Holy Spirit

Jul

2024

Called to be alongside of others

A message for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost

Sharing peace in Christ, leaving no one out

by David Sellnow

Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Texas_Tech_University,_Student_Union.jpg

In my early years of ministry, I led weekly Bible studies on campus for a student group at a large public university in Texas. Anybody was welcome to attend. One who began coming regularly was Linda, who was somewhat older than the traditional college-age students in the group. After attending for a couple of months, asking many questions herself and listening to the discussions I led with the group, Linda approached me after one of the evening sessions. She told me, “I’ve decided you’re not a cult leader.” “I’m glad to hear that!” I said. Linda explained she had spent over ten years of her life stuck in a thought-controlling cult. After getting out and getting reoriented, she became a cult interventionist, helping extricate others from similar situations. The religious body that was the parent church for our student organization had a reputation for fixed doctrines that everyone agreed to. That had been a red flag for Linda, and she had decided to investigate our group. Thankfully, I had passed the test and was not a cult leader. I wasn’t mind-controlling anyone or causing spiritual damage. We were digging in Scripture together and sharing thoughts openly and equally.

Sadly, there are religious leaders and religious organizations that dominate in ways that are abusive and harmful. Much research has been done into complex post-traumatic stress disorder, including religious trauma, when religious systems harm rather than help. It happens when individuals are made to feel fearful and trapped and depressed and lose who they are. They experience an erosion of their individual personality. They are compelled to conform themselves to the dictates and decisions and rules of the group (CPTSD Foundation).

Not all stern, unbending churches are inflicting religious trauma in the formal sense of the term. But they may be ignoring the hurts and hopes and needs of many who are looking for good news and instead find mostly restrictions and legalisms.

I knew a young woman whose pastor preached that any and all forms of birth control were wrong. The young woman’s fiance had the same, unyielding view. As he and she talked about marriage, he insisted they should have as many babies as they could. Any attempts to limit that he saw as sin. The young woman was terrified, wondering if her body and mind and emotions could handle so much. Her pastor and her fiance were overemphasizing one thought in Scripture, that a man who has many children has been given a great blessing (cf. Psalm 127:3-5). They meanwhile were ignoring another Bible imperative, that husbands are to show consideration and concern for their wives and honor their needs of body, mind and spirit (cf. 1 Peter 3:7).

I knew young men and women who were training for roles in ministry in the church, who would not talk about internal struggles they had. If they had doubts or questions about any particular spiritual teachings, they were afraid to express them. If they experienced any mental health challenges, such as feeling anxious or depressed, they did not dare admit these things out loud. The church culture that surrounded them made them feel that any admission of weakness would disqualify them from ministry. They feared being dismissed from pre-ministry training because they weren’t good enough, weren’t strong enough, weren’t perfect enough to be pastors or teachers. Somehow they were forgetting the stories of all the human faith leaders we see in Scripture. Scripture openly shows the flaws and shortcomings of Abraham, Moses, David, Peter, Paul, and others whom God called into leadership. Good leaders lead through God’s strength, not their own (cf. Philippians 4:13). We don’t lead—and we are not disciples—because we are perfect people.

Religious groups and religious leaders can lose that understanding and that humility. They can begin to view themselves as having a rightness that’s righter than others, a betterness that’s better than others. They overlook their own failings and inconsistencies and judge persons who don’t adhere to their rules as out of line, as less than, as falling short.

These are the kinds of things that the LORD spoke against, through Jeremiah, saying, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! … You have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them” (Jeremiah 23:1,2).

In One Coin Found: How God’s Love Stretches to the Margins,” Emmy Kegler points us to Jesus’ parable of the lost coin (Luke 15:8-10). She says, “The thing about coins is that they can’t get lost by themselves. They can’t roll away on their own. Coins get lost because their owners aren’t careful; whoever was in charge was wasteful with them. Coins get lost because they lose their shine, because dirt and rust cling to them, and without careful attention, they turn a color indistinguishable from dust and mess.” Lost and dismayed and scattered souls are often in that condition because persons charged with responsibility in faith and religion have not kept their focus on God’s grace, have not maintained mercy in their preaching and their practice. As a result, people are cast aside—or they pull away because they are afraid, because they feel shamed and judged, because they are not led forward in hope and joy.

Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bob5d/16730007506

Do we do things in our own ministries and dealings with people that make others feel less than, as not properly in line? Are we more concerned about holding onto our own traditions than we are about welcoming others who have different backgrounds and different perspectives? Do we think of the church as our church, as if it belongs to us and anybody coming to us needs to fit in with our expectations and think the way we think? Do we put signs outside our churches and banners on our websites saying, “All are welcome,” but if folks come who aren’t the kind of people we were expecting to join us, make them feel unwelcome?

Back in the early days of the Christian church, the members who had been part of the Jewish traditions of faith did not easily adjust to having Gentiles joining the faith. The new Gentile Christians did not share the cultural context of Judaism, and often were made to feel like second-class citizens. The apostle Paul, who had described himself as the most enthusiastic proponent there could be of the Jewish faith (cf. Philippians 3:4-6), addressed that problem. In the church in Antioch (in Syria), he even confronted the Apostle Peter for going along with the standoffish behavior that Jewish Christians there were showing over against Gentile believers (cf. Galatians 2:11-21). In his letter to Gentile Christians in the Greek city of Ephesus, Paul reassured them that they were fully equal members of the church. He wrote to them, “You were [once] without Christ … aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise. … But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. He is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall between us. … You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:12-14,19). Paul also strongly made this point: Christ “has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace …. Through Christ all of us have access in one Spirit to the Father” (Ephesians 2:15,17-18). Jesus had fulfilled God’s laws for all of us. So laws and rules of the Jewish community were not to create a barrier to Gentile persons finding a spiritual home in the church. The church was not to have rules that made people change who they were in order to belong.

Nearly two thousand years have gone by since Paul wrote those words to Gentile Christians in what was then primarily a Jewish church. Today, do we Gentile Christians, with a long history and tradition in our practices of faith, need to hear the lesson Paul was teaching to Jewish traditionalists back in his day? Have we become so used to the church fabric and makeup as it has been that we don’t (or won’t) open our eyes to new people and new possibilities for the church in our own time? Do we truly welcome everyone, as Jesus welcomed everyone? Or are we sometimes too focused on ourselves to be full of caring and compassion for others?

Think of the ministry of Jesus. He labored with all his energy to reach out to every soul in need. At one time, when he and his disciples were exhausted from their work and had not even had time to eat, he said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mark 6:31). They decided to cross Lake Kinneret, but the crowds hurried on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them (Mark 6:32-33). What did Jesus do as he went ashore? He saw the great crowd (over five thousand people), “and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34). Tired as he was, he took the time to teach them, delivering words of comfort and hope. And along with his teaching, Jesus then also did a miracle of mercy, providing a meal of bread and fish for that whole crowd, more than they could even eat (cf. Mark 6:35-44). We’re told of the general pattern of Jesus’ ministry that “wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed” (Mark 6:53-56).

We are called by Jesus to carry on ministry in the same spirit as his ministry. Do you remember the woman who had been suffering for twelve years from hemorrhages, who said she just hoped to touch Jesus’ clothes and his power would heal her (Mark 5:25-34)? Do you remember the Syrophoenician woman, from outside of the children of Israel, who came to Jesus for help for her daughter, and said to him, “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7:28). People of all sorts and all needs reach out for love and acceptance and hope and help. They may not even be consciously reaching out toward the church. But they may be reaching out to you, if you are in their circle of acquaintance. Don’t look down on them. Don’t turn away from them—any of them, no matter who they are or what they are. Reach out to take their hand. Reach out to put an arm around their shoulder. Reach out as an ally to them, as an advocate for them, as a friend and partner. If I may use a Greek word, be a “paraclete” to them. That’s a word that Jesus used when he promised to send us his Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “ I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Paraclete [Παράκλeτοß], to be with you forever. … You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you” (John 14:16,17). The Greek word parakletos, literally translated, means one who is called to the side of another. Jesus has been that for us. God’s Spirit has been that for us. We are called to be that for one another, for our neighbors, for our friends, for strangers, for enemies, for everyone.

We are not a cult, trying to control others and make them follow us without question and without thinking. We will not be like the shepherds Jeremiah described, who scatter and drive souls away in fear and trauma, rather than attending to them with care. We hope to be the sort of shepherds the LORD said he would raise up, providing a witness to God’s love and an embodiment of his grace, so that those whom we reach “shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing” (Jeremiah 23:4). We will not demand people fabricate their own righteousness; rather we will point to the Savior God raised up in Jesus, whose very name by which he is called means: “The LORD is our righteousness” (Jeremiah 23:6). We are the church, established by Jesus, being “built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God” (Ephesians 2:22)—and for all of his people. Once we were not a people, but now we are God’s people; once we had not received mercy, but now we have received mercy (1 Peter 2:10). Christ, in his mercy, has called us alongside him that we might call others alongside us. We proclaim the mighty acts of the one who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9). Let us be that light, in Christ, to all of our neighbors, near and far.

For a related devotional thought, see this post on The Electric Gospel: https://theelectricgospel.com/the-house-of-disposable-souls/

Scripture quotations, except where otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

May

2024

John 3:16 – Father, Son, and Spirit in Action

Trinity Sunday was observed this week. The Gospel reading for the day included a well-known and well-loved passage from Scripture, John 3:16. I’ll share here a message based on John 3:16, pondering the actions of the Triune God on our behalf.

For additional thoughts for Trinity Sunday and season, see also the post, “We trust in a God who goes beyond our understanding.”

God Loves You

In the town where I grew up, it was not uncommon to be stopped on the street and asked, “Are you saved?” (The questioners were students from a small Bible college in the town.) You won’t find the question, “Are you saved?” as a mission strategy used by any of God’s witnesses or apostles in the Bible. You will find them, time and again, telling and retelling the simple, straightforward message of why we needed Jesus and what Jesus did for us. God’s message is not a question, “Are you saved?” but a declaration: “You are saved!” God doesn’t interrogate us, pressuring us to make decisions we don’t have the spiritual power to make. Instead, he tells us where we stand when we are standing outside of his grace, and he tells us how we are rescued by his amazing grace.

The message God speaks to you again and again in Scripture is that he loves you. The most famous such Bible statement is John 3:16. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

That one sentence is the Word of God in a nutshell. It holds within it a complete story of how much we needed God and how much his love has done for us. God loves us so much that he, the Father, gave up his Son. God, the Son, gave up his life. God the Holy Spirit gives us life when he brings us to believe in what God has done in Jesus. God—the Father, Son and Spirit—in threefold fashion is our Savior from the sin and desperation in which otherwise we would perish.

Let’s look at the love of the Father first. God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son. Amazing. Simply amazing. For one thing, we marvel at the relationship between Father, Son and Spirit who exist in one Being. We stand awestruck at that thought. We never fully fathom how God can be how he is—but he is! And then we’re amazed at the grace of God, that he would give up his Son, who is one with the Father, letting his eternal Son die in order to rescue us. We did not live to please God; we live to please ourselves. We are people who are ruled by our desires—desires that fight against God so that we do not and cannot obey God’s laws (see Romans 8:5-7). And yet God loves us! What grace! It is undeserved and unappreciated, but God loves us anyway. Like a father of runaway children who left home to live in the streets, God loved us even though we made ourselves unlovable. He kept his arms open to receive us even though we told him not to wait up, that we weren’t coming home. God loves us like a Father who never gives up on his children—and gave his most beloved Child, his own eternal Son—so that we could be his children and included in his family. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are” (1 John 3:1).

And Jesus, God’s own Son, was a willing participant in this plan. Jesus did not object to his role in our redemption. He looked straight ahead and hoisted the cross on his shoulder and began to drag it to the place where he would be executed as the ultimate act of God’s love for sinners. Even before it happened, Jesus matter-of-factly told his disciples, “The Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him” (Mark 10:33-34). When one of his disciples said, “No! Never, Lord!” Jesus scolded him for thinking that way, for not having God’s plan in mind (cf. Matthew 16:21-22). “Christ loved us and gave himself for us,” is how Scripture tells the story (Ephesians 5:2). No one took his life from him; he laid it down of his own accord (John 10:18). The apostle Paul pondered on the magnitude of what Jesus did, saying, “Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:7-8). That’s an amazing amount of love—God the Son gave up his life to make us sons and daughters of God with him, when there was nothing inherently in us that made us worthy of such a gift.

And there’s still more. God, who sent his Son from heaven, who gave his life on the cross, is not content to leave it at that and then let it up to us from there. He brings his love to us personally. He pours out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he gives to us (Romans 5:5). The Holy Spirit gives us life from God. Notice something in the familiar words of John 3:16, that whoever believes in God’s Son (Jesus) shall have eternal life. Believing in Christ is not something we, of ourselves, have the power to do. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3). We were dead in our spirits, but God made us alive with the Spirit’s message of Christ. The Bible says it quite plainly: A person “without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:14 NIV). We needed the Spirit to take the blindness from our eyes so we could see God, to lift the veil of deadness from our hearts so we could believe in God.

The Father loved us and gave up his Son. The Son loved us and gave up his life. The Spirit loved us and gave us the gift of faith, so that all the love of God would be revealed to us and believed by us. God loves us through and through, from start to finish—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As I said at the outset, there’s no question about whether or not you are saved; there is a definitive answer, a declarative statement. God loves you and has saved you in Christ and has convinced you of that truth by his Spirit. God’s love is not a question; it is a fact, a certainty.

Still, even though we know this, our fragile hearts find ways to question God, to question whether God really loves us. You know how it goes, something like this: God, you say you love me … but then why, God, is my life so difficult? How come people who don’t seem to care about you get all the breaks in life and I get nothing? How come I have to struggle and scrape to get by? You say you love me, God, but I have a hard time seeing it. If you love me so much, why don’t you make my life better?”

Why do we ask such questions? Why do we make such accusations against God? Why do we find ourselves doubting his love? Because we look for evidence of his love in the wrong places. We look for evidence of the wrong sort. We look for evidence in terms of earthly things and earthly advantages and earthly successes. That typically isn’t the sort of evidence of his love that God gives.

Let me ask you this: Would you say that God the Father loved his Son, Jesus? Yes, of course. He even said so for people to hear when Jesus was on this earth. When Jesus was baptized, God’s voice was heard from heaven, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love” (Matthew 3:17). There were two other occasions later in Jesus’ time on earth when the same thing happened—God spoke from heaven and said, “This is my Son, whom I love.” God loved Jesus; we’ll take that as an undeniable fact.

Yet Jesus said of his own life on earth, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). Jesus had no mansion, no castle, not even a house. He went from place to place all the time. At the end of his life, Jesus’ wardrobe consisted of the clothes on his back. And those clothes were stripped off of him and divided up by soldiers who crucified him. Jesus was stripped naked and nailed to a cross and hung up to die.

God loved Jesus. How could God allow his own Son whom he loved to be treated like that? Because God had a higher, better, bigger goal in mind. Jesus would die without a thing in this world to his name, but would rise again to life and have us as his own. He and we look forward to eternal pleasures in the kingdom of heaven (cf. Psalm 16:11).

God isn’t so much concerned about how nice your house might be on this planet, or how much luxury you can afford, or how many clothing choices you have when you look in your closet. Oh, he will give you enough to get by—you can thank him for that. But all that stuff is surely not the main way in which God wishes to show love to you. His love to you is mainly in Jesus. His love for you is intended to connect you to him for eternity. His love to you is most concerned with preparing a place for you in the mansions of heaven, not making sure you’re comfortable in some suburban subdivision here below. If you look for God’s love in terms of what kind of house you can afford and what kind of car you drive and what kind of friends you have in your neighborhood, you’re bound to be disappointed. Look to God, instead, for the best of what he has to give you:

Love that is constant in Jesus even when persons in this world seem not to love you.
Life that is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit even when what you experience in this world seems to be one failed promise after another.
A relationship that is solid with the Father in heaven even when relationships on earth with family and friends are cracked and strained and unstable.

Don’t look for evidence of God’s love merely in people and things—see the evidence of God’s love in God himself, in what he has done. God so loved the world (and God so loved you) that he gave his precious Son, Jesus Christ, to secure eternal life for you.

God loves you. If you ever have any doubt about that, look at what the Father did. Look at what Jesus did. Look at what the Holy Spirit has done and is doing. Salvation is not a question; it’s the deepest, greatest truth in the universe. God loves you in Christ and has made you his own by his Spirit, and you will live forever in him. Hang onto that love—the best love there is, no question about it.

Apr

2024

The power of Jesus’ resurrection

Easter this year was March 31st … but the Easter season continues into the month of May. And the impact of Christ’s resurrection continues every day, in every season. This message contemplates Christ’s resurrection power in our everyday lives.

We are not zombies. We are alive with Jesus.

You likely are familiar with the miracle when Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave. Lazarus, a dear friend of Jesus, had been ill and died. When Jesus arrived, Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days. Jesus asked that the stone sealing the tomb be taken away. Then he called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” Then do you recall what happened? Was it like this?

Lazarus stood up and came out of his grave. He smelled of death, and moved stiffly from rigor mortis. When they took off the grave clothes he’d been wrapped in, they saw that his body had started to bloat, and bloody foam was oozing from his nose and mouth. …

I’ll stop with descriptions of how a human body decomposes after death. You know that is not how it went when Jesus raised Lazarus. Jesus had said, “I am the resurrection and the life.Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:23,25,26). Jesus did not promise some meager reanimation of dead bodies, a zombie sort of life. With Lazarus and others that Jesus raised from death, he brought them back full and whole. He returned them to their families as living, breathing, loving human beings. Jesus came so we “may have life, and have it to the full,” a “rich and satisfying life,” that we enjoy life “abundantly” (John 10:10 NIV, NLT, NRSV). We are not meant to be walking zombies.

The apostle John said, “Beloved, we are God’s children now” (1 John 3:2), reminding us that no one who abides in Christ continues in sin, that we pursue what is right and righteous because Christ is righteous (1 John 1:7). John went on to say, “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death” (1 John 3:14).

John’s words cause us to examine our lives. Are we sometimes like spiritual zombies, rather than the truly raised-to-life people that we are in Christ? A zombie is a dead person that goes through the motions of life but isn’t really alive. Does that description ever fit us? Let’s think about what dead bodies do, and apply that to the life of our souls.

Dead bodies stink with a foul odor. People turn away because the smell is offensive. What would a dead soul be like? A person who gives off a foul odor emotionally, spiritually. Someone who is hard to be around. You repel people by your irritability or harshness or selfishness. Are you ever like that? Aren’t we all often like that?
Dead bodies rot and decompose. They decay. What would a dead soul be like? A person whose behavior goes from bad to worse. Someone whose bad habits grow like pus and fungus. You don’t get stronger or healthier day by day, but just the opposite—your spiritual life degrades abd gets deader. Are you ever like that? Aren’t we all often like that?
Think of the flesh-eating zombies of the movies or the fungus-infected bodies in The Last of Us video game or TV series. What do they do? They attack. They devour. They have no motive other than their own insatiable appetite. What would a zombie soul be like? Someone who lashes out mindlessly at others. Someone who tears down anyone who stands in their way. You don’t care about anything or anyone, only about what you want. Are you ever like that? Aren’t we all often like that?
Zombies, as portrayed in popular fiction, have no emotion. No feeling. No thoughts.They don’t communicate with you. You are nothing to them. What would a zombie soul be like? A person who is dead to the feelings of others. Someone who has no real relationship to those around them, who exists only for themselves. You don’t love. You don’t care. You just trudge from one moment to the next in your own mindless existence. Are you ever like that? Aren’t we all often like that?
Or think of a dead body, a corpse. What does a dead body do? It doesn’t move. It doesn’t walk, doesn’t run, doesn’t dance. It is lifeless. What would a dead soul be like? Lifeless. Cold. Callous. Inactive. You just stare at life with blank, empty eyes. You don’t move a muscle when there is spiritual work to be done in the world. Are you ever like that? Aren’t we all often like that?

We celebrated Easter a few weeks ago—the glorious good news of Jesus’ resurrection from death. We know that Jesus’ resurrection means our own resurrection one day, our bodies restored from the grave to live forever with the Lord. At our resurrection on the last day, Jesus won’t be unearthing us as the walking dead, as some sort of reanimated corpses. We will be completely alive, renewed, transformed. Death will be swallowed up in victory (1 Corinthians 15:54). Jesus resurrects his people to full, complete, unlimited life—life that will go on eternally.

And—this is important, my friends—the life which we receive from Jesus we have received already now. We have already been brought back from death to life. There is a resurrection that has already happened in you, a reviving of your soul with the life of God. Think of how that resurrection affects your day-to-day life. We are not zombies. We are alive with Jesus.

Think of the difference in the apostles who first witnessed Jesus’ resurrection. They had been cowering behind locked doors in fear. Then, emboldened by seeing Christ alive, they went out into the center of Jerusalem and announced, “You killed the one who leads people to life. But God raised him from death, and all of us can tell you what he has done” (Acts 3:15 CEV). Following his resurrection, Jesus told his disciples (and tells us today) that “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations” (Luke 24:47), that we are his witnesses in the world. Our witness to Christ is shown by the life and liveliness, the love and committedness that we show in our lives as Christian people.

Now, admittedly, we struggle with this. Christ knows that we struggle. As he once told his disciples, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). Christ’s apostles knew that we struggle. The apostle Paul described the struggle from a personal perspective. He had written: “How can we who died to sin go on living in it? … We have been buried with Christ by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:2-4). And then, in the same letter, Paul also admitted: ““I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. … it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. … I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members” (Romans 7:15-23).

Our struggle with sin is like going through life with a “body of death” inside us, lingering there (Romans 7:24). We have been raised to new life by Christ our Savior, yet we backslide again and again into habits of sin and ick and decay. We have the power of new life from Jesus rushing through our spirits, by his Spirit … but we still struggle with being cold in our hearts, unthinking in our actions.

We have the rot, the fungus of sin living in us, yes. But Christ is stronger than sin. Christ is the remedy to sin. Christ will one day lift us above and out of all our sin into the heavenly holiness that awaits us. Even now, he cleanses us from our sins. He is life. He empowers us against the sin and selfishness within ourselves. As the apostle Paul said elsewhere, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17)!

What I said before about how zombies and corpses function is false as applied to us now, in our resurrected spiritual lives.

We are new, we are alive, we are refreshed and full of life in Christ.
We exude a pleasant spiritual aroma, making others want to be around us because they can sense the breath of God’s Spirit in our attitudes and words.
We grow more and more alive as the love of Christ grows in us, invigorates us, and motivates us.
Just the opposite of mindless and soulless, our lives in Christ now are mindful of the persons around us, reaching out in relationship, seeking to connect with others’ hearts and souls through the message of Christ. We exist more for the sake of others than for our own appetites.
Not dead but alive, we walk, we run, we dance through life in joy in the Lord. We are active, energetic, lively for the Lord’s work and for serving one another.

That’s how living people live—and that’s who we now are. We are the living people of God, alive by the power of Christ’s resurrection. True, the new life we live is never easy. As long as we are on this earth, we still carry something of that old zombie self inside of us. We still will lapse into the stench and rot that characterizes us as sinners. But we have hope. We can have confidence. We renew our strength daily, because we have an answer. When Paul pondered the struggle within his own life and said, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24 NIV), he immediately answered his own question: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 7:25 NIV)!

We are not doomed to live as zombies. “God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. … If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:9,12). We need not succumb to sin as our master any longer (cf. Romans 6:13). We live now under God’s grace. God’s grace be with you, as you go out daily as witnesses to the living Christ and live life in his name.

Additional versions used:

Contemporary English Version, copyright © 1995 by American Bible Society
New International Version, copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.
New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation.

Jun

2023

Thoughts for Trinity Sunday

“Trust in Yahweh with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5, World English Bible).

We trust in a God who goes beyond understanding

by David Sellnow

Image by jette55 from Pixabay

There is an ancient Christian creed that says, “We worship one God in three persons, and three persons in one God,” that “the Father is eternal, the Son eternal, the Holy Spirit eternal. Yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal Lord God” (The Athanasian Creed). Can you explain that? That makes no sense humanly speaking, mathematically or logically. Yet we declare it to be true.

The conundrum of the Trinity is just one of the many secrets of God. Consider Jesus Christ himself. Jesus is Son of God and Son of Man. In Christ all the fullness of God is present in a human body, the Bible says (cf. Colossians, 2:9). Can you explain how that is possible, that God became human and lived among us? Incredible, isn’t it? Yet it is also true.

Consider the wonders God has done. Out of nothing, God made everything. He called the universe into being. Can you scientifically account for the intricacies of the created order? The most brilliant scientific minds continue to search and study such questions. God’s word asserts that his divine hand is behind it all. To quote a psalmist: “Heaven is declaring God’s glory; the sky is proclaiming his handiwork. … His lightning lights up the world … and all nations have seen his glory” (Psalm 19:1; Psalm 97:4,6, Common English Bible).

God tells us that he will one day resurrect our bodies from the grave. Dead tissue will come back to life. Scattered ashes and decomposed bones will rise up again as the same people who once lived in these bodies. Is that something you can devise and do at home? If we understood how resurrection could happen, surely somebody would be building a life-reviving business right now. But we don’t rationally comprehend such things. The miracles and mysteries of God are beyond what we can humanly conceive or do. It’s like Elihu told Job in days of old: “Surely, God is great. … My heart trembles and leaps out of its place” (Job 36:26, 37:1).

We believe in a God who goes beyond understanding. That is good–because where our understanding is limited, God is unlimited. His ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:9). Even the revered King Solomon, who was renowned throughout the world for his wisdom, readily admitted his inadequacy before God. It is Solomon who tells us: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight” (Proverbs 3:5). Solomon’s own life story exemplified how following his own instincts became a meaningless “chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:11). He learned that apart from God, no one could enjoy life or have what they need (Ecclesiastes 2:25).

When we ponder God’s triune nature, we may offer analogies like water, ice, and steam (the same substance in three different forms). However, none of our illustrations do justice to the greatness of God’s being. I once tried my own illustration for a children’s sermon. I asked three of the youngsters in church to come forward, and I said I was going to combine them into one person. Then I put my arms around all three of them in a bear hug and squeezed and squeezed. They laughed, but of course, they could not all be one in essence together. Yet God tells us that he is Father, Son, and Spirit, each distinct, and yet all three unified as one together in the divine Being.

If we try to put God into a framework that fits our way of thinking, then as the author J.B. Phillips said, we’ve made God too small. As Phillips wrote, the immensely broad sweep of the Creator’s activity, the astonishing complexity of his mind’s processes (which science labors to uncover), the vast sea of what we see as God’s handiwork–all this is only a small portion of who God is. We have only a glimpse of his awesomeness in the small corner of the universe in which we human beings live and move and have our being.

We accept the greatness of God and all his miraculous doings on faith. Faith confesses that we live and move and have our being in God (Acts 17:28), though we can’t see him. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). We have not seen God, nor can we comprehend everything about him, yet we believe and trust in him with all our hearts.

And God is worthy of being trusted. He is the LORD, Yahweh or Jehovah, whose name means “He is.” He just is, always the same, always existing, always the Lord. From everlasting to everlasting, he is God (Psalm 90:2). The number of his years is past finding out (Job 36:26). He fills heaven and earth (Jeremiah 23:24). He rides on the wings of the wind (Psalm 104:2,3). He is beyond our reach and exalted in power (Job 37:23). He does great things beyond our grasp (Job 37:5). His greatness no one can fathom (Psalm 145:3).

I could go on and on with more quotes from Scripture. The Lord is amazing in every way. An English translation of the ancient creed I mentioned before said it with style: “The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible; and yet not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible.” God is incomprehensible–infinite, uncreated, eternal, almighty. He is the Lord. Therefore, we trust in him–and our trust is not misplaced.

Solomon’s proverb pictures the contrast between trusting in God vs. relying on one’s own brainpower with an intriguing choice of Hebrew words. In English, we read, “Trust in Yahweh with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5 WEB). The idea in the Hebrew word “SHa’aN,” (שָׁעַן) means to lean on something like you’d lean on a cane or walking stick. It holds you up, but barely. It’s a crutch that lets you limp along. On the other hand, for the Hebrew expression describing “trust in” the Lord, Solomon used another word: BaTaKH ( בְּטַ֣ח). It means to feel safe and fully confident, to have an unshakeable sense of security. To picture this, think of a young child finding security in her father’s or mother’s arms. Envision a sick or injured toddler, who is unable to understand the hurt. Still, she feels safe in her parent’s embrace. She will fall asleep there, calm and reassured. That’s what trusting God is like. And God is our Father. He is in control and can cure all ills. He is a very real help and refuge to us at all times, able to remove our fears (cf. Psalm 46). What a blessing to be held up and carried in his everlasting arms (cf. Deuteronomy 33:27)! We need not wobble along with only our own intelligence or ability to prop us up.

We recognize that God “dwells in unapproachable light” and “no one has ever seen or can see” him (1 Timothy 6:16). Yet while God is unapproachable, unimaginable, in so many ways, he does not wish to remain unknown to us or unseen by us. He wants us to be able to stand before his throne and see his face (Revelation 22:4), to know fully and see face-to-face the glory that is his (1 Corinthians 13:12). To that end, he provided a way for us to know him and come to him. While “no one has ever seen God, It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:18). That, ultimately, is the basis for our trust in the Lord. We trust in God not because it makes such good sense or we understand every detail about eternity. We trust in him because he’s shown us such great love and safeguards our souls.

Faith consists not in trying to hold ourselves up with the crutch of our own understanding, but relying fully on the strong rock who is God, trusting in the Savior God provided (Jesus), believing because the Spirit has convinced us all this is true. That’s all we really need to understand. We know Jesus, and Jesus is sufficient to meet all our needs (Hebrews 7:26). Jesus bridges the gap between us and God. The peace which God gives us goes beyond all understanding, and keeps our hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7). We rest assured when we are resting in God and his promises.

Let me add just one more thing as we conclude this meditation. Confessing that God goes beyond our understanding doesn’t mean we stop using our understanding—our minds and all the other good gifts with which God has blessed us. Trusting in the Lord doesn’t mean we go through life saying, “God knows what’s best for me, so I’ll wait for a sign from heaven”–about what job or career path to pursue, or what decisions to make. We use our minds and the skills God has given us. We take stock of ourselves, assess the gifts and abilities God has given us and the opportunities set before us, and we make decisions. Trusting in the Lord and not leaning on human understanding doesn’t mean that when we get sick, we’ll decline seeing a doctor and just say, “I’ll pray about this, because I know God can heal me.” We will pray, but most certainly also will make use of help and resources available to us in God’s created world. All the while, we know that even if modern medicine cannot cure us, not even death can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord (cf. Romans 8:38,39).

Photo by Jessica Lewis Creative: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-mug-with-religious-text-from-holy-bible-4200823/

Our God has created us with much ability, much understanding, many resources and tools. We will use all those things to navigate our lives as best we can. But as people of faith, we also have this underlying confidence: A loving God who is far greater than us is always with us. When life hits us with challenges bigger than we can handle, when we can’t answer all the questions and dilemmas of our world, when death is on our doorstep or takes loved ones from us, when we are at our wit’s end … we still have our God, our heavenly Father, holding out his arms to fold us into his embrace. We still have our Brother, our Savior, Jesus, who gave his life for us and gives us life eternally with him. We still have our encourager, our Advocate (John 14:26), the Holy Spirit, who fills up our hearts and enables us to live with hope. Dear friends, fellow believers, we have peace of mind and peace of heart in knowing God. And the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit will be with you, always (cf. 2 Corinthians 13:7).

Dec

2022

Truths to ponder in our hearts — and tell to the world

Thoughts in reflection on the Christmas gospel

Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them (Luke 2:19-20).

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A traditional storyteller beginning In the Arab world goes, “This happened or maybe it did not. The time is long past and much is forgot” (The Paris Review, 2018). When a story starts in such a way, like, “Once upon a time,” you know right away that it’s a fable.

When the account of Christmas starts out, “And it came to pass in those days” (Luke 2:1 KJV), I suppose some might think it one of those fanciful sorts of stories. But if you listen closer, that’s not what the Gospel writer intended us to think:

“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered” (Luke 2:1-3).

Luke strove to recount history as it had actually happened. Luke was a studious man, a physician by training. He investigated everything carefully, in order to relate events “just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses.” His goal was “to write an orderly account,” wanting us to “know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed” (Luke 1:1-4).

I will admit, you’ll find all sorts of debates as to whether Luke got the historical details right. Was his timing off as to when Quirinius governed the province of Syria and when Caesar Augustus put orders in motion for registering the populace in that part of the Roman world? I’d not worry yourself over whether Luke’s historical record aligns exactly with other ancient historical records. It is good simply to take in and understand that what Luke reports to us is a historical record. This isn’t a story of “there was (or maybe there was not) a child born in Bethlehem.” This isn’t “once upon a time.” This is the account of how God came into our world in an astonishing way, in the birth of the Christ child. It is an account that shows how God has accomplished great wonders in and through the lives of ordinary people. It is an inspiration to us today, as we continue to live under God’s grace, knowing that God came to be with us, among us, in person, in Jesus Christ. It is a truth that moves us to live in service to others and with confidence in our eternal future.

When we hear miracle stories from the Bible, we may come away with the impression that supernatural things were being seen and heard all the time in those days. But bear in mind, the record of the Bible tells of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of human history. There were miraculous happenings at key times in that history, and those events etch themselves in our memories. But mostly, for God’s people long ago, just like for us today, most days things would appear more ordinary. In the book of Samuel, we are told, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread” (1 Samuel 3:1). When God began speaking to Samuel as a prophet, that was highly extraordinary. Samuel’s mentor, Eli, had to help him understand what was happening, as it was so totally unexpected (1 Samuel 3:2-18). We’re typically not looking for the interventions of God in our lives. We often don’t recognize God’s interventions when they happen in the course of ordinary events. And even when God has acted in special, miraculous ways, it intersects with the actions of ordinary people in the regular course of their lives.

Think, for instance, of what transpired for Mary and Joseph leading up to the birth of Jesus. Mary received a miraculous visit from an angel, informing her that she, an ordinary young woman, had been chosen to be the birth mother of God incarnate. A child conceived by the Spirit of God himself would grow in her womb (Luke 1:26-38). Understandably, Joseph had a hard time believing that story about his fiancee–until an angel convinced him also that the supernatural really was happening (Matthew 1:18-25). But then, things went back to normalcy. Joseph and Mary began everyday life together in the northern town of Nazareth. And during the first months of their marriage, a very this-world sort of event interrupted their plans. The government imposed a registration. We find it inconvenient when the government imposes an annual tax filing deadline on us. When a census is done every ten years, we may find that inconvenient too. Imagine if the federal government required not just a mailed or online filing of forms. Imagine if you had to travel to wherever your family’s ancestry was first established in this country and register in person. That was the way Rome did things back in the empire days. Registrations were a sort of census-taking, for various purposes (cf. Bible Archaeology Report, 2019). Rome did several official “lustrums” (as they called them) during Augustus’ reign to register people for the purposes of taxation. It seems most likely, though, by the timing, that the registration that made Joseph and Mary travel to Bethlehem was a special registration for a different reason. Rome was commemorating the 750th anniversary of its founding and the 25th anniversary of Augustus’ reign as caesar. The Roman Senate had given Augustus the title, “Father of the Fatherland” (Pater Patriae), and Augustus called for all persons across the empire to sign their allegiance to him and to Rome (An Unusual Census Decree, 2018, also Christianity.com, 2010). So, Joseph had to go with Mary, who carried the very Son of God in her womb, on a trip of 90 miles, to comply with an earthly government requirement.

In the midst of what seemed the standard course of human events, God was intervening in a way few were aware of. While the powerful in this world were taking a headcount to reassert their power and control over people’s lives, God was carrying out his own plans to bring grace and hope to people’s lives–through the coming of the Prince of Peace.

God would show the blessing and strength of his plans during the course of Jesus’ life and in what transpired afterward. Jesus brought good news to the poor (Matthew 11:5). Jesus showed himself to be the way, the truth, and life (John 14:6). Under the weight of the Roman Empire and its power, Jesus was put to death–crucified–though he had committed no sin. But God raised him up again, “because it was impossible for him to be held in death’s power” (Acts 2:24). And because of what they had witnessed in Christ and in his resurrection, those who knew him as their Savior began “turning the world upside down,” because they knew there was “another king named Jesus” (Acts 17:6,7)–more important and more worthy of our allegiance than any caesar or earthly ruler.

Christ’s first followers testified, “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16). The gospel of Jesus was no fantasy story or hoax. The miracle of Christ’s birth and of his life on this earth and his death and resurrection–these earth-changing events were the best of good news. Convinced of the truth of Christ’s story, we today will continue spreading the good news of great joy that was first heard from angels on Christmas eve. Peace and good will from God, in Jesus, for all people on earth!

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Jun

2022

Teaching a Love for Souls

Pentecost Sunday, 2022

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Luke’s Pentecost narrative [Acts chapter 2] challenges the church today to find even more effective ways of communicating the gospel to peoples in every land on earth. … Just as the early Christians moved beyond the land of Israel and the Jewish people, so we must help all the peoples in our world hear and express the gospel in their own languages and according to their own cultural patterns. – Daniel J. Harrington, “The Challenge of Pentecost,” America (May 5, 2008)

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Many peoples, one God

The sign over the classroom door encouraged students’ eagerness: “Enter with an open mind.” Inside, though, an open-minded approach was not consistently encouraged. In this elementary classroom at a Christian school, religious lessons for the month were focused on the practices of other groups, organizations, and faiths (different from the affiliation of the parochial school). The children would come home and tell their parents, “Do you know what this (or that) group believes? They’re so weird!” The lessons were teaching young denomination members to judge others. One of the assignments, mislabeled as an “evangelism exercise,” asked the children to compose a letter that they would send to Tom Cruise, trying to convince him of the dangers and evils of Scientology.

Certainly, God tells us to be wary of temptations and to steer clear of false teachings. Yet our call as evangelists (proclaimers of good news) is to be warm and winsome in our witness to others, to be models and messengers of the character of Christ. It is an unhappy consequence if education efforts lead us to become insular and narrow and focused on our own ways and practices. Our discipleship goal in the body of Christ is not to close minds and hearts or isolate ourselves from others in our communities. Rather, we seek to expand and enrich our own understanding and reach out to others with the truths we have come to know in Christ.

The apostle Paul advised us, “From now on … regard no one from a human point of view” (2 Corinthians 5:16). We don’t calculate who might be more inclined to agree with us or who seems too different from us. We take a view that is open to the wide variety of persons in our world–all of whom are people for whom Jesus died and rose again. We don’t close ourselves off from the world around us or avoid those who seem “weird” to us. [Truthfully, we likely seem “weird” to them too.] Our aim is to live in the world and impact the world by the testimony of lives in Jesus. We want to be seasoned by the Spirit to serve as the salt of the earth, to walk as children of the light to give off light to the world (cf. John 13:35-36). May we see ourselves (and teach our children to see themselves) as ambassadors for Christ, imploring other’s on Christ’s behalf to be reconciled to God (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:20). That will be our way of “praising God and having the goodwill of all the people” (Acts 2:47).

A Pentecost prayer:

God of all the nations, we pray for your one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. Praise to you for the great diversity present in the peoples, languages, rituals and practices of all people who follow you in the name of Jesus Christ. Turn us from fear of difference toward celebration. We pray for all people globally. Through the Spirit, grant us the power to be your disciples in the world. In our worship and in our work in the world, guide us to be good neighbors to our neighbors near and far. Free us from prejudice, that we may see your face in people around the world, through Jesus Christ, our Savior, and share his peace with all. (Adapted from Celebrate Global Ministries, Pentecost Sunday, 2017)

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Jan

2022

Hidden in Plain Sight

The Quiet Power of God’s Presence

Thoughts for Epiphany (January 6) and for the Baptism of our Lord (Sunday after Epiphany)
David Sellnow

They say that heaven is 10 zillion light years away
But if there is a God, we need him now
“Where is your God”
That’s what my friends ask me
And I say it’s taken him so long
‘Cause we’ve got so far to come

-Stevie Wonder, “Heaven is 10 Zillion Light Years Away,” Fulfillingness’ First Finale (Tamla, 1974)

Some of you might recognize those lyrics from a Stevie Wonder song from 1974. It was the case then–and remains the case always–that human eyes look for evidence of God’s presence in big, obvious ways. We think that if our lives are overflowing with an abundance of wealth and good health, that’s when God is with us. When times are hard, we assume we’ve been abandoned and God isn’t there. There are problems with this point of view. For one thing, having riches and success rarely indicates how close to God a person is. In fact, many powerful, successful persons often achieve such glories by godlessness–not by prioritizing kindness and walking humbly in the ways of God (cf. Micah 6:8). Another thing: The testimony of Scripture shows that God never abandons those who trust in his name, and he is especially with us in the experiences that challenge our faith in him.

Think of Job, who lost all his wealth and lost loved ones and cried out wondering where God was. God knew everything and was, in fact, striving to connect Job’s heart even closer to his own.
Think of the parables Jesus told. It was not the well-to-do Pharisee who was right with God as he bragged proudly of how much he’d done. The social pariah, the tax collector, who prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 9:13)–that’s who Jesus said was exalted in God’s eyes.
It was not the rich man “dressed in purple and fine linen … who feasted sumptuously every day” that ascended into heaven on the day he died (Luke 18:19-31). The beggar who sat in the street outside the rich man’s home, whose only friends were stray dogs that licked his open sores–that’s the person Jesus said was blessed.

When we look at the world through our usual human perspective, we don’t see God in action in the obvious ways we want to see.

The way we see things and the way things really often are out of alignment. As we go about our lives, we focus on physical, material, tangible things that can easily be measured. We are not attuned to sensing spiritual realities–the ways that in God “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Psychologists have noticed something called “inattentional blindness” in how we interpret the world. Rather than noticing each detail around us, we tend to concentrate on the things most important to us. We see things in the context of existing mental frameworks that we have adopted (Kendra Cherry, “Inattentional Blindness in Psychology, VeryWellMind, 5/4/2020). If you’ll allow me to apply that principle in a broader way, our earthbound primary focus notices the flow of what’s happening outwardly in our lives, and we miss many details of what God is doing in and through and underneath those events. While “no one has ever seen God” (John 1:18), the hand of God is evident in things that can be seen. “Ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Romans 1:20). But we tend not to look past outward appearances, and so we miss seeing important truths. “Focusing our attention on one thing can cause us to overlook another” even if the other is right in front of us. (Daniel Nevers, “A Brief History of Hiding in Plain Sight, Mills College Art Museum, 2019). That’s how we tend to be with the manifestations of God that are given to us. God shows himself, but human beings mostly fail to pay attention to these evidences of God. Spiritual realities escape our notice, hidden in plain sight all around us.

Think about the ways God made himself known when Jesus Christ came into our world. There were clear manifestations of the miracle of redemption God was bringing about, but most people’s attention was aimed in other directions. When God chooses to make his presence seen and known, he often does so in what seem like insignificant ways.

When Jesus was born, he arrived in one of the world’s least significant places, the little town of Bethlehem. The King of kings might be expected to be found in a palace, at the center of politics and power. Yet when astronomers from an eastern land came looking for him in Jerusalem, the king in Jerusalem had to consult Jewish religious scholars to ask where the Messiah was to be born (Matthew 2:4).
The woman who had given birth to Jesus was no one of fame or acclaim. She and Joseph, the legal father of the virgin-born child Jesus, both were “descended from the house and family line of David” (Luke 2:4), but otherwise they were pretty much nobodies. Joseph was a carpenter (Matthew 13:55). Mary was his teenage wife, who herself said the Lord had “looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant” when choosing her to bear the Christ child in her womb (Luke 1:48).
When Jesus was anointed to begin his work as Teacher and Savior, there was no grand national ceremony with parades and dignitaries. Rather, John, a cousin of Jesus, served as the prophet to point to Jesus as the Messiah. John lived in the wilderness by the Jordan River, wearing clothing of camel’s hair and subsisting on a diet of locusts and wild honey (Matthew 3:4). John proclaimed “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4), and people did come to be baptized. Then Jesus requested that John baptize him also–“to fulfill all righteousness,” as Jesus insisted (Matthew 3:15). At Jesus’ baptism, “the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:22). But I wonder if most people who were there when that happened heard and saw things differently. “Look at that, a dove just landed on him,” I imagine many said, not understanding the spiritual significance. And, as happened on another occasion when the Father spoke audibly from heaven, rather than hearing the words “This is my Son, the Beloved,” the crowd standing there may well have thought, “Was that thunder?” (cf. John 12:28-29).

Our eyes and ears aren’t attuned in such a way that we grasp the workings of God, even when they happen right in front of us. Think of baptism itself, the holy act by which God claims us as his own. What do we see? Ordinary water, nothing special. A few simple words, as we are baptized into “the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). When we have our baptisms, there is no dove that miraculously appears or audible voice speaking from the skies. But with eyes of faith, we confess that “baptism is not simply plain water,” but that “it is water used according to God’s command and connected with God’s word.” We believe beyond what we can see, that baptism “brings about forgiveness of sins, redeems from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe” (Martin Luther’s Small Catechism). So also with communion, the Lord’s Supper. We eat and drink the most basic sorts of things – little bits of bread, small sips of wine. But because such simple actions were directed by Christ himself, whoever believes his words “has what they declare, namely, forgiveness of sin” (Martin Luther’s Small Catechism).

Such is God’s way of making himself known to us, his way of connecting himself to us, of doing the miraculous for us. It’s not typically in the spectacular, but in things that seem everyday and ordinary. Do you remember Naaman, “commander of the army of the king of Aram, a great man and in high favor”–but who suffered from the disease of leprosy (2 Kings 5:1)? Naaman had a slave girl who had been captured from the people of Israel. The slave girl urged her master Naaman to go see the prophet in Israel for healing. Naaman went to Israel, and the prophet Elisha merely sent a messenger to tell him to go wash in the Jordan River seven times and he’d be healed (2 Kings 5:10). Naaman became angry and began to leave, because he was expecting some great and mighty prophet to “come out and stand and call on the name of the Lord” and wave his hand over Naaman in dramatic fashion and cure the disease (2 Kings 5:11). Naaman had to be convinced by others of his servants, who said to him, “If the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it” (2 Kings 5:13)? So, Naaman did the simple thing the prophet had said, and he was healed.

That’s how it often is with God. As Elisha’s teacher, Elijah, had learned, don’t expect God to show up by splitting mountains in half or shaking the earth beneath our feet. God more likely will make his presence known in what Elijah heard as the “sound of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19:12), or “a still, small voice,” as the King James Version of the Bible expressed it. Every day, in all sorts of seemingly ordinary ways, God makes his presence known and shares his grace by the life and witness of people who are acting in his name.

There is the son who visits his elderly mother every weekend, spends time with her, takes care of chores around the house for her, cooks a meal for her. And when she has to go to a nursing home, the son continues to visit, even as his mother becomes more confined, her health diminishes, and her memory fades away.
There is the mother whose toddler is throwing a tantrum and cannot calm down, so she sits down on the floor and gathers the child in her arms and just holds on, closely, securely, through all the kicks and screams, until the toddler finally melts into her embrace and hugs her back and says, “I’m sorry, Momma. I love you, Momma.”
There is the student who sees a schoolmate being picked on by others, avoided and ostracized and gossiped about for being different–and this classmate seeks out and befriends the outcast. They sit together in the cafeteria, spend time together studying and not studying (just hanging out), making it clear to everyone that acceptance and understanding are better than prejudice and pettiness.

Those could be just human actions of kindness, yes. In many cases, though, they are far more than that. They are the acts of God’s people making God’s love known in the ordinary course of events, doing things that are, in fact, extraordinary. God is working to make himself known to others through you–ordinary people in your everyday lives. Nothing spectacular. Nothing dazzling. Just you laboring patiently to serve your family, your neighbors, your community. Just you loving earnestly and committedly, caring for others with hearts that have been invigorated by the Spirit of Christ. That’s your calling as God’s people. God says to each of you, “I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. … You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you” (Isaiah 43:1,4). He also says, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior” (Isaiah 43:2). How does that help, that strength, that rescue from the Lord usually show up in your lives when you are hurting or in trouble? Through the actions of people doing simple things, basic, necessary things, in God’s name. The neighbor who shovels your sidewalk or snowblows your driveway–because he knows you are away from home, caring for a sick relative. Fellow church members who take turns dropping off meals at your home–because you are the caregiver for a disabled family member or for your spouse who is going through chemotherapy, and they want to help bear your burdens. Complete strangers who contribute to an online plea for funds to help with extensive medical bills incurred from a major surgery or a lengthy stay in the hospital ICU recovering from disease.

Every now and then, God has intervened in history with supernatural interruptions of natural events. But more often, God does his work through us, his people, in less astonishing ways. Let me remind you again of the experience of God’s prophet Elijah. Elijah had the experience of God making his presence obvious and forceful and explosive. Elijah prevailed over the enemies of God by calling on God to do a miracle, to consume a sacrifice with fire sent from heaven. And God did so, spectacularly. “The fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench” around Elijah’s offering (1 Kings 18:38). But the perspective of the world doesn’t readily change when a miracle like that happens. In fact, the enemies of God (and of Elijah) only got more determined against God’s plans and against God’s prophet. Death threats were issued from the royal household against Elijah, and he ran. He ran back to the mountain where God had once revealed himself to Moses, and felt ready to die. “I’ve had enough,” he said to God. “Take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4). Instead, God told him to get up and he would reveal himself to Elijah. God did show himself, but not in expected ways. Not in a mighty, raging wind. Not in a rock-smashing earthquake. God revealed himself In a still, small voice, in the “sound of sheer silence” (I kings 19).

God’s powerful presence is often in the still, small voice–a voice carried out into the world by individuals, one at a time, by people like Elijah, by people like you and me. God’s way of enacting change in the hearts of people, one person at a time, is by the simple testimony of his words on our lips and his love lived out in our lives. He brings about the miracle of salvation by one baptism, then another baptism, then another, sending his Spirit to live in each baptized person’s heart and life. He carries out the actions of salvation in our hearts and lives, as we who have been saved by grace through faith, “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Ephesians 3:10), go about doing those works on behalf of one another, and for our neighbors, and for our communities.

When you feel like God is 10 zillion light years away, like God is so far distant from your life that you wonder if he’s even there at all, look again. Listen again. Feel again. Take notice of the little things, the inconspicuous ways that God is showing himself. Others’ actions. Your own actions. All the everyday words and actions whereby God makes his presence known and shares his peace among us. The smallest of kind words and actions toward one of the least of those whom Jesus considers his brothers and sisters are gifts to Jesus and blessings from Jesus (cf. Matthew 25:40). As Martin Luther taught, “God is so in control that the good we do is really God’s work. We’re nothing but the hands of Christ …. In the good we do, we are ‘little Christs’ to each other” (Luther’s Works, Vol.34, p.111, Volu.24, p.226, Vol. 31, p.367-368, quoted by Mark Ellingson in Living Lutheran, August 11, 2017). May our lives each day appreciate and extend the Epiphany of Christ in this way.

Feb

2021

God so loved the world

Valentines’ Day focuses attention on love. Traditions say that a priest named Valentine stood up for love and marriage at a time when Rome’s emperor had banned weddings, insisting men be devoted only to their military duty (History.com). Love binds us to each other.

The love we share with one another, of course, is a reflection of God’s love, “for God is love” (1 John 4:8). On this day to celebrate love, let’s look at what may be the most well-known statement about God’s love, John 3:16.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Let’s ponder that passage a word or two at a time.

God – the Author of life (Acts 3:15), the originator of love. It was he who created us; it is he who sustains us. As human beings, we reach for all sorts of gods, things to believe in. We make ourselves into gods, thinking we have within us all that we need. But ultimately God is who he is, the one self-sufficient Being and source of all existence. “In him we live and move and have our being,” as Paul pointed out to an Athenian audience from their own poetry about the highest deity (Acts 17:28). The true, eternal God is not some inanimate force floating about in the universe. He is our Father who has deeply personal connections to us and concerns for us.

God loved. Love that comes from God is not merely a sentimental feeling. When we speak of love, our feelings can be short-lived, shallow, even selfish. When God speaks of love, he tells of something pure, profound, and lasting. God’s love is not swayed by our appearance or actions. God is committed to caring for us despite how we appear and how we behave.

God loved the world. Every person, every individual, rich or poor, young or old, thin or fat, wise or simple, high or low–God loves all. God doesn’t limit his love to those who look good by human standards–or by divine standards. Thank God he doesn’t, since all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). We are full of wrongdoing and God knows it. Yet God has loved us and has given his love to us all.

God so loved the world–so much, so greatly, so amazingly, that he gave. We tend to think of relationships as give and take. If I’m going to give to you, I expect also to receive something in exchange. But God simply gave. No strings, no conditions, no ulterior motives. He just gave. He gave lovingly of himself, ever so painfully of himself, not for his own gain but for ours. He needed nothing; he already is and has all things. We needed everything, and God gave. He gave so that we might share in what he has.

And consider the magnitude of God’s gift.

God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. God did not send a servant to do his bidding. He did not send an angel or even an archangel. He sent his Son–the One and Only, the Only-Begotten, the divine Son who is eternal with Father and Spirit. God gave of himself, a gift of unfathomable love. God the Only Son took on human flesh. He lived in our place and died in our place. God “did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us” (Romans 8:32). The incarnate God in Christ “emptied himself …. He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death–even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7,8). This was the awe-inspiring extent to which God gave.

And now, everyone who believes in him receives this greatest of all gifts. Again, the gift is for everyone, a benefit available to the whole world. The benefit is received by believing, not by doing, not by some act or decision or sacrifice of our own. The gift is ours simply by receiving faith from God, a faith he instills in us, bringing us to believe in what he has done. We are saved by the gift of God’s grace, through faith which is not our own doing–it too is the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8). From start to finish, God has embraced us by his love.

Thank God for his love–love that means we will not perish but have eternal life. Thanks to God’s love, we will not end up separated and isolated. We will not languish in loneliness and shame. We are not lost to hopelessness and futility forever. Thanks to God’s love, we have a living, vibrant, endless relationship with God as our Father and Christ as our Brother. We are encouraged daily by God’s Spirit. May we “abide in his love” so that our “joy may be complete” (John 15:10,11).

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Nov

2020

The King who Inscribes his Character on Us

A message for Christ the King Sunday

Our King does not dominate or dictate
Our King invigorates us to be like him

There are a number of churches around the world named “Christ the King.” The Cathedral of Christ the King in Mullingar, Ireland, is reportedly the first church given that name. The Cathedral of Christ the King in Atlanta is one of the ten largest congregations in the United States. Those are just a couple of the big Christ the King churches. There are numerous smaller congregations too.

I don’t know of any churches named “Christ the Tyrant” or “Christ the Despot” or “Christ the Dictator.” I Google-searched for such names, but couldn’t find any. I did find an opinion piece arguing that Christians tend to view their Lord that way–as a benevolent dictator. But if there are people of faith who take that view, they’re mistaken. Christ the King is certainly not like some military strongman or arbitrary emperor, nor even like a benevolent dictator. Christ is not someone who looks upon us as weak subjects who do his bidding simply to suit his whims. Christ did not become our king by standing above us, pointing out what we must do from moment to moment. Christ became our king by standing with us, among us, leading us in a path we could not have followed without his leadership. Jesus said to those who followed him, “I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27). On the night he said that, Jesus proved his point by getting down on the floor and washing his disciples’ feet (cf. John 13).

Quite clearly, Jesus is the opposite of a tyrant. He won our allegiance by going into battle against tyrants and overlords for us. The tyrant was sin. The tyrant was the devil who accuses and all the demons that torment us. Those are the sorts of rulers that dictate and demand, that control us by fear and guilt. Christ is not like that.

Jesus is also much different from even the most benevolent dictator. Such a ruler believes that he must decide all things for the people underneath him because they are underlings and he is so much above them. Now, it is true that Christ, our King, certainly does know what is best for us. Christ is “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). As high as the heavens are above the earth, so far are his thoughts higher than our thoughts (cf. Isaiah 55:9). But the fact that Christ is superior to us in all things does not mean he deals with us as inferiors. Rather, he comes alongside us and shares his life and strength with us. He invigorates us with his words, his Spirit, so that we become alive in him. We become more and more like him as we grow in our relationship with him.

I have known God-fearing people who haven’t understood this, who haven’t grasped how Christ is seeking to lead them. They trouble themselves over every detail of their lives, searching desperately for some sort of sign from God. “What is God’s will?” they’ll say; “What does God want me to do?” I knew a woman who struggled over the smallest decisions like that. She begged to know what actions God wanted her to take, almost hoping a daily to-do list would appear like handwriting on the wall, so she’d know she wasn’t making any mistakes. In her anxiousness, she once put two pens side by side on the table and asked, “Now, which pen does God want me to use? The blue one or the black one?” That’s going too far in expecting God to direct our lives. Yes, Christ is our leader by night and by day. But Jesus leads us not as though we are blindfolded and he must guide our feet for every step we take. He instills his character and his way of life in us, so that we make our own decisions as the new persons that we are in Christ (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:17). It’s an outmoded way, a childish way, to want God to dictate every direction to us, to tell us exactly what to do in every instant. It’s a new way of life, as we become mature in Christ, that we make our own decisions and take actions that flow from the mind of Christ which is in us (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:16).

Consider the Epistle assigned for this weekend for the festival of Christ the King. The prayer for the Christians at Ephesus remains an apostlic prayer for us today. Notice the emphasis on how the power of Christ works in us and inspires us as he extends his kingdom into our hearts.

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you … and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion …. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all (Ephesians 1:17-23).

Christ as king is head over all things for us. That’s not an image of some giant head floating in the air like the Great and Powerful Oz. There’s no false pretense of power with Christ our King. He rules in a way far better than the way any authority in this world operates. Even while Christ is seated high above in the heavenly places, he is at the same time intimately connected to us, like the head to members of the body. His thoughts pulse through us and we operate in unity with him. We are his feet to run out into the world, his hands to extend help and care to persons in his name, to put into practice his love.

Consider also the description of what Christ will find when he returns at the end of time, when he “comes in his glory, and all the angels with him” and “all the nations will be gathered before him” (Matthew 25:31-42). Who are the people he calls his own, who truly have known him?

The king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Matthew 25:34-36).

When Christ says this to his people, what is their reaction? “When did we do that?” They wonder what he’s talking about. Christ’s people do such actions on behalf of “the least of these” fellow members of the human family not because they’re keeping score of their good deeds, not because they’re trying to impress God by their actions. They do such things just because that’s who they are, because the spirit of Christ inhabits them and propels them into action. The people of Christ’s kingdom serve everyone they encounter without thinking, “This is something I must do because the king has issued an executive order.” Yes, the kingdom of Christ has laws, but those laws are designed by our Lord for our good and the good of our neighbors. As we grow in our understanding and relationship with our King, we embody more and more the spirit and compassion and action that he has for all who are in need. We become Christ to our neighbors.

Martin Luther famously wrote on that theme–that we become like “little Christs.” In his booklet On the Freedom of a Christian (1520), Luther wrote:

Since God has overwhelmed me with such inestimable riches, why should I not freely, cheerfully, and with my whole heart do all that I know will be pleasing to him? I will therefore give myself, as a sort of Christ, to my neighbor, as Christ has given himself to me. I will do whatever is advantageous and wholesome for my neighbor, since by faith I abound in all good things in Christ. … We each become a sort of Christ to each other, so that we may be mutually Christs, and that the same Christ may be in all of us; that is, that we may be truly Christians.

Our life as Christ’s people, in his service, is not like serving an earthly ruler who dominates and bullies to get his way, and whose subjects survive by trying to ingratiate themselves with the ruler. We serve as people whose character has been transformed by the grace and goodness of our king. We become his allies in extending the life of his kingdom into a world that has not understood him and operates by principles so often opposite to his.

Which leads to one final point that must be mentioned. We need to take notice of the other sort of approach that predominates in this world. It is an approach not only by the rich and powerful, who lord it over others in positions of power and authority. It’s also an approach adopted by people in general toward authority — including God’s authority. It may work with the powers that be in this world, but it doesn’t work with God. In the Gospel reading for today, did you notice how those who are on the wrong side of Christ respond when Christ says they did not do the things that people of his kingdom do? They say, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you” (Matthew 25:44)? And he will answer them, “Just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (Matthew 25:45). They thought they had done good things.They thought of themselves as good people. They expected God should be pleased with them, because they had minded their own business and stayed out of trouble. They may even think they had done great undertakings for the King, that they would have an elevated position in his kingdom because of high-powered things that they did. Jesus described such persons in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:21-23):

Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?” Then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.”

Too often people have the wrong idea, thinking Jesus owes it to everybody to be nice to them. And they also think that if they go out of their way to do things they think God wants, that then they are entitled to extra rewards, sort of like people may think their donations or efforts on behalf of some political leader entitle them to perks and privileges in that person’s administration. But Christ our King doesn’t operate by those principles. Christ calls his people to follow him, not worldly “philosophy and empty deceit” or “human tradition” (Colossians 2:9). We are called to follow the truth according to Christ, whose kingdom is not of this world (cf. John 18:36). So let’s not be confused. Let’s not slip back into worldly thinking, into tallying up our good deeds as though keeping a scoresheet will impress Christ the King, or boasting about where we think we stand with God or how right or righteous we are. Being servants of Christ’s kingdom means setting ourselves aside and simply serving others. Christ established his kingdom by laying down his life for those whom he loved and came to serve. As servants of Christ the King, we carry on in his kingdom and extend his kingdom in the same way. We deny ourselves. We take up whatever crosses we may be asked to carry, and we do all we can to help others carry their crosses too (cf. Luke 29:23-25). As the word of our King tells us, “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). That’s how we serve–and whom we serve–as the people of Christ the King.

Jul

2020

Life without love = nothing

by David Sellnow

In the previous post on this blog, I mentioned Scripture’s instruction that if we do not have love, our witness will ring hollow. I’d like to expand on that thought, making further application of what the apostle Paul affirmed (1 Corinthians 13:1-3):

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Notice that the various things Paul mentioned are all good things: speaking in heavenly ways, having deep spiritual knowledge, possessing great faith, being willing to undergo poverty and suffering. Yet such things by themselves do not exhibit the heart and soul of someone who lives in Christ. If our beliefs or knowledge or speaking or acting aren’t “rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17), then others are right to question whether Christ fully dwells in our hearts, whether we are indeed strengthened in our inner being with power through his Spirit (cf. Ephesians 3:16,17).

Allow me to expand on Paul’s list of examples, thinking of our lives individually and congregationally, continuing in the style of Paul’s refrain.

If we are well-dressed, well-groomed, well-behaved — but do not have love — our lives are only a show of appearances, not an embodiment of God’s grace.
If we are nice to our neighbors and active in community projects, but do not have love, we are fostering our own reputation more than serving others’ souls.
If we are good employees, good citizens, good friends, but do not have love, our goodness is an outward affair only, not an inward renewal of our hearts.
If we dig deeply into doctrine and explore every intricacy of spiritual teaching, but do not have love, we don’t draw closer to God, but fail to see his true path.
If we sing glorious songs with many voices in our choirs, but do not have love, we are making music but nothing more.
If we develop programs for youth, for seniors, for singles, for whatever group or audience, but do not have love, we are providing activities without a foundation, things to do without values that will endure.
If we create engaging church websites and social media campaigns, but do not have love, we have only a virtual presence, without really being there for others.
If we build chapels and cathedrals and schools and other edifices, but do not have love, we have nothing but shingles and stones, roofs and walls.
If we have overflowing crowds when we gather for worship, but do not have love, we gather for nothing.

Image credit: Thomas Hawk on Flickr <https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/48487781532/>

I don’t mean to demean any of the items listed in those examples. Being helpful to neighbors, dedicated on the job, dutiful in spiritual study — these are good things. Organizing church programs and activities, singing in the choir, building spaces that can be used for ministry purposes — these are worthwhile pursuits. However, for any of our endeavors to be genuine and truly alive, love must be the source that gives rise to them. Roots deep in the soil supply life to plants and the fruit the plants produce. So too with our lives as Christians. Christ is the source of our life; his love is the root of any actual good we do. If we do things that purport to be good, but the love of Christ is not in us, then it rings hollow. That expression stems from the Middle Ages, when coins filled with less-than-precious metals could be exposed as counterfeit by the dull sound they made when dropped on a stone slab. A real coin would ring true. We aspire to be real in our Christianity, followers of Christ who are filled with his love through and through.

A Christian’s life without love in it is, ultimately, nothing. “I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus said. “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). The disciple who perhaps knew Jesus’ love best — his dear friend John — emphasized his Lord’s point when he wrote: “Love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God” (1 John 4:7,8).

May the Lord make us “increase and abound in love for one another and for all” (1 Thessalonians 3:12). For if “we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12).

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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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