Podcasts about in jesus god

Who Is Christ?   In the person of Jesus God physically entered into our world. An infinite God came to live in a finite world. The one who knew exactly how things were supposed to be came to a place where things obviously weren't. In Jesus God and man became one person, a person unlike anyone else the world has ever seen or will ever see. Jesus Christ was, and forever will be, fully God and fully man in one person. And that one person changed the course of history forever.   Jesus—Fully Man   Jesus was fully and completely human. He was conceived in the womb of his mother by a miraculous work of the Holy Spirit. This is made clear in Matthew 1:18: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” While many things could be said about this, one thing is clear: Jesus was born of a human mother. His ordinary human birth affirms his humanity.

If you are born again, you are alive with Christ! If you are born again, everything listed in Ephesians 1:3-14 is true of you! In those twelve verses the phrase: In Him or in Christ is stated. Before we even touch Ephesians 4:1-3, I want you to marvel over what it means to be in Christ. In Jesus, I can now know the God for whom I was made. In Jesus God no longer sees my sin, but the righteousness of His Son. In Jesus, I am becoming more and more like the person I was born to be. In Jesus, I have redemption and am now a child of God instead of an enemy; here are eighteen other reasons to celebrate what it means to be in Christ.: In Christ, I am justified freely by His grace (Rom. 3:24) In Christ, I am now Gods child (1 Peter 1:3) In Christ, I am forgiven of all my sins (Eph. 1:7; Heb. 9:14) In Christ, I have peace (John 14:27) In Christ, I am loved by God the Father (John 16:27) In Christ, I belong to God (John 17:9) In Christ, I will never be forsaken or abandoned by God (John 10) In Christ, I am treasured by God (1 Peter 1-2) In Christ, I am the righteousness of Christ (2 Cor. 5:21) In Christ, there is for me NO condemnation (Rom. 8:1) In Christ, God is working all things together for my good (Rom. 8:28) In Christ, I have obtained an inheritance that only God alone can give (Eph. 1:11) In Christ, I am a new creation the old is gone and the new has come (2 Cor. 5:17) In Christ, I am a son/daughter of God (Gal. 4:6) In Christ, I am no longer a stranger or alien, but a fellow citizen with the saints (Eph. 2:19) In Christ, I am a member of the body of Christ (Eph. 3:6) In Christ, I am set apart for the mission of God (Eph. 2:10) In Christ, I am loved by an everlasting God (1 John 4:19) Paul begins verse four with the word, Therefore. When you read your Bible, this word serves as a clue that in light of what has been written, what you are about to read next is in response to what proceeded it. Another way to say it is: In light of Ephesians 1-3, this is how you are to behave. How are we to behave? Since we are alive in Christ, we are to walk as the spiritually living. Since we are not the only ones made alive in Christ, we should walk together as the living. I want to look at both of those points Paul makes in the verses that follow. How to Walk as the Living Paul begins with these words: Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, urge you (v. 1a). So far in his epistle this is only the second place when Paul tells his readers to do something. The first time Paul told the Ephesians they had to do something, it was in 2:12, remember that you were. Remember what Paul? Remember who you were and who you now are! In Ephesians 4:1, Paul is not telling these Christians to remember their identity in Christ but to walk in step with their identity as those who have been called out of death into life with Christ. There are two words I want you to notice that I will call, The Two Ws of the Christian life. The first word is walk, and the second word is worthy. The Ws of the Christian life serve as evidence that you are alive in Jesus and no longer dead in your sins. When Paul uses the word walk in his epistle, he is referring metaphorically to the way a person lives out their life ethically. Paul uses the word walk thirty-two times in his epistles, eight of which are used in Ephesians, and every time it is used metaphorically! In Ephesians 2:1-2, our walk was governed by a Christless life: And you were dead in your offenses and sins, in which you previously walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. In Colossians Paul also described the way the Christian used to walk, listen to the way he uses the word, walk in Colossians 3:5-7, Therefore, treat the parts of your earthly body as dead to sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. For it is because of these things that the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience, and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them. Jesus used the same metaphor in describing what will happen to the one who follows Him: I am the Light of the world; the one who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life (John 8:12). Listen to the other ways Paul uses the word walk in his epistles: But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. (Gal. 5:16) Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life. (Rom. 6:4) Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma. (Eph. 5:12) Here, in the verse before us this morning, we are commanded to, walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called. The second W word of the Christian life is the word worthy. The Greek word Paul uses is axiōs, and it literally means worthily. The word worthy means to have worth or value in the same way a scale measures the weight of something. So, picture a scale in your mind; on the one side of the scale you have all of the doctrinal goodness that is true of you in Christ from Ephesians 1-3, and on the other side of the scale is the weight of your new life in Jesus applied in the way you live out that doctrinal truth. Martyn Lloyd-Jones describes what Paul is saying in this verse in the following way: The Apostle is beseeching them and exhorting them always to give equal weight in their lives to doctrine and practice. They must not put all the weight on doctrine and none on practice; nor all the weight on practice and just a little, if any at all, on doctrine. To do so produces imbalance and lopsidedness. The Ephesians must take great pains to see that the scales are perfectly balanced.[1] Let me say it in another way: Orthodoxy is right doctrine, and orthopraxy is right-practice. Here is where it gets real for you and me! In evangelical churches, you will probably run into two types of people who claim to be Christian: the first is the kind of Christian who can quote chapter and verse from the Bible, seems to have their theology nailed down and dialed in, but has little to show for it in the way they live out (practice) their Christianity. The other person you may run into seems to be a really nice Christian but has little understanding of the Bible or what passes for right doctrine.What we learn from Ephesians 4:1 is that our metaphorical Christian scale needs sound and solid doctrine from the Bible that is balanced by a life that is shaped by a growing understanding of the Word of God. Let me say it another way: as a Christian, you should be growing in your understanding of who God is and what it means to follow Jesus, and as you grow, your life will demonstrate that growth in equal measure. The Way We Walk Together as the Living So what does it look like to, walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called? It looks like verses 2-3, which is a life with, all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, being diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Two themes flow out of Ephesians 4-6 and that is, 1) unity between the redeemed and 2) the godly life lived out. In verses 2-3, Paul provides a list of five character traits that the one who is truly alive in Christ ought to long and strive for as he/she follows Jesus. What Paul lists are five characteristics that ought to be on the side of the scale that is labeled: practice. Humility. Think about your salvation and what it cost Jesus to redeem you. You who once stood before a holy God as a child of wrath living in the lusts of your flesh and mind (vv. 2-3), God made you alive in Christ (v. 4-5). Could there not be any clearer statement to shatter any hint of pride in you: but God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us made us alive together with Christ. If you understand the doctrine of Gods grace and mercy, then you will understand that the grace you received was not free and the mercy you received was not deserved: For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works, so that no one may boast (Eph. 2:8-9). There is no room for pride in the blood-bought and redeemed life of the Christian. Gentleness. To be a Christian is to be a disciple of Jesus, and to be a disciple of Jesus is to follow and imitate His ways. We have been redeemed by and follow the One who invites all: Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls (Matt. 11:2829). To be gentle is to be meek, but that does not mean that Jesus was weak. Moses is described in Numbers 12:3 as, very humble, more than any person who was on the face of the earth. If you know anything about Moses, he was a courageous and gifted leader who bravely stood before the most powerful man of his day to demand that he let the Hebrew slaves go. We who were far from God, he found us and met us in our sin! Consider Romans 2:4 and the kindness of God: Do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and restraint and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? When it comes to the way we treat others, we ought to be known for our gentleness, and when it comes to the sins of others, the Word of God is very clear: Brothers and sisters, even if a person is caught in any wrongdoing, you who are spiritual are to restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you are not tempted as well (Gal. 6:1). Patience. The Greek word Paul used for patience is makrothymia which also means forbearance or long-suffering. How do you develop long-suffering as a Christian? We develop patience in the Christian life through the things we suffer. Listen, suffering is the fire God uses to purge the dross from our lives. Find a person who has suffered much and you will find a person who is either bitter or empathetic towards others. W. Tozer, a pastor known for his prayer life, once said of the person who wished to be used of God: It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply." God raises up storms of conflict in relationships at times to accomplish that deeper work in our character. If you dont buy into what Tozer said, consider what we read in Romans 5:3-5, And not only this, but we also celebrate in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us (Rom. 5:35). If you are serious about following Jesus, you will experience the suffering God intends for your good and His glory. Patience in the life of the Christian will not only come by way of suffering, but it comes through confidence and trust in a good and sovereign God. The more you grow in your understanding of who God is (orthodoxy) the greater your patience will become (orthopraxy). Bearing with one another. The fruit of godly humility, gentleness, and patience is the desire and hard work of bearing with one another. The Greek word for bearing here can also be translated as tolerate, put up with, or endure. To the scattered and suffering Christian located in what is now modern Turkey, the apostle Peter instructed: Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins (1 Pet. 4:8). Christian, you are a work in progress and the goal of becoming holy and blameless is not complete in you and will not be until a death or a resurrection, yet God is patient with you; oh, how easily we forget the 10,000 ways God endures us while He remains committed to the good He is doing in us! If God endures you, how is it that you are unwilling to endure your brother or sister in whom God is committed to do the same thing He is doing in you? How often and to what degree do we continue to wrong Him who endured the cross for our redemption? How easily we forget our Lords words from His Sermon on the Mount: For if you forgive other people for their offenses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive other people, then your Father will not forgive your offenses (Matt. 6:1415). Unity. Paul does not just tell us to be united, but to be, diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. The way the NASB translates diligent is not a bad translation, but in the original language (spoudazō) the word is better translated as zealous or eager. I think the way the NASB translates this verse loses the edge and urgency that Paul meant to communicate to the Ephesian Christians. Listen, Paul is urging you, Christian, to be zealous and eager to maintain the unity we share as those who have been redeemed through the slaughtering of the Lamb of God so that we can be the children of God. As His Church, we are sealed by the Holy Spirit as His redeemed people. This is the unity of the Spirit that we are to keep within the community of faith in such a way that it is visible to the world around us! This is why Jesus commanded: I am giving you a new commandment, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples: if you have love for one another (John 13:3435). Oh, the petty things we allow to disrupt our union as Jesus Bride! The things we fight about and break fellowship over grieve the heart of the One who was crushed and cursed so that we could be reconciled to the God we sinned against. Peter OBrien wrote of this verse the following indictment that would do us well to heed and respond to in repentance: To live in a manner which mars the unity of the Spirit is to scorn the gracious reconciling work of Christ. It is tantamount to saying that his sacrificial death by which relationships with God and others have been restored, along with the resulting freedom of access to the Father, are of no real consequence to us![2] We have spent 20 weeks together in first three chapters in Ephesians, and some of you are still on track for reading through the Bible in a year. I have been with you for over five years now, and I have seen so much growth in many of you regarding your theological understand of God. I love that many of you honor or have grown to honor the Bible for what it is as the Word of God. I love that I can hear pages of your Bibles turn as we engage the Word of God each and every Sunday together! I am so proud of you and your growth dear brothers and sisters! My question for you this morning is simply this: What are you doing with your orthodoxy? Permit me to close our time with some questions to think about: How has your growth and understanding of who God is through His revealed word deepened your humility? How has it tenderized you towards others? How has your theology of Ephesians 1:3-14 and 2:1-10 made you a more patient person? Has your right awareness and understanding of Gods choosing, redeeming, and sealing of you as His reconciled child created in you to extend the same mercy and grace that you received to others who God is working through and with? Has your zeal for knowing God fostered a zeal to find what you disagree with, or has it created in you a zeal to maintain and celebrate the primary things you agree upon? [1] D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Christian Unity: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:1 to 16 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 24. [2] Peter Thomas OBrien, The Letter to the Ephesians, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 280.

If you are born again, you are alive with Christ! If you are born again, everything listed in Ephesians 1:3-14 is true of you! In those twelve verses the phrase: In Him or in Christ is stated. Before we even touch Ephesians 4:1-3, I want you to marvel over what it means to be in Christ. In Jesus, I can now know the God for whom I was made. In Jesus God no longer sees my sin, but the righteousness of His Son. In Jesus, I am becoming more and more like the person I was born to be. In Jesus, I have redemption and am now a child of God instead of an enemy; here are eighteen other reasons to celebrate what it means to be in Christ.: In Christ, I am justified freely by His grace (Rom. 3:24) In Christ, I am now Gods child (1 Peter 1:3) In Christ, I am forgiven of all my sins (Eph. 1:7; Heb. 9:14) In Christ, I have peace (John 14:27) In Christ, I am loved by God the Father (John 16:27) In Christ, I belong to God (John 17:9) In Christ, I will never be forsaken or abandoned by God (John 10) In Christ, I am treasured by God (1 Peter 1-2) In Christ, I am the righteousness of Christ (2 Cor. 5:21) In Christ, there is for me NO condemnation (Rom. 8:1) In Christ, God is working all things together for my good (Rom. 8:28) In Christ, I have obtained an inheritance that only God alone can give (Eph. 1:11) In Christ, I am a new creation the old is gone and the new has come (2 Cor. 5:17) In Christ, I am a son/daughter of God (Gal. 4:6) In Christ, I am no longer a stranger or alien, but a fellow citizen with the saints (Eph. 2:19) In Christ, I am a member of the body of Christ (Eph. 3:6) In Christ, I am set apart for the mission of God (Eph. 2:10) In Christ, I am loved by an everlasting God (1 John 4:19) Paul begins verse four with the word, Therefore. When you read your Bible, this word serves as a clue that in light of what has been written, what you are about to read next is in response to what proceeded it. Another way to say it is: In light of Ephesians 1-3, this is how you are to behave. How are we to behave? Since we are alive in Christ, we are to walk as the spiritually living. Since we are not the only ones made alive in Christ, we should walk together as the living. I want to look at both of those points Paul makes in the verses that follow. How to Walk as the Living Paul begins with these words: Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, urge you (v. 1a). So far in his epistle this is only the second place when Paul tells his readers to do something. The first time Paul told the Ephesians they had to do something, it was in 2:12, remember that you were. Remember what Paul? Remember who you were and who you now are! In Ephesians 4:1, Paul is not telling these Christians to remember their identity in Christ but to walk in step with their identity as those who have been called out of death into life with Christ. There are two words I want you to notice that I will call, The Two Ws of the Christian life. The first word is walk, and the second word is worthy. The Ws of the Christian life serve as evidence that you are alive in Jesus and no longer dead in your sins. When Paul uses the word walk in his epistle, he is referring metaphorically to the way a person lives out their life ethically. Paul uses the word walk thirty-two times in his epistles, eight of which are used in Ephesians, and every time it is used metaphorically! In Ephesians 2:1-2, our walk was governed by a Christless life: And you were dead in your offenses and sins, in which you previously walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. In Colossians Paul also described the way the Christian used to walk, listen to the way he uses the word, walk in Colossians 3:5-7, Therefore, treat the parts of your earthly body as dead to sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. For it is because of these things that the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience, and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them. Jesus used the same metaphor in describing what will happen to the one who follows Him: I am the Light of the world; the one who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life (John 8:12). Listen to the other ways Paul uses the word walk in his epistles: But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. (Gal. 5:16) Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life. (Rom. 6:4) Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma. (Eph. 5:12) Here, in the verse before us this morning, we are commanded to, walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called. The second W word of the Christian life is the word worthy. The Greek word Paul uses is axiōs, and it literally means worthily. The word worthy means to have worth or value in the same way a scale measures the weight of something. So, picture a scale in your mind; on the one side of the scale you have all of the doctrinal goodness that is true of you in Christ from Ephesians 1-3, and on the other side of the scale is the weight of your new life in Jesus applied in the way you live out that doctrinal truth. Martyn Lloyd-Jones describes what Paul is saying in this verse in the following way: The Apostle is beseeching them and exhorting them always to give equal weight in their lives to doctrine and practice. They must not put all the weight on doctrine and none on practice; nor all the weight on practice and just a little, if any at all, on doctrine. To do so produces imbalance and lopsidedness. The Ephesians must take great pains to see that the scales are perfectly balanced.[1] Let me say it in another way: Orthodoxy is right doctrine, and orthopraxy is right-practice. Here is where it gets real for you and me! In evangelical churches, you will probably run into two types of people who claim to be Christian: the first is the kind of Christian who can quote chapter and verse from the Bible, seems to have their theology nailed down and dialed in, but has little to show for it in the way they live out (practice) their Christianity. The other person you may run into seems to be a really nice Christian but has little understanding of the Bible or what passes for right doctrine.What we learn from Ephesians 4:1 is that our metaphorical Christian scale needs sound and solid doctrine from the Bible that is balanced by a life that is shaped by a growing understanding of the Word of God. Let me say it another way: as a Christian, you should be growing in your understanding of who God is and what it means to follow Jesus, and as you grow, your life will demonstrate that growth in equal measure. The Way We Walk Together as the Living So what does it look like to, walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called? It looks like verses 2-3, which is a life with, all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, being diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Two themes flow out of Ephesians 4-6 and that is, 1) unity between the redeemed and 2) the godly life lived out. In verses 2-3, Paul provides a list of five character traits that the one who is truly alive in Christ ought to long and strive for as he/she follows Jesus. What Paul lists are five characteristics that ought to be on the side of the scale that is labeled: practice. Humility. Think about your salvation and what it cost Jesus to redeem you. You who once stood before a holy God as a child of wrath living in the lusts of your flesh and mind (vv. 2-3), God made you alive in Christ (v. 4-5). Could there not be any clearer statement to shatter any hint of pride in you: but God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us made us alive together with Christ. If you understand the doctrine of Gods grace and mercy, then you will understand that the grace you received was not free and the mercy you received was not deserved: For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works, so that no one may boast (Eph. 2:8-9). There is no room for pride in the blood-bought and redeemed life of the Christian. Gentleness. To be a Christian is to be a disciple of Jesus, and to be a disciple of Jesus is to follow and imitate His ways. We have been redeemed by and follow the One who invites all: Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls (Matt. 11:2829). To be gentle is to be meek, but that does not mean that Jesus was weak. Moses is described in Numbers 12:3 as, very humble, more than any person who was on the face of the earth. If you know anything about Moses, he was a courageous and gifted leader who bravely stood before the most powerful man of his day to demand that he let the Hebrew slaves go. We who were far from God, he found us and met us in our sin! Consider Romans 2:4 and the kindness of God: Do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and restraint and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? When it comes to the way we treat others, we ought to be known for our gentleness, and when it comes to the sins of others, the Word of God is very clear: Brothers and sisters, even if a person is caught in any wrongdoing, you who are spiritual are to restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you are not tempted as well (Gal. 6:1). Patience. The Greek word Paul used for patience is makrothymia which also means forbearance or long-suffering. How do you develop long-suffering as a Christian? We develop patience in the Christian life through the things we suffer. Listen, suffering is the fire God uses to purge the dross from our lives. Find a person who has suffered much and you will find a person who is either bitter or empathetic towards others. W. Tozer, a pastor known for his prayer life, once said of the person who wished to be used of God: It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply." God raises up storms of conflict in relationships at times to accomplish that deeper work in our character. If you dont buy into what Tozer said, consider what we read in Romans 5:3-5, And not only this, but we also celebrate in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us (Rom. 5:35). If you are serious about following Jesus, you will experience the suffering God intends for your good and His glory. Patience in the life of the Christian will not only come by way of suffering, but it comes through confidence and trust in a good and sovereign God. The more you grow in your understanding of who God is (orthodoxy) the greater your patience will become (orthopraxy). Bearing with one another. The fruit of godly humility, gentleness, and patience is the desire and hard work of bearing with one another. The Greek word for bearing here can also be translated as tolerate, put up with, or endure. To the scattered and suffering Christian located in what is now modern Turkey, the apostle Peter instructed: Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins (1 Pet. 4:8). Christian, you are a work in progress and the goal of becoming holy and blameless is not complete in you and will not be until a death or a resurrection, yet God is patient with you; oh, how easily we forget the 10,000 ways God endures us while He remains committed to the good He is doing in us! If God endures you, how is it that you are unwilling to endure your brother or sister in whom God is committed to do the same thing He is doing in you? How often and to what degree do we continue to wrong Him who endured the cross for our redemption? How easily we forget our Lords words from His Sermon on the Mount: For if you forgive other people for their offenses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive other people, then your Father will not forgive your offenses (Matt. 6:1415). Unity. Paul does not just tell us to be united, but to be, diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. The way the NASB translates diligent is not a bad translation, but in the original language (spoudazō) the word is better translated as zealous or eager. I think the way the NASB translates this verse loses the edge and urgency that Paul meant to communicate to the Ephesian Christians. Listen, Paul is urging you, Christian, to be zealous and eager to maintain the unity we share as those who have been redeemed through the slaughtering of the Lamb of God so that we can be the children of God. As His Church, we are sealed by the Holy Spirit as His redeemed people. This is the unity of the Spirit that we are to keep within the community of faith in such a way that it is visible to the world around us! This is why Jesus commanded: I am giving you a new commandment, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples: if you have love for one another (John 13:3435). Oh, the petty things we allow to disrupt our union as Jesus Bride! The things we fight about and break fellowship over grieve the heart of the One who was crushed and cursed so that we could be reconciled to the God we sinned against. Peter OBrien wrote of this verse the following indictment that would do us well to heed and respond to in repentance: To live in a manner which mars the unity of the Spirit is to scorn the gracious reconciling work of Christ. It is tantamount to saying that his sacrificial death by which relationships with God and others have been restored, along with the resulting freedom of access to the Father, are of no real consequence to us![2] We have spent 20 weeks together in first three chapters in Ephesians, and some of you are still on track for reading through the Bible in a year. I have been with you for over five years now, and I have seen so much growth in many of you regarding your theological understand of God. I love that many of you honor or have grown to honor the Bible for what it is as the Word of God. I love that I can hear pages of your Bibles turn as we engage the Word of God each and every Sunday together! I am so proud of you and your growth dear brothers and sisters! My question for you this morning is simply this: What are you doing with your orthodoxy? Permit me to close our time with some questions to think about: How has your growth and understanding of who God is through His revealed word deepened your humility? How has it tenderized you towards others? How has your theology of Ephesians 1:3-14 and 2:1-10 made you a more patient person? Has your right awareness and understanding of Gods choosing, redeeming, and sealing of you as His reconciled child created in you to extend the same mercy and grace that you received to others who God is working through and with? Has your zeal for knowing God fostered a zeal to find what you disagree with, or has it created in you a zeal to maintain and celebrate the primary things you agree upon? [1] D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Christian Unity: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:1 to 16 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 24. [2] Peter Thomas OBrien, The Letter to the Ephesians, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 280.

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday St. John 3:1-17 by William Klock Knock!  Knock!  Knock!  Someone was at the door.  Peter—or maybe it was John or James—got up to see who it was.  It had been a long day.  Everywhere Jesus went the crowds followed.  Some were full of questions, but most of all they were full of problems.  And they brought them all to Jesus.  The blind, the deaf, the sick, the dying, the demon-possessed.  This isn't how the world is supposed to be, full of tears.  Everyone knew it then.  Everyone knows it now.  And everyone then and now hoped for a day when somehow it will all be set to rights.  And so the people flocked to Jesus, because wherever he went, there was a little pocket of the world as it should be, the world as God had made it, the world set to rights.  Wherever Jesus went, there was a little pocket of God's future brought into the present.  A little pocket of the world where the tears are wiped away. Knock!  Knock!  Knock!  There it was again.  They'd found a quiet place to spend the night away from the crowds, but someone had found it.  Peter was getting himself ready to tell whoever-it-was to go away, so image his surprise when he opened the door and saw Nicodemus standing there.  They'd never met, but everyone knew who Nicodemus was.  He was a rich man, he was one of the leaders of the Pharisees, but more than that, he was a member of the Sanhedrin—the ruling council of the Jews.  And here he was at the door of the house where Jesus was staying, standing there with a couple of his servants, politely asking to speak with the rabbi now that the crowds were gone. Nicodemus had seen what Jesus was doing.  Nicodemus had heard what Jesus was preaching.  Nicodemus had watched from the edge of the crowds and listened in the temple court.  In Jesus he saw the hopes of Israel being fulfilled.  He saw that little pocket of God's future following wherever Jesus went.  He believed—he just wasn't sure what exactly it was that he was believing.  Have you ever had that happen?  You see God at work.  It's obvious.  But it's not what you expected.  So you believe, but you don't really understand.  That's where Nicodemus was.  He wasn't one of the simple people who just needed some physical manifestation of the kingdom—like the blind and the deaf and the sick.  He knew the scriptures.  He knew how the God of Israel was supposed to fulfil his prophecies.  And Jesus was fulfilling them, but not in the ways anyone expected.  So the great theologian had come, not to be healed, but to ask how all this can be.  “We know that you're a teacher who's come from God,” Nicodemus said to Jesus, “Nobody can do the signs that you're doing, unless God is with him.” You can hear the unspoken question implicit in Nicodemus' affirmation.  It's the theologian's equivalent of “Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief.”  It was like this for everyone.  The disciples saw, they heard, they believed, but whenever Jesus pressed them with questions, ninety per cent of the time they gave the wrong answer.  Peter knew with certainty that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of the living God.  But when push came to shove, he drew his sword and was ready to bring God's kingdom with violence.  Even the disciples were full of all the wrong ideas the Jews had about the Messiah and the coming of the kingdom.  Nicodemus was in the same boat.  It's just that he knew he was missing something and here he was to get it sorted out.  But Jesus doesn't give him the answer he wanted, because even if Jesus explained it all, even if Jesus connected all the dots for Nicodemus, that's wouldn't solve the problem.  Nicodemus would still need something more.  And this is where Jesus answers his implicit question with those familiar words, “Let me tell you the solemn truth.  Unless someone has been born from above, he won't be able to see God's kingdom.” It wasn't just Nicodemus struggling with all this.  Think of all our Gospel lessons during Easter- and Ascensiontide, those lessons where Jesus tells his disciples that as good as it is for him to be with them, he's going to have to leave so that something better can happen.  And they don't understand.  They're confused.  If Jesus leaves, that little pocket of the kingdom that follows him wherever he goes, it will be gone with him.  They didn't understand either.  They, too, had to be born from above in order to see—in order to be part of—the kingdom.  In order to themselves become little pockets of God's future in the present.  And, of course, that's what we saw last Sunday as we remembered Pentecost.  The God of Israel sent his Spirit to indwell his people—they were born from above—and suddenly it all made sense and Peter preached that Pentecost sermon that would have been impossible for him to preach just the day before and from there they went out to make God's kingdom known to the world. This is, incidentally, why we have this story of Nicodemus' visit to Jesus as our Gospel lesson today.  Trinity Sunday didn't come along until the high Middle Ages.  Long before today was Trinity Sunday, it was the Sunday after Pentecost and today's Gospel was assigned to explain the Pentecost events we read about last Sunday.  When Trinity Sunday came along no one changed the lesson, because here we see the Trinity revealed in the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus as the Son reveals that the Father must send the Spirit to create, to give life to a renewed people. So Nicodemus knew the story.  He knew the God of Israel.  But he knew there was more to it.  He knew the world is not as it should be and he knew that that the people of Israel were failing at what God had called them to be.  And he knew the Lord's promises to set the world and Israel to rights.  He saw the Lord's promises being fulfilled in Jesus and he'd heard Jesus talking about this new work, this new exodus, this new deliverance of the people—this exodus even greater than the one that defined them when the Lord delivered them from Pharaoh.  And Jesus warned about a judgement soon to come on those who refused to repent of their old ways and to get in line with the Lord's plans.  It didn't fit into the expectations of the people of Israel and especially not into what the Pharisees expected, but there had to be something to it, because the Lord was so clearly with Jesus. Again, Jesus picks up on the question implied in Nicodemus' statement.  He says, “The central truth you're missing, Nicodemus, is that you've got to be born from above to see the kingdom of God.”  Nicodemus understood so much.  If anyone wanted to see God's will done and his kingdom come on earth as in heaven it was the Pharisees.  That's what they lived for.  And Nicodemus saw it in Jesus, but he struggled to reconcile his expectations with what Jesus was saying.  And Jesus says that what he's missing—what all of Israel is missing—is this new birth, this being born from above, this being born again.  And it's important to understand that as much as Jesus is saying, “You, Nicodemus, must be born again—which is how the ears of modern Christians have been trained to hear this in individualistic terms—Jesus' stress is on Israel, on the whole people.  In verse 7 he says, “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.'”  When he says “You must be born again,” that's plural, it's “you all must be born again”.  Israel as a people had been born the first time when they passed through the waters of the Red Sea and Jesus is saying that now Israel had to be born a second time.  This is why John was out in the wilderness baptizing in the Jordan, but that wasn't all.  Israel had been baptised in water before and it wasn't enough.  Now they needed to be baptised in both water and the Spirit.  Israel was always supposed to be a pocket of God's future in the present—so that the nations could see and know the goodness of God.  And Jesus is saying that it's the Spirit who will finally make the people what God had called them to be.  As Jesus had said over and over in various ways, he, Jesus, was sent by the Father, but that it would be the Spirit—the “Helper”—who would come after, who would testify to them about this truth and then that through them, this Spirit would testify to the rest of Israel and even to the nations…fulfilling the prophets, effectively creating a new Israel, and through this new people, fulfilling the mission the Lord had given to them from the beginning: to fill the world with the knowledge of him as the waters cover the sea and to testify to the nations in such a way that the nations would flock to the God of Israel to give him glory. But Nicodemus didn't get it.  Neither did Jesus' disciples.  Because the Spirit had not yet come to testify about Jesus.  So Nicodemus asked Jesus, “How can I be born again?  I know you're not talking about returning to my mother's womb, but what do you mean?  A person is only born once.”  And as he answers Nicodemus, this is where Jesus switches from saying things like “Unless one is born again” to “Unless you—all of you—are born again”.  Because it's not so much about one person being born again or even about a whole bunch of individuals being born again.  It's about Israel as a people being born again so that she could be put back on track to fulfil her mission—the one given to Abraham two thousand years before.  And this idea of birth would have resonated particularly with someone like Nicodemus, because to be a Jew was all about being born as part of Abraham's family.  Other things like circumcision and the sabbath and what you ate (or didn't eat) were important and especially so for the Pharisees, but those things were important because they identified you as part of Abraham's family.  They also drew a clear boundary between those who were in the family and all the uncircumcised, unclean gentiles who were most definitely not. What Jesus is saying now is that being born into Abraham's family in the way the Jews had been thinking about it all this time wasn't enough.  In fact, it never had been enough.  And Nicodemus should have known this.  For two millennia people were being born into Abraham's family and God's kingdom still hadn't come.  For two millennia people were born into Abraham's family and still the Gentiles hadn't experienced the Lord's blessing through them, at least not on the large scale envisioned in the Scriptures.  Just the opposite.  The Prophet Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Gentiles would be grabbing hold of Jews by their coattails saying, “Take us with you, because we hear that God is with you!”  Instead, because of the way most of Abraham's children were living, the nations mocked them and taunted them saying, “Where's your God?”  It takes more than being born of the flesh of Abraham.  It even takes more than being born of water, as Israel had been in the Red Sea.  And as a man devoted to the law, to torah, Nicodemus should have understood this.  The Pharisees were all about exhorting their fellow Jews to be better keepers of the law, but it wasn't working.  They of all people should have been looking forward to the day when the law would no longer be written on tablets of stone, but engraved on the very hearts of the people by the Holy Spirit. So Jesus says to Nicodemus, “I'm telling you the solemn truth.  Unless you're born of water and the Spirit you cannot enter God's kingdom.  Flesh is born from flesh, but spirit is born from spirit.”  Israel needs something more than a biological inheritance.  What does Jesus mean, though, when he talks about being born of water and the Spirit?  This is was what John the Baptist was preaching about.  God was about to lead his people in a new exodus.  As Israel had been led through the waters of the Red Sea to become a covenant family, so John was calling people to pass through the waters of the Jordan—a step of repentance and faith—and into a new covenant.  They all needed that baptism of repentance.  They needed to turn aside from their own misguided expectations of the kingdom and of the Messiah and from their failures to be faithful to the Lord and his covenant.  But remember what John promised.  When people asked if he was the Messiah he said that he was only the forerunner.  John said, “I baptise you with water, but he will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.”  And that's just what Jesus does.  As we recalled last week on Pentecost, Jesus takes those who have repented, who have turned aside from every false lord, from every false god, from every false source of security, from every false way in order to take hold of him in faith by passing through the waters of baptism and he plunges us into the Holy Spirit.  And it's the Spirit who does the work of transforming us.  It's the Spirit who regenerates us.  It's the Spirit who causes us to be born again as he takes our old dead wood and unites it to the life of Jesus, causing us to bear fruit—making us the pocket of God's future in the present.  Through the Spirit we're born again, born from above. The last few months I've been reading Ed Sanders' books on the relationship between the New Testament and Second Temple Judaism.  Sanders was a brilliant scholar and full of deep insights.  His work has had a profound impact on how we understand the New Testament.  But he wasn't a Christian.  He described himself as a “secular Mainline Protestant”.  And it shows.  As brilliant as his insights into Jesus and Paul are, as fascinating as he is to read, it's all spiritually dry as dust.  There's no doxology to any of it.  Sanders even refused to weigh in on whether or not Christianity is superior to Judaism.  And so it was like a breath of fresh air when I finished Sanders' “Paul and Palestinian Judaism” and picked up Tom Wright's new book of Romans and it was full of the same sorts of brilliant and deep insights—many of them ideas that started with Sanders back in the 1970s—but Bp. Wright's work is overflowing with doxology and gospel joy.  That's the difference that Jesus and the Spirit make in us. Think of your baptism as something like Israel at the Red Sea.  There was the parted water and God calling Israel to pass through to freedom and new life on the other side.  There was no receiving the law in Egypt; they had to cross to the other side of the sea to find covenant, to find relationship with the Lord.  And so we stand at the waters of baptism today.  In them Jesus gives his promise: Repent, turn aside from every false way, trust me, follow me in faith and you will find forgiveness of sins and new life through the Spirit.  To pass through the waters of baptism is to take hold of Jesus' promise and to be born again of water and the Spirit—and to be made part of this new covenant people ready and equipped to live and to proclaim his kingdom. But, again, this didn't fit what Nicodemus knew.  “How can this be so?” he asks.  And Jesus asks a bit incredulously, “How can you not know this?  You're one of the teachers of Israel!”  Nicodemus knew the story.  He understood how Israel had so miserably failed in her mission.  As a Pharisee he was abundantly aware of this problem.  Jesus tells Nicodemus: God has heard your cries and is visiting his people and he's doing it in me.  I'm the son of man, the one spoken of by Daniel all those years ago.  I can tell you reliably the things of heaven because I'm the one who has come down from heaven. At this point, I think, Nicodemus starts to connect the dots as much as anyone could in those days before the Spirit was sent.  He started to understand, because now Jesus really starts to correct what was wrong with Israel's thinking about herself, about what it meant to be God's people, and about what it would mean for the Lord to come to deliver them.  Jesus reminds Nicodemus of an event from Israel's time in the wilderness.  The Israelites grumbled against Moses—which was ultimately grumbling against the Lord—and so he sent poisonous snakes into the camp.  They bit people and many of those who were bit died.  But the Lord also gave Moses the remedy.  He told Moses to cast a snake out of bronze and to mount it on a pole.  Anyone who would look up to the bronze snake would be healed. And now Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up that snake in the wilderness, in the same way the son of man must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may share in the life of God's new age.”  Jesus is pointing to his own crucifixion.  As the snake was the affliction of the people lifted up for them to look at, so Jesus would take the affliction of Israel on himself—he would suffer the punishment for their sins—and be lifted up on the cross.  He would be lifted up for everyone to look upon—to see the horror and the gravity of their sin, to see that the wages of sin is death.  But they would also see Jesus taking it all on himself and in that, the horror and ugliness of his being raised up would become an act by which he is ultimately glorified.  In the cross we see the love of God made manifest in Jesus.  And Jesus says in the familiar words we all know, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” Jesus corrects the central error in the thinking of Israel in his day.  They were hoping and praying for the day when the Lord would come, not just to vindicate his people, but to judge their enemies—to rain down fire and brimstone on the Romans and all the other gentiles.  But instead Jesus tells Nicodemus that he's come not to condemn, but to save all who will look to him.  All.  The Jews thought the Lord, when he came, would vindicate them for their faithfulness, but Jesus says to Nicodemus, even the most righteous of you need this new birth, this salvation if you want to know God's vindication.  And it's not just for you.  The Jews looked forward to the condemnation he would bring, but Jesus says he's come not to condemn, but to save.  And this is where the part about being born again of water and the Spirit comes into play.  Being born of water and the Spirit supersedes biology and genealogy.  In Jesus God opens his arms to welcome Jew and Gentile alike.  It was the Jews first, because if the Lord is faithful—and he is—he had to first fulfil his promises to his own people, but most importantly, in that act of faithfulness, the nations would take note of the God of Israel.  In Jesus, the nations would see that the God of Israel is not like the puny, selfish, fickle, and powerless gods they have known, and they would then flock to this God who is truly good and faithful.  This is what God's future looks like, not just Israel set to rights and everyone else set on fire.  God's future is for everyone who sees Jesus and his people wiping away the tears and forgiving sin, who believes, and who becomes part of it—whether born of Abraham by the flesh or born of Abraham by faith—all born in God's Spirit. Abraham's family is integral to the story and the plan, but Jesus reminds us that genes and DNA were never really what made anyone part of Abraham's family; it was about faith.  It was faith for Abraham himself and it was faith in God's promises for all who followed after: for Isaac and Jacob, for Joseph and Moses and Joshua, for gentiles like Rahab and Ruth, and even for the great kings like David and Solomon.  And God's promise was that through his covenant people, through these people who knew him in faith and were reconciled to him by faith, he would bless the nations.  It happened here and there in the Old Testament.  Rahab and Ruth are two of many small-scale testimonies to that, but here we finally see the Lord's promise coming to full fruit.  It's what we celebrated last week on Pentecost as Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on these men of Israel gathered from around the world.  They had heard Peter preach about Jesus and what he'd come to do.  They rallied to Jesus in faith and in response Jesus poured his Spirit into them.  Finally, through Jesus, Israel became the source of blessing she was intended to be—not by flesh, but by the Spirit—as these men and women took the good news to the nations: Jesus is Lord.  He has conquered sin and death.  In him is the forgiveness of sin, in him is life, in him God has returned to his creation as King.  And in him—the Incarnate Word—God makes himself known.  In Jesus, God Incarnate, we have the restoration and fellowship with our Creator that he has been working towards ever since the day we rebelled and were cast out of his presence.  In Jesus, God's kingdom—his new creation—has been inaugurated, in us and through us in the world.  Brothers and Sisters, we are that people the God of Israel was working to create and to make new all those millennia.  Jesus and the Spirit have finally made us that pocket of God's future in the present, the pocket where the world is set to rights and where the tears are wiped away, the pocket shows the world the faithfulness and goodness of God.  May we be that people—God's future in the present, the heralds of his new creation—may we be faithful in being this Spirit-renewed gospel people who make known God's glory to the world. Let us pray: Almighty God we praise you this morning for the grace you have shown us.  Even as we rebelled against you, our good Creator, you were setting in motion our redemption: Father sending, calling, electing; Son speaking, coming, dying, rising; and Spirit uniting, renewing, regenerating, empowering.  In the redemption of the world we see the glory of the Trinity and the majesty of the Unity and in gratitude we fall before you with the angels to sing, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty.”  By your grace, keep us strong in faith, O Lord, but keep us also faithful in our witness and our ministry to make your redeeming love known to the world.  We ask this through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.  Amen.

The readings this Sunday offer us a diagnosis of our spiritual ill-health and the ills of our society, the contradictions within us and how these could be resolved.In the first reading we see human wretchedness in action. The Prophet Isaiah tells us that we have become like unclean people, all our good deeds are polluted rages, our guilt carries us away like the wind.But along with wretchedness the 2nd reading also describe our greatness. St Paul speaks about the grace given to us by Christ Jesus. He has enriched us with discourse, knowledge, spiritual gifts.So we find ourselves stretched between extremes: wretchedness and glory, misery and magnificence. What should we do? Two things: First, recognize that the very fact we know our wretchedness shows our greatness. The second thing is what Jesus tells us in today's Gospel: Be watchful! Be alert because God can come for us at any time; in our death, at the final judgment at the end of the world, in everything He has created, in every person, in every interpersonal encounter.  Jesus alone can resolve our inner contradictions. In Jesus God has humbled himself to lift us up. He wants us during this season of Advent to use those gifts to lift Him up and to lift up others.He wants us to help those who carry heavy burdens. As we begin the season of Advent we ask for the grace to stay alert and watchful.

Trinity Sunday: Born of Water and the Spirit St. John 3:1-17 by William Klock Years ago in my life as a computer tech, I made a house-call to the home of an elderly couple whose children had signed them up for Internet service as a Christmas present.  I went out to get this couple set up with a modem and all the software they'd need to get online and to communicate with their family.  I quickly set everything up and then had the woman sit down next to me so that I could show her how everything worked.  I clicked on the “Connect” button and we listened as the modem made those familiar touch-tone dialling sounds, connecting to the Internet service provider.  But then the modem on the other end picked up and this woman, startled, jumped out of her seat when loud noises started emitting from the modem.  You remember those noises.  Static and beeps and bwongs and more static and more beeps and bwongs until the connection was made.  It was so normal to me that it didn't occur to me to warn her that the modem was about to make some funny noises.  She thought something was broken or that the modem or the computer was about to catch on fire. So I had to explain the concept of network “handshaking”.  When your modem connects to another modem over the phone lines, they send signals back and forth until they find something that works for them—something that's sort of mutually intelligible and reliable.  Sometimes you might have an old, slow modem.  Sometimes—maybe if you dial up at a busy time of day—instead of getting one of the ISP's fancy new modems, you get one of the old, slow, back-up ones.  And sometimes—especially back in those days—it could be hard to get a good line with a clear signal.  So the two modems send packets of data back and forth and check with each other to make sure that what's received on one end matches what was sent on the other.  And when ideal, it happens quickly and the data might go back and forth at high speed, and other times—those times when the static and the beeps and the bwongs go on and on and on—the line might not be so good and the data's getting corrupted or your modem is slower than the one on the other end and it keeps having to negotiate downward to a slower speed until it finally finds one that your modem and the line can handle. She sat there for a minutes and then turned to me and said, “That sounds like God trying to talk to me.  He tries to tell me something and I'm too slow or too thick to understand or too stuck in my own way to obey.  Sometimes he calls back later.  Sometimes he just keeps telling me until he's dumbed it down to the point that I can finally understand it.  But he doesn't give.  Everything he has to say is important and he always makes sure I get the message, even if it takes a long time.”  I kind of laughed and said, “Yes, something like that.”  What I was thinking was, “You and me both, Lady.  You and me both.”  Do you ever feel like that?  I know the Lord does.  He's been feeling like that since he created the human race.  But it must be especially frustrating when your own people are blind or dumb or confused or just plain obstinate and don't get the message.  Thankfully our God is patient—and we see that too, all the way through the story of God and humanity. In today's Gospel we read about the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus.  It's an interesting scripture lesson to have on Trinity Sunday and that's because long before Trinity Sunday was Trinity Sunday, it was simply the Sunday after Pentecost.  Usually our major feast days like Christmas and Easter, Ascension and Pentecost have lessons that focus on the events we're remembering, but there's usually a Sunday before or after where the lessons then explain the significance of those events.  So our lessons today originally did that for the feast of Pentecost.  But when Trinity Sunday came along no one changed the lessons, because here we see the Trinity revealed in the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, we see the Trinity revealed as Israel's story reaches its climax in Jesus and as the Spirit is poured out on God's people.  Really, our readings from John's Gospel through Easter and Ascensiontide keep pointing us to this.  Over and over we hear Jesus explaining to his disciples that the Father has sent him to set his people to rights, but that that's not all there is to it.  Jesus also tells them that he can't stay with them forever.  First, the Father has sent him to give his life to make his people new, but even after he's been raised from the dead, second, he still has to go—to return to the Father, so that the very Spirit of the Father, of the God of Israel can be sent to make real in his people the new life, the new covenant that has been established by the death and resurrection of Jesus, his Son. And, of course, as we read in the lessons from John, everyone was confused by the things Jesus said.  Which, of course, highlights just how much they needed the Spirit and that highlights why it was so important that Jesus leave them so that he could send the Spirit.  In Jesus the new Israel was born and our Gospel today sort of bridges the gap between the old Israel at Mt. Sinai and the new Israel at Pentecost.  Everyone kind of had a sense that the Lord was working through Jesus, even if they didn't really understand it completely.  At the very least, everyone could see as they watched the things Jesus did and listened to the things he said, that he had come from and was acting on behalf of the God of Israel.  There was no question about it.  Some people were thrilled.  Some even believed.  Others got angry.  And that was true even of the leaders of Israel.  And so, we read, Nicodemus came to Jesus. John says that Nicodemus was both a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews and since elsewhere John distinguishes between these two terms, we can conclude that Nicodemus was a member of the part of the Pharisees and that he was also probably a member of the Sanhedrin, the governing council of the Jews.  He was a very important person.  And John says he came to Jesus at night.  I used to think this was probably because Nicodemus, as a leading figure amongst the Jews, was afraid to be seen visiting Jesus by day, but as the years have gone by and I've read John's Gospel over and over and over, I've noticed that John otherwise portrays Nicodemus as a very brave character.  In Chapter 7 we see him standing up to the chief priests and Pharisees when they wanted to arrest Jesus.  He reminded them that the law required them to give Jesus a fair hearing and in return he was accused of having become one of Jesus' disciples.  Nicodemus very bravely exposed the irony of the leaders of Israel.  They were zealous for the law, but they failed to follow it—or at least they were happy to ignore it—when it wasn't inconvenient.  And then in Chapter 19, in contrast to the disciples who had fled and gone into hiding out of fear that the authorities would come for them next, Nicodemus made a point of bringing a large quantity of expensive spices for the anointing of Jesus' body.  These aren't the actions of someone who was afraid of being seen with or associated with Jesus.  I think it's more likely he came to see Jesus as night, because it was the only chance he had to visit Jesus when he wasn't being overwhelmed by the crowds.  Nicodemus had some important questions to ask and he wanted to hear the answers—and as a leader of the people, he had the privilege of coming to Jesus “after hours” so to speak, of having a private audience. So John says that he came to see Jesus that night.  He'd been watching and listening to Jesus.  He saw that the God of Israel was clearly at work in and through Jesus, it was just that—like most everyone else in Israel—he struggled to reconcile what Jesus was doing and saying with the expectations they all had of the Messiah.   So he asks Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you're a teacher who's come from God.  No one could do these signs you're doing unless God is with him.” Nicodemus knew the story.  He knew the God of Israel.  But he knew there was more to it.  As he'd watched and listened to Jesus he'd figured that out.  Jesus was talking about the Lord doing another great work, of the Lord leading his people in another exodus, this time more significant than the last one from Egypt.  And he warned about a judgement soon to come on those who refused to repent of their old ways and to get in line with the Lord's plans.  It didn't fit into the expectations of the people of Israel and especially not into what the Pharisees expected, but there had to be something to it, because the Lord was so clearly with Jesus. And Jesus picks up on the question implied in Nicodemus' statement.  He says, “The central truth you're missing, Nicodemus, is that you've got to be born again to see the kingdom of God.”  Nicodemus understood so much.  If anyone wanted to see God's will done and his kingdom come on earth as in heaven it was the Pharisees.  That's what they lived for.  And Nicodemus saw it in Jesus, but Jesus wasn't preaching what the Pharisees were preaching.  Nicodemus didn't understand.  Like one modem trying over and over to talk to another modem and just not making the connection, he struggled to reconcile his expectations with what Jesus was saying.  And Jesus says that what he's missing, what he needs to make the connection is this new birth, this being born again.  And it's important to understand that as much as Jesus is saying, “You, Nicodemus, must be born again—which is how the ears of modern Christians have been trained to hear this in individualistic terms—Jesus' stress is on Israel, on the whole people.  In verse 7 he says, “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.'”  When he says “You must be born again,” that's plural, it's “you all must be born again”.  Israel as a people had been born the first time when they passed through the waters of the Red Sea and Jesus is saying that now Israel had to be born a second time.  This is why John was out in the wilderness baptizing in the Jordan, but that wasn't all.  Israel had been baptised in water before and it wasn't enough.  Now they needed to be baptised in both water and the Spirit.  The Spirit would finally make the connection.  As Jesus had said over and over in various ways, he, Jesus, was sent by the Father, but that it would be the Spirit—the “Helper”—who would come after, who would testify to them about this truth and then that through them, this Spirit would testify to the rest of Israel and even to the nations…fulfilling the prophets, effectively creating a new Israel, and through this new people, fulfilling the mission the Lord had given to them from the beginning: to fill the world with the knowledge of him as the waters cover the sea and to testify to the nations in such a way that the nations would flock to the God of Israel to give him glory. But Nicodemus didn't get it.  And part of that was because the Spirit had not yet come to testify about Jesus.  So he asked Jesus, “How can I be born again?  I know you're not talking about returning to my mother's womb, but what do you mean?  A person is only born once.”  And as he answers Nicodemus, this is where Jesus switches from saying things like “Unless one is born again” to “Unless you—all of you—are born again”.  Because it's not so much about one person being born again or even about a whole bunch of individuals being born again.  It's about Israel as a people being born again so that she could be put back on track to fulfil her mission—the one given to Abraham almost two thousand years before.  And this idea of birth would have resonated particularly with someone like Nicodemus, because to be a Jew was all about being born as part of Abraham's family.  Other things like circumcision and what you ate (or didn't eat) were important and especially so for the Pharisees, but those things were important because they identified you as part of Abraham's family.  They also drew a clear boundary between those who were in the family and all the uncircumcised, unclean gentiles were most definitely not. What Jesus is saying now is that being born into Abraham's family in the way the Jews had been thinking about it all this time wasn't enough.  In fact, it never had been enough.  And Nicodemus should have known this.  For two millennia people were being born into Abraham's family and God's kingdom still hadn't come.  For two millennia people were born into Abraham's family and still the Gentiles hadn't experienced the Lord's blessing through them, at least not on the large scale envisioned in the Scriptures.  Just the opposite.  Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Gentiles would be grabbing hold of Jews by their coattails saying, “Take us with you, because we hear that God is with you!”  Instead, because of the way most of Abraham's children were living, the nations mocked them and taunted them saying, “Where's your God now?”  It takes more than being born of the flesh of Abraham.  It even takes more than being born of water, as Israel had been in the Red Sea.  And as a man devoted to the law, to torah, Nicodemus should have understood this.  The Pharisees were all about exhorting their fellow Jews to be better keepers of the law, but it wasn't working.  They of all people should have been looking forward to the day when the law would no longer be written on tablets of stone, but engraved on the very hearts of the people by the Holy Spirit. So Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, unless you're born of water and the Spirit you cannot enter God's kingdom.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”  Israel needs something more than a biological inheritance.  What does Jesus mean, though, when he talks about being born of water and the Spirit?  This is was what John the Baptist was preaching about.  God was about to lead his people in a new exodus.  As Israel had been led through the waters of the Red Sea to become a covenant family, so John was calling people to pass through the waters of the Jordan—a step of repentance and faith—and into a new covenant.  They all needed that baptism of repentance.  They needed to turn aside from their own misguided expectations of the kingdom and of the Messiah and from their failures to be faithful to the Lord and his covenant.  But remember what John promised.  When people asked if he was the Messiah he said that he was only the forerunner.  John said, “I baptise you with water, but he will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.”  And that's just what Jesus does.  As we recalled last week on Pentecost, Jesus takes those who have repented, who have turned aside from every false lord, from every false god, from every false source of security in order to take hold of him in faith by passing through the waters of baptism and he plunges us into the Holy Spirit.  And it's the Spirit who does the work of transforming us.  It's the Spirit who regenerates us.  It's the Spirit who causes us to be born again as he takes our old dead wood and unites it to the life of Jesus, causing us to bear fruit.  And it's the Spirit who finally makes that connection between God and us.  Without the Spirit we're sort of like modems perpetually beeping and bwonging and never quite connecting, but then the Spirit comes to us and testifies about Jesus and the Father and it clicks, it comes into focus, it connects. In our baptism we're back at the Red Sea.  There was the parted sea and God calling Israel to pass through to freedom and new life on the other side.  There was no receiving of the law in Egypt; they had to cross to the other side of the sea to find covenant with the Lord.  And so we stand at the waters of baptism today.  In them Jesus gives his promise: Repent, turn aside from every false way, trust me, follow me in faith and you will find forgiveness of sins and new life through the Spirit.  To pass through the waters of baptism is to take hold of Jesus' promise and to be born again of water and the Spirit—and to made part of this new covenant people ready and equipped to live and to proclaim his kingdom. But, again, this didn't fit what Nicodemus knew.  “How can this be so?” he asks.  And Jesus asks a bit incredulously, “How can you not know this?  You're one of the teachers of Israel!”  Nicodemus knew the story.  He understood how Israel had so miserably failed in her mission.  As a Pharisee he was abundantly aware of this problem.  Jesus tells Nicodemus: God has heard your cries and is visiting his people and he's doing it in me.  I'm the son of man, the one spoken of by Daniel all those years ago.  I can tell you reliably the things of heaven because I'm the one who has come down from heaven. At this point, I think, all this started to connect with Nicodemus.  He started to understand, because now Jesus really starts to correct what was wrong with Israel's thinking about herself, about what it meant to be God's people, and about what it would mean for the Lord to come to deliver them.  Jesus reminds Nicodemus of an event from Israel's time in the wilderness.  The Israelites grumbled against Moses—which was ultimately grumbling against the Lord—and so he sent poisonous snakes into the camp.  They bit people and many of those who were bit died.  But the Lord also gave Moses the remedy.  He told Moses to cast a snake out of bronze and to mount it on a pole.  Anyone who would look up to the bronze snake would be healed. And now Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up that snake in the wilderness, so the son of man must be lifted up so that all who believe in him may have eternal life.”  Jesus is pointing to his own crucifixion.  As the snake was the affliction of the people lifted up for them to look at, so Jesus would take the affliction of Israel on himself—he would suffer the punishment for their sins—and be lifted up on the cross.  He would be lifted up for all to look upon—to see the horror and the gravity of their sin, to see that the wages of sin is death.  But they would also see Jesus taking it all on himself and in that, the horror and ugliness of his being raised up would become an act by which he is ultimately glorified.  In the cross we see the love of God made manifest in Jesus.  And Jesus says in the familiar words we all know, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” Jesus corrects the central error in the thinking of Israel in his day.  They were hoping and praying for the day when the Lord would come, not just to vindicate his people, but to judge their enemies—to rain down fire and brimstone on the Romans and all the other gentiles.  But instead Jesus tells Nicodemus that he's come not to condemn, but to save all who will look to him.  All.  The Jews thought the Lord, when he came, would vindicate them for their faithfulness, but Jesus says to Nicodemus, even the most righteous of you need this new birth, this salvation if you want to know God's vindication.  And it's not just for you.  The Jews looked forward to the condemnation he would bring, but Jesus says he's come not to condemn, but to save.  And this is where the part about being born again of water and the Spirit comes into play.  Being born of water and the Spirit supersedes biology and genealogy.  In Jesus God opens his arms to welcome Jew and Gentile alike.  It was the Jews first, because if the Lord is faithful—and he is—he had to first fulfil his promises to his own people, but most importantly, in that act of faithfulness, the nations would take note of the God of Israel.  In Jesus, the nations would see that the God of Israel is not like the puny, selfish, fickle, and powerless gods they have known, and they would then flock to this God who is truly good and faithful.  Abraham's family is integral to the story and the plan, but Jesus reminds us that genes and DNA were never really what made anyone part of Abraham's family; it was about faith.  It was faith for Abraham himself and it was faith in God's promises for all who followed after: for Isaac and Jacob, for Joseph and Moses and Joshua, for gentiles like Rahab and Ruth, and even for the great kings like David and Solomon.  And God's promise was that through his covenant people, through these people who knew him in faith and were reconciled to him by faith, he would bless the nations.  It happened here and there in the Old Testament.  Rahab and Ruth are two of many small-scale testimonies to that, but here we finally see the Lord's promise coming to full fruit.  It's what we celebrated last week on Pentecost as Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on these men of Israel gathered from around the world.  They had heard Peter preach about Jesus and what he'd come to do.  They rallied to Jesus in faith and in response Jesus poured his Spirit into them.  Finally, through Jesus, Israel became the source of blessing she was intended to be—not by flesh, but by the Spirit—as these men and women took the good news to the nations: Jesus is Lord.  He has conquered sin and death.  In him is the forgiveness of sin, in him is life, in him God has returned to his creation as King.  And in him—the Incarnate Word—God makes himself known.  In Jesus, God Incarnate, we have the restoration and fellowship with our Creator that he has been working towards ever since the day we rebelled and were cast out of his presence.  In Jesus, God's kingdom—his new creation—has been inaugurated, in us and through us in the world.  Brothers and Sisters, we are that people the God of Israel was working to create, to forge, to make new all those millenia.  In Jesus and in us, his people, the promises made to Abraham are being fulfilled and we see that the blessing of God to the nations is for them to know him and to be reconciled to him in Jesus and the power of the Spirit. Let us pray: Almighty God we praise you this morning for the grace you have shown us.  Even as we rebelled against you, our good Creator, you were setting in motion our redemption: Father sending, calling, electing; Son speaking, coming, dying, rising; and Spirit uniting, renewing, regenerating, empowering.  In the redemption of the world we see the glory of the Trinity and the majesty of the Unity and in gratitude we fall before you with the angels to sing, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty.”  By your grace, keep us strong in faith, O Lord, but keep us also faithful in our witness and our ministry to make your redeeming love known to the world.  We ask this through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.  Amen.  

Having established that all of humanity - Greek, Jewish, Pagan or otherwise - has at its heart the brokenness of sin. Paul then depicts the glorious act of God righting what was wrong. Sin is a cosmic, societal, but also particularly personal problem and it is far more than simply moral performance. In Jesus God becomes the lightening rod of all human sin, and in his body, he gives it what it deserves - annihilation. Jesus' death is not a just death at the hands of God, it is an unjust death at the hands of sinful humanity. Jesus is what humanity was always supposed to be - innocent and perfect. And in his sinlessness he takes on humanity's sin in his body to destroy it on the cross forever. God's justice is then gloriously displayed in raising the innocent Jesus from the dead. Death cannot hold the guiltless God-Man. God makes a spectacle of all the powers of evil - personal, religious, societal, national and supernatural - exposing them for what they are and robbing them on the cross of their power. What this means to us is that God is not angry - he never was. God is love. And it means all our attempts to appease him through moral or religious performance are futile. None of us will be good enough, but he is. We can simply receive the gift of sin destroyed. And it means we can be changed. Jesus' death is the defining emancipation of the whole universe. It sets us free from all the power of sin, death and the devil, and restores to us his image-bearing vocation - to be his people and do his work.  By Ed Flint

Having established that all of humanity - Greek, Jewish, Pagan or otherwise - has at its heart the brokenness of sin. Paul then depicts the glorious act of God righting what was wrong. Sin is a cosmic, societal, but also particularly personal problem and it is far more than simply moral performance. In Jesus God becomes the lightening rod of all human sin, and in his body, he gives it what it deserves - annihilation. Jesus' death is not a just death at the hands of God, it is an unjust death at the hands of sinful humanity. Jesus is what humanity was always supposed to be - innocent and perfect. And in his sinlessness he takes on humanity's sin in his body to destroy it on the cross forever. God's justice is then gloriously displayed in raising the innocent Jesus from the dead. Death cannot hold the guiltless God-Man. God makes a spectacle of all the powers of evil - personal, religious, societal, national and supernatural - exposing them for what they are and robbing them on the cross of their power. What this means to us is that God is not angry - he never was. God is love. And it means all our attempts to appease him through moral or religious performance are futile. None of us will be good enough, but he is. We can simply receive the gift of sin destroyed. And it means we can be changed. Jesus' death is the defining emancipation of the whole universe. It sets us free from all the power of sin, death and the devil, and restores to us his image-bearing vocation - to be his people and do his work. 

Sermon for Christmas Day 2022. The Scripture readings are Exodus 40:17-21, 34-38; Titus 3:4-7; and John 1:1-18.“When the goodness and loving kindness of our God and Savior appeared, He saved us” (Tit. 3:4-7). The loving-kindness in Greek is philanthropia, where we get our word ‘philanthropy' – lover of man. God Himself is the ultimate philanthropist. He has appeared in the flesh of Jesus to love you by saving you.You aren't saved by doing all sorts of good, righteous works. You are saved by God's mercy through the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. And God pours His Holy Spirit out on you richly through Jesus Christ, your Savior.God has come to earth. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn. 1:14) – literally, He tabernacled among us. And by His tabernacling with us, He is made known.In Jesus God, makes Himself known as your Savior, your King, your Deliverer.

I believe we live in a time of great skepticism and growing mistrust and yet skepticism of truth claims and the challenge of discerning what is true and what is not- is not restricted to our modern time. Through John's witness, we see that from the opening verses of the bible through the very end, the story of God we encounter is one who greatly loves this broken material world. Let's remember that in the original creation, God declared the material world good! That includes the stuff of this world, our bodies of flesh and blood.  And even after humankind rebelled against God with broken lives and a broken world being the tragic result, God refused to give up on his world and has chosen to redeem and restore it. In Jesus God came to rescue and redeem our world. The very act of Jesus assuming human flesh, the Word sanctified and hallowed our material bodies and our material world. Jesus is history's greatest miracle and Jesus is our greatest hope.Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4882573522.01.16

Talk 2 God speaks to us in Jesus (Part 1) In the last talk we gave an outline of what the Bible teaches on how God speaks to us. We saw that: God speaks to all humanity through creation He spoke to Israel by the prophets He has finally spoken by his Son He speaks today through the Bible He speaks by his Spirit He speaks through other people Now because this series is primarily about how God speaks to us as Christians today, I won't be developing points 1 and 2 any further. This is because: Although Christians may see more clearly than other people that God speaks through his creation, as we saw in the last talk, God speaks to all people in this way, not just to Christians. The fact that God spoke to Israel in Old Testament times by the prophets has no direct bearing on how he speaks to Christians today. He now speaks by his Son.   It's points 3-6, however, that do have a direct bearing on how God speaks to us as Christians today, and those are the things we'll be dealing with in more detail in the remaining talks. We'll begin in this talk by considering how God continues to speak to us in Jesus. As we have already seen, although in the past God spoke to Israel through the Old Testament prophets, he has now spoken by his Son: In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son (Hebrews 1:1-2). But he has not just spoken. He continues to speak to us through Jesus. Jesus is God's Word to us (John 1:1-2, 14). In Jesus God continues to speak to us in the following ways: God speaks to us in the person of Jesus God speaks to us in the words of Jesus God speaks to us in the actions of Jesus (next time) In these three ways God speaks  to us through Jesus revealing what he (God) is like, teaching us what to believe, and showing us how we should live. God speaks to us in the person of Jesus We have already seen from Hebrews 1 that in these last days God has spoken to us by his Son. But the passage goes on to make a staggering claim about who Jesus actually is: In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven (Hebrews 1:1-3). These verses make it clear that Jesus is none other than God himself. He is the exact representation of his being. Colossians 1 says the same thing: For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him (vv.13-16). Jesus is here described as the image of the invisible God. Putting it simply, both writers are saying, If you want to know what God is like, take a look at Jesus! Jesus himself said the same thing in John 14:6-9: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him." Philip said, "Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us." Jesus answered: "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father… All these verses confirm the truth that in the person of Jesus we see exactly what God is like. As we have seen, God has revealed his existence through creation and from it we have some understanding of what God is like. But that is nothing compared with the way God has revealed himself in Jesus. In Jesus we have a clear picture of who God is. John 1:18 tells us that No one has ever seen God, but the One and Only who is at the Father's side has made him known. Jesus is the full and final revelation of who God is. To see Jesus is to see God. God speaks to us in Jesus and reveals his goodness, his kindness, his compassion, his humility, his patience, and his love. In Jesus we see him healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, feeding the hungry, raising the dead and forgiving sinners. As we look at Jesus in the pages of the New Testament we hear God saying, I LOVE YOU! God speaks to us in the words of Jesus So God speaks to us in the person of Jesus revealing what God is like. But he also speaks to us in the words of Jesus teaching us what to believe. What we believe is important for three main reasons: It what affects we say It influences how we behave It determines our ultimate destiny. Jesus made it clear that what we believe in our heart will affect what we say: The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks (Luke 6:45. Cf. Matthew 12:34). The apostle Paul expresses the same truth when he says: It is written: "I believed; therefore I have spoken." With that same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak (2 Corinthians 4:13, quoting Psalm 116:10). And again In Romans 10:9-10 he says: That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. These verses are not merely an illustration of how what we believe will affect what we say. They show that, when it comes to the matter of salvation, there's a clear connection between believing in Jesus with our heart and acknowledging him with our mouth. If our faith is real, we'll be talking about him. In the following verses Paul goes on to say that salvation is available to anyone who will trust in Jesus (v.11) and that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (v.13). He then goes on to ask: How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? (v.14). So what we believe is important because it affects what we say, and what we say is important because it affects other people. If we believe what Jesus says about himself and tell others about him, we will be sharing with them the truth that can lead to their salvation. As we read the New Testament, then, we should pay attention to what Jesus says. His words are the expression of his heart and he himself is the Word of God and is the expression of his Father's heart. God speaks to us in the words of Jesus teaching us what to believe and tell others. On the other hand, if we believe and say things that are not true we may lead others into error. Secondly, what we believe is important because it influences how we behave. We only have to look around us to see plenty of evidence of this. From a negative perspective, believing something that isn't true can have disastrous consequences. It's evident in the thousands of girls whose lives have been ruined through female genital mutilation (FGM) in countries where there is a tradition of female circumcision. Why do they do this? Because they believe that it's the right thing to do! Belief influences behaviour. That's why what we believe is so important. And as Christians it's the teaching of Jesus that determines what we believe and how we behave. Or at least it should be! We need to believe what he says and put it into practice. In James 2 we're told that believing is not enough. If our faith is genuine it will be expressed in action: What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead (vv.14-17). So when our faith, our belief in Jesus, is real it will be accompanied by action. If we love him we will do what he says – even when it seems crazy! Let me give you one small example. As a teenager I was personally challenged by what Jesus says in Matthew chapter 5: You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also… You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy. 'But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven (vv.38-39, 43-45). Did Jesus mean that literally, or was there another explanation? Now explain it away as much as you like, I couldn't escape the clear meaning of what Jesus said. If someone hit me I was not to hit back. Shortly after coming to this decision, I had an unexpected opportunity to put into practice what I believed. It was a Sunday evening and I was walking home after church. Two boys about my age were coming in the opposite direction towards me. Suddenly, as they got level with me, one of them, without warning, took a swing at me and hit me on the side of my face! I think I was surprised rather than hurt. I didn't know him. As far as I know, he didn't know me. I hadn't done anything that could have offended him. So why did he hit me? I didn't ask, but, remembering Jesus' teaching, I said, ‘I don't know why you did that, but, if it gave you any pleasure, perhaps you'd like to hit the other side now'. How did he react? A look of sheer amazement, an embarrassed laugh, followed by a speedy retreat! Now let me make it clear. I'm not suggesting that Jesus gave us these instructions as a piece of advice on self-defence! I think that in such circumstances we should expect to be hit a second time, but I believe that on this occasion God was honouring my obedience to the words of the Lord Jesus. And I'm not trying to tell anyone else how they should behave. I'm just asking the question, How seriously do we take what Jesus says? John tells us that we love him because he first loved us (1 John 4:19) and Jesus said that if we love him we will do what he says (John 14:15). Finally, what we believe is important because it determines our ultimate destiny. The most important thing Jesus teaches us to believe is to believe in him. Trusting in Jesus is the only way of salvation. The things we have done wrong separate us from a holy God. Our only means of access to God, either in this life or the next, is through Jesus. That's because only Jesus was good enough to take the punishment our sins deserve. In the words of an old hymn: There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin. He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in. Nowhere is this clearer than in John's Gospel where Jesus clearly states: I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6). Peter proclaims the same truth when, talking about Jesus, he says: Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12). And Paul tells us that there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus who gave himself as a ransom for all (1 Timothy 2:5-6). We can't put things right with God by trying to do better or ‘turning over a new leaf'. Our only hope is for God to have mercy on us – and he will, if we put our trust in Jesus. These verses in John 3 could not be clearer: 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. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. 36 Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him. What we believe is vitally important because it affects our ultimate destiny. Next time: God speaks to us in the actions of Jesus

 Audio recordingSermon manuscript:Have you ever had the experience of dreading a day that was coming? Maybe you have dreaded the day when you have to go to the dentist or the day of surgery. Maybe you have dreaded the day when your child is going to leave home. The date is right there on the calendar and only gets closer. Each passing day increases the anxiety. This was Jesus's experience this Holy Week. Did you notice this past Sunday how Jesus was troubled on Palm Sunday? There were some Greeks who wanted to see Jesus. Greeks wanting to see Jesus is different than Jews wanting to see Jesus. Greeks weren't the blood descendants of Abraham. And yet, here they are, wanting to see the Christ. Jesus knew that the hour had come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Jesus said in our Gospel reading on Sunday, “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour'? No, this is the reason I came to this hour.” Jesus knew that he had to drink the cup that the Father gave him to drink. He was going to save all people by being crushed with their iniquities. He isn't looking forward to doing it. He knows he needs to be done. His soul is troubled. On an almost infinitely smaller scale we can understand that. That is how it can be for us when we are dreading that thing in the future. We know we need the surgery. There's no other choice. Sometimes we manage to forget about it, but then, all of a sudden, it hits us again. The soul is troubled. Our reading tonight is from the Thursday of Holy Week. At the beginning of the reading it says, “Jesus was troubled in his spirit.” Yet another thing was falling into place for the dreadful thing that was coming. Jesus was to be betrayed by one of the twelve. Judas sold his soul for a mere thirty pieces of silver. Satan entered him when he took the bread from Jesus. Although he sold his soul so cheaply, he would come to loathe even that paltry sum. When he saw how Jesus was condemned to die he despaired. A horrible, black, pit of despair overtook him. He threw that money back to the Jewish officials and went and hung himself. God save us from despair in this life and in the next! With Judas gone, on his way to the officials who would arrest him, Jesus knew it was just a matter of time. Maybe it's a tiny bit like arriving at the hospital and entering a room where you have to change out of your clothes and into a hospital gown. There's no stopping it now. When Judas left the upper room where Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Passover, it was already dark. Evening had come on that Thursday of Holy Week. Jesus and his disciples left that upper room that evening, walked across the Kidron valley, and up on to the Mount of Olives. There was a garden there name Gethsemane. Jesus liked to go there with his disciples. Now he wanted to go there in order to pray. He asked Peter, James, and John to please stay up and watch and pray with him. He said his soul was sorrowful, even unto death. Then he went on a stone's throw to pray by himself. He said, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. But not my will, but your will be done.” This is holy ground. We have to take the shoes off of our understanding. We won't be able to grasp it completely. Jesus, who is God, asks that the cup should pass from him. Jesus, unlike us, is perfect and remains perfect. Jesus, unlike us, is delighted to fulfill the will of God. Here he asks that the cup might pass from him. How the Son of God could say something like that is beyond our comprehension, but that is what he said. What we can know for certain is that his soul was troubled. His sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood. The weight which was going to crush Jesus was coming. Our sin was going to kill God. Three times Jesus came back to his apostles, but he found them asleep. Jesus's sorrow had rubbed off on them and they were overcome by sleepiness. The third time Jesus returned to the apostles he could see Judas coming with a whole bunch of people. The Jewish authorities were there. They had brought along a whole bunch of soldiers. They had their torches and weapons. Jesus was being sucked down into the Maelstrom. From here he would go to the chief priest's house, from the chief priest's house he would be brought to Pilate's house, and from Pilate's house he would be nailed to a cross. By 9 o'clock, Friday morning, the Son of God would be lifted up, and, to use Jesus's expression, “glorified.” In the midst of all of this, in the midst of Jesus's soul being troubled, on this Thursday, Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper which we continue to observe to this very day as Jesus's disciples. We very easily take this sacrament for granted and think nothing of it. What a shame. This sacrament came at the last possible moment for Jesus. Twice Jesus says, with both the body and the blood, “Do this in remembrance of me.” What we can remember of Jesus is how his soul was troubled. In addition to everything that we have talked about tonight, Jesus knew that he was going to be all alone. Even his heavenly Father would turn his back on his Son, for Jesus cries out from the cross: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus was troubled. The burden that Jesus bore was absolutely unique. Nobody has experienced anything like it, and nobody will ever experience anything like it again. This Jesus did for our redemption. As we do this in remembrance of Jesus we might also remember that Jesus wanted to do all of this for us. Jesus said to his disciples when he instituted the Lord's Supper that he passionately desired to have this Pascha with them. If we were to put that into more colloquial language he said that he “really, really wanted to have this meal with them.” The day of dread was drawing near and was on his mind, but something else was also on his mind. Jesus was really looking forward to the Lord's Supper with his disciples. The reason why Jesus desired to have this sacrament with the disciples must be learned from the Words of Institution. Jesus himself defines this sacrament. He is very specific about it. “This bread is my body which is given for you.” “This cup is the New Testament, the new arrangement between God and man, in my blood, which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” This sacrament is the sacrament of Jesus's death for you. It was instituted at the last hour before the processes that would lead to his death were put into motion. Paul said in our Epistle reading that the sacrament is a proclamation of Christ's death until he comes again in glory. And it is for you. Jesus wants you to have this. Why? So that you may know that you have been reconciled to God by Jesus's death. So that you may have peace on account of Jesus being troubled, chastised and crushed. By this sacrament, by faith in Jesus's words, we may therefore rise above whatever day or event we could possibly be dreading. No matter how dreadful that thing might be, we can rise above it through faith in Jesus, because he has overcome it. – Jesus wasn't able to do that. Jesus wasn't able to transcend his troubles. He bore the full brunt of everything. He drank the cup to its last dregs. We, however, can rise above whatever comes our way. It does not matter if it is disappointment, or sadness, or shame, or death or anything else in all creation. In Jesus God is for us. Who can be against us? Jesus wants us to know this. He really, really wants to have this sacrament with us in order that we may be at peace through faith in him.

I believe we live in a time of great skepticism and growing mistrust and yet skepticism of truth claims and the challenge of discerning what is true and what is not- is not restricted to our modern time. Through John's witness, we see that from the opening verses of the bible through the very end, the story of God we encounter is one who greatly loves this broken material world. Let's remember that in the original creation, God declared the material world good! That includes the stuff of this world, our bodies of flesh and blood.  And even after humankind rebelled against God with broken lives and a broken world being the tragic result, God refused to give up on his world and has chosen to redeem and restore it. In Jesus God came to rescue and redeem our world. The very act of Jesus assuming human flesh, the Word sanctified and hallowed our material bodies and our material world. Jesus is history's greatest miracle and Jesus is our greatest hope.Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4882101822.01.09

Christy finishes her series on rethinking Christmas with a reminder of who Jesus came to be: not just a baby in a manger, but a Savior on a cross. God's wrath, justice, and punishment for sin might not seem like Christmas messages, but Jesus came for one reason -- to die. Unless we remember that, we will always be missing the real magic of Christmas. A God who loved us enough to become one of us, live among us, and take the punishment that we deserved upon Himself. In Jesus God's wrath and love collided. Someone had to die, so God chose that person to be Himself.

A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity Romans 6:3-11 & St. Matthew 5:20-26 by William Klock Our Gospel today is just a short clip from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.  The whole sermon runs for three chapters, from Matthew 5 to Matthew 7.  Luke records a similar sermon preached another time.  You could say that this was Jesus' kingdom manifesto and he probably preached this sermon or something very much like it wherever he went.  And wherever he preached it people responded just as people today respond to it: Jesus starts out his sermon with what we call the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the peacemakers, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.  Jesus tells them that they've got to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  Hearing that we think, “Oh!  That's really nice.  Wouldn't the world be a better place if we all lived that way.”  But as Jesus keeps preaching and as what he says sinks in we think, “But Jesus, that's impossible!”  In verse 20, as today's Gospel begins, Jesus announces: Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.   The Pharisees were the most righteous people around.  They lived their lives, right down to the last detail, as if they were living in the temple itself—the place where earth and heaven intersected.  They weren't priests, but they lived as though they were.  They lived each day as if they were in the presence of God and they encouraged everyone else to repent and do the same.  That, they believed, was how the kingdom would come: when Israel stopped compromising the law and living like the Gentiles.  The problem was that it was next to impossible for an ordinary person to do.  The Pharisees were mostly rich people who didn't have to worry about getting dirty with life.  And yet here's Jesus talking to ordinary people and telling them: If you want to see the kingdom, you've got to do better than the Pharisees. Jesus spoke with authority.  He did amazing things.  People were eager to listen.  People had to have been taken aback when he said this, but they were willing to keep listening.  Maybe he didn't mean what it sounded like he meant.  But then Jesus goes on and it's exactly what he said—the righteousness of the Pharisees doesn't go far enough.  Look at verses 21 and 22: You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.'  But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!' will be liable to the hell of fire.   Sin culminates in violence.  That's the lesson we see in Genesis, back at the beginning of the story.  Cain resented his brother Abel, he hated him, and eventually his hate boiled over and he killed him.  Before long violence broke out everywhere.  The first king in Genesis was praised by the people for his violence.  Genesis says that on the eve of the great flood the earth was filled with violence.  The Lord chose and called Israel to be a light on a hill—to show the nations a better way—and so in the law the Lord told Israel, “Thou shalt not murder.”  But people were still angry and they still hated.  Israel—the people who were supposed to be the light of the world—was boiling over with anger and hatred, the Pharisees against the Sadducees, the Zealots against the Herodians, and everyone against the Romans.  We still struggle with anger and hatred.  Watch or read the news and your blood boils against this person or that group who aren't doing things right.  Your boss is a jerk.  Your husband or your wife knows exactly how to push your buttons.  Your kids don't do what they're told.  Your neighbour is loud and his dogs won't stop barking.  The Prime Minister, your MP, or your MLA, they're destroying the country.  The anger smoulders.  Granted, most of us probably don't seriously think of murdering anyone, but Jesus says that stopping short of murder isn't enough.  It's not the point.  Your anger may not go any further than anger and your hate may not go any further than hate, but it's still not pleasing to God and the person who thinks he's righteous because he satisfied his anger or his hate with brooding, bitterness, name-calling, or cursing instead of pulling a knife or a gun is no more righteous for it. Instead, Jesus offers an alternative: reconciliation. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go.  First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.  Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison.  Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.  (Matthew 5:23-26) No matter how you read it, this is a challenge.  But it's more challenging than it might seem at first glance.  We tend to read it as if Jesus is talking directly to us.  We picture ourselves coming to worship on a Sunday and as we put our offering in the plate or as we come to the Lord's Table we realise that we need to go and reconcile with a brother or sister.  But Jesus isn't talking directly to us.  He was talking to people who lived in Galilee two thousand years ago.  What he's actually describing is one of these people making the three- or four-day trip down to Jerusalem to go to the temple.  They make the long trip, wrangling an animal for sacrifice all the way there.  Jesus describes that person going to the Temple, but as he leads the animal to where the priests offer the sacrifices, as he's reminded of God's love and God's holiness, he's also reminded of his own sin—how because of his own hate or his own anger he's at odds with, separated from some person he should be close to.  He's gone to all this trouble to make things right with God, but done nothing to make things right with his brother.  Back at home.  In Galilee. Jesus didn't really expect that this person would run back home to Galilee to make things right and leave the animal there in the temple for a week.  But Jesus' point stands.  The kingdom way is not patting yourself on the back for hating your neighbour but not actually killing him.  The kingdom way is reconciliation.  And it contrasts not just with the righteousness of the Pharisees, but the general attitude of Jews and everyone else.  The Pharisees tried to live their lives as if they were perpetually, every day and in every thing, in the temple, in the presence of God.  And yet it wouldn't have occurred to many of them, even if they were in the actual temple itself, that to come before the presence of our holy and loving God, to come before his presence seeking reconciliation—that was the point of the sacrifice Jesus describes—while being angry and at odds with a neighbour or a brother or a sister made a mockery out of the whole thing. Jesus says: Yes, live each day as if you were living in the temple, living in God's presence.  The Pharisees are right about that.  But that means understanding and appreciating that God has forgiven you and reconciled you to himself and that you need to make love and reconciliation part of your own life.  You can't live deliberately at odds with someone, you can't wilfully hold onto your anger and bitterness towards someone if you're going to live before the holy and loving God who has forgiven you. This is what it looks like to be God's people.  This is what it means to be salt and light.  This is what it means to be Israel.  But that's not what Israel was doing.  Jesus warns the people to reconcile before they wind up in court.  Again, to understand what Jesus is saying we have to remember to whom he was speaking.  The Jews were waiting eagerly for their day in court.  They were going to drag their enemies before the Lord and they prayed that day would come soon so that the Lord could rain down judgement on those enemies.  But that's not what it looks like to be the salt of the earth or the light of the world.  And so Jesus warns: Your day in court will come, but it may be your enemies who win.  Judgement may fall on you instead—because you haven't been salt and light.  As Jesus continues preaching this theme gets stronger and stronger.  To be light means to seek reconciliation because to be light means shining the reconciling love of God into the anger and hate of the world.  And if that sounds hard to us, it sounded even harder to Israel.  The Jews had suffered centuries of defeat and exile and oppression and persecution.  If any people had a right to be angry, to hate, to lash out with violence, to pray for judgement they did.  But Jesus warns: That's not the way.  Not the way for Israel and not the way for us.  The reconciliation Jesus talks about, this loving your neighbour even though you have every right to hate him, all of this sounds impossible.  We all have people in our lives that are impossible to love.  It can't be done.  Until we look at Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, think of Jesus.  He was scorned and rejected.  He was mocked and beaten.  He was killed in the most brutal and humiliating way imaginable.  He didn't deserve any of it.  He was God himself.  In Jesus God humbled himself and took on our flesh.  He became one of us.  Specifically, he became Israel's representative, he took up the mission God had given her, the mission she had failed at so miserably, he took her punishment on himself, and being lifted on the cross on that hill outside Jerusalem he was lifted up as the true light of the world.  He embraced sin and returned love and in that God's light was blindingly beautiful. And now we need to leave Matthew and turn to Paul and our Epistle from Romans.  We're jumping into the middle of Romans, but to this point Paul has been talking about grace and Jesus dying for the sins of his people.  It is by grace that sin is forgiven, he says, and wherever sin abounds, grace abounds even more.  And so he anticipates someone then saying, “Oh well, then, if grace is so good, we should keep living in sin in order to receive more grace.”  And Paul writes, “No!  Absolutely not.  We've died to sin.  How can we then live for sin?  We can't!”  It's not very different from hearing Jesus tell us to do the impossible—to reconcile with and to love our enemies.  How can we do that?  And Paul reminds us: It was impossible, but something's changed.  We've died to sin and that changes everything.  He goes on in Romans 6:3-4. Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.  For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. Baptism changes everything.  Again, just as we need to imagine ourselves as First Century Galileans when we hear Jesus preaching we need to remember that Paul, too, was writing to mostly Jewish Christians only a few decades later.  When we do that what we realise is that in Romans Paul is retelling Israel's story and in Romans 6, as he writes about Baptism and what it means and does, he's simultaneously telling the story of Israel's exodus from Egypt. Israel cried out to the Lord from the misery of her slavery and oppression.  The Lord heard and he sent Moses.  Moses led the people out of their bondage and into the Promised Land and that journey began at the Red Sea.  They entered the sea as slaves and they came out the other side a free people, their captors crushed and drowned under the waves.  And yet they had to pass through the wilderness.  It took longer than the people expected.  They grumbled a lot and even got angry with the Lord and with Moses and talked about going back to Egypt.  But the Lord led his people—a cloud by day and fire by night—and eventually they entered the Promised Land. Again, the Israelites entered the Sea slaves and they came out the other side a free people.  And Paul uses this to illustrate what happens in baptism.  We go into the water dead and we come out alive.  We go into the water slaves to sin and death and we come out free people.  And that's what makes Jesus' impossible calling possible.  It's what makes possible a righteousness greater even than the righteousness of the Pharisees.  Paul says that in our baptism we are united with Jesus in his death and resurrection.  God called Israel to be salt and light.  No matter how hard she tried she couldn't do it.  But Jesus came as the true Israelite.  His life and ministry embodied Israel's calling.  He even followed Israel's pattern symbolically in his own baptism and his own forty days in the wilderness.  And then he took on himself the crucifixion that Israel deserved.  His enemies killed him, but instead of returning judgement and violence on them, instead of cursing them, he responded by praying to his Father: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  Sin and death, anger and hate did their worst to Jesus at the cross and Jesus overcame them with love and with sacrifice.  Impossible?  For human beings who have only their own sinful wills to rely on, yes.  But not for Jesus and not for those who have been baptised into the death and resurrection of Jesus.  We are not who we once were.  Earlier in Romans Paul describes what we used to be as being “in Adam”.  By birth we are part of the old humanity, fallen and enslaved to sin.  By virtue of our baptism we are born again.  We are now “in Christ”—in the new Adam, in Jesus the Messiah. This is what Paul means when he writes in verses 6 and 7: We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.  For one who has died has been set free from sin. Sometimes sin comes knocking at the door and it seems impossible to say no.  Sometimes that certain person who irritates us comes around and we know we should forgive and love them but it seems impossible.  It feels like we're still slaves to sin.  All sin has to do is show up, give us a little wave, and we cave in to it.  But Paul says, No!  That old self is dead.  It was crucified with Jesus.  We are no longer slaves.  We have been set free from bondage to sin.  Like Israel wanting to go back to Egypt, it's easy to be tempted to go back to that bondage.  The wilderness isn't an easy place to be, but the Lord is with us anyway.  And Paul stresses that we need to remember that sin no longer has any hold on us.  We're new and free people in Christ. Paul goes on: Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.  We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.  For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.  So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.  (Romans 6:8-11) Jesus burst alive from the tomb that first Easter.  Other people, like Lazarus, had come back from the dead too, but Jesus' resurrection is different.  Lazarus had to die again, but Jesus has gone through death and come out the other side into a kind of life that death can never touch and, Paul says, if we are in Christ then we have a share in this new life. We're not there yet.  We too still have to face death, but we live in hope knowing that like Jesus we will come out the other side of death alive in a way we never have been before—alive in the way that God truly intended us to be when he created us.  But what about today?  Sin and death can't touch our future, but what about our present?  Jesus' calling still seems impossible so much of the time.  And this is why Paul makes this point.  Our baptism pulls our future hope into the present.  It takes the life of Jesus and his victory over sin and death and applies it to us today.  There's a change whether we feel it or not.  The Israelites didn't necessarily feel any different on one side of the Red Sea than they had on the other, but everything was still different for them.  They had been slaves; now they were free.  And just so for us.  We are no longer in Adam; we are in Christ.  Jesus has poured God's Spirit into us and the Spirit is at work to renew our minds and regenerate our hearts as we live in this in-between time. In verse 11 Paul says that we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ.  That word “consider” is an accounting term that Paul uses.  And here's his point.  When you send your books to your accountant he adds everything up and gives you the bottom line.  His reckoning doesn't change your financial situation.  Nothing about your situation has actually changed by the fact that your accountant has added up your profit and loss columns.  But that bottom line he reckons for you shows you in fact where you stand.  It might mean you've got money you need to invest or creditors you need to pay or it might mean you need to cut back and tighten your belt.  Adding up your profits and losses doesn't itself have an impact on the health of your business, but it does make you aware of it and it tells you what you need to do. And so Paul looks at the cross and he looks at the empty tomb and he looks at the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost and everything else and he says: I've done the math and it says that you are in Christ.  You are dead to sin and alive to God.  Now start living that way! Is it a challenge?  Of course.  Jesus was baptised, the heavens opened up, the Spirit descended on him and the Father spoke, “This is my Son.  With him I am pleased”.  And then the Spirit sent Jesus straight into the wilderness to battle the devil.  The Lord led Israel out of Egypt through the miraculous parting of the sea, he was present with her, giving the law and leading as cloud and as fire and yet he led her straight into the wilderness.  And we too.  We're baptised and the Lord sends us straight from the Font into the world.  There's a reason why, in our baptism, we're called on to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil.  All three will come after us.  They'll tell us that nothing has changed.  They'll tell us that following after Jesus is impossible.  They'll tempt us to give up or at least to compromise.  When others sin against us, when they hurt us, when they wrong us the temptation comes saying: “It's okay, be angry or be bitter.  Get that person out of your life—you don't need them.  Hey, look how well you're doing!  You didn't kill them!”  Brothers and Sisters, that's sin calling.  Jesus calls us to seek to reconcile.  Jesus calls us to embrace the wrongs that others do to us and to return those wrongs with grace.  Jesus calls us to break the cycle of anger and hate and violence.  And when it seems impossible, remember your baptism, remember that you have died and risen again with Jesus, remember that he has poured his Spirit into you and then in faith live the impossible life that he has made possible.  Not only will you and I see the kingdom of God, the people all around us will see it too. Let us pray: Gracious Father, you have poured your gracious love into us poor sinners by giving your own Son as a sacrifice.  Teach us to pour that love back out to the world.  When it seems impossible to break the cycle of sin and anger and hate, remind us of our baptism and that we have in faith trusted in your promise of forgiveness and life in Jesus.  Remind us that we have died with him and risen with him and that sin and death no longer hold us captive.  Teach us to live for righteousness that the world might see Jesus and his kingdom through us.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday St. John 3:1-17 by William Klock The Feast of the Holy Trinity was introduced in the early Tenth Century by Stephen, the Bishop of Liége in Belgium.  It caught on quickly and became popular in the churches of the Low Countries, Germany, and England.  For hundreds of years there had been a tradition of a private mass, said by the priest each Sunday that honoured the Trinity, but this feast day sort of went public with it—made a much bigger deal of it.  But our lessons today go back long before the Sunday after Pentecost was observed as Trinity Sunday.  Typically, when we have a major feast on the calendar—like Christmas or Easter or Pentecost—there’s a Sunday before or after that fleshes it out, that explains what was going on when that event happened.  And that’s what our lessons—particularly our Gospel—today were meant to do for Pentecost.  But when Trinity Sunday came along no one changed the lessons, because here we see the Trinity revealed in the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, we see the Trinity revealed as Israel’s story reaches its climax in Jesus and as the Spirit is poured out on God’s people. In Jesus the new Israel was born and our Gospel today sort of bridges the gap between the old Israel at Mt. Sinai and the new Israel at Pentecost. Nicodemus comes to visit Jesus.  He came at night, which suggests he was afraid of being seen.  He was one of the Pharisees—not all of them were bad or hostile to Jesus, but they were the ones who had it all figured out and Jesus didn’t fit well into their thinking.  He’d been watching and listening to Jesus.  He saw the God of Israel at work.  He says to him, “Rabbi, we know that you’re a teacher who’s come from God.  No one could do these signs you’re doing unless God is with him.” Nicodemus knew the story.  He knew the God of Israel.  But he knew there was more to it.  As he’d watched and listened to Jesus he’d figured that out.  Jesus was talking about the Lord doing another great work, of the Lord leading his people in another exodus, this time more significant than the last one from Egypt.  It didn’t fit into his Pharisaical paradigm, but there had to be something to it, because the Lord was so clearly with Jesus. And Jesus picks up on the question implied in Nicodemus’ statement.  He says, “The central truth you’re missing, Nicodemus, is that you’ve got to be born again to see the kingdom of God.”  Nicodemus understood so much.  If anyone wanted to see God’s will done and his kingdom come on earth as in heaven it was the Pharisees.  That’s what they lived for.  And Nicodemus saw it in Jesus, but Jesus wasn’t preaching what the Pharisees were preaching.  Jesus is saying to him that what he’s missing is this new birth, this being born again. And Nicodemus doesn’t get it.  “How can I be born again, Jesus?  I know you’re not talking about returning to my mother’s womb, but what do you mean.  A person is only born once.”  You see, what Jesus is getting at is this idea that Israel needs to be put back on track so that she can fulfil her mission—the one given to Abraham almost two thousand years before.  And this idea of birth would have resonated particularly with someone like Nicodemus.  To be a Jew was all about being born as part of Abraham’s family.  Other things like circumcision and what you ate (or didn’t eat) were important too and especially so for the Pharisees, but those things were important because they identified you as part of Abraham’s family.  They also drew a clear boundary between those who were in the family and all the uncircumcised, unclean gentiles were most definitely not. What Jesus is saying now is that being born into Abraham’s family in the way the Jews had been thinking about it all this time wasn’t enough.  In fact, it never had been enough.  And Nicodemus should have known this.  For almost two millennia people were being born into Abraham’s family and God’s kingdom still hadn’t come.  For almost two millennia people were born into Abraham’s family and still the Gentiles hadn’t experienced the Lord’s blessing through them, at least not on the large scale envisioned in the Scriptures.  Just the opposite.  Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Gentiles would be grabbing hold of Jews by their clothing saying, “Take us with you, because we hear that God is with you!”  Instead, because of the way most of Abraham’s children were living, the nations mocked them and taunted them saying, “Where’s your God now?”  It takes more than being born of the flesh of Abraham. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, unless you’re born of water and the Spirit you cannot enter God’s kingdom.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”  Israel needs something more than a biological inheritance.  What does Jesus mean, though, when he talks about being born of water and the Spirit?  This was what John the Baptist was preaching about.  God was about to lead his people in a new exodus.  As Israel had been led through the waters of the Red Sea to become a covenant family, so John was calling people to pass through the waters of the Jordan—a step of repentance and faith—and into a new covenant.  Nicodemus needed that baptism of repentance.  He needed to turn aside from his own misguided expectations of the kingdom and of the Messiah.  But remember what John promised.  When people asked if he was the Messiah he said that he was only the forerunner.  John said, “I baptise you with water, but he will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.”  And that’s just what Jesus does.  As we recalled last week on Pentecost, Jesus takes those who have repented, who have turned aside from every false lord, from every false god, from every false source of security in order to take hold of him in faith by passing through the waters of baptism and he plunges us into the Holy Spirit.  And it’s the Spirit who does the work of transforming us.  It’s the Spirit who regenerates us.  It’s the Spirit who causes us to be born again as he takes our old dead wood and unites it to the life of Jesus, causing us to bear fruit. In our baptism we’re back at the Red Sea.  There was the parted sea and God calling Israel to pass through to freedom and new life on the other side.  There was no receiving of the law in Egypt; they had to cross to the other side of the sea to find covenant with the Lord.  And so we stand at the waters of baptism today.  In them Jesus gives his promise: Repent, turn aside from every false way, trust me, follow me in faith and you will find forgiveness of sins and new life through the Spirit.  To pass through the waters of baptism is to take hold of Jesus’ promise and to be born again of water and the Spirit. But, again, this didn’t fit what Nicodemus knew.  “How can this be so?” he asks.  And Jesus asks a bit incredulously, “How can you not know this?  You’re one of the teachers of Israel!”  Nicodemus knew the story.  He understood how Israel had so miserably failed in her mission.  In fact, that’s what the Pharisees were all about: Calling Israel to be more faithful to the law so that the Lord would return to her.  Jesus tells Nicodemus: God has heard cries and is visiting his people and he’s doing it in me.  I’m the son of man, the one spoken of by Daniel all those years ago.  I can tell you reliably the things of heaven because I’m the one who has come down from heaven. I suspect that things must have started to sink in for Nicodemus at this point.  He started to understand, because now Jesus really starts to correct what was wrong with Israel’s thinking about herself, about what it meant to God’s people, and about what it would mean for the Lord to come to deliver them.  Jesus reminds Nicodemus of an event from Israel’s time in the wilderness.  The Israelites grumbled against Moses—which was ultimately grumbling against the Lord—and so he sent poisonous snakes into the camp.  They bit people and many of those who were bitten died.  But the Lord also gave Moses the remedy.  He told Moses to cast a snake out of bronze and to mount it on a pole.  Anyone who would look up to the bronze snake would be healed. And now Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up that snake in the wilderness, so the son of man must be lifted up so that all who believe in him may have eternal life.”  Jesus is pointing to his own crucifixion.  As the snake was the affliction of the people lifted up for them to look at, so Jesus will take our affliction on himself—our sin and the punishment for it—and be lifted up on the cross.  He will be lifted up for all to look upon—to see the horror and the gravity of our sin, to see that the wages of sin is death.  But we will also see Jesus taking it all on himself and in that the horror and ugliness of his being raised up becomes an act by which he is glorified.  In the cross we see the love of God made manifest in Jesus.  And Jesus says in the familiar words we all know, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” Jesus corrects the central error in the thinking of Israel in his day.  They were hoping and praying for the day when the Lord would come, not just to vindicate his people, but to judge their enemies—to rain down fire and brimstone on the Romans and all other gentiles.  But instead Jesus tells Nicodemus that he’s come not to condemn, but to save all who will look to him.  All.  The Jews looked forward to the condemnation he would bring, but Jesus says he’s come not to condemn, but to save.  And this is where the part about being born again of water and the Spirit comes into play.  Being born of water and the Spirit supersedes biology and genealogy.  In Jesus God opens his arms to welcome Jew and Gentile alike.  Abraham’s family is still central and important, but Jesus reminds us that genes and DNA were never really what made anyone part of Abraham’s family; it was about faith.  It was faith for Abraham himself and it was faith in God’s promises for all who followed after: for Isaac and Jacob, for Joseph and Moses and Joshua, for gentiles like Rahab and Ruth, and even for the great kings like David and Solomon.  And God’s promise was that through his covenant people, through these people who knew him in faith and were reconciled to him by faith, he would bless the nations.  It happened here and there in the Old Testament.  Rahab and Ruth are two of many small-scale testimonies to that, but here we finally see the Lord’s promise coming to full fruit.  It’s what we celebrated last week on Pentecost as Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on these men of Israel gathered from around the world.  They had heard Peter preach about Jesus and what he’d come to do.  They rallied to Jesus in faith and in response Jesus poured his Spirit into them.  Finally, through Jesus Israel became the source of blessing she was intended to be—not by flesh, but by the Spirit—as these men and women took the good news to the nations: Jesus is Lord.  He has conquered sin and death.  In him is the forgiveness of sin, in him is life, in him God has returned to his Creation as King.  And in him—the Incarnate Word—God makes himself known.  In Jesus, God Incarnate, we have the restoration and fellowship with our Creator that he has been working towards ever since the day we rebelled and were cast out of his presence.  In Jesus God’s kingdom—his new creation—has been inaugurated, in us and through us in the world.  In Jesus and in us, his people, the promises made to Abraham are being fulfilled and we see that the blessing of God to the nations is for them to know him and to be reconciled to him in Jesus and the power of the Spirit. Let us pray: Almighty God we praise you this morning for the grace you have shown us.  Even as we rebelled against you, our good Creator, you were setting in motion our redemption: Father sending, calling, electing; Son speaking, coming, dying, rising; and Spirit uniting, renewing, regenerating, empowering.  In the redemption of the world we see the glory of the Trinity and the majesty of the Unity and in gratitude we fall before you with the angels to sing, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty.”  By your grace, keep us strong in faith, O Lord, but keep us also faithful in our witness and our ministry to make your redeeming love known to the world.  We ask this through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.  Amen.  

PRINCIPLESIn Jesus, God has given us a great and powerful representative in His presence. In Jesus God provided struggling sinners better access to Him than Old Testament believers ever had.The ministry of Old Testament priests did not produce godly people.Jesus’ ministry for us is effective because it is eternal.Jesus’ ministry for us is effective because Jesus has spotless character.Jesus’ sacrifice was effective as it was once for all and there is no need for it to be repeated.APPLICATIONSOffer praise and thanksgiving to God for the greatness of the ministry which Christ has for you.Let us take some time and just be in awe of Jesus and His greatness. With this chapter, let us think of the ways He has not only granted us greater access to the Father, but also how He makes us pure and holy, because He is and always has been pure, holy, and eternal.Find hope in the fact that Christ is able to save you completely and for all eternity.Cast the burden of your sins on Christ because His sacrifice has paid for all your sins. No matter what you have failed at, give that guilt and shame to Christ.Make no excuses for your own failures. Confess your sins and repent of them. And claim strength and forgiveness from Christ to move forward in obedience.For more information about this show, which includes additional notes and details, please visit the show page here or visit our home page at SeekingourGod.comMusicLife of Riley by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3976-life-of-rileyLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas Isaiah 61:1-3 & St. Matthew 2:19-23 by William Klock If Joseph’s hometown was Bethlehem, how did Jesus end up in Nazareth?  Well, St. Luke tells us that at the time he was betrothed to Mary, Joseph was already living in Nazareth.  He doesn’t tell us why.  Maybe it was due to the availability of work, but in the end we’re never told.  Due to the Emperor’s census, he and Mary travelled back to Bethlehem and the Gospels indicate that they stayed there for quite some time, probably about two years, before fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath.  But how did the family end up back in Nazareth?  Enter St. Matthew with today’s Gospel: But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.”  And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel.  But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee.  And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.  (Matthew 2:19-23) This is a continuation of Matthew’s telling of the nativity as read in the Gospel for the Sunday after Christmas and then, following after that, the Gospel for the Feast of the Holy Innocents.  Of course, we didn’t read either of those Gospels this year, but today’s continues the story nevertheless and I’ll give a little recap to give some context. At the beginning of Chapter 2 the wise men arrive in Jerusalem, following an unusual star—some think it may have been a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn as we saw last week.  In those days the planet Jupiter was associated with kings and many associated Saturn with the Jews.  Seeing their conjunction the wise men—astrologers from the East—concluded that a great king had been born in Israel.  Of course, this is just one explanation.  For all we know the star could have been some other natural phenomenon provided in God’s providence or it may have been an entirely supernatural event.  At the end of the day we don’t know.  But whatever it was, the it signalled the birth of the King of the Jews to these magi.  They naturally went Jerusalem and to the place of King Herod, but he knew nothing about it.  He sent them on their way, but he was troubled.  It’s highly doubtful that Herod would have considered this a serious threat, but he decided to “take care” of any potential problem, just in case.  He asked the wise men to stop on their way home to tell him what they had found.  When they returned by a different route, Herod decided the safest course of action was to murder all the baby boys in Bethlehem, two years old and younger. And so Herod’s soldiers marched to nearby Bethlehem.  There were probably ten to twenty little boys two years and younger in the small town.  They weren’t hard to find.  There having been a census not long before might have made it even easier.  It’s an awful story that the Church commemorates every December 28th.  It’s difficult to imagine soldiers murdering little children, and yet we see it today on the news and on the internet.  Families, fathers, mothers, and little children massacred in war and in genocide.  Sunni children killed by Shia militiamen in Iraq, Christian children cut in two by Islamic State militants, Arab families with their infants burned alive by Jewish settlers while they sleep in their homes.  And lest we think these awful things only happen in far away countries, we have our own atrocities here.  It makes it easier that so many deny their humanity and that we do it in clean medical facilities, but we murderer our own unborn by the tens of thousands every year in this country and millions more do so around the world.  God created us to be his friends and to rule his Creation in his name, but in our rejection of him we have become a cruel and barbaric race, subjecting each other to unspeakable things—the strong running rough-shod over the weak. We wonder how Herod could do such a thing, but just remember that this was a man who murdered his own family just to make sure he had no rivals.  He even murdered his own wife.  As he was on his death bed he issued an order that the leading citizens of Jericho be murdered—so that there would be people crying at his funeral.  He was an evil and brutal man and the people under his rule suffered for it.  When we think of the oppression that the Jewish people lived under in the time of Jesus we usually think of the Romans, but Herod was there too and while the cruelty of the Romans was usually predictable, Herod’s was not—it was often chaotic and arbitrary. When St. John opens his Gospel by talking about light coming into the darkness, this is the sort of darkness he had in mind.  And Jesus was born right in the middle of it.  This is what so many people simply couldn’t grasp.  They expected the Messiah to come as a great warrior—like King David, but much more glorious and powerful—to drive away the darkness.  They expected him to turn the tables.  But that’s just it.  Turning the tables too often results in the oppressed becoming the new oppressor.  Just look at where the current Post-modern philosophy of victimhood is leading our society today.  No, Brothers and Sisters, God had something much better in mind—something to stop the whole cycle of evil and sin.  And so, instead of being born in a palace to people with power, Jesus was born to an ordinary couple in the midst of the chaos and upheaval created by the Emperor’s census and then became a refugee, fleeing the darkness—to Egypt, of all places. Why? Consider the names that the angel revealed to Joseph before Jesus was born.  Joseph was understandably upset when he found out Mary was pregnant.  He was prepared to quietly divorce her.  But then the Lord spoke. “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”  (Matthew 1:20-21) And Matthew comments on this, saying:   All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,   and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us). (Matthew 1:22-23) You shall call his name Jesus.  There was nothing particularly unusual about the name “Jesus”.  It was pretty common, in fact.  In Hebrew it was “Yeshua”, one of several very common variants of “Joshua”.  It means “Yahweh saves”, “The Lord saves”.  And it was such a common name precisely because of the darkness in which the people lived.  They were desperate for the Lord to save them and we know that especially in the time in which Jesus was born the people were particularly expectant—the worse things got, the stronger their hopes became—and things were horrible.  And so as Joshua led God’s people into the promised land, Jesus was sent to lead his people in a new and bigger and better exodus into a new and bigger and better promised land.  In the first exodus the Israelites became a nation and were delivered from the bondage of Egypt; in this new exodus all humanity is to join in Jesus as the new Israel and in him the Lord will save them—save us—from our bondage to sin and death. And yet it’s in Matthew’s commentary that we see the “how” of it all.  This he says is to fulfil what Isaiah spoke: “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son and he shall be called Immanuel, which means ‘God with us’.”  Matthew quotes from Isaiah 7:14.  It’s interesting that no one before Matthew ever seems to have understood this passage as pointing to the future Messiah.  Isaiah had spoken these words over seven centuries earlier and he spoke them to King Ahaz of Judah.  It was another very dark time for the Lord’s people.  The king of the northern tribes of Israel had made an alliance with the king of Syria and they laid siege to Jerusalem.  King Ahaz and his people were scared, but through the prophet the Lord exhorted them to stand firm in faith.  They were to trust him and he would vanquish their enemies and this promised child was a sign.  A young woman—the Hebrew doesn’t demand we translate it necessarily as “virgin”—perhaps Ahaz’s wife or daughter or Isaiah’s own wife, would bear a son and before he’s old enough to know the difference between good and evil the Lord would make good on his promise to deliver his people.  The child was to be prophetically called “Immanuel—God with us”, giving assurance to the people that the Lord had heard their cries from the darkness, that he would visit them, and that he would deliver them. Just as the exodus in the days of Moses became an image of the ministry of Jesus leading his people out of sin’s bondage, that baby—Immanuel—born in the reign of Ahaz became another image of Jesus’ ministry.  In him God once again had heard the cries of his people from the darkness—the darkness of Herod, the darkness of Caesar—in Jesus he visited his people, and in Jesus he delivered them.  Even more so, Jesus is literally “God with us”.  In him God took on our human flesh, becoming one with us.  He was born not in some privileged palace to wealthy or nobles parents, but to a humble couple just as they were being submitted to the indignity of Roman rule.  Almost immediately he was made a refugee by the wicked and murderous King Herod.  In Jesus God is truly with us in every way imaginable, sharing our nature, sharing our life, sharing our pain, sharing our griefs, sharing our humanity—sharing our everything.  Jesus has come into the darkness and into the pain and into the grief.  This is how the Lord saves. Joseph and Mary’s flight to Egypt underscores just how Jesus came into the midst of the darkness and not just that he’s come and joined us in it, but that he’s found us in the darkness and so that he can lead us out.  After telling us about the angel warning Joseph to flee to Egypt, Matthew tells us that this took place to fulfil what the prophet Hosea wrote: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”  But Hosea wasn’t looking forward to the Messiah—to Jesus—when he wrote those words.  He was talking about Israel.  Israel was the Lord’s son and the Lord called that son and rescued that son out of Egypt.  And now Jesus is constituting a new Israel where the old Israel had failed.  He is the Lord’s Son and the Lord will call him from Egypt as he once did Israel.  Matthew points to Jesus as the fulfilment and the culmination of Israel’s story. And then as Matthew writes about the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem, he quotes from Jeremiah’s prophecy: “A voice was heard in Ramah,   weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children;   she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Matthew 2:18) It seems like an odd passage to quote.  When Jeremiah wrote those words he was writing to the people of Judah during their exile in Babylon.  It’s a passage, first, of mourning.  The children of Rachel had lost everything.  Think of the darkness of the world.  Israel had lost it all: their land, their prosperity, their temple.  Everything that the Lord had promised and everything that reminded them of their status as the Lord’s people had been taken away—even his presence, that cloud of glory that had rested in the holy of holies was gone.  Had the Lord forgotten them?  That was what they asked as they wept by the river of Babylon.  But Jeremiah then wrote about the Lord renewing his covenant with Israel.  When she had repented he would restore her to the land he had promised and he would make her prosperous again.  Eventually the Lord did restore Israel.  She returned from exile.  She rebuilt Jerusalem and rebuilt the temple.  But the darkness remained.  Matthew was writing to a Jewish audience and they would have seen here again Jesus, the Messiah, coming into the darkness to rescue the people from exile and to restore the Lord’s covenant with them. And, finally, at the end of today’s Gospel we’re told that when the family returned from Egypt and heard that Archelaus was in power, Joseph decided to settle the family in Nazareth—about as far from Archelaus as he could get.  In his providence, the Lord had provided a connection for Joseph with this little, relatively remote village.  And Matthew says in verse, 23, that this was “so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.” Again, Matthew doesn’t use or quote the prophets the way we might expect him to, as if there’s a one-to-one equation between Isaiah or Jeremiah and the events surrounding Jesus’ birth.  Verse 23 continues to raise questions after two thousand years, because there is no mention of Nazareth anywhere in the Old Testament.  None of the prophets says anything about Jesus being a Nazarene.  The most likely explanation is that Matthew was making a word play.  In Isaiah 11:1 the prophet wrote about the Messiah: There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,   and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.   They key word is the word “branch”.  In Hebrew the word is nazir, which sounds like Nazareth or Nazarene.  It’s not the sort of thing we would do with an Old Testament text, but it’s just the sort of sounds-like word game that was common then.  The point is that Jesus has a royal lineage.  The Lord had established a covenant with David that his house would be established forever.  In the course of history, David’s house eventually fell.  No descendant of David ever returned to the throne after the exile, but the covenant was still there.  A shoot from the cut-off and seemingly dead stump of Jesse—David’s father— would one day come forth and that branch—that nazir—would bear fruit. Do you see what Matthew is doing here?  Think of the big picture—the sweep of Israel’s story as it’s told in the Bible.  That’s what Matthew is getting at with these quotes from and references to the prophets.  The three key points of Israel’s story that Luke pointed to were God’s covenant with Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt and his covenant at Sinai, and finally his covenant with David.  Israel’s identity was forged in these covenants and in them she found her hope for the future—and in Jesus all three covenants are brought together and fulfilled.  Matthew now does something very similar.  Quoting Hosea he reminds us of the Exodus.  Quoting Isaiah 11—the passage about the branch or nazir from Jesse—he reminds us of the covenant the Lord established with David.  And quoting Jeremiah 31 he gives a vivid picture of Israel’s need for rescue and of the darkness in which the world was lost.  Again, Jesus didn’t parachute into history at random.  Luke and Matthew both stress that Jesus came when the time was exactly right and that he came as the culmination of Israel’s story.  In him all the covenants and promises the Lord had made to Israel are brought together and fulfilled.  Jesus is Israel, which is why St. Paul can talk about Gentiles like us being grafted into Israel.  John the Baptist warned, as he preached the need for repentance in preparation for Jesus’ coming, that the Lord would lay his axe to the dead wood of Israel while raising children for Abraham from the stones. Brothers and Sisters, this means that you and I are now part of this story—the story that goes back to God’s covenant with Abraham, to the Exodus from Egypt, and to the covenant with David.  All those who are in Jesus the Messiah—all those who have turned aside from everything that is not Jesus and instead have laid hold of him in hoping faith with both hands—share in the great story of Israel and of Israel’s God.  As Jesus came to bring light into the darkness—into the darkness of Caesar’s empire and of Herod’s brutal and murderous cruelty, Jesus has come to bring light into our darkness. Listen to the words of our lesson from Isaiah 61:1-3.  These were the words Jesus preached from in the synagogue in Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry and they were words he claimed for himself.  This is what he came to do.  This is how he came to be light in the darkness. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,   because the Lord has anointed me  to bring good news to the poor;   he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives,   and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,   and the day of vengeance of our God;   to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion—   to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,  the oil of gladness instead of mourning,   the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;  that they may be called oaks of righteousness,   the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.   This is Jesus—the Lord’s salvation.  This is what it looks like for God to be with us.  He has delivered us from bondage to sin and from the fear of death, its wages.  There’s darkness all around.  Again, all we have to do is turn on the evening news, read the paper, or look on the Internet.  The world is lost in darkness.  We may not have to deal with war and genocide here, but we all deal with the fallout of sin in the world around us and our problems are no less real to us.  We deal with sickness and with poverty.  We deal with difficult jobs, difficult people, with broken relationships and with the loss of loved ones.  We’ve spent the better part of a year living with a viral pandemic, confronted by our mortality and reminded that, because of our rebellion against him, we have been cut off from the life he created us to share in.  We have spent a month with our churches closed and I can’t help but think of Israel in exile, cut off from the temple.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has come into the darkness.  He has shared it with us.  He knows and he understands.  And so Jesus speaks good news to us, he binds up our broken hearts.  He takes away the ashes that have been poured on our heads and the sackcloth we’ve been wearing in mourning and gives us beautiful headdresses and garments of praise.  He is light in our darkness.  He is God with us.  Isaiah says that this is so that we will be called “oaks of righteousness” planted by the Lord so that he will be glorified. Having God with us brings amazing transformation.  Imagine the chaos of the world all around, lost in sin, everyone struggling to get on top.  Think of our own suffering and pain and grief.  And then picture what we become when God is with us.  Isaiah says we are oaks of righteousness.  Ordinarily I could tell you to look out the window to the great oaks surrounding our church.  They’re there—on the other side of this wall, hanging over the roof above me.  As our building deteriorated from neglect in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s those trees only got stronger and bigger.  The storms come and go.  Every once in a while one of those big storms damages the church building, but the trees are there as strong as ever.  They’re an illustration of what Jesus has called us to be: light in the darkness, oaks in the storm, standing firm, making him known, providing a place of shelter to any who will come, giving a foretaste of his glorious kingdom and moving everyone around us to give glory to God.  He has not abandoned us.  In Jesus he saves.  In Jesus he has come to be with us—to find us in the dark and to make us light. Let us pray: Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word:  Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

If the story had ended after chapter 3 we might expect to read that the sailors, Jonah, and the people of Nineveh lived happily ever after trusting and believing in God who is merciful and gracious to all! But, no, instead we find Jonah exceedingly angry with God. Nineveh’s evil had risen up before God (1:2). Jonah had begrudgingly preached God’s Word and the Ninevites were transformed. Jonah now steps into the place of Nineveh. He will accuse God of evil. Swallowed by a big fish, Jonah is now swallowed up by his anger. “It’s not fair!” Jonah protests. Evil people should be punished. Where’s the justice?! And there is the lesson God seeks us to learn. In Jesus God’s mercy and grace trumps his justice everytime.

If the story had ended after chapter 3 we might expect to read that the sailors, Jonah, and the people of Nineveh lived happily ever after trusting and believing in God who is merciful and gracious to all! But, no, instead we find Jonah exceedingly angry with God. Nineveh’s evil had risen up before God (1:2). Jonah had begrudgingly preached God’s Word and the Ninevites were transformed. Jonah now steps into the place of Nineveh. He will accuse God of evil. Swallowed by a big fish, Jonah is now swallowed up by his anger. “It’s not fair!” Jonah protests. Evil people should be punished. Where’s the justice?! And there is the lesson God seeks us to learn. In Jesus God’s mercy and grace trumps his justice everytime.

Let the Day Perish Job 3:1-26 by William Klock It’s not easy to really understand something you haven’t experienced.  I’d love to be able to hand the book of Job over to someone else—someone who has a greater grasp of suffering than I do.  As we get to Chapter 3 we transition from the prologue into the dialogue between Job and his friends.  The Lord will eventually, near the end, enter the dialogue, too.  But it begins with a great lament from Job.  And I’m not sure that any of us can grasp the depth of Job’s lament, although I’m sure there are some of you who can grasp, who know that kind of lament, better than I do.  Job has expressed his faith.  “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return.  The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (1:21).  And, later, when his wife told him to give up, to curse God and die, Job responded, “Shall we not receive the good from God, and shall we not receive evil” (2:10).  We’re told that in all this, Job did not sin.  But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t upset, that he didn’t lament, or that he didn’t ask the big question: Why? I can’t say I’ve ever struggled all that deeply with that question.  In the times that bad things have happened to me and I’ve asked “Why?”, it doesn’t usually take much introspection to realise that the answer is that I did something dumb and brought my problems on myself.  Personally, the deepest I think I’ve ever come to lament was on the birth of our stillborn daughter.  It wasn’t until the nurses brought her back to us, dressed in an outfit made by volunteers, and left her with us to grieve that the life and death of this little person—my child, but still a stranger—was real.  Veronica was still sedated from the surgery, but I was left there with this tiny, lifeless child and had to ask, “Why?”  But I can’t pretend that my asking the big question was anything as deep as Job’s asking or that my lament was nearly as deep as Job’s lament.  He’d lost everything, including his ten adult children, and was afflicted himself from head to foot.  It’s not surprising that as I’ve been making my way through the commentaries on Job, I’ve found the evangelical ones tend to be rather shallow, while the best I’ve found have come out of Judaism—from a people who have known deep loss and suffering.  There seem to be a lot of Evangelicals who struggle to deal with Job’s questions.  How can a faithful person ask the things Job is asking?  But people who have truly known suffering have usually asked those questions of God themselves and they understand. So that’s where Job’s at as we get to Chapter 3.  His friends have come to comfort him, but they’re so struck by the situation and by his appearance when they find him on the ash-heap, that they lose all words.  They simply sit with him.  The language describing their actions suggests that they’re treating this as if it were a funeral ritual.  Job might as well be dead. And Job might wish he were dead, but he’s not ready to give up.  His lament is in three parts and he begins by cursing the day he was born.  Look at Job 3:1-10. After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.  And Job said: “Let the day perish on which I was born,          and the night that said,          ‘A man is conceived.’ Let that day be darkness!          May God above not seek it,          nor light shine upon it. Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.          Let clouds dwell upon it;          let the blackness of the day terrify it. That night—let thick darkness seize it!          Let it not rejoice among the days of the year;          let it not come into the number of the months. Behold, let that night be barren;          let no joyful cry enter it. Let those curse it who curse the day,          who are ready to rouse up Leviathan. Let the stars of its dawn be dark;          let it hope for light, but have none,          nor see the eyelids of the morning, because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb,          nor hide trouble from my eyes.   Job doesn’t curse God, but he does curse the day on which he was born and he spares no words to do so.  We get a sense of his overwhelming despair.  No doubt the day he was born was a happy one for his parents.  It had been a happy one for Job, until all this happened.  Now he looks back on the joy with which is parents spoke of his birthday and he says, “Curse the day!”  Curse the day that saw me born and curse the night when my parents conceived me. Next he heaps up words for darkness.  “Let that day be darkness…nor light shine upon it.  Let gloom and deep darkness claim it…clouds dwell upon it; let the blackness of day terrify it.”  This is the language of “de-creation”.  Creation began in the darkness and chaos, and God began his creative work of bringing order and purpose to that chaos by calling for light.  Light symbolises the creative and sustaining hands of God.  Light symbolises his goodness and his care.  Light symbolises the order that God brought out of the chaos of the precreated cosmos.  And so Job calls down darkness on the day he was born.  “May God not seek it out.”  May the day of my birth pass by God unnoticed, unordered, unsustained, for then I might not have been born.  Job laments his very creation.  If only God had been sleeping, not paying attention, or otherwise busy on that day, it might have passed by, Job would never have been born, and he never would have known all this sorrow. While his parents knew joy the night he was conceived, Job calls out to the keepers of Leviathan, the great chaos beast of the sea.  You see, for the Jews—as for many ancient Near Eastern peoples—the sea was a remnant of that pre-creation chaos, a bit of the chaos still untamed.  (This, by the way, is probably why St. John’s vision of the new creation has no sea, not because the sea will literally be gone, but because it’s a symbol of the Lord finishing what he began and leaving nothing to wreak havoc again as the serpent had.)  Leviathan personified the chaos of the sea.  It was a beast of uncreation and Job calls on its keepers to set the great monster loose to curse the day of his birth, wishing that day had never been. Job has lost hope.  Even in the darkest of days, the birth of a child brings hope.  New life coming into the world.  There’s excitement and anticipation.  If you were to ask an expectant mother if she’s looking forward to anything she might think you were crazy.  Of course she’s looking forward to something!  Isn’t it obvious?  Job’s mother and father felt that way once, but Job’s discouragement is so deep that he wishes that day had never happened.  Again, he’s lost all hope.  And so, knowing that he can’t actually curse the day of his birth, he moves from pronouncing a curse to wailing a formal lament for the day.  Look at verses 11-19: “Why did I not die at birth,          come out from the womb and expire? Why did the knees receive me?          Or why the breasts, that I should nurse? For then I would have lain down and been quiet;          I would have slept; then I would have been at rest, with kings and counselors of the earth          who rebuilt ruins for themselves, or with princes who had gold,          who filled their houses with silver. Or why was I not as a hidden stillborn child,          as infants who never see the light? There the wicked cease from troubling,          and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together;          they hear not the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there,          and the slave is free from his master.   If he had to be born, why couldn’t he have been stillborn?  Again, we get sense of the depth of Job’s grief and despair.  He’d rather be dead, in fact, he’d rather know nothing of life itself.  Better the quiet and peace of the grave than the pain he’s known.  He could lie down with kings and counsellors and princes—with great men—and even though dead, they’d be better company than the life he knew. In the grave, the wicked are no longer able to cause trouble.  In the grave the weary finally find rest.  In the grave, the prisoner finally finds release.  In the grave, even the slave finally knows what is to be free.  Had he died at birth, Job would know only the quiet of the grave and, he’s sunk so low, what a blessing that would be! I think that here, if we listen closely to Job, we get a sense of the difference between his perspective and our perspective and we get some insight into where he (and his friends) are coming from as they grapple with the question of justice.  I think, too, that Job offers some push-back against the way that many of us think about this issue as Christians. As Christians Job’s attitude might seem foreign.  Better dead than suffering?  And especially in light of the fact that when Job talks about “dead”, he’s talking about the grave.  As Christians, we may experience evil and pain and suffering in our lives, but we know that no matter how bad it gets, we have a hope the other side of death.  Life—real life, a life that the life we now know is only a shadow of—resurrection to life awaits those who are in Jesus by faith.  Someday, when Jesus has put every enemy under his feet, he will finish the work of new creation that he has begun and the culmination of that will the resurrection of the dead to life in the presence of God.  We may not know justice this side of death, but we can live in hope knowing that all things will be made new someday and that everything that is wrong will be set to rights.  But Job didn’t know that hope and neither did the other Old Testament saints.  Towards the end of the Old Testament period we see a belief in the coming of a future king and of the resurrection of the faithful dead begin to develop—in the writings of prophets like Isaiah—but even then, it wasn’t a well-defined idea.  For the most part, in the Old Testament, there was only the grave.  Their word for it was sheol.  Job doesn’t use sheol in his lament, but he does several times later in the book and that’s what he’s getting at here when he speaks of the grave.  Sheol wasn’t really good or bad.  It just was.  Sometimes it’s used metaphorically to simply point to the grave.  Other times it’s a reference to the afterlife, the abode of those who have died.  It’s neither presented as a place of punishment or a place of reward.  It just is.  Sheol is the great equaliser, the destiny of everyone, rich or poor, good or bad.  The connotation is usually that, at least compared to life, sheol isn’t a pleasant place, but then that really underlines Job’s despair.  To have been still born, to have never known life, to know only this sort of limbo existence in sheol, would be better than his current state. And that there was no punishment or reward to be found in sheol points to Job’s need to wrestle with this question of the justice of God.  For the Old Testament saints, justice was something to be expected in this life.  We see this throughout the psalms, where the psalmists cry out—and expect!—to be delivered from their enemies.  They trust that the Lord will destroy or punish their enemies while they go on to lead a long and happy life.  This was Job’s thinking and it explains his confusion and his frustration with God. Again, I think this can give some needed balance to how we think as Christians.  The Old Testament saints didn’t follow the Lord for or didn’t build their faith around a hope of eternal life with God.  While sheol was not out of God’s reach, it was a place apart from him.  They expected to walk with the Lord and to receive his blessings in life.  And, of course, this is where the Adversary’s challenge came from.  “Is Job only pursuing God for the good stuff he’ll get in return?”  Well, now we’ve seen that, no, Job is pursuing God for God’s sake.  Now, as Christians, Jesus has given us hope greater than anyone knew in the Old Testament.  New Creation has begun and we live in hopeful expectation that Jesus will finish that work and make us a part of it.  But how often are we guilty of the same thing?  We’ve often been guilty of structuring our evangelism around this very problem and when we do that, we lead people astray from the get-go.  We persuade people to faith with the fear of hell and the reward of heaven, but if we leave it at that or if we stress that aspect of things too much, we may very well be making a whole lot of Christians who are serving God not for God’s sake and not pursuing righteousness for righteousness sake, but doing it for the reward.  There are therapeutic ramifications of the gospel, but if we present the gospel as primarily therapeutic, we end up making Christians who are in it for themselves.  Don’t misunderstand.  We need to stand with St. Paul and declare that to live is Christ and to die is gain.  We need to live in hope of life with God in the age to come and we need to declare that hope to the world.  But I think the faith of the Old Testament saints, the faith of people like Job, pulls us back from the future and cautions us against escapist and gnostic fancies and down to earth, prompting us to seek righteousness and justice in life, not just as pie-in-the-sky when we die. Now, in the final part of Job’s lament comes the big question, the one he’s been working towards: Why?  Look at verses 20-26: “Why is light given to him who is in misery,          and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it comes not,          and dig for it more than for hidden treasures, who rejoice exceedingly          and are glad when they find the grave? Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,          whom God has hedged in? For my sighing comes instead of my bread,          and my groanings are poured out like water. For the thing that I fear comes upon me,          and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;          I have no rest, but trouble comes.”   “Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?” asks Job.  There’s some irony here.  Because we, the readers, have been let in on the scene in the Lord’s council, we know that Job had been hedged in.  Job now cries out that the Lord’s hedge is an injustice.  In reality, the Lord’s hedge brought Job incredible blessing, but Job knew nothing of that.  All he can see now, from his vantage point of suffering, is that the Lord has put a hedge between himself and Job.  Job knew the Lord and his fellowship.  He knew the Lord’s blessing.  And now it’s as if the Lord has placed a wall between himself and Job.  Job feels alone and he feels as though he’s in the dark, and from the dark he’s crying out, “Why?”  And it feels like his cries to the Lord are simply bouncing off that wall.  It’s often when we need God the most that he seems the most distant and uncaring.  After his wife died, C. S. Lewis wrote a little book titled A Grief Observed, sort of a journal of his journey through grief.  He experienced this same phenomenon and I think he describes it very well: “This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him…if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once.” I suspect we’ve all been there at some point.  The door seems closed, but we know that God is there on the other side and we can’t give up.  Somehow we have to keep pushing the door, calling over the wall.  Hope—even if all we have left of our hope is a sliver—our hope demands we not give up our pursuit of God. And we see this with Job.  As he cries out he says he’s lost all hope.  He cries out for death.  But, Brothers and Sisters, that he still cries out to God highlights that he really hasn’t lost all hope.  Maybe he thinks he has or maybe he’s just angry and discouraged, but the hope is still there, otherwise he’d give up, turn away from the hedge, and curse the God behind it.  But he doesn’t.  He doesn’t understand how any of this can be.  How can God bring such suffering on a righteous man?  How can such a God be just?  Job wrestles with these questions because he has known this God, because he has known this God and known him to be good, and so his questions become a lifeline—a way of holding fast to God even when his fingers feel like they’re grasping at thin air, even when Job doesn’t realise what he’s doing. We cry out to God from our grief and ask “Why?”, not because we question his goodness, but because we’ve just experienced something very bad and, yet, we know that God is good.  We know it in our heads, in our hearts, in our guts.  We know that God is good.  The evidence of his goodness is there in Scripture on page after page after page.  We know he’s good.  And so we cry out “Why?”  We want to square the circle, to settle our question, to reconcile our present experience with our experience and what we know of God.  From the darkness we cry. And, once again, the gospel meets us in the darkness.  If Job knew God’s goodness well enough to cry out “Why?”, to seek to reconcile his circumstances with what he knew of God, how much better do we know the goodness of God this side of the cross?  We know the goodness of God demonstrated in his humbling himself to be born a human being and to die on a cross for the sake of his enemies.  Brothers and Sisters, the cross assures us of God’s goodness no matter how dark our days, not matter how firmly shut the door, no matter how high the wall.  And it also points us in the right direction to find our answer.  Job asked, “Why?” because he couldn’t reconcile his understanding of justice with what God had done.  Why had God rewarded righteousness with suffering?  Friends, the same thing happened to Jesus.  He who knew no sin suffered.  And yet there was a reason for it.  He who knew no sin became sin for us.  In Jesus we get a glimpse behind the scenes to see that God is bigger than the retribution principle, that God is not a divine vending machine dispensing blessings in return for service.  In Jesus God shows us that his justice is deeper than we can ever fully grasp.  In Jesus we have a glimpse of the perfect wisdom of God at work to bring goodness and blessing the likes of which the Old Testament saints never knew.  They looked for blessings in this life and then expected nothing more than the grave.  But Brothers and Sisters, because of Jesus we know a hope of the life of the age to come, a life in a world set right, a life in a world where we’ll never have to ask “Why?”. Let us pray: Heavenly Father, keep your Son and his Cross ever before our eyes and especially so as we struggle through difficult days.  Keep Jesus and his Cross before us as we struggle to understand and when we ask “Why?”.  Let the cross of Christ be a reminder to us that even when our vision is clouded, even when we’re stumbling in the dark and can’t see where we’re going, even when you seem distant, we can confidently hold onto the knowledge that you are good and that you are there and that you love us.  Strengthen our faith as we walk through difficult days in the shadow of the cross, we ask, that we might hold ever tighter to Jesus.  Amen.

“In Jesus God assures us that, ‘I am not just powerful, I am good”’ Over the last 14 years Steve Znachko has been connected to some amazing things God is doing in Ukraine. He shared yesterday some of the incredible ways he has seen Jesus’ love in difficult situations and how Jesus wants to impact your every day life.

The miracle of God’s grace is in his “with-ness.” In Jesus God comes to be with us, even in the worst of times. Learning to walk with God means learning to walk with one another as God has walked with us.

In Jesus God has Spoken to UsHebrews 1:1-4  Today and next Sunday we’re going to take a break from the book of Isaiah and dig into two powerful passages which explain the meaning of Christmas.  Both of these passages are in the book of Hebrews...