Church isn't a place for the perfect, but a fellowship for recovering sinners.
After I posted that on Facebook earlier today, a high school classmate wrote to ask, "Mark do we ever really 'recover' from sinfulness?"
If by "recover," it was meant to "get over," the answer is no. Just as with any addiction, we never fully get over the common human condition of sin this side of the grave. We depend on God's grace and the power of the Holy Spirit to help us resist temptation and to enable us do better when we "fall off the... wagon" and any sin, from taking God's Name in vain to engaging in sexual intimacy outside of marriage, from gossip to thievery.
Just as an alcoholic who has given up drink is still only a recovering alcoholic no matter how many years it's been since their last drink, Christians are nothing more than recovering sinners.
But, thank God for the process of recovery--what the Biblical theology calls "sanctification"--that happens for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ.
That's why Christians, mindful that we are sinners saved only by the grace of God given through Jesus Christ, should never look down their noses on unrepentant sinners. Instead, we should befriend them, tell them God's truth in love, pray for them, and ask them, one sinner to another, to "come and see" what it's like to be set free from sin's power, to live today as recovering sinners, and to look to an eternal future when we will live the sinless lives for which God first made us.
The Church exists as the fellowship within which we hear God's Word and receive the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, confess our sins, receive forgiveness through Christ, and learn together to follow Jesus in our everyday lives. While Christians boldly confess, as Jesus Himself has taught, that Jesus is the only way to a relationship with God, arrogance is inconsistent with being a Christian. As Paul puts it in the New Testament: "If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness...", that is, my complete dependence on Jesus Christ.
So, if you're looking for a church home, find one where neither pastor nor people think they're "all that," but who freely acknowledge their imperfections. It's in the fellowship of other "recovering sinners" that you can really experience what it is to be set free from the power of sin.
Church isn't a place for the perfect, but a fellowship for recovering sinners. Want to be a part of that?
[If you live in or near Logan or Hocking County, Ohio, you're invited to "come and see" how Jesus is living in our congregation, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church. Sunday School for all ages--and we have a great adult Sunday School class--meets at 9:15AM each Sunday. Worship happens at 10:15AM. If you currently have no church home, we would love to welcome you!]
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Audio of Wednesday Morning's 'Read the Bible in a Year' Discussion
At Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, we're reading the Bible together in a year. This is the Wednesday discussion of this week's readings, Luke 19 through John 15.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
How Can I Pray When I Don't Feel Like Praying?
"How can I discipline myself to pray even when I don't 'feel' like praying?"
This is what a man asked me recently.
It's a good question. Here's something that works for me, which, like all my good ideas, I stole from someone much wiser than myself. This idea comes from Bill Hybels, senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois. He writes about it in his book, Too Busy Not to Pray.
Hybels' approach is built off of the ACTS pattern for prayer. ACTS is an acronym, the letters of which stand for adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication.
But Hybels takes ACTS-praying one step further. He suggests that, at least for a period of time, we write out our prayers (whether on the computer or in long hand is up to you, I suppose), in the ACTS format.
So, instead of jumping into your prayer requests (supplications), you first write out words praising God for His greatness, grace, rectitude, and power.
Second, you humbly confess our sins to God. This is a good time to put your life under the microscope of the Ten Commandments, which aren't an archaic list of "thou shalt nots," but expressive of God's plan for the optimal human life. (If you're not sure about the contents of the Ten Commandments, here is a good place to go for them. This list is taken from Martin Luther's Small Catechism, which also gives brief explanations of each commandment.)
The Bible says this about confession:
Fourth, Hybels says, write out your prayer requests (supplications).
Offer all these requests in Jesus' Name. To ask for anything in Jesus' Name means that you:
I use this method several days a week and find it beneficial, especially when, periodically, as Hybels suggests, I go back to read the previous prayers and see how God is working in my life.
You can take this approach to your prayers at any time of day that works best for you. But if you really want to pray, I think that what I call ACTS journaling is one good tool to help you stick to regular prayer.
The benefit of committing to this approach is that it disciplines us to STOP. AND. TAKE. THE. TIME. for the most important relationship in our lives and the most important conversation we can have any day.
This is what a man asked me recently.
It's a good question. Here's something that works for me, which, like all my good ideas, I stole from someone much wiser than myself. This idea comes from Bill Hybels, senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois. He writes about it in his book, Too Busy Not to Pray.
Hybels' approach is built off of the ACTS pattern for prayer. ACTS is an acronym, the letters of which stand for adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication.
But Hybels takes ACTS-praying one step further. He suggests that, at least for a period of time, we write out our prayers (whether on the computer or in long hand is up to you, I suppose), in the ACTS format.
So, instead of jumping into your prayer requests (supplications), you first write out words praising God for His greatness, grace, rectitude, and power.
Second, you humbly confess our sins to God. This is a good time to put your life under the microscope of the Ten Commandments, which aren't an archaic list of "thou shalt nots," but expressive of God's plan for the optimal human life. (If you're not sure about the contents of the Ten Commandments, here is a good place to go for them. This list is taken from Martin Luther's Small Catechism, which also gives brief explanations of each commandment.)
The Bible says this about confession:
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:8-10)Third, you write out our words of thanksgiving for all of God's blessings to you, from the death and resurrection of God's only Son, Jesus, to the everyday blessings all of us can take for granted.
Fourth, Hybels says, write out your prayer requests (supplications).
Offer all these requests in Jesus' Name. To ask for anything in Jesus' Name means that you:
- acknowledge that it's only through Jesus that you dare approach God;
- are willing to receive from God--whether it's greater than you can ask or imagine or less than you want--what is consistent with God's character and will as revealed in Jesus; and
- submit to the will of God, as Jesus did when He faced execution on the cross.
I use this method several days a week and find it beneficial, especially when, periodically, as Hybels suggests, I go back to read the previous prayers and see how God is working in my life.
You can take this approach to your prayers at any time of day that works best for you. But if you really want to pray, I think that what I call ACTS journaling is one good tool to help you stick to regular prayer.
The benefit of committing to this approach is that it disciplines us to STOP. AND. TAKE. THE. TIME. for the most important relationship in our lives and the most important conversation we can have any day.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Can Revival Happen Here and Now? Yes!
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
Mark 1:4-11
In his best-selling book, Whatever Became of Sin?, psychiatrist Karl Menninger tells the true story of a man, stern-faced and unremarkably dressed, who stood on a busy sidewalk in Chicago.
As people hurried along, he pointed to a person he singled out, and shout, "Guilty!" Then without changing expression, he resumed his stance for a few more moments until he directed the same gesture and word at someone else: "Guilty!"
You can almost imagine the effect this strange display had on the passersby. They stared at him, hesitated, looked away, looked at each other, and then hurried on their ways. One man who had received this stranger’s verdict turned to another and asked, "But how did he know?"
Was the stern man who indicted passersby crazy or was he on a mission from God?
Whether he was nuts or not, one thing is true: His verdict was correct. The Bible says that, “there is no one who is righteous, not even one.” We are all guilty of sin. And the Bible teaches that the proper wages for sin is death, separation from God. Crazy or not, the streetside prophet was onto something.
We live in a time, though, when the notion of sin or judgment by God is out of fashion. Actually, this attitude is nothing new. Four hundred years before the birth of Jesus, the prophet Malachi said that God’s own people were wearying God by telling each other, "’God loves sinners and sin alike. God loves all.’ And also by saying, ‘Judgment? God's too nice to judge.’" I hear people say stuff like that all the time.
Look, folks, God makes it clear in His Word: Just because God loves us does not mean that He winks indulgently at our sins. God will not force us into His eternal kingdom if we choose to spend our time in this life walking away from God’s will. In the suffering and cross of Jesus, God has spared no effort to reach out to us, to save us from our sins, and, as Jesus Himself puts it, “to seek and save” those who are lost in their sin. But God will not veto the choices that human beings make when they walk their own way and not God’s way.
We don’t like to be told that we’re guilty of sin. That’s what made the ministry of John the Baptist so remarkable. John told people that they were guilty. Yet despite his unpalatable message, thousands of people apparently thronged to him and confessed that they were sinners in need of the grace of God. Verse 5 of our Gospel lesson from Mark says, “People from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him, confessing their sins.”
Why did that happen? Why did thousands go to repent and be washed in the Jordan River?
Because the power of God was at work in a person who himself was cleansed through repentance and faith in God. People went to hear John the Baptist's call to repentance and faith not because of John the Baptist, but because they saw God working within this strange man.
Is it possible in the sin-hardened times in which you and I live where sin is so accepted that people might, like they did when John preached on the Jordan, turn to repent for sin and humbly trust in God?
Will people admit their greed and materialism, sexual immorality and selfishness, racism and sexism, gossiping and other forms of violence that characterize these times, then give them up, and seek God’s power to help them walk with God?
I believe that the answer is, “Yes!”
In 1989, Pastor Tim Keller, went to midtown Manhattan in New York City to start a new church. Midtown Manhattan is one of the most interesting and exciting places in the world. I love it! But it’s also a place where the most flagrant disregard for God’s will is on open display, where sin is commended and sinners are seen as heroes. Manhattan is home to some of the most important churches in American history and many of them are dead or dying.
But Redeemer Presbyterian Church, the congregation Keller founded, has grown and is thriving. People who visit there are surprised, Keller says, that the church doesn’t have contemporary praise bands or glitzy video presentations.
Nor is the congregation’s theology tilted toward winning over the multicultural free-spirits of New York City: Keller and the Church teach that all human beings are sinners who need the forgiveness and new life that come to those who repent for sin and believe in Jesus Christ. They teach that Jesus is the one and only way to a relationship with God, that sinners who refuse to repent or believe in Christ will go to hell, that sexual intimacy is meant only for a man and a woman in the covenant of marriage.
Despite holding up the teachings of Jesus and the Bible and running directly against all the politically correct preferences of American culture—in Logan as much as in New York City, Redeemer has grown and welcomes thousands of people to worship each week. Why?
Quite simply, Keller and the people of Redeemer, with humility about their own failings, tell the truth about sin, repentance, and the grace of Christ.
People went to see John the Baptist back in first century Judea because he told the truth about the human condition and their need of God. Through this same truth-telling, Redeemer Presbyterian Church is making disciples for Jesus Christ in what some would consider an inhospitable place.
The same thing needs to happen here in Logan!
But if we want people in Logan to experience the miracle of a life made new by Christ, it must start with Christ’s Church, with you and me.*
In 1947, a group of five men in the Hebrides Islands off the coast of Scotland began to pray together in a barn. They were heartsick over the spiritual state of their community and country. People were far from God, lost in sin. “God,” they cried out, “do something for our islands.” They prayed together nightly.
Every time they prayed, they also read a passage of Scripture. After two years of prayer, nothing had changed in their village, let alone their country. But one night in 1949, they gathered once more to pray, beginning by opening their Bibles, this time reading these words from Psalm 24: “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in His holy place? Those who have clean hands and pure hearts…”
Suddenly, God hit these men with a hard, heavenly truth: They had been praying for two years that their islands would turn from sin and turn to Christ, but their own hands were unclean, their own hearts were impure!
They needed to clear away the mark of sin on their own lives and put their sins and their lives under the blood of Jesus Christ! Then, with lives made clean by the grace of Jesus, their prayers for revival--new life--might be heard.
They began to confess their sins to one another. Then they prayed. When they finished, it was 1:30 in the morning. They headed for their homes.
As they walked together, they topped a hill and saw two town drunks, stumbling and mumbling on their knees in a ditch. But as they got closer, they saw that the two men were sober, praying, and asking God to forgive them for their sins.
Then they looked up to see that all over the village, lights had come on in the middle of the night. Dozens of families, aware suddenly of how far they were from God, had gotten out of their beds to pray for forgiveness.
The next morning, people throughout the village met one another and they knew that something had changed. The pall of unrepented sin and selfish living had been lifted. They were walking in the lightness and freedom that belongs to all repentant believers in Jesus.
After that, the people of the village invited Duncan Campbell, an English evangelist, to preach in their homeland. He came and preached and on the strength of the repentant prayers of hundreds, then thousands, of Scots, a great revival of faith happened. The Hebrides Revival, as history now calls it, lasted for three years. Thousands came to faith in Christ.
The same kind of thing can happen here in Logan! God is just as anxious to call people to repentance and faith and new life in Jesus today in Hocking County as He was when He called John the Baptist to preach by the Jordan River, just as anxious as He was when He died on a cross and rose from the dead for us.
But our neighbors and friends not presently walking with Jesus will never know that they need to repent for sin and they’ll never know that their sins can be forgiven through Jesus Christ if all we Christians ever do is engage in our favorite indoor sport. Do you know what that is? It's bellyaching about the awful mess the world is in.
The world is in an awful mess and it has been since Adam and Eve bit into the forbidden fruit.
It was to eternally free us from the mess we’re in that Jesus came into our mess in order to die and rise for us.
So, get over the world being a mess and instead, resolve today not to be a bellyacher, but a knee-bender, a prayer warrior!
Be someone who prays, “God, clean my hands and my heart so that my prayers will be acceptable to you, so that, covered by the grace and forgiveness of Jesus, I can pray for those whose lives are in messes because they don’t have you to guide them through the good and the bad times. Make me clean so that my personal witness for Christ has credibility and the power to convince others to follow Jesus, too!”
This year, I believe that we at Saint Matthew need to commit ourselves to prayer in Jesus’ Name as we never have before. God is doing so much among us and through us and there is still so much more that God wants to do.
We must not be complacent, either about our own need for Christ or the needs of others for Christ. We must pray!
Are you ready for the kingdom of God to break out in the Hocking Hills and see the devil hamstrung?
Are you ready to see hundreds repent and trust in Jesus Christ?
The path to that vision is clear, though it will demand much of us. We must
God has plans for us! But they will not come to pass unless you and I live completely and totally for the One Who died and rose for us. If you’re ready for this, you may be in for the best time of your whole life. Jesus, please make it so. Amen!
Mark 1:4-11
In his best-selling book, Whatever Became of Sin?, psychiatrist Karl Menninger tells the true story of a man, stern-faced and unremarkably dressed, who stood on a busy sidewalk in Chicago.
As people hurried along, he pointed to a person he singled out, and shout, "Guilty!" Then without changing expression, he resumed his stance for a few more moments until he directed the same gesture and word at someone else: "Guilty!"
You can almost imagine the effect this strange display had on the passersby. They stared at him, hesitated, looked away, looked at each other, and then hurried on their ways. One man who had received this stranger’s verdict turned to another and asked, "But how did he know?"
Was the stern man who indicted passersby crazy or was he on a mission from God?
Whether he was nuts or not, one thing is true: His verdict was correct. The Bible says that, “there is no one who is righteous, not even one.” We are all guilty of sin. And the Bible teaches that the proper wages for sin is death, separation from God. Crazy or not, the streetside prophet was onto something.
We live in a time, though, when the notion of sin or judgment by God is out of fashion. Actually, this attitude is nothing new. Four hundred years before the birth of Jesus, the prophet Malachi said that God’s own people were wearying God by telling each other, "’God loves sinners and sin alike. God loves all.’ And also by saying, ‘Judgment? God's too nice to judge.’" I hear people say stuff like that all the time.
Look, folks, God makes it clear in His Word: Just because God loves us does not mean that He winks indulgently at our sins. God will not force us into His eternal kingdom if we choose to spend our time in this life walking away from God’s will. In the suffering and cross of Jesus, God has spared no effort to reach out to us, to save us from our sins, and, as Jesus Himself puts it, “to seek and save” those who are lost in their sin. But God will not veto the choices that human beings make when they walk their own way and not God’s way.
We don’t like to be told that we’re guilty of sin. That’s what made the ministry of John the Baptist so remarkable. John told people that they were guilty. Yet despite his unpalatable message, thousands of people apparently thronged to him and confessed that they were sinners in need of the grace of God. Verse 5 of our Gospel lesson from Mark says, “People from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him, confessing their sins.”
Why did that happen? Why did thousands go to repent and be washed in the Jordan River?
Because the power of God was at work in a person who himself was cleansed through repentance and faith in God. People went to hear John the Baptist's call to repentance and faith not because of John the Baptist, but because they saw God working within this strange man.
Is it possible in the sin-hardened times in which you and I live where sin is so accepted that people might, like they did when John preached on the Jordan, turn to repent for sin and humbly trust in God?
Will people admit their greed and materialism, sexual immorality and selfishness, racism and sexism, gossiping and other forms of violence that characterize these times, then give them up, and seek God’s power to help them walk with God?
I believe that the answer is, “Yes!”
In 1989, Pastor Tim Keller, went to midtown Manhattan in New York City to start a new church. Midtown Manhattan is one of the most interesting and exciting places in the world. I love it! But it’s also a place where the most flagrant disregard for God’s will is on open display, where sin is commended and sinners are seen as heroes. Manhattan is home to some of the most important churches in American history and many of them are dead or dying.
But Redeemer Presbyterian Church, the congregation Keller founded, has grown and is thriving. People who visit there are surprised, Keller says, that the church doesn’t have contemporary praise bands or glitzy video presentations.
Nor is the congregation’s theology tilted toward winning over the multicultural free-spirits of New York City: Keller and the Church teach that all human beings are sinners who need the forgiveness and new life that come to those who repent for sin and believe in Jesus Christ. They teach that Jesus is the one and only way to a relationship with God, that sinners who refuse to repent or believe in Christ will go to hell, that sexual intimacy is meant only for a man and a woman in the covenant of marriage.
Despite holding up the teachings of Jesus and the Bible and running directly against all the politically correct preferences of American culture—in Logan as much as in New York City, Redeemer has grown and welcomes thousands of people to worship each week. Why?
Quite simply, Keller and the people of Redeemer, with humility about their own failings, tell the truth about sin, repentance, and the grace of Christ.
People went to see John the Baptist back in first century Judea because he told the truth about the human condition and their need of God. Through this same truth-telling, Redeemer Presbyterian Church is making disciples for Jesus Christ in what some would consider an inhospitable place.
The same thing needs to happen here in Logan!
But if we want people in Logan to experience the miracle of a life made new by Christ, it must start with Christ’s Church, with you and me.*
In 1947, a group of five men in the Hebrides Islands off the coast of Scotland began to pray together in a barn. They were heartsick over the spiritual state of their community and country. People were far from God, lost in sin. “God,” they cried out, “do something for our islands.” They prayed together nightly.
Every time they prayed, they also read a passage of Scripture. After two years of prayer, nothing had changed in their village, let alone their country. But one night in 1949, they gathered once more to pray, beginning by opening their Bibles, this time reading these words from Psalm 24: “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in His holy place? Those who have clean hands and pure hearts…”
Suddenly, God hit these men with a hard, heavenly truth: They had been praying for two years that their islands would turn from sin and turn to Christ, but their own hands were unclean, their own hearts were impure!
They needed to clear away the mark of sin on their own lives and put their sins and their lives under the blood of Jesus Christ! Then, with lives made clean by the grace of Jesus, their prayers for revival--new life--might be heard.
They began to confess their sins to one another. Then they prayed. When they finished, it was 1:30 in the morning. They headed for their homes.
As they walked together, they topped a hill and saw two town drunks, stumbling and mumbling on their knees in a ditch. But as they got closer, they saw that the two men were sober, praying, and asking God to forgive them for their sins.
Then they looked up to see that all over the village, lights had come on in the middle of the night. Dozens of families, aware suddenly of how far they were from God, had gotten out of their beds to pray for forgiveness.
The next morning, people throughout the village met one another and they knew that something had changed. The pall of unrepented sin and selfish living had been lifted. They were walking in the lightness and freedom that belongs to all repentant believers in Jesus.
After that, the people of the village invited Duncan Campbell, an English evangelist, to preach in their homeland. He came and preached and on the strength of the repentant prayers of hundreds, then thousands, of Scots, a great revival of faith happened. The Hebrides Revival, as history now calls it, lasted for three years. Thousands came to faith in Christ.
The same kind of thing can happen here in Logan! God is just as anxious to call people to repentance and faith and new life in Jesus today in Hocking County as He was when He called John the Baptist to preach by the Jordan River, just as anxious as He was when He died on a cross and rose from the dead for us.
But our neighbors and friends not presently walking with Jesus will never know that they need to repent for sin and they’ll never know that their sins can be forgiven through Jesus Christ if all we Christians ever do is engage in our favorite indoor sport. Do you know what that is? It's bellyaching about the awful mess the world is in.
The world is in an awful mess and it has been since Adam and Eve bit into the forbidden fruit.
It was to eternally free us from the mess we’re in that Jesus came into our mess in order to die and rise for us.
So, get over the world being a mess and instead, resolve today not to be a bellyacher, but a knee-bender, a prayer warrior!
Be someone who prays, “God, clean my hands and my heart so that my prayers will be acceptable to you, so that, covered by the grace and forgiveness of Jesus, I can pray for those whose lives are in messes because they don’t have you to guide them through the good and the bad times. Make me clean so that my personal witness for Christ has credibility and the power to convince others to follow Jesus, too!”
This year, I believe that we at Saint Matthew need to commit ourselves to prayer in Jesus’ Name as we never have before. God is doing so much among us and through us and there is still so much more that God wants to do.
We must not be complacent, either about our own need for Christ or the needs of others for Christ. We must pray!
Are you ready for the kingdom of God to break out in the Hocking Hills and see the devil hamstrung?
Are you ready to see hundreds repent and trust in Jesus Christ?
The path to that vision is clear, though it will demand much of us. We must
- daily confess our sins;
- ask for the power of the Holy Spirit to live as faithful witnesses for Christ;
- pray that Jesus will be the undisputed Lord of Saint Matthew and of our community;
- and when we pray that God’s will be done in our lives, we must also volunteer to do whatever God wants to do through us.
God has plans for us! But they will not come to pass unless you and I live completely and totally for the One Who died and rose for us. If you’re ready for this, you may be in for the best time of your whole life. Jesus, please make it so. Amen!
*Of course, it starts with God, Who claims us in Baptism and incites us to repentance and prayer. But, as Jesus shows in the Great Commission, God brings spiritual renewal and revival through the people of His Church (Matthew 28:19-20).
Friday, January 06, 2012
A Mindful Life
Jesus said: "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have strength...to stand before the Son of Man" (Luke 21:34-36).
Jesus says that we're to live "mindful lives." Grateful for the free gifts of forgiveness and new life that belong to all who turn from sin and give their lives to Him, we're to be mindful of ways in which we can fulfill what Jesus calls the greatest commandment: to love God completely and to love others as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40).
Mindfulness of others--of God and of other people--doesn't come naturally to us. The Bible says that from imperfect parents and imperfect ancestors, we inherit an inborn impulse to think of ourselves first (Psalm 51:5).
But self-absorbed living, Jesus says, is a trap. It prevents us from having the life only the Creator of life can give. And it prevents us from fulfilling the most joyful part of being human, being able to share the life God gives in Christ with others (1 John 1:4).
We spend much of our lives trying to gain, earn, beg, or steal the things we think will give us life. But only Christ can do that (John 14:6; John 6:68).
One step toward a mindful life is to ask that God will free us from the common human addiction to living for ourselves (or for our family, country, or cause) and to replace it with a dependence on Christ alone (Luke 10:41-42). Jesus sets us free to become our true selves, who we were created to be by the master designer, God.
When we're living mindfully, here's some of what happens:
[This was inspired by yesterday's readings for Read the Bible in a Year here at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]
Jesus says that we're to live "mindful lives." Grateful for the free gifts of forgiveness and new life that belong to all who turn from sin and give their lives to Him, we're to be mindful of ways in which we can fulfill what Jesus calls the greatest commandment: to love God completely and to love others as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40).
Mindfulness of others--of God and of other people--doesn't come naturally to us. The Bible says that from imperfect parents and imperfect ancestors, we inherit an inborn impulse to think of ourselves first (Psalm 51:5).
But self-absorbed living, Jesus says, is a trap. It prevents us from having the life only the Creator of life can give. And it prevents us from fulfilling the most joyful part of being human, being able to share the life God gives in Christ with others (1 John 1:4).
We spend much of our lives trying to gain, earn, beg, or steal the things we think will give us life. But only Christ can do that (John 14:6; John 6:68).
One step toward a mindful life is to ask that God will free us from the common human addiction to living for ourselves (or for our family, country, or cause) and to replace it with a dependence on Christ alone (Luke 10:41-42). Jesus sets us free to become our true selves, who we were created to be by the master designer, God.
When we're living mindfully, here's some of what happens:
- We see Christ in those in need and try to serve them as though we were serving Christ Himself (Matthew 25:31-46).
- We prepare to share the hope we have with others (1 Peter 3:15-16).
- We resist the temptation to sin, which is really a temptation to dehumanize ourselves or others and dishonor God and ourselves (Matthew 6:13).
- We get over ourselves and forgive others as God forgives us (Luke 11:4).
[This was inspired by yesterday's readings for Read the Bible in a Year here at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]
Thursday, January 05, 2012
Audio of Yesterday Morning's 'Read the Bible in a Year' Discussion
We're reading the Bible together in a year at Saint Matthew. Each week since last March, when we began, we've been discussing the week's readings from the Scriptures. Yesterday, we discussed readings from Mark, chapter 13 through Luke, chapter 18.
I hope that you find it helpful.
"You walk three miles a day in your house? Isn't that boring?"
Nah! Check it out.
Frankly, I don't take a walk just to take a walk, but to stay fit for living the life I almost lost when I had my widow-maker heart attack back in June, 2010.
I walk to push aside health limitations that would otherwise cling to me, for the same reason that I repent for my sins each day, setting aside sins, guilt, and discord that would otherwise destroy me, so that I can, as the book of Hebrews puts it, "run with perseverance the race that is set before [me], looking to Jesus the Pioneer and Perfecter of [my] faith, Who for the sake of the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and [for our sake's] has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebrews 12:1-2).
When I was being formed in my mother's womb, God miraculously installed an extra artery in my heart which, fifty-seven years later, took some of the blood that could not be pumped as it ordinarily would have been, so that I could take these added days to this life for a purpose: To share the message that God so loves every human being that He gave His only Son Jesus so that all who believe in Him will not perish, lost to God forever in hell, but have eternal life with God.
It would be ungrateful for me not to use my own unique life and gifts to do anything other than lift Jesus up.
That's why I run the race God has set before me. Well, right now, I walk it...but I walk it real fast!
Frankly, I don't take a walk just to take a walk, but to stay fit for living the life I almost lost when I had my widow-maker heart attack back in June, 2010.
I walk to push aside health limitations that would otherwise cling to me, for the same reason that I repent for my sins each day, setting aside sins, guilt, and discord that would otherwise destroy me, so that I can, as the book of Hebrews puts it, "run with perseverance the race that is set before [me], looking to Jesus the Pioneer and Perfecter of [my] faith, Who for the sake of the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and [for our sake's] has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebrews 12:1-2).
When I was being formed in my mother's womb, God miraculously installed an extra artery in my heart which, fifty-seven years later, took some of the blood that could not be pumped as it ordinarily would have been, so that I could take these added days to this life for a purpose: To share the message that God so loves every human being that He gave His only Son Jesus so that all who believe in Him will not perish, lost to God forever in hell, but have eternal life with God.
It would be ungrateful for me not to use my own unique life and gifts to do anything other than lift Jesus up.
That's why I run the race God has set before me. Well, right now, I walk it...but I walk it real fast!
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
From Someone Who's 'Dumber Than Dirt'
The biggest regrets of my life are all associated with those times when I have impulsively decided to do what I wanted to do, rather than taking the time to seek the wisdom of God in the Bible and through prayer in Jesus' Name.
Fifty-eight years on Planet Earth have taught me that I'm not "all that" and that the mere passage of years doesn't make a person wise. Only the God we know and follow in Jesus Christ can give us wisdom. That's why I love Proverbs 9:10 in the Old Testament:
We may not always like the guidance that God gives to us, but it will always set us on the right path. I can't say that about the "wisdom" I might derive from myself or other people.
So, seek God's wisdom. Dig into God's Word, the Bible. Lift up prayers for counsel to God through prayer in Jesus' Name. Ask God to send Christian counselors to you as you make decisions. And ask God to give you the faith to walk in the paths He marks out for you.
James writes in the New Testament:
Check out these thoughts on getting wisdom from God in today's post at Our Daily Bread. Be sure to read Proverbs 2:1-9, on which it's based, first.
Fifty-eight years on Planet Earth have taught me that I'm not "all that" and that the mere passage of years doesn't make a person wise. Only the God we know and follow in Jesus Christ can give us wisdom. That's why I love Proverbs 9:10 in the Old Testament:
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,Though my use of God's wisdom has often been limited by my own egotistical resistance to taking instruction from anyone or anything besides my intelligence, knowledge, common sense, or emotional impulses, I've learned that God is not stingy about giving us His wisdom if we're humble enough to ask for it.
and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.
We may not always like the guidance that God gives to us, but it will always set us on the right path. I can't say that about the "wisdom" I might derive from myself or other people.
So, seek God's wisdom. Dig into God's Word, the Bible. Lift up prayers for counsel to God through prayer in Jesus' Name. Ask God to send Christian counselors to you as you make decisions. And ask God to give you the faith to walk in the paths He marks out for you.
James writes in the New Testament:
If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, Who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you. (James 1:5)My wife and I often say that, in so many ways in life, we are "dumber than dirt." But we've found, often against our own wills or initial judgments, that God is a lot wiser than we are and that when we submit to Him, He helps us to make wise decisions.
Check out these thoughts on getting wisdom from God in today's post at Our Daily Bread. Be sure to read Proverbs 2:1-9, on which it's based, first.
Monday, January 02, 2012
Sunday, January 01, 2012
"Am I Saved?"
[This was prepared to be shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio this morning.]
Galatians 4:4-7
Let’s pretend that you’re an average, normal Lutheran walking through a crowded mall.
You’re minding your own business, not bothering anybody else--because, after all, you are an average, normal Lutheran--when a young man walks up to you and with urgency in his voice, asks, “Are you saved?”
Now, as an average, normal Lutheran, you’re thrown off by this sudden violation of your personal space. (After all, you’re still trying to get used to the pastor who hugs everybody during the Sharing of the Peace!) All you hear at first is the word, “saved” and naturally, as an average, normal Lutheran who likes to save a buck, you assume that this guy is bragging about a bargain that saved him a lot of money.
But the young man's message and manner don’t quite compute. So you respond to his question by saying, “Huh?” The young man repeats himself, “Are you saved?” “Oh,” you think to yourself, “one of those Christians!”
By now, you are practiced at fending off such unwanted discussions of God, salvation, sin, and being born anew. So, you say, softly, so that nobody else can hear, “Why, yes, I am saved.” The young man, pleased with your answer and concerned that he might soon be stopped by security, looks over his shoulder, then scans the mall for his next victim.
Let me say at the outset that by that little vignette, I mean no disrespect either for the interviewer or the interviewee. The young man is right to want to share his faith in Christ with others. Jesus has commanded—and not just suggested that—all Christians to make disciples.
On the other hand, the average, normal Lutheran is right to feel that making disciples ought to happen more in the course of conversations between two willing participants—sort of like Philip telling Nathanael in the Gospel of John to come and see Jesus for himself—than in a flash of religious verbiage among strangers.
Nonetheless, as our average, normal Lutheran finds a bench to wait for his wife while she hits the After-Christmas Sale at Bath and Body Works, he can’t help thinking of the young man’s question: “Are you saved?” “Am I saved?” he asks himself.
Actually, this is a question I get a lot from Lutherans. “I don’t know what to say when people ask me that question,” they’ll say. “Am I saved?”
Our second lesson for this Sunday in which we celebrate the power of Jesus’ Name may help you to feel a little more comfortable in addressing that question.
Before digging into the lesson though, we should note that both Jesus and the Bible teach that there are people who will not be saved and that there are things from which we all need to be saved.
According to Jesus, there are people—maybe people you and I know—who will go to hell. In one of Jesus’ parables, which we looked at this past week as part of reading the Bible together in a year, Jesus tells about a wedding banquet filled with people who gain entry into the party by wearing special wedding robes issued by a king. One man crashes the party without such a robe. The king has him thrown out, Jesus says, into the “outer darkness, where there [is] weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The point of Jesus’ story is clear: Those who seek to gain entrance into eternity with God while remaining naked in their sins, unclothed by the forgiveness of sin that belongs only to those who repent for sin and believe in Christ, will ticket themselves for separation from God, for hell.
Hell is real. But life with God is also real. And because both heaven and hell are real, this business of salvation has life-and-death importance for every single human being!
Now, pull out the Celebrate insert, please, and turn to our second lesson for today, Galatians 4:4-7.
The church in Galatia was started by the first-century evangelist Paul in about 49AD. Galatia was a prosperous region in what is today Turkey. The church’s members were Gentiles, that is, non-Jews. They had received the good news of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ through Paul’s ministry. It had come as great, life-changing news to them.
But since Paul had left them, a group of people known as Judaizers had come along to confuse them about their faith. They told the Galatians that it wasn’t enough to believe in Jesus. If they really wanted salvation, the Judaizers said, they also had to submit to Old Testament ritual law. The men had to be circumcised. Everybody had to conform to Jewish dietary laws. They needed to make sacrifices for their sins. All of these things and more, they claimed, were the conditions for salvation.
Some of the folks in the church at Galatia bought into all this nonsense. They allowed themselves to turn what God had given as a free gift—new and everlasting life for all who believe in Jesus Christ—into a legal transaction.
Others, intimidated by the Judaizers in the way our avergage, normal Lutheran was in his encounter with the young man at the mall, were rocked back on their heels and wondered, “Am I saved?”
Paul responds to this question and to the decision of some to turn their backs on Christ to take up the notion that they could save themselves by doing the right things. “You foolish Galatians!” he says at one point. “Who has bewitched you?”
He goes on to say that all who simply trust in Jesus Christ become descendants of Abraham, the founder of God’s Jewish people. Abraham himself was saved, Paul points out, not because of any good works he had done, but simply because he believed in the promises of God, promises that pointed to the sending of God’s Son for the salvation of all people.
Paul talks about the coming of the Son in verses 4 and 5, the opening of our lesson. Take a look at those verses, please: “…when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem [that is, to buy them back from slavery to sin and death] those who were under the law, so that they might receive adoption as children.”
When God decided that the time was right, He sent His Son. But, as we remember at Christmas, Jesus didn’t come in the full majesty of His deity. Nor did He arrive with the paraphernalia of the world's tinhorn kings and dictators. He came as a man to share our lives, our deaths, and our condemnation for sin.
The Bible tells us that Jesus, after His death, even experienced life in hell, where “He made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.” Jesus shared the condemnation that belongs to human beings when they refuse His outstretched hand of mercy, who decide that they don’t need God and don’t need to worry about the question, “Am I saved?”
To be "saved" is to be adopted as God’s children. This is an important point! Jesus once told some of His fellow Jews who refused to believe in Him that, because of their failure to trust in Him, they were children of their father, the devil. Imperfect ourselves, we are nonetheless saved by the blood of Jesus, our Savior! We are adopted into the family of God as a gift of God to all with faith in Christ.
Verse 6 says: “And because you are children [of God], God has sent the Spirit of His Son [this is another way of talking about the Holy Spirit] into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”
People sometimes ask me, “How do I know that I have the Holy Spirit?”
One way to confirm that you have the Holy Spirit is to ask yourself, “Do I believe in Jesus Christ?” If your answer is, “Yes,” you know that the Holy Spirit is operating in your life because, as the New Testament tells us elsewhere, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit."
You can also know you have the Holy Spirit when you’re able to call God, “Abba!” “Abba” is the term Jesus used for “our Father in heaven” when He taught us the Lord’s Prayer. In Jesus’ everyday language of Aramaic, “Abba” was the term that little children used for their fathers, a term that connoted all the trust a child has in her or his daddy. When you trustingly and submissively pray to your Father in heaven, your own spirit is confirming that God’s Holy Spirit lives within you and that you are a child of God through faith in Christ.
Besides, we have the promise of the Bible, in the words of Peter at the first Pentecost, among other places, that all who are baptized in Jesus’ Name have forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Don’t let anyone ever make you feel like a second-class Christian because you don’t have the same spiritual gifts that they claim as some achievement on their parts! If you humbly pray to God, your Father, you have the Holy Spirit. And He will bring You comfort, hope, guidance, and the assurance of God’s love for you, no matter what happens in your life.
Paul underscores this in verse 7 of our lesson: “So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.” In the New Testament book of Romans, Paul writes in another passage: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
In neither of these passages are there any ifs, ands, or buts. If you believe in the Jesus revealed in life and on the pages of Scripture—who was born of a virgin, suffered death on the cross for our sins, raised from the dead by God the Father, who offers new life to all who turn from their sins and believe in Him—you can rest assured that you have been saved. You are a child of God!
Now folks, that’s such an incredible thing that, while we may not like the method of the young man in the mall of our little scenario, we should be able to understand why he wants to share the good news of salvation for all who believe in Jesus with others, don't you think?
Confident that we have been saved through Christ, may 2012 be a year in which we average, normal Lutherans join the apostles Peter and John, who, when facing persecution told those who threatened them with punishment if they ever again spoke in the Name of Jesus, “we cannot keep from speaking about” Jesus, the One Whose Name is above all names, the One Who has saved us.
If you believe in Jesus Christ, you are saved. That's good news. Amen!
Galatians 4:4-7
Let’s pretend that you’re an average, normal Lutheran walking through a crowded mall.
You’re minding your own business, not bothering anybody else--because, after all, you are an average, normal Lutheran--when a young man walks up to you and with urgency in his voice, asks, “Are you saved?”
Now, as an average, normal Lutheran, you’re thrown off by this sudden violation of your personal space. (After all, you’re still trying to get used to the pastor who hugs everybody during the Sharing of the Peace!) All you hear at first is the word, “saved” and naturally, as an average, normal Lutheran who likes to save a buck, you assume that this guy is bragging about a bargain that saved him a lot of money.
But the young man's message and manner don’t quite compute. So you respond to his question by saying, “Huh?” The young man repeats himself, “Are you saved?” “Oh,” you think to yourself, “one of those Christians!”
By now, you are practiced at fending off such unwanted discussions of God, salvation, sin, and being born anew. So, you say, softly, so that nobody else can hear, “Why, yes, I am saved.” The young man, pleased with your answer and concerned that he might soon be stopped by security, looks over his shoulder, then scans the mall for his next victim.
Let me say at the outset that by that little vignette, I mean no disrespect either for the interviewer or the interviewee. The young man is right to want to share his faith in Christ with others. Jesus has commanded—and not just suggested that—all Christians to make disciples.
On the other hand, the average, normal Lutheran is right to feel that making disciples ought to happen more in the course of conversations between two willing participants—sort of like Philip telling Nathanael in the Gospel of John to come and see Jesus for himself—than in a flash of religious verbiage among strangers.
Nonetheless, as our average, normal Lutheran finds a bench to wait for his wife while she hits the After-Christmas Sale at Bath and Body Works, he can’t help thinking of the young man’s question: “Are you saved?” “Am I saved?” he asks himself.
Actually, this is a question I get a lot from Lutherans. “I don’t know what to say when people ask me that question,” they’ll say. “Am I saved?”
Our second lesson for this Sunday in which we celebrate the power of Jesus’ Name may help you to feel a little more comfortable in addressing that question.
Before digging into the lesson though, we should note that both Jesus and the Bible teach that there are people who will not be saved and that there are things from which we all need to be saved.
According to Jesus, there are people—maybe people you and I know—who will go to hell. In one of Jesus’ parables, which we looked at this past week as part of reading the Bible together in a year, Jesus tells about a wedding banquet filled with people who gain entry into the party by wearing special wedding robes issued by a king. One man crashes the party without such a robe. The king has him thrown out, Jesus says, into the “outer darkness, where there [is] weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The point of Jesus’ story is clear: Those who seek to gain entrance into eternity with God while remaining naked in their sins, unclothed by the forgiveness of sin that belongs only to those who repent for sin and believe in Christ, will ticket themselves for separation from God, for hell.
Hell is real. But life with God is also real. And because both heaven and hell are real, this business of salvation has life-and-death importance for every single human being!
Now, pull out the Celebrate insert, please, and turn to our second lesson for today, Galatians 4:4-7.
The church in Galatia was started by the first-century evangelist Paul in about 49AD. Galatia was a prosperous region in what is today Turkey. The church’s members were Gentiles, that is, non-Jews. They had received the good news of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ through Paul’s ministry. It had come as great, life-changing news to them.
But since Paul had left them, a group of people known as Judaizers had come along to confuse them about their faith. They told the Galatians that it wasn’t enough to believe in Jesus. If they really wanted salvation, the Judaizers said, they also had to submit to Old Testament ritual law. The men had to be circumcised. Everybody had to conform to Jewish dietary laws. They needed to make sacrifices for their sins. All of these things and more, they claimed, were the conditions for salvation.
Some of the folks in the church at Galatia bought into all this nonsense. They allowed themselves to turn what God had given as a free gift—new and everlasting life for all who believe in Jesus Christ—into a legal transaction.
Others, intimidated by the Judaizers in the way our avergage, normal Lutheran was in his encounter with the young man at the mall, were rocked back on their heels and wondered, “Am I saved?”
Paul responds to this question and to the decision of some to turn their backs on Christ to take up the notion that they could save themselves by doing the right things. “You foolish Galatians!” he says at one point. “Who has bewitched you?”
He goes on to say that all who simply trust in Jesus Christ become descendants of Abraham, the founder of God’s Jewish people. Abraham himself was saved, Paul points out, not because of any good works he had done, but simply because he believed in the promises of God, promises that pointed to the sending of God’s Son for the salvation of all people.
Paul talks about the coming of the Son in verses 4 and 5, the opening of our lesson. Take a look at those verses, please: “…when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem [that is, to buy them back from slavery to sin and death] those who were under the law, so that they might receive adoption as children.”
When God decided that the time was right, He sent His Son. But, as we remember at Christmas, Jesus didn’t come in the full majesty of His deity. Nor did He arrive with the paraphernalia of the world's tinhorn kings and dictators. He came as a man to share our lives, our deaths, and our condemnation for sin.
The Bible tells us that Jesus, after His death, even experienced life in hell, where “He made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.” Jesus shared the condemnation that belongs to human beings when they refuse His outstretched hand of mercy, who decide that they don’t need God and don’t need to worry about the question, “Am I saved?”
To be "saved" is to be adopted as God’s children. This is an important point! Jesus once told some of His fellow Jews who refused to believe in Him that, because of their failure to trust in Him, they were children of their father, the devil. Imperfect ourselves, we are nonetheless saved by the blood of Jesus, our Savior! We are adopted into the family of God as a gift of God to all with faith in Christ.
Verse 6 says: “And because you are children [of God], God has sent the Spirit of His Son [this is another way of talking about the Holy Spirit] into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”
People sometimes ask me, “How do I know that I have the Holy Spirit?”
One way to confirm that you have the Holy Spirit is to ask yourself, “Do I believe in Jesus Christ?” If your answer is, “Yes,” you know that the Holy Spirit is operating in your life because, as the New Testament tells us elsewhere, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit."
You can also know you have the Holy Spirit when you’re able to call God, “Abba!” “Abba” is the term Jesus used for “our Father in heaven” when He taught us the Lord’s Prayer. In Jesus’ everyday language of Aramaic, “Abba” was the term that little children used for their fathers, a term that connoted all the trust a child has in her or his daddy. When you trustingly and submissively pray to your Father in heaven, your own spirit is confirming that God’s Holy Spirit lives within you and that you are a child of God through faith in Christ.
Besides, we have the promise of the Bible, in the words of Peter at the first Pentecost, among other places, that all who are baptized in Jesus’ Name have forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Don’t let anyone ever make you feel like a second-class Christian because you don’t have the same spiritual gifts that they claim as some achievement on their parts! If you humbly pray to God, your Father, you have the Holy Spirit. And He will bring You comfort, hope, guidance, and the assurance of God’s love for you, no matter what happens in your life.
Paul underscores this in verse 7 of our lesson: “So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.” In the New Testament book of Romans, Paul writes in another passage: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
In neither of these passages are there any ifs, ands, or buts. If you believe in the Jesus revealed in life and on the pages of Scripture—who was born of a virgin, suffered death on the cross for our sins, raised from the dead by God the Father, who offers new life to all who turn from their sins and believe in Him—you can rest assured that you have been saved. You are a child of God!
Now folks, that’s such an incredible thing that, while we may not like the method of the young man in the mall of our little scenario, we should be able to understand why he wants to share the good news of salvation for all who believe in Jesus with others, don't you think?
Confident that we have been saved through Christ, may 2012 be a year in which we average, normal Lutherans join the apostles Peter and John, who, when facing persecution told those who threatened them with punishment if they ever again spoke in the Name of Jesus, “we cannot keep from speaking about” Jesus, the One Whose Name is above all names, the One Who has saved us.
If you believe in Jesus Christ, you are saved. That's good news. Amen!
Saturday, December 31, 2011
One Woman's Solution to Modern Day Slavery
I've mentioned before that there are more slaves in our world today than at any time in history. Here, Holly Boardman talks about her exploration of this subject and one woman's remarkably simple and gratifying solution to this evil.
Friday, December 30, 2011
We Have Seen the Enemy and He is Us
From an inspiring daily reader by Joseph C. Piscatella, a three-and-a-half decade survivor of heart bypass surgery:
Remember, for every one person whose heart disease originates with bad genes, there are 449 who have created their problems with a knife, a fork, and an unhealthy love affair with their couch.
Guess the Year To Which This Refers
"The [economic downturn] hit that year with whirlwind suddenness and created widespread economic devastation...The boom economy, fed by easy credit, abruptly ended."
Guess the year. I'll give the answer, as well as the source of the quote in the Comments section.
Guess the year. I'll give the answer, as well as the source of the quote in the Comments section.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Reds Will Win 2012 World Series
Forget about the upcoming presidential election, the biggest story of 2012 will be the Cincinnati Reds winning the World Series. So says a Sports Illustrated writer. And there's more good news for Reds fans in his predictions. See here.
Now, if we could just get the Veterans Committee to vote David Concepcion into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, that would be great!
Now, if we could just get the Veterans Committee to vote David Concepcion into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, that would be great!
Sunday, December 25, 2011
The Drama of Salvation: God Saves the Best for Last (Christmas Morning)
[This was prepared to be shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
Hebrews 1:1-4
When I was in the ninth grade at Westmoor Junior High School in Columbus, I took Drama class. We read and analyzed plays, designed sets, learned the nomenclature of theater, and created skits and monologues.
I wasn’t a very good drama student. But I do remember one point that Miss Snead drummed into our heads about a good dramatic presentation: The final act of a good play is the part where all the threads of the story get pulled together. The resolution toward which the plot of the play has been leading becomes clear. Everything that precedes it readies an audience for the last act. The best is saved for last.
The New Testament book of Hebrews, from which our second lesson is taken, is a sermon delivered by an unknown preacher to a group of Jewish believers in Jesus, who were being tempted to turn their backs on Jesus and Christ’s Church by authorities of the Roman Empire under which they lived.
The Roman government had never been kind to Jews, often subjecting them to persecution. But the Jews never threatened the very foundations of worldly power the way believers in Jesus did. When men or women realized that they had an everlasting relationship with the one God of the universe simply by turning from sin and believing in God the Son Jesus, they were freed from the pressures to conform exerted by all the cults of the Roman gods and by the government.
When the first Christians came to believe that Jesus had destroyed the power of death over their lives, threats from Roman emperors, governors, and centurions lost their power. Like the apostle Paul, they lived in the assurance that there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” and that nothing “in all creation [is] able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” They realized that death is not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian.
When, through Jesus Christ, a person is free from the fear of dying, dictatorships, political correctness, and other earthly powers cannot control them.
Confounded by the first Christians’ stubborn allegiance to Jesus, the leaders of the Roman Empire panicked as despots and dictators always do.
They decided on a strategy that they thought would divide and destroy the Christian movement. They promised to let Jewish believers in Jesus live in peace, without harassment, without the threat of death, and with no requirement that they acknowledge Roman gods, if they would only renounce their faith in Jesus.
All the Christians had to do was pledge their ultimate allegiance to the emperor and disavow belief in Jesus as the Son of God Who gives eternal life to all who repent for sin and believe in Him, and go back to the rites and customs of Judaism they and their families had known for centuries.
It’s into this situation that the preacher of Hebrews, himself clearly a Jewish Christian, steps, urging his fellow Jewish Christians not to cave into the tempting offer of acceptance and freedom from persecution offered by the Roman authorities.
He does so by reminding them that as Jews, members of God’s chosen people, descendants of Abraham and Sarah, they knew about the opening act of the salvation drama that has been playing out in human history ever since the first human beings, Adam and Eve, bit into fruit pulled from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden.
But he also reminded them that, through Jesus, the final act of that drama was (and is) being played out.
Pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the second lesson and read the first two verses aloud with me: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.”
The first act of the salvation drama is recorded in the Old Testament. God is both the playwright and the leading actor.
The last scenes—the last books—of the Old Testament find God using prophets to drop hints of what’s to come in the second and final act.
Through Isaiah, for example, God said that in “the latter time” He would make His glory fully known in “the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.” And then speaking of the future in the past tense, we’re told in Isaiah, chapter 9: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who have lived in a land of deep darkness—on them a light has shined…For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests on His shoulders; and He is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace…”
Through Jeremiah, God said, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign…”
And, as we remembered last evening, through Micah, God promised, “But you, O Bethlehem Ephratah…from you shall come forth for Me, One Who is to rule in Israel, Whose origin is…from ancient days.”
In the opening verses of his sermon, the preacher in Hebrews reminds his fellow Jewish Christians of how God spoke through many prophets to point them to the coming of the one anointed King of kings, the Savior of the world, God in the flesh: Jesus. Now, he says, in the last days—in the second and final act—that started when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, God speaks to us directly, intimately, personally through His Son, Jesus, through Whom God created all the worlds.
And just so we understand that Jesus isn’t second-fiddle to God the Father, but is God Himself in the flesh, look at what the preacher says of Jesus in verse 3: “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and He sustains all things by His powerful word.”
As the second act of God’s salvation drama began two thousand years ago, the Author Himself came onto the stage, taking on the role of a human being Who would speak God’s call to repentance and belief to us directly and repeatedly and then, go to a cross in order to set the stage for the final scene of His great drama.
That’s what the preacher addresses next in the rest of verse 3. Look at what he says: “When He had made purification for sins [that is, when the Savior Jesus offered up His sinless body on the cross as the perfect sacrifice not for any sins He committed, because He committed none, but for our sins], He sat down at the right hand [that is, the power hand] of Majesty [God the Father] on high, having become as much superior to angels as the Name He has inherited is more excellent than theirs.”
Through Jesus Christ, we know now how the play is going to end.
Sin and death will end!
Tears and suffering will be no more!
But there is one last scene to be played out.
It’s the scene of the drama in which the Jewish Christians to whom the book of Hebrews was addressed were then participants.
It’s the scene in which you and I find ourselves today.
It’s the scene in which followers of Jesus, filled with His desperate love for all people, share His call to repent and believe in Him and so, live with God forever.
It’s also the scene in which you and I are tempted, as were the first century Jewish Christians, to choose between the Jesus road and the easy road.
The easy road is the one we taken when honor God with our lips, but keep our hearts far from Him.
The easy road is the one we take when see trouble, pain, sorrow, or grief as a reason or an excuse to give up on God.
Jesus says that “the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Jesus and trust in Jesus, no matter what life may bring us, is the only way to God, the only way to life.
The path of faith in Christ will sometimes lead us through adversity and pain. As surely as sin, death, and the devil ran Jesus through their gauntlets, as we follow Jesus, we too, will go through the same gauntlets.
But if we will seek God’s strength, the power of His Holy Spirit, to keep following Jesus—to keep on keeping on in faith—we will have God’s peace and help and the presence of the risen Jesus, in our lives right now.
And when the last scene of the last act plays out, we will be with Jesus in eternity, along with all those who have believed in Him. Jesus promises us that “the one who endures [in faith] to the end will be saved.”
Pastor Joe Stowell wrote in Our Daily Bread this past week that “Christianity is unique among all religions for it is about God’s pursuit of us to draw us to Himself” and not, like other religions, about the human pursuit of deities or harmony with the universe.
In the drama of salvation, God is both author and star. But God is no egotistical actor looking for close-ups and glory for His own selfish ends.
On the first Christmas, God became a helpless baby.
When He grew into manhood, He took on the role of slave, servant, and condemned criminal just so He could die and rise and welcome all who believe in Him into a new life now and into life as it was meant to be for us—a life without disease, suffering, death, oppression, or hardships—in eternity.
On this Christmas Morning, 2011, ask God to help you make and keep a vow to never more be part of the audience observing God’s salvation drama, a pew sitter who leaves Jesus at the church door, but a participant, taking any role God and His Church may give you that will let you join the saints and angels in proclaiming, “To the One seated on the throne and the Lamb [Jesus] be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”
Dearly loved people of God, merry Christmas and God’s blessings to you now and through the coming year! Amen!
Hebrews 1:1-4
When I was in the ninth grade at Westmoor Junior High School in Columbus, I took Drama class. We read and analyzed plays, designed sets, learned the nomenclature of theater, and created skits and monologues.
I wasn’t a very good drama student. But I do remember one point that Miss Snead drummed into our heads about a good dramatic presentation: The final act of a good play is the part where all the threads of the story get pulled together. The resolution toward which the plot of the play has been leading becomes clear. Everything that precedes it readies an audience for the last act. The best is saved for last.
The New Testament book of Hebrews, from which our second lesson is taken, is a sermon delivered by an unknown preacher to a group of Jewish believers in Jesus, who were being tempted to turn their backs on Jesus and Christ’s Church by authorities of the Roman Empire under which they lived.
The Roman government had never been kind to Jews, often subjecting them to persecution. But the Jews never threatened the very foundations of worldly power the way believers in Jesus did. When men or women realized that they had an everlasting relationship with the one God of the universe simply by turning from sin and believing in God the Son Jesus, they were freed from the pressures to conform exerted by all the cults of the Roman gods and by the government.
When the first Christians came to believe that Jesus had destroyed the power of death over their lives, threats from Roman emperors, governors, and centurions lost their power. Like the apostle Paul, they lived in the assurance that there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” and that nothing “in all creation [is] able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” They realized that death is not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian.
When, through Jesus Christ, a person is free from the fear of dying, dictatorships, political correctness, and other earthly powers cannot control them.
Confounded by the first Christians’ stubborn allegiance to Jesus, the leaders of the Roman Empire panicked as despots and dictators always do.
They decided on a strategy that they thought would divide and destroy the Christian movement. They promised to let Jewish believers in Jesus live in peace, without harassment, without the threat of death, and with no requirement that they acknowledge Roman gods, if they would only renounce their faith in Jesus.
All the Christians had to do was pledge their ultimate allegiance to the emperor and disavow belief in Jesus as the Son of God Who gives eternal life to all who repent for sin and believe in Him, and go back to the rites and customs of Judaism they and their families had known for centuries.
It’s into this situation that the preacher of Hebrews, himself clearly a Jewish Christian, steps, urging his fellow Jewish Christians not to cave into the tempting offer of acceptance and freedom from persecution offered by the Roman authorities.
He does so by reminding them that as Jews, members of God’s chosen people, descendants of Abraham and Sarah, they knew about the opening act of the salvation drama that has been playing out in human history ever since the first human beings, Adam and Eve, bit into fruit pulled from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden.
But he also reminded them that, through Jesus, the final act of that drama was (and is) being played out.
Pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the second lesson and read the first two verses aloud with me: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.”
The first act of the salvation drama is recorded in the Old Testament. God is both the playwright and the leading actor.
The last scenes—the last books—of the Old Testament find God using prophets to drop hints of what’s to come in the second and final act.
Through Isaiah, for example, God said that in “the latter time” He would make His glory fully known in “the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.” And then speaking of the future in the past tense, we’re told in Isaiah, chapter 9: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who have lived in a land of deep darkness—on them a light has shined…For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests on His shoulders; and He is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace…”
Through Jeremiah, God said, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign…”
And, as we remembered last evening, through Micah, God promised, “But you, O Bethlehem Ephratah…from you shall come forth for Me, One Who is to rule in Israel, Whose origin is…from ancient days.”
In the opening verses of his sermon, the preacher in Hebrews reminds his fellow Jewish Christians of how God spoke through many prophets to point them to the coming of the one anointed King of kings, the Savior of the world, God in the flesh: Jesus. Now, he says, in the last days—in the second and final act—that started when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, God speaks to us directly, intimately, personally through His Son, Jesus, through Whom God created all the worlds.
And just so we understand that Jesus isn’t second-fiddle to God the Father, but is God Himself in the flesh, look at what the preacher says of Jesus in verse 3: “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and He sustains all things by His powerful word.”
As the second act of God’s salvation drama began two thousand years ago, the Author Himself came onto the stage, taking on the role of a human being Who would speak God’s call to repentance and belief to us directly and repeatedly and then, go to a cross in order to set the stage for the final scene of His great drama.
That’s what the preacher addresses next in the rest of verse 3. Look at what he says: “When He had made purification for sins [that is, when the Savior Jesus offered up His sinless body on the cross as the perfect sacrifice not for any sins He committed, because He committed none, but for our sins], He sat down at the right hand [that is, the power hand] of Majesty [God the Father] on high, having become as much superior to angels as the Name He has inherited is more excellent than theirs.”
Through Jesus Christ, we know now how the play is going to end.
Sin and death will end!
Tears and suffering will be no more!
But there is one last scene to be played out.
It’s the scene of the drama in which the Jewish Christians to whom the book of Hebrews was addressed were then participants.
It’s the scene in which you and I find ourselves today.
It’s the scene in which followers of Jesus, filled with His desperate love for all people, share His call to repent and believe in Him and so, live with God forever.
It’s also the scene in which you and I are tempted, as were the first century Jewish Christians, to choose between the Jesus road and the easy road.
The easy road is the one we taken when honor God with our lips, but keep our hearts far from Him.
The easy road is the one we take when see trouble, pain, sorrow, or grief as a reason or an excuse to give up on God.
Jesus says that “the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Jesus and trust in Jesus, no matter what life may bring us, is the only way to God, the only way to life.
The path of faith in Christ will sometimes lead us through adversity and pain. As surely as sin, death, and the devil ran Jesus through their gauntlets, as we follow Jesus, we too, will go through the same gauntlets.
But if we will seek God’s strength, the power of His Holy Spirit, to keep following Jesus—to keep on keeping on in faith—we will have God’s peace and help and the presence of the risen Jesus, in our lives right now.
And when the last scene of the last act plays out, we will be with Jesus in eternity, along with all those who have believed in Him. Jesus promises us that “the one who endures [in faith] to the end will be saved.”
Pastor Joe Stowell wrote in Our Daily Bread this past week that “Christianity is unique among all religions for it is about God’s pursuit of us to draw us to Himself” and not, like other religions, about the human pursuit of deities or harmony with the universe.
In the drama of salvation, God is both author and star. But God is no egotistical actor looking for close-ups and glory for His own selfish ends.
On the first Christmas, God became a helpless baby.
When He grew into manhood, He took on the role of slave, servant, and condemned criminal just so He could die and rise and welcome all who believe in Him into a new life now and into life as it was meant to be for us—a life without disease, suffering, death, oppression, or hardships—in eternity.
On this Christmas Morning, 2011, ask God to help you make and keep a vow to never more be part of the audience observing God’s salvation drama, a pew sitter who leaves Jesus at the church door, but a participant, taking any role God and His Church may give you that will let you join the saints and angels in proclaiming, “To the One seated on the throne and the Lamb [Jesus] be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”
Dearly loved people of God, merry Christmas and God’s blessings to you now and through the coming year! Amen!
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Christmas: The Punchline God Wants You to Get
[This message was prepared for the Christmas Eve Candlelight Worship Service of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]
Luke 2:1-7
In the first parish I served as a pastor was a couple who had been married many years and were deeply devoted to each other. Several years before I arrived, the woman, Laura, had been struck with Alzheimer’s Disease. By the time I became Laura’s and Vern’s pastor, she was confined to a bed in a nursing home, incapable of recognizing anyone or carrying on a conversation, not even Vern. But every day, Vern would visit and spend hours with Laura. He fed her with a baster, read the Bible and the newspaper to her, told her all the latest family news, and prayed with her. Often, when I visited Laura to pray aloud for her, I would find Vern there by her bedside. And often, when we spoke in private, Vern would tell me all about Laura, his love for her, and their life together. “She was always the first to send a note of encouragement to people who had bad things happen in their lives,” he told me. “And always called them to congratulate them or just be happy with them when good things happened. And she loved going to church, especially at Advent, just before Christmas, because she loved remembering that one day, Jesus was coming back again.” I remember commenting to Vern how rare it was for someone to love Advent. They might love Christmas or Easter, but few people loved Advent. But Laura did.
Some five years after Vern first told me of Laura’s love for Advent, she died. It was just a few days before Christmas, in the waning days of Advent. We’re never ready for the loss of loved ones, even when we know that their deaths are inevitable. I was with Vern when Laura passed. Tears filled his eyes and his throat was choked with emotion. But he turned to me with a smile on his face and chuckle in his voice when he said, “It was her Advent, pastor. Laura is with Jesus now.” In the midst of tragedy, because of Jesus Christ, Vern knew he (and Laura) had something to smile about! They were in on God’s punchline!
One way to read the events of the first Christmas that we celebrate tonight is to see them as one wonderful punchline that God wants all the world to get.
In our Gospel lesson from Luke, we’re told that the emperor in Rome decided that everyone under the domain of the Roman Empire needed to be counted in a census. Judea, composed of God’s people, the Jews, had been conquered by Rome decades earlier. So, the people of Judea, including the couple God had chosen to act as foster parents to Jesus, had to submit to the census. In ancient times, a census, especially when those being counted were a conquered people, was designed to find who could be conscripted into the military and forced labor and to let the extortionist tax collectors know where they could find all their victims. A census was a way for corrupt dictators to flex their power.
That’s what Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor, thought he was doing in ordering this particular census. He surely had no knowledge of the words of God spoken through the prophet Micah 740 years earlier: “But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are one the littlest clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for Me One Who is to rule Israel, Whose origin is from old, from ancient days…” The Messiah, the Anointed King, the Christ, repeatedly promised by God through the prophets, was to be born in Bethlehem, a tiny town about five miles from Jerusalem.
The promises of a Messiah had been forgotten or dismissed as myth by many Jews by the time the Roman emperor issued orders for a census. But not by God! God never forgets His promises!
Now, the Jews had a custom: Whenever they had a census, they were counted not in the places where they resided, but in their ancestral homes. So, though Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth, they went to be counted—registered—in the ancestral home of both their families, Bethlehem, about sixty miles away.
The trip, in first-century Judea, would have been routine. People from all over the country ordinarily traveled to nearby Jerusalem several times a year for the great festivals of their faith, like Passover.
But there’s nothing routine about a woman nine months pregnant making such a trip over such hard terrain!
And yet, as Mary and Joseph left Nazareth and headed for Bethlehem, they may have smiled. An emperor in faraway Rome who would never know their names thought that he was exercising power, moving millions of people around like so many checkers on a game board. He had no idea that, unwittingly, by his orders, he was placing Mary exactly where God wanted her to be to fulfill the ancient promise of a Savior.
Luke tells what happened next simply: “So it was, that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger…”
When, some time after Jesus’ birth, shepherds arrived with the story of how an angel had told them that the Messiah had been born, Mary and Joseph may have smiled again, knowing that, whatever the obstacles, however much heartache or time may pass between the delivery of God’s promises and their fulfillment, and no matter how people may fool themselves with ideas that they’re in control or that their sins don’t matter or that they don’t need God’s help, there are really only two ways that the affairs of the world can go (you've heard me say it before): Either God gets His way or God gets His way!
Be still. God is in control!
The truth that God is in ultimate control of the universe is sometimes hard for us to believe or to see.
It may be hard for you to see it tonight.
You may be facing financial hard times and wonder what use God is in dealing with them.
You may be dealing with health issues, grieving the loss of a loved one, experiencing discord in your family, or battling an addiction and feel that God is far away or even useless.
You may look at the world, with its injustices, natural disasters, and selfishness and even think that God is out of the picture, that we’re all on our own. But don’t you believe any of those lies!
On the first Christmas, God let a simple couple from Nazareth in on the most wonderful joke of all. No matter how far sin seems to have spun the world out of God’s hands, no matter what tragedies may befall us, no matter how arrogantly those who think they have power may act, God is still in charge.
God can put a baby into the womb of a virgin.
God can let emperors think they’re in control while working His good and gracious will through their orders.
And, in Jesus Christ, you can know that God still cares about you.
God still holds those who believe in Him in the palm of His hands.
And God can sustain you through the tough times of this life when nothing makes sense by giving You the certainty that His grace and mercy for You will always prevail!
We can rest assured in God, or as the New Testament book of James calls Him, “the Father of lights, with Whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”
The God we know in Jesus Christ “is the same yesterday and today and forever.”
And this is the God Who tells us that He so loved the world—that He so loved you—that “He gave His only Son [Jesus], so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish [may not go to hell, the place of no life] but may have eternal life.”
God is still in control. This fact was underscored again when, hree decades after the first Christmas. Pilate, an emissary from the Roman Emperor, in Judea, the preachers and teachers of Judea, and people gathered in Jerusalem from the far corners of the known world, all agreed that Jesus, the One Whose birth the angels sang at Christmas, had to die. In nailing Jesus to a cross, they tried to declare their independence from God. They sought to assert human control over life and death, the present and the future. On that Good Friday when Jesus was executed, those who had believed in Him were sure that the promises of God had only been a dream. They thought that they could never be happy again, that life was, in the words of an English writer, “nasty, brutish, and short.” And then Jesus’ dead body was placed in a tomb.
But on Easter, God once more showed that He was in control. Jesus rose from the dead to claim forgiveness and new life for all who turn from sin and entrust their lives to Him.
Tonight, you may feel alone. To you, the Jesus Who was born on Christmas, died on Good Friday, and rose from the dead, says, “Remember, I am with you always.”
You may feel that your sins are too great for God to forgive. God’s Word says that in Jesus, “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.” In Jesus, we see that God is “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” We see that though we are, “are stained red with sin, [God] will wash [us] as clean as snow.”
Tonight, you may feel that the pain of grief or relational discord you feel is unbearable. But God’s Word says that when we suffer, emptied of arrogance or self-sufficiency, Christ’s power is perfected in us. God replaces our weakness with His strength and we can face anything.
And tonight, you may think that your eternal future is bleak and that death is the end of things. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in Me, though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.” And God’s Word promises that in eternity, God “will wipe every tear from [believers'] eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more…”
No matter how far from God you may have felt when you walked in here tonight, you can walk away from here knowing that the God Who came into our world at Christmas and Who will return one day to fully establish His eternal kingdom, will never leave your nor forsake you.
Christmas, the feast of Jesus’ birth, can be a moment of rebirth and renewal for you, whether you’ve followed Christ your whole life, had a distant, Christmas-and-Easter relationship with Christ, or never in your life bowed down and confessed that Jesus the Messiah is your Lord and your God and your King.
You see, God wants you to be “in on the joke.” He wants you to let Him love you and make you new, now, and He wants you to be with Him for all eternity. He wants all of us to experience intimacy with Him and the incredible comfort and power that belongs to all who surrender and dare to believe in Him.
If you want any of those things tonight, please bow your heads now and silently affirm that the prayer I’m about to offer is your prayer, too:
Luke 2:1-7
In the first parish I served as a pastor was a couple who had been married many years and were deeply devoted to each other. Several years before I arrived, the woman, Laura, had been struck with Alzheimer’s Disease. By the time I became Laura’s and Vern’s pastor, she was confined to a bed in a nursing home, incapable of recognizing anyone or carrying on a conversation, not even Vern. But every day, Vern would visit and spend hours with Laura. He fed her with a baster, read the Bible and the newspaper to her, told her all the latest family news, and prayed with her. Often, when I visited Laura to pray aloud for her, I would find Vern there by her bedside. And often, when we spoke in private, Vern would tell me all about Laura, his love for her, and their life together. “She was always the first to send a note of encouragement to people who had bad things happen in their lives,” he told me. “And always called them to congratulate them or just be happy with them when good things happened. And she loved going to church, especially at Advent, just before Christmas, because she loved remembering that one day, Jesus was coming back again.” I remember commenting to Vern how rare it was for someone to love Advent. They might love Christmas or Easter, but few people loved Advent. But Laura did.
Some five years after Vern first told me of Laura’s love for Advent, she died. It was just a few days before Christmas, in the waning days of Advent. We’re never ready for the loss of loved ones, even when we know that their deaths are inevitable. I was with Vern when Laura passed. Tears filled his eyes and his throat was choked with emotion. But he turned to me with a smile on his face and chuckle in his voice when he said, “It was her Advent, pastor. Laura is with Jesus now.” In the midst of tragedy, because of Jesus Christ, Vern knew he (and Laura) had something to smile about! They were in on God’s punchline!
One way to read the events of the first Christmas that we celebrate tonight is to see them as one wonderful punchline that God wants all the world to get.
In our Gospel lesson from Luke, we’re told that the emperor in Rome decided that everyone under the domain of the Roman Empire needed to be counted in a census. Judea, composed of God’s people, the Jews, had been conquered by Rome decades earlier. So, the people of Judea, including the couple God had chosen to act as foster parents to Jesus, had to submit to the census. In ancient times, a census, especially when those being counted were a conquered people, was designed to find who could be conscripted into the military and forced labor and to let the extortionist tax collectors know where they could find all their victims. A census was a way for corrupt dictators to flex their power.
That’s what Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor, thought he was doing in ordering this particular census. He surely had no knowledge of the words of God spoken through the prophet Micah 740 years earlier: “But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are one the littlest clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for Me One Who is to rule Israel, Whose origin is from old, from ancient days…” The Messiah, the Anointed King, the Christ, repeatedly promised by God through the prophets, was to be born in Bethlehem, a tiny town about five miles from Jerusalem.
The promises of a Messiah had been forgotten or dismissed as myth by many Jews by the time the Roman emperor issued orders for a census. But not by God! God never forgets His promises!
Now, the Jews had a custom: Whenever they had a census, they were counted not in the places where they resided, but in their ancestral homes. So, though Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth, they went to be counted—registered—in the ancestral home of both their families, Bethlehem, about sixty miles away.
The trip, in first-century Judea, would have been routine. People from all over the country ordinarily traveled to nearby Jerusalem several times a year for the great festivals of their faith, like Passover.
But there’s nothing routine about a woman nine months pregnant making such a trip over such hard terrain!
And yet, as Mary and Joseph left Nazareth and headed for Bethlehem, they may have smiled. An emperor in faraway Rome who would never know their names thought that he was exercising power, moving millions of people around like so many checkers on a game board. He had no idea that, unwittingly, by his orders, he was placing Mary exactly where God wanted her to be to fulfill the ancient promise of a Savior.
Luke tells what happened next simply: “So it was, that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger…”
When, some time after Jesus’ birth, shepherds arrived with the story of how an angel had told them that the Messiah had been born, Mary and Joseph may have smiled again, knowing that, whatever the obstacles, however much heartache or time may pass between the delivery of God’s promises and their fulfillment, and no matter how people may fool themselves with ideas that they’re in control or that their sins don’t matter or that they don’t need God’s help, there are really only two ways that the affairs of the world can go (you've heard me say it before): Either God gets His way or God gets His way!
Be still. God is in control!
The truth that God is in ultimate control of the universe is sometimes hard for us to believe or to see.
It may be hard for you to see it tonight.
You may be facing financial hard times and wonder what use God is in dealing with them.
You may be dealing with health issues, grieving the loss of a loved one, experiencing discord in your family, or battling an addiction and feel that God is far away or even useless.
You may look at the world, with its injustices, natural disasters, and selfishness and even think that God is out of the picture, that we’re all on our own. But don’t you believe any of those lies!
On the first Christmas, God let a simple couple from Nazareth in on the most wonderful joke of all. No matter how far sin seems to have spun the world out of God’s hands, no matter what tragedies may befall us, no matter how arrogantly those who think they have power may act, God is still in charge.
God can put a baby into the womb of a virgin.
God can let emperors think they’re in control while working His good and gracious will through their orders.
And, in Jesus Christ, you can know that God still cares about you.
God still holds those who believe in Him in the palm of His hands.
And God can sustain you through the tough times of this life when nothing makes sense by giving You the certainty that His grace and mercy for You will always prevail!
We can rest assured in God, or as the New Testament book of James calls Him, “the Father of lights, with Whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”
The God we know in Jesus Christ “is the same yesterday and today and forever.”
And this is the God Who tells us that He so loved the world—that He so loved you—that “He gave His only Son [Jesus], so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish [may not go to hell, the place of no life] but may have eternal life.”
God is still in control. This fact was underscored again when, hree decades after the first Christmas. Pilate, an emissary from the Roman Emperor, in Judea, the preachers and teachers of Judea, and people gathered in Jerusalem from the far corners of the known world, all agreed that Jesus, the One Whose birth the angels sang at Christmas, had to die. In nailing Jesus to a cross, they tried to declare their independence from God. They sought to assert human control over life and death, the present and the future. On that Good Friday when Jesus was executed, those who had believed in Him were sure that the promises of God had only been a dream. They thought that they could never be happy again, that life was, in the words of an English writer, “nasty, brutish, and short.” And then Jesus’ dead body was placed in a tomb.
But on Easter, God once more showed that He was in control. Jesus rose from the dead to claim forgiveness and new life for all who turn from sin and entrust their lives to Him.
Tonight, you may feel alone. To you, the Jesus Who was born on Christmas, died on Good Friday, and rose from the dead, says, “Remember, I am with you always.”
You may feel that your sins are too great for God to forgive. God’s Word says that in Jesus, “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.” In Jesus, we see that God is “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” We see that though we are, “are stained red with sin, [God] will wash [us] as clean as snow.”
Tonight, you may feel that the pain of grief or relational discord you feel is unbearable. But God’s Word says that when we suffer, emptied of arrogance or self-sufficiency, Christ’s power is perfected in us. God replaces our weakness with His strength and we can face anything.
And tonight, you may think that your eternal future is bleak and that death is the end of things. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in Me, though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.” And God’s Word promises that in eternity, God “will wipe every tear from [believers'] eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more…”
No matter how far from God you may have felt when you walked in here tonight, you can walk away from here knowing that the God Who came into our world at Christmas and Who will return one day to fully establish His eternal kingdom, will never leave your nor forsake you.
Christmas, the feast of Jesus’ birth, can be a moment of rebirth and renewal for you, whether you’ve followed Christ your whole life, had a distant, Christmas-and-Easter relationship with Christ, or never in your life bowed down and confessed that Jesus the Messiah is your Lord and your God and your King.
You see, God wants you to be “in on the joke.” He wants you to let Him love you and make you new, now, and He wants you to be with Him for all eternity. He wants all of us to experience intimacy with Him and the incredible comfort and power that belongs to all who surrender and dare to believe in Him.
If you want any of those things tonight, please bow your heads now and silently affirm that the prayer I’m about to offer is your prayer, too:
Gracious Father God, we thank You that You have never given up on us or on Your promises to us. We thank You that on the first Christmas You sent Jesus, God the Son, to live life as we do, to experience all that we experience, to die on our behalf, and to rise from death, so that You can give forgiveness and new life to all who believe in Jesus. We thank You that Your Holy Spirit is here with us right now, in good and bad times, in moments of clarity and in times of confounding mystery, convincing us that Your promises are true, that You want to be with us always, that You want to reshape our characters and make us more like Jesus, and that, at the ends of our days, whenever they come, You will be waiting for us with open arms and infinite love. We ask You to fill us with joy, peace, and hope, no matter the condition of our health, our emotions, or our pocketbooks. As Jesus lived for us, help us to live for You only, tonight and always. In Jesus’ Name we pray. AmenMerry Christmas, everybody!
"Calculating Christmas"
I thought I knew how the date for Christmas was set. But I may have been wrong. Read this interesting article.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Are Bishops Necessary?
From today's devotional in Our Daily Bread: "Caring for God’s people includes feeding them spiritually, leading them gently, and warning them firmly. Leaders in the church are to be motivated by the incalculable price Christ paid on the cross."
These are important words.
But here are a few additional thoughts triggered by the Bible passage on which the devotion is based, Acts 2:22-32. (You might want to go read it now. Go ahead! I'll wait here for you to do it.)
The word translated in the New Revised Standard Version rendering of the passage, as "overseers," is, in the original Greek, "episcopos." Episcopos is a compound word composed of the prefix, "epi," meaning "over," and "skopos" (from which we get words like telescope and microscope) and means "see."
So, an episcopos, is an overseer, someone who, in the church, sees over the spiritual needs of a congregation or a group of individual Christians.
The word "episcopos" came to be rendered in English as "bishop" and has come to be applied to clergy persons who oversee the work of groups of congregations and pastors, whether those groups are referred to as synods, conferences, districts, or dioceses.
However, the New Testament has no reference to persons bearing the title "bishop" or "episcopos" functioning in this way.*
When the New Testament refers to "overseers" or "bishops," it has in mind what we would today call "pastors." Pastors, in the New Testament context, could be the shepherds of congregations or serve the shepherding role among groups of believers within a larger body.
The New Testament doesn't lay out any particular system for individual congregations or groups of congregations to organize themselves. Biblically, we are free in Christ to be organized in any way that seems practical, helping us to pursue our common mission as believers in Christ.
The Lutheran Confessions are similarly indifferent to how congregations or groups of congregations are organized. Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession, an expression of how Lutheran Christians understand God, the Bible, and Christian faith, says, "It is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word."
Lutherans have always believed that authority over the actions of the Church aren't governed by human beings, but by God, as mediated to us through God's Word, the Bible. Part 1 of the Formula of Concord, another basic Lutheran confessional statement, says, "We believe, teach, and confess that the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged...Other writings of ancient and modern teachers, whatever their names, should not be put on a par with Holy Scripture. Every single one of them should be subordinated to the Scriptures..." [italics are mine]
It's fine for denominational groups, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) of which I am a part, to have bishops, so long as that's agreeable to those within the ELCA. But the Bible only knows "bishops" (overseers) as pastors. Bishops over a synod or a diocese are in a category Martin Luther called "adiaphora," an element of church life that has nothing to do with and is unnecessary for, our salvation.
*You will notice that the word episcopos is very much like the term Episcopalian. That's because the Episcopal Church, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, traces its organizational structure back to that of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, and other Christian traditions, operate with an episcopal system. This means that they are governed largely by bishops. Most notably, bishops in all of these traditions assign pastors to congregations, rather than congregations prayerfully deciding who to call to be their pastors.
Under episcopal structures, to varying degrees, bishops also are deemed to be the ultimate authorities within the regions, dioceses, synods, or districts in which they serve, over the faith and practice of the Church. So, for example, when some bishops in the the Episcopal Church-USA, authorized the ordination of practicing homosexuals, some Episcopal parishes chose to place themselves under the authority of bishops of other dioceses, ones in which the bishops adhered to differing understandings of the underlying Biblical issues.
These are important words.
But here are a few additional thoughts triggered by the Bible passage on which the devotion is based, Acts 2:22-32. (You might want to go read it now. Go ahead! I'll wait here for you to do it.)
The word translated in the New Revised Standard Version rendering of the passage, as "overseers," is, in the original Greek, "episcopos." Episcopos is a compound word composed of the prefix, "epi," meaning "over," and "skopos" (from which we get words like telescope and microscope) and means "see."
So, an episcopos, is an overseer, someone who, in the church, sees over the spiritual needs of a congregation or a group of individual Christians.
The word "episcopos" came to be rendered in English as "bishop" and has come to be applied to clergy persons who oversee the work of groups of congregations and pastors, whether those groups are referred to as synods, conferences, districts, or dioceses.
However, the New Testament has no reference to persons bearing the title "bishop" or "episcopos" functioning in this way.*
When the New Testament refers to "overseers" or "bishops," it has in mind what we would today call "pastors." Pastors, in the New Testament context, could be the shepherds of congregations or serve the shepherding role among groups of believers within a larger body.
The New Testament doesn't lay out any particular system for individual congregations or groups of congregations to organize themselves. Biblically, we are free in Christ to be organized in any way that seems practical, helping us to pursue our common mission as believers in Christ.
The Lutheran Confessions are similarly indifferent to how congregations or groups of congregations are organized. Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession, an expression of how Lutheran Christians understand God, the Bible, and Christian faith, says, "It is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word."
Lutherans have always believed that authority over the actions of the Church aren't governed by human beings, but by God, as mediated to us through God's Word, the Bible. Part 1 of the Formula of Concord, another basic Lutheran confessional statement, says, "We believe, teach, and confess that the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged...Other writings of ancient and modern teachers, whatever their names, should not be put on a par with Holy Scripture. Every single one of them should be subordinated to the Scriptures..." [italics are mine]
It's fine for denominational groups, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) of which I am a part, to have bishops, so long as that's agreeable to those within the ELCA. But the Bible only knows "bishops" (overseers) as pastors. Bishops over a synod or a diocese are in a category Martin Luther called "adiaphora," an element of church life that has nothing to do with and is unnecessary for, our salvation.
*You will notice that the word episcopos is very much like the term Episcopalian. That's because the Episcopal Church, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, traces its organizational structure back to that of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, and other Christian traditions, operate with an episcopal system. This means that they are governed largely by bishops. Most notably, bishops in all of these traditions assign pastors to congregations, rather than congregations prayerfully deciding who to call to be their pastors.
Under episcopal structures, to varying degrees, bishops also are deemed to be the ultimate authorities within the regions, dioceses, synods, or districts in which they serve, over the faith and practice of the Church. So, for example, when some bishops in the the Episcopal Church-USA, authorized the ordination of practicing homosexuals, some Episcopal parishes chose to place themselves under the authority of bishops of other dioceses, ones in which the bishops adhered to differing understandings of the underlying Biblical issues.
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