People come from far and wide to spend time in the Hocking Hills here in Ohio during the autumn months. You can see why in this video I took tonight when my wife and I walked the track at the Hocking County Fairgrounds here in Logan. The leaf colors were gorgeous on perfectly clear night.
Saturday, October 08, 2011
A Beautiful Night at Rock Mill Park
We've had tremendous weather here in Ohio: sunny and warm with no humidity. So, last night, we headed to Rock Mill Park in rural Fairfield County, near Lancaster. The site is being developed by the Fairfield park system and is unique for having both a nineteenth century grist mill and covered bridge of similar vintage. The water power for the mill was provided by the Hocking River, at a point where it's particularly narrow.
While we were there, a photographer was snapping pictures of a young woman who wandered barefooted in the shallow water. They'll probably be part of her portfolio of high school senior pictures.
While we were there, a photographer was snapping pictures of a young woman who wandered barefooted in the shallow water. They'll probably be part of her portfolio of high school senior pictures.
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Remembering Fred Shuttlesworth
Sadly, news of the death of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth has been overshadowed by the death of Steve Jobs. Jobs was a genius, of course, whose life is worth remembering and appreciating. But the courageous Shuttlesworth deserves eulogizing, too. Check out this New York Times piece.
[This photograph by the Associated Press' Dave Martin appears with the article.]
[This photograph by the Associated Press' Dave Martin appears with the article.]
The Lutheran Confessions on the Bible
"Holy Scripture remains the only judge, rule, and norm according to which as the only touchstone all doctrines should and must be understood and judged as good or evil, right or wrong." (The Formula of Concord, one of the Lutheran confessions)
"The Greatest Form of Evangelism?"
In the thirty-plus years in which evangelism--sharing the Good News about Jesus--has been an obsession of mine, both as a layperson and as a pastor, I have seen lots of evangelism programs come and go.
Each one has promised to revolutionize individual congregations and lead to great spiritual and numerical growth in Christ's Church. I've had it up to my gills with church programs!
I'm not alone. Rice Broocks writes convincingly about the greatest form of evangelism.
By the way, preaching or telling others about Jesus is too important to be left up to preachers only and certainly shouldn't be confined to the pulpit. Every Christian needs to get into the act.
Each one has promised to revolutionize individual congregations and lead to great spiritual and numerical growth in Christ's Church. I've had it up to my gills with church programs!
I'm not alone. Rice Broocks writes convincingly about the greatest form of evangelism.
By the way, preaching or telling others about Jesus is too important to be left up to preachers only and certainly shouldn't be confined to the pulpit. Every Christian needs to get into the act.
"Hats Off to Steve Jobs"
That's the title of this short post on Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs from my buddy, Steve Sjogren. Worth the one minute it will take you to read.
Sunday, October 02, 2011
The Partnership
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio earlier today.]
Matthew 21:33-46
You’ve probably heard the story about a day when the pastor visited a church member who was a farmer. The farmer had been incredibly successful, against all odds turning his farm into a money-making machine. The pastor was impressed. “God has really been good to you,” he said. “Yes, pastor,” the farmer answered, “I suppose you’re right. But you should have seen how bad off this place was back when God was running it by Himself.”
Among the unique qualities of being human is that we, unlike any of God’s other creatures, have been made in the image of God. None of God’s creatures are closer to God or more like God than human beings. With that privileged position goes the responsibility of faithfully and creatively using all the gifts that God gives to us. After creating our first parents, Adam and Eve, the Old Testament book of Genesis says that God told them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Later in Genesis, we’re told that God put the first humans in the Garden of Eden “to till it and keep it.”
God never planned on running this universe without our involvement. He always planned on showering the human race with all we needed to play our role in the universe and we were always meant to respond to His blessings with lives of faithfulness to His ways and His will.
But the human role in God’s plans—our partnership with God—became impossible to fulfill faithfully or fully when the condition of sin entered the human gene pool. The condition of sin is more than just doing bad things. It is, as one Lutheran pastor points out, “the attitude of selfishness [that thinks it] needs no God.”
The condition of sin introduced all sorts of things into life in this world that God never intended for human beings to experience. Things like suffering, aging, and death, for example. And the futility that makes it hard for us to do jobs well or on time; that make relationships challenging; and that subjects all of us to decay and illness. The Bible teaches that because of the condition of sin that has infected God’s most important creatures, the entire creation for which God has made us responsible has been “subjected to futility” and “in…bondage to decay” as the apostle Paul puts it in the New Testament book of Romans. It’s not a pretty picture.
Yet, God has refused to give up on you, the human race, or His creation!
That’s why He has personally come into this world to plant the Kingdom of God, a new and eternal creation in which there is no more sin, death, or futility. Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, told people, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of has come near, repent, and believe in the Good News.”
Followers of Jesus believe that while this world will inevitably do its worst to us, that because we live in this world,we will die, that doesn’t have to be the end of our stories.
As Jesus put it when speaking with a grieving friend, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
The New Testament book of Second Corinthians promises: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new.”
Through His death and resurrection, Jesus makes it possible for all who repent for sin and believe in Him to live in fellowship with God now and in eternity. God grants those who follow Christ an eternal do-over! And it will be a do-better, infinitely better!
In the Garden of Eden, God asked Adam and Eve to respond to Him with trusting faith. He had given them everything already; all they needed to do was trust in Him. Those who have been reached by the Kingdom of God through Jesus are asked to daily turn our backs on the old ways of selfishness and sin and in trust to Christ.
The Bible teaches that when we repent and trust in Christ, our lives are re-oriented away from sin and self and out toward God and neighbor. We become part of the Kingdom of God and our lives are imbued with new purpose. We want to live and work with God and for God’s aims.
This is what Jesus calls “bearing fruit.”
Each day we live trusting Christ, our lives are being transformed from deserts of futility to gardens burgeoning with the life of God.
Some find this hard to understand. In 1809, the same year that Abraham Lincoln was born, a Scotsman named Robert Morrison headed for China as a missionary. While on the way, the captain of the ship was skeptical of Morrison’s dream of carrying the Good News of Jesus Christ to the Chinese. The captain derided Morrison. “I suppose,” he said, “you think you’re going to make an impression on China.” Morrison replied, “No, sir. I believe God will.”
Morrison was in partnership with God. Are you?
It’s to exactly this kind of partnership that Jesus calls us in today’s Gospel lesson. Pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the Gospel for the day, Matthew 21:33-46. The lesson incorporates one of a string of parables (or stories) that Jesus tells in this section of Matthew’s gospel.
You know the story: A landowner planted a vineyard. He went all out. He fenced the vineyard in, dug a wine press, and erected a watchtower. He created a perfect place--an Eden--for the tenants to whom he leased it to work, make a living, and raise their families. After that, the landowner went to another country. Time passed and the landowner sent slaves to collect his share of the vineyard’s produce. This was only right because it was his land, his vines, his wine press, his watchtower.
But the tenants didn’t want to fulfill their responsibility to the landowner. They wanted to keep everything for themselves. So, they either beat, stoned, or killed, the landowners’ slaves, on two different occasions.
So, the landowner decided to send his son. He was certain that the tenants would respect him. But, Jesus said, the tenants killed him too.
When Jesus asked His original listeners—members of the religious elite, priests and Pharisees—what should happen to the tenants, they were clear what the rightful punishment for the tenants would be. Each, they said, should be given miserable deaths and other tenants should be given their land and produce.
I believe that Jesus told this parable for several reasons.
First, He was telling the religious elites of first-century Judea that they were just like the religious elites of previous centuries who had killed prophets who, in the Name of God, had called people to respond to God’s love by turning from sin and trusting in God. Jesus knew that in a short time, these very elites would arrange for Him—the Son of God, the Creator of the universe—to be killed, too.
But Jesus also told this parable for you and me. It’s so easy and so tempting for us to get caught up in living and measuring our lives by the standards of this world, so easy to forget that through our Baptisms, God has made us part of an eternal kingdom, so easy to think that the God Who seems to live in “another country” is impotent in the face of all that troubles us in this country.
In fact, I think that it’s sadly true that many Christians most of the time live as functional atheists. I once heard Pastor Paul Cedar tell the story of conducting a Bible study with the leaders of the congregation he served, passionately imploring them to make prayer a regular part of their lives. He was shocked when one council member told him he didn’t have time to pray because, he said, “Prayer doesn’t work.”
Whether from cynicism or despair, we all may be tempted to feel that way sometimes. The sin of this world may tempt us to believe that nothing about our faith is true. I know that was especially true for me back when I was locked in the despair of atheism. In those days, I wrote songs and for me, God wasn't the living Maker and Redeemer of the universe, but a symbol for all that was wrong with the world. In one of my songs, I found myself singing, "Sometimes God, I feel like I'm a million miles from heaven and I can't find my way back home."
There are times, I have seen, when even the most committed Christian may feel like this. Those are good times for us to remember a few things. When our prayers aren’t answered or we’re accosted by grief or heartache, we remember that God knows our grief and heartache first hand; He understands and cares.
We remember that He died for us, a death He didn’t deserve and we remember that He did it to take a punishment that, because of our sin, you and I do deserve.
We remember that He rose from the dead so that all who believe in Christ will one day awaken to an eternal day with Him and all the saints.
When we remember the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, God will awaken faithfulness in us and we will, as Jesus puts it, “bear fruit,” living lives of dependence on God’s grace and power.
When Jesus is in our lives, we live less like the victims of sin and more like the conquerors of death Christ makes of those who trust in Him!
Jesus has brought His kingdom to you and me and He wants to forge a partnership with us that lasts for eternity. It’s a partnership He wants to have with us even now in this imperfect world.
Some of you may know that when our friend Karen Hendrickson was dying of cancer, she called me up and said, “I understand that our church council vice president has resigned. I would like to be appointed to that position.” “Karen,” I said, “are you sure you want to do that?” “Mark, I’ve decided that whatever time I have left on earth, I want to give it to God.” We appointed Karen to council and she served there effectively almost until the end of her life.
Karen bore the fruit of God’s kingdom even as her earthly body was being ravaged. Assured of eternity with Christ, she decided that she didn’t want to waste any time living the way this world says we ought to live—looking out for ourselves or those we decide to care about—and she decided instead, to live and work with God in building up the Kingdom that will live long after this universe has burned up and burned out.
Jesus wants to be a partner with you in building and enjoying the Kingdom of God with Him for all eternity. Turn from sin, trust in Him, seek to live in sync with God’s will and bear good fruit. Let Jesus be your partner in all of your life. Amen
Matthew 21:33-46
You’ve probably heard the story about a day when the pastor visited a church member who was a farmer. The farmer had been incredibly successful, against all odds turning his farm into a money-making machine. The pastor was impressed. “God has really been good to you,” he said. “Yes, pastor,” the farmer answered, “I suppose you’re right. But you should have seen how bad off this place was back when God was running it by Himself.”
Among the unique qualities of being human is that we, unlike any of God’s other creatures, have been made in the image of God. None of God’s creatures are closer to God or more like God than human beings. With that privileged position goes the responsibility of faithfully and creatively using all the gifts that God gives to us. After creating our first parents, Adam and Eve, the Old Testament book of Genesis says that God told them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Later in Genesis, we’re told that God put the first humans in the Garden of Eden “to till it and keep it.”
God never planned on running this universe without our involvement. He always planned on showering the human race with all we needed to play our role in the universe and we were always meant to respond to His blessings with lives of faithfulness to His ways and His will.
But the human role in God’s plans—our partnership with God—became impossible to fulfill faithfully or fully when the condition of sin entered the human gene pool. The condition of sin is more than just doing bad things. It is, as one Lutheran pastor points out, “the attitude of selfishness [that thinks it] needs no God.”
The condition of sin introduced all sorts of things into life in this world that God never intended for human beings to experience. Things like suffering, aging, and death, for example. And the futility that makes it hard for us to do jobs well or on time; that make relationships challenging; and that subjects all of us to decay and illness. The Bible teaches that because of the condition of sin that has infected God’s most important creatures, the entire creation for which God has made us responsible has been “subjected to futility” and “in…bondage to decay” as the apostle Paul puts it in the New Testament book of Romans. It’s not a pretty picture.
Yet, God has refused to give up on you, the human race, or His creation!
That’s why He has personally come into this world to plant the Kingdom of God, a new and eternal creation in which there is no more sin, death, or futility. Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, told people, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of has come near, repent, and believe in the Good News.”
Followers of Jesus believe that while this world will inevitably do its worst to us, that because we live in this world,we will die, that doesn’t have to be the end of our stories.
As Jesus put it when speaking with a grieving friend, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
The New Testament book of Second Corinthians promises: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new.”
Through His death and resurrection, Jesus makes it possible for all who repent for sin and believe in Him to live in fellowship with God now and in eternity. God grants those who follow Christ an eternal do-over! And it will be a do-better, infinitely better!
In the Garden of Eden, God asked Adam and Eve to respond to Him with trusting faith. He had given them everything already; all they needed to do was trust in Him. Those who have been reached by the Kingdom of God through Jesus are asked to daily turn our backs on the old ways of selfishness and sin and in trust to Christ.
The Bible teaches that when we repent and trust in Christ, our lives are re-oriented away from sin and self and out toward God and neighbor. We become part of the Kingdom of God and our lives are imbued with new purpose. We want to live and work with God and for God’s aims.
This is what Jesus calls “bearing fruit.”
Each day we live trusting Christ, our lives are being transformed from deserts of futility to gardens burgeoning with the life of God.
Some find this hard to understand. In 1809, the same year that Abraham Lincoln was born, a Scotsman named Robert Morrison headed for China as a missionary. While on the way, the captain of the ship was skeptical of Morrison’s dream of carrying the Good News of Jesus Christ to the Chinese. The captain derided Morrison. “I suppose,” he said, “you think you’re going to make an impression on China.” Morrison replied, “No, sir. I believe God will.”
Morrison was in partnership with God. Are you?
It’s to exactly this kind of partnership that Jesus calls us in today’s Gospel lesson. Pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the Gospel for the day, Matthew 21:33-46. The lesson incorporates one of a string of parables (or stories) that Jesus tells in this section of Matthew’s gospel.
You know the story: A landowner planted a vineyard. He went all out. He fenced the vineyard in, dug a wine press, and erected a watchtower. He created a perfect place--an Eden--for the tenants to whom he leased it to work, make a living, and raise their families. After that, the landowner went to another country. Time passed and the landowner sent slaves to collect his share of the vineyard’s produce. This was only right because it was his land, his vines, his wine press, his watchtower.
But the tenants didn’t want to fulfill their responsibility to the landowner. They wanted to keep everything for themselves. So, they either beat, stoned, or killed, the landowners’ slaves, on two different occasions.
So, the landowner decided to send his son. He was certain that the tenants would respect him. But, Jesus said, the tenants killed him too.
When Jesus asked His original listeners—members of the religious elite, priests and Pharisees—what should happen to the tenants, they were clear what the rightful punishment for the tenants would be. Each, they said, should be given miserable deaths and other tenants should be given their land and produce.
I believe that Jesus told this parable for several reasons.
First, He was telling the religious elites of first-century Judea that they were just like the religious elites of previous centuries who had killed prophets who, in the Name of God, had called people to respond to God’s love by turning from sin and trusting in God. Jesus knew that in a short time, these very elites would arrange for Him—the Son of God, the Creator of the universe—to be killed, too.
But Jesus also told this parable for you and me. It’s so easy and so tempting for us to get caught up in living and measuring our lives by the standards of this world, so easy to forget that through our Baptisms, God has made us part of an eternal kingdom, so easy to think that the God Who seems to live in “another country” is impotent in the face of all that troubles us in this country.
In fact, I think that it’s sadly true that many Christians most of the time live as functional atheists. I once heard Pastor Paul Cedar tell the story of conducting a Bible study with the leaders of the congregation he served, passionately imploring them to make prayer a regular part of their lives. He was shocked when one council member told him he didn’t have time to pray because, he said, “Prayer doesn’t work.”
Whether from cynicism or despair, we all may be tempted to feel that way sometimes. The sin of this world may tempt us to believe that nothing about our faith is true. I know that was especially true for me back when I was locked in the despair of atheism. In those days, I wrote songs and for me, God wasn't the living Maker and Redeemer of the universe, but a symbol for all that was wrong with the world. In one of my songs, I found myself singing, "Sometimes God, I feel like I'm a million miles from heaven and I can't find my way back home."
There are times, I have seen, when even the most committed Christian may feel like this. Those are good times for us to remember a few things. When our prayers aren’t answered or we’re accosted by grief or heartache, we remember that God knows our grief and heartache first hand; He understands and cares.
We remember that He died for us, a death He didn’t deserve and we remember that He did it to take a punishment that, because of our sin, you and I do deserve.
We remember that He rose from the dead so that all who believe in Christ will one day awaken to an eternal day with Him and all the saints.
When we remember the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, God will awaken faithfulness in us and we will, as Jesus puts it, “bear fruit,” living lives of dependence on God’s grace and power.
When Jesus is in our lives, we live less like the victims of sin and more like the conquerors of death Christ makes of those who trust in Him!
Jesus has brought His kingdom to you and me and He wants to forge a partnership with us that lasts for eternity. It’s a partnership He wants to have with us even now in this imperfect world.
Some of you may know that when our friend Karen Hendrickson was dying of cancer, she called me up and said, “I understand that our church council vice president has resigned. I would like to be appointed to that position.” “Karen,” I said, “are you sure you want to do that?” “Mark, I’ve decided that whatever time I have left on earth, I want to give it to God.” We appointed Karen to council and she served there effectively almost until the end of her life.
Karen bore the fruit of God’s kingdom even as her earthly body was being ravaged. Assured of eternity with Christ, she decided that she didn’t want to waste any time living the way this world says we ought to live—looking out for ourselves or those we decide to care about—and she decided instead, to live and work with God in building up the Kingdom that will live long after this universe has burned up and burned out.
Jesus wants to be a partner with you in building and enjoying the Kingdom of God with Him for all eternity. Turn from sin, trust in Him, seek to live in sync with God’s will and bear good fruit. Let Jesus be your partner in all of your life. Amen
Friday, September 30, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
People Like Daniel
Today, I went to Columbus to visit Janice, a member of our Saint Matthew congregation who suffered a stroke on Monday night. She is doing remarkably well and may be discharged soon. Fantastic care at the hospital in Columbus, buttressed by the prayers offered by many people, no doubt explain Janice's progress. We said a prayer that included thanks to God during my visit today.
I've been feeling sort of "flu-ish" over the past several days. So, I decided that while in Columbus, I would see my own doctor. He diagnosed a sinus infection and prescribed an antibiotic. Knowing that I was planning on visiting Janice, he asked if I would like for him to send the scrip to the hospital pharmacy. That's how I found myself sitting in the hospital pharmacy when Daniel walked in today.
Daniel works at the hospital as a custodian. I'm sure that the table next to me needed dusted and polished. But I'm also sure God sent Daniel at that particular moment to teach me a lesson.
"Hi," I said. Daniel, who up to that point, had looked intent on being unobtrusive, stood erectly and smiled at me while returning my greeting.
He saw my clerical collar. "Are you a priest or a pastor?" he asked. I explained that I was a Lutheran pastor.
He told me that, at the hospital, he had a ministry. Every day during his breaks, he and his supervisor go to the chapel and pray for the intensive care patients and for anyone else, aware of their ministry, who asks for prayer. (Often, I take breaks, all I do is stuff my face and scan a magazine. Daniel prays for people!)
As our conversation progressed, he told me that he and his wife were from Ethiopia. Both worked at the hospital, taking different shifts so that they could take turns caring for their son. They had just flipped shifts.
He went on to explain that under Ethiopia's previous regime, life was difficult for Ethiopian Christians. It still can be. I told him that both Saint Matthew and I personally had been praying for the oldest Protestant body in Ethiopia, the Mekane Yesus Church, which is a Lutheran denomination. In recent months, more than 50 congregational buildings of the Mekane Yesus Church, which is larger than the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America of which I'm a part, have been burned by radical Islamists.
In Ethiopia, it turns out, Daniel had worked for a Bible society which distributed audiotapes of the Bible, part of a program called, Faith Comes Through Hearing. At many Ethiopian churches, believers and those seeking to know the God of the Bible, ultimately revealed in Jesus, gather to listen to segments of the Bible on tape, then discuss what they've heard. It's one means by which faith in Christ is growing in depth and in numbers in Ethiopia.*
Daniel told me about the day he went to visit one of the churches that was using the Bible on audiotape. The church's building had been attacked by radical Islamists. That was difficult enough for the church's pastor and for Daniel to accept. But Daniel told me that he and the pastor wept when, going through the ash and rubble, they found the case in which the Bible tapes were kept, burnt. "Look, Daniel," the pastor said, "they even burned the Word of God." Daniel told me that on seeing this, both he and the pastor wept.
Two years ago, Daniel and his family came to America. Because of persecution, they had been praying for the chance to leave Ethiopia. "Then," Daniel told me, "God let us come here."
Today, Daniel and his family are involved with an Ethiopian immigrant church in Columbus where 300 believers regularly gather on Sundays. His smiling face betrayed none of his past pain.
My guess is that Daniel would like one day to return to Ethiopia. But I know that wherever he goes, he will have a ministry. He will carry Jesus with him everywhere.
I also know this: All who believe in Jesus Christ can live in the confidence that through our crucified and risen Savior, nothing can separate us from God. When I think of all the bellyaching I can do over minor inconveniences and setbacks, it makes me feel ashamed. That's especially true when I meet joyful Christians with servant hearts, people like Daniel.
People like Daniel inspire renewed confidence in the Lord Who promises to be with His people always, Who promises to meet them even in eternity, where He has prepared places for all who turn from sin and believe in Him.
Thank You, God, for sending Daniel to dust that table and to teach me to trust in You.
*The Mekane Yesuse Church, for example, grew by 300,000 members from 2009 to 2010!
I've been feeling sort of "flu-ish" over the past several days. So, I decided that while in Columbus, I would see my own doctor. He diagnosed a sinus infection and prescribed an antibiotic. Knowing that I was planning on visiting Janice, he asked if I would like for him to send the scrip to the hospital pharmacy. That's how I found myself sitting in the hospital pharmacy when Daniel walked in today.
Daniel works at the hospital as a custodian. I'm sure that the table next to me needed dusted and polished. But I'm also sure God sent Daniel at that particular moment to teach me a lesson.
"Hi," I said. Daniel, who up to that point, had looked intent on being unobtrusive, stood erectly and smiled at me while returning my greeting.
He saw my clerical collar. "Are you a priest or a pastor?" he asked. I explained that I was a Lutheran pastor.
He told me that, at the hospital, he had a ministry. Every day during his breaks, he and his supervisor go to the chapel and pray for the intensive care patients and for anyone else, aware of their ministry, who asks for prayer. (Often, I take breaks, all I do is stuff my face and scan a magazine. Daniel prays for people!)
As our conversation progressed, he told me that he and his wife were from Ethiopia. Both worked at the hospital, taking different shifts so that they could take turns caring for their son. They had just flipped shifts.
He went on to explain that under Ethiopia's previous regime, life was difficult for Ethiopian Christians. It still can be. I told him that both Saint Matthew and I personally had been praying for the oldest Protestant body in Ethiopia, the Mekane Yesus Church, which is a Lutheran denomination. In recent months, more than 50 congregational buildings of the Mekane Yesus Church, which is larger than the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America of which I'm a part, have been burned by radical Islamists.
In Ethiopia, it turns out, Daniel had worked for a Bible society which distributed audiotapes of the Bible, part of a program called, Faith Comes Through Hearing. At many Ethiopian churches, believers and those seeking to know the God of the Bible, ultimately revealed in Jesus, gather to listen to segments of the Bible on tape, then discuss what they've heard. It's one means by which faith in Christ is growing in depth and in numbers in Ethiopia.*
Daniel told me about the day he went to visit one of the churches that was using the Bible on audiotape. The church's building had been attacked by radical Islamists. That was difficult enough for the church's pastor and for Daniel to accept. But Daniel told me that he and the pastor wept when, going through the ash and rubble, they found the case in which the Bible tapes were kept, burnt. "Look, Daniel," the pastor said, "they even burned the Word of God." Daniel told me that on seeing this, both he and the pastor wept.
Two years ago, Daniel and his family came to America. Because of persecution, they had been praying for the chance to leave Ethiopia. "Then," Daniel told me, "God let us come here."
Today, Daniel and his family are involved with an Ethiopian immigrant church in Columbus where 300 believers regularly gather on Sundays. His smiling face betrayed none of his past pain.
My guess is that Daniel would like one day to return to Ethiopia. But I know that wherever he goes, he will have a ministry. He will carry Jesus with him everywhere.
I also know this: All who believe in Jesus Christ can live in the confidence that through our crucified and risen Savior, nothing can separate us from God. When I think of all the bellyaching I can do over minor inconveniences and setbacks, it makes me feel ashamed. That's especially true when I meet joyful Christians with servant hearts, people like Daniel.
People like Daniel inspire renewed confidence in the Lord Who promises to be with His people always, Who promises to meet them even in eternity, where He has prepared places for all who turn from sin and believe in Him.
Thank You, God, for sending Daniel to dust that table and to teach me to trust in You.
*The Mekane Yesuse Church, for example, grew by 300,000 members from 2009 to 2010!
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Why We Worship
[Shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
Philippians 2:1-13
True story of a boy named Chad: One day Chad came home from school and told his mother that he wanted to make Valentine’s Day cards for his classmates. His mother wished that she could convince him to forget the idea. Chad’s classmates were always putting him down, picking him last for baseball at recess, and laughing at him. But Chad was insistent; he wanted to make those Valentine’s cards for his classmates. So, Chad’s mom bought the construction paper and the crayons and for three nights he worked hard on making the cards: Thirty five cards, one for each classmate!
On Valentine’s Day, Chad was excited! He carefully picked up the cards, put them in a bag, and ran out the door. Certain that he would be disappointed that his classmates hadn’t remembered him with Valentine’s Day cards, Chad’s mother baked his favorite cookies and had them waiting for the moment he got home from school.
At the usual time, she heard the other children laughing and talking as they walked toward their houses. Behind them all, walking by himself was Chad. It broke her heart to see him. But when he came through the door, there was a spring in his step, even though she could see that, unlike the other kids, Chad wasn’t holding a bag full of Valentine’s cards. Choking back tears, she announced that she had his favorite cookies and some milk for him. But Chad didn't seem to hear. His face was glowing and all he could say was, “Not a one...not a one.” Now, his mother thought she would cry. But then Chad told her, “I didn’t forget a one...not a single one!”
Today, I want to talk with you about worship.
By worship, I don’t mean just what we do on Sunday mornings. Worship is something that we do with our whole lives. And it begins not with our words or our songs or our offerings.
It begins with our attitudes, with the thoughts, actions, and feelings that we allow to be the controlling motifs of our lives. Chad could have been resentful. After all, once again, he had been overlooked and undervalued. Instead, he took a different attitude, the attitude of a servant who isn’t looking out for himself, but for others.
This is the very attitude that the first-century preacher and evangelist Paul commends in our second Bible lesson for today. Take a look at it in our Celebrate insert. Quoting from what had by that early point in the Church’s history, already become a valued worship song, Paul tells the followers of Jesus in the Greek city of Philippi:
The word worship, is the descendant of a compound word from Old English, worth-ship. Lives of worship convey the worthiness of Jesus Christ. People who worship God in Jesus Christ say, “This Jesus is the most important Person, presence, power, and force in my life! I give every part of me to Him, because He has given His whole self for me.”
When we gather for community worship on Sunday mornings, we do so for several important reasons.
First and foremost, we worship together because the God we know through Jesus is really worthy of being honored and praised by His people. But we need to be reminded of how much we have to be grateful for.
It’s so easy to fall into ingratitude because we tend to take things for granted. When I was about six years old, my grandparents bought a wooden table and chair set for my sister, Betsy. She used to have tea parties for her dolls with it.
One day, I got the idea that a friend and I could put the table and chairs to better use! I decided to take them to my buddy’s house down the street. So, I found some rope in the garage and, keeping the table upright, I tied two of the legs to the back of my tricycle. With the extra rope, I tied the wooden chairs to the top of the table. My cargo safely secured, I pulled my trike out into the middle of the street and headed for my friend’s house.
Until that point, my mother had no idea what I’d been up to. But with the legs of the table scratching, dragging, and bumping on the pavement, she heard the noise and ran to the door. Then I heard a noise. It was my mother’s voice. “Mark James Daniels, stop this minute!”
After forcing me to help her carry the table and chairs back to our house and before meting out my punishment, my mother asked me what on earth I had been thinking. “Your grandparents spent good money to give this gift to your sister! What made you think you had the right to do that?”
Those words reminded me to never take gifts for granted, especially gifts that resulted from others’ sacrifices. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, sacrificed Himself on the cross and was raised from death by God that Father. Jesus did that for you! This, the most incredible act of self-giving love imaginable, was done for us, not because we deserved anything good, but so that all of us who deserve death for our sins can, if we repent and believe in Jesus, have life with God for eternity!
Sometimes we take Christ and our salvation for granted. In weekly worship, we remind each other of how great and awesome God’s gifts to us really are. We remind each other that a sacrifice of such infinite grace is worthy of the surrender of our whole selves to the God we know in Jesus.
Second, we worship to help us hold onto the God of the Bible alone. Life and a bad-news world seems intent on tearing us away from God.
But the confessions of the Lutheran movement, the constituting documents of our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the constitution of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church all confess that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are to be the yardstick against which all our decisions and actions are to measured.
While we don’t always practice what we preach, we Lutherans believe in the Bible not because the Bible is magical. We believe in the Bible because the Holy Spirit has taught us there is something God-inspired, God-breathed about the Bible. God is invested in these words He gave to finite, imperfect human beings. For over five-hundred years, we Lutherans have believed that the Bible is like no other book because of its unique and life-changing witness, from Genesis to Revelation, of the God of justice and grace we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.
We engage in public worship on Sunday mornings and at other times to hear God’s Word and to help us all to hold onto the God of the Bible, the God we meet in Jesus, for all our hope, inspiration, and encouragement.
Finally, we worship together to stir each other to live like Jesus, lives not lived for ourselves, but for others. That kind of life doesn’t make sense to many people you may meet. But you and I know differently.
Think of it like this. If you were billionaire Warren Buffet, how giving could you afford to be? The answer: Very giving! The fact is that is no matter what we may go through in this life, no matter how much of a success or a failure this world may see us as being, the baptized believer in Jesus Christ who repents and trusts in Christ is wealthy beyond all reckoning.
Believers in Jesus have an eternity of riches. Like Paul, writing in the New Testament book of Romans, we can say, “[God] who did not withhold His Son, but gave Him for all of us [on the cross], will He not with Him also give us everything else?”
How generous, how loving, how compassionate can we be toward others when we know that nothing can separate us from the love of the God we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus? Very generous. Very loving. Very compassionate. When we worship together, we’re reminded how much we’re loved…and how much we can love others as a result.
Worship is to be the Christian’s way of life. We worship together each Sunday because we know how worthy God is of our honor and praise. We worship to help us to hold onto the Good News of the God Who is for us even in the midst of a world that never seems to tire of feeding us bad news. And we worship God to inspire one another to live not for ourselves, but for the purposes of God, for the good of others who need the eternity of blessings that we followers of Jesus already have!
Worship is the work of God’s servants who, certain that they belong to God for all eternity, can give themselves utterly to the love of God and love of neighbor. As we worship God together and apart, may God help us to be faithful servants of our loving God. Amen
The story of Chad, originally told by Pastor Dale Galloway, is recounted by Chuck Swindoll, in his book, Improving Your Serve.
Philippians 2:1-13
True story of a boy named Chad: One day Chad came home from school and told his mother that he wanted to make Valentine’s Day cards for his classmates. His mother wished that she could convince him to forget the idea. Chad’s classmates were always putting him down, picking him last for baseball at recess, and laughing at him. But Chad was insistent; he wanted to make those Valentine’s cards for his classmates. So, Chad’s mom bought the construction paper and the crayons and for three nights he worked hard on making the cards: Thirty five cards, one for each classmate!
On Valentine’s Day, Chad was excited! He carefully picked up the cards, put them in a bag, and ran out the door. Certain that he would be disappointed that his classmates hadn’t remembered him with Valentine’s Day cards, Chad’s mother baked his favorite cookies and had them waiting for the moment he got home from school.
At the usual time, she heard the other children laughing and talking as they walked toward their houses. Behind them all, walking by himself was Chad. It broke her heart to see him. But when he came through the door, there was a spring in his step, even though she could see that, unlike the other kids, Chad wasn’t holding a bag full of Valentine’s cards. Choking back tears, she announced that she had his favorite cookies and some milk for him. But Chad didn't seem to hear. His face was glowing and all he could say was, “Not a one...not a one.” Now, his mother thought she would cry. But then Chad told her, “I didn’t forget a one...not a single one!”
Today, I want to talk with you about worship.
By worship, I don’t mean just what we do on Sunday mornings. Worship is something that we do with our whole lives. And it begins not with our words or our songs or our offerings.
It begins with our attitudes, with the thoughts, actions, and feelings that we allow to be the controlling motifs of our lives. Chad could have been resentful. After all, once again, he had been overlooked and undervalued. Instead, he took a different attitude, the attitude of a servant who isn’t looking out for himself, but for others.
This is the very attitude that the first-century preacher and evangelist Paul commends in our second Bible lesson for today. Take a look at it in our Celebrate insert. Quoting from what had by that early point in the Church’s history, already become a valued worship song, Paul tells the followers of Jesus in the Greek city of Philippi:
If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. [And then Paul points out that this reflects an attitude, the very attitude Jesus had while living here on earth:] Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, ...though he was in the form of God, [Jesus] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.Worship, real worship, is something that the Christian is called to offer every moment of every day. Worship is a life lived in gratitude for the new life God gives to all with faith in Jesus Christ. In our worship, we constantly express thanks for the new life that Jesus has gained through His death and resurrection for all who repent for sin and entrust their lives to Him.
The word worship, is the descendant of a compound word from Old English, worth-ship. Lives of worship convey the worthiness of Jesus Christ. People who worship God in Jesus Christ say, “This Jesus is the most important Person, presence, power, and force in my life! I give every part of me to Him, because He has given His whole self for me.”
When we gather for community worship on Sunday mornings, we do so for several important reasons.
First and foremost, we worship together because the God we know through Jesus is really worthy of being honored and praised by His people. But we need to be reminded of how much we have to be grateful for.
It’s so easy to fall into ingratitude because we tend to take things for granted. When I was about six years old, my grandparents bought a wooden table and chair set for my sister, Betsy. She used to have tea parties for her dolls with it.
One day, I got the idea that a friend and I could put the table and chairs to better use! I decided to take them to my buddy’s house down the street. So, I found some rope in the garage and, keeping the table upright, I tied two of the legs to the back of my tricycle. With the extra rope, I tied the wooden chairs to the top of the table. My cargo safely secured, I pulled my trike out into the middle of the street and headed for my friend’s house.
Until that point, my mother had no idea what I’d been up to. But with the legs of the table scratching, dragging, and bumping on the pavement, she heard the noise and ran to the door. Then I heard a noise. It was my mother’s voice. “Mark James Daniels, stop this minute!”
After forcing me to help her carry the table and chairs back to our house and before meting out my punishment, my mother asked me what on earth I had been thinking. “Your grandparents spent good money to give this gift to your sister! What made you think you had the right to do that?”
Those words reminded me to never take gifts for granted, especially gifts that resulted from others’ sacrifices. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, sacrificed Himself on the cross and was raised from death by God that Father. Jesus did that for you! This, the most incredible act of self-giving love imaginable, was done for us, not because we deserved anything good, but so that all of us who deserve death for our sins can, if we repent and believe in Jesus, have life with God for eternity!
Sometimes we take Christ and our salvation for granted. In weekly worship, we remind each other of how great and awesome God’s gifts to us really are. We remind each other that a sacrifice of such infinite grace is worthy of the surrender of our whole selves to the God we know in Jesus.
Second, we worship to help us hold onto the God of the Bible alone. Life and a bad-news world seems intent on tearing us away from God.
But the confessions of the Lutheran movement, the constituting documents of our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the constitution of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church all confess that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are to be the yardstick against which all our decisions and actions are to measured.
While we don’t always practice what we preach, we Lutherans believe in the Bible not because the Bible is magical. We believe in the Bible because the Holy Spirit has taught us there is something God-inspired, God-breathed about the Bible. God is invested in these words He gave to finite, imperfect human beings. For over five-hundred years, we Lutherans have believed that the Bible is like no other book because of its unique and life-changing witness, from Genesis to Revelation, of the God of justice and grace we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.
We engage in public worship on Sunday mornings and at other times to hear God’s Word and to help us all to hold onto the God of the Bible, the God we meet in Jesus, for all our hope, inspiration, and encouragement.
Finally, we worship together to stir each other to live like Jesus, lives not lived for ourselves, but for others. That kind of life doesn’t make sense to many people you may meet. But you and I know differently.
Think of it like this. If you were billionaire Warren Buffet, how giving could you afford to be? The answer: Very giving! The fact is that is no matter what we may go through in this life, no matter how much of a success or a failure this world may see us as being, the baptized believer in Jesus Christ who repents and trusts in Christ is wealthy beyond all reckoning.
Believers in Jesus have an eternity of riches. Like Paul, writing in the New Testament book of Romans, we can say, “[God] who did not withhold His Son, but gave Him for all of us [on the cross], will He not with Him also give us everything else?”
How generous, how loving, how compassionate can we be toward others when we know that nothing can separate us from the love of the God we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus? Very generous. Very loving. Very compassionate. When we worship together, we’re reminded how much we’re loved…and how much we can love others as a result.
Worship is to be the Christian’s way of life. We worship together each Sunday because we know how worthy God is of our honor and praise. We worship to help us to hold onto the Good News of the God Who is for us even in the midst of a world that never seems to tire of feeding us bad news. And we worship God to inspire one another to live not for ourselves, but for the purposes of God, for the good of others who need the eternity of blessings that we followers of Jesus already have!
Worship is the work of God’s servants who, certain that they belong to God for all eternity, can give themselves utterly to the love of God and love of neighbor. As we worship God together and apart, may God help us to be faithful servants of our loving God. Amen
The story of Chad, originally told by Pastor Dale Galloway, is recounted by Chuck Swindoll, in his book, Improving Your Serve.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Choose the Right Path, Not the Easy One
From Julie Ackerman Link:
Whenever we set out to do something good, even when we’re certain that God wants us to do it, we shouldn’t be surprised when the situation gets worse before it gets better. This doesn’t prove that we’re doing the wrong thing; it just reminds us that we need God to accomplish everything. [emphasis mine][See here.]
Monday, September 19, 2011
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"
One of my nieces posted this on Facebook recently and I re-posted it. It contains a great anti-bullying message and apparently was circulated in connection with suicide prevention:
Put on Christ (Wedding of Katelyn and Noah)
[This was share during the wedding our niece, Katelyn, and her new husband, Noah. God bless you both!]
Romans 13:14
Noah, you surely know by now that Katelyn loves to accessorize!
I’ll never forget the day that Katelyn showed us some of the contents of her bag. Inside were other bags. Inside them were purses and holders of all kinds. Accessories inside of accessories, purses inside of purses, sort of like those Russian babushka dolls, each one concealing smaller dolls inside, until you get to a tiny one in the middle.
Today, as you begin your married life together, I want to talk with you about the essential accessory you will need for both your marriage and your lives. This accessory and what we need to do with it is described in Romans chapter 13, verse 14. It says, “Put on Christ.”
That phrasing may seem odd at first, but it’s deliberate and precise in describing what it means to be a follower of Christ. Each of us knows that, as the Bible tells us that love, the love we need to power our marriages and our relationships, “is patient…kind…not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” We know that it doesn’t “insist on its own way…is not irritable or resentful…does not rejoice in wrongdoing…bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Some couples hear that description of love, smile smugly, casting knowing looks at one another and seem to believe, “That’s us. We know how to love.” Sigh.
Let me share a bit of wisdom with you, as your uncle, as a pastor, and as someone who’s been around the block a time or two. No couple—no matter how much they love each other, no matter how well intentioned they are—no couple can muster the kind of love we all know that it takes for a lifetime marital partnership to work.
Only the God we meet in Jesus Christ, the God Who took on human flesh, Who offered His life as the perfect sacrifice for our sin, taking the death sentence we all deserve, Who was raised to life again by God the Father so that all who turn from sin and trust in Christ have everlasting life with God, and Who sends the Holy Spiirit to stand by us, guide us, give us wisdom, and pump us full of hope when it can’t be found anywhere else—only this God can fill you with the love, the forgiveness, the charity, and the understanding you will need to have a marriage more filled with love fifty years from now than it is today.
That’s why you need to “put on Christ,” you need to clothe yourselves in Christ, entrust yourselves to Christ each day. You need to import His tough love, wear it as the essential accessory for living life to the full!
Now, don’t get the wrong idea, the only “happily ever afters” Jesus promises come in eternity. In fact, Jesus once made a strange promise to those Who follow Him. “In this world,” He said, “you will have trouble.” But, He goes on to tell us to take heart because, through His death and resurrection, Jesus also says, “I have overcome this world.” Life can do its worst to us, yet through Christ, we can know that nothing will separate us from the love of God!
Putting on Christ—having faith in Christ—does not come naturally to us. We like to think that we can make it through life on the strength of our own love, or own wills, or our own resolution. But Jesus is emphatic when He says that apart from Him, we can do nothing. The love and help of Christ can be hard to accept; it seems too good to be true that a Savior we can’t see can possibly help us.
But He can, no matter how puny our surrender to Him may sometimes be. A man once approached Jesus. He needed a miracle for his child. “If You are able” to help my son, the man pleaded with Jesus, “would you?” “If?” Jesus asked Him. Anything can be done for the person who believes, Jesus said. “I do believe,” the man responded, “help my unbelief.” It may be hard for us to believe or trust in Jesus—and by the way, harder by far to believe in Jesus when things are going well than when things are going poorly. But if, like that father going to Jesus on behalf of his son, you’re willing to trust Jesus, if you’re willing to put Him on your life and fill you with love and power, you will be amazed at what God does.
Put on Christ! And to reinforce your relationship with Him, be involved with a church family, pray, study God’s Word, serve others in Jesus’ Name, daily repent for sin and trust in Jesus, forgive as you’ve been forgiven.
As you put Christ on day by day, your marriage and your faith will grow stronger. And Jesus will no longer be a mere accessory. He will be, as He has been for Aunt Ann and me these thirty-seven years, “the way, and the truth, and the life,” the third member of your marriage, the One Who helps you confidently to say that while you may be able to do nothing without Christ, you can, as the Bible puts it, “do all things through [Christ] Who strengthens” you.
God bless you both. I love you. Amen
Romans 13:14
Noah, you surely know by now that Katelyn loves to accessorize!
I’ll never forget the day that Katelyn showed us some of the contents of her bag. Inside were other bags. Inside them were purses and holders of all kinds. Accessories inside of accessories, purses inside of purses, sort of like those Russian babushka dolls, each one concealing smaller dolls inside, until you get to a tiny one in the middle.
Today, as you begin your married life together, I want to talk with you about the essential accessory you will need for both your marriage and your lives. This accessory and what we need to do with it is described in Romans chapter 13, verse 14. It says, “Put on Christ.”
That phrasing may seem odd at first, but it’s deliberate and precise in describing what it means to be a follower of Christ. Each of us knows that, as the Bible tells us that love, the love we need to power our marriages and our relationships, “is patient…kind…not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” We know that it doesn’t “insist on its own way…is not irritable or resentful…does not rejoice in wrongdoing…bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Some couples hear that description of love, smile smugly, casting knowing looks at one another and seem to believe, “That’s us. We know how to love.” Sigh.
Let me share a bit of wisdom with you, as your uncle, as a pastor, and as someone who’s been around the block a time or two. No couple—no matter how much they love each other, no matter how well intentioned they are—no couple can muster the kind of love we all know that it takes for a lifetime marital partnership to work.
Only the God we meet in Jesus Christ, the God Who took on human flesh, Who offered His life as the perfect sacrifice for our sin, taking the death sentence we all deserve, Who was raised to life again by God the Father so that all who turn from sin and trust in Christ have everlasting life with God, and Who sends the Holy Spiirit to stand by us, guide us, give us wisdom, and pump us full of hope when it can’t be found anywhere else—only this God can fill you with the love, the forgiveness, the charity, and the understanding you will need to have a marriage more filled with love fifty years from now than it is today.
That’s why you need to “put on Christ,” you need to clothe yourselves in Christ, entrust yourselves to Christ each day. You need to import His tough love, wear it as the essential accessory for living life to the full!
Now, don’t get the wrong idea, the only “happily ever afters” Jesus promises come in eternity. In fact, Jesus once made a strange promise to those Who follow Him. “In this world,” He said, “you will have trouble.” But, He goes on to tell us to take heart because, through His death and resurrection, Jesus also says, “I have overcome this world.” Life can do its worst to us, yet through Christ, we can know that nothing will separate us from the love of God!
Putting on Christ—having faith in Christ—does not come naturally to us. We like to think that we can make it through life on the strength of our own love, or own wills, or our own resolution. But Jesus is emphatic when He says that apart from Him, we can do nothing. The love and help of Christ can be hard to accept; it seems too good to be true that a Savior we can’t see can possibly help us.
But He can, no matter how puny our surrender to Him may sometimes be. A man once approached Jesus. He needed a miracle for his child. “If You are able” to help my son, the man pleaded with Jesus, “would you?” “If?” Jesus asked Him. Anything can be done for the person who believes, Jesus said. “I do believe,” the man responded, “help my unbelief.” It may be hard for us to believe or trust in Jesus—and by the way, harder by far to believe in Jesus when things are going well than when things are going poorly. But if, like that father going to Jesus on behalf of his son, you’re willing to trust Jesus, if you’re willing to put Him on your life and fill you with love and power, you will be amazed at what God does.
Put on Christ! And to reinforce your relationship with Him, be involved with a church family, pray, study God’s Word, serve others in Jesus’ Name, daily repent for sin and trust in Jesus, forgive as you’ve been forgiven.
As you put Christ on day by day, your marriage and your faith will grow stronger. And Jesus will no longer be a mere accessory. He will be, as He has been for Aunt Ann and me these thirty-seven years, “the way, and the truth, and the life,” the third member of your marriage, the One Who helps you confidently to say that while you may be able to do nothing without Christ, you can, as the Bible puts it, “do all things through [Christ] Who strengthens” you.
God bless you both. I love you. Amen
Select, Pray, Invite; Select, Pray, Invite
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, on Sunday morning, September 18, 2011.]
Jonah 3:10-4:11
Every Sunday School student knows the story of Jonah, an eighth century Israelite prophet.
God told Jonah to cry out against the evil perpetrated by the people of the city of Nineveh in Assyria. Assyria was the menacing evil empire of its day. For Jonah, as a Jew, to go to Nineveh and tell the people how rotten their sins were would be a bit like God sending you or me to go tell the leadership of al Qaeda that terrorism is evil. That would be a scary mission!
No wonder then that in chapter one of the Old Testament book named for him, after being given his marching orders with God’s message for Nineveh, Jonah got on board a ship and headed instead in the opposite direction, for the Spanish port of Tarshish.
You know what happened next. God caused a fierce storm that terrified everyone on the ship. When the other passengers and the crew learned that it was Jonah’s refusal to go where God had sent him that had roused God’s anger and brought on the storm, Jonah said that the only thing that could save them was to throw him into the sea.
Reluctantly, they agreed and tossed Jonah into the drink. That solved things for everyone but Jonah. But God had a solution, a special taxi service in the form of a great fish. Eventually, God caused Jonah to be disgorged by the fish. After that, Jonah went to Nineveh, in the heart of enemy territory to deliver God’s message for the people there.
Jonah clearly didn’t spend a lot of time polishing it. He made no attempt to give his listeners any background. And he showed them no compassion. He simply went to the city and said: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
That’s it. The whole city, knowing almost nothing about the God of Israel, nonetheless repented for their sins and trusted (or believed) in God. The Ninevite king voiced their faith when he said, “Who knows? God may relent and change His mind; He may turn from His fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”
What happened in Nineveh after Jonah preached his pathetic sermon is analogous to one of us, without a megaphone or advertising or press releases or billboards or web sites or interviews on ‘Good Morning, America,’ going to Times Square in New York City, uttering a one-sentence message from God, then seeing the entire city turn from sin and turn in faith to Jesus Christ!
The power of a message from God is not in the human messenger God uses to bring that message. The power is in the message-sender, in God Himself! We see that in Jonah.
I once heard Lutheran pastor Don Abdon talk about one of the first times he shared Jesus Christ with another person. He asked the man, “Would you like to receive Jesus Christ as your Savior?” The guy answered, “Yes.” Abdon, aware of what a disjointed mess his witness for Christ had been, couldn’t believe his ears. “Are you sure?” he asked. Fortunately, despite this opportunity to weasel out of it, the man repeated, “Yes.”
Jonah should have looked at what happened in Nineveh with awe and gratitude. God’s Word had turned a whole city from sin and turned it to faith in God!
How would we feel if we saw that happen in Logan and Hocking County today?
Wouldn’t we be happy with the changes that would take place when those of low self-esteem walked confidently in the grace of God?
Or when gossip and backstabbing were seen as something to repent for and not to encourage?
When community leaders sought to think less of their own agendas and more about what the will of God might be?
Or when young people saw their bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit and not places to dump drugs?
Or when everyone prayerfully enlisted the power and help of God to resist temptation and keep the gift of sexual intimacy within the bounds of marriage between a man and a woman?
I think we would be happy if our whole community and we ourselves were totally sold out to the God we know in Jesus Christ, if our community were, not perfect, but repentant and believing.
Jonah wasn’t happy to see these kinds of things happen in Nineveh. He was angry!
Scan our first lesson, printed on the Celebrate insert. As the lesson begins you'll see that Nineveh has repented and turned to God. God changed His mind about the calamity He had planned to bring on the city for its sin.
This leads to the strange prayer in Jonah 4:2. (If you can call what Jonah utters a prayer.) Jonah claims that the reason he'd at first headed for Tarshish in the first place wasn’t because he was terrified to go to Nineveh, but because he knew that this was the kind of stunt God would pull. Jonah recalls words that God had used of Himself some six centuries earlier, speaking with the people of Israel in the wilderness when Moses was their leader. I didn’t want to come to Nineveh, Jonah says, because I knew that You are the God Who is “gracious…and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”
Jonah accuses God of being too wimpy, too lacking in backbone, too willing to forgive sinners!
These are stupid words coming from a man who had personally experienced the power of God.
And they are ungrateful words from someone who had rebelled against God, yet been forgiven and helped by God.
Jonah seems to have forgotten that, like the people of Nineveh, he too had been saved by God’s grace.
I’ve mentioned before the conversation I had after worship at one of my previous parishes with a man who was upset with the passage from Matthew that makes up today’s Gospel lesson, which recounts a parable Jesus told about a wealthy man who gave the same wages to workers no matter how early or late in the day he had hired them.
My parishioner understood Jesus’ point. “Jesus is saying that someone who’s led a rotten life who repents for their sins and believes in Jesus Christ is given eternal life just the same as someone like me who has always believed,” he said with considerable feeling. “Someone like me,” he went on. “Yes,” I said. “But that’s not fair!” he replied.
Listen: God isn’t fair.
But the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, affirms two things about God.
I sometimes wonder whether we don’t have the same attitude about the world we live in as Jonah had. I wonder whether we modern believers don't just want to hunker down and quietly believe, and wait our lives out until we can get into heaven. Polling consistently shows that something like 1% of all Lutherans ever tell a spiritually disconnected person about Jesus, even though Jesus commands all Christians to be His witnesses and to make disciples.
We don’t tell others about Jesus because, like Jonah, I think, we’re afraid.
There may be good reason for our fear. After the church of my friend, Pastor Steve Sjogren, started doing kindness outreaches regularly, an influx of visitors started worship there and the congregation saw many people coming to faith in Christ. Not all of the people coming to Steve's church played well with others initially, though. Many conformed to the description of the Ninevites that God gives at the end of our lesson, they didn’t know “their right hand from their left.”
One day, Steve was shocked when a family attracted to the church through the outreaches started a knock-down, drag-out fight in the church parking lot. The elders had to call the cops to break things up. It could have been a terrible turning point in the life of the congregation. The people of Steve’s church could have been so revolted by the behavior of these sinful people that, like Jonah, they could have sulked and kept to themselves.
Instead, they decided that if they were going to continue reaching out to people whose lives were made messy by sin and being disconnected from God, it would be best to have some police on the church parking lot every time they got together for worship. They didn’t stop sharing Jesus!
From that point on, Steve’s church grew from several hundred people, about the size of Saint Matthew, to a congregation that welcomed 6000 to worship each weekend.
Now, in a city like Logan, whose population is 6000, I can’t envision Saint Matthew becoming a megachurch, although maybe God can.
But I do know that the people of our community need the God Who is both just and gracious, the God Who will demand punishment for people’s sins unless they receive the free gifts of His grace and forgiveness by faith in Jesus Christ.
And I know that God has called us to share this message with our neighbors. God wants to use us to transform the life of our community by calling people to repent for sin and believe in Christ.
So, here’s a simple plea from your pastor. Make it your aim every Sunday night to select one spiritually-disconnected person you know, to pray over the next three days that God will make that person receptive to Jesus, and then on Thursday of that same week, invite them to worship, Sunday School, the women's group, or Bible discussion group.
Don’t be spooked if they say no. Keep praying for them and pray that God will give you another crack at inviting them later.
Then, the next Sunday, select another person who has no connection to Christ’s Church, start praying for their receptivity to your invitation on Sunday night, and then on Thursday, invite them to worship, Sunday School, women's group, or Bible discussion group.
Keep doing this week-in and week-out: select, pray, invite; select, pray, invite.
While you know lots more people in Logan than I do, I promise to go through this same procedure—select, pray, invite—as best I can.
God used a reluctant Jonah to save a whole city once steeped in sin and far from God. How much more might God be used by the people of Saint Matthew as we willingly share the Good News of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ with our community?
God is looking for Saint Matthew members willing to say, “Here I am, Lord; send me!” May we be those people!
Jonah 3:10-4:11
Every Sunday School student knows the story of Jonah, an eighth century Israelite prophet.
God told Jonah to cry out against the evil perpetrated by the people of the city of Nineveh in Assyria. Assyria was the menacing evil empire of its day. For Jonah, as a Jew, to go to Nineveh and tell the people how rotten their sins were would be a bit like God sending you or me to go tell the leadership of al Qaeda that terrorism is evil. That would be a scary mission!
No wonder then that in chapter one of the Old Testament book named for him, after being given his marching orders with God’s message for Nineveh, Jonah got on board a ship and headed instead in the opposite direction, for the Spanish port of Tarshish.
[This map shows Joppa, where Jonah received his marching orders from God, and that Nineveh is a relatively short distance to the east, while Tarshish was well to the west in Spain.]
You know what happened next. God caused a fierce storm that terrified everyone on the ship. When the other passengers and the crew learned that it was Jonah’s refusal to go where God had sent him that had roused God’s anger and brought on the storm, Jonah said that the only thing that could save them was to throw him into the sea.
Reluctantly, they agreed and tossed Jonah into the drink. That solved things for everyone but Jonah. But God had a solution, a special taxi service in the form of a great fish. Eventually, God caused Jonah to be disgorged by the fish. After that, Jonah went to Nineveh, in the heart of enemy territory to deliver God’s message for the people there.
Jonah clearly didn’t spend a lot of time polishing it. He made no attempt to give his listeners any background. And he showed them no compassion. He simply went to the city and said: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
That’s it. The whole city, knowing almost nothing about the God of Israel, nonetheless repented for their sins and trusted (or believed) in God. The Ninevite king voiced their faith when he said, “Who knows? God may relent and change His mind; He may turn from His fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”
What happened in Nineveh after Jonah preached his pathetic sermon is analogous to one of us, without a megaphone or advertising or press releases or billboards or web sites or interviews on ‘Good Morning, America,’ going to Times Square in New York City, uttering a one-sentence message from God, then seeing the entire city turn from sin and turn in faith to Jesus Christ!
The power of a message from God is not in the human messenger God uses to bring that message. The power is in the message-sender, in God Himself! We see that in Jonah.
I once heard Lutheran pastor Don Abdon talk about one of the first times he shared Jesus Christ with another person. He asked the man, “Would you like to receive Jesus Christ as your Savior?” The guy answered, “Yes.” Abdon, aware of what a disjointed mess his witness for Christ had been, couldn’t believe his ears. “Are you sure?” he asked. Fortunately, despite this opportunity to weasel out of it, the man repeated, “Yes.”
Jonah should have looked at what happened in Nineveh with awe and gratitude. God’s Word had turned a whole city from sin and turned it to faith in God!
How would we feel if we saw that happen in Logan and Hocking County today?
Wouldn’t we be happy with the changes that would take place when those of low self-esteem walked confidently in the grace of God?
Or when gossip and backstabbing were seen as something to repent for and not to encourage?
When community leaders sought to think less of their own agendas and more about what the will of God might be?
Or when young people saw their bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit and not places to dump drugs?
Or when everyone prayerfully enlisted the power and help of God to resist temptation and keep the gift of sexual intimacy within the bounds of marriage between a man and a woman?
I think we would be happy if our whole community and we ourselves were totally sold out to the God we know in Jesus Christ, if our community were, not perfect, but repentant and believing.
Jonah wasn’t happy to see these kinds of things happen in Nineveh. He was angry!
Scan our first lesson, printed on the Celebrate insert. As the lesson begins you'll see that Nineveh has repented and turned to God. God changed His mind about the calamity He had planned to bring on the city for its sin.
This leads to the strange prayer in Jonah 4:2. (If you can call what Jonah utters a prayer.) Jonah claims that the reason he'd at first headed for Tarshish in the first place wasn’t because he was terrified to go to Nineveh, but because he knew that this was the kind of stunt God would pull. Jonah recalls words that God had used of Himself some six centuries earlier, speaking with the people of Israel in the wilderness when Moses was their leader. I didn’t want to come to Nineveh, Jonah says, because I knew that You are the God Who is “gracious…and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”
Jonah accuses God of being too wimpy, too lacking in backbone, too willing to forgive sinners!
These are stupid words coming from a man who had personally experienced the power of God.
And they are ungrateful words from someone who had rebelled against God, yet been forgiven and helped by God.
Jonah seems to have forgotten that, like the people of Nineveh, he too had been saved by God’s grace.
I’ve mentioned before the conversation I had after worship at one of my previous parishes with a man who was upset with the passage from Matthew that makes up today’s Gospel lesson, which recounts a parable Jesus told about a wealthy man who gave the same wages to workers no matter how early or late in the day he had hired them.
My parishioner understood Jesus’ point. “Jesus is saying that someone who’s led a rotten life who repents for their sins and believes in Jesus Christ is given eternal life just the same as someone like me who has always believed,” he said with considerable feeling. “Someone like me,” he went on. “Yes,” I said. “But that’s not fair!” he replied.
Listen: God isn’t fair.
But the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, affirms two things about God.
- First, that God is just. “The wages of sin is death,” the New Testament book of Romans says. And Jesus tells us emphatically, “Unless you repent, you will perish.”
- But the Bible also affirms that God is gracious and merciful. God is charitable for us. The Old Testament tells us that God remembers that we are dust, created beings in need of help and desperatelt dependent on His charitable love.
I sometimes wonder whether we don’t have the same attitude about the world we live in as Jonah had. I wonder whether we modern believers don't just want to hunker down and quietly believe, and wait our lives out until we can get into heaven. Polling consistently shows that something like 1% of all Lutherans ever tell a spiritually disconnected person about Jesus, even though Jesus commands all Christians to be His witnesses and to make disciples.
We don’t tell others about Jesus because, like Jonah, I think, we’re afraid.
There may be good reason for our fear. After the church of my friend, Pastor Steve Sjogren, started doing kindness outreaches regularly, an influx of visitors started worship there and the congregation saw many people coming to faith in Christ. Not all of the people coming to Steve's church played well with others initially, though. Many conformed to the description of the Ninevites that God gives at the end of our lesson, they didn’t know “their right hand from their left.”
One day, Steve was shocked when a family attracted to the church through the outreaches started a knock-down, drag-out fight in the church parking lot. The elders had to call the cops to break things up. It could have been a terrible turning point in the life of the congregation. The people of Steve’s church could have been so revolted by the behavior of these sinful people that, like Jonah, they could have sulked and kept to themselves.
Instead, they decided that if they were going to continue reaching out to people whose lives were made messy by sin and being disconnected from God, it would be best to have some police on the church parking lot every time they got together for worship. They didn’t stop sharing Jesus!
From that point on, Steve’s church grew from several hundred people, about the size of Saint Matthew, to a congregation that welcomed 6000 to worship each weekend.
Now, in a city like Logan, whose population is 6000, I can’t envision Saint Matthew becoming a megachurch, although maybe God can.
But I do know that the people of our community need the God Who is both just and gracious, the God Who will demand punishment for people’s sins unless they receive the free gifts of His grace and forgiveness by faith in Jesus Christ.
And I know that God has called us to share this message with our neighbors. God wants to use us to transform the life of our community by calling people to repent for sin and believe in Christ.
So, here’s a simple plea from your pastor. Make it your aim every Sunday night to select one spiritually-disconnected person you know, to pray over the next three days that God will make that person receptive to Jesus, and then on Thursday of that same week, invite them to worship, Sunday School, the women's group, or Bible discussion group.
Don’t be spooked if they say no. Keep praying for them and pray that God will give you another crack at inviting them later.
Then, the next Sunday, select another person who has no connection to Christ’s Church, start praying for their receptivity to your invitation on Sunday night, and then on Thursday, invite them to worship, Sunday School, women's group, or Bible discussion group.
Keep doing this week-in and week-out: select, pray, invite; select, pray, invite.
While you know lots more people in Logan than I do, I promise to go through this same procedure—select, pray, invite—as best I can.
God used a reluctant Jonah to save a whole city once steeped in sin and far from God. How much more might God be used by the people of Saint Matthew as we willingly share the Good News of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ with our community?
God is looking for Saint Matthew members willing to say, “Here I am, Lord; send me!” May we be those people!
Sunday, September 18, 2011
I've Begun My Campaign for Pope
My son snapped this picture of me in the Cardinal Room at Buca di Beppo.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Christian Teens and Single Adults...
...abstinence isn't something you give to God in order to get "the right one." Refraining from sexual intimacy outside of marriage, according to one single, is a simple matter of obedience to God.
Sometimes obedience doesn't get us what we imagined. But then...God didn't say that it would. Our hope and consolation are—they have to be—that he is worth it. No other hope or consolation will do.
Time for Some Midcourse Corrections
"A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion" (Proverbs 18:2).
One of the sad trends in the contemporary church--whether conservative or liberal--is that we dare to put our own experiences, preferences, feelings, analysis, scholarship, and opinions on a par with what God has revealed to be His will in His Word, the Bible. I know this to be true in my own denomination and it saddens me.
May God forgive us and guide us.
One of the sad trends in the contemporary church--whether conservative or liberal--is that we dare to put our own experiences, preferences, feelings, analysis, scholarship, and opinions on a par with what God has revealed to be His will in His Word, the Bible. I know this to be true in my own denomination and it saddens me.
May God forgive us and guide us.
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