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 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.
May 8, 2026
The new commandment is a finished love. Christ made it on a cross. He gives it to you here in water and word and bread and wine. It is yours. The commandment and the gift are one. Faith and love are baked together like one loaf. Christ holds the one, and you hold the other, and there is no separating them. Christ went where you could not go, so that you could love as you have been loved.
This is the advantage. Not God near in the way you wanted. Better than that. The Spirit who convicts — your sin named and buried, Christ's righteousness declared and given, the ruler's judgment executed and delivered — doing his work here, in this service, for you.
Handout: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1pZdcXSqajaj87tLsZPrMEaBw-n8gDQUT&usp=drive_fsThesis 27: "Actually one should call the work of Christ an acting work (operans) and our work an accomplished work (operatum), and thus an accomplished work pleasing to God by the grace of the acting work."Thesis 28: "The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it."
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