A sinner saved by the grace of God given to those with faith in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. Period.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Good Friday Worship
Friday, March 30, 2018
Good Friday: God's Love for You
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Christmas: For You
Luke 2:1-20
Have you ever had this experience?
You go somewhere special or spend special time with someone you love, then later regretted that you hadn’t really taken the time to savor it?
Hadn’t taken the time to just let the moment penetrate the recesses of your memory?
Or allowed yourself to think, “This is so special, I need to always remember exactly what I’m thinking and feeling and doing”?
Life tears by and we often fail to mark the special times in memory and reflection.
The next-to-last verse in tonight’s Christmas gospel lesson tells us, “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”
The word translated as treasured is, in the Greek in which Luke wrote his gospel, a compound word that means gathered together. Mary gathered together the events of that night and pondered or, in Luke’s original words, threw them together.
In other words, Mary made a point of noting and remembering everything that happened on the first Christmas.
Then she threw them together in her mind, turning them over, seeking to see what they all meant, how what was happening all jibed with God’s centuries-old promise of a Savior-Messiah and with the angel Gabriel’s announcement that she would give birth to that Messiah.
Mary collected her memories and thought about their significance.
This is what I want to ask you to do over the next few minutes.
The Christmas story, as recorded by Luke and Matthew, is so familiar to us that we forget not only the details, but also their meaning.
We take Christmas for granted.
This Christmas, I beg you to not do that.
Christmas is one of the most important events in human history--and in our personal histories, surpassed only by Good Friday and Easter Sunday, neither of which could have happened had Christmas not happened.
Tonight, we consider and praise God for the moment when God the Son took on human flesh and took up residence in this world, not as a king or a president, not as a celebrity or a tycoon or a general, but as a baby born in a barn to an impoverished and unmarried couple who hadn’t yet consummated their union.
If you want a picture of just how much God loves you, Jesus in the manger will do.
It says even more than what we might think at first, in fact. Take a look at verse 7 of our gospel lesson, please.
The stage had been set by God. God had revealed through the prophets more than seven centuries earlier that the Messiah, the Son of God, God-enfleshed, would be raised in a home of descendants of King David, and that He would be born in Bethlehem, David’s city. God had orchestrated events so that Mary and Joseph would be in Bethlehem when the baby was born. God had even put it into the head of the Roman emperor to order a census in Judea so that Joseph and Mary would have to be in Bethlehem, their ancestral home, to be counted.
And then, the birth happens. Verse 7: “...and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.”
What must Mary have thought when she placed her newborn in that manger?
For sure, one thing that she must have thought about was the depths of God’s love, the lengths He was willing to go to in order to rescue you and me from sin and death. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son,” Jesus would tell Nicodemus decades later. And this Son would die and rise to set all who trust in Him free of the shackles of sin and death, to set you and me free to be the people God made us to be when He lovingly formed us in our mothers’ wombs. All of this had to be have been part of Mary’s pondering.
But she must also have considered the significance of the fact that her son’s first crib was an animal feeding trough.
In the Greek in which Luke wrote his gospel, there were two words that could be translated as manger, table, or crib. One of those words was παχνί. The other was φάτνῃ (phantne).
When the second word, phantne, is used, it seems to usually refer to a certain kind of manger. Let me show you a few pictures ancient phantnes.
As you can see, these mangers were hewn stone, not comfortable surfaces to sleep on.
With hay in the manger and the baby wrapped in swaddling cloths, it may have been a bit more comfortable.
Still, Mary would have known that this Child did not come into this world to be comfortable. He came to bring comfort, the comfort of God to a human race fallen into sin and its consequences, death.
Maybe Mary thought of words she often heard read in the Nazareth synagogue, Isaiah 40:1-2: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for…”
This baby came to pay for our sins, yours and mine, with His shed blood and His earthly life, on the cross.
And maybe Mary thought of something else as she saw her first-born in that hard manger, of something else hewn from stone.
It may have been dawning on her that the only way Israel and the rest of the human race could be saved from sin and death was for an innocent human being, also God, to bear our punishment for sin, to die, so that when God raised Him from the dead, He could raise all who repent and believe in Jesus, would have everlasting life with God.
Jesus had come to die and rise in order to be our advocate in the halls of heaven. As God’s Word says: “...this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son does not have life” (1 John 5:11-12).
Mary may have begun to understand all of this. And if the idea was just dawning on her that night in Bethlehem, it would have been made clearer to her in a short time. Eight days after Jesus’ birth, Simeon, an old man who identified Jesus as the Messiah warned Mary of the suffering her Son would endure and the stone tomb in which He would be laid, when he told Mary: “...sorrow, like a sharp sword, will break your own heart.” (Luke 2:35, Good News Translation)
As I told the Church Council this past week, there is a whiff of Good Friday in that stone manger, a foreshadowing of the tomb where Jesus’ lifeless body would be lain.
But, listen: There’s also the scent of Easter because the tomb of stone couldn’t contain Jesus and His grace for sinners any more than the news of His birth, His death, and His resurrection could have been contained these past two-thousand years.
Thank God that sin and death met their Conqueror that night in Bethlehem!
The Child has come to rescue you from sin, death, and purposeless living.
He’s come to cover your sins in His amazing grace and make you new.
He’s come to stand with you, by you, and for you as you trust in Him and call on His name.
He’s come to make sense of your living and give you life beyond your dying.
Jesus came into our world, precisely and specifically, because He loved not just the human race as a whole, but because He loved and loves you in particular.
His birth, death, and resurrection all happened for you.
And one day, He will raise all who trusted in Him from the dead. I pray that includes you and everyone whose lives we touch with the good news of Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter.
This is the Christmas truth that I hope you will ponder and savor tonight and tomorrow as you celebrate the miracle of this night: This Child, the Savior of humanity, has come for you.
For you.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Friday, February 03, 2017
The Power of the Cross: A Word to Al Qaeda and ISIS
There are all sorts of thoughts this provokes in me. But two in particular stand out.
The first is this. Islamist terrorist groups operate under the misconception that the pluralistic West, including the United States, is entirely Christian. And like many non-Christians in this country, they also are under the misconception that some boisterous, political Christians speak on behalf of all Christians. Just as I do not assume that Isis or Al Qadea speak for all Muslims, people shouldn't assume that terrorists speak for all Muslims. It's dangerous and inappropriate to dump all Westerners or Christians in the same category. Shorthand stereotypes like this are almost always false.
The second thought is this. Whether it's to Islamist terrorists or most people in the post-modern West, the cross is always an object of derision.
The cross is seen by most as a place of defeat and many self-identified Christians shroud it in sentimentality or ignore it altogether.
Christians believe (and by faith, have experienced) that the cross on which Jesus Christ died is also the place where He achieved victory over sin, death, and darkness for all who turn from sin and trust in Christ. That's why we call the commemoration of Jesus' death on the cross "Good" Friday.
Jesus, revealed to be both God and human, led a perfect, sinless life, then offered Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. By that sacrifice, He won life for those who believe. Romans 6:23, in the New Testament, says: "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Jesus says that we become heirs of His victory when we pick up our crosses--in other words, admit our own need of forgiveness and new life, submitting to the crucifixion of our old sinful selves--and follow Him--that is, trust our whole lives to Him and seek to live in faithful dependence on Him.
The good news or gospel is that, by faith, we can apprehend a share in Christ's destruction of our sin, by belief in Him. Jesus' resurrection affirmed Christ's victory on the cross. Death couldn't contain Him...and it can't contain those who trust in Him. This, in turn, frees us to love God, love our neighbor, seek justice, and boldly share Christ with others.
For many, the cross of Christ and the gospel of freedom from sin, death, and darkness that was unleashed from the cross seems foolish and implausible. But with the apostle Paul, Christians can say: "I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile." (Romans 1:16)
This past Sunday, in many Christians congregations around the world, 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, was the appointed second lesson. We read and heard these verses at Living Water Lutheran Church as well. Paul addresses those who think that the power of the cross can be destroyed in the ways buildings can be or that it can be killed the way mortal human beings can be. This is what he writes:
"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:
'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.'
Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: 'Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.'”
So, a word to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a word also to ISIS: You will never destroy the cross or its power to change lives for good.
You will never conquer its life-giving power.
You will never erase the witness for Christ.
You will never stop the Church's Christ-mandated mission of making disciples.
The Word of God will have the last word.
And all who trust in the Lord Who gave Himself on the cross will keep on loving God and loving you, and living beyond the bounds of death, irrespective of your nihilism, your violence, your hatred, and your bombs.
From the cross, Christ said, "It is finished," or more literally, "It is completion." On the cross, Jesus has already defeated the sin, death, and darkness in which you truck. And you can do nothing to undo His victory or the victory He gives to all who believe in Him.
And one more word: Christ died on the cross for you too. "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8) Join the people of the cross in daily turning from sin and daily trusting in Christ. You too can live in the power of God's amazing grace given in Christ. You too can know the victory of the cross!
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Thursday, March 24, 2016
An Invitation...
Each day is uniquely important.
On the first Maundy Thursday, while celebrating the Passover with His disciples, Jesus gave Christians a new commandment: that they love each other with the same passionate self-sacrifice with which He would enact His love for them on the cross.
He also instituted Holy Communion, the means by which He gives His body and blood to believers, imparting forgiveness, new life, and the companionship of the Church, Christ's people, as He does so.
On Good Friday, Jesus triumphantly sacrificed Himself on the cross. Though Jesus, God in flesh, was sinless, He bore the punishment we properly deserve for our sin. (As the New Testament reminds us, "The wages of sin is death...")
Jesus did this in order to set free those who turn from sin (repent) and believe in Him (which means really, to trustingly surrender our lives and wills to Christ), from our inborn slavery to sin and self-destruction, from death, from an eternity without God. Jesus gives us everlasting life, His constant presence, and purpose as we follow Him.
Both Maundy Thursday and Good Friday worthy of marking. Please plan on participating in worship on both Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, at a church near you.
When you do so, the meaning of Easter will be enriched for you beyond measure.
Saturday, April 04, 2015
Final Thoughts on Good Friday
Along with Christmas Eve, I think that Good Friday is my favorite special day on the Church calendar.
To think of what Jesus, God in the flesh, did for sinners like me is overwhelming.
By the death of this sinless Savior in our place, He banishes sin and death from the eternal futures of all who believe in Him. Then, by the Holy Spirit, God guides us, despite our imperfections and the sadness that often comes our ways, through this life.
Good Friday shows us graphically and definitively, God's amazing grace.
Martin Luther taught that if you want to know what God is like, look to Christ on the cross. There, God's love for all is seen with clarity.
Friday, April 03, 2015
Why Do We Call This "Good" Friday? (A Re-Run)
"Why do we call this 'Good' Friday?"
That's what an inquisitive second-grader (named Isaac) asked me once.
It's a sensible question. The day we commemorate as Good Friday, after all, brought multiple tragedies.
Good Friday, which this year falls on April 3, is when Christians all over the world remember the day when Jesus of Nazareth, the One we believe was the Messiah (that is, the Christ, God's Anointed King of kings) was crucified.
The Bible says that Jesus' death on a cross resulted from the rejection of the entire world, at least the entire world as known by Jesus' first-century followers: the people of God (the Judeans) and everybody else (the Gentiles), represented by the preeminent power of the day, the Roman Empire.
The prologue to the Gospel of John reminds us that Jesus was more than a human being. He was God enfleshed. Yet the whole world rejected Jesus. "He was in the world," John writes, "and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own [the world He made], and his own people [Jews and Gentiles] did not accept him." (John 1:10-11)
The day we call Good Friday then, wasn't only tragic because the sinless God and Savior of the world died a horrible death. It was also tragic because a human race in need of salvation rejected God's outstretched hand, spurned the love of God, turned away from God Himself.
But there is an even deeper layer of tragedy to the day. God the Father, the first Person of the Trinity, perfect and sinless, was separated from Jesus in those horrible hours when Jesus hung on the cross.
Why? Paul writes in the New Testament, "For our sake he [God the Father] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin..." (Second Corinthians 5:21). Jesus, in spite of His sinlessness, bore the weight of our sin. He embodied the sins of us all, taking our rightful punishment for sin. (Romans 6:23 tells us that "the wages of sin is death.")
God, in His holiness, cannot abide the mere sight of sin and on the cross, Jesus bore the total weight of all human alienation from God, all human distrust of God, and every misdeed, small and large, that's ever been committed or ever will be committed by the whole human race. God the Father simply couldn't look at Jesus on the cross because, utterly sinless though Jesus was, He voluntarily embodied our sin and took our punishment for it there.
There is a reason that Jesus did all this, which I'll address momentarily. But that reality can't in any way erase the awful agony Jesus endured, feeling utterly abandoned by the Father as He died on the cross. No more poignant words have ever been uttered on this planet than those Jesus cried out near the end of His earthly life, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matthew 27:46)
So, if Good Friday remembers that Jesus was rejected by the whole world and abandoned by God the Father, what could possibly be good about it?
That goes back to the reason that Jesus had for going to the cross. You see, the world thought in killing off Jesus, it was done with Him. Some of the more perceptive people who wanted Jesus dead understood that He was God and so thought that in killing Him, they were getting rid of God and God's rightful authority over their lives (our lives, too). (Jesus told a parable showing that this was the motive of many who sought His death, here.)
In short, they thought that Good Friday was all about what they did to Jesus. The subject of their sentences about Jesus' crucifixion would have been themselves. "We crucified Jesus," they would claim. Herod, the puppet king of Judea, known to have been a particularly violent, sadistic, and loathsome character, might have said, "I ordered Jesus' abuse. He was under my control." Pilate, the Roman governor, would have told anyone who would listen, "I exercised my power and had Jesus crucified."
But, in fact, the events of Good Friday unfolded precisely as God wanted them to happen. Jesus came into the world to die for us. That was always the plan.
This is something that the wise men from the East seemed to know even when Jesus was a baby. Among the gifts they brought was myrrh, an aromatic resin used to anoint the dead, hardly a fitting present for a baby when you think about it, a bit like giving a gift certificate from a casket factory at a baby shower.
After He began His ministry, Jesus made it clear that He was intent on going to a cross to His disciples. You may remember what happened the first time Jesus talked about this:
...Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Matthew 16:21-23)In the night before His crucifixion, Jesus was brought to Pilate for questioning. But Jesus refused to answer. That resulted in this exchange between the two of them:
Pilate therefore said to him, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above... (John 19:10-11)Jesus says of His life:
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. (John 10:18)We call this day Good Friday because on the first one some two-thousand years ago, Jesus fulfilled God's plan. He took our punishment for sin and later, rose from death so that all who repent of sin and entrust their lives to Him will live forever.
So, the wages of sin is death, "but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 6:23)
Good Friday is good because, just as it was the route through which Jesus moved to Easter, it's also the route through which all who believe in Him share in His Easter victory! It's because of what Jesus did on Good Friday for us, followed by God the Father raising Him from the dead, that you and I can confess our belief in the "forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." Amen!
Thursday, April 02, 2015
Above All by Michael W. Smith
For Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
Jesus, God in human flesh, intentionally faced certain suffering and death because He thought of us above all...and through His crucifixion and resurrection for us, He has become above all!
"Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. On the way, he took the Twelve aside and said to them, 'We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!'" (Matthew 20:17-19)
"In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
and gave him the name that is above every name,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
to the glory of God the Father." (Philippians 2:5-11)
Monday, April 08, 2013
Understand Easter?
Oh how sweet grace, the grace of Easter, becomes when one truly realizes what is being forgiven. Jesus is not just forgiving me "my sins," He is forgiving me for killing Him!Please, take the time to read the whole thing!
What response can we possibly offer to such revelation? I am certain nothing I ever do can in any fashion merit the grace I am granted nor compensate Christ for the agony He suffered. But I must make the effort -- with the total commitment of all that I am and all that I have. Every time I sin, each slip I make, is another hammer blow on one of the spikes holding Christ to the cross - or driving the spear just a bit deeper into His side. I do not wish to be a part of that hideous scene anymore. I MUST give my all to overcome it.
Monday, April 01, 2013
Leaving the Past Behind (Good Friday, 2013)
John 18:1-19:42
Before the service, Howard and I were talking about what makes this Friday good? Humanity conspired to kill God in the flesh, an innocent man. That doesn't seem very good, does it? But Jesus offered Himself up voluntarily, the perfect sacrificial Lamb, to atone for our sins and open up the possibility of forgiveness and new life for all people. That's why, despite of the ugliness of the events, we commemorate this day as Good Friday.
Each year in fact, Good Friday comes as a brutal dose of reality for those prone to living in the pretend world of a perfect past, for those who look at episodes of The Andy Griffith Show and say to themselves, “That’s how life used to be.”
But the phrase "nostalgic Christian" is an oxymoron.
In fact, believers in Jesus want to leave the past behind, living with Christ in the now and looking ahead with excitement and anticipation to the perfect future ahead for all who believe in Jesus.
"Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead," the apostle Paul wrote in Philippians 3:13-14, "I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”
Good Friday reminds us of the bad old days from which Jesus Christ wants to set all of us free.
From the moment that Adam and Eve bit into the fruit that God had warned them not to eat, the human race has been, collectively and individually, plunged into sin: alienated from God, from one another, from the creation God gave us to manage and tend.
Sin entered into the human gene pool, passed along from generation to generation.
It was to eliminate the condition of sin from us and to end our slavery to sin and restore our relationship with God that Jesus, God in the flesh, came into our world. He took death, the punishment for sin that you and I deserve, onto Himself. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that God the Father made Jesus "to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Jesus entered into death. Based on Scripture, many of us in our creeds say that on Good Friday, Jesus descended to hell. Then He rose from the grave to claim new life and a perfect future for all who follow Him.
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” He says. “No one comes to the Father except through Me.” [John 14:6]
And, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in Me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.” [John 11:25]J
And, “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. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. Those who believe in Him are not condemned; but those who do not believe in Him are condemned already, because they have not believed in the Name of the only Son.” [John 3:16-18]
It wasn't "bad Romans" or "bad Jews" or aberrant representatives of the human race who put Jesus on the cross. It was you, me, our parents, and our grandparents and the common human desire to "be like God," to flush God from our lives or considerations, going all the way back to Eden, that drove the nails into Jesus' flesh on the first Good Friday.
It was for us and our sins that He died, for us that He came to offer life in His Name. No wonder then that God inspired the witness of the first Christians about Jesus: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” [Acts 4:12]
Different expressions of our sinful nature go in and out of style.
So in the morality department, you and I are no better or worse today than past generations were.
Good Friday shows us that.
But Good Friday also shows us that sin, the human race's ancient and ongoing alienation from God and the life only God can give, does not have to be the last word over our lives.
God has acted.
In Christ, God is reconciling Himself to all who confess their sins and entrust their lives to the rule of Jesus, the King of kings.
In Christ, the sins of our past that weigh us down are taken off our shoulders and put on those of the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.
All who are in Christ have the power of the Holy Spirit working within us, giving us and making us part of His holy catholic Church and the communion of saints, assured of the forgiveness of our sins, the resurrection of our bodies with Christ and all the saints, and of the life everlasting with God.
It's a lie to believe in some perfect past. It never existed.
But when we trust in Christ, the Savior Who died and then rose to give us life, our present is invaded by the presence, power, and love of God.
That doesn't mean that the world will be hospitable to Christ and the good news about Him.
In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus points to a time in world history when the followers of Jesus will be hated because of their allegiance to Him. Many will then fall away from trusting in Him, He says, “and they will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold.” The pall of sin that made Good Friday necessary will even blanket the human race, Jesus says, after He has died on a cross and risen from the dead so that we might be saved by God’s grace through faith in Christ. But even then, Jesus tells us not to pine for a dead past or to despair over the present or the future. He says: “...the one who endures to the end will be saved.” [Matthew 24:9-14]
If we remain steadfast in following Jesus, He will invade our todays with peace and strength and our futures will be more perfect than we could ever imagine.
On the Sunday after Jesus' crucifixion, some of the female disciples went to anoint Jesus' dead body. But they were met by a "young man, dressed in a white robe" who told them that Jesus was not dead, but risen. "Go," he told them, "tell his disciples and Peter that [Jesus] is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you" [Mark 16:7].
Jesus has broken out of the dead past.
He's blown our nostalgic notions to bits.
He's ahead of us, pioneering a way for us through this life and opening up eternity to us.
Don't pine for the past. Follow Jesus into the future! That's the call of Good Friday. Amen
Thursday, April 05, 2012
"Tweeting" the Easter Story
Friday, April 22, 2011
"What We Can Learn from a Thief"
Be With Us for Good Friday or Easter at Saint Matthew
Tonight at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, 258 East Hunter Street in Logan, Ohio, we'll commemorate Good Friday, remembering the death of Jesus Christ on the cross some two thousand years ago. Jesus, the sinless God-in-the-flesh, took our rightful punishment for sin.
As part of the service, which will begin at 7:00PM, we'll remember the seven last words, or phrases, that Jesus spoke from the cross.
If you will be in southeastern Ohio, home to the beautiful Hocking Hills, we would love to welcome you.
Also, if you're in the area on Sunday, you're invited to join us as we celebrate Christ's resurrection Easter Sunday--that's this Sunday, April 24. We'll have two Easter celebrations: at 8:00AM and 10:15AM.
Why Do We Call This "Good" Friday?
"Why do we call this 'Good' Friday?"
That's what an inquisitive second-grader asked me once.
It's a sensible question. The day we commemorate as Good Friday, after all, brought multiple tragedies.
Good Friday, which this year falls on April 22, is when Christians all over the world remember the day when Jesus of Nazareth, the One we believe was the Messiah (that is, the Christ, God's Anointed King of kings) was crucified.
The Bible says that Jesus' death on a cross resulted from the rejection of the entire world, at least the entire world as known by Jesus' first-century followers: the people of God (the Judeans) and everybody else (the Gentiles), represented by the preeminent power of the day, the Roman Empire.
The prologue to the Gospel of John reminds us that Jesus was more than a human being. He was God enfleshed. Yet the whole world rejected Jesus. "He was in the world," John writes, "and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own [the world He made], and his own people [Jews and Gentiles] did not accept him." (John 1:10-11)
The day we call Good Friday then, wasn't only tragic because the sinless God and Savior of the world died a horrible death. It was also tragic because a human race in need of salvation rejected God's outstretched hand, spurned the love of God, turned away from God Himself.
But there is an even deeper layer of tragedy to the day. God the Father, the first Person of the Trinity, perfect and sinless, was separated from Jesus in those horrible hours when Jesus hung on the cross.
Why? Paul writes in the New Testament, "For our sake he [God the Father] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin..." (Second Corinthians 5:21). Jesus, in spite of His sinlessness, bore the weight of our sin. He embodied the sins of us all, taking our rightful punishment for sin. (Romans 6:23 tells us that "the wages of sin is death.")
God, in His holiness, cannot abide the mere sight of sin and on the cross, Jesus bore the total weight of all human alienation from God, all human distrust of God, and every misdeed, small and large, that's ever been committed or ever will be committed by the whole human race. God the Father simply couldn't look at Jesus on the cross because, utterly sinless though Jesus was, He voluntarily embodied our sin and took our punishment for it there.
There is a reason that Jesus did all this, which I'll address momentarily. But that reality can't in any way erase the awful agony Jesus endured, feeling utterly abandoned by the Father as He died on the cross. No more poignant words have ever been uttered on this planet than those Jesus cried out near the end of His earthly life, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matthew 27:46)
So, if Good Friday remembers that Jesus was rejected by the whole world and abandoned by God the Father, what could possibly be good about it?
That goes back to the reason that Jesus had for going to the cross. You see, the world thought in killing off Jesus, it was done with Him. Some of the more perceptive people who wanted Jesus dead understood that He was God and so thought that in killing Him, they were getting rid of God and God's rightful authority over their lives (our lives, too). (Jesus told a parable showing that this was the motive of many who sought His death, here.)
In short, they thought that Good Friday was all about what they did to Jesus. The subject of their sentences about Jesus' crucifixion would have been themselves. "We crucified Jesus," they would claim. Herod, the puppet king of Judea, known to have been a particularly violent, sadistic, and loathsome character, might have said, "I ordered Jesus' abuse. He was under my control." Pilate, the Roman governor, would have told anyone who would listen, "I exercised my power and had Jesus crucified."
But, in fact, the events of Good Friday unfolded precisely as God wanted them to happen. Jesus came into the world to die for us. That was always the plan.
This is something that the wise men from the East seemed to know even when Jesus was a baby. Among the gifts they brought was myrrh, an aromatic resin used to anoint the dead, hardly a fitting present for a baby when you think about it, a bit like giving a gift certificate from a casket factory at a baby shower.
After He began His ministry, Jesus made it clear that He was intent on going to a cross to His disciples. You may remember what happened the first time Jesus talked about this:
...Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Matthew 16:21-23)In the night before His crucifixion, Jesus was brought to Pilate for questioning. But Jesus refused to answer. That resulted in this exchange between the two of them:
Pilate therefore said to him, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above... (John 19:10-11)Jesus says of His life:
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. (John 10:18)We call this day Good Friday because on the first one some two-thousand years ago, Jesus fulfilled God's plan. He took our punishment for sin and later, rose from death so that all who repent of sin and entrust their lives to Him will live forever.
So, the wages of sin is death, "but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 6:23)
Good Friday is good because, just as it was the route through which Jesus moved to Easter, it's also the route through which all who believe in Him share in His Easter victory! It's because of what Jesus did on Good Friday for us, followed by God the Father raising Him from the dead, that you and I can confess our belief in the "forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." Amen!
Monday, April 18, 2011
Passover and the Lamb of God, Who Takes Away the Sin of the World
In Numbers 9:1-5, we're told:
The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the first month of the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying: 2Let the Israelites keep the passover at its appointed time. 3On the fourteenth day of this month, at twilight, you shall keep it at its appointed time; according to all its statutes and all its regulations you shall keep it. 4So Moses told the Israelites that they should keep the passover. 5They kept the passover in the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at twilight, in the wilderness of Sinai. Just as the Lord had commanded Moses, so the Israelites did.Passover begins on the 14th day of Nisan. Nisan is the first month of the Jewish calendar. By the reckoning of this calendar, new days begin at sundown. Today is the 14th of Nisan, 5771.
Passover, of course, remembers the events recorded in Exodus 12. There, we're told of what happened when God sent a tenth and final plague to Egypt designed to gain the freedom of His chosen people--the Hebrews or the Israelites--from slavery. They had been slaves in Egypt for 430 years. The tenth plague came when God sent the angel of death to bring the deaths of all the first-born in Egypt.
The Israelites were spared though because, as God instructed them through Moses, they had previously smeared the blood of unblemished lambs on the doorposts of their dwellings. The lambs were offered to God in place of the firstborn Israelites. When the angel of death encountered the blood of the lambs, it passed over, ensuring that the first-born in those dwellings didn't die.
Blood, of course, carries life. In the Bible's account of the first murder, when Cain killed his brother Abel, God said that the blood of Abel cried out.
On the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur on the Jewish calendar, in Temple times, an unblemished lamb was offered as sacrifice signaling repentance and bringing reconciliation (atonement) with God, on behalf of the people. Its blood covered the sins the people committed fin the preceding year. As part of the rite on this day, the priest sprinkled the blood of the sacrificed lamb on the people. The blood of the lamb, in effect, called out to God and God passed over their sins. The significance of this can be seen when we consider the statement of a devout Jew who came to follow Jesus as Messiah, Lord, and God, the apostle Paul writing in Romans 6:23, "The wages of sin is death." By God's gracious intervention, the ancient Israelites were spared the proper "wages" for sin; God allowed the unblemished lamb to take the place of His people.
We Christians believe that just as the blood of unblemished lambs on the doorposts of the Hebrew dwellings in Egypt caused the angel of death to pass over God's people, leading ultimately to the Hebrews' liberation from slavery, the blood of Christ, covering the sins of repentant believers in Him, brings freedom from sin and death.
Jesus is, as John the Baptizer put it, "the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world." And this sacrifice needn't be made repeatedly, as was true of the lambs of Yom Kippur. Jesus' sacrifice is effective once and for all. As the New Testament book of Hebrews puts it, Christ, the highest of priests, sacrificed Himself, so that all who repent and believe in Him are forgiven their sins, ever reconciled to God, and given everlasting life with God.
Paul puts the connection between the Jewish Passover and the Christian commemorations of Good Friday and Easter succinctly when he says:
Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed...(1 Corinthians 5:7, TNIV)[Please also read Ephesians 2:11-13. Without faith in Jesus Christ, we stand outside a relationship with God. But we are brought near "by the blood of Christ."]
Monday, April 05, 2010
God Can Bring Blessings from Anything
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
"If God can bring blessing from the broken body of Jesus
and glory from something that's as obscene as the cross,
He can bring blessing from my problems and my pain
and my unanswered prayer. I just have to trust Him."
Anne Graham Lotz
Scripture
Proverbs 3:5 NIV
Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding.
Prayer
Lord help me to the look at the cross and be reminded
to trust you for all things and in all circumstances.
Amen
*************************************************
Friday, April 10, 2009
Why Do We Call It "Good" Friday?
This is what an inquisitive second-grader asked me a few weeks ago.
It's a sensible question. The day we commemorate as Good Friday brought multiple tragedies.
Good Friday, which this year falls on [April 10], is when Christians all over the world remember the day when Jesus of Nazareth, the One we believe was the Messiah (the Christ, God's Anointed King of kings) was crucified.
The Bible says that Jesus' death on a cross resulted from the rejection of the entire world, at least the entire world as known by Jesus' first-century followers: the people of God (the Judeans) and everybody else (the Gentiles), represented by the preeminent power of the day, the Roman Empire.
The prologue to the Gospel of John reminds us that Jesus was more than a human being. He was God enfleshed. Yet the whole world rejected Jesus. "He was in the world," John writes, "and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own [the world He made], and his own people did not accept him." (John 1:10-11)
The day we call Good Friday then, wasn't only tragic because the sinless God and Savior of the world died a horrible death. It was also tragic because a human race in need of salvation rejected God's outstretched hand, spurned the love of God, turned away from God Himself.
But there is an even deeper layer of tragedy to the day. God the Father, the first Person of the Trinity, perfect and sinless, was separated from Jesus in those horrible hours when Jesus hung on the cross. Why? Paul writes in the New Testament, "For our sake he [God the Father] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin..." (Second Corinthians 5:21). Jesus, in spite of His sinlessness, bore the weight of our sin. He embodied the sins of us all, taking our rightful punishment for sin. (Romans 6:23 tells us that "the wages of sin is death.")
There is a reason that Jesus did all this, which I'll address momentarily. But that reality can't in any way erase the awful agony Jesus endured of feeling utterly abandoned by the Father as He died on the cross. No more poignant words have ever been uttered on this planet than those Jesus cried out near the end of His earthly life, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matthew 27:46)
So, if Good Friday remembers that Jesus was rejected by the whole world and abandoned by God the Father, what could possibly be good about it?
That goes back to the reason that Jesus had for going to the cross. You see, the world thought in killing off Jesus, it was done with Him. Some of the more perceptive people who wanted Jesus dead understood that He was God and so thought that in killing Him, they were getting rid of God and God's rightful authority over their lives (our lives, too).
In short, they thought that Good Friday was all about what they did to Jesus. The subject of their sentences about Jesus' crucifixion would have been themselves. "We crucified Jesus," they would claim. Herod, the puppet king of Judea, known to have been a particularly violent, sadistic, and loathsome character, might have said, "I ordered Jesus' abuse. He was under my control." Pilate, the Roman governor, would have told anyone who would listen, "I exercised my power and had Jesus crucified."
But, in fact, the events of Good Friday were precisely what God wanted to happen. Jesus came into the world to die for us.
This is something that the wise men from the East seemed to know even when Jesus was a baby. Among the gifts they brought was myrrh, an aromatic resin used to anoint the dead, hardly a fitting present for a baby when you think about it, a bit like giving a gift certificate from a casket factory at a baby shower.
After He began His ministry, Jesus made it clear that He was intent on going to a cross to His disciples. You may remember what happened the first time Jesus talked about this:
...Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Matthew 16:21-23)In the night before His crucifixion, Jesus was brought to Pilate for questioning. But Jesus refused to answer. That resulted in this exchange between the two of them:
Pilate therefore said to him, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above... (John 19:10-11)Jesus says of His life:
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. (John 10:18)We call it Good Friday because on the first one some two-thousand years ago, Jesus fulfilled God's plan. He took our punishment for sin and later, rose from death so that all who repent of sin and entrust their lives to Him will live forever.
So, the wages of sin is death, "but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 6:23)
Good Friday is good because, just as it was the route through which Jesus moved to Easter, it's also the route through which all who believe in Him share in His Easter victory!
[Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for linking to this post.]
Friday, March 21, 2008
"God wept and waited for Easter"
All of these things [Christ] endured, for us.He was crucified for my sins. He bled for my iniquity. The guilt and shame of my disobedience to God was laid heavily on his head. He was an innocent man burdened, crushed beneath a heap of wrongs that belonged to me, you, all of us.
Before Easter can come, the awful price of our disobedience against God must be paid in full.
And Jesus paid it, willingly. As his blood ran down that wooden cross, he gasped for his last breath and said, "It is finished. Father, I entrust my spirit into your hands."
His lifeless body was lovingly carried to a rock tomb where he was hastily bound in linen and burial spices and closed in behind a huge stone. Guards were posted to keep the body from being disturbed.
And God wept and waited for Easter.
Read the whole thing.
Q-and-A: Why Do We Call It 'Good' Friday?
The question makes sense. The day we commemorate as Good Friday brought multiple tragedies.
Good Friday, which this year falls on March 21, is when Christians all over the world remember the day when Jesus of Nazareth, the One we believe was the Messiah (the Christ, God's Anointed King of kings) was crucified.
The Bible says that Jesus' death on a cross resulted from the rejection of the entire world, at least the entire world as known by Jesus' first-century followers: the people of God (the Judeans) and everybody else (the Gentiles), represented by the preeminent power of the day, the Roman Empire.
The prologue to the Gospel of John reminds us that Jesus was more than a human being. He was God enfleshed. Yet the whole world rejected Jesus. "He was in the world," John writes, "and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own [the world He made], and his own people did not accept him." (John 1:10-11)
The day we call Good Friday then, wasn't only tragic because the sinless God and Savior of the world died a horrible death, thoiugh. It was also tragic because a human race in need of salvation, rejected God's outstretched hand, spurned the love of God, turned away from God Himself.
But there is an even deeper layer of tragedy to the day. God the Father, the first Person of the Trinity, perfect and sinless was separated from Jesus in those horrible hours when Jesus hung on the cross. Why? Paul writes in the New Testament, "For our sake he [God the Father] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin..." (Second Corinthians 5:21). Jesus, in spite of His sinlessness, bore the weight of our sin. He embodied the sins of us all, taking our rightful punishment for sin. (Romans 6:23 tells us that "the wages of sin is death.")
There is a reason that Jesus did all this, which I'll address momentarily. But that reality can't in any way erase the awful agony Jesus endured of feeling utterly abandoned by the Father as He died on the cross. No more poignant words have ever been uttered on this planet than those Jesus cried out near the end of His earthly life, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matthew 27:46)
So, if Good Friday remembers that Jesus was rejected by the whole world and abandoned by God the Father, what could possibly be good about it?
That goes back to the reason that Jesus had for going to the cross. You see, the world thought in killing off Jesus, it was done with Him. Some of the more perceptive people who wanted Jesus dead understood that He was God and so thought that in killing Him, they were getting rid of God and God's rightful authority over their lives (our lives, too).
In short, they thought that Good Friday was all about what they did to Jesus. The subject of their sentences about Jesus' crucifixion would have been themselves. "We crucified Jesus," they would claim. Herod, the puppet king of Judea, known to have been a particularly violent, sadistic, and loathsome character, might have said, "I ordered Jesus' abuse. He was under my control." Pilate, the Roman governor, would have told anyone who would listen, "I exercised my power and had Jesus crucified."
But, in fact, the events of Good Friday were precisely what God wanted to happen. Jesus came into the world to die for us.
This is something that the wise men from the East seemed to know even when Jesus was a baby. Among the gifts they brought was myrrh, an aromatic resin used to anoint the dead, hardly a fitting present for a baby when you think about it, a bit like giving a gift certificate from a casket factory at a baby shower.
After He began His ministry, Jesus made it clear that He was intent on going to a cross to His disciples. You may remember what happened the first time Jesus talked about this:
...Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Matthew 16:21-23)In the night before His crucifixion, Jesus was brought to Pilate for questioning. But Jesus refused to answer. That resulted in this exchange between the two of them:
Pilate therefore said to him, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above... (John 19:10-11)Jesus says of His life:
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. (John 10:18)We call it Good Friday because on the first one some two-thousand years ago, Jesus fulfilled God's plan. He took our punishment for sin and later, rose from death so that all who repent of sin and entrust their lives to Him will live forever.
So, the wages of sin is death, "but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 6:23)
Good Friday is good because, just as it was the route through which Jesus moved to Easter, it's also the route through which all who believe in Him share in His Easter victory!