A thought

Only those who care nothing for power can be trusted with power. And even then, they must pray that God will protect them from falling in love with the power conferred on them.

Father, Protect Me from Myself

[This a journal entry from my quiet time with God a week-and-a-half ago. I hope you find it helpful.]

Look: [God said:] “...Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death....Nothing impure will ever enter [the heavenly city], nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” (Revelation 21:7-9, 27)

John receives a vision of the new creation descending to this old creation, supplanting and replacing the old. He describes those who inherit this kingdom in which God dwells in fullness by speaking of who will not be part of it: “the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars.” Their place will be in the condemning fires of hell. He goes on to say that “nothing impure will ever enter [the heavenly city], nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”

Listen: No human being, no matter how much faith in Christ they have, will ever be fully free of sin on this earth. We’re sinful by nature. Sin is in our DNA and to fall prey to it is like breathing to us. Our only hope is in Christ, on Whose grace we throw ourselves in trusting faith and through Whom we receive forgiveness and new life we don’t deserve. Thank God for grace!

But these words from Revelation show that willful sinning, insistent sin on the part of believers who simply ignore God and do whatever they want to do, will not enter God’s eternal kingdom. When we willfully go against God’s will--away from true love of God and of neighbor, we build a wall between ourselves and God’s grace. This is what Jesus references when He says that, “every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.” (Matthew 12:31)

It’s the Spirit Who, by the Word He inspires, both convicts us of sin and convinces us of the power of God’s grace given through the crucified and risen Jesus, can save even us. It’s the Spirit Who creates faith within us by the power of the Gospel Word about Jesus.

But when we think so little of God’s grace or so little of the Lord Who dwells in His people or so little of ourselves that we turn a deaf ear to the Holy Spirit, we set ourselves up for separation from God and from the life He gives to those who believe in Christ.

Response: Father, when I am tempted to ignore Your clearly disclosed truth about a sin that tempts me, give me the power to resist it. Help me not to make excuses or rationalizations.

There are no excuses or exceptions for a disciple of Jesus to willfully ignore Your will, to sin because I may think it’s a good idea or an excusable breach. Even these sins are forgivable, of course. But the problem with willful sin is that after you’ve done it once, it becomes easier and easier to do the next time and the next. We think that we’re living free as we descend into a life apart from You in this way and may even convince ourselves that these sins are simply part of the freedom in Christ you give to those who believe. But, in fact, we’re only handing Satan, the world, and our sinful selves the shackles to re-enslave us.

Paul wrote to the first-century Galatian church: “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again?” (Galatians 4:8-9)

The preacher in Hebrews says, chillingly: “It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.” (Hebrews 6:4-6)

Is it possible for those who have experienced the saving grace of God given through faith in Jesus Christ to depart from the faith? The Word seems to say this is possible. Why else would the devil spend so much time trying to take us from Christ? Why else would Peter write to the first-century churches in Asia Minor?:

“Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)

I take comfort from the words of the apostle John:

“My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father--Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.” (John 2:1)

God loves to welcome home we prodigals.

Respond: Lord, You know me. You know the ways in which I have rationalized and excused my way to the sins I wanted to commit even as I heard Your Holy Spirit telling me to repent and believe, to return to You. Protect me from myself, Father. I ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen 

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

The Resurrected Life

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

Luke 20:27-40
In Romans 10:17, in the New Testament, the apostle Paul says that “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Every Sunday in most churches at worship around the world, in this century as it’s been during the twenty centuries that came before, after God’s Word is proclaimed, pastors and priests, confident that this Word from God about Christ has the power to bring or deepen faith in Christ within those who hear it, invite worshipers to confess their faith.

In the Apostles’ Creed, we say that we believe “in the resurrection of the dead.”

In the Nicene Creed, we say that we “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

And in the barely used Athanasian Creed, we say that at Jesus’ return to this word, “all people shall rise bodily to give an account of their own deeds.” (The only “deed” that will matter, of course, is whether we have believed in Jesus. As Jesus Himself puts it, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent [that is, to believe in Jesus] (John 6:29).”)

But for all this talk of the resurrection life with God that you find in the New Testament or in the Church, there are few passages of Scripture, except maybe in Daniel and Revelation and a few other scattered places, that talk about what that resurrected life with God will look like.

That’s undoubtedly as it should be.

For one thing, our call is to trust that anywhere Jesus is will be wonderful. Period.

Our call is to turn to Jesus and trust Him to take care of both the journey and the destination.

As Jesus told Nicodemus, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness [This refers to when, in the Exodus, God instructed Moses to forge a bronze snake like the ones that were biting and killing the people, so that the people could, in looking on the bronze representation, acknowledge their sins and look to God for forgiveness and life.], “so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him." (John 3:14) Our call is to turn to Christ when His Word calls us to faith in Him and live, knowing that He’s got us in His hands even beyond death. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus tells us. “The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)

When you live in a world in which death seems to have the final word though--when you listen to the sin and death of the world more than you listen to the Word of Christ--belief in the resurrection of the dead can be hard. I have even heard church-goers say things like, “When you die, you die.”

The second-largest bloc of Jewish believers in Jesus’ day, the Sadducees, thought in just this way. Jesus encounters them in today’s gospel lesson, Luke 20:27-40. Like the Pharisees, who, unlike the Sadducees, believed in the resurrection of the dead, the Sadducees were concerned that Jesus’ popularity, demonstrated in the welcome He had received on what we now call Palm Sunday just a few days before our lesson takes place, would cause the Romans to come down hard on all of God’s people. The Pharisees and the Scribes have gone up against Jesus, hoping to discredit or even kill Him, just before our lesson begins. Now it's the Sadducees' turn. Take a look at the lesson, please.

Verse 27: “Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. ‘Teacher,” they said [In Luke’s gospel, the only people who call Jesus teacher are enemies who use the term sarcastically or to butter Jesus up with fake respect.], ‘Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”

The Sadducees only accepted the first books of the Old Testament--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch, all thought to be from Moses--as God’s Word. So they loved to appeal to Moses whenever they were engaged in religious debate. And the Sadducees are right here: The law God gave to Moses, concerned with ensuring that every one of God’s ancient people received their inheritance in the promised land, said that if a husband died before he and his wife had a son who could be an heir, the next unmarried man in the deceased husband’s family was obligated to marry his sister-in-law. Their first son would become the heir of the dead man. But, trying to ridicule notions of a resurrected life beyond death, the Sadducees create an absurd scenario of a woman who has married seven brothers. Then they ask Jesus, in the resurrection Jesus talks about, whose wife will this poor woman be?

If the Sadducees with their tall tale here appear to have vivid imaginations, Jesus shows them they’re not vivid enough. They can’t imagine what the resurrected life God has in mind for His people will be like. Like most people in the history of the world, from the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, the Mayans, Buddhists, and Hindus, right on through to modern people who bury their loved-ones with six-packs of beer and money, when the Sadducees imagined a resurrected life, they imagined it as being pretty much like this one.

Jesus’ response to them shows that, for the disciple of Jesus Christ, the resurrected life is in some ways beyond our imagining. (Which may be another reason why Jesus and the Scriptures spend so little time telling us what it will look like.)

Verse 34: “Jesus replied, ‘The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.’”

Marriage won’t be a thing in the resurrected life, Jesus is saying. God instituted marriage in this world, in part so that mortal humans could live on in their offspring. In an eternity composed of people “considered worthy of taking part in the age to come” because they believed in Jesus Christ, there will be no chance that his new human race, made new and eternal by grace through faith in Jesus, will ever die out. Marriage, in that sense, will be unnecessary.

In the resurrection, the raptures of marital intimacy, sometimes plagued by difficulties, disagreements, and griefs, will be replaced in by the eternal ecstasies of immediate intimacy with God and His everlasting kingdom of perfection.

In the Old Testament, there are hints about life in the resurrection that Jesus brings.

• Job, the man who suffered much but kept trusting in God says centuries before Abraham and Sarah “I know that my redeemer [God] lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes--I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!” (Job 19:25-27) 
• Also in the Old Testament, Daniel 12 gives a vision of the resurrection of the dead. 

But, since the Sadducees only believed in those first five books of the Old Testament, Jesus decides to show them that the resurrection is real by referring to Moses.

Verse 37: “[Jesus says] But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ [that’s Exodus 3:6] He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”

The living God of the universe isn’t the God of dead people, but of people made alive by grace through faith in Him, the One revealed to us even today in Jesus.

The living God is the God of the resurrected life.

While those imperfect old saints--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--haven’t yet risen from the dead, they are alive in the presence of the God in Whom they believed.

They’re like Moses and Elijah, who could confer with Jesus on the mount of Transfiguration though centuries dead.

They’re like the thief on the cross who begged repentantly to be part of Jesus’ eternal kingdom and was told by Jesus, “Truly I tell you, today [not tomorrow or some day] you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43)

They’re asleep and dead to this world, but awake and alive to God, and one day bound to rise when Jesus closes down this tired old creation and brings the new one in its fullness.

The resurrected life we who daily persist in turning from our sin and trusting in Christ are going to one day enjoy will be, in the apostle Paul's phrase, “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).

But even now, the resurrected life, the fully burgeoning and consummated Kingdom of God that Jesus gives to all who believe in Him has invaded our world and give our lives God’s hope, peace, and joy. Wherever the Word of Christ is heard and believed, wherever the sacraments are administered and received, that invasion takes place.

In His high priestly prayer, offered to God the Father on the night of His betrayal, Jesus says, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3) If you trust in Jesus, the resurrected life He died and rose to bring to sinners like you and me has already begun. The “resurrection of the body” is just around the corner!

For that, you can trust Jesus, the risen One. Amen

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

Saints: Who Are They? Who Aren't They?

[This message was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio during All Saints' Sunday worship last Sunday.]

Revelation 7:9-17

What is a saint? All Saints’ Sunday challenges us to ask that question each year. 

The first thing we should do in approaching this question, I suppose, is to talk about what saints aren't, or in a phrase used by the late Lutheran composer John Ylvisaker, what the saints ain't. There's a helpful discussion of this subject in Article XXI of what's known as the Apology to the Augsburg Confession. The confession makes up a portion of The Book of Concord, a place where Lutheran Christians summarize their understanding of Biblical Christian faith.

Article XXI deals with the subject of the invocation of saints, the use of saints' names to intervene for people in prayer. Behind this idea is that saints are somehow superabundantly good and can somehow put in good words for us with God that Jesus, the One we confess to be Lord, God, and Savior, doesn't.

The article says, in part, "Our Confession approves honoring the saints in three ways. The first is thanksgiving. [In their lives, we see examples of God's mercy for sinful human beings.]...The second service is the strengthening our faith. When we see Peter's denial forgiven, we also are encouraged to believe all the more that grace truly superabounds over sin...The third honor is the imitation, first of faith, then of the other virtues...[God, by His grace creates through Christ]...We admit that, just as the saints (when alive) pray for the Church universal in general, so in heaven they pray for the Church in general. However no passage about the praying of the dead exists in the Scriptures...Scripture does not teach the invocation of the saints, or that we are to ask the saints for aid..."

In short, dead saints aren't who we're to talk to when we're trying to communicate with God. Scripture teaches that we're to pray in the name of God the Son, Jesus. The early Church knew that there is no other name given by God by which we can be saved. Jesus says that He is the way, the truth, and the life, the only connection that humanity can have to God for salvation and prayers heard by God. As a young person said to me years ago, "If I can go right to the top, to God, in my praying, why would I talk to a dead believer who can't hear me?"

That's what saints aren't. To find out what they are, we’ll turn to today’s first lesson, Revelation 7:9-17. 

Revelation, as you know, is based on a series of visions given to the apostle John about sixty years after Jesus’ resurrection. 

Beginning at chapter 6, John sees Jesus, the second Person of the one God, open the first six of seven seals. With the opening of each seal, John sees this old creation in which we live move closer to its inevitable end. He also sees glimmers of the new creation that the risen and ascended Jesus will fully usher in at His second coming, when He returns to this world to claim His kingdom from our enemies: sin, death, and the devil. Jesus’ return will bring celebration and relief to all who have turned from sin and who have believed in Christ.

But, as the last verse of Revelation 6 points out, the return of Jesus won’t be universally welcomed, any more than He or His people are universally welcomed today. Those who have rejected Christ will ask the caves, mountains, and rocks for help. “‘Fall on us,’ they will beg, ‘and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb [the Lamb being Jesus]!’ For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?” (Revelation 6:16)

Then, just before the opening of the seventh and final seal, John is allowed to see two scenes which he records in Revelation, chapter 7. 

The first scene comes in Revelation 7:1-8, right before today’s lesson. The location of this scene is this world. God assigns four angels to hold back the final destruction of the old creation. “Don’t damage the earth,” God tells the angels, “until we’ve marked all of the servants of God with a seal on their foreheads” (Revelation 7:3) (This is the seal of the Holy Spirit which every baptized person receives on the day they’re made new by water and the Spirit.) Then the numbers of those sealed for salvation are counted out. The total comes to 144,000. The Bible is not here saying that just 144,000 people out of all human history will be part of God’s eternal kingdom! The number 144 is derived from multiplying the 12 tribes of Israel times the 12 apostles Jesus chose to lead the post-resurrection church. For John, it would have been a number implying perfection and completeness. And, tacking three zeroes onto the back of 144, would be a bit like one of us saying that “a gazillion” people showed up for an Ohio State football game or watched the seventh game of the World Series this past week. 

Then comes Revelation 7:9. John writes: “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count…” 

This is no little crowd of 144,000! It’s a crowd so big that “no one could count” it! 

I find this incredibly moving because on a starlit night 4000 years ago, an elderly man to whom God had promised the impossible struggled to believe that God could overcome decay and death to give him a son and a future to his descendants.

The man’s name at the time was Abram. (Later to be changed by God to Abraham.) To Abram, the promise seemed too good to be true. So, God reassured Abram in Genesis 15:5: “[God took Abram] outside and said, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’” 

The multitude from every nation that John is shown in His vision of heaven after the life of this old world has come to an end are the descendants of Abram, the very descendants God had promised on that starry night so long ago. They were, in the words of John in his gospel: “children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:13). This multitude comes to be numbered among Abraham’s descendants not by genetics, but by faith in the God Who ultimately revealed Himself to Jews and Gentiles in the person of Jesus Christ. 

Jesus says in John 14:9: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” This the Father, God the Father, the same one Who made Abraham and Sarah the ancestors of nations, not because their bodies were capable of making children, but because God’s Holy Spirit, by the grace of God, can make new life in all who turn from sin and entrust themselves to Jesus.  

Jesus, God the Son, is the God Who gave Abraham that promise four millennia ago. And He is the God Who promises that all who turn from sin and believe in Him become descendants of Abraham. They are saints of God. When we come to believe in Christ as our God and Savior, we are the saints of God!

Saints are those who trust God to give them the free gifts that come to all who follow Jesus: gifts like forgiveness of sin, eternal life, and the power to live each day for His purposes. 

But if sainthood is a free gift from God, we must not think for a moment that sainthood is easy. We see this from just four words in our lesson from Revelation today. 

The first two of those words appear at the beginning of verse 9: “After this.” After what, exactly? John saw the multitude of saints after an event that’s mentioned in verse 14. 

That’s where you can read two more important words: “great tribulation.” 

Despite the propaganda that comes from those who misconstrue Revelation, "the great tribulation" does not refer to some endtime cataclysm. The great tribulation is the common experience through which every believer in Jesus goes in this life.

Life in this world is the great tribulation. 

We live in a place filled with beauty and wonder. But with its beauty and wonder marred by human sin, death, and even the suffering of the saints, this world, at its best, can still only give us a glimpse--a kind of shimmering shadow--of the beauty and wonder—the perfection—that await all who persevere to the end in following Jesus as their only God and King. 

After completing life in this world, the saints who have kept on trusting Jesus, will be met by the Savior, Who will make them clean forever, Who will dry their tears, Who will feed their hunger and quench their thirst for the righteous life that only He can give, and He will welcome them into the new creation for which each of us was made. 

For now, we live in a time in which, as Paul writes Romans 8, both we and the whole of creation wait with eager longing for Christ to reveal Himself and His children. 

But even in the best of times, this life can be a struggle. 

And sometimes, our struggles are made even harder because God’s Word has ignited faith in Jesus Christ within us. 

How much easier the lives of Christians would be if we just went along with the world instead of rooting ourselves in the truth and grace of God revealed in His Word. Of course, along with that ease would come death, because life is only found in Christ!

The devil tests, tempts, and tries the saints. And every believer in Christ will, eventually, bear the scars—physical, emotional, relational, or all three—that come to those who seek to follow Christ. 

Mark it well: Follow Christ and He will most certainly thwart you in some of your most heartfelt desires because He is far less interested in giving you momentary happiness than He is in fitting and forging you and your character for an eternity spent in His presence. In this life, I have chafed under Christ's hand of loving discipline more than once and I'm sure that I will chafe under it many times again before I die. I'm reminded of the words of the preacher in the New Testament book of Hebrews: "Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined--and everyone undergoes discipline--then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness." (Hebrews 12:7-10)

The Old Testament saints living in exile, the victims of injustice, would cry out to God, “How long, O Lord?” Their pain was echoed for me in the words of a saint and friend battling cancer who told me, “I just can’t seem to catch a break.” In this life, we’ve all been there...or will be. 

Our own personal “great ordeals” may include persecution, chronic or fatal illness, disagreements over priorities with those we love or with whom we work, or the conflicts that happen within us when a sin tantalizes us and we know that we must choose God’s way and not our own. The latter may be the greatest tribulation of all!

What is a saint? 

Saints are people who daily turn to Jesus for forgiveness, faith, courage, and new life. 

Saints are sinners who trust that Jesus loves and gives new and everlasting life to sinners. 

Sometimes saints turn to Jesus haltingly. Always imperfectly. At times, speaking for myself anyway, resentfully. But saints find that their lives as disciples and human beings are always buttressed by daily repentance and renewal. 

No matter how saints’ hearts may wander, they always know to come back to Christ. 

They know to Whom they belong and they know where they’re headed. 

They know that this life is not perfect. But they have a purpose in their living: To live for and to let the whole world know about the Lamb Jesus, Who will, after the last page has been closed in the last chapter of the last volume of this world's story, welcome all who have trusted in Him to His new creation. 

In the meantime, dear saints of God, trust in Jesus. Know His love for you even in the midst of life’s greatest tribulations and know for a fact that, if you remain steadfast in following Jesus, like saints before us, you will be in Jesus' everlasting kingdom. You will hear Jesus say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” (Matthew 25:34) Amen!

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. I'm also a saint by grace through faith in Jesus Christ and a sinner by my very nature at the same time.]

A Reminder to All Who Have (or Seek) Power

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

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

God rules over this world in two ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justified by Grace Through Faith in Jesus Christ (with audio)

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

Romans 3:19-28

Today is Reformation Sunday, a day that calls us to focus on the whole idea of righteousness and what it means to be righteous.

These are two words used a lot in the Church, but hardly ever in the rest of the world. But according to the Bible, the Word of God, being righteous is of eternal importance to every human being. Righteousness is the quality we must possess in order to claim an eternal place in heaven and avoid eternal consignment to hell. 

So, this business of being righteous is, to put it bluntly, the single most important thing any of us can appreciate, appropriate, or understand. And that’s no overstatement.

To be righteous means to be in sync with the Law of God, the will of God for human beings. To be righteous is to walk in the ways of God.

A young German, Roman Catholic monk named Martin Luther, who lived in the sixteenth century, knew how essential being righteous is for anyone to have a relationship with God, either now or in eternity. 

Luther likely would have read words like those of Jesus in Matthew 5:20--”...unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven”--and think, “I need to get busy. I need to do more good things. I need to remember more of my sins and repent for them. Otherwise, God will damn me for eternity.” Luther thought that to become righteous, he had to work at it.

The problem was that no matter how much he repented or how many good things he did, he would always remember one more unrepented sin or commit new ones after confessing the old ones or fail to do enough good or fail to do good for the right reasons. Through daily experience, Luther learned that there was nothing that he could do to attain the title of righteous.

And guess what? Luther was right. Luther couldn’t make himself righteous. 

Neither can you and I. 

When we consider the sinful things we do or think or fantasize about, we’re bound to confess with King Solomon, who writes in Ecclesiastes 7:20: “...there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins.” No one. 

And so, Luther looked at how far he fell short of the moral standards of righteousness embodied in the Ten Commandments and realized that he would never measure up. Life with God was out of his reach. 

Luther later confessed that there in the monastery, working at being righteous for God and realizing that he never could make himself righteous, he hated God. And in hating God, his guilt and his sense that there was nothing he could do to avoid being swallowed up by the fires of hell, only increased.

Then, something happened. At the direction of his superiors, Luther became a student and teacher of the Bible. (Dangerous things can happen to us when we start studying the Bible!) 

Through his study of God’s Word, Luther came to realize that righteousness can never come to us through our perpetually failed attempts to keep God’s Law. 

That’s what our second lesson for this joyous day, Romans 3:19-28, tells us. Take a look at what the apostle Paul, writing to Christians in the capital city of the Roman Empire in about 65 AD says, starting at verse 19: “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.”

It’s good and loving for God to give us His commandments. They mark out the boundaries within which the righteous life happens, the ways in which our lives not only are more pleasing to God but also more fulfilling for us. All of us, for example, would acknowledge that it’s better for us not to steal, or covet, or live in hatred toward others. But because we can never keep God’s Law perfectly, His Law can never make us righteous. 

At the most, the Law is a mirror that shows us the awful truth with which Luther wrestled about himself, which is true of us as well, that we aren’t righteous and can’t make ourselves righteous. The Law makes all our pretense of being wonderful people pure nonsense. 

The Law is very bad news for anyone who thinks that being nice or doing good is enough to give us an in with God. But there is good news!

Verse 21: “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” 

To understand the message of these magnificent verses from our lesson, let’s consider the meanings of two words that Paul uses. They’re Greek words, of course, because Greek is the language in which Paul and the other New Testament writers composed their books and letters. 

The first word is δικαιοσύνη, which we translate as righteousness. 

The other word, which you see in verse 26, is justifies; in the Greek in which the apostle Paul wrote the verse, that word is δικαιοῦντα, a form of the verb dikaio. 

These two words share the same root., which you can detect just in hearing them pronounced: dikaio, dikaiosune.  

What these two related words tell us is that despite our sin, despite our inability to obey God’s Law or to make ourselves righteous, God GIVES Christ’s righteousness to those who trust Christ, to those in whom, by the power of God the Holy Spirit, the fire of the faith has been kindled by the good news of Jesus! 

We can’t attain the righteousness necessary to enter God’s Kingdom. 

We can't work to become righteous, but God makes righteous, He "righteous-fies," all who entrust their lives to Christ. 

Jesus has perfectly obeyed God’s Law for us and then shares the perfection of His obedience, made perfect by His death on the cross on our behalf, with those who believe in Him to make us righteous. 

Martin Luther said that when he realized that we can be justified--made righteous--not by anything we do, but only by faith in Christ through the charitable grace of God, it was as if the doors of heaven opened to Him. 

Through Christ, he came to know God not as an angry judge, but as our loving Father. 

And whenever we trust in Christ rather than ourselves, our efforts, our goodness, our achievements, our success, our worthiness, or our parents’ faith, heaven opens to us too.

Look at how Paul finishes our second lesson. Verses 27-28: “Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the law that requires faith. For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.”

Many of the self-identified Christians who get play in the media are people who seem to make a point of telling others how good they themselves are, how wholesome they are, and what good values they have, while others are evil, devoid of values. 

These phonies are braggarts, counterfeit Christians. 

If people brag about their own goodness or imply that they’ve attained righteousness by being wonderful people, they’re probably not Christians. 

Or, at the least, they’re Christians who need to repent for their sin and surrender their egos to Christ.

When Christians do brag, it’s about something else altogether. After Martin Luther died, a scrap of paper was found in his pocket, on which he had written six words: “We are beggars; this is true.” As Christians, we don’t brag about how wonderful we are. We know better. Our daily gaze in the face of God and into the mirror of God’s Law will tell us that. Instead, we brag about how wonderful God is! 

We’re not braggarts, we’re beggars: completely, utterly, totally dependent on the crucified and risen Jesus to justify us, to make us righteous, fit for life with God. Like the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 64:6), we can honestly confess: “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags...” 

But we live with the joy of knowing that even when the devil, the world, and our sinful selves are forced to agree with the Law that, in our own power, we aren’t and never can be righteous, in the power of God, through the spent blood of Jesus on the cross and our faith in Him, we are justified, we are right with God, we are righteous!

And so, Paul writes elsewhere in Romans: “...there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…” (Romans 8:1) We’ve been set free from sin and death and condemnation. And set free, no longer under the thumb of the Law, we can focus on truly living as disciples: following Christ, drawing on the Holy Spirit’s power to love God as He has loved us and to love others as Christ has loved us.

In Christ, we are justified, we are righteous. That’s worth celebrating not just on the October Sunday closest to October 31, but every single day. Friends of Christ, happy Reformation Day!

Amen

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

Here is the audio of this message.