Should This Be Filed Under, "No Surprise"?

JULY 24, 2012

Many Financial Pros Feel Pressure to Compromise Ethics

30% of financial services professionals say their compensation or bonus plans create pressure to compromise ethical standards or violate the law, according to a survey in the U.S. and UK conducted for the law firm Labaton Sucharow. 22% of female respondents say they'd face retaliation if they reported wrongdoing in the workplace, compared with 12% percent of male respondents.

Source: Professionals Feel Unethical Behavior May Be a Necessary Evil and Have Knowledge of Workplace Misconduct, According to Labaton Sucharow Survey

This came in today's Daily Stat from the Harvard Business Review. Maybe the only shocking thing about the findings is that such a small percentage of financial services professionals feel pressured to play fast and loose with ethics or the law.

If that seems cynical, I hasten to add that feeling the heat to cheat isn't itself unethical, criminal, or sinful.

When internalized, the pressure to cheat may be described with the Biblical term, temptation. Being tempted to sin isn't to do wrong.

And, if we're honest, we've all been tempted to do wrong.

That's part of being human.

 Jesus Christ, truly God and truly human, experienced temptation, but unlike the rest of us, never sinned. Christ not only has conquered sin and death for those who repent for sin and believe in Him, He also understands what it's like to be tempted...to be human. Hebrews 4:15, in the New Testament, says, "[In Christ]...we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin."

When faced with temptation, the God revealed to us in Christ can help us. "No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone," 1 Corinthians 10:13, also in the New Testament, says, "God is faithful and he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it."

 Of course, if we don't want to avoid sin or successfully elude the temptation to do so, there is no help to be had from God. While God wants to help us, He won't force His help on us.

But, honestly, it's better to run away from sin (and all its consequences) into the arms of God than to run to sin. Take it from one who knows.

Shepherd for the Harassed and Helpless

Here's the somewhat scratchy and hard-to-hear audio of this past Sunday's 8:30 AM Chapel Holy Communion Service at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.

The Biblical text used is Mark 6:30-34, 53-56:

³⁰The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. ³¹He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. ³²And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. ³³Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. ³⁴As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.
⁵³When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. ⁵⁴When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, ⁵⁵and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. ⁵⁶And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.

Barry Larkin Inducted Into Baseball Hall of Fame

Barry Larkin was a great hitting shortstop for my fave Cincinnati Reds for nineteen years. I am so glad that, yesterday, he was inducted into Baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. He had a true Hall of Fame career and is deserving.

Now, I hope that through the veterans committee, another Cincinnati shortstop, David Concepcion, will be admitted to the hall. Concepcion was the best shortstop of his era and deserves to be honored as a Hall of Famer.

3 Things to Remember

[This was shared this morning during the 10:15 worship service with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]

Ephesians 2:11-22
Our second Bible lesson for today, Ephesians 2:11-22, was written to a Gentile (that is, non-Jewish) Christian community in the first century who lived in an area then called Asia Minor, which you and I know as Turkey.

But there is more than musty history to be found in these verses. In the midst of the demands and challenges of our everyday lives, these verses remind us to do three things:

• Remember who we were. 
• Remember who, by grace through faith in Christ, we are. 
• Remember who, by grace through faith in Christ, we are to be. 

Please go to our lesson, Ephesians 2:11-22.

Look first, please, at verses 11 to 13. We’re told, “Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh—who are called Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision made in the flesh by hands—  that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

To understand this passage, we must remember a simple Biblical truth: God is the giver of life. Without a connection to God, we are dead, even if we have a strong pulse and heartbeat. We are dead in our sins and we face an eternity divorced from life and an earthly lifetime of futility and meaninglessness without connection to God.

While the Bible tells us that there have always been people who have believed there was a God and who sought Him in their own ways, God first disclosed Himself and His nature to a single people, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the Jews. The Jews were called by God to be His own people.

God evidently had His reasons for focusing His attention and energy on one people.

For one thing, the Jews were meant to be “a light to the nations,” showing the whole world the glory of God.

For another, the Jewish people became a laboratory showing the whole world how God’s law, grace, and forgiveness work, what repentance and faith are all about.

What we see when we read the Old Testament’s account of God’s interactions with the Jewish people is that He is no different from the God we encounter in the New Testament in the Person of Jesus. (See here and here.)

Look at Genesis 15:6. God has promised Abraham that he and his wife Sarah will have a son and become the ancestors of nations. It’s an outlandish promise--almost as outlandish as promising eternal life to those who repent and believe in Christ. Abraham and Sarah were old, well beyond child-bearing or child-rearing years. Yet look at Genesis 15:6: “And [Abraham] believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.”

Now, flip back to Ephesians 2:8 and see the remarkably consistent way by which God brings salvation or righteousness to imperfect sinners like you and me: “For by grace [that’s God’s charity] you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.”

Verses 11 to 13 of our lesson tell us that the miracle of salvation, once a gift belonging only to the Jews now belongs to all who believe in Christ. As verse 13 says, “now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

It used to be that only Jewish men who had been circumcised, along with their wives, daughters, and sisters, could claim to be God’s people, reconciled to God, one with God. Those who weren’t Jewish were aliens, foreigners, strangers to God. But God has brought all who believe in Jesus close to Himself.

It’s good though, to remember who we once were without Christ. It’s good to remember that, in spite of not being “members of the club” and in spite of our sin, Christ welcomes all who repent for sin and believe in Him with open arms.

Nobody I know is more critical of me than me. There are times when I get so angry at myself, thinking, “How many times do you have to commit the same sin before you learn your lesson? How many more times do you intend to disappoint God with your hard-headedness and hard-heartedness?” But then I go to God in prayer and I read His Word and I’m reminded of passages like Isaiah 1:18, where God says: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

Or, Jesus’ words from the cross, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

I remember who I once was: A sinner without hope. Through Christ, like all who believe in Him, I have been transformed: a forgiven sinner with an eternity of hope.

Look at the next section of our second lesson, Ephesians 2:14-18. It says: “For He [Christ] Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances [this refers to the Jewish ritual and civil laws, not to the moral laws, like the ten commandments, which still stand], so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father.”

I heard a man say of his son, “He came out of the womb, cigar in hand, barking out orders.” Truth is, we all came into the world that way, more or less. The Bible, in Psalm 139:14, tells us that each of us is “fearfully and wonderfully made.” But, we also come equipped with an inheritance from our imperfect human parents: an insatiable commitment to having things our own way, a desire to “be like God.” King David speaks for us all in Psalm 51:5, when he writes: “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.”

We are born at war with God. But Jesus Christ has come to make peace between God and us.

Peace with God is what Christ has come to give to us. But it’s a peace that can only be ours when we surrender to Christ!

Jesus wants us in His eternal kingdom. But we can’t get in if we insist on holding onto our sins, if we insist that our favorite violations of God’s will for human beings are “no big deal.”

To God, every sin--from taking His Name in vain to sexual intimacy outside of marriage between a man and a woman, from murder to false witnessing (what we call gossiping)--every sin is an assault that disrupts and destroys the peace in which He wants His creation to live.

1 John 1:8-10 contains words familiar to most Lutheran Christians: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make [God] a liar and His word is not in us.”

The  peace of God comes to those honest enough to admit their sin and honest enough to own their need of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to change their lives. In Romans 5:1-2, the apostle Paul writes: “Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through Whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”

In Christ, repentant believers in Jesus have peace with God and even with those who hate us.

I once read about a Lutheran pastor and psychologist doing graduate work in a major US city in the east. We’ll call him Bill. Bill began attending a local congregation and made himself known to the pastor. The pastor was happy to have Bill in the congregation and took Bill up on his offer to help in any ways he could. Bill saw a few congregants in counseling situations and occasionally led worship and preached.

As time went on, Bill became aware that, to some parishioners, the pastor seemed like an angry person whose venom was creating a lot of ill-will. Bill initially discounted it until one Sunday, just before a service at which Bill was to preach, the angry pastor lit into Bill, accusing him falsely of all sorts of maliciousness.

The service began and, silently, Bill begged God to help him get through it, knowing that the entire time the pastor was staring at him with searingly angry eyes. Bill says that God not only gave him peace internally, but also peace in his relationship with that pastor. He was eventually able to get the pastor to the help he needed for healing.

In Christ, God makes peace with you and if you will let Him, He promises that--in the words of Philippians 4:7--”the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

Remember by grace through faith in Christ who you are right now: a person at peace with God and with others.

Look, please, at the final verses of our second lesson, Ephesians 2:19-22: “Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

After remembering who we were without Christ and who we are with Christ, Ephesians reminds of who we are becoming through Christ. Once foreigners to God, now members of God’s own household, confident of God’s love for us and His presence with us right now, we also have a lot to look forward to.

Through the witness of the apostles and the prophets found on the pages of our Bibles, God is building us up to be part of a temple, the very place God lives. And, as much as we may like our church buildings, it isn’t in brick, mortar, or plaster that God lives, but in people who dare to give their lives to Jesus Christ. As someone has said, “Christians don’t go to Church. They are the Church.”

And it’s this Church into which you and I are being built for all eternity. It’s the Church in which sin, death, grief, and futile toil will come to an end. Every tear will be wiped from our eyes and we will live with joy and purpose alongside all who have trusted in the Name of Christ.

The world has brought sad and tragic news to our doorsteps this past week. This life is fragile and fleeting. But when we who trust in Jesus, remember who we were, who we are, and who our God is making us to be, we do not despair.

This morning, we thank God for Christ and we recommit ourselves to that commission which Christ has given to every follower of Jesus. Turn to that commission, please, in Matthew 28:19-20. The risen Jesus commands all who have been saved by His grace:

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” 

God has given us His peace through Christ. Share that peace with others by sharing Christ with them. That’s the work to which you and I are called while on earth. May it be our way of life. Amen!

After Aurora: What the World Needs Most

As Alan Knox rightly points out, every Christian is called to "preach" the gospel. This fact is part of what it means to be a member of what Martin Luther called, "the priesthood of all believers."

And, given the frail and fleeting nature of life on this earth we have seen underscored in the Aurora, Colorado tragedy, every person on earth needs to hear the gospel.

And what is the gospel? It's "the good news" that Jesus receives sinful human beings who repent and believe in the power of His death and resurrection to transform them from enemies of God to God's friends for eternity. Jesus summed up how the gospel is activated in our lives in a short sermon found in the gospel of Mark:

"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."

By a sheer act of charity (what the Bible calls grace), God creates faith in Christ in those who are willing to believe and by that same grace, God counts our faith in Christ as rightness with God.

That's the power of the gospel we Christians ought to proclaim (preach) with love and consideration, without coercion or apology. Every Christian should be able to affirm with the apostle Paul:

"...I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith [in Christ], to the Jew first and also to the Greek [non-Jews or Gentiles]. For in it the righteousness [rightness] of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written [in the Old Testament book of Habakkuk], 'The one who is righteous will live by faith.'" (Romans 1:16-17)

More than ever, the world needs the gospel of Jesus Christ and it's the call of every Christian to pass it on!

Prayers and Thoughts for the Colorado Tragedy

Today, we need to be in prayer for all the victims of the Colorado movie theater tragedy.

From eleven years ago, here is a column I wrote for the Press Community newspapers in Cincinnati in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks that might have some relevance today: Four Things to Tell Children After 9/11. (One of the points made is so specific to the 9/11 attacks as to be irrelevant. But you can judge for yourself whether the other three points are helpful.)

Doubt in the Life of the Christian

Recently, talking with friends, one asked me if I ever doubted Jesus' resurrection or the resurrection from the dead that Jesus promises all who turn from sin and believe in Him.

I had to answer honestly that the resurrection isn't something I doubt.

The facticity of Jesus' resurrection is supported by another fact, it seems to me: That the very first followers of Jesus were emphatic that Christ's death and resurrection were central to their proclamation about Christ. Something like 500 people staked their lives on the claim that they had seen the resurrected Jesus.

There was nothing in it for them financially.

There was nothing in it for them socially or politically.

In fact, by insisting that, as Jesus had taught during His pre-crucifixion and pre-resurrection ministry, Jesus

• was born of a virgin, 
• was both fully God and fully human, 
• was sinless, 
• suffered and died for sinful humanity, and 
• was raised by God the Father in order to open a new, eternal relationship with God to all who died to self (repented) and entrusted their lives to Christ, 

the first Christians were putting their lives on the line.*

To confess all these things, was to subject themselves to ridicule, rejection, and persecution.

If they were all guilty of hysteria, you would have imagined that at some point in their lives--and some apparently lived a long while after Jesus' death and resurrection--the hysteria would have broken.

If they were involved in some financial conspiracy--and there is no record intimating that anywhere that I know of--that too, would have broken down.

In fact, if history, even recent history, shows us anything, it's that conspiracies almost inevitably break down, especially under the force of the kind of political and religious persecution to which Christians were subjected in the earliest years of the movement.

Of course, the weight of facts can't get you to faith. Faith comes to those able to say, "Lord, I don't understand it all. But I trust Jesus. I find Him credible. I want to turn away from a life without Christ and live with Him as the center of my life. I want to believe. Help me do that."

Faith, as I've said before, comes to those willing to believe.

But, that doesn't mean that doubts ever go completely away. We are human, after all.

For me, the doubts never revolve around Jesus' resurrection or His promise to raise me and all those who have believed in Him at "the last day."

Instead, the doubts that sometimes accost me revolve around today.

Despite a thirty-five year track record in which the risen and living Jesus has sustained, encouraged, and empowered me, I sometimes wonder whether He's going to sustain me in the next challenge.

The God I know in Jesus Christ has been so powerful in my life through the years and yet, when facing new challenges or hurdles, I wonder, "Are you with me, Jesus? Have you had enough of me?"

Just last week, I was facing a hurdle. I was feeling distant from Jesus.** But here's what happened: In prayer, I owned my feeling of distance with Jesus. The simple sharing of that reality in my life with Christ was the opening Jesus took to assure me of His presence and our intimacy.

Whatever our doubts about Christ or the new life He offers to those who surrender to Him, the antidote is always the same: To come to Him honestly. To surrender to Him again each day. When we do, we learn the truth of the New Testament when it tells us that nothing "will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:31).

*And, by the way, recent studies indicate that the so-called diversity of Christianities of the early Church, in which it's supposed that the first followers of Christ had more diverse proclamations about Jesus than what are found in the New Testament, have proven false. The proclamation about Jesus clearly incorporated the above elements from the outset. Groups and documents claiming contrary things about many of the above points came later.

**It's important to remember that faith isn't contingent on our feelings or on our rationality. Christ is alive and the gracious Lord and refuge for sinners, whether, at any given moment, we don't feel or think those realities.

Foodie Alert: Calling All Arteries

7-11 stores in Singapore are serving up this delectable delight. But it can't be long before it will be clogging arteries in the good old USA, can it?

Black Women Among Most Religious in USA

Here.

Why Resist Evil?

[This is the sermon prepared for delivery at this morning's 10:15 worship service with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio. You are invited to worship with us any time.]


Mark 6:14-29
With its account of John the Baptist’s execution, our gospel lesson from Mark for today is so laced with evil that it’s disturbing. I’d rather just close the Bible on this passage today and move on to Holy Communion.

But that’s no way to treat the Bible, God’s revealed Word. Second Timothy 3:16, in the New Testament, says that, “all scripture is given by the inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” That’s true even of the disturbing parts.

And when I think of it, what I see in today’s Gospel lesson is a lot like what I see in life on Monday through Saturday. As wonderful as this life can be, there are things I would rather not face. These are the evils—like the inhumane things that human beings sometimes do to one another—that, when you learn of them, make you wonder, “How could this have happened? How can people be so cruel or sadistic?”

And I’m not talking just about murders or holocausts. I’m thinking also of the everyday evils, the cutting, harsh ways in which we all can diverge from the clear will of God to love God and love neighbor:

The husband or wife who ignores the spouse.

The parent who discourages a child.

The child who is disrespectful to the parent.

The customer who berates the clerk at the store.

None of us wants to be mistreated. Yet, often we can find ourselves subjecting others to the very disrespect or callous disregard that we hate to receive!

We all are sinners, of course. That’s the burden that the sinless Jesus came to take from us, the weight He took on His own shoulders on the cross so that all who repent for sin and trust in Him will have life with God forever.

As Christians, we’re called to do daily battle with our sin, which, if ignored, acts as a wall between God and us, between life and death.

We’re called to keep grabbing the strong, outstretched hand of Jesus Christ so that the power of sin and death over our lives can be destroyed by God’s powerful grace and deathless love.

That isn’t always as easy to do as it seems it should be.

You’ve heard me speak before about the frog in the kettle. A frog haplessly plopped himself into a kettle full of water that set on a stove top. Shortly after he got there, someone turned on the burner underneath the kettle. The frog, being a cold-blooded animal, adaptable to the world around him, didn’t realize he was being boiled to death.

Only insane people set out to be evil. Yet, like the frog in the kettle, sometimes people who should know better, are capable of evil, of cruelty to others. We allow our kettles--our environments, the world and the people around us--to dictate how we will act and react in everyday life. We adapt ourselves so well to the world around us that we boil ourselves in our own sin.

Herod Antipas was a man who should have known better than to fall into evil. He had been schooled in God’s will through a thorough knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, what we know as the Old Testament. On top of that, Herod had good political reasons for avoiding evil: Though his family had no legitimate claim on the honor, they had for generations held themselves to be Israel’s royal family. It was so important to Herod Antipas to be seen as the “king of the Jews” that he had undertaken to build a new temple on Mount Zion, the same spot in Jerusalem where, a thousand years before, King Solomon had built the first temple. Both spiritual training and political common sense should have kept Herod from evil.

But our Gospel lesson for today tells us that Herod perpetrated a horrible evil: Ordering the execution of John the Baptizer, whose crime was speaking the Word of God.

How that happened, a story you know well, comprises most of the lesson. Please turn to it, Mark 6:14 to 29. The stotry comes in what the moviemakers would call a flashback. Herod gets reports about the miracle-working ministry of Jesus and is convinced that John, whose beheading he had ordered, has come back from the dead. The memory of his evil clearly haunted Herod.

We’re then told about the night Herod threw a birthday party for himself, how the daughter of his wife—the wife he had stolen from his brother--had danced for him, pleasing Herod a lot, how—probably a little more than drunk—Herod had promised the girl anything in exchange for the dance, how she had asked her mother what to ask for and was given the chilling reply (in verse 24), “The head of John the Baptist,” and how, in spite of what Herod knew to be right, he complied with the girl’s wish.

It was an act of evil equal to anything you might hear about tonight on the Eleven O’Clock News. But I believe that our gospel lesson can help us to avoid falling into evil ourselves.

It does this by helping us to see that evil happens, first of all, when we want what we want more than we want what God wants. Herod wanted his wife’s daughter. He let himself be led by his lust and not by God.

That sort of thing can happen to us, too.

It may not be lust that leads us.

It might be materialism or acceptance or even a competitive spirit grown out of right proportions.

A woman, upset with herself, once told me, “I don’t know what happens to me at work. It’s like I’m a different person. I say and do things to get by or get what I want that, a few years ago, I could never have imagined myself doing.”

This woman was a frog in a kettle and she didn’t know how to get out! She was being led by things other than God.

Evil also happens when we’re more concerned with how we appear than we are with who we are. Herod kept his vow to his wife's daughter because he didn’t want to seem like a welcher to his guests. He didn't want to seem incapable of or unwilling to keep his word. He let the opinions of others lead him into evil.

Years ago, a pastor I know taught me a valuable lesson. One week, he made a mistake, one that the congregation needn’t have known about, not a sin, but a failure to make a deadline which cost the church some money. The first thing that pastor did the following Sunday morning during the announcements was stand up and apologize. If he had worried about appearances, he wouldn’t have said a word. But he was willing to admit his imperfections and gained credibility for it.

Evil also happens when we ignore the Word of God. Herod, in spite of the judgment against his actions he could hear in John’s preaching, liked to listen to John. He knew that John’s words were from God. Yet, at his birthday party, Herod turned a deaf ear to God’s Word and he ordered the execution of a man whose crime had been clearly speaking God’s Word.

It’s clear that to avoid evil, we need to:

• keep God’s will foremost in our priorities, 
• be focused on our character than our status, and 
• remain attentive to God’s Word. 

It’s by these means that the God we know in Jesus Christ can free us from the push to selfishness and evil that exists within us and around us.

But that still leaves us with a question: What’s in it for us? At the end of our Gospel lesson, after all, Herod was still alive, still on his throne, and John’s body was taken away by his disciples for burial. Herod had caved into evil. John had remained faithful to God. So, does it really pay off for us to resist evil?

Of course, there’s the obvious answer to that question: Those who faithfully seek to follow the God we know in Jesus Christ will, in spite of our sins and failings, spend eternity with God. Jesus promises: “the one who endures to the end will be saved” from sin, death, and separation from God.

But there are more immediate rewards for those who commit themselves to keeping hold of Christ’s hand and resisting the temptation to sin. They’re mentioned in our lesson from Ephesians for today. We’re given, we’re told “every spiritual blessing.” Herod went to bed on the night he killed John the Baptizer knowing that he had done evil and that barring a renewal of his relationship with God, on a collision course with hell.

Unlike Herod Antipas, John the Baptist lived and died with the certainty that, even in the midst of things he couldn’t and didn’t fully understand, in resisting evil, in seeking to follow God faithfully, he had a Lord, a Friend, and an Advocate Who would never desert him, not even at the gates of death. Who, do you suppose, died a happier man: Herod Antipas or John the Baptist?

Sometimes, people ask me, “Where is God?” The simple truth is that God is present for all who want God around. God is present for all who call on the Name of Jesus Christ. If you want Jesus in your life, you can find Him in the Word of God, in prayers in Jesus’ Name, in the fellowship of the Church, in the Sacraments, in the neighbor you’re called to serve and share the gospel with each day.

And having Jesus Christ at the center of our lives makes all the difference in this life and in the one to come. And, finally, gloriously, eternally, joyfully, having Jesus Christ at the center of your life makes resisting evil worth all the trouble it can bring to our lives. Amen

Turning a Deaf Ear to God's Word (from the Pastor's Cutting Room Floor)

This didn't make it into tomorrow's sermon. But I thought that I'd share it here:

When we turn a deaf ear to God’s Word, ignoring either God’s Law or God’s promise as revealed in the Old and New Testaments, it’s like driving another nail into Jesus’ scarred flesh all over again.

It’s like joining the Good Friday conspirators who thought that by killing Jesus, they could throw off the lordship of God and, like Adam and Eve at the dawn of human history, make their play to “be like God.”

This comes through clearly in a passage in the New Testament, Acts 9:4. A man named Saul had been deputized to seek out Jews who were following Jesus and bring them back to Jerusalem, bound as prisoners. On his way to Damascus, Saul (who would later become Paul, a great preacher of faith in Jesus) encounters the risen and ascended Jesus, Who asks, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

Whenever we turn our backs on the Word of God as revealed in the Bible, we persecute Jesus and distance ourselves from Him.

God forbid that we should do that! God forbid that we should turn our backs on the One Who says, "The Father and I are one" (John 10:30) and "I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you know Me, you will know My Father also" (John 14:6-7).

Wednesday Evening's 'Read the New Testament in a Year' Discussion at Saint Matthew

This is our oft-interrupted discussion of John 8 through 11 in 'Read the New Testament in a Year,
from the evening of July 11.

The Power That Can Only Be Experienced by the Weak

[This was prepared for delivery during the 10:15 worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, earlier this morning. But then, I forgot to bring the sermon with me and had to wing it.]

2 Corinthians 12:2-10
You and I will be telling stories about the hurricane-force winds and resultant Power Outage of 2012 for a long time to come. After our power came back for the second time on Thursday, Ann and I reminded each other not to get too used to the comfort; the power could go again.

That skepticism or wariness is warranted. Human beings and human technology aren't all-powerful. Our best laid plans and most thorough preparations can--and often are--upended by life.

But I wonder: Do we ever entertain similar skepticism or wariness about the power of Jesus Christ?

Skepticism about Jesus’ power and the good it does in the lives of those who believe in Jesus is nothing new, even sometimes among those who know Jesus well.

In our gospel lesson for today, Mark 6:1-13, Jesus, Who in the previous five chapters of Mark’s gospel is recorded to have done many miracles and signs, could do no deeds of power because of the skepticism and unbelief of the people in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth.

And underscoring this theme, all four of the gospels say that after Jesus, God in the flesh, had died on the cross, His closest followers doubted that God had the power to do what Jesus had said He would: raise Jesus from the dead so that all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus can have eternal life with God.

Even today, although Christ’s resurrection is an accomplished fact, people who bear Christ’s Name go through times when they doubt Christ’s power.

In our second Bible lesson, 2 Corinthians 12:2-10, the apostle Paul, the first century evangelist, is dealing with Christians who are skeptical about Christ’s power, hankering for what I call happy-talk preachers who promise that following Jesus will mean that their lives in this world will be peaches and cream.

You see, shortly before Paul wrote to the Christian community in the Greek city of Corinth, the Corinthian church had been wowed by some preachers who convinced them that if the power of the God made known to the world through Jesus was really working in them, then their lives would be problem-free. They would have success, victories, and no illness.

Now, it is true that Christ gives His Church, among other ministries, the power to bring God’s help to people, including, sometimes, healing.

But no physical healing lasts indefinitely. This world is imperfect and, unless you and I are among those Christians living on earth when Jesus returns, death will come to us all. There’s no way around that.

“So, where is the power of God and what good is the power of God in your preaching?” the Corinthians asked Paul.

Their questions were pointed because, unlike the preachers who had wowed them, Paul was a less than impressive figure. By this time, about 56AD, Paul was deep into his forties or early fifties, slight, balding, a poor and rambling speaker who scratched together what little income he made by making tents.

His career as a Christian preacher wasn’t notable for what the world would call successes. In the course of his work, he’d been arrested and flogged, shipwrecked and beaten, mocked, chased out of several towns, and jailed. Most people in that time would probably have looked at Paul and seen a big “L” for “loser” on his forehead.

But by the time we get to the point in the letter to the Corinthian Christians that makes up our second lesson, this loser Paul has a message for these people who question the authenticity of his message about Jesus Christ and his authority to share it.

Wary of being a braggart, Paul starts out by using the third person to tell about a personal experience he’d had of the power of God fourteen years earlier.

Paul says, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a one was caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— 4 how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words.”

Paul had an experience of heaven that the preachers who had impressed the Corinthian Christians might not have been able to even imagine.

But, Paul says, that experience, as awesome as it was, did not prove Jesus’ power over sin and death and it didn’t prove Paul’s authority to tell others about Jesus.

God's power, Paul shows us, is most readily seen in ways the world might not call flashy, but in two other ways.

The first is in God's grace.

The second is in our weakness.

Grace is God’s charity, God’s willingness to accept the repentant who entrust their sins and their entire lives to Christ. Grace doesn’t paper over or ignore our sins. But it welcomes those who are willing to turn from sin and believe in Christ into eternal fellowship with God.

God doesn’t wait for us to be perfect before we have life with Him. Life with Him is a free gift for all who have faith in Christ.

The super apostles who had wowed the Corinthian Christians said that, “If there’s something wrong in your life—some illness, adversity, heartbreak, poverty, or struggle—it proves that you’re faithless.”

You still hear people saying things like this today. Some of them have TV shows and multimillion dollar ministries and books on the best seller lists. They don’t understand grace!

Having the grace of God that comes only from Jesus Christ in our lives doesn’t mean that our lives will be perfect; it means, rather, that we will still have God’s grace even when things aren’t perfect!

In verse 7 of our lesson (take a look at it), Paul says that to keep him from being too elated by his heavenly vision, God had allowed Satan to afflict Paul with a “thorn in the flesh.”

We have no idea what Paul's thorn in the flesh was. It may have been an illness, an incessant temptation, a psychological disturbance, a relationship problem, a lack of money. We don’t know.

But three times, Paul says, he had asked God in prayer to remove the thorn. And three times the answer came back (look, Paul records it in verse 9), “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” God refused to bring Paul the relief Paul sought, telling Paul that His grace was all Paul really needed.

Everybody here this morning knows what it is to experience thorns in the flesh. They’re the problems and heartaches that bedevil us and seem never to go completely away. They drive us to our knees and there, before God, we learn that all of the things we thought we needed—health, money, connections, the big house, the respect of others—are nice, but they're not what we need the most.

What we really need is the life-giving grace of God given through Jesus Christ. God's tough, incessant, faithful grace is the first thing that proves the power of Jesus Christ.

This leads to the second thing that proves the power of Jesus Christ: our weakness.

Listen: God gives those humble enough to admit their weakness the strength they need for living.

Many of you know exactly what I’m talking about.

You were with a loved one as they were dying and you knew that on your own, you couldn’t do all that you needed to do, but, with God’s help, you did it.

You had to undergo one more round of medical treatments, one more battery of tests, and you knew that you just couldn’t take it, but with Jesus by your side, you did.

In order to graduate or be certified, you had to pass a class for which you knew you had no talent or ability and, after prayer in Jesus’ Name, God helped you study and to learn what you needed to learn to pass.

To pay your bills, you had to work double shifts for which you knew you didn’t have the energy, yet God’s Spirit filled you with the needed energy.

In each case, you called out to the God we know in Jesus Christ and confessed, “Lord, I can’t.” And in each case, God told you, “I know that you can’t. But I can! Lean on me."

God has more than enough grace to help us and it only comes to those weak enough to admit that they need the crucified and risen Jesus.

This was exactly what Paul experienced when he had asked God to remove the unidentified thorn in his flesh. “I’m not taking this adversity away,” God told Paul. “You’re going to have to go through it, leaning on my grace.”

Why?

Because, God says in verse 9: “...My grace is made perfect in weakness.”

God’s power is experienced only by people who admit that they’re powerless without Jesus Christ.

We’re powerless when, by ourselves, we try to make sound decisions, make our relationships work, be happy, deal with our sins, or face life and death.

But when we own our weakness and seek Christ’s help, we can face anything.

God’s power surges into us.

That’s what Paul means when he writes in verse 10: “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

“I didn’t know if I could ever be happy again,” a woman told me years after her husband had died. There were dark days, pain interspersed with lifeless numbness. But there were things to be done—children to be raised, bills to be paid, errands to be run. “I was sure that I just couldn’t do it,” she said. But in the midst of it all, she prayed and learned what Paul underscores in today’s lesson.

Through Jesus Christ, God demonstrates His power by giving grace to the needy—and that’s all of us—and strength to the weak—that, too, is all of us.

If you’re feeling weak or powerless today, that’s a great sign!

It means you’re seeing life clearly.

You’re ready to give up on relying on yourself and start depending on Jesus Christ alone.

The Lord does not help those who help themselves; the Lord helps those who admit that they need the Lord’s help.

Call out to the God we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus and let God the Holy Spirit fill you with strength you can’t generate on your own.

Life in this world will not always make sense nor does God promise us that it will be easy. But He does promise to help us do all things when we place the full weight of our lives on the shoulders of Jesus Christ alone! Our strong God stands at the ready to give you grace and strength in all circumstances.

Unlike AEP, God’s power never gives out. And, if you let Him, God will see you through whatever you may face, all the way to eternity. Amen

God Can See Us Through (from the Cutting Room Floor)

From this preacher's "cutting room," a paragraph that didn't make it into tomorrow's sermon on 2 Corinthians 12:2-10:

One of my favorite incidents in the Bible is that involving Gideon, a simple farmer God called to lead His people, Israel, in war against a people called the Midianites who were harassing Israel. 

Gideon had no experience as a soldier. But God called Gideon anyway. 

Then, God told Gideon to recruit an army. He did, a force of 32,000 meant to go up against Midianites 135,000 experienced fighting men. 

But look at what God tells Gideon to do next in Judges 7. 

In verse 2, God tells Gideon that he has too many soldiers. Gideon needs to demobilize his forces. 

In verse 3, God orders Gideon to say that whoever is afraid of going into battle (who wouldn't be?) should go back where it’s safe, to Mount Gilead. That left 22,000 troops. 

But then God says, that’s still too many to fight the 135,000 Midianites. So, God creates a strange test, detailed in verses 5 and 6, whittling Gideon’s force down to 300 men! 

Look at what God says in verse 7: “By the three hundred...I will save you, and deliver the Midianites into your hand. Let all the other people go, every man to their place.” 

Gideon and the people of Israel learned what Paul learned some 1200 years later, when God didn’t take away his "thorn in the flesh," a suffering that did not go away: Our power is finite and impotent; but God’s grace is always sufficient. God can see us through no matter what the circumstances of our lives!

Hot Kindness Outreach Fun!

Eleven Saint Matthew folks turned out today to give away 200 bottles of water to thirsty drivers and passengers for this week's Kindness Outreach.

Thanks to each one of them!

It was funny: As hot as it is today (we're at 93 degrees as I write this), a higher number of people than usual seemed to refuse the water today. The hot weather can make us all cranky, of course. It apparently can even cause sweaty people to turn down free cold water!

On the other hand, those who took our free gift were more enthusiastic in expressing their thanks than usually seems to be the case!

As I handed the free water to one man, he couldn't believe it. "Are you serious? This is great! Thanks a million!"

One woman, driving alone, told me, "We don't usually don't let water in the car. But I'll make an exception today. Thanks!"

Initially, one man, whose little girl was riding in her seat in the back of their vehicle, refused our offer. But a few moments later, he honked and lowered the front passenger window. "Did you have a change of heart?" I asked. Pointing to his little girl, he said with a smile, "She did." As I handed both of them bottles of water, he said, "Thanks!"

Sheila, a member of our Saint Matthew congregation, reported that one person said that she would just take the card and we could keep the water. Sheila gave the water to her anyway.

Despite the heat, we had fun sharing the love of Jesus Christ through this simple act of service to our neighbors.

We Have Power

A few hours shy of six full days since the power outage began for us, power was restored to our home. At the time, we were with friends in Cincinnati celebrating the Fourth of July. There are still people here in our community and in other places without power and I'm keeping them in my prayers tonight. I'm also saying prayers of thanks for the utility workers who are working 16-hour shifts to restore power to a huge area that, just one week ago, was hit with hurricane-force winds.

Of the southern Ohio communities through which we traveled today, Wellston seemed to have been particularly hard-hit. Utility poles were pulled out by the winds and a portion of the downtown area was closed to traffic.

Keep all those hit by last week's storm in your prayers.

Please also pray for the Ohio farmers and farmers in other states facing this summer's drought.

5 Pointers for Lutherans (and other Christians) Who Want to Share Christ with Others

Yeah, you're a Christian grateful for the new life God gives to you by His grace through your faith in Jesus Christ. And, yep, you know all about that Great Commission thingy, when Jesus deputized all who believe in Christ to tell others about the new life Jesus can give to them.

But sometimes, as a deputy, you feel a lot like Barney Fife. So, what can you do? How can you get on with the job Christ has given to you?

Here five pointers, taken from my sermon of yesterday, for Lutherans and other Christians who want to be faithful witnesses for Christ. Maybe they'll help.

• Maintain intimacy with Christ. Use what we Lutherans call "the means of grace," the routes God takes to fill us with faith, to give you a closer walk with Jesus Christ. These include God's Word, which we need to study, and Holy Communion. They also include prayer, conversation with the Lord. Through each, Christ draws us closer to Himself and fills us with assurance that "nothing in all creation"--not even our halting, imperfect attempts to give witness for the eternity of hope we have as believers in Jesus--can separate us from the love of God, given through Christ.
• Live in daily repentance and renewal. Repentance is changing our minds about our sins and turning to God for the forgiveness He offers through Christ. When we do this, God will renew us, helping us to live more faithfully. Two major things will happen when we live in daily repentance and renewal. First, God helps us to avoid sins that might harm us, harm others, or harm our relationship with God. Second, God helps others see the authenticity of our faith. As the bumper stickers put it, "Christians aren't perfect; just forgiven." When others see that we are admittedly imperfect people who seek each day to orient our lives to the will of God, it will enhance the credibility of our witness for Christ.
• Be intentional about forming friendships with spiritually-disconnected people. Jesus was always reaching out to unbelieving people. Many came to follow Him. God's Holy Spirit can empower us to reach out to the same kinds of people and, as we share our witness for Jesus with them, some of them too, will come to follow Jesus.
• Remember your own story. Real witnessing for Christ doesn't usually come when we share Bible tracts with people, but at the intersection of God's story, our story, and the story of our unbelieving friend. Remember how God has given you the undeserved gift of life with God through faith in Jesus Christ. Remember the sins for which Christ daily gives you forgiveness. Be ready to share the story of your relationship with Christ with others at the opportune moments.
• Be kind. Romans 2:4 says that the kindness of God is given in order to lead us to repentance. God has been kind to us. Although we deserve death and condemnation, He has patiently given us time to become acquainted with His Son, repent for our sins, and believe in Jesus. Be kind, patient, and forbearing toward your disbelieving friends. Give them the time and space to experience God's love so that they too, can come to believe in Christ.

Taking Shelter, Scattering Seeds

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

Mark 4:26-34
In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells two parables or stories about “the kingdom of God.” The kingdom of God exists wherever the Holy Spirit empowers a person to believe in Jesus Christ as the only way to life with God and so, repents of sin and surrenders their whole life to Christ.

But we live in a fallen, sinful world. Sin exists within and around us, which is why it’s so important for Christians to confess our sins, ask God’s help to resist the temptation to sin, and put our lives in the hands of Jesus every day.

Yet, given the simple fact that sin so clearly has our world, our nation, and this community by the throat, we may feel reason to question whether the kingdom of God is present or if it hasn't been completely overrun by evil.

In these two parables, Jesus encourages us not to give in to despair!

Yes, disrespect for God’s Name, thievery and murder of all kinds, injustice to the poor, violations of God’s will that human beings have sexual intimacy only with persons of the opposite sex to whom they are married for life, reputation-damaging gossip, materialism, and all sorts of other sins fill our world.

Yet, the kingdom of God is still among us, still growing, and still able to usher into eternity with God anyone who dares to break with the world, repent of sin, and give their lives to Jesus Christ.

Turn to our lesson, Mark 4:26-34, in the pew Bibles.

The first parable Jesus tells in the lesson is found in Mark 4:26-29. Look what Jesus says in the first few verses there: “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he himself does not know how.”

Here, Jesus introduces us to a reckless farmer. He scatters seed. He doesn’t bother with things like watering, hoeing to remove weeds, or laying on manure. He just scatters and goes through his daily routine, sleeping at night, waking in the morning. This man’s job--his only job, apparently--is to scatter the seed and wait and presumably, pray.

Folks, that’s our job as Christians, too. The seed of God’s kingdom in this parable is our word--our witness--about the gospel, the story of how Jesus Christ makes people right with God.

We use that word gospel, the modern rendering of an old English compound word, “God’s spell” or “God’s news,” all the time. But we ought to remind ourselves of what the gospel is.

Look at the passage of Scripture that Martin Luther called “the gospel in a nutshell”: John 3:16. Jesus says: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

All human beings are born in sin and we deserve death, everlasting separation from God, punishment in hell. But God loves us so much that He sent God the Son, Jesus, to take the punishment for sin we deserve. He did that on a cross. There, Jesus died in our places. Then, God the Father raised Jesus up from the dead, so that all who surrender their lives--all their past sins and current temptations, all their present needs, and all their future lives, earthly and eternal--to Jesus, will have forgiveness of sin, the guidance of God’s Holy Spirit, and the everlasting life with God for which human beings were first made.

God graciously offers these free gifts to all who trust in Jesus. This is the gospel and Jesus says that this good news is scattered by one means only: through you and me.

We are the farmers whose one and only job as Christians is to tell others the good news about Jesus. We’re to scatter the seed of God’s kingdom, then leave the growth and cultivation of that seed to God.

That’s a simple mission.

Yet it seems that when we Christians interact with our spiritually-disconnected friends, we find it easier to talk about anything or everything but the gospel.

But have you noticed something?

While we Christians fail to tell others the good news about Jesus and our churches get involved with politics and social issues and social gatherings and focus more on accommodating the world by telling people things like, “It’s OK if you shack up, cause boys will be boys and girls will be girls; it’s OK if you don’t believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and physically rose from the dead because we’ve never known anyone but Him like that either,” while we’re talking about everything but the gospel, the world is embracing all sorts of new evil, walking farther away from God.

In Acts 1:11, the crucified and risen Jesus, just before He ascended into heaven, told the eleven apostles and, through them, told us: “You shall be witnesses of Me.”

If you’re a baptized believer in Jesus Christ, you are one of His witnesses, called to scatter the seed of the Gospel.

The only question is: Will we be faithful or unfaithful witnesses?

We just had a murder trial in Logan. What would have happened if all the witnesses called on sat on the stand and provided no information on the case? The jury would have been unable to make a decision.

If we Christians, who have been called to be witnesses for Christ, fail to tell others about Christ, they are unable to make a judgment about whether to receive the new life in God’s kingdom that Jesus offers. 

The stakes are so high! Heaven and hell for all the people we may interact with in our lives depends on whether we Christians will be faithful witnesses for Christ or not!

Look at what Jesus says in Mark 4:29, at the end of the first parable: “But when the grain ripens, immediately He puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

It’s pretty clear to me that the “He” here is not the farmer who scatters the seed in the first few verses of the parable.

Turn to Joel 3:13. This passage from the Old Testament prophet is what lay behind Jesus’ words here. It says: “Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe. Come, go down; for the winepress is full, the vats overflow--for their wickedness is great.”

Both this passage from Joel and the words of Jesus in Mark 4:29, are about the ultimate judgment that will come to this world. The world will hurtle along from one evil day to the next. Evil will overflow through the life of the world. Those who refuse to repent and believe in Jesus will keep on sinning unrepentantly and never blink an eye.

Then God will wield His sickle. This world will come to an end. Only the seeds that have borne grain--only those who believe in Jesus Christ--will rise again.

This is why you and I must get over ourselves, get over our fears, and ask the Holy Spirit each day to present us with opportunities to scatter the seed of the gospel. We need to ask God to give us time in our conversations with our neighbors, friends, and family members to tell them that surrender to Jesus Christ is the only way to life with God. We need to ask God to help us scatter the seeds of His kingdom each day!

But how do we quiet Lutheran Christians do that? How do we find a way to scatter the seed of the gospel so that others can come to eternal life with God? Here are a few steps you can take toward being a faithful witness for Christ:

• Maintain intimacy with Christ. Use what we Lutherans call "the means of grace," the routes God takes to fill us with faith, to give you a closer walk with Jesus Christ. These include God's Word, which we need to study, and Holy Communion. They also include prayer, conversation with the Lord. Through each, Christ draws us closer to Himself and fills us with assurance that "nothing in all creation"--not even our halting, imperfect attempts to give witness for the eternity of hope we have as believers in Jesus--can separate us from the love of God, given through Christ.
  
• Live in daily repentance and renewal. Repentance is changing our minds about our sins and turning to God for the forgiveness He offers through Christ. When we do this, God will renew us, helping us to live more faithfully. Two major things will happen when we live in daily repentance and renewal. First, God helps us to avoid sins that might harm us, harm others, or harm our relationship with God. Second, God helps others see the authenticity of our faith. As the bumper stickers put it, "Christians aren't perfect; just forgiven." When others see that we are admittedly imperfect people who seek each day to orient our lives to the will of God, it will enhance the credibility of our witness for Christ.
• Be intentional about forming friendships with spiritually-disconnected people. Jesus was always reaching out to unbelieving people. Many came to follow Him. God's Holy Spirit can empower us to reach out to the same kinds of people and, as we share our witness for Jesus with them, some of them too, will come to follow Jesus.
• Remember your own story. Real witnessing for Christ doesn't usually come when we share Bible tracts with people, but at the intersection of God's story, our story, and the story of our unbelieving friend. Remember how God has given you the undeserved gift of life with God through faith in Jesus Christ. Remember the sins for which Christ daily gives you forgiveness. Be ready to share the story of your relationship with Christ with others at the opportune moments.
• Be kind. Romans 2:4 says that the kindness of God is given in order to lead us to repentance. God has been kind to us. Although we deserve death and condemnation, He has patiently given us time to become acquainted with His Son, repent for our sins, and believe in Jesus. Be kind, patient, and forbearing toward your disbelieving friends. Give them the time and space to experience God's love so that they too, can come to believe in Christ.

When the gospel--the kingdom of God--takes hold in a person’s life, it brings indescribable comfort and hope and peace.

In the second parable, Jesus tells us more about the kingdom of God. Look at how He describes it in Mark 4:30-32. He begins with a question: “To what shall we liken the kingdom of God? Or with what parable shall we picture it?”

When hearing Jesus say this, His first listeners probably thought of similar words from the Old Testament. Turn to Isaiah 40:18. Written hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, Isaiah challenges God’s ancient people, Israel, to get a fresh picture of what God is like. He writes: “To whom will you liken God? Or what likeness will you compare to Him?” The similarity between these words and those spoken by Jesus are so similar that we can be certain the words written by the prophet in Isaiah 40 form a backdrop for Jesus' words in our gospel lesson.

After these opening questions, Isaiah warns that you can’t compare God to the carved images that an artist might sculpt or to any picture our imaginations might create. God is greater than anything we can conceive. Then Isaiah writes in verse 24 of the princes and supposedly important people of this world: “Scarcely shall they be planted, scarcely shall they be sown, scarcely shall their stock take root in the earth, when He [when God] will also blow on them, and they will wither, and the whirlwind will take them away like stubble.”  Those who think that they're "all that" and that they don't need God may thrive for a time. But only God can give life to dead people and what will those who think they have no need of God do when they face God on the last day of this broken, dying world?

Now, go back to Mark 4 and look at Jesus second parable, verses 31-32. The kingdom of God, Jesus says, “is like a mustard seed which, when it is sown on the ground, is smaller than all the seeds on the earth; but when it is sown, it grows up and becomes greater than all the herbs, and shoots out large branches, so that the birds of the air may nest under its shade.”

Listen: In a world with so much tragedy and sadness and sin, it can be easy for us to lose sight of the fact that the ultimate fate of all the world still is in the hands of almighty God. The kingdom of God may seem as small and insignificant as a little mustard seed in this great big universe. But those who surrender to Jesus Christ are not alone and this fallen world is not the final destination of those who trust in Christ!

In my first parish one day, I went to visit a woman who was dying of cancer. She had undergone much more pain than she would have otherwise because she had consented to taking experimental treatments at the University of Michigan hospital, allowing doctors to learn more about her particular cancer and its treatment. She was back in the hospital in Defiance, Ohio, barely able to breathe, near death.

“Are you mad at God?” I asked her. Gasping, she drew in the air to say, “I was.” Then, using her thumb to point to the wall behind her, where a cross hung above her bed, she said, “But now I know that He’s always been right here. He won’t let me go.”

She left this life shortly thereafter. But not before she had learned to take shelter in the arms of the God Who has shared our death so that those who trust in Him, even when they die, can share His life for eternity. She trusted in Jesus and so, lived in peace and died with hope.

That woman taught me that all the wealth, power, and even good health that some may enjoy in this world are all destined to be taken from them and in the end, all that will stand for eternity will be the God we know in Jesus Christ--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--and those to whom God gives life through their faith in Jesus.

It may not always be so clear in this world where reality has gotten jumbled by sin and death, but those who have Jesus as their God and king know the truth of words in verses 13-15 of today’s psalm, Psalm 92: “Those who are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God...They shall be fresh and flourishing, to declare that the Lord is upright: [God] is my rock...”

May God be your rock.

May you daily let the seed of His kingdom be planted and grow in you.

May you daily scatter the seed of Christ’s good news so that, believing in Jesus, they may live with God forever.

And may you take shelter in the arms of the God Who never lets go of those who trust in Him.

Amen

When Sin Stands in the Way of Your Closeness to God

In her book, When You Don't Know What to Pray: How to Talk to God About Anything, Linda Evans Shepherd includes a chapter on praying to experience God's presence in our lives. Included there is a list of those things that may prevent us from enjoying closeness with God. Number one on her list is unrepented sin. Shepherd writes:

...it's not like God quits loving us, it's more like we can't hear his music because we're tuned to another station. We need to tune our antenna to God! We need to stop watching the shows we know we shouldn't see. Quit listening to music we know we shouldn't hear. Quit saying those things about our pastor, our family, our spouse, our co-workers, and our neighbors we know we shouldn't say. Stop sleeping with those people to whom we're not married. Block the porn sites. Stop with the drugs and the alcohol.

God hasn't moved. He hasn't left us. However, if we have sin in our lives, we need to clean up our act so we can enjoy his sweet spirit.

If we don't start taking our Christian walk more seriously, we're going to reap disaster in our personal lives, our families, our churches, and our community. Why? Because when we go our own way we'll zoom headlong into trouble. So, if you're doing something you shouldn't, stop it, right now. Put it down or turn it off and walk away.

Good advice! Except that, from my reading of the Bible and my own personal experience, I would put it slightly differently: Run away!

Shepherd lists several other reasons we may not be enjoying God's presence:

• Lack of invitation
• Unanswered prayer
• Grief
• No understanding of the depths of God's love

Just before He ascended to heaven, the resurrected Jesus promised believers, "I am with you always." The great thing about the promises of Jesus, God enfleshed, is that they're valid and real even when we don't feel them. Neither God nor our faith are captive to our feelings. So, even when we don't feel God's presence with us, He's still there!

What Leadership Is

John Schroeder cites this from Jonathon Leeman:

Leadership is not about running after all your dreams and ambitions, it’s often about getting on your hands and knees and making your life a stage on which those you love can pursue their ambitions, hopes, and ministries. It’s about building up as much as it’s about moving up. It’s about equipping and enabling and empowering.

John then quotes Philippians 2:5-8, worth quoting again here:

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.  

That, is leadership, and why there are very few true leaders in the world at any given time and why most people have never heard of them.

Clash of Households

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

Mark 3:20-35
The words of Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson are as likely to offend us as they did the first people to hear them in first-century Judea. In a few short verses, Jesus turns His back on His family from Nazareth and on the scribes, who stand as representatives of God’s people, Israel. He says that His ultimate loyalty in life does not go to His family, nor His country.

Please pull out a Bible and turn to Mark 13:34-35, the last verses of our lesson. We’re told: “And He [Jesus] looked around in a circle at those who sat about Him and said, ‘Here are My mother and My brothers! For whoever does the will of God is My brother and My sister and mother.’”

We’re going to dig more deeply into this passage in a moment. But first, we need to understand the context in which Jesus says these words. What was going on before the set of personal encounters in which Jesus said these things?

In Mark 3:13-19, Jesus, we’re told, went up on a mountain and called twelve people to be His apostles. Jesus was going to train these men for the time after His death, resurrection, and ascension. At that time, they would be sent to spread the good news of new life for all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus as God and Savior. Ancient Israel, God’s people, you remember, were founded on the twelve sons of Jacob, who became the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. In Jesus, God is now extending the offer of new and everlasting life with God to all people--Jews and Gentiles--who believe in Jesus Christ. The apostles are to be the founding fathers of a new community of faith, the Church, a new creation, that lasts for all eternity.

After Jesus calls the apostles, Mark 3:19 tells us that Jesus and His new founding family of faith, go into a house. Some translations say "His house,” which would make sense because we know that by this point in His life, Jesus had left Nazareth and was living in a house at Capernaum, on shores of the Sea of Galilee. But this seemingly insignificant word, house, is really important for what comes in our gospel lesson. In it, the confrontation between the house of Jesus and the house of Satan comes into full view, as does a shocking revelation of who lives in those two places.

Verse 20, the first verse of our Gospel lesson, says that a huge group of people crowded around Jesus’ house. People had been crowding around Jesus from the moment that He began His public ministry, telling people: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” By this point though, Jesus' family is starting to freak out. Look at verse 20: “...when His own people [that is, Jesus’ family from Nazareth] heard about this, they went out to lay hold of [Jesus], for they said, ‘He is out of His mind.’”

No, you’re not misreading this passage. Jesus’ own family turned against Him, including we’ll see, His mother, Mary.

They want to try to get Jesus out of the house, away from the apostles and the crowd, and presumably back to Nazareth.

The passage says that they wanted to “lay hold of Him,” a phrase that translates the word, kratese, from the Greek in which Mark originally wrote his gospel; it means arrest and it’s the same word that Mark used of the arrest of both John the Baptist and Jesus Himself.  Jesus’ family want to stop Him from continuing His ministry. They say that Jesus is “out of His mind,” literally “beside Himself.” In those days, mental illness, being out of one’s mind, was equated with being possessed by a demon! This is what Jesus' mother and brothers think of Jesus!

Why would they think that? Probably because, as Pastor Meda Stamper writes, Jesus was violating the family “script.”

In first century Judea, loyalty to family was equated with loyalty to God and country and there were certain things family members were expected to do. For example, the oldest son was expected to inherit the lion’s share of his father’s estate,  take his widowed mother into his home, and continue the family business and way of life.

But Jesus had violated all those expectations. He’d left Nazareth, forsaking the family business and while we know that He would later provide for the care of His mother, Mary, by entrusting her to His friend, John, He didn’t have Mary living with Him in Capernaum.

Maybe when Mary had so faithfully accepted that her firstborn was going to be the Messiah, she hadn’t thought it would entail His dropping everything, leaving His family behind, and being so radically committed to doing His Father’s will.

In any case, one can easily imagine the conversations of Mary and the rest of Jesus’ family: “Jesus has gone out of His mind, mother." "We have to get him away from all those people.”

Sometimes, our families are the people who will work the hardest to keep us from Jesus Christ.

A pastor in New York City reports that one of the biggest obstacles his congregation faces in reaching out to young people involved in selling drugs is the pressure they get from their parents. You see, selling drugs can bring a lot of money into a household. When a young person involved in that trade finds himself wanting to know more about Jesus Christ, wanting to hear how through Christ, God can forgive their sins and give them new lives, their parents become concerned about losing all that income. So, the parents will tell them things like, “Stay away from those Christians. Why do you want to become a religious fanatic? Why do you want to turn your back on your family?”

I remember the reaction of some of my extended family members after I had come to faith in Christ and made it clear that, on Christmas Eve, Ann and I would be arriving for the family gift exchange after we had worshiped at the Christmas Eve service. You’d have thought I had just told them I was planning to rob a bank. Why, one of them wondered, would you want to disrupt the family’s Christmas celebrations by going to celebrate Christ’s birth with Christ’s family, the Church? This was the kind of opposition to His faithfulness to God the Father Jesus faced from His own family.

But they weren’t the only ones against Jesus’ pursuit of the will of His Father.

In verse 22, the scribes, guardians of Jewish religious faith, come after Jesus, too. Look, they say of Him, “He has Beelzebub [another name for Satan]” and “By the ruler of the demons He casts out demons.” Satan, the scribes claim, possesses Jesus and it’s through the power of Satan that Jesus is able to cast out demons.

Look at verse 23 to see how Jesus responds to their accusations. “How,” Jesus asks, “can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, the kingdom cannot stand.” In other words, if Satan is setting out to destroy his own kingdom--the household of Satan--by giving Jesus the power to cast out demons, Satan’s house wouldn’t stand for long.

Jesus cuts their argument to pieces--clearly demonstrating that He isn’t out of His mind or filled with a demon. I love the way Eugene Peterson renders verse 26 in The Message. There, Jesus says: “If Satan were fighting Satan, there soon wouldn't be any Satan left.” So, Jesus is saying, whether I am sent by God or by Satan, the jig is up for Satan. His kingdom--His household--is being destroyed.

But in reality, Jesus says in verse 27, something else is happening: Someone stronger than Satan, God Himself, is entering the house of Satan and stealing away those who have been kidnapped by Him through sin and death and giving new and everlasting life to Jesus, the stronger one.

What Jesus says next is critically important. Neither His family nor the scribes believed in Jesus for one simple reason: They refused to heed the witness of the Holy Spirit and the simple evidence before them.

Jesus was doing all that the Old Testament prophets had revealed hundreds of years before that the Messiah, God’s anointed King, would do. But instead of believing the witness of God’s Holy Spirit about Who Jesus was, Jesus’ family and the scribes accused Jesus of having a demon.

So, Jesus says, beginning in verse 28: “Assuredly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven...and whatever blasphemies they utter [blasphemy is showing contempt for or insulting God] they may utter; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal damnation.”

The New Testament teaches that the Holy Spirit has two major functions. He convicts of sin, showing us that we deserve separation from God, and He convinces us of God’s grace, God’s charitable love and forgiveness, offered to all with faith in Christ.

The Spirit teaches that through Jesus and our faith in Him, we leave the household of Satan, where people live in bondage to sin and cannot free themselves, and enter the household of God.

When people willfully refuse to heed what the Holy Spirit teaches about Jesus, they erect a wall between God and them. The free gift of new life offered by Jesus can penetrate any heart and make any person new. But not if they refuse to believe the witness of the Holy Spirit about Jesus, the Son of God.

In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis points out that there are three ways we can view Jesus.

We can say that Jesus is a lunatic, which is what Jesus’ family said of Him. Jesus claims that He and God the Father are one, an assertion which, as Lewis says, a bit like a man claiming to be a poached egg. Yet, all you have to do is consider the coherence of arguments like the ones Jesus offers in our gospel lesson and know that Jesus was not crazy.

We can say that Jesus is a liar, which is what the scribes said, claiming that Jesus was really an agent of Satan. But the miracles He never performed in His own interest, but for the well being of others, and His resurrection from the dead are strong indicators that when He claimed to be God and Savior of the world, Jesus was telling the truth.

The evidence then, indicates that Jesus was neither lunatic nor liar. So, Lewis says, if Jesus is neither of these things, He must be precisely Who He claimed to be: the Lord God in human flesh, “the way, and the truth, and the life,” the only way to everlasting life with God!

Turn for a moment, if you would, to John 6:29.  Jesus says: “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him Whom He [the Father] sent.” We become part of the only family that will outlast this fallen, dying world, the household of Jesus Christ, by believing in, staking our whole lives on, Jesus and no one and nothing else. This is the will of God for every human being.

And if you believe in Jesus, His words in Mark 3:35 should give you comfort and power every day you live. Read them with me now: “For whoever does the will of God is My brother and My sister and mother.”

Many things in this world can work to drive a wedge between Jesus and us: Our families, friends, careers, and country, to name just a few. But none of those things can bring us life with God, peace with God, or the hope of eternity. Only life with Jesus can bring us these things and much more. When the world--even the people closest to us who we love the most--tries to put anything ahead of Jesus and the will of God that we believe in Him, we must learn from Jesus and resist that pressure. When we do that, Jesus says, He will keep a promise to us, a promise sealed by His death and resurrection: "The one who endures to the end [keeps believing in Christ] will be saved."

When you and I believe in Jesus, we are the brothers, sisters, and mothers of Jesus, members of the family of Jesus. And when we remain as steadfast members of Jesus' household, by the power of the Holy Spirit, resisting the world's attempts (and the devil's attempts) to tear us from the hands of Christ, we have life with God today and forever. That’s good news!

But don’t keep it to yourself: Tell others about the new and everlasting creation of which they can be a part when they believe in Jesus. Invite them to become part of God’s eternal family too. Amen

Kindness Should Be the Christian's MO

My wife and I ate at a place called Jimmy's Pizza in Litchfield, Minnesota the other day. One server was working the dining room, taking incoming phone calls for delivery orders, and checking customers out at the register. The place wasn't packed, but it was a Friday and, judging by the numbers of times new phone calls came in, business was steady.

Our server was amazing, though! She kept up with everything and did so with a smile, an occasional kind comment, and efficiency.

Toward the end of our visit, after we'd told her that we would take our check any time she could get to it, I said to her, "It would be great to bottle up your energy and good attitude and sell them!" She smiled, then moved to clear away the dishes of a party that had just left. With what seemed like a single motion, she put the dishes in one hand, swept the tip from the table, and wiped the table clean.

But then, she whirled around, fixed me with a smile, and said, "Just for the record, that may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me!"

It's amazing the impact a simple expression of kindness and appreciation can have on people!

My friend Steve Sjogren likes to riff off an observation once made by Mother Teresa. Steve says, "Small things done with great love will change the world."

The Bible says that it's the kindness of God that leads people to repentance. (Repentance is changing our minds about God, His Son Jesus Christ, our sins and exchanging our selfish views for God's views about what's right and wrong, useful and useless.)

When people repent, they're open to trusting in Christ, the one Who came into the world to bring new, everlasting life to those who dare to trust in Him.

Jesus says, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life" (John 3:16). 

God has been incredibly kind to me, granting me forgiveness and new life I don't deserve. He's also commissioned me and every person who believes in Him to help others believe in Him. That's why there may be no more important things for Christians, as ambassadors for Christ, representatives of the One revealed to be God in the flesh, to do than to be kind to others.

UPDATE (6/7/2012): See here.

Overhearing Office Chatter Decreases Productivity

I've never been able to write, read, research, pray, or engage in any concentration-intense activity when a TV is on or when there's loud conversation happening close to me. And precisely because I love music so much, the only kind of music I can have playing around me when I'm working on a sermon, for example, is instrumental stuff, like classical or jazz, that doesn't engage me emotionally or mentally. Were I to play any of my favorite artists' music, all of whom sing, or listen to NPR, while trying to be productive, I could forget about getting anything useful done.

Maybe I'm easily distracted. But today's Harvard Business Review's Daily Stat indicates that at least one form of distraction, one that I would find hard to deal with if I worked in an office with others, can decrease productivity.

JUNE 4, 2012 Coworkers' Conversations Impair Your Performance Overhearing your office mates' conversations can cause a decline of 5% to 10% in your ability to read, write, and carry out other tasks requiring efficient use of short-term memory, according to a New York Times report of a study by Finland's Institute of Occupational Health. The researchers found that in an office environment, speech is the most disturbing type of sound because it is processed by working memory. Employees perform better when speech is masked by the sound of a babbling brook. Source: From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz

Silence is More Than Golden

"Discretion of speech is better than eloquence with words." Today's post from Our Daily Bread is particularly powerful.

One of the toughest passages of Scripture to live is (at least it is for me): "And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the Name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him" (Colossians 3:17).

Silence may be more than golden; it may be the very word God wants us to speak.

Father, give the Holy Spirit total access to my mind, body, and tongue, so that everything I do, say, and am glorifies You and expresses my thanks for the gift of new life that comes from Jesus Christ alone. Amen

Taking the Costly Road

"...following Jesus is costly. The costs of not following, however, are eternal." (Craig S. Keener)

Putting Christ first in our lives may cost us misunderstandings with friends and the loss of relationships with them over those misunderstandings.

Putting Christ first may mean loss of social acceptability, the loss of jobs or income.

It may, sometimes, even cost us our earthly lives, as many Christians over the past one-hundred years or so have found. (More Christians were martyred for their faith in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen centuries combined.)

But, by the grace of God given in Christ, may we learn to say with the apostle Paul: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18).