If I'm going to vex people, Lord, grant that I'll vex them for following You

My quiet time with God today revolved around Psalm 109. It’s an imprecatory psalm in which, among other things, the psalmist prays: “Appoint someone evil to oppose my enemy; let an accuser stand at his right hand. When he is tried, let him be found guilty, and may his prayers condemn him. May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership. May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.” (Psalm 109:6-10)

The language is jarring! It doesn’t seem consistent with biblical, Christian faith.

And, in truth, it’s not the kind of thing that a Christian should say or even think.

But, honesty compels us to admit that while we may not go as far as the psalmist does here, there are vexing people in our lives we don’t exactly wish well in our thoughts. And, if as believers, we want to lay our entire lives before God, we cannot conceal such sentiments from Him. It’s only when we acknowledge such thoughts to God (not to our neighbor), that we can be set free of the slavery that goes with grudge-holding and be set free to be the joyful people God desires for us to be.

A touchstone passage from the Psalms for me is this prayer: “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)

We “vent” to God, whether it’s in complaining, praising, confessing, or imploring so that the free, clean air of His grace can make us new, so that He can set us free to live in closer fellowship with Him and so that our lives can give Him glory for saving us from sin and death through Jesus. When we try to sweep our ill-feelings toward others under the carpet before God, we’re really concealing reality from ourselves. After all, God already sees everything.

Jesus tells us,  “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…” (Matthew 5:43-44) Few of us today think of people as our enemies and, in America anyway, we don’t have anyone persecuting us. But there are people who vex us, speak ill of us, and give us a hard time. These are the people for whom Jesus says His disciples are to pray. 

I have found that the more I pray for people, the less I’m able to hold grudges, withhold forgiveness, or have ill feelings toward them. God also gives me a heart to be more understanding. But Psalm 109 and other imprecatory psalms tell me, anyway, that until I can own my ill feelings toward people, I can’t be free enough of myself to pray for their good.

Lord, today help me to be honest about all of my feelings with You. Help me to pray for others. And help me to so reflect Your love and grace that I don’t vex people for the wrong reasons. In other words, if I’m going to vex people today, grant that it will be because I’m following You and not because I’m following my own sinful impulses or feelings. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen

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

Wrestling with a Lie (my own)

One of the things I'm reading these days is a short booklet called, Deception: Letting Go of Lying by Lou Priolo. A while back, a friend accused me of lying. The old Adam, this old earthly sinner, in me, raised a wail of indignant denial.

But, as time has passed, I've come to believe that my friend was right. I had lied.

Here's what happened. A group of disciples at my former parish had led the charge in favor of the authority of God's Word in a dispute in our congregation. They backed my position. There were votes over whether the congregation would stay within a denomination we thought was turning away from Scripture or move to a congregation that upheld Scripture's authority.

This group who prayed hard, studied hard, and worked hard to move the congregation to the new denomination, and I, would often speak about what we might do depending on the congregation's decisions. In the midst of it, I made the implicit promise that I would stick with them. There were many complicating factors, as there always are in life. But that's the bottom line: I said that I was sticking it out.

After the congregation had decided to be dual-rostered, I found out about a church that was only two years old, had been severely reduced in numbers in a set of conflicts involving the former senior pastor, and, despite it all, had a notable commitment to mission. I later came to learn that some in the congregation, Living Water Lutheran Church, were unsure whether the community would survive much longer. (Two men, in fact, had even made a pact; they would be the last ones out the doors, if it came to that.)

The description of what the congregation was looking for in a senior pastor is what caught my attention, though. It was as if they were telling me, "We created this position for you."

I contacted an official from our denomination about the possibility of submitting my name to the church's call committee. He didn't discourage me, but he didn't give me any encouragement either. "You should know, Mark," he said, "that a lot of good pastors have put their names in there."

My biggest concern was whether I would be abandoning Saint Matthew if I were to leave after six years as the congregation's pastor. Based on prayer and conversation, I decided that there would be no harm in submitting my name and, if the call committee at Living Water decided to proceed, interviewing for the position. I submitted my name and vita with little expectation that the call committee would even want to speak with me.

In all of this praying, talking, and considering, I never once took anyone at Saint Matthew into my confidence, not even that faithful group of leaders to whom I was so close.

I had been taught that you just didn't tell anybody in your current parish when you were contemplating a potential call to another church. The thinking was that if it turned out that God wasn't calling you to another church, you didn't want to be in the position of jerking people around. "I'm your pastor. Follow my lead. But I might be going," are hardly words designed to inspire confidence or assurance.

And I have seen congregations impacted negatively when pastors took calls to other churches two years and more after saying that that was a possibility. In the meantime, ministries lost momentum. And some congregants feel that if the pastor was going to leave anyway, she or he ought to just go.

So much for what I'd been taught or what I saw as the rationale.

I now realize that I should have taken that special coterie of courageous people of faith into my confidence. I needn't have told the entire congregation that I was talking with another church. But I should have told these leaders something like, "I don't know how this is going to turn out. But I've been interviewing with another congregation." I owed them that.

When I finally told these amazing people that it was 90% certain I would be leaving, it was awful. They felt that they'd been deceived. And they had been. It wasn't that I had lied to them overtly. I lied to them by withholding information.

As Priolo explains it, "concealment involves withholding essential elements of the truth from those who have a need to know them. He talks about the lie of concealment that first tripped the human race into sin, when the serpent told Eve (and Adam, who was with her) that if they ate of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that God had forbidden them to eat, they would "be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5-7)

After the two had bitten into the fruit, Priolo notes, "Their eyes were indeed opened, and they did see good and evil. But unlike God (and this is what the serpent neglected to tell them), Adam and Eve would know evil experientially. God indeed knows the difference between the two, but His knowledge of evil is not firsthand--but, as it were, from a distance."

"Of course," Priolo continues, "Satan also concealed the sinful and utterly miserable condition that this 'new state of enlightenment' would bestow upon them."

It was partly because of this lie by concealment that Jesus called Satan, "the father of lies" (John 8:44).

Of course, lying about others is specifically prohibited in the Bible's eighth commandment: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." As Martin Luther explains in The Small Catechism, the implications of this command go way beyond refraining from telling untruths about others. Luther says:

We should fear and love God so that we do not betray, slander, lie, or gossip about our neighbors, but defend them, speak well of them, and put the most charitable construction on all that they do.

But beyond the Bible's condemnation of false witness, it reveals that God takes a dim view of lying generally:

Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who deal faithfully are His delight. (Proverbs 12:22) 

A righteous man hates falsehood. (Proverbs 13:5)

As I look back prayerfully on those days of concealing the truth from my friends, there are several things that I believe:

First, God's Holy Spirit was stirring me to interview for and ultimately to accept the call to Living Water. His hand was in things from the start, when I read the job description and thought that they were describing me. And I take great comfort from the fact that this congregation, the council, and the call committee approached their task with constant prayer and with thoroughness. I've never had any doubts that God called me to Living Water; I've entertained many doubts about how I handled leaving Saint Matthew.

Second, I should have taken that group of dedicated leaders at Saint Matthew into my confidence and told them what was going on. Yes, that would have been tough. But it would have been more forthright and more helpful had I done so, rather than simply unloading on them one evening, telling them that my leaving was all but a done deal.

Third, I need to be very intentional about incorporating unflinching truth-telling in my everyday living. This is a lot easier said than done. The truth is, we probably all lie. Or, as Priolo puts it: "Who can really maintain that he never breaks this commandment? To make such a claim is to instantly break it."

Lying is part of much of our everyday discourse, whether we realize it or not. During the 1976 presidential campaign, the first presidential election held after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, done in by the mountains of lies he had spread about his attempts to subvert democracy and justice, Jimmy Carter promised the American people that he would never tell a lie. A reporter asked Carter's mother if her son ever told lies. Miss Lillian replied that he might sometimes tell "a little white lie." The reporter asked what she meant by "a little white lie." "Well," she said, "do you remember how I said that I was glad to see you when you walked in just now?" But a lie is a lie whether we add the adjectives "little white" or not.

The Bible does seem to intimate that there are times, as when you're trying to protect someone from being killed, that lying is acceptable. For example, the book of Exodus tells us that after the Pharaoh in Egypt ordered that all male babies of the Hebrew slaves should be killed by the Hebrew midwives. But the midwives didn't do what the Pharaoh ordered them to do, claiming that the Hebrew women were so strong that they were birthing their baby boys before the midwives could get to them. (Exodus 1:15-21). Exodus says that God "dealt well with the midwives" for this deception that saved lives.

Later, the book of Joshua tells us that when the Hebrews, God's people, prepared to occupy the land that God had given to them, a prostitute Rahab who had come to believe in God lied regarding the whereabouts of Hebrew slaves who had entered the city of Jericho to spy it out before attack. The New Testament book of Hebrews hails Rahab as a person of faith, made right with God by her faith in Him: "By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies" (Hebrews 11:31).

But these are exceptions. Most of the time, we don't lie to protect other people's lives, but to protect our own skins, our reputations, our desire to have pleasant conditions for ourselves. Those aren't sound reasons for any kind of lying.

I'm reading this booklet in the hopes that it will help me to speak the truth (even inconvenient truths) in love (Ephesians 4:15). Priolo does give helpful pointers on dealing with this particular sin in our lives.

But the first step in dealing with this, as with any other, sin, is to acknowledge its existence within us.
I do acknowledge this sin. 1 John 1:8 says: "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us."

The second necessary step is to confess this to the God we know in Christ, seeking forgiveness. 
Scripture says: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).

The third thing we need to do is to confess to those who have been hurt by our sin. 
This may sometimes be hard to pull off. And our apologies may not be accepted. (More on this below.) Jesus says: "if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift" (Matthew 5:23-24). I have confessed this wrong to the members of this group back at Saint Matthew. I hope that they know how much I regret the my concealment.

The fourth thing we need to do is to accept that, even after God has forgiven us for the sake of what Jesus did for us on the cross, not only may others not accept us or ever trust us again, there may be consequences from the sin of lying we can't imagine.
In Christ, God forgives and grace is free, but the bonds of trust with those to whom we have lied are deeply harmed, sometimes completely destroyed, by our lies. In the Old Testament, we're told that God forgave David for adultery and murder, but that his sins had consequences on earth, his reign as king forever marred by the trust and respect he had lost.

The key thing is to continuously turn to Jesus, God in human flesh, Who took the death punishment that we all deserve for sin and rose from the dead, confirming His power to forgive us and make us new.
Jesus can renew us in His forgiving grace each time we truly repent for our sins. Jesus can also give us the power to live our lives differently. He is "the way and the truth and the life," the only path to life with God runs through repentant faith in Jesus.

Despite my sins and faults, I'm relying on Him to make me new. You can too.

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

Palm Sunday: Jesus' Call to Humility

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

Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 21:1-11
Today, as we celebrate Palm Sunday, I want to talk with you about humility. Both our Gospel lesson from Matthew and our second lesson, written by the apostle Paul to the Christian church in the Greek city of Philippi, underscore that Jesus accomplished His mission of saving all who believe in Him from sin and death through His humble submission to the will of God the Father.

In recounting Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday when crowds hailed Jesus as a conquering king, our Gospel lesson remembers the Old Testament prophecy of Zechariah:

Tell the daughter of Zion, "Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey… 

Prophetic fulfillment or not, it may have been at this moment of seeming triumph that some in the crowd began to suspect that Jesus hadn’t come to be the sort of king for whom they were looking.

The people didn’t expect Jesus to be a humble Savior Who submitted to death on a cross as the ultimate and only atoning sacrifice for sin. They wanted Jesus to be a conquering king who fulfilled their expectations of Him,  destroying their Roman conquerors, lining their pockets with money, and making their lives easy.

You can imagine why, within a few days’ time, disappointed and angry that Jesus wasn’t the king they wanted Him to be, many in this same crowd who hailed Jesus as king would, by Thursday, call for His execution.

They wanted Jesus to exhibit humility, alright: a humble submission to their wants and whims and not to God the Father Whose intention it was (and is) to offer us much more than ease in this world.

He offers instead, an eternity of life with Him. And that eternity with God begins in this life, where God refashions us, sometimes in ways that bring us pain and humiliation, into the people God wills us to be, the people we were made to be.

Jesus was humble before the Father and so not only fulfilled His mission of dying and rising for us, but also reclaimed His rightful place as King of all creation, as your King and my King.

Look at the hymn to Jesus Paul quotes in our second lesson. You can find it on our Celebrate insert. Paul writes:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

Just as Jesus, Who never knew sin, had to humbly submit to the will of the Father in order to claim new, everlasting life for all who believe in Him, we who are sinners must humbly submit to God so that our old sinful selves can be crucified day by day and God can give us the life Christ has won for us.

That entails submission to Jesus Christ and His Word, the Bible, as the final authority over our lives.

It also means confessing our sins and humbly seeking and accepting His forgiveness.

And it means submitting to the death of the arrogant presumption we all inherited from Adam and Eve, that we can turn our backs on God's will and “be like God.”

The apostle Peter, who knew a thing or two about repenting for his sins and swallowing his pride, writes in 1 Peter 5:6, “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time.”

Jesus’ plan for those who follow Him is that, with Him, we will rule over creation for all eternity. But that will only happen when we humble ourselves, surrendering to Christ and Christ alone.

Now, please look at the very first verse of our processional Gospel, Matthew 21:1-11. That verse establishes this theme of humility. Look at what it says:

When they [that is, Jesus and His disciples] had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage [a town close to Jerusalem], at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples… 

Then Jesus gives instructions on how they’re to prepare for their celebration of the Passover.

The other day while preparing for this sermon, I noticed something in that first verse that I’d never seen before: The two disciples Jesus sent aren’t named.

Think about that! These two disciples are sent on one of the most important missions in human history and Matthew doesn’t see fit to give us their names. They aren't given any credit.

You already know why: Because who Jesus sent wasn’t important; Who sent them—Jesus—was everything.

Paul once quoted a Greek poet who said that in God "we live and move and have our being.” Those who simply walk in the good actions God has prepared for them beforehand to be their way of life don’t need credit.

All the credit and the glory go to God. Those who humbly trust in Christ have the simple and awesome privilege of living as God made human beings to live, imperfectly now and fully in eternity! “Have this mind you that was in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes. Be humble as your King is humble.

The question which all this talk of humble submission to Christ lays before me anyway, is, “How humble am I willing to be for Christ?” How low am I willing to go in order to place myself completely under Jesus' Lordship?

Two weeks ago, I recounted the true story of Pastor Jim Cymbala’s encounter with a homeless man after worship on an Easter Sunday and how Cymbala’s revulsion melted and he was able to share the Savior Jesus with this man who desperately wanted Him.

During worship, right after I delivered that sermon, I prayed silently, telling God, “I try to share Jesus with people in my ministry all the time. But unlike the other people in this sanctuary, who don't have  credentials, titles, or clerical collars standing as walls between them and other people, I don’t always have the opportunity to share Jesus personally with others. Please give me that privilege, Lord.”

As I told the church council this past Tuesday, "Be careful what you pray for." Within minutes of my offering that prayer, a member of this congregation told me about someone who needed to hear about Jesus. On the following Monday, I got a call from a member telling me about someone else who needed the same thing. I went to both of those people, in absolute awe of the ways in which God answers our humble prayers. Later that week, I was able to share the Good News of Jesus with the family and friends of that second person when I was asked to preside at her funeral.

In the face of these answered prayers, all I could do was thank God and express my awe of His greatness and of His willingness to allow an imperfect sinner like me to play some small role in bringing Jesus to others. It was amazing!

Be in awe of God. But, please, do not be impressed with me! You see, this past week, I fell off the humility wagon.

Another phone call. Another person from outside of the congregation in need. But this time, like the priest and levite in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, I was preoccupied with my own agenda, bothered by this inconvenient interruption. I was curt with the person who made the request for help. “I can’t do everything,” I said. But, of course, God hadn’t asked me to do everything. He asked me to do just one thing…and that one thing was something I had actually asked Him to send my way!

Now, I can be thick-skulled. It can take me awhile to figure things out…or as Ann might put it, it takes some time before God’s two-by-four penetrates my consciousness. But yesterday, as I kneeled by my bed for my daily devotional and prayer time, I found it hard to pray. I sensed God telling me, “Don’t even think of praying right now. You have business to attend to.”

I remembered Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:23-24: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.“ I realized that I couldn’t offer my praise (or my requests) to God until I had done what I could to set things right with this person I had wronged.

So, I rummaged through my trash (that's humbling) until I found the discarded paper on which was written the telephone number of the person with whom I felt I’d been so short. I called. There was no answer. But thankfully, there was an answering machine on the other end of the line. I mentioned who I was and apologized for my wrong.

I don’t know if they’ve gotten the message yet. But I can tell you that I sensed a wall between God and me had been torn down. I was actually able to pray. I was able to come into God’s presence with joy once again. Remember what Peter wrote: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time.”

We can’t manufacture humility. We can’t resolve to be humble. Humility is a gift we may not always want, but which truly is a gift. God will give us humility only as we submit to Jesus Christ, asking the Father and the Holy Spirit to give us the same humble spirit that caused Jesus to willingly ride a donkey into Jerusalem, knowing full well what horrors lay ahead of Him in the next few days.

As we prepare for Holy Week and Easter, pray that God will fill you with the humble spirit of Jesus.

If you pray that prayer, there will be times, I suspect, when you too will fall off the humility wagon.

But it is the humble, those who willingly lay their whole lives under the authority of the God made known in Jesus Christ, who experience oneness with God.

They know the exhilaration of being part of God’s holy plans and work in the world.

They have the privilege of seeing what happens as they fulfill the great commandment to love God and neighbor and the great commission to make disciples in their neighborhood and in the world.

And it’s those who humbly surrender to Jesus Christ, believing in Him, who can look forward to a day when they will be exalted and hear those words of Jesus, which, as I’ve told you before, I long to hear more than any others: “Well done, good and trustworthy slave…enter into the joy of your master.”