"Look, there go my sins."

Luke 22:47-48

47 While he was still speaking a crowd came up, and the man who was called Judas, one of the Twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him, 48 but Jesus asked him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”

Sermon

We are taking a look tonight at Judas and his betrayal of Jesus. This event is one of the great betrayals in history. Marcus Brutus betrayed Caesar on the day we remember as “the Ides of March” (March 15). My grandfather always wanted me to know about Benedict Arnold growing up. I have no idea why, it was important to him. Ephialtes betrayed the Spartans.  

If you appreciate fiction betrayals, you’ll think of the Cipher from the Matrix, or one of my personal favorites, Lando Calrissian in the empire strikes back.  

Yet Judas is unique. No one has ever betrayed such an innocent, wonderful man.  

Charles Templeton – friend of Billy Graham – became an agnostic.  

“How do you assess Jesus?” “He was,” Templeton began, “the greatest human being who has ever lived. He was a moral genius. His ethical sense was unique. He was the intrinsically wisest person that I’ve ever encountered in my life or in my readings. His commitment was total and led to his own death, much to the detriment of the world. What could one say about him except that this was a form of greatness?” 

How can Judas’ betrayal give us God’s greatness?  

One of the first things everyone says is that you and I are basically just like Judas.  

Why is this important?  

• Some would say, you’ve got to get your values and your priorities right. And they’re right. If you are a Christian who wants to worship God first, then you have to say, “Maybe I could be like Judas and betray or at least turn my back on the Lord.”  

• If you a more secular person, and honestly, I think for all of us, you’ve got to say this to yourself: 

• Judas lived in a society that was very communal. It was less important what I believed. What we believed was more important. We are much more individualistic.  

• Am I more likely or less likely to choose according to our values? We’ve said, I reject the pull of my family and community to define our values. Not as much in this town or this community, but I still hear a lot of people saying, I’ve got to find my own way. I need to make my own choices. That’s okay. Really!  

• The question is, are you, relying on your own strength more or less likely than Judas to choose according to your values? 

Because one of the things this COVID-19 does is make us realize, maybe I don’t have as much of a foundation as I thought. Maybe my values aren’t what they should be. Then if I realize that I’m not as good at making decisions according to my values as I thought, or to put it another way, my decision making process isn’t as healthy as I assumed, where does that leave me?  

See? I think it matters if you and I are basically like Judas. Is it the case that you and I are basically like Judas?  

• JD Greear, “All of us have [a price]; or have had [a price] where our commitment to Jesus stops and you sell him out.  

• Martin Franzmann puts it this way, “Every person has a “savior,” something that he thinks saves his life from nothingness.”  

I would say that it’s better to say, “everyone has the capacity to do what Judas did”. I always think, would I have done what Jesus did? Honestly, I have no idea. 

Remember everything Judas saw the week before 

• Triumphant entry 

• Jesus cleanses (wrecks) the temple 

• Jesus argues with (and defeats) all the religious leaders 

• The Passover and Jesus instituted a new covenant “This is the new covenant in my blood”.  A new religion. 

You have to imagine, you are a deeply patriotic person. Someone has marched on Washington DC. They have wrecked the White House and driven out the president. They went down to Congress, both the House and the Senate, and won all the debates on the floor. They went to the Supreme Court and made a mockery of the judges. And then that person went to St John’s Episcopal Church, “The Church of the Presidents”, won arguments with the bishops and cleaned the church out.  

Some people would cheer. Some people would be rightly absolutely terrified. They would say, we have a tyrant on our hands worse than we could ever imagine.  

Would I have done it? I have no idea. But here is what you can’t say. 

You can’t say Judas was just a bad guy. You can’t say he was a bad apple.  

• The Bible tells us he was a thief (John 12:6). Petty theft.  

• Jesus accepted him.  

• He sent him out on mission trips. Multiple trips. That already puts him in a special category. A lot of us don’t have service or mission trips under our belts.  

• He was fiscally minded and a good steward of the resources. “Hey, do we really need to spend money on that?” 

• There is absolutely no evidence that he was a murder, an adulterer, an abuser, an embezzler (not a Bernie Madoff) And the theft he committed was petty theft.  

You can’t say Judas missed out on the Holy Spirit.  

• He performed miracles. He went healing, casting out demons, preaching and teaching just like the rest of the disciples.   

You can’t say he just made one big, bad mistake. Something no one else would ever do. That’s definitely not accurate because betrayal happens all the time.  

Maybe you could say, he made a special mistake. One that is very unique to his circumstances. I’m not even sure if that is accurate.  

People always sin according to their circumstances.  

People sin in ways that are appropriate for their normal condition in life.  

I mean I grew up in an intact, two parent household. I don’t think I ever really lacked for anything of any substance in life – food, clothing, a roof over my head, or even an education. Along with that all, I was safe. I was secure. I was not afraid.  

What does that mean about sin in my life? Well, for various reasons, sin tends to show up for more as arrogance, self-righteousness, coldness of heart, passive aggressive snark, and sarcasm. Sin for me is not usually theft or adultery or more outwardly harmful actions. I don’t have any need for them. It’s not even adultery.  

It’s not stuff that has to do with me physically having a place in this world. It has do with me relationally securing my place in the world.  

Compare me with someone born in where I used to live and work in Milwaukee, like the 53206 zip code which is the highest incarceration rate zip code in the country. They have the exact same sinful pride as I do. The same amount, the same strength, give or take a little.  

What is his sinful pride going to look like? It will probably look very different. He will probably be violent. He’ll fight to secure his place in the community. He’ll act out in other ways that lead to incarceration. 

What I’m saying is, while it’s possible that someone makes one big “oooops”, that’s not really how life works. People sin according to their situations. If you’ve made a big “oooops”, it’s probably because you’ve made a lot of little oops leading up to it. No one becomes a thief, adulterer, or drug addict over night.  

You know what is really frightening?  

John Gottman, marriage researcher. Spent a ton of time investigating why some marriages and others don’t. Why do some people stay faithful when others fall apart? He can predict divorce with 91% accuracy.  

“happy marriages are based on deep friendship”.   

(Is there something about nothing intrinsically different?)  

Everyone has the capacity to do what Judas did. Everyone has the capacity to turn on our best friend.  

Part 2  

But if that is all that we are getting out of this, we are missing the point. What should we really see?  

In verse 47, Jesus says “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?” He actually calls him out for what he is doing ahead of time.  

I think to really get these words, we need to remember what happens this day.  

• Jesus just celebrated the Passover meal with his disciples. Passover is an ancient meal dating back to the Exodus from Egypt.  

• A key element of that meal was the Passover Lamb. One lamb from that meal was sacrificed for the family. That blood was used to cover over the sins of the people. 

• It was at that very meal where Jesus said, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” We even hear that the disciples thought he was supposed to buy something for the dinner.  

• The next time we meet Judas he is in the Garden of Gethsemane with an armed guard.  

• That armed guard will hand Jesus over for “examination” or testing, and then  

What Jesus is saying with these words is, Judas, you think you are betraying the Son of Man. Let me tell you what is really happening here. You are handing over the Passover Lamb.  

An old pastor, John Gerhard, says it this way. “Judas was no ordinary Christian; … he is brought to the point where he betrays His Lord and Master and leads him to the table of blood.” (Johann Gerhard, History of the Suffering and Death, pg 75)  

You see what this? If what is in Judas is in all of us, and Judas is the one who hands over Jesus for us, then it’s no different from each and every one of us saying, “here is my sacrificial lamb. Here is the sacrifice for my sins.”  

Each and every one of us can say, “there go my sins. I’m handing over my lamb for sacrifice.”  

Part 3 

And when you see that, that is the one thing that will keep you from doing what Judas did – to yourself, to your friends and family, or to Jesus.  

We are so driven by guilt.  

Anyone a fan of Matthew McConaughey? McConaughey actually had this really good insight in HBO’s TV show “True Detective”. McConaughey said, “Look – everybody knows there’s something wrong with them. They just don’t know what it is. Everybody wants confession, everybody wants some cathartic narrative for it. The guilty especially. And everybody’s guilty.” http://www.mbird.com/2014/02/everybodys-guilty-on-true-detectivei/ 

And this is something that a man named James KA  Smith, one of the better philosophers in America today has pointed out. “here is a truth...: people want to confess.”  

You want to get rid of your guilt so you can be joyfully, gladly loyal and faithful to him?  

Listen to him say, “Are you betraying? No, you silly Judas, I’m handing myself over. I’m your Passover lamb.” He is here to take away your sins.  

And if you need someone physical, flesh and blood to listen to your sins, you find yourself a good friend or pastor who will point you to Jesus and say, “Look, there go your sins.” That’s God’s greatness.  

Encounters with Jesus:

John 11:17-45

17 On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. 18 Now Bethany was less than two miles[a] from Jerusalem, 19 and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. 20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.

21 “Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

24 Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; 26 and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

27 “Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”

28 After she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. “The Teacher is here,” she said, “and is asking for you.” 29 When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. 30 Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. 31 When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there.

32 When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. 34 “Where have you laid him?” he asked.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.

35 Jesus wept.

36 Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”

37 But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Jesus Raises Lazarus From the Dead

38 Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. 39 “Take away the stone,” he said.

“But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”

40 Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

41 So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”

43 When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.

Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

The Plot to Kill Jesus

45 Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.

Listening guide

The questions are coming ….
“this sickness … is for God’s glory” (verse 4).

If Jesus is the resurrection and the life, __________ ___________ comes from ___________.

“the one who believes in me will live.” (verse 25)

Real physical life is available to each person because of who ______ ________, not who _______ _________.

take off the grave clothes and let him go.” (verse 44)

Death is the _____________ ____________. Let’s live!

Discussion questions

Sermon

Questions are coming – what's going on with this? Is God punishing us? Are we in trouble? What should we be doing and learning?  

That’s good.  

One thing this is not. God is not weeding some out or selecting some to get rid of.  

That’s what a purely irreligious or naturalist view says. “This is nature’s way to make sure the fittest survive.” I don’t know if anyone is saying that about this event. Certainly people have said it about past events.  

God wants life. Real, physical life.  

Adventure/Discover 

What embracing real, physical life does.  

This is just the right time. Nicodemus - new life; woman at the well - stop chasing  

Part 1: The resurrection to life matters 

How does the resurrection to life matter? If the resurrection of the dead really will happen, then what does that mean for life?  

• Time is linear not cyclical  

• Who we are is more important than what we do, because something of who we are will go on into our new person 

• Eternity will be a better reality.  

• You will someday get that new start – forgiveness is the best thing, but there is often this residual blame or shame we feel. 

• The people we love will live again. 

The biggest thing... 

Jesus hears Lazarus is sick. When he hears, he says, “this sickness … is for God’s glory” (verse 4). He doesn‘t mean every sickness is for God’s glory. Every sickness is a chance for his glory to appear. This one is special.  

God’s glory is his weight, his impact. He is going to show off. When that happens we get to see who he really is. What does he show?  

(verse 21, 22) The friends and the family are “sitting shivah”. He meets Martha.  

• She says, in short, you’re too late.  

• She also says, I trust you.  

• Jesus confirms her trust - “I am the resurrection and the life” 

A few minutes pass … 

(verse 33) He meets Mary  

• She is crying. She says, “you’re late.” 

• Jesus is “troubled”, in a minute he will weep with her 

Jesus relates well to us. I compare what he is doing to what is going on in our life.  

• We on a search for some locks. I know I brought them in from the car, I just can’t remember where I put them in the house.  

• The other day, a kid says to me, “Which car were you driving dad?” It took everything I had to not say be snarky.  

Jesus relates really well to us. He is fully God, fully man  

• Not 50/50 - not part God, part man.  

• He naturally affirms our full trust in him for life.  

• He naturally displays his own vulnerability.  

But there is more to it.  

Jesus, fully God, fully man, is the giver of life. Your life comes to me.  

If Jesus is the resurrection and the life, our life comes from him.  

Just think about this. One of things people have said, heck, I’ve said it sometimes is, “why should I listen to Jesus? Who is he to run my life? Can’t I do whatever I want with my life?”  

That question makes all the sense in the world if we’ve come from nothing and we’re going to nothing and we don’t depend on anything else. If it’s true, we can destroy ourselves and others. Life is meaningless.  

But if Jesus is the giver of life, then my life, your life, our life comes from him. That’s the place to get life.  

Part 2 Life is possible for you  

That’s what Jesus wants to make a reality for you.  

When Jesus walked up, he told Martha, “the one who believes in me will live.” (verse 25) And I think that for the most part, we can say Martha accepted that fact. She says to him, “I believe you are the Messiah.” (verse 27) She accepts he is the one God has chosen. But she doesn’t trust him. 

Jesus goes to the tomb and he says, “take away the stone.” Martha responds, “He stinks”. She basically denies.  

I love. What does Jesus do? He doesn’t tell at her. He doesn’t criticize her. He raises Lazarus anyways. I love this.  

God doesn’t bless you and me because we’re so great, or even because our faith is so awesome 

Only unbelievers say that God both loves and accepts everyone no matter who they trust. It’s just as unbelieving to say, “God let’s good people live.” No he doesn’t. When God works a miracle to give people new physical life, he does it for people who trust him. He doesn’t measure your life, your faith or anything else.  

It’s not about you. It’s about him. And he has made the life he has available to you all.  

Real physical life is available to each person because of who he is, not who you are.  

Part 3  

Let’s get ahold of this life.  

This is hard stuff. What Jesus says in verse 44, “take off the grave clothes and let him go.” (verse 44) He is telling Lazarus, you can walk away from death. Death is defeated and you can just walk away. The right way to look at death is to say death is a defeated enemy.  

It’s still an enemy! Christianity is incredibly realistic about the suffering of our lives. Sin, Satan and death are my enemies. They are bigger, stronger, and I can’t control them. 

If these enemies are bigger and stronger than me, then the gospel isn’t primarily a message of personal empowerment. It’s not primarily a message to make me bigger and stronger. Those enemies will always be stronger.  

What the gospel says is these enemies have already been defeated for you by the grace of Jesus Christ and you get to experience that reality every day. It’s to change your whole life and death.  

We can see this, as painful as this is, as hard this.  

It is painful. It is hard to live in the middle of death. The gospel says your suffering is real, but your life is real too. Rise up and live it. 

AN story – raised in an abusive situation – physical, emotional, verbal. She also grew up connected to a Christian church. She enjoyed the relationships with people at the church, including the pastor. She never really believed the gospel.  

Later she met a young man. He connected with her. He shared the gospel with her. He also joined her in her suffering. He was with her as she relived the painful experiences and began to process the fear, guilt, and shame that she felt.  

There were a lot of painful moments along the way. He was there. So was a group of Christians that she met along the way. She heard the gospel for the first time in a safe, protected environment and it started to mean something to her.  

She believed it. She wanted the new spiritual life of Jesus. She got baptized.  

Then a close relative got deathly sick. She was not there when grandma died.  

Initially she felt a lot of guilt. Then things started to change and she said, “I don’t feel that badly.” They talked about the situation. Part of it was probably denial – one of the stages of suffering. The other part was that she could say, my relative lives, I will live, and life lives. “I don’t feel bad and guilty.” 

Death is the defeated enemy. Let’s live! 

Encounters with Jesus: Make his love fill us with purpose.

John 13:1-17

It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

2 The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. 3 Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; 4 so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. 5 After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

7 Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

8 “No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.”

Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

9 “Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”

10 Jesus answered, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you.” 11 For he knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said not every one was clean.

12 When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. 13 “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. 14 Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. 15 I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. 16 Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. 17 Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.

Listening guide

Develop your purpose. 

 “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” (John 13:1)  

This is what I’m living for: _______________ ___________.

To fill someone’s life with meaning, you’ve got to ______ _________ into their life. 

Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.” (John 13:8)  

To fill someone’s life with meaning, you’ve got to ________ ______ ________ out of their life.

Viktor Frankl - “ I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose.”

Make his love fill us with purpose. 

Discussion questions

Sermon

Nathaniel Timmermann 

Peace Lutheran Church 

March 22, 2020 

John 13:1-17 

Encounters with Jesus: Make his love fill us with purpose. 

Prayer 

Intro 

The PG story – Found out she hadn’t eaten much lately, she probably hadn’t taken her meds. I asked if I could help out at all. She said she would be okay. After we talked, I called another person and asked her to call the first person and check on her.  

A few days later, I called the woman back. I asked “How are things going? Have you been taking your meds?” She said, “I’ve been taking my meds. I ate breakfast and lunch. And some other people and I have been talking. I’m feeling better.”  

The physical things are very important – food, meds, even human connection. All of that does something else for us. Behind all that, especially the human contact, reminds us there is purpose and meaning behind our existence. “I do have a purpose and meaning in my life.”  

Human beings can do incredible things when we have a sense of purpose or meaning.  

Stories of people lifting cars or during other heroic actions.  

Viktor Frankl – Jew, captured and placed in the prison camps during WW2, including Auschwitz. Eventually become someone who started logotherapy, an important psychology practice.  

He spent a ton of time thinking about this one question: what is it? what caused some people to survive the camps and not others?  

Lots of factors: previous state in life - were people healthy and well before they came, their social structure, morality or lack of it, luck/fortune/grace 

“Any attempt at fighting the camp’s psychopathological influence on the prisoner by psychotherapeutic or psychohygienic methods had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which he could look forward.” (Frankl, Viktor E.. Man's Search for Meaning (p. 72). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition) 

You see that? “Inner strength … by pointing out to him a future goal”. 

What is that? That’s purpose.  

We deeply resist people forcing on us a purpose for our lives. If you dislike your job, it doesn’t matter how much you get paid, at some point you’ll get sick of it. You’ll start to say, “This paycheck is not worth the work I’m doing.”  

If you have a sense of purpose, if you have the inner strength that points you to a future goal, you can go through almost anything.  

Discovery/adventure 

Jesus invites us to develop our purpose.  

What a great time to do it. On the one side, we’re experiencing this crisis in America that is raising many questions. At the same time, he has given us this new life, this new vitality in our study over the last few weeks.  

You can see who you are, can’t you? Take the vitality you have and use it in a specific direction.  

Three things: What it could be, two things for making that happen  

First what it could be  

Jesus is with disciples for the Passover. … John tells us what is going on in his head. “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” (John 13:1)  

What a cool thing to say. What does that mean? He loved them to the end.  It’s not just a time thing. It’s not just his goal to love them. He actually loves them to get them to their final purpose. He loved them into the completion. He loved them into the goal.  

Jesus is about to ascend to the heights by descending to the depths. Jesus Christ is about to pull off the greatest victory by being captured and tortured and oppressed and murdered. Jesus’ understanding of power and success is so completely topsy-turvy that there is not a single culture or ideology that can really understand or accept it. It cuts against everything we know. We’ve talked about it before. Jesus says, “The way up is down. The way to power is to serve. The way to get happiness is not to seek your own happiness but the happiness of somebody else,” an inside-out understanding of greatness. 

 Jesus Christ here in John 13, is illustrating with his deeds what he tells them with his words in places like Matthew 20 and Luke 22. He looks at them and he says, “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served” 

The word serves that he uses is a word that means the most menial and the most humble of all kinds of service. Jesus basically says, “Who is greater? The person who sits at the table at 4 Roses, or the busboy?” He says, “I walk in the shoes of the busboy, the grease monkey.” Why would he actually use that as the paradigm for his career? 

What he does here in John 13 is he gets down on his hands and knees and begins to wash their feet. We know (we mentioned this a couple of weeks ago) that washing someone’s dirty feet in that environment was something only slaves did, and in many municipalities it was even illegal to make a slave do it, it was so disgusting and so low and servile. Yet Jesus Christ takes the position of sort of a slave below slaves, and he turns to his friends, and he says, “O friends, O dumb friends, how many times do I have to tell you? This is what life is about. This is what I’m about. This is what I live for.” 

If somebody gave you a machine, and it was all full of lights and wheels and beeps, and they said, “Here, this is a present for you …” And it’s big. It’s very impressive. You’d say, “Well, it’s very busy, it’s very impressive, but what is it for?” What if your friend said, “Well, I don’t know what it’s for?” You’d say, “Well then what good is it? We have to find out what it’s for. Let’s ask the ones who made it. Is there a label on here anywhere? Let’s find out the manufacturers and ask the ones who made it.” 

Now look at yourselves. You’re so busy. Your lives are full of lights and beeps and wheels.  on steroids that nobody can turn off, and here you are in the middle of it. You’re so busy, and your life is full of lights and wheels and beeps. Some of you have beepers on this morning. The question is … What is it for? 

There is a strong sense that so much of it is meaningless. Isn’t there? Don’t you sense it? Don’t you feel it?  

["The works of modern authors … reveal “the persistent need for meaning and the gnawing sense of its elusiveness.” (Tim Keller, Making Sense of God, pg 62) ]  

Do you see what happens? As soon as you begin to think into life more than six inches deep, you’re into religion. As soon as you start to ask any kind of substantial question … “Look at this wonderful machine. Look at my life. Look at all the wheels and the lights and the noises and the bells and the beeps.” As soon as you say, “What is it for? What really matters? What is life all about? What does it mean?” you’re into religion. 

Because in the same way, the only way you’re going to find out what this machine is for is by getting in touch with the manufacturer. The only way you’re going to find out what life is for and what life is about is to get in touch with the manufacturer. Here you have the manufacturer, and he is saying, “Let me tell you what life is about. Let me tell you what I am about. Let me tell you what you should be about. It’s for this kind of greatness. It’s for this inside-out greatness. Life is about kneeling love. Life is about love that gets on its knees, that comes down out of its place.” 

Jesus said, “That’s what I’m about and that’s what you should be about.” That’s what life is about. Until you understand that, all the beeps and all the whizzes and all the whirls and all the lights mean nothing. So basically what Jesus is saying here is, “Here is how life gets purpose, gets meaning. This is what I’m living for, this is what you’re living for: Kneeling love.” 

Jesus puts it into action in 2 ways.  

He came down  

First, “so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. 5 After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” (Jn 13:4-5)  

Jesus is thinking about his mission, about his career, and there are two parts to it. First of all, he gets down. Just as he leaves his place of honor at the table and sets aside his normal garments, in the same way, the Bible tells us that though he was God, though he was the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity, though he was the God who’s so great that heaven and highest heaven could not contain him, the God to whom the entire universe is nothing more than a piece of belly button lint, that great God came down and became a human being. We sing about it at Christmas each year when we sing … 

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; 

Hail the incarnate Deity, 

Pleased as man with men to dwell, 

Jesus, our Emmanuel. 

Jesus takes the time to get down into our lives.  

You haven’t yet started to serve people if you aren’t physically getting down into the mess of their lives.  

That’s a lot harder than I would like to admit. Just take the simplest act, listening. Listening is physical work. But you can listen up and stay out of someone’s life, or you can get down into it.  

This week, I was on the phone a lot. I called one person. Someone was talking. There were emails coming in. Someone walked through the door. I said, uh huh, uh huh. Then they said, well, thanks for the talk pastor. Have a good week.  

I didn’t get down into their life at all. I stayed in my own life.  

Point 1: To fill someone’s life with meaning, you’ve got to go down into their life.  

I’m so thankful for all the doctors and the nurses and the medical assistants and the paramedics who are getting down into our lives. Would you join  

The first step in getting meaning into someone’s life, is getting down into their life. Whether you are a doctor or a nurse or someone else, don’t we all have the opportunity to get down into someone else’s life?  

Wash  

But that’s only half of the career, only half of the mission. Not only does he come down from God to be a man, but secondly, he doesn’t come just as a man but as a servant.  

He goes to wash Peter’s feet and Peter says, “No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.”  

Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.” (John 13:8)  

I love this. Jesus doesn’t come down as someone to lead a great political party to victory, but instead he comes to take their sicknesses, diseases and plagues on himself.  

To fill someone’s life with meaning, you’ve got to ________ ______ ________ out of their life (wash the crud).  

One of the most powerful things that happens on the cross is that Jesus says I will take your sin, I will take your guilt, I will take your blame and put it on myself. And in the waters of baptism I’m going to wash your mess away. I am glad to do that so you can really do what you are called to do.  

That is even harder to do. There are so many times I would love to wash away the junk of your life. Jesus says I will actually take the junk of your life.  

When you have experienced, when you have tasted what it is really like to have that sin and that mess washed away, you will know, there is meaning to everything you do.  

One of the great examples of a person who finds meaning in life not through his work, not through his skills and abilities, but because someone got down into his life and cleansed his soul, was that man Viktor Frankl.  

He has a number of experiences that helped him find meaning. He tells one of them.  

Viktor Frankl -- Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. . . . 

Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et lux in tenebris lucet”—and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. 

That’s an example of what a wife can do for a husband, even if she isn’t there. How much greater can’t it be if you and I have a sense and an awareness if the king of heaven and earth has come down into our mess and cleaned away that crud? How much greater can’t the purpose and the meaning of our life be if we are aware of that?  

What’s the awesome take away from this? You and I could search for meaning and purpose for our lives. I’ve asked this question as much as anyone else 

Do my days really mean something to someone else? As I sit here and make my little speeches or my phone calls.  

Yet it was this point...When his love becomes real, it fills you with purpose and it fills others with purpose.  

Make his love fill us with purpose. When his love is real to you, that will fill you and us with purpose. That will matter whether you are a doctor or a nurse on the front lines, working in the factory, or caring for your family. Make his love fill us with purpose. We’ll have incredibly meaning for our lives. 

Let’s pray 

Heavenly Father, very often we turn to the weak and the shallow for a sense of meaning and purpose. Rather than receiving from you the love you want to give to us, we look to money, power, fame, family, to give us our sense of purpose and meaning.  I pray that in this important time you would power us with your love. Then we can flow that love out into the lives of others, and together enjoy the meaning you have for us. We pray this all in Jesus’ name, Amen!  

Encounters with Jesus: See differently

John 9:1-41

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 

3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. 5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 

6 After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. 7 “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing. 

8 His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some claimed that he was. 

Others said, “No, he only looks like him.” 

But he himself insisted, “I am the man.” 

10 “How then were your eyes opened?” they asked. 

11 He replied, “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.” 

12 “Where is this man?” they asked him. 

“I don’t know,” he said. 

The Pharisees Investigate the Healing 

13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. 14 Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath. 15 Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. “He put mud on my eyes,” the man replied, “and I washed, and now I see.” 

16 Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” 

But others asked, “How can a sinner perform such signs?” So they were divided. 

17 Then they turned again to the blind man, “What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” 

The man replied, “He is a prophet.” 

18 They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man’s parents. 19 “Is this your son?” they asked. “Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?” 

20 “We know he is our son,” the parents answered, “and we know he was born blind. 21 But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.” 22 His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. 23 That was why his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.” 

24 A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.” 

25 He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” 

26 Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 

27 He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?” 

28 Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! 29 We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.” 

30 The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. 32 Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” 

34 To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out. 

Spiritual Blindness 

35 Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 

36 “Who is he, sir?” the man asked. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.” 

37 Jesus said, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” 

38 Then the man said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him. 

39 Jesus said,[a] “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” 

40 Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?” 

41 Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains. 

Listening guide

Can we gain spiritual sight? 

“Who sinned, this man or his father”? (verse 2)

 No one __________________ sees ____________________.

Spiritual blindness = 

“You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.”

You see differently when ________________  _________.

Sermon

I’m a slow learner. It’s taken me 10 years to recognize the spiritual effect I have in my wife. Making some area of the house clean, picked up – shame  

JS – sensing her guilt, assuring her that this doesn’t mean she is a failure  

Big topic of the week. Peeps are out for Easter. It’s true. Did you see Meijer, Walmart? Lots of Peeps. Just kidding.  

 COVID-19.   

Discover/adventure 

This kind of spiritual sight is more than just personality. More than training 

You can each have spiritual sight that brings healing, forgiveness to relationships  

Sure maybe I have more than some of you because true spiritual sight is a gift. That’s my training and experience.  

Some of you probably have a lot more of it than I. All of you can have it to some extent. True spiritual sight that makes a difference in the souls of others is a supernatural gift from God 

Part 1  

Jesus is with his disciples. They meet a man born blind.  

The disciples ask a very basic question: “Who sinned, this man or his father”? (verse 2) 

We need to see where we stand with other people.  

• Are we good?  

• Are we bad?  

• Did I wrong you?  

• You’ve wronged me.  

We all do this.  

Then you can see what Jesus does. Jesus says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (9:3) 

This blows me away. You and I living in the 21st century live in what’s caused a closed box universe.  

It’s slowly reopening, but for the most part, it’s closed. What do I mean? I’ve talked to a lot of people about the coronavirus this week. Do you know how many people have asked me about the spiritual implications or even commented about them? Fewer than 5. Talked to a lot of people but the number of people who say, “what’s God up to here? What is God going for? What would cause God to let this happen.” or the people who have said, “It’ll be okay. I’ve done everything I can and I trust God to take care of me.”  

You might say....   That is the very essence of a closed box universe.  

A closed box universe says, “the material world is all there is. There is only physical stuff. There is nothing more than what we can touch and feel and see.”  

I can completely understand someone in the 21st century not thinking about God. … meet someone in the store. .. But look at these disciples 

They don’t think about God either.  

I think they are a little ahead of us. They think about other people. … Listen to the people talk about coronavirus. They say, “I’ll be okay. My family will be okay.” It’s not about you. It’s about what you might do to someone else. These disciples are at least that far ahead of us. Still...  

They don’t say, “Maybe God is punishing him.” They don’t ask, “Jesus, why did God let this happen.” … This is spiritual blindness.  

No one naturally sees spiritually. 

We all know this blindness at times. Everybody goes through a situation where you really blow something, a relationship, a job, or a project. You look back five years, and you say, “I was so blind. I knew it, but I didn’t know it. I had the data, but I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t get it. It didn’t sink in. I was such an idiot.” What is that? It’s not like you got new data. It’s not like you actually, literally, physically didn’t see something. It’s that you realize you were spiritually blind. 

What is spiritual blindness? Here is how Martin Luther put it, believing we are “free, happy, unfettered, able, well, and alive” when we are not. (Martin Luther, Bondage of the Will)  

• Free – I can make choices for myself and they will benefit other people  

No one naturally sees spiritually.  

Part 2  

If we are unable to see ourselves and other people for who they are,  

We don’t have time for this today... Maybe you can look at this at home. But  

If we don’t see spiritually naturally, if we don’t have natural spiritual sight, what do we put in place to guide these relationships?  

Later on the religious leaders say, “we follow Moses.” The religious leaders have Moses – they have religious rules  

His parents also get involved – family norms.  

Everyone experiences this spiritual blindness. If we don’t gain spiritual sight, then we put something else in the place to help us see how we relate to other people.  

Gaining sight  

When it comes to gaining sight, there are really a number of things that should be said 

• Spiritual sight comes in a community  

• Faith is instantaneous and complete, sight comes in stages  

• Jesus went and endured the darkness. The darkness swallowed him and snuffed him out. And because the light of the world was extinguished, we can see. It’s a trade.  

That’s not what we see here. This story tells us something else of gaining sight.  

Jesus sees a man born blind  

“After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. 7 “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.” 

There is a physical, tactile experience. Part of gaining spiritual sight is a physical experience. And not just any kind of experience  

Spiritual sight comes from physically living out God’s Word.  

Almost all of us, I think I can even say all of us, deal with something physical in order to gain real spiritual sight. Money, careers, health, retirement, family.  

If you haven’t gained spiritual sight, Jesus says, “Wash that away.” Let me give you the gift that washes. Not baptism. The gift of forgiveness.  

At the end of the event, after all the discussions and debates, Jesus comes back to the man and says, Jesus says, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” (verse 37) 

If you want spiritual sight, not only does it mean forgiveness for the physical ties you love so much. It means getting seen, being known by the one who sees all things.  

He sees you and when you see that, then your eyes will be opened from your blindness.  

Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. At the age of nineteen months, she became ill with what was at the time called “brain fever.” She had been left blind and deaf as a result of the illness. Helen could not see any light or objects, and her ears could not conduct sound either through bone or via air. This situation continued for almost six years. Years later, Helen wrote about that period in her life: 

I had no concepts whatever of nature or mind or death or God. I literally thought with my body. I was like an unconscious clod of earth. There was nothing in me except the instinct to eat and drink and sleep. My days were a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without interest or joy. 

Then Keller met a woman named Anne Mansfield Sullivan (1866–1936). Miss Sullivan had been working with Helen on spelling words over and over with her fingers. Miss Sullivan kept spelling the words over and over! Finally, she took Helen to the pump house; and as she pumped with one hand, she spelled water with the other. According to Helen: 

She spelled w-a-t-e-r emphatically. I stood still, my whole body’s attention fixed on the motions of her fingers as the cool stream flowed over my hand. All at once there was a strange stir within me—a misty consciousness, a sense of something remembered. It was as if I had come back to life after being dead! … Now I see it was my mental awakening. I think it was an experience somewhat in the nature of a revelation. 

That wasn’t the end. Helen went to a school.  

John Hitz was the person who brought Emanuel Swedenborg and his religious teachings to Helen’s attention, giving her a copy of Heaven and Hell when she was fourteen. She writes: 

 The words “Love” and “Wisdom” seemed to caress my fingers from paragraph to paragraph and these two words released in me new forces to stimulate my somewhat indolent nature and urge me forward evermore. . . . I was not “religious” in the sense of practicing ritual, but happy, because I saw God altogether lovely,...The Word of God, … has been at once the joy and good of my life.[3] 

As she writes: “I do not know whether I adopted the faith or the faith adopted me. I can only say that the heart of the young girl sitting with a big book of raised letters on her lap in the sublime sunshine was thrilled by a radiance and inexpressibly endearing voice.”[9] In speaking of Divine Love and Wisdom, she writes, “[it] is a fountain of life I am always happy to be near. . . . I bury my fingers in this great river of light that is higher than all stars, deeper than the silence that enfolds me. It also is great, while all else is small, fragmentary.”[10] 

You see differently when you’re seen. 

Conclusion 

These kinds of times we see a community’s true colors.  

You will see differently when you’ve been seen. You’ll have a love for the greediest, the most selfish, or the foolish out there and you will have a justice that upholds what is true and good and defends the helpless.  

You will literally see things differently. 

That’s what happens when you get seen.  

You see differently when you’re seen. 

Encounters with Jesus: Live for what gives life

John 4:5-29

5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.[a])

10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

17 “I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

26 Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

The Disciples Rejoin Jesus

27 Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

28 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”

Discussion notes

Phenomenal story: Jesus and the woman 

What gives you life?  

“you would have asked and he would have given you living water”. In short he says, “I can give you living water.” (verse 10) 

Is there something physical you are looking to for life? Yes No   

 If so, what is it?   

The ______________ __________ (physical stuff) of life cannot give life. 

“the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (verse 14) 

What’s driving you and filling you with life? _______________ 

Everyone needs something _____________ (inside) filling them with life.   

Live for what gives life.   

Sermon

Phenomenal story. It’s about Jesus and a woman who lives with another man. They meet at the local watering hole about noon. Literally, the watering hole. Not the bar.  

When the whole thing is done, look at the end of this story. The woman runs back to town. She tells all these people, “I’ve met someone who has told me everything I’ve done. Come and see.”  

Here is why that is incredible.  

First, have you ever, ever met someone who said, “I met someone who told me all the bad things I did in life and told me that I was worse off than I imagined. It was so awesome. You’ve got to come meet this guy.” That’s what she was saying to the other people.  

The reason she met Jesus in the first place is that whether they excluded her or she just felt excluded, she was filled with shame. She didn’t go to the well with everyone else.  

The reason she didn’t go to the well with everyone else was that she was divorced five times. Even today in our free sex life, people don’t divorce 5 times. I tried to look up the number of people on their fifth marriage or divorce. Couldn’t find it. Send em over if you do. Stop googling. Do it later.  

She was also one of those free religious thinkers. You know, the kind everyone hates because they’re always saying, “yeah, but what about?” By the way, I think I’m one of those. Somehow every time all the pastors get together, I get ‘em all worked up.  

She basically says to Jesus, I’m thinking about which religion to be part of: Samaritan or Jewish. What do you think?  

She has done all that stuff. She comes back to the people in town. He told me I’m a mess. Come and see.  

Who does that? There are a few. There’s a writer I enjoy, Mark Clark. He grew up an atheist. He did drugs as a kid. He stole. He got Tourettes and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. His dad was a deadbeat who died when he was 15. When he was 17 he said he believed in Jesus. He is one of the few guys I know of who gets up, and he can kind of smile and say, “I’m a mess. I’m a wreck. This guy Jesus told me about it. You should come and check him out.”  

Discover 

Last week was the gospel for the insider. The person who has their life all figured out, they just need to hear, look, as long as you think you don’t need life, you don’t have it.  

This week, the gospel for the outsider. The person who desperately searches for new life, tries drugs, or sex, or career, or marriage, and can’t find anything that will give them life.  

The question is just this: what gives you life? Where do you get meaning, satisfaction, and vitality for every day? What gives you life?  

What we need for life 

First thing to get here is what we need for life. Jesus says to this woman, “you would have asked and he would have given you living water”. In short he says, “I can give you living water.” (verse 10) 

This is a big deal. Water and air are our most basic physical needs. Without air a person dies in minutes. Without water they die in days. Water is so plentiful for us that we don’t even think about a world without water. One of my college classmates worked on a nonprofit that dug wells. About 10% of the world doesn’t have a basic drinking water source and almost 30% of the world drinks from a contaminated source. We’re blessed, kind of like this woman at the well, to have drinkable water. So Jesus is really talking to people like us when he says, “I can give you living water.”  

What does that mean? It means the most basic thing in life – water – can't really make you alive. It can’t give you life. You need something else to make you alive.  

If Jesus says, I can give you living water, what do you think are the odds that you have living money? Or a living marriage? Or a living career? What I mean is, if water the most basic thing in life is not really alive enough to give you life, what do you think is the chance that anything else physical actually gives you life?  

This has been a big struggle in my life because even if you think I’m a heady guy and I like ideas, I like physical stuff as much as any other guy. I have found it so hard to get my life and happiness from something other than physical circumstances. I remember one guy who asked, are you happy? I said, eh, I’m working on happiness apart from circumstances. He said, good, that’ll help. Tough, but it’ll help. Just the other day someone asked, is that part of life “life giving”? I said, “eh”. I still have a ways to go.  

Let me ask you: 

Is there something physical you are looking to for life? Yes No  

If so, what is it?  

Here is our first takeaway for today if you’re following along. The ______________ __________ (physical stuff) of life cannot give life.  

Where it is  

This is just the beginning. Jesus wants to make an even stronger point. He says, “the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (verse 14)  

This is another stunning point. Remember in the ancient world people basically denied their feelings. They said, the mind is everything. Control your feelings. Control what comes from within. In the modern world, we say almost the opposite. Just notice how people talk. We say, “I feel that we should do blah blah blah.” That’s probably not even correct. What they mean is, I think. Pretty much everything is about what we feel. Jesus says, I can give you something that will fill you on the inside. It’s not thinking or feeling that is right.  

Your entire thinking, your feeling, and even down to the very convictions of your life can be filled with a vitality, a liveliness. I think in my own life there are a few people who have been so filled with life that is just dynamic. It’s flowing over. And it doesn’t come from outside them.  

One of my favorites is my grandma …. knee surgery …. moving …. husband has heart failure and surgery …. Life is no longer flowing to them. It’s flowing from them. What he is showing her, and us... 

Everyone’s life has to flow out of something. Some people get life from physical things. They know who they are from the stuff they have. They know what groups they belong to from the things they own. They know where they are going from the things they want to have. If you say to yourself, “my goal right now is life to have a cabin by the lake” what is that? That’s a goal that’s filling you with life.  

And some people don’t even need physical things. I think I’ve told you about the famous comments from Bruce Becker before. The great tennis star Bruce Becker had everything, but for him it wasn’t about the possessions. It was the drive to be the best. “I had won Wimbledon twice, once as the youngest player. I was rich. . . . I had all the material possessions I needed.” But even that drive isn’t life giving. It won’t fill you with life. He went on to say,  

“It is the old song of movie stars and pop stars who commit suicide. They have everything, and yet they are so unhappy. I had no inner peace.” See, Jesus isn’t saying, you can’t have an identity. He isn’t saying you can’t have a sense of belonging. He isn’t saying you can’t have goals and purposes. He is simply saying those things can’t drive your life. Something else has to drive you and fill you with life.  

What’s driving you and filling you with life? _______________ Think about that a little. Maybe like Becker, it’s not even really the physical stuff. Maybe it’s the drive to be the best.  

Everyone needs something _____________(inside) filling them with life.  

Part 3 

There is a neat illustration someone else came up with for this source of life.  

Imagine a man wandering through a desert with bottles of water on his shoulder. He conserves his water careful until it is all gone and then he begins to get thirsty. That thirst gets deeper and deeper until he sees a pump and runs to it. He lifts the handle and pulls it down but all he hears is the sound of metal on metal. He starts to panic. Then he sees a tin can at the bottom of the pump and in the tin can is a message. “Dear traveller do not despair there is enough water here, just follow the instructions. Lift the handle of the pump, bring it down and when you hear the sound of metal on metal discouraging you here’s what you do. Under the pump in front of you there is buried under the sand a bottle of water. Do not despair. Pick up the bottle of water pour it into the cylinder and start priming the pump. The moisture will get the system to work. A rush of water will start gushing out of the pump. You can drink all of the water you want, fill all your bottles but do not forget to fill up the bottle again and leave it for the next passerby. Warning: you’re going to be tempted, when you see this one bottle of water, to drink it. But you’ll be so thirsty again and so will everyone else who goes by. Empty it out as instructed and you will have all the water you want and so will everybody else going by”…. 

When you come up against Christ he offers you that drink, that living water to free you from all your sin and give you life that lasts forever. If you take the littler water of your own life and pour it out on yourself you will soon be thirsty again and so will everybody else who comes across your path. But if you draw from the deep well of God, you will never run out of water.  

But you have to ask, who filled the water bottle first? Where did that water first come from?   

It was because Jesus was thirsty. It was because the divine Son of God, the maker of heaven and earth, had emptied himself of his glory and descended into the world as a vulnerable mortal, subject to becoming weary and thirsty. In other words, she found the living water because Jesus Christ said, “I thirst.” That is not the last time Jesus Christ said, “I thirst,” in the book of John. 

On the cross just before he died, he said, “I thirst,” and he meant more than just physical thirst. There Jesus was experiencing the loss of the relationship with his father because he was taking the punishment we deserved for our sins. There he was cut off from the Father, the source of living water. He was experiencing the ultimate, torturous, killing, eternal thirst of which the worst death by dehydration is just a hint. That is both paradoxical and astonishing. It is because Jesus Christ experienced cosmic thirst on the cross that you and I can have our spiritual thirst satisfied. 

Live for what gives life. Everyone lives for something. Are you living for what really gives life in the end? Live for what gives life 

Encounters with Jesus: Get a (new) life

John 3:1-16

Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. 2 He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

3 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.[a]”

4 “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit[b] gives birth to spirit. 7 You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You[c] must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”[d]

9 “How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.

10 “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? 11 Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. 12 I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? 13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man.[e] 14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up,[f] 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”[g]

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Sermon

Do you realize that the founder of one of the great movements of Christianity, one that we’re a part of, was a 37 year old adult convert?  

Did you remember that he was highly religious – a monk and a scholar – for about 15 years when he thought heaven was closed to him?  

Do you know it after that time that he risked his significant political position?  

I’m talking about Martin Luther. Martin wasn’t the only one.  

Do you know William Wilberforce? What great thing did William Wilberforce do? William Wilberforce was the most influential figure in the end of the slave trade in England.  

He was 27 when the slave trade became an abomination to him. 27 when the whole creation sang in praise on an Easter morning.  

Chuck Colson 

The “hatchet man” of President Nixon in the Watergate scandal.  

He was 40 years old when he professed faith in Jesus.  

He never read a Bible growing up. He only went to church for nominal visits. His mother said he should be a pastor for “social reasons”.  

If it holds, I think probably the most radical conversion of my lifetime will probably be Kanye West.  

Kanye is 5 years older than I am. He has experienced every level of fame, wealth, and significance. He is married to an American icon, Kim Kardashian.  

It’s at 42 he says he is a born again Christian and is saved by faith in Jesus Christ.  

In today’s lesson, we’ve got a guy just as famous, popular, and out there. And yet he is promised, and I’m pretty sure receives, an awesome, new life.  

Discover  

You know what is the greatest threat to your new life, a life that makes a difference? It’s not your age. It’s not that you grew up in an irreligious house. It’s not that you grew up in a religious. It’s not your education. It’s not your morality or your immorality.  

Jesus invites you today not only to identify the threat to your new life, and the new life.  

Part 1 – the threat to new life  

If anyone had found the foundation and secret to a great life, you might think it was Nicodemus. He is a Pharisee and a member of the Jewish ruling council. Verse 1 tells us he was  

• Male – important in a patriarchal society  

• Older 

• Pharisee  

• Ruling council – one of the 70 most important men in Israel at the time – more elite than our Senate.  

• He calls Jesus, “Rabbi”. Could have been some sarcasm here or insincerity, but also some incredible generosity. Uneducated teacher d 

Jesus tells him, “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (verse 3)  

Even if you are person who doesn’t have a specific idea in mind when you think of the “new birth”, I think it’s really easy to have a specific idea in mind. It can be easy to think it’s like this:  

• Really bad people – drug addicts, abusers; people like Chuck Colson, maybe Kanye West 

But what about Martin Luther? What about Nicodemus?  

The foundation and secret to a great life, a new life cannot be more traditional morality or religiosity. It’s not immorality, but it’s not for morality either. It can’t be. Nicodemus represents everything of traditional morality and religion.  

If traditional morality and religion was the secret to a great life, a new life, Jesus would tell Nicodemus, you must be born again.  

This is the number one threat to the Christian faith. It is not various kinds of sexuality. It is not stealing. It’s not lieing and all the rotten things people say about one another, although that is a close second. It’s pride. I’m just going to speak for myself here for a second.  

The times when I experienced the most conflict in my life, the most struggle, intense self-doubt, where the times when I thought I could do it. I had it covered.  

It’s a life about me. Lifting myself up.  

Everyone needs the new life. The greatest threat to the new life is thinking I don’t need it.  

Part 2 – the new life  

So what is the foundation and secret of a new life?  

Jesus says “they are born of water and the Spirit” (verse 5). Supernatural cleansing as well as a supernatural gifting of the Holy Spirit. I cannot do this on my own.  

He is flashing back to Genesis where he says darkness is over the surface of the deep and the spirit hovered. We’ve got to start creation over again. We need a new creation to happen to you.  

I realize that a lot of us perhaps, most of us, were baptized as children. For many of us then, it’s a far off, a distant experience.  

Basically every adult who stays around the Christian life has a time and probably multiple times when they can say, that baptism that happened long ago, it’s real. I have been born again. For me, 2 times 1) is God real; 2) do I need everyone else’s approval.  

I’m going to stop trying to call the shots in my life 

Jesus stops being a facet of your life and a component of your life and he starts being your life.  

That’s two things.  

First, Jesus says, “be born again”. No child births themselves. It’s mom’s anguish. It’s mom’s burden. She does it for you. 

You cannot make yourself  

Salvation is God’s labor. It’s God’s bleeding.  

You can’t cause it control it  

But you absolutely can benefit from it.  

You know it is there. There is evidence, very clearly. Jesus says, “the wind blows where it pleases”. Do you think really the new life of God could blow in your life without messing up your hair?  

You’ve got let the new life happen to you. The first thing is to just “endure” or “pass through”  

The process that brings new life doesn’t just say, “I’m sorry for the bad stuff I’ve done” it also says, “I’m sorry for the good things I've done that I thought count for something.” They don’t, they don’t count at all. To see that it’s his works that have saved us. 

Second, Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up”  

But what happened in the desert—you find it back in the book of Numbers 21:4-9—is that the children of God had sinned. Israel had sinned. And God sent a plague of snakes, venomous snakes, and they bit them and they were dying. And in a sense, the venom represented sin in their life. Basically, the venom represented in their bodies what was killing them in their soul. And what Moses was told to do was to take a bronze serpent—an image of the thing that was killing them—put it up on a pole (you know, “as Moses lifted up the serpent”), and all they had to do was look… because some of them were so sick, and so immobilized, they couldn’t possibly go over to it and rub it or touch it or any of that. All you have to do is look. I should even just say, all you can do is look.  

The second thing is to look.  

You can have a new life.  

• Can you pass through the experience, whatever God in his Word might ask you go to through?  

• Can you look at someone taking your sin?  

Conclusion 

I ask you sometimes, “What is God up to in your life and the lives of the people around you?” Some of you look really uncomfortable by that question. Jesus says “no one can see the kingdom of God”.  

You can see God’s kingdom. Not directly. You see the effects of the wind. How can the power of the almighty God blow in your life and you  

Is it reasonable that the power of the almighty God would blow around in your life and it wouldn’t blow around your hair a little bit? your money, your relationships, your time, your priorities.  

Bottom line: Get a (new) life.  

Let the Bible consistently influence your life.

2 Peter 1:16-21

16 For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”[a] 18 We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.

19 We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. 20 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Sermon

Even as a pastor... I don’t know, maybe especially as a pastor, I’m constantly finding areas in my life where the Bible doesn’t have very consistent influence.  

For example, this last week I was talking with a friend. He was telling me about this project he did for a church one time. The pastor assured him as he started this project, and it was a pretty big project, that when he was done the whole city would be able to make use of his work. He wasn’t just doing it for the church. He was doing it for the town.  

As he finished up the project, the church leadership came to him. They said, nope, we aren’t going to let other people use this. This is just for our church.  

I thought, man, that’s too bad. Isn’t that sad? I’m sure the pastor didn’t mean to lie or deceive. For whatever reason, he just wasn’t able to act with integrity and honesty.  

When I worked on this lesson from 2 Peter, I thought, woah, what about me? How consistently does the Bible influence my life? I thought about this time I told people, sure we can do this project for the city. We can include others. And it didn’t work out. I think about the times when I’ve said, yes, the church is about forgiveness, but then I refused to forgive this young lady who sinned against me. I think about my own failure to let my whole life be a life of repentance even as I’m asking other people to repent, and then someone says to me, “where is your empathy?”  

This is pervasive.  

If you think the Bible consistently influences your life, I want you just to really think about it for a minute. I’m pretty sure that we are all really selective about the times we let someone else influence and the times we listen to ourselves. I’ve got an acquaintance, not one of you, not near here.  

• He is really aware of his forgiveness. When the Bible speaks about his forgiveness, he takes that seriously. Takes that to heart.  

• But when the Bible says, “be subject to the elders and clothe yourselves with humility” he says, no way. He admits that most of the time he makes people earn his respect before he gives them respect.  

What’s going on here, and I'm going to summarize what author Tim Keller says. He says basically “The root idea of modernity is the overturning of all authority outside of the self. In the 18th century European ‘Enlightenment’ thinkers insisted that the modern person must question all tradition, revelation, and external authority by subjecting them to the supreme court of his or her own reason and intuition. We are our own moral authority.” 

What he is saying is, in the modern age, we’ve set up life so that we get to pick and choose when we listen to any external authority or influence and when we don’t. We’ve set it up so that when it is convenient for us to say, Oh sure, the Bible is the number 1 influence on my life, we’ll say it. But when it isn’t convenient, we’ll say, “Who are you to tell me what to do?” We can do both. No one questions it. That’s just the way it is.  

Don’t think this happens, or happens to us? Just watch what happens in Bible study where there is a formal authority figure. If we’re sitting around with friends or relatives at a birthday party and we start arguing about some moral issue, let’s say we’re talking about marijuana. Some people will get really quiet because they aren’t talkers and don’t have anything to say. Some people will get really animated. In that environment, there is no universal authority or influence. Everyone can basically say whatever they want. In a Bible study with a formal authority figure, it’s very different.  

This has been a tough thing to figure out as a pastor. Just this last week, I asked one of those bad teacher questions, the factual kind that only has one answer. I won’t tell you what it was. Doesn’t matter.  

There were some good answers, some not so great.  

There was at least one time that I said a pretty short “no”. You should have seen the room deflate. If I say a flat “no” to people, you can just watch the whole room deflate. It’s like you pushed a pin into a balloon. Why is that? It’s because we all say, I’m in charge of my self. I get to decide what is right and wrong for me. Who are you to tell me? If someone says, you’re wrong, you’ve got to defend yourself or you’re crushed.  

You lose all your identity. Your sense of self. Your sense of worth. Now it doesn’t have to be that way.  

I remember one Bible study with a group of people who saw the world much more black and white. They weren’t really shaped by the rejection of external authority. They were a group of people who said, I submit my whole life to the Bible. I’m going to let God and his Word speak to me. And no matter how wrong it is or how bad it makes me feel, I’m going to get at it. It was this Bible study with about 10 people. And it was intense. It was probably one of the deepest biblical discussions I’ve ever had.  

There was nothing about “you make me feel like less of a person”. Or “you’re taking away my authority over my life.” It was completely, “I will let God influence every step of my life. I will let the Bible influence everything I do.” 

Those people weren’t perfect. I’m not saying they were. But it was a really cool experience for me. Peter invites you and I to the same thing as we get ready for Lent. What consistently influences your life? Is it you? Or could it be something else?  

Discover 

What could consistently influence your life?  

Part 1 External evidence for the Bible 

The first thing Peter tells us to help the Bible properly influence our lives is he says, “We did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ”.  

He is getting at what we would call the historical nature of the text, something we even might call the genre of the Bible. This is the external evidence for the Bible There were some people who called the information about Jesus and the Old Testament “cleverly devised stories”. That grew out of the complicated religious time they were living in.  

What we know is that culturally, there were a lot of religions at Peter’s time. On top of that different ethnicities had different expectations. Jews demanded signs. People had to do miracles to demonstrate their religion.  

One example is a book we call the “Greek Magical Papyri”. There is this huge book, you can buy it if you are interested, with hundreds of incantations and stories of miracles. There were stories about Jesus going around too. One of my favorites is a story about Jesus and birds. The story goes that Jesus was playing by the seaside on the Sabbath. He made 12 clay birds. The other kids reported that he was working on the Sabbath. As his dad came to yell at him, he breathed on them and they flew away. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infancy_Gospel_of_Thomas)  

People were really good at telling stories to prove their religion. In one sense, there is nothing wrong with that. If you come to me and say, “hey Nathaniel, why do you accept the Bible? Why should I accept the Bible?” I’m going to offer you some different evidence. Some of what I’m going to say will be stories.  

• I’m going to tell you that maybe you heard the Bible we have is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and along the way, the meaning has changed and gotten all messed up. I’m going to say, that isn’t true. For more than the last 500 years, every translation – that's what this English Bible is – goes back to the earliest Hebrew and Greek texts we have. They go back to the earliest. And yes, there are some problems with the earliest manuscripts. Just like if you look at the meetings notes from the meetings of this church – the council and the voters – you are going to find some typos, some copy paste errors, some word order problems or other things, you will find the same in the Bible. In the end, out of all those problems, only about 40 make any difference in the meaning. That’s it. 40. They weren’t in the original editions. Maybe someday we’ll figure them out. There are definitely a lot fewer than 500 years ago. 500 years ago we maybe had 100. That isn’t really a story. That’s just a piece of external evidence. We’ve got consistent manuscripts. One reason for the Bible to influence your life is consistent manuscripts.  

• I’m also going to tell you a story. I’m going to say, one time there was a prominent Christian pastor and scholar on a panel with a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim imam. These are the three great religions of the world. They agree they have a lot in common. They all accept one god. They rely on texts. They all said, there is one big difference. The big difference is Jesus. Who is he, what did he do. The Bible has unique content – Jesus. One reason for the Bible to influence your life is unique content – Jesus. 

Everyone uses stories to support their religion. That just is. Peter says, at some point, you need more. You have to look at the whole Bible differently. Peter says "we did not follow cleverly devised stories”. When he says, “follow”, you think, how do you follow a message?  

At some point you’ve got to stop saying, I’m going to prove this piece of it or that piece of it. You and I can discuss pieces of evidence and I can tell you stories all day long. If you say to me, pastor, I really have a problem with this whole judging sin thing. I don’t want to tell people they are sinners. I will say to you, Imagine you go to the doctor. The doctor finds you have cancer. Don’t you want to the doctor to tell you? Shouldn’t the doctor say you have cancer? I’ll tell you that story.  

We can go on. At some point, we have to realize what Peter says, “we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” Who is we? He is talking about the people who actually literally saw Jesus himself, saw what he did, heard what he said. He gives one example: the transfiguration, which, is one of the more supernatural events in the history of Jesus’ life. He’s talking about those people who actually saw Jesus and therefore, they are the sources of what he said and did. They’re the New Testament authors. 

He is saying, the Bible is an incredibly unique religious book. The Bible is the only religious book that gives you first-hand, eyewitness testimony over almost 2,000 years that says, “this happened for you”. Every other religion is going to say to you, let this text personally influence you and change your life. Let it rule over you. Islam says submit. Buddhism says suffer.  

They all say, if you do that enough, suffer enough, submit enough, eventually God will save you. The Bible says, “look, hear this, listen to this. Jesus saved you. It’s done. End of story.” The Bible is an actual historical account of our salvation.  

When you get that, your skepticism and questing starts to melt away. As a pastor, I’ve been baffled by two things. Everyone, even long time Christians, has questions. At the same time, the questions of Christians amplify grace. Christians can stand around and say, wow, isn’t that suffering terrible. It’s awful. What a tragedy. And they say, thank God protects us from that tragedy.  

I don’t think I’ve heard of a better example of this than a Frenchman named Emile Cailliet. He grew up an agnostic right before WW1. He graduated from college without having seen a Bible. He served in WW1. He was overwhelmed by the human condition, the awfulness of humanity.  

He got shot. He lay there in the hospital recovering. He longed for, in his words, “a book that understand him.” He was a thinker, a philosopher. He wanted something that helped him make sense of his life. See who he was and who he could be.  

He didn’t know of any such book, so he started writing down passages from useful books that he read. He read a quote, then would write it down for later. He was really excited to read it all some day. He expected it would lead him through fear and other stages and finally to supreme joy.  

One day he sits down to read. Disappointment washes over him with every page. He recognizes all the passages and he remembers when he wrote them, but they no longer apply to him. It’s not a book that understands him. It’s a book that tells his story. Then he realized, “the whole thing would not work, simply because it was of my own making.”  

His wife walks by. She just met a pastor. He gave her a French Bible. She gives it to him. He reads it. He is no longer filled with all these little questions of, “how many angels were at the resurrection” or “why do I have to tell people they are sinning.” He realizes this is the only possible book that could tell him a story “not of his own making”.  

That’s exactly what happened. He says, “As I looked through the Gospels, the One who spoke and acted in them became alive to me... This is the book that would understand me.”  

What happened? As he got past all of those questions and the Bible stood all by itself before him, Peter’s words were true for him. Peter said, “prophets spoke from God.” Suddenly this whole thing came together saying, “here is where you’re coming from, here is who you are, and here is where you could go.” Wouldn’t you like to go there?  

Don’t you see? If you understand that no prophecy came from the prophets own thoughts, but men spoke from God, suddenly there was one consistent influence to make sense of his life.  

Don’t you wonder what it could be like if you could say, this is the book that understands me? If it is was the one consistent influence of your life?  

I know a lot of us read our Bibles. A lot of us don’t. Do you think we can read it each of the 40 days of Lent. If you’re not a reader, there are ways to listen. You can even watch. To encourage you, let me give you this. If you want, each one of you can ask a question or make a comment to me this week. I won’t think of it as boasting or anything. Just say, I was reading this and I had this question.  

What could it be if the Bible was the consistent influence over your life?  

Blessed: the path to privilege

Matthew 5:1-6

This is one way to think about being a disciple. It’s a privilege life.  

Jesus says “blessed” What does he mean by blessed? Is he just naming different physical bad circumstances and saying you’re blessed if you go through them? Yes, but no.  

Yes he talks about physical stuff, but not just physical. He is really talking about spiritual. He is talking about spiritual needs with physical concepts.  

We know we can’t survive that long without water. But how long do we think we can live without God almighty? Millions are trying to do it. We’re blind to our spiritual needs, so he uses these physical concepts to make it clearer.  

He is saying there is a really unique, select group of people who grasp their situation.  

In the wider Greek world this word “blessed” was used of the gods, the Christian martyrs, and a few select people who were determined could be happy. It described the kind of satisfaction or privilege only someone who wasn’t really part of this world could achieve or accomplish. 

The privileged  

Discover/adventure  

To achieve this select privilege  

Poor in spirit 

The first step on the path to this privilege is poverty of spirit. Jesus says “blessed are the poor in spirit”.  

The poor are people who have nothing. If this was strictly a description of their financial place in life, they have no savings. They don’t even have clean clothes. Food is scarce. A sense of desperation sits over their life. They are anxious about their next meal.  

But these people aren’t poor physically. They are poor in spirit. A person who is entering the kingdom has to realize, “My problems are more than psychological, but they are at least psychological. They’re more than social, though they’re at least social. They’re more than philosophical; they’re spiritual.”  

Poverty of spirit doesn’t mean a person lacks smarts. It doesn’t mean a person is missing passion or even that their character has some flaw in it. To be poor in spirit is much deeper, much broader than that.  

If you and I were a little short on cash, we might watch a few videos and skim a few websites about picking up gig jobs. If we really wanted to work hard at it, we might take a Dave Ramsay course.  

If you and I needed to get our act together, get our life together, we might learn a new productivity system or take a quick life course.  

Even if we needed to improve our relationships, we could see a counselor a few times.  

We live in this awesome self-help culture. We’ve got free YouTube videos to help out with so many problems and if that isn’t enough, we can spend $12.95 for an expert who says, spend $12 and this is the last book you’ll ever need. You’ll be an expert.    

We’ve got this awesome self-help culture. We’ve figured out we have so many shortcomings, failings, and issues. We’ve got tools and tricks to help you with all of them. We can even help you – we think – with your spiritual poverty.  

We’re the first people to say thigs like, “Believe in yourself”, “Love yourself”, and “actualize your potential.” 100 plus years ago no one said things like that. They still heard the same restless inner murmur. Thye didn’t silence it.  

Jesus is saying, if you really want to reach a place of privilege, you have to start like this. A lot of people approach Christianity likes it’s a self-help thing. People hit bad patch in life and say, “I’ve hit a bad patch now. I better clean up my life a little. I’ll go to church. I’ll stop this or that. If I need to, I’ll talk to pastor or someone else some. And then God’s power will show up in my life!”  

You cannot self-help yourself into a relationship with the God of the universe; you have to have poverty of spirit. You can’t say, “I’ll clean my life up”; you have to say, “My problems are beyond me.” You can’t say, “I’m suffering. I’m having a bad patch. I need a little boost”; you have to say, “I’m not coming to you O Lord because I need a boost, I’m coming to you O Lord because I owe you everything and I owe you more than I can pay. I’m poor in spirit. I’m spiritually bankrupt. My problems are beyond me, and they’re spiritual problems.” Are you there? That’s the first step 

Mourn 

Being poor in spirit is simply becoming aware about the realities of your life. Most people understand how bad things are in the world. Some people don’t. They’re spiritual teenagers. I’m kind of like this when it comes to accomplishing work goals.  

I’ll meet with one mentor or another every 6 months or so. And they’ll say, so what projects are working on? What are you trying to accomplish? Since I’m a pastor, my goals are usually something relational.  

I’m trying to build 10 new gospel relationships. 5 new discipling relationships. I’m going to reduce the unhealthy conflict behaviors by 25%. And so on.  

“Woah”, they say, “that’s a BHAG – a big hairy audacious goal!” They’ll always say, “How is that going for you?”  

I always end up saying, well, you know this person left work or we had this event come up or  

Until I finally say, I can’t do this. I’m not getting this done. I really don’t want to mourn over the situation. I don’t want to go to the place where I say, “This is beyond me. It’s more than I can handle.”  

You can’t just know the symptoms, recognize the symptoms, and understand the symptoms. If you’re really going to reach that privileged place, you have to know what’s wrong. You have to take the situation seriously enough to ask someone what is causing the problems and what the disease is.  

For a lot of people, the greatest sadness they experience in life is over circumstances. There certainly is plenty of that. Job loss, relational conflict, and even death. We all experience that stuff because of sin in the world.  

Most people never ask, hey, what is going on behind all of this? What’s the cause of all these problems? 

Poor in spirit means acknowledging your deepest life problems are beyond yourself. You don’t have the resources to handle them. To mourn means to acknowledge that those deepest life problems are actually your spiritual problems. Your sin problems.   

In other words, our first instinct is to say..., If I were to ask most of you, what are your biggest problems, Most people say it’s my financial problems, relationships problems, or its my health problems. The real problem … 

The real problem is our struggle with sin. When you mourn, the weight of this guilt pushes on you. Just like a job loss, relational struggles, or a death might push on you and make you feel the hopelessness, the cheerlessness, the fear of it all, when you mourn over sin, the hopelessness, the cheerlessness pushes on you. It doesn’t crush you. I'm not saying that. Jesus has more to say about that in a minute.  

But there is a certain weight that falls on you. The weight of your own sin might really bring you to tears.  

And if you don’t mourn, realize you’ll never be comforted. Jesus says, Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. It’s only those who mourn who are ever comforted.  

Meek  

When they weight begins to press on you, a lot of people are going to say, woah, this is too hard. This is too difficult. I can’t carry all this weight. It’s going to crush me.  

People might say, I see my problems are beyond me. I can’t please God, and that just frustrates me to know. I’m going to feel bad. I’m going to be angry at the world. I’m just going to sit here and give up. A lot of people do that.  

The other approach is what Jesus says. He says, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” 

You can see what he is saying. He is saying, if you truly humble yourself, you can’t be discouraged. You can’t be filled with despair. You can’t just sit down and give up. Why? Because you inherit the earth.  

The humble hold the entire universe in their hands. This is another way to say, whoever loses their life will save it. But first comes the difference between meekness and self-pity.  

A lot of people think they have given up their life. A lot of people will say something to me like, “I believe God has forgiven me, but I don’t know if I can forgive myself”. That sounds helpful. That sounds really humble. It’s actually a great test for the difference between real humility and fake humility.  

What you might actually be saying is, what many people are saying is, I know God is a God of love. And because of that, he doesn’t hold this thing against me. But me, I need to be a good person. I need to be really good. I have higher standards than God. I intend to hold up these higher standards. I’m too proud, I’m too capable to accept forgiveness from God. 

This is a great place to remember what CS Lewis says true humility is. CS Lewis, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” True humility is not self-pity. It’s saying, God, I’m going to listen to you. What you say matters. You are Lord of my life, I’m not. Whatever you say about me, sinner and saint, it’s true, no matter what.  

Can you see what a difference this could make? A truly humble person realizes Jesus is all about them. This changes them. They can be all about you. That’s how you recognize a truly humble person. They are really, genuinely all about you. They are never insanely high one day and off the charts low the next day. Why? Because a meek person is always saying, On my own I’m nothing. I’ve done nothing to deserve this. Everything I have is a gift from God. God will never take those gifts away.  

Hunger and thirst for righteousness -  

By now, what we’ve got is a person who recognizes their deepest problems in life are beyond themselves. They don’t have the resources to handle them. Along with that, they see these problems as genuine spiritual problems. Sin problems. The weight of that bears on them. It diminishes them. They’re losing their own life and in the process the life of Jesus has grown for them.  

And we’re getting hungry more.  

There is this story told by a woman named Rebecca Pippert. She was a speaker and after one of her talks, a woman came up to her and said, “I need to talk to you.” The woman said, I was married recently. She was a member of a very, very conservative evangelical Lutheran church – probably a WELS church. She and her husband to be were considered leaders and shining lights in the church.  

You can see they were passionate for Jesus. They were zealous for his glory. It very much looked like they hungered for righteousness.  

What is righteousness? It’s to be right with someone. Men, if you remember what it felt like when your wife to be actually accepted you, despite the fact that you drank weird beer and wore clothes from grade school and stayed up all night playing video games, you experienced righteousness. You lived rightness.  

This woman and her husband to me, it seemed like they wanted that. They worked hard at church. They were desperate for approval.  

Six months before the wedding, they realized they were pregnant. They realized the scandal. They decided she would have an abortion. As she walked down the aisle on her wedding day, everybody was looking at the beaming bride, and all she was thinking to herself was, “You murderer.”  

She kept saying to herself, “You were so worried about showing these people you really were. You were so zealous to look right that you would murder this life. I know what you are, she said, and God knows.  

She said to Rebecca, I’ve confessed this a thousand times over, again and again. I’m obsessed with it. It’s running me into the ground. How could God possibly forgive me?  

Rebecca said, ““My dear friend, Jesus Christ had to die for all our sins, sins of the religious and the non-religious, sins of the Nazis and the victims, sins of the moral types and the immoral types. We are all responsible for the death of the only innocent man who ever lived. The sin that caused you to destroy this life was pride, and it was pride that destroyed Jesus Christ’s life 2,000 years ago. As Luther said, ‘We all carry about in our pockets his very nails.’ You were already a murderer before this happened, and it was all totally paid for long ago.” 

What happened to that woman? Did she suddenly say, “You’re making me feel worse?” No, because she got the point. She turned to Becky, and she said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You’re right. I always in my head believed I was a sinner and my sins were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, and now I see it. I came to tell you I did the worst thing imaginable, and you told me I’ve done something worse than that. If I’m worse than I’ve imagined, if I killed God’s Son, and that can be forgiven, then anything else can.” 

You and I are so hungry for approval, we’ll often swallow the bitter taste of anything else. There isn’t a pill too bitter that we won’t swallow it down.  

Jesus wasn’t hungry for approval. You know what Jesus was hungry for? There is passage in John. Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of my Father.” (John 4)  

You know what that means? It means Jesus was hungry for you. Jesus said, I’ve hungered and thirsted for you. There is only one feast that could possibly satisfy me. And once I’ve got that food, I finally won’t be hungry for anything else. I’ll be done.  

And the more you enjoy the privileges he is giving you, the more privileged a follower of Jesus you’ll become.  

Enjoy the privilege of following Jesus.  

Love One Another: Love to listen ... and be loved

Matthew 17:1-9

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. 2 There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. 3 Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.

4 Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”

5 While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

6 When the disciples heard this, they fell facedown to the ground, terrified. 7 But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” 8 When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.

9 As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, “Don’t tell anyone what you have seen, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.

Listening guide

Basic ways to practice good listening ...

Good listening ______ ____ ______ other people. 

Great listening __________ us and them. 

“Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering,” (Is 53:4) 

“Carry each other’s burdens” (Gal 6:2)

Love to listen … and be loved.   

Discussion questions

Sermon

Here are some basic ways to practice good listening.  

“Are we okay?” 

I put away my phone, stop the video game, or turn off the TV when people want to talk to me. I give them my attention.  

I don’t get defensive or judgmental.  

“I thought you said …. Is that what you mean?” Or “I missed something in what you said...let’s try again.” Can I clarify?  

“Tell me more” “Do you want to tell me anything else?” 

“What I’m hearing you say is” or “What would you like me to remember from this conversation?” 

All these and more are part of good listening. What about you? What do you add as good ways to practice listening? 

One I left off is attunement. It’s matching your nonverbal body signals to those of the other person.  

I'm not even going to ask how you and I are at listening. I don’t want to make us anxious.  

Michael E experience – do you want to tell me more  

“you changed my life”  

Become good (or at least better) listeners 

Listening is the first way to show people we care. This is another place where the Bible and good common sense and research all say basically the same thing.  

Stephen Covey said, Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood. Ernest Hemingway said “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” I always think that scene from the old Robin Hood is pretty funny. The castle is burning down. The snake and Prince John watch it burn. “I knew it. I knew it. I just knew this would happen. I tried to warn you, but no, you wouldn't listen. You just had to...” And then Prince John chases the snake trying to smash his mother’s mirror on him.  

Religions value listening too. Solomon summarizes the wisdom “Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise.” (Pr 19:20) Theologian David Mathis writes, "Poor listening diminishes another person, while good listening invites them to exist and matter.”  The fourth precept of Buddhism says speak rightly of others, and to do that listen well.  

What the Bible adds is that listening is also the way to love God. It’s kind of surprising! The oldest summary of the Jewish faith was a sentence called the shema. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” They said, “hear”. Listen. The beginning of a life with God was listening. Jesus made the same point about listening.  

“Listen to him.” the Father said. Most of the time when Jesus told a parable, he didn’t say, “Go and do likewise.” He said, “he who has ears to hear, let him hear.” This is different from religion 

Religion says, “Do good and maybe God will accept you, love you, and forgive you.” Your whole relationship with god begins with what you do. The Bible and the gospel start with “Listen”. It’s not about what you do. You listen. That’s how it starts. You simply be with God. 

That’s what good listening does. It puts us with other people.  

Heard a great story of powerful listening this week.   

A man spent about 15 years in the police department, especially working in the narcotics division. (https://vimeo.com/387666461, 25:00 ff)  

He retires. He actually decides to go and become a pastor.  

One day, he picks up the phone. It’s his chief! They haven’t talked in years. That day together in the duck blind was one of the best days of my life.  

What makes you different? I’m not. If anything, its because I’ve got church and the Lord’s important to me. 

What’s important is that Jesus is our Savior. 

You have no idea who I really am. You might be surprised. 

“I love you”. “I love you too chief.” He gets home and tells his wife, I think I might do something stupid.  

He bought a plane ticket. Got off work and went to the airport. Walked into the hospital. 

Looked at me, looked at his wife, “I just talked to you. Is this real?” Why would you do this for me?  

Last night, I said “I love you.” That was just shock. No man has ever said that to me. I realized that if I really did love you, I would do everything I could to make sure you knew I loved you, including tell you about Jesus.  

Can I please tell you about Jesus? “I think it is a good time for that.” 

What’s going on? He entered someone’s world. He left his own world and he traveled to someone else’s world. He is stepping into it. It’s surrounding him. It’s enveloping him. Consuming him. Do you know what is going to happen?  

What’s going to happen is. That moment and those words press on him. They push on him. That hospital room, that chief, they shape him and mold him. 

That’s what really great listening is. It’s leaving your own world and entering someone else’s world. That is exactly what happens to Peter, Andrew, and James. The cloud envelopes them. They have left their own world and traveled to the world of Jesus. They’re surrounded by him and his glory. It pushes on them. Confronts them. And then those words change you and them. Great listening changes us and them. 

I’m going to put to you, I think we need to let this happen. You can try to stay in your own world if you want. People do it all the time. Have you ever told someone, “who are you to tell me what to do?” Or maybe you’re a Bon Jovi fan. I kind of am. We recently got Guitar Hero back up at our house and I’ve rocked out “It’s My Life” a couple of times. What does that song say? It says, why should I listen to you. Why should I enter your world and see life from your perspective.  

A couple hundred years ago, people wouldn’t have asked this question. They wouldn’t have talked this way. Why? Because 500 years ago, people lived in a communal or collectivistic society. People made decisions about questions like who am I, what’s my place in the world, and what am I supposed to do with my life through the filter of “us”. People said, my grandpa was a blacksmith, my dad was a blacksmith, my brother is a blacksmith, I must be a blacksmith too. We live in an individualistic society. 

That means we answer questions like “who am I?”, “what’s my place in the world?” and “what am I supposed to do with my life” through the filter of “me” not “us”.  

I’m not saying that’s all bad. Sometimes people will answer the question in life of “who am I?” with the answer, my dad was a carpenter, now I’m a philanthropist. People are so much more likely to serve people. It’s much easier to answer the question, “How can I help you?” than it is to say, “how can we get together and help all those people?” So I’m not saying this necessarily a bad thing.  

Where it is a problem is when we say, “who am I listening to?” “who gets to speak into my life?” Because we’re most likely to answer, just me.  

I think we need to listen well, even if it changes our lives, because if ever there was a person who could have said, “Who are you to tell me what to do?” it was Jesus. Or he could have said, “It’s my life.”  

Instead what he says  

“Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering,” (Is 53:4)  

You think how do you carry someone’s pain? Jesus did it in a profound way. He listened to their sicknesses, the fears, and their questions.  

“Carry each other’s burdens” (Gal 6:2)  

Because if he has listened to us, how can we not listen to others?  

Action 

Listen to Jesus so you can listen to us.  

C.S. Lewis wrote an essay called, “At the Fringe of Language”. He said if your basic message is how to do something, language isn’t the best way to convey it. He actually said language isn’t very good at describing complex operations. He said, for example, if you’re trying to get across to somebody how to tie a Windsor knot in a man’s tie, don’t write it out in words. 

I’m convinced that’s why Youtube is so awesome. Men finally have a place to get directions that actually make sense to them.  

With Jesus we don’t have someone who gives us instructions. We get a message that says, I’ve died for you. I’ve risen for you. I forgive you. I accept you because of me. And I invite to  

Love to listen … and be loved.  

Love One Another: Let God deeply into your life so he can help the world through you.

Matthew 5:13-16

13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.  

14 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. 

Sermon

Who are the people who have really changed your life? ______________________, ___________________, _________________________ 

What made them such life changing people?  

Some of them probably did something great for you. Maybe you were literally rescued by someone who gave you an organ in your body, or just happened to be there when you wrecked your car, or maybe someone pushed you out of the way of a speeding car. Those people literally changed your life.  

The life changing people I really remember shared their lives with me. All of their lives – the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the beautiful and the ugly, the pretty and the awful.  

Yet somehow, through them, I still got something that changed my life. 

Take our seminary’s president. We’re talking about Romans ch 1. Mom said, “It’s just wicked Paul, just wicked.”  

Same man looks me in the eye and says, “I’m glad that you are going to pastor my son. I’m glad that you are going to be there with my son.”  

We got to do that in 2019. That’s one thing we’ve got to celebrate today. 2019 was a great year and God used his Word to change people’s hearts and lives.  

You can be someone who helps change the world.  

Basically the question is this: Who are the people that make a difference? The kind of people the world needs, where those people are 

Part 1  

“You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.” In Jesus’ day, the Near Eastern times, salt was used as a preservative. They didn’t have freezers, so the only way to keep meat from going bad was to salt it like crazy. Light did basically the same thing.  

Jesus wasn’t talking about electric lights. He is talking about a candle or a wick in a cup of oil. If you have ever been in complete and utter darkness, not just a little dark, but utter darkness, you get a sense of vertigo and disorientation and my dad had a word when I was a kid – discombobulated. Any of you say that?  

The first thing that matters to change the world is that the world needs preserving.  

What Jesus is saying when he says the world needs salt and light is that the world, human existence, needs something to preserve it, order it, and locate it. He means human existence left to itself inevitably goes to greater and greater disorder, dislocation, and disintegration. To put it simply, things fall apart. Everything falls apart. Think about it physically. The human body falls apart.  

What’s the natural tendency of everything? Everything falls apart. Eventually we die and fall apart. As terrible as that it, everything is the same way. Petals fall of flowers. Their stems crumble. Rocks are crushed, they become pebbles, then sand, and finally nothing.  

Think of this relationally and socially. All relationships tend to go bad. Marriages have to be renewed every 7 years or so. Pastor and people relationships have about the same – 7 to 10 years. At that point they need a new vision, a new life cycle. The vast majority of our friendships grow quickly then fade. If you want to have a meaningful relationship with someone, you have to constantly work, constantly pray, constantly talk, and communicate to make sure you keep on connecting.  

The minute you stop working like that, things fall apart. There are social systems and classes and races. What’s the tendency? It’s toward disintegration. Disorder. Discombobulation.  

Think about energy, the universe. The first law of energy might say that things in motion stay in motion. The second law says that energy itself is running out. Eventually the earth is going to dry up or blow up or something.  

I think we feel this more than ever right now. This disintegration, disorder, discombobulation isn’t just physical, or relational, or social anymore, it’s even emotional or maybe even more correctly its spiritual. Just look at the cynicism we all have. There is deep cynicism about doctors and the medical system. We literally mock and scorn our doctors – oh, they’re just out for our money. Look at Americans trust in the government.  Only about 1 in every 5 of us trusts the government to do the right thing most of the time.  

There is a song I grew up with that perfectly summarizes the American spirit today for many. “It’s called American Idiot. It’s based on the music of a trio, Green Day. One review says. “It’s the depiction of a new American generation … bored, disaffected, cynical about their own cynicism. The chorus of one song is, ‘I don’t care if you don’t care.’ … That’s their default attitude to life in twenty first-century America.”  

Some of you are probably saying, well, yeah, pastor you aren’t saying anything that surprising. This is what I’ve always thought. Isn’t this what the Bible teaches? That everything is just going to hell in a handbasket. Yeah, sort of. But this is radical.  

See for Jesus the world was cyclical. History was cyclical. Take the Egyptians. There are no biographies of Egyptian pharoahs as best we can tell. They did that because they believed there was nothing unique or interesting about each one. They were each different manifestations of the Egyptian gods. The Egyptians are known to have an incredibly traditional culture to make sure everything returned to cosmic harmony and order each year. It was all about the seasons and the farming.  

That lasted until about the 1700s. We are born and bred and raised in a world infused with what sociologists call “the myth of progress”. That means, since we are kindergarten we are told, hey things are pretty good in the world and they’re getting better and you can be part of it. We’re getting bigger, faster, smarter, stronger, kinder, more moral. One of our former leaders used the line “the arc of the moral universe”, implying that the universe inevitably moves in a certain direction. Toward a certain point.  

The one thing nobody believes?! That things are good but they slowly fall apart. 

That’s the one thing nobody says. Who wants to say that? Who wants to say everything falls apart? No one. That sounds like the epitome of hopelessness and despair.  

The people the world needs are people who know the reality of it. You can’t help if you add your voice too all the people who believe in the myth of progress. I'm all for progress. For sure. I use a lot of the developments of life all the time.  

There is no point going back to be a person who says, “All of history, all of life is cyclical.” Yes, that person adds some insight to life. You’ll teach us things.  

The person the world needs looks at life and says, “A lot of things are good, but they slowly fall apart.”  

Take an example. What kind of person does my family need?  

I leave my kids home and I say, okay, finish eating dinner, then clean everything up. Pick up the house a little bit. Put your pajamas on. And get into bed. I’ll be home about 8. I’ve got some meetings. Am I surprised and sad and angry when I walk in the house at 8 and the table is covered in food and the oven is still on and the living room floor is literally covered in legos. And as I turn to head up the stairs I hear audio books blaring from one room and the other room has VBS music. That’s not surprising. That’s just the way it is.  

You don’t walk into a house that was messed up by a bunch of kids and say, bad house, bad kids. You say, where is the positive influence? You don’t walk into a dark room and say, “bad darkness”. You walk into a dark room and say, “where is the light?”   

Where is the light?  

If the world needs preserving, who or what is the best thing for it? Or if the world needs ordering and  

Or rather it is God the Holy Spirit at work in you and through you by the Word.  

See, we radically underestimate the challenge of simply renewing things. Of bringing new life to something old. It is much easier to make new. And I’m all for progress and new things, but we just said that ultimately what the world needs is preserving, ordering. It needs renewal, not new. And we radically underestimate how hard that is.  

Take Coca Cola bottles. When I was a child, the icon of soda was dieing. The glass Coca Cola bottle. It was just fading out. I always liked going up north to my grandparents because their small town always had a few places that still had the old bottles. Everywhere else gave up on them. Too expensive. No on wants to return them. Too hard to refill. So much easier to fill a metal can onece and move on.  

A much better example is Sears. By my count ex CEO Eddie Lampert has spent closing in on 10 billion dollars on Sears trying to revive. It hasn’t worked one bit.  

Now realize what we got to see at Peace this last year.  

You and I, we got to see, not one, but multiple people do something amazing. They grew up hearing God’s Word. They heard the gospel and they believed it was true. Then who knows how many years went by and they gave it up. Did all kinds of other things.  

10, 20, 30, 40 years later they are back saying, not only do I believe in Jesus. I have this renewal and strong sense that I should connect with other people here at Peace under God’s Word. I’m going to put up with other sins so I can forgive and be forgiven. I’m going to repent so I can call others to repent.  

Do you realize how amazing this is?  

God has said there is a very limited, a very specific kind of person who is really going to do the most good in life. It’s the person who can bring out the best in something else. It’s the person who can  

Think about the best steak you’ve had. You can always tell how much I care about you based on how good the meat is when you come over.  

If I’ve made the time, I’ll put a rub on the meat and rub it in hours in advance, maybe days if I really have the time. And you’ll taste it. That steak, that roast will be so tender, so juicy.  

If I’m in a hurry, I’ll throw some salt on the top and quick beat it. Throw it on the grill. Call it good. It’s just not the same. You’ve got to let the influence deep down.  

Psalm 66:9-10 

9 he has preserved our lives  

and kept our feet from slipping.  

10 For you, God, tested us;  

you refined us like silver. 

For 

You don’t become salt and light by just waking up one morning and saying, I think I’ll be salt and light. You are salt and light. 

Whatever deep work comes after that, whatever testing, whatever trial, whatever hardship, that is always something to come back to and say, the gospel that God loves me in Jesus not because of what I do but because of Christ.  

Only he was the salt that was considered trash.  

Only he was the light that was snuffed out. 

Realize that? On the cross, darkness covered the whole world. Why is that? It’s because the light of the world gave up his light to fill your world with light.  

I don’t think I realized, when I professed faith in Jesus, just how long it was going to take to work the gospel all the way into my life.  

The chief influencer makes us great influences. 

Funny story drove this point home for me.  

What’s good parenting? Good parents face their own failures to do what is hard in the moment to have long term beautiful effects on a kid. If you just give your kid what they want, they’ll be a disaster.  

Momentary pain in yourself and someone else for long term gain. Momentary pain long term gain.  

Imagine a six year old daughter. She has those 2 teeth, right here, just dangling. Just hanging by a vein. All you want to do whenever you see her, you just want to flick em out. “No daddy, no, she screams. They’ll fall out.”  

It’s so bad, when you’re at dinner time, I snuggle up next to her and put my arm around her and poke at the teeth.  

That was real for us. Here is the part I didn’t do, but another dad told me about this.  

One night, he is reading. His wife yells from another room, “Steve”. He runs in. She is wrestling with the kid. His job is to pin the kid’s arms down while his wife grabs the tooth. You know this isn’t my story because my wife would never do that. She is too kind. The girl is writhing on the ground and she is just crazy.  

All before that she says, “I hate you I hate you I hate you. I’m never going to support you when you get old. You can’t live with me.  

As soon as the tooth is out, I love you, I love you I love you. Ooo, it feels so funny, so weird.  

This is the job of parenting.  

This is the job of Christianing.  

"Love without truth is sentimentality. … Truth without love is harshness. God's saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent.” (Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage)  

Let God deep in your life so he can help the world. 

Love One Another: Come to clarity

Matthew 4:12-23

12 When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee. 13 Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali— 14 to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah:

15 “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
    the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan,
    Galilee of the Gentiles—
16 the people living in darkness
    have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
    a light has dawned.”[a]

17 From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Jesus Calls His First Disciples

18 As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 19 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” 20 At once they left their nets and followed him.

21 Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, 22 and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

Jesus Heals the Sick

23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.

Listening guide

Who we are to others is based on _____________ __________ __________

Only ____________________ can start to see. 

Follow the thread

Come to clarity

Discussion questions

Love One Another: People can bring pleasure

Matthew 3:13-17

13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. 14 But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

15 Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented.

16 As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Listening guide

Relationships – hard?  

• “I’m trying to connect with you” 

• “I’m just trying to love people”  

• “Why is it that so many Christians make such lousy human beings?”  

• Half of Americans view themselves as lonely.  

• Confidants = 0 

Jesus connects with people 

• Peter’s mother 

• The first disciples 

• Sick family members, poor people, mourning individuals 

Today’s question: why be with people?  

“This is my son” (verse 17)  

“With him I am well-pleased" (verse 17)  

The Triune God shows the _____________ of ____________. 

“it is proper to do this to fulfill all righteousness”. (verse 15)  

The prince of England, the first astronauts, and the dean - “The answer is here, wherever it is that faith resides”.  

Jesus fulfills every _________________.   

Mark 12:30-31 “30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[a] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] There is no commandment greater than these. 

People bring great pleasure 

Discussion questions

Sermon

 This week I had one of those hard relationship conversations. We were working through an issue. One of us said, “hey, I’m trying to connect with you here.” I.e. cut me a little slack, I'm working on this, we can do this. There was this awkward moment of silence that basically said, “yeah, and how is that going for us?” Sometimes building relationships can be hard.  

I remember telling someone one time, “I’m just trying to love people.” Even as I said it, I knew the only reason was because we hadn’t really loved people well.  

Pete Scazzero, who is something of an expert on relationships, because in his own words he was so bad at them for so long, he tells this story. He says one time a friend came to him and said, “Why is it that so many Christians make such lousy human beings?” He said, “Why is it that so many are judgmental, defensive, and touchy?” 

I’m not saying this is only our problem. Americans are bad at relationships. The results of a major study from Cigna were reported in 2018. “Half of Americans view themselves as lonely.” (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/01/606588504/americans-are-a-lonely-lot-and-young-people-bear-the-heaviest-burden). And the percentage is higher among younger people than older people. Think about that. Glance around this room. Of the people under 45, it is likely that 2 out of 3 feel lonely.  

Do you know what the most common response to how many confidants do you have in your life is? 0. I have no one in my life that I can really be close to, that I can really be transparent and open with. 

We struggle with relationships.  

One thing I love to see in Jesus is how good he is with relationships. During Epiphany – these 6 weeks or so between Christmas and Lent – we see how is really good at everything. He can fix what is wrong with the world. He can teach God’s Word with authority. He knows how to impress, wow, and overwhelm people. And he is really good connecting with them.  

He talks to Peter’s mother at her house and she loves him. He invites men to follow him and they get up and go. People come to him in all sorts of desperate situations – sick family members, poverty, and even death, and in every case he figures out how to show them what’s really wrong but still get them to appreciate him. It’s just remarkable. I think there is something for us here.  

You can and should use Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Or if you haven’t considered Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, you’re missing out. They show us many reasons we stink with people.  

But there is a power available to us. When you combine emotional health and good relational practices with God’s power and God's spirituality, it is truly life changing. You will be transformed.  

That’s what the Triune God wants to do for us over the next few weeks. He starts with a simple thing: why be with people. What could people do for us. In coming weeks he has some other things: here is how to make your expectations clear in a God pleasing way, be sure to deal with the underlying issues that get in the way, and then are you really present for people. Today it’s an easy start: why be with people. It’s two things: who God is and what he does.  

Part 1 

We’ve got an event in Matthew 3 we call the baptism of Jesus. It shows us amazing and remarkable individuals.  

We start with Jesus. He comes to John at the Jordan River to be baptized by John the Baptist. After he is baptized, a voice announces from heaven, “This is my Son.” (baptism of Jesus picture) So we know Jesus is a Son. No big surprise there. Every male human being is a son of someone. I guess the surprise would be if you expected Mary or Joseph there. Instead it’s a voice from heaven.  

If the voice says, “This is my Son”, that means the speaker must be the Father. And in between the Spirit descends as a dove. This is what we call the Trinity.  

Tri-une. Trinity. I suppose if you don’t like the word, you can talk around it. You can avoid it. It’s not used in anywhere in the Bible. It simply means “three - one”. It’s not really smart. Geniuses who came up with this name. Three – one. If you can say, supercalifra …. Trinity shouldn’t be a problem.  

These three persons closely relate to each other. They don’t just do and say things that impact each other. There is more. The Holy Spirit comes down in the form of a dove and lands on Jesus. He connects to the Son. The Father says something personal and individual to the Son. He connects with the Son. They all connect with each other. And there is something remarkable about it all. Verse 17 “with him I am well-pleased".  

How much do you like other people? If you are in the early stages of a dating relationship or first year of marriage or you just had a baby, you’re like “Me, me, me, me” (make kissy action). The rest of us are kind of like, uh yeah, people. We’ve said the line from Charles Schulz “I love humanity – it's people I can’t stand.”     Relationships are so hard. Sometimes personal connection feels pointless. But that’s not the Triune God.  

I’m going to come down to you (the Holy Spirit) and with you I am well pleased. The persons of the Trinity actually want to connect to each other. They’re family, but not really. This is not grandpa and grandma gushing over the grandkids.  

The Triune God is totally content. The three of them. They have a great relationship. The relationship is so awesome that we’ve got a way to describe God’s existence: aseity. It means God’s self-existence or self-sufficiency. He is not in any way dependent on other beings. Let me just draw your attention two awesome aspects of God’s self-existence.  

On the one side, the relationship that the Son and the Father have is so intimate, so close that Jesus can say, “I and the Father are one.” You begin to taste this when you’re married and you have a kid. You find yourself saying, “Oh my gosh that kid is me, that kid is my wife. That kid is us, all in one.” But you can be married for 10 years, 50 years and you will still find out something new about your spouse. You will never fully see through the other person. You can’t know them fully. Jesus can say, “I and the Father are one.” That is the one side of their relationship. So intimate.  

The other side, Jesus and the Father are firmly independent of one another, and the kind of emotional entanglement and relational entanglement that characterizes our relationships isn’t a problem for them. Let me give us a quick example. You know you have an unhealthy relationship with your father when you can’t do anything without his approval. Or when you are anxious if he isn’t around. Or if you feel unnecessarily guilty or ashamed about things. That’s a sign of a codependent relationship. That’s not Jesus.  

After Jesus rises from the dead, he tells Mary, don’t cling to me. “I’ve got to go to my God”. Jesus is going to return to his Father so there is a closeness still. But there is a separation. He calls him “my God”. It’s like calling your dad “my manager”. One of the clearest examples is on the cross. He calls out and says, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.” You notice he doesn’t say, “My father my father why have you forsaken me.” He says, “My God my God.” That’s the other side of their relationship. Firmly independent. They’ve got a genuinely interdependent relationship. It’s no wonder the Father says, “with you I’m well pleased.”  

They actually like each other. They’ve got a great relationship.  

The Triune God shows the pleasure of people 

Take this to heart. I think a lot of us hear, “family relationships bring pleasure”. This is more. Connection, real relationship brings pleasure. If you go back to Genesis 2, and we’ll do that sometime, you see you and I were built in the image of the Triune God where there is an usness, a community 

We need to take a look at this reality and process it. This is the end of isolation, putting up walls, blocking other people out. This is the end of loneliness. Other people can bring pleasure. The persons of the Trinity brought each other pleasure. 

Part 2 

Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that marvelous? When I see that, I just marvel at it. There is incredible power at work here.  

Why? What does God do to make this relationship?  

Jesus has this great line to explain why he is getting baptized. He shows up to John. John is his rough and tumble cousin. Immediately recognizes him. John is repulsed by the idea that he should baptize Jesus. Jesus says “it is proper to do this to fulfill all righteousness”.  

This is straight up, straight forward gospel. Jesus has this amazing relationship with his father. Everything is good. Still he will satisfy all the expectations and requirements. 

Every other religion says to us “You live a righteous life and give it to God. You offer yourself and if you are good enough, maybe you can please God and he will accept you. Christianity says, “Jesus has lived a righteous life and he gives it to you.”  

Jesus wants to be your substitute. He wants to live in your place. He will do all the expectations and requirements.  

Let me give us an example. I don’t even know if they meant to but they did such a good job. Some of you might have seen this story from “The Crown”. This is the story of Prince Philip and the first astronauts to reach the moon.  

What happens is that you’ve got the prince of England, Prince Philip. He goes through some a crisis. It starts one day at church. He can’t stand the dean and his preaching. He leaves.  

They get a new dean. About the same time, the first astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin – don't you all want to say Buzz Lightyear every time you have to say his name?- and Michael Collins go to the moon. The way the story goes, not sure if its accurate, is that Philip was absolutely enamored by this. For weeks, even months it was all he talked about.  

The dean invites him to join something of a spiritual retreat. There are about 8 men discussing religion and their place in the world. They’ve lost their way they feel. They have no sense of significance, value, and meaning. The prince listens patiently. Then finally he explodes. He mocks the men for doing nothing. These astronauts, they are real men. They have actually done something meaningful with their lives.  

The prince gets to meet the astronauts. He asks them how it felt. What did the sense as they looked down on the earth or as they stepped onto the moon? The way the story goes, they’ve got nothing. They were so busy with the tasks that the never reflected. They were so shallow that it never dawned on them to consider the smallness of their lives, the majesty of God’s creation, their own meaning and significance. They want to ask him about the palace, the driver, and his wife as queen – all these shallow and insignificant things, in his mind.  

He returns to the circle of men to discuss greater spiritual matters. “[I’ve experienced] an almost jealous fascination with the achievements of these astronauts. An inability to find calm, satisfaction, or fulfillment. … My mother died recently. She saw that something was missing in her only child. Faith. How is your faith, she asked me. I admit I’ve lost it. The loneliness and the emptiness and the anticlimax to go all the way to the moon and to find nothing but haunting desolation, ghostly silence, gloom.... I’m trying to say that the solution to our problems is not the science or technology or bravery. The answer is here, wherever it is that faith resides.” The vicar sits in silence.  

There is nothing he can say. Only one person can handle all the weight of our hopes, our dreams, our expectations, and our requirements.  

Only Jesus said, “I am doi  He made the meaning of his life to fulfill what was required of you and me.”  

If you put your demands and your expectations on someone else in this life, do you know what we call that? That’s a savior. That’s an idol. 

Only one person has fulfilled all our dreams, our hopes, our longings, and ex A lot of us need to take this to heart in our families, our friendships, our workplaces, and our communities. We all have relational expectations. The more we make someone else carry those expectations, the more we are likely to get crushed and crush someone else.  

The devil is busy saying to us and through us, You need this in order to be pleasing.” Jesus says, “That will not make you pleasing. It’s only the Word of God that will make you pleasing. Bread will not satisfy you. It’s God saying, ‘You are my beloved child.’ ” 

What makes God’s relationship so wonderful, so full of pleasure?  

Jesus fulfills every expectation.  

Action 

The heart of healthy relationships is Jesus’ summary of the law. Mark 12:30-31 “30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[a] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] There is no commandment greater than these. 

Realize that you can’t love God without loving others and you can’t love others without loving God. The two are inextricably linked.  

It’s only as we begin to see the awesome relationship that God has in himself that we are going to experience true love in our relationships.  

People bring great pleasure when you let Jesus fulfill all the expectations, all the righteousness.  

Christmas 2019 (Epiphany 2020): Let's give great gifts this year!

Matthew 2:1-12

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi[a] from the east came to Jerusalem 2 and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

3 When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. 4 When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. 5 “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

6 “‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
    are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
    who will shepherd my people Israel.’[b]”

7 Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”

9 After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. 11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

Listening guide

What’s the best gift you gave this Christmas? ___________________ 

“It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Acts 20:35 

“After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 2 and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” (Mt 2:1-2) 

____________ is a ______ part of life. 

“King Herod heard (that there was a new born king of the Jews), he was disturbed and all Jerusalem was disturbed with him”. (Mt 2:3) 

“overjoyed” = “they rejoiced an exceedingly great excessive joy.” 

So your ___________ feels ______. 

“They saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. They returned home.”  (Mt 2:11-12) 

Because it (your heart) is ________. 

Let’s give great gifts this year.  

Discussion questions

Notes  

1. Depending on the number of people discussing, it may be easier to split into same gender groups.   

1. You will not have time to discuss all the questions. Discuss those that interest you.  

Getting talking  

1. What was the best gift you gave this Christmas?  

1. Is it easy for you to give gifts? Why or why not?  

This week’s discussion questions 

1. I feel confident of my adoption as God’s son/daughter and rarely, if ever, question his acceptance of me.                                                                                                           1 2 3 4 

1. I love to worship God by myself as well as with others.                                           1 2 3 4 

1. I spend regular quality time in the Word of God and in prayer.                             1 2 3 4 

1. I sense the unique ways God has gifted me individually and am actively using my spiritual gifts for his service.                                                                                                                  1 2 3 4 

1. I am a vital participant in a community with other believers.                                 1 2 3 4 

1. It is clear that my money, gifts, time, and abilities are completely at God’s disposal and not my own.                                                                                                                                   1 2 3 4 

1. I consistently integrate my faith in the marketplace and the world.                     1 2 3 4 

TOTAL ______ 

Name: ________________________________________ 

Date completed: _____________________________ 

Goals last until: ______________________________ 

Strengths	Weaknesses
Strengths of my life enjoying God's grace	Weaknesses of my life enjoying God's grace
Opportunities	Threats
Opportunities to enjoy God's grace more or differently	Threats to my enjoyment of God's grace

Two or three opportunities or strengths of my life in God’s grace that I can build on for the next 3-6 months are _____________________________________________________________ 

_________________________________________________________________ 

__________________________________________________________________ 

_________________________________________________________________ 

_________________________________________________________________ 

One weakness of my life in God’s grace that I can work on for the next 3-6 months is 

_________________________________________________________________ 

_________________________________________________________________ 

_________________________________________________________________ 

Wrap up  

1. How have you seen God at work in your life lately?   

1. What has God been teaching you in his Word?   

1. What’s an area of your life where you need to repent or grow? How can we encourage you?   

1. What kind of conversations are you having with non-Christians? How can we encourage and help you?   

1. What good can we do around here?   

1. How can we pray for you and others? 

Sermon

What’s the best gift you gave this Christmas? ___________________ 

I don’t want you to share the best gift you got. What’s the best gift you gave someone else this Christmas?  

Share with someone in the row ahead of you. If you are in the front row, you can walk all the way to the back, or you can just turn around.  

I think I kind of stunk this year on gift giving. I don’t know why. I think I was a little bit in a daze or a stupor this year.  

Some years, I’ve killed it. Some years, I really paid attention to my wife and kids over the year. When I’m on the ball, I keep a list of things they say they want, and then voila, Christmas Day I can surprise them with this awesome gift. This year I kind of had a one track mind. I really wanted to get my kids a BB gun. And when that didn’t happen, I kind of shut down. What’s the best gift you gave this Christmas? 

If you get Christmas, then you can give great gifts. Men, you listen to this. Just because you are a guy doesn’t mean you are cursed to be a bad gift giver. You too can give great gifts.  

That’s what Christmas means. That’s what Christmas does. The birth of Jesus is this incredible gift. He is literally the cradle that rocked the world. And this child Jesus, the Son of God, is a gift for you to experience. You can actually live and know and taste and feel life like a son of God himself.  

What that does is, it changes your religion.  

If people talk about religion at all, we say this: “I switched to the Lutheran religion.” I always chuckle a little. They aren’t using the word correctly. They mean the Lutheran denomination or the Lutheran confession. I switched to the Lutheran confession. But I know what they mean.  

And they’re saying way more than I think they know they are saying. They are saying, I found some new beliefs and new desires and new symbols, and that changed my life. Reoriented my life. That’s what the Bible says.  

James says, religion that is good to look after orphans and widows in their distress. Paul says, religion should look like this, children and grandchildren of a widow should care for their own family.  

I bet most of us know this verse. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Acts 20:35 

Christmas reorients your religion. This is what happens when you stop believing “If I’m good, God will forgive me and accept me and love.” This is what happens when you get your religion right.  

Let’s discover what God does when we get religion right.  

Part 1  

That’s what this lesson of the Magi gets at. Matthew starts and tells us, “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 2 and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” (Mt 2:1-2)  

What we’ve got here is the first marks of religion. These wise men have come from Persia, maybe Babylon. They've got this belief.  

Their belief is this. “A king has been born.” This is a belief. It’s like saying, “God exists.” It can’t be absolutely proven. It can be demonstrated to be reasonably true. Some people think that kings and queens are made. Caesar Augustus is a good example of a king that was made. Napoleon Bonaparte is another one. King Herod is a good example of this. Other people think kings are born. Queen Victoria of England, Charlemagne. King Frederich 2 of Prussia. They have this belief. They also have a desire.  

What is it? “We have come to worship him.” Remember that scene from Star Wars: A New Hope when the Ewoks suddenly begin chanting and bowing down to C3P0? What does religion look like? It looks like worship. It’s a public profession that this person, thing, or nonphysical being is our highest value, our highest good.  

And religion has a specific form. Remember what the Ewoks do? They put him on a throne. They are going to burn a sacrifice to him. These wise men, they follow a star. They ask the Jewish religious leaders to check their scriptures. They’ve brought gifts.  

The wise men are some smart guys. They are the knowledge elite. They are the intellectuals of the ancient times. They were the experts. And they are practicing a religion. 

As recently as 50 years ago, people would have looked at these wise men and said, “Oh, those antiquated wise men. No one relies on the stars anymore. Johannes Kepler told us science is better.” Carl Sagan said it famously, “The universe is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”  

50 years later, Chani Nicholas, an astrologer based in Los Angeles says this. “Then there’s something that’s happened in the last five years that’s given (astrology) an edginess, a relevance for this time and place, that it hasn’t had for a good 35 years. Millennials have taken it and run with it.” (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/the-new-age-of-astrology/550034/, accessed 1/3/2020). Look at us!  

 It’s really easy right now to say, “I don’t see the need for religion.” “I don’t see the need for church”. There is this belief, we’re going to do it better or faster or smarter than our parents. We understand sexuality. We understand self-esteem. We understand forgiveness. We understand family systems. We’re going to do it better than our parents.  

We might do it better than our parents. I’m not sure if that’s because we’re better or faster or smarter than them.  

If you only attach yourself to the time where you are, the only thing you are is timely. If you want to be a person who is always relevant, you’ve got to be timeless  

One of the things that means is the public expression of beliefs and desires in physicals signs is a real part of life. Religion is a real part of life.  

Part 2: Purpose  

What’s it for then?  

One of the major reasons people have given in the last 100 years for religion is right here. It’s kind of hidden, so let’s look at it.  

The next verse, verse 3, Matthew says, “King Herod heard (that there was a new born king of the Jews), he was disturbed and all Jerusalem was disturbed with him”. That doesn’t sound very happy, does it? This speaks directly to one of the reasons people give for religion. 

Something people say frequently, and you’ve probably heard it too, goes like this. “If God really existed and cared, what about all the homeless people? Or what about the hurricanes? Or what about earthquakes?” What’s the assumption there?  

The assumption there is that God and religion should make the world a better place.  

 For example an economist and professor at George Mason University named Tyler says that he would like the serious religion of Utah to spread to other parts of the country because Utah experiences a lot less drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and broken families. What’s his reason for religion? It makes the world a better place. 

Sometimes we even say, I come to church because I want my kids to have that moral instruction. Or we’ll simply say, it makes me a better person. Look, I appreciate you say that. That’s really nice. Really, it is.  

That’s not what brought the magi to their king.  

Here is what God says through Matthew. "Herod called together the people’s chief priests and the teachers of the law and he asked them where the Messiah was to be born.” And they said, “Bethlehem in Judea” the prophets wrote. (Mt 2:4-6) What brought the magi to Jesus? Not a better life. Not happiness. Not even a star. The pageants always get this wrong. What took the wise men to Jesus?  

Herod missed it. After the wise men deceived him, he thought he could fix the situation. His religion came entirely out of his own heart and mind. All he cared about was not eternal good, but the approval and the acceptance of Caesar. If only I do good, then Caesar my god will accept me, he said.  

The Jewish religious leaders missed it too. Did you catch that? These intellectual elites come from the east and say, “We’re looking for the chosen Savior.” And they say, “he is over there. Bye bye.” They ignore him! They don’t care. They think they’re safe. They think they’re good. They believe, “if there is a God, he certainly accepts me and forgives me and approves of me.” 

This is Matthew’s whole point. The wisdom of the world will only take you so far. What finishes your religion? The Word of God. They get a Word from the Scriptures.  

They follow that Word. The star goes ahead of them. They were “overjoyed”. What Matthew really says is, they were giddy like a bunch of children on Christmas Day saying, “Wake up dad, wake up, it’s Christmas.” Really! That is what mine says. Actually what he really says is, “they rejoiced an exceedingly great excessive joy.” Honestly. They’re giddy like a bunch of kids on Christmas morning. That’s what religion does.  

If you are a person who has come to church so your kids get their moral instruction or so the world is a better place, that’s a start. Thank you. Thank you for being here. That’s a great place to start. At some point, it has to switch to this.  

There is something wrong with you. And what God wants to do is heal your heart. He wants to bring you the same inexpressible, exuberant joy that these elites found in Jesus. He wants to bring you the same inexpressible, exuberant joy children know on Christmas. That’s what God wants. He wants your heart to feel joy.  

Point 2: So your heart feels joy.  

Part 3 

How? That’s the last thing, and it is so incredible. 

“they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. They returned home.” (Mt 2:11-12)  

I want you to think about the last one to three year old you had around. How did you want to treat it?  

I want to wrestle my older son. Man that kid. Snuggle and hug and kiss my younger one. You probably wanted to give them presents. If you were lucky, they said thank you for the presents. Maybe. An hour later they asked for more presents. Basically as soon as they were gone. Then they asked if you could go to the store and buy some more presents.  

Did any of you want to worship the last two year old you saw?  

This child filled the hearts of those elites. He accepted them. He received their gifts offered in faith with thanks and sincerity. He let them come to him. And it didn’t matter that they were astrologers. He didn’t reject them because they had worshipped false gods before. He accepted them.  

And then he sent them home. 

I’m sure they could have stayed for years, loved him, and followed him. But they worshipped and they left. He didn’t take anything else.  

This is it. This is the only thing in all of creation that you can make the center of your life and you will be completely satisfied, happy, and content. Why? Because he has made you the center of his life.  

Religion always says, you try hard and work hard and God will accept you. Maybe then you can be happy and go back to your life.  

The gospel always says, God has worked hard and tried hard. He forgives you and accepts you and sends you on your way.  

And I want to invite you to just accept this and let it change your whole life.  

The best gift I saw given this year, and I might be bias a little bit, was my son. Don’t tell him I’m telling you this, but its too cute to not share.  

My son went with my wife and his siblings to shop for Christmas presents. He came back all excited about the gift he got for me. Christmas Day I opened his present. It was a cap gun! Pretty cool, I thought. I haven’t had a cap gun in like 25 years.  

He says, dad, dad, let’s go try it! I try to explain to him we can’t, we have to go buy caps first.  

He tries the cap gun first.  

He stores the gun in his gun collection. 

He puts it in his backpack to take to grandpa and grandmas.  

And when we get home, he keeps it.  

That's what God says to you, in a much bigger way  

-you want to give me your best money and gifts. You give it away to someone else. I’ve given you the best gift ever, my son.  

-you want to accept me and approve of me. You give it away to someone else. I accept you in Jesus for eternity.  

-you want to give me your love? You give it away to someone else. I love you more than life itself. 

Religion is a real part of your life so your heart feels joy because its full. 

Action 

Let’s give great gifts this year 

I’m incredibly thankful and grateful right now. We had a great year last year financially. You are truly generous.  

Keep the gun, give it to someone else.  

The wonder of Christmas, then, is that pagan astrologer magician-types are transformed to worship the incarnate Son of God because of the ancient words.  

Christmas 2019: Embrace your status as a son

Galatians 4:4-7

4 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.[a] 6 Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba,[b] Father.” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.

Listening guide

What’s our status after Christmas? 

Verse 4 “When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son”  

Verse 5 “God sent his Son … so that we might receive adoption to sonship.” 

Claim a new status as a _____.

Verse 6 “God sent his Spirit into our hearts.”  

We _____________________ its reality. 

Verse 7 “You are no longer slaves, but sons.” 

Embrace your _____________ as _________..

Discussion questions

Sermon

Timothy Paul Jones. He tells the story of trying to adopt his middle daughter.  

She had been previously adopted by another family. I [Timothy] am sure this couple had the best of intentions, but they never quite integrated the adopted child into their family of biological children. After a couple of rough years, they dissolved the adoption, and we ended up welcoming an eight-year-old girl into our home.  

For one reason or another, whenever our daughter’s previous family vacationed at Disney World, they took their biological children with them, but they left their adopted daughter with a family friend. Usually — at least in the child’s mind — this happened because she did something wrong that precluded her presence on the trip.  

And so, by the time we adopted our daughter, she had seen many pictures of Disney World and she had heard about the rides and the characters and the parades. But when it came to passing through the gates of the Magic Kingdom, she had always been the one left on the outside. Once I found out about this history, I made plans to take her to Disney World the next time a speaking engagement took our family to the southeastern United States.  

What surprised him then was that the prospect of visiting this dreamworld produced a stream of downright devilish behavior in our newest daughter. In the month leading up to our trip to the Magic Kingdom, she stole food when a simple request would have gained her a snack. She lied when it would have been easier to tell the truth. She whispered insults that were carefully crafted to hurt her older sister as deeply as possible — and, as the days on the calendar moved closer to the trip, her mutinies multiplied. 

A couple of days before our family headed to Florida, I pulled our daughter into my lap to talk through her latest escapade. “I know what you’re going to do,” she stated flatly. “You’re not going to take me to Disney World, are you?” The thought hadn’t actually crossed my mind, but her downward spiral suddenly started to make some sense. She knew she couldn’t earn her way into the Magic Kingdom — she had tried and failed that test several times before — so she was living in a way that placed her as far as possible from the most magical place on earth.”  

That’s the challenge of claiming a new sonship.  

That is what happens all the time as the Father makes us his sons and daughters. We act out in our own way. Today God just wants to invite us to accept our new status.  

Adventure: let’s accept our new status: the experience, acceptance of it 

Two things today: experience and acceptance 

Part 1 

Listen to this: verse 4 “God sent his Son … so that we might receive adoption to sonship.” verse 6, “God sent his Spirit into our hearts.” 

This is so awesome. It’s really wonderful. Like most Christians, I tend to think of my new life is mostly negative terms. I’m forgiven from sin. It’s freedom from. Paul is saying, the Christian faith is also freedom for. I can come before God like all our kids did right after Christmas and said, I want this other thing. I’ve got all this stuff, but I still want that.  

Picture it like steel I-beams. Not crushing you, because now you are walking on them.  

This should make us bold, but it often doesn’t .  

Commentators will make the comparison to the story we call the prodigal son. The story of the prodigal son goes like …. What does he say when he comes back? “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.” (Lk 15:18–19) The question today is, Is he bold when he comes home?  

Of course he isn’t bold. Why would he be bold? What does he say,  

But we have the status of sonship. We are not slaves anymore. We are sons. If you are a woman, be sure to realize this is not a sexist thing. ... We are sons. Look at what God promises. He doesn’t just say, “God sent his Son”. He says in verse 6, “God sent his Spirit into our hearts.” 

God doesn’t just promise a new status. He promises an experience in our hearts. 

That changes everything. There is an objective and subjective reality here. 

The objective reality is that we really are sons.  

The subjective reality is that we know it and feel it. We experience. When the Holy Spirit is doing its job, we say, “It’s true. I know it. I really am.”  

Repentance is good. You should repent over your sins. Repentance does not mean you live in perpetual sorrow. Repentance means sorrow and humble confidence.  

As soon as you have the Holy Spirit in you, you must come to God like this. “God, “I am all right with you. I have the Holy Spirit. Jesus, in whom I believe, makes me worthy. (I am not worthy because I am do enough good stuff or because I’m sad enough about my sin.) Jesus makes me worthy. I gladly hear, read, sing, and write of Him.” (Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, pg 108)  

That’s how you call Abba, Father. You have the Holy Spirit by your baptism. Speak to God that way.  

Point: We don’t just claim this new status. We experience its reality.  

Part 2 

If you’re like me, this is making you really uncomfortable right now. Why?  

I look at the next verse. Very definitively Verse 7 “You are no longer slaves, but God’s child.”  

Yeah, but what about when I blew up at so and so? And what about when I lied? And what about  

My dad may have never kicked me out of the house and disowned me, but there were an awful lot of days were I didn’t feel like a son because of what I did. And what if the same thing is true for God?  

No. You are not a slave, but a son.  

“In retrospect, I’m embarrassed to admit that, in that moment, I was tempted to turn her fear to my own advantage. The easiest response would have been, “If you don’t start behaving better, you’re right, we won’t take you” — but, by God’s grace, I didn’t. Instead, I asked her, “Is this trip something we’re doing as a family?”   

She nodded, brown eyes wide and tear-rimmed.   

“Are you part of this family?”   

She nodded again.   

“Then you’re going with us. Sure, there may be some consequences to help you remember what’s right and what’s wrong — but you’re part of our family, and we’re not leaving you behind.”   

Sonship. Do you know what that means?  

“He says, “The profound truth of Roman adoption was that the adoptee was taken out of his previous state and placed in a new relationship of son to his new father … All his old debts were [instantly] canceled, and in effect the adoptee started a new life as part of his new family … (Francis Lyall, who wrote a book called Slaves, Citizens, Sons) 

Jesus paid your debt. “Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. 2 He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. 

The more you see he has accepted you, the more you accept your status as a son.  

Action: Assure someone they are a son.  

Old English preacher named Thomas Goodwin said picture it this way: Picture a man walking along a road with his little boy, holding hands … father and son, son and father. The little boy knows the man is his father and that his father loves him. 

Suddenly the father stops, picks up the boy, lifts him up into his arms, embraces him, and kisses him. The boy is actually no more a son when he’s being embraced and kissed than he was before. The father’s action has not changed the status of the boy, but oh, the difference in the enjoyment of the status. 

Bottom line: Embrace your status as sons. 

Christmas Day 2019

Isaiah 52:7-10

Christmas Eve 2019

Luke 2:11

“Today in the town of a David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.” 

Listening guide

The manger is a ___ _____ 

The Christmas message = In Jesus, God became a man. He lived a perfect life and did all the things we need to do. He died a real death for all of us and was punished as we deserve to be. Now, no matter how bad or good you think you are or how bad or good you think life is, and no matter how bad or good everyone else thinks you are or thinks your life is, God promises you, if you admit you are worse off than you imagined and can accept you are better off than you ever thought possible, he comes to you. Jesus comes to you. 

Luke 2:11 “Today in the town of a David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.” 

Messiah = ______ ____________ ________ 

John 3:16 = “God so loved the world that he gave his Son” 

Christmas is not a big deal like my babies, but like a gift you want but don’t.  

He makes us a really ______ ____________ and that is how Christmas becomes a big deal for us. 

“Where meek souls will receive him still, The dear Christ enters in.” 

Discussion questions

Sermon

I’m sure some of you know this book cover. (Harry Potter cover)  

I bet all of you know this one.  

I bet some of you know this logo. 

I bet all of you know this one.  

I would be surprised if any of you recognized this. (Chinese calendar) 

All of us know this.  

This is the impact of the manger. There is no greater item that has changed this world. More than 2 billion people tonight and tomorrow celebrate the impact of this (point at the manger). The manager is a big deal.  

Tonight God invites you to be part of this big deal.  

The message of Christmas is simple: In Jesus, God became a man. He lived a perfect life and did all the things we need to do. He died a real death for all of us and was punished as we deserve to be. Now, no matter how bad or good you think you are or how bad or good you think life is, and no matter how bad or good everyone else thinks you are or thinks your life is, God promises you, if you admit you are worse off than you imagined and can accept you are better off than you ever thought possible, he comes to you. Jesus comes to you. I heard a really powerful story that brought this out for me.  

It was the story of Bubba. Bubba’s story goes like this. About ten years ago a couple, I think they were in WI, had a baby. Then they wanted to expand their family and got pregnant again. This time, sadly, she miscarried. She got pregnant a third time and miscarried a second time. Then she miscarried a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, and an eighth time. The couple got involved in a Bible study group at their church.  

And it kept happening. They would announce a pregnancy, except it was hard for them to smile, because they kind of knew what was going to happen again. Their friends prayed for them, and then again, a miscarriage. It would break everyone’s hearts.  

And so when they got pregnant, they didn’t break out the party hats and cake. They held their breath. The weeks went by, then the weeks into months. Then the second trimester, then the third.  

Finally Bubba was born. And everyone said, “Every time I see that kid, it makes me so happy. You’re here. You’re actually with us. Like Jesus.”  

That’s the reality of Christmas. Evil is real. Sin is real. And death is real. The Christmas lights, the presents, the hot cocoa, and the carols don’t take any of that away. It’s just that into this reality comes Jesus. He accepts the sin, the evil, and the death on himself. He confirms to you, absolutely, without a doubt that God loves you.  

That is what this verse says. “Today in the town of a David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.”  I would like to direct your attention to that middle title first. Messiah. That word Messiah isn’t Jesus’ last name. That’s a Hebrew word. It’s title. We’ve usually translated it Christ. And the best way we have to speak of it is “the chosen one”. 

So I thought about people we might regularly call “the chosen one”. One person that popped into my mind is Lebron James. Some of you might remember this cover from SI a few years back. He was called “the chosen one”. The experts all saw him play in high school and college and said, he will be the guy to rescue teams.  

The thing is, he isn’t sure who he wants to rescue. He has played now for what, four teams? Okay, three teams four times. Is he really the chosen one? Nothing against Lebron James, but you have to wonder: Is Miami supposed to say “he is the one for us”. The Cavs? The Lakers?  

Jesus only played for one team. Team you. Your team.  

Here is just one verse where the Bible puts this beautifully. “God so loved the world that he gave his Son”. Do you see that word “world”? That means Jesus is on your team. He always has been. He is on your team and your team and your team. He is on our team. See, how do you know you are loved?  

In our house, one part of our division of labor works like this. I make breakfast and my wife makes most of the other meals. That’s a really good thing by the way, you don’t want me cooking most of the time. We’ll often have oatmeal or eggs or yogurt and granola. Those are common Timmermann breakfasts if you ever want to come over.  

I have this terrible habit though at breakfast. I’ll be making some eggs. Fry them all up. We never make less than 6 eggs anymore. Someone is always hungry. They’re done. I take a few out of the pan. Then I leave the pan and walk away. Sometimes my wife wants some eggs, so I’ll get a plate for her. Then a through another 6 eggs in the pan and walk away.  

I think about the first 500 times I did that my wife, understandably, said, what are you doing? Why don’t you ever pick up after yourself?  

I’ve gotten a lot better, thankfully. Otherwise we might need marital counseling. But it still happens. She says nothing. She just puts it all away.  

How do I know I’m loved? She knows my faults, my failures, and my foibles. She experiences them. They cause her pain. She covers over them. She doesn’t just overlook them, but she makes everything right. And she treats me like I didn’t do anything wrong. Like I was right the whole time.  

Do you know what Jesus did for you? “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was on him and by his wounds we are healed.” Jesus knows all your faults, your foibles, and your failures. He experiences them all. They cause him pain and hurt. Still he covers over it all with his life and his death. He makes everything right. And he treats you like you didn’t do anything wrong. He never leaves you no matter what. 

Would you like that much love to be a big deal to you?  

You have to feel the challenge of Christmas.  

It’s really easy to think about Christmas like this. I’ve got a pretty new baby at home. And then on top of it, my kids had their first band concert the other night. So I’ve got all these cute kid memories flying around my life. My wife and I are taking pictures and sending them back and forth. We’re sharing little clips with my parents and grandparents. They make me happy. They make us really happy.  

Here are a few of the pictures. 

A question for you. How happy do my kids make you?  

(laugh a little) It’s kind of a weird question, isn’t it?  

I was thinking about that. Their birth. How many people did their birth actually make happy? I can actually count numerically the people who rejoiced over these babies. There was mom and dad. 4 grandparents. 6 great grandparents. My siblings. My wife’s siblings. I don’t know how many uncles and aunts, cousins. A couple of close friends. I can actually count numerically the number of kids who rejoiced over my kid’s birth. It’s maybe 20, maybe 2 dozen if you really want to be generous. It’s a big deal for me. They make me feel happy. They don’t make you feel loved.  

To know the love of Christmas, you must receive a gift. Imagine you got a copy of the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. How many of you have read that book?  

It’s a great book. Especially if you are trying to improve working relationships – non friendly, business or loose social relationships, it’s really helpful. How would you feel if your mom gave you that book for Christmas?  

You’d probably say, um thanks mom. Yeah, it’s just what I really wanted. Because what does the book say?  

Along with saying I care about you and you are important to me, that gift also says I really hope you get better at winning friends. When you say, “thanks for the gift” you are saying, I could really use some help making friends. Some gifts are hard to receive because to take them is to admit flaws and weaknesses and to say you need help.  

There has never been a gift given that makes you swallow your pride than the gift of Jesus Christ. Christmas means you and I are so lost, so unbale to save ourselves that nothing less than the death of the Son of God could save us. That means you and I are not people who can pull ourselves together and live a good life.  

Once you have this gift, your whole life changes. From the inside. We love the giver of our gifts more than the gifts themselves, because we have the greatest gift. We enjoy the journey of life rather than regret and resist it, because we are his highest joy and delight. We reflect the light of the world rather than our own darkness, because we have been filled with light.  

He makes us a really big deal and that is how Christmas becomes a big deal for us.  

New group and study after Christmas starting January 8th at 6:30.  

“How silently, how silently  

The wondrous gift is given! 

So God imparts to human hearts  

The blessings of his heaven 

No ear may hear his coming 

But in this world of sin 

Where meek souls will receive him still, 

The dear Christ enters in.”  

You're a big deal to him and he'll be your big deal. 

Children's Christmas 2019

Matthew 1:18-25

18 This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about[a]: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. 19 Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet[b] did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

20 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,[c] because he will save his people from their sins.”

22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”[d] (which means “God with us”).

24 When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. 25 But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.

Matthew 1:18-25

Listening guide

Don’t just _____ _____________. ________ __________________.

Discussion questions

Notes 

1. Depending on the number of people discussing, it may be easier to split into same gender groups.  

2. You will not have time to discuss all the questions. Discuss those that interest you. 

Getting talking 

1. What is a challenge you are facing lately? Any way we can help?  

2. In Matthew 1:18-25, Joseph sees an angel. What are some other Bible stories that have an angel visiting a person?  

3. Have you ever seen an angel? Has someone you’ve known seen an angel? Tell us about the time.  

Getting into Matthew 1:18-25  

1. After reading this story, any comments or questions?  

2. This section teaches the incarnation. Incarnation means God becoming flesh. Other religions have an incarnation. What are some interesting aspects of this incarnation?  

3. What were the steps of obedience Joseph was asked to take? What do you think would have been the hardest part of the angel’s instructions to Joseph?  

4. It can be pretty hard or uncomfortable for us to trust God. Is there anything that you are finding hard right now in your own life?  

5. In verse 21 and 23, we hear names for Jesus and work he is going to do. What is that work? How would you describe being “saved” to someone who has no idea what it means?  

6. John Gerhard, a great Lutheran pastor, offers the following list of Jesus’ work. Pick a line and tell us why you like it.  

   1. The Son of God came down from heaven, that we might receive the adoption of sons (Gal. 4:5).  

   2. God became man, that man might become a partaker of divine grace and of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4).  

   3. Christ chose to be born into the world in the evening of the world’s life, to signify that the benefits of His incarnation pertain not to this present life, but to eternal life. 

   4.  He chose to be born in the time of the peaceful Augustus, because He was the blessed peacemaker between man and God.  

   5. He chose to be born in the time of Israel’s servitude, because He is the true liberator and defender of His people.  

   6. He chose to be born under the reign of a foreign prince, seeing that His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).  

   7. He is born of a virgin to signify that He is born in the hearts of spiritual virgins only (2 Cor. 11:2), that is, in those who are not joined to the world or to the devil, but to God by one Spirit.  

   8. He is born pure and holy, that He might sanctify our impure and defiled birth.  

   9. He is born of a virgin espoused to a man, that He might set forth the honor of marriage as a divine institution.  

   10. He was born in the darkness of the night, who came as the true light to illumine the darkness of the world.  

   11. He is born among the beasts of the stall, that He might restore to their former dignity and honor sinful men, who through their sins had made themselves little better than the beasts.  

   12. He is born in Bethlehem, the house of bread, who brought with Himself from heaven the bread of life for our souls.  

   13. He is the first and only-begotten of His mother here on earth, who according to His divine nature is the first and only-begotten of His Father in heaven.  

   14. He is born poor and needy (2 Cor. 8:9), that He might prepare the riches of heaven for us.  

   15. He is born in a mean stable, that He might lead us back to the royal palace of His Father in heaven. 

Wrap up 

1.  How have you seen God at work in your life lately?  

2. What has God been teaching you in his Word?  

3. What’s an area of your life where you need to repent or grow? How can we encourage you?  

4. What kind of conversations are you having with non-Christians? How can we encourage and help you?  

5. What good can we do around here?  

6. How can we pray for you and others? 

Sermon

Almost every year you have to watch Charlie Brown’s Christmas at least once. Lucy asks Schroeder to play Jingle Bells. First Schroeder plays this beautiful setting of Jingle Bells, probably a Mozart arrangement or something. It’s beautiful. She says, no, no no, I mean Jingle Bells. He plays this more powerful organ setting. She says, no, no, no I mean Jingle Bells. So he plays this two fingered Jingle Bells (pounds it out). It’s miserable. Then  

Charlie brings the Christmas tree back and people start saying,  

“-What kind of a tree is that? 

-You were supposed to get a good tree. 

Can't you even tell a good tree from a poor tree? 

Boy, are you stupid [dumb], Charlie Brown. 

I told you he'd goof it up. 

He's not the kind you can depend on to do anything right. 

-You're hopeless, Charlie Brown. 

-Completely hopeless. 

You've been dumb before, Charlie Brown, but this time you really did it.” (https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=a-charlie-brown-christmas)  

You watch that scene and say, that stinks for Charlie Brown. I feel like that all the time! 

• Don’t ever send me to the grocery store without an exact list of everything you need, down to the exact brand you want, the size you want and the quantity you want. Otherwise I’m going to get home and you’re going to say, what’s all this? You got all this junk we don’t want and hardly any of the stuff we do want. You’re hopeless, Nathaniel.  

• Marc’s annual review, territory expanded, extra sales, but still not good enough for a raise 

Can anyone ever do good? Just do a good job?   

Then we have Joseph, who God gives to us as this silent superhero.  

Huntsman ““There are few examples in ancient text,” he said, “of someone who knowingly raised someone else’s child.” 

“Fathers in that culture were the dominant figures in a family, not inclined to bend to a woman’s needs.  

“Joseph presents a different model, Huntsman said. “Instead of ruling or presiding, he is serving, caring and nurturing, putting aside his own needs for those of his wife and baby.” (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joseph-father-jesus_n_4498409) 

Discover that with God, you can not only do good, you can even be good.  

Joseph was a good guy. Absolutely was. In the section of the Bible just before these words, we hear about his ancestors. His ancestors included the great king David, a whole bunch of other good and bad kings of Israel, the governor who broke the exiles from Babylon, and perhaps the man who started the Sadduccees. He was a craftsman or a builder of some sort, so likely a hardworking guy. He took his family into political asylum when it was necessary. When verse 19 in this text says he was “faithful to the law”, it really meant it.  

Some of you are here today saying, hey don't say too much about God. I don’t want to have an encounter with God. My life is pretty good. I'm mostly doing good stuff. I'm just here to do something good for Grandma Jean or Grandpa Jo or whatever. I’m dressed up. I just want to sing a few nice songs. Don’t make this into a whole big thing. 

You're thinking you can get through life like Captain America. Did you ever notice the one guy who survives the entire Avengers saga? Who is it? The guy who survives is the one guy who basically always does the right thing. The guy who survives is not the guy partying and celebrating, he is the guy sitting with the support group and cheering everyone up. And like Captain America, 

You're saying, I’m mostly doing good stuff with my life. Just leave me alone.  

You can't. God is doing crazy stuff. He won’t leave you alone.  

Look at me.  

• You look at me and you could easily think, there’s a pretty good guy. He has got it all together.  

• I’m the good who was ten years ago saying, I’m not sure if there is god. I don’t think there is a god.  

• “I’m not sure if you’ll be a good pastor”. And a lot of the time I’m not that good, but.. 

God is working in people’s lives  

• I’ve got people coming and saying, “I want to be baptized.”  

• I’ve got people coming and saying, “I want to profess faith that Jesus is my Savior and Lord.”  

• I’ve got people saying, “Why are you all so generous?  

• I’ve got people saying, “I want to be part of this. I want to use my time and energy and gifts to change other people’s lives.”  

• How many of you ten or even five years ago would have said I never would have been here? 

Here you are.  

Are you starting to see what is going on?  

Joseph thought he had to do good. He found out that his wife to be was pregnant. He said, wow this stinks. This is sad. I’m going to do the good thing and let her go marry the other guy. We’ll keep it quiet. God says to Joseph, don’t just do good. Don’t just do good.  ________ __________________.  What if you could make it all be good? God says it this way, “Don’t be afraid to take Mary home as your wife...he will save his people from their sins.”  

What God said to Joseph is, there is a whole ton of shame and isolation and guilt and blame to go around here. Don’t push it away. Blame this kid who I put into your life and one day you will be more accepted than you ever imagined. Let him be isolated and one day you will be more integrated than you ever imagined. Make him guilty and you will finally be forgiven and free.  

You can try to do good and push all that sin as far away as possible. You can try to push the guilt and the shame and the isolation away.  

Or you can let this baby take it and finally all will be good. You know what I’m saying? 

I bet a lot of you saw the new Lion King this year. It opens with this scene where all the animals are running to meet this new baby. That scene should strike you, because you’re watching this and all the lions and leopards are running right next to the elephants and the rhinos who are right next to all the giraffes and zebras. These are all animals that normally don’t get along. They normally eat each other. They fight. They’re like a bunch of kids when you put pizza out (devour pizza). But at that moment they don’t care. They’re just stampeding to see this new baby. The only one who still has guilt and fear and isolation is Scar.  

Scar lurks on the edge. He hates that baby. He wants nothing to do with it. Murder grows in his heart. Eventually his fear drives away that new life. 

Then death swallows the land. Blackness and anger and desolation and fear descend on the country. Nobody gets along. Everyone is killing everybody. Until that baby returns.  

He endures the shame. He takes the blame. He even hangs ….. of the edge of that rock. It’s only then, when that baby returns, that life comes to the land again.  

“He will save his people from their sins.” It strikes me in that moment. That’s why he came. He took the blame and the guilt and the shame and the alienation and the wrath of God and he didn’t push it away. He let himself hang. He took it all away.  

Listen. It can all be good. You’re a mess. I’m a mess. He loves you. He died to take it all away and rose to bring you life. He came for you. He died for you. He rose for you. Because that’s what kings do. They put themselves in the place of the people they love dearly. The true king makes it all good.  

Great Expectations: Samuel and Peace

1 Samuel 1

Listening guide

My recent crisis is/was ______________ 

God calls us to ________ the _______. (embrace repentance) 

God takes our __________ to fill us with his ________.  

Brokenness brings __________ , and pain, as hard as it is, brings _______.  

Discussion questions

Notes 

1. Depending on the number of people discussing, it may be easier to split into same gender groups.  

2. You will not have time to discuss all the questions. Discuss those that interest you. 

Getting talking 

3. Please share a high and a low from your week.  

4. If there was one person from history that you would like to meet, who would it be?  

5. We won’t share it with the group, but what is the last thing you were filled with grief, anguish, and sadness about? What made you broken hearted? On the other hand, what filled you with bitterness, anger, and maybe even rage? Write them both down.  

Getting into 1 Samuel 1 

6. These events take place about 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus. Hannah will be the mother of Samuel, one of the greatest prophets of Israel. Samuel will eventually anoint the first two kings of Israel: Saul and David. If you have anything to add about the context of these events, please share it with the others now.  

7. In 1 Samuel 1:1-17, how would you characterize Hannah’s heart – especially regarding children?  

8. Infertility remains a significant issue. I think I personally know a half dozen Christian couples who would like their own children. As you’ve talked with them, what are some of the things they are experiencing? If you don’t know anyone, what do you think they might be experiencing.  

9. After reading 1:10, 15, Hannah is not angry or bitter about this issue. She is deeply sad. At the same time, she doesn’t blame herself or accept responsibility for something that is out of her control. Do you think Hannah’s response is good and healthy?  

10. Do you also take appropriate amounts of time for grieving, sadness, and anguish before God, or do you tend to hide those negative emotions?   

11. In 1 Samuel 1:11, Hannah made a vow to God. Do you think this is wise of Hannah? Would you make a vow to God?  

12. If you have made a vow to God, how did God work it out for you?  

13. According to 1 Samuel 1:27-28, what does Hannah’s sorrow lead to?  

14. What God is showing us here is a great example of repentance. Our confessions explain repentance this way: ““Now properly speaking, true repentance is nothing else than to have contrition and sorrow, or terror about sin, and yet at the same time to believe in the gospel and absolution that sin is forgiven and grace is obtained through Christ. Such faith, in turn, comforts the heart and puts it at peace” (The Book of Concord, p. 44).” Darrel Bock describes repentance as, “John preaches [repentance] in the manner of the Old Testament prophets, seeking for a “turning” of the heart. Though the Greek word for “repentance” (metanoia) means “a change of mind,” the concept of repentance has Old Testament roots in the idea of turning to God (1 Kings 8:47; 2 Kings 23:25; Psalm 78:34, Isaiah 6:10, Ezekiel 3:19, Amos 4:6, 8). To be prepared for God’s salvation, one’s heart must be opened to his message. Any doubt that this is John’s thrust can be seen in his exposition of repentance in Luke 3:10-14 where it is defined not as an abstract of the mind, but as something that expresses itself in action.” Has genuine repentance been part of your life lately? Is it time to add it?  

15. Samuel is one of the most fascinating people in Scripture. He was the last of the judges, a prophet, and a king-maker. Nobody questioned his authority, even over Saul. As you have time, skim 1 Samuel 15 and comment on the role Samuel would eventually play in Israel.  

16. Last time, we saw a bad example of expectation. Moses expected to save the people of Israel from Egypt in his time and way. In this lesson, Hannah expects that God will help a miserable sinner. Share how God’s grace in this story leads you to practice repentance like Hannah. Or to ask a different question, how has God’s grace to you led you to practice repentance like Hannah?  

Wrap up 

17. How have you seen God at work in your life lately?  

18. What has God been teaching you in his Word?  

19. What’s an area of your life where you need to repent or grow? How can we encourage you?  

20. What kind of conversations are you having with non-Christians? How can we encourage and help you?  

21. What good can we do around here?  

22. How can we pray for you and others?  

Sermon

I still think that one of the more crisis moments of my life was getting told by some people, hey, we know you do good things here but we don’t really like you and we’d rather not have you. I remember reeling from that situation and thinking, what, you can say that? Isn’t this the 21st century? Don’t we have to like everyone? The answer, by the way, is no we don’t. We need to love everyone in Christian kindness. Show gentleness and respect. We don’t have to like everyone.  

That was far from the first or the last one. When I broke up with the first serious girlfriend, man, you would have thought the world was ending. When my first job said, nope, we don’t want you back this year. A whole bunch of different crisis.  

And I’m far from the only one who has these crisis moments. There was a girl one time having a long talk with a pastor because she was depressed. Eventually they discovered she was dealing with some boy issues. The pastor tried to assure her that God loved her and Jesus died and rose for her and she was precious and valued by him. And she said, but pastor, how does any of that matter when none of the boys will even look at me? Or there was the moment when the young man said, “I don’t know who I am without my family.” There was the soul searching of a recently divorced woman.  

What was your last crisis moment? Maybe you are even going through one now. Can you identify it? Take a moment, if you’d like and write it down. There are notes for the sermon study in the service folder. If you want you can fill in, my recent crisis is/was ________.  

In the Bible today, God gives us a woman experiencing a significant crisis. Her name is Hannah. She lives about 1,000 years before Jesus. Her crisis? She and her husband deal with infertility.  

I know a number of families that deal with infertility. It’s a big deal. It’s not quite the same thing as Hannah’s time. 

We live in an individual culture. America says your meaning and worth are dependent on individual qualities like your own dating relationships, athletic abilities, smarts, musical talent, or money, or career, or good looks. Hannah lived in collectivistic culture – a family culture. What matters there is your family’s class in society, your family’s reputation, your family’s legacy, respect, and honor. It was all about everyone together.  

For Hannah, there was no “everyone else”. There was no group. She only had herself. And so one commentator said about Hannah’s life, “In a culture where value and security was determined by family, Hannah can’t have kids! [P]ractically speaking, she has no significance, no life and no hope!” (JD Greear,  Did you hear that? “No significance, no life, and no hope.”  

Wow. So hard. 

That’s where we are today. Hannah has a crisis moment. And she makes us ask, what do we do when crisis hits?  - something about getting to peace in it . And let me just give you a little teaser right away. The thing that Hannah wants from the beginning and then God’s Word so changes her that she even gives it away. 

How do you handle crisis? 

Here is what tends to happen. I heard this example from a Christian man. “I was raised in the Christian church. I wasn’t repenting. I was not walking a Christian way. I was drinking. I was sleeping with my girlfriend. I was involved in all these different habitual sins. A really good mentor came to me and asked, “Chris, how do you go on this long trip with your girlfriend and not have sex?” And in that moment I lied through my teeth to him. You just don’t have sex. I was lieing.” (Chris de Monye https://thisisvillagechurch.com/sermon/repentance-confession-and-grace/)  

That’s what a lot of tend to do. We tend to cover up the situation. We cover up the tough stuff.  

In one sense, I have no idea where we get this from. Really. I mean, almost everyone tells you that this is absolutely not the way to live life.  

When you were growing up, every time you hit a hard situation did your parents say, be sure to run away from it?  

There is an educational tool called Love and Logic. It’s used in a lot in urban schools. ... The whole premise is you have to let people experience the result of their choices.  

Brene Brown is a professor in Houston. She has her own Netflix show, “The Call to Courage”. Netflix show Anyway, she says that we can’t deal with life if we change who we are, only if we be who we are. And being who we are only comes when we cope with adversity.  

Or there is a famous saying from a Buddhist monk that says, “Without the mud, you cannot grow the lotus flower.”  

There is so much evidence that says we have to deal with the tough stuff.  

And yet we don’t. The other guy lied. I know what I tend to do is get angry. If I hit a moment in life that I can’t break through, like say, I'm trying to encourage someone through an awful situation and I can’t be there with them, I can’t do it for them. I know I get angry. I get mad about my own inabilities and limitations. Another guy I know, he was leading an organization. He was asked to speak about his successes at a conference. He got up there and told the story. He conveyed a sense of mastery and control. But he admits that he glossed over the disappointments, the failures, and the setbacks. He exaggerated. https://www.faithgateway.com/live-lead-brokenness-vulnerability/#.XepIHuhKhPZ 

This is how we handle our tough situations. There is a whole bunch going on here.  

• Pain averse  

• We seek our own righteousness. We want to look well before other people.  

• Ernst Becker The Denial of Death  Universal human need for heroic figures who are less helpless or broken than ourselves https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/projection-and-transference/?v=7516fd43adaa  

What he is saying there is that each of us wants someone in our brokenness who is better than us.  

Take a look with me at Hannah and see how she handles that offer. Verse 8 her husband says, “Hannah, why are you weeping? … Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?” Do you hear what he is saying to her? “I can be your value. I can be your significance. I can be your person who is less broken than you.”   

Now Hannah is in incredible pain. Back in verse 6 it says that her fellow wife “irritated” her. This went way beyond one mosquito buzzing around her. It was more like being trapped in a swarm of bees or tossed around by a hurricane. She felt “deep anguish” (verse 10), she “wept bitterly” (verse 10) and she was “deeply troubled” (verse 15).  

We’ve got to say that Hannah’s inner life was characterized by roaring agony. Her inner life was torn up by anger and despondency as the sea is torn up by winds. She had incredible pain to process. 

God’s way was for her to deal with the tough stuff. And in a really deep way. God’s way for her was to process the pain. To work through it. To embrace the brokenness.  

When her husband offered himself as her meaning and significance and value, here is what she did. Verse 9 “they were eating and drinking in Shiloh, [she] stood up. In her deep anguish, [she] prayed to the Lord. … She was praying in her heart and her lips were moving but her voice was not heard.” She prayed to God. She did not transfer her brokenness to her husband. She transferred it to God. Her vow was so full of anguish, so full of pain, that she couldn’t even speak the words out loud.  

Remember, Hannah hasn’t done anything specifically wrong. I’m sure she argued with her husband sometimes and fought with the other wife. When she repents, she didn’t do anything wrong. She just comes before God with her silent prayer.  

Repentance can be a simple thing. It’s a silent prayer spoken from your heart and mouth to God. 

Repentance often sucks all the breath you have out of you. 

That’s the difference between what even the smart people will say about facing the tough stuff and what God says. They’ll say, you’re right, this is some tough stuff. You need to go through this crisis, not around it. You’ve got to let it work on you so that who you really are comes out. Because deep down you really are good.  

God says no way. In verse 10 he describes what Hannah was going through. “In deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord”. “deep anguish”. What he actually says was her breath or her life was bitter. She breathed it all out. She had to get it out of her body. Have you ever had an anxiety attack or seem someone have an anxiety attack? That kind of heaving. Their breath is running away from them.  

Then God offers Hannah peace. “Go in peace” verse 17.  

That’s Gods offer you and I. It’s his offer of peace.  

He knocks the wind out of you. He takes the very breath of your life out of you. Why? So he can give you something better.  

Hannah lost her breath and she got life. God gives her a son. 

It’s crazy, isn’t it. What happened is that Hannah’s life got knocked out of her so that God could put another life in her. God takes our breath to fill us with his life. 

Hannah receives that peace. She experiences real peace. She doesn’t even keep the baby. She gives the baby to Eli to serve in the temple. She doesn’t even keep the baby. She wanted security, value, stability, and meaning in a child. In her brokenness and pain, God gave it to her. She didn’t need the child for her security and stability. God was there for her to ask anytime she wanted.  

The old pastor Dwight Moody had a great illustration for this. He held up a glass and asked, “How can I get the air out of this glass?” One man shouted, “Suck it out with a pump!” Moody replied, “That would create a vacuum and shatter the glass.” After numerous other suggestions Moody smiled, picked up a pitcher of water, and filled the glass. “There,” he said, “all the air is now removed.” https://ministry127.com/resources/illustration/secret-for-victory 

What God does in a little bit for Hannah with Samuel, God does in Jesus Christ for each and every one of us.  

God says, “I will pour out my son” When Jesus is in the garden, he is in deep anguish. He is pouring out his life so you can have it.  

God won’t keep his life. When you come to him in your brokenness and your pain, he will transfer his own life to you.  

There is no better reality of this than the Lord’s Supper   

• We don’t come with some bad covering over a little good that we need to bring out 

• We come with bad through and through that we need to get rid of  

Friends, if you embrace the brokenness and pain of repentance, I can promise you that you will not lose anything that counts. You will have forgiveness that holds you safe in any storm.  You will have the righteousness of Jesus. You will have the life of Jesus that keeps you alive no matter how bitter the pain is.  

Someday, Christ will return and will all your brokenness. Your pain, both physical and internal, will be overwhelmed by the peace that surpasses all understanding. Until then, embrace the brokenness, because brokenness brings blessing, and pain, as hard as it is, brings peace.  

Great Expectations: Moses and hope

Exodus 1:6-12, 2:1-4, 9-15 

6 Now Joseph and all his brothers and all that generation died, 7 but the Israelites were exceedingly fruitful; they multiplied greatly, increased in numbers and became so numerous that the land was filled with them.  

8 Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. 9 “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. 10 Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”  

11 So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. 12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites   

Exodus 2:1–4 (NIV)  

The Birth of Moses  

2 Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, 2 and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. 3 But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. 4 His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.   

Exodus 2:9–15 (NIV)  

9 Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.” So the woman took the baby and nursed him. 10 When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water.”  

Moses Flees to Midian  

11 One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. 12 Looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13 The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, “Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?”  

14 The man said, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid and thought, “What I did must have become known.”  

15 When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well.   

Listening guide 

Hebrews “multiply greatly” (1:7), “put slave masters over them” (1:11) 

We live with  ___________ from the _____________ of power.  

““Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile”. (1:22) 

“he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem who were two years old and under.” (Matthew 2:16) 

We all experience ____________ because of the __________ sentence that hangs over us. 

6:26-27 It was this Aaron and Moses to whom the LORD said, “Bring the Israelites out of Egypt by their divisions.” They were the ones who spoke to Pharaoh king of Egypt about bringing the Israelites out of Egypt—this same Moses and Aaron.” = “something is not right here”  

We are _______________ because of our fallen nature. 

“Moses was afraid.” (2:14)  

Hope _______________ expectations. 

Discussion questions

Notes 

1. Depending on the number of people discussing, it may be easier to split into same gender groups.  

2. You will not have time to discuss all the questions. Discuss those that interest you. 

Getting talking 

1. Share two blessings from your life lately.  

2. Does it help to know someone is thinking of you?  

Getting into Exodus 1 & 2  

1. Read Exodus 1:21 What do you think it means that the midwives “feared God”? Is that good or bad?  

2. Are you surprised that the midwives thought of God as they went through this situation? Share a time, if you can, when your thought of God changed what you did or said.  

3. Read Exodus 2:3 – 4. Moses’ parents abandoned him. Some people see Moses’ placement in the river as an act of defeat; others see it as an act of faith and trust in God. How do you see it?  

4. What are some actions that today might look like defeat but could also be acts of faith? It might be easiest to speak from your own experience or from what you’ve seen others do.  

5. In America, it is estimated that more than 7,000 children are abandoned annually. If the group wishes, discuss what might cause this and if there is anything that can be done about it in your location.  

6. Read Exodus 2:24. God “remembers” his people in slavery. In several places in Scripture, particularly in times of great plight, scripture says that God “remembered” His people and then acted on their behalf. How might it help you to know that God is thinking of you and your hardships are on His mind? 

7. There are many parallels or similarities between the story of Moses and the story of Jesus. What are some of them?  

8. Despite all the trouble in Egypt, the Israelites complained frequently as they traveled to Canaan. See Numbers 21:4-9. Discomfort in their circumstances and fear of the future kept them from embracing the work God was doing in them at the moment. How might fear or discomfort keep us from appreciating the ways God is working in our lives and challenging us to grow?  

Wrap up 

1. How did you see God at work in your life this week?  

2. What has God been teaching you in his Word?  

3. What’s something that you would like someone else to check in with you about this week?  

4. What kind of conversations are you having with non-Christians? 

5. Pray for one another.