A mind focused on Jesus

 July 25 2021

Ephesians 2:11-22

         Well, it is hard to believe but we have reached the mid-point in our summer series called Confident. As I have said many times, the series title comes from something that Jesus told his disciples on the night he was betrayed. As Jesus stood before his disciples knowing that within a day all of these loyal followers of his would be scattered, their faith severely shaken, he wanted them to in their sorrow and affliction reach deep within themselves and know that although what they had witnessed seemed like the worst defeat it was instead the greatest victory because on that cross Jesus had overcome the world. We have to imagine that they were just as confused about what Jesus had told them as people are today when they hear Jesus speak words that tell us about overcoming the world. What does that even mean? I mean just what is this world that Jesus speaks of and just why was it so important that through his death and resurrection this world had been overcome because it is what Jesus has done that is to be the source of our confidence, our source of our unshakability in a world that often trembles. You see, as we look at our articles of faith that we the people of the Church of the Nazarene adhere to, what we are supposed to come away with is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has come as one of us in our flesh and through his life, death and resurrection everything has changed whether you and I realize it or not. Everything we state is a part of our faith hinges on that very fact. It is Jesus who has revealed that the God we place our faith in is a God of three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and we know the Father and the Holy Spirit only in and through their relationship with Jesus. We also know that Jesus came to fulfill the Law which can be summed up as doing to others what we would want done to us. This is what we should know to do but of course, we fail to do, and this is why we all stand in need of a Savior. As are article on sin states, we all commit sins and we at the same time are under the power of sin, what is known as original sin. To fully understand this being under sin we also said that this also means that we stand in need of a Savior. Jesus came and shed his blood and died because we were at one time weak, unholy, sinners, and as Paul states it, the very enemies of God.  The only way out of this mess that all of us find ourselves in is through Jesus, the very Son of God leaving his Father’s side and coming to take on our flesh and die upon the cross so that through his blood we might be cleansed and so that Jesus might become for us the mercy seat where we who were unholy people might at last be able to be in the presence of a holy God. This affect that the death and resurrection has had on our world is called the Atonement and as we said we now have peace with God and we are able to enter into the grace, the favor and welcome of God.  It is because of all the Jesus has done for us that we can now rejoice in the hope of  the glory of God. This glory of God is, as we said, God’s self-sacrificing love which was so clearly demonstrated for us upon the cross. This same love is the love which the Holy Spirit pours into our hearts.

         Now, the reason why we must keep all that Jesus has accomplished always front and center is that when we begin to see how it is a person comes to saving faith, the power that accomplishes this is what Jesus has already completed through his death, resurrection and ascension. This is what we learned about the grace that comes before our decision of faith, what our church calls Prevenient Grace. God, in his grace chose each of us before the foundation of the world because from even before creation the Son of God has always planned on taking on our sinful and corrupt flesh, so that through his death on the cross, sin in the flesh might forever stand condemned. Through this act of self-giving love Jesus has made peace with everyone, binding himself to everyone’s life. So, whether we were aware of it or not, God has always been part of your life and my life. It is when we hear the gospel that we then become aware of the grace of God. This gospel message is this, that God loves us so utterly and completely that he has given himself to us in Jesus Christ       his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged himself for our salvation. In Jesus Christ, God has made real his unconditional love for us in our human nature in such a once-for-all way, that he cannot go back on it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross thereby denying himself. Jesus died for us precisely because we were sinful and unworthy of him, and has thereby already made us his own before and apart from our ever believing in him. God has bound himself to us in such a way that he will never let us go, for even if we refuse him, his love for us will never cease. When we hear this word of truth we are made aware of the immense grace of God, that he has always been in our life, steadfastly with us through all the highs and all of the lows. Then as we contemplate this faithful presence of God we also become aware that if God in Christ has always been with us where we are at then it surely follows that we will be where he is,  ascended to the very presence of God. This is the new hope, a certain hope unlike so many of the other worldly treasures we seek to place our hope in.

         So, with all of that in mind we come at last to our eighth article of faith which we will be thinking about today, the act of repentance. Here is what we read in the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene. Article Eight:Repentance. We believe that repentance, which is a sincere and thorough change of the mind in regard to sin, involving a personal guilt and a voluntary turning away from sin, is demanded of all who have by act or purpose become sinners against God. The Spirit of God gives to all who repent the gracious help of penitence of heart and hope of mercy, that they may believe unto pardon and spiritual life.

         So, with this article of faith we come to one of the most misunderstood acts that a Christian is called to do. Most Christians might assume that repentance is an attempt by preachers to produce a conviction of sin through the fear of judgment. Through fear, the preacher would attempt to get the sinner to repent of their sin, to renounce their wrongdoing so that they might receive forgiveness and hear the comforts of the gospel message. In doing so, the preacher uses the fear of hell and the hope of heaven to drive the Christian life. So, what ends up happening is that the person of Christ and the person of the Holy Spirit become utilities, things to be used instead of persons to love, on a persons personal venture to escape hell and get into heaven. Ultimately, what is lost is all assurance of one’s  salvation.

         With all that being said, I hope when that understanding of repentance is laid out that it becomes pretty easy to see just how very flawed it really is. For one, there is nothing a person can do to get God to forgive their sins because ones sins have already been forgiven on a day called Good Friday. Jesus proclaimed from the cross that it is finished for a very good reason that being that it really is finished. Also, if anyone tries to motivate a person’s spiritual journey using fear they are unwittingly leading that person into sin for as Paul teaches us, anything that does not proceed from faith is sin. So, needless to say, it is best if we leave that false version of repentance behind and go on to discover the real Biblical repentance that is grounded on what Christ has already accomplished for us.

         The place where we start is where we ended in our talk about Prevenient Grace which was that through this grace that comes before, we come to place our hope in heaven, and at last understand that Christ within us is our hope of glory. Now, what we must remember is that the same Prevenient Grace in our life is the same exact grace in every person’s life. In other words, God is bound to each and every person on the planet no matter how vile and evil we might think that they are; its good to ponder on that. So, if Christ has bound himself to us and Christ has bound himself to everyone else, than we can also say that we are all bound together because of being bound to Christ. This is the conclusion that Paul came to and it is this amazing idea that is behind our scripture for today. There, Paul writes that the people in all of the nations outside of Israel, these were people who Paul writes about in very negative terms; they were at one time separated from Christ, they were separated from God’s people, they were strangers to the covenants that ensured God’s promise, in other words they had no hope, and ultimately they had no God. Into this very bleak scenario comes the words, “But now…” because now something amazing has happened, these people who had nothing going for them had found themselves bound to Christ. Even though it seemed like they were a million miles away from ever being on God’s radar, here they were in the very presence of Christ all because his blood had been shed. So, Christ not only was the mediator between us and God but he was, at the same time, the mediator between all of the people of the world.

         As we go further in our thinking about what Christ has accomplished what we have to understand is that this unity that Jesus Christ has made possible through his blood is what is meant by our hope of glory. We mentioned before that God was glorified when Jesus was crucified upon the cross because it was there that the world saw the greater love which was Jesus willing to lay down his life for those he loved. This love was a self-sacrificial love and it was this love that brings glory and honor to God. So, the love which binds us to Christ is supposed to be the love which binds us all together because as Paul writes in the fifth chapter of Romans, it is this self-sacrificial love which is to be poured in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. With all of this in mind listen to what Paul writes in the first chapter of Ephesians; In Christ, that is being bound to Christ, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace which he lavished upon us. So, here we have the assurance that Christ has indeed forgiven all of our sins, past, present and future so we don’t have to let anyone manipulate us using guilt as a motivator. Further, Paul writes, that he has given this grace, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which our Heavenly Father has set forth in his Son, Jesus Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. So, Jesus has not only bound us to himself thereby binding us all together, but he has also, because he is perfectly God as well, as perfectly human, bound us as Paul tells us to the Father through the Spirit. So, all those who at one time felt very estranged from God no longer have to feel that way because now those who were strangers have become full fledged citizens of God city. They have become holy people, and they can know themselves as welcome in the house of God. Can you catch the beauty of this glorious vision which Paul describes, of people becoming united together all the while they are united together with God? You see, the Biblical story is one where heaven comes in a mighty way down to us instead of how we normally think of it, our going up to heaven.

         Now, one more thing to take away from what Paul has written in our scripture for today and that is that Paul does not write as if this uniting of people together with each other and with God is not just some prophetic vision which is a future we can look forward to; no, what Paul writes about is something that is already happening. I’m sure that Paul’s certainty of this unity first became evident to him when, on the road to Damascus, he encountered the risen Lord Jesus who thundered at Paul as to why it was that Paul was persecuting him? Now, it had to sound pretty strange to Paul’s ears because he had been persecuting people who followed the way of the Rabbi Jesus, the one who had been crucified. Yet, here was the one who had been crucified who spoke of a unity with those who followed him. What Paul had done to the followers of Jesus turned out to have been done to Jesus as well. It was one thing to persecute misguided people who appeared to be blaspheming God; it was quite another to be persecuting the risen Son of Man. It was at this moment, I believe, that Paul began to contemplate just how it was that the death of Jesus had bound everyone to himself and in doing so, had bound everyone together. This vision which had been a future hope had suddenly become a present reality.

         Now, after laying out all of what Christ has accomplished you are probably wondering just when will I address this idea of repentance? The answer is that we have to know this ideal that Christ bled and died to create in order for us to understand just what it is that we must change our minds about, just what is it that we must turn away from. You see, most people think that repentance is just uttering a laundry list of sins they have committed and promising to never do them again. The only problem is without understanding what Christ has accomplished first, the root of all of their sin is never addressed, so their repentance is like removing stems and branches from weeds which continually grow back. So, if we understand that Christ bled and died to bring people near to him in order that through his binding together people and God in unity, then we have to develop the mindset that the unity is more important than our individual selves. This is found in the heart of the teaching of Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, found in the fifth chapter of Matthew, where Jesus tells an interesting story about a guy who gets up one morning, ready to worship God and he is so moved by his love of God he feels led to give a sizable gift as well. So, as he is there, so fully involved in worship, it comes to him that he and his neighbor had got into a bit of a shouting match over the new fence that he was putting up. Now, Jesus says what this guy should do is to stop worship immediately, go hop in his car and see if he can mend his fences, so to speak. That’s rather weird advice don’t you think? It is a bit strange but it makes sense when we know that the unity is more important than the self. We see this in the next teaching Jesus gives that looking at a woman with a desire to have her all to yourself is just as bad as committing adultery. How can this be possible? The answer, again is that here one is thinking only about themselves and not giving any consideration as to what affect such unbridled passion is going to have on the unity, the unity of his family, and the unity of his community. This is the same reason Jesus comes out against divorce because his concern is the destruction of the unity, the bonds Jesus is bringing together that end up getting torn apart. This also explains the next teaching Jesus gives about swearing oaths. At first blush it is hard to figure out what swearing oaths has to do with unity until you come to the point Jesus is making which is let what you say be simply “Yes” or “No”. In other words, be a person of integrity, let their be unity between what is in your heart and what comes out of your mouth. It just makes sense that a person who is not unified within themselves is going to be a person unable to keep from destroying the unity outside of themselves. After this teaching, Jesus goes on to tell us to keep the unity even in the presence of the evil which is trying to tear it apart. If that means that one slaps you on the right and the left cheek, then so be it. If that means you give someone your shirt after that have taken your coat, by all means let them have it. Go the extra mile every time in order to preserve the peace. This means that you love and care for those who oppose you, who persecute you and hate you without a cause because its about the unity Christ is creating; it’s not about you. All of this is summed up in the central teaching of Jesus that those who follow him must every morning tell themselves, it is not about me, its all about the unity because this is what is meant by us carrying our cross, day by day.This is the repentance that we are compelled to do because the unity Christ  has brought together through his blood, not thinking of himself, this unity is our only sure and certain hope. To God be the glory! Amen

A Hope that Changes Everything

 July 18 2021

Colossians 1:3-27

         I love this time of year especially when I see the pictures of all the kids headed off to enjoy a week at church camp. You see, I was once one of those kids. Growing up I was a United Methodist so the church camp I went to was Camp Wanake. I remember that I started going to church camp at the age of eight, which would have been in nineteen sixty nine, the same year as the moon landing. I am sure that I learned a lot about Jesus that first year but what really is stuck in my mind is that the bathroom facilities were outhouses and I was quite terrified of going into that stinky little shed overrun by spiders and so the result was a very bad stomach ache which helped me overcome my fear. Despite this rocky start though I continued to go back every year to Camp Wanake for the next five years. I remember drinking lots of bug juice, roasting many hotdogs and marshmallows over the fire and around that same fire our Camp Counselors would tell us stories about a man named Jesus, about how he came and lived just like us and how he loved us and how he died just for us. I remember also the little red paperback gospel of Luke which became quite dog eared which I still have. So, when I look back on my life, its quite obvious that even though I may have not realized it at the time, going off to church camp was pretty important in my ending up spiritually where I did. 

         You too might have similar stories, maybe not about church camp perhaps your story involved a Sunday School teacher or a friend or a pastor or a youth group leader who just took the time to listen but I hope you had some experience of God’s love in your past that had an affect on where you are in your walk with Jesus today. Those ways we became aware of God’s grace is what we are going to speak about today in our seventh part of our summer series called Confident. Jesus wants us to be confident, to have the utmost trust and faith in him because despite all of the afflictions of this world, Jesus remains the one who has overcome the world. The way that we strengthen our confidence in Jesus is through examining just what it is that we believe, just what it is that we hold to be true in a world with so much misinformation. For us who make up the Church of the Nazarene there are sixteen articles of faith that we can be absolutely confident about. As we have spoken in previous weeks we are people who trust confidently that our God is a triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit because this is what has been revealed to us by Jesus. Out of that primary belief in who God is comes our trust that we have a God whose nature is love. Everything we believe from that point on builds upon the fact of God’s love. It is the love of God that led Jesus, the Son of God to leave the Father’s side in heaven and take on our flesh through the Virgin birth which happened through the power of the Holy Spirit. We believe that Jesus is our Savior, the one who while we were weak and unholy, while we were yet sinners, while we were enemies of God, this Jesus our Savior died for us. Through his shed blood Jesus cleansed away our sin becoming for us the mercy seat where we could at last be reconciled to God. Through his rising from the dead, Jesus has made it possible for us to know ourselves as people who are declared to be just before God. All this brings us to what we discovered last week when we learned about our belief in what the Church calls Atonement. This is the change that has occurred because of what Jesus has done for us. Now, we have peace with God, we are forever united with him. We also because of Jesus, are now able to have access to the grace, the favor or welcome into the holy presence of God and because of Jesus we have the hope of the glory of God. This glory of God is the self-giving love of God demonstrated by Jesus upon the cross, the love which is our reason to honor and glorify him. This is the love which we are told in the fifth chapter of Romans that is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

         As you go through these articles of belief you begin to see how they all interconnect with one another. When we talked about our belief in the Holy Spirit we spoke of how the Holy Spirit, working in the lives of those who believe in Jesus, empowers those believers to be a light in a dark world. The Holy Spirit shines a light into the world about sin when he pours the love of heaven into those who believe in Christ. This we know is true because of what Jesus has accomplished through the Atonement. The same goes for how the Holy Spirit shines a light on the world concerning righteousness. The Holy Spirit does this in the lives of believers when he affects their prayer life by interceding for them. This close communion with God is what we experience when we enter into the grace of God, when we come and stand before his holy presence, an experience which we have because of what Christ has accomplished for us. The Holy Spirit we also said shines a light in the hearts of the believers concerning the judgment of the ruler of this world because it is the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of our adoption which makes us know God as our Abba, Father. Now, when we know God as our Father we also know that we have an inheritance which is ours beyond this life. This too is what is part of our atonement, what has been accomplished for us through the death of Christ on the cross. We are told that we have the hope of the glory of God which is the anticipation of sharing in the very life of God, which is the inheritance our Father intends to give to us. I say all of this just to point out that what the Holy Spirit does is to make the Atonement that has been made possible for us through the death of Christ a reality for us to live in and live out. 

         As you look over these first six articles of faith then what you notice is that they are all very God focused, even the article of faith concerning sin because to understand sin one must first know the Savior, who is Jesus, the Son of God. Today we begin a new aspect of our faith because now we want to begin to understand the journey of humanity and how it is that weak, unholy, sinners, the very enemies of God become full partakers in all that God has accomplished for them. We begin with what the church calls prevenient grace, which is nothing more than the grace which comes before, the grace I experienced at church camp, the grace which you hopefully remember that influenced you. Here is what the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene has to tell us about Prevenient Grace. Article Seven: Prevenient Grace. We believe that the human race’s creation in Godlikeness included ability to choose between right and wrong, and that thus human beings were made morally responsible; that through the fall of Adam they became depraved so that they cannot now turn and prepare themselves by their own natural strength and works to faith and calling upon God. But we also believe that the grace of God through Jesus Christ is freely bestowed upon all people, enabling all who will turn from sin to righteousness, believe on Jesus Christ for pardon and cleansing from, sin and follow good works pleasing and acceptable in His sight.

         We believe that all persons, though in the possession of the experience of regeneration and entire sanctification, may fall from grace and apostatize and,  unless they repent of their sins, be hopelessly and eternally lost.

         So, once again as we read this there is a lot to figure out, the first of which is the rather strange name for this grace, prevenient. Well, it is actually two words the first, pre, is a word that means before. The second word, venire, means to come. So, it is a word that simply means “to come before’. The reason that the founders of our denomination felt so strongly about understanding that God’s grace, his favor and welcome had to come before any human action and response is that they also firmly believed that all of us are so messed up that none of us could by our own strength come to trust in the Savior who died for us. We can not forget that, as Paul tells us, we stand in need of a Savior because we were weak, we were unholy, we were sinners and we were enemies of God. You see, sin is so deceitful, that we believe that we have something called free will which we are able to make our own choices but the reality is that our free will is nothing more than self-will, a will turned in upon itself. We hear this in our scripture for today where Paul points out to the church he is writing to that they had been people who were alienated, hostile in mind, doing evil deeds. This doesn’t sound like people who one day out of the blue could just decide that they should place their faith and trust in Jesus does it? This is the conundrum that from the very early days of the church pastors and teachers have struggled with. They knew the temptation would be that either we could just say that we are not really so bad off that we cannot choose to do good if we really wanted to, or we could say that we are so bad that God gets to choose who will be given saving faith and who doesn’t with tragic consequences for those who aren’t winners in the salvation lottery. Both of these ideas, thankfully our forefathers in the faith refused to accept and instead decided that it was God working in the lives of sinful people is what would empower them to come to saving faith.

         So, we have to ask ourselves just when did this grace begin in our lives and the answer is quite surprising. Think about what Paul writes in the first few verses of the first chapter of Ephesians, where we read, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly place, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.” How can we not be amazed that God’s favor and welcome were extended to us before not only we existed but even before creation existed! The way that we were chosen is that Jesus, the Son of God had chosen to take on our flesh even before our flesh existed, and as Paul writes in his letter to the Colossians it was this body of flesh that Jesus took on, this is when his choice of us became a reality. It was there at his birth, being born a child clothed in the sinful and corrupt flesh of our humanity, this is when God’s grace invaded earth in the fullness of time. Jesus in this flesh, lived and then died upon the cross to reconcile us, to put to death our sinful nature so that at long last we might have peace with God, as we spoke about last week.

         Now, the greatness of what Christ has accomplished for us is quite overwhelming and we often want to diminish this act of grace yet what has to be the logical conclusion is that the death of Jesus upon the cross is our guarantee that God has always been united with us.  This is what Paul alludes to when he tells the church at Colossae that they had come to understand the grace of God, the grace that had already existed before they had come to know about it. The way Paul tells us that one becomes aware of this grace that goes before our decision for Christ is through the truth of the gospel message. We have to ask ourselves then just what is this gospel message especially knowing that we as sinful and corrupt people are rightfully unable to on our own to make a response? Here is how the gospel message was written by a man I greatly admire, pastor and theologian, Thomas Torrance. It is perhaps the best way that I have heard the gospel explained : God loves us so utterly and completely that he has given himself to us in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged himself for our salvation. In Jesus Christ God has made real his unconditional love for us in our human nature in such a once-for-all way, that he cannot go back on it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross thereby denying himself. Jesus died for us precisely because we were sinful and unworthy of him, and has thereby already made us his own before and apart from our ever believing in him. God has bound himself to us in such a way that he will never let us go, for even if we refuse him his love for us will never cease. This is the gospel, the word of truth that  we hear and when we do we begin to understand the grace of God. The word translated as ‘understood’ that Paul uses is a word that means to know through the experience of a personal relationship. So, to understand this grace then is to know that God through Jesus has made us his very own before we even are aware that he was in our lives. As we continue to figure out just what this means for us we come to realize that God has been with us through every experience we have ever had. Through all the mountain top experiences and through all the difficult moments, God was there with us even if we didn’t recognize his presence. So, consider all of those moments that brought you to your knees in anguish, wondering just where God was, the truth is that God was indeed right there with you. Through every hurt, every pain, through every bewilderment, through every moment of overwhelming loss, and every unmet expectation, through these all the grace of God assures us that God was there with us.This is why Paul calls our Heavenly Father, the one who searches our hearts, the one who is one with the Spirit who groans with groans too deep for words, because we know that our God is always present with us, the one who knows that which affects us at the very center of our being.This is what we know to be the truth because of what Jesus has accomplished for us.

         When we understand this about God, how he has always been present with us, then we begin to understand that the way that we enter into relationship with this God who is ever present with us is through this idea of hope. Hope is that which we anticipate, that which we would gladly welcome its arrival, that which we expect to be certain to happen. As Paul tells us in our scripture for today, he had heard of his readers faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that they had for the saints because of the hope laid up for them in heaven. So, what comes first, before a decision of faith, before any action of love, is hope, but we must ask, what is it a hope in? This Paul explains is a hope of glory. This hope is just an out working of the grace we have begun to know because if we know that God has been with us where we have been then it follows that we will be with him where he will be, and since Christ was risen from the dead in the flesh and has ascended back to the side of his Father, then this is where we can hope to one day be. This hope then is much like a treasure that we desire. As Jesus spoke about the things we treasure, as found in the sixth chapter of Matthew, the treasures we lay up for ourselves on earth, those things we put our hope in, all of these things, Jesus tells us are subject to destruction either through moths eating them, or rust destroying them or these treasures might be taken from us by thieves. In other words, our world is a broken world where our treasures come to nothing and our hopes end up being shattered. This God understands because he has been with us in our sorrow when the things we anticipated didn’t happen, when our expectations became something far less than we expected. It is this hurt we experience that causes us to turn inward, to begin to only trust ourselves and in so doing making the world all about us. Into this comes a word, a true word, speaking of one who was the treasure of God that God allowed to be destroyed upon the cross all because he treasured us. Yet all was not lost, without hope, because God our Father raised his Son to life through the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was raised to life so that we might have new life, a life of hope, the hope of glory because as Jesus was raised we too shall be raised and as Jesus is now glorified so shall we also be. This is why Jesus, in speaking of treasures implores us to lay up our treasures in heaven. We are to treasure what is in heaven because it is there we find the one who treasures us. This is what the grace that goes before us does, it changes what we place our hope in so that we come to hope in the hope which changes us, the hope who is Jesus, our hope of glory. Amen.

 

 

A Kingdom of One

 July 11 2021

Romans 5:1-12

         Last week being the Fourth of July, there is, of course, much talk about our United States and just how really united we really are. There is no argument that we are divided on a number of issues but historically that is the way it has always been. The important lesson learned from history though, is that we have always sought the good of the nation over the differences between those who make up the nation.  I say all this just to point out that unity is a great idea but a very difficult challenge to make happen. Unity is also a different goal than say, uniformity where what is sought is for everyone to be little cookie cutter replicas of each other. No, unity is finding a oneness while leaving our differences in tact which is another idea all together.

         Now, if we think that coming together and seeking unity is difficult for us as people we can only imagine just what it must be like for us as people to be unified with God. Have you ever considered just what it must be like for us to be united with God? This is what we are going to explore in this the sixth week of our summer series entitled Confident. When facing all of the afflictions of our world which threaten to come against our faith, Jesus tells us to be confident because he has overcome the world. We grow in our confidence as we remember just what it is that we believe, that we revisit those beliefs and allow these times of reflection to strengthen our trust in Jesus. As we have stated previously, the Church of the Nazarene has sixteen core beliefs that all of us can be confident in. So far in our series we have learned about our belief in a Triune God, in Jesus the Son of God, perfect God and perfect man who took upon himself our sinful and corrupt flesh but was without sin. We have learned about the Holy Spirit, the God nearby, who fills us with the love of heaven, who is our communion with God and who is our Spirit of adoption who makes us cry out Abba, Father. We have learned that the story of Scripture is about our being able to do unto others as we would want done to us and how Jesus is the fulfillment of this Law. Last week, we spoke about just what it is that keeps us from living out this good we know to do because all of us know just what it is, the good, that we would want done to us. Yet, even though we know the good we know to do we find that we are unable to accomplish the good we know to do. We see this in the life of Peter in the garden of Gethsemane when asked by Jesus to pray for him in the hardest time of his life but Peter instead fell asleep and Jesus told him that his spirit was willing but his flesh was weak. Peter loved Jesus and would have done anything for him yet his devotion, his spirit was not enough to overcome the power of his sinful flesh. It is this inherent weakness within all of us, this is why all of us are people who must confess that we are people who on our own do not give honor and glory to God with the lives that God has given us. What all of us need is a Savior, someone who can come and rescue us from this body of death as Paul puts it in the seventh chapter of Romans. This Savior is Jesus, the Son of God, the one who came to us while we were yet sinners. This then is what it means to be a sinner, someone who stands in need of a Savior, and praise God, he has given us a Savior whose name is Jesus. Through the shedding of his blood, Jesus has made himself the mercy seat where we as unholy people can be cleansed so that we might be able to come into the presence of a holy God. Now, as Jesus as been merciful to us, we too must be merciful to others otherwise we will find that we remain as enemies of God when we are enemies with someone else.

         So, with all this in mind we come to our article of faith for today which goes by the name of Atonement. Here is what is found in the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene. Article Six. Atonement: We believe that Jesus Christ, by his sufferings, by the shedding of his blood, by his death on the Cross, made a full atonement for all human sin, and that this Atonement is the only ground of salvation, and that it is sufficient for every individual of Adam’s race. The Atonement is graciously efficacious for the salvation of those incapable of moral responsibility and for the children in innocency but is efficacious for the salvation of those who reach the age of responsibility only when they repent and believe.

         So, there is a lot to unpack here, to say the least. Perhaps the first thing we must figure out is just what is this word, ‘atonement’ mean? Well, the word ‘atonement’ is a relatively new word that was coined as a translation of the Greek word, ‘katallasso’. This was a Greek word that was originally used for a coin exchange. This would be very similar to those machines that you put a dollar bill into in order to receive four quarters. You exchange the dollar bill for four quarters because the machines you want to use only takes quarters. So, when Paul wanted to describe what had happened to the human race when Jesus he used this Greek word for a coin exchange because something very similar had happened, an exchange had taken place so that now instead of being sinners in need of a Savior we experience what the translators termed, ‘atonement’, we are at one with God.  So, when we are saved we are not only saved from something, our sinful state, but we are, at the same time, saved to something, this state we call atonement. We hear this in Paul’s writing in the first chapter of Colossians, where we read that the Father has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. The word translated here as ‘transferred’ is a Greek word which means that a change of where one stands has occurred. This change is what we call atonement.

         Now, I’m not sure if you caught it or not but I have done something today that I have never done concerning the scripture, which is that I have used the exact scripture I used for last weeks message. I didn’t do this because I thought we needed to go over it twice so that this time it might stick; no, I used the same scripture because in Paul’s understanding sin, salvation and atonement are hard to separate. To understand sin you have to first know the one who saves us from sin in order to know just what it is we are saved from and when we figure out what we are saved from then we must go on to figure out what we are saved to. Too often we only talk about our salvation from sin as if when we receive our salvation we are then free to go about our business as long as we behave ourselves. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. You see, in our scripture for today, from the fifth chapter of Romans what Paul first writes about is our current status which has been brought about through the death of Jesus. The first five verses of the fifth chapter of Romans concerns what we know as the atonement. In the sixth verse of this fifth chapter is where we hear the word, ‘for’, which tells us that what has been described in the previous five verses has come about because of what follows, the salvation that occurred through the death of Jesus.

         So, knowing all of that just how are we to understand what we call ‘atonement’ this transformation that has happened where we find ourselves at one with God, united at last with him? Well, as we have continually stated throughout this series on our article of beliefs, the one who holds the key to our understanding is Jesus. Everything concerning our faith must find itself anchored by him for he is our anchor of our faith. So, if we want to know what is meant by being one with God we find a place in scripture where Jesus speaks about this oneness and that place is found in the tenth chapter of John, the thirtieth verse where Jesus plainly states that he and his Heavenly Father are one. When the Pharisees in his audience heard Jesus declare this they were, of course, enraged, and stated that Jesus had committed blasphemy. Jesus answers them by quoting from the eighty second psalm, where the psalmist imagines God addressing all of the so called gods that the people of the world believed in. In this Psalm, the one true living God, Jesus tells the Pharisees, is quoted as saying that he knew of these lesser gods and just what it was that made them out to be false gods. This meant that it was God, and not these Pharisees who understood what defines the true God from all the counterfeits. The true God we are told in the eighty second Psalm is the one who gives justice to the weak, and the fatherless, the one who maintains the right of the afflicted and the destitute. He is a God who rescues the weak and the needy, delivering them from the hand of the wicked. Now, how all of this ties in with the claim of Jesus that he is one with the Father is  found when Jesus tells the Pharisees, “If I am not doing the works of my Father then do not believe me; but, if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know  and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.So, from this we can begin to comprehend that when we speak of the atonement, this being unified with God, we are not merely speaking of some mystical union of God and I walking hand and hand from here to eternity but rather being one with God, God in us and we in God means that the works we do will be the work of God , the work of giving justice to the weak and the fatherless, the work of maintaining the rights of the afflicted and destitute, the work of rescuing the weak and the needy, delivering them from the hand of the wicked. It is important that we allow this definition of how our life is supposed to look to be in the fore front of our thoughts as we speak of our walk with God because if this is the way of a holy God then this more than anything is the very definition of the holy life we have been saved from death to live out. You see, for us, many times holy living for us is about what we are giving up rather than what we are taking on, whose lives we are stepping into to bring the love of God.

         Well, all this is well and good we might say but just where are ever told that we are one with God? The answer is found in what Paul writes in the beginning verses of the fifth chapter of Romans where he tells us since we have been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. It is this word, ‘peace’ that Paul uses here that causes most of the trouble for us when thinking about this idea of the atonement. For us, peace means that hostilities have ceased such as a war being over but this word in the Greek goes much farther. For the Greeks, this word we know as peace meant to tie together into a whole.

So, I believe Paul uses this word to describe what has transpired because of what Jesus has accomplished. Now, because of Jesus we have been bound to God  so that we are forever united with him.This is the new reality that we are to ask God to make real to us by faith This is the change that has occurred where once we were unholy people unable to approach a holy God now through the death of Jesus we have become bound together with him.

         As wonderful as knowing that we now have peace with God is, there is more because Paul also writes that through Christ  we have obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand. Here, Paul speaks of grace and how he describes it is very important for us. I say this because too often when we hear people speak of grace it seems as if they are talking about some mystical substance that seems to be able to be held in a bottle which God can pour out on people. This is not how Paul speaks about grace, though, because he writes that grace is a place that is stepped into, a place where we stand. So, here Paul is telling us that grace is the favor or the welcome of God where we can enter into the most of holy of places and do so without fear. Now, I thought it was also interesting that Paul would be clear to state that it is in this place that we are to stand and I wondered what was so important about mentioning this act of standing. There could be many possible answers as to why Paul insists that we are to stand however the most intriguing answer comes from understanding that before the fifth chapter of Romans Paul has just been writing about the life of Abraham. There was one incident that we are told where Abraham stood in the presence of God. The story is found in the eighteenth chapter of Genesis and it concerns God’s plans to destroy Sodom. Abraham we are told stood before God and asked God if he intended to sweep away the righteous with the wicked and then begins to intercede on behalf of the righteous that might be living in Sodom. Abraham begins and asks God to spare Sodom if fifty righteous people live there and then barters with God until at last God agrees to spare Sodom if there were but ten righteous people in Sodom. So, Abraham, the one whose faith God counted toward him as being righteous,  he is an example of one who stood before the presence of God and interceded for God to be gracious to the righteous in a wicked city. So, perhaps this grace by which we enter into the holy presence of God is supposed to lead us to be people who plead for God’s grace for others. It is this understanding that helps us to grasp what we read in the second chapter of the book of Titus, “For the grace of God  has appeared, bringing salvation to all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions…”The ungodliness written about in this passage is the same ungodliness Paul tells us, in the fifth chapter of Romans, that Jesus Christ has died to save us from. So, do you hear just how it is that God transforms people from being ungodly people who need a Savior to being people who renounce that same ungodliness and earthly desires? God transforms them by his grace, through welcoming them into his presence because it is there through his favor people can behold the glory of God. How utterly wrong we are when we see unholy behavior in others and believe that we can get them to change their ways by judging them, pointing our fingers at them and telling them how terribly wrong they are! We should, instead, when standing in the presence of God through his grace, pleading for God to be gracious to others as he has been gracious to us because it is only the grace of God that can train people to renounce their unholy behavior.

 Instead of our judgment, Paul tells us that others should see our joy. Paul tells us that those who entered into the grace of God are those who have joy in the hope of the glory of God. The reason our hope fills us with joy is that the hope found in Jesus is the only hope that anyone can be certain of. All of the many different things we place our hope in must fail so that we at last will turn to the hope that can never fail, the hope of the glory of God. Jesus in the twelfth chapter of John’s gospel told his disciples that the hour had come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Here, Jesus was speaking of his death upon the cross because what it means for Jesus to be glorified is for us to value him as he truly is, the God of self-giving love. This is what Jesus goes on to further explain to his disciples that whoever loves his life will lose it and whoever is willing to give up his life in this world will keep their life for eternity. If anyone serves me, Jesus continues, they must follow me; and where I am there my servant will be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor them. Our hope then is found in the glory of God which is God’s self-giving love. Only by knowing this can we understand Paul’s reasoning that we are to rejoice in our suffering. It is in our suffering that we exercise the self-giving love, the self-giving love which is the anchor of our hope. As we endure, remain under this reality of suffering we are being tested to see if this self-giving love is our true way of life. Yet there is no worries as to whether we can persist in loving with this self-giving love because the Holy Spirit is continually pouring his love into our hearts. So, there is no shame for us if we suffer as we love with such a love because we are certain that in the end our Heavenly Father will honor us when we serve him. In the end we will enter into the joy of our Master and hear, “Well, done good and faithful servant.” This is the fullness and greatness of what it means for us to be united with God. Amen!

The Need for a Savior

 July 4, 2021

Romans 5:1-12

         Well, here we are on the Fourth of July and we are so blessed that this year, unlike last year, that we can celebrate  this holiday together. This just seems to be the way that it should be, because this is what makes us great as a nation is that we know that we are able to be so much more together. This is also the fifth week of our summer series, Confident. We are confident because as Jesus tells us despite having to face afflictions, we can be confident that Jesus has overcome the world. In this series we are covering the sixteen articles of faith that we believe as the Church of the Nazarene. So far we have talked about our Triune God, whose nature was revealed to us by Jesus. That nature we learned is that God is love, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit having loved one another before the foundations of the world. Then we learned about Jesus, that he is the Son of God  who was raised in power from the dead by the Spirit of holiness. Jesus through the Virgin Birth, was fully human and fully God having taken on our mortal and corrupt flesh. Through being united with us, Jesus in his death put to death our sinful nature and when he rose again he raised us all to new life. When he ascended to the throne room of heaven we too have ascended with him. We also learned about the Holy Spirit that he is the third member of the Trinity, the one who is the Paraclete, the God who is nearby, speaking truth into our lives, leading us in the Way we know as Jesus, the Way unto the Father. Through the Spirit we are filled with the love of God, we have communion with God and we experience God as our Father just as Jesus did. Last week, we talked about the Holy Scriptures, how the central theme of all scripture is that we are to do unto others as we would want done to us. This is what Jesus tells us that the Law and the Prophets, the Old Testament is all about. It is Jesus who came to fulfill this Law, to make it possible that through the taking upon himself our judgment now the Holy Spirit of God can be given to us when we ask for him and through the Holy Spirit we are filled with the love of God so that now we can love others as we would want to be loved. 

         So far, as you can see all that we have covered is very positive, we have a loving God who is willing to come to us as one of us, a God who desires to be close to us and indwell us so that through him the world might be full of people loving each other as they would want to be loved. We could say that this is the ideal, the perfection God desires because it is also quite evident that the world we live in is a long way from this ideal. On this Fourth of July weekend, it is easy to think of our countries ideal, these unalienable rights, as we have often heard it, to be endowed with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These too are ideals that we are aiming for but we haven’t always achieved. What is interesting about our country’s ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is that these are the very ideals that Jesus fully denied that he had any rights to. This is something that was brought to my attention by a Nazarene author by the name of Tom Noble. He states that Jesus recognized that before God, sinful humanity could claim no rights and since he fully embodied our humanity with all of its sinfulness, yet without sin, he nonetheless would claim none of these rights for himself. Jesus knew that he could claim no right to the pursuit of happiness and so he became a man of sorrows who was acquainted with grief. Jesus knew that he could claim no right to liberty and thus gave himself up to be held captive as a prisoner of Rome. Jesus would claim no right to life for he gave himself up to death upon the cross to do his Father’s will.  I thought that what Tom Noble has so wonderfully written helps us as people who now live under grace and not under judgment to fully understand and to feel the terrible weight of sin experienced by Jesus knowing that as one who had been embodied by sinful flesh he could claim no rights before his Heavenly Father.

         So, yes, our fifth article of faith deals with sin, that which is the cause as to what holds our world back from experiencing the wonderful ideal that God has in mind for it. Here is what the fifth article of faith tells us. Sin, Original and Personal: we believe that sin came into the world through the disobedience of our first parents, and death by sin. We believe that sin is of two kinds: original sin or depravity, and actual or personal sin. 5.1 We believe that original sin, or depravity, is the corruption of the nature of the offspring of Adam by reason of which everyone is far gone from original righteousness or the pure state of our first parents at the time of our creation, which is averse to God, is without spiritual life, and inclined to evil, and that continually. We further believe that original sin continues to exist with the new life of the regenerate, until the heart is fully cleansed by the Holy Spirit. 5.2 We believe that original sin differs from actual sin in that it constitutes an inherited propensity to actual sin for which no one is accountable until its divinely provided remedy is neglected or rejected. 5.3We believe that actual or personal sin is a voluntary violation of a known law of God by a morally responsible person. It is therefore not to be confused with involuntary and inescapable shortcomings, infirmities, faults, mistakes, failures or other deviations from a standard of perfect conduct that are residual effects of the Fall. However, such innocent effects do not include attitudes or responses contrary to the spirit of Christ, which may be called sins of the spirit. We believe that personal sin is primarily and essentially a violation of the law of love; and that in relation to Christ sin may be defined as unbelief. Wow, what a mouthful. Again, like last week we have some big words to sort out like the word depravity which in its original meaning is something that is completely crooked or perverse. This is how  all of humanity is since the Fall. Another important point of this statement of faith is our belief of sin being original and actual. The reason for this is that sin as it is written of in scripture is written both as a power or principle that we live under and sin is also the actions each of us do that go against the ideal God has for each of us.

         Now, as we begin to talk about sin, it would seem quite natural that we begin where our statement of faith points us to, to the actions of our fore-parents, Adam and Eve and their corruption in the Garden. However, what should have become evident by now in our series, is that we don’t really rightly understand anything without Jesus. It is Jesus who revealed that God’s true nature is that he is the three in one God. It is Jesus who is the Way upon which the Holy Spirit leads us, the Truth that the Spirit speaks to us about. It is Jesus who reveals that the Law and the Prophets are about doing to others the same way that we would want done to us and it is Jesus who is the fulfillment of that Law. And it is Jesus, once again that must be the one who defines for us just what is meant by sin. Nowhere is this most evident than in the life of Paul who writes in the third chapter of Philippians, that as to righteousness under the law he was blameless. In other words, Paul before he met Jesus thought himself to be without sin and surely in no need of a Savior. He held onto that belief right up until the day that the risen Jesus encountered Paul and through that encounter Paul at last understood his sin because he first had met his Savior. You see, the question that has to be figured out is just why did God need to come into our world, clothe himself with our mortal and corrupt flesh and take his life and lay it down upon the cross to die for all the world? The small answer to why Jesus, the Son of God did what he did was sin. You see we cannot begin by claiming to know ourselves as sinners and then go and find a Savior who corresponds to whatever our problems are. We must begin with Jesus who is our Savior and then know that it is Jesus who diagnosis our condition and it is Jesus who is the one who is the remedy for our condition.

         So, we cannot speak of sin without speaking of the Savior who saves us from our sin. This is exactly what we find in Paul’s letter to the Romans in the fifth chapter of this letter. In this chapter, beginning with the sixth verse through the tenth verse, four short verses, Paul mentions the death of Jesus three times. Within these four verses Paul also speaks of four realities that necessitated our need for a Savior. The first is that we are weak. The word used here is the same word found in the fifth chapter of Matthew, where Jesus tells his disciples that blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God. We are blessed when we realize our weakness, our poverty of spirit which is unable to control our flesh. This is what Paul speaks of in the seventh chapter of Romans when he writes, “I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. It is for this weakness, this inability to do the good we know to do, this is why Christ died for us.

         Paul also goes on to say that in our weakness, in our spiritual poverty, we were ungodly. This term, “ungodly” is one that means a failure to respect or honor that which is holy. And it is this ungodliness, this lack of respect for the holiness of God that Paul tells us in the first chapter of Romans that God’s wrath is coming against.  As Paul further in that first chapter explains, for although people knew God, they failed to honor God or give thanks to him. Now, to understand what Paul is saying here we have to remember that in the fifth chapter of Romans, Paul states that it was while we were weak that Christ died for the ungodly which implies that it is our weakness, the inability to do the good that we know to do that is in some way connected with us also becoming ungodly people who do not respect or honor what is holy. The connection is understood when one realizes that in our weakness we are simply unable to do the good that we know to do, to be the holy people that God created us to be and therefore our lives simply cannot respect or honor that which is holy.  In not realizing the inability of our flesh to do any good, we then attempt to do that which gives the appearance of being good, drawing attention to our actions instead of what God is able to do through us therefore depriving God of the honor and thanksgiving that he deserves.

         Paul goes on to say in the fifth chapter of Romans that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have been justified by his blood how much more shall we be saved from the wrath of God. What Paul says here echoes what he writes about in the third chapter of Romans where after stating that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, Paul goes on to tell us that we are justified in our claim of being righteous by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forth as the mercy seat by his blood to be received by faith. The word, ‘redemption’ is a word that points us to the Exodus, of God delivering his people from slavery down in Egypt. Here it is Jesus who has paid the price to deliver humanity from the slavery of sin, the original sin spoken of in our article of faith. It just follows that we would be in sin since that we are weak, poor in spirit, unable to do good and in that state of poverty we find ourselves being ungodly unable to honor the holiness of God. In this understanding then we can at last figure out that sinners are people in need of a Savior. Sin is the condition all of us have for needing Christ, the one we are told in the ninth chapter of Matthew, who comes to call not the righteous but the sinners. It is Jesus, the Son of God, who took upon himself our flesh, only he could shed his blood to cleanse  away  the judgment which stood against us and in doing so, now we could be at last considered righteous in the eyes of God. It is this laying down of the life of Jesus, an act of the greatest love, this is what creates the transformation. It is this awareness that we all begin in a state of nothingness, deserving death, the very coming of ourselves to nothing that it is here that God comes to us and gives us everything, for no other reason than he loves us.

         Yet as wonderful as all of this is, Paul goes on to say one more time that Christ has died for us and this time the reason given is that Christ gave his life upon the cross to reconcile the enemies of God to himself. Now, we have to wonder just what is meant by this term an enemy of God because as Jesus taught his disciples in the fifth chapter of Matthew, our God is a God who already loves his enemies, a God who will always love his enemies; this we know for this is the same love he calls us to show to others. The only ones who we are told by Jesus who are in need of reconciliation with God are those who refuse to forgive others and be reconciled  with them. So, what Paul is implying when he tells us that Christ died so that the enemies of God might be reconciled to him is that the death of Christ, the forgiveness we receive through the shedding of his blood, this is to make us forgiving people. It is only those who refuse to be merciful who are unable to receive God’s mercy and thereby remain under his wrath. Now, because of Christ’s forgiveness we are changed into people who forgive, people reconciled with each other and thus reconciled to God.

         So, by looking at the ones that Jesus died for we can begin to see that Jesus died for people who are weak, people who are poor of spirit unable to will their corrupt flesh to do the good, the good we would want done to us, to do this as God created us to do. It is because we are unable to do the good we know we should do that we in turn do not display the holiness of God in all that we say and do, and so we dishonor God and we do not give him the thanks we deserve. This means that we end up being a people who are unable to be holy people in the presence of a holy God, people who need a Savior, people who know themselves as sinners. Someone has to pay the price to set us free and this price was paid by Jesus. His blood was shed to cleanse the mercy seat, and so in Jesus we find that place where at last we can come to meet a holy God without fear. The reason that Jesus has done this for us is simply love, and it is this love that transforms us. As transformed people who have received mercy then we extend mercy to others, becoming reconciled to them and at last we are reconciled with God.

         When we begin to understand sin as being this whole reality where we are weak, ungodly people, sinners in need of a Savior, people refusing mercy to others then it becomes clearer as to  why our church speaks of two states of sin. Actual sin or personal sin is when we realize our own weakness, our spiritual poverty, our inability to do the good we know to do and how this is a state of ungodliness because our lives do not reflect the holiness of God. It is when we can cry out to Jesus as sinners in need of a Savior and experience his mercy, trusting in his blood shed for us, this is when our sins, our actual sins are at last forgiven. What needs to follow then as we experience the power and love of the Holy Spirit is that we become aware of how we refuse to extend the mercy we have received from God to those we have decided as being unworthy of our mercy. This is original sin, or universal sin, the sin of the world and the nations to love only those we are certain who will love us in return, to forgive only those who we know will be merciful to us. To be set free from original sin then means that at last we will love with the perfect love of God, no longer ungodly but finally displaying God’s holiness to all. Amen!

Do you get the text?

 June 27 2021

Matthew 7:12

         Last week being Father’s Day we had the kids over and they cooked us up a wonderful lunch, grilled steak and baked chicken which was great. Now, I wasn’t expecting any gifts because I think just having my kids around is the best gift but Elizabeth, our oldest child, her love language is giving gifts; this is just the way she’s always been. So, of course, she bought a gift, which was a dish towel. That might seem like a weird gift for Father’s Day but this was no ordinary dish towel because this one had a great saying printed on it which reads:Danger! Holy Bible: Bible use can become habit-forming. Regular reading can cause loss of anxiety, fear, and a decreased appetite for impatience and anger. Symptoms include increased love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. If symptoms persist, just Praise The Lord! Isn’t that great?! I love it! It has to be my favorite dish towel ever. What makes it even better is that she gave it to me a week before we would be talking about the fourth article of faith for the Church of the Nazarene which is all about Scripture. So, yes, timing is everything!

         So, yes, today we are going to be diving into the Bible today as part of our Summer Series, called Confident. As we have said before this title comes from something Jesus told his disciples on the night he was betrayed as found in the sixteenth chapter of the gospel of John, where we read, “In this world you will have afflictions but be confident for I have overcome the world.  To be confident means that we have an intensive trust in something and this is what we should have in the articles of our faith. So far we should know that we should have an intensive trust that the God revealed to us by Jesus is a Triune God, a God who is Father, Son and Holy Ghost. It is because that our God is a three in one God that we can trust that our God is love, it is his nature, not just something he chooses to do if and when he feels like it. So, his loving us does not depend upon us, what we might do or not do which is really great news. Not, only that but we should be intensively trust that Jesus is the very Son of God because he arose from the dead through the power of the Spirit of holiness. Jesus was fully God and he was also fully man having taken on our corrupt flesh through his Virgin birth, being born through an action of the Holy Spirit. It was because he united himself with us through his taking on our flesh that now we know that when Jesus died upon the cross, our sinful nature died there with him. When Jesus arose from the dead three days later, we too arose to new life through the power of the Holy Spirit which justifies our claim of righteousness. And when Jesus ascended to the throne room of God we ascended there with him so that Paul, writing in the third chapter of Colossians, could say that now our life is hid with Christ in God and when Christ is revealed in glory so shall we be as well. 

         The third article of faith that we covered last week was all about the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the God who comes alongside of us and speaks into our lives. The Holy Spirit is able to come to us now because Jesus has taken upon himself the judgment that was ours so that because we have peace with God he can at last come near to us. This God who is near to us, the Holy Spirit, Jesus tells us, is sent to us to lead us into all the truth. The Way that the Spirit leads is the Way that we know as Jesus and the Truth he leads us into is the Truth that Jesus is, the very Truth about our Heavenly Father. It is the Spirit in us that bears witness to the world. The Spirit pours the love of heaven into our hearts, the Spirit creates communion between us and our Heavenly Father and it is the Spirit who is the Spirit of our adoption, the Spirit that causes us to cry out Abba, Father.  It is when these three things are evident in our life that our light shines in a dark world and they begin to understand about sin, righteousness and judgment.

         So, with all of that behind us we come today to the fourth article of faith which states: The Holy Scriptures: We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, by which we understand the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation, so that whatever is not contained within is not to be enjoined as an article of faith. Ok, so that has a lot of big words that we first need to figure out, like plenary, for example. Plenary just means full, or complete and so what is being said is that we believe in the complete inspiration of the Scriptures. Inspiration actually means to be breathed into, which is an interesting way to think of how God breathed the Scriptures into existence. All of this is just another way of saying that God’s fingerprints are all over the Holy Scriptures, all 66 books. This also means that we don’t have to concern ourselves with the how of how the Bible came to be but instead we are to focus on the who of the Bible, who is the Bible about. Another big word found in this article of faith is the word inerrantly and it just means to be without errors. Now, it is important that we see just what it is that is without errors, because if we look and see what this article of faith says is without errors it is the revelation of the will of God concerning all things necessary to our salvation. In other words, there are no mistakes in Scriptures as to what God has revealed about how we might be saved. Do you begin to see just what is really important about the Bible?

         So, with this understanding in our heads that the Holy Scriptures main focus is on the salvation of humanity, lets turn to our text for today that comes from those Holy Scriptures. The reason I have chosen this particular text is that just as we needed Jesus to reveal to us the truth about God, that our God is a three in one God, so too I believe that that since Scripture is considered the Word of God, then we should allow Jesus to reveal to us just what this Word is all about. Here in the seventh chapter of Matthew’s gospel, we hear Jesus reveal to his disciples something very astonishing, that the entirety of the Law and the Prophets, the bulk of the Old Testament can be all summed up in one little phrase. This pithy little statement comes from the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus where God speaking to his people through Moses tells them that they were to love their neighbor as themselves. Now, yes, this is slightly different than what Jesus has declared here in the seventh chapter of Matthew because here he states that whatever you wish others to do to you, do also to them. What Jesus has done if you study both of these statements side-by-side is that Jesus has defined just what exactly is meant by loving ones neighbor. The reason I believe Jesus has done so is that the statement that he gave, what is called the Golden Rule, is very similar to statements found in ancient civilizations like Babylon and in modern philosophies and religions. What all these other people state though, is this: Whatever is hateful, harmful, or hurtful don’t do that to others. This sounds a lot like what Jesus said until you begin to think about it and then it becomes clear that it is very different.  This other rule merely states that as long as I don’t do something that might hurt someone else, that is all one needs to get along in the world. It is merely the avoidance of wrong doing which could easily be done by just staying in bed and avoiding people but we have to ask ourselves is this really loving someone else? Jesus would answer, no, just not hurting someone is a great start but it isn’t really love. No, in order to love to actually have to do something; you have to do the good that you desire to happen to you and go and do that good to someone else. This is how Jesus defines love and it is very similar to how the love that is to be found among the followers of Jesus is also defined. When we read in the fifteenth chapter of John where Jesus tells his disciples that they were to keep his commandments and abide in his love, the love Jesus was speaking of as the love known in the Greek as being agape love. Agape was one of four words that the Greek had for love, another word you might be familiar with is philia which is known as brotherly love or a love between comrades. Agape love is a special love and the early church took the word agape which had originally meant preference to use as this special kind of love that was demonstrated by Jesus. Agape love is a love which shows a preference for others over oneself as in I would rather love you and think nothing of myself. That’s really the essence of agape love, a love that seeks the good or the best for those a person comes in contact to. So, do you see how agape love is what Jesus is talking about when he tells us that whatever we wish that others would do to us this is the standard as to what we are to do for them. This just begs the question then just what is it that you want others to do to you?Most of us would probably say that we would like other people to treat us with respect, that we would like others to be honest with us, to be understanding with us when we mess up and forgiving of us when we hurt them I suppose that most of us would like others to listen to what we have to say, to seek our goodwill, to be there for us when we are down and to come and celebrate with us when life shines on us. These same things that we desire are the very same things that Jesus tells us that we are to do to all the others who pop up in our life; this is what agape love looks like in action. And if you are wondering if we are ever getting back to talking about the Holy Scriptures, doing all these things that we would desire others to do to us, this incredibly enough, Jesus tells us is the Law and the Prophets.

         When we hear Jesus tell us something like this we quite naturally want to justify this statement. Is the Law really all about doing to others what we would want done to us, is this what the first five books are all about? Well, if we look at those first five books, the central storyline that consumes most of the books, Genesis through Deuteronomy is the story of God setting his people free from slavery in Egypt. What is interesting is just why did God allow this to happen? I mean, he is God, he could have made a way to bring them out of Egypt before the people of Israel ever became slaves because, you know, he’s God. We don’t really know the full reason why God did what he did, perhaps it was to demonstrate his power and goodness in a mighty way not only to his people but to the world but another reason that is given for the people of Israel having their experience in Egypt is that it made them better people. Listen to what we read at the end of the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus, “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall do him no wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt; I am the Lord your God.” Did you hear what was said here? Their experience down in Egypt was a preparation for them to think and ponder on so that they could understand just how they wished to be treated. When God set them free then they were to take their painful experience and turn that around and do just the opposite, treating the strangers the way they wished they had been treated when they were strangers themselves. So, what God was doing in his Law was using the painful experience of his people as the motive for them to create a new way of living whereby they would do to others as they longed to be treated down in Egypt. Much of the Law then was helping the people of Israel remember the very fact of their pain and to remember that God had set them free from that pain in order that they would become people who refused to inflict a similar pain upon others. We see this in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy where we are told that God commanded his people to observe the Sabbath every seven days because they were to remember that they were slaves down in Egypt who never got a day to rest and now that they were set free from that life they were to make sure those around them got to experience a time of rest. So, with just a quick look we understand that, yes, Jesus was correct the Law is founded upon this idea of a love which does to others what we would want done to us.

         Well, not only did Jesus say the Law was founded on doing to others as we would want done to us but he also spoke about the Prophets also basing their cries for justice on this very same thing. The mention of the prophets points us to the reality that the people of Israel failed miserably to hold on to the ideal that God had hoped they would live by. Generations went by who no longer remembered what it was like to be a stranger, what is was like to be a person abused and hurting at the hands of another and with that loss of memory there was also a loss of love for the others that the people of Israel encountered even those closest to them. The prophets pointed to the fact that the Law was simply unable to be kept by God’s people but all was not lost because to these lost people, to a lost world, God sent a Savior. Earlier in Matthew’s gospel in the fifth chapter, Jesus, told his disciples that he had not come to abolish the Law but he came to fulfill the Law. Jesus then is the one who came to make our treating others as we would want to be treated a reality for all people. In other words, with the coming of Jesus there are no excuses as to why we should not act this way toward others for Jesus has done all things possible to make this love a way of life. It is understanding that Jesus is the one who came to make it possible that we can now fulfill the Law that helps us figure out what he meant when, in the fifth chapter of John’s gospel, that the Scriptures bear witness about him and further in that same chapter, we hear Jesus also say that Moses had even written about Jesus. It is quite amazing to think that the Scriptures, which  Jesus meant to be, the Old Testament, are what bears witness to Jesus! Yet, if we know that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law then it makes sense that the Scriptures would quite naturally speak of the day when God would come into our reality and create in us a new heart, a heart on which would be written God’s law. The reference to Moses points us to the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy, where Moses tells the people of Israel that  the Lord their God would come and circumcise their hearts so that they might love the Lord their God with all of their hearts and with all of their soul, so that they may live. The God who came to God’s people and cut away and condemned life in the flesh with his death upon the cross was none other than Jesus.There upon the cross our sinful nature in the flesh was condemned to death so that when Jesus rose from death through the power of the Spirit, we too might at last be able to live by the power of the Spirit.  This giving of the Spirit is what makes it possible for us to fulfill all the Law, to do to others as we would want done to us. We read this in the seventh chapter of Matthew just before Jesus gives us the Golden Rule. There Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and it shall be found; knock and the door shall be open to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and the one who knocks it will be opened.  If you know how to give good gifts to your children how much more will your Father in heaven give the good, the Holy Spirit, to those who ask him! Therefore, because God has given you this, whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them. This then is the Old Testament, the Law and the Prophets, that we should do unto others as we would want done to us, finding its fulfillment in the New Testament in Jesus Christ who came so that God our Heavenly Father could send to those who ask, and seek and knock upon his door, the Holy Spirit, the one who pours the love of God into our hearts so that we can love him by loving others. The authority of scripture then, is when we accept the reality it presents and we live our lives loving others for this is our salvation. The question that only you can answer is if this: can you say honestly that scripture is the authority over your life? I pray that you ask, seek and knock on the door of your Father’s house and receive the Holy Spirit so that the reality spoken of in Scripture might be yours today. Amen!