St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church & School (Sherman Center) is in Random Lake, Wisconsin and is served by Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie. St. John Lutheran is God's place for Christians to gather around our Lord's Word and be edified by His gifts. We are a congregation of the Lutheran Church—Miss…
The religious men accused Jesus—“This Man receives sinners and eats with them”—and He took it up as His glory, answering with the lost sheep and the lost coin. The affliction that sweeps through your life is not a club driving you out but a broom sweeping you home: His pursuit, not your punishment. He lights the lamp of His Word, finds the worn coin that still bears His image, lays the sheep on His own shoulders rejoicing, and carries you to the rail. You came in a lost coin; you go out treasure in the King's own hand.
For twelve years, she had been unclean — exiled from the assembly, emptied by physicians who took everything and healed nothing. So she comes to steal a cure from the fringe of Jesus' garment, certain that God's mercy runs out as everything else has. But His power goes out from Him, and nothing is subtracted: she came to take a cure and leaves a daughter. There is always more where that came from.
Jesus is not condemning farming, buying or selling, or marriage. Fields, oxen, and wives are gifts of God, given from His own hand. Abraham had fields. Jacob had livestock past counting. God Himself instituted marriage in Eden. The sin is not in the things. The sin is in the ranking. Each man looked at the gift in his hand and the Giver at his door, and he feared losing the gift more than he feared the Giver.
The Lord's Supper is not given to profitable servants who have earned a seat. It is given to unprofitable ones. Given precisely where the Law has done its work — where you know you have been the scandal, where you know your forgiveness came out thin and grudging, where your faith on its best day is the size of a mustard seed. “Lord, increase our faith” (Luke 17:5).
June 7, 2026
June 4, 2026
The font is where Nicodemus's question died. Where the Sadducees' question died. You went into that water still carrying the old premise — still asking what resurrection could possibly mean, still uncertain whether the age to come is anything more than this age with the dying removed. And you came out having been given something you did not generate, extra nos, outside yourself, from the One whose Name was spoken over you. The Holy Spirit begot you. The old Adam did not survive. You are already a son of the resurrection before you have died — not because of what you brought to the water, but because of whose Name is on you.
You look, and you live. You do not first understand, and then live. The teacher came carrying everything he knew and was handed two things he could do nothing with: a birth he could not perform and a cross he could only behold. And even the looking is not the last small work left to his credit — the eyes that turn to the lifted Son are opened by the same Spirit who blows where He wills, the birth of water and the Spirit, not of the will of the flesh, not of any man's deciding. It is given the whole way down.
He is coming upon you, by His Spirit. He is drawing you with the net of His Word. And He is doing more than draw you — He is making His home in you.
May 26, 2026
Catechesis Handouts: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1pZdcXSqajaj87tLsZPrMEaBw-n8gDQUT&usp=drive_fs
He who scattered at Babel gathers here at Pentecost. He who divided the tongues there of evil, now unites them here for good. The same Spirit. The same fire. At Babel, God came down and scattered. At Pentecost, God came down to gather, and He gathered by preaching. Not by making the nations speak one language. By making the one Gospel spoken in every language. Every tongue heard the same thing: the Spirit gives you the peace Christ bought.
May 20, 2026
The angels asked: Why do you stand gazing? He is not up there, away, unreachable. He fills all things. He is here — in His word, in His sacrament — as surely as He was on the mountain before the cloud came. The cloud did not remove Him. It revealed Him. As the One who sits at the right hand of the Father. As the One who, in that human nature, fills all things. As your Brother, enthroned.
© 2020-2026 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
