Forgiven and Free

[Below you'll find videos from both worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio and the message prepared for the services on November 19, 2023.]

Matthew 25:14-30

As we delve into the meaning of the parable Jesus tells us this morning,I want to use something C.S. Lewis writes in his classic, Mere Christianity as a kind of prism through which to view it.

“There are,” Lewis says, “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.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy [that is, life with God and His people in the kingdom of heaven…No soul that seriously and constantly desires that] will ever miss it.”

This is a word of reassurance that Christians often seem to need. More than once, I’ve had people ask me, “How can I be sure I will be with Jesus in eternity?” I can tell them with confidence, “The fact that you want Jesus indicates to me that you will be with Jesus in eternity. If you didn’t believe in Him, you wouldn’t even be interested in the question.”

Today, in Matthew 25:14-30, Jesus tells us about the two kinds of people identified by Lewis: Those who cherish and thrive in the gracious will of the giving God of the universe and those who take death and condemnation because they think of God as a hard deity who is loathe to give us anything.

The parable is familiar to you. A master, representing God, about to go on a journey, calls in three servants. The word used by Jesus for these three men is δούλους, literally meaning slaves. This gives us a good understanding of their low standing in the world.

Our translation makes a hash of what happens next in the parable, talking about bags of gold. In fact, what Jesus does say is that, based on the individual slaves’ abilities, the master gives πέντε τάλαντα (five talents) to the first slave; δύο τάλαντα (two talents) to the second; and ἕν (or, one talent) to the third.

These numbers would have caused Jesus’ original hearers’ eyes to pop out. Remember that a common day laborer earned one denarius for a twelve-hour workday. A talent was the equivalent of 600,000 denarii. Whether the master gave you five or two talents or just one talent, he would be giving you, not just a servant but a slave, an enormous amount of money, Warren Buffett-kind of money. Can you imagine?

After disbursing the funds, Jesus says, the master “went on his journey…” (Matthew 25:19)

After a long time, the master returns, just as the crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus, God the Son, will one day return to this world.

You remember what happens next. The man to whom the master had given five talents says, “Master,...you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’” And the master responds, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’” Similarly, the slave given two talents reports that he has made an additional two talents with the master’s gift. The master tells him, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!” (Matthew 25:19-23)

Then comes the third slave. “‘Master,’ he says, ‘I knew that you are a hard man [well, he didn’t know that; that was simply what he thought of his master], harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed [notice the accusations hurled by this third man against his master, calling the master lazy and unfair]. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’”(Matthew 25:24-25)

The master takes in the third slave’s whininess and accusations and tells the slave, in effect, that if he had such a low opinion of him, the master, thinking that he harvested where He hadn’t planted seeds and reaped where he’d done no work, the slave should have done more than just give back his talent! He then orders the talent to be taken from the man and to be sent into darkness, where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth, here clearly symbolic of someone being sent to hell and eternal separation from God.

Now, I ask you to listen very carefully to what I’m going to say in the rest of the message.

In the past, I would have said–and even preached, that what Jesus is saying was, “Get busy. Use the blessings of God in ways that please God.”

Friends, this is not what Jesus is telling you today!

If you could earn a place in the Kingdom of heaven or if you could earn a better place in heaven, Jesus would not have needed to suffer and die for you.

As it is, no work you and I might do, no amount of goodness we might display, could ever compensate for our sinfulness and unrighteousness.

Only Jesus taking our sins at the cross and taking the punishment you and I deserve could ever pay the debt we owe to God for our sin.

It is only by God’s charity or grace that sinners are justified or made worthy for eternity with God and that gift does not come to us because we’ve kept busy or properly used God’s blessings: We are truly justified by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone.

It is Jesus’ goodness and not ours that saves us.

The goodness of Jesus sets us free to live new lives.

So what is Jesus telling you today?

First of all, the talents the master gives his slaves are what we call absolution, God’s forgiveness of all our sins.

There is nothing the three slaves did to earn, merit, or deserve the massive sums of money he conferred on them. Nor is there anything we can do or need to do to gain God’s absolution, forgiveness.

God’s Word tells us, “At just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” (Romans 5:8)

Before you even knew you needed God’s forgiveness or that you were born dead in your sin and could only be made alive by Christ acting for you, Jesus went to the cross to save you. This is His extravagant gift to you!

The second thing Jesus is telling us is this: Jesus died to save all people from sin, death, and the eternal anguish of hell. But not all people will enter the Kingdom of heaven.

It all hinges on Who you think God is: an inflexible lawgiver or, by the power of the Holy Spirit, you believe that God is a dispenser of undeserved grace,  whether you think of God’s forgiveness as a gift or as something you must earn.

The first two slaves in Jesus’ parable understood they were the beneficiaries of undeserved grace. They didn’t see the new life their master had given them in these vast fortunes as a test or a trap. They saw the talents for what they were: treasures of grace, a chance to live without fear of failure. The master commends them both for being “good and faithful”--that is, believing, servants. They trusted that their master and his gifts to them were good. (And let’s be clear that even had the first two slaves lost every penny given to them by the master, he still would have commended them for faithfully using his gift of grace.)

Friends, when you were baptized into the Triune name of God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–you received the gifts of all the forgiveness, life, peace, and hope that an eternal God can bestow on you.

You can live your life to the full and know that whether you fall or rise, fail or succeed, live or die, you have life in the eternal kingdom of heaven that cannot be taken from you.

As you do that, God will work in your life to make it useful to you, your neighbor, and God.

That’s God’s gift to you.

It’s the same gift He gave to Mary Magdalene (once filled with seven demons), the woman at the well (who had lived in one adulterous relationship after another), the apostle Paul (who had breathed murderous threats against believers in Jesus), and Thomas, the unbeliever.

If the God we know in Jesus Christ can give absolution and freedom from death or fear of failure to them, He can give these blessings to you too!

The third slave viewed what his master gave him as an obligation he had to preserve by playing it safe. When people view forgiveness as something they must earn by playing at religion, turning the God revealed in Jesus into a grim taskmaster, Jesus will tell them, as the master effectively tells the third slave, “If that’s how you see Me and that’s how contemptuous of Me and My gifts you are, wanting to turn my gifts of grace into religious brownie points you earn, I will take My grace away and you will spend eternity learning to your regret that My love cannot be earned.”

Friends, Jesus died and rose for you.

He has set you free from the condemnation of sin and the sentence of death.

To those who receive the gift of faith in Him, He says: “God did not appoint us to suffer wrath [the very thing the third slave feared] but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians 5:9)

Today, Jesus once more gives you all the treasures of His grace–in His Word and in His body and blood–and makes you part of His everlasting kingdom.

Now, friends, live in the freedom of His forgiveness and love.

Live the life Jesus has set you free to live! Amen

The Purpose of Your Life

[This message was shared during worship with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier today.]

Matthew 25:14-30
Someone once said to me: “I know that Jesus loves me and that I’m saved by grace through my faith in Christ, but what exactly is the purpose of my life?”

The short answer is that you and I are alive for only one purpose: To glorify God. In Isaiah 43:7, God says, “...everyone who is called by my name...whom I created for my glory.”

God commands this not because God is an egomaniac.To glorify God entails using our lives in the ways intended to be used by the One Who created us out of an overabundance of gracious love. When we glorify God, acknowledge the relationship of love initiated by the God Who made us and Who has redeemed us through Christ, setting us free to be all that those created in God's image are meant to be.

We most glorify God not when we consider at the Bible’s portrayal of holy living, like we see in the Ten Commandments or in Jesus’ Beatitudes, then grit our teeth and strive to be good and holy people, whether it makes us or others miserable or not. We most glorify God when we enjoy God and use His gifts to us in ways that honor Him.

None of this is to say that following Jesus is easy. It's not.

But there will be no joy in living with Christ if we think we must be holy people who glorify God in the strength of our own power. We must learn the joy of letting go and letting God, of acknowledging our sin and weakness, so that we can be covered in the grace and filled with the power of God. This is what Paul was talking about in the New Testament when he wrote: "...when I am weak, then I am strong." God's power is perfected in us when we admit our weakness. (1 Corinthians 12:9-10)

The Lord Who saved us by going to the cross for us will be glorified within us if we will allow the Holy Spirit empower us to live according to God’s call in Proverbs 3:5: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.”

Our prayer each day should be that God would help us to glorify Him by helping us to remember His goodness to us and leaning on Him.

The parable Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson is the story of two men who didn’t grit their teeth to do the right thing, but who remembered the goodness of their master and so, enjoyed and used the blessings of the master to bring pleasure both to them and to the master.

It’s also the story of a third man who ignored the blessings given to him by his master, relying on his own personal sense of what was right and wrong, and so, denied himself a continuing relationship with him.

You know the story. A master, clearly a stand-in for God the Son, Jesus, is about to go on a journey. As we read Jesus’ story, we understand the “journey” Jesus is talking about. Since the crucified and risen Jesus ascended into heaven, we know that He has been enthroned in heaven, giving His followers millennia to share the Good News that all who turn from sin and believe in the crucified and risen God of all creation, will not perish in eternal separation from God, but will have eternal life with God! Jesus has been away from the earth on a long journey. As we talked about last week, there will be a day when the millennia cease and Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead and to establish His eternal kingdom, finally and fully making all things new.

Anticipating his journey, the master in Jesus’ parable entrusts some of his money to three different servants, just as Christ has entrusted the riches of the gospel to those of who follow Him (1 Corinthians 4:1-2).

Even the single talent (which is the word used by Jesus in this passage, not bags of gold, as the New International Version translates it, the master gave the third servant could be worth between 20 and 600 years of a day laborer’s wages!

In the same way, God entrusts a fortune of blessings to every human being. It’s called being alive. 

And that’s just the start for followers of Jesus Christ! Jesus expended His life on the cross so that all we fallen, sinful, imperfect human beings can, like the thief who was crucified next to Jesus on the cross, acknowledge our sin, turn from that sin, and turn to Him Jesus in faith to live with God for eternity. What a gift! 

Living lives that joyfully express gratitude for these two gifts--the gift of life and the gift of life made new that comes to us by grace through faith in Christ--is not a burden. It’s joy!

That isn’t to say that it’s easy. Throw yourself with abandon into the life of following Jesus--the life of Christian discipleship--and you’ll get bruised too. Maybe more than bruised. You may face rejection, ridicule. In some places today, following Jesus will put a disciple's life at risk. But even here, people may question your sanity or your judgment if you follow Jesus.

A woman told me once that she couldn’t speak with her father about her relationship with Christ. “He thinks I’m crazy,” she told me.

And the possibility of rejection is made greater these days by the public figures and “Christian” groups who claim to be Christians who live unrepentantly un-Christian lives or who turn Christian faith into a religion of good works and looking innocent while decaying inside from spiritual pride, what Jesus called "whitewashed tombs"! (Matthew 23:27-28)

But all of us who are bruised for believing in Jesus need to remember the words of Jesus’ earthly brother “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4)

In Jesus’ parable, the master came back, as Jesus one day will return to the earth, and, like Jesus on judgment day, the master demanded an accounting for how the servants had used all he had given to them.

The master was glad to see that the first two men had enjoyed and used their gifts and so brought glory to his name.

The last man, not so much. His failure to honor and enjoy either his gifts or the giver brought him total separation from the master, just as happens to those who refuse to honor or enjoy Jesus, the Giver of the best gifts of all.

In his book, The Purpose Driven Life, which Lutherans can heartily endorse though not agreeing with everything in it, Pastor Rick Warren gives five portraits of what people who glorify God look like.

First, they worship God all the time. As Warren puts it, “Worship is a lifestyle of enjoying God, loving Him, and giving ourselves to be used for His purposes.”

Second, they love other believers. Long before Jesus walked the earth, God had already commanded all people to love God and to love neighbors. But just before His crucifixion, Jesus told believers, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (John 13:34) Jesus’ sacrificial love for us brought us eternity with God and He commands us to love our fellow believers in exactly the same way.

Third, they glorify God by allowing Him to shape them into the likeness of Jesus. Paul writes of Christian disciples in 1 Corinthians 3:18: “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

We need to stand aside, lay down our will and submit to God’s will, which is to refashion us to be just like Jesus: loving, bold, fearless, forgiving, purposeful. If the third man in Jesus’ parable had simply used the gracious gift the master had given him, he would have had a productive, joyful life. But he didn’t. Christians who keep Christ buried, out of sight and out of mind, during the week, then try to resurrect Him on Sunday morning, are missing out on all that God has in mind for them.

Fourth, we glorify God by serving others with our gifts. No matter what our gifts or our limitations, God has gifted every Christian to glorify God by serving others in some way or another.

Finally, we glorify God by telling others about Jesus. Sharing our faith in Christ with others is the only way we will keep or grow in our faith. Use your faith and it grows. Hoard your faith and it dies out. Truly, faith in Christ is a “use it or lose it” proposition.

We can be like the first two men in Jesus’ parable. We can use the gifts our Master has given to us to glorify God. We do this when we worship God in our daily lives, love our fellow believers, ask God’s help to become more like Jesus, use our gifts to serve others, and tell others about Jesus and the new and everlasting life only He can give to those who turn from sin and believe in Him.

What is the purpose of our lives?

To put it another way, it's to take all the grace and blessings and forgiveness God has given to us through Jesus and our faith in Jesus and, in the certainty that we belong to God forever, give the grace and blessings and forgiveness to everyone we encounter.

First John 5:11, another one of our discipleship group memory verses, reminds us: “And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son, has life; whoever does not have the Son does not have life.”

You can never give away so much of your life for the glory of God that God can’t replace over and over for all eternity, if we will just trust in Jesus Christ alone. 

The purpose of our lives, yours and mine, then, is to spend our lives completely on glorifying God--Methodist theologian Leonard Sweet calls it "spending our last check," knowing that God has an eternity of life to give to all who live completely for Him.

God will never run out of life to give to those who daily surrender Jesus Christ!

So, Jesus calls us to a simple decision that can be framed like this:

Are we willing to give away the life that God gives to us in Christ for God’s purposes and so, allow God to grow our faith, our joy, our purpose for living? 

Or, will we hoard all of God’s grace and blessings given through Christ and die, whimpering about how hard this life is, and so, separate ourselves from God?

 Will we let God's grace in or lock it out? 

The choice is ours.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

The Call to Risk

[This was shared during this morning's worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

Matthew 25:14-30
When we look at Jesus’ parable in today’s gospel lesson, we have to be careful.

That’s because a lazy reading of this story might cause a person to think that, at the ends of our lives, God judges us on the basis of how much good we’ve done or how good we’ve been. But that’s not what this parable is about.

If we simply stop and think about it, we realize that that can’t be Jesus’ message to us this morning. After all, throughout His ministry, Jesus took pains to announce that He had come “to seek and save the lost,” the sinners of the world. (Like me and, if I may say so, you.)

He frequently went after the Scribes and the Pharisees, the religious leaders who thought they obeyed God’s Law and who boiled a saving relationship with God down to abiding by a list of some 620 rules. They had made themselves good people, they thought. And so, they also thought, God preferred them and loved them and didn’t like the sinners Jesus spent so much time around.

Jesus told them they were wrong.

So, we have to leave behind any notion that Jesus is talking about being saved by our works when we read this parable. We are saved from sin, death, and darkness not by our works, but simply by our faith in--our trust in--Jesus Christ. That's one message of this parable, in fact.

But faith or trust is not simply intellectual agreement. Faith is more than intellectual assent to a proposition. That too is a message of this parable.

Let’s dig into it now, Matthew 25:14-30.

Jesus’ words follow those He spoke last week. He says: “Again it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey.”

I understand why the translators of the New International Version, from which we're reading, used the term bags here. They wanted to convey that the master was entrusting a lot of cash to his servants. But the word that appears in Matthew’s manuscript isn’t bags, but talenta, talents.

A talent was a Greek word for a sum of money. “A silver talent was worth c 7,300 denarii,” a single denarius being worth a single day’s wages. A gold talent could be worth thirty times that!

So, the Master is entrusting huge sums of money to these three slaves. And he does so fully intending that they should try to make the money grow. He expects them to take risks with the trust He has given to them.

Jesus tells this parable as part of a string of parables all about the end of this world and His coming kingdom. In this particular parable, it’s clear that Jesus is the Master. He’s the One Who has gone away for a time and Who will one day return to settle accounts.

You and I, His Church, are the slaves.

And the talents? This is the message of the Gospel, which promises us that all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ have forgiveness of sin and new and everlasting lives with God.

In another parable, Jesus gave an idea of how valuable this Gospel--this good news--is for us when He talked about a man who “sold everything he had” in order to possess it.

But, as we’ll see, faith resides not just in the possession of the Gospel. Faith also resides in trusting God enough to recklessly invest it in every aspect and all the people of our lives.

Jesus goes on: “The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

“After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them.  The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

“The man with two bags of gold also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.’

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’”

Something important needs to be pointed out here: Jesus gives bags of different value to the three men. He gives them a trust over his money in proportion to their ability.

You know, one of the foundational principles of this country is that all people are created equal. And, as Christians, we can affirm that all people have equal worth in the eyes of God. Jesus Christ came to be the Savior of all human beings willing to have Him.

But not everyone has the same gifts, abilities, advantages, opportunities, or even faith.

Jesus graciously does not hold us accountable for the blessings we don’t have. He doesn’t expect me to be a mechanic, for example, because God hasn’t endowed me with that gift or interest. But Jesus does hold us all accountable for how we use the freedom from sin, death, and darkness He gives to all baptized believers in Him.

The man in Jesus’ parable who doubled the two bags (or talents) with which He’d been entrusted was given the exact same commendation for doubling what He’d been given as the man to whom the Master had entrusted five bags. Now, Jesus knows full well that 10 bags are more than 4 bags.

Here’s the point: We are only accountable to God for using the faith and the life that we have. God doesn’t expect me to be a Billy Graham, or a Dan Mershon, or a John Bradosky, or a Martin Luther. But He does expect me to seek to live out my call to be the Mark Daniels His gospel has set me free to be.

All of which leads to the next part of the parable. Verse 24: “Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’”

In first century Judea, where Jesus told this parable, the religious leaders of His day had been guilty of burying the truth that human beings, Jews or Gentiles, were saved not because they belonged to the right ethnic group, nor because they slavishly adhered to a set of religious do’s and don’t’s, but solely because they believed in the God revealed to Israel. (This same God has been revealed to all the world in Jesus Christ, true God and true man.)

The first century religious leaders had buried salvation by faith in a gracious God under a mountain of religious duty born of distrust. They didn’t trust God.

They didn’t trust that even if they were killed for their faith in God, God would see their enduring faith and welcome them into eternity.

The third man in Jesus’ parable didn’t trust the Master. So, instead of risking to make something more of the one talent with which he had been entrusted, he buried it.

This man is like the Christian who refuses to take any risks in pursuing the one and only mission with which those of us who have been saved by grace through faith in Christ have been entrusted. This man is like Christians who want nothing to do with making disciples. Monday through Saturday, they bury their faith in Christ in a private place.

Because of this burial, they don’t grow in faith or character or in certainty of God’s love for them. And the people they might touch with the good news of new life in Christ remain untouched.

This kind of safe living is not what God intends for us as believers. He has set us free for more than just slinking through life, heads down, fearful.

In Matthew 5:14-16, Jesus tells believers: "You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

In the book of James, Jesus’ earthly brother writes: “...faith without works is dead.”

We are not saved by our good deeds or works; we are saved by our faith in the God we meet in Jesus Christ. But if we have faith--in other words, if we trust Christ to stand with us always, to bring meaning to our lives, to give us the power to forgive as we’ve been forgiven, to have life beyond the grave with God, then we will do the deeds that God empowers us to do.

They’re deeds that will bring God glory, show Christ to others, make disciples, and build God’s kingdom.

Our call is to not bury our faith and make ourselves more palatable to others in our everyday lives, but to let that faith and our Savior be seen as we serve people in His Name, offer to pray with the hurting, tell others about the hope that we have through Christ even in this life’s dark times, and to help others know Christ and His salvation for themselves.

At the end of Jesus’ parable, the faithless servant is condemned, thrown “...outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’” He was separated from his Master.

Jesus here uses language that He uses elsewhere in describing hell. Truly, this was the fate the faithless servant chose for himself when he turned his back on his Master’s grace, choosing instead distance from and wariness of the master, rather than trusting relationship with Him.

In a sense, he chose death over life by choosing seeming safety and security over trust in the Master who had given him so much.

The Master in Jesus' parable was gone a long a long time. Similarly, it’s been many centuries since Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven. In a world that evidences everything between indifference to hostility regarding the good news that can save a life for all eternity, it’s tempting to bury our faith.

I face this temptation all the time, frankly. "Oh, no," I imagine family and friends and acquaintances telling themselves, "Here come the preacher." When imaginings like this go through my mind, I'm tempted just to bury any mention of my Lord or of the gospel hope that's mine in Christ.

Recently, we went to visit the family of a friend we have known for about thirty years who was dying. In all that years, we hadn’t really talked about Christ, though I knew there is much faith in the family. I wanted to do and say the right thing. I prayed silently that God would help me to be faithful. Then I asked before we left, “Would you mind if we all shared a prayer?”

The response was immediate, “Yes, please.” And there at what would prove to be our friend’s death bed, we prayed.

Never be afraid to risk sharing your faith.

Never be afraid of investing in others with the good news that has changed your life for eternity.

It’s only when we risk and invest in this way that God’s kingdom grows and that we grow in our relationship with God.

And in doing so, we fulfill the very purpose of our lives. Amen

Jesus, Slip 'n Slides, and the Purpose of Your Life

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

Matthew 25:14-30
A young man came to see me. “I know that Jesus loves me and that I’m saved by grace through my faith in Christ,” he said, “but what exactly is the purpose of my life?”

The short answer is that you and I are alive for only one purpose: To glorify God.

In Isaiah 43:7, God says, “Everyone who is called by My Name…I created for My glory.”

We most glorify God though, not when we look at the Bible’s portrayal of holy living, like we see in the Ten Commandments or in Jesus’ Beatitudes and then grit our teeth and strive to be good and holy people, whether it makes us or others miserable or not.

We most glorify God when we enjoy God and use His gifts to us in ways that honor Him.

Following Jesus from here to eternity presents its challenges. But there will be no joy in living with Christ if we think we must face those challenges on our own or in our own power.

The Lord Who saved us by going to the cross for us will also be glorified within us (and we will enjoy His company), if we will begin to learn one simple prayer of faith: “Lord, live within me and give me joy so that You are glorified.”

“Lord, live within me and give me joy so that You are glorified.”  

The parable Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson is the story of two men who didn’t grit their teeth to do the right thing, but who remembered the goodness of their master and so enjoyed and used the blessings of the master.

It’s also the story of a third man who ignored the blessings given to him by his master, relying on his own personal sense of what was right and wrong, and so, denied himself a continuing relationship with him.

You know the story. A master, clearly a stand-in for God the Son, Jesus, is about to go on a journey. As we read Jesus’ story, we understand the “journey” Jesus is talking about. Since the crucified and risen Jesus ascended into heaven, we know that He has been enthroned in heaven, giving His followers millennia to share the Good News that all who turn from sin and believe in the crucified and risen God of all creation, will not perish in eternal separation from God, but will have eternal life with God!

There will be a day though when the millennia cease and Jesus returns here to judge the living and the dead and to establish His eternal kingdom in the new heaven and the new earth.

Anticipating his journey, the master in Jesus’ parable entrusts some of his money to three different servants. Even the measly single talent—a unit of money—the master gave the third servant could be worth between 20 and 600 years of a day laborer’s wages!

In the same way, God entrusts a fortune of blessings to every human being. It’s called being alive.

And that’s just the start for followers of Jesus Christ! Jesus expended His life on the cross so that all we fallen, sinful, imperfect human beings can, like the thief who was crucified next to Jesus on the cross, acknowledge our sin, turn from that sin, and turn to Him Jesus in faith to live with God for eternity.

What a gift! Living lives that joyfully express gratitude for these two gifts--the gift of life and the gift of life made new that comes to us by grace through faith in Christ--is not a burden. It’s joy, pure it’s-so-great-to-be-alive-that-I’m-belly-flopping-downhill-on-a-Slip-and-Slide-joy!

If you’ve ever done a Slip and Slide, you know that as much fun as it can be, there will often be a few painful bruises as a result of throwing yourself to the ground with abandon. I've even been known to throw myself onto a Slip and Slide in my adult years and every time I have, I've ended up with bruises and sore spots and friction burns.

Throw yourself with similar abandon into the life of following Jesus and you’ll get bruised too. Maybe more than bruised.

Today is an international day of prayer for the persecuted church around the world. There are Christians today who live in 52 nations in which it is illegal to confess that Jesus is Lord. (That's a huge percentage of the globe's 196 countries!)

Many Christian believers are losing their lives or being tossed into jails right now because they believe in Jesus. I think of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani mother of five condemned to death for blasphemy--for which there is no law on the books--against Allah simply because she is a follower of Jesus Christ. She is just one of many Christians throughout the world for whom it isn't safe to confess belief in Jesus!

Other Chrisitans, in safer places, feel afraid to follow Jesus because of what their friends, their neighbors, their bosses, or their family members may say about them.

But anyone who dares to follow Jesus is bound to be attacked by more than just flesh and blood enemies. Follow Jesus and you will be bruised by Satan, who hates no human being more than the one who seeks to follow Jesus.*

A woman told me a few weeks ago that she cannot speak with her father about her relationship with Christ. “He thinks I’m crazy,” she told me. That's hard!

But all who are bruised for believing in Jesus need to remember the words of James in the New Testament: “My sisters and brothers, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking for nothing”—or, as I would put it, you will be completely ready for everything in this life and the world to come!

In Jesus’ parable, the master came back, as Jesus one day will return to the earth, and, like Jesus on judgment day, the master demanded an accounting for how the servants had used all he had given to them.

The master was delighted to see that the first two men had enjoyed and used their gifts and so brought glory to his name.

The last man, not so much. His failure to honor and enjoy either his gifts or the giver brought him total separation from the master, just as happens to those who refuse to honor or enjoy Jesus, the Giver of the best gifts of all.

In his book, The Purpose Driven Life, Pastor Rick Warren gives five portraits of what people who glorify God look like.

First, they worship God all the time. As Warren puts it, “Worship is a lifestyle of enjoying God, loving Him, and giving ourselves to be used for His purposes.”

Second, they love other believers. Long before Jesus walked the earth, God had already commanded all people to love God and to love neighbors. But just before His crucifixion, Jesus told believers, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you…”

Jesus’ sacrificial love for us brought us eternity with God and He commands us to love our fellow believers in exactly the same way.

Echoing Jesus' command, Paul writes in the New Testament: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” That's sacrificial love.

I know that I can only love like that by relying on the supernatural power of God’s Holy Spirit, asking God to love others I find unlovable through me.

Loving sacrificially does not mean that we become spineless yes-women or yes-men.

It doesn’t mean that we go along with sin.

Jesus shows that sacrificial love must be tough in confronting evil, even when we find it among fellow believers. When Peter chastised Jesus for insisting that He must go to Jerusalem to be crucified, then rise from the dead, in order to claim an eternal kingdom, Jesus was blunt. “Get behind Me, Satan,” He told Peter.

Sacrificial love will always speak and live out the truth in Christian love toward our fellow believers, even when the truth isn’t pleasant.

Third, they glorify God by allowing Him to shape them into the likeness of Jesus. The New Testament teaches that it’s God’s aim for all of us to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus. Submitting to God reshaping us into the likeness of Jesus is a difficult process that doesn’t end this side of our resurrection.

Submission to Christ means that the Word of God and the will of God must always trump our preferences, our emotions, our reason, and our experiences.

This is something we are at risk of totally forgetting in North American Christianity and for which we must repent or risk losing all connection to Jesus. Like our Savior in the garden at Gethsemane, we must be committed to daily telling God, “Nonetheless, not my will, but Thine alone be done.”

Fourth, we glorify God by serving others with our gifts. No matter what our gifts or our limitations, God has gifted every Christian to glorify God by serving others in some way or another.

Finally, Warren says, we glorify God by telling others about Jesus. As some readers of my blog know, this past week I heard a colleague tell the true story of a contractor he recently met in Ethiopia, a lay member of the Lutheran Mekane Yesus Church. This contractor takes on big jobs in various parts of his country.

Along with the rest of the work crews at any site, he also hires two pastors for every project. Every morning, the pastors lead worship among the crew before the start of the workday. After that, the pastors go into the nearby towns to see if there are any needs they can address, any prayers they can offer, any people who might want to know about Jesus and the new life He offers.

If there’s a group of people in that community who want to be part of a new Lutheran congregation, this contractor will then also pay the salary of one of the pastors for an additional year in order to develop the new church.

Sometimes, this guy gets flak for his witness for Christ from local government authorities or from leading people in the community. He always meets the skeptics, gives them Bibles, invites them to read the Bibles, and, if after they’ve read some of God’s Word, they still have questions about why he does what he does, he offers to meet them again.

It's because of committed lay Christians like this man that the Lutheran Church in Ethiopia gained 300,000 new members between 2009 and 2010. It already has 1-million more members than our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And, recognizing how desperately America needs Jesus Christ, the Lutherans in Ethiopia are about to send missionaries to the United States.

Not all of us can do what that contractor does to tell others about Christ. But each of us can do something to tell others about Jesus, even something as simple as using one the “This meal’s on us!” cards you can still find in the back of the sanctuary.

We can be like the first two men in Jesus’ parable. We can use the gifts our Master has given to us to glorify God and joyfully use our gifts.

We do this when we worship God in our daily lives, love our fellow believers, ask God’s help to become more like Jesus, use our gifts to serve others, and tell others about Jesus and the new and everlasting life only He can give to those who turn from sin and believe in Him.

Today, I want to close with one simple question. Who among us is willing to belly flop with utter abandon to enjoy and follow Jesus Christ?

If you are, I promise you that Jesus will always be there to catch you...and you will glorify God!

Amen!

*Ephesians 6:10-12, in the New Testament, explains this well:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle 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 in the heavenly places. ¹¹¹²

Remember

[This was shared during the funeral for Dorothy, a lifelong member of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, earlier today.]

Romans 8:31-39
Psalm 23
Luke 12:22-31
There are really only two legacies any of us ever leave behind, only two things we can give others that last.

One is love. The love that Dorothy bestowed on and shared with her family and friends didn’t end on Tuesday. The urgent desire of her family to be with her even in her final hours as she slept and occasionally fluttered her eyes is testimony to the love that was her gift to you, a gift you still possess and always will.

The only other enduring legacy we can bestow on others is our personal testimony about the truth of Jesus Christ. It’s a testimony we can give every day of our lives in words and actions.

The most powerful testimonies don’t usually come from people called to climb into pulpits and proclaim God’s Word. They more often come from people we see regularly, people who live their faith in the everyday places of life.

These testimonies can even come from grandmas who tell their grandchildren as they face new challenges and temptations in life, “Don’t forget who you are.” That, I’m told is something Dorothy sometimes told you, Ben and Sarah.

It seems to me that there are several ways you could have heard that simple admonition.

First, you could have heard it as a reminder of who you are in the eyes of God. Like your grandmother before you, you were baptized at the Saint Matthew Lutheran Church baptismal font. Water was poured over your head in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God was invoked, and, without any qualifications or merit on your parts, God claimed you as His own.

The title “child of God” is a privilege that, again, like your grandmother before you, you claimed as your own when you affirmed your baptismal covenant at the time of your confirmation. First John 3:1 says, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”

Today, I invite you to remember, Ben and Sarah, and all who mourn Dorothy’s passing, that being a child of God is a tremendous privilege. When we children of God grieve, the God Who conquered death (and sin and futility in our lives) through the death and resurrection of Jesus, can be beside us. When we wander from God’s will, as we are all prone to do, God is ready and willing to welcome us into His embrace. When we rejoice, God rejoices with us. Remember who you are.

Of course, there’s another side of that admonition. It was no doubt what Dorothy immediately had in mind when she said it to her grandchildren. Remember that you were raised in a Christian home. Remember God’s commandments. Remember the love and respect you are expected to bear toward not just family members and people you like, but toward those you dislike or those who dislike you, toward strangers. Remember God’s grace and that it is, as we sang a few moments ago, amazing.

But remember too that God’s grace isn’t cheap. To give you His presence today and His promise of tomorrow cost Jesus Christ His life on the cross and that came after He underwent intense agony and the abandonment of His friends.

The very least we owe God in response to this free gift of everlasting life for all who believe in Christ are lives of obedience and love and daily repentance, lives in which we seek, however imperfectly, to tell God thank You and to display His presence in our lives.

Remember who you are.  Dorothy has left you with powerful legacies: love, the great way of living, and the good news of new life through Jesus Christ.

But today, I want to add something to Dorothy’s admonition. Remember who you are, to be sure. But also, remember who she was. Some of who she was comes through in two of the Bible passages we’ve read today, passages I’m told were among her favorites.

One is Psalm 23. In it, the psalmist, speaking as a child of God, proclaims confidently, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for His Name’s sake.”

Because of the heart God has revealed He has for us through Jesus Christ, we can cling to these confident words. As children of God, we can trust, as our lesson from Romans reminds us, that nothing…nothing…in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Another of Dorothy’s favorite passages is found in Luke 12, where Jesus said, “Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” And then Jesus says, “If God so clothes the grass of the field…alive today and tomorrow is thrown in the oven, how much more will He clothe you—you of little faith.”

Martin Luther, the great reformer of the sixteenth century, used to talk about what it will be like when we all come into the presence of God for judgment. Considering all the passages of Scripture that speak of judgment, Luther says that God will look upon two groups of sinners, the whole human race in one of these two groups.

When God looks on one group, they’ll stand naked in their sins, living in the separation from God and self-will they chose while living here on earth.

But when God looks on the other group, He won’t see their sins—though they will be just as numerous and horrible as those committed by those in the first group.

Instead, in this latter group, God will see people clothed in Jesus, people who, in this life, claimed their baptismal heritage and trusted in Jesus for life and hope and peace even in life’s dark valleys.

When Dorothy came into the immediate presence of God on Tuesday morning, she was clothed as she had always been in the righteousness of Jesus. We do a lot of unnecessary toiling and spinning in life. But all we need is Jesus Christ!. Dorothy knew that. She was a child of God. That’s who she was. And that’s why I’m confident that when God met her at 6:30AM on Tuesday morning, the Lord said to her, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Father.”

I didn’t get to know Dorothy the way I would have had I arrived at Saint Matthew years before. But despite dementia, something of her essential self came through in our monthly visits. And much of who she was can be seen in the rich legacies of love and faith she bestowed on her family. That’s why today I know that Dorothy wants all those who are here this morning to one day hear those same words—“Well done, good and faithful servant!”—from God.

And we can hear them, joining her and all the saints in eternity, if we will simply remember who we are as children of God, saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus and our faith in Him.

And whenever you need inspiration, remember who Dorothy was.

If you can commit yourself to remember these two things in all the days that lie ahead in your lives, no matter what, your joy will be full and you will never go wrong. Amen

How Will You Invest Your Life?

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

Matthew 25:14-30
The parable that Jesus tells in our Gospel lesson this morning is likely one that you’ve heard many times. A master, preparing to go away on a long journey, gives whopping sums of money to three of his slaves, in lots of what were called talents. To one slave, he gives five talents; to another, two; and to a third slave, he gives one talent.

Now, there’s no reason for us to feel any pity for the third servant. One talent amounted to between 75 and 96 pounds of silver and equaled what one day laborer would have received for about twenty years of work!

So, the master is generous to all three slaves. He gives them their money, tells them he’s going away, and leaves.

Later, the master returns and asks the slaves to tell him what they’ve done with the money he gave them. The first two report that they’ve found ways to double the master’s gifts. The master is so pleased that he invites the two to party down with him and he gives them greater responsibility. The third slave, probably confident that he’s done the right thing, explains that for fear of losing anything the master gave him, he had buried his one talent and now was bringing it back.

The master isn’t pleased at all. “How wicked and lazy can you be?” he tells the third slave. “At the very least, you could have opened a savings account and gotten a little interest.” Then he orders that the one talent be taken from that slave and given to the first guy. And the third servant is sent away.

There are three things I want to say about this story this morning. First: It’s important to understand that the master in Jesus’ story didn’t simply entrust this money to the slaves, but gave it to them. That doesn't come through very well in our translation. The word describing the master's action in the original Greek of the New Testament is paradidomi, which means to give over or hand over. The talents given to the three slaves was their money to use, to invest, to disburse, or to squander. The choices about what to do with those gifts were theirs to make.

My first car was a 1963 white Dodge 330. I called it The Tank. I bought it...for a dollar from my grandfather. He gave the dollar back to me after we’d had the title work notarized. In other words, it was really a gift.

And it was a pretty valuable gift, too, because my grandfather, just like my other grandfather, and just like my father, was a mechanic. (Those genes skipped over me!) When he gave that car to me, it was in top condition. How do you think I responded to his gift? I ran it into the ground!

In fact, I did that with the first five cars I ever owned. I didn’t know what it was like to trade a car in until I was thirty-six years old. (Even then, I wondered why the car dealer had actually given us any trade-in on our old car!)

Now, here’s the point: Our lives, minds, and bodies are all gifts from our master, the God we know through Jesus Christ.

So too, is the new and eternal life that goes to all with faith in Christ.

So too, are the basic gifts we all enjoy as members of Christ’s Church: God’s Word, the communion of Saints, Holy Baptism, Holy Communion.

On top of that, God gives to everyone of us skills, abilities, and spiritual gifts.

God gives all of these things to you and me to be used. Not hoarded. Not forgotten. Not denied. But used.

All of God's gifts demand a response of gratitude from believers in Jesus Christ. The way I treated the car my grandfather gave me didn’t display gratitude to him. I pray that the way I live my life displays gratitude to God for all His gifts to me. So point #1: God’s gifts deserve our gratitude.

Point #2: The master in Jesus’ story gives no specific instructions on how his gifts are to be used by the slaves. He just gives them and leaves. That was so maddening to the third slave that he was left paralyzed and did nothing.

You and I, as followers of Jesus, live in what can be called the in-between times. We’re in-between Jesus’ resurrection and His ascension into heaven, on the one hand, and His return, which will happen some day, on the other.

Jesus has given some general directives to us on how to occupy ourselves during this in-between time. They’re called the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. Incorporated in two passages in Matthew’s Gospel, they can be summarized in five points: We’re to worship God with our entire lives; live in fellowship with Christ’s Church; open ourselves to God’s Spirit, so that we grow to become more like Christ; serve others in Jesus’ Name; and tell the world about the free new life God offers to all with faith in Jesus.

But Jesus never tells us exactly how to do those things. Like the slaves in His story, we must decide for ourselves how to live in this in-between time, how to take the gifts God grants us and live faithful, useful lives. We must do that as individuals and as a church family, each seeking God’s glory and guidance above all else.

Point #3: Like the slaves, we’re to do something with God’s gifts to us. The Christian life isn’t a passive life. Confident of our place with God for all eternity, we’re called to jump into life: serving others, sharing Christ with them, being advocates for justice, and acting as servants to the neglected and the despised.

A number of years ago, Guideposts’ annual book of daily devotions had a piece written by a young man majoring in business at the University of Tennessee who apparently had a talent for investing in the stock market. By the time he’d reached the end of his junior year in college, he'd become successful at it and looked down his nose a bit at his parents for failing to make the most of their money. At home for a break, he made a few comments about this to his folks and how he believed they could do better with their investments.

One day during this visit, he and his mother went to a mall where they ran into a young woman he’d never met. She had benefited from a scholarship provided by an organization of which his parents were an active part and to which they gave money. "Who was that?" he asked his mon. His mother smiled and explained, “That’s one of our investments.”

Next week will bring us to our Consecration Sunday. You’ll be asked to make an estimate of your giving for 2009. Last week, our own Bryan Starner suggested that you prayerfully consider increasing your giving by a “stairstep.” It will be great if you do that.

But if, in consideration of all of God’s gifts to us, our financial giving is the only thing that increases, Consecration Sunday will be a failure.

Even in tough economic times like these, it’s easier to write a check than it is to teach a class, volunteer for a ministry, tell a skeptical friend about Jesus, or visit a sick person.

Lutheran pastor Brian Stoffregen notes that to be a good and faithful servant of Jesus “is not mere theological correctness, passive waiting, or strict obedience to clear instructions, but active responsibility that takes initiative and takes risks.”

What sorts of risks may God be calling you and me to take today?

Methodist pastor Douglas Mullins tells the true story of Belinda, a member of one of the churches he served. Belinda had become the single parent of a five year old son when her husband left her after she’d had breast cancer. He left when he realized that she would be disfigured by the surgery she’d undergone.

One night, she was tucking her son, Ryan, into bed, reading a story to him, when he interrupted to ask if she had bought the book she was reading for him. “Yes,” she said. And had she bought his bed? “Yes.” And the house in which they lived? “Yes.” And the new sweater he liked so much? “Yes” was the answer again. As Mullins explains it, Ryan “thought about how good [his mother] had been to him...and finally said, ‘Mommy, get my piggy bank. There are seven pennies in it. Take them and get something you really want for you.”

None of us has anything that God needs. Everything we have comes from God anyway, just as the slaves in Jesus’ parable got everything from their master. But if you and I are going to faithfully respond to God’s call on our lives, if we’re going to express our gratitude to God for all His gifts, if we’re going to find our own unique ways of responding to God’s gifts, and if we’re going make investments of eternal significance, we need, like the first two servants in Jesus’ parable, to take risks.

We need to take all the blessings God has given to us—including our time and talents and our passions—and invest them in loving God, loving neighbor, serving others, and making disciples. We need to move from being Christian spectators to active Christian disciples.

It’s only when we strive to use all our gifts in response to God’s love in Christ that we really start to live!

When pour our lives into living for God's purposes--what Methodist theologian Leonard Sweet calls "cashing our last check"--we find as those first two servants did, that God’s presence, provisions, and promises fill our lives.

Grateful people who invest their lives in living God's way are paid off in the dividend of an endless and deepening assurance that the God we meet in Jesus Christ is always and forever with us, for us, and by us. Amen

[This sermon was inspired by the fine work of the pastoral staff at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Burnsville, Minnesota.]