For You

It's true God is everywhere, but He is not everywhere for you. So He is in the fire, but you don't jump in the fire to get close to God. He is in the ocean, but you don't jump in the ocean to get close to God. As Dr. Normon Nagel once said, "We do not need a God who is everywhere is as useless as a God that is nowhere. What we need is a God who is somewhere."

You have to find where He has placed Himself to be a benefit for you. So we are always looking for those words "for you," and that is what we find in the Supper. This is my body given "for you." The blood of the New Testament poured out "for you." So we see the Lord Jesus has put His body and blood specifically in the bread and wine for Christians to eat and drink with the promise of the forgiveness of sins.

- Pr. Bryan Wolfmueller

The Serpent And Eve's Seed

The fact that God speaks of the Serpent having to go on its belly as if he did not go on his belly before might recall the words from Revelation 12 that identify the Dragon with the ancient Serpent. So imagine his wings being clipped, if you will.

The Church has long regarded [Genesis 3:15] as the first Gospel promise after the Fall. "Her seed" is a most unusual expression because we don't usually think of women as having seed; they have eggs. In Latin, this reads "semen eius." The woman will have seed, and that seed will be the one to bruise or mash the Serpent's head, but it will cost Him. The Serpent will bite His heal.

All the way back to the second century, we find this passage referring specifically as Christ's triumph over Satan and death.

- Pr. Will Weedon

Venial Sin And Mortal Sin

Christians who have been baptized, converted, and brought to the faith; scripture teaches that there are in them some sins with which faith and the Holy Spirit can remain. The believer is not condemned because of them, but he has and retains faith, the Holy Spirit, God's grace, the forgiveness of sins, and eternal life. This doctrine has its bases in Romans 6-8, John 1, Psalms 32, and so on. And these sins are called venial sins.

By contrast, scripture also says with great earnestness that Christians may well fall into those sins through which they lose faith, the Holy Spirit, God's grace, forgiveness of sins, and the inheritance of the kingdom of God and thus fall back under the wrath of God unto eternal condemnation unless they again repent and are reconciled anew in faith for Christ sake. This doctrine has its bases in statements of Paul and Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 6, Galatians 5, Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, and James 1. These statements should be instilled in the people with diligence, and these sins are called mortal sins.*

Through repentance, every sin becomes a venial sin. This may be summed up for the simple in these two parts: repentance and faith, that is, whether we find displeasure in sin or are enemy of it, oppose it and crucify and mortify it, or else whether we are pleased with sin and have desire and love for it. Seek every occasion for it, follow it, act upon it, and so on. Likewise, whether we seek to be rid of sin or to increase it. Any simple person can understand this and can find it in himself. And when the doctrine of mortal and venial sin is subjected to this examination, every Christian can make good use of this doctrine in daily life. And this doctrine should thus be directed to the end that each should make sure that he is not stuck in mortal damnable sin and caught in it by God's judgment, but rather repent while there is time.**

Those who teach Christians may not lose faith and God's grace through any sin, and likewise, no sort of sin may harm believers should be avoided as the worst poison to the soul. Luther powerfully and with great passion refutes such teaching in the Smalcald Articles 3.3.43-45. This also agrees with the Augsburg Confession Article XII.

*Martin Chemnitz

**Aurelius Ambrosius

- Pr. Heath Curtis

Postmodernism And Confessional Lutheranism

Confessional Lutheranism is antithetical toward postmodernism because it sets forth so clearly the boundaries of the Christian life. Who is God? What is He like? What is the condition of original sin? How are we justified? What is required in our vocation? It is just very clear. It says certain things are true, and it excludes others. It is a highly coherent, thoroughly biblical framework for all of Christian life.

What it's trying to do precisely is teach everything that Christ commanded us, and that is quite opposed to the consumer-driven postmodern model, which would allow individuals to consume those portions of Christianity that fit their preferred narrative.

It is the medicine we need. As C.S. Lewis says, "We have to convince people of the unwelcome diagnosis." That means we have to get the nature of sin right. And the nature of sin is certainly not right in postmodern Christianity because it allows people to redefine moral law in a lot of different ways. And because it doesn't diagnose our problem correctly, it cannot present the true gospel either.

- Dr. Angus Menuge

A Dog Named Jake

The Church is supposed to be a colony of the future, where the rebellion against God is history. Where His will is His people's delight. So to bring into that assembly of brothers and sisters of Christ, publicly unrepented sin of whatever sort is to try to drag the rebellion of Satan into the very assembly where it is all past and done with.

Obviously, St. Paul knows that the Church is comprised of nothing but sinners, as St. John said in his first letter, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." (1 John 1:8). But there is a world of difference between the sins into which the Christian people still stumble at times, even daily, and the attitude of the unrepented sinner who says, "I don't care what God says about this or that, I'm doing my own thing thank you very much." That is what cannot be allowed to breathe and grow in the Church.

Have I ever told you the story about Jake? Jake was a dog we ended up with, and he and I had our run-ins, but none as bad as the day he got himself a rabbit, and when I called him to come in, he wasn't about to let that little bloody carcass stay outside - no, no, no, he was going to bring it in the house. So we had quite an altercation when I would not let him bring it in, and I made him drop it. Jake, with his bloody bunny, is a perfect picture of the sinner who doesn't want to let go of the sin but intends to drag it with him into the Kingdom. Hey, you may be thinking, God loves me just the way I am. In a way, of course, you're right, and He also loves you way too much to leave you like that. So to enter the Church is to exit being of the world. Still in the world, but no longer a willing rebel; Instead, a forgiven one who joins the fight against the rebellion, even the rebellion that keeps popping up in our lives.

St. Paul throws in not even to eat with such a one, and that leads Theodoret of Cyrus, writing in the fourth century, to observe obvious if we are not to eat ordinary food with such people, we are not to admit them to the Lord's Table either.

- Pr. Will Weedon

The Liturgy And Acts 2:42

Two of the biggest myths against the Historic Liturgy today are 1. Early Christians worshiped in a free-form "open mic night" sort of a thing. 2. The Historic Liturgy is the product of Roman Catholicism.

Long before the establishment of the papacy, if you read through the actual records on how the Christians were worshiping, you very easily see this order. The very first Christians were almost all Jewish. They began to worship apart from the synagogue; they took the basic synagogue liturgy and added Christian elements. This became the foundation upon which the Historic Liturgy of the church was based. 1 Corinthians 14:40 and Acts 2:42 gave the early Christians and for us today instructions on how to conduct our worship.

When we take Acts 2 apart - "they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." Some things rise to the surface. First, "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship." What's the apostles' teaching? Well, it is the New Testament. We look at the idea of fellowship, "koinonia." They didn't just gather around the coffee urn or a covered dish meal; they gathered around the table that brought community, namely communion. We feel pretty confident that this is the main bread Acts is speaking of (cf. "Jesus took bread and broke it"). So the first two things they devoted themselves to were the Word of God and the Holy Supper. "The prayers," with the definite article "the" in front of prayers; it is not just that they were praying; they were prayers of the Jewish people, that is, the Psalms.

The Lutheran Reformers of the 16th century maintained the basic structure of the Liturgy as it had been celebrated. The few changes made were to have it in the people's language. Luther removed medieval devotional attachments that encouraged superstition and allowed congregants to receive the chalice. More congregational singing and greater attention to the quality and content of the preaching of the word were emphasized.

- Pr. Todd Wilken

God Is Not Limited To A Building

 "God isn't limited to a church building" is, nine times out of ten, not the language of faith speaking. It's crucial that believers understand this. Yes, sometimes we can't gather. But the church is the ecclesia, the "gathering." The fact that God is everywhere does not mean that He is everywhere "for you" with His saving gifts. You need His Word, including preaching and the communion of saints.

Being dismissive of the gathering of believers (rather than mourning its loss, in the rare event that it is lost) is the first step down the road to a wholesale rejection of faith. Lone-ranger Christianity begins with the believer confidently asserting that they can read the Word themselves perfectly fine at home and scoffing at those who "need a building." But this is rarely kept up for long. Once out of the habit of gathering, it becomes easier and more convenient to stay away. Believe me when I tell you that even in the realm of online services, viewership has gone way down in the past year or so. It is known that those exclusively "worshiping at home" eventually, in the long term, don't worship at home. Disconnected from the body of Christ, the individual Christian dies.

Pop-American Christianity has laid the groundwork for this destructive form of individualism for several decades, and the fruit it's bearing is terrible. Forms' of the church that strongly minimize the importance of the things that are incarnational and tangible-- like the sacraments and the absolution-- are more naturally prone to the temptation of a "Christianity" that becomes increasingly disembodied, undefined, private, and centered on the merely cerebral or emotional. But there are zero excuses for Lutherans to be taken in by this.

If you can't gather with the believers for some reason, mourn the loss-- don't shrug and say, "God is everywhere." If you are intentionally avoiding the gathering of believers and the preaching of the Word in any form you are able to hear it, you're breaking the Third Commandment. And if you're flaunting this commandment with an unrepentant heart, your very faith is hanging in the balance. That is something that needs to be taken very seriously.

-Kelly Klages