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The Critical Need… Isn’t Deeper Theology…
Thoughts which carry me to Jesus, and to the Cross
“Now an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you understand it?”The expert answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”” (Luke 10:25–28, NET)
“Opening sentences
One thing I have asked of the Lord,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life;
to behold the beauty of the Lord
and to seek Him in His temple.
Call: Who is it that you seek?
Response: We seek the Lord our God.
Call: Do you seek Him with all your heart?
Response: Amen. Lord, have mercy.
Call: Do you seek Him with all your soul?
Response: Amen. Lord, have mercy.
Call: Do you seek Him with all your mind?
Response: Amen. Lord, have mercy.
Call: Do you seek Him with all your strength?
Response: Amen. Christ, have mercy.”
Yes, it is fun to fool around with councils and fathers if one juggles with the letters or constantly postpones the council, as has now been done for twenty years, and does not think of what happens meanwhile to the souls who must be fed with conscientious teaching, as Christ says, “Tend my sheep” [John 21:16].
The responsive prayer above in green is one I have used, on and off for years. I originally found it in a book called “Celtic Daily Prayer” and later found the website version above.
The responsive part of it, means so much to me, not that i full seek the Lord, but it reminds me to pray and do so. and to to strive to do it with all I am. For there I will find the love and peace I need to survive. I will find the grace that enables me to look past this troubled day.
I need to seek God, with all I am… and I need to be reminded to do so.
I see that in ministry as well. There are a lot of cool things to look at in academic theology. Wonderful thoughts about the mysteries of God, all the incredible histories, some of which provide warnings by example. But far too often, these histories, these doctrinal disputes, these things become red herrings and strawmen, capturing our hearts and minds, stealing our focus on Jesus.
That’s Luther’s point about the councils, and studying their works. Sometimes the actual work of those councils stopped the priests, bishops and cardinals from providing the pastoral care their people need. That they desperately need.
This is true today as well, as I find people, hungry for hope, turn to Youtube and other social media, looking for experts to teach them. They find teachers and apologists, men and women who do know a lot about doctrines and histories from within one framework or another, But what is not provided is pastoral care and guidance–which should focus us on our relationship with Jesus and celebrate our being healed from our brokenness with others that are broken.
I am not doubting the sincerity of these teachers, or necessarily what they teach, but we need to be carried to Jesus, we need to receive His healing. Then this other stuff might be beneficial.
What is critical – to experience the love and mercy of God, to experience the resurrection from the dead, that only comes from dying with Jesus at the cross and rising with Him – His people.
May we seek Him, and be strengthened by those who help carry us to Him.
Amen
https://www.northumbriacommunity.org/offices/morning-prayer/
Robinson, P. W. (1539). On the Councils and the Church. In H. J. Hillerbrand, K. I. Stjerna, T. J. Wengert, & P. W. Robinson (Eds.), Church and Sacraments (Vol. 3, p. 359). Fortress Press.
God’s Plan! Revealed and Finally Realized! The Plan Reveals Who We Are! A Sermon on 1 John 3:1-3
God’s Plan! Revealed and Finally Realized!
The Plan Reveals Who We Are
1 John 3:1-3
† In Jesus Name †
May the grace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ help you to accept that you are His child and that you are pure and holy!
I am Your Father!
On Friday, I was over at the retreat Bob was heading up, with the purpose of meeting the team, and giving a 20 minute talk about what it meant to be friends with God.
The format that they gave me required some pretty deep thought about my identity and who I was, and what I’ve went through in life. The basic idea – was that God was there, in the midst of the trauma, in the midst of it all…
Jesus no longer called us slaves or servants, He calls us His friends.
Which means something we can hear and know with our minds, but it will take a lifetime to really, really understand with out heart and our soul…
Think about how long it took Luke Skywalker to comprehend that Darth Vader was his dad—no I have a better illustration, a real one. Rather than being a reunion with a dad, it was one with a mother, my birth mom. (and it didn’t cost me my hand!)
In July of 2006, at 10:16 in the lobby of a casino in Vegas, I met the lady who gave birth to me 41 years before. It was an awkward, confusing, joyful, amazing time as we gave each other a hug and talked for 4 or 5 hours.
Over the next few days, I learned a lot, had a number of questions answered that gave me insight into who I am, and oddly enough, enhanced the other relationships I have in my life, including those with my adopted parents.
My point is simple here… whether we are talking about Jesus calling us his brothers, or the Father calling us His sons and daughters, there is a lot to think through, a lot to understand this truth here in our head, and then it boil in our hearts and souls as this truth begins to affect out life.
The world can’t help us! They have it all wrong!
The first challenge to this, the transforming truth comes from the world. The Apostle John describes it with these words. “But the people who belong to this world don’t recognize that we are God’s children because they don’t know him.”
I first read this with a sense that the people of this world were antagonisticly evil, that they were opposed to us so viciously, and so violently because they didn’t like God, and therefore they didn’t like us.
But then I thought of my birth mom and my conversation, finding out that our families ate at the same restaurant on Sundays, that her mom was a nurse where I often was a patient, and fifty other times and places where we could have been a couple of feet apart.
But we didn’t know…
In the same way, people don’t understand what it means to be a Christian and child of God, because even though they are close. They don’t see a God who loves us as a good Father loves His children, but instead they see God as a Darth Vader type character, who will cut anyone in half, if they don’t do what He expects.
Using our theme for October and November, they didn’t know the plans God has for them, they didn’t even have a clue about God’s love, so they are without a future and a hope, which is why sin doesn’t bother them in the same way as it does us.
Or the way it should bother us…
John wrote, “3 And all who have this eager expectation will keep themselves pure, just as he is pure.
If you don’t know God’s plan, if you don’t understand the relationship we have with God, then you can’t understand the doctrines affecting holiness, the doctrine of having a pure, unmarred, unmarked by sin.
If the relationship matters, even if we don’t comprehend it completely, then our attitude toward sin is different. We realize the division sin causes in the relationship with God, and we dread the consequences.
And when we are thinking properly, we communicate about sin that way – talking of being saved from it and wanting people saved from it, rather than being in bondage to it and the condemnation it carries with it.
The love of a parent
That is why it is so essential to see God as our heavenly Father, or even better, as our Abba – our daddy. The one who cares for us so much that He sent His one and only begotten Son Jesus, to join with us.
Martin Luther described this passage with these words, As if he were what we are, he makes whatever concerns us to concern him as well, and even more than it does us. In turn we so care for Christ, as if we were what he is, which indeed we shall finally be—we shall be conformed to his likeness. As St. John says, “We know that when he shall be revealed we shall be like him” [1 John 3:2]. So deep and complete is the fellowship of Christ and all the saints with us. Thus our sins assail him, while his righteousness protects us. For the union makes all things common, until at last Christ completely destroys sin in us and makes us like himself, at the Last Day. Likewise by the same love we are to be united with our neighbors, we in them and they in us.[1]
This was God’s plan, to reveal to us in Christ what the transformation, that’s what God’s plan has always been, to make us like Jesus… to unite us to our Dad, God the Father, and all our siblings AMEN!
———
[1] Luther, M. (2012). Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (W. R. Russell & T. F. Lull, Eds.; Third Edition, pp. 190–191). Fortress Press.
A New Year… a Time to Heal Brokenness
Devotional Thought of the Day:
†14 I am the LORD your God, and I command you not to make fun of the deaf or to cause a blind person to stumble. Leviticus 19:14 CEV
17 Don’t hold grudges. On the other hand, it’s wrong not to correct someone who needs correcting. 18 Stop being angry and don’t try to take revenge. I am the LORD, and I command you to love others as much as you love yourself. Leviticus 19:17-18 CEV
So they ran all over that part of the country to bring their sick people to him on mats. They brought them each time they heard where he was. 56 In every village or farm or marketplace where Jesus went, the people brought their sick to him. They begged him to let them just touch his clothes, and everyone who did was healed. Mark 6:55-56 CEV
I wondered this morning as I read the first passage whether the deaf and blind were only physically blind, or if it included those we consider spiritually blind as well.
It doesn’t matter if we a progressive or conservative, contemporary or traditional, right or left, or somewhere on a different spectrum. We all believe there are people that are so out of touch with reality. that they can’t see or hear, because otherwise, how could they be that stupid?
Or perhaps they are the people we resent, with cause perhaps. People we are angry with, people we want ot hurt just as much (if not more) than they hurt us. We will take ourselves out of their lives, stating they are the toxic ones, they are the ones that shattered the relationship that was once valued, even treasured.
What would life be like if we, like those who dragged their ailing friends, neighbors, brought these people, the spiritually deaf and blind or those who have hurt us and those we love, before the throne of God?
What would happen if we prayed for them, even wept over the brokenness we think we perceive?
Would God be any less willing to listen, to interact, to bring sight to their eyes (or ours) and enable their ears to hear? Would He bring them to repentance, and forgive their sins?
Or maybe, answering our prayers, would He change us…
Something to think through and pray about this new year, as we look forward to seeing how God is God, our Almighty God, our Wonderful Counselor, our Everlasting Father, our Prince of Peace.
Godspeed to you and yours… and this time next year, may you see the healing God has long desired in your life! AMEN!
An Advent Sermon Series: The Relationships of Christmas Past, Present, and Future (Genesis 44-45)
The Relationships of Christmas Past
Genesis 44:30-44
† In Jesus Name †
May the grace of God our Father and our Lord Jesus convince you of the healing that is indeed happening in your life, and in the lives of those you knew in Christmases past…
Haunted
I can imagine, as Judah stands before the brother he does not recognize, the heartache that he feels. His heart and soul flashbacks to the look in his father’s eyes when they told him of Joseph’s death. Of watching his dad weep for months,
How it must have ate him up, even though he knew his brother probably wasn’t dead, but simply a slave somewhere.
Still, he had to look down, and see his father, wracked with tears, and live with his father’s overprotective nature toward Joseph’s younger brother, the only joy this broken man had…
Judah then considers having to break the news to his father, that his other son would be lost to him as well. His heart breaks, as guilt and shame have so weakened him, he realizes he can’t go back, he can’t watch his father die, because of the sin he has committed.
Surely he is haunted far more than Bob Marley or the most of the ghost of Christmas past ever could.
Our Relationships of Christmas Past
For many of us, the holidays are a challenge. We miss many dear friends and family. Some are memories form our youth, like those we looked up to have past away, some of them decades ago.
Others are missing for a different reason.
Our sin.
Maybe we didn’t sell them into slavery, but the effect is much the same. We never, ever, want to bump into each other, for the sin that divides us is too grievous. Like Judah, thinking of the pain he caused his father, (not even thinking of Joseph) we can’t live with it. I can’t imagine bearing up with that kind of pain for decades…
Or can I?
I think back to the relationships of Christmases past, and know the absence of lives that brought joy, people I had fun with, that won’t be there this year without a miracle. If I think about it, I understand all to well the pain that Judah felt, as he considered going back to his father,
I could easily share in the words of Judah,
33 Sir, I am your slave. Please let me stay here in place of Benjamin and let him return home with his brothers. 34 How can I face my father if Benjamin isn’t with me? I couldn’t bear to see my father in such sorrow.
As we regret the past, as we wish we, as we pray like Judah did, as we grieve over the damage of our sin, we hear God respond, “no…”
It is hard to hear God answer no…
So hard we don’t always hear, “my son, that is not necessary….”
But our Brother can..
It is actually impossible to take care of what we’ve broken and shattered. We can’t take the place of the joy, we can’t somehow sacrifice the life we have to restore that which is broken.
But that isn’t why God says “no”
He says no because He had already taken care of the sin that caused Judah’s grief, and anxiety. The brother he thinks dead, he is standing before. What his and his brother’s sin threw away, the love of their Father is now going to be restored.
This is the moment that is the perfect example of Advent. We stand before the King who is about to be revealed, trying to do with our guilt and shame, trying to figure out how to face the eternal consequences for our actions. How can we face God our father, when the relationships of our past mean our brother, our sister, isn’t going to be with us? It is as this moment we understand the power of Advent and the greater moment of Christmas…
We really need to hear what God has already said, we need to hear it with all our heart and all our mind, and all our soul.
“Let it be done for you as you believe. By Jesus’ command I tell you, Your sins are forgiven, and what was done for evil, God will use for good. This is promised in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN!”
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The Relationships of Christmas Present
Genesis 45:-18a
† I.H.S. †
May the grace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be so revealed in your life, that broken relationships you deal with today are healed.
A Quick Review of the past
Last week, we looked at relationships of Christmas past, and we walked in the footsteps of Judah and his brothers. We saw the desire, and the inability to make up for the sins we’ve committed against others.
We had to see the only hope to deal with the guilt, the shame, the separation was to put it into God’s hands.
So now we come to the Relationships of Christmas Present…
In this moment!
Instead of walking in Judah’s footsteps, we have to exchange them for Joseph’s and deal with the pain of relationships in the present, those relationships that will not be celebrated at Christmas, because sin has again divided us.
Not our sin this time… “theirs!”
You know who I am talking about, every one of us has someone who, if they walked in the room right now, we would not want to interact with them. We may not be angry at them, we may not be burying our resentment, or at least we tell ourselves this. But the pain is there. The heartache, and the discomfort when they walk in the room.
Joseph’s attitude:
If only we could see them, as Joseph saw his brothers, if only we could weep at the division between us, if only we could ask them to “please come closer,” and urge them as he did, “don’t be upset, and don’t be angry with yourselves for hurting me this way,”
If only our grief caused by their sin was able to be dealt with in that way!
If only… we could love more than we hurt…
if only… the relationship meant more to us… than our pain.
My God, there are days where I wish I had the strength of Joseph’s faith…
But I do not…and if I read scripture right, neither do any of you.
The Key To Healing Relationships of Christmas Present
There is only one way to be able to generate that much strength, that much desire to see things “made right” in the relationship with us, that someone shattered. It is walking in Joseph’s steps and seeing what God has done, not in their life, but in ours.
That is where Joseph looks and sees God at work in His life. He sees God at work, as He promised to be, making everything work for good for those who love Him, those He’s called to be His own people.
It isn’t so much that we make the decision to love them, that we will ourselves to give up the pain and the hurt, that we willingly just give Jesus the resentment and pain.
It fades away, in the light of His glory, it fades away as we see the manger, and realize He is with us, it fades away.. as we see the cross, and realize He lived and died and rose again… because He loves us.
and there, in that moment, we find ourselves, empowered and driven by the Holy Spirit, going to those who’ve sinned against us, with tears in our eyes, saying,
It is I, your brother, don’t be afraid, don’t be upset with yourselves, God is at work here…
And then be amazed, for the peace of God which passes all understanding envelops you all, and guards your heart and soul and mind. AMEN!
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The relationships of Christmas Future
Genesis 45:16-21-25-28
† In Jesus Name †
May the grace mercy and peace of God enable you to see the result of God reconciling us all into Himself.
The Journey Past and Present
This advent we’ve already looked at the Relationships of Christmas Past, those times where we have not been there, the times where our sin has dramatically impacted relationships, much as Judah and His brothers betrayed and sinned against Joseph.
And we saw how Christ did what Judah could not do, taking on the punishment we deserved. Knowing that gave us hope for the relationships we broke in the past.
Then we looked at the Relationships of Christmas Present, and saw the relationships shattered by the sins of others.
We saw Joseph find the grace that comes when we realize God is at work in our lives, and that all things work out for God, even the things that people planned ot hurt us.
Now we get into the look for relationships in our future.., including those of the past and present. It is the hope to which each of the previous weeks pointed to, it is the hope of advent, it is the hope that parable of scrooge pointed to as well – relationships healed by the power of God
What the King has in mind
When the news gets to the Pharaoh and his leaders that Joseph’s brothers had come, the reaction is amazing. Here is how it reads, “When it was told in the palace that Joseph’s brothers had come, the king and his officials were happy” But “happy” is then seen in the reaction – “go get them, I will give them the nest of everything. They can eat and enjoy it all!”
That sounds more like the meaning behind the Hebrew there… which ranges from “it was very good, to delightful. Pharaoh was excited = you see his reaction – give them the best Joseph – the best of whatever I got!
That’s a picture of heaven, not the getting the best stuff, but the excitement of the Pharaoh is the excitement that God has, in seeing us “come home!” It is the regathering, the people that matter to God, His people whom Jesus died for, finally ending up where they belong!
It’s that joy we need to see tonight, the joy of God as He sees us as we are in Christ – reconciled together.
That is why Pharaoh includes this instruction as well, “They can leave their possessions behind,”
The more we understand God’s delight, His joy for His people to dwell in His presence, the more this makes sense. We don’t have to bring all the baggage we carry in this life!
Pharaoh provided everything they needed, just get in the chariots and come!
This is what God does for us, providing everything we need to dwell with Him, not just during the hard times of this life, but for eternity.
But the excitement – go get the people – bring them!
This amazing Pharaoh is as much a picture of God our Father as the Pharaoh 425 years later will not be!
I Must GO – His Son is really alive!
Up to this point in the story, Jacob has been distressed and depressed. And when the moving chariots get there, I love his reaction,
“My son Joseph must really be alive, and I will get to see him before I die.”
It reminds me of Joseph’s words,
26 And after my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God! 27 I will see him for myself. Yes, I will see him with my own eyes. I am overwhelmed at the thought! Job 19:26-27 (NLT2)
What makes the difference here is the interaction, Jacob will see his son, Job will see God, we will encounter Jesus,.
A son, once thought dead is found alive, and not only is he alive, but he is reigning and sits at the right hand of the King, Jacob’s life changed dramatically.
Just as Jesus has risen, and not is He alive, He reigns at the right hand of the Father, our lives have changed, reconciled, restored. He is truly risen!
Therefore, We ARE RISEN INDEED,
And when we see Him every relationship will be healed, will be made whole, as all dwell with the Lord, who has forgiven our sins, and united us all in the death and resurrection of Jesus. AMEN!
