Same Say

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9).

Now we meet this important word confess. It's deeper than just admitting. The Greek term etymological means to "same say," you say the same thing as, so you say the same thing about yourself that God has said about you. You Amen His evaluation of you as being the truth.

This is what leads to that quite common practice in Christian worship of including a confession of sin in the Liturgy when we gather. In Lutheran Churches, we often make this confession in the words: "I, a poor, miserable sinner, confess unto You all my sins and iniquities with which I have ever offended You and justly deserved Your temporal and eternal punishment."

Now that's to say about our sins and what the Word of God teaches us about them. That it is damnable, and that we are indeed poor, miserable, that is, in need of mercy, sinners. But when you uncover your sin like that before God, you have this beautiful promise that God will cover them up with Christ's blood.

He is faithful and just. Just because the blood of Christ has paid for them all to forgive us all our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, to put it in Lutheran parlance, that means to justify you and to sanctify you. The two always go together.

-Pr. Will Weedon

Adopted

God has one "begotten" Son. He adopted the rest! But the Bible never refers to us as adopted children, only as children. "Adopted" is the action God used to make us His children but never used to describe us.

As "children" of wrath" (Ephesians 2:3), we needed God's adoption action. It cost Him. He gave His only-begotten Son so we might become "sons." Through faith in his adoption process of death and resurrection, we receive the inheritance of eternal life and the unparalleled privilege of coming to Him as dear children come to their dear Father.

What positive light this sheds on earthly adoptions! Couples sometimes say, "We want our own child." That's understandable, but there are two ways to get your own child - through birth and through adoption. Once either is accomplished, the couple has not a "birth child" or an "adopted child" but their own child, a gift from God. Rejoice today in your adoption by your heavenly Father.

-Portals of Prayer January 15, 2014

Grandfather In Heaven

We shouldn't hear God is love in some way that guts love into being mere benevolence. C.S. Lewis nailed this: We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, " a good time was had by all."

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. That nails it! God is love, a firey, jealous, wondrous love, and He won't settle. Said another way, He is determined to make you blessedly holy. It is not at all the same thing as making your happiness His top concern.

-Pr. Will Weedon

Incense

Often people have questions as to why we have incense in our church. Incense has deep biblical roots. In the Old Testament, the Lord commands incense to be used. So it's biblical, but didn't those Old Testament things pass away? Yes and no. This brings us to Jesus. When Jesus was born, the Wisemen brought three gifts. Two (frankincense and myrrh) were priestly gifts of incense. When Jesus died, we again encountered these things: Nicademius anointed Jesus' body with incense and a lot of it, anywhere between 70 and 100 pounds. When Jesus emerges alive, what do you suppose He smelled like? Jesus had just been lying in incense for three days.

This is what makes incense pleasing to God the Father. It is the smell of His Son. So when we pray and the Bible pictures our prayers going up before Him as incense (Psalms 141:2). What makes our prayers acceptable to God the Father? The intercession of His Son and our prayers bear the scent of Christ brought up to God and received by Him. Likewise, in the Divine Service, we use incense to mark where the congregation will encounter the living Christ. So every time we smell this, we're to think on Jesus, and we're going to say, that's where I'm going to find Him; I can smell Him. This is the scent of the Son.

-Pr. David Kind

Wine Makes Glad The Heart

Wine makes glad the heart of men; the Bible says that. We sometimes think joy and the goodness of creation are unnecessary, but in fact, it is part of the established order in what God gave, and He wants us to enjoy His creation. There is a sense wine is always luxurious; it's superfluous, and you don't really need it in order to live. But there is something about wine that is needed, not just simply to, you know, grease the social machine, but human beings need to rest, they need to relax, they need to rejoice, and wine aids in that. There's also this reality in the Bible that wine turns a meal into a feast, and wine is associated in the Bible with joy and with the Holy Spirit.

-Pr. David Petersen

Demon Slayer

If you want to be a demon slayer, you got to start hunting the demons in your own room first, and they're not the big wiggly scary boogeyman; they're the ghost of your past. They're the voices that want to tear you down. They're the false stories that you've allowed to be true stories. There's only one antidote, the man Jesus Christ and his holy everlasting word. Grasp it with both hands; seize the righteousness as it is truly given by grace alone, and then don't wallow in the muck, but stand, lift your head, and hit your chest with confidence all the more as you see your death approaching. All the more as you see the day approaching.

-Pr. Jonathan Fisk

Faith

 "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciple." (John 8:31)

Faith can never be a possession. It's not something you stick in your back pocket and treat like your get-out-of-hell-free card. Oh, no! Faith is living, and like every living thing, faith needs food and what faith eats is exactly what begot faith in the first place - the word of Jesus... Faith needs food, or faith will wither, wilt and die, and faith eats the words of Jesus. Or if you think of faith like a plant, then the words of Jesus are its rain and sunshine. Take them away; deprive faith of them, and faith simply cannot go on. God gives faith, not God gave faith; there's a big difference!

Faith is always only a gift. Faith comes from hearing; He didn't say came from hearing, as though you heard it, and now you had it. No, faith comes from hearing, hearing from the words of Christ. So this word is constantly being spoken to us so that our faith continues. It's exactly parallel with- I can't say I breathed, so I don't need to breathe anymore. I ate, so I don't need to eat anymore. I slept, so I don't need to sleep anymore. No, these are gifts you constantly need to receive to go on being. Just in the same way with the word of God in our lives, it is vital that we actually hear it.

In fact, the entirety of the sacred Scripture is Jesus' words inspired by His Spirit. These are not meant to be an occasional guest in your heart and mind. They are not presented to us as mere information; they are always a means of communion. He will come with His words and His Father and His Spirit..." If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. (John 14:23)

Pr. Will Weedon

Christianity and Science

One of the fascinating things about the scientific revolution is that when you look at the luminaries of the events of the late 16th but mostly the 17th century, you come up with names of people like Galileo, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Rene Descartes, Johannes Kepler, and the list goes on. These are names that even schoolchildren bumped into when they studied an outline of the Western European intellectual history of science. These are all people who were deeply committed Christians. If it's the case of the scientific revolution meant reason letting go of religion, it would be odd to set that up in such a way when many of the leaders themselves saw themselves doing God's work.

Take, for example, Kepler, who himself was a Lutheran. He originally thought he would be a Lutheran minister, and he went to seminary but ended up instead going the route of mathematics and astronomy. He was thrilled later on in his life when he came up with his law of planetary motion that his work was being useful; he said, "I originally thought that I would become a preacher seeing that I can glorify God and do God's work this way I'm happy to see myself effectively reading the book of nature."

One of the prevailing metaphors was the metaphor of God's two books, in which he reveals Himself through His words and His works. Many of the scientists of the scientific revolution saw themselves as an exegesis of nature and that they were reading the handy work of God and laying it bare as they were seeking to recover the lost knowledge Adam once had.

Isaac Newton actually wrote more on theology than he did on science. If you took a pile and stacked up all his theological musings, he was particularly interested in Old Testament prophecy. He wrote more about theology and speculated upon the divine and his natural philosophy than he did in his comparably briefer scientific works.

Robert Boyle, one of the leaders of modern chemistry, was very much concerned with doing his science as an exercise in natural theology, showing God was a designer who reveals His own power, wisdom, and attributes in His book of nature.

-Dr.Mark Kalthoff

Our Father In Heaven

 "Our Father in heaven." With these words, God tenderly invites us to believe that He is our true Father and that we are His true children so that with all boldness and confidence, we may ask Him as dear children ask their dear father.

C.S. Lewis pondered that, and He wrote of the Lord's Prayer: "Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean, quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course, the moment you realize what the words mean, you realize that you are not a son of God. You are not a being like the Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greed, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up as if Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek. But the odd thing is that He has ordered us to do it." That's what Paul means by "in whom," in Jesus, we have the confidence and the boldness to take that huge cheekiness in hand and turn to the Father and say, our Father.

-Pr. Will Weedon

The Two Natures Of Christ

Jesus had to be fully God and fully man to die for the sins of the world, and here is why: "If the sharing between the divine nature and the human nature does not or cannot occur, then the blood that Jesus shed at the cross that we are told repeatedly cleanses us from all sins can't cleanse us from all sin, it's just human blood. The reason that some random man can't die for our sins is two-fold: One is because he has to die for his own sins, and two, if he is just a man and is actually sinless, then he could die for one other person, but we needed a redeemer who could die for all of us and that requires more. If Jesus' human nature doesn't share in the divine power, then Jesus can't be a substitute for all of our sins; there has to be a divine power that extends the merits of that death to all people; otherwise, the Redemption doesn't exist."

-Dr. Jacob Corzine

False Prophets

 Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves (Matthew 7:15).

A prophet is simply one who speaks God's word. A prophet today would be a priest, pastor, minister, evangelist, and missionary. What is the message of the false prophet? Jeremiah tells us - Thus, says the Lord of hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, It shall be well with you; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No disaster shall come upon you. But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people, and they would have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their deeds. (Jeremiah 22:16-17, 22).

The mark here of these false teachers is promising peace and prosperity to those who blindly toss God's will and word behind their backs and go on in their own twisted ways. The mark of these false prophets was they did not rebuke sin but blessed it! They did not use God's word to turn people from disobedience to faithful walking with Yahweh. They dress their lives up in Scripture, and they try to make it sound like they're in the fold of Christ.

"You will know them by their fruit..." (Matthew 7:16). People tend to miss hearing this verse. We are used to associating fruit with Galatians 5, the fruit of Spirit versus the works of the flesh. Certainly, evil living is not a good sign of a godly teacher but in the context here in St. Matthew, Jesus is actually warning against what happens in your life if you listen to the false teacher and believe what they say. Their fruit then should be understood as the fruit of their teaching being believed. This goes right back to what was cited in Jeremiah, where the result of the message being believed is people do not repent of their sins but instead are confirmed in their rebellion and despising of God's Word.

-Pr. Will Weedon

Wedding Garment

"But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment." (Matthew 22:11)

Even in our casual age where folks are wearing pj's at Walmart and flip-flops to the Whitehouse, we still would find it offensive that someone showed up at a wedding dressed in dirty work clothes and not having showered for a few days. It would show contempt for the giver of the feast, wouldn't it?

John Chrysostom, as he taught on this to his congregation in the fourth-century Antioch, told them the garment is life and practice. He acknowledges that the call is pure grace (glory be to God) but the possibility of saying, great, I'll take your forgiveness gladly, and no, I have no intention in changing my life and fighting sin, are you crazy? I love sinning, and I'm going to keep on doing it! That is contempt for the king who throws his great banquet for the marriage of his son, who supplies the food for the banquet, and the slaughter of his son on the cross - who desires us for himself and not for sin. This is the man without the wedding garment.

And he said to him, friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment? And he was speechless (verse 12). Speechless, there is no answering back at the judgment. There is no talking your way out of it. Things will be known as they truly are, and then it will be too late to remedy the situation. The time to remedy is now in the day of grace.

-Pr. Will Weedon

The Naming Of Jesus And His Circumcision

"That at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth" (Philippians 2:10)

Jesus shows He is the sin-bearer; He is taking our place under the Law shedding His blood [for the first time] on our behalf. This is a once and for all event in a sense; no one will become a Jew through circumcision, that is, enter into God's family through circumcision with the coming of Jesus. It's now going to be by baptism, as Paul does in his letters; he parallels circumcision and baptism.

The eighth day is a sign of the resurrection because Jesus rose on the eighth day; if you count six days, God created the world and rested on the seventh day of the week. The first day of the week being the day of resurrection, the day that follows the Sabbath, a beginning of a new week in which all other days are counted. Early Christians believed when the resurrection came, they had entered eternity. Now, time was no longer valid. We have entered the eighth day in the flesh of Jesus, the resurrected flesh of Jesus.

It is the eighth day, and that is not insignificant. The number eight is the number of eternity. In some ways, this day is the first day of the new week of God's creation, and Jesus begins His mission on this day. It's the first shedding of His blood. It is a foretaste of His resurrection because when He rises from the dead, it's the eighth day.

This number eight is a recognition that once Christ comes, we have entered into eternity; we are now living in the end times. We only await His coming again in glory; for our own entrance into His rest when we die. The number eight clearly was recognized from the beginning; there were eight souls in all on Noah's Ark. It's in our baptismal liturgies, a citation from 1 Peter 3. It's a beginning of a new humanity.

When Jesus died on Good Friday and was raised on the first day of the week, which is the first day of the second creation, the eighth day, there is now, in a sense, no more death because all of death has been conquered with His death. Yes, we will die, but it's an entrance into His life now that never ends. This is the beginning of a new week in which no other day is counted; we live in Christ, who is the Eternal One; even though we do count our days, time to a certain extent, is irrelevant for us.

 This is why our baptismal fonts are eight-sided; that is where we enter into this eternal life. That's why we worship on Sunday, the eighth day, and every Sunday is a recognition that already now, by His bodily presents among us in His word and sacrament, we are in eternity, and heaven comes to earth. We live in this liminal period between heaven and earth where Christ is present, and His name, who will save us from our sins, reminds us we are saved by Him and by His name."

-Dr. Arthur Just