God at Work

Texts: Romans 3:1- 4:8; John 6:24-29

WHEN I WAS A KID, I COULD NEVER see the point of the Labor Day holiday. The day was about labor, right? So why did people get the day off?

Of course, I learned in time that Labor Day doesn't celebrate labor, it celebrates laborers. Especially workers who often were taken for granted for long centuries of human history. It was established in 1894 to highlight the achievements of men and women who worked in the mills, the factories, and the mines of America.

And America's workers have a lot to be proud of. Historically, we have the most productive labor force in the world. It stands to reason that labor should have a day to boast in what they've done for America and the world.

But it's not just America's workers who want to take pride in their accomplishments on the job. Everywhere in the world laborers want to feel that their efforts count for something. We have a basic human need to stand on our own feet and know we've got things under control for ourselves and our families. As it says in Ecclesiastes 2:24, "A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God . . . "

That's how it is in this world. We can say that's how things should be in this world; "under the sun," as Solomon puts it.

But human labor and human capability has a limit. There's one job only one Worker can do, and that's the job of reconciling lost and sinful humanity to the almighty Creator of heaven and earth. That one Worker is God Himself, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We humans can do a lot in this world to keep body and soul together and find fulfilment doing it. God gives us the time and talents and strength to make our living, and we have to put our backs into it ourselves if we want to get along. But only God Himself by Himself can accomplish the work of salvation and sanctification that brings us into His kingdom of everlasting life. Only He can overcome the sin and wickedness that separates every human creature from Himself.

But as we know, human history has been one long process of mankind disagreeing with that principle. We think that when it comes to our salvation, God helps them who help themselves.

From the dawn of time, every tribe and nation in this world from has been aware that there is a High God to Whom they owe worship and right moral behaviour. Every person ever born has it written on his or her heart that certain things are right and certain things are wrong; that there's a good way and a bad way to treat God and our neighbor. It teaches that God has the right to expect good behavior from us. This is called natural law, or conscience. It's not the possession of any particular faith or religion; it's what God has put within us because we are human beings made in His image.

Then there's also a distinctive people, the Jews, and the Lord God revealed to them His spoken and written Law. They didn't have to guess at what they had to do to please God and live; they had it down in detail.

But Jew or pagan alike, humankind has always distorted the law of God and watered it down into something they could manage. They felt that they could do enough to please God, and God would reward them for their hard work with prosperity in this life and maybe even eternal blessedness in the world to come.

Was the Creator of heaven and earth impressed? Did He look down on humanity and say, "Oh, my, you're doing your best, you should be so proud of yourselves! You've worked so hard, I'm going to give you a Labor Day parade!"

No. Rather, in Romans 3:19, the Apostle Paul, speaking by the Holy Spirit, says "Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God." The pagan peoples stand guilty because they've perverted and departed from the natural law written on the heart. The Jews are convicted because they have disobeyed the Law revealed through Moses. What's just as bad or worse, when they were supposedly trying to work to please God, everyone to whom Paul writes has been trying to earn their own righteousness by observing the law according to their own version of it. But the Scripture says that no one can stand righteous in the sight of God by doing that, no matter how hard they work.

But what about us, citizens of the United States and the western world? We live after the cross of Christ. Even if we don't actually belong to a church, our ethics and morals are pretty much based on the law of love that Jesus preached, right? If we just follow Jesus as our good example, and do the things He would do, won't that will be okay with God?

All the time we hear people say, "I work hard to do what's right. God will let me into heaven because of that." People say, "God knows I'm doing my best. He knows my heart, that'll be enough."

But even for us today, that is not enough. "Doing our best" and "making a good effort" is still us trying to justify ourselves by works of the law. We've lowered the standard for what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves and to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, but even so, we're still laboring to earn God's favor, so we can boast that we deserved it.

The Scripture, however, is clear. We are all defendants in God's courtroom, and every mouth is silenced before Him. The whole world is accountable before God, including ourselves. No one will be declared righteous by works of the law; rather, the law-- the revealed law and the natural law-- the law full and forceful from the hand of Almighty God-- shows us what great sinners we are. Jesus Himself proclaimed that the fountain of wickedness is us is the very heart that we think will earn us our ticket into heaven. And once the law makes us truly conscious of sin, we won't be boasting that God will accept us because He knows our hearts. We'll want to run and hide from His righteous anger.

What can we do? Our condition is nothing to have a parade about! Not unless it's a parade to the gallows.

The answer is, we can do nothing. God, the great Worker of salvation, does it all. As Romans 3:21 says, "But now--" Now, that we have been declared guilty and worthy of condemnation-- "Now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known." The law and the prophets all testified that this righteousness was coming. It came to us through Jesus Christ our Lord; He brought us perfect redemption through His sinless life, His atoning death, and His glorious resurrection. God Himself has worked to give us access to His own righteousness through faith in Jesus, and not even that faith was a work of ours. As it says in Ephesians 2, "It is by grace you have been saved, through faith-- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-- not by works, so that no one can boast."

Our salvation is God's great labor from start to finish. Only He could have done it. The righteousness and justice of God demanded that sin be paid for. We couldn't pay it. No matter what we did, we could never be good enough to ward off the wrath of God that we deserved for our sins. But it was also the loving will of God that He would justify His elect. What was God to do?

What only God could do. God the Son, the second Person of the Trinity, came into the world as a perfect Human Being and died as a sacrifice of atonement to God. His blood covers all our sins. That way, God's holy justice is satisfied and He is able to say to those whom He calls to faith in Christ, "You are perfect and righteous in My sight."

This is what God did for you when He brought you to faith in Christ by the voice of His Holy Spirit. This is what He may be doing for you even now as the power of His word works in your life, convicting you of your sin and convincing you to trust in Christ alone for your salvation. This is God at work! This is the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, may His name be praised forever!

But you may have noticed something about yourself; I'm sure I've noticed it about me. It's that even after God has called us to faith in Jesus Christ, there's still that old sin nature hanging around in us. And it whispers, "You really did part of the work in your own salvation. God must've saved you because of something good you did or were!"

And isn't that what unbelievers think we Christians believe about ourselves? That we think we deserved to be saved because we're actually holier or better than other people? Heaven help us, sometimes we give them good excuse to think that. Let me ask you this, what is your attitude towards flagrant sinners? What do you think about homosexuals and drunkards and bitter-tongued gossips and adulterers? What's your attitude towards corporate CEOs or government officials who apparently are cheating the public? Does that immediately drive you to pray for their salvation? Or . . . ?

Let's admit it. The temptation is to say, "Thank God I'm not like that! Those people should try harder to do what's right! God should punish them and give them what they deserve!"

I hope you resist that temptation. I hope you flee it with every fiber of your being. It's true, people like that don't deserve God's mercy. Neither did you or I. Romans teaches that none of us has the right to boast of being holier-than-thou. We are not, not, not justified by our works of righteousness, or by anything we earned or deserved. No, we were saved by Christ's work of righteousness imputed to us by the one God of all.

We don't used this word "imputed" or "imputation" every day, but it describes what God does for us. Think of somebody who's horribly in debt. And a kind and rich person comes along and credits the entire amount of the debt to the debtor's account and totally pays it off. That money is reckoned as his and he gets the good of it. What he can't do is boast that it's his own money or that somehow he deserved it.

That's what God did for Abraham and what He does for us. Abraham simply believed that God had accepted him and he believed God's promises of blessing to him. Ultimately, Abraham's faith looked forward to the Messiah Jesus who was his many-times-great grandson. In the same way, it's not up to us to earn our righteousness, but simply to accept the righteous sacrifice of Christ in our behalf.

The Galileans who saw Jesus feed the 5,000 chased Him back to Capernaum because they wanted more of the physical bread He'd given. Jesus says, No, that's not the bread you should be working for, but the food that endures to eternal life that He, the Son of Man, would give them. These people were like us. They wanted everlasting happiness with God and they wanted to know what they had to do to get it. We'll work for it, Master, we really will! That's what we say, too. "What must we do to do the works God requires?" And Jesus answers, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent."

This isn't "your work" that you have to do. It's the work of God that He does within you! God is the one worker of our salvation, He is responsible for it all. He saved us and He can save the most flagrant of sinners, regardless of who or what they may be.

And it's His work, not ours, that keeps us in His grace. Maybe you've picked up the idea that you were saved by Christ's death on the cross, but now it's up to you to make sure you stay saved. Brothers and sisters! It's all a gift! It's all God's workmanship! We can't brag about our salvation and we can't brag about how He's making us holy! Right now He's working in you by His Holy Spirit, forgiving your sins, making you more like Christ, drawing you to love your fellow-Christians and also all the poor dying sinners who need the Savior just like we do! It's all God at work!

So now, take a holiday from your own works, because God has put in all the labor for you. As you do His will, know that it's His Spirit working in you. With all God's justified and grace-imputed people, sing with King David that

"Blessed are they
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the man
whose sin the Lord will never count against him."

Blessed of the Father, rest in the work He does for you. And if anyone wants to boast, let him boast joyfully in the Lord.

To whom be all honor and glory, wisdom and strength, now and forever. Amen.

A Different Gospel-- No Gospel at All

Texts:  Jeremiah 2:4-13; Galatians 1:1-10

AS YOU CERTAINLY REMEMBER, in 2008 the president campaigned on a platform of "Hope and Change." But it wasn't just the Democrats who took that approach. My Republican state representative over in Beaver County ran with the motto "Change Is Good." And change isn't attractive only in politics. Young and old, we've all been through times when our lives seems so monotonous, so ordinary, so stifling that we just wanted things to be different. There's something alluring and refreshing about the idea of change, especially when things aren't going so well. Not about any particular change, just "change" in general.

And if we go for a different phone or alter the way we dress or vote in a new politician to represent us, maybe it works out and maybe it doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't make that much difference, and sometimes it seems to makes all the difference in the world. But when it comes to changes involving the Lord our God, it makes a difference not only in this world, it effects our lives for all eternity.

When the Lord God Almighty rescued the children of Israel out of Egypt about 3,500 years ago, they were ready for change. For long years they'd been laboring under the heavy yoke of Pharaoh and his taskmasters. They were groaning for relief and the Lord God of their fathers heard their cry and rescued them. He sent terrible plagues on the Egyptians and brought the Israelites through the Red Sea with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. As it says in our passage from Jeremiah chapter 2,

[The Lord] brought [them] up out of Egypt
and led [them] through the barren wilderness,
through a land of deserts and rifts,
a land of drought and darkness,
a land where no one travels and no one lives.

Ultimately He

brought [them] into a fertile land
to eat its fruit and rich produce.

That was a tremendous change! And definitely a change for the better. Out of slavery He brought them, to a wonderful land rich with produce and abundant with fruit, where they lived in houses they hadn't had to build and drank from cisterns they hadn't had to dig. But that wasn't the best part of the change God made for them. In Egypt, they were just that Hebrew rabble. But now, the children of Israel were the people of God, the dearly-loved possession of the Lord of the universe! They were His covenant nation, endowed with His laws and protected by His faithfulness! What a glorious difference! What a marvellous change!

So you'd think they'd be happy with their new situation and want to live in it forever. But as we know, in the wilderness it wasn't long before the Israelites started complaining that freedom equalled certain death and they'd be better off going back and being slaves again in Egypt. And pretty soon after the Lord brought them into the promised land-- well, let Jeremiah tell it:

Has a nation ever changed its gods?
(Yet they are not gods at all.)
But my people have exchanged their Glory
for worthless idols.

God's own chosen people turned their backs on Him, who was their Glory! They exchanged Him for the do-nothing, no-good, ersatz gods of the Canaanites they'd driven out! Yes, human beings have a hankering for change, but who ever heard of something like this, that a nation should change its gods as the Israelites had changed theirs? Go across the sea to Kittim, says the Lord through Jeremiah; that is, go to Cyprus and the Greek peoples there. Do they stop worshipping Zeus (though he is no god at all)? Send to Kedar; that is, to the Syro-Arabian desert where the Bedouin nomads live. Do they forsake their idols (though they're only wood and stone and cast metal)? So how could Israel and Judah forsake the Lord Almighty, God Most High who made heaven and earth and saved them to be His very own?

The clue is in verse 13:

"My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me,
the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water."

"They have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water." There's a saying that goes, "The Jews are like everybody else, except more so." We have no standing to cast stones at our Old Testament predecessors or at their modern-day children. If we'd been in their place, we would've done the same. We would have turned from the good change that God had brought us into and gone after a situation where we were in control. It's our fallen, sinful human nature.

A cistern is a good thing to have in a dry climate. I've wished I had one buried in my backyard this dry summer. Then when it rains I could store up enough water to take care of my garden. But it'd be even better if I had a fresh, flowing spring on my property! Cistern water is okay for the crops, but for drinking and cooking and even for bathing, it's a far-back second place.

The Lord our God is like a spring of living water to His people. We don't control Him; He's simply there for us with His goodness and grace. But we and our spiritual ancestors the Jews wanted gods they could control, that were like cisterns they'd dug and lined themselves.

When I was in college, I took a course or two on North American Indian Anthropology. And I remember my Anthro professor telling us that the gods and totems of the various tribes were expressions of how they wanted to see themselves. A tribe wanted to regard themselves as fierce like the bear or all-seeing like the eagle or cunning like the fox, so the bear-spirit or the eagle-spirit or the fox-spirit were what they worshipped. Yes, there was the idea of a Great Spirit, just like the nations of the ancient Near East acknowledged a God Most High. But for pagan peoples throughout history, that Spirit or God wasn't the One you really worshipped. No, you made your offering to Baal, the storm god, or Ashtoreth, the goddess of sex and fertility. And you could feel proud of yourself, because your nation was strong like Baal and prolific like Ashtoreth. And even when you feared your deities, you could bribe them to do what you wanted by offering the right sacrifices-- like burning one of your own children alive in the ritual fire, then the deity really had to listen. Besides, wasn't it great to worship gods where sleeping with temple prostitutes was part of the liturgy? I mean, talk about a worship experience!

So if you're an Israelite with this going on all around you, your inborn human desire for novelty and change and control could and did lure you away from the Lord. Even though He was the One who really did give you all that was pleasant and good. Even though you were throwing yourself right into the dead metal arms of worthless idols. Even though you were deserting the One who'd saved you and turning to different gods, who were not gods at all.

How could the Lord not judge His people? How could He not take them into exile? They had to learn that He alone was Lord and God, that He was their Life, their Hope, and their Glory. Not for their sake alone, but for the sake of all of us who would one day come to believe in Jesus, the promised Messiah of Israel. God had to change them from idolatry back into His people.

And in the fullness of time, our Lord Christ, the Son of David, the promised Savior, was born into this world. And things were better, in a way. At least Jesus didn't have to combat open idolatry as Jeremiah or Elijah did. No, the anti-God change in Israel was more subtle. The Jewish leaders in Jesus' day didn't worship Baal, but something even more deceptive: They worshipped their own ability to keep the Law of God. They depended on their own capacity to be righteous as God is righteous. Their teaching was that if every Jew could keep all the ordinances of the Law all day for just one day, the kingdom of God would come. But here comes Jesus proclaiming that now that He's here, the kingdom of God has arrived! And preaching and pronouncing and doing miracles as if He Himself is the divine King! That was a change they couldn't accept, and it got Him crucified.

But you know, that was God's plan all along. And far from being a victim, Jesus Christ took His throne on that cross and shed His blood to pay for the sins of you and me. He took the punishment for all our idolatries, for all our disobedience, for all the times we turn our back on the Lord our God. In His rising again we have new and eternal life through Him. This is God's one and only plan for the salvation of mankind. This is the Gospel St. Paul and all the apostles preached throughout the Roman world and beyond. Repent and believe that Jesus perfectly kept the Law for you! Accept the forgiveness that He won for you on the cross! If you're Jewish, turn from your failed attempts to follow all the ordinances and statutes of Moses and depend on Christ alone! If you're a Gentile pagan, turn from your worthless idols and believe in the Son of the one, true, and everliving God! This change is good!

This message was for the Galatians and it's for us today. We, too, were in the slavery of sin until Jesus saved us by His blood. We, too, worshipped worthless idols of our own making. We needed and every day need the change only Christ can give.

But somehow we all keep hankering after the kind of change we can control. Paul is upset and angry with the Galatians because they have "so quickly desert[ed] the one who called them by the grace of Christ and [have turned] to a different gospel-- which is really no gospel at all." This gospel is what we read in verses 3 and 4: It's the good news of "Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father."

Now, who is this one Paul says they've turned from, in verse 6? Some might say it's the Apostle Paul himself. But the following verses contradict that. Paul says that even if he himself should come preaching a gospel other than redemption and forgiveness of sins in the shed blood of Jesus Christ, "let him be eternally condemned!" Or, more bluntly-speaking, may he go straight to hell! No, verse 3 of chapter 3 tells us it was God the Holy Spirit who had called the Galatians into faith in Christ, and He's the One who calls us. It says, "Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?"

Ah. There it is again. Abandoning the Spring of living water and digging out leaky cisterns that can't hold a drop to drink. The different so-called gospel the Galatians were running after is the same one too many Christians go after today. Perverters of the gospel had come to Galatia, preaching that to if you wanted to be really saved you had to keep the food laws, the feast day laws, the handwashing laws-- all the parts of the law of Moses that Jesus Himself had already fulfilled and abolished by His perfect righteous life and death. But the Galatians were ready to set His sacrifice aside to observe all that, just to "make sure."

Today we don't aspire to keeping all the kosher laws. But we're still tempted to desert the Holy Spirit and change over to the false "gospel" of human effort. For instance, do you believe that Christianity is fundamentally about loving your neighbor as yourself and being good so God will reward you in this life and the next? If so, welcome to the land of leaky cisterns. Welcome to the approval of men instead of the approval of God.

Brothers and sisters, loving your neighbor as yourself is the result of the gospel of Jesus Christ! We love our neighbor because God has first loved us in the death and resurrection of His Son. Through Christ He changes us so we can truly love God and our neighbor. It is not our own effort that produces good fruit for God, but the Spirit working in us. Even our trust in Him is not something we work up on our own; our faith itself is a gift from our Father in heaven.

Jesus does it all! That's why Paul has to remind the Galatians-- and us-- that his apostleship is not from man or by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Christ from the dead. Because there are teachers even today who claim Paul got it wrong. That all his preaching of the blood atonement was just a distraction from the "simple, pure gospel of walking in Jesus' footsteps" that the Savior "really preached." I don't know what so-called Savior these people are talking about, but he's not the Jesus Christ who shed His blood on the cross to reconcile you and me to Almighty God.

The idolatrous so-called "gospel" of salvation by our own efforts has been popular since the Garden of Eden. But the good news is, you don't have to be drawn away by it. You don't even have to depend on your own efforts not to be drawn away by it! Believe God in His word: Jesus has paid for all your sins. Trust Him and know that you have the Holy Spirit living in you, to lead you in the paths of righteousness, for His name's sake. And when you stray, as we all do daily, accept the forgiveness He has won for you.

Rest and rejoice in the change the Lord has made in you, and never change from the true and only Gospel of Jesus Christ, who gave himself for your sins to rescue you from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Living in the Salvation of the Lord

Texts: Isaiah 26:1-15; Titus 2:11 - 3:11

TOWARDS THE END OF MY 3rd grade year, my parents split up. My mom moved herself and us kids to our grandparents'. That meant starting at a whole new school for 4th grade, and, let me tell you, things did not go well. My new class liked games I hated and had strange rules about what new kids should and shouldn't do and I didn't figure out which end was up till it was too late. At my old school I was one of the popular kids, I had lots of friends, and I was in on everything. At the new school, most of the time during recess, when I wasn't actually being bullied, I found myself alone on the hill next to the playground, just sitting there thinking. I thought about God and why He was letting all this happen to me. And I decided it was because the year before at my old school I'd helped tease a new girl whose mother had died and who only had her father to raise her. I never teased her about that, no, but I was ready as anybody else to make her feel uncomfortable. Because she was, well, different.

Frankly, I thought God was overdoing it with the punishment. I'd say, "Lord, I wasn't that mean to her!" But I never questioned that I was getting divine retribution for my sins. I was a church-going kid, and I knew I was supposed to be good. And if I wasn't good, God would punish me for it.

Because that's the way it's supposed to work, isn't it? If you're a Christian, you read the Bible to find out what God wants of you, and you do your best to follow His rules? And if you do, He'll reward you with salvation, and if you mess up, He'll punish you for what you've done wrong. And hopefully your good works will outweigh your bad and you'll make it into heaven in the end. Why shouldn't we believe that about Christianity? That's what every religion in the world teaches, why not ours?

But that's not what the Bible teaches about Christianity. Not at all. And our reading from Titus shows us how amazingly different our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ really is, so we can joyfully live in His salvation and never have to be afraid again.

If belonging to Jesus were about our human efforts to be good, the ancient Cretans would have been total failures at it. As you probably know, Crete is a large island in the Mediterranean Sea, about a hundred miles south of mainland Greece. About thirty years after Jesus died and rose again, Paul and Titus made a missionary journey there, and successfully planted churches in many of the Cretan towns. Paul returned to Athens, but as we read in chapter 1, he left Titus on the island that he "might straighten out what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town." All churches need good leadership, but the Cretan churches needed it especially, because they were going to have to live in opposition to a very difficult, very wicked culture. All sort of sins abounded all around the pagan world, but the Cretans were a special case. Paul writes, "Even one of their own prophets has said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.'" Yikes! Not exactly what you'd call ethnically-sensitive or politically-correct, is it? But many writers of the time bear out the truth of the statement. Cretans were infamous for being habitual liars. I don't mean fish-story liars, but cheat-you-out-of-house-and-home liars. They were known around the Mediterranean for being vengeful and vindictive, men who'd cut your throat if you looked at them cross-eyed-- that is, when they weren't lying about feeding their faces and refusing to work.

And now many of these people had become Christians. Their lives needed to demonstrate the holiness and righteousness of God. What if Paul had written to Titus something like, "Titus, my son, you have many Cretan Jews there in your congregations: you make them elders so they can teach the Gentile believers the Law of Moses. That way they'll know what's right and what's wrong. The Law'll make honest, gentle, and industrious citizens out of them"? Would that have been the way of Christ? What if he'd written, "Titus, tell them that Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If the Cretans can get that behavior down, they'll be good Christians and God will be pleased with them"? What if?

But Paul didn't write that, because that's not the Gospel. Paul does direct Titus to teach the church members good and godly behavior, according to sound doctrine. But what is that sound doctrine? Here it is, as it's written in Titus 2:11: "For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men." Or, as the Greek says, to all persons. All our good Christian behavior comes after what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. All our striving to please God is how we live in the salvation He has provided for us.

God's grace that brings salvation comes first! Our Isaiah 26 reading shows us that salvation has always been a work of the grace of God. Isaiah writes, "You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast [or, him whose mind is stayed on You], because he trusts in you." Even from of old, God's people were called to keep the Law because first of all God had proved Himself to be gracious and trustworthy.

Isaiah looked forward to the time when the gracious salvation of God would be perfectly revealed to all humanity in the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. Now Jesus has come and has perfectly kept the Law that we could never fulfill. Now He has died to ward off the wrath of God that we deserved for our sins and risen again to give us new and everlasting life. Now Jesus has put His Spirit in us so that we can say "No!" to ungodliness and worldly passions, and "Yes!" to self-control, uprightness, and godliness.

Could the Cretans do that without Christ saving them first? Could we? Of course not. For as Paul writes in verse 3 of chapter 3, "At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another." Paul includes himself and Titus in this guilty verdict, and when we look at ourselves, we have to admit it's true of us, too. We've never physically taken someone's life, but we certainly have dehumanized others, refused to forgive, or wished someone was dead in our hearts. We've all been led astray by what we felt like doing, so we failed in our duty to God and our neighbor. We've been rude and proud; we've gossiped and envied; we've disobeyed our parents, our teachers, the law of the land, and the Law of God itself. Not one of us can claim to be worthy to stand before a holy God, and He's not interested in our stories that what we've done isn't "that bad" or that He should punish somebody else who's so much worse, instead. Even when we try to do good our motives are mixed, our deeds are polluted, and we can never meet the standard He has given us in His holy law. How can we possibly please God? What can people like the Cretans or people like ourselves do to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly in this present age?

Nothing. We can do nothing at all. Left to ourselves, we can expect only judgment. "But," says Paul, "when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy." As the hymn puts it, "'Tis mercy all, immense and free! For O my God, it found out me!" We didn't deserve it, we could never earn it, God would have been perfectly justified in letting us all go to perdition as our sins deserved. But in His mercy "He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior." Our triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, poured out His salvation on us so we no longer have to fear the judgment of the law! By His free, unmerited, boundless grace He has justified you and me, declaring us Not Guilty and giving us credit for Christ's righteousness. He did this to make us heirs of His, looking forward in hope to all the riches of eternal life. As it says in chapter 2, verse 13, we now wait for that blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. He has already redeemed us from the power of wickedness, and now He is in the process of purifying us, making us fit to be His very own, worthy to live with Him forever. Now, through His finished work, Jesus Christ is making us into people who are eager to do what is good.

Not fearful of doing what is bad, but eager to do good! Now through the grace we have from God, we can live in the salvation He gives and do what is godly, righteous, and self-controlled because we are thankful to Him for what He has done for us. Because He's put a new heart in us and we want to, not because the Law has forced us to!

So do we just lie back and let the Spirit work? No, God gives us the means of grace in His Word and Sacraments and we must not neglect them. So Paul tells Titus to be sure to teach these things. Titus, teach the salvation we have in Christ and the new life that flows from it! Titus, teach the sound doctrine of salvation in Christ alone through faith alone! Titus, "encourage and rebuke with all authority. Do not let anyone despise you." We ministers and elders are charged to encourage those who are doing good, to rebuke those who are doing evil, and to help people to know the difference. Some might read "Do not let anyone despise you" as giving the pastor license to throw his or her weight around. Not at all. This command assumes that the minister first has submitted himself to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and is teaching and guiding according to God's truth. When the faithful pastor is rightly teaching the revealed Word, to despise him or her is to despise God and His mercy.

And so, as it says in 3:8, the minister of Christ is to stress what the Lord has done for us and what He has rescued us from. We have trusted in God, and so now with joy we can be careful to devote ourselves to doing what is good. Now we can reap the benefits of a holy and righteous life, which is excellent and profitable for everyone.

This is the reward of our faith. Because Jesus has saved us, we can live in our salvation and please God through the Holy Spirit He has given. But the Lord knows we're often tempted to go back to our old ways. The old Adam and the old Eve in us are like weed seeds in a garden plot wanting to sprout up and choke out the good plantings again and again. It's our responsibility as Christians to keep running to Christ, to keep reading His Word, to keep calling on His Holy Spirit to enable us to say No to what is hateful to God and harmful to our neighbors and ourselves.

And it's the responsibility of the pastor and the elders swiftly to deal with problems that can disrupt the church and make our life in Christ more difficult. In verses 9-11 of chapter 3 Paul calls Titus to go against the Cretan culture of his time. This command is for today's church leaders, too. The world tells us to "celebrate diversity." But not when that diversity means departing from the truth that comes in Jesus Christ. We don't have many people today teaching we should return to keeping the Jewish kosher laws. More frequently our modern heresies say we should integrate Hindu or Muslim or nature-worshipping elements into our church services. Or believe in special revelations from the Holy Spirit that have nothing to do with God's revealed Word. We see it when Christians promote popular authors who allege that Christianity used to involve goddess worship or who invite their readers to doubt the truth of Scripture. When false teachers like that show up in the church, the leadership should warn them once, twice. Who knows, they may be sincerely mistaken and willing to repent. But if they will not listen, Paul says, have nothing to do with them. They have rejected the saving grace they were offered in Jesus Christ. They are warped, sinful, and self-condemned.

But you have received the grace of God that brings salvation. This is His good news to you whether you've been a Christian for sixty years or if the Holy Spirit is working in your heart to save you, today. Enough with fretting over being good so God will reward you with heaven! Believe in Jesus Christ: He has taken the punishment for your sins on the cross. Trust in His goodness: He has been good in your behalf. Receive the riches of His grace that He pours out upon you by His Holy Spirit, and live in the salvation of the Lord. Serve Him in true humility and joy, knowing that it is Christ who is working in you, both to will and to do. For as Isaiah the prophet says, "LORD, you establish peace for us; all that we have accomplished you have done for us." All honor, glory, wisdom and strength be to You, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and forever more. Amen.

Our Real Tangible Spiritual Resurrection Bodies

Texts: 1 Corinthians 15:12-20 & 35-49; Luke 24:33-49

AS I MENTIONED DURING the Joys and Concerns, I'm being treated for Stage 1C ovarian cancer. So a week or two ago I was sitting on a neighbor's front porch with her and her sister-in-law who was visiting from Denver. My neighbor had told her relative that I was undergoing chemotherapy, and she was very curious about the whole thing. At one point she asked, "Are you afraid to die?" I told her my surgeon says it's very probable I'm cured already, and we're just doing the chemo just in case. Still, if the cancer comes back anyway, I just have to remember how wonderfully much Jesus loves me and what He's done for me. "I believe in the resurrection of the body," I said. "You mean the resurrection of the spirit," said my neighbor. "No," I replied, "the resurrection of the body. Just like Jesus rose again with a real, glorified human body, we'll be like Him and have the same." My neighbor wasn't so sure she liked that idea. Don't our bodies just give us trouble? Who'd want to be stuck with one for all eternity?

Well, it's common for us humans not to be too excited about the idea of the bodily resurrection of the dead. Once after one of my seminary classmates had guest preached on the subject, a man of that church, one of their board members, came up to me and said, "I always enjoy it so much when you Wycliffe people come and preach to us. You always bring such novel doctrine!" "‘Novel'?" I asked him. "How's that?" "Well," he said, "I've always been taught that Jesus' resurrection body was just a spiritual one." "But," I said, "what about when He tells His disciples to feel Him to prove He still has solid flesh and bone?" "Oh," said the man, "Jesus just made it seem like He had a physical body so He wouldn't upset the disciples. He really was only a ghost!"

The doctrine of the bodily resurrection from the dead is a basic teaching of our Christian faith, but obviously many people have trouble accepting it. Even evangelical Christians can't always get their hearts around it: How many times at a funeral have you heard someone say their departed loved one is now an angel in heaven? But angels have nothing to do with resurrection. As it says in the book of Hebrews, angels are ministering spirits and Christ's promise of new life from the dead is not for them.

But it is for us, and I hope to show you how our bodily resurrection in Jesus Christ is not only true, but also is our hope and comfort and the very assurance of the everlasting love of God.

It all flows from Jesus and what He's done for us. Jesus' disciples weren't expecting Him to rise from the dead. Time and again He'd told them He'd be arrested and put to death and then rise on the third day, but their minds were kept from understanding it. So on the evening of that first Easter Sunday, when Jesus stood among them in the upper room, they were startled and frightened. Luke tells us they'd thought they were seeing a ghost! This was even after the two disciples who'd encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus had come back to Jerusalem and reported what had happened! Now, the disciples were good Jews. They expected there to be some sort of bodily resurrection way off in the future, at the end of the age. But the idea that someone they knew and loved could be standing live and in the flesh before them after being so very dead three days before was simply unthinkable.

Nevertheless, it was true! "Why are you troubled," Jesus said to them, "and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have."

Jesus was solid, and real! No way was He just a ghost or a spirit! No way was He fooling the disciples into thinking He had a resurrection body when He did not! And as they were still standing there in unbelief and amazement, Jesus asked them for some broiled fish and ate it in their presence!

Why did He go to such lengths to prove that He was truly, really, bodily risen? Why does it matter that Jesus' resurrection was truly a rising again, in the same body He died in, and not a mere apparition?

Because, as He told the disciples, this victory over death was what the whole of the Scriptures, all of God's grand and glorious plan, had all been leading up to! "This is what is written," Jesus reminded them (in verse 45), "The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations." Without the bodily resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, there is no forgiveness of sins! Without Jesus truly risen from the dead, death still would have its hold over Him. Without Jesus' rising again in the same body that went to the cross, death would still have its hold over us! If Christ is not truly risen, our sins are not atoned for, His life was in vain, and we are still under the wrath of God and headed straight to hell.

But as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, "But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep." Jesus is the prototype, the forerunner of all who sleep in death. His bodily resurrection proves that His sacrifice on the cross was sufficient, fully-acceptable to God to atone for our sins. Had Jesus not actually risen, everyone would have known that He had died for His own errors and crimes. But He was and is the Sinless One who had life-in-Himself, as it says in the Gospel according to St. John. He rose in all the triumph of that life and He gives it to all who believe in Him. Some people will tell you that the Christian message is about being nice to other people. Brothers and sisters, every religious system in the world has taught we should be nice to other people, they just differ in which people we're supposed to be nice to! No, the basic message of Christianity, the main point of the Gospel, is that Jesus Christ is died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was raised bodily on the third day, and that through faith in Him we have forgiveness of sins and life forever. Not just some of your sins, but all of them! Peace with God and glorious joy with Him, now and always!

You may be saying, "I certainly believe that!" But some of the members of the 1st century Corinthian church were rejecting the bodily resurrection outright. Most of them were originally Gentiles, and they'd grown up with the Greek notion that the body and its flesh was at best just a vehicle, a donkey, you might say, for the mind and the spirit. At worst the body was full of corruption and evil, and no better way to see that was in a rotting corpse. Why would anyone want to come back in that? Don't we all want to get free?

This is where we see the providence and wisdom of God in choosing the Jews as His Messianic people. The Hebrew understanding was that each person was a unity of body, mind, and spirit, and to be a full, living human you had to have all three, and this is what God affirms in raising His Son from the dead. You get so-called theologians who claim that Jesus was "risen" in the disciples' hearts and imaginations and that was enough. No, that is not enough, not if Jesus was truly to defeat death, His enemy and ours. Any so-called rising of the God-Man that left His flesh to decay would have been no victory over death at all. Paul wants us to understand that in Christ there is life and victory beyond the grave, life and victory for the whole man and the whole woman. We have hope in Christ for this life and for the next.

And so faithful Christian preaching is not useless and we are not lying about God and what He has done. Your faith in Christ means something! It has a purpose, and its purpose is to unite you with your Lord who truly came back from the grave in a glorious, renewed body. Its goes to assure you that you and every Christian loved one you have lost will truly stand glorified and solid in their renewed flesh and bone, praising and serving God in the new heaven and the new earth. Even though at the brink of the grave, we mourn, but we are not to be pitied, for our hope is good for more than this life: it extends to all eternity.

Nevertheless, some hold to the conviction that this life is all there is. They were the type in Corinth who were questioning, "How are the dead raised. With what kind of body will they come?"

You can see by Paul's reaction that they weren't earnestly seeking knowledge, because his first word in verse 36 is not "How foolish!" but rather, "Fool!" Which is what you called someone only when you were sure they were a double-dyed, deliberately-blind moral trifler. Open your eyes, he says! The very course of nature shows us that it's perfectly possible for the final, mature form of a body to be different and more complex than its initial form. We see that, don't we? Think of the tomato seeds you may've planted in your garden this spring. Didn't look anything like the luscious tomatoes I hope you're eating now, did they? Not only is that tomato plant different from the seed you planted, but you don't get that plant and that fruit unless you bury that seed in the dirt and allow it to break down. In short, to die. Every day in every garden, in every farmer's field new life comes from death; isn't God, who is the ultimate Gardener, able to bring new life from our mortal bodies?

And then, there are all sorts of types of bodies in this world: human, animal, fish, bird, and on and on. We don't say, "Well, humans can't breathe in water, so I don't believe in a creature that can." No, we know that fish exist. Their makeup is different, and so they can do things humans cannot. In the same way, our resurrection bodies will be able to do things our mortal bodies cannot. The Bible does not go into a lot of detail, but from the example of Jesus, we can see that we will have power over nature so that we can enjoy it when we want to-- as in Jesus eating the broiled fish-- but we won't be hampered or hindered by it: Think of Him being able simply to appear in the upper room despite the locked door.

And for those who think the resurrection body will just be these same weak ones resuscitated, St. Paul reminds us that different bodies have different kinds of splendor. Our bodies now do have a certain kind of splendor, but it will be nothing compared to what we shall be like when we are raised from the death and are made like our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. For what was sown, or buried, is perishable. Obviously-- for the person died. But the renewed flesh Jesus gives can never die again. Dead flesh is something dishonorable, to be gotten out of sight as soon as possible. But our renewed flesh will be clothed in honor when we're raised at the last day, for we will share in the glory that is Christ's. The body that dies is weak and powerless; it is raised in the power of the everliving God. It is buried a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

But many people read this word "spiritual" and say "See! Our bodies in heaven won't be physical! We'll be like the angels, who are all spirits!" But that's making the wrong contrast. The comparison isn't between "physical" and "spiritual" as regards the composition of our resurrection bodies; no, it's between "natural" and "spiritual," referring to how each kind of body is made alive. Look at it this way: our bodies here on earth have a lot in common with those of other animals. All animals-- humans, dogs, cats, cows, whatever, have a soul or what our ancestors called "the breath of life." As Paul quotes Genesis 2:7, "the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." That's the natural way of things. And when that soul or or anima departs, the creature is no longer alive. But the resurrection body will be different. For before it was quickened by the soul, but then it will be made alive by the Spirit of God and can never die.

How can this be? Compare Adam and Christ, who is called the last or ultimate Adam. Our ancestor Adam was made of dust, and to dust he returned. Our Saviour Jesus Christ also shared our dust, but His life was from above, from heaven, and so the grave could not hold Him. Jesus is the Man from heaven who puts His Spirit in us to make us alive and to cause our weak and mortal bodies to be raised up glorious and immortal like His own.

Our flesh and blood as it now is cannot inherit the kingdom of God. But the same power that raised Jesus from the dead will raise our mortal bodies as well and make them like His own. This is a truth that all the religious systems and philosophies of this world could never conceive. It took Jesus the Son of God to reveal it to us, and He is the one who made it possible.

So give glory to God and rejoice in the resurrection victory He gives! It is your hope and your shield and the perfection of all God's plans for you. Already Jesus has put His Holy Spirit in you, as a down payment to prove that you will live eternally with Him. Not as a ghost, not as a spirit, not even as an angel in heaven, but as something much better: As a splendid, bodily, spiritual human being, who with all His saints will glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus!

The Liberty of the Lord's Day

Texts: Exodus 20:8-11 & Deuteronomy 5:12-15; Colossians 2:13-17; Luke 13:10-17

LET ME SET A SCENE before your mind's eye:

It's Sunday in rural America, some time in the 19th century. A Presbyterian family is walking through the fields, on their way home from morning worship. One of the daughters says to her sister, "Milly, I do admire the way you've trimmed your bonnet! When we get home, won't you show me how you tied the ribbon just so?" Immediately, the mother rebukes her: "Eliza, you mustn't be thinking about worldly things like bonnets on the Sabbath! And how can you talk about working on one on the Lord's Day! I'm ashamed of you!" Meanwhile, the young son has run ahead. When the rest of the family catch up, they see he's skipping stones across the creek. "Thomas!" thunders his father. "Stop that immediately!" "But Papa," says the boy, "You never said I mightn't skip stones!" "No," his father replies, "but the Fourth Commandment says we must put aside all worldly recreations today and occupy ourselves with God alone! It's our Sabbath duty!" With the children duly chastened, the family proceed home in silence.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, what do you think? Wouldn't it be a good thing if we could return to the high Lord's Day standards of our ancestors? Surely even their strict observance would be better than sleeping in and ignoring God on Sundays, or going in to work or telecommuting 24/7! Is Sabbatarianism how we should keep the Lord's Day?

I submit to you, No. The Lord's Day is not the Jewish Sabbath; it's our day of Christian liberty, and the Word of God shows us what that holy liberty is, Whom it comes from, and how it can be enjoyed.

To appreciate the liberty of the Lord's Day, we need to understand how it's different from the Sabbath ordained for our spiritual ancestors the Jews.

The Fourth Commandment, to keep the Sabbath day, is found in both Exodus and Deuteronomy. Both versions say the seventh day is to be kept holy--the Hebrew word "Shabat" (Sabbath) means "rest" and "seventh." Both renditions say that on that day the people of Israel and the immigrants within their gates were to refrain from work. Deuteronomy includes the beasts of burden, but the point is the same. But in these two readings the theological grounding for ceasing work is different. In Exodus we read,

For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

The Sabbath day ordinance in Exodus is based on God's resting from His work of creation. Did God rest on that cosmic seventh day because He was tired? No, He rested because He had finished all His creative work. Figuratively-speaking, now He could "sit down" and enjoy the "very-goodness" of what He had made. That resting of God from His work of Creation has never ended from the time the world began. And so the Sabbath commandment was Israel's royal summons weekly to enter into the rest that God enjoys forever. It was a time to rejoice in God and in God's perfect work. God was and is in control, He made all things for mankind to enjoy, and so His people were free to cease from their labors and trust Him to provide.

When the Ten Commandments are repeated in Deuteronomy, a different reason is cited for the Sabbath rest. It says,

Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.

Here is Sabbath liberation indeed! In Egypt, the children of Israel had no rest. The weeks and months were a continual round of slave labor and cruel drudgery. They could never have escaped Pharaoh and his armies by themselves. But in their utter helplessness, the Lord God had reached out His mighty hand and set them free. On the Sabbath day His redeemed people were physically to rest in the Lord, rejoicing that He had "removed the burden from their shoulders; their hands were set free from the basket," as it says in Psalm 81. The seventh day was their weekly reminder that it was not their effort that achieved their redemption, but the arm of Yahweh God alone.

So each Sabbath day, Israel participated in God's rest from His work in creation and celebrated His freeing them from bondage. The bodily rest was a picture of the spiritual rest they enjoyed in God.

At least, that was the command. But the ancient Israelites were no better at resting in the work of the Lord than we are. So God gave sanctions through Moses to punish those who broke the Sabbath rest. Those who disobeyed and did any work were liable to the penalty of death. Why was the Lord so strict about Sabbath observance for Israel? Because, as it says in Exodus 31, the Sabbath was the sign of His covenant with them.

We tend to think of the Ten Commandments as a list of rules to live by. And Commandments five through ten do apply to all nations-- they summarize the natural law that God has written on every human heart. But in the context of the Law of Moses, the Ten Words are the summary of God's covenant with Israel as His chosen people. They're the basic terms of the treaty He drew up with them as His subjects and Him as their overlord. The Sabbath command in particular set Israel apart as holy to the Lord, distinct from all the other nations. The Sabbaths reminded the people on a weekly basis what the Lord their King had done to set them free and make them into His people. It was a particular sign of the Old Covenant.

So what about us? Is our Lord's Day observance on the first day of the week a sign of the New Covenant God has made with us in Jesus Christ? Are we to be like our forebears and take over ancient Jewish Sabbath observance wholesale, in order to be pleasing to God?

The testimony of Scripture says No.  First, because for God's New Covenant people, the Sabbath is not the sign of our inclusion in Christ; rather, our covenant sign and seal is the Holy Spirit, as we read in Ephesians 1 and 4. And secondly, because the weekly Sabbath was never the actual Sabbath rest that the Lord invites us into in Jesus, the promised Messiah. It was only a symbol, a foretaste of the liberation that God our Father would lead us into through the death and resurrection of His Son.

That's why Jesus was always running up against the Pharisees over Sabbath observance all through His earthly ministry. God had always meant the Sabbath to call to mind what He'd done for His people, so they'd rest in Him and not depend on their own works to save and sustain them. But the Pharisees got tangled up in the rules and regulations that defined Sabbath-keeping, as if it in itself and not the work of God were the important thing.

As so in our Luke passage Jesus restores the Sabbath as a day of liberation by releasing the crippled woman on that holy day. Strictly-speaking, the synagogue ruler is right to be indignant about what Christ had done. But the synagogue ruler was missing the greater point. The Sabbath was always a sign of the freedom of God! What better day for this daughter of Abraham to be set free from the infirmity that had bound her for eighteen long years! And who else could set her free than the One who was God in human flesh?

In another incident, related by St. Mark, Jesus asserts that as the Son of Man, He is Lord of the Sabbath. St. John records the time when Jesus healed the man by the pool of Siloam on the Sabbath. The Jewish leaders persecuted Him for it, and our Lord said to them, "My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working." Wait a minute. Didn't God "sit down," as it were, to His eternal rest on the seventh day of Creation? Yes, He eternally rested from His work of creation, but even in that eternal Sabbath the triune God continues to sustain and redeem what He has made.

In all His works Jesus identified Himself with the God who was rested in and enjoyed in the weekly Sabbath. He established Himself as the One who would be His people's eternal Sabbath rest. Israel's exodus from Egypt was God's great and powerful act of liberation; infinitely greater is the freedom from sin, death, and the devil that Jesus won for us on the cross. The material creation that God pronounced "very good" at the beginning of time was wonderful beyond words; far more worthy of praise is the new creation Jesus makes of us through His rising from the dead.

And so in the book of Hebrews it says, "There remains, then, a Sabbath rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from His." What is this "rest of God"? It is the eternal Sabbath rest our Lord Jesus achieved and became when He rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God the Father almighty. Christian friends, we do not observe the Jewish Sabbath with all its restrictions and regulations. In fact, as Gentile Christians we should not observe it, for it belongs to the Old Covenant that has passed away, and not to the New Covenant inaugurated in the shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians says that no one is to judge us as to Sabbath keeping-- that was part of the shadow of things to come, along with the annual festivals and the kosher laws. "The reality," he says, "is found in Christ."

Indeed, if we try to take the traditional seventh-day Jewish Sabbath observance over onto the first day of the week, we're returning to slavery under the Law. Instead, we celebrate the Lord's Day, the day of Resurrection, the day when Christ like a mighty conqueror triumphed in our behalf once and for all. He disarmed the demonic powers and authorities had bound us in sin and death and forever set us free! We were dead in our sins, and He made us alive in His blood! On the first day and every day let us rejoice in the great and wondrous liberty He has given!

So in one sense, we who are redeemed by Christ are utterly free to determine how we will spend the Lord's Day. As Paul says in Romans 14, "One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike." Nevertheless, Paul also says that, living or dying, all we do as Christians is done in relationship with and to the Lord. We belong to Christ, and all our days are His! We are not free to ignore Him, or to act as if our redemption means nothing. And for the Church as a whole, the Lord's Day is different. On the first day of the week Christ's body assembles to worship Him for the great salvation He has won for us. Here together we sing His praises, petition Him for our needs, participate in His blessed Sacraments, and learn more of His glory through the reading and preaching of His holy Word. How can anyone who claims to love the Lord voluntarily fail to come into His glorious presence?

But what if our jobs keep us on duty on the Lord's Day, and every other day besides? Yes, there are times when continual labor will be necessary, when there's an extraordinary deadline that has to be met or that's the only employment to be found. But I urge every Christian who finds himself always on that treadmill to examine himself. Whom do you fear more, God or your boss? Whose work are you relying on to provide for you, yours or that of the Lord God Almighty? Offer the difficulty up to your Lord Jesus and claim your Lord's Day liberty, for He has removed the burden from your back, and from the heavy basket He has set you free.

We do not observe the Jewish Sabbath. That belongs to the Old Covenant shadow that has passed way. Rather, as children of Christ's New Creation, we have even more reason to rest in the eternal Sabbath He has won for us! Not spiritually only, for we are physical creatures as well. It is good for us to cease our earthly labors one day out of each week, to rest and enjoy God and all His works. Not because we have to, or because He'll punish us if we don't, but because we are free to! The Lord who redeemed you and loves you has given you rest!

As New Covenant people, we must know that our true Sabbath rest is not mere ceasing from physical labor. Let us watch our hearts, lest we find ourselves working, working, working to gain or maintain our own salvation. That kind of forbidden work includes following rules and regulations about weekly Sabbath-keeping to earn God's favor! Do not break Christ's Sabbath rest by trying to defeat sin by your own works and virtues. To do that is to reject Christ, and the punishment for rejecting Christ is eternal death.

No, my friends. Only the Son of Man was strong and holy enough to accomplish the great work of redemption. Only Christ could make us into His new creation. And now He commands us to cease from our work forever and enter into His rest.

Will you come and enjoy the liberty of the Lord's Day? This first day of the week is our day of Resurrection, our festal day of freedom in Christ. This is the day the Lord alone has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!

Don't Lose Your Freedom!

Texts: Jeremiah 34:8-22; Galatians 5:1-15

LET ME WISH YOU A VERY happy and grateful Independence Day.

How blessed we are to enjoy the freedoms and privileges of living in the United States of America! This nation was founded on the principle that our rights and liberties are inalienable gifts of the one Creator God and that government exists to protect and preserve those rights, not to dole them out by its own authority. Never, never should we take our freedom for granted. Always and forever must we watch and work to maintain our liberties, whether we're struggling against an intrusive government, against overreaching institutions, or against our own self-indulgence and complacency. Other nations have benefited from America's principles of economic, religious, and personal freedom, but our land is still the last best hope of liberty in this world. If America were to fall into tyranny and slavery, we wouldn't suffer alone; the darkness would fall on all nations of the earth.

But, brothers and sisters in Christ, terrible as it would be for us to lose our freedom here in the United States of America, it would be nothing to the eternal disaster we'd suffer if we were to lose our freedom in Christ.

St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians has been called a testament to Christian liberty. But strangely enough, it's not filled with joyous, God-praising, send-up-the-Roman-candles celebration. No, all the way through it's about the strictest rebuke to God's people to be found anywhere outside of the Old Testament prophets. Why? Because the members of the Galatian church weren't celebrating their freedom in Christ. No, they were on the verge of heading back into slavery! In the first verse of our passage, the apostle writes, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." This message isn't just for the disciples who lived in the first century A.D.; it's also for us and for any other Christian person who might be tempted to let their spiritual freedom go.

To understand what the Holy Spirit is saying to us, we need to know how the institution of slavery worked in the ancient world, and especially in Israel. First of all, God never established slavery as something that was good in itself. There were pro-slavery people in these United States who claimed that in the 19th century, but they were wrong. There are anti-Christian, anti-Bible folks who claim that now in the 21st century, and they're wrong, too. Slavery in the ancient world was a human accommodation to the evils and difficulties of the human condition, and the Law of God regulated it so those evils wouldn't bear so hardly on those who were enslaved.

There were two general kinds of slavery. One was the forced servitude you got when one nation defeated another in war. It's like when Goliath challenged the Israelites and said if he beat Israel's champion, Israel would have to serve the Philistines, and if Israel's champion beat him, the Philistines would serve Israel. Then there was economic slavery, or bond-servitude, where a person would put his time and labor under the mastery of another person for a given period to pay back a debt or just to keep himself alive. Sometimes, bond-slavery was involuntary, as when a thief would be sentenced to work for his victim to make restitution, or when your creditors would be given the right to sell you and your entire family into slavery, to pay back what you owed them. Today we have bankruptcy for situations like that, but in the ancient world it was unthinkable that a debt would be dismissed by a third party like a bankruptcy court. Either you worked it off, or your creditor forgave you.

But the Law given through Moses said that if you had a slave who was a fellow-Hebrew, you could make him serve you only up to six years. The seventh year, you were to let him go free, regardless of how much he still owed. This reflected the fact that God almighty had set all Israel free from bondage to Pharaoh when He liberated them from Egypt. As they had been released from the yoke of the Egyptians so they could worship God and enjoy His Sabbath rest, so, too, their fellow Hebrews must be released from servitude at the beginning of their sabbatical year.

Nevertheless, slavery was something you wanted to avoid if at all possible. If you were a Hebrew and yoked under it, you counted the days till your seventh year would come around and you'd regain your liberty. If you were an Israelite enslaved in another country or a foreigner enslaved to an Israelite, you prayed for the day when your armies would march in and set you free.

So in Galatians chapter 15, St. Paul warns the Galatian church that if they let themselves be circumcised, it would be a return to spiritual slavery; Christ will be of no value to them at all. Today, if you're the average non-Jewish guy in America, circumcision is something your parents decided to have done or not have done to you when you were an infant, for health or aesthetic reasons. It has nothing to do with moral and ethical obligations or with one's relationship to God. But in Paul's day, it was the sign written in every Jewish male's body that he was pledged to keep the whole law of Moses down to the last I-dot and t-cross. It meant he hoped to find his blessedness and salvation in his own obedience. If a Gentile convert submitted to Jewish circumcision he voluntarily called down on himself all the covenant curses the law demanded if he didn't perfectly obey all the covenant decrees, statutes, and ordinances.

We see the effect of covenant curses in our reading from Jeremiah 34. For years past, the masters of Israel and Judah had disobeyed the law about freeing their fellow Hebrews after six years. They'd been keeping them in perpetual bondage. And now, with the Babylonians laying siege to Jerusalem, King Zedekiah and all the slaveholding people of Jerusalem made a solemn covenant to set all their fellow Jews free immediately, and never to enslave their countrymen and women at all again. When you made a covenant in those days, you didn't just lay your hand on a copy of the Torah and swear to do something; no, a covenant was made in blood. We see in verse 18 how a calf was slaughtered and split in two with the pieces laid on the ground with room to walk between them. And every man who made that covenant walked between those bloody pieces and swore before God that if he did not keep his word, that the Lord should slaughter him and make him like that dead, dismembered calf.

The Lord took this oath of theirs seriously. When these perjurers changed their minds and forced their former slaves back into bondage, God swore that He would bring back the Babylonians and give the oathbreakers into their hands for death and disgrace. They had called their own blood onto their heads, and blood it would be.

In the same way, circumcision cut a covenant of blood between each male Jew and the God of Israel. The shed blood declared, "May the Lord shed my blood unto death if I do not keep and obey all of His holy law."

But as Paul points out earlier in this letter, the law, holy and righteous as it was, could never bring anyone to the blessedness of God; rather, through our inability to keep it, it brought down the Old Covenant curses upon us.

You have probably heard from your preachers in the past that the law of Moses was made up of the ceremonial, the civil, and the moral codes. Circumcision bound a person to obey all three.

The ceremonial law set forth how the God of Israel was to be worshipped, and in the fullness of time God revealed that all the sacrifices and holy days looked forward to the perfect Lamb of God, Jesus Christ. With the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Christ, the ceremonial law was fulfilled and superseded. There is no longer any need for it.

Nevertheless, if any Christian should take upon himself Jewish circumcision, he would be obligating himself-- and his household-- to observe and participate in the temple rituals, turning his back on Jesus Christ who had come and set him free.

The civil law set out how things should be arranged politically and judicially in the commonwealth of God's holy people. God was Israel's true King, and they were to be righteous before Him. Thus the penalties that seem so severe to us, like stoning someone to death for adultery or breaking the Sabbath. These laws were designed to keep the nation pure and holy before God and the nations. In that Israel would be a fit channel for the coming of the Messiah, by whom all peoples would be blessed. Then Jesus our Messiah did come, and God made a new covenant in His blood and opened up citizenship in the holy nation to all people, Jew and Gentile alike. Ethnic Israel no longer was God's exclusive chosen people. And so Christ the civil code of the Law of Moses was fulfilled and superseded.

But if anyone should take upon himself Jewish circumcision, he would obligate himself to follow all the civil rules and bear all the penalties set out in the books of the Law.

That leaves the moral law, summed up as "Love your neighbor as yourself," and it binds all humanity, Jew and Gentile alike. Those who love the Lord can, like King David in Psalm 119, look into the law of God and marvel at its perfection, for it reflects the very glory and righteousness of God. But it also shows up how far short we fall of His glory. Never, ever, ever can we come anywhere near God's perfect holiness-- but that's the standard we have to attain, if we expect to gain life and blessing by keeping the moral law. In chapter 3 of Galatians Paul demonstrates that the law never could impart life to us. Rather, it was like a jailer who kept us locked up until Christ should come and declare us not guilty through faith in Him. Here in chapter 5 Paul says that by faith in Christ we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. Christ has come and taken the covenant curses on Himself. He paid for our lawbreaking with His sinless blood. So now the moral code has not been superseded or set aside, but in Christ we depend not upon our own obedience to gain blessedness with God, but upon His. Now the law is our friend and guide as our faith expresses itself through love to our neighbor and to God.

That is, if we truly are trusting in Christ alone and not taking on a yoke of slavery again. I doubt anyone here, male or female, loses sleep at night wondering if he ought to undergo Jewish circumcision to make sure he's in good with God. But we have a hundred different ways we try to return ourselves and others to the yoke of spiritual slavery.

Do you ever catch yourself saying, "Oh, she's a pretty good person. She does a lot of good things. God wouldn't keep her out of heaven just because she doesn't believe in Christ!" You're binding that person in slavery under the law.

Have you ever said, "I just can't forgive myself for what I did to him"? Or worse, "I can never forgive him for what he did to me"? That's rejecting the freedom you have in Christ and returning to slavery under the law.

How about the people who think that following Jesus is about doing good things and being good people so God will be pleased with them? Maybe sometimes those people are you and me! That is a turning away from the mercies and merits of Christ and obligating ourselves again to the law.

What about those who preach that the cross of Christ only served to show us how we should love other people, with nothing about how His righteous blood turned aside the wrath of God against our sin? In this way they would seek to abolish the offense of the cross. For it is offensive to our hyper-tolerant age to assert that Christ's sacrifice is the only way for anyone to come into proper relationship with our God and Father. But when we turn our backs on the blood atonement and preach the cross as merely a good example, we throw ourselves back into the clutches of the law.

We certainly are called to obedience, but obedience to the truth that is in Jesus Christ. He died for you, He rose for you, He sent His Holy Spirit to live in you and guide you. In Christ we are free to do what is good, to fulfill God's will as we could not when we in bondage to sin and the law. The sin that remains in us tries to get us to misuse our freedom in Christ to indulge our sinful natures. To assert our own rights. To abuse one another, even hurting our brothers and sisters in the church. Cling to your divine liberty and do not be enslaved to sin in the name of a false freedom! In Christ you are free to "Love your neighbor as yourself," because He lives in you, He loves your neighbor through you, and sets you free to do wonderful things in His name you never imagined you could do before.

On this Independence Day, be grateful for the earthly freedom God has given you in these United States. But even more, be grateful and praise His name forever for the eternal freedom He has given you in Jesus Christ His Son. This world will try to tempt you to find your redemption in keeping rules, codes, and laws, but that is the way back to slavery. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free: Free to be justified, free to serve, free to love. Amen.

Christ's Vision for Christ's Church

Texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6; 16-32; Matthew 28:16-20

WE CHRISTIANS HAVE OUR own language.

It's not just us, of course. So do doctors and computer programmers and football players. In the Church we have special theological words like "incarnation" and "resurrection" and "atonement." All Christians should learn them, because they say in one word what would take us preachers half a sermon to explain otherwise.

But this morning I thinking about something different, about the new and trendy words and phrases we come up with to try to keep ourselves relevant and cutting-edge. Phrases like "faith journey" and "worship experience" and "purpose-driven." Words like "missional" and "emergent" and "vision." All these terms have a kernel of meaning in them; maybe some more than others; what we must do as members of the body of Christ is make sure that those meanings match up with what the Holy Spirit has revealed to us about Christ and His Church in His written Word.

The word for today is "vision." Proverbs 29:18 says "Where there is no vision, the people perish." And it goes on to say, "but he that keepeth the law, happy is he." That tells us from the start that the true vision for God's people is always the one given by God. The Law of Moses was God's perfect picture of what life on earth would be like if His people would love Him with their whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, and if they would love their neighbors as themselves. Where that godly vision is lost, people do what is right in their own eyes, the covenant between God and man breaks down, and the end result is death.

In Christ and through Christ, we are God's new covenant people. We are the new Israel, His body, His Church. The vision that keeps us from perishing and gives us eternal blessing Christ Jesus Himself and His perfect will. This is God's revelation for His Church in every time and place. It's not something we have to reinvent to match our particular circumstances; we can read it plainly in the everlasting words of the Holy Scriptures. Hear now the vision for the Church that our Lord Himself declared to His disciples in Galilee after He rose from the dead:

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

Christ's vision for Christ's own church is that men and women of all nations should made members of His body, forgiven and saved by Him, following Him, being conformed to His image and obeying His commands. This vision is to be carried out in His authority and under His supervision, not in our power or according to our worldly ideas. Wherever the Scripture speaks of the purposes of Christ's church, it all fleshes out what it means for us to be His obedient baptised disciples, as Jesus Himself ordains here at the end of the Gospel of Matthew.
As this congregation embarks on your interim period, you will be called upon to define your vision for the church's future. I urge you to remain focussed on the vision Christ Himself has given. Make the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit your unwavering destination. From the very beginning of your interim process, I exhort you never to confuse methods and strategies with your ultimate goal, which must always be to glorify God as you add to your number and grow as faithful disciples of His Son Jesus Christ.

If you read very many Church Information Forms, you'd be shocked to see how few church vision or mission statements say anything about Jesus Christ at all. Our more liberal brethren in the PC(USA) tend to feel that the primary goal of the church is to carry out programs of social justice. But we evangelicals do Christ no honor by adopting the latest mega-church program for seeker-sensitive church growth. Or by demanding that our pastor come up with some unique new vision that somehow will work faster and better and-- you'll pardon the term-- sexier than Christ's own vision for His own church.

The trendy term for that is "vision-casting." The idea is that if the pastor is a really good vision-caster, the whole membership will get charged up with a glorious new vision of what the church should be and do, usually having to do with numbers, quantities, budgets, and so on. And that if the leadership can't or won't do this kind of "visioning," God can't or won't do anything with that church.

This process might be all right if it would leave the origin of the vision where it belongs: with God. It's no accident that the Hebrew word that Proverbs 29:18 that the King James Version translates as "vision" is rendered "revelation" in the New International Version. The vision or revelation that keeps us alive and makes us blessed is from God and not from ourselves. Making disciples by baptising and teaching people doesn't tend to conform to visionary thinking. It's plodding, ordinary, every day work. But it's the method of church growth that Jesus Himself has ordained.

But "vision-casting" by nature seems to try to go God one better. Frankly, the term itself gives me the willies. Maybe because it sounds so much like "spell-casting," which is witchcraft. Actually, "vision-casting" and "spell-casting" aren't so far different from one another, because both have to do with frail and fallen human beings trying to manipulate God's reality in spite of God's revealed will for their own profit and ends instead of for His glory.

False ministry and false visions were at the root of the disobedience that brought God's Old Testament people Israel to destruction and exile. "Woe," declares the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah, "woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture!" Woe to the priests and Levites who refused to care for the people! These shepherds were to offer worthy sacrifices to make atonement for the sins of the people, yes. That was part of their work. But they were also to instruct the people in the truth of the law and build them up spiritually. As it says in Malachi 2:7, "The lips of a priest ought to preserve knowledge, and from his mouth men should seek instruction—because he is the messenger of the LORD Almighty." But the priests and Levites of Jeremiah's time couldn't be bothered to teach the message of the Lord's will to the people. If some poor slob wanted to bring a lamb to the Temple to sacrifice it, yeah, okay, the priests'd get up and burn it on the altar, but they couldn't be bothered to instruct that Jew to make sure he understand how he'd sinned against the Lord. They didn't care whether ordinary Israelites knew what their sacrifices meant in terms of blood atonement and God forgiving them their sins. As long as the tasty animals kept coming, that was the thing. The priests and Levites by law got a portion of most sacrifices, and the ordinary people, the flock of God, represented a steady income for them, not pastoral responsibility. And so the Lord's sheep were scattered and driven away. Literally scattered, for the shepherds' neglect and the people's own disobedience brought the judgment of exile upon them, and they were taken captive by Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, and scattered among many nations in the greater Near East.

But Christ's vision for His church is that people should be made His disciples. How? First of all by baptising them. Unpopular as it may seem, it is important and essential that people be formally incorporated into His body by the sacrament of baptism. Baptism is the sign and seal of our dying to sin and rising to new life by the washing of Christ's blood, shed for us on the cross. No one can be Jesus' disciple who is unwilling to commit themselves and all they are to Him in holy baptism. For those who have been baptised previously, being His disciple in a local church involves reaffirming the covenant of baptism as we formally commit to join. Truly, there is no salvation outside the church-- for to belong to Christ is to belong to His body. And to belong to the Church Universal, we must physically join ourselves with a local congregation. This is Christ's vision for His church.

Why? Because the local congregation is where the godly teaching is done! It's where the sheep are cared for and fed. But many "seeker sensitive" or "new vision" pastors go the way of the scattering shepherds of Jeremiah's time. They say that church members should feed and pastor themselves, that all the leadership's effort should go towards attracting seekers and unbelievers. But why should a church want to attract new believers if not to instruct them in the ways of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

You may be thinking that Concord Church would never fall into that trap. I hope that's true. But there's another snare that trips up traditional churches, that's just as deadly. And that's confusing pastoral care with chaplaincy or social visiting. Yes, we pastors must be present with the people, both in times of crisis and ordinarily, house to house. But if we drink your coffee but never offer to pray with you, if we never inquire after your spiritual welfare, if we never instruct you one-on-one in the faith once delivered to the saints, if we never call you to repentance over offenses you're trying to hide, rebuke us and call us back to our Christ-given jobs! Teaching disciples to obey everything Jesus has commanded us certainly starts in the pulpit, but it doesn't end there!

But oh! said the false prophets of Jeremiah's day! Oh! say the false visionaries of our time! Don't ever talk to people about their sin! Tell them that God loves them just as they are! You'll never meet your membership objectives if you offend people!

Yes, it's true that when God loves you, He loves you just as you are. But He doesn't love you in and with and for your sins. He loves you because you are elect in Jesus Christ and when He looks at you, He sees not your sin, but the righteousness of His Son.

That's not what the false prophets ancient and modern mean, though. They mean that sin means nothing to God and He's willing to overlook it, Just Because. But the Lord Almighty says through Jeremiah,

"Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you;
they fill you with false hopes.
They speak visions from their own minds,
not from the mouth of the LORD.
They keep saying to those who despise me,
‘The LORD says: You will have peace.'
And to all who follow the stubbornness of their hearts
they say, ‘No harm will come to you.'"

Sound familiar? How many of you have been to the funeral of someone who spent his life despising Christ and His salvation, and the preacher inferred that the deceased was in heaven even now? I'm sure you never heard such a thing out of Harper Brady, but there are ministers those who think their pastoral office requires them to tell such lies, in order to grow the church!

The prophet or preacher who stands in the council of God will teach the people of God to hate their sin and to love the obedience of Jesus Christ their Lord. He or she will instruct the members of the church in the awesome greatness of God, who fills heaven and earth and sees everything, even the innermost secret places of our hearts and minds. The leader who fulfills Christ's vision for Christ's church will speak the word of the Lord faithfully, and let it do its work. Christ-centered, cross-focussed, law-and-gospel preaching is not as exciting as lights and sound systems and professional-quality praise bands. It's not as quick at gaining adherents as messages that promise instant prosperity and rapturous marriages and perfectly-behaved kids. It's not as "inspiring" as a five-year plan for three new campuses and a tenfold increase in church revenue. But it is effective in making disciples for Christ in His Church, for, declares the Lord, "Is not my word like fire, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" That word of God kindles our cold hearts with love for Him and burns away in us all that is not holy and all that is not true. The word of His instruction breaks down our hard-heartedness and teaches us to hate our sin and turn to Him for forgiveness and peace.

"Let the prophet who has a dream tell his dream," says the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah, "but let the one who has my word speak it faithfully." Jesus Christ has set forth His vision for His church in His Holy Word, and He commands this congregation and every other church that bears His name to search the Scriptures and find it written there for themselves. Why should we waste our time on dreams the Lord has not given and will not bless? "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," says our Lord. He has the right to determine our vision for our churches, and this He has done. He has the power to make sure His revealed will will come to fruition in His Church, and this He will do.

And so, Concord Presbyterian Church, go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything our Lord Jesus Christ has commanded us. And surely He is with you always, to the very end of the age.