You Are Loved By God (Your Neighbor Is Too)

[Below, you'll find live stream video of today's worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. You'll also find the prepared text of the message shared during both services. Have a blessed week!]

Matthew 9:35-10:8

Dear friends, this morning Jesus Christ, God the Son, wants you to know that you are deeply loved by God.

You are the apple of God’s eye.

It’s your sin Christ bore on the cross to set you free from condemnation and death.

It’s for you that He died.

It’s for you that He rose from the dead.

The God we meet in Jesus isn’t One Who turns up His nose at our sinful, selfish natures or our sinful, selfish thoughts, actions, or lives.

He doesn’t turn away.

He doesn’t abandon you.

Instead, God the Son wears human flesh with sinless perfection.

And He does this not to taunt you for your imperfections nor to damn you for being His betrayers.

Or for worshiping at the altars of false gods like our egos.

Or for hearing His Word with contempt or indifference.

Or for murdering others with our words, committing adultery with our minds, or stealing from others in our fantasies.

Instead, Jesus comes into our world to save us.

He sets us free from the condemnation of God’s Law that none of us measures up to.

He gives us life with God that never ends.

He comes to us to make us righteous–innocent, justified, fit to live in God’s presence for all eternity.

That’s why the apostle Paul writes: “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” (Romans 10:4, English Standard Version]

And, “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.” (Romans 10:9, NIV)

Paul isn’t saying that if you’re a Christian, you have a free pass to sin unrepentantly. He is saying that when you daily take refuge in Christ, trusting Him to justify you by grace through faith in Him, sinner though you are and sinner though you will be until Jesus calls you from the grave, God’s Law will not condemn you and you will be saved for life with God for eternity.

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus is going around the villages and towns of Galilee, loving people in three ways. These are three ways He is loving you this morning too.

First, He teaches in their synagogues. As Jesus worships God the Father with His fellow Jews, He teaches them. Jesus doesn’t teach them the Law. They already know the moral law of God that is written on every human being’s heart. It’s likely rather that Jesus teaches them, as He did the people at His home synagogue in Nazareth, what God had revealed about a Savior Who would be the Messiah or the Christ, God’s Anointed King: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” [Luke 4:18-19]

Next, Matthew tells us this morning, Jesus proclaims the good news–the gospel–of the Messiah’s coming, of Jesus’ coming, by saying, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21) Jesus is the Gospel. Jesus is our good news. He is the promised King Who makes all who, by the power of the Holy Spirit working in His Word, believe in Him, part of His everlasting Kingdom.

Third, Jesus heals every disease and sickness, or more literally every illness and weakness. This doesn’t mean that those to whom Jesus restores health and strength will live forever in their sins in this sinful world. Poor old Lazarus, who Jesus raised from the dead, tells us that. Ever after he’d died and been brought back to life, he had to go life in this sinful world and death all over again. What Jesus healing every illness and weakness does mean is that He gives to those who believe in Him the power to live through the challenges and even horrors and death of this world to live with Him in an eternity with God where there will be no more mourning or pain and every tear will be wiped from our eyes. (Revelation 21:4)

This is the Gospel of love Jesus gives to you this morning.

But Jesus’ love isn’t just for you and me.

It’s for everyone.

For family members who have hurt you.

For people in the other political party who drive you to distraction.

For those who lead unrepentantly sinful lives.

Jesus loves them and everyone else as much He loves you. He wants them with Him forever no less than He wants you with Him forever. 

We know this today when we hear what Matthew tells us: “When [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion [The word here is ἐσπλαγχνίσθη, more literally meaning Jesus’ gut was stirred to pity] on them, because they were harassed and helpless [literally, flayed and cast off], like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36)

All around Him, Jesus sees people in distress, wandering far from God.

Some are flayed, vexed, gutted, by the horrors of a world in which nobody has taught them about God’s love for them and so, view life as a succession of meaningless events interspersed with occasional thrills and laughs, leading only to death.

Jesus also sees other people who are helpless. Their only “knowledge” of God is the Law of Moses, the law of right and wrong and because, even though they they may have spent their whole lives in churches, have never encountered the Jesus Who embraces sinners, are lost to God. This is the Jesus Who wants to tell them: “Everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” (John 6:40)

Jesus wants all people, starting with the descendants of Abraham, to be set free by this good news.

So, Jesus tells His first disciples and you and me, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” (Matthew 10:37-38)

According to Jesus, all the vexed, gutted people and all those people convinced that God will never have anything to do with them–all the cynics, atheists, and Christian legalists, all the narcissists and hedonists, all the hopeless who think they aren’t and can’t be loved by God and all the spiritually indifferent–are harvest.

All people are ripe for hearing, receiving, and believing in the gospel.

Ripe for being told God loves them.

Ripe to hear what Peter told the Pentecost crowd: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved…” (Acts 2:21)

Dear friends in Christ, God loves you with a passion, depth, and commitment you and I could never have imagined, but which we can see in the crucified and risen Jesus. Jesus has already done everything needed to save you now and forever for eternal life with God!

Jesus loves your neighbor too. You, who have been saved by grace through faith in Jesus, are called to pray that God the Holy Spirit will send Christian disciples–believers in Jesus–into the world to share our good news so that God can create saving faith in the ripe harvest of people out beyond the walls of our church buildings.

And if what Jesus does in today’s Gospel lesson when He calls twelve of the disciples to be His apostles is any indication, He may even call you to share His Gospel with others.

If so, may you be so moved by gratitude for God’s grace and by compassion for your Christ-less neighbor that you tell God, as the Old Testament prophet told Him long ago, “Here am I, [Lord]. Send me!” Send me! (Isaiah 6:8) Amen

[Graphic from Sola Publishing, used by permission through their SOWER subscription service.]

The Word That Changes Everything

[Below you'll find live stream video of both Easter worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church as well as the text of the message shared at both services. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!]

Matthew 28:1-10

Easter is the most important event in the history of the world.

Easter works differently from the way things work in this cosmos, though. Here, everything starts with life and ends in death. This is why the novelist Ernest Hemingway said that every true story ends in death. In this though, as in most other things, Hemingway was wrong. We know this because the true story of Easter begins in death and ends in life…and not just for Jesus! This is what makes Easter so important.

God’s Word says, “[Jesus] was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” (Romans 4:25)

We are born sinners mired in sin and self-absorption, turned away from God, thinking first of ourselves and acting accordingly. For this, we deserve death, condemnation, and everlasting separation from God and others.

On the cross, Christ, truly God and truly human, Who was sinless, bore the sins of the whole world, including yours and mine: all the ways we fail to love God and others, all our idolatry, murderous thoughts and actions, all our contempt for parents and others in authority, all our theft and greed, all our gossiping and injustice. Jesus took all this sin into Himself.

He was delivered to death at the prompting of God the Father, taking the punishment of damnation and everlasting isolation from God that you and I deserve.

But after Jesus died on Friday, the first day, laying lifeless in the tomb on Saturday, the second day, God the Father raised Jesus on the third day, Sunday, Easter day.

He did so for our “justification.”

To be justified means to be declared innocent, righteous, verified, able to leave the solitary confinement of hell, acceptable to enter into life with God and His people, now and forever.

To be justified by God is to be declared innocent despite all the evidence to the contrary.

A person who has been justified by God’s charity–that is, by God’s grace–through God-given faith in Jesus can say, “I’ve been made right with God, forgiven, brimming with new life from God, just if I’d never been a sinner, never had a sinful thought, never done a sinful thing!”

Jesus has taken our old dead bodies into His own and gives us His new, sinless body!

And so the Word tells us: “[Jesus] was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”

This Word also tells us that Christ is the end of the Law’s condemnation for us, because Christ has already borne that condemnation. Christ fulfills God’s promise given through the prophet Micah, centuries before Jesus’ birth, to hurl our sins into the depths, never to be seen or heard of by God again.

God has called you to be here this morning, whether through family expectations or traditions, a nagging family member, or through heartfelt desire on your part.

He called you here not to deliver information like, “Jesus died and rose” to you. Even Satan knows that Jesus died and rose. Mere information won’t save you and me from condemnation and hell.

No, God has called us together on this Easter Sunday for the same reason God calls His Church to regular worship Sunday after Sunday.

God calls us to worship so that we can be immersed in His Word–read, spoken, sung, or given in, with, and under water, bread, or wine–and so that we may here and now be crucified, convicted of our sins, and be raised again to face another day, week, month, year, a lifetime, and eternity itself with the certain hope that nothing can separate those who trust in Him from the love of God given to us in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.

The Gospel Word that Jesus was delivered to death for you and raised to give you everlasting life comes to you not as data to be filed away and forgotten, but as your deliverance from the grave, your gift of joy and certainty in a lost and uncertain world.

Matthew’s account of the first Easter Sunday is well known to you.

According to Matthew, Mary Magdalene and another Mary, presumably the sister of Lazarus, go to “look at the tomb.” (Matthew 28:1)

They have no expectations. They just want to look at the tomb.

They live in a dark and fallen world. Even the One they once hailed as the Messiah, God’s own Son, has died.

But Matthew tells us that an angel, a messenger from God, is sent to the tomb and creates an earthquake. He rolls away the stone that has covered the tomb from which Jesus has already risen, then sits on the stone.

The angel’s appearance indicates that he’s just come from the presence of God in His bright glory.

Just like all the hard-hearted and closed-minded of the world–people like I used to be when I was an atheist, the Roman guards placed at the tomb by Pilate are not happy to see this ambassador from God.

They’re terrified, becoming like what they are–like what we all are without the forgiveness and new life God gives through faith in Christ–dead men.

The angel tells the women that Jesus isn’t dead anymore. “He has risen from the dead,” the angel says, “and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.”

The women run back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples. This is good news to be shared!

“Suddenly,” Matthew says, the risen Jesus meets them.

In part, Jesus is going to give them the same message the angel gave them. “​​Do not be afraid,” He says. “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” (Matthew 28:10)

But before saying that and before the women fall down, grasping the feet of Jesus’ now-living body, and worshiping Jesus, Jesus says something else.

He says one Word.

It’s a single Word that changes human history.

A single Word that transforms those who, by the power of God’s Spirit to work faith in us, receive it.

It’s a Word that changes us from God’s enemies to God’s friends, from the damned and dead to the favored and living, from the guilty to the justified.

Jesus’ first Word, His Easter Word, to the women and to you is this: “Greetings.” (Mattthew 28:9)

Disappointed?

You have a right to be.

The translations in all of our English version Bibles of this Word are anemic. None of our common English translations do this Word justice. None of the translations are bad, per se, it’s just that none of them really deliver the good news–the Gospel–that Jesus wants to give us here this morning!

According to Matthew, who wrote his gospel in Greek, the Word Jesus spoke to the women, that He speaks to you and me today, is Χαίρετε.

That was a word that in common usage had come to mean little more than hello, just like a word that once meant God bless you in English has become nothing more than goodbye.

But what this word Χαίρετε, from the word for  God’s grace, His charity, for sinners, means coming from Jesus at this moment is this. Listen: “All My grace, all My favor, the blessings of Resurrection and of new and everlasting life, the reality of the forgiveness of your sins, all the joy of heaven belongs to you who turn from sin and turn to Me.”

All of that is what Jesus means when He greets the women!

In other words, Jesus is telling the women and you, “Resurrection to you! My victory over sin and death to you! You thought that death and darkness were all that were left to you. You thought all you could do was look at a tomb. But I’m going to raise all who believe in Me from their tombs to live with Me forever!”

And, friends, that is Jesus’ message for you this morning!

He is no longer in the tomb.

He sits on the right hand of God the Father and through God the Holy Spirit, His grace and power have been set loose in this dying, tomb-pocked world.

Wherever Jesus isn’t received, there is death, condemnation, uncertainty, fear, furtiveness, and fatalism.

Wherever and whenever He comes to us in Word and Sacrament, there is forgiveness, grace, joy, peace, and resurrection.

These are the gifts of the risen Jesus.

His Word gives these to you once again today and they belong to all who receive Him and His gospel with the faith His Spirit and His Word give to those who hear it openly.

“[Jesus] was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”

He died for your sins and rose for your justification. You can trust in Christ for this.

A blessed Easter to you, friends. Amen!

When Worship Happens

[Below you'll find live stream video of worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church that took place this past Sunday as well the message shared during both services.]

John 4:5-30, 39-42

A man came to visit me once. He was deeply troubled by something he had done years earlier. His wife became pregnant and he insisted that she have an abortion.

The man was overcome with grief and guilt, first of all, because of the little life that had been snuffed out and secondly, because, by his insistence, he laid deep guilt and regret on his wife while driving a wedge between him and his wife that had never diminished. He wondered what he could do to take both his and his wife’s guilt away.

Over the centuries, all of the religions of the world but one have tried to deal with this problem of human guilt and God’s expectation that we should be righteous by various forms of works righteousness, that is deeds or gestures the religions tell us we can do to overcome our sin.

These religions have been obsessive about creating systems of sacrifice. Through these systems, human beings, conscious of their sin, have made offerings of sacrifices to get out from under the guilt they know they bear.

In olden times, people offered up animals, plants, gold and silver, and even other human beings to try to make themselves right with God.

Today, people give up swearing for Lent, trumpet their contributions to good causes, and so on as a way of assuring themselves and the world and, sometimes, God, that they’re good, righteous people.

Even Old Testament Judaism had a system of sacrifices that saw the offering of sheep, pigeons, and grain, although King David reminded God’s people: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (Psalm 51:17, English Standard Version] God, David was saying, didn’t want our stuff or our showy deeds, he wanted hearts and lives turned to Him. He still does.

There are two big problems with sacrificial religions.

The first is that as soon as you offer up a sacrifice like putting a bit more in the offering plate or standing up for someone who’s being gossiped about, making you feel all clean and righteous based on your own behavior, you commit another sin. You take God’s name in vain. You entertain a lustful thought. You lose patience with your spouse or child.

The second problem with sacrificial religion is that you can never be sure you’ve sacrificed enough. And if a  sacrifice isn’t enough to cover a person’s sin, eternal separation from God is the consequence.

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus encounters a woman who confronts her sin and her sinful nature all the time.

She’s the woman at the well outside the Samaritan village of Sychar.

Married five times, now living with another man to whom she isn’t married, she goes to the well at noon each day, despite the scorching heat, to avoid condemnation and shunning from the other villagers.

From what she says to Jesus, the only hope she has for forgiveness or righteousness is in the sacrifices she and all Samaritans make at Mount Gerizim.

Under the sacrificial system, the woman at the well could only hope that her sacrifices could earn God’s forgiveness for her. But she could never be sure.

That’s why Samaritans and Jews kept offering sacrifices for their sins year after year, over and over again.

Now the woman meets Jesus.

Jesus asks her for a drink. She’s shocked because Jews won’t talk to Samaritans and Jewish men aren’t supposed to talk with women to whom they’re unrelated in public.

Then Jesus tells her that if she would ask Him, He could give her “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:14) Jesus is offering her a free gift that she thought she could only earn, a life with God that never ends.

The woman is dumbfounded with disbelief and fear.

Could Jesus be greater than Jacob, the Jewish patriarch who had dug this well for God’s people?

She would love to be out from under the condemnation of God, freed of her debt of sin, assured of life with God. “Sir,” she says, “give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” (John 4:15)

Knowing this woman and loving her the way God loves all of us sinners, Jesus now confronts the woman in her sin. God’s grace comes as new life to those who understand that they are otherwise dead in sin. That’s why Jesus tells us elsewhere, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)

Jesus now tells the Samaritan woman to bring her guilt to Him, the guilt from which she’s tried to run and for which she’s offered endless sacrifices. “Go,” Jesus says, “call your husband and come back.” (John 4:16)

Jesus has already offered the woman eternal life, the Gospel. But here, He surfaces the very set of sins–her serialized and continuing adulteries–to show her that even when the world’s religions of sacrifice and good works fail to give us peace with God or peace with ourselves,

Jesus gives us that peace as a free gift.

He gives us forgiveness.

He gives us life.

At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, Mark tells us that He preached, “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15) By the well at Sychar, Jesus is proclaiming the same message to this woman who spent a lifetime in sin, regret, and shame. Turn from death and turn to Me, Jesus is telling her.

In the offer of living water, the woman had heard the Word of God’s grace. In Jesus’ request that she fetch her husband, she heard the Word of God’s Law condemning sin.

To her credit, she doesn’t try to dodge Jesus’ call to confession and repentance. She admits that she’s breaking the sixth commandment at that very moment and had many times before with other men.

When you and I gather for worship on Sunday mornings, the first thing we do is hear Jesus’ call to repentance. We turn to Jesus so that we can once more live in the freedom of forgiven sin and the grace of God by which we sinners are declared saints, NOT by sacrifices or religious works. NONE of that stuff can make us righteous or acceptable to God. Religious law cannot save us. It can only tell us, as it told the woman who had been trudging day-in, day-out to the village well burdened by guilt, unsure of God’s forgiveness, that we are sinners whose impulses, thoughts, attitudes, and actions merit condemnation.

In Romans 10:4, the apostle Paul writes that, “Christ is the culmination [or the fulfillment or the end] of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.”

We are made righteous before God not because of sacrifices or works, but by grace through faith in Jesus alone.

Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that true worship isn’t about making sacrifices to God nor about the places where sacrifices are made, whether at Jerusalem. “A time is coming and has now come,” Jesus tells her, “when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.” (John 4:23)

Listen, friends, to what Jesus is telling us: True worship isn’t about what we do for God or give to God.

Worship happens when needy sinners like you and me enter into the presence of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and Jesus the Messiah explains everything to us, everything we need to have faith, to be righteous, to be assured that we are free of all condemnation by God!

Worship happens when, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we hear and believe the truth of the Gospel, as expressed by Paul in our second lesson today: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

Worship is about what God gives to us in the Word and the Sacraments, not about what we think we do for or give to Him!

Each time we worship, Jesus Christ, sent to us by God the Father, presents Himself to us crucified and risen, and tells us, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” (John 6:29)

Each time we worship, He gives us the Word that the Holy Spirit uses to give us saving faith.

And each time we worship, Christ gives us His body and blood by which we are filled with His forgiveness and new life!
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When the woman in our Gospel lesson hears Jesus identify Himself as the very Messiah Who could save her (and you and me), without our sacrifices but simply by grace through faith, she leaves her buckets behind and runs back into Sychar!

Head held high in the freedom of God’s forgiving Gospel, she tells the very people from whom she’s been hiding all about Jesus: “He told me everything I ever did!”

God wants you to hold your head high in His forgiving grace too, friends! He knows everything you ever did and loves you and died for you and rose for you anyway!

Nothing you ever do will ever make God love you any more than He already does.

Nothing you ever do–no sacrifice or good work–will ever make you more righteous than you are through Jesus Christ.

Jesus has already done everything needed to give you life with God!

It’s when we hear and receive this message, this gospel, that we worship in spirit and truth!

As Jesus says later in John’s Gospel: “Whoever hears my word and believes [the Father] who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.” (John 5:24)

When you hear and believe Jesus’ word of life, your sin is not held against you and you are alive in God’s grace forever.

Friends, you can trust in that promise. Amen