died and rose, as a person of faith: “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”
Job trusted that despite his own sins and mortality, the God Who made the heavens and the earth, could also give life again to those who repented and trusted in God.
What Job believed by faith is now available to all who believe in the crucified and risen Jesus, God in the flesh, Who offers us beyond the grave or the crematorium.
The New Testament tells us: “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
We are ashes and dust. We must understand that. It shows us how finite and dependent on God we are, how much we need Jesus to save us from ourselves.
But as surely as God scooped up dust from the earth and animated it to give life to the first human being, He gives new, eternal lives to those who turn to Christ for life. This life isn’t pointless or futile when we seek, by the help of the Holy Spirit, to live it for Jesus Christ!
The other lie the world tries to sell is the idea that death isn’t that big a deal. It’s just a speedbump to eternity. In this view, everyone’s going to have life with God, whether or not they’ve paid any attention to Jesus, the only One Who can give us life with God, in their whole lives on earth. These people see death as a hiccup.
This lie is the very one that the serpent told Adam and Eve in the garden. When the serpent learned that God had told the couple that if they partook of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would die, the serpent said: “You will not certainly die” (Genesis 3:4). He chose not to add the fine-print caveat, right away. “You will not die right away…” Instead, he portrayed God as being stingy with His blessings because he didn’t want Adam and Eve to know about or experience the consequences of evil.
The serpent then said: “God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Again, the fine print was missing. The serpent should have said, “you will be like God, knowing good and evil. But because you’re creatures, not the Creator, you won’t be able to handle the knowledge of evil like God, Who is perfect and holy, can. It will be like kryptonite in your hands. It will be like a flame to a moth. It will kill you.”
This neglected fine print reminds me of the ten to fifteen seconds in the middle of every prescription drug commercial. After telling you how wonderful their product is, the advertisers add a bunch of disclaimers including one that can be summarized: It could kill you.
In the garden of Eden, the FDA hadn’t been invented yet. So, naively cynical, Adam and Eve bought the lie of endless life apart from God hook, line, and sinker.
Christians know that death is a big deal.
Death is real.
We must reckon with the reality of it.
We are born sinners and sinners die.
Medicine may extend our lives for a time. It may enhance our lives for a time. And that’s wonderful.
But in the words of that twentieth-century poet, the late Robert Palmer, we know that “no pill’s gonna cure my ill.”
The gospel tells us that we must turn away from our sin (we must repent) and trust that Jesus will give us life even after we die.
Jesus, the One Who rose from the dead, promises: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)
So, why ashes? Three reasons.
First, ashes remind us of our dust-iness, our mortality, of our utter dependence on God. Dust could never turn itself into a human being made an image of God. Only God could make something as magnificent as human beings from a clump of dust. Every human being can say with King David, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14).
Second, ashes remind us of the judgment which this old creation will undergo. The apostle Peter tells us that when Christ brings down the curtain on this creation: “The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.” (2 Peter 3:10) We must not grow too attached to this creation as it is.
Third, ashes represent repentance and renewal. Sometimes, our forestry service conducts controlled burns. Forests often erupt in natural fires. They’re God’s way of bringing renewal. Foresters cooperate with natural fires by confining them to certain areas, allowing old brush and threatening plant life to be burned away and for new life to emerge. From the ashes emerge the sprigs of new trees. Jesus once spoke of the resurrection life that would emerge from His death: “...unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24) Just so, when we repent, dying to our sins and our sinful desires and, instead seek to live in utter dependence on Christ, we are given new life from God. As often as we repent and trust in Christ, God will keep renewing us all through eternity. (Martin Luther said that the Christian is to live in daily repentance and renewal.)
We commemorate Ash Wednesday each year because we believe in telling ourselves, each other, and the world the truth: Death is real, but death is not the end for those who trust in Christ.
These ashes--you and I--have new life through faith in Jesus.
Paul puts it better in Romans 8:1: “...there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
If the ashes on our foreheads remind you of that tonight, then this symbolic beginning of the Lenten season will have done its work. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
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