God Loves Us Three Times Over

[Below you'll find live stream videos of both the traditional and modern worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, from yesterday morning. Also, you'll see the text of the message shared during worship. Yesterday was Holy Trinity Sunday on the Church calendar.]





John 8:48-59

Two thousand years before the birth of Jesus, three strangers appeared beneath the oak trees at a place called Mamre, where a husband and wife and their party were staying. The couple--Abraham and Sarah– who left their homeland to go to a place God promised He would reveal to them on their way, welcomed the three strangers, then fed them a feast.

During their visit, the three strangers revealed that within a year’s time, Sarah, an old woman, would give birth to the son promised to them by God years earlier.

Abraham and Sarah realize that they are in the presence of God, although they certainly couldn’t understand the divine math by which the God Who stood before them could be one God, yet simultaneously, three Persons.

Later, the three strangers engage in a private conversation. “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?...” [Genesis 18:17]

Was God talking to Himself?

Yes, most assuredly.

And it’s not the first time the Bible records God doing that. In Genesis 1:26, we’re told that God said to Himself: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness...”

These Bible passages give us hints at what Jesus later made explicit in the Great Commission, when He commanded His Church to baptize all peoples in the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

God’s three-in-one nature is part of the mystery of God’s identity and being, but the Trinity--a term never used in the Bible that we use to describe what God has revealed about Himself--is more than just an odd theological idea. God’s triune nature is essential to Who He is. 

In today’s Gospel lesson, John 8:48-59, which recounts an incident that occurred two thousand years after Abraham’s and Sarah’s time, Jesus is in the temple in Jerusalem. He’s teaching and He meets opposition. The opponents are those who had believed in Him, now turned off by the challenge of discipleship. (This isn’t the last time that believers will be turned off by the challenge of discipleship.)

They accuse Jesus of having a demon [John 8:48]. Jesus then ushers them (and us) into the mysterious realm of the Holy Trinity. “I am not possessed by a demon,” says Jesus, “but I honor my Father and you dishonor me. I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.”

Jesus is pointing us to the Father Who judges sin. It’s the Father, Jesus says, Who seeks glory for Jesus, not Him.

This shows us the nature of the love that exists within the Trinity: self-giving love that doesn’t seek for itself, self-sufficient love that didn’t need to create the universe or the human race in God’s image, but chose  to do so out of a superabundance of pure, giving love. It was this same love, Jesus says elsewhere, that brought Him to the world: "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son..."

If you really honored God, Jesus tells His now-disbelieving fellow Jews, you would see that I am God and you would honor Me too. The crowd is scandalized! “Now we know that you are demon-possessed! Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?” Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and obey his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”

This pious crowd is paralyzed with rage at Jesus. Who did He think He was? They should know the answer to that question by now. They should remember what the three strangers--identified in our English translations of our Bibles as L-O-R-D, all four letters capitalized, translating Yahweh--I AM, the name God--had said that day by the oaks of Mamre. Yahweh had said: “Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.” [Genesis 18:18]

It was through Jesus, the Messiah King of Abraham’s descendants (and of the world), that God’s promise to Abraham that Abraham and all people who trust in Yahweh would be made righteous and would become a great eternal nation, the kingdom of God, came to be. Had they truly known God, they should have recognized Him when He appeared among them in Jesus Christ!

Through God the Son made flesh, all who turn from sin and believe, are members of God’s new creation. Abraham, Jesus says, had heard this promise and if Abraham had been standing in the temple that day, he would have been filled with joy. But the crowd of skeptics in John 8 aren't thinking as Jesus says Abraham would think at all. Verse 57: “You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!” “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!”

Jesus is telling them, I know exactly what Abraham thought. Not only am I older than Abraham, I made Abraham. I gave life to everything that breathes and moves. “Before Abraham was born, Yahweh, I AM!” Jesus tells them.

Jesus didn’t intend for the crowd in the temple (or us) to see Him as a great teacher or a magnetic leader who might give them what they wanted. Jesus wants us to see that He is the loving God of the universe in human flesh, Who bears our sin and death on the cross and is raised by the Father to bring an end to human slavery to sin and death to all who trust in Him. 

It’s to help the people who are rejecting Him in our lesson to see Who He is that Jesus provokes a confrontation with them. It’s why He provokes a confrontation with us in every word of Scripture.

Do we believe that Jesus is God in the flesh?

Do we believe that He is the incarnation of the God that Abraham saw back at the oaks of Mamre?

If He is God–and I believe He is, then why would any of us mess around with living lives of unrepentant sin, that break faith with our Creator and our Redeemer, that dehumanize us, that fail to love God or neighbor?

Why would we put our ultimate trust in the things or people of the world that are going to die and who only have life by the power of God and His Word?

Why would we insist on our right to take God’s name in vain?

Or justify our adultery?

Why would we make excuses for murder or gossip?

Why would we want to take ourselves and our own desires more seriously than we do the will of the One Who made us and brought salvation to us on the cross?

Why would we choose to worry rather than trust in Him?

Why would we acquiesce to a sin-sick world that tells us, “Love is love” when we know that what the world calls love isn’t love if it doesn’t please God?

It was for our sins, all of our sins and every one of our sins, along with our sinful nature, that Jesus died for you and me and came to set us free, covering us with His forgiving grace, and putting us at liberty to live as human beings are meant to live, as children of God, assuring us that as we turn to Him each day in repentance and faith, we are covered with His forgiveness and made new.

On hearing Jesus’ claim to be God, the crowd reacts. Verse 59 says: “At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.”

Let’s be clear here.

The crowd didn’t want to stone Jesus because they thought He was dishonoring-- blaspheming-- God. They wanted to stone Him because they knew that He was God enfleshed and saw their chance to take advantage of His voluntary acceptance of the limits of humanity.

In their murderous rage, you see a preview of how on the first Good Friday, the whole world, Jew and Gentile, would cheer to see Jesus executed on a cross.

“But,” as Peter says in the Pentecost sermon, a part of which makes up our second lesson today, “God raised [Jesus] from the dead.”

And it’s here that we see the practical implications of this strange doctrine of the Trinity.

It was out of love that God the Father sent God the Son.

It was this same love that caused the Father to bring Jesus back to life.

Not love for Himself, but love for the Son and love for the world for Who Jesus died and rose.

Without God’s triune nature then, we could not know that "God is love."

Without God's triune nature, we could not be saved.

Nor could we know or believe in this God, because it’s God the Holy Spirit, the comforter sent in love by God to call us to faith, who creates faith in Jesus within us.

It’s from the love that God has always known within Himself--the love that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have for each other--that He loves you and makes you His own through Christ.

The Trinity is how God loves.

It's also how He loves us.

Three times over, He loves us, and we are eternally the richer for it! Amen

The New Testament Book of Second Thessalonians, Part 4 and 4B

[The study got cut off just as we were winding up for the night. So, I came back with a little addendum.]

The New Testament Book of Second Thessalonians, Part 3

Babel and Pentecost

 
[This is the message prepared for worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, yesterday.]

Genesis 11:1-19
Acts 2:1-21

To begin this morning, let me tell you something I used to think and then let me tell you why I was wrong.

Basically, I used to say that in Genesis at the tower of Babel, God confused the common language of the people there so they couldn’t talk with each other anymore, and at Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus’ Resurrection and ten days after His Ascension, He made it possible for people to talk with each other again. I thought that God just changed His mind and I didn’t know why.

But that spin flies in the face of what God’s Word reveals to us about God!

God told the Old Testament prophet Malachi: “I the Lord do not change…” (Malachi 3:6)

And the preacher of the New Testament book of Hebrews says of Jesus, God the Son: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8)

What this tells me is that while God will spare sinners who repent and believe in Him from judgment–God will change their eternal destiny, God’s essential, perfect, loving nature never changes.

So, what does this all mean for us today?

Let’s consider our first two lessons and see.

Moses, the writer of Genesis, tells the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9, right after telling us about Noah and the great flood. The human race, you’ll remember, had become so consumed by idolatry and sin that God decided to destroy the earth in a flood and start things over with Noah and his family, the only people in the world who trusted in God. After the flood subsided, Noah built an altar to the Lord and God gave a rainbow as a sign of His promise, “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though [after the flood]] every inclination of the human heart is [still] evil from childhood.” (Genesis 8:21) 

Despite God’s grace though, the human race went from bad to worse. The descendants of Noah moved to a plain in a place called Shinar, still filled with sin, heedless of God, worshiping objects, works of fiction and myth, and, most of all, themselves. Which leads us to the tower.

You know the story. The people decided to build a tower to “make a name for ourselves…” (Genesis 11:4)

The tower was to be a monument to their self-sufficiency. It was a declaration of independence from God, an affirmation of a common human delusion that we can and should do whatever we want to do no matter what God says.

The egomania and sin of the builders of the tower of Babel are echoed, if we’re honest, in our own lives.

We daily fail to love God or love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

We put our desires above the will of God and the call to follow Jesus.

Even though Jesus has told us, “apart from me you can do nothing,” we deem ourselves self-sufficient and tell each other to follow our hearts or our inclinations rather than confessing that we are all born in sin and need God’s forgiveness in Jesus and that we are nothing without the God Who made us! (John 15:5)

The people of Babel spoke a common language, enabling them to build the tower. But to save the people from themselves and from the consequences of their sinful delusion of self-sufficiency, God confused their language, confronting them with the reality that they weren’t “all that” and maybe  opening the eyes of some to see their need for God for forgiveness, life, and wisdom. Soon, the construction stopped and the egomaniacs headed for other places.

Fast forward 3000 years or so to the first Pentecost after Jesus had died, risen, and ascended back to heaven.

While the builders at Babylon had worked to erect a monument to themselves, Jesus’ first disciples heeded Jesus’ directive to wait in Jerusalem to receive the power of God, the power of the Holy Spirit, to do the one thing God has called His Church and we individual Christians to do, to be Jesus’ witnesses everywhere (Acts 1:8)

You see what Jesus was telling His Church then and His Church now?

Jesus gives us what is an impossible job if we try to do it ourselves.

If Peter had said, “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back,” the Holy Spirit would have reminded Peter of how he said a similar thing on the night of Jesus’ arrest, then, within hours, denied knowing Jesus at all three times.

The powerless misfits who followed Jesus never could make disciples of all nations, could never even have enduring faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, if they undertook to do those things in their own powe.

Neither can you and I.

In other words, whether for our salvation or for our faithfulness to God’s call on our lives, self-sufficiency is completely foreign to Christian discipleship. We need the power of God, the Holy Spirit to live in Christ, to believe in Christ, to have salvation through Christ, and to have a life of purpose and meaning that comes from Christ alone.

And so, I’d misunderstood what the histories of Babel and of the first Christian Pentecost tell us.

At Babel, God confused the language of the people in order to get their attention and alert them to the damnation and eternal alone-ness that will come to those who turn from God and believe in their own self-sufficiency.

At Pentecost, God gifted the Church with the power to speak Christ’s saving Gospel and God’s great love in ways that people can understand and receive with faith! The Holy Spirit was at work in Martin Luther when He inspired Luther to write the melody of A Mighty Fortress is Our God in the style of popular German beer-drinking songs. It’s why today we have both modern praise songs and traditional hymnody. We all speak different languages. But God wants to speak the good news that we are only saved and made acceptable to God by grace through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus!

At Babel, God thwarted the communication of human arrogance. At Pentecost, He made it possible for those humbled by life, death, or circumstance to hear what God wants to tell each and every human being.

A week ago this past Thursday, as some of you know, Jim Lopez took me to one of the weekly dinners held at a house run by Whole Truth Ministries. This is a Christian outreach that engages people recovering from addictions in a residential program to help them stay clean and start living productive lives again.

Whole Truth uses a combination of Twelve Step and other addiction recovery approaches, all of which begin with a fundamental insight and admission on the part of the addict: that they are powerless over whatever substance addicts them and that their lives are unmanageable because of their addiction. The second step is coming to believe that a Power greater than ourselves–God–can restore them.

As I spent time with those women and men, it struck me that people who have become addicted to things like alcohol or drugs may have certain advantages over the rest of the human race. The rest of us might be addicted to things like self-righteousness, bigotry, money, power, acceptance, sex outside of marriage, comfort, or self-indulgence, addictions that, just like addictions to drug or alcohol, will drive us away from God and deeper into the cesspool of our own sin. As far as I can see, all addiction is, along with the complicated physiological and psychological elements that are undeniably involved, idolatry, the worship of something or someone as a god that is not God, looking for meaning or comfort or peace or life in something or someone other than Jesus Christ alone. Martin Luther insightfully says, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.”

The consequences of being addicted to alcohol or drugs include the possibility of becoming a social pariah, losing one’s job, destroying one’s reputation, or dying. But if you’re addicted to self-righteousness, bigotry, money, and so on, many of which are more or less socially acceptable, you may go all the way to hell without realizing that you’ve wandered away from the God we know in Jesus and the life that only He can bring.

Most addicts I’ve known who are in recovery know what the first Christians who waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit knew: Without reliance on the God we meet in Jesus Christ, we can do nothing, we are people without hope.

So, Pentecost not only calls us to be Spirit-filled witnesses for Jesus. It also calls us to rely completely, like the first disciples on Pentecost did, on Jesus Christ.

To be right with God, ourselves, and the world, to be righteous and whole, we need Jesus Christ.

As we daily turn to Him, He sets us free from our sins and idolatry and replaces our insufficiency with His complete sufficiency.

The Spirit makes it possible for us to believe in Jesus and to proclaim Jesus.

The bottom line, friends: Jesus is our crutch.

No Christian should be afraid to admit that.

Jesus is the only way to life with God, to peace, and to eternal hope.

As Christians, we rejoice in that and want everyone in the world to know Him as Lord, God, Savior, and dearest Friend!

Next week we’ll look at the rest of Peter’s Pentecost sermon.

The New Testament Book of Second Thessalonians, Part 2

The New Testament Book of Second Thessalonians, Part 1

The New Testament Book of First Thessalonians, Part 7

Praying in Jesus' Name?

[Below you'll find live stream videos of both Sunday, May 22 worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, and the text of the Sunday sermon.]





John 16:23-33

People often ask me to pray for them. I’m happy to do so, of course. Jesus promises that God hears whenever “two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for…” (Matthew 16:19) But, sometimes people ask me to pray for them because they feel that they themselves aren’t worthy to pray to God. Some are even terrified of God.

All of us, of course, have reason to fear God. God, after all, is perfect in righteousness and holiness; you and I are sinners whose only hope is the grace and forgiveness God gives in the crucified and risen Jesus. Martin Luther said that when human beings are out of sync with God, refusing to repent for sin and refusing to trust in Jesus Christ, even the rustling of wind can terrify us, filling us with fear that it--or any other mysterious "omen"--may be bringing God’s judgment. 

So, for many people, the prospect of coming into God’s presence is a fearful thing. Yet, in the interest of “covering all their bases,” they will sometimes approach people they think have a pipeline to God to pray for them. And some people, thinking themselves pious, will appeal to "superheroes of the faith," especially dead ones, to pray to God the Father for them. 

But, friends, God the Father, Who sent Jesus to die and to rise for us doesn’t want there to be any walls between Him and us. Jesus died to give us complete, intimate contact with our Father in heaven. Because of what Jesus has accomplished in the crucifixion and resurrection, it’s possible for we sinful, imperfect human beings to go directly to God the Father without fear, not because we’re perfect, but because Jesus is. That’s what today’s gospel lesson is about.

Take a look at the first part of John 16:23-33, please. This is a continuation of words Jesus spoke to His disciples just before He was arrested. Verse 23: “In that day [Jesus says] you will no longer ask me anything. Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete. Though I have been speaking figuratively, a time is coming when I will no longer use this kind of language but will tell you plainly about my Father. In that day you will ask in my name. I am not saying that I will ask the Father on your behalf. No, the Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God. I came from the Father and entered the world; now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father.”

The “that day” to which Jesus refers is the day when He has been glorified, the day when He has accomplished His mission on this earth: Dying for our sins, rising to open up life to those who trust in Him, and ascending to heaven. Once “that day” has come, Jesus is saying, the disciples, including you and me, will be able to go directly to the Father, ask for anything in His name, and receive it.

But what does it mean to ask in Jesus’ name? Is the invocation of Jesus’ name a magical incantation binding on God the Father? 

No. Listen: The baptized believer in Jesus is the beneficiary of what Jesus has accomplished for us on the cross and from the empty tomb. When Jesus gave up His life, the temple curtain that shielded people from being in the direct presence of God the Father was torn. That means that nobody needs to use someone else’s pipeline to connect with God. 

People baptized in the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are covered with Jesus, not with their sins. They’re a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). If you believe in Jesus, you are covered with Jesus, even on the days when you don’t feel like it. Christ is still the Lord Who died and rose for you and opened up a relationship with God for you no matter how happy, sad, elated, depressed, victorious, defeated, healthy, or unhealthy you may feel at any given time. And when you are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not only do you have a connection with the Father made possible by Jesus for you, not only are you covered in Jesus’ identity so that when God looks at you, all He sees is Jesus, you also have God the Holy Spirit living in you!  In John 14, Jesus promised that He would send an Advocate for believers in Him: “...the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.” (John 15:17) 

To pray in Jesus’ name then is to speak to the Father directly, covered with Jesus and filled with the Holy Spirit. Think of that! This is true whether the person doing the praying is an elderly saint in a nursing home or an toddler who knows Jesus Love Me.

But, this gives rise to a nagging question: Has God given you everything you’ve ever asked Him for? Are there marriages you prayed for that ended anyway, children you prayed for who still made the wrong decisions, healings you asked for that didn’t come...even though you prayed for them all “in Jesus’ name”? All of us can point to prayers that weren’t answered the way we wanted them to be answered. Jesus had the same experience. In the garden of Gethsemane, you remember, He prayed to the Father that His cup of suffering would be removed from Him. Jesus didn’t want the agony of the cross He bore for you and me. But then He prayed, “...yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). 

And this tells us a lot about what it means to pray in Jesus’ name. It means to ask the Father to do His will in and through us, even when the answers God seems to give make no sense to us. (I say “seems to give” because it’s just possible that God’s final answer to our prayers is something we’ll never perceive or understand in this world!) 

To pray in Jesus’ name is to trustingly lay ourselves, our world, and the people and situations about which we pray before God. The apostle Paul says, “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.” (Romans 8:26-27)

To pray in Jesus’ name is to cede control of our lives and all for whom we pray to our Father in heaven. Our words may be jumbled. We may not understand all involved in what we pray for. We may not know what God will do with our prayers or how He will deploy His power in the situations we pray about. But we can trust that God does and will answer rightly, even when, as Jesus experienced on the cross, we may think that the Father has forsaken us. In Jesus Christ, the risen Lord, we can be sure that God will never forsake or forget or ignore us!

We can pray and we can live in the confidence of Jesus’ promise, made at the end of today’s gospel lesson: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33) Jesus has overcome everything to give you perfect peace with God. You can trust in Him, always. Thank God for that. Amen!