Praying to Our Father

Below you'll find live stream video of yesterday's 8:45 and 11:00 AM worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. You can also read the text of the message. Because I presently have a light case of COVID-19, thanks go to Mark and Trish for handling the services. Thanks to Mark for sharing my message. Thanks to Trish for bringing the elements of Holy Communion to our driveway, allowing me to consecrate the elements from a safe distance in our garage.]





Luke 11:1-13

In Romans 8, the apostle Paul says: “...the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.” (Romans 8:26)

We do not know what we ought to pray for. As I grow in my faith, I increasingly understand how true this statement is. I often don’t know how I should pray! What is the right thing to pray for?

Some well-meaning people will say, “Pray from the heart.” The Bible teaches us that “​​The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” (Jeremiah 17:9) Following our hearts, in prayer as well as in anything else, can lead us away from the One we are to follow, Jesus Christ. Others will say, “Just pray what makes sense.” God’s Word also tells us that “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” (Proverbs 14:12) Following our thoughts can also lead us far from God.

We don’t know how to pray, but Paul’s words assure us that as we come to God the Father in Jesus’ name, the Holy Spirit turns our vague yearnings into prayer. Any Christian who has come to the end of their rope and been able to only pray, “Help, Lord!” knows that Paul’s right!

But the Holy Spirit can help us pray in another way. It’s the Holy Spirit Who inspired the Gospel writers, including Luke the evangelist, to record a pattern for praying from Jesus Himself, a prayer we can pray when we have no idea how to pray!

Our Gospel lesson for today, Luke 11:1-13, says that after observing Jesus praying, one of the hundred or so disciples with Jesus at the time, asked the Lord to teach them how to pray. According to Matthew’s gospel, Jesus had already taught the form of the Lord’s Prayer that we use on Sunday mornings. But this is a different group and a different occasion. What Jesus gives us is a slightly different version of the prayer. Although it’s brief, it contains every element needed in our praying.

Let’s look at the prayer briefly this morning, with particular emphasis on just one word, the key to understanding the whole thing. The prayer starts with the address, Father. Jesus often spoke of God the Father as, “My Father.” And now, in the Lord’s Prayer, He wants to share His Father with us.

This is a remarkable gift of love! You remember that Jesus once confronted a group of His fellow Jews Who refused to accept Him as God. They tried to be “holier than thou” with Jesus by claiming Abraham, the ancient patriarch of God’s people, as their father. But Jesus told them, “You belong to your father, the devil and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44) Jesus is describing us at the moments we are born into this world, born in sin. At birth, God is our creator, but not our Father. We are instead, effectively fatherless, since the devil who lured and lures humanity into sin, death, and destruction, bears no concern or compassion for us.

Jesus came into the world to change that! “[T]he Son of Man,” Jesus says of Himself, “came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:10) Jesus has died for your sins and for mine already at the cross. He has risen from the dead to open up eternity to you and me. He calls us now to daily bring our sins to the foot of the cross and follow Him to become heirs of God’s grace. (Luke 9:23) Today, Jesus comes to us in the Gospel Word and in the sacraments to bring us the forgiveness of our sins and the assurance that we are God’s children. As we receive these gifts by faith, we know that God truly is our Father.

Jesus, of course, presents us with an unforgettable picture of what God the Father is like in the parable of the prodigal son. The Father in Jesus’ story gives both of his sons, not just the oldest, as was common in those days, an equal share in the inheritance. And though the youngest son squanders all, the Father welcomes the son home with open arms. Jesus wants us to know that, for those who trust in Him as Lord and God, that is God’s attitude toward us and our prayers.

The petitions of the prayer are simple and flow from knowing God as our Father. We ask first, that God’s name’s–whether Father, Jesus, God, or Lord–will be hallowed or regarded as holy, set apart, special. Martin Luther says in The Small Catechism: “God’s name is indeed holy in itself, but we pray in this petition that it may be kept holy also among us.” “God,” we’re saying in this petition, “You’ve given us the privilege of calling You our Father for prayer, praise, and thanksgiving. Help us to use Your holy name for its intended purposes.”

Jesus says, then pray, “your kingdom come.” Jesus, of course, has come into our world to bring the kingdom of God, the reign of God, into this fallen world. Whenever God’s Word is shared and whenever it comes to us in water or bread and wine, the kingdom has come near to us. Here, we pray that this kingdom will continually come to us and that we will never grow indifferent to God’s Word or its call to trust in Jesus.

Jesus tells us to pray, “Give us each day our daily bread.” Even earthly fathers have compassion on their children. Jesus here urges us to recognize that every need we have–physical as well as spiritual–comes from our Father. The Bible reminds us that, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father…” (James 1:17)

Jesus tells us to pray, “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.” We don’t deserve to be children of God. But because of Jesus’ cross and resurrection and our baptism into Jesus, we are forgiven and made new. Jesus frees us then to pray that we will forgive others as we have already been forgiven–and are daily being forgiven–by God.

Jesus tells us then to pray, “And lead us not into temptation.” Luther points out in The Small Catechism that God, of course, tempts no one into sin. But here, we pray that we would avoid the deceptions of the devil, the world, and our sinful selves, avoiding harm to ourselves or others, avoiding hurting the Father Who sent His Son to save us from sin and death.

Life can throw all sorts of circumstances our way. Grief or the prospect of death may come at any time. Recent years with the pandemic, political turmoil, supply chain issues, severe weather, and others things have shown us how vulnerable we all truly are. It can be hard to know what to pray at times. This simple prayer of Jesus encompasses everything we need and everything we could pray for–reverence for God, citizenship in God’s eternal kingdom, daily and ongoing provision for our needs, the forgiveness of our sins, and protection from temptation. Jesus Christ has made all baptized believers children of God and conferred upon us the right to approach God as our Father and to ask for all these things. So ask. Amen

How to spot a liar

"You may think that fidgeting and not making eye contact are telltale signs that someone’s lying to you," writes Jenna Goudreau at motto, from the editors of TIME. "But according to Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy, there is no one nonverbal cue that’s a dead giveaway."

Cuddy, a psychologist says, though:

...instead of looking for one big “reveal,” the best way to spot deception is to look for discrepancies across multiple channels of communication, including facial expressions, posture, and speech.

“Lying is hard work,” Cuddy says. “We’re telling one story while suppressing another, and if that’s not complicated enough, most of us are experiencing psychological guilt about doing this, which we’re also trying suppress. We just don’t have the brainpower to manage it all without letting something go — without ‘leaking.'” 

The best way to catch these “leaks” is to look for differences between what people are saying and what they are doing, she says. Conflicting emotions, like a happy tone of voice paired with an agitated facial expression, can be particularly telling.

Another way to spot a liar might be to take a look in the mirror. There are so many different ways we might be lying, most of which we might be apt to excuse as "a little white lie." "Does this dress make me look fat?" is a question dreaded by many husbands. ("Do I look as old as the other men in my class?" is the one dreaded by many wives.)

The Bible warns that no human being is righteous, no one. And lying, the attempt to avoid unpleasant disclosures, has been part of the human profile since Adam and Eve bit into the forbidden fruit and attempted to conceal it from God. In John 8, Jesus says that our fallen race are all children of "the father of lies," Satan. No amount of wriggling, dodging, or "explaining" can change that fact.

Some people are more dishonest than others, of course. Some people are more comfortable with lying. Some, as the old saying puts it, "lie when the truth would suit better." But we all need the help that only God can give to us in the honesty department.

The New Testament says that a reliance on Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit He sends to all believers in Him, can empower us to speak "the truth in love." Doing so is part of growing into maturity as a disciple of Jesus.

Overcoming this sin, as is true of any sin, is a constant battle in this life for those who truly want to follow Christ and live life God's way. It begins (and is continued) with the simple acknowledgment that we're addicted to sin, to self-willed living, including lying. It continues with utter reliance on Christ for the grace of God that brings forgiveness for all sins and peace with God. And it continues on from there in daily seeking God's help to be authentic, loving truth-tellers.

People who lie to us can and do harm us, in many ways. But before we get too self-righteous, we need to look at ourselves. One of my favorite passages in the Old Testament offers a prayer that all of us might adopt as our own:

Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)

"Show me my wrong, God," the psalm teaches us to pray to God, "and then lead me to life with You that never ends."

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

How to Grow Up Big and Strong by Rich Mullins

This powerful indictment of the human impulse to vanquish and dominate others appeared on the late Rich Mullins' 1993 classic, A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band.

It's hard to imagine such a courageous and overtly Christian critique of humanity's penchant for making wars, whether in neighborhoods, households, or among nations, being recorded by too many Christian recording artists today. Too often today's Christian contemporary artists bleed the reality out of their tunes, removing the Gospel's scandalous call for total surrender to and simple trust in Christ.

The Gospel--the good news of new and everlasting life for all who believe in Jesus with their whole lives--frees us from the lie of self-sufficiency that the devil has been telling us to take us away from a relationship with God, and so to eternally kill us off, since back in the Garden of Eden.

And it puts the lie to all notions that living like the Rock's or Vin Diesel's onscreen personas is anything other than a big, fat lie ending in death, eternal separation from God and others.

The kingdom of God brought to all who dare to surrender to Jesus belongs only to those with childlike trust in Christ. In it, the least in this world become the greatest and the greatest in this world are the least.

To be big and strong in Christ's kingdom, here now as much as in eternity, is to gain the strength given only to those honest enough to know that without Christ, we can't do any good thing, but that with Christ, we can do all things: from poverty to wealth and back to poverty again, from lowliness to fame and back to lowliness.

Wars may sometimes be necessary to protect others from the aggressive who think that preying on others make them "big and strong." (World War II comes to mind.)

But most human conflicts, at least at the interpersonal level anyway, would disappear if we would realize that God in human flesh, who led a sinless, perfect life, dying for a sinner like me, means I've got nothing to prove by being big and strong. Christ already proved our worth when He died on the cross you and I should have taken.

Still, we teach our kids to look out for number one, forgetting to tell them that Christ has done and is doing all the looking out we'll ever need if we'll just surrender.

Enjoy this amazing song, which sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday.

(In fact, I would love to hear people like Peter Furler, Steve Taylor, Lecrae, Andy Mineo, and U2 cover it today!)

[Blogger Mark Daniels is the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]



Here are the lyrics, as provided by GooglePlayer:

Strong man strangle universe
He drown the stars
Blinded by the mission of a thousand wars
He fit and dominant
Not wonder why
He heed the battle cry

Strong man is survivor
He live to pound
Little wooden crosses in the bloody ground
He fit and dominant
He stand a chance
He not bound to circumstance

And the world keep on turning
And the sun keep on burning
And the children keep learning
How to grow up big and strong
How to grow up big and strong

Strong man take no prisoner
Favor no plea
He leave no gold in teeth of enemy
He fit and dominant
He rise above
He not have the word that mean love

And the world keep on turning
And the sun keep on burning
And the children keep learning
How to grow up big and strong
How to grow up big and strong

Strong man beat the plowshare
He forges sword
He take the flower and he curse the thorn
He crush the serpent
He bite the fruit
His hand is absolute

And the world keep on turning
And the sun keep on burning
And the children keep learning
How to grow up big and strong
How to grow up big and strong
How to grow up big and strong
How to grow up big and strong
How to grow up big and strong

Saved

[This was shared during worship services with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, earlier today.]

Galatians 4:4-7

This morning, I want to ask you to do a thought experiment. 

This is a stretch: But, let’s pretend that you’re an average, normal Lutheran walking through a crowded mall. You’re minding your own business, not bothering anybody else--because, after all, you are an average, normal Lutheran--when a young man walks up to you and with urgency in his voice, asks, “Are you saved?” 

By now, you are practiced at fending off such unwanted discussions with strangers. So, you say, softly, so that nobody else can hear (because, after all, you are an average, normal Lutheran), “Why, yes, I am saved.” The young man, pleased with your answer, scans the mall for the next person to speak to.

I mean no disrespect either for the interviewer or the interviewee in this little vignette. The young man is right to want to share his faith in Christ with others. Jesus has commanded—and not just suggested that—all Christians make disciples. 

On the other hand, the average, normal Lutheran is right to feel that making disciples ought to happen more in the course of conversations between two willing participants than in a flash of religious verbiage among strangers.

After the encounter, our average, normal Lutheran finds a bench to wait for his wife while she hits the After-Christmas Sale at Bath and Body Works. But he can’t help thinking about the young man’s question: “Are you saved?” “Am I saved?” he asks himself. 

And that’s a good question for me to pose to you this morning, one average, normal Lutheran to another: “Are you saved?”

For our answer, we’ll be looking at today’s second lesson, Galatians 4:4-7. 

Before digging into it though, we should be honest and note that both Jesus and the Bible teach that there are people who will not be saved and that there are things--like sin and death, over which we have no personal power, from which we all need to be saved. 

According to Jesus, for example, there are people—maybe people you and I know—who will go to hell. In one of Jesus’ parables, Jesus tells about a wedding banquet filled with people who gain entry into the celebration by wearing special wedding robes issued by a king. One man crashes the party without such a robe. The king has him thrown out, Jesus says, into the “outer darkness, where there [is] weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 

The point of Jesus’ story is clear: Those who seek to gain entrance into eternity with God while remaining naked in their sins, unclothed by the forgiveness that belongs only to those who repent for sin and believe in Christ, will ticket themselves for separation from God, for hell. 

Hell is real. 

But life with God is also real. 

And because both heaven and hell are real, this business of salvation has life-and-death importance for every single human being!

Now, please turn to our second lesson for today, Galatians 4:4-7. It’s on page 812 in the sanctuary Bibles. 

The church in Galatia, to which this letter was written, was started by the apostle Paul, the writer of this letter, in about 49AD. Galatia was a prosperous region in what is today Turkey. The church’s members were Gentiles, non-Jews. They had received the good news of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ through Paul’s ministry. 

But since Paul had left them, a group of people known as Judaizers had come along to confuse them about their faith. They told the Galatians that it wasn’t enough to believe in Jesus. If they really wanted salvation, the Judaizers said, they also had to submit to Old Testament ritual law, which had been rendered unnecessary by Christ's crucifixion. The men had to be circumcised. Everybody had to conform to Jewish dietary laws. They needed to make sacrifices for their sins, as though the sacrifice of the "Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world" was insufficient. All of these things and more, they claimed, were conditions for salvation.

Some people in the Galatian church bought into all this nonsense. They allowed themselves to turn what God had given as a free gift—new and everlasting life for all who believe in Jesus Christ—into a legal transaction. 

Others, intimidated by the Judaizers in the way our average, normal Lutheran was in his encounter with the young man at the mall, were rocked back on their heels and wondered, “Am I saved?” 

Paul responds to this question and to the decision of some to turn their backs on power of Christ’s free gifts of forgiveness and life for all who turn from sin and believe in Him alone. “You foolish Galatians!” Paul says in Galatians 3:1. “Who has bewitched you?” How could you have forgotten, Paul is asking, that you’re not saved by your good deeds or your standup characters or by conforming to religious law, but solely by grace through faith in Christ?

Now, please look at our second lesson. Paul talks about the coming of the Son at Christmas in verses 4 and 5: “…when the set time had fully come [when the time was right according to God’s timetable], God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem [to redeem means to buy out slavery] those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.” When God decided that the time was right, He sent His Son. But, as we remember at Christmas, Jesus didn’t come in the full majesty of His deity. Nor did He arrive with the paraphernalia of the worldly kings. He came as a man to share our lives, our deaths, and our condemnation for sin. That’s what it means to say that He was "born under the law," the very law that condemns us to death for our sin. So completely did Jesus share the condemnation for our sins that First Peter 3:19 tells us that Jesus, after His death, even experienced life in hell, where “He made a proclamation to the imprisoned spirits.” Jesus did all this so that those who believe in Him share in His resurrection victory and never need to ask themselves, “Am I saved?”

To be "saved" is to be adopted as God’s children. This is an important point! Jesus once told some of His fellow Jews that God was no longer their father. Genealogical descent from a man named Abraham did not make them children of God. “You belong to your father, the devil,” He said in John 8:44. 

We can only be adopted as God’s children when we believe in Jesus Christ and in what only He has accomplished for us through His cross and empty tomb. We are saved by the blood of Jesus, our Savior! We are adopted into the family of God as a gift of God to all with faith in Christ.

Verse 6 says: “Because you are his sons [his daughtersm his children], God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’”  You know that you’re a child of God, that you’ve been saved, when you’re able to call God, “Abba!” 

“Abba” is the term Jesus used for “our Father in heaven” when He taught us the Lord’s Prayer. In Jesus’ everyday language of Aramaic, “Abba” was the term that little children used for their fathers, a term that connoted all the trust a child has in her or his daddy. When you trustingly and submissively pray to your Father in heaven, your own spirit is confirming that God’s Holy Spirit lives within you and that you are a child of God through faith in Christ.

Don’t let anyone ever make you feel like a second-class Christian because you don’t have the same spiritual gifts or the same spiritual experiences that they claim to have! If you humbly pray to God, your Father, you have the Holy Spirit. You are saved. And He will bring You comfort, hope, guidance, and the assurance of God’s love for you, no matter what happens in your life.

Paul underscores this in verse 7 of our lesson: “So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.” In another place in the New Testament, Romans 10:9, Paul writes: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Both of these passages are crystal clear: If you believe in the Jesus revealed in life and on the pages of Scripture—who was born of a virgin, suffered death on the cross for our sins, raised from the dead by God the Father, who offers new life to all who turn from their sins and believe in Him—you can rest assured that you have been saved. You are a child of God!

Now folks, that’s such an incredible thing that, while we may not like the method of the young man in the mall of our little scenario, we should be able to understand why he wants to share the good news of salvation for all who believe in Jesus with others, don't you think? Yesterday on Facebook, a colleague from the NALC posted a quote from C.H. Spurgeon: "A Christian who is not a missionary is an impostor."

Confident that we have been saved through Christ, may 2015 be a year in which we average, normal Lutherans join the apostles Peter and John, who, when facing persecution told those who threatened them with punishment if they ever again spoke in the Name of Jesus, “we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard” [Acts 4:20] in Jesus, the One Whose Name is above all names [Philippians 2:9], the One Who has saved us.

If you believe in Jesus Christ, you are saved. That's good news. It should comfort and empower our living. And it is worth sharing. Amen!

The Son of God (Augsburg Confession, Part 3)

We’re involved in a sermon series that seeks to answer the question, “What is a Lutheran Christian?” We’re using one of the basic confessional documents of Lutheranism, The Augsburg Confession, which presents the Lutheran understanding of Biblical Christian faith, to help us answer that question.

Before launching into an exploration of the Confession's Article 3, “The Son of God,” I want you to know something: The devil worked hard to prevent this sermon from being studied for, written, and delivered. This past week, I have learned anew the truth of the words of Ephesians 6:12: “...our struggle [as followers of Jesus Christ] is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil...” The devil has fought with me every step of the way. I have been in the midst of the very kind of spiritual warfare that Martin Luther wrote about in A Mighty Fortress is Our God. And it is only by the grace of God, given to those who cling to Jesus Christ, that I've been able to push through.

This is a sermon then, that the devil does not want you to hear. So, I ask you all to pray that the Holy Spirit will work powerfully in this moment to open our minds, hearts, and wills to the only Truth we can reliably build our lives upon.

Now, there’s a reason the devil doesn’t want this sermon to be given today. It’s because the truths The Augsburg Confession’s Article 3 asserts about Who Jesus is, about what Jesus has done, and about what Jesus will do in the future, contradict the lies about Jesus that are gaining increasing currency in our time.

And Satan, the one Jesus calls “the father of lies” is behind every one of the lies told about Jesus today. You can’t go through a week without encountering these lies on the Internet, on TV, or in newspapers and magazines. Supposedly knowledgeable people say that Jesus wasn’t God in the flesh, wasn’t born of a virgin, didn’t rise physically from the dead, and isn’t the only pathway to God.

They ignore the testimony of reliable witnesses as to Jesus being the Son of God and Savior of the world.

They also ignore the fact that the ancient documentation for the understanding of Jesus they denigrate came earlier and from more different sources than any of the documentation that exists in relationship to other figures of the ancient world.

For example, Colossians 1:15-20, written by Paul in about 60 AD, is composed of material reflecting the confession of faith that all scholars, conservative and liberal, agree Christians were using to give witness about Jesus almost immediately following Jesus' death and resurrection.

The confession of faith found in these verses came together so close to the days of Jesus' time on earth that to read it is almost like reading an email about an event that happened yesterday. Take a look:

[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. [Emphasis is mine.]

It’s bad enough that these lies are being foisted on the world at large. But what’s worse is that these revisionist views, held by people who want to revise God’s truth, have taken root in our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

For example, recently an assistant to the bishop of the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod of our ELCA, Don Carlson, writing a guest post on his bishop’s web site, wrote of Jesus’ virgin birth: “I think that the [Christmas] stories are made up...”

In 2009, our ELCA publishing house issued a version of the Bible they called Lutheran Study Bible. It had footnotes written by ELCA scholars ostensibly designed to help readers better understand the Bible. Now, one of the most important passages in Scripture is Matthew 28:19-20, in which the risen Jesus, just before ascending into heaven, gives what we call “the great commission” to His Church, commanding us to make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching people to obey all that He commands.” But Dr. Duane Priebe, professor of systematic theology at another ELCA seminary, Wartburg in Iowa, wrote this in his footnote on Matthew 28:19-20: “[Jesus] does not mean make everyone disciples...Jesus includes in salvation people who do not believe in Him.”* While the New Testament intimates that people who have not heard the good news of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection and seek to live in accordance with the law that God has written on every human heart (see Romans 2:14-16), will be treated with mercy by God, those who have heard the good news of Jesus and have not believed, according to Jesus, will be eternally separated from God (see John 3:16-18; Mark 16:16; John 8:24).

These incidents of revisionism aren’t isolated. Increasingly, revisionist theology is favored by the hierarchy, clergy, and publications of our denomination.

The reason for revisionism’s popularity is no mystery.  According to Genesis 3:5, Adam and Eve, responding to the temptations of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, wanted to “be like God” and so do we. Deny the revealed truths about Jesus, the Son of God, and you can be a god yourself, the ultimate authority over your life. But, folks, lose these truths about Jesus in order to act as our own gods, and we lose life, hope, peace, our humanity, and our salvation!

Please pull a copy of The Augsburg Confession from the pew racks and turn to Article 3, on page 12. It says:

Our churches teach that the Word, that is, the Son of God..., assumed the human nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary. So there are two natures--the divine and the human--inseparably joined in one person. There is one Christ, true God and true man, who was born of the virgin Mary, truly suffered, was crucified, died, and was buried. He did this to reconcile the Father to us and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt [which we talked about last Sunday], but also for the actual sins of [humankind].

He also descended into hell, and truly rose again in the third day. Afterward, He ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. There He forever reigns and has dominion over all creatures. He sanctifies [meaning, He makes holy or sets apart for God] those who believe in Him, by sending the Holy Spirit into their hearts to rule, comfort, and make them alive. He defends them against the devil and the power of sin.

The same Christ will openly come again to judge the living and the dead, and so forth, according to the Apostles’ Creed.

Every word of this article is rooted in the witness of Scripture. Every word lifts up Jesus as the Son of God. And it stands as a condemnation of the lies a revisionist world tells about Jesus.

But how can we know that the revisionists are wrong?

How can you and I know that Jesus is the Son of God Who can fill both dead consciences and dead bodies with new life?
 
Let me lay before you one rational, empirical reason for believing that Jesus is the Son of God.

And then let me tell how I believe you can personally know that what the Bible and The Augsburg Confession teach about Jesus is true.

The revisionists say that the first Christians didn’t really meet the resurrected Jesus. They say that after Jesus’ death on the cross, the first Christians thought back on Him and had good feelings. These good feelings, the revisionists claim, caused the first Christians to think of Jesus as being with them in some way. Then, they claim, the Christians made up the stories of Jesus’ resurrection to convince others that they could have good feelings too.

Please pull out the pew Bibles and turn to 1 Corinthians 15:3-8.

First Corinthians was written by the apostle Paul in about 55 AD to the church at Corinth, which he had founded. Here, he reminds them, of the most basic evidence that Jesus is Lord. He says:

...I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen by Cephas [Cephas is the Latin version of the apostle Peter’s name], then by the twelve [apostles, including  Matthias, who took the place of Judas after Judas betrayed Jesus and took his own life]. After that He was seen by over five hundred [believers in Jesus] at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep [some had died by 55 AD]. After that [the risen Jesus] was seen by James [this is one of physical sons of Mary and Joseph and Jesus grew up in the same household with James], then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was seen by me also...

Paul claims that more than 500 people had seen the risen Jesus!

He was no figment of their good feelings.

He was real.

He was true God and true man, born of a virgin, the only way to peace with God, Who died and rose to give us a life with that not even death can destroy.

The first Christians never wavered in affirming the reality of Who Jesus was, of His physical resurrection, or of His promise to return one day to fully establish His kingdom.

They staked their lives on these truths, hard as nails people who had drunk deeply of life and of sin, but who had been given new life through Christ.

And many of these tough people--fishermen, tax collectors, former prostitutes, soldiers, manual laborers, scholars, rich, poor, men, and women would, like Paul and Peter, accept execution a punishment for their belief in the Son of God, rather than turning their backs on Jesus!

The first followers of Jesus weren't firebrands. They weren't kooks. They weren't desperate. They had everything to lose and nothing to gain from sticking with their story about Jesus. Yet they did stick with it!

When you see rational people staking their lives on the veracity of a truth they claim to have experienced--John says that he and the other first Christians had heard, seen, and touched with their hands the crucified and risen Son of God (see 1 John 1:1-3)--that’s an empirical reason for believing that Jesus is the Son of God.

But trusting in Jesus--having faith in Jesus--isn’t the result of believing in empirical evidence.

I have known people and you have too, who believed that Jesus is the Son of God, that He was born of a virgin, and that after suffering for us, He rose from the dead. Yet they still don't believe in Jesus. They don't trust Him. They trust themselves. Or they put their trust in things of the world, every one of which will die.

The simple truth is that we can’t be forced into believing in Jesus by trotting out facts. Nor can we be said to believe in Jesus just because we accept the veracity of the New Testament's claims about Jesus. According to 1 Corinthians 12:3, faith in Jesus is a gift that God’s Holy Spirit creates only in those who are willing to believe in Jesus.

And this leads us to how, finally, you and I can know that Jesus, the Son of God, is, has done, and will do all the things claimed by Article 3 of the Confession.

Turn please to Hebrews 11:1. It says:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 

You’ve heard me tell many times of my experience as an atheist who came to faith in Jesus Christ.  Intrigued by the Lutheran Christians of Ann’s home church, I attended a 16-week class called, Life with God.

I read the book we used for the class.

I read and wrote down all the Bible verses to which it referred.

I asked questions.

I listened.

The more I heard and read about Jesus, the more I wanted Him as my Lord!

I was still resistant. I had my own plans. I really wanted to be my own god.

But, in the midst of all this, even when I still thought of myself as an atheist, I found myself praying to the God revealed to the whole world in Jesus.

There wasn’t a lightning flash moment when faith came to me. I simply had been open to believing and the closer I got to Jesus, the more firmly the Holy Spirit created faith in Jesus within me.

I believed in the Son of God.

As the passage from Hebrews tells us, my faith became the evidence of things unseen.

Among the people I've meet on this earth, I’ve never known a person born of a virgin.

Or a sinless human being.

Or someone who rose from the dead days after their death.

And neither have you.

But by faith I came to know and I still know such a person, the God-man Jesus.

And if we will open ourselves to Him, all of us can, by faith, know Him.

We can experience His presence with us as a constant companion who will usher us into the presence and love of God.

And as we hold onto that faith, as we cling to Jesus, we can be assured that one day we will see Him face to face.

This is a sermon the devil didn’t want you to hear, which only proves how important it is to know, follow, and surrender to Jesus, the Son of God. Amen!

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

*After numerous protests, Priebe's comments were excised from the next edition of Lutheran Study Bible. However, he never recanted for the position he took on Matthew 28:19-20. Nor, apparently, was there ever any attempt on the part of the ELCA or the synod to correct him or the church's publishing house for his original comments.

"Am I Saved?"

[This was prepared to be shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio this morning.]

Galatians 4:4-7
Let’s pretend that you’re an average, normal Lutheran walking through a crowded mall.

You’re minding your own business, not bothering anybody else--because, after all, you are an average, normal Lutheran--when a young man walks up to you and with urgency in his voice, asks, “Are you saved?”

Now, as an average, normal Lutheran, you’re thrown off by this sudden violation of your personal space. (After all, you’re still trying to get used to the pastor who hugs everybody during the Sharing of the Peace!) All you hear at first is the word, “saved” and naturally, as an average, normal Lutheran who likes to save a buck, you assume that this guy is bragging about a bargain that saved him a lot of money.

But the young man's message and manner don’t quite compute. So you respond to his question by saying, “Huh?” The young man repeats himself, “Are you saved?” “Oh,” you think to yourself, “one of those Christians!”

By now, you are practiced at fending off such unwanted discussions of God, salvation, sin, and being born anew. So, you say, softly, so that nobody else can hear, “Why, yes, I am saved.” The young man, pleased with your answer and concerned that he might soon be stopped by security, looks over his shoulder, then scans the mall for his next victim.

Let me say at the outset that by that little vignette, I mean no disrespect either for the interviewer or the interviewee. The young man is right to want to share his faith in Christ with others. Jesus has commanded—and not just suggested that—all Christians to make disciples.

On the other hand, the average, normal Lutheran is right to feel that making disciples ought to happen more in the course of conversations between two willing participants—sort of like Philip telling Nathanael in the Gospel of John to come and see Jesus for himself—than in a flash of religious verbiage among strangers.

Nonetheless, as our average, normal Lutheran finds a bench to wait for his wife while she hits the After-Christmas Sale at Bath and Body Works, he can’t help thinking of the young man’s question: “Are you saved?” “Am I saved?” he asks himself.

Actually, this is a question I get a lot from Lutherans. “I don’t know what to say when people ask me that question,” they’ll say. “Am I saved?”

Our second lesson for this Sunday in which we celebrate the power of Jesus’ Name may help you to feel a little more comfortable in addressing that question.

Before digging into the lesson though, we should note that both Jesus and the Bible teach that there are people who will not be saved and that there are things from which we all need to be saved.

According to Jesus, there are people—maybe people you and I know—who will go to hell. In one of Jesus’ parables, which we looked at this past week as part of reading the Bible together in a year, Jesus tells about a wedding banquet filled with people who gain entry into the party by wearing special wedding robes issued by a king. One man crashes the party without such a robe. The king has him thrown out, Jesus says, into the “outer darkness, where there [is] weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The point of Jesus’ story is clear: Those who seek to gain entrance into eternity with God while remaining naked in their sins, unclothed by the forgiveness of sin that belongs only to those who repent for sin and believe in Christ, will ticket themselves for separation from God, for hell.

Hell is real. But life with God is also real. And because both heaven and hell are real, this business of salvation has life-and-death importance for every single human being!

Now, pull out the Celebrate insert, please, and turn to our second lesson for today, Galatians 4:4-7.

The church in Galatia was started by the first-century evangelist Paul in about 49AD. Galatia was a prosperous region in what is today Turkey. The church’s members were Gentiles, that is, non-Jews. They had received the good news of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ through Paul’s ministry. It had come as great, life-changing news to them.

But since Paul had left them, a group of people known as Judaizers had come along to confuse them about their faith. They told the Galatians that it wasn’t enough to believe in Jesus. If they really wanted salvation, the Judaizers said, they also had to submit to Old Testament ritual law. The men had to be circumcised. Everybody had to conform to Jewish dietary laws. They needed to make sacrifices for their sins. All of these things and more, they claimed, were the conditions for salvation.

Some of the folks in the church at Galatia bought into all this nonsense. They allowed themselves to turn what God had given as a free gift—new and everlasting life for all who believe in Jesus Christ—into a legal transaction.

Others, intimidated by the Judaizers in the way our avergage, normal Lutheran was in his encounter with the young man at the mall, were rocked back on their heels and wondered, “Am I saved?”

Paul responds to this question and to the decision of some to turn their backs on Christ to take up the notion that they could save themselves by doing the right things. “You foolish Galatians!” he says at one point. “Who has bewitched you?”

He goes on to say that all who simply trust in Jesus Christ become descendants of Abraham, the founder of God’s Jewish people. Abraham himself was saved, Paul points out, not because of any good works he had done, but simply because he believed in the promises of God, promises that pointed to the sending of God’s Son for the salvation of all people.

Paul talks about the coming of the Son in verses 4 and 5, the opening of our lesson. Take a look at those verses, please: “…when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem [that is, to buy them back from slavery to sin and death] those who were under the law, so that they might receive adoption as children.”

When God decided that the time was right, He sent His Son. But, as we remember at Christmas, Jesus didn’t come in the full majesty of His deity. Nor did He arrive with the paraphernalia of the world's tinhorn kings and dictators. He came as a man to share our lives, our deaths, and our condemnation for sin.

The Bible tells us that Jesus, after His death, even experienced life in hell, where “He made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.” Jesus shared the condemnation that belongs to human beings when they refuse His outstretched hand of mercy, who decide that they don’t need God and don’t need to worry about the question, “Am I saved?”

To be "saved" is to be adopted as God’s children. This is an important point! Jesus once told some of His fellow Jews who refused to believe in Him that, because of their failure to trust in Him, they were children of their father, the devil. Imperfect ourselves, we are nonetheless saved by the blood of Jesus, our Savior! We are adopted into the family of God as a gift of God to all with faith in Christ.

Verse 6 says: “And because you are children [of God], God has sent the Spirit of His Son [this is another way of talking about the Holy Spirit] into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”

People sometimes ask me, “How do I know that I have the Holy Spirit?”

One way to confirm that you have the Holy Spirit is to ask yourself, “Do I believe in Jesus Christ?” If your answer is, “Yes,” you know that the Holy Spirit is operating in your life because, as the New Testament tells us elsewhere, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit."

You can also know you have the Holy Spirit when you’re able to call God, “Abba!” “Abba” is the term Jesus used for “our Father in heaven” when He taught us the Lord’s Prayer. In Jesus’ everyday language of Aramaic, “Abba” was the term that little children used for their fathers, a term that connoted all the trust a child has in her or his daddy. When you trustingly and submissively pray to your Father in heaven, your own spirit is confirming that God’s Holy Spirit lives within you and that you are a child of God through faith in Christ.

Besides, we have the promise of the Bible, in the words of Peter at the first Pentecost, among other places, that all who are baptized in Jesus’ Name have forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Don’t let anyone ever make you feel like a second-class Christian because you don’t have the same spiritual gifts that they claim as some achievement on their parts! If you humbly pray to God, your Father, you have the Holy Spirit. And He will bring You comfort, hope, guidance, and the assurance of God’s love for you, no matter what happens in your life.

Paul underscores this in verse 7 of our lesson: “So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.” In the New Testament book of Romans, Paul writes in another passage: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

In neither of these passages are there any ifs, ands, or buts. If you believe in the Jesus revealed in life and on the pages of Scripture—who was born of a virgin, suffered death on the cross for our sins, raised from the dead by God the Father, who offers new life to all who turn from their sins and believe in Him—you can rest assured that you have been saved. You are a child of God!

Now folks, that’s such an incredible thing that, while we may not like the method of the young man in the mall of our little scenario, we should be able to understand why he wants to share the good news of salvation for all who believe in Jesus with others, don't you think?

Confident that we have been saved through Christ, may 2012 be a year in which we average, normal Lutherans join the apostles Peter and John, who, when facing persecution told those who threatened them with punishment if they ever again spoke in the Name of Jesus, “we cannot keep from speaking about” Jesus, the One Whose Name is above all names, the One Who has saved us.

If you believe in Jesus Christ, you are saved. That's good news. Amen!