Friday Night's Weeknight Study of Romans, Chapter 3

Tonight's Weeknight Study of the Gospel of John, Chapter 12

Faith or Fear (AUDIO)

The contest happens within us every day: faith or fear? Listen to the message here. I hope you find it helpful.

Freed from Greed

[This message was shared yesterday morning with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Luke 12:13-21

A few years ago, I watched an interview conducted by a talk show host with a musician. “I’ve never understood what was so bad about greed,” the musician said. “Neither have I,” the talk show host agreed. The talk show host agreed with greed.

I think that most people would do the same. They may not feel comfortable with overt expressions of greed, like the character in the old movie Wall Street, who said, “Greed is good.” But their behaviors and attitudes speak volumes. 

A woman I knew was dying. Her daughter sat down beside her deathbed and said, in what was to be their final conversation on this earth, “Mom, if you’ve got any money hidden, you’d better tell us where it is now.” (Isn’t that heartwarming? A real Hallmark moment.)

You’re familiar with the old quote, sometimes attributed to Henry Ford, other times to John D. Rockefeller, who was supposedly asked, “How much money does the average person need to get by these days?” The reply: “Just a little more.”

In today’s gospel lesson, Luke 12:13-21, Jesus underscores how destructive, how fatal greed is. 

Greed, the constant desire for “just a little more,” is a violation of the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods.” 

Jesus and God’s written Word don’t tell us to refrain from having ambitions in life. Christians are allowed ambitions. 

Paul’s ambition was to plant the gospel throughout the Gentile world. 

Martin Luther’s ambition was to reform the Church and set people free from sin and darkness with the gospel word about Jesus. 

The ambition of Gregor Mendel, a monk, was to understand how God engineered life, becoming the father of modern genetics. 

William Wilberforce set out to see slavery outlawed in the British Empire and it happened, thirty years before it happened in America and without a Civil War. 

Mother Teresa’s ambition was to serve the dying in Calcutta. 

There’s nothing wrong with the ambition to maximize the talents and gifts God has given to us. 

And there's nothing wrong with the ambition to take care of our families. 

These are all holy, God-blessed, and I would say, God-prompted, ambitions.
And, it should be said that human beings are ambitious by nature. It’s part of how God made us. 

“Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it,” God told the human race at our creation. “Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” 

God made us co-conspirators with Him in nurturing and, where needed, making better the life of the world, in the power of His love and grace. That is an ambitious undertaking! 

But when our ambitions revolve around self-worship or the worship of the things of this dying world, they become expressions of greed, false gods, tickets to hell. 

Greed is rooted in fear. 

Fear that the God Who provides daily bread won’t provide it for us. 

Fear that the Christian message that this world isn’t all there is to life is untrue. 

Fear that the God Who promises to be with us always will abandon us. 

Fear that the God Who promises an eternal world to those who trust in Jesus won’t come through and that we need to grab for the good things we can enjoy in this world.

Greed is rooted in fear. Jesus warns us against in today’s gospel lesson. 

Let’s take a look at it, starting at verse 13: “Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.’”

Jesus has been teaching the crowd about the Kingdom of God, the eternal kingdom that belongs to all baptized believers in the crucified and risen Jesus. In the previous twelve verses of Luke, chapter 12, Luke tells us that Jesus: 

• warned the disciples about the false teachings of the Pharisees;
• encouraged them to live without fear, knowing that every human life is precious in God’s eyes, so valuable that Christ came to die and rise to set all who trust in Him free of sin and death;and 
• told them--and us--that we must fearlessly and publicly follow Him, Jesus, as our Savior, and not keep our faith hidden from the world.

But there’s a guy in the crowd who clearly isn’t interested in learning about being part of God’s eternal kingdom. He has something that he considers to be “more important,” "more practical," than having a life with God. He wants Jesus to be the mediator between his brother and himself in a family squabble over their father’s will. The man in the crowd wants Jesus to use His authority in the best way the man can imagine, to line the man's pockets. 

Greed, you see, makes us forget what’s important. It makes us chase the things that are here today and gone tomorrow, rather than following Jesus for life with God that never ends.

Verse 14: “Jesus replied, ‘Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Then he said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.’” (Luke 12:14-15)

Jesus' response here is ironic. 

We know, of course, that Jesus is the judge of the world. 

That’s the point of His portrayal, in Matthew 25:31-46, of the final judgment in which Jesus the King separates the sheep from the goats. 

And we’re told in 1 Timothy 2:5, “...there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus…” 

Jesus Christ is the judge and mediator of the universe. But the man in the crowd in our lesson is only interested in using Jesus to get what he wants. If we were to boil his request of Jesus down to a prayer petition, it would be something like, “Lord, my will be done.” 

But Jesus tells him and the crowd that life, the gift of God to those who believe, doesn’t come to those who set their ultimate ambitions on the things of this world. “Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” 

Jesus' words echo those He spoke to Martha, the anxious hostess greedy not for money but for attention, affirmation, and compliments, resentful of the different role to which God was calling her sister Mary. “‘Martha, Martha,’ [Jesus told her], “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42) 

In today's gospel lesson, Jesus effectively tells yet another resentful sibling, “Choose life over death. Choose life with God over death by things.”

To undergird His point, Jesus then tells one of His parables. 

You know it well. A man is blessed with a particularly fertile piece of land. It grows so abundant a harvest that the farmer has no idea where he’s going to store all of it. (This was obviously in the days before those sprawling self-storage units you see everywhere today.) The farmer decides to build bigger grain silos to store it all, take care of himself for life, and then just chill, happily self-sufficient, happily heedless of the will of God or the needs of others. “But God said to him, [Jesus tells us] ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’” (Luke 12:20) Someone was paraphrasing Jesus here when she or he famously said, “There won’t be a U-Haul trailer hitched to the hearse when they take your earthly remains to the cemetery.”

The things of this world, including money and stuff, will not bring us life. And when the call of greed takes hold in our lives, nothing we do, nothing we own, nothing in our investment portfolios or bank accounts, will ever be enough. Greed will compel us to want “just a little more.” God, the life He offers through Christ, and other people will be crowded out of our lives and our concerns. Jesus says: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:21) 

Greed is a killer, a creation of Satan designed to make us think that the God we know in Jesus Christ isn’t enough. That is a lie.

There is a better way to live. God has created it for us in Jesus Christ. It’s the life of certainty and security in God’s love and provision, the life of freedom to love God and love neighbor and to share with one another, the life that Jesus makes possible for those who trust in Him, for those who daily fall into His arms and seek God’s will for our lives. 

We can live in the kingdom of God, no longer viewing life as a zero-sum game where if someone else gets more, I get less. 

In the kingdom of God, we know that in the God we meet in the crucified Jesus, there will always be “daily bread” and there will be more grace, love, and security than we can imagine, in Jesus’ words, “good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over” (Luke 6:38). 

Jesus gives those who trust in Him so much of Himself that their lives can be spent in finding ways to share our blessings, not hoarding them!

As God’s ancient Hebrew people were about to enter the land He had promised them, God told the people: “...This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life…” (Deuteronomy 30:19). 

Each day, as we come to God in repentance and faith in Jesus, we choose life. We choose God’s kingdom over our greed and over all of our sins. We choose to rest in God’s grace rather than stewing in the anxiety and futility of self-worship.

One New Testament scholar says this of Jesus’ words to us today, “The kingdom of God is, at its heart, about God’s sovereignty sweeping the world with love and power, so that human beings, each made in God’s image and each one loved dearly, may relax in the knowledge that God is in control.” 

That’s Jesus’ message for us today: Relax and live in His grace. Amen


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

Wait. What?

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

John 16:12-22

The two things that every human being has in common are birth and death. 

And what birth and death almost always have in common for us is pain. 

We may sometimes hear of women who give birth to children almost unaware of being in labor until right before delivery or of people who pass away peacefully in their beds after long, healthy lives. But we note stories of people like these as the exceptions. 

When we are born into this world and when we die out of this world, there is almost always pain.

In the end, the only thing that can make the pain of birth and death bearable for us is the belief in new life beyond the pain. 

That’s why, long before most of the world had ever heard of Jesus Christ, people created myths of heroes that conquered death by exploits, virtues, or deal-making. The problem with these comforting stories human beings told (and still tell) themselves is that they’re all untrue, happy talk for the fearful. 

None of us is virtuous enough, or adept enough at making deals, or courageous enough in the face of what we go through in our lives to earn, gain, or steal life beyond pain.

In our gospel lesson for this morning, John 16:12-22, Jesus acknowledges that birth and death bring pain. But He also points to the hope of new life beyond pain, a new life in eternity without pain, for those who follow Him. 

Let’s be clear though. Jesus’ words would be nothing more than another version of the happy lies we tell ourselves as human beings if it weren’t for one simple fact: Jesus, has immersed Himself into our humanity, including its pain and death, so that He can absorb all of our pain, all of our death, all of our sin into Himself.

Jesus does this so that, after dying condemned for our sins, God the Father could raise Him from the dead. 

It’s Jesus’ dying and rising that makes it possible for all who, by faith, absorb the death of Jesus into our own bodies and lives to be raised to new life beyond the pain of birth and death. That’s what Good Friday and Easter Sunday are about.

At the beginning of our lesson, we find Jesus preparing His disciples for the pain--the grief--they’re about to endure as He is taken from them and murdered. In fact, Jesus has been deluging the disciples with teaching that fills several chapters of John’s gospel. The disciples must have sensed from Jesus’ words, even if they didn’t fully understand them, that a crisis was about to hit. Jesus has been giving them instructions for how to face the crisis. Yet, they must have also wondered, “How can we possibly remember all of this?”

Jesus promises the disciples that He will send the Holy Spirit to His Church. When, Jesus says, “the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come” (John 16:13). It was the Holy Spirit Who would enable the disciples to remember what Jesus taught about the meaning of His death and resurrection for a human race dying in its sin. It was the Holy Spirit that empowered the disciples to remember and so teach us that the pain of life is not the last word over those who trust in Jesus. 

Their remembrances come to us in the Bible. The Bible then is the Holy Spirit-inspired Word from God, pointing us to new life through Jesus. And this Word has power! Hebrews 4:12 reminds us, “...the word of God is alive and active…” 

When we read or hear the Bible, we encounter the same powerful Word God spoke to bring the universe into being. And this same Word, when we stand under its authority, brings us new life.

Jesus next tells the disciples, “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.” (John 16:16) 

This incites a confused and almost comical conversation among the disciples that might best be summarized as, “Wait. What?” 

They don’t understand what Jesus is telling them. At that moment, they really can’t. 

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? We lose someone we love or a way of life we’ve valued and we wonder how we can go on. 

Jesus tells the disciples that soon they won’t see Him anymore. They’re confused. Then Jesus adds to their fog by telling them, that “after a little while,” they’re going to see Him again. 

When the pain of death comes to us, it’s as hard imagine being able to once again see our dead loved ones as it must have been for my mom to believe that anything good was going to result from thirty-six hours of labor only to give birth to a scrawny blue breech baby who had to be put in an incubator and couldn’t hold up his head for months after his birth. New life out of pain is often beyond our imagining.

It’s because of our failure to imagine that God can bring new life out of pain that Jesus says what He does next in our gospel lesson. “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.” (John 16:21) Jesus isn’t saying that moms develop amnesia about their labor pains. He is saying that that their suffering seems worth it for the joy of the new life they now hold in their arms.

As Jesus speaks here, He Himself is about about to deliver a new creation. He will labor on the cross so that when He rises, new resurrected life will come to Him. 

And like a mother delivering a child, Jesus doesn’t labor on the cross for Himself. Since Jesus was sinless and eternal, He didn’t need to endure the pain of death and birth to have life. He already had life to the full, perfect, sinless, eternal life.

Jesus labored for us. “For the joy set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, scorning its shame...” (Hebrews 12:2) 

And what was the joy set before Jesus? 

Jesus’ joy, the thing that made Him willing to suffer pain, cross and death, was you! 

The reward He sought was you, with Him, eternally safe and secure from the sin and death and separation from God into which we are born in this life. 

Jesus’ joy is to give new birth to you, beyond the pain of this fallen world. 

Jesus says that “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:3). Jesus, in the words of the Christmas hymn, was “born to give us second birth.” He died for that end as well. That’s how important you are to Jesus. He simply refuses to imagine spending eternity without you!

The new birth that Jesus brings is a free gift. We can’t earn, acquire, or steal it for ourselves. 

But to take hold of it will cost us our lives. The new life that Jesus secures for us can’t be ours if we insist on holding onto our pretenses of being in control in this life. We must let go of the myths of our self-sufficiency, goodness, or power. That’s painful; but it’s the way of following Jesus. “Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy,” Jesus tells us in John 16:22.

So, how does Jesus’ life, death, and resurrected life become embodied in us so that we are part of His new creation? 

Not by anything we do! Jesus says in John 3:5: “...no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” 

Our new life begins when God acts to save us in Holy Baptism. 

In Baptism, He drowns our old selves and the Holy Spirit infuses us with the resurrection life that Jesus, like a mother who endures labor, has suffered to give to us. 

The apostle Peter says that the water of the flood in which God saved Noah and his family “symbolizes baptism that now saves you also..It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ…” (1 Peter 3:21) Baptism is how God brings us into His new creation.

“Wait. What?” you might be saying right now. “Isn’t there something we need to do do? Don’t we at least have to believe?” 

Yes and no. We do have to believe. Jesus says, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:16) And, “whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) Yes, we must believe. We must have faith.

But faith isn’t something we do. Faith is something we don’t do. Faith is something God, acting through Jesus Christ, does to us. 

I’m not saying that we won’t do things because we have faith. But we mustn’t confuse faith, childlike trust in God, with what we do because we already have received the gift of faith. 

We can’t manufacture faith in Jesus. 

Faith isn’t “positive thinking.” 

It’s not trying to psych ourselves into buying something as true, repeating in the style of the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz, “I do believe in Jesus. I do believe in Jesus.”

Faith is the creation of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit Who comes to us in our baptisms. 

The same Spirit Jesus promises will help us to remember the promise of new life amid the pains of this life. 

Faith happens when the Word of God--preached, taught, and embodied in Holy Baptism and Holy Communion--demolishes our desire to be gods unto ourselves and opens us to trust in Christ alone for life, when we can say of ourselves and Jesus what John the Baptist said, “He must increase, but I must increase.” (John 3:30) 

Faith is foreign to our inborn sinful natures. That's why the Bible tells us, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 12:3) Faith is God's work in us!

Only faith created in us by God the Holy Spirit comprehends that Jesus bore the pain of death and agony to win new life for us. 

When we live in Spirit-powered faith in Jesus, we endure the pain of being separated from all our favorite sins--from gossip to covetousness, from adultery to worshiping ourselves and other false gods, from materialism to prejudice. 

But, born anew in Christ’s new kingdom, the Holy Spirit works to make us over in Jesus’ image, setting us free to live in the freedom of being God’s emancipated children, not yet all God that is going to make of us, but no longer slaves to sin, death, and fear, disciples of Christ with nothing to prove, everything to celebrate, and a Lord we want to spend today and all eternity glorifying! Amen

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

I Want Life, Not Dust

[Jesus said:] “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?" (Matthew 16:24-26)

We spend a lot of time trying to acquire things that this dying world has to offer, like success, security, comfort, some validation of our worthiness.

But these trophies will mean nothing and do nothing for us when we've been reduced to powder.

Only the God Who made us and is ultimately revealed for everyone to know and see in the crucified and risen Jesus can give us life: Life today, in an imperfect and fallen world, with Christ beside us. And life tomorrow, beyond the dust, life that never ends, life as God intended for us to have it when He first breathed life into dust to make Adam.

I can easily see the trophies offered by this world. That's what makes them so tempting.

But I ask that the Holy Spirit will help me to remember the trophy that is more lasting and more meaningful than anything a dead world can offer me, the trophy of eternal life with God through faith in Jesus.

God, make my central ambition the same as that of the apostle Paul: "I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead." (Philippians 3:10-11) In Jesus' name I pray. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. These are reflections from my quiet time with God today.]

Powerful Rebuttal

Christmas: For You! (AUDIO)

Here's the audio for the message shared during the Christmas Eve candlelight services, which happened at 5:00, 7:00, and 9:00pm in the building of Living Water Lutheran Church this past Sunday night. (We also had a Family Christmas Eve service, featuring the Christmas story for children, at 3:00pm that day.)

Below are the pictures that are referenced in the message.

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