Cost Benefit Analysis

Here, belatedly, you'll find last Sunday's worship service with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, as well as the text the message that day. I hope that you find it helpful.



Mark 10:17-22

The incident recounted in today’s Gospel lesson, Mark 10:17-22, in which a wealthy man asks Jesus about eternal life, is among the saddest events in Jesus’ entire earthly ministry. 

Mark says that Jesus, God in the flesh, “who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth,” (1 Timothy 2:4) is Himself saddened by the conversation. 

And, we learn that this man who came to Jesus to understand how he could have eternal life, walks away from Jesus, filled with sorrow. 

And yet our lesson shows us that we can have an eternity with God. 

The question is whether we’re willing to receive the gift of Christ and the eternal life He brings.

In today’s lesson, a man runs up to Jesus, kneels before Him, and asks, “Good teacher,...what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17) 

Here is a man who wants eternal life with God. But Jesus sees that the man is muddled by the ways this world ordinarily operates and by his own particular sin. Rather than taking the man and his assumptions head-on, Jesus decides to meet the man where he is.

“Why do you call me good?” [Jesus asks] “No one is good—except God alone.” (Mark 10:18) If the man is calling Jesus good because he knows Jesus is God, he’s on his way to knowing the way to eternal life.  But, Jesus is saying, if the man is throwing out an honorary title to prove himself worthy of eternal life, he needs to save his breath.

Jesus then says, “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.” 

Since you’re so interested in earning eternal life, Jesus is saying, you know about God’s moral standards. He then lists commandments four through eight of the Ten Commandments, all drawn from the second table, which addresses how we are to relate to our neighbors. He doesn’t mention the ninth and tenth commandments. Nor does He mention any of the commandments in the first table, the first through third commandments, which address our relationship with God. 

But the commandments Jesus does mention should be sufficient for what Jesus wants to accomplish in citing them. He wants this man who thinks he can earn the inheritance of eternal life to look into the moral Law of God as he might look in a mirror.

I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the less I like looking at a mirror. (And I never was that keen on it!) Sometimes when I pass my reflection, I’m startled and wonder, “Who is that old man?” 

To look into the mirror of God’s Law and see what it shows about us is even more startling. 

The apostle Paul, quoting the Old Testament psalms, says: “There is no one righteous, not even one…” 

And God was including me when He observed in Genesis, that “every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood…” (Genesis 8:21) 

Speaking for myself, I know that I’m a sinner from birth, a sinner by inclination, and a sinner not only in my actions, but also in my thoughts and desires. 

Whenever God holds up the mirror of His Law before us, He wants to drive us to be like the repentant tax collector in Jesus’ parable, who cried, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” (Luke 18:13) 

God wants to lead us to such prayers because it’s only in seeing the truth about our sinful nature that we understand, first of all, as sinners, we could never be good enough or do enough good to earn eternal life. 

God also wants us to see that Jesus, God the Son, is our righteousness, the One Whose death and resurrection makes all who repent and believe in Him fit for eternal life. As Saint Paul says, Jesus is “our righteousness, holiness and redemption.” (1 Corinthians 1:30)

But it’s really true that “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.” 

It’s also true that we each have particular sins that can enslave us and prevent us from seeing our need of Jesus for eternal life. 

After Jesus held up the mirror of God’s moral Law to the man wanting eternal life, the man says with self-satisfaction: “Teacher...all these I have kept since I was a boy.” (Mark 10:22) 

Maybe the man actually thinks he’s never done anything wrong. But even if that were so, it wouldn’t account for the wrong he’s thought or the wrong he’s felt. No, he, just like you and me, needs the Savior Jesus.

Even now, Mark tells us, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” (Mark 10:21) 

Friends, that’s precisely Jesus’ attitude toward you. Although our sin is the reason that Jesus had to die on the cross, bearing the punishment for our sinful nature, Jesus still loves us. 

He died for us because He thinks you and I are worth saving! 

It’s at this point in their conversation that Jesus decides to drill down to this man’s favorite sin, his idolatry of wealth. Sell off all your assets, Jesus tells the man, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Me. 

You see, you can outwardly appear like a disciple of the God we know in Jesus, but still be turned away from God, filled with raging and selfish sinfulness. This man would never be free to take eternal life from Jesus until he let go of the thing he relied on more than God.

Money, of course, isn’t the only god we may need to turn from to receive eternal life with God. A colleague of mine told me about counseling with a couple having problems because the husband insisted on looking at pornography. “It’s harmless fun,” the man insisted. “It’s adultery and idolatry,” the pastor said. The marriage ended when the man decided he wanted porn more than he wanted the married life with his wife that God had gifted him. 

Are there things you love in this life that threaten your eternal life with God? Could it be money or security, good looks or good times? Whatever it may be, Jesus can set you free, eternally free.

Verse 22, at the end of our lesson tells us, “​​At this [Jesus’ suggestion] the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.” 

The man knew what he was giving up. He knew that he was turning his back on the greatest gift anyone could ever receive: forgiveness and eternal life with God. 

“Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live,” is a promise we have from Jesus. (John 11:25) 

Jesus also says, “...whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.” (Luke 9:24) 

And Jesus promises that “the one who stands firm [in trusting in Him] to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 24:13)

Eternal life with God is an inheritance that we cannot earn and do not have to earn. 

All the earning has already been done by Jesus Himself. 

He earned it when He died on the cross. 

Our call is to, each day, turn from the dead and dying things of this world and turn to Him for life. 

Do a simple cost/benefit analysis: Which lasts longer, a comfortably sinful life here in this world for seven, eight, or nine decades, or a life of love and righteousness with God for eternity? 

Turn to Jesus. Today and every day. Amen

The Old Testament Book of Genesis, Part 17

Aren't We Blessed?

Here you'll find the video of this past Sunday's modern worship service with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. Below it is the text of the message presented there.



Genesis 2:18-25

The word alone first appears in the English language some seven hundred years ago, around 1300 AD. It’s actually a contraction of two Old English words, all ana or all one. It means, totally one. To be alone is to be completely and totally by oneself.

Our first lesson for this morning, Genesis 2:18-25, begins with God saying, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18) 

There are people who might dispute that. There are parents with young children who might think they’d like nothing better than being alone. The same might be true of anyone being daily accosted by customers, bosses, teachers, deadlines, competitors. Relationships bring demands, disagreements, jangling telephones, interrupting texts and emails, people in need, distractions. We all reach a point when we say, “I wish I could have just five minutes by myself!”

Even Jesus, God the Son, knew the pressure of relationships and the need for downtime. The Gospels record Jesus going off to quiet places. 

But when Jesus did that, He never sought to be completely on His own. He reached up to commune with God the Father. Jesus wanted the One to Whom He had the closest connection, the One Who understood Him the most. 

For everlasting eons, in the mystery of eternity, where there is no time and no space, the one God in three Persons--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--had never known what it was like to be alone. Within the one God, there has always existed oneness, companionship, love, empathy. 

When God the Son, Jesus, volunteered to enter His creation as a baby born at Bethlehem in order to die and rise to free you and me and the whole cosmos from sin, death, and darkness, it was the first time the Son had been separated from the Father and the Holy Spirit. 

Jesus knew what it meant to be totally alone in a roomful of people. He went off to quiet places because He needed fellowship with those who shared His nature as God.

God declares that it’s not good for Adam to be alone because man is the only one of God’s creatures created “in the image of God.” Without someone who shares this unique and privileged position in the universe to accompany him through life, Adam is alone. God understands the joy of being in relationship with those of one’s own kind. So, out of love for Adam, God declares, “I will make a helper suitable for him.” (Genesis 2:18)

There has been a lot of destructive mischief made of these words. In deciding to create a helper for Adam, God is not creating an assistant to Adam to whom the man can bark out orders. The word translated as help or helper from the Hebrew in which the Old Testament was written is ezer. In the Bible this word is usually not applied to subordinates. It’s a word most often used of God Himself. “We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield,” Psalm 33:20 says, for example. When Moses named one of his sons, he called the child Eliezer, meaning God helps. During His earthly ministry, Jesus used the equivalent of this word to talk about God the Holy Spirit: “...I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— the Spirit of truth.” (John 14:16-17)

So, after no member of the animal kingdom was found who could assuage Adam’s aloneness, God performed the first surgery. He put Adam to sleep and opened up Adam’s side and took a portion of Adam’s body to make the woman. Adam declares: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” (Genesis 2:23) 

Adam is doing a little wordplay here. One word for man in Hebrew is ish; Adam calls the woman ishshah. By the way he identifies the woman, Adam is saying, “This is the one to whom I am connected. I am not alone anymore.” In Genesis 2:24, Moses, the author of Genesis, comments“That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” 

In other words, God establishes marriages and families so that we will not be alone. 

But this passage is about much more than marriages and families. It encompasses God’s plan for the entire human race: men, women, married, unmarried, widowed. Everyone. 

That’s because the oneness, the connection, each of us needs cannot be fully encompassed in marriages or friendships alone. We are all meant for relationship...with God and with others.

The first casualty of the fall of Adam and Eve into sin, which happened shortly after the events recorded in our first lesson, was ruptured relationships. Adam blamed God and the woman for his sin. The woman blamed the serpent. 

When sin entered the human picture, every human stood alone in their own sin and their own death. Sin leaves us each profoundly alone, each of us striving to “be like God” and to prove ourselves to the world and, in some cases, to God. 

Many people picture hell as a place where the rowdy will party for eternity. But the Bible teaches that hell will be a place of intense loneliness in which those who spurn Christ’s call to repentance and faith grit their teeth in everlasting agony and regret. 

It is not good for any of us to be alone. 

That’s why the two tables of the Ten Commandments, God’s fundamental moral law, are summarized by Jesus in the Great Commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…[and] Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:36-40) 

But you may have noticed something. Even when we earnestly try to love God and love others, we, our sinful natures, our judgmental attitudes, our competitive streaks, and our constant teetering between feeling inferior at some moments and superior in others, get in our way. We find it so impossible to get over ourselves that we, just like Adam and Eve, in our own power, can’t love as we’re commanded to love. 

Eternal separation from God and from others would be our ultimate destiny were it not for God helping us.

When, about twenty or thirty years after Jesus’ resurrection, the apostle Paul talked about Adam and Eve and marriage, he saw their story as a foreshadowing of a set of relationships God wants all people to have. Adam once exulted that Eve was bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. In their oneness, Adam was saying, his body belonged to Eve, and Eve’s body belonged to him; they were one. And while this is meant to be expressed sexually in and only in marriage, Paul says it points to the oneness with God and others that’s ours through Christ and His Church. In Ephesians 5:30, after talking about the oneness intended for husbands and wives, Paul says that marriage is a like the lives of Christians with Christ and fellow disciples; “we are members of His body,” Paul says. The connection is to be so close and so intimate among those of us who confess Christ in the Church that, “[i]f one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” (1 Corinthians 12:26)

On the cross, Jesus bore the weight of our aloneness and alienation from God. “My God, My God,” He cried, “why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46) But when the Father raised Jesus from the dead (Acts 2:24), Jesus, because He is not only truly God, but also truly human, bridged the chasm between God and us. He paid the penalty for our sin and has become for us “the Way and the truth and the life.” (John 14:6) He has prepared a place in eternity with God for all who repent for their sin and trust Him as their Lord and God. Not only that, He promises all who turn to Him in faith, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

And He does even more for us. 

You’ve heard me tell the story before of the little boy who was afraid of the dark and kept asking his father to come sleep with him. When the dad explained that even if he or the boy’s mom weren’t in his room, God was. “I know,” the little boy said, “but I want someone with skin on him.” 

Jesus is God with skin on Him and He understands what it is to be alone. To assure us that He will never leave us nor forsake us, He gives two incredible gifts. 

One is the Holy Spirit, Who will guide those who pay heed to God’s Word and partake of the Sacraments, that Jesus will never leave us. 

The other is His Church, the people with skin on them who are part of this congregation and every congregation in which a people being transformed and saved by God’s Word can confess that Jesus is Lord!

It isn’t good for us to be alone. 

For many, this will, in part, mean that God blesses us with the gift of marriage and family, what Martin Luther called “the little Church.” 

But for all in whom God’s Word and Spirit creates faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, it means that through life’s joys and sorrows and into eternity itself, we are part of a single family with God as our Father and fellow disciples as our sisters and brothers. 

Aren’t we blessed? Amen

When Jesus Spoke About Hell

Here's the video of today's second worship service at Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. Below the video, you'll find the script of the message.



Mark 9:38-50
We Lutherans don’t talk much about Hell.

It does come up in the Apostles’ Creed on most Sundays of the Church Year when we respond to God’s Word by confessing our faith in the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We confess that after Jesus was crucified, dead, and buried, “He descended into hell,” bearing the full consequence of separation from God that we all merit for our sin.

But we’re shy about talking about hell as a destination for those who spurn Christ and His Gospel.

Jesus had no such shyness.

He talked about hell quite a bit, but not to everyone. As one Bible scholar has written, “Jesus...spoke of hell to professed saints, and of heaven to acknowledged sinners…”

In other words, Jesus didn’t speak much of hell to people like the tax extortionists and prostitutes to whom He was always reaching out; He had no desire to scare them into following Him. Fear-driven faith never lasts!

But Jesus did speak of hell to those who claimed to be devout believers in God. He did this lest their spiritual pride lead them away from God.

When I was a boy, I remember reading Irving Stone’s book, They Also Ran. It profiled all the losing major party candidates for president up until the time Stone wrote the last edition of his book in 1966. Stone talked about William Jennings Bryan, who was nominated for president three times and lost each election. Bryan wanted to mix his Christian faith with his politics. Stone says that Bryan went through phases that began with a simple faith and culminated in megalomania. As Stone tells it, the phases went like this: “God is with me, God is for me, God is in me, God is me; I am God.” When our life with God leads us to self-congratulation bordering on self-worship, we are in deadly trouble!

That’s why in the middle of today’s Gospel lesson, Mark 9:38-50, Jesus talks with the disciples about hell. He sees self-righteousness threatening their faith.

Our lesson continues the narration of events that took place right after Jesus returned from the Mount of Transfiguration which we’ve been following over the past several Sundays.

On the mountain, Peter, James, and John, the three apostles Jesus had taken with Him, had been slow to understand that Jesus is God the Son.

When they came to the base of the mountain, Jesus entered a scene of conflict and confusion occasioned by the fact that when a man approached Jesus’ disciples for help with His demon-possessed son, the disciples were powerless.

Jesus, you’ll remember, is initially stern with the twelve for their failure to pray, then, after exorcising the demon from the boy, instructs the disciples more gently.

Jesus concluded last Sunday’s Gospel lesson by telling the disciples that whoever welcomes a child, children being the lowest of the low on the social scale of first-century Judea, were really welcoming Him. Jesus always identifies with the humble and lowly, not the arrogant and powerful.

Now John, one of the sons of Zebedee the fisherman, steps forward.

John is often called “the beloved disciple.”

He’s the guy who seems to “get it” much of the time.

He’s the disciple to whom Jesus, from the cross, entrusts His mother.

He’s one of the inner circle of three disciples into whom Jesus poured the most intense teaching and training.

But in our lesson, John acts like a Pharisee, certain of his own holiness, disdainful of others.

“Teacher,” says John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.” (Mark 9:38)

The irony is lost on John: This entire section of Mark’s gospel begins with nine of the apostles unable to use prayer in Jesus’ name to cast a demon from a young boy. Yet, here’s John saying that the apostles told someone not part of their in-crowd who trusted Jesus enough to cast out demons in Jesus’ name to stop. Jesus tells John that if someone believes in Him and His name enough to cast out demons in His name, that person won’t later speak against Jesus.

Then comes Jesus’ warnings against spiritual pride in verses 42-48. And here Jesus speaks clearly of hell.

There are three main words that we translate from the Greek in which the New Testament was written as hell. The word  that Jesus uses in today’s lesson is gehenna.

It takes its name from the Hebrew place in Jerusalem called the valley of hinnom. In Old Testament times, the valley of hinnom was a place where faithless kings had offered human sacrifices, including child sacrifices, to the false idol of Moloch. This practice was condemned by God, of course.

The valley in which it happened became so notorious that faithful people cursed it. It later became the city dump in Jerusalem, a place where the flames from burning refuse smoldered all the time, twenty-four hours a day.

That’s how it came to give its name to the place reserved for the dead who in their earthly lives spurn faith in the God now revealed to all the world in Jesus Christ.

Jesus uses a series of vivid “it would be better” statements to underscore how much every human being should desire paradise over hell, life with Him in eternity over sliding into gehenna through spiritual pride, indifference, and the failure to daily repent for our sins and trust in His grace.

Jesus says that it would be better for us to be fitted with millstones around our necks and thrown into the sea than to cause “little ones”--like children or those of immature faith--to sin or turn from God.

He says that if our hand, foot, or eye, cause us to sin, to turn from Him, it would be better to get rid of them and enter paradise maimed than to die and take up residence in gehenna, in hell, “where, [quoting Isaiah 66:4], ‘the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched’” (Mark 9:48)

Of course, Jesus is using hyperbolic language to make a point here. Neither our hands, feet, or eyes cause us to sin. It’s our sinful natures that make sin so attractive to us. Jesus says elsewhere that it’s from our hearts that “evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witnesses, [and] blasphemies” come. (Matthew 15:9)

What Jesus is telling us is that if there are habits of thought, life, or associations that readily entice us to sin, we need to get those things out of our lives. They will otherwise lead us to hell.

This is troubling talk, especially since we try to domesticate Jesus, turning “the Lion of Judah” into a pet who bends to our wills and whims.

But it isn’t as if Jesus wants anyone to go to an eternity of torment in hell.

First Timothy 2:3-4 tells us that Jesus, “God our Savior” “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

As Jesus tells Nicodemus, “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. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” (John 3:16-18)

Jesus came into this world to save us from sin and death and hell. That’s what His cross and resurrection are all about. But He will not force us to enter eternity with Him. God created us with the capacity to say no to Him.

As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity: “​​There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’"

The lesson that Jesus is trying to teach the disciples (and us) is that we  human beings shouldn’t be confident in our own righteousness.

John, as our lesson begins, seems to think that He’s righteous enough to merit a place in Jesus’ eternal kingdom. But eternity with Jesus only comes to those who recognize their need of Christ, His cross, His resurrection, His forgiveness, His righteousness. It is belief in Jesus, and belief in Jesus alone, that allows us to enter the place in eternity that Jesus has prepared for us.

And knowing that, by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, we belong to God forever, will change the way we face our lives...and our deaths. Nobody wants to die. As has been said, “I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Having been with many people just before they die or at the moments of their death, I can tell you there is a qualitative difference in the way people who trust in Christ face death and the way those who don’t trust in Christ face it.

You’ve heard me talk about my father’s death. He had received all the treatments for COVID-19 short of going on a ventilator. The medical folks explained that even if dad went on a vent, his condition wouldn’t improve in two weeks’ time. His lungs and the rest of his body were too ravaged. They could, though, make him comfortable as COVID did its worst. When Dad indicated that he didn’t want to go on the ventilator and chose the second option, the nurse asked again to clarify his intentions. Dad told her crisply, “I’m good to go. I know where I’m going.”

“I know where I’m going” could be the motto of every person saved by grace through faith in Christ. And knowing where we’re going will surely change how we live until we get there! Christians know we need Jesus.

Hell will be filled with people who thought they didn’t need Jesus.

Our model should be the thief on the cross. When He cried out to Jesus, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” Jesus answered, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:42-43) 

At His death, Jesus Christ descended into the very fires of hell so that all who believe in Him will never have to.

Paradise with Jesus, eternal life, belongs to all who, imperfect though we are, keep turning to Jesus and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, trust only in Him. Amen