Friday, July 31, 2020
Thursday, July 30, 2020
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Monday, July 27, 2020
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Jesus Isn't Your Buddy, Not a Member of Your Political Party
The church's loyalty cannot be auctioned off to those who promised it political influence; nor can its core convictions be pummeled into submission to fit the raining zeitgeist. For citizens of heaven, the gospel should to be declared, not domesticated. @profntwright @mbird12
— Dr. Derwin L. Gray (@DerwinLGray) July 14, 2020
I love this pastor's citation of a wonderful quote from N.T. Wright.
Jesus is not a Democrat.
He's not a Republican.
Jesus doesn't share our enthusiasms for human ideologies, philosophies, rationalizations, or excuses.
Jesus isn't an American.
He is the Lord of heaven and earth.
He is the great I AM.
He is the crucified, risen, and ascended One.
He's the conqueror of sin and death, the Word made flesh, the Pioneer and Perfecter of our salvation, the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.
His is the name that is above all names to which ultimately, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess is God the Son, all to the glory of God.
So, quit trying to make Him your buddy.
Quit trying to enlist Him as a co-conspirator in your preferred political positions.
Quit trying to make Him an amiable buffoon who will acquiesce to anything that makes you feel good.
Quit trying to portray His tough love, that loves us absolutely and loves us too much to leave us dead in our favorite sins, whatever they may be, as excusing or rationalizing the self-directed, self-aggrandizing path you've already decided to take.
Read the Bible. Partake of the Sacraments.
Get to know Jesus as He is.
Then, bend your knee in abject submission.
Confess to Him the sins He shows you in yourself.
Turn to Him for forgiveness, absolution, and renewal.
Let Him guide you in the true path of His love and righteousness.
That path won't look much like the paths that political. correctness, be it conservative or liberal, this world commends. How could it look like those paths? The ways of the world are dead or dying. The way of Jesus, God the Son, is living, pulsing with the power of the eternal God.
As we follow Him, He goes to work reconstructing us in His image. That reconstruction process is painful. It means giving up on worshiping our favorites gods--ourselves or our own rectitude and rightness, for example.
I haven't made much progress on this path in the forty-four years since Jesus called me back to Him. But I know that He--not political parties, not social movements, not my family that I love, not my country that I love too, not my political preferences--but only Jesus is "the way, and the truth, and the life." All -isms, personal preferences, prejudices, and favorite sins must give way to Him.
The path of following Jesus is the way to truth and life and wholeness and hope and joy. Following Jesus leads us into the very heart of the One Who made us. Jesus alone. Only Jesus.
Idolatry, Injustice, and Freedom
I read several chapters of Jeremiah for my quiet time with God today. Wow! That book has relevance to our contemporary situation.
While the United States is a secular republic, never intended to be a theocracy, the judgments of God on ancient Israel and on the nations of that era that had nothing to do with God were related to two things: idolatry and injustice.
God calls all nations and individual people to worship Him alone, not because God is an egomaniac, but because only the God first revealed to Israel and now to all people in Jesus, can give us life.
When nations or individuals start chasing after false gods, false sources of security, peace, or self-esteem, injustice always follows. Think of all the injustice unleashed in the world by people or countries that have followed fake gods:
- from the gods of self or family to the gods of racial or ethnic superiority,
- from the gods of materialism to the gods of sexual promiscuity,
- from the gods of politics and human philosophies to the gods of legalistic religions that promise people good if they only behave in certain ways,
- from the gods of social acceptance and popularity to the gods of comfort without regard to others.
Following them--worshiping them--also leads people and nations to perpetrate or to be complicit with the most heinous acts of injustices, injustices that become so much a part of idolaters' lives that they never question them. They assume, as God's ancient people did, according to Jeremiah, that God approves of their idolatries.
Jeremiah warns that God never approves of our chasing after false gods, which is exactly what we do whenever we allow any sin to take root in our lives.
Behind every violation of God's moral law, given in the Ten Commandments, is an act of idol worship. Above all, every willful sin commit is an act of self-worship, an example of the abiding human sin that can be traced back to Adam and Eve, the desire "to be like God," to BE God ourselves. That delusional ambition lay behind every injustice, heartache, relational breakdown, and sin that has ever been seen in human history.
Our call is simple: To daily turn from the idols that drag us down and to turn instead to Jesus for forgiveness and the life that only He, God the Son, can give.
Jeremiah's bracing message reminded me of that today. So, once more, I take refuge in Jesus so that He can free me from the idolatries of this world and the injustices to which they lead.
Friday, July 24, 2020
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study of the Book of Acts, Chapter 2:1-28
Tonight, we developed connection issues as we were looking at Acts 2. The video fizzles as I was talking about Acts 2:29-36. So, tomorrow night, God willing, we'll look at the end of Acts 2 nd all of Acts 3.
Here, we close in prayer.
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Monday, July 20, 2020
Sunday, July 19, 2020
Friday, July 17, 2020
How to Know God...and Why You Might Want To
Jesus reveals God to the whole human race.
"Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.'” (John 14:6-7)
Jesus is how you can know God.
He's also how you can be reconciled to God. Jesus told a man named Nicodemus, one of Jesus' fellow Jews, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son." (John 3:16-18)
Get to know Jesus and prayerfully consider following Him. The blessings of doing so are for today and for eternity.
As the apostle Paul, also a Jew and once an enemy of Christian faith who later came to believe in Jesus said: "Therefore, since we have been justified through faith [counted right with God through belief in Jesus], we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God." (Romans 5:1-2)
Feel free to share with a friend.
Thursday, July 16, 2020
Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study of the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 26, verses 36-75
[I apologize that the first half of the video is somewhat distorted. I was using to much bandwidth.]
Getting Things Straight
In my quiet time today, I was struck by this verse: "Lord...all that we have accomplished you have done for us." (Isaiah 26:12) Whatever good I do in this world, in fact, I don't do. Good is so foreign to my nature that if I do it, it's God doing it through me.
This reminds me of something that some of us on Twitter were discussing yesterday, Jesus' words in John 15:5: "I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."
As a disciple of Jesus, my call is to recognize that, in Luther's phrase, "we are all beggars": I'm a person saved by grace who only does good things insofar as Christ, through Spirit-given daily repentance and renewal, lives in me.
The phrase "proud Christian" is an oxymoron.
Lord, destroy my pride and help me to live in and for you alone. In Jesus' name, I pray. Amen
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
Monday, July 13, 2020
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)