The God Who Finds Us

[Below, you'll find live stream videos of both worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, yesterday. Also, you'll find the text of the message. It was a blessed day for our congregation, as we welcomed a total of 11 new members to our congregational family: 1 at the first service and 10 at the second. If you live in the Dayton area and don't have a church home, please consider worshiping with us on some Sunday in the future!]





Luke 15:1-10

In the chapters of Luke’s gospel leading up to today’s lesson, Luke 15:1-10, Jesus repeatedly makes the point that in the Kingdom of God He has come to usher into the world, everything gets turned upside down. “Indeed,” Jesus says, “there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.” (Luke 13:30)

Here, Jesus is sounding one of the great themes of His Gospel on which Luke repeatedly focuses. Bible scholars call it the great reversal.

This theme can be heard in Mary’s song, the Magnificat, in Luke 1, when she says of what God is going to do in Jesus, “He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:51-53)

This, in fact, was a theme in the Old Testament as well. While pride may be applauded in our world, there is no place for it in God’s Kingdom! Proverbs 16:5 says: “The Lord detests all the proud of heart. Be sure of this: They will not go unpunished.”

Jesus underscores heaven’s condemnation of pride when He says in Luke 14:11, our Bible verse from last month: “...all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Pride, exalting ourselves, is a violation of the first table of the ten commandments, because the proud, no matter how pious and godly they may think themselves to be, have another god besides the one true God of the cosmos: themselves.

Pride too, is a violation of the second table of the ten commandments, because the proud do not love others as they love themselves.

Pride then is a violation of God’s command that we love.

And, as James tells us, “...whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” (James 2:10)

This is uncomfortable, to say the least! Like the apostle Paul, honesty may cause us to confess, “...I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” (Romans 7:17) Speaking personally, I want to avoid the sin of pride, but I seem to fall into it all the time!

If that personal confession goes for you too, we’re not alone. We’ll see that in our gospel lesson for this morning. It begins: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” (Luke 15:1-2)

Luke’s description of those straining to hear Jesus isn’t complimentary. They’re “tax collectors and sinners.”

Tax collectors in those days were extortionists. They held franchises to collect Roman taxes in a given area and were allowed to take some of the revenue for themselves as they did so. But the Romans didn’t mind how much money beyond the tax rates the tax collectors took. The tax collectors were then, by and large, unscrupulous fat cats.

As is true today, these particular unscrupulous fat cats tended to keep company with others as unscrupulous as themselves: prostitutes, pimps, and other thieves.

When Luke describes this crowd as “sinners,” he doesn’t mean ordinary sinners like you and me, people who, according to the Bible, are sinful from conception. These were unrepentant, brazen sinners who flouted any notion of right and wrong. Even Jesus, in other places in Luke’s gospel, described people like these as “tax collectors and sinners.”

Yet, as our Gospel lesson begins, these are the very people who want to hear Jesus. They want to hear His Word. In doing so, they keep God’s Third Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” In The Small Catechism, Martin Luther reminds us that this commandment isn’t about a day of the week; it’s about our desire and willingness to hear God’s Word. “We should fear and love God,” Luther writes, “so that we do not despise His Word and the preaching of it, but acknowledge it as holy and gladly hear and learn it.”

Standing on the periphery as Jesus taught and interacted with these notorious sinners were Pharisees and scribes, teachers of God’s Law. They believed, as you know, that they could perfectly obey God’s Law and were sure that their obedience was the means by which they would be welcomed into God’s eternal kingdom. They didn’t need God’s forgiveness or grace; they were good people and God would have to let them into heaven. They were proud of their righteousness, even though you can’t be both proud and righteous.

Righteousness, acceptability to God, has always been God’s gift to sinful human beings! Righteousness isn’t a state that we can attain through our efforts or goodness!

Not even Abram, later to be called Abraham, the patriarch of Biblical faith was capable of a perfect obedience to God’s law that could make him righteous. Genesis says of him: “Abram believed the LORD, and [God] credited it to him as righteousness.” (Genesis 15:6)

Today, God has come to us in Jesus Christ, God the Son, crucified and risen. We can only be made righteous and be saved from sin and the death sentence that our sin warrants, by God’s grace–His charity–through the faith in Jesus given to us by the Holy Spirit through God’s Word.

We believe in the Savior Jesus for whom God’s people had long looked and by that God-given faith, God credits Christ’s righteousness to us!

This is the very gracious Word and promise that the tax collectors and sinners craved as Jesus moved among them! It was good news and they knew it. Do we know that it’s good news for us as well?

Aware of the derision of the proud religious folks who thought Jesus couldn’t be of God if He shared the Gospel Word with sinners, Jesus told two parables for all, like us, prone to the sin of pride.

The first is about a shepherd who loses one of his one-hundred sheep. He leaves ninety-nine sheep “in the wilderness” in order to go find the lost one. While in Old Testament times, shepherds were valued by God’s people, by Jesus’ day, people like the Pharisees and teachers of the law viewed shepherds as low-lifes. They even had a list of dirty, contemptible professions, and shepherds were on it.

Yet, in Jesus’ parable, the shepherd is a stand-in for God Who so loves every single human being, that He sent His Son to seek and save everyone who would otherwise be eternally lost in sin and death.

Jesus sought and still seeks you and me in the very depths of our sin and death, bearing our sin in His sinless body and enduring death on the cross so that He could give His righteous perfection and life with God as we turn from sin and trust in Him.

When, in Jesus’ parable, the shepherd finds the lost sheep, he carries it back to the wilderness with other ninety-nine sheep, but to his home. He then invites his friends to a party.

Jesus says that, just so, there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner who turns to Him than over ninety-nine proud people, like the Pharisees and scribes, who trust in themselves and don’t think they need to repent or trust in God.

Notice too, what the lost sheep has to do in order to be saved by the shepherd: nothing.

Repentance and faith in Jesus consist in just this: being found by Jesus, our good shepherd.

If we will not stand apart from Jesus, as the Pharisees and scribes did, His Word can find us and bring us saving faith!

Jesus tells a second parable about a woman who loses and then seeks to find one of her ten coins.

Like the lost sheep, the lost coin does nothing to find itself, any more than we can find ourselves or save ourselves or overcome our sins or avoid dying.

God comes to us in His Word and in the Sacraments, bringing us the salvation Jesus has earned through His death on the cross for us. When that Word finds us and when, by God’s grace, faith takes hold in us, we are saved from sin and death.

At that, God and all the angels in heaven rejoice. This partying happens every time we encounter God’s Word and the Spirit incites us to gladly hear, learn, and believe it. The righteousness of Jesus covers all our unrighteousness.

Jesus humbly offered Himself on the cross to overcome all our sins, even our pride. The God Who searches for us in God the Word, Jesus, brings us saving faith in Jesus and we who are born lost and needy are found.

Whether because of pride or some other sin that tempts us daily, you and I are prone to wander from the God Who searches for us in love. We get lost.

May we then each day lay aside our pride, asking God to crucify it and our whole sinful selves, knowing that without Jesus’ grace, forgiveness, and righteousness, we are lost.

So, let this be our prayer as we turn to God In Jesus’ name each day: “Lord, find me again today. Find me every day. Then carry me into the kingdom You have won for all who trust in You alone.” Amen

You don't have to love. You get to love!

John 14:15-21
A renowned theologian made a confession to a group of people who were celebrating his career. “For forty years,” he said, “I’ve told people, ‘You’ve got to love.’ Now I realize that I’ve had it wrong. The message of Jesus is, ‘You get to love.’”

It’s so easy for us to get the message of Jesus wrong.

It’s so easy to become Christian Pharisees, turning Jesus into a law-giver, and boiling our faith down to being obedient to His command (and the entire Bible’s command) that we love God and love neighbor.

But how confident are we of our ability to be perfectly obedient to God’s law of love? I hope not very confident.

Otherwise, the confession of sin we offered to God together at the beginning of worship today was a meaningless exercise.

Even more seriously, if you and I are confident in our ability to obey God’s law of love, we’re placing our trust in ourselves and not in God.

“Wait a minute,” you might say, “I’m not such a bad person. I do a fair job of loving God and loving my neighbor...to a point.”

To those who may be inclined to offer such a hedged defense, may I remind you of what’s involved in God’s law of love, as summarized in the Ten Commandments?

• You shall have no other gods before God. 
• You shall not take the name of God in vain. 
• Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. 
• Honor your father and your mother. 
• You shall not murder. 
• You shall not commit adultery. 
• You shall not steal. 
• You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 
• You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. 
• You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his workers, his livestock, or anything that else that is your neighbor’s.

“I’m good at nine out of ten of them,” some might think. Or, "I obey most of them."

But James reminds us: “...whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (James 2:10).

And Jesus tells us that even to think of committing these sins is the same as committing them. “The things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart,” Jesus says in Matthew 15:18-20, “and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person…”

Considering these facts, the conclusion reached by the apostle Paul is unavoidable: “...all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…” (Romans 3:23).

And since “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), Paul’s question for himself in Romans 7:24 is one that every member of the human race should be asking themselves: “Wretched man [or woman] that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (ESV)

This, of course, is where Jesus comes in.

God looks on the children He created in His image with compassion, even though we are sinners who fail to abide by His law of love. It saddens Him because He doesn’t want us to condemn ourselves by remaining enslaved to sin, putting our trust in our own “pretty good” behavior. Every baby born into the world today is destined for death and condemnation for sin unless God acts to saves them.

That’s why He sent Jesus to bear the condemnation for sin we deserve and to rise to become our trailblazer to eternity. 

And that’s why He sends the Holy Spirit to teach us and to remind us to turn to Christ and be forgiven, turn to Him and live, turn to Him and be given new, eternal lives.

Today’s gospel lesson finds Jesus not laying down laws that will earn us salvation. No such laws exist.

You and I can never be good enough to be saved.

Instead, Jesus describes the life that He, by His death and resurrection, makes possible for those who trust in Him. 

He isn’t telling us, “You have to love,” but, “You get to love.” 

And, He tells us that we get so much more by the power of His grace and deity. 

Let’s take a look at what He says this morning in John 14:15-21.

Verse 15: “If you love me, keep my commands.” Already, Jesus has promised the disciples (including you and me):

• that all who follow Him have an eternal place in His kingdom prepared by Him (John 14:1-4); 
• that He is the way to life with God (John 14:6-7); and 
• answers to prayers to the Father offered in Jesus’ name (John 4:13-14),

for all who believe in Him.

Now, let me ask you something: Knowing that God has loved you so much that He does all of this for you as a gift to the one with faith in Jesus, what is the only appropriate response from you (or me)? 

Love. Trusting, grateful love!

We love God, as the apostle John writes elsewhere, because God loved us first (1 John 4:19). 

Once trust in Christ and gratitude for God’s grace infects a soul, love is the response.

And so, Jesus offers here not so much a command, but an observation. When, by faith, you have come to love God and God resides in you, you will do what God commands.

Not perfectly. Our old sinful selves get in the way.

But as we live in daily repentance and renewal, daily surrender to Jesus, the great arc of our lives will bend increasingly toward Jesus and His loving way of life.

You’ll do that as an almost automatic, involuntary response to the relationship of love with God into which Christ brings you.

After my mother died, I thanked my dad for all the many years he spent caring for her. He said, matter-of-factly, “Well, what else was I going to do?”

What else was I going to do? That’s the question of love.

When, in the words of a great song by B.B. King and U2, “love comes to town,” when it comes to save you and when it comes to take residence in your life, what else are you going to do? Love becomes not a command, but a way of life.

Jesus shows this in His great parable about the last judgment when He says He will say to His sheep: "Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me..." And the sheep will ask Jesus, "When did we do any of that? We don't remember doing any of that!" Jesus says that His sheep are the ones who respond to His love with love for God and love for neighbor, simply living without a thought of getting credit or keeping score! (Matthew 25:31-46)

But how will we love? After all, “love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)

These verses from the Bible's "love chapter," of course, are often read at weddings. When I read them at weddings, I will often look up at the couples standing before me as they smile smugly, their expressions saying, "Yes, that's our love. That's how we love each other." Really?

How is it possible for us to perfectly keep Christ’s law by loving in the style of the love chapter?

Jesus tells us. Verse 16: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.”

To baptized believers in Jesus, Jesus comes to live. Through His Holy Spirit, Jesus comes to us. He speaks Jesus’ word of truth to us, in us, for us.

• He does this at the Baptismal font, where we are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then “marked by the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit forever.” 
• He does it in His Word, where we read and hear God’s life-giving truth. 
• He does it in the bread and wine, where He says, “Take and eat; this is My body...Take and drink; this is My blood,” offered to bring us forgiveness and effecting the miracle of re-membering us to Christ--breaking down the walls of separation, the walls of sin and death. By this, I mean that when Jesus gives us His body and blood at Holy Communion and says, "Do this in remembrance of Me," He is not saying, "Bring memories of Me to mind." He isn't saying, "Recollect Me." He's saying, "Be remembered to Me. Be reconnected to Me. Be the branches to My vine and take My life into your very body, soul, spirit, and will."

To the unbelieving world, the notion that by the power of the Holy Spirit, God comes to us in the Word and sacraments is crazy.

When you’ve never dared to open yourself to Christ and His love, talk of the Holy Spirit seems like foolishness.

But we know better.

When Jesus knocks on the doors of our hearts and we let Him in (Revelation 3:20), we know what it is to have life-giving communion with the God revealed in Jesus.

The Holy Spirit lives in believers in Jesus.

• When we sin, He calls us to repent. 
• When we love, He tells us, “good and faithful servant.” 
• When we don’t know what to pray, He forms our longing into groaning prayers too deep for words. 

Despite a bad news world filled with sin and death and selfishness, even within ourselves, the Holy Spirit empowers us to trust that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life and that because Jesus, crucified and risen, lives, we too will live.

The Holy Spirit brings Jesus’ love into the centers of our souls and we know that we’re not orphans and, fortified by His love, He makes it possible for us to love when we can’t.

I’ve told you that one prayer I’ve offered through the years is, “Lord, I find myself incapable of loving so-and-so. Please love them through me.” I find that God not only loves those people through me, over time, He creates within me genuine love for them.

I’m sure that others have offered similar prayers regarding Mark Daniels.

A woman heard me share this years ago and told me months later that she had tried this on her husband. “I’d gotten to where I couldn’t stand him,” she told me, “but after awhile, I began to see him differently and his behavior seemed to change as I loved Him.”

When Christ’s love and the Holy Spirit come to town, when we let Christ and the Spirit lodge within us and we surrender, we will love.

We will keep Christ’s commands without thinking of it. That’s how grace works.

Jesus continues: “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”

Here’s an incredible thought: The Creator of the universe ushers with faith in Jesus into the same relationship of intimacy, trust, and love He has enjoyed within the Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--for all eternity. He wants you beside Him now and in eternity.

When we surrender to the grace that accepts us as we are and works to make us all that we can be, our relationship with God is totally transformed. We are transformed.

“You shall have no other gods before me,” for example, is changed from a command to a promise.

Through Jesus, we know we have no need of other gods.

We don’t look for love, affirmation, success, peace, or hope anywhere else.

We have it all in Jesus!

No other gods will bother us, entice us, or drag us down.

We’ll have the God we meet in Jesus and, through Him, we have life.

The message of Jesus then is that you don’t have to love, you get to love, just like the Lord Who made you, Who died and rose for you, Who speaks His truth to you again this morning.

Through Jesus, you get to be a free, redeemed child of God, now and forever. Hallelujah!

Now live in His love!


[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This was the message for today's Sunday worship services.]

Is the Biblical view of homosexuality unloving?

Genesis 1:27
Matthew 19:4-6
1 John 4:8
In thirty-two years of ministry, I have counseled with one person who confessed to being gay to me. It happened many years ago. For this person to do so took great courage; they knew my Christian convictions about the practice of homosexuality. But the reason for their telling me was clear enough: They wanted some Christian they trusted to listen to them speak of their struggles with their sexual orientation.

And so the person told me simply, “I’m gay, pastor.” I responded in the only way I knew how to as a Christian and a pastor. I put my hand on that person’s hand and told them, “I understand and I want you to know that I love you and that God loves you too.”

In telling that person that God loved them, I wasn’t encouraging them to give into their own personal impulse to engage in homosexual relationships. But just as I would use God’s love as the starting point in conversations with any person struggling with temptation, I began with God’s love.

Love is always the place God starts in helping us to deal with temptation or sin in our lives.

As Luther points out in The Small Catechism, even God’s moral law, as summarized in the Ten Commandments, begins with the words, “I am the Lord your God, Who brought you out of Egypt…”

God and His Word always begin in love. We see this in Jesus: God sent His Son Jesus into this world to save sinners; and if we are willing to turn from sin (and to keep turning from sin) and to believe in Him (and to keep believing in Him), God will save us for life with Him that lasts for all eternity.

But, as we deal with tonight’s question, “Is the Biblical view of homosexuality unloving?” we need to briefly mention a few facts we know about God through His Word and through Jesus, God’s Word made flesh.

Fact one: To suffer temptation is no sin. Every human being who has ever walked this planet, even Jesus, Who was both true God and true man, gets tempted to sin.

The orientation to homosexual behavior is no worse than the orientation to sin which is universal to human experience and no different from the particular sins that might have special appeal to us. (I often joke that we all have our own favored personal sins of specialization, along with all the other sins to which everyone else is drawn.)

Had I told the counselee who confessed to being gay that they were damned for their sexual orientation, I not only would have been unloving, I would have been lying.

Fact two: No sin is worse than any other sin. James 2:10 says: “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.”

All sin is a violation of God’s holiness and will. To judge the gay person involved with one or more people sexually to be worse than the heterosexual person involved with others sexually or than the person who routinely takes God’s name in vain, is wrong.

Sin is sin. And the wages of sin is death. But all who own their sin at the cross, trusting in what Christ accomplished there, has forgiveness and life with God.

Fact three: Love is not approval. When Jesus prevented a judgmental mob from stoning a woman caught in adultery, He didn’t tell her, “Go back and keep doing what you were doing.” He told her, "Go now and leave your life of sin." (John 8:11)

Fact four: We in the Church hold what Jesus calls “the keys to the kingdom.” That means that we have the delegated responsibility to proclaim God’s forgiveness to the repentant and His condemnation to the unrepentant.

We are to speak God’s truth, even God’s uncomfortable truth, in love (Ephesians 4:15).

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re standing in front of the church building and you see two young people go out to play in the middle of Miamsiburg-Centerville Road.

Would you say to yourself, “That must be what they like to do”?

Or would you, instead, say something to warn them of the dangers in doing what they’re doing?

Love would compel you to warn them, I think.

Just so, the loving exercise of “the keys of the kingdom” should call us to tell anyone who asks what God has to say about the unrepentant practice of homosexuality: it places those who engage in it in a state of separation from God, no matter how much we love them.

So, what exactly does God’s Word say about homosexuality?

Exodus 20:14 tells us, “You shall not commit adultery.” This is the sixth commandment, which The Small Catechism explains: “We should fear and love God so that in matters of sex we are chaste and disciplined in our words and actions, and that husband and wife love and honor each other.”

The covenant of marriage between a man and a woman is meant by God to be the exclusive place in which sexual intimacy happens.

Now, let’s be honest: Jesus says that even when a husband looks lustfully on another woman, he violates this command. So, the chances are that no human being is guiltless when it comes to the sixth commandment. Not one. (If you think you are guiltless of violating this command, see me after worship. We'll talk. But you'll have a lot of convincing to do!)

But, whatever our sexual orientation, our call remains the same, to repent and believe in the gospel, the good news of new life through Jesus (Mark 1:15).

A section of Leviticus is known as the holiness code. Unlike other parts of Leviticus, which contains ritual/sacrificial law no longer valid because Jesus has become the once-and-for-all definitive sacrifice for our sins and civil laws meant to govern a theocratic nation that no longer exists (ancient Israel), the holiness code is an elaboration by God of the ten commandments. It's part of what the theologians call God’s moral law. One elaboration of the sixth commandment is in Leviticus 18:22. God says: “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.”

Of course, some people who think that there’s a divide between the God of the Old Testament and the God revealed in Jesus will object to our even mentioning passages from the Old Testament.

Such people haven’t paid attention to either Old or New Testament.

Jesus says of the Old Testament’s moral law: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).

Yes, some may say, but Jesus never condemned homosexual intimacy as a sin.

That’s not entirely true.

Every time Jesus spoke of sexuality, He spoke of it as something that happens exclusively within a marriage between a woman and a man. He quoted Genesis: “For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will live with his wife. The two will become one” (Matthew 19:5).

Homosexual practice was far more prevalent in first century Rome than it is today; yet Jesus always puts sexual intimacy within the bounds of a heterosexual marriage with three partners: God, a woman, and a man.

So, is God’s will about sexuality and homosexuality as expressed by Jesus and in various places in Scripture unloving?

For me, this boils down to one simple question: What is God’s reason for making us sexual beings? I think that the Bible identifies three reasons.

First, God intends to acclimate us to what a relationship with God is like.

God is eternal; we are mortal.

God is spirit; we are physical.

And yet, in Jesus, God reaches out to us and calls us to be in relationship with One Who is totally different from us, totally other.

Ephesians 5 and other passages of Scripture imply that marriage is a metaphor for our relationship with God in Christ. We marry the opposite and in that relationship, God intends for us to be made as complete as it's possible to be in an earthly relationship (despite all of the ways married people have created to get in the way of that happening), just as we are made eternally complete through our relationship with Christ.

Man and woman complement each other. They are the same but different.

In Genesis 2:23 [ESV], we’re told that Adam looked on the woman God made to be his wife and declared that she was the same, but different: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”

People may experience a kind of love and sexual excitement in homosexual relationships, but they won’t be all that God intends for us.

We are most challenged to be our best selves, our fullest selves, in relationships with the other, not in those with the same.

Ephesians 5 says that husbands and wives are both to submit to each other in the same way that we are to submit to Christ. It's in the surrender to “the other” that God liberates us to be who God made us to be.

There are two other reasons that God made sexuality for married couples, I think: to provide pleasurable intimacy to one another and, when it is God’s will, to share their love with children.

In the Old Testament, Sarah gave expression to both of these purposes when she asked God about His improbable promise that she, in her nineties, would, for the first time, become the mother of a child: "After I am worn out and my lord [my husband] is old, will I now have this pleasure?" (Genesis 18:12) God’s answer was, “Yes!”

The gift of sexuality comes from God. God thought it up. He created it.

And it is a gift of love that He intends to protect from any adulteration of these three purposes.

God doesn’t say no to sexual intimacy outside of marriage because He hates us, but because He loves us and wants us to use His gift as it was (and) is intended.

In this, as in so many other aspects of our lives, even when we don't think it's true, God is love.

[You might also be interested in my take on the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. In a nutshell, as a civil matter of law for our pluralistic society, it didn't really bother me that much. Read the whole thing.]

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This was the final installment of our midweek Lenten series, Tough Questions.]

Jettisoning the "little things" to live

For my morning Quiet Time, I spent a second day with Jesus in Mark 10.

Mark 10:21 drew my attention today. In response to the man looking for eternal life with God, Jesus said that despite the man's apparent obedience to God's moral law, as embodied in the Ten Commandments, there was yet something he lacked.

Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

Jesus isn't here condemning wealth. But having looked and actually seen the man and loving him, Jesus identifies the major obstruction between the man and the life with God he desires. The man's wealth is his god.

And the thing he lacked was an authentic relationship with God that goes beyond obeying rules. We are only saved for life with God by faith in Christ.

No matter how "successful" we are in avoiding violations of the second table of the commandments--"Honor your father and your mother," "You shall not kill," "You shall not commit adultery," "You shall not steal," "You shall not bear false witness," "You shall not covet"--if there is anything that we worship other than the one true God revealed first to Israel and then definitively to all the world in Christ, we violate all of God's moral law, including the first table, which addresses our relationship with God (i.e., "You shall have no other gods," "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain," "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy").

As James puts it in the New Testament: "...whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it" (James 2:10). 

I couldn't help thinking about what it is that I turn to for life rather than to God alone.

I realize(d) that I too am guilty of idolatries that Christ is telling me I must leave behind.

To follow Christ, to have eternal life, to be a whole person, to experience grace freely offered and freely given, I must let go of those things--almost all of them good things--that keep me from having life with God.

This is no wifty philosophical matter. This is life and death.

It involves giving up things that are harmless on their face. Little things.

But the road to hell is paved by little things--little compromises, little obsessions that worm their ways into the centers of our souls and destroy the new Christ-like Adams and Eves got wants to make of us.

The wealthy man may have avoided all manner of immorality, been in worship regularly, given to the poor, taken care of his family. (They say that Hitler never smoked or drank.) But Jesus could see that in the inner recesses of his soul, the thing that gave the man his version of life...even though "you can't take it with you." Wealth was the god that he lived for.

It was also the thing he was evidently willing to die for. After Jesus told the man to sell everything he had, give the proceeds to the poor--divesting himself of his god, and follow Jesus: "...the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth" (Mark 10:22). He preferred dying counting his cash rather than living with God.

It's one of the saddest verses in Scripture.

But rather than tsk-ing over this man, I needed and need to ask myself: What must I jettison in order to walk with Christ?

Such divesting is never easy. And, this side of the grave, I think that a person never loses the attraction to their particular god or gods. (Think of Gollum in Lord of the Rings.) 

This is where prayer and the fellowship of the Church comes in. Prayer in the name of Jesus is the most powerful form of communication in the universe. The name of Jesus represents all the power and authority of God. When we take refuge in Him, sometimes by even saying His name with faith, He will give us shelter. He will save us. He will give us life.

The Church is the fellowship of recovering sinners and hypocrites. We turn to the Church, our fellow believers, not because we're perfect or sinless, but because we're imperfect and sinful. Whether through worship, receiving the Sacraments, community Bible study and prayer, or private conversation with more mature believers, God can give us the strength to divest ourselves of our idols and to hold onto Christ.

I know what I have to leave behind, but what is that you need to be set free from in order to follow Christ?

Pray in Christ's name.

Humbly join the community of faith, the Church, in confessing sin, receiving forgiveness, and being empowered by the Holy Spirit to live.

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

"A Little Glitch"

A little glitch can have a big impact, even in our relationship with God. That's why we need Jesus Christ! (Thanks to Carol, a Saint Matthew member, for pointing me to this insightful devotion.)

What Are the Uses of God's Law Today?

This question was also addressed during our weekly Read the Bible in a Year discussion group today. To see what the Bible means by "the Law," go here.

God's moral law cannot save us from sin and death.

Yet God's demand that we obey the Law stands.

These two facts would otherwise leave us eternally condemned and without hope. But as Saint Paul wrote to the first century church at Rome:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. ²For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. ³For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, ⁴so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Romans 8:1-4)

Jesus calls us to repent and believe in Him and the "good news" He brings. (Believing in Jesus isn't just affirming His Lordship. Even Satan can vouch for that. To believe in Jesus is to entrust our lives--past, present, and future--to Him and to Him alone.) Jesus says that all who believe in Him are saved from sin and death and live with God eternally.

So, what are the uses of God's Law today? Lutheran theology identifies three.

First: God's moral law acts as a hedge, protecting human beings, even those who refuse to acknowledge God's existence, from themselves and from one another. Human beings have an understanding of what is right and wrong. As C.S. Lewis points out in the opening chapter of Mere Christianity, the reason that human beings "quarrel," attempting to prove each other wrong and themselves right, is that, without even articulating it, they each believe in some baseline understanding of what is moral and what is immoral. Good governments and despotic ones alike, explain and justify their laws based on this moral law, encompassed in the Ten Commandments, whether they know the commandments or God or not.

Paul talks about this in Romans 2:14-16:

When Gentiles [non-Jews and particularly, Paul refers to Gentiles who have no awareness of God's moral law], who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. ¹⁵They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them ¹⁶on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all. 

Without the law written on our hearts, the world would be in an even bigger mess than it is. Nothing would act as a hedge or curb against our inborn sin turning every piece of this planet into total anarchy. Luther said that were it not for the law curbing human impulses, believers in Christ would be like "lambs among ravenous wolves."

The second use of the moral law is to act as a mirror. God's moral law shows us how far we are from God's expectations for human beings. We see ourselves as we are and know that we are condemned to death by our sin.

Paul says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).

Another New Testament writer, James, says, "Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it" (James 2:10).

The proper "wages" for sin, Paul also writes, is death. And the absolute most the moral law can do for us is show us that we are sinners alienated from God and life.

Passages like that should give us pause, helping us to see ourselves truthfully and driving us to the God revealed in Jesus Christ for mercy and forgiveness.

Jesus' parable about the son who "came to himself," recognizing how he had sinned against God and against his father, and returned to his father, willing to be a slave and not a son, is a great picture of how the moral law acts as a mirror, turning us to the God we meet in Christ for forgiveness. By God's grace--His charitable, forgiving love for sinners, all who repent and believe in Jesus are saved from sin and death. The mirror of the Law shows us that, without this grace we're lost to God forever and sends us to Christ in desperation.

The third use of the moral law is to act as a guide for those who already are living in relationship with Jesus Christ. This is the use the psalmist had in mind when he wrote:

Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my thoughts.
See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me to the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)

This side of our own death and resurrection, believers who have been made into Christ's new creation must nonetheless live with our old sinful selves. Without attention to God's commandments and submission to Christ's authority over our lives, it becomes easy to slide into sinful patterns which, if left unchecked, could take us into unbelief or willful sin. The third use of God's moral law helps believers face the truth about themselves and to keep turning to Christ for forgiveness and new life.