Dear friends in Christ.
What was the last big event that you and your family celebrated? Was it a wedding, where you had the opportunity to celebrate the joining of a new couple in wedded bliss? Was it maybe a family reunion, where you had the opportunity to connect with any number of relatives that you hadn’t seen for a long time. Was it maybe a baby shower, where you had the fun of celebrating with the new and expecting mother to be? Was it perhaps a birthday, where you got a chance to shower one of your children with a few gifts and make him or her special for the day? No matter what it was, it seems that we need very little reason to celebrate events no matter how big or small they might be. Well, this morning as we celebrate the Festival of the Reformation, we will have the opportunity to celebrate with each other as we celebrate the heritage that we have together.
But what, some of you may be asking, is our heritage? Well, our heritage is a solid adherence to the teachings of the Bible. Our heritage is the time we spent unified with the Missouri Synod growing more and more conservative in our understanding of God’s Word until the time came when our paths split in the early 60’s. Our heritage goes back to 1850, almost 160 years ago when 3 German-American Pastors got together in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and formed the Wisconsin Synod. And yet, our heritage goes back even farther than that, because we can trace it back to October 31st, 1517, the night on which Martin Luther stealthily approached the doors of the castle church in Wittenberg and nailed his 95 theses—his 95 points for discussion or debate—to the door and set into motion the events that we celebrate as the Reformation. But that isn’t even the beginning of our heritage because we can trace our heritage all the way back to the first promise of a Savior delivered to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, just shortly after they had fallen into sin. It is that promise, fulfilled in the birth of our Savior, some 2000 years ago, that is the root and the source of the heritage that we are celebrating today! Today we are celebrating the fact that Jesus is our heritage, because Jesus is the one who freed us from our sins by his perfect life, his innocent death, and his glorious resurrection. We are celebrating the fact that when Jesus gave his life in our place and took it back again on the third day, by his actions he declared that you and I were completely innocent of any of the sins that satan had leveled against us. By his actions Jesus declared that we were completely righteous in his sight through the faith that he himself had created in our hearts. In fact, it is that very heritage of righteousness that the Apostle Paul is celebrating in our text as he writes, “But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.” (Philippians 3:7-9).
Though there had been a time in Paul’s life that he actually though he could earn his own salvation, once he had been called to faith in Jesus Christ, he realized that the righteousness he had was not of his own making, rather it was the heritage that Jesus himself had bestowed upon him as a gift through the faith created in Paul’s heart by the work of the Holy Spirit.
Well, the same thing is true for each and every one of us today! Though there may have been a time when we counted our good deeds as something that we could lay at Jesus’ feet and somehow gain eternal life by our own efforts, now that we have been declared righteous by our Savior’s death and resurrection, we consider all that stuff as loss. We consider it to be completely worthless; as useless to us as the garbage that we put out at the curb each week so that the garbage men can haul it away. In fact, when we compare all our own efforts to the surpassing greatness of our Christian Heritage of faith in Jesus Christ, our own works are no useful than that of burned up newspaper. In fact, when we are reminded how Jesus completed the transaction of our salvation with the payment of his blood, it makes all the more clear how our righteousness is his declaration to us—not as a result of our own actions, but as his gift to us through the heritage of faith. A gift which he himself bestowed upon us as he declared to be innocent and now, through faith, makes us perfect.
What an incredible heritage we have! For, today, as we celebrate the heritage that we have in Jesus Christ our Savior, we find that it is Christ our Savior who makes us perfect. It is Christ our Savior who makes us perfect in the eyes of our God—not merely acceptable, passing, good enough, sufficient, or even above average! It is Christ our Savior who makes us perfect in the eyes of the Lord our God through the faith he created in our hearts; the faith through which he applied to us the power of his resurrection and the righteousness that he won for us in the World Series of Calvary. This, in fact, is the very heritage that the Apostle Paul was celebrating as he wrote in our text, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:10-14).
As Christians, this is the goal to which we are pressing. This is the heritage we celebrate in Jesus Christ our Savior—the perfection that will be ours when God our Savior calls us heaven ward in Christ Jesus. We are looking forward to the day when our Lord Jesus will finally and forever make us perfect when he calls us out of this world of sin to our lives by his side in his heavenly kingdom. Though we have not yet achieved it, we know that through faith the day is coming when we will never again experience sin. We will never again deal with frustration. We will never again face suffering or pain. We will never again face any of these things because on the day when we are made perfect by our Savior’s side in heaven, we will have escaped the sorrows of this life. On the day when we are made perfect in our Savior’s kingdom, we will gather around the throne of our God and serve him day and night in his holy temple. On that day when we are called to live in perfection with our Savior, we will rest from all our labors and we will enjoy the gift of eternal life that our Savior longs to bestow upon us.
This is the Christian heritage we are celebrating today; the heritage that has been passed down to us since the days of Adam and Eve. It is the heritage of the forgiveness of sins won for us by Christ our Savior through which we have been declared completely innocent and will one day be made perfect in eternal life. Though the celebration may not be the same as a Birthday party, wedding, or even baby shower, it many ways our celebration today is like that of a great family reunion—a family reunion to which we have all been invited though faith in our brother, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Pastor David M. Shilling
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church -Le Sueur, MN
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Draw Near to the Lord (James 4:7-10)
Dear friends in Christ.
At one time or another during their years in grade school, children learn about magnets. They learn how magnets attract metal objects to themselves and how those metal objects can become magnetized by prolonged exposure to a magnet. But they also learn about the positive and negative attraction of magnets. For example, when you take two magnets that are both positively charged and try to force them together, they will repel each other, and the same thing happens when you try it with negatively charged magnets. But if you take one magnet that is charged positive and one that is charged negative, and bring them together, there will be a point when they almost try to leap out of your hands and snap together. In fact, if you would set them down at just the right distance apart, you could watch as the two magnets draw themselves closer and closer to each other until they finally connect. Well, in our text today, this is the point which James is trying to get across to you and me as he encourages and assures us that when we draw near to the Lord, the Lord will draw near to us. Just listen to what James it telling us in verses 7 and 8 of chapter 4: “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you,” (James 4:7-8a).
Now, when James wrote this letter less than twenty years had passed since Jesus had ascended into heaven, and yet there were many Christians who had simply forgotten what being a Christian was all about. There were some Christians who were simply going through the motions of Christianity without really letting the message of salvation affect their hearts. There were others who had stopped focusing their attention on God and the blessings he had bestowed upon them and were focusing on all the great things they could get for themselves so that they could rise in stature and power within their congregation. There were even others who were so taken with their Christian freedom that they really didn’t worry about how they lived their lives, they went out and did pretty much whatever they wanted to, figuring that Jesus’ death and resurrection was their get out of jail free card—their license to sin and do whatever they wanted to because they had been forgiven. So when James wrote these words calling on them to draw near to the Lord and submit themselves to him, these were words that hit them hard. They were words that cut them deep making them realize how they may have proudly walked around with their Christianity on their shoulders for all to see, and yet they failed to act like Christians. They were words that made them realize that by not submitting themselves to God they were not drawing near to God, and because they were not drawing near to God they were not resisting the devil, and because they were not resisting the devil, they were falling into his many traps and in many ways finding that they were actually lost in their sins.
How often don’t we find the same thing to be true in our lives? Rather than drawing near to the Lord and submitting ourselves to his will, how often doesn’t it happen that we actually distance ourselves from the Lord because we can’t stand the idea of submitting ourselves to anyone? After all, isn’t the idea of submission connected with the feeling of weakness? Doesn’t our national pride scream out that as Americans we never submit? We may make others submit to us, but we never submit? Isn’t it true that as soon as we hear even the remotest concept of submission our sinful nature rears up its ugly head and cries out, “Why do I have to submit to God? Why must I be subservient to him? Why must I be treated as his slave?”
Yet when we look at the truth of it, submitting ourselves to God and his will simply means that we are drawing ourselves closer to him so that he might draw himself closer to us. When we look at the truth of submitting ourselves to the Lord we begin to understand that placing ourselves under our caring and gracious God is not such a terrible thing, after all, it is exactly what Jesus did for each and every one of us. Even Jesus, who is God himself, submitted himself to the Lord, followed his will and saved us from our sins. And this is what the Apostle James is calling on us as Christians to do today. He is calling on us to submit ourselves to God and draw near to him by listening to his Word. For it is through his Word, which we have gathered to hear, that we draw near to the Lord and the Lord draws near to us, and it is through that Word that he calls us to repentance.
Back on April 30, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln was essentially calling on the American Nation to the very same thing when he proclaimed a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer. For on that day he said, “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, the many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to God that made us. It behooves us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.[1]
Well, in the same way that our 16th president called on a nation to draw near to the Lord and repent of her sins, so also James is calling on each and every one of us to do the very same thing. James writes in verse 7-10 of chapter 4: “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you, wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” (James 4:8a-10).
Though words like this can be difficult to hear, as we draw near to the Lord we begin to realize the extent of the sins that have piled up in our hearts like the leaves piling up on our front lawns. When we draw near to the Lord and hear his word proclaimed to us, we are reminded of the perfection we have failed to achieve. When we meditate on the commandments of our God we are reminded that no matter how hard we’ve tried to honor him above all things, we have not succeeded. No matter how hard we’ve tried to love our neighbor as ourselves, we have failed. No matter how hard we’ve tried to honor our parents, to keep our hearts pure from evil, keep from lusting, coveting, and hating, we have simply not been able to do it. For we know how we have sinned against our God with the words we have spoken, the things we have done, the thoughts that have echoed through our minds and we are laid bare and all our many sins are exposed before the Lord!
Yet, even as we draw near to the Lord and are condemned by his word, it is through that same word that we are moved to repent. It is through that same word that we are enabled to confess our many sins and iniquities to the Lord, and it is through that same word that we draw near to the Lord our God who covers over our many sins with the blanket of our Savior’s forgiveness. For it is through that message of Law and Gospel that we are convicted of our sins, comforted by our Savior, assured of his forgiveness and drawn closer to our God through repentance. It is through the message of the gospel that we learn about God’s Son, who threw himself in front of the bullet of sin so that it wouldn’t take us to hell with it. It is only in the gospel that we learn how Jesus ran into the street to push us out of the path of the Mac Truck of death, which was speeding toward us, and was killed in our place. It is only in the gospel where we learn about Jesus who gave us the life saving transfusion of his blood, which cleanses us from our sins, makes us members of his family, and gives us the gift of eternal life. This is why James calls on us to draw near to the Lord in repentance so that through his forgiveness he might draw himself closer to us and move us serve him with gratitude as we seek to follow his will for our lives.
It is gratitude that prompted an old man to visit an old broken pier on the eastern seacoast of Florida. Every Friday night, until his death in 1973, he would return with a large bucket of shrimp. The sea gulls would flock to this old man, and he would feed them from his bucket. Many years before, in October, 1942, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on a mission in a B-17 to deliver an important message to General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea. But somewhere over the South Pacific the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean...For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun, and even starvation. Eight days out, their rations were long gone or destroyed by the salt water. They knew it would take a miracle to sustain them, and a miracle occurred. In Captain Eddie's own words, "Something landed on my head. I knew that it was a sea gull. I don't know how I knew, I just knew. The gull meant food...if I could catch it." Captain Eddie caught the gull. Its flesh was eaten. Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish. The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles from land, offered itself as a sacrifice. Captain Eddie made it, and he never forgot, because every Friday evening, about sunset...on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida seacoast...you could see an old man walking...His bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls...to remember that one which, on a day long past, gave itself without a struggle...like manna in the wilderness.[2]
As Christians who have drawn near to the Lord who has forgiven their every sin, we now seek to live lives of gratitude and thanks like Captain Eddie. But unlike his life of feeding gulls, we seek to live our lives in service to the Lord. We seek to follow his law for our lives, not because we have to, but because Jesus fulfilled every demand of that law for us. We seek to follow his law for our lives in order that we might say thank you to the one who gave us the life giving transfusion of his blood. We seek to follow the Law of our God so that by our lives we might please him and thank him for the salvation he bestowed upon us. We seek to follow his law so that as we live our lives in service to him, we might continually draw near to him in the same way that oppositely charged magnets will draw themselves to each other.
For in the same way that grade school children learn about magnets and how they can attract and draw other magnets to themselves, so also today we have learned why it is so important for us to draw near to the Lord our God. So let us do just that, as we continue on in our lives. Let us draw near to the Lord in repentance submission and thanksgiving, so that the Lord our God may continue to draw near to us.
Amen.
Pastor David M. Shilling
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church -Le Sueur, MN
[1] http://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/r/repentance.htm (Accessed Oct 8, 2009)
[2] Paul Aurandt, "The Old Man and the Gulls", Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story, 1977, quoted in Heaven Bound Living, Knofel Stanton, Standard, 1989, p. 79-80. From http://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/t/thanksgiving.htm (Accessed October 10, 2009) Modified
At one time or another during their years in grade school, children learn about magnets. They learn how magnets attract metal objects to themselves and how those metal objects can become magnetized by prolonged exposure to a magnet. But they also learn about the positive and negative attraction of magnets. For example, when you take two magnets that are both positively charged and try to force them together, they will repel each other, and the same thing happens when you try it with negatively charged magnets. But if you take one magnet that is charged positive and one that is charged negative, and bring them together, there will be a point when they almost try to leap out of your hands and snap together. In fact, if you would set them down at just the right distance apart, you could watch as the two magnets draw themselves closer and closer to each other until they finally connect. Well, in our text today, this is the point which James is trying to get across to you and me as he encourages and assures us that when we draw near to the Lord, the Lord will draw near to us. Just listen to what James it telling us in verses 7 and 8 of chapter 4: “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you,” (James 4:7-8a).
Now, when James wrote this letter less than twenty years had passed since Jesus had ascended into heaven, and yet there were many Christians who had simply forgotten what being a Christian was all about. There were some Christians who were simply going through the motions of Christianity without really letting the message of salvation affect their hearts. There were others who had stopped focusing their attention on God and the blessings he had bestowed upon them and were focusing on all the great things they could get for themselves so that they could rise in stature and power within their congregation. There were even others who were so taken with their Christian freedom that they really didn’t worry about how they lived their lives, they went out and did pretty much whatever they wanted to, figuring that Jesus’ death and resurrection was their get out of jail free card—their license to sin and do whatever they wanted to because they had been forgiven. So when James wrote these words calling on them to draw near to the Lord and submit themselves to him, these were words that hit them hard. They were words that cut them deep making them realize how they may have proudly walked around with their Christianity on their shoulders for all to see, and yet they failed to act like Christians. They were words that made them realize that by not submitting themselves to God they were not drawing near to God, and because they were not drawing near to God they were not resisting the devil, and because they were not resisting the devil, they were falling into his many traps and in many ways finding that they were actually lost in their sins.
How often don’t we find the same thing to be true in our lives? Rather than drawing near to the Lord and submitting ourselves to his will, how often doesn’t it happen that we actually distance ourselves from the Lord because we can’t stand the idea of submitting ourselves to anyone? After all, isn’t the idea of submission connected with the feeling of weakness? Doesn’t our national pride scream out that as Americans we never submit? We may make others submit to us, but we never submit? Isn’t it true that as soon as we hear even the remotest concept of submission our sinful nature rears up its ugly head and cries out, “Why do I have to submit to God? Why must I be subservient to him? Why must I be treated as his slave?”
Yet when we look at the truth of it, submitting ourselves to God and his will simply means that we are drawing ourselves closer to him so that he might draw himself closer to us. When we look at the truth of submitting ourselves to the Lord we begin to understand that placing ourselves under our caring and gracious God is not such a terrible thing, after all, it is exactly what Jesus did for each and every one of us. Even Jesus, who is God himself, submitted himself to the Lord, followed his will and saved us from our sins. And this is what the Apostle James is calling on us as Christians to do today. He is calling on us to submit ourselves to God and draw near to him by listening to his Word. For it is through his Word, which we have gathered to hear, that we draw near to the Lord and the Lord draws near to us, and it is through that Word that he calls us to repentance.
Back on April 30, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln was essentially calling on the American Nation to the very same thing when he proclaimed a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer. For on that day he said, “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, the many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to God that made us. It behooves us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.[1]
Well, in the same way that our 16th president called on a nation to draw near to the Lord and repent of her sins, so also James is calling on each and every one of us to do the very same thing. James writes in verse 7-10 of chapter 4: “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you, wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” (James 4:8a-10).
Though words like this can be difficult to hear, as we draw near to the Lord we begin to realize the extent of the sins that have piled up in our hearts like the leaves piling up on our front lawns. When we draw near to the Lord and hear his word proclaimed to us, we are reminded of the perfection we have failed to achieve. When we meditate on the commandments of our God we are reminded that no matter how hard we’ve tried to honor him above all things, we have not succeeded. No matter how hard we’ve tried to love our neighbor as ourselves, we have failed. No matter how hard we’ve tried to honor our parents, to keep our hearts pure from evil, keep from lusting, coveting, and hating, we have simply not been able to do it. For we know how we have sinned against our God with the words we have spoken, the things we have done, the thoughts that have echoed through our minds and we are laid bare and all our many sins are exposed before the Lord!
Yet, even as we draw near to the Lord and are condemned by his word, it is through that same word that we are moved to repent. It is through that same word that we are enabled to confess our many sins and iniquities to the Lord, and it is through that same word that we draw near to the Lord our God who covers over our many sins with the blanket of our Savior’s forgiveness. For it is through that message of Law and Gospel that we are convicted of our sins, comforted by our Savior, assured of his forgiveness and drawn closer to our God through repentance. It is through the message of the gospel that we learn about God’s Son, who threw himself in front of the bullet of sin so that it wouldn’t take us to hell with it. It is only in the gospel that we learn how Jesus ran into the street to push us out of the path of the Mac Truck of death, which was speeding toward us, and was killed in our place. It is only in the gospel where we learn about Jesus who gave us the life saving transfusion of his blood, which cleanses us from our sins, makes us members of his family, and gives us the gift of eternal life. This is why James calls on us to draw near to the Lord in repentance so that through his forgiveness he might draw himself closer to us and move us serve him with gratitude as we seek to follow his will for our lives.
It is gratitude that prompted an old man to visit an old broken pier on the eastern seacoast of Florida. Every Friday night, until his death in 1973, he would return with a large bucket of shrimp. The sea gulls would flock to this old man, and he would feed them from his bucket. Many years before, in October, 1942, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on a mission in a B-17 to deliver an important message to General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea. But somewhere over the South Pacific the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean...For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun, and even starvation. Eight days out, their rations were long gone or destroyed by the salt water. They knew it would take a miracle to sustain them, and a miracle occurred. In Captain Eddie's own words, "Something landed on my head. I knew that it was a sea gull. I don't know how I knew, I just knew. The gull meant food...if I could catch it." Captain Eddie caught the gull. Its flesh was eaten. Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish. The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles from land, offered itself as a sacrifice. Captain Eddie made it, and he never forgot, because every Friday evening, about sunset...on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida seacoast...you could see an old man walking...His bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls...to remember that one which, on a day long past, gave itself without a struggle...like manna in the wilderness.[2]
As Christians who have drawn near to the Lord who has forgiven their every sin, we now seek to live lives of gratitude and thanks like Captain Eddie. But unlike his life of feeding gulls, we seek to live our lives in service to the Lord. We seek to follow his law for our lives, not because we have to, but because Jesus fulfilled every demand of that law for us. We seek to follow his law for our lives in order that we might say thank you to the one who gave us the life giving transfusion of his blood. We seek to follow the Law of our God so that by our lives we might please him and thank him for the salvation he bestowed upon us. We seek to follow his law so that as we live our lives in service to him, we might continually draw near to him in the same way that oppositely charged magnets will draw themselves to each other.
For in the same way that grade school children learn about magnets and how they can attract and draw other magnets to themselves, so also today we have learned why it is so important for us to draw near to the Lord our God. So let us do just that, as we continue on in our lives. Let us draw near to the Lord in repentance submission and thanksgiving, so that the Lord our God may continue to draw near to us.
Amen.
Pastor David M. Shilling
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church -Le Sueur, MN
[1] http://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/r/repentance.htm (Accessed Oct 8, 2009)
[2] Paul Aurandt, "The Old Man and the Gulls", Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story, 1977, quoted in Heaven Bound Living, Knofel Stanton, Standard, 1989, p. 79-80. From http://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/t/thanksgiving.htm (Accessed October 10, 2009) Modified
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