When We Love

[Below you'll find the message shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, earlier today, as well as video of both worship services.] 

John 14:15-21

Do Jesus’ words at the beginning of today’s Gospel lesson make you uncomfortable? He says “If you love me, keep my commands.” (John 14:15) 

Does Jesus seem to be contradicting Himself and the rest of the Bible?

Elsewhere, He famously says, for example, “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.” (John 3:16)

And also: “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” (John 6:29)

The apostle Paul summarizes all this teaching from Jesus by saying, “For we maintain that a person is justified [that is, declared innocent of their sins] by faith [in Christ] apart from the works of the law.” (Romans 3:28)

The distillation of these passages of Scripture and many more is that we who are born sinners cannot and are not saved from death, the condemnation for our sin, by anything we do; we are saved solely by Christ Who died and rose for all sinners through the faith in Christ we receive through the Gospel Word about Jesus.

So, what is up with Jesus’ words at the beginning of today’s Gospel lesson: “If you love me, keep my commands”? It sounds as if Jesus is saying that our relationship with Him and our eternal salvation from Him depend on how much we love Him and on our obedience to His commands.

There are schools of thought within Christianity that teach this is exactly what Jesus is saying here. They think their salvation depends on what they do and the depths of their love for Jesus. People taught this way are constantly turned in on themselves, trying to police themselves of doubt or sin.

But, friends, this kind of thinking can only lead us to one of two endpoints: Either false pride when we think that we really are obeying and loving Jesus perfectly or despair, even unbelief, at the realization that we cannot obey or love Jesus perfectly.

Jesus and the whole Bible are clear though that we won’t find life with God by diving more deeply into our personal sewers of sin and self-obsession.

Freedom from sin and death only come from outside ourselves through Jesus Christ!

So, what is Jesus telling us in the first verse of our Gospel lesson? There are two words in the verse that say much more than we might realize and will help us understand what Jesus is saying.

The first word is if, “If you love Me,” Jesus says.

The word in the Greek in which John wrote his gospel is ἐάν, a conjunction that usually means if. But there is an irregular use of the word and almost every time it appears in John’s writings, this irregular use is meant. Let me give you a few examples of this use.

In John 12:32, Jesus says, “And I, when [that’s our word, ean] I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

Another example, 1 John 2:28 : “And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when [there’s our word again] he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.” (1 John 2:28)

One more, 1 John 3:2: “...we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

So, Jesus isn’t telling us, “If you get yourself convinced that you love Me.” He’s saying, “When, by the power of my Word, given in Scripture, preaching, teaching, and the Sacraments, that all your sins are forgiven and that you have been justified by grace through faith in Me…”

Jesus is assuring you: “When you have been told, ‘I therefore declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,’ you will love Jesus.”

That’s the power of His forgiving, loving Word; it incites love for Him within us.

“This is love,” the apostle John writes elsewhere, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:10)

We love Jesus when His Gospel Word allows us to experience the love He has given to us from the cross. It was this very love that the disciples who betrayed Jesus would experience after His resurrection: forgiveness and love despite their sin.

The second word is keep. “If you love me,” Jesus says, “keep my commands.” The word here in the original Greek is τηρέω. It means to watch over, to guard, to observe. To keep the commands of Jesus, of God, is to acknowledge their authority over us. It doesn’t mean perfect obedience to God’s Law, which God’s Word tells us no sinful human being can muster.

Jesus, you’ll remember, used words from the Old Testament to summarize God’s commandments for the human race.

He summarized commandments one through three–that we have no other gods, that we not take His name in vain, that we hold His Word at the center of our lives–by telling us to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Deuteronomy 6:5; Matthew 22:37).

He summarized commandments four through ten–that we honor our parents, not murder, not commit adultery, not steal, not bear false witness, and not covet–by commanding us, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:39)

Honesty compels each of us to acknowledge that we do not obey God’s law of love. We are worthy of condemnation.

But, friends, we keep these commands of Jesus every time we come to Him and acknowledge, formally or informally, together or on our own, “We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” We keep His commands whenever we respond to His Word and take up our crosses daily and follow Him. (Luke 9:23)

We love Jesus and we keep His commands, acknowledging His grace and authority, whenever He comes to us with His Word assuring us that through Him, all our sins are forgiven. This is what Jesus explains to us in the rest of today’s gospel lesson. Jesus sends His Holy Spirit Who comes to us in the word of forgiveness and rebirth we receive at Holy Baptism, in the preaching of His Gospel Word, and in the forgiveness and power for living we receive in Holy Communion.

When Jesus tells us today, “If you love me, keep my commands,” Jesus isn’t turning us in on ourselves to engage in a morbid inventory of our sinful selves. He’s freeing us from both the sewers of self-congratulation and self-condemnation.

He calls us to look to Him, the One Who died and rose to set us free from sin and death.

It’s good and right for us to confess our sins to God. But when Jesus’ words of forgiveness come to us, our old sinful self is crucified and, with the words of absolution, we rise to newness of life!

Pastor David Schmitt talks about a friend who, as she puts on a coat to go outside, says with a smile of her deceased dad, “My father always told me to wear a coat.” These are the words of a woman who knew how deeply her earthly father loved her, that his “command” wasn’t arbitrary but came from love, and so, even now, out of his immediate presence–even when she forgets to put on her coat, she “keeps” her father’s “command.”

When the Holy Spirit–the Spirit of truth–turns our attention to Jesus and we know that He has already paid the price for our sin and already given eternal life to all who believe in Him, we are filled with the love of children who know they are deeply loved by God and, from love, reverence, and respect, will always gladly acknowledge His authority over us.

Receive the forgiving love of Jesus and you will love.

That is Jesus’ Word for us today.

Amen

Ash Wednesday: Free in Christ

[This message was shared during this evening's Ash Wednesday worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
In our gospel lesson for tonight, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21, Jesus warns believers: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” 

He goes on to say that when we give to the needy, we should seek to keep it quiet. If our aim is to impress others with our giving, the greatest reward we can expect is the applause of a dead world. If our aim is to honor God, our reward will be all the gifts an eternal God can give. 

When we offer prayers only to be seen by others, we may impress a dying world. But that won’t help us in eternity, where God gives eternal rewards. We should pray to connect with, confess sin to, give praise to, and seek help from God. 

When we fast, it should be done for the purpose of emptying ourselves of sin or to listen to God. If we fast to get spiritual brownie points from the people before whom we play out our religious shows, those brownie points, which have zero value in this world or the next, will have to suffice as our reward.

In other words, the question of motivation is important to Christians, even on Ash Wednesday. If we come to this service, receive the mark of the cross, sing the hymns, or partake of the body and blood of Jesus to impress other people or climb a religious ladder, we may receive some earthly rewards. People in the congregation may be impressed that you came to worship on a Wednesday night. People may see you at a grocery or convenience store you stop at on the way home and, noticing the cross on your forehead, think well of you or ill of themselves because of your piety.

But Jesus says that the only reward a Christian disciple should seek is the reward Jesus Himself won for us on the cross, the forgiveness of sin and everlasting life with God that belongs to all who believe in Him.

Jesus’ warning to watch our motives for things like giving to the poor, fasting, or praying raises another issue for some Christians, though. It subjects them to what has been called the paralysis of self-analysis. 

There’s a story told of two actors, one a seasoned veteran with many credits, the other a celebrated up-and-comer. There was a brief scene in which these two were to appear together. The older one sat in a room. The younger was to enter the room through one door and exit through another. It would take all of five seconds. But rehearsal ground to a stop when the younger actor couldn’t figure out how to “play” the scene. “What’s my motivation for walking in and out of that room at that moment?” he asked. “What has my character been doing? What is he going to do? Why does he have to go through that room to do it?” Finally, the veteran actor had enough. “Your motivation,” he shouted, “is to walk through the room and get on with the scene!”

The younger actor was paralyzed from doing anything because he obsessed over whether he had the right motivation. Listen: Our motivations matter. But if we Christians wait to do anything before we’re certain that our motives are absolutely pure, we won’t do anything for God at all. 

Remember how the apostle Paul wrestled with his own sinfulness? “...I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.” (Romans 7:21-23) Despite knowing that his motivations were adulterated by his sinful human nature, Paul continued to do the right thing he thought God was calling him to do.

Paul recognized that every baptized Christian, even the most seasoned and exemplary, has several things in common. First, we are all sinners. Second, we are all saints. We are sinners made saints not by what we do or by the pure motives with which we do them, but solely by God’s grace given to us through faith in Jesus Christ.

As we trust Christ and live in daily relationship with Him and His Church, God is transforming us. We can trust in that. He works within us as we turn to Him in daily repentance and renewal so that the sinner in us is daily subjected to death and the new us--the new you and me--is raised. 

This is an ongoing process in the lives of believers in Jesus. It's called sanctification. But the final purification will only happen after we have physically died and been raised by God and we see Jesus face to face. The apostle John tells us, “Dear friends, now [today, although we’re still imperfect] we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)

Ultimately, Jesus’ call to us in our gospel lesson tonight and in the season of Lent is simple: To get our minds off of ourselves and onto Him as the only one Who can give us life, forgiveness, purpose, and the desire to do things for His glory, not our own. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” Galatians 5:1 tells us. And Colossians 3:23-24 puts it all succinctly: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

When we know that we have been saved from sin, death, darkness, and worry over ourselves through Christ, we are set free! We’re free to stop taking ourselves so seriously while taking our Savior’s call to love God, love neighbor, and love fellow believers with the utmost seriousness. We learn to be unafraid of death (even if we’re still afraid of the process of dying), unafraid of whether the world rewards us or not. Death and the opinions of us held by the world can make the final judgments over our lives only if we refuse to trust in Jesus.

Our freedom in Christ may be expressed in many ways, including, as Jesus discussed tonight, in giving to the poor, fasting, and praying. In fact, Jesus takes it as a matter of course that they will be expressed in these ways, since He says of them, “When you give, when you fast, when you pray.” 

But through Jesus, we’re free from the have tos, the musts, and gotta do its of the world, the religious hoops we think we have to negotiate in order to please God (and impress others). In Jesus, we get to love. We get to be the people Christ sets us free to be. We get to live our lives in God’s charity, His grace, not by the world’s punishing standards. “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved,” Jesus says (Mark 16:16).

You may do a spiritual discipline for Lent, something you give up or add to your life. If that’s true, try not to tell anyone about it. Seek to do it not for yourself--there are few things more boring or spiritually pointless than a discipline adopted to bring self-improvement. Do it for Christ. Do it for God’s glory. And if you do it imperfectly, talk it over with God and don’t stew about it. Christ didn’t die for perfect people. He died for you and me, mortals created by God from ashes and dust, but mortals who, as we trust in Christ, have the reward no mortal could ever earn or deserve, eternity with God. There’s freedom in that, freedom from playing to the crowd, freeing from worrying over whether we’re good enough or worthy, freedom from sin, freedom from self. Jesus gives freedom. Sisters and brothers in Christ, live in that freedom!

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

Radical Makeover

[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio during both this morning's traditional and contemporary worship celebrations.]

Mark 8:27-38
Imagine a scene with me. You're in your doctor's office for a consultation. You’ve had some tests and now you're back to see the doc to learn the results. She enters the office and says, "It’'s serious and the prognosis is not good." Your heart sinks.

Then, she says, "But I have a treatment that's going to make everything OK...I'm going to give you a facelift."

You know that can't be right: When you're up against a major illness, a superficial remedy won't do. In the face of radical maladies, only radical therapies stand a chance.

We human beings are confronted with a major malady.

It's called death and it's the result of sin.

You and I were created in the image of God, the pinnacle of God's creation. But sin has distorted our natures. In fact, one Biblical word for sin is taken from the experience a person has looking at their reflection in a pool of water, then having that reflection distorted when a stone is thrown into the water. The image gets distorted.

Because the human race is the pinnacle of the creation, the Bible says that all creation groans under the weight of our sin, the distortion of God's image in each of us.

The Bible uses the word, sin, in two different ways.

One way the Bible talks about sin is as a condition of our birth, original sin. This is what David is talking about in Psalm 51:5: "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me." If you had human parents, you were born sinful, too. Sin is a debt we owe to God. You and I are born with a debt so crippling we could never possibly pay it off.

But if that sounds bad, it gets worse. Being born in sin means that we have an inborn inclination to add to our debts by committing sins. This is what the Lutheran confessions call concupiscence. This is the other way the Bible speaks of sin: a particular violation of the will of God as expressed in the Ten Commandments: murder, taking God's Name in vain, failing to help our neighbor in need.

Because of the condition of original sin, our sinfulness is stubbornly evidenced in all our thinking, speaking, and living. Because we are born sinners, we sin naturally.

In Romans 7:15, the apostle Paul writes: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do [obey God’s commands] I do not do, but what I hate I do."

We are born in sin and we find ourselves incapable of refraining from sin.

And the Bible doesn’t soft pedal what that means: "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).

"Wait," we might say. "I'm not perfect. But I've never committed any of the really big sins. I've never murdered. I've never committed adultery. I've never stolen."

James 2:10 says: "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it."

So, in sin, we have a major illness and the prognosis is death. Superficial therapies won’t do. That's what Jesus is talking about in today's Gospel lesson.

Turn to Mark 8:27-38 (page 705), please. Near the beginning of a conversation with the disciples, Jesus asks them, "Who do you say I am?” In Mark 8:29, Peter says, "You are the Messiah [or, the Christ]."

The title, Christ (from Christos as it appears in the New Testament, which was written in Greek) or Messiah (from the Hebrew in which the Old Testament was written), means Anointed One. The kings of God's people were always anointed with oil on being enthroned. The Old Testament had repeatedly foretold of an ultimate Messiah who would bring God’s rule to earth.

Through the centuries, certain popular expectations developed about the coming Christ or Messiah. The people of first-century Judea, the place to which Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, came to live, die, and rise, thought that the Messiah would make what would amount to cosmetic changes, the moral equivalent of a facelift as a cure for cancer.

To them, the problems they faced had nothing to do with themselves or their own deficiencies. (This is a common theme in human history. The late Karl Menninger once quoted a folk song that said, "Everything I do that's wrong is someone else's fault.")

Jesus' fellow Judeans wanted a king who would toss the Romans out of their land. They wanted an end to oppressive government regulations. They wanted the rich to pay their fair share in taxes and they wanted to the Romans to ease up on the poor. They wanted a king who would do their bidding. Their idea of what God should do in their lives was very different from what God had in mind.

That's why Peter's declaration of faith in Jesus as the Messiah was dangerous. Jesus had to instruct the disciples on what it means to confess Jesus as the Christ. He didn't want to feed their false expectations. Jesus had come to do more than offer facelifts on dying people!

Look at Mark 8:31: "He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again."

The therapy for our sin, Jesus is saying, begins with Him.

He, Who never once sinned, would undergo the death we deserve for our sin so that the debt can be paid for all who repent and believe in Jesus.

But when Peter heard Jesus predict that He would suffer, be rejected, and be killed, he couldn’t take it. It certainly did sound like a very compelling campaign platform!

Look at Mark 8:32: "Peter took him [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke him." The word rebuke, epitimao in the Greek in which Mark originally wrote, means to warn, upbraid, condemn, set straight.

Imagine this: Peter has just declared Jesus to be God's Anointed King and now he has the audacity to tell Jesus how to do His job!

Verse 33: "But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ he said. ‘You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.’"

When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, you'll remember, he tried to lure Jesus away from suffering, rejection, and the cross. He did so because if Jesus was faithful in taking these agonies onto Himself, He would pay our debt in full and thereby empower all who turn from sin and trust in Him as their God to be raised just as God the Father raised Jesus on the first Easter.

Jesus knew that He needed to fulfill His purpose for coming to earth, whatever pain He caused Himself. He couldn't let Satan stand in His way.

Now Jesus applies the name of Satan to Peter!

Peter may have thought that He was doing a nice thing, like the church member who says, "Pastor, I know that the Bible says that Jesus is the only way to eternity with God, but you make people feel uncomfortable when you tell the truth like that."

"Niceness" of the kind Peter exhibits here leads people away from God.

"Niceness" like this suits Satan's purposes just fine. Jesus, in essence, is telling Peter,

In fact one of the great afflictions of the Christian churches in North America and Europe today is that too often, we've become the Church of Nice rather than the Church of Christ.

Jesus was telling Peter, in essence: "I am the great Physician and My suffering, rejection by others, and death on a cross are the first part of the cure. So, Peter, get out of My way!"

Then, Jesus gives the second part of His radical therapy for our sin and death.

Look at verses 34 and 35: "...he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it."

Here we see that to believe that Jesus is the Christ--the King, the Lord of all--is more than just saying the right words on Sunday mornings.

To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is, first of all, to surrender ourselves, even to the point of discomfort and death, to God's only aim for our lives, our sole aim in life.

God's sole aim for our lives is articulated in 2 Corinthians 3:18, which says: "But we all [all of us who trust in Christ as God and Savior], with uncovered face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."

If sin has distorted the image of God within us, it's God's aim to infuse us with the image of God the Son so that we can begin to experience human life as God intended for it to be lived.

God aims to make us over into the very image of Jesus!

As we trust in Jesus each day, the Holy Spirit works a miracle: We who have been distorted by sin are made over in the image of Christ!

It doesn't happen fully within our time on this earth.

And on the way to our resurrection from the dead, we won't avoid suffering, rejection, or death any more than Jesus did.

But we will become more and more like Jesus.

1 John 3:2 says, "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."

So, to believe in Jesus means, first of all, to surrender to Him even to the point of discomfort and death.

To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is, secondly, to embrace the life style of Jesus.

When, through Jesus' death and resurrection, you understand that you are number one in God's eyes, you’re freed from “looking out for number one."

Philippians 2:3-4 says: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others."

John Stott tells the story of a college classroom in India. The professor, a Hindu, realized that one of his students was a Christian. "If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ," the professor told the student, "India would be at your feet tomorrow." That professor could as easily say that to any Christian in this country: "If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, America would be at your feet."

No Christian wants to have others at their feet, of course. Like our Lord, we come to serve, not to be served.

But our joy as Christians is only made complete when we share Christ with others and they too, come to believe in Jesus as the Christ.

Sin and death threaten to separate us from God for eternity. God's cure is radical, but sure. It begins with the Christ, God the Son, suffering, dying, and rising for us. And it's fulfilled when, after confessing Jesus with our lips, we confess Him with our lives, taking up our crosses and following Him: submitting ourselves to the death of our old sinful selves, committing ourselves to letting God make us over in the image of Jesus Himself, and embracing the very life of self-sacrifice and unstinting love that Jesus lived.

May God give us the power to have a faith that's more than words, a faith that shows in our whole lives.

May we submit to the radical cure that gives us life with God forever!

Amen

Christ's Return for Judgment (Part 13, The Augsburg Confession)

We Lutherans confess our belief in it almost every time we gather for worship.

What is the "it" we confess?

Well, in the Apostles’ Creed, we claim to believe that the risen and ascended Jesus will one day “come again to judge the living and the dead.”

In the Nicene Creed, we say that Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.”

Lutheran Christians have always accepted the historic creeds as faithful expressions of, not just belief, but of essential truth revealed to the world by God. And that includes their assertion that one day Jesus Christ will return to judge every human being.

Today, as we continue to consider what it means to be a Lutheran Christian, we look at the topic of Article 16 of The Augsburg Confession, “Christ’s Return for Judgment.” The first paragraph of the article says:

Our [Lutheran] churches teach that at the end of the world Christ will appear for judgment and will raise all the dead....He will give the godly and elect eternal life and everlasting joys, but He will condemn ungodly people and the devils to be tormented without end... 

For those who seek to bring God under human authority or subject Christ to their own preferences, the very notion that Jesus Who made Himself our servant and bore our sin on the cross is going to one day send some people to hell is disagreeable. "All because they don’t believe in Jesus?" they wonder. “That’s awfully arbitrary,” a woman said to me once.

But I couldn’t help but wonder if she also thought it arbitrary of God to extend the possibility of forgiveness and new life to sinners who deserve condemnation and death.

If you and I are willing to accept the Jesus Who is so arbitrary that He offers eternity as a free and undeserved gift to all who turn from sin and believe in Him, we must also be willing to accept the Jesus Who acquiesces to the desires of some for lives without Him. There will come a point when Jesus will accept that as people's final answer to Him.

But should we fear judgment day? What will it be like?

Please turn to the passage that the Confession mentions first, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:2.

Paul wrote the letter from which these verses come to the Christians living in a place called Thessalonica, a Greek city set on the Aegean Sea. He wrote it in about 51 AD.

The Thessalonian Christians were disappointed, less then twenty years after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension, that the Lord hadn’t yet returned to bring His new creation to its final, eternal fulfillment.

In the meantime, believers had died. What, the surviving Christians wondered, would happen to those who had already passed away if they weren’t around when Jesus returned to this world?

Paul sought to calm their fears. He writes: “...I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope.”

Paul is saying that the deaths of believers will bring grief to those who loved them as surely as the deaths of non-believers bring grief to their loved ones. But, he’s saying, if the one you loved was a believer in Jesus, there will also be hope in your grief, the hope of living eternally with a Savior Who conquered sin, death, and the devil for those who believe in Him!

That’s why Paul writes what he does next: “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep.” (In other words, those who died believing in Christ will be raised at the moment of Jesus’ return and they too will witness Jesus’ return.)

Then, Paul describes what will happen on the day of Christ's return. “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with a trumpet of God. [There will be no mystery about it when Jesus returns. He won’t show up incognito. The whole human population, Christians and non-Christians will hear it and see it at the moment He makes His appearance.]

"Then [Paul goes on] we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.”

What Paul is trying to convey here is not what some people refer to as a rapture, but a reunion between Christ and His people.

After telling the Thessalonians to comfort one another with his words, he goes on: “But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need that I should write to you.” In this, Paul reflects Jesus’ words to His apostles when speaking of the day when He returns and judges the living and the dead: No one knows when it will happen. And anyone who claims they do is lying.

In fact, Christ's return will come perhaps when the world least expects it, when most of its inhabitants have no thought of Christ. Paul says, “that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.”

But what will Jesus be judging on judgment day?

Jesus will be judging one thing. One thing only. It’s this: Do we have faith? That means...

• Do we trust Jesus? 
• Have we trusted Him enough to confess our sins in His Name? 
• Have we trusted in Him enough to confess our doubts about Him? 
• Have we trusted in Him enough to let Him lead and direct us through His Word, found in the Bible, even when where He leads isn’t where we want to go and what He directs us to do is the last thing we want to do? 
• Have we wanted Jesus even when we wandered down the blind alley of sin? 

Faith is what Jesus will be judging.

Faith is that gift we receive as we openly take the Word of God about Jesus Christ and the Sacraments of the Church. The just--the people made right with God--live by faith, the Bible tells us (Habakkuk 2:4, Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11, Hebrews 10:38).

In Matthew 24:13, Jesus tells us how powerful this faith is within the context of talking about the day when He returns to the world: “...the one who endures to the end will be saved.”

What does it mean to endure in our faith in Christ?

There are superstars like Paul and Peter, Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie ten-Boom and Mother Teresa to inspire us with their enduring faith, of course. Despite persecution, sometimes in spite of their own doubts, they endured in trusting in Christ.

They kept heeding the Word about new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ, even when sin, death, and the devil accosted them.

But I want to hold up a different saint as an example of faith to you right now. You don’t know her. In fact, I’m not even going to use her real name. She was a member of one of my former parishes.

Joan had been afflicted with a disease that had kept her from doing many of the ordinary things people do in life since she was a teenager. But she had married. She had become a mother. She had become a grandmother.

But now, at just age 54, she was about to lose her life. Her hospital room was dark the day I visited her because any light seemed to cause her pain and she never opened her eyes. She barely had the strength to speak.

“Oh, pastor,” she told me, “I’m afraid to die. It’s not the dying that frightens me. It’s just that I’m an awful sinner.”

Now, we all know that all sins are violations of God’s holiness. In the eyes of a holy God, every sin we commit--from failing to keep a day for Him to taking His Name in vain, from stealing to gossiping, from sexual intimacy outside of marriage to murder--is equally damning.

But as I sat with Joan, I felt certain of two things.

First, I was certain that she was a sinner, just like me. Just like you.

And second, I felt certain that only a person who recognizes their sin and realizes how wonderful the God we know in Jesus Christ receives the forgiveness for sin God offers to those who repent and believe Christ.

As gently as I could, I asked, “Joan, do you remember what Jesus told Nicodemus? He said, ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.’”

“Do you believe in Jesus?” I asked Joan. A tear poured down one of her cheeks and she said, “Yes.”

I tried to assure Joan that soon, she would see Jesus face to face.

To many of us, the biggest mystery about God is this: He has saved unworthy sinners like us.

It does show how gracious God is. But, you know what? We need to get over  thoughts like that. They’re too much about us. We need to focus on Christ instead.

Even if you and I found a way to go through a single day without sinning, we still wouldn’t deserve forgiveness or eternity. In my natural inborn self, I’m a sinner who deserves death.

Thank God that on judgment day, I will not be judged for whom I am, but for Who Jesus Christ is and that, through faith in Him, He has come to live in me.

Please look Galatians 2:20. Paul writes there: “I have been crucified [that is my old sinful self] with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.”

Martin Luther had this passage in mind when he spoke of how he dealt with the devil's temptations to sin. When Luther sensed the devil tempting him, knocking on the door of his heart, Luther didn't dare go to to the door. Instead, he sent Jesus to answer for him. Luther sensed Jesus telling the devil, "Martin Luther doesn't live here any more. I do. Now go to where you belong!"

Listen, Lutherans: Your old sinful self died at Baptism. A new self, your Christ self, rose then.

People can commit spiritual suicide as surely as they commit physical suicide, of course. They can walk away from Christ and His promises as I did when I was an atheist. Had I died in those years, Christ would have respected my preferences and allowed me to enter eternity without Him.

But if you and I keep holding onto Jesus, I can assure you that when we are genuinely repentant for sin, on the day of Christ’s return, God the Father will look not on us as the sinners we are. Instead, He will only see Jesus Christ living in us.

God makes of every person who repents and believes in Christ another Christ--a "little Christ," as Luther put it, another child of God, each with our own personalities and gifts, but each surrendered to the God Who made us and loves them, who pray with Jesus, “nonetheless, Father, not my will, but Your will be done.”

God covers the sins of those who believe in Christ with the grace and forgiveness of Christ and imbues our lives with Christ-like purposes and pursuits.

And as we keep repenting and keep believing, the old sinner is drowned all over again in our baptismal waters and the new self is enlivened again by the Word of God and sustained again by Christ’s body and blood in Holy Communion.

First John 3:2 says, “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed [in other words, when Jesus returns to judge the living the dead], we shall be like Him...”

We will be just like Jesus, fit for eternity, not because we did good or holy deeds, but because, like Joan, we held onto the promise of forgiveness and new life God makes to those who turn their backs on sin, death, and the devil and keep on following Jesus, when their faith is weak and when their faith is strong.

At the day of judgment, all who have endured in following Jesus will hear Jesus tell them--you who believe in Jesus will hear Him tell you: “Enter the joy of your Master.”

Could there possibly be better words than those to hear? If there are, I can’t imagine what they might be!

This week, ask God to give you the chance to share the good news of Jesus Christ with every person you can, to invite them to worship and study and pray with you, to ask them how, as a believer in Jesus, you can help them. Do those things, I beg you, so that everyone you know or love will come to believe in Jesus and hear those same words on judgment day that you want to hear: "Enter the joy of your Master!” Amen!

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 [This was shared during both of this morning's worship services at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.] 

After this morning's early service at Saint Matthew, I was asked what happened to Christians when they die: do they sleep until the resurrection or do they go immediately into the presence of God? The answer, I think is, "Yes." I talk about this question in this blog post from 2008, Where Do We Go When We Die?