A Reminder to All Who Have (or Seek) Power

Today for my quiet time with God, I read the 19th. chapter of John's gospel, with its account of Jesus' trial and execution.

These verses, part of the exchange between Jesus and the spineless but ruthless Roman governor Pilate struck me: "'Do you refuse to speak to me?' Pilate said. 'Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?' Jesus answered, 'You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above...'" (John 19:9-10)

God rules over this world in two ways.

First, He rules over those who have come to trust in Him through Jesus. True disciples of Jesus voluntarily accede to the gracious rule of God out of gratitude for the undeserved grace He bears for those who persist in turning from their sin and trusting in Him to give them victory over sin, death, and darkness. People who live in this kingdom seek, imperfectly, to love God and neighbor, trust in Christ, and live a lifestyle of daily repentance and renewal.

Second, God rules through imperfect human governments. Recognizing sinful human nature (as did the writers of the US Constitution, hence the system of "checks and balances") and the inherent human desire to be own gods and to rule over our neighbors, God gives coercive authority to earthly governments. Absent earthly governments with their coercive power, the world would be an infinitely more chaotic place than it is.

But earthly governments and earthly governors are to act justly. When they don't, Christians may and should seek redress...not for themselves, but for their neighbors who they love.

Romans 13:1 in the New Testament, for example, tells Christians: "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established."

But just a chapter before, Christians are also told, "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

In other words, for the sake of our neighbors, Christians are to obey their governments.

But for the sake of the same neighbor--and for our own eternal identities as disciples saved by grace through faith in Jesus, we are to stand against authorities when they act unjustly. The witness of Scripture is that this is particularly so when the victims of injustice are the poor, the stranger, the widow, the powerless, or the marginalized.

In John's account of Jesus' passion, Jesus offers no resistance to Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. Jesus' concern is not for Himself, but for others. It was precisely to go to the cross as the perfect sinless sacrifice for human sin and to reverse the death sentence that sin brings every human being that Jesus came into the world.

Concerned though that Pilate has an understanding of reality and the lengths to which God was willing to go in order to spare us from death and separation from God (remember John 3:16), Jesus reminds Pilate, "You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above."

There's an important reminder here for all of us who wield power in this world, whether we're parents or teachers, politicians or pastors, generals, doctors, factory supervisors, employers, customers, or citizens: Whatever power has been given to us over the life of this world or our little corners of it, has been entrusted to us by God. That power is to be exercised lovingly, justly, and humbly.

May the God Who is revealed in Jesus Christ help us to do so.

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

Giving (Part 5, Reaching Up, Reaching In, Reaching Out)

[This was shared during midweek Lenten worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, earlier today.]

Malachi 3:8-10
Luke 6:38

If a skeptical friend were to ask us as Christians what we think is God’s most basic character trait, we probably would say love. After all, 1 John 4:8 tells us, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” At the very center of God's character then, is love.

“But how,” our friend might ask us, “do we know that about God?”

More than anything, we see that God loves not by His words, but in His giving.

God gave life to us, a gift none of us deserved.

And when the human race fell into the condition of sin, separation from God, that brought death, God wasn’t done giving. Every Christian knows John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

We know about God’s love because God gives.

And when we become Jesus’ disciples--when we let Jesus reign over our lives--we’re called reach out to others in Christ’s name through lives that reflect the generosity God has shown to us.

Giving involves our whole beings: giving our time, commitment, energy, for example.

But giving does involve money too.

Personally, this has been a hard part of my faith in Christ to live out. For lots of reasons, by the time I hit my teens, I was a tightwad.

I could list all sorts of contributing factors, but there’s really a simple explanation for the stinginess that characterized my young adult years: I was an atheist then and didn’t know that my brain and my brawn, the means by which I earned my income, came from God and therefore, everything I had was a gift from God.

But even after I came to faith at age 23, giving was hard for me.

And yet, in response to God’s love in Christ, we are to be generous.

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers,” the apostle Paul writes in Romans 12:1, “by the mercies of God, to present [or give] your bodies [your whole selves] as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

We read statements like this and think, “If I give myself and my money away, there will be less for me.”

But when we think that, we underestimate our God.

When it comes to the provision, love, and grace of God, there’s always more where that came from.

We can never outgive God!

In Old Testament times, God’s people were commanded to give the first 10% of their income-a tithe-to support the priests at the temple. But in the whole history of ancient Israel, the people rarely did that. It was true that many of the priests were corrupt. So, they may have thought they had a good excuse for not giving the tithe.

But, the corruption of the prophets didn’t invalidate God’s command that His ancient people give in response to His grace.

In Malachi 3:8-10, God tells His people: “Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me. But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’ In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,' says the Lord Almighty, 'and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.'”

This is the only place in Scripture where God tells His people to test Him. Be generous, part with what you don’t think you can part with, God was saying, and see if I don’t look after you.

God isn’t commending the “prosperity gospel” peddled by some televangelists here. He’s not saying, “GIve me 10% of your income and I’ll make you a millionaire.”

He is saying that giving is a way in which we express thanks to Him for grace and a way in which we express faith in God’s ability to keep caring for eternity.

In fact, our faith and our joy in the Lord tend to grow in proportion to the ways in which give we give of ourselves to the causes of loving God, loving others, and making disciples. In Luke 6:38, Jesus says: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

Through the years, God has sent me living examples of giving disciples for me to imitate.

At the church I served in Cincinnati, we used to have a message in the worship bulletins: “We ask our guests not to make an offering. It’s our privilege to welcome you today.” That message was wrong for several reasons. (And I was the one who insisted it needed to be included in the bulletin!) One is that it saw the church in institutional terms, as though the offerings we give in worship are all about the care and feeding of the church as an institution.

Much of our offerings do go to support the work that congregations do to fulfill Christ’s great commission of making disciples. But more than anything, we give because as believers in Christ, we need to give. Giving takes our attention off of ourselves and puts it onto God and neighbor. Giving also expresses our trust in God.

It was a woman who began worshiping with us at our church in Cincinnati who taught me that. The first time she worshiped with us, she saw that message--“We ask our guests not to make an offering. It’s our privilege to welcome you today"--and thought, “There is no way you’re going to keep me from making an offering.”

That's because years before, she had left an abusive marriage, was raising a young child on her own, and was working a job that allowed her to barely eke out a living. But she knew that God was sustaining her through her challenges and she decided then that she would join a church and give, even of her money, 10% of her meager income. The New Testament doesn’t designate a required amount for our giving, but what that woman found, as she later told me, was that as she trusted God, “God took care of 100% of my needs on 90% of my income.” That lesson stuck with me.

Our call is to reach up, reach in, and reach out because we follow a God Who saves us by grace through faith in Christ.

When we give, whether to the Church or to mission agencies or to people in need, we give praise, worship, and honor to the God Who shows His love for us in how much He gives to us. We trust Him to take care of all our needs--to provide our daily bread--even as we dare to give. Amen

Galatians 6:2, 5 (A 5 by 5 by 5 Reflection)

As some may know, I'm using the Navigators' 5x5x5 Bible Reading Plan for my daily times with God. Today's reading is Galatians, chapter 6. I've read this chapter many times. But today, something stood out: The seeming contradiction between verses 2 and 5.

Verse 2:

Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.

The "law of Christ," I take it, is first, Jesus' great commandment, summarizing the two tables of the Ten Commandments, that we love God with our whole beings and love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

I take it also to mean the new commandment that Jesus gave to His followers to love fellow believers as Christ has loved them, with their whole lives.

Finally, I take this "law" to encompass Jesus' great commission that all who are part of His Church make disciples.

But since Galatians 6 deals with the internal life of Christ's Church, I think Paul has in mind the first two components of what I believe he means by the "law of Christ."

The thrust of the passage is that, even in restoring those who have rebelled against Christ, being careful not to fall into temptation ourselves (v. 1), we in the Church are to bear each other's burdens.

I've seen this exemplified in the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in the days leading up to and following my wife's recent surgery. On the night before the surgery, during our Lenten midweek service, the people in attendance gathered around me (my wife was unable to attend) and prayed for her healing and for my encouragement. We received many calls, cards, and emails of encouragement, assuring us of people's prayers. On the day of the surgery, a couple from the congregation drove the hour-plus to the hospital to be with my daughter, mother-in-law, and me; they stayed all day. Someone sent us a gift card to a local restaurant. Several have brought or offered to bring meals. Some have offered to take my wife to where she needs to be, since she can't drive right now. These are the kinds of things, I believe, that Paul has in mind when he tells Christians to "bear one another's burdens." The love of Christ is seen and experienced in these acts and gestures of love, the power of Christ is demonstrated when we pray for one another.

I also have a friend who lives miles away who is wonderful about praying for people whose needs are brought to her attention. In addition, this friend is compassionate, generous, and forgiving of others, whatever their needs. All of these traits too, demonstrate the Christian bearing others' burdens.

But then we come to Galatians 6:5:

For all must carry their own loads.

I'll never forget eating lunch, more than thirty years ago, with a seminary classmate at a fast food restaurant in Columbus. We were working on a project together and we both had our Bibles open, discussing the project. A middle aged man approached us, who, it became clear, had a bee in his bonnet.

"You know," he said, "if everyone studied the Bible the way you two are, we wouldn't need welfare or charity programs for the poor. There wouldn't be any poor."

My classmate asked the guy how he'd arrived at that conclusion. He pointed to Galatians 6:5 and said, if everybody carried their own loads, everyone would be working.

I'd half-forgotten that encounter until I read this passage again this morning.

Of course, even thirty years ago, I realized that the man at the fast food restaurant was taking one passage of Scripture out of context with no regard for the total witness of Scripture on what the believer's stance toward the poor should be.

For example, throughout the Old Testament moral law, God's people were told to make provisions for the poor, the orphaned, foreigners, and the widowed. Farmers weren't to harvest their crops to the edges of their fields and if, after harvesting, they realized that parts of their fields were unharvested, they weren't to go back to harvest the rest of their crops. All of these leavings were to remain for the benefit of the poor who could glean them.

Jesus and the New Testament commends a similar concern for the poor.

Whether any of this bears relevance to government relief programs is one question. But there can be no question that what the man called "charity" programs, at least those in which Christians who have give to others who have not, is both commended and commanded by God.

So, is Paul contradicting himself in Galatians 6:2 and 6:5?

I dug a little deeper today.

In Galatians 6:2, the word translated as burdens that Paul uses in the Greek in which his letter was originally composed is baros. The word he uses in Galatians 6:5 translated as loads is phortion.

While these words can have similar meanings, there are subtle shades of difference between the two.

According to one New Testament Greek-English lexicon, baros, carries the meanings of "heaviness, weight, burden, trouble." In the context of Galatians 6, the burdens referred to are clearly those experiences in life that weigh us down, things like physical illness, relational discord, financial troubles, worry over loved ones, poverty, grief, heartbreaks, depression. The call in Galatians 6:2 is for Christians to lighten the burdens of fellow believers when they encounter these weights of life.

That same lexicon says that phortion can mean burden or load, with particular reference to the cargo being carried by a ship. It can also reference burdensome religious duties or "faults of the conscience that burden the soul."

In the context of 6:5, a different meaning emerges: the obligations we have to respond to the free gifts of God's forgiveness and new life that comes to all who believe in Christ. This "load," to be borne by every Christian is what Paul calls in Romans 12:1 our "true and proper worship" or, in other translations, "spiritual worship" or "reasonable service."

In other words, concern and care for the poor and all who are in need are among the good fruits that will spring from the life a person made new by the forgiveness and grace of Jesus Christ.

In fact, Galatians 6:5 appears to have no direct reference to work for an income, but the work of every believer as a priest and minister of the gospel. 

As with Jesus in His parable of the final judgement in Matthew 25:31-46, Paul isn't saying that we are saved by our good works, by shouldering some odious burdens, but that, touched and transformed by Christ, we will, almost as an involuntary Holy Spirit-created response to grace, do good works, including caring for the poor. (See Ephesians 2:8-10)

The "load" that Paul talks about in Galatians 6:5, is what Jesus also talks about when he tells those heavily laden either by the implacable demands of a dog-eat-dog world or by religious striving to be "good:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

The light burden to which Christ refers, I think, is taking His loving lordship over our lives, believing in Him as our God and Savior.

When we do that, in Martin Luther's words, Christians become "the Holy Spirit's workshop." God goes to work on us, transforming us even without our conscious awareness. It's as though we fall into Christ's orbit and can't always see the ways in which He is changing us. The "load" is to keep living in daily repentance and renewal so that the Master Craftsman can continue to to make us over in the image of Christ.

In dispelling the seeming contradiction between Galatians 6:2 and 6:5, The Lutheran Study Bible says simply: "Those who are willing to accept personal accountability for their own actions before God (bearing their own "load"...phortion) are more willing to to bear others burdens (v.2, "burden"...baros)..."

So, Paul's message in a nutshell, seems to be: "Christians: Bear the burdens of others. Your willingness to do so is the measure of God's grace operating in your life; it's your 'load' as a believer."

Salvation is a free gift and each believer is responsible to God for how they use their salvation.

To not use the power of God living within us as Christians to help others is like being gifted with the power to make music and never singing a note or playing a tune.

Or like having the power to do medical research that might save lives, but staying away from the lab.

Or being a gifted athlete and never trying out for the team.

Just as God wants Christians to use their spiritual gifts for the mutual upbuilding of all in Christ's Church, He also wants us to use His grace to take on the ministry of caring for others.