The Sacrifice for Sin (Maundy Thursday)

John 13:1-17, 31-35
During Sundays in the Lenten season as we bring our offerings to the altar, we often pray: “Almighty God, you gave your Son both as a sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life…”

Of course, what’s most important about Jesus is not the life He models. You and I could repeatedly resolve that we are going to live like Jesus...and repeatedly fail.

Not that people haven’t tried. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin, a deist who didn’t really believe in the God revealed in Jesus, decided to live his life around a set righteous virtues he had identified. Franklin wrote each of these virtues on the top of a piece of paper and gathered them in a small book. His plan was to conquer one virtue, then move to the next, conquering it, and so on. He never conquered the first one.

Without realizing it perhaps, Franklin had learned the truth of the apostle Paul’s words in Romans 7: “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:19) Paul concludes: “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” (Romans 7:20) In other words, we cannot live a godly life in our own power.

When we try, we seem to get in the way.

Some of you know that last year, I was losing the weight I needed to shed. But more recently, I’ve been eating too much and putting weight back on. God’s Word says that our bodies are “temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). That means that the abuse to which I subject my body is a spiritual issue. It’s a sin issue.

Right now, I must report, that as it relates to the food I’m putting into my body, sin is winning out.

And why has this happened? Because I took my eyes off of Jesus.

To be sure, I took Jesus as an example of the godly life because Jesus was always self-disciplined in the use of His mind and body. I also became subtly proud of my virtuous self-discipline.

I forgot what Jesus tells all who want to follow Him: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.” (John 15:5-6)

The point? If we see Jesus only or even primarily as our example as we set out to lead virtuous lives, we will fall on our faces every time.

We need help.

We need Jesus.

We need Him infinitely less as a model of the godly life than we need Him as the definitive sacrifice for our sin.

We need His righteousness because we are completely unrighteous.

We need His goodness, because God alone is good.

That’s why Jesus does and says things in the order in which He does and says them in tonight’s Maundy Thursday gospel lesson.

John is the most sacramentally minded of the four gospel writers. He begins his account of Jesus' earthly ministry with Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine, pointing to the two sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion. He draws the curtain on Jesus' pre-resurrection earthly ministry with a soldier piercing Jesus' side and water and blood emanating from the wound, again pointing to Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.

Yet in recounting events on Maundy Thursday, John doesn’t talk about Holy Communion, which Jesus instituted on that night. Instead, he focuses on three things from the events of Maundy Thursday:

• Jesus washing the feet of His disciples; 
• Jesus telling the disciples to serve each other similarly; 
• Jesus giving a new commandment, the only new commandment Jesus ever gave. 

Let’s look at each one of these.

During the course of the meal, Jesus ate with His disciples, got up, stripped down to nothing but a towel wrapped around His waist, and prepared to wash the disciples’ feet, starting with Peter’s. You’ve lived through enough Maundy Thursdays to know that washing people’s feet in the first century AD was the work of servants. It seems to get mentioned in every Maundy Thursday sermon.

But feet were seen predominantly in two ways in that culture.

One was to look on them with revulsion, encrusted as they were with dirt from walking in sandals through the sand and rocks of Judea.

The other was to regard feet as euphemistic representations of the most private places of the human body. This is what’s behind the otherwise cryptic passage of Ruth 3:14, which tells us that: “So [Ruth] lay at [Boaz’s] feet until morning, but got up before anyone could be recognized; and he said, ‘No one must know that a woman came to the threshing floor.’"

So, Jesus washing the feet of His disciples was not just an act of selfless servanthood, but also one of loving intimacy, the Bridegroom serving His Bride, the Church.

And Jesus points to His washing of the disciples’ feet as symbolizing the great act of servanthood and love that He’s about to accomplish at the cross. “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand,” Jesus tells Peter who, at first protests Jesus’ intention of washing the disciples’ feet.

Hebrews 10 tells us that through Christ’s act of servanthood and love on the cross, all who believe in Him “have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” (Hebrews 10:10)

And, Hebrews says that, through this sacrifice, we have an advocate for eternity: “...when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” (Hebrews 10:12-14)

Baptized believers in Christ are washed clean of their sin. That's why Jesus says that we don't need to be completely rewashed of our sin again and again; once we have been born as children of God in Baptism, we only need to come again to God in the name of the Lord in which we have been baptized to repent and be renewed as God's people.

Each time we repent and trust Christ with our sins and our lives, remembering that we are baptized into His death and resurrection, Jesus cleans us again from the grime of sin and death that’s always dogging us and attaching itself to us in this life.

Jesus is the perfect sacrifice for our sin and when we trust in Him, He takes up residence within us. We experience what Paul talks about in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Martin Luther may have had this passage in mind when he said: "When [the devil] comes knocking at the door of my heart, and asks, ‘Who lives here?’ Jesus goes to the door and says, 'Martin Luther used to live here, but he has moved out. Now I leave here.'”

After pointing to His cross, Jesus gives us two commands, one a re-expression of the Old Testament law regarding hospitality, the other a totally new law with Jesus.

Command one: “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:17) In other words, Jesus is telling us, “Serve as I have served you. Without thought to your status in the world, or to how humbling it may be.”

Command two: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35) In other words, Jesus is telling us, “Love your sisters and brothers in the faith sacrificially just as I have loved you.”

It’s no accident that Jesus gives these two commands after pointing to the cross, because it’s only after taking up residence in our lives through our faith in Him that Jesus can change the ways we live, the ways we respond to our neighbors.

Jesus may be an example for godly or wholesome living to the whole world, Christian and non-Christian alike; but unless Jesus lives in us and powers us, we cannot lead godly lives.

On Monday, I drove to Cincinnati, where God allowed me to administer Holy Baptism to Jameson, the little guy for whom we’ve been praying through his three years of life, and his older brother, Jackson.

After getting back to Dayton, I went to Columbus to be with my mom and my family at a hospital ICU, where mom died on Tuesday morning.

To tell you the truth, my thoughts weren't prone to focus on the homeless guy standing at the freeway off-ramp that day.

And the Old Mark battled with the Lord Jesus Who has taken up residence in my life. “Who knows if he’s really homeless,” I argued. “Besides, I’m out of the McDonald gift cards I keep for situations like this. And on top of that, I’m busy, I’m tired, I’m concerned about my family. Is this guy really that big a deal, God?”

But Jesus won the argument. (He usually does when you start talking with Him!)

I pulled out a five-dollar bill and handed it to the man at the ramp.

Listen: I would not have done that had I relied on my own reasoning. If I'd only been arguing with myself, I would have easily convinced myself to drive on by. Instead, because Jesus lives in me and I have the assurance that no matter how much duping, using, or humiliation this world may subject me to, I still belong to the God we meet in Jesus, Jesus set me free to part with a little of money.

It was, for all its simplicity and humanity, a divine moment that wasn’t done by me, but by Jesus living in me.

I’ve gotten to the point where I believe the line in the old Amy Grant singalong song: “If there’s anything good that happens in life, it’s from Jesus.”

And when you know that, in the words of the late Baptist pastor, Gerald Mann, through Christ you have "God's cosmic okie-dokie," the humiliations meted out by this world become less important to you. You know that the world cannot rob you of you dignity, because by God's grace through faith in Christ, your life is imbued with an eternity dignity.

I don’t have to know whether the ramp guy spent those five bucks on cigarettes, alcohol, drugs,  lottery tickets, or food.

I don’t care to know whether he was, from the standpoint of the world, “worthy” of my help.

But I do know two things.

First, I know that on the night of His betrayal, even though He knew what Judas was going to do, Jesus washed Judas’ feet. Jesus gives grace to all, worthy in the world’s eyes or not. Think of that!

Second, I know that, in the eyes of heaven, I’m not worthy of the grace, forgiveness, and love God makes available to us through Christ.

I’m a sinner. So, who am I to withhold from another person any smidge of grace God puts it in my power to give away?

Despite my sin, Christ served, loved, and died for me anyway. Romans 5:8 reminds us that, “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Christ is the “sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life.”

But Maundy Thursday reminds us that if we would live a godly life, a useful life, a life that even unbelievers would acknowledge to be a life filled with goodness, it doesn’t begin with any of us trying to be good. 

It begins and continues only with Christ loving us, serving us, dying for us, rising for us, and our day in, day out, letting Him into our lives so that God’s will becomes our will, God’s love for others becomes our love for others. 

It begins and ends with Jesus alone!

Jesus’ message for us tonight is simple. Don’t try to be a good person on your own steam. Let Jesus into your life, let Jesus live in you, and He will lead you in the godly life, empowering you to love and serve today and preparing you to joyfully love and serve for all eternity. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

So, what's stopping us?

John 4:5-42
The fourth chapter of the gospel of John, with its account of Jesus’ encounter with a Samaritan woman and what results from it, is among my favorite places in Scripture.

I've taught on this passage many times. But, so far as I can remember, I’ve never preached about it. A thirty-eight verse lesson is a big bite to chew for preacher and congregation. Yet, the whole passage goes together as a cohesive unit and, in it, there are important things God has to tell us. So, this morning, let’s supersize, and listen to what God says to us in this meeting between Jesus--God the Son, the Word made flesh--and a woman who’d spent her entire life deep in the sins of human flesh.

[Samaritan Woman at the Well by He Qi]

Jesus has left Judea accompanied by His disciples, with whom He’s headed to their common home region of Galilee.

They have to cut through a sliver of Samaria to get there.

Now, the Samaritans could trace their lineage back to Abraham and Sarah, the ancestors of all Jews, and lived in what had once been the northern portion of Israel. They were then, partly, Hebrews or Jews by heritage. But they had formed their own separate kingdom, the northern kingdom, with its own earthly ruler and their own center of worship. This happened after the death of Solomon in Old Testament times.

The Samaritans endured the scorn of the people of Judah to the south because they had intermingled the worship of Yahweh, I AM, with the worship of other gods; had removed themselves from Jerusalem as the place they offered sacrifices; had intermarried with unbelievers; and mixed the falsehoods of other religions with the revealed truth of God. And do you know what you get when you mix the revealed truth of God and the falsehoods of other religions? Nothing but falsehood that leaves you far from God.

Samaritans were hated by the Judeans, which is one reason why Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan scandalized them; they regarded the Samaritans as low-lives.*

When Jesus and the disciples got to the outskirts of the Samaritan village of Sychar, Jesus sat down at the well because He was exhausted, and the disciples went into the village to see if they could buy some food.

Take a look at what happens next, starting in John 4:7. “When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, ‘Will you give me a drink?’”

Then verse 9: “The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?’ (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.’ ‘Sir,’ the woman said, ‘you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?’ Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.’”

Jesus starts out His conversation with this woman not by looking down on her. Jesus gives her dignity. He makes her feel that she has something to give to Him, even though His people demean Samaritans; even though He’s a man and she’s a woman living in an age in which women were to be seen but not heard; even though you and I know that He’s God in the flesh.

Sometimes, we Christians are guilty of looking down on people we think are less than us. If we reach out to them, we can be patronizing, our attitudes and words signaling the message, “Look at me being nice to you, even though you don’t deserve it.”

Jesus asked the woman if she would do something for Him. Sometimes the best act of loving service we can do for others is to let them serve us. When we do this, we give them respect.

A few weeks ago, my dad handed me a covered bowl of green beans and boiled potatoes, to take home. I could have said, “Dad, you don’t have to do that. You made that for mom and you and if I take any of it, there will be less for you.” But I thanked dad and took the green beans and boiled potatoes home with me.

I heated them up and, I have to tell you, they were delicious. I phoned my dad to tell him so. I genuinely appreciated this touch of home that I remember from my childhood at those times when dad sometimes fixed our meals.

But, I think it also made my dad feel good being able to do something for me...again.

That’s how the Samaritan woman felt.

But she was also stunned! She couldn’t believe a Jewish man was speaking to her.

Then, she gets practical: Jesus had nothing in which to hold water. And Jesus tells her that if she asked, He would give her water that would last forever.

This appealed to her because the Samaritan woman was likely even hated by her fellow Samaritans.

This is why she was at the well at the sixth hour, noon. As we’ll see, the woman was of less than sterling morals and had she gone to the well at the times when all the other women of the village were there--in the morning or at dusk--she would have been subjected to shunning or insults.

No wonder she jumped at the prospect of getting a never-ending supply of water!

How many people do we Christians alienate because we think that their morals don’t measure up?

How many people fail to drink Christ’s living water because we Christians refuse to dole it out to people whose sins we deem more odious than our own?

We can be guilty of making these kinds of judgments even though we know, to name a few examples:

• that homosexuality is no worse a sin than pride,
• that murder is no worse a sin than failing to love our neighbor,
• that adultery is no worse than taking God’s name in vain.

The woman has given Jesus an opening for sharing more than a bucket of water. He, in turn, wants to give her the eternal life available to all who entrust their past and present sins, along with their whole lives, to Him in faith.

Verse 16: “He told her, ‘Go, call your husband and come back.’ ‘I have no husband,’ she replied. Jesus said to her, ‘You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.’”

By treating this woman with respect, Jesus has now earned the right to be honest with her.

We earn the right to share God’s Word and God’s sometimes uncomfortable truth with our neighbors when we treat them with respect.

Jesus knows that this woman has had five husbands and that now she’s shacking up with another man without the benefit of marriage, the rite instituted by God to be the exclusive place of intimacy between a man and a woman.

But Jesus is calling attention to more than just the woman’s adultery and fornication.

In the Old Testament, God referred to Himself as the husband of His people Israel (Isaiah 54:5-6) and He compared the idol worship that characterized life in Samaria as adultery (Jeremiah 3:20).

We commit adultery against God whenever we let anything--our jobs, our families, our country, our security--anything take the place in our lives that belongs exclusively to God.

In the New Testament, Jesus is called the Bridegroom to His bride, the Church (Revelation 21:2; Revelation 19:7; Mark 2:19).

Jesus is confronting this woman for the adultery she was daily committing both with the man with whom she lived and with the false gods she worshiped along with her people.

Now, this woman understands that Jesus is more than just a Jewish man at a Samaritan well. She tells Jesus that He must be a prophet. And then, she does something secular people often do when they meet someone who professes faith: She started talking religion.

I have this happen to me all the time. I'll be on a plane having a conversation with the passenger next to me. The conversation may go on for a time when they ask me what work I do. When I tell them that I'm a pastor, suddenly they start talking religion. Often they'll come up with the weirdest combination of religious ideas you can imagine. A woman once told me, "I believe in Jesus and stuff. But I also believe in reincarnation." Oy! We had quite a little talk after that.

People do this with me all the time. When they learn that I’m a pastor, they feel the need to start talking about their own religious beliefs, trying to prove to me how righteous they are.

But you know what? My opinion of people’s righteousness is totally unimportant. The only One Whose opinion matters is God. And God says that we are only righteous when we stop trying to justify ourselves and instead, humbly surrender to Him and trust in Jesus Christ for life. When we believe in Jesus, God covers us in Jesus' righteousness, the only brand of righteousness that impresses God or gains us entrance into God's kingdom.

Jesus refuses to accept any of this woman’s religious talk. Verse 21: “...a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem,” He says. Then in verse 23, He tells her: “...a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.”

At this, the woman shifts gears and starts talking about the Messiah. And it's here Jesus confronts her with the most amazing thing she will ever hear in her life. Verse 26, Jesus tells the woman:

“I, the one speaking to you—I am (Yahweh) he.”

What happens next is truly stunning.

This woman, who has been avoiding contact with anyone, runs back to the village to tell everyone: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”

If you remember nothing else from today’s message, remember this: The time to tell others about Jesus is now!

This woman doesn’t wait to go to seminary or attend a class or become familiar with all sixty-six books of the Bible. She has met Jesus. Now she's telling people about Jesus.

We make all sorts of excuses for not telling others about Jesus. Things like: “I’m not well enough informed.” “What if they ask me a question I can’t answer?”

The Samaritan woman was too excited about encountering Jesus to keep it to herself.

How excited are you about Jesus, our Living Water?

If you and I believe in Jesus, we have no excuses for not telling others about Him. Or, for failing to get to know Him better each day ourselves.

The woman got over herself to tell others about Jesus. We need to get over ourselves too!

In verse 39, the Samaritan woman tells the people of Sychar: “He told me everything I did.” “He knows all my sins,” she’s saying, “and He offered me the living water of forgiven sin and resurrection life through faith in Him anyway!”

The villagers come running to Jesus and say in verse 42: “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

Who could you establish a relationship with so that you could, like the woman at the well, earn the right to invite others to come and see Jesus?

Begin praying about that this week, please.

There’s a world of people like her--people running from their sins, running from others, running from life, running from God--who would come running to God if only you and I would tell them about Jesus, the living water.

So, what’s stopping us?

*Notice that after Jesus has told the parable of the Good Samaritan, the man who identified which of the three men who had encountered the wounded man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho couldn't even bring himself to say that it was the Samaritan who had fulfilled God's law of love. The Judeans were loathe to ascribe anything positive to a Samaritan, even a fictional one. This is how bigotry can cloud the human heart.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This was the message for worship this morning.]

Loving the Church...and the People In It

[This was prepared for sharing during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, yesterday.]

John 13:34-35
During these weeks in Lent, we’re focusing on five building blocks for our personal Christian discipleship and for the life of the Church. They are:

• loving God,
• loving others,
• loving fellow believers,
• making disciples, and
• growing in our own discipleship

Today, our focus is on Jesus’ new commandment, John 13:34-35 (page 751 in the sanctuary Bible). Jesus is the speaker. He says:

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

What makes this commandment so new? And why does Jesus give it?

There are two main ways in which this commandment is different from Jesus’ command to love others as we love ourselves. That command does hold up an impossible standard for us to adhere to, to have the same regard for the needs, hopes, desires, loves, hurts, and difficulties of others that we have for our own needs, hopes, desires, loves, hurts, and difficulties. 

But Jesus’ new commandment holds us to a much higher standard: We are to love just as God in Jesus Christ has loved us!

In thinking about how God loved us, Paul writes in Romans 5:6-8: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” That’s how Christ loves us!

Jesus says in Matthew 20:28: “...the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." That’s how Christ loves us!

2 Corinthians 5:1 says: “God made [Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” And that’s how Christ loves us!

He willingly bore the condemnation for sin we deserve--death--so that, when He rose, He could claim new and everlasting life for all who repudiate sin as their way of life and trust in Him, believe in Him, as the only way to God, their only hope for this world and the next, their only Savior, God and Lord of their lives.

Jesus says that we are to love like that. To be willing to love even to the point of doing what He did for us, giving our lives for others.

As Paul says in Romans, we might do that for a righteous person.

Or we might do it for a family member or a friend.

But Christ did that for a world of people--including you and me--who really don’t want God over our lives, who nailed Him to a cross. “Love like that,” Jesus tells us.

If you’re not feeling a bit squeamish right now, you haven’t been paying attention.

So, the first thing that makes this a new commandment is that it dramatically ups the ante on the love that God requires of us as believers. We’re not just to love others as we love ourselves, we’re to willingly give our lives for them, no matter how they may feel about us, no matter what they do to us. (This doesn’t mean we should submit to abusive or co-dependent relationships, something we’ll talk about another time, I’m sure.)

Now, here’s the second thing that makes this a new commandment: The object of the love Jesus commands isn’t the ordinary neighbors in our lives.

The object of love in this commandment is our fellow believers, our fellow disciples, other Christians, the people who make up Christ’s Church, all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and God and Savior and King, inside and outside our congregation, inside and outside our denomination.

We are to love the Church--not an abstraction and not the sentimentality surrounding the scent of burning candles or stirring music or fellowship time, but the Church: the flesh and blood, imperfect people, saints by the grace of God who in this world remain sinners by birth and impulse, the people of the Church with whom we confess faith, worship God, receive the sacraments, study God’s Word, pray, serve in Christ’s Name, the people with whom we sometimes disagree or don’t understand or who drive us crazy...These are the people Jesus tells us to love and serve and live for to the point of death itself, if necessary.

Why? Why does Jesus make such a steep and daunting demand of us as His disciples? Jesus, of course, gives the most important reason for obeying the new commandment: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

When the world sees Christians loving and caring for each other, as I see happening so often in the life of Living Water, the world then knows that we truly are Christ’s disciples. They see Christ living in us and that makes following Christ--becoming disciples themselves--more compelling to an unbelieving world.

The book of Acts tells us that people saw how the early Christians loved each other and their neighbors and enjoyed “the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” (By the way, notice that the Bible isn't squeamish about saying that some people are saved and some aren't. Those who reject faith in Christ, reject His salvation.)

When the Church is united in its commitment to Christ, to the authority of God’s Word over its life, and its love for God, the world, and one another, it is a powerful magnet for people who don’t yet know Jesus Christ or the freedom from sin and death only Christ can give.

We all know, by personal experience how destructive church fights can be.  The world sees Christians fighting and they figure the whole Christianity thing is a worthless delusion.

Church fights are nothing new. Paul wrote early in his first letter to the Church at Corinth, filled with conflict, back in the first century: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.”

So, does loving like Christ mean we paper over our differences?

Hardly! Jesus Himself confronted false teaching. He threw out the moneychangers who were using the faith of others to line their pockets. He called Peter a Satan.

Some church fights are stupid. I know of a church that split because people couldn't agree on the color of the carpeting in the sanctuary.

Some church fights are necessary. When the basics of the faith are called into question--when people deny Jesus' virgin birth or His resurrection from the dead or that He performed and still performs miracles or that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and things like that, then church fights are essential. God's truth is worth fighting for within His Church.

The New Testament makes clear that the Church should discipline or remove preachers who preach or teachers who teach false doctrine, that it should confront and deal with unrepentant sin. It should only call people to positions of leadership and service among them who have the gifts for particular ministries and have the courage to say when they don't.

Jesus Himself teaches that there will be fights in the Church, that sometimes those fights must happen, and, in Matthew 18:15-20, gives a whole process by which those fights should be fought cleanly, with love and grace. And even those fights, Jesus says, should be fought with the idea of restoring unity to the Church.

So why is the unity of the Church so important?

First, because it authenticates our faith.

Second, because we need each other! “People learn from one another, just as iron sharpens iron,” Proverbs 27:17 says. There is no such thing as a solo Christian because when you try a “Jesus and me” faith, there is no one to tell you that you’re full of it when you forget to get full of Christ or full of the Bible instead.

But the Church is so important to Jesus for another reason: It’s the only entity that will survive the end of this old creation, that is eternity.

In Revelation 19:7, we’re told about the rejoicing that will happen in the new heaven and the new earth after Jesus has returned to this world, the dead in Him rise, and this old creation has been destroyed. It describes the wedding between the groom, the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world, and His bride. “Let us rejoice and be glad and give [God] glory!” it says. “For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.”

The Church is the bride of Christ. The Church--the fellowship of those who turn from sin and trust in Jesus as God in the flesh for forgiveness, life, and eternity--will live forever. And Christ wants His bride to produce many newborn children of God. He wants His Church to be the safe harbor in which His bride, living in His grace and forgiveness, is made ready for its wedding day in heaven. It becomes that when those to whom we reach out with the Gospel, in our words and in our deeds, see that we love each other as Christ has loved us.

But, how do we do that? Only, as we’ve said the past few weeks about loving God and loving our neighbors, by letting Christ live within us. Only by becoming one with Christ and renewing our relationship with Him in daily repentance and renewal by the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells us how this works in John 15:5-8 (page 752 in the sanctuary Bible):

"I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”

If we try to love Christ’s Church apart from a tight connection to Christ, we’ll give up. No one but God Himself is capable of loving with the passionate love Christ lived out and died for on the cross...unless, like the branches of a vine, we remain connected to Christ. That’s why the Church is here: to keep pumping us full of Christ’s love and God’s truth as we move through life, that we might flourish and grow in the love of God given in Christ. Then that love comes alive in us and among us and a world mired in sin wants what we have. “Jesus is what we’ve got. Do you want Him too?”

Christ’s love living in people is a magnet. It starts to exert its pull when we believe in Christ and as we submit to letting Christ grow our faith, we come to do what doesn’t come naturally to human beings: to love God, to love our neighbors, and to love each other. On these three building blocks and the two more we’ll be discussing in the next few weeks, Christ readies us as individual disciples and His the whole Church for eternity with Him.