The Master's Property

Texts:    2 Timothy 4:1-5; Matthew 25:14-30

    HAVE YOU EVER DONE RENOVATIONS to your house?  Or maybe you watch DIY programs like Holmes Inspection on TV.  If you do, you know how it goes.  You start out to do some improvement, to put in a new bathroom or whatever, but when you do the tear-out you discover there's rot in the walls or the foundation is weak or the plumbing is about to burst.  And instead of getting straight to the fun things like tiling and painting, you have to go back and redo the basic structure.

        We're in that position this morning as we look at Jesus' parable of the talents as it comes to us in Matthew chapter 25, verses 14-30. We've got to do some tearing out before we can begin to build.  The problem is this word "talent."  In ancient times, it had nothing to do with someone's personal endowments or abilities, it was simply a unit of weight, used especially for mass quantities of precious metals.  Over the centuries, however, the English language has taken this word, from this very parable, and changed its meaning to connote our God-given natural abilities, or, as we say, our talents.  So we build on that to conclude that Jesus will hold us accountable for how we put our natural gifts like singing or reasoning or entrepreneurship into service for Him.

    And this is true. He will hold us accountable for that.  But in this parable the word "talents" is referring to something different from our abilities.  Look at verse 15.  It says there that the master gave talents of money to each of his servants, "each according to his ability."  The servants' abilities or natural gifts were something different from the property their master entrusted to them. What profit they would make from it would go along with the abilities-- or, as we would say, the talents-- they already had.

    The talents in this parable do not naturally belong to the servants themselves.  They are, as it says in verse 14, the master's property.  Very valuable property, too.  The weight of a talent varied across the ancient world, but in 1st century occupied Israel it came to 2,080 ounces.  To get an idea of its value, let's reckon it up as gold.  At yesterday's price, one of those talents would have been worth $3,718,728.00.  Just one.  This property is the master's, and it is very, very precious.

    As we heard last week, in these parables our Lord is answering the disciples' question in Matthew 24:3, " . . . what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?"  In the parable of the talents, a master goes away, and after a long time, the master returns.  The Master is Christ, and He warns us to be prepared for His coming at the end of the age. 

    Jesus begins the parable by saying, "Again, it will be like . . . " What will what be like?  Look back at verse 1 of chapter 25: "At that time"-- the time of His coming and the end of the age-- "the kingdom of heaven will be like . . . "  He is speaking of the time of His return.  So when Christ returns as Judge, it will be like a master who has entrusted his great and precious property to his servants and gone away, expecting to find they've turned a profit with it when he returns to settle his accounts. 

    Brothers and sisters, the kingdom of God will not begin with the moment of Christ's return.  We who believe in Him live under Jesus' rulership right now, and it affects how we His servants work with His property in the long weeks and months and years until He comes.

    So what is this property He puts into the hands of His servants?  If it isn't our natural abilities, if it isn't even the spiritual gifts He gives us for ministry, what could it be?

    We can find a clue in Matthew 13, in the parable of the sower.  There, various kinds of soil receive the same seed and yield different amounts of increase, depending on the nature of the soil.  In the parable of the talents, different kinds of servants receive the same kind of money in different amounts and yield different amounts of increase, depending on the nature of their abilities and attitudes.  Jesus tells us in Matthew 13:19 that the seed sown is the message about the kingdom of heaven.  The Master's property in Matthew 25 are the same thing: It is the good news about Jesus Christ the Son of God, come to earth to establish the kingdom of God as its divine Lord and King.  As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15,

    [This is] the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. . . .  that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures [and appeared to many faithful witnesses].

Christ's servants the apostles were good and faithful.  By their labors we have received the trust of this good news, too.  His glorious gospel is the currency of the kingdom, and in this parable Jesus our Master charges us to put it to work for Him until He comes.

    So again, if we're talking gold, one servant receives five talents, worth around $18,600,000 at today's prices; one is entrusted with two, about $7,400,000; and the last servant is handed one talent at about $3,700,000.  Verse 16 says the first man immediately put his five talents to work. This man exerted himself to do business with his master's property so it might be increased, and the second servant did the same.

    So how do we exert ourselves in the business of the Gospel?  What is the Gospel's business, anyway?  The Word of Christ on earth has three primary purposes: For grace-- that is, to bring salvation and redemption to the sinner; for growth-- to build up the Church and each individual member in it so we achieve the full likeness of Jesus our Saviour; and for glory-- for the greater glory of God, and for the ultimate glorification of all His saints in Him.

    Each of us is given the Good News of Christ crucified and risen for us and for the sins of the world.  Our depth of understanding may be greater or lesser, but each of us in the Church have heard-- or should be hearing-- what Jesus has done for us.  According to the abilities we have from God, we minister this Word to one another and to the pagan at our door, so that grace, growth, and glory may increase and abound.

    Five-talent people might be those like St. Paul, or, more recently, someone like C. S. Lewis.  When the Holy Spirit brought him out of the darkness of modern paganism, Lewis took the wonderful riches of Christ's gift of salvation and multiplied it in his speaking and writing, and his profit to his Master increases to this day all around the world.

    We can't all be five-talent servants of our Lord.  But we can be good and faithful in our sphere and according to our abilities.  We can be like that wise Sunday School teacher who influenced the children in the church for grace, growth, and God's glory up to the time of her death.  We can be godly parents who lead our children in the way of the Lord, and never take it for granted that they know that Jesus died for them.  We can exert ourselves to increase in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ as we study His word and participate in His sacraments.  We can be good capitalists of the Word-- if I dare use the term in these protesting times-- and follow Paul's charge to Timothy in 2 Timothy chapter 4, being prepared in season and out of season to communicate the Word of Christ.  For all Scripture-- all of which speaks of Christ, as He Himself reminds us-- is God-breathed and is useful-- profitable-- for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.  So, put it to work, beginning in your own life and the life of your household.  Paul's charge applies especially to us pastors and elders, but all of us who have been entrusted with the good news of Jesus Christ should be prepared at all times to give anyone who asks a reason for the kingdom hope that is within us, so our Master's property might increase.

    What about the third servant?  The other two each increase their master's property 100% and the master commends them, entrusts them even more responsibility, and invites them to share in his great happiness.  But this man buries his $3,700,000 in the ground and very disrespectfully hands it back to his master on his return.  In our understanding of the parable, did he ever truly belong to Jesus Christ at all?

    As any human being belongs to God, yes.  Physically, he was a resident worker in the master's household.  But in his heart and mind, he was not the master's man.  He's like those who sit in church for decades letting the preaching wash over them, but they're never actually converted.  They think they know all about God and what He's really like, and they think they're smarter than He is.  And kinder and more loving, too.  The Jews in Jesus' day knew that God for centuries had made a practice of only saving a remnant of His chosen people. But then He'd go and have mercy on Gentiles.  How was that fair?  "Hey, God, don't You have enough to do taking care of us Jews?  Why meddle with people who pledge allegiance to other gods?  They don't belong to You!"  And so in the parable, "Master, I knew you were a hard man, harvesting where you had not sown and gathering where you had not scattered seed."  A man like that today might reason, "God's going to save whoever He's going to save, whether I say anything to anybody about Jesus or not.  And He'll send to hell anybody He feels like, even if they're really good people.  So why should I get myself in trouble in this world by going around talking about Jesus?  Let God get back what He gave, and keep me out of it."

    This is a terrible distortion of the truth.  But many church members use it so they don't have to exert themselves to increase their Master's property in the kingdom of heaven.  The master in verse 26 in effect says, "So that was your opinion of me?  In that case, you should truly have been afraid to return my money to me profitless.  You should've at least put the money to the bankers so I'd get some interest out of it."

    Now, I humbly admit that I am not certain how our Lord wants us to understand and apply this.  Most Bible commentators I've read skip right over it!  Jews weren't allowed to charge interest, so perhaps the master is saying, "All right, you've called me a cruel man and a thief; why didn't you put my money out at interest so you could call me a usurer, too?"  In that case, it would be a warning against speaking ill of our Lord and God.  But Jesus often used the unrighteous practices and people of this world to illustrate truths about the good of the kingdom of heaven. So Jesus could be saying to so-called followers like that, "You were afraid to speak the Gospel yourself?  Very well, you should at least have opened your home to My apostles who were speaking it.  You should have supported My missionaries and evangelists, even if you never said a word about Me yourself.  Then you would have received for Me some of what they earned."  (This is just a possibility, and if the Holy Spirit commends it to you, good; if not, let it alone.)

    But Jesus' conclusion is clear: As Paul says, when Christ, the righteous Judge, returns on the last day, He will reward His good and faithful servants with a crown of righteousness-- a crown that will signify their responsibility over much more than He entrusted to them on this earth.  But those who take the Gospel for granted, those who think the message of Christ crucified is a word of intolerance and exclusion, those who play it safe in church and bury their Master's property, they will be cast away from His presence into outer darkness forever.  They will find that what they thought they had of Christianity and Jesus will be taken away, but those who truly have laid hold on the truth of the gospel and increased grace, growth, and God's glory in this world, they'll find their share in Jesus Christ and His work wonderfully increased in the world to come.

    Which kind of servant will you and I be?  Our Master Jesus has entrusted His property to us, the infinitely valuable good news of sins forgiven in His blood.  He has also given us abilities, natural and spiritual, so we can put the Gospel to work.  May we be those receive His trust and immediately set to work for the increase of His kingdom.  And when Christ comes again in glory, may He gladly say to us,

    "Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!"

    Amen.

Value Judgment

 Texts:  Philippians 3:2-11; Matthew 13:44-52

  AROUND TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO, A father, two grown sons, and a couple of their friends out in Kansas City shared an interest in treasure hunting.  They heard tell of a riverboat called the Arabia that'd gone down in the Missouri River near there in 1856, that she'd carried a cargo of gold and barrel upon barrel of excellent whiskey.  She was said to lie under a certain cornfield-- the Missouri has shifted considerably since the mid-1800s-- and they got permission from the farmer to find her and dig her up if they could.  So the men pooled thousands of dollars of their own money for the necessary equipment and set to work.  For weeks they dug and dug until at last, the wreck of the Arabia emerged from the silt 45 feet down.  And all the time the men were thinking of that valuable whiskey and gold, how they were going to sell it and make their fortunes.

    But a funny thing happened when the steamboat started yielding up its treasures . . . and I'll tell you what it was as I conclude this sermon.  But it's human nature to want to strike it rich.  There's something in us that feels that finding hidden treasure would be the most wonderful thing that could happen to us, and it'd be worth giving up a lot to get at it.  And our Lord Jesus, does He wag His finger at us pathetic human beings and say, "Naughty, naughty!  Stop being so greedy!"?  Not at all.  He totally agrees that nothing would be more joy-inspiring than finding something of infinite value where and when we least expect it.  In fact, our reading from St. Matthew this morning has to do with that very subject.  But what Jesus wants us to understand is that there is a more valuable treasure to be found than gold or silver or jewels.  And when we find it, it's worth giving up everything to gain.

    Matthew 13:44 begins, "The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field."  No use looking for mysterious meanings, there it is: the kingdom of heaven is like a hidden treasure.  But one day a man comes along and finds it.  Unlike the Arabia's salvagers, he isn't looking for it.  Good chance he's a hired man, digging the field for the landowner.  Now, it's not part of Jesus' meaning for us to get tangled up in who buried the treasure and the legal ramifications of the ancient Jewish finders-keepers laws, if they had any.  The point is, that there's a marvellous treasure, the man finds it, and he is struck by its value.  So he hides it again, sells everything he has, and buys that field.  He judged that it was worth the price, so valuable was the treasure he found.

    Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like that.  Suddenly in the midst of the ordinary pressures and desires and attractions of this earthly life we see our Lord and His kingdom presented to us in all its wonder, and we accept that it's worth giving up everything we have, if only it-- if only He-- might be ours.

    Jesus' disciples would identify with the man in this parable.  From verse 11 of this chapter of Matthew, Jesus has made a distinction between the crowds, who follow Him for what they can get out of Him in the way of healings and food and excitement, and true disciples, who truly want to know Jesus and submit to Him as their Master and Lord.  The disciples were the ones to whom it was given, as Jesus said in that same verse 11, to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven.  So Jesus did not entrust this parable of the treasure hidden in the field to the crowds, but He spoke it in "the house" (probably Simon Peter's home in Capernaum), in private, to the disciples only.  They would hear it and think, "Yes, I was living my everyday life, doing my ordinary work, and all of a sudden this very ordinary-looking Man from Nazareth came along preaching the kingdom of heaven, and somehow in His presence it was like an amazing treasure was revealed to me.   Suddenly I saw that the kingdom of heaven was somehow wrapped up in Him.  And I knew I had to leave everything and follow Him, no matter what it would cost."

    Are you a true disciple of Jesus Christ?  When you look at Him in the pages of Scripture, do you recognize and confess that He, Himself, is the very embodiment of the kingdom of God?  And that He's worth following no matter what? 

    Be sure it is the real Jesus you're following after.  Beware that you don't squander everything you have on treasure that is false.  Some will tell you that the kingdom of heaven is a state of personal fulfilment where believers are continually satisfied with themselves and their lives.  Others say it will be a social utopia where everyone is equal and there are no more wars or thefts or social injustice.  Either way, they'll say it's up to us to bring the kingdom in.  Yes, the kingdom of heaven will include all those good things, but if we wear ourselves out trying to achieve good ends by us making the kingdom come, we've wasted our substance on fool's gold.  The kingdom is something only God can bring in.  It truly comes only when men and women, boys and girls, joyfully submit to Jesus Christ as their Saviour and King.  That's what the kingdom of heaven is: that state of affairs where God is King, beginning in your heart and mine.  And as our King, He's the Source and due Recipient of everything we've got and everything we are.

    And, Jesus begins in verse 45, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls.  Now, this is different. You'd think that He would say, "The kingdom of heaven is like a pearl of great value."  But now the merchant himself and his quest for perfect pearls are an image of God's rulership in the world. 

    A pearl is an interesting gem.  It isn't like other jewel.  Every gemstone has been there since the beginning of the world and you dig them out of the earth.  But pearls represent something new.  They have to be made, by an oyster, and they start with a little piece of dirt that irritates the oyster, and the mollusc coats and coats and coats that piece of grit with mother-of-pearl until it produces the beautiful lustrous orb we see in the jewelry store.  In the ancient world, fine pearls were valued more than diamonds, and the merchant Jesus speaks of is willing to sell everything he has to acquire it.

    And the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant, who comes deliberately seeking this pearl.  Brothers and sisters, Jesus Christ came into this world seeking us, His Church, and it cost Him everything He had, His very life's blood, to win us.  But wait a minute, you might say.  Before we were saved we were anything but pure and lustrous.  True. But the Lord not only sees from the beginning how things will turn out in the end, He also makes sure that things end up the way He's planned them.  In Paul's letter to the Ephesians, we're told that Christ gave Himself up for the Church, and that one day He will present her-- that is, us as a body-- to Himself as a radiant Church, without spot or wrinkle or any sort of blemish.  And in the book of the prophet Malachi the Lord indicates that a day will come when He will "make up His treasured possession," and we will be His, we who fear the Lord and honor His name.  We are His pearl of great price, and when it came time for Him to gain us, He held nothing back.  He paid the price for our sin and won us to Himself to be His holy people, precious in His sight.  It's significant, I think, that a pearl is essentially a bit of dirt covered over by radiant purity.  For in just that way Jesus Christ in His sacrificial love has covered our sins, so they are forgotten and never seen or thought of anymore; all that is seen is the loveliness we have become in Him.

    But there's a problem here.  Have you spotted it?  I'm preaching as if I assumed that all of us in this room have true faith in Jesus Christ.  That all of us have joyfully bowed the knee to Him as our King and our God.  I'm talking as if all of us have had our sins washed away in His blood and are willing, like Paul, to consider everything a loss for the sake of knowing Christ and the power of His resurrection.  I hope and pray that is so.  But it may not be.  Some of you may be like the crowds, only interested in Jesus for what He can do for you in this world.  You may think your kind of sinfulness is no big deal, that if God is offended at it that's His problem.  You may have no interest in the treasure that is the kingdom of heaven, and no desire that Christ should seek long and hard to find and purchase you for His own.

    If this is in your heart, beware.  For Jesus taught His disciples another parable about the kingdom of heaven.  He says that the it's like a great dragnet that is let down into the lake and catches all kinds of fish, both good and bad.  Do the fishermen keep all of them?  No, the bad fish are thrown away. They perish.  This, Jesus says, is how it will be at the end of the age, when He returns to judge the living and the dead.  There are many people who in this world seem to be children of the kingdom; they're all in the net.  But the time will come when mankind will be separated out and judged, the wicked from the righteous, and the wicked will be thrown into the fiery furnace.  There, Jesus says,  there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  There, people who refused to worship Him as King, who thought they could use Him as a source of good advice, will spend eternity in burning despair and frustration, weeping with rage because they know God is righteous and their sentence was just.

    Please, don't let this happen to you.  Hear the Holy Spirit today as He speaks of Christ's love for you.  There is a remedy for your sin.  He has paid the price already, that you might be His own.  All you have to do is say, "Yes, Lord, You did for me what I could never do for myself.  Please bring me into your heavenly kingdom, for I trust you as my Saviour and Lord."

    After Jesus had finished teaching these parables, Matthew tells us, He asked His disciples, "Have you understood all these things?"  He puts the same question to you. Have you understood the unsurpassable value of the kingdom of heaven, that to gain it, it's worth everything you have and are?  Do you understand that Jesus Himself gave up everything to purchase us for His kingdom?  Do you understand that there will be a time of final judgement, when God will set the true value of every human creature, according to the value they set on the blood of Christ, shed on Calvary's cross?

    The disciples said yes, they understood. Jesus accepted their answer and told another short parable, which applies both to them and to us.  They, and we, are those who have been instructed about the kingdom of heaven.  Under the training of His word, we become teachers of the New Covenant law.  And so we are like householders who possess the old treasures of what God did for His people Israel and the new treasure of His grace to us in Jesus Christ.  And we don't keep these valuable things hidden; we bring them out and put them on display in our behavior and in our words, so that an impoverished and cursed world might be enriched and blessed.

    Which brings us back to the men who spent all that money and did all that work to salvage the steamboat Arabia.  They didn't find any gold or whiskey.  What they discovered was barrel upon barrel, crate upon crate, box upon box of every kind of household good and luxury that a frontier family could desire.  To quote the Arabia website, there was "castor oil and cognac, needles and nutmegs, windowpanes and wedding bands, eyeglasses and earrings"; think of anything you might want in your home, it was there in abundance. For a moment-- just a moment-- the men considered how much money they could get for all this.  But right away, they realized they couldn't sell the Arabia's cargo.  Immediately they began to conserve it, and the work goes on, twenty-two years later.  They raised the money to build a museum.  They put their discoveries on display, so people from all over America and around the world can see and appreciate the amazing treasure they found.

    That is what our Lord wants you and me to do with the treasure that is the kingdom of heaven.  He died and rose again to purchase your eternal membership in His kingdom, that in Him you will find everlasting joy that can never diminish or fade.  Let us not keep the treasure hidden.  Let us bring out the wonders of His grace from our storeroom and put them on display.  In the short time He has given us, let us reveal His glory daily, and shine like the most precious pearl He has purchased us to be.

    In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Don't Be Surprised

Texts: Psalm 116; John 15:18 - 16:11; 16:33

THREE OR FOUR WEEKS ago I decided to preach today on the theme, "In this world you will have trouble. But be of good courage, I [Jesus] have overcome the world." I use the New International Version for my personal devotions, and "trouble" is how it translated the Greek here in verse 16:33. And after the events in Japan this past week, I thought that it'd be more appropriate than ever to preach on the whys and wherefores of the trouble and disasters that comes to us in this world, especially when it seems to contradict our belief in an all-powerful and all-good God.


But the Scripture has a way of speaking for itself, and when I looked closer at this passage in John, I had to admit that the "trouble" Jesus is speaking of isn't things like earthquakes and tsunamis and bankruptcy and cancer, terrible as those things are. It's the tribulation and persecution that will certainly come to those who belong to and identify with Jesus Christ.

I mentioned last Sunday the sort of comments that were coming up online, in response to videos of the destruction in Japan. Comments where people were using this tragedy as a soapbox from which to deny and blaspheme God and insult His believing people. Examples? "Your god is a fairy tale." "I don't believe in a sky monster that causes disasters." "You're a schizophrenic primitive-minded retard who's still living in the dark ages." "Your Jesus story doesn't make any sense." "Stop praying, start helping." And so on. I've been online since 1998 or so, and it seems to me that this sort of thing is getting worse and worse. Used to be, if someone disagreed with another person's religious position, they'd keep their mouths shut about it. Or at least have an honest go at proving why the religious person was wrong. But more and more, the vitriol, nastiness, and just plain hatred leveled at Christian believers is unveiled, aggressive, and totally unapologetic.

But should we be surprised? Not at all. John records in chapter 15, verse 8 of his gospel that Jesus said this to His disciples, the night He was betrayed: "If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you." In fact, we should feel more surprised and worried if we never get any trouble for being a Christian, for then we might need to question our identity in Christ.

Jesus says that the world hated Him before it hated us. First, maybe we should define this word, "world." After all, doesn't John 3:16 say, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life"? Yes, Jesus said that there. But let's keep in mind that that "world" is all the lost, rebellious, God-hating sinners that love darkness rather than light, the world that needed the blood of the Son of God to be shed before even one of us could be called out of darkness into God's marvellous light. "The world" is the whole manmade system of thinking and believing that denies God and sets up thousands of idols rather than bow the knee to Him. It's the evil urge in all of us that says "Me first!" and be damned-- yes, damned-- to anyone who gets in our way.

Last Sunday evening, I was participating in an online conversation on Facebook. One friend, who's the mother of four, posted this statement: " . . . the most destructive force on the planet is not a tornado, tsunami or earthquake, it's a 16 month old human child."

Well, some people sympathized--we know how one-year-olds can be--and one aunt Expressed Astonishment that anyone could imply such a thing about her adorable nephew. But one friend wrote a comment that simply said, "Too soon."

Too soon to be minimizing the tragedy unfolding in Japan by saying that it takes a back seat to the depredations of one's destructive toddler. Too soon, while post-tsunami victims were perhaps taking their last despairing breaths under the wreckage; too soon, while survivors were numbly searching for lost loved ones, while the crises at the nuclear plants grew worse and worse. Surely, to liken all that pain and horror to the rampages of a self-willed infant was bad taste at best and cold-hearten unkindness to the people of Japan at worst.

But that very spirit of rebellion that's frustrating but cute in a toddler is the same heart of sin that erupts in hatred of God and persecution of His Church. Jesus says, "If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world-- therefore the world hates you."

Remember, now we are in Christ. We are identified with Him, as He has identified Himself with us. He is our Elder Brother, our greatest of Friends, and our Master. If you have trouble in this world because you belong to Jesus, don't be surprised. As He reminds us, "Remember the word that I said to you, ‘Servants are not greater than their master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you."

But it hasn't seemed to be that way, not here in America, at least. For a long time in the 19th and 20th centuries, if you were a nice, respectable, middle or upper class person and you weren't Jewish, you were considered to be a Christian. And that was a good thing. In fact, you weren't considered a good candidate for certain jobs or offices if you couldn't claim membership in some church or other. And we all believed in God and Jesus Christ (or we thought everyone did) and when it comes down to it, maybe a lot of us believed in God and Jesus Christ because we thought everyone did.

But now it's getting harder. Now we're encountering more people we know and even like who think Christianity is silly or even dangerous. Now our faith has to be in Jesus, and not in the idea that society in general believes.

There in the Upper Room, Jesus was preparing the Eleven for the fact that life was not going to be easy when He's gone. And if it wasn't easy for them, in a way, it's even harder for us. For unlike them, we have never physically seen, heard, and touched Him. What we know, however, is that we have been marked with His name; He has put His new life into us and we are His. So now, let's not be surprised when the world treats us badly, for it only proves they neither know Christ nor the One who sent Him.

And there's no excuse for it. Just because everything Jesus said and did is in the past does not mean He didn't do them or that they're no longer true. The Son of God was born into this world to manifest the power and glory of the Father in this world. He did this in everything He did and in every word He spoke. Those who complain, "Your Jesus story doesn't make sense" really mean "it doesn't fit in with my desire to be the god of my own life." For such people, the existence of God is the most inconvenient thing there could be. And we, as symbols of the risen Christ, get in their way just by existing.

But, you might say, not everyone denies there's a God. Most people do hold to the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity, right? And even if they don't believe in Jesus, they're still on our side, yes?

Well, actually, no. Jesus Himself is the touchstone, the definition of what it means to have faith in the one true God. If you're going to talk about God the Father, it's crucial we make sure we're talking about the One, True, and Living God, not some idol we've made up in our heads. God is triune, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You can't have God as your Father if Jesus is not the Brother who saved you, first. Our Lord says in verse 23, "Whoever hates me hates my Father as well." He proved He was the Son of God by the miracles He did, and after this teaching, in four short days, He would prove it conclusively by rising from the dead. If He hadn't done all this, people might have some excuse, "But now," Jesus says, "they have seen and hated both me and my Father."

But doesn't that raise the question, what about people who have never heard about Christ? The hidden assumption goes something like, "God isn't being fair to those other people, therefore I don't have to believe in Him." The real question is, What about you now that you have heard? And if you have heard and believed and you're concerned about the heathen (or so you say), what might God want you to do for them so they can hear?

Don't be surprised when the people of this world come up with every excuse they can to reject Christ and ridicule you for your faith in Him. And do not fear when it comes time to testify to what Jesus has done on your behalf. For that is the job of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate. He's your crack attorney when the world tries to put you in the dock for the offense of the cross. He gives witness to the truth of Jesus and in His power, you and I can testify to Jesus, too.

The Holy Spirit speaking through the Scriptures reminds us what "testifying on Jesus' behalf" means. It's all about the cross, how the Lord of life was slain to give eternal life to sinners like me and you. If we go telling people they should come to Jesus because believing in Him will make their earthly existence all comfortable and easy, we deserve every bit of ridicule we get from the pagan world. It amounts to taking the Lord's name in vain, for He never promised that being His servant would be comfortable or easy. When disaster comes and people mock that false sugar-daddy god, we shouldn't be surprised. As we shouldn't be surprised when people reject the message that they need a Saviour from their sin. That's going to happen, so Jesus warns us ahead of time, so we will not stumble when rejection comes.

And we need to be warned that the most painful rejection will come from people who seemed to be fellow-Christians. For the disciples, the fiercest and most tragic persecution came from their fellow-Jews, the ones who were the most religious, the ones who would have claimed they had the best interests of God's people at heart. It's the same for us today. In the March/April issue of Modern Reformation, Reformed pastor Fletcher Matandika, from Malawi, writes an open letter to the North American churches, lamenting our shallow refusal to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints. He writes, "A few years ago, an older minister from a mainline denomination who had reached retirement age lamented as we talked. ‘Fletcher,' [the pastor said], ‘I cannot preach about sin in my congregation. People get mad at me and they would walk out of the church if I did that.'" If it's difficult for us pastors, how much harder it will be for you. People who claim the name of Christ will call you narrowminded and bigoted for upholding the standards of Scripture. They'll tell you we know more today about Jesus' identity and mission than Jesus knew Himself-- and they'll say it in the name of God. As Jesus said to the Eleven, "They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God."

This happened literally to most of the disciples. I pray the Lord will spare us and it will not come to the shedding of our blood. In many parts of the world, you know, it does. And if you truly are in Christ, your heart will bleed over what the world says about Him and about you for the sake of His name. "But I have said these things to you so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you about them." Don't be surprised!

And do not fear. The Holy Spirit is with you, helping you to withstand whatever the world may throw your way. The world may mock and ridicule and deny, but the Spirit exposes the guilt of the world. The fact that they rejected the Son of God when He came proves their sin. The fact that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven proves His righteousness. And the fact of His triumph proves that Satan has already been judged.

The world will do whatever it can to deny the witness of the Spirit about Jesus Christ. Indeed, they cannot receive His message, for their minds are darkened by their own rebellion and wilfulness. So do not be surprised if the world hates you, for it hated Jesus first.

Rather, be of good courage. Jesus Christ took your sin and bore its penalty in His own body. Testify to that fact, whenever the Spirit leads you. Pray for those who persecute you-- the Lord saved us, and He is able to save whomever He chooses to call. In this world, we will face persecution. But be of good heart and stand strong, for Jesus our Lord has overcome the world.

The Cost of Discipleship

Texts: Philemon 1:1-21; Luke 14:25-33

DID YOU KNOW WHAT YOU were getting into when you became a Christian? Probably you were baptised as a baby. Most likely you went through Confirmation Class as a young teenager. Maybe you came to faith as an adult.  However it was, there was probably some event or process in your life when you chose to identify yourself as a follower of Jesus Christ. Did you sit down and consider the consequences? Or was being a Christian just the ordinary logical thing for someone in your time and place to be?

Jesus our Lord says we should count the cost before we commit to being His disciple. Now, on the divine level, from God's point of view, we have no choice at all. He has elected us from all eternity to be His, as it says in Ephesians 1:4 and 5: "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Christ Jesus, in accordance with his pleasure and will." His grace calls us to faith without our being able to resist it, as it says in John 6:37: "All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away." His providence, not our works, keeps us bound to Christ for all eternity, as we read in John 6:39: "And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given to me, but raise them up at the last day." But God works out His sovereign will for our salvation on the level of this world. He has us experience it from our human point of view. To those who find the idea of following Jesus attractive, our Lord says, "Take a good look at what believing in Me will mean. Come into it with your eyes open. Count the cost."

Luke says in Chapter 14, verse 25 that large crowds were following Jesus. He was preaching the kingdom of God, something all good Jews were looking forward to, especially in those days with the Romans occupying Israel. The kingdom of God would mean joy and feasting and power, with the saints of God-- that is, the Jews-- supreme over the nations when the Messiah came to rule the world. Jesus of Nazareth was talking and acting more like the Messiah all the time; who wouldn't want to follow him around and be there when He was crowned and king and started handing out the benefits?

In the same way, thousands, even millions of people nowadays are attracted to Jesus and Christianity by what they think it can offer them. Even people who call themselves Evangelicals. At the worst you have the Health-and-Wealth prosperity gospel types who believe that it's God's will that all Christians should be rolling in mansions and Rolls-Royces, you just need to exercise the power of faith. More subtly, and, I think, more dangerously, you have the people who think that being a Christian means discovering "God's wonderful purpose for your life" and learning the formula for having "your best life now." For them, Christian preaching means talks on improving your marriage and how to raise well-adjusted kids. As a lady at a church I used to pastor once said, "We want something nice to take home with us."

Jesus is adamant: None of that is what being His disciple means. He turns to the following crowds (and by His Spirit He turns to us) and says, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters— yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple."

So much for "gentle Jesus, meek and mild"! Does Jesus literally want us to violate God's commandments about honoring and taking care of our families? Is He ordering us to go against every law of human affection? Some cults would have us think so. But no. He is using a form of speech called hyperbole, because He wants to shock the multitudes-- and us-- out of our idolatrous visions of what being a disciple of Jesus is all about. Yes, you are to love and honor and cherish your father, your mother, your spouse, your children, your siblings. But compared to the love you have for God in Christ, that love should amount to hate. Yes, you are to nourish and protect your own body and not recklessly put yourself in the way of disease and danger. But compared to the new life Jesus offers, this mortal life should mean nothing to you at all. And if your love for your dearest friends and relations makes you compromise your commitment to Jesus, you cannot be His disciple. If you would rather deny Him than be persecuted or tortured or killed for the sake of the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified, you cannot be His.

Count the cost, you who would more than His follower be. Discipleship entails self-discipline. Jesus says, "And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple." Not follow Him around like groupies trailing after a rock band, but walk in His footsteps as He toils up the hill of Calvary. A cross always meant death to those Jews following Jesus. Once the Roman soldier had laid that cross on you, you were going to die. Not all of Jesus' disciples have been called to undergo actual crucifixion or some other death for His sake. But all of us He calls to be dead to this world, dead to our own desires, dead to even the best things this life has to offer, and alive only to His mastership and His will.

What is the cost of being Jesus' disciple? Simply, everything. Everything we have and everything we are. Nothing can be allowed to take precedence of Him.

Jesus hammers the point home by giving us three parables or figures: the builder, the weak king, and salt.

I've gradually been renovating my house for the last seven years. The other day I got a call from a contractor wondering if I was ready to redo my bathroom. No. Not now. The funds just aren't there. Jesus speaks of a man who wants to build a tower. If he's sensible, he'll make the same sort of deliberations. A half-finished tower is really visible and will bring a lot of derision. In the same way, anyone who wants a part in the kingdom of God has to be aware that everyone will be looking at his life expecting it to reflect what they know of Christ and His lordship. Living the Christian life will not bring ease and earthly fulfillment; it'll take everything we've got.

Then Jesus talks about a king. A king with the bigger force is coming at this king's little city-state: what should he do? For attacks are sure to come at us from the world, the flesh, and the devil when we identify ourselves with the cause of Christ. Will we be ready to fight the good fight of the faith, or will we just cave in?

John Calvin, in his Commentary on the Gospels, writes this: "The statements which our Lord makes to this effect must not be applied . . . as if we were to enter into any compromise with our spiritual foe, when our strength and resources fail. It would be idle to treat parables as applying in every minute point to the matter in hand. But our Lord simply means that we ought to be so well prepared, as not to be taken by surprise for want of a proper defense, or basely to turn our backs . . . The design of Christ, therefore, is to warn his followers to bear the cross, that they may prepare themselves with courage." Troubles will come even though we are Christians! Troubles will come because we are Christians! Jesus says we have to give up everything to be His disciple, including the foolish idea that being His will mean everything will be easy and safe and secure with us.

People of Muslim background who become Christians experience this firsthand. For them, letting "goods and kindred go, this mortal life also" is not just a line in a hymn, it's a daily reality. It comes with being Christ's disciple. They know what giving up everything to be Jesus' disciple is all about. If we live our lives thinking belonging to Christ is supposed to be easy, we'll compromise with the world, the flesh, and the devil the first time a real difficulty presents itself.

And then there is the image of salt. Jesus, and Luke, assume that His hearers will know that the figurative salt that preserves and purifies in this present age is the word of God and the people of God who take that word into the world. Jesus says, "Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?" Physical salt, sodium chloride, can lose its saltiness by being so mixed in with other elements that it becomes corrupted and impure. Or the salts can be leached out of it by outside influences. Either way, it's no good even for the compost heap. Indeed, it'd do the soil a lot of damage if you put it in.

So if our lives are preaching a false, corrupted gospel, or if we corrupt and falsify the gospel to give an excuse for our unChristlike lives, we are like that worthless salt. No, we have to be ready to stand up for the pure faith once for all delivered to the saints.

What is the cost of discipleship? Taking up our cross in total surrender to our Lord Jesus Christ. It costs us everything we have and everything we are.

But I've noticed: Often we can accept the possibility of physical martyrdom for the faith, at least in theory. There's something stirring and noble about the idea. What's harder is when God calls us to bear the cross in lesser matters, every day of our lives.

Think of the situation of Philemon of Laodicea. Clearly Philemon is a man of position and means. He lives in a commodious house. He owns slaves. Philemon is also a Christian, converted by the apostle Paul himself.

We can assume that his whole household, slave or free, professed faith in Christ at the same time. But not the slave Onesimus. One fine day he helped himself to some of his master's goods and ran off for Rome.

And now he has been found, and has returned to Laodicea, bearing a letter. Philemon had every right to sell such a worthless slave (ironic, since "Onesimus" means "useful") to the salt mines, or to the arena to be fodder for the wild beasts. He had every civil right to demean him as a worker and as a man. Philemon's pagan neighbors would have expected no less.

But the letter Onesimus bears is from Paul himself. Onesimus, he writes, has become his son in their common faith. He now belongs to Christ. So Paul is sending him back to Philemon, "no longer as a slave, but better than a slave-- as a dear brother." And not just as any brother: Philemon is to receive this formerly thieving, useless, runaway slave as he would St. Paul himself!

Did Philemon have any idea that that was ahead of him when he committed to being a disciple of Jesus Christ? What would such unthinkable mercy mean for his relations with his other Christian slaves? What would the pagan neighbors say? Why, if such unmasterlike behaviour caught on, it could disrupt the economic system of the entire Roman world!

But the duty to welcome Onesimus back wholeheartedly and with honor was now Philemon's cross and the cost of his discipleship. Church history tells us he accepted that burden, for it tells us that Onesimus ended up as the beloved bishop of the church in Ephesus.

This is the kind of cross-bearing God demands of us when we heed Christ's call to be His disciple. He doesn't want imaginary dramatic sacrifices we may never be called to make; rather he requires the ordinary, everyday self-denials we may wish were none of God's business. Like saying Yes to service we'd rather shirk. Giving time to others when we'd rather have it for ourselves. Remaining faithful when a loved one dies or when the doctor tells us we have a terrible disease. Saying No to desires and activities and even people when they come between us and the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Because, you know what? When God's good grace makes us Jesus' disciples, we become His slaves. We belong to Him totally, for He has bought us with His precious blood. You might say, "In that case, I've counted the cost and sorry, Jesus, I'm out of here. I'd rather live free." Ah, but if you will not be a slave of Christ and owe everything to Him, you will remain a slave to sin, and your wages will be death.

Humanly-speaking, it's impossible for us to make the total surrender Jesus requires. But God Himself gives us the strength and will to be His disciple, through the merit and mercy of His Son Jesus Christ. His word is His preserving and purifying salt in us, and His Holy Spirit enables us to be salt in this dying world. The price that would be too much for you to pay He has paid for you.

What is the cost of Christian discipleship? All you have and all you are. What is its reward? Jesus and all His riches in glory. I'd say the sacrifice is worth it. And now in the name of Christ I ask, is it worth it to you?

What God Does with Small and Broken Things

Texts: Haggai 2:1-9; 2 Corinthians 6:3 - 7:1

LET’S IMAGINE a scene from long ago. It’s 519 years before the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, within the ruins of the city of Jerusalem, in the days after some of the exiles have returned from Babylon to rebuild the city . . . .


The old couple struggled up the way from city below. Painfully, they reached the summit of Mount Moriah and stood silently, watching.

"Look, Tzipora," said the old man, pointing with his stick. "There they are, at it."

"Yes, Eliezar," his wife answered. "They’ve been working for almost a month."

"Yes, and where has it gotten us?" Eliezar replied bitterly. "Beginning of last month, that prophet Haggai comes telling Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest that it’s past time for us to be rebuilding the Lord’s temple. He says the reason the harvest has been so bad is because we’ve been building ourselves nice houses and neglecting the house of the Lord. But how can we build the Lord the kind of temple He deserves?"

"But Eliezar," Tzipora replied, "the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord Almighty! We have to listen to him. The governor and the high priest listened to him. We all did. Remember how our spirits rose when Haggai said, ‘"I am with you," declares the Lord’? Remember how we feared the Lord our God and came and began to work to rebuild His house?"

"Yes, yes, I remember all that!" said her husband, wearily. "It was only a few weeks ago; I haven’t lost my memory yet! . . . Though it might be better for me if I had." He stopped, and regarded the ragtag gang of amateur builders laboring on the temple’s framework. "Look at that," he resumed. "Timber, not stone! Tzipora, you remember our temple before the Babylonians burned it! We were both children then, but you remember those massive stones King Solomon brought from Lebanon! You remember how glorious our Temple was!"

"Yes, Eliezar, I remember."

"Well, look at that," he said again. "Look at it! Do we have any hope of matching Solomon’s temple now? Even if we had the strength to build it, even if we were numerous enough, where could we poor Jews find the money? Where is the silver and gold it would take to erect such a temple in our day? And the nations around us! They’d never let us build what we should! We’ve been trying to rebuild this temple the past nineteen years, and every time we begin, those Gentiles write off to the king in Persia and get him to make us stop! Now King Darius says we can go ahead, but what’s the use?"

"But the Lord’s command, Eliezar!"

"Yes, Tzipora, the Lord commanded us to return to the work. But how can He be pleased with what we can give? Don’t you remember that day when the prophet Ezekiel spoke to us when we were still in Babylon? Such a new temple he described! How glorious with its walls and courts and gates and altar! That’s what the Lord expects us to build! And we can’t do it! We can’t do it! This new temple is nothing. Nothing."

"Nothing," his wife echoed, and sighed.

Eliezar and Tzipora watched the workmen struggle on. And almost as if the laborers had overheard the old man’s bitter words, the shouts over the work seemed subdued, flattened, discouraged.

Around the corner of the shell of the building appeared two men in fine robes and turbans, obviously high officials. "Look, Eliezar! There’s Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest!"

"Inspecting the work, I suppose," he replied. "I wonder what they think of it."

The old couple saw the governor say something to the high priest, who shook his head. Both men seemed weary, their shoulders drooping, their heads low.

Suddenly, a firm step sounded on the pavement behind Tzipora and Eliezar. Startled, they turned, the woman’s hand to her heart. "Oh! My lord Haggai!" she gasped. The prophet’s eyes seemed to burn into her soul.

"My lord, the governor and the high priest are there, just above," faltered Eliezar. "You have business with them?"

"Yes," said the prophet, "and with you, Eliezar son of Berekiah. And with you, Tzipora wife of Eliezar." He smiled. "Come. Hear what the Lord has to say to you and to all the remnant of His people. Come."


. . . People of the Presbyterian Church of N---, I don't think you have to reach far to identify with Eliezar and Tzipora. Going by what I heard when I preached here in August, there are many of you who remember how it used to be, back in the glory days of this congregation. I’m guessing that someplace you have an anniversary photo showing so many members you could never get them inside the doors at once. There was a time when the Sunday School swarmed with children; when church societies and organizations flourished; when acts of charity and service flowed out of this place with many willing hands to help them along. You remember when this congregation and its pastor and officers were leaders in this community, and the light of Jesus Christ shone out from this place like a beacon of peace and hope.

And now? Let the prophet Haggai speaking in the name of the Lord tell us how things are now. Just as he asked the Jews of Jerusalem in 519 BC, he asks you, "Who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Does it not seem like nothing?"

But hear now what the Lord has to say to you. Be encouraged, people of the Presbyterian Church of N---. The words of Haggai to the remnant of Israel are God’s words to you and to all God’s struggling people around this fallen world. The Scripture says to you, "'But now be strong, you elders. Be strong, you deacons and musicians and teachers. Be strong, all you people of the church. Be strong, and work. For I am with you,' declares the Lord Almighty.

"‘Be strong, and work. For I am with you,’ declares the Lord Almighty." Our downfall in our brokenness is that so often we think it’s all up to us to fix it. And either we try really, really hard and maybe we come up with something and are pumped up with pride in ourselves, or we get discouraged and give up because we can’t make things happen the way they used to or the way we think they should. We act as if God were busy up in heaven doing whatever and leaving it all to us, or maybe He’s on the sidelines, cheering us on, but in the end it’s our work to rebuild the church, not His.

But no! "‘I am with you,’ declares the Lord Almighty." Whatever He asks us to do in His name, He is the prime mover. He is the one who takes the lead and makes sure the job gets done. For us to think and act otherwise isn’t merely counterproductive, it’s sin.

In 519 BC God promised to help His people because of the covenant He made with Israel when He brought them out of Egypt. But you can claim His power on the basis of a better covenant, the one our Sovereign Lord made with you on Calvary through the blood of His only Son Jesus Christ.

For hear what the Lord says to all His chosen people, from Israel of old to us His new Israel today. He says,

"‘In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations, and the desired of all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,’ says the LORD Almighty."

Our Lord shook the heavens and the earth when He brought His people out of Egypt. But much more did He shake all creation when He Himself became incarnate in Jesus Christ, eternal God in human flesh! He shook all creation when God the Son of Man hung on a cross to take His own righteous wrath against our sin. He shook all creation when Jesus our Saviour rose triumphant from the dead to give new and unending life to all who are called in His name. Jesus Christ is the desired of all nations, and it is in Him and Him alone that God’s church is filled with glory.

The peoples of this earth don’t realize that Jesus crucified and risen is their desire. All of us-- all of us-- manufacture messiahs of our own imagining to fulfill our hopes and dreams, and we keep on doing it until God by His Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see His glory in Jesus Christ. It is the glory of Christ’s church, the glory of this congregation, to display to the world the true Messiah, to show the lost where their true longing lies. In this very town you are surrounded by unbelievers and people who claim to be Christian but know nothing whatever of the free grace of Jesus Christ who died to save them from their sins. This house is needed here. You are needed here. The Lord says to you, "Build!" No, not the physical building of the church, necessarily, but build your ministry in this place! Serve Him where He has put you; be a witness to the nations right where you are and right as you are!

But how can you do that? Does this church not seem small and broken? Just keeping the doors open is a struggle. And as for having the power and resources to rebuild the ministry of this church, who here feels the power in him or herself to do that? Ministry takes money, doesn’t it? Where is it to come from, especially in this rotten economy?

Remember what the Lord said through Haggai:

"‘The silver is mine and the gold is mine,’ declares the LORD Almighty."

If money is needed, the Lord can provide it. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills! All creation is His! If money is the answer here, our Lord will shower it down.

But maybe God has something greater in mind, something money can’t buy. For,

"‘The glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house,’ says the LORD Almighty."

Was Haggai the prophet referring to the literal temple the Jews were trying to rebuild? No! Compared to Solomon’s temple, that building truly was nothing. No, the glory prophesied was that of the coming Messiah, Jesus Christ. Though they didn’t know it, the temple of God being built there was the people of God themselves. As they trusted and worked and worshipped, they were being made into a fit vessel from which the Messiah would come. As they trusted God and obeyed Him even in their smallness and brokenness, they became a channel through which the Lord would demonstrate His creation-shaking glory. And as He did it through them, so He can do it through you.

I know of a church over in Oxford, England. It was down to so few members, the diocese was about to close it. But six elderly women covenanted together to pray for the ministry of St. Matthew’s church and the Lord in His power answered their prayer. A couple of years later that church was filled to the windows with people of all ages and had a thriving ministry.

There may not be that many people in this area for that to happen here. But even in its smallness and brokenness, this house can be filled with the glory of God. This congregation can be made strong to do His will.

Isn’t that always the way of our Lord? Time and again He takes the littlest, the least, the youngest, the broken, the despised in the eyes of this world and uses it to show His almighty power. St. Paul in our New Testament reading declares that his own ministry is commended in his hardships, afflictions, dishonor, insignificance, poverty, and poor reputation. All the things that the world would look down upon, God turns into badges of honor. Not that these things are virtues in themselves, but because in Paul’s weakness, the gifts of God’s Spirit and His divine power more clearly shine forth. God uses Paul’s very smallness and brokenness to demonstrate the glory of Jesus Christ to the world.

For what could be more small and broken and despised than our Lord Himself, on that dark Friday on Calvary? The religious authorities mocked Him, the civil authorities considered Him a problem to be swept out of the way, the devil of Hell probably roared in premature triumph. Hung as a criminal on a cross! Rejected, scorned, bruised, and broken, Jesus was not the glorious Messiah the people expected to see. How could this Nazarene be the desired of all nations? Did He not look to all the world like nothing?

But in the very nothingness of the crucified Jesus, our God brought everything to this blind and broken world. He exalted this Lord Jesus to His right hand in glory and appointed that in Him and Him alone all men must meet with God. Jesus Christ is our Temple. He is the one place where the Almighty grants His peace. And as He dwells in you His church and as you His church dwell in Him, you are His temple here on earth.

And so, as St. Paul says, we must stop being unequally yoked with unbelievers. There are all sorts of ideas about what that means, but at the very least it must mean, Do not use the ways of this world to promote the goals of God. The world demands strength and power, but we preach Christ crucified in weakness. The world says church growth comes from high-tech glamor and the latest sure-fire marketing methods and appeals to sinners’ felt needs, but we preach repentance and forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ name. The world says success is judged by size and numbers and the bigger the better, but we preach faithfulness to our God and trust in Him to fill this house with His glory, however large or small the membership may be.

People of God, trust in His power, not in your own. Rejoice in your smallness and brokenness, for God is with you and will do great things in you. There is ministry here for you to do and He has given you gifts by the Holy Spirit for you to do it. So be strong, and work. Build the church in this place, not in your own strength, but in the strength of Jesus Christ, your Temple and your glory. Consecrate yourselves to Him in holiness, for in Him, you are all the temple of the living God.

To close, let us pray a prayer that John Calvin wrote in response to this passage in Haggai:

Grant, Almighty God, that as we are not only alienated in mind from thee, but also often relapse after having been once stirred up by thee, either into perverseness, or into our own vanity, or are led astray by various things, so that nothing is more difficult than to pursue our course until we reach the end of our race- - O grant that we may not confide in our own strength, nor claim for ourselves more than what is right, but, with our hearts raised above, depend on thee alone, and constantly call on thee to supply us with new strength, and so to confirm us that we may persevere to the end in the discharge of our duty, until we shall at length attain the true and perfect form of that temple which thou commandest us to build, in which thy perfect glory shines forth, and into which we are to be transformed by Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Food That Endures

Texts: Exodus 16:1-20; John 6:22-40

I’M GOING TO TAKE A risk now: Even though I’ve just met you all, I’ll predict that sometime during this service you’ll be thinking about food. No matter how hard you try, some stray thought will cross your mind about what you’re going to eat once you get home, or how the roast is doing in the oven, or how crowded it might be at the restaurant where you always go after church. I’m not risking that I might be wrong about that; the risk is that now I’ve brought the subject up, you won’t be able to think about anything except food.

It doesn’t take much to get us thinking about food, does it? Here in America, even when times are harder than usual, our thoughts usually run to what we might be eating next and how good it’s going to taste. In other places and times, we’d more likely worry about where our next meal is coming from at all. Food means life and lifestyle and a whole lot of other important and necessary things, and it stands to reason we’ll often have it on our minds.

The problem is, we don’t take our concern for food far enough. We contemplate and worry about and work for the kind of food that will sustain and enliven and give pleasure to our physical bodies, but we neglect to go on to contemplate and desire and work for the food that will enliven and sustain and give pleasure to our immortal souls. We consume our lives going after the kind of food that feeds us for a little while then we need more or we die, but forget about the food that can make us live forever. Sure, let us think about food, but let us go much further and concern ourselves with the food that really matters!

In John, chapter 6, verse 27, our Lord Jesus Christ says, "Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you." Jesus the Son of Man has this special kind of food that sustains the new and different kind of life that we all need, and He promises simply to give it to us!

The people He originally addressed with these words, the crowd gathered around Him there in Capernaum, certainly needed this good news. They’d been running themselves to exhaustion the past several hours trying to get Jesus to give them more of the food that spoils. Yes, the bread and fish that Jesus gave them on the other side of the Lake was miraculously multiplied. But it remained plain ordinary bread and fish. Yes, God gave the Children of Israel manna in the wilderness, long ago in the days of the exodus from Egypt. But it was still food for the flesh, to be digested and done with; after a few hours, it would still breed maggots and spoil.

But that was the kind of food the crowds were after. That’s why they’d been searching so strenuously for Jesus. That’s why, as John tells us up in verse 15, they’d wanted to make Him king of Israel by force. Feed us, Jesus! Give us food for our bodies! We’ll do anything, we’ll be Your subjects and slaves, if You’ll just satisfy the hunger of our flesh! Their minds were stuck here on earth and hadn’t risen up to desire the food that endures to eternal life.

We’re often the same. Not just when we’re feeling hungry ourselves, but even in our Christian service. Too often we think our main calling as followers of Jesus Christ is to do physical relief work. To make sure the less advantaged are provided with food and clothing and medical care. And that once we’ve done that, we’ve done our duty as Christian disciples.

Now I’m really getting into dangerous territory, right? Yes, we should and ought and must show that kind of loving physical care for others. James the brother of our Lord says in his letter that if we see a brother or sister starving or naked and simply say, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed" and do nothing to meet his physical needs, we’ve clearly demonstrated that our faith in Jesus is meaningless and dead. But if food and clothing is all we give; if physical help is all we render, then we’ve given them only the food that perishes and we’re starving them of the food that endures. And that goes triple if the needy person is not yet a brother or sister in Christ. This mortal body is important, but it is doomed to die. What’s more, any well-meaning unbeliever can feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Only we as followers of Christ can go beyond that good work to do the best work of all. What’s the point of us going into the world in Jesus’ name if we nourish only people’s mortal bodies and fail to serve them the enduring food that only Jesus gives?

And yes, Jesus, alone, is the only Giver of that food. There’s a wonderful irony here in verse 27. "Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you."

Wait a minute! You don’t work for a gift! You just receive it! Are we listening? Do we have ears to hear? The crowd there in Capernaum were deaf to what Jesus had to say. They missed the part about the gift and asked, "What must we do to the works God requires?" We fall into the same trap today. Okay, Jesus, okay, You’re offering us a better kind of food that doesn’t go bad but lasts forever and nourishes eternal life. All right, tell us what we have to do to get it!

And to them and to us, Jesus replies, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent."

That’s it. Just receive the gift of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man. He is the one whom God has approved. He is the one whom God the Father has sent from heaven to be our Bread of eternal life. Open the hands and mouth of your will and take Him in by faith. When you have done that, you have done all that God requires for you to be fed. Preach Him broken on the cross for the sin of humankind and you have fed a spiritually-starving world.

The manna in the wilderness was a wonderful thing. But the Jews of Jesus’ day were wrong to be fixated on it. The manna that God gave in Moses’ day was not the true bread of heaven, rather it pointed to it. Or rather, it pointed to Him, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of the Father, sent into the world to die for our sins and turn aside the wrath of God we so deeply deserved. We all wander starving in the wilderness of our rebellion until God raises up the cross of Christ before us and leads us into the bounty of His eternal kingdom. Jesus tells us clearly, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty."

"Yes, Lord," we say, "but I’ve lost my job, my unemployment’s running out, and if it’s all the same to You, I’d prefer You gave me food I can chomp down on with my physical teeth." If that’s where you are, I can’t blame you. In my flesh I’m just as shortsighted. Before we can even desire Jesus to give us Himself as the bread of God, we first need to beg Him to give us a true and holy appetite for Him. Oh, that He would make us into sort of people, that if some persecutor should give us the choice between eating a meal and remaining faithful to Jesus Christ, we’d choose to starve our physical bodies so our spiritual bodies could live.

That heavenly appetite is not something we can gin up on our own. It’s not in our fallen human nature to crave the bread of heaven over the bread of this earth. We can never come to Jesus to feed on Him unless the Father first has put that craving in us by giving us to His Son. It is God alone who makes us desire Jesus the bread of life beyond all other satisfactions. The good news is, that if you even desire to desire this, it’s a good sign that the Father is drawing you closer, ever closer to eternal life in Him.

The Lord’s Supper is a sign and seal of the reality of God’s promise in His Son. This year we’re celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, and he said a beautiful thing about Holy Communion. He said that the heavenly reality of eternal life through the broken body and shed blood of Jesus Christ is given along with the physical elements of bread and wine. The bread and wine are not changed in themselves, but they certainly are set apart to a holy use and mystery. For when we eat the bread and drink the cup, looking in faith to the Son and believing in His power to raise us up at the last day, we truly receive all the holy and life-giving benefits won for us by Jesus Christ our crucified and risen Lord. St. Augustine, many centuries before Calvin, was asked, "How can one eat of Christ, the bread of heaven?" He answered, "Believe, and you have eaten."

For this is the work of God: to believe in the One He has sent. It not only is the work God requires, it is the work God Himself performs on our behalf. Belief itself is a gift from God the Father; our ability to exercise that belief is also a gift, and Jesus Christ, the food that endures to eternal life, is the greatest gift of all.

So be at peace in Him. Your life with God does not depend upon your works, your good intentions, or even on how much you feel you love and desire Him. It depends totally on Him, in the power of the Holy Spirit, through our Lord Jesus Christ. He has given you to His Son, He has given His Son to you, and whoever comes to Jesus He will never drive away.

The manna that fed the Hebrews in the wilderness was a picture and a preview of Christ the true bread from heaven. In our own lives, may every meal, every thought of food, remind us of Jesus the bread of life. May the food that spoils spur us on to crave and hunger for the food that endures, the food that is Jesus Christ alone. May this craving seize not only ourselves, but all who don’t even realize they are perishing without the Son of God. And may God in His love use us to spread that hunger so others may refuse to be satisfied with anything less than Christ, the true and ever-living Bread.

This is His Table, spread for you. Here taste of the bread which satisfies all hunger, and drink of the wine that slakes all thirst. Receive your Lord, Jesus, the bread of life. In thankfulness and faith feast on Him, and receive the food that endures to eternal life.

24-Karat Faith

Texts: 1 Peter 1:3-16; Mark 6:6b-7, 12-29 5:21-43

WHEN I WAS IN FIFTH GRADE I decided when I was grown up I’d go to Africa and be a missionary. I imagined myself suffering hardship in the jungle, facing down a fearsome witch doctor, maybe being taken captive by cannibals (I’d been watching too many cartoons) and being in danger for my life, all in defense of the faith. Oh, yes, it seemed really romantic and exciting, the idea of suffering and maybe even dying for the cause of Jesus Christ.

But one evening I was up in my bedroom contemplating this. And I got into one of those silly poses kids do, and slipped and knocked my nose with my knee. Hard. Good golly, that hurt! It hurt so bad I could hardly stand it.

And that was the end of my missionary ambitions. I figured, if I could hardly deal with the pain of my own knee hitting my nose, how could I remain faithful if those cannibals started poking me with their spears?

Now that I’m grown I can laugh at my childish ideas about foreign missions. But today’s Scriptures bring out my real error, and it wasn’t just my ignorance about Africa and its people. My real mistake was focussing on my potential sufferings and my potential glory, instead of on the suffering and glory of my Lord Jesus Christ. I was thinking how I would win the victory over evil forces in this world, instead of rejoicing over the great salvation my Savior and God had already won for me.

I doubt that I’m alone. That’s how a lot of us picture of facing persecution for the faith. We imagine how we’re going to successfully stand up against it-- or maybe we dread how we might fail. We see ourselves as heros in the war against the world and the devil-- or we hope Jesus will let us stay behind the lines and not get into the fighting at all. But as Mark and Peter both remind us, in the war of God vs. Satan and good vs. evil, the true focus isn’t on us and what we will do, it’s on Jesus Christ and what He has done for us. Yes, we will benefit from what He has done. We will receive praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. But our victory will be ours only because first it is His.

But perhaps you think this has nothing to do with you. Maybe you’re sure you’ll never face persecution for the sake of Jesus Christ at all. I suppose, compared to what our brothers and sisters in Muslim and Communist countries are going through, we have nothing to complain of. But Christian persecution isn’t only having somebody put a knife to your throat and yelling, "Deny Jesus Christ or I kill you!" The spiritual battle against us is much more subtle than that, and if we don’t recognize our little skirmishes and cling to Christ and His benefits in them, we’ll certainly fail when more severe tests come our way. If you belong to Jesus Christ you face persecution for His sake every day, and the battle isn’t merely against the world and the devil, it’s against our own fears and desires as well.

The Apostle Peter notes in verse 6 of our reading that now on this earth we may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. The implication is that if we haven’t already, we soon will. This word "all kinds" in the Greek literally means "many colored." Some griefs and troubles are screaming red like fire, some are pale gray like ash. They are all part of our warfare against this world, the Devil, and our own indwelling sin. We don’t like them, we aren’t called to go after them, but God in His sovereign will allows them as the means to test and purify our faith in Him, so it will come through like pure, 24-karat gold.

Persecution for Christ’s sake is inevitable, since we’ve been born again, we’re new creatures, and what we are will always be at war with what we used to be. Don’t imagine that your part in the battle will always be clear cut and dramatic. For then you won’t recognise a trial of faith when it comes.

We see how trivial, how pedestrian the battle can be in our reading from Mark’s gospel, where he tells us about the martyrdom of John the Baptist. This is the man Jesus Himself called the greatest of those born of woman, and the culmination of the Law and the prophets. If anybody, you’d think John would go to his death in some glorious spiritual last stand.

But no. John is beheaded and his head served up like some exotic dish because of the everyday earthly lust and spite of one woman, Herodias, an amateur dance performance by her daughter Salome, and the lust, pride, and political fear of Herodias’ brother-in-law and unlawful husband, King Herod. Herod had put John away in prison so he couldn’t go around the countryside reminding the people of how he, Herod, was violating God’s law in running off with his brother’s wife. But he had no desire to torture or execute John for his message. Mark tells us Herod feared John, he was puzzled at him, but he liked to listen to him. We have no reason to believe that John in prison did not keep on proclaiming that the kingdom of God was at hand, that the Messiah had arrived, and that people should repent and obey the law of God. Being in prison was a form of persecution, of course. But from Herod’s point of view, he wasn’t standing against the Jewish faith when he imprisoned John; no, it was simply the best thing he could do politically. And when it came time for John to die, there was no crisis, John did nothing specific to make Herod behead him, it was just one more of those everyday situations when human selfishness wanted its way and nothing was going to stop it.

It’s the same with us, disciples of Jesus Christ who bear His name. Your struggles and trials as a Christian will most likely not be spectacular. Those who oppose you may not have any idea they’re causing you to suffer for Christ’s sake at all. But you should be aware of it. Think of those times when you feel pressure to compromise what is right because your boss thinks it’s good for business. Think of situations where a little voice inside tells you to give God the glory for something good that had happened to you, but you hear your own voice taking credit for it yourself, because you don’t want to seem "too religious." Call to mind those times when popular opinion on certain political and moral issues goes against the will of God as revealed in the Scriptures, and you’re ridiculed or called a bigot when you stand up for what you know to be the truth. These are the trials of your faith in Christ, allowed so it will come out more pure than 24-karat gold.

Think, too, of those times when pressure from other people isn’t involved at all, when the grief is in your own situation. Some of you may be struggling with financial hardship at this time, even unemployment or impending bankruptcy. You may have learned that you or someone you love is facing a deadly or painful chronic disease. How is your faith in Jesus Christ? Does this trial make you rely on Him and His faithfulness all the more? Does it make you search out the depths of His love for you and move you to love and trust Him for all you are and all you will have? Or does your trouble cause you to doubt Christ and His benefits-- or even, sometimes, to forget Him altogether?

These kinds of grief seem so ordinary and earthbound, hardly anything to do with being a Christian at all! But these everyday trials are the beginning of the refinement process for your faith, and if your faith turns out to be only 2-karat gold or no gold at all, where will you be when the ultimate trials come?

And they will come. Already our Congress is contemplating legislation that would make it hate speech for Christians to stand up for Biblical moral principles. Already in countries like Great Britain and Canada Muslim sharia law is allowed to hold sway in some areas, and Muslim leaders declare it’s their goal that sharia be in force throughout the world.

What shall we do about it? Expect the government to rescue us? Certainly, whatever we can do as citizens we should do, just as St. Paul appealed to his Roman citizenship whenever the time was right. But we must never expect the United States government or any other human institution to stand between us and the persecutions that will come because we bear the name of Jesus Christ. They will come, they must come, "so that your faith-- of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire-- may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed."

It is Christ who brings us through the fire and Christ alone. His heavenly Father and ours has given us new birth into a living hope in Him, through Christ’s resurrection from the dead. This hope is not like the earthly wishing that says, "I hope it rains before my flowers die" or "I hope I get a new job before I start missing mortgage payments." This hope is in the person and work of the deathless Son of God. It teaches us to look beyond our earthly troubles to the sure and solid inheritance He has won and preserves in heaven for us.

Our brother Peter reminds us that no matter what happens, in this life we are shielded through God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. Individually we have already been saved and justified through the shed blood of Jesus Christ, and when our Lord comes in glory and takes us to Himself, His work of salvation will be perfected in us and in all creation and the total victory will be His.

Even now we see the evidence of that coming victory. We see it when the Spirit of Christ in us enables us to do things we thought we never could and certainly never could without His aid. We see it when we find ourselves coming to the assistance of someone we have feared, not through compulsion but out of Christian love. Maybe you’ve taken a stand for Christ and you were nervous about it, but then you found it wasn’t so hard after all, and you found yourself caring about the person you were speaking to and wanting them to know Jesus and receive His heavenly inheritance, too. Maybe you said No to that business compromise or refused to be depressed by the current economic situation, because the Holy Spirit had filled you with the inexpressible joy He gives in Jesus Christ. This is the power of Jesus Christ working in you.

Jesus’ apostles witnessed the first fruits of Christ’s victory over sin and Satan when Jesus sent them out in His name to preach repentance, to heal, and to drive out demons. His power in them was so great that King Herod thought John the Baptist had been raised from the dead. Herod thought that when John’s headless body was buried, the Baptist and the power that was in him were dead and gone. But the power of God manifest in Jesus Christ our Lord can never die. Our hope in Him is living and sure, and our inheritance in Him can never perish, spoil, or fade.

24-karat faith trusts totally in Jesus Christ and what He has done for us. God our loving heavenly Father permits griefs and trials and persecutions in our lives , to prove to us and the world that our faith is not in ourselves or our own boldness, not in human systems or governments, but in Christ alone. 24-karat faith maintains us in an attitude of obedience to God, focussed on Him and His will, confiding only in Him.

To this goal, Peter admonishes us to prepare our minds for action. Be sure that grief and trials will come to you, some because you belong to Jesus, some simply because of your human condition. Meet them as one who belongs to your faithful God and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Study God’s word; know what He has done for your ancestors in the faith, so you also may be ready to meet trouble honorably and courageously in the strength Jesus gives. Set your hope on the grace He gives you even now, grace that will be fulfilled when He is revealed in glory. Through Him you can renounce the ways of Herod, Herodias, and Salome-- through Him you can stop being impelled and hemmed in by your fears and desires and instead live free in the holiness of Almighty God.

It was easy for me to give up my grade-school dream of being a Christian missionary because it really wasn’t about Christ at all. The truth was that I’d recently started at a new school, some of the kids were picking on me, and I figured that if I was going to suffer persecution, I may as well do it in a good cause. But now I understand that my mission field back then wasn’t someday in Africa, it was right there, right then, on that school playground.

And now my mission field and yours is wherever we are and in whatever situation we might be. Our field of battle is wherever the world, the devil, and our own sin set themselves up against the Kingdom of God. Our faith will come through the fire like 24-karat gold, because Jesus who died and rose again empowers us, protects us, and keeps our heavenly inheritance secure for us. Trust in Him like Peter, believe in Him like John, for He is your risen Lord and your gracious, living Hope.

To Him be all glory, honor, and praise, with God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit, now and forever, amen.

Giving What We Have Received

Texts: Isaiah 55:1-8; Romans 11:25-36; Matthew 14:13-21

THERE’S AN EXPRESSION THAT goes, "You can’t give what you haven’t got." It’s used a lot in business and education. It stands to reason: If, say, you don’t know beans about differential calculus, you can’t teach it. If you have no authority to give orders, you can’t give someone else the authority to give orders.

But there’s another side to it: It’s not just that you can’t give what you haven’t got, you also won’t and don’t and can’t give what you don’t know you have! I imagine a lot of job seekers sell themselves short telling interviewers they can’t do something they’re perfectly capable of, if they only knew they had it in them.

But once you know what you have, and you know there’s a need for it, will you give it? That’s the question that faces us in our Gospel lesson today.

St. Matthew begins by saying, "Now when Jesus heard this." That is, He’d heard that King Herod had cruelly and unjustly put to death John the Baptist. John was Jesus’ own cousin, and Jesus Himself said John was the greatest prophet God had ever sent to His people Israel. Jesus knew He needed to get away and mourn for John, and to think and pray about what John’s death would mean for the next stage in His own ministry.

But the crowds didn’t care about Jesus’ loss or Jesus’ needs. Poor souls! They were eaten up with needs of their own. So they ran around the margin of the lake, and by the time the boat got Jesus there, there were all the people, waiting for Him.

Matthew tells us that Jesus our Savior had compassion on them. If He were merely human, He might have said, "This is too much! I have nothing left to give." But Jesus continually received power from His Father in heaven. The Holy Spirit was One with Him, empowering Him, strengthening Him, giving Him the divine patience He needed. Jesus knew what He had, and He was able to give the crowds what they needed. And so throughout that long day, Jesus healed their sick, and as Mark and Luke tell us, He taught them about the Kingdom of God.

But then it was evening. The hour was late, past time for supper. "We’re done here!" our Lord’s disciples say. "It’s time for the crowds to go away and buy themselves something to eat!"

That wasn’t a breach of hospitality; it was simply facing reality. The crowds weren’t the disciples’ guests; they weren’t even a properly assembled congregation. Each person was there to get his own needs and wants met, not to be part of a unified group. In the ordinary way of things, the disciples had no obligation to these people whatsoever. In fact, the disciples were actually being kind to them, by asking Jesus to dismiss the crowds and let them go.

But Jesus doesn’t do things in the ordinary way. He responds, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat."

Whaaaattt??? The disciples are supposed to give all these people supper? How can Jesus ask that? It’s a good chance the disciples had planned to buy food for this retreat in the villages, themselves! How can Jesus tell them to give what they hadn’t got?

They reply, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish." That’d be something like small pita breads, and the fish would have been dried and salted and pretty small, too. But what is that among so many? You can’t give what you haven’t got, and when it comes to feeding maybe 15,000 people all told, five little loaves and fishes are like nothing!

The disciples had nothing to give! That was the problem! Or was the real problem that they weren’t giving something they didn’t know they actually had?

Jesus said, "Bring them [that is, the loaves and fish] here to me." And He orders the crowds to sit down on the grass.

Let’s not rush by this. First of all, Jesus is giving the people rest. The custom in that time was that the teacher sat to teach, and the learners stood to hear him. Only if you were crippled or absolutely infirm did you sit down when the rabbi spoke. If you want to get an idea of this, attend a Greek Orthodox service. Even the most elderly will stand for hours, out of respect for the divine Word given them in the liturgy.

So Jesus gives them rest, by ordering them to sit down. But He gives them something else. By commanding them to sit down in His presence, He makes of them a single family, sitting down to table with Jesus Himself as the father of the family presiding over the meal. Before they’d had a single bite to eat, Jesus gave these people something they didn’t have before: Community, oneness, family unity in the presence of God. It’s something He could give, for He has known it from eternity in the communion of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

They sat, and Jesus took the bit of food into His hands. Our translation says "He blessed and broke the loaves." But there really should be a comma after "blessed," because by the original Greek and by the ancient custom of the Jewish father at a family meal, Jesus surely blessed God for the food and for God’s power that was about to be demonstrated in and through this food. We must not visualize our Lord saying some sort of special holy words over this bread and fish, that magically caused them to multiply! No, what Jesus did here He did in the power and communion and fellowship of His Father in heaven.

And once Jesus had broken the bread and the fish, He gave it to His disciples. And now, they had something to give and they knew they had something to give! And they gave, and gave, and gave, until every last man, woman, and child had eaten his or her fill and every disciple was in charge of a full basket of leftovers to take home.

But did the disciples understand then and there what it was they really had to give, there in that deserted place on the other side of the Sea of Galilee? Do we know what we have to give, when Jesus sends us into the world as His church?

After our Lord’s death and resurrection, they knew. They knew they had much more to give than mere physical bread. No, beyond any physical food, the disciples learned they possessed and could give away the most nourishing Food of all: Jesus Christ Himself, the Bread of heaven. This is the Food which if anyone eats of it, he will never hunger again. This is the eternal food that we and all Jesus’ disciples have received to give to the world.

Isn’t that what the Holy Spirit says through the prophet Isaiah? He says,

"Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live."

Jesus Christ is the banquet to which we are called. Jesus Christ is the heavenly Bread sufficient to feed the hungry soul. His blood is the heavenly wine that washes away the thirst of desperation and sin. His body was broken and torn on Calvary’s cross to offer us eternal food that truly satisfies; His blood was poured out to gives us salvation and peace without money and without price.

As Jesus commanded the disciples that evening long ago, so now He commands His Church: "You give them something to eat." And God has given us such an abundance to give away! Jesus Himself is the One we have received, and He is the One we give. Jesus Himself nourishes us through His Word and Sacraments, and with Him we nourish the lost and hungry people of this fallen world.

We don’t have to belong to big churches with money and members and ministries tumbling out the windows in order to satisfy the deepest needs of the crowds at our door! People of God! Every church where Jesus Christ is faithfully preached as crucified for our sins and risen for our life has something to give! Every church where the feast of God is spread in the royal banquet of Holy Communion, every church where sins are shown to be washed away in the waters of Baptism can satisfy the needs of the hungry world! Every church that knows that the living Christ dwells among them, every church that faithfully believes and proclaims Christ and Him crucified-- that church has all it needs to offer the crowds in its time and place. For it is giving what it has received: Jesus Christ, the Bread of heaven.

What is more, that church can offer the sin-sick, heart-hungry crowds community in Christ. That church-- no, this church can offer the lost, hurting, and hungry people of Butler County membership in a family, where Jesus Christ sits at the head of the Table and breaks and gives His own body to satisfy and heal us all.

You don’t have to send people away to be fed elsewhere. And you don’t have to work and labor to buy the bread your soul needs. Jesus Christ has paid for it by His blood. Jesus Christ is the Bread that satisfies the hungry soul. He is here among you, given to you by grace, received by you in faith. Delight in Him, feed on Him, and turn and joyfully give what you have received.